Week 4 - Kehinde Wiley and inter-textuality

1. Find a clear definition of Intertextuality and quote it accurately on your blog using the APA referencing system. Use your own words to explain the definition more thoroughly.
 
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. Intertextuality refers to the way that any one text (written or visual ) is influenced, or made up of a variety of other earlier texts.(Chandler, D. (2003))

2. Research Wiley's work and write a paragraph that analyzes how we might make sense of his work. Identify intertextuality in Wiley's work.

He is a renaissance technician with hip-hop subject. Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles in 1977. His father was from Nigeria, and his mother was African-American. He did not grow up with his father, so, at the age of 20, he traveled to Nigeria to explore his roots and meet his father. His latest work focuses on young black men in a sadly familiar posture: Down. Part of Wiley's process was lifting his subjects straight from the street and rendering them-complete with sneakers, track pants, tank tops, and team caps-in the visual language of classic European portraiture, all of these issues relate to the intertextuality, we can see really clearly intertextuality in his art work.

‘down’ by kehinde wiley

deitch projects, new york
november 1 - december 20, 2008



3.Wiley's work relates to next weeks Postmodern theme "PLURALISM" . Read page 46 and discuss how the work relates to this theme.

Pluralism in art refer to the nature of artforms and artists as diverse. The culture context of art is all encompassing in its respect for the art of the world's culture. Include of many different values. I can see in Wiley's work relate to the pluralism. Most of his work have the colourful patten as the background background, I can say the style of the most painting is colsed to renaissance artist, which is fine and details. However, he inter new element of the issue in the picture to create his own art, from the clothings and the another object in the painting, Wiley makes the art more interesting and much different from the renaissance painting.

4. Comment on how Wiley's work raises questions around social/cultural hierarchies , colonisation, globalisation, stereotypes and the politics which govern a western worldview.

Wylie conflates historical formulas-Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, with hip-hop fashion elements and finds his own complex style. Most of his works emphasizes the everyday theatricality of Black youth culture, with its fetishization of personal style. That how he work on the sensitivity issue. Turn the serious subject into the funny or interesting image and combine with the old classical painting.

5. Add some reflective comments of your own, which may add more information that
you have read during your research.

In my opinion, Wiley try to used the old classical painting to make people have sympathetic responses, and created his own personalty. One of the important thing in his painting is the posing of the man in the picture, that is the part to show the emotion of whole painting.

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/w/kehinde_wiley/index.html

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/4538/down-by-kehinde-wiley.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/kehinde-wiley/

ALVC BOOK

Week 3- Hussein Chalayan

1. Chalayan’s works in clothing, like Afterwords (2000) and Burka (1996) , are often challenging to both the viewer and the wearer. What are your personal responses to these works? Are Afterwords and Burka fashion, or are they art? What is the difference? Not all clothing is fashion, so what makes fashion fashion?.

Every significant piece he created a story of movement, travel, flight, even loss, from the clothes that fold into airmail envelopes to those famous pieces of “portable architecture”. And I think the ''Afterwords(2000)'' is kind of architecture combine with fashion, the skirt is made by wood with many layers. He choose different material to challenge how people define fashion and create new art. The wood is different from the fabric, the wood skirt on the model looks really attractive and reasonable, and the wood also enhance the whole dress. Another work ''Burka(1996)'' which challenging ideas such as modesty, identity and feminity, Chalayan presented models wearing different length burka inspired creations with nothing underneath them, with some of the model's being completely naked except for a mask and sandals. The burka is the one of the important thing Muslim womem should dress. It also shows women to appear to be all the same with their faces covered, like the burka or length of the mask. Clothing is a medium to make people accept that how he turned the fashion into art . I think that why Chalayan's fashion works looks fashion and creative.

2.Chalayan has strong links to industry. Pieces likeThe Level Tunnel(2006) and Repose(2006) are made in collaboration with, and paid for by, commercial business; in these cases, a vodka company and a crystal manufacturer. How does this impact on the nature of Chalayan’s work? Does the meaning of art change when it is used to sell products? Is it still art?

'The level tunnel' is a 15m long, 5m high installation that can be experienced from the exterior or blindfolded on the inside. The different from Chalayan's original work is this work is kind of art. Chalayan has developed an experience of the senses, working with a number of different materials and playing with scent, touch and sound. The viewing is blindfolded and led into the installation, where they are confronted with sound created by a flute made from a vodka bottle. I do not think the art become selling product will not be art any more. Because if the art can turn into the part of our life or another simple idea can mostly people understand, that make art work more successful. Further on, a breeze carries the scent of lemon and cedar as the visitors moves along the leather coated railings. a heart monitor is fitted onto the visitor and a display on the outside projects their heartbeat to external viewers.

