Art 2200 Final Project: Hell and a Handbag

Hell and a Handbag

                       For my final project, I researched and took inspiration from the work of the artist Sarah Sze. Sze is known for her amazingly complex and detailed sculptures which she makes with everyday objects. She spends a great deal of time assembling her intricate works, and typically incorporates architectural themes. One can look at her work for a long time while visually discovering the many components, which are each placed in a seemingly very deliberate fashion, in the manner of a complex machine.

            Inspired by Sze’s work, I made a sculpture from everyday objects for my final project. There are many components which can be visually explored, similarly to Sze’s work. However, my sculpture differs in that it was made from mundane pieces of trash and appliances that I gathered from an old farm dump, which have all been aged for a minimum of 20 years outside. Sze typically uses new materials, such as matches, paper, string, and food to construct her work. Additionally, I made a small fountain of dripping water in my project, which incorporates movement and further addresses the subject of time. Many of Sze’s sculptures appear to be stationary.

            The components of this sculpture include a rusted metal chair, old appliances such as a television, slow cooker, and Singer sewing machine, and garbage, such as glass bottles, soda cans, a can of dried red barn paint, a water heating element, a plastic pecan pie mix bag (“just add fresh pecans!”), a muffler, and a plastic clothes label indicating the size “medium”. There is also a leather or imitation leather handbag. These objects were stacked on top of each other to secure the muffler upright in the chair, so that an ash tree switch could be held up by being inserted into the compacted dirt and rust inside of the muffler. Cable ties were used to hold cans, a funnel, and a drain spout onto the branch to create a dripping fountain.

These objects interest me because of the different ways in which they have aged, such as in the way that the technology has become outdated or that the plastic has remained almost like new. Time has aged the objects, and grown plants over them, but it has not changed the problematic nature of the garbage having once been dumped rather than disposed of properly. This sculpture addresses the enduring nature of human-generated garbage by bringing it out of the places in which it has been hidden and into view. The dripping water is incorporated for its time-metering effect. 

Final Project Work in Progress

I finally, finally, came up with an idea for my final project sculpture. The artist I researched, Sarah Sze, is known for making sculptures out of everyday objects. They're so complex that one can look at them for a long time as the eye discovers new components. We are not supposed to copy our artist's work, however. I planned to make a complicated sculpture too, but it needed to be something different.

At last I thought of going to the old farm dump and taking everyday objects from there! My new objects are a minimum of 20 years old, weathered, and somewhere between garbage, very inappropriately dumped in the woods decades ago, and treasure. I can't believe some of the stuff I found, too! Usually the dump is inaccessible under its veil of poison ivy. Who knew there was an old Singer sewing machine in there!

The running water also adds movement to the sculpture, and an element that I didn't encounter in Sze's work. I was originally going to use some lab equipment for that, but I was not able to set up an environment sturdy enough to hold up expensive glass instruments. An old can will have to do.

Here are some work in progress shots. I think the sculpture might look more like art if it were inside of a building.

Assignment 6: Ephemeral Installation

In preparation for this assignment, we watched the film River and Tides, which is about the work of the incredibly eloquent artist Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy creates art by going into nature and moving the materials he finds there into studies natural shapes and forms. His elegant pieces require time and patience to complete, but may last only moments before falling apart.

            I chose a sunny place along an old fencerow in the woods on campus, near the south-west corner of the soccer field, to construct my installation.  The fencerow still has wire field fence and piled stones, and there is a small ravine running to the creek. The spring birds were calling, the weather was fair, garter snakes were coming out of hibernation on the hillside, and little spring beauty flowers were beginning to bloom. Our campus is beautiful, and I love that while there is a triumph of nature where the woods have grown back, there is still evidence of the farms and people’s lives that used to be there. The old fences were built by people once, and every stone is in its place because a person picked it up and moved it there. Moving rocks is an enduring way in which people can reach across great lengths of time. Goldsworthy discussed this in his film. There is a kind of human connection in stones.

