Art 125/FIST 318 Smart Phone Art Phone...Welcome!

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.

Art 340/540 New Media- Paul McCarthy

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...

Here's a PowerPoint...


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oVNxUFzzuJXjQkR__EiGF-6PD8XVJhod/view?usp=sharing


YOU WILL NEED TO DOUBLE CLICK 2020mccarthy.pptx AND THEN SELECT THE CloudConvert APP TO OPEN THE FILE OR DOWNLOAD THE FOLDER TO YOUR HARD DRIVE.

Art 340/540 New Media; The World We Now Live In

Jean Baudrillard related to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown; How an actual sign can exist as a Sign

Coming soon to every corner.

Why do we live in the wold we now live in?

Learning from Las Vegas...

 And from Photography...

 Look at this PowerPoint!!!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ppb1LzQZSCtzkw2jXASHBkDNmpkpgezB?usp=sharing

 YOU WILL NEED TO DOUBLE CLICK llv.pptx AND THEN SELECT THE CloudConvert APP TO OPEN THE FILE OR DOWNLOAD THE FOLDER TO YOUR HARD DRIVE.

Art 330/530 Street Photography: Intimacy and Distance

The catalog and beyond

 Google Street View has a straightforward conceptual goal...to make a continuous panorama that encompasses every public street on earth.

Artists who make photographs in public spaces need not be so dogmatic in their approach. Saul Leiter sought-out small visual miracles, where aspects of the street came together in a 1/60th of a second that created brilliant, harmonious mosaics of color and form.

"'Seeing is a neglected enterprise,' Mr. Leiter often said. Where other New York photographers of the period were apt to document the city's streets discreetly- streets, people, buildings - Mr. Leiter captured the almost indefinable spaces where all three intersect, many of them within a two-block radius of the East Village apartment in which he had lived since the early 1950s." -(Margalit Fox, Saul Leiter, Photographer who Captured New York's Palette, Dies at 89, The New York Times)

"I go out with my camera because I enjoy catching certain moments. Of course I don't know that I'm going to get what I'm going to get. It takes time." -Saul Leiter,  In No Great Hurry: 15 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (Thomas Leach, director, 2014)

Saul Leiter, Taxi, 1956

Saul Leiter, Barbershop, 75, 1950's

Saul Leiter, Street Scene, 1959

Saul Leiter, Dog in Doorway, Patterson, 1952

Saul Leiter, Foot on El, 1954

Richard Renaldi, Touching Strangers

 

For some artists the street is a place for theater, where quickly orchestrated social maneuvers can unfold into tender, awkward moments that become monumental.

CBS Evening News, June 20, 2014

Richard Renaldi, From the series "Touching Strangers"

From; The New Yorker Magazine - 24 Hours at the Epicenter of the Pandemic

Richard Renaldi, 12:11p.m. Washington Square Park

Richard Renaldi, 12:21p.m. Greenwich Village

Richard Renaldi, 1:53 p.m. SoHo

Art 340/540 New Media; Carved in Stone (?)

COUNTERFEIT;

The Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park is a full-scale copy of the original Parthenon in Athens. It was originally stucco and was later rebuilt in concrete.


PRODUCTION;

Erik Sommer’s sculpture/installation “Volvo 240”: a real Volvo, coated completely in concrete.

SIMULATION; 

 The Stucco Angel 

 The Wisconsin Concrete Park is an outdoor museum with 237 embellished concrete and mixed media sculptures built between 1948 and 1964 by Fred Smith.

 It's only a recording...

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14Ot-70NTxLqCj2XArB_uYgOhUIrtLWcQ?usp=sharing

YOU WILL NEED TO DOUBLE CLICK humanoid.pptx AND THEN SELECT THE CloudConvert APP TO OPEN THE FILE OR DOWNLOAD TO YOUR HARD DRIVE.
 

Art 330/530 Photo; Simulated Windows: The Politics of Landscape

 Intuitively we may believe an objective image of a landscape could exist, but can it? Won't even a formalist's agenda highly mediate our viewing experience? Is the depiction of a landscape always an act of consumption?

