Response to Digital Potrait: Subjective versus Objective

After completing the Digital Portrait assignment and observing the thought process behind each person's own portrait I discovered that the line that differentiates between subjectivity and objectivity is very blurred. It was interesting to see how each person approached this problem of subjectivity versus objectivity differently and what one individual read as subjective could be seen as objective to someone else. This is also interesting because in the end no matter how objective an image is each person carries with them their own subjectivity, therefore the same image can look very different to one person based on their own subjective beliefs compared to another outside viewer and then even more different then how the artist's hand intended it to be read.

Response to Robert Frank Exhibition and the National Gallery

Visiting the Robert Frank exhibition at the National Gallery was truly an enlightening experience. It felt so personal to be able to see his work and thought process up close. The amount of planning and thinking that went into organizing the sequencing, the amount of editing and care that went into each photograph, and the amount of decision making that was involved in producing The Americans shows the love and devotion that Robert Frank has for his work and his discipline. It was great to see each of the photographs blown up individually to draw attention to how each one can stand alone as well as in series. It was also really interesting to be able to see images and thinking from earlier projects that he had worked on prior to the completion of The Americans. I was able to see how everything that Robert Frank had done had helped him to create The Americans as well as how he had grown as a photographer. Seeing his thought process from his contact sheets was also incredible. It was so cool to see how he selected some images over others, how he cropped images, and burned and dodged to make the image better. In the end it was an amazing experience to see work that I have been so familiar with from learning about Robert Frank so up close and personal that it made the images new again to me.

New Media Artist#9 Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas a member of the Young British Artists is best known for her work that uses furniture as a substitute for the human body with such works as Bitch and Pauline Bunny. Her provocative work uses "humour, visual puns and sexual metaphor to discuss sex, death, Englishness and gender." I was drawn to Lucas' creative use of material and edgy message. How she uses objects that I would have never even crossed my mind when thinking about art. One such example is her work Is Suicide Genetic? (1996) in which Lucas photographed the inside of a rusted toilet on which she had written "Is suicide genetic?" on the inside of the bowl. Similar to Tracey Emin, it is obvious that Lucas has a message she wants to show the world and she doesn't care who it offends. Lucas is also well known for her self-portrait photography such as Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, Self Portrait with Mug of Tea, and Eating a Banana. Lucas describes that in each of these portraits she uses her masculine appearance and 'machoness' to her advantage in order to comment on gender, sexuality, and defiant femininity. Lucas' explains that she is interested in the concepts of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his theory of drives such as a sex drive and a death drive. Lucas incorporates these ideas successfully into her own work and explores them through her own media. I admire Sarah Lucas because her work is not about being pretty or even ascetically pleasing but rather it is a means to ask a question to make the audience think. 

New Media Artist#8 Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst an English artist and member of the Young British Artists is most well known for his work featuring a series of dead animals preserved in formaldehyde. One in particular titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living displays a 14 foot tiger shark encased in a glass case of formaldehyde. For the installation Hirst commissioned a fisherman to catch a shark of the coast of Australia stating he wanted something "big enough to eat you." Being a psychology major I was intrigued by this installation because although you know that the shark is dead and there is no way that it can in any way harm you I imagine that seeing the exhibition that up close and personal must still give many viewers that jitters. It plays with your mind and reality. You are conditioned to feel fear when you find yourself starring head on into the dark beady eyes of a shark but this shark can not hurt you so you are not really sure what to think. Hirst's exhibitions also include other animals such as a sheep and a cow. However not all other artists find Hirst's work so fascination. The Stuckist art group created in 1999 opened a Stuckism gallery under the name A Dead Shark Isn't Art. They argued that Hirst was the downfall of contemporary art proving that "financial value was now the only meaning that remained for art." 

Scrapbook Entry#17 Footprints

Everyone's fingerprint is unique. The pattern of lines and circles on your thumb is not the same as anyone else's. However, similar to fingerprints, footprints are unique to the individual who made them as well. The size, the width, the height of the arch, and the force at which it was made are all aspects that tell us something about the individual. In my opinion footprints tell us more about an individual then a fingerprint. A fingerprint is only useful if there is already information linked to that fingerprint, the fingerprint must already be on file. A footprint on the other hand can tell us something about a person based solely on the information we have in front of us. For example, based on the size and width we can tell roughly about the person's height and build. We can tell if the print was made by a young child or a grown man. If there are multiple prints we can reenact the person's stride. We may be able to tell if the person is pigeon-toed or possible has a limp. Yet, unlike fingerprints footprints do not go on file and are usually not forever. The temporariness of a footprint in the sand before the water washes it away or in the mud before a rainstorm causes us to make sure we give our attention to the footprint before it is lost forever or until another person walks down that same path. A footprint is not art but it deserves our attention nonetheless because it is a representation of something that was there before. It shows the path of something that has already gone ahead and although we may be able to see it now it may not be there when we go looking for it again. 

Scrapbook Entry#18 The House

When driving down a new neighborhood in the suburbs you often see a repetition of the same cookie cutter house, sometimes slightly modified, but still the same backbone. Yet, although the same from the outside, each of these houses are very different on the inside. The people who live in them, the lives that take place in them, are each their own. It is interesting to me that something so similar can also be so unique. That the same place can mean something to one person and something completely different to another. In this way the house is representative of the human being. On the outside we are all the same, there are obviously variations just like houses we may be painted different colors but our backbone is still the same, we are all human. However, clearly no person is the same. Even identical twins are not ever the same. We each have our own personality, our own voice, our own name, our own history, our own experiences. These things shape the inside of our house, they are what make us different from the person sitting next to us. Most of us would not look at a normal everyday house as a piece of art but the larger picture still deserves our attention. Many people criticize suburban sprawl but we must recognize that these homes are providing families with a home although it may not be aesthetically pleasing or express creativity from the outside the lives that happen with inside these homes makes them interesting. 

Scrapbook Entry#16 Fruit and Vegetables

When growing up and learning about how to draw and how to paint the first step was always the still life. It often featured a bowl with fruit and vegetables placed strategically inside and then carefully placed on a slightly folded cloth hanging of the edge of a table. Although I at first hated doing still lifes, thinking that they were so boring and posed, I began to become intrigued by the variety of colors the fruit and vegetables had to offer. The vibrancy of an orange against a ripe red pepper or a bright green apple next to the yellow of a banana. I enjoyed working with such vibrant paints and mixing colors to create the exact color of each object. I found the variety of textures to also be fascinating. The dimples in the orange contrasted against the waxiness of an apple, the seeds of a strawberry compared to the hairiness of a kiwi. I am not only intrigued by fruits and vegetables in the context of a painting but in food as well. The variety of flavors, the different way each is encased in a peel or not, the contrast of the inside and outside. It is interesting to me how such natural things can be so bizarre and unique. In conclusion it is not the fruit and vegetables in a still life that is the art, but rather the way the painter's hand interprets these objects. However I believe that the evolution of such a painting starts with the objects themselves therefore the fruit and vegetables deserve our attention.