Interesting Kinds of Art
Mainstream “Art”
Decorative
Therapeutic
Self-Expression
Entertainment
Religious
Traditional Art Forms
Painting
Sculpture
Drawing
“More and more contemporary artists
act as a kind of journalists, researching
and presenting various evidence
through different media including text,
still photographs, video, etc. What
matters is the initial idea, a strategy, a
procedure, rather than the details of
how the findings or documentation are
presented. . . . In short, a typical
contemporary artist who was educated
in the last two decades is no longer
making paintings, or photographs, or
video – instead, s/he is making
“projects.” This term appropriately
emphasizes that artistic practice has
become about organizing agents and
forces around a particular idea, goal, or
procedure. It is no longer about a
single person crafting unique objects in
a particular media.”
Lev Manovich says
Theo Jansen “Strandbeest”
Giant robots that walk the beach powered only by the wind. www.strandbeest.com
Theo Jansen “Strandbeest”
Theo Jansen “Strandbeest”
Theo Jansen “Strandbeest”
strandbeest
theojansen
Theo Jansen, artist, studied science at the University of Delft Holland. The
first seven years being a artist he just made paintings. Then he starts a
project with a big flying saucer, which could really fly. It flew over the town
of Delft in 1980 and brought the people in the street and the police in
commotion. Since about ten years he is occupied with the making of a new
nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic
matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on
the wind. Eventualy he wants to put these animals out in herds on the
beaches, so they will live their own lives.
Vanessa Beecroft (performance art)
Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft (performance art)
Vanessa Beecroft (performance art)
Vanessa Beecroft (performance art)
“ . . . naked girls in high heels and implicit instructions : don't talk,
don't move too fast, don't move too slow. be classic. don't act.
here, nudity becomes its own kind of outfit, not unlike the old
emperor's new clothes fairy tale. high heels give legs their line and
nude women aren't really nude if they wear them.
pale-skinned models and no accents on the women's personalities,
nor is any emphasis on femininity intended. one model is almost
resembling another, nudity is a form of clothing.
the use of a uniform - a particular hair color, shoe or shade of pantyhose creates the illusion of integration. and beecroft's uniform has evolved
into nudity. what could be more unifying and neutral than naked ?
"beauty creates shame," beecroft claimed "...I want women on heels
because that’s powerful, that’s not natural nudity or pureness," she explains.
"when men see this woman standing on heels as if she were dressed,
and facing the audience, well, if that’s what they like to see, then here it is,
so what. I don’t know if that will create more respect or go
somewhere beyond that. maybe after they see it twenty times they’ll start
not to think of it the same way, I’m not sure. it’s an experiment.“
http://www.designboom.com/portrait/beecroft.html
Damien Hirst (installation)
Physical Impossibility of Death
in the Mind of Someone Living
In Hirst’s The the shark is a
metaphor for humanity. “The
shark floating in a tank of
formaldehyde is a 'something'
rather than a 'someone', but it
is human death that the title
refers to, the end of human
consciousness.” This work
suggests that “both sharks
and humans are sentient
beings, capable of sensation or
feeling.”(Podstolski)
Damien Hirst (installation)
Isolated Elements Swimming
in the Same Direction With the
Purpose of Understanding
Damien Hirst (installation)
Away from the Flock
Kara Walker (installation)
Insurrection! (Our Tools
Were Rudimentary,
Yet We Pressed On)
Kara Walker arranges life-sized
silhouetted figures into
raucous tableaux that recount
the brutal, and often
repressed, history of American
race relations. Her unique use
of the paper cut-out technique
derives from the old craft of
silhouetting. The artist likens
this representational method
to the nature of stereotypes
themselves, in which the
complexities of individual
identities, situations, and
personalities are simplified and
distorted into easily readable,
caricatured forms.
Anna Gaskell (photography)
Anna Gaskell (photography)
Anna Gaskell (photography)
Anna Gaskell crafts foreboding photographic tableaux of preadolescent girls that
reference children's games, literature, and psychology. She is interested in isolating
dramatic moments from larger plots such as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland,
visible in two series: wonder (1996–97) and override (1997). In Gaskell's style of
“narrative photography,” of which Cindy Sherman is a pioneer, the image is carefully
planned and staged; the scene presented is “artificial” in that it exists only to be
photographed. While this may be similar to the process of filmmaking, there is an
important difference. Gaskell's photographs are not tied together by a linear thread;
it is as though their events all take place simultaneously, in an ever-present. Each
image's “before” and “after” are lost, allowing possible interpretations to multiply. In
untitled #9 of the wonder series, a wet bar of soap has been dragged along a wooden
floor. In untitled #17 it appears again, forced into a girl's mouth, with no explanation
of how or why. This suspension of time and causality lends Gaskell's images a
remarkable ambiguity that she uses to evoke a vivid and dreamlike world.
Jacquelyn Black
Photography/Graphics
Last Meal
A book of all prisoners executed in the
State of Texas, this art work shows
a photograph of the inmate, the
inmate’s last words, and a photo of
the last meal. What do you think
Black’s message is, based on how
the inmates and the food are
represented?
Patty Chang (performance)
In Love
Patty Chang (performance)
Exploring the darker side of femininity and socially constructed notions of desire, Patty Chang
often takes a corporeal, visceral approach to Performance [more], an art form that underlies
her work in video and photography. . . .
Much as Janine Antoni, Sally Mann, and Gillian Wearing have explored the sexuality and
conflicts inherent to the parent-child relationship, Chang examines the territory of the primal,
parental connection in her work In Love (2001). In this dual-channel video, two separate
scenes of the artist with a parent are juxtaposed. Chang faces her mother and, in the adjacent
frame, appears face to face with her father. Simultaneously both images show the artist's and
respective parent's faces pressed together in what at first appears to be a deep kiss. Gradually
it becomes evident that the video is running in reverse time, and that they share not a kiss
but rather an onion from which they both eat. They bite into it slowly, pausing as they take
turns offering it to each other, as if it suggests the proverbial, forbidden fruit. Parent and child
swallow before they take additional bites, blinking hard to hold back tears from the onion’s
sharpness and pungency. However, in the video's reversal of time, the onion is reconstituted
and the tears disappear—wholeness is thus regained.
Biotech Art (“transgenic”)
n
n
GFP Bunny (2000) by Eduardo Kac
"Alba", the green fluorescent bunny, was
created with a green fluorescent gene
found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria.
“New Genre Art”
n
Critical Art Ensemble (w/ Steve Kurtz)
and subRosa
Natalie Bookchin
Interactive Media (“Metapet”)
Chip Neville
Animation
How is this Art? (Monet’s Water Lilies)