mumbling to myself aloud, in public. at times it is embarrassing, but it is as it is. I know you're expecting art!
It is here, but interwoven / embedded with cyber residue of life.
two of the three went well. the third i got bogged down, distracted a stymied on the conference's old laptop, finding the buttons and touch pad clumsy. sigh. next time i just break the rules and plug in my mac. then i can not only run my presentation from my phone and stand anywhere, but can also see my notes simultaneously! my presentations are typically dependent on visuals, they actually provide unsaid information, now they also include key stats, which in my mine, numbers are better seen than said.
here is partial sampling of my three on three. remember you are not getting the verbal commentary, just a half snippet. PS I love Janine Antoni, Robert Morris, and Schneeman's work. How could they not be freaking influential on my primary practice. PSS I am not a historian, but a practicing studio artist, plus grad student, and I teach/present from this perspective.
in the written text of female visual artists are there linguistic traces of self-limiting social positioning?
Robert Morris | agile evasion of disciplinary definition = transgenred
the body is never neutral, never silent[contemporary art history]
ps. disclaimer - imagery was used for educational purpose in educational setting. outside of a grade, honoring, and self-respect, there was no fiscal benefit.
throw back thursday on a slightly warming saturday.
PG 13 yet more moderate than a Victoria secret catalog
contemporary art lecture remembered...i show the first image and it took 15 minutes before anyone identifies how offensive my choices were. the works themselves not offensive yet offensive when combined. of course the topic was the manifestation of art from a sense of other, real and perceived oppression. as an affluent over educated white female and their professor, i had to do some permission granting to coax them into touching on the politically incorrect offense, not even politically, just a flat out offense. finally a small population of the 90 began speaking up. all lead by one brave she-child with the guts to point out how the specific offense related to the cow...you know who you are! good job. yay. It was a good day...
relationships help us see what otherwise might go unnoticed. it allows us to see other; to see ourselves with more clarity if we dare to listen and see little truths without the gloss over of habit. comparative analysis which we partake in all day long in navigating this chair or that, this route or that, this person or that, allows us also to see culturally shifts and sameness. art as a social barometer for me is a key interest except when i just get tripped up on its trinkethood, art as product. it bores me. art as a social barometer, a barometer of self and other, a barometer of social habits unmasked, NOW that is of interest.
so i throw together images that on the surface [formally or content] seem similar...and through comparative analysis we hunt to see more than if they stood alone.
your turn. hunt and have fun with it. feel free to harvest for your own discussions and consider the images not my own but google harvested shared for educational purposes only...
there are superficial relationships, plus your current cultural baggage you bring to the analysis, but in each pairing if you do some background research (even google skimming), the similarities and differences are deep and profound. for instance many of these pairs have years, decades, some centuries, bridging their making, others span oceans, gender, the real and the made, education, affluence, margin, medium, and method...i finally started learning my geography and world history through the analysis of art which made it living and breathing enough so it enthralled.
ha. perhaps it is FATE that has me rethinking, reexamining and revisiting the mark and the facilitation of its practice. perhaps. (Link to associated handouts for projects)
the mark and its exploration is not a new thing but ever beautiful and seductive.
All images are of my students' works 2007-2013
mark making isn't an exercise in scribble or field painting. instead it is an exploration in the mark, movement, method, meaning, and mood. it is about repetition and rhythm, freedom and restraint, it is about the amazing play between the occupation of space with the silence of the unoccupied. it is about the role of similarity and difference, about lulling and captivation. it mimics the breath, the dialogue. it is a way of listening. it is a translation of primal perception. it is not a damn scribbled field pinned to a wall like a child's painting or to your professor's metaphorical refrigerator. even the simplest of marks can sing of sophistication.
as our wheels roll us habitually home, our dominant hand rolls with the rhythms of writing. no cognition or recognition required, just a bundle of spacial and methodological habits. what does it take to de-rut the routine of writing in the practices of the arts, in the practice of the hand? i've found the success in at least temporarily derutting leads to an openness with other materials and methods while pursuing alternative practices.
perhaps it is not FATE that my students continuously made magnificent marks. perhaps each crew i had was a mad cluster of awesomeness. i lean toward their awesomeness.
Much of the mark making practice and the facilitations of exploration into and around i gleaned from the design professors at University of Houston ! a thousand thank yous! their design program is amazing!
Mark Making Projects have evolved from studies of hand and body movements, tools, building mark making device for mark and stand alone object, to the inclusion of story and spacial and conceptual manifestions
Projects/Practices harvested and adapted from UH design professors
StoryLINE which I developed out of the concept of line, it explores sourcing of ideas, metaphorical development, creative writing, and the expression of lines in space, real or conceptual.
it is always ego nice to see systems, projects, crit and teaching practices i've developed and implemented, refined, and modeled, put into practice and promoted by other educators because they work. they do. In this case the initial explorations into the visceral mark making, movement, methods was harvested and adapted over time from my uh design professors. Thank you
