A Sculpture, by me?

I'm awful at sculptures, and I've had several attempts to confirm this.
I find them interesting, but have always lacked the ability to take an idea from the two demensional drawing to the real world.

As a part of a different classes' project, I created this sculpture.

It's an elephant, if you're curious. It isn't supposed to be realistic, in fact I meant to add several more segments to the legs before calling it complete, but as a bad sculptor I feared for the structural integrity of it should I add more (it isn't the most stable thing).

It is a photograph/sculptural representation of my fondness of Salvador Dali, which I found ironic because of DTC 477 I am doing a recreation of a Dali piece.

This one is a homage to this Dali piece:

As you can see my legs were not nearly long enough!

Just posting for the enjoyment of others, I thought that this was an interesting way to combine two mediums (photography and sculpture) to express an admiration of an artist.

The sculpture is made out of empty plastic bottles, if you're interested. The paint on the board is supposed to be splotchy.

-Thomas

DTC 477 Shanken 15-30

I'm always interested in unique ways of using equipment and mediums.

I think there's something special about the kinds of work that can emerge from distorting, destroying, and confusing digital media. 

There are many traditional works where people use their medium to realistically record a moment in time or a figment of their imagination. While I love that kind of work the most, there's definitely a unique and not entirely mutually exclusive set of people who are using mediums in a different way.

From the reading I'm thinking of page 22s paragraph on Mary Lucier's Dawn Burn and the recreation by Jochen Gerz in his Prometheus piece.

The idea of pushing a medium to its absolute limits to find out what happens is exciting to me, and honestly I believe that it is people who endeavor to create those kinds of works who really provide a blueprint to the expansion and refining of a medium for future inventors and thinkers.

Using the Dawn Burn example, we get an interesting work of art from the failure of a technology, but it also provides us with a goal for the video industry to perhaps one day create a lens capable of handling the sun in its entirety.

Works like this take a stroke of ingenuity, something I always admire. 

-Thomas 

DTC 477 Sharken 1-15

In this section I picked up mostly on the beginning statement about technology in the artistic culture.
The book says that electronic arts are slowly beginning to be pulled into the mainstream, but I still feel that such a movement is moving too slowly.

It would be fantastic if in ten years contemporary art galleries and museums were everywhere, but I feel as if it just won't happen.

I would love to live in a time where the electronic medium is widespread, but have the feeling that in most cases it's too far "out there" from what people expect art to be to be accepted in the masses.

Artists are in part to blame, stereotypes come to exist originally from a distorted truth. If artists create landscapes and portraits as realistically as possible a thousand times, people are going to expect it.

With the often slow-changing perceptions of society towards a creative movement and the stereotypes artists are forced under, I fear it will be past even my time before new medium artwork is truly accepted as mainstream.
(Though isn't part of being an artist going against the flow? In which case the entire desire of artists for contemporary artwork to be mainstream becomes flawed.)

In closing I want to say there is nothing wrong with the traditional mediums and techniques, I admire them. But I feel it places the artistic mind in such a narrow confine.
The artistic class has unlimited potential to change the way the world sees things, so it seems a shame to pretend that the world is the same as it has been for hundreds of years (with classic subjects such as scenery and portraits).

Hopefully I'm wrong and society proves to be more forward thinking than I anticipate. I'd like nothing more than to be a elderly guy walking through a museum and seeing some modern artwork with some real depth on the walls rather than another portrait of a cattle.

-Thomas

DTC 355 Stewart: pg. 287-311

In this section of reading, the part that interested me was the examination of film and editing.
It was the little bit on tempo that I found interesting, though it felt a little redundant to say that editing clips can lead to slower or faster scenes.

Rapid cuts would create a rush to the scene, especially when complimented with fast movement of the characters.

I liked the example of Star Wars, not because I felt it was an especially great example, but because the scene described is very much in the "middle". It isn't a fast or slow scene. To be honest, when I see that scene, it doesn't feel much like a fight scene.

Now given when it was directed, maybe I'm just overly saturated to movies with brutal fighting and constant fight music. But I can still look at it without that lens and see the tempo as it is.

(This was written a while ago but when I hit publish it went to drafts).

-Thomas Holland

Making a New Art Form

I came across this article the other day, and I thought it was pretty interesting.
I haven't had the chance to read the full thing, just the first two sections.

But I liked the first section about trying to create a new art form, and how anything that is made can't really be "new" or "original" because everything is invariably based off of something else.

We discussed this same issue of "originality" in art a few weeks ago, but I thought it was interesting to see it pop-up elsewhere.

 I mean, it's a true statement, we can't separate ourselves from our backgrounds and knowledge. If you sit down to make art, you can't just "make" something original (and if you think you do, it's extremely unlikely that it hasn't been done before).

But it is interesting to see it elsewhere because you don't hear people talking about this kind of thing often.
Anyways, here's the article, take a look.



http://home.earthlink.net/~hsbecker/articles/lisbon.html

-Thomas Holland

DTC 356 POL 337-343

In this section, I read about the built environment, and what meanings can be derived from the changing styles of buildings.

For me, this section really bound together art and the rest of the world. Art infiltrates each and every aspect of life, even in places you wouldn't expect.

From branding to furniture, buildings to maps, the world is articulated visually by the arts.
While art is often seen as an exclusionary area of interest, its the creative ones in society who create representations of values and the current view of the world.

The AT&T building in New York on page 341 is even a social statement.

I feel like too often are artists undervalued, pushed below others in the social ladder.

-Thomas Holland

DTC 355 Stewart pg. 311-331

When I got to the end of this section and read about causality, I knew what I would blog on.
Causality is a story's progression from A to B to C through one event causing the next to happen.

So naturally, my first thought was Quentin Tarantino. Specifically, Pulp Fiction.
That movie jumps around, proceeding in a non-linear manner. But the real beauty of the movie lays in how the events all interact.

While the viewer may not know by the end of their first time watching the movie, over time you realize each of the events snugly fit together. In a way, he is a master of causality. Each event chains to the next, explaining why each person is in the scene and how they got there.

I thought it was interesting to see this connection to Causality.


-Thomas Holland