Nature

We are now in week seven. I never thought that week seven would come this fast, just yesterday I felt like I was writing my first blog. This week we didn’t really dwell on looking at art in our lecture but instead looked at how we interpret art and what art means to us. We pretty much were figuring out art,  which I have to say is pretty hard to do. Our presenter for this week is Carla Bengston and our readings go over William Kentridge, Roland Barthes, and Kiki Smith.

           

Carla came into our class and told us that she was a painter but during the lecture she never discussed her paintings. Instead of showing us her work, she talked to us about how we look, feel, respond and interact with nature. As we talked about that we also discussed how we, as people staring at a piece of art, look and feel about the work. We looked over other artist work such as DeMaria and Daniel Buren. What I liked about these artists was how they physically used themselves with nature to create art. It is one thing to paint a landscape but to actually use the environment around us I thought was pretty neat. What I mean by using the environment around us, we saw in class artist bending their bodies to the mold of the ground or using the ground as a canvas. I found the lecture to be really intriguing because personally I would prefer to be outside then inside and seeing these artists on the slide show doing creative art work out in nature is really cool.  A piece from the slideshow that really stuck with me was Earth Room. Just the concept of putting earth into a modern building really interested me.

            “Art is just a way to think”.  Kiki Smith was a really fun artist to read about and watch. I really enjoyed how she was explaining how art was to her. I always like hearing different artists discuss what art means to them and each person always seems to have a different response, but I really liked Kiki’s.  I also liked her response in the videos towards re-doing a sculpture; she would rather not start over but keep going at the wax sculpture. She doesn’t seem like a perfectionist but someone who lets the art do the talking. I like Kiki but I have to say that some to a majority of her work kind of freaked me out a little. For example her dead animals gallery installment. It freaked me out and just had a deathly vibe to it.

           

For this week we had to try and dissect the reading from Roland Barthes “Death of the Author”. Well I have to say that the reading wasn’t easy but was cleared up in class the following day by one example from Professor Ty, which was the picture of a man and his dog. We were supposed to explain how this picture made us feel and what the F%*$ is going on. After listening to other people’s responses to the picture, it soon became obvious that the picture had a life of its own and we can respond to it in any fashion we want.  What I kept finding interesting in the reading was the constant artist/author to viewer debate on what the work was meant to portray. I’m not sure if that makes sense but if you let go of your art, it will build a life of its own. When discussing the writing in class, we also talked about signs. I thought that this was an important discussion too because signs are universally born with a meaning. A cross symbolizes a religion even if it wasn’t meant to by the artist. 

             When trying to tie all these people together that we learned about this week all I can think about is how we interpret art and what do we get from art. All the artists share a similar quality when showing their art, which is tying art with emotions. When I looked at Kiki’s work, I felt an eerie dark feeling and while I looked at work such as the spiral jetty, I felt tranquility. It nice to look at art that has that much depth to it that doesn’t immediately pop right out at first glance.  Another important trait that was shared this week was art and nature and how they are tied together.