            Goldsworthy often makes pieces in which he arranges objects so that their natural differences in color create a perfect circle. I could find very little color in the woods so early in spring, but after looking around for a few minutes I noticed that some of the rocks had bright green moss growing on their surfaces. When I lifted them out of the ground, I found that the moss ended abruptly where the stone had not been exposed to light, creating a contrast in color. I piled stones and arranged them so that the areas of moss formed a circle of green surrounded by the bare surfaces, and I found that it was much more difficult than I had realized. It took me several hours to gather the stones and the circle required trial and error to construct, but I found this process to be very pleasant. There was a meditative calm in spending some time working with my hands, and I enjoyed being alone with my thoughts on such a nice day. It was therapeutic to be free to concentrate on that task.

            My finished piece is a green circle on a background of gray made by arranging stones from the old fencerow, with a smaller circle of red beside it, which was made with some fungus I had found. I was not able to achieve a very strong contrast in the moss circle, and so I think that the effect is subtle and it blends into the environment.

            Demise is always a part of an ephemeral piece. My fungus circle will not last long, but if the stones are not disturbed they may be there long after I am gone. The pattern of moss will not last, however, because now that the stones have been moved their conditions have changed, and moss will die is some places and begin to grow in others. I think that there is a beauty in the aging of ephemeral art, and the eventual loss of the circle is a part of the piece.

Assignment 5: Action

In this assignment we were asked to make a performance art piece. In class we learned that performance art is influenced by the work of sound artist John Cage, the anti-art movement Dadaism, and fluxus, and so it is not surprising that many performance art pieces are made to provoke thought and often involve socially unacceptable subject matter such as public nudity. Performance art "challenges and violates borders", and must be remembered through documentation of the performance because of its ephemeral nature.

My performance was much more tame than the work of artists such as Vito Acconci and Tehching Hsieh. Taking inspiration directly from the assignment handout, I "[took] the action of folding [my] laundry, and place[d] it on a public sidewalk." This piece moved a commonplace event into a different and unexpected context in order to assess how this might change the meaning of the act.

I brought an ironing board to help make the action of folding clothes more recognizable, and stood at the corner of an intersection on campus for fifteen minutes on a Monday morning while I folded as many garments as I had been able to fit into one laundry hamper. I did not know what to expect from the piece in advance. I had hoped that campus security might come to ask me to move along, in which case I would have requested a written warning, which would have made a great documentation of the performance. With the exception of a fellow student in this class who waved as she drove past, nobody acknowledged me, and I was alone with my thoughts on the sidewalk in the wind for the duration of the performance. One person walking down the sidewalk crossed the street so he wouldn't have to walk past me. At one point the wind blew the tripod over.

In making this piece I explored what makes art art. When I fold my clothes at home, it's a chore, not art. There's certainly no artistry in my folding technique, either. Moving the chore to an unusual place created a situation where its meaning became undefined and open to interpretation. If one of the tasks of art is to make people think, then perhaps this performance was art. If I had said that my performance was a piece about feminism, although it was not, then it would more clearly be art because it would be specifically critiquing a female role in domestic duties. I was not trying to make that statement, however. Conversely, if I had folded my laundry on the sidewalk out of necessity, the same act would become an everyday chore again, with its commonplace meaning. I think it is the context, rather than the action, that makes this piece art. It is art not only because I, the artist, would have described it as "performance art" had anyone asked me for an explanation, but far more importantly, because my university art professor provided the concept for this performance specifically in a list of acceptable ideas on the handout for an art assignment in an art class. Duchamp's Fountain, the "urinal on the wall", was art because he said it was, and this is art because my art professor said it is.

Crushed garbage from the nearby road and parking lot 

This tennis ball was sitting by the curb on the other side of the street

Some lint from the dryer

Before

During the performance

After

Assignment 4: Remix

Aren't'cha Hungry?

