Character and Art

To make it in the art world does one have to be a character? In Thornton, the author describes the people who work at Artforum as characters. They are eccentric, have huge personalities, and strong opinions. Even their presentation of self is performative, they dress in outrageous outfits that are meant to command attention. Thinking outside of just Artforum many of the most well known artists are themselves a spectical. Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Sophie Calle: all of them are characters who are almost as equally well known as their work. So how do these two things interact, persona and work. Do they have to? Does success depend on it?

I'm missing home and decided to look up Llyn Foulkes. He's a one man band and performs all over the place. Here's his website. click the 'music' tab and enjoy!
http://llynfoulkes.com

Contemporary Art vs. Contemporarty Writing

I have two B.A.s, one in English (Creative Writing) and the other in Studio Art. I had to decide which discipline to pursue. I chose art because I felt less constricted by it.

Reading the Thorton book, I found it interesting when she quoted Elizabeth Schamelan, senior editor at Artforum, who said, "Contemporary art seemed to be taking more interesting risks than contemporary fiction" (153). I think part of the ability for contemporary art to take more risks is that it isn't as much of a mass produced commodity as fiction. The two markets do share similarities, but when it comes to the publishing house, fiction needs a certain marketability. This marketability means that fiction has to stay within specific forms. There are limited options for form and language, because in order to get readers writers need to make work that sits within a the tradition of literature and its structure.

Contemporary artists have some more freedom of expression because they are making an object that doesn't rely upon a publisher for realization. Their objects are stand alone and (generally) one of a kind. I'm aware that contemporary artists are concerned with where they fit in the market, but I don't think they have to be slaves to the mass public reception of their work in the same way that contemporary writers do.

Here are some artsy music videos i've been watching

Murakami and MTV

Check out MTV's report on Murakami's opening in Brooklyn in 2008. They call him "the Louis Vuitton artist" which made me cringe.

Art:21

I am watching Art:21 these days.It's really a helpful resource for us to know what exactly the artists are thinking about their works and how they accomplished the works. There are five seasons in it,we can find DVDs at Flexman Library and also watch them online at: http://video.pbs.org/program/1217143847/
To watch William Kendtrige cutting paper horses,talking about his fantastic ideas and other artists' having fun with their works are the most enjoyable time for me these days.

Thomas Kinkade on ShopNBC

Kitsch, kitsch, kitsch. I was flipping through channels on tv can came across Mr. Thomas Kinkade selling is paintings on ShopNBC. Kinkade himself talked about his paintings as a world for his collectors to step into. On this segment I stumbled upon, Kinkade painted a scene from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. I guess people want to be in Disney movies.

Millennium Park

I was very interested in the Professor Yood's discussion of Millennium Park. The city parks that I grew up with were only green spaces. They were places that were meant to relax and get away from the city. Yet Millennium park is the opposite. It is a feast of entertainment and there are constantly event going on in the space. Even it's very location is unusual it is right in the heart of the business center of the city. And while in the park you are surrounded my skyscrapers. That fact that you are in the heart of city is all around you when you are in the park. The presence of large metal structures and concrete boulevards through the park create an interesting city meets park feeling. That as Professor Yood said is unique.

Metro

Saturday night a friend and I went to a concert at Metro. We saw Male Bonding, Free Energy, and Best Coast. We also were privileged enough to run into the massive crowds outside of Wrigley Field who were there for the Jason Mraz/Dave Matthews Band concert.

My friend and I talked about music but our conversation had a lot to do with art in general and it got me thinking. Every band markets to a certain crowd. They produce a certain type of music so their consumers know what to expect. They make money.

The bands and the crowd kept cracking jokes about the Dave Matthews concert, but in reality we were doing the same thing: we were consuming a certain type of music. We came there to see the songs we expected to be played, played. There was no surprise, no real art making in that, other than the skill of the musicians.

Visual art is the same way. Someone like Kehinde Wiley produces the same type of image with the same message because that's what makes him money and that's what people come to expect. The art world, the music industry, the fashion industry, are all looking to make money. Once a certain innovation has been popularized it becomes a money making scheme.

I enjoy money making schemes, though. That concert was awesome.

animation

here's a video about a new kind of stop-motion animation some people thought of, ending up looking like a hologram in space. the video's kind of stupid, and saturated in iCulture, but i think it's a novel idea.
http://laughingsquid.com/3d-light-painting-made-using-an-ipad/
it seems like computers are going to have a lot to do with art soon.

Last night my roommate and I attended Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop. I found this film to be relevant to a number of issues that we are addressing in this class. The rise and success of street art in the contemporary fine art scene is fascinating, but the rise and success of Mr Brainwash is mind blowing. This film showed the most intimate moments in creating street art, as well as creating intimate insight as to who these alias artists are; it makes one feel even more connected to them. I do not want to spoil the film so instead I am just going to highly recommend it. Through Exit Through the Gift Shop the audience enters the world of street art, art exhibitions, the auction house, collectors and dealers, and sees the unusual rise of an artist.

