fourteen

I chose this piece of plaster to go along with the shells because when I saw them sitting near each other on my desk I mistook the plaster for a shell. Plaster is an interesting medium to me because it is so tactile and also kind of annoying. If plaster is a material through which art is made, does it connote art itself in the same way that dried paint on a palette references painting? Or, because plaster is a more widely used material, does it have no meaning on its own? 

thirteen

I found these shells at Church Point. I was drawn to these shells because they look really cool. Two of them even have holes that would make them perfect for putting on a necklace. I think it's interesting that things like these occur naturally in the world because they look almost too cool to have been created by anything other than a machine. I think that shells and art have something in common but I'm not sure what that is. 

SMP presentation response

Today I went to some of the Art and Art History department SMP presentations. I was especially interested in April Morgan's art history SMP. She studied the way the curriculum of the AAH department changed over time and how this can be tracked through student work in the teaching collection. I think it's always good to be introspective and I would be interested in knowing more about what she found. I think that changes in society over time can be mapped through art curriculum. There was a time when women weren't allowed to go to art school, and if they wanted to they would have to agree to model for male painters. Art movements have been met with resistance before being accepted into the art world and this is also important to note.

I really agreed with what April said about the importance of merging art studio and art history. I don't think you can call yourself an artist if you don't study art history or if you can't write about art. You have to get into stuff and figure out what you like and what you don't like, and how to discriminate between the two without solely relying on personal aesthetic values. I think it's imperative for artists to be able to articulate with words as well as images and other media. 

la grande jetee

This film completely blew my mind. I expected to be bored by the fact that all of the action was occurring in still pictures but after the first five minutes you really lose sight of that. The plot was so engrossing that it was easy to lose track of the fact that it was all being narrated. The ending was great. It was uniquely one of those moments in film where everything comes together and fails to make any sense at all, at the same time. 

olia lialina

Olia Lialina is the artist responsible for "My Boyfriend Came Back from the War," a website created with basic gif images and html code that tells the story lovers reunited after a war. It is "among the first works of New Media art to produce the kind of compelling and emotionally powerful experience that we have come to expect from older, more established media." Lialina calls MBCBFTW a "netfilm." I think this is an important piece because of the way, thematically, it split with ideas of what new media art is and can be by adding evocative emotional elements to relatively simple code and text. 

alexei shulgin

Alexei Shulgin is the front man of 386 DX, the "world's first cyberpunk rock band" featuring an old computer and MIDI software. The use of antiquated technology is intentional as Shulgin is satirizing contemporary technological culture in part. 

keith obadike

Keith Obadike is a "sought after sound designer" on the hip hop scene. Obadike attempted to auction off his blackness on eBay as a performance art piece. The idea that heritage or ethnicity is something that can be bought and sold is new but this piece recalls Glenn Ligon and Adrian Piper, artists who both created self portraits "exaggerating [their] negroid features." Pieces like these show how discussions about race as it relates to identity aren't over just because the sixties are over.