I still want to lighten his hair. Take down some of the highlights in the sand and finish the large chunks of sand coming from his feet, and work on the squinting eye before the colour begins.
Artist I dislike Assignment:
The artist that I chose for this assignment is Marina Abramovic. Mike introduced us to her briefly in class the other day. He talked about how in one of her large performances at MOMA she sat in front of people for hours just staring at them. People broke down crying and felt some kind of connection to the artist or to themselves that they needed her to help them discover. I felt that this was really odd, I don't love performance art and this to me just seemed to be hyped up nothingness framed in a gallery to give it a pretentious glamor. I understand the need that some people have to find a non verbal connection to someone or something in the world but was a sad state of affairs that they have to figure out how to do this with a complete stranger.
I did some research on her when I got home and started to look at some of her earlier work. She really had some interesting ideas about having people feel their human-ness. She works with the idea of ritual and humans fundamental need for creating them. She also works with human behavior and the limits of her audience when the rules are suspended for long periods of time. What strikes a chord with me is her willingness to sacrifice her life for her work. Something must be missing in your life if your work needs to take on that kind of sacrifice.
Her work with the objects on the table and allowing people to do or not do what ever they wanted to her with them for 6 hours. This at first glance seems like an interesting experiment but what concerned me was the bullet and the gun. When someone loaded it, held it to her head and tried to get her to press the trigger, she did not resist nor did there seem to be any security that would be cued if her life was in danger. In many of her works she takes her own life into her hands and had to be rescued by doctors in the audience and took experimental drugs to see the effects that could have given her permanent damage. I guess although I like some of the ideology behind her work the fact that there is no line to be drawn disturbs me. I'm sure she wouldn't mind that but its like watching a really sadistic horror movie and then realizing you just don't get rid of those images they remain with you forever. Even more disturbing is the fact that the next time I'm inclined to watch another one of those movies the violence has less of an emotional impact and that scares me even more.
A 2009 article on Abramovic showed some really sickening images of very young children with assault rifles in their hands and she was posing with them called 'The Family" that was shot in Laos. All I could think about was my own children and all the precautions we use to keep our children safe. It was horrifying. After further reading I discovered why she had taken the images and it made m peaceful ritual with a shaman children were playing around with realistic toy guns. The contrast of the two scenes caused her to research more about what the children where doing to think of this as play and why the adults didn't seem to mind.
She discovered that the children were allowed to watch very violent shows on Laos TV. Unedited war scenes and ultra violent Kung Fu Movies ( Art in America, may 2009). TV antennas in the village were so big they were bending the houses over.
The photographs she took where her reactions to being so appalled. The guns were plastic, the parents where there, The kids where very well prepped. She was trying to show the Laos family dynamic- one son is trained to kill the other to pray.
Ok, so where does that leave me? I started with disliking her, then I though she was kind of cool in a meditative, warped 60's kind of way, then I say the children and the guns and was revolted by her, now I really like the work.
Last insight. I just finished talking to Michelle about the last statement and there is still the idea that if the general public has to read the context to understand the work and comes away with judgments about the work that are surface ones and add to violent imagery without a purpose than perhaps the artist, art world is missing something. (run on sentence) Can art made this way last? So my next challenge is too look for more contemporary artist that can offer me both a subtle enough ambiguity that I can find room for interpretation, an aesthetic that I can engage with and some deeper meaning that will add to the work rather than give it a completely separate meaning.
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