Assignment 4: Remix

            Recently we have studied copyright law and famous cases of copyright infringement, and have learned that a piece of artwork which incorporates copyrighted material is more likely to be considered fair use if it transforms the nature of its borrowed content. In this assignment, we were asked to deliberately appropriate footage and manipulate it in such a way as to change or add to its meaning.

            My mother occasionally sings a ditty that she remembers from the movie theater, which goes, “let’s all go to the lobby and get ourselves a treat.” It has become a joke about commercialism and advertising to her, but I had never seen it. I found this intermission advertisement on YouTube, along with quite a few old candy and fast food commercials, and combined them with a few scenes from two episodes of the television show How It’s Made, one about hotdogs and the other about mayonnaise, to make this video.

            I combined the most obviously commercial parts of advertisements with the intent to make their motives became a little too obvious. I did not alter any footage, but by putting specific pieces together I hoped to change their meaning from advertisements into a critique of food commercials and commercialism. Food advertisements are designed to do just the right things to grab attention and sell their products, but I think that they often become too blatant and become parodies of themselves. I really enjoy that part of them, and wanted to highlight it in this video. They also only show their audience the appetizing side of food, and often eschew a less appealing side, like the manufacturing process. I used parts of the How It’s Made episodes to superimpose the manufacturing process with the food. All of the pieces together make something that looks and sounds a bit like a commercial of its own. We’re so accustomed to seeing food commercials that we might not give them much thought, and my intention was to make a commercial that instead invites critical thinking about the ways in which they’re constructed.

"Remix" Reading and Response

In the introduction to his book Remix, Lawrence Lessig discusses the repercussions that the “copyright wars” have had on creative work. Lessig explains that artistic appropriation of copyrighted material does not cause financial damage to copyright holders in the way that blatant sharing of the original works can do, but lawyers police all infractions as a matter of principle. Stephanie Lenz’s seemingly innocent home video of her dancing baby, which has a copyrighted song playing on the radio in the background, was targeted by lawyers, but even more derivative artistic work has been stifled by copyright laws. Lessig shares examples of artistic work which has been challenged, such as Candice Breitz’s exhibitions featuring videos of many music fans singing songs from their favorite artists, or the illegally remixed music produced by artist Gregg Gillis. They have all attempted to use and build upon copyrighted music with varying degrees of impediment and legal repercussion.

                Lessig feels that appropriation of copyrighted music is beneficial. The resources copyright holders and their lawyers spend in pursuit of making examples out of these artistic works are grossly misused. Artists have found non-licensed creative remixing to be somewhat revolutionary. Artist SilviaO found that the remixes of her Creative Commons licensed a cappella tracks gave the sound “new meaning”, as Lessig describes. Breitz explained that her work was “never thought of as. . . stealing. . .[but] the natural way in which culture evolves and develops and moves forward”, adding that it is a “new layer of interpretation”.

                I am inclined to agree with Lessig. Although it is important that copyright holders are not deprived of income, artistic use is not likely to be a major source of financial damage. The creativity and ingenuity of remixed works is valuable, and provides a medium for cultural critique and exploration that should not be stifled. Some very popular music and artistic work can become so well known that it becomes part of our culture, like Any Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans, and inevitably become subject to heavy interpretation in doing so.

                This article reminded me of some of the remixed songs I have seen on YouTube, and I have two to share. One is a combination of popular country western songs which pokes fun at a “winning formula” in country songs, filling one of art’s vital roles as a medium for cultural critique. Another is a remix of Walt Disney Studios’  Alice in Wonderland that I think is quite beautiful. I don’t know the stories behind either of these videos, but I imagine that they were not produced with legal permission. 

