I keep coming back to the golden ratio-- It continues to fascinate me. click HERE

To find out more about Theo Jansen, the creator of these Strandbeests, click

HERE.

Marcel

TO watch videos and interviews with the great pantomime artist Marcel Marceau click  HERE and click again and one more time to see The Hands.

Black Panthers Graphic Artist

Emory Douglas

Robert Arneson

Read the article below and then watch a video about a controversial sculpture by Robert Arneson.  Post your response: Do you think Arneson's "Portrait of George" should have remained at it's original site? Explain why or why not. (for video click here). 

Portrait of George, 1981, by Robert Arneson "is a bust portrait of George Moscone, a popular mayor of San Francisco in the late 1970s. Moscone's big smile, with crooked teeth and squinting eyes, is distinct and alive, and the surface of splattered colors animates the face. The bust sits on a column casually covered, graffiti-like, with phrases recalling Moscone's background, some of his more memorable sayings, and events from his life and death. Arneson's piece was to have been placed in the Moscone Center, a new civic center in San Francisco named after the deceased mayor. Moscone and another politician had been assassinated three years earlier by a disgruntled San Francisco city supervisor named Dan White, who had disagreed with Moscone on most political points, including issues concerning homosexuals.

"Arneson's Portrait of George departs from the status quo of bland, bronze portrait heads of political leaders that are common in parks and in lobbies of many public buildings. This sculpture is irreverent, colorful, and very large, and the viewer cannot pass by without noticing it. It was the pedestal below the head, however, that caused the greatest controversy. Among the words, bullet holes apparently pierce the column, making a comment on the ubiquity of guns in the United States today. A yellow, phallic Twinkie is prominent. Dan White received a light sentence of voluntary manslaughter for his crimes. His lawyers claimed that he had been unbalanced at the time of the shootings because he had eaten too many Twinkie snack cakes. Many San Franciscans protested the lighter sentence, and there was a night of rioting. Arneson's Portrait of George was a vivid, permanent reminder of the circumstances that surrounded his death, the recent riot, and the tensions in the city.  (Margaret Lazzari & Dona Schlesier, "Exploring Art," p. 360. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.)

PreColombian ceramics portrait pots

This is a typical design of a pre-colombian stirrup spout pottery vessel. These vessels are from the Nazca, Mochica, and Chimu cultures of ancient Peru.

It is hard to believe these artworks are at least 2500 years old. Talk about timelessness... they feel like art of TODAY!

 

For further information ( and inspiration!) click here.

A Subtlety

(from Art Education, January 2015)

     In the early summer of 2014, artist Kara Walker was commissioned by Creative Time, an organization that "commissions, produces, and presents art that engages history, breaks new ground, challenges the status quo, and infiltrates the public realm" to install a temporary 40-foot-tall, 75-foot long, and 35-foot wide sculpture of sugar in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.  The sculpture was surrounded by attendants -boy-shaped figures made of a molasses and sugar resin. The gigantic white sculpture was produced in an old sugar factory that was destined for demolition.
There are multiple meanings to this work. Watch and listen to a video of Kara Walker talking about her sculpture, A Subtlety, by clicking here.

for further information, check out  CreativeTimes web site. Click HERE

click here --  watch, listen, and then answer this question: what does"aesthetic" mean? In your sketchbook, draw or collect three or more examples of objects that appeal to your own aesthetic.

Elegy for Robert Rauschengerg

"Elegy for Robert Rauschenberg" is a video created shortly after the artist's death in 2008.

Robert Rauschenberg was an artist who pushed the limits of sculpture and painting. He is credited with inventing the art form now known as "Combines" -- you can think of them as morphs(a combination of painting and sculpture). He walked around New York City picking up trashed objects like work boots and car tires, to be incorporated into his paintings.

When he died in 2008 (at age 83 ) this beautiful video was made of an exhibition of his Combines.

The video maker and a group of other artists and musicians composed the music you'll hear in the background. It, too, was a kind of morphing of sounds and chance arrangements.

How has the video artist used sound and movement to influence the viewers understanding of Robert Rauschenberg's "Combines"?

Look, listen, learn and leave your comments.

Aritst and Activist Ai Wiewei is free to travel again

In class we're watching the film "Never Sorry" -- a documentary about the activist-artist Ai Weiwei. The film is a few years old now, but at the time of its release we were unsure of the outcome for  Ai Weiwei. However, much to our collective relief, he has been released from custody, his passport has been returned, and this courageous man is now free to travel the world.  Click HERE to read an article from the NY TIMES, Sept.15,2015

Click HERE to check out the remarkable dioramas of Chinese dissident artist Ai WeiWei.
For our next project we,too, will make DIORAMAS. Unlike Ai WeiWei's unjust depiction of reality, our dioramas will depict scenes from myths and fairy tales told around the world.
In what ways do you think the artist Ai WeiWei uses his art as a form of activism?