Colorama #274, Surfers and surfboards, Peter Gales, 1966

The Colorama was a backlit 18x60 foot photographic display located inside New York City's Grand Central Terminal from 1950 to 1990, a virtual window looking onto a fictionalized, idealized world where constant consumption and snapshot making abound, and the landscape is often prominent.

Grand Central Station, 1963

The colorama below, art directed by Norman Rockwell, has all the subtle satire of his magazine cover illustrations.

Colorama #126, Amdursky and Baker, Closing a Summer Cottage, 1957

Herb Archer. FAMILY CAMPING, LAKE PLACID NY, July/Aug 1959

Peter Gales, Colorama that appeared in Grand Central Station Aug. 26th, 1968

Rebecca Solnit, in her book, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art writes, 

"The desert is famously a place of silence. A place without language, to some extent, unnamed, unmapped, unfamiliar, corresponding to no familiar categories of experience, not truly outside representation but challenging to it.  It was, for a long time, literally a territory without a map, the last part of the continent to be explored and mapped, and much of what is now the (Nevada) Test Site seems to be the last part of the contiguous forty-eight states to be mapped.  Baudrillard would still be lost out here. Much of the difficulty the desert of the American West presented was linguistic and categorical: it did not correspond to what was known by easterners and Europeans.  It is not only because the Spanish arrived earlier that many aspects of this place - arroyos, mesas, playas, bajadas - have Spanish names, but also because there are no English words for such landforms...

Richard Misrach, "Simulated Window" Wendover Airforce Base, Utah, 1986

The politics of the simulacra carry a different weight inside the Enola Gay bunker.  Misrach's "Simulated Windows" shows a slab of drywall that closed off that bunker's view of the outside world on which military personnel drew and labeled "simulated scenery," "simulated bush,"...in a collection of images as clever and cold as anything by David Salle or Richard Prince, except that the detachment of these amateur artists is quite likely to be literally lethal, since it is not safely becalmed in the cultural driveway....Nuclear war and the U.S.military can be called, among other things, totalizing discourses, discourses that could be examined most clearly out here among some of the most crucial landscapes of the cold war....

Too, such a landscape at such a time makes demands that undermine the art histories we might call "landscape theory." Clouds here are not equivalents, the landscape is not a pathetic fallacy, because to hear it speak purely of self is to drown out urgent political histories, which affect that self profoundly. Both modernism and post-modernism are essentially urban, eastern practices. In both, landscape has been considered the most pedestrian, unintellectual of the themes of visual art, a kind of mental picnic. To find politics in its most virulent and secret form out in the desert upends those traditions. The landscape is no longer a given, but a threatened territory. The primary landscape tradition for Western civilization is that of the pastoral, in both literature and art: the pastoral as the antithesis of the city, a refuge from the politics and corruption of cities, a place of virtue, a place significantly outside history and ruled by cyclical rather than linear time. The pastoral at its most banal is the resort, vacationland, campsite. This tradition has made it hard to reinvision the landscape as instead the complex place in which futures are being prepared, secret wars carried out, poisons dispersed, histories inscribed." (Solnit p.75-78)

Art340/540; Are You a Commie?

The hidden menace of communism and the cold war. A menace that was only perceived to exist and a war that was never fought?

Close Up Foundation's "Ordinary Americans" series.

Found some pretty campy stuff for this PowerPoint on the 'red scare'.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ldTi88FwfBwyKg5zI4nG7_EDQOeW9WbY?usp=sharing

YOU WILL NEED TO DOUBLE CLICK uacommie.pptx AND THEN SELECT THE CloudConvert APP TO OPEN THE FILE OR DOWNLOAD TO YOUR HARD DRIVE.

Email me if you're having technical difficulties with the PowerPoints, getting the videos to play, etc. My newer computer opens these so effortlessly that it's not clear to me what it's doing!