I spent most of my time at River North.This is my first time saw Christina Bothwell's sculpture in person.Her glass sculptures are most babies,children and animals figures. Within each glass figure, there is a smaller figure seen through the surface of the glass.She develops the inner spaces of the glass and also lets the light transmit through the glass. She also introduces other media into her work.There is a sculpture called "memory childhood",a pink dress glass made little girl with a small video screen playing her childhood video inside her .It makes me feel the girl is becoming alive, I can hear her laughing,crying and talking.

Wiley, Weintraub, and Cartier-Bresson

Today I went to the Rhona Hoffman Gallery and the Peter Miller Gallery in the West Loop, as well as to the Art Institute to see the Cartier-Bresson Exhibit.

It interesting to see Kehinde Wiley right next door to Caleb Weintraub. In Weintraub's artist statement he describes the settings of his art as, "an imagined future where the boundaries between the perceived world and the virtual world tangle." Kehinde Wiley uses art historical references in his paintings. Both artists use the displacement of their subjects into these settings to tell something about their subjects as well as the reality they have been taken out of.

The Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit was a different type of experience. I have never seen any of Cartier-Bresson's photographs in person. The size of the exhibition and the potency of the photographs made for an amazing and beautiful show. Other than seeing the photographs, my favorite part of experiencing that exhibition was watching an older woman look at Listening to de Gaulle, near Aubenas, France . She walked up to the photograph, paused, and laughed. I could see how delighted she was by the image.

Great day.

-Jess

I went to the galleries in the West Loop and Pilsen on Friday night. The difference in the scenes is pretty interesting to see. It felt like if you want to really make money as an artist, work hard and get into the West Loop scene. But if you are starting out, want to collaborate a little bit and maybe help fight a cause then definitely look into the Pilsen scene. I really enjoyed the Kahinde Wiley pieces in the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, his technique is impeccable. The works by Chris Johanson in Kavi Gupta Gallery were pretty fun to look at. In Pilsen in Rooms Productions on Halsted they had an ongoing performance piece dealing with time. I had a lot of fun finally getting to experience the art scene in Chicago! ; )

The importance of White and White Noise

I went to a couple of the west loop galleries on Friday night. I was really interested in the atmosphere that many of these galleries cultivated. The presence of white was essential, and bright artificial lighting. Coupled with the stark white boxes of the gallery, the presence of noise became even more noticeable. Some galleries decided to control this white noise by playing music in the background. But others did not, allowing all of the discussions to become a part of the show. This white noise became an important element of the gallery opening experience. The dialogue of the attendees became part of the art and influenced my interpretations of certain pieces. I can't decide of this is a positive or negative element of the gallery opening but I as a viewer did feel less engaged by the art in the more silent and less occupied galleries.

Art Walk

I mostly spent my time in River North. A friend from class, Andrew Woolbright had a piece up at the Perimeter Gallery so we ended up there for a bit. This gallery is mostly figurative including predominately paintings with some sculpture. In my personal opinion I loved Andrews piece more than many of the other works in there, its truly beautiful. I really enjoyed his use of paint and color; his brush strokes very quick and thick. Another gallery in River North I went to was Habatat Gallery with all glass sculpture. I didn't know and artists except for some Chihuly work, a large hanging blue piece. Also in the Chihuly room were some of his paintings/sketches of vases which I liked in some ways more than the glass. The last gallery we went to was in Wicker Park called Roots and Culture wehre Carol Jackson, a professor here at SAIC, had a dual show with John Henely. Henely mostly had paintings while Carol worked with sculpture and mixed media.

Overall I had a good time looking at all the art. I didn't get to every gallery but will within the next couple weeks.

galleries

I spent most of my time at the river north galleries. Two artists:
David Burdeny had long-distance photos of places on the water, all with an overcast sky. The result was typically a thin strip of shoreline across the middle of the photo with flat white on top and bottom. He picked some locations that fit this technique very well, like a small, isolated town in some place that looked like Greenland. Another was of Venice, but that one was just sort of advantageous of its architecture, like it was from a tourist's guidebook.
The artist that stood out the most to me was Robert Middaugh. He had two pieces near Audrey Niffenegger's work. He was a very old man sitting right by them. They were delicate wood constructions that hung on a wall, combining doll house-like compartments and diagrams of the phases of the moon and characters of an foreign alphabet I couldn't recognize. I looked him up on google, and he has good paintings, too.