Sarah Sze, Triple Point, at Venice Biennale 2013

The artist Sarah Sze captured my interest and imagination when I first saw her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago. She went on to gain notice to the extent that she represented the United States in 2013 at the Venice Bienalle, an annual international art exhibition. View the images of her installation there and read the article posted in Wired Magazine by clicking here.
 Regarding drawing, she says,
         "I think of drawing in a much wider context — I think of it as the cursor on this page, the route you walk to work, the map I just googled for directions, or the print in the label in your t-shirt. I think of drawing as lines created in space, on the page, on a screen, or just mentally and emotionally to make sense of information or to convey information. So when artists draw it’s not about the page or the hand, it’s about connecting dots and the charting of complex information in whatever form that may take"
 Considering that Sarah Sze's installations are "sculpture" comment on the way you see drawing  as it relates to her artwork.

Janine Antoni. "Lick and Lather," detail, 1993. 7 soap and 7 chocolate self-portrait busts, 24 x 16 x 13 inches each. Collection of Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo by John Bessler. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine.

"I wanted to work with the tradition of self-portraiture, but also with the classical bust. I had the idea that I would make a replica of myself in chocolate and in soap, and I would feed myself with my self, and wash myself with my self. Both the licking and the bathing are quite gentle and loving acts, but what's interesting is that I'm slowly erasing my self through the process. So for me, it's about that conflict, that love/hate relationship we have with our physical appearance, and the problem I have with looking in the mirror and thinking, 'Is that who I am?'"
—Janine Antoni

What materials and tools do artists use to create art today? How have tools and materials for making art changed over time?

After reading the attached article: WHY WE MAKE ART?" (Click here)
select one or more of the artists whose reasons for making art are most like your own reasons.  Write and post one or two paragraphs explaining why.  If your reasons for making art are unlike any of the featured artists explain how you differ.
Your response is due by MIDNIGHT, SEPT.14.

                                                      miniature  monuments to FOOD

Why carve miniatures? Does the size of the artwork change your relationship to it? Does small artwork draw you closer to it than large artwork? Click here to look at the sculptures of two artists: Diem Chau, originally from Vietnam, and now in Seattle,Washington, and Brazilian artist Dalton Ghetti. Submit a response : Name two things that small artworks give to the viewer that big artworks do not. Explain your reasoning.

Hello Sculptors. take a look at this artwork, Lick and Lather, by Janine Antoni

Click her name to read more about Janine Antoni, and respond to this question: What are some of the reasons this artist makes self-portraits, and what are some reasons why you might also make a self-portrait ?

from the Museum of Contemporary Art website:

Maurizio Cattelan's giant cat, named Felix after the famous cartoon cat created in the early twentieth century by Otto Messmer (American, 1892-1983) draws on popular culture and delves into our collective imagination and desire for spectacle. Measuring more than forty-six feet in length with a tail that extends twenty-six feet in the air, the cat skeleton dwarfs a human being, playing with scale to shift the power relationship with the viewer.

As in his other works, with Felix Cattelan experiments with how viewers must suspend their disbelief in order to succumb to the fantasy of his vision. In 2001, when visiting Chicago in preparation for a commission at the MCA, Cattelan was inspired by Sue - the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered -at the Field Museum of Natural History. Cattelan designed Felix for a particular space, the MCA atrium and wanted his work to become a popular museum attraction, like Sue.

Cattelan's work, involving distortions of scale and reality, probes issues of originality, popular culture, humor, and fear. Inspired by the public's fascination with the origins of Sue, the popular Tyrannosaurus rex on view at the Field Museum, Cattelan has transformed a household cat into an ominously gargantuan figure. While challenging viewers' perceptions of the subject matter and its scale, Cattelan also questions notions of both artifact and exhibition. Naming the skeleton after the cartoon character Felix the Cat, Cattelan jokingly undermines historical fact with fiction to reactivate the realm of childhood wonderment within a contemporary art public space. 

Post a response to this question:
Considering these ideas, and the kind of dialogue Cattelan was creating with the Field Museum,if you were to submit your sculpture (the skeleton) as a proposal for a large public monument somewhere in Chicago, where would you have it  placed, and why?