Between 1925 and 1954 Frida Kahlo painted 55 self-portraits. In most of these she confronts the viewer in a full-frontal, straight-on manner. This helps her bring you into her world. She wants you to feel her pain, and her passion.
'The Broken column' painted in 1944
Much of her pain was physical. Her health problems began when she contracted Polio at age 6. At age 18 a bus she was riding in was struck by a streetcar and she was impaled by a handrail and her pelvis, spine and leg received multiple fractures. It was during this bedridden recovery period when she began painting seriously. But she never did really recover. In her lifetime she would have 35 surgeries and would wear 50 different supportive corsets and a prosthetic leg.
'Self-Portrait with Monkeys' painted in 1943
Her damaged body did nothing to suppress the power that emanates from the inner self here. We are left to wonder what her understanding of 'self' really was and how she was able to so directly communicate something so intangible.
Much of the lore of her life surrounds her long, disrupted marriage to Mexican painter Diego Rivera. The well-known biographical movie, Frida (2002), is no exception;
The Wriston digital lab is in the lower level of the Wriston Art Center, in the near West portion of the building. Your LU ID will buzz you into the building and the room. Currently only one student can occupy the lab at a time. There is a sign-up sheet on the door if you wish to reserve time, and an 'un/occupied' sign on the doorknob. Only the back computer is hooked-up to the printer. Open your image in photoshop. If you set the screen brightness to 3 suns it will give you a good idea of what it may look like printed...most images need to be brightened up a bit. Check that the printer is powered-up. Insert an 8.5 by 11 sheet of the luster photo paper into the printer vertically with the shiny-ish side up, to the far right part of the paper slot. Make sure the printer dialog is set to 'professional'. Use this video to help navigate the printer dialog;
Most of these settings will not need to be changed. It is important to size your image so it is nicely placed on the sheet, as when we frame the 11x14s the amount of border, or bleed-off, is critical to the look of the framed image.
Sometimes we need to think about how lines on paper translate to life on the street. This photo shows Alÿs carrying a dripping can of green paint along the armistice boundary that Moshe Dayan marked on a map with green pencil after Israel’s War of Independence ended in 1948. It questions the physicality and cultural relevance of the Green Line, its function as a social and spiritual division in the city of Jerusalem, and its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Sometimes form is created simply by the act of walking, as in this poignant and gorgeous 1997 film by Alys;
Francis Alÿs Cuentos Patrióticos, 1997
"In his wanderings through his adopted home country of Mexico, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) addresses the topic of urban power structures – for instance, in his film Cuentos Patrioticos, which plays out on the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square. The square was laid out by the Spanish conquistadors as an emblem of their victory over the Aztecs and has repeatedly been the scene of demonstrations of power. In Alÿs’ film Cuentos Patrioticos we see a man taking a sheep on a lead in a circle around the large flagpole on Zócalo square. With every ring of the bell more sheep join the bellwether. Sheep are gregarious animals and accordingly, at the sight of the strange parade on this square so steeped in history, the automatic temptation is to see them as blind followers. In his film Cuentos Patrioticos Alÿs is referencing a real event which took place here in 1968. At the height of the political unrest thousands of civil servants were forced to demonstrate for the government on this central square in the Mexican metropolis. In an act both subversive and, at the same time, humorous, the civil servants rebelled against this directive in the following way: Although they did flock to the square, they turned their backs on the government platform and bleated like sheep. A framed text chosen by the artist and a postcard referring to the events are part of the work and are exhibited alongside the film."
Hello and welcome to our online class! Here we'll be posting art on social media platforms while identifying and applying conceptual design concepts. The art you're making doesn't need to be created or posted with a phone...we are just assuming that this is how it will be viewed. This blog will be shared with my ART/FIST 240 class, which will explore related ideas.
The concepts we'll be implementing are taken from the Graphic Design The New Basics book, where our first reading acknowleges the influence of the Bauhaus school...
These ideas can take on broad applications...to sound, movement, or what-have-you.
Although we had a taste of this last term, the process of creating a community of artists across the country, and world, seems incredible to me! This is an amazing opportunity to learn about and appreciate everyone's art via public presentation on social media with a bit of background on process via your blogs.
What contemporary artist relates most directly to this Simulations book we're reading?...maybe Paul McCarthy, a multi-media madman (not at all really) whose work many consider to be about the most primal level of human experience. Maybe it is intuition that takes him to these hyperreal worlds, or maybe that butter and hamburger-covered head is packed full of late 20th century theory? We shouldn't care, in art it may not matter.
'The Painter' is so hilarious that it's almost dangerous for me to watch...
But what are we watching here...exactly? It's clearly satire, but it's a super-intense artist playing the role of a super-intense artist of maybe one generation back, in a way that becomes self-satire, particularly in its unmasking of artistic focus. It's humorous, but not 'comedy', the character drifts from being a clownish actor to being Paul himself, mocking his own work (tube of shit, etc.) and humiliating himself. Drifting from hyperrealness to simulation to...maybe even some kind of elusive true real.
His most recent work has been in virtual reality...