   



3.Chalayan’s film Absent Presence screened at the 2005 Venice Biennale. It features the process of caring for worn clothes, and retrieving and analysing the traces of the wearer, in the form of DNA. This work has been influenced by many different art movements; can you think of some, and in what ways they might have inspired Chalayan’s approach?

Exclusively produced for Venice Biennale, The Absent Presence, is an enigmatic story based on identity, geography, genetics, biology and anthropology. Chalayan opens the argument on how certain identities can or cannot adapt to new environments and generates a research based narration for his cross-disciplined installation with filmic images and sculptures. There is a serious research behind the end product displaying the interplay of the real and the imagined with a series of collected clothes and deformed crystallized garments. A DNA extraction process from the clothes collected from unknown people, an anthropological evaluation, and a 3 D manipulation all treated through the London sound-scape as the environment reveals the approach of Chalayan to the dilemma of identity

4. Many of Chalayan’s pieces are physically designed and constructed by someone else; for example, sculptor Lone Sigurdsson made some works from Chalayan’s Echoform (1999) and Before Minus Now (2000) fashion ranges. In fashion design this is standard practice, but in art it remains unexpected. Work by artists such as Jackson Pollock hold their value in the fact that he personally made the painting. Contrastingly, Andy Warhol’s pop art was largely produced in a New York collective called The Factory, and many of his silk-screened works were produced by assistants. Contemporarily, Damien Hirst doesn’t personally build his vitrines or preserve the sharks himself. So when and why is it important that the artist personally made the piece?

Chalayan's greatest skill may be his ability to use colors and graphic prints so dramatically, and yet allow the woman wearing them to seem elusive, even chilly. Women who buy his clothes pay dearly for that image. He is the rare designer whose commercial line is priced higher than his own. Each artist or designer have their own personal style, and the personal style is the essential part of the artist. The viewers can see the different story or thinking of the artist, and personally made artist to make different piece.

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/read.php?CATEGORY_PK=&TOPIC_PK=2858
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23626540-hussein-chalayan-is-fashions-techno-wizard.do
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein_Chalayan
http://www.husseinchalayan.com/blog/

Post-Modernism, Ai Weiwei and Banksy

1. Define Post-Modernism using 8-10 bullet points that include short quotes.

* Is used in the philosophy, literature, socialsciences and architecture.

* Is associated with relativism. And the idea of the relativism is ''anything goes''.

* Is an intentional departure from modernist approaches that had previously been dominant.

* Post-modernism is composed by two words. Post is ''after'', and the modernism belong to the modern period.

* A grand narrative has left the idea in post-modernism.

* Is used in critical theory to belong the literature, drama, architecture, cinema, journalism, and design, as well as in marketing and business and in the interpretation of law, culture, and religion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Particularly as an academic movement, can be understood as a reaction to modernism in the Humanities.

* Postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person.

* Social constructivism is another idea with in the post-modernism. The main idea is there is no objective knowledge or absolute representation of reality.


2. Use a quote by Witcombe (2000) to define the Post-Modern artist.


The post modern artist is “reflexive” in that he/ she is self aware and consciously involved in a process of thinking about him/ herself and society in a deconstructive manner, “demasking” pretensions , becoming aware of his/ her culture self in history, and acceleration the process of self-consciousness”

3. Use the grid on pages 42 and 43 to summarize the list of the features of Post-
Modernity.

Since 1980, most of the art has been considered to be Post-Modern. The main focus and content in real and personal, postmodernists subject morality to personal opinion and they define morality as each person’s private code of ethics without the need to follow traditional values and rule. Hyper reality, image saturation are more powerful than original. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.


4. Use this summary to answer the next two questions.

5. Research Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's 'Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola logo'(1994)
in order to say what features of the work are Post-Modern.



Ai Wei Wei, he is one of the China's earliest and most influential avant-garde artists. In the late 1970s, he was a member of "The Stars," a group of largely self-taught artists who challenged official communist icons and ideology and helped spark the modern art movement in Beijing. He has also used this symbol in combination with Chinese traditional ceramics. His ‘Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo’ (1994) is a well-known example. The coca cola sign and the urn are totally different period of object. He combined two object to represent the changing of the period. And in post-modernism is focused on making image saturation more powerful than original and he also created a new art work and broke the traditional views and rules. Ai’s concept differs in that the urn and the logo are not fused together as one seamless object, but can be seen with the logo as an act of violent defacement on the urn, or with the logo as artistic graffiti on the urn of mainstream tradition. The hand of the artist is very much present and emphasized.

6. Research British artist Banksy's street art, and analyze the following two works by the artist to discuss how each work can be defined at Post-Modern.(Use your list from point 6.)

Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director and painter. His street art combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in distinctive stencil-ling technique. In his work 'Flower Riot', the pose of the man is throwing the flower, the original object should be stone or something else. Another work is Los Angeles (2008), this work is in Valuable Banksy Street Art Stolen From East Los Angeles Wall. We can see the ancient man is holding the plate with the junk food. Both of the works showed strong post-modernism, which without traditional rules and represent really obvious personal idea.

                                    

http://vanyice.pixnet.net/blog/post/12024649-%E8%97%9D%E8%A1%93%E6%81%90%E6%80%96%E5%88%86%E5%AD%90-banksy

http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/characteristics-of-postmodernism-faq.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy

http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html

http://ambro32.tripod.com/postmod.html

ALVC BOOK

Week 1- Nathalie Djurberg's 'Claymations'

Nathalie Djurberg is a Swedish video artist who born in 1978. She is popular for producing clymation short film that are faux-naïve, but graphically violent and erotic.Her star rose higher when she won the Silver Lion for best young artist at the 2009 Venice Biennale, where she produced a bigger-than-life, Plasticine Garden of Eden and three videos that featured a decorous May-December couple being hounded by nature as well as ritualistic play between bosomy naked women and robed priests.

Nathalie Djurberg’s New Movements in Fashion, 2006. © Nathalie Djurberg. Courtesy of Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, and Gio Marconi, Milan.

1. What do you understand by the word 'claymation'?

Claymation is an animation process using clay or Plasticine figures that are moved and filmed using stop-motion photography to create a lifelike look.

    

2. What is meant by the term 'surrealistic Garden of Eden'? and 'all that is natural goes awry'?

 

The eden probably is derived from the Akkadian word edinu, borrowed from the Sumerian eden, meaning "plain." Nowadays, people also have the explanation of the Garden of Eden is which Adam and Eve were placed at the creation. In her work '' the experiment'', she made the flowers bigger than original size which even taller than a person, the color tone of the flowers is based on cold tone. Although she made opposite thinking that how people generally think of the Eden, so she called her Eden ''surrealistic Garden of Eden''. Her work always in the grotesque atmosphere which is created lie both sexual insinuations and ambiguous relationships. Al-though at first sight the animations seem allude to puppet theaters and the naive and harmless expressions of childhood. That maybe why she called the work ''all that is natural goes awry''

3. What are the 'complexity of emotions' that Djurberg confronts us with?

Djurberg’s work show the human behavior, unflinchingly revealing the inhumanities and abuses. The subjects she addresses in her works are the massacres of innocent civilians in wartime, racial discrimination under colonial and post-colonial regimes, or sexual abuse by those in positions of power.

  

4. How does Djurberg play with the ideas of children's stories, and innocence in some of her work?

The views always can find animals pair up with humans in her work and the video which she made always begin with fairy- tale sweetness and dissolve into grisly sadism.

5. There is a current fascination by some designers with turning the innocent and sweet into something disturbing. Why do you think this has come about?

 

In my opinion, most of people desire to see something interesting issues closer to human behavior, about the society, sexual, individual. And the opposite subject can make the emotion more stronger and clearer, the viewers can have more feeling and the work can be much affected.

6.In your opinion, why do you think Djurberg's work is so interesting that it was chosen for the Venice Biennale?

She used the unique material and commands everything from idea, costume and not least dramaturgy. And the music of ''the experiment'' which made from Han Berg, he played the important part in the exhibition. The music pushes the narration forward and actually creates extra tension.

http://www.regionmuseet.m.se/english_natalie-djurberg.htm
http://www.columbusunderground.com/human-behavior-nathalie-djurberg-with-music-by-hans-berg
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_45/ai_n24354920/?tag=mantle_skin;content
http://www.wexarts.org/info/press/1011/spex/djurberg/
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/nathalie-djurberg#!/photos/47242/1

Industrialisation, Modernism and architecture

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (1997) Frank Gehry

Eiffel Tower (1889) Gustave Eiffel

The Importance of the Design and Construction

          The Eiffel tower is consisted of immense exposed latticework, which made in puddle iron. The main function of Eiffel tower is to see the view of Paris, it has three levels. The first and second levels have some souvenir shops and restaurants. The third level people can see exceptional panoramic views whether day or night time. About Guggenheim museum, the building is twisted, irregular curving lines and series of volume, which made by limestone and some others made in metallic titanium. It totally different from Eiffel tower and Guggenheim museum, in the sight view the Eiffel tower is simple and symmetrical shape, compare to the Guggenheim museum is irregular building.

Significance of the Materials

        As I mentioned in last paragraph, the Eiffel tower is made in puddle with a lot of great exposed latticework. The Guggenheim museum is more mathematical complexity, the materials includes the limestone, metallic titanium, glass, and the sinuous stone.



