Week of April 25

Wednesday, April 27

Jill Magid is an American artist that was once involved with the Dutch Secret Service. In 2008, she created the work "I Will Burn Your Face" which was a wall mounted piece with 7mm neon transformers and wires. It was altered permanently in 2009 to reflect confiscations by the Dutch Secret Service. "To Burn a Face" is a phrase used to expose a source's identity. Jill Magid wrote down descriptions of agents she interviewed and then used these descriptions to "burn" them. The neon words are from her notebook in her handwriting.

Week of April 18

Monday, April 18




Banksy is a British street artist that juxtapositions images to create his works. The place where the image is located connects to what he is trying to say. However, a lot of his works are anarchy signs. Banksy does not like copyright laws as he does not believe that people should "own" their images. Banksy is an anonymous artist. He displays his art on public surfaces such as walls and even goes as far as building physical prop pieces. He does not sell photos of his art directly himself, however art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location. The image above is located in West Los Angeles, California.

Week of April 11

Monday, April 11

Today we watched the video "A Darwinian Theory of Beauty" by Dennis Button. In this video it is shown that beauty goes beyond the standard idea that it is in the eye of the beholder. Dennis Button believes that how we experience beauty is based upon our evolved human psychology. We adapt to beauty and use this in the creation and enjoyment of art and entertainment. Beauty travels across cultures which underlies the foundation of what every person believes is beautiful. We do agree somewhat with Dennis Button's belief as many of our instincts and feelings toward certain objects is learned. However, every person differs in what they feel is beautiful even if they follow the same cultural characteristics as beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Wednesday, April 13

Jeremy Deller is best known for his "Battle of Orgreave". This piece was a reenactment of the actual Battle of Orgreave that took place in 1984 in the UK. This reenactment took place in 2001. Deller collaborated with members of historical societies and with local people from mining communities in South Yorkshire. Jeremy was drawn to reenactment because it was seen as a type of folk art. Folk art is specific to a particular culture and it is hard to describe it as a whole.

Week of April 4

Monday, April 4



Above is the watercolor by William Powhida entitled "Why You Should Buy Art!". This work takes art to the masses than just the limited pool of collectors who have the ability to buy unique and expensive art objects. This piece is interesting as it is not what people would automatically consider to be art.

We have been discussing collections in class. As a child Christina collected Pogs. I got them from a variety of sources including birthday parties, game rooms and trading them with friends. As a child Katie collected Beanie Babies. Katie received them as presents and when new beanie babies would come out she would purchase them. Although we didn't know it at the time, our collections told us about what we were the most interested in. Collections come in all shapes and sizes and can be defined by collecting many different objects not just art.

Wednesday, April 6

In 1992, Fred Wilson did an installation piece at the Maryland Historical Society. Fred works with various collections to put together exhibits that will mean something else. At the Maryland Historical Society the collection was to highlight the Native and African Americans in Maryland. His unique artist approach is to examine, question and redefine the traditional display of art and artifacts in museums. This leads viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. The way Wilson places objects, forces the viewer to question cultural institutions and how they convey historical truth and artistic value.

Week of March 28

Monday, March 28



Above is an image of Doris Salcedo's work called "Shibboleth". This is the first piece of work to ever directly be done in a turbine hall. The walls of the crevice are lined with a steel mesh fence. Salcedo's work focuses the viewers eyes directly to the floor making it the principal focus of this work. "Shibboleth" stirs questions regarding sculpture, space, architecture, and the shaky foundations of which modern objects are built. "Shibboleth" is used to exclude those who do not belong to a particular group. It deems them unsuitable. This work was entitled "Shibboleth" because Salcedo is addressing racism and colonialism. This work enables the viewer to question the truths that we already know by living in the modern world.

Friday, April 1

Today we visited the University Art Museum at the University of Albany. The exhibit that was taking place was Eunjung Hwang - Three Thousand Revisits and Ati Maier - Event Horizon.

Above is a photo of  the work "Sharpie" by Eunjung Hwang. We found this inflated sculpture to be particularly interesting as it is out of the norm. It has a cartoon design to it which we found is unique to Eunjung Hwang's style. This piece of her work derives from a family of quasi-figurative characters from her personal dreams.

Above is another piece of artwork from Eunjung Hwang. This piece is in a series of works of various animations. The animations follow a story line in favor of something that is instinctive. The images derive from an oddly twisted world in which certain behaviors lead to violence. Hwang's characters lead us through a world in which the foolishness of humans actions are played out. Hwang has a fascination about supernatural things (ghosts, superstitious beliefs) and sometimes encounters dreams that show the hidden truth about the human condition. Hwang also gets ideas from comic books. At the exhibit there were also works of Eunjung Hwang's animations in video projections.

Above are two photos taken of works by Ati Maier's - Event Horizon. Ati Maier uses a dizzying variety of colors, lines, warped spaces and swirling movements that attract the viewer to its complexity. She depicts landscapes that use conventions of traditional painting while keeping a connection to historical art and sources of science. Maier has used her works to develop 3D animations which you can see in the second photo. She produces the sensation of actually moving through her paintings.

Week of March 21

Wednesday, March 23

Today we began to watch the video "The Mona Lisa Curse" narrated by Robert Hughes. This video explained that the art world is different from the 1960s as the "Mona Lisa" created new expectations about art. This artwork became a piece of art to an icon of mass consumption. People came to see the "Mona Lisa" at the Met in the 1960s not to enjoy the painting itself but to just simply say that they saw it. It deeply changed the way that art was seen. In 1963, the painting was quickly scanned and then disregarded showing limited viewer interest. This video shows how money and wealth has become a curse in the way art is made, controlled, and experienced. Hughes focuses on New York in this video but speaks to art everywhere.

Week of March 14

Over break we were assigned a reading by Arthur Danto entitled "After the end of Art". This work presents Danto's reformulation of his original insight that art ended in the sixties. With abstract expressionism art has turned from what it was established to be in the Renaissance. Arthur engages the reader in several conversations that discuss the relevant philosophical issues of art. His reading covered art history, pop art, "people's art" the the role of museums. He states that it wasn't the invention of pop art and modernist art that ended the traditional ways of what art seemed to be. Danto challenges readers to think about the role that contemporary art plays and what direction it may be taking in the future. This article was interesting as it allowed us to challenge Danto's propsed thesis and formulate our own thoughts about how we felt about this topic.