In my opinion Stelarc was the easiest performance artist to understand. His ideas aren't as out there as some of the other artists we looked at. Stelarc seemed to focus his work on the modification of the human body. One of his inventions was the robotic arm that when attached to a human could be manipulated much like a real human arm. Really amazing stuff. His newest project consists of him having a human ear grown under the skin of his arm. The thought of it is a bit strange but once you see the pictures you will see how strange it really is. At some point he is going to put a microphone in that third ear and stream the sounds live on the web. I think that really brings his newest act up to the level of his prior acts.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Orlan
Santiago started this particular class by telling us that we would see some crazy shit today. He wasn't joking. We looked at Orlan, a performance artist from France. Her performances were radical and extremely odd. Orlan's legacy was made on a surgery table and with plastic surgery. She had a few plastic surgeries done. That alone isnt that strange but she made it art. She had cameras in the surgery that let viewers watch live. She also read from a book and was dressed in unusually outfits. The first thing that came to mind after seeing her performances was that she is crazy, and committed to her ideas.
Fluxus and Joseph Beuys
We briefly looked at a performance art group called Fluxus. It was immediately noticed that they were on the radical end of the movement. After viewing a handful of clips from several artists from the Fluxus movement it was quite obvious that these people felt very strongly about the ideas that they were addressing in their acts.
One of the artists we looked at was Joseph Beuys. He was Germans performance artist. The performance that, for me, was the most notable was his dead hare performance. This act consisted of him walking around in a gallery with a dead hare in his arms, telling it what art is. This was seen by many people as they passed by the gallery but few actually heard what he was saying, so it just looked like he was talking to a dead rabbit. Some odd things came out of Fluxus.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
New artists and new movements
This last week in Art 211 we viewed some new material. We jumped off the main track of watching video excerpts about art/technology advances and actually focused down on a handful of artists and their movements.
After seeing the timeline of the ever changing art movements we were introduced to a few in particular. A couple of artists were brought to our attention. One of these being Marcel Duchamp. This artist helped to fuel one of the largest turning points in art history. His works challenged what had become know as art. One picture in particular stuck out and is considered one of Duchamp's most important paintings.
This painting makes fun of histories most noticeable painting, the Mona Lisa. In the Duchamp version not much is changed. The women still sits in her pose, but now she wears a mustache and a go-tee. Also, at the base of the painting there is text spelled as L.H.O.O.Q. This text has little meaning unless you speak French. If said in the right way the text becomes a phrase, "Her ass is on fire". Duchamp is clearly making a huge statement with this painting. He is making fun of not just the Mona Lisa but all art.
The second artist we viewed was one I have heard of and seen a large portion of his work. He is the father of the surreal movement and he is Salvador Dali. We were shown a video of his that was incredibly hard to understand. But I believe now that, that was one of the points of the movie. Some of the scenes were odd. One scene had a man cut open a womens eye, another a hand with a hole in it and ants crawling out. Very interesting video to say the least.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
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