Thus far I have really enjoyed Seven Days in the Art World. One reason being that Thornton discusses her use of Participant Observation as her research method, which reminds me of the ethnographies I read as an Anthropology student. However, this might be one of the most interesting ethnographies I have come across. The art world is more fascinating than I could have fathomed. I am just begging to discover the weight of all the players in the contemporary art world. not just the artists. I am so looking forward gaining insight into the various niches of the contemporary art world, and understanding it from all perspective. I thought Jeff Poe made a very intriguing observation of the art world: "The art world isn't about power but control. Power can be vulgar. Control is smarter, more pinpointed. It starts with the artists, because their work determines how things get played out, but they need an honest dialogue with a conspirator. Quite control--mediated by trust--is what the art world is really about". BAAM
-Emmaline

For the love of God

I am deeply moved by the work" for the love of God".To me, this 100 million dollars diamond skull shows the amazing and incredible combination of ancient meaning life's transience and promise of eternity. The name of this sculpture is inspired by Hirst's mother who once asked" For the love of God, what are you going to do next?" I wish someday I can see it face to face.

Candy

I was very interested in the piece "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)" by Felix Gonzalez-Torres that we saw in Stone exhibition and then also in class on Friday. I found this piece to be interesting not only from a conceptual standpoint, but also it's construction and maintenance were interesting. Because people eat the candy the piece is every changing yet is meant to appear the somewhat the same. It was also interesting watching the public interact with this piece in the gallery. Most people were very unsure if they could actually take a piece, and many did not. I think even more fascinating was considering this piece of art outside of the gallery space. It is owned by the Stone family and I assume is normally placed somewhere in their house. But what does it mean to own a piece like this?

last class

I was surprised to hear at the lecture last Friday how little the class will have to do with history. It seems like the five-pointed star he introduced at the beginning of class will also serve as the structure of the course. I guess it's like American or World history, where the closer you get to the present, the more it becomes political science.
One thing I thought was interesting was how there hasn't been a strong leader in the visual arts since Warhol. I wonder if there will be thirty years from now.

Eyeball

After class on Friday I went to Barnes and Noble to pick up the books for class, and I noticed Tony Tasset's "Eye" right across the street. Because Prof. Yood talked out it in lecture, and because I'd never seen it before, I crossed the street to look at it. I witnessed a rally by the "End the Fed" folks. A man was standing right under the iris of "Eye" shouting into a bullhorn. It was a small rally (the only security they had was one bored bicycle cop), but I find it really interesting that "Eye" has become a landmark so quickly. I also find it fitting that the rally took place in the shadow of this particular sculpture because these people think they're seeing something that the rest of America is not.

I loved seeing that sculpture, the size of a small building, among the stone architecture and the rally-ers. The presence of the eye made the rally less serious and more surreal. I witnessed first-hand that sculpture's ability to affect its area.

-Jess

What's up

I hope everyone is having a fruitful Labor Day weekend. I agree with Geanna, Hendricks and Wiley definitely share a similar agenda. I like Hendricks better, his work seems less pretentious and more honest. Here are two kinda weird music videos I just watched that both include helpless Jim Hensonish puppets:

http://congratulations.whoismgmt.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO1y1wJduCo

Contemporary or Not?

I thought the discussion in class was great and opened my eyes to a lot of variables that go into the art world. I don't have too much to say but the one quote that I took with me, "contemporary art is something that hasn't been digested." Now when looking at art I think about if its been "digested" or not.

-Lauren Fejarang

First Class Post

Class was very intriguing. I look forward to hearing about next week's topic about the dealer/critic aspect of art work/art world. I previously worked as a registrar and learned a lot about the dynamics of the museum and the artist relationship. But this lecture gave me a further understanding of some of what I learned before.
The artist he mentioned, Kehinde Wiley, reminds me of another painter from the 70's named Barkley L. Hendricks. They both do large scale paintings of figures with bold colors. Check out Hendricks if you have the time and see the comparisons, it's pretty cool!

-Geanna M. Hernandez

Ideas for Posts

1) further discuss topics/artists/issues from Professor Yood's lectures or our discussion section
2) write about an artwork that you viewed this week
3) reviews of gallery shows or exhibits that you visited this week
4) respond to an article relating to the contemporary art world in an art magazine
5) discuss parts of the readings that are specifically interesting to you

Welcome to the Contemporary Art: 8th Floor Section Blog!

Welcome to the Contemporary Art: 8th Floor Section Blog! 

We will use this space to exchange ideas and further discuss topics from Professor Yood's lectures, our Thursday sections, and anything and everything that we discover within the Contemporary Art World!  Though this blog is a weekly requirement, it is meant to be fun!  Please write about what is interesting to you and feel free to post images of artworks, etc that you are writing about.

I look forward to exploring and discussing the Contemporary Art World with all of you!

Best,
Lauren