Assignment 3: Anti-Video

Rose Colored Glasses

When I did my video observation, I found that mainstream videos today share many common themes. They all seem to be very “human-centric”, with most of the footage being of people, like hosts and characters. When I closed my eyes and listened to the sound being played with the videos, it was almost entirely human voices, like narration and people talking. The footage was taken from the familiar perspective of human eye level. We like to watch other people talking about things. In lecture we learned that films almost exclusively have plots that are easy to follow and have logical conclusions, and are made to be passively consumable.

           

In this assignment, we were asked to make an “anti-video”, which goes against the conventions of videos in popular media. I did not include any footage of people in my video, although most of the footage was taken from typical human vantage points. I did use some upside-down footage of empty hallways for a non-human perspective, and I like that it can take a moment to realize that our familiar hallways are upside down. I think that I expect that the footage I watch is going to be from the standard human perspective, and I don’t seem to put much effort into confirming whether it actually is or not, so the upside-down hallways create an interesting illusion to me. I did also use human voice in this video because it really seems to demand our attention, and I thought it would be useful in making the video more surreal. I called my poor brother on the phone and silently recorded his answer, and he very kindly gave me permission to use the recordings when I later explained what I had been doing. I think that his “hellos” feel like they should have a meaning or purpose in this video, even though they have none.

I find it interesting that we seem to want to make sense of what’s going on in a video, and so in a random assembly of footage and sound we’re still trying to piece together a plot, even if there is none. To make this video, I used my brother’s voice and sounds of a string trimmer and frying eggs, along with footage of upside-down hallways, cracking eggs, an online textbook, tree tops, a hollow log, and some footage of a field taken through a rose-colored glass casserole dish lid. The pieces have nothing more in common than that they were the things I had access to in a typical week, but I like that it appears as though they have some collective meaning when placed together in the finished video. My anti-video is fairly strange, but I think it does accomplish the goal of going against standard media conventions.

Review of "Love Stories" by artist Nichola Kinch

                Artist Nichola Kinch’s spring 2016 exhibition Love Stories is uncluttered and elegant, with the gallery emptied to clean, bare walls in order to showcase her work. In front of the gallery’s large windows overlooking the woods, Kinch has hung a forest of two-dimensional, identical, cut-out images of tree trunks reaching from floor to ceiling. When viewed from the front of the room the piece looks like a group of cloned shapes in a “photoshopped” image, but the paper thin trunks give the illusion of disappearing when one walks between them.

                Kinch’s zoetrope-like machine is displayed in front of the tree trunks. Modeled after old moving image toys used before the availability of film, the interactive piece requires an audience member to look through slots on one wheel while turning a hand crank in order to view a moving image of the phases of the moon. The piece is equally impressive when viewed from a distance, because the disc displaying the moon phases is in the open and illuminated from behind. Kinch explained that the images of the moons are created by carving into the disk to allow light to shine through the thinned areas, and that no images appear when the light is turned off.

                Kinch explained that the exhibition is meant to explore optical illusions and pre-photography technology, and she has captured an atmosphere of almost fairytale-like wonder with the illusions and glowing moons displayed in the space. “Riding the line between illusion and fantasy,” as she explained, her tree trunks are only pretending to be trees. Love Stories also incorporates the passage of time in many ways. In the gallery, light shining in through the windows changes throughout the day and can distort and conceal the illuminated moon phases at times. Kinch’s work is also modeled after old technology, but made with the use of new technology. A carving drill guided by a computer was used to create the disk of moon phases, and the tree trunks, displayed in pairing with the old technology of the moving image machine, are a reference to the iconic “cloning” of cut-out images made popular by modern Photoshop software. The moon phases also directly address time, as the turning of the hand crank models the passage of month, “[representing] time and illusion”, as Kinch explained.

                The opportunity to hear Kinch speak about her work was valuable in understanding her exhibition. Kinch described her work as having a hands-on quality that relates to her background in ceramics, and she shared her delight in creating layers of illusions in the gallery space. In this exhibition, there is no agenda or deeper meaning, but rather a place meant just to be explored and enjoyed. Many exhibitions offer complicated social critiques, requiring thought and research to understand properly, and Kinch's descriptions reinforce that this exhibition is meant for “play.” 