Significance of the Designer

       The artist who bulit the Guggenheim museum in Spain is Frank Gehry. His architectural style is inventive and irreverent. He created unexpected architect, using unorthodox materials like corrugated metal and chain link. His work have been called radical, playful, organic and sensual. Effil tower was made by Gustave Eiffel, he was a famous French engineer and architect, he used the great metallic struvtures and the base with the creating shadow.

Function for Which Each Was Built
Function Now-has It Changed?

      The function of the eiffel tower was built to celebrate the engineering and science achievements of its age, but now the eiffel tower is a famous viewpoint in Frence and the good location to see the hole view of Frence. The Guggenhein museum is one of the country's most important until now and its become more popular which has another four locations distribute around Spain.

http://architecture.about.com/od/greatarchitects/p/gehry.htm

http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/Paris/Monuments-Paris/Eiffel.shtml

http://www.guggenheim.org/guggenheim-foundation

 

Landscape and the Sublime

1. What and when was the Enlightenment?

The enlightenment (or the age of enlightenment) is a movement which was happened centered upon the 18^th century. The core of the enlightenment was a critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs, and morals, and strong belief in rationality and science, the philosophies were contradictory or divergent frequency in the movement.

2. Define the concept of the Sublime.

The sublime is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude which has been concept of aesthetic theory in Western art and philosophy. It especially refers to a greatness with nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility.

3. How did the concept of the Sublime come out of the Enlightenment thought?

Enlightenment influenced by empiricism and the classics. Most aesthetic idea of the enlightenment insisted on reason and experience, and classified genius as something outside the rule.

4. Discuss the subject matter, and aesthetic (look) of Misrach's work to identify the Sublime in his work. Add some more images of his work.

The sublime is about the immensity and vastness within nature. And most of the mean theme from Misrach is landscape and nature photograph.

5. Identify some other artists or designers that work with ideas around the Sublime, from the Enlightenment era as well as contemporary artists.

 'The Triumph of Venus'  François Boucher

6. How does Misrach's photography make you feel? Does it appeal to your imagination?

From Misrach’s photography, i feel the great power of nature, the time stop and the silent in the moment. And the color tones of his photography represent gray and cool tones, which bring a lot of reverse side of emotion to people. but also bring about calmness and peace in the deeply side of soul. The photos also made a lot of missing about happiness and some memories.

7. Add a Sublime image of your choice to your blog, which can be Art or just a Sublime photograph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=397117&section=6

http://www.amerindianarts.us/articles/concept_of_the_sublime_as_an_aesthetic_quality.shtml

http://lauradallaston.blogspot.com/2010/05/richard-misrach-and-sublime.html

The social status of the artist

1.Identify aspects of Durer's self portrait that show a changing view of the artist's view of himself as an individual.

In the later European art, they take for recognized the subject matter of the self-portrait and artist take it as natural the sense of themselves as unique. This self-portrait which paints by Dürer is quite usual. The portrait is unlike any that came before. The size of the portrait is half-length, frontal and highly symmetrical (67 x 49 cm). As the history note, we found this painting is similar to some religions paintings, involving the symmetry, the dark one background and gesture. Especially, the manner is shown raising his right hand to the middle of his chest which is the pose of blessing. There is unknown why Dürer decided to portray himself in this painting. However, he painted the self-portrait as Chris and the historians found the painting which is similar poses or expressions in his 1498 Christ as Man of Sorrows.

2.Explain how the artist's social status increased during the Renaissance period. Briefly explain why this happened

During the renaissance, the artist’s became more important and independent, music and literature either. People started to use some of the wealth on supported writers and artists; they got more interesting in arts. People started to ask more detail in the art and various content and from. Many innovations from artists were encouraged by the wealthy people.

3.Comment on Gavin Turk's work in relation to individualism, status of the artist and egotism

Most works from Given Turk based on his own signature. We can see the strong personality in his work that the definition of individualism. He also made some photographic and sculptural self-portraits. I can have adequate proof that it related egotism. He also interested in the effect of the way fame and celebrity in understanding art, he has been describe many famous people on his sculpture works. Turk has participated in group exhibitions and designs community education projects recently year.

4.Comment on Damien Hirst's use of his work and the media for self promotion

Death is a central theme in Damien Hirst’s work. He put animals (e.g. a shark, a sheep, a cow) in formaldehyde. He also made "spin paintings," created on a spinning circular surface, and "spot paintings".

5.Find 2 images of work by artists or designers that reflects some of the ideas of individualism, self promotion or egotism that have been discussed on this blog. Upload images to your blog, title and date the work, identify the artist/designer and comment on the work in relation to the question.

"pop" Gavin Turk

"The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living"Damien Hirst