Video Observation

For our Video Observation homework assignment, we were asked to spend one day “pay[ing] special attention to the video” we “see on television, computer, phone, and movie screens.” I do not have television, so on the day of my observations I took the excuse to watch a lot of media online. I watched some of the videos embedded in news article pages, a few episodes of a BBC expedition documentary/nature show on Netflix, and also spent some time on YouTube watching a sample of the front page recommendations. 

                I found that the shorter videos, such as commercials and those on news websites and YouTube, were usually fast paced and attention grabbing. The footage was cut and put together very tightly, so that there was very little excess time between the points of most interest. Videos with informative content were primarily shots of a person facing and speaking to the camera, peppered with illustrative photographs or animations. It seemed that the content of most of the videos was constructed to satisfy the viewers’ curiosity about something, whether about the subject matter or a tempting title. Some video could be rough, or shaky, or poorly angled or lit. Songs and sound effects had been added over some of the video, especially in commercials. 

I found that the footage I watched was generally very human-centric, having been taken at a human height, from a human perspective, in order to document something that a person was doing or experiencing. In the nature documentary, some footage was taken high up in trees or low on the forest floor, but still from the perspective of the people who had reached those places at the time, as opposed to footage taken by a drone with a camera, for example. If I closed my eyes and just listened, there was always the sound of humans talking or narrating. Any other sounds were typically much quieter than the sounds of the voices. Footage in commercials was typically of an actor or actress speaking. The majority of people visible in the video I watched were white, especially in the leading roles. Visually, male and female hosts seemed to be evenly portrayed in videos, while the majority of hosts in commercials seemed to be female, although there wasn’t any discussion of gender in that day’s sample of videos. Interestingly, almost every person in the various footage I saw was in the age range of maybe about 25 – 60, except for a few children in the background of the BBC documentary.

The more professional the context of the footage, the more it generally had bright colors and entertaining camera angles. I think that I should have watched some fictional shows on the day of my observations, because I remember a lot of interesting perspectives in TV shows like Breaking Bad. I think that the short, non-fiction videos I watched on the internet were all fairly similar to one another. 

Assignment 2: Sound

Assignment 2: Sound

We have learned that the sound artist John Cage believed that all sounds are musical and worth paying attention to. After completing the listening exercise and learning about John Cage’s work, I think that I really have become more aware of the beauty in everyday sounds. When I was gathering sound recordings for this project, I noticed that I very frequently hear the sounds of doors opening and closing. Every door makes a unique sound with it's own combination of metal clicks and bumps and vibrations. When you hear something in real life, there is no loss of quality from a recording or a speaker. There really is a musical quality to even the most mundane, everyday sounds.

I gathered sounds over the weekend by taking my phone out to record anything that stood out to me during the day, like birds calling and doors closing. I also specifically sought and created a lot of destructive sounds like popping and crunching, the sound of my hand saw cutting down a dead ash sapling, and paper ripping. I enjoyed listening to the isolation of each sound in the recordings. It was like taking photographs, except that the sound is less contextually expressive and more descriptive of time as it passes.

 When it came time to put all of the sounds together, I found that I had no plan for them. I distorted some sounds, although it’s very hard to hear in the finished composition, and I layered many of them on top of each other. Each one had a specific order and place in the composition, but what I came up with was a cacophony, and I was fairly displeased at first. I have taken some time to think about it, and I think what happened was that once again I approached making a piece without a plan, and what came through was how I felt at the time. Sometimes in a comic an artist will give a character a thought bubble with only an angry scribble in it to describe how the character feels. This sound composition might be somewhat of an auditory version of that scribble. Maybe the chaos will convey that mood, of being fatigued, and stressed about school and how many things are happening at once; doors opening, and doors closing.