Final Essay

The Flat Side of the Knife

        We went to MoMA PS1 to look at some installations made by artists. The one that caught my eye was The Flat Side of the Knife by Samara Golden. When I first saw it, I was struck by its strangeness. I hadn't seen an installation like that before. Her work is initially hard to understand. Second of all, I noticed how large it was, occupying the space from ceiling to floor. It felt even larger than it actually was also, perhaps due to the mirrors creating an illusion of depth. When you view it from the top, you get a different perspective than you do from viewing it from the bottom. 

      Samara Golden created this immersive installation, full of random household objects. Staircases, couches, lamps, musical instruments, fans, and beds are scattered in her vertically placed installation. I saw there was a wheelchair on a staircase, that when you viewed it in the mirror, was seen upside-down. Her use of mirrors, like the large one placed at the bottom of her installation, created an illusion of depth that was not actually there. Rooms that were presented by this reflective mirror-like object did not actually exist but looked as if they did. There was also a video projection. With her work, Golden wanted to create something physical with her installation, but with the mirror wanted to create an illusionary world to the viewers. At first this installation looks domestic and ordinary, but the mirrors reflecting spaces that do not exist create something more psychologically unnerving. I believe her work is showing opposites at work; negativity and positivity, and the strange and normal. The color scheme in this installation is mainly silver-coated objects and light-colored arrangements, emphasizing a dreamy state. 

        When I first saw the bed, I assumed it was a house. The arrangement is very domestic. When I saw a cup of wine dropped on the floor, I thought there lived a person who was disillusioned with life. However, when I saw the instruments, I thought whoever occupied this house was someone who knew how to appreciate the music. But when I saw the wheelchair, I thought that it was a hospital and that in that hospital they would have taken care of older people with many medical problems. Under one of the staircases with the wheelchair, you can see a cluster of fabric animals. This gave me the impression of something from childhood. This installation seemed to show the stages of life for someone, perhaps, present, past, and future. The sensation that the mirrors reflecting everything gave me was that people can see more than what there really is. I thought the artist had a real ability in changing things that are real, giving them another perspective, or layer.

Assignment #9

Bibliography
Belcove, Julie L. "Artist Janine Antoni Takes on Childbirth and the Female Body in Two New          Shows." The Cut. The Cut, 27 Feb. 2015. Web. 25 May 2015.
"Janine Antoni." Luhring Augustine. Luhrig Augustine, n.d. Web. 25 May 2015.
"Janine Antoni." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 25 May 2015.
Outline
Introduction: Janine Antoni was born in the Bahamas in 1964. She currently lives and works in New York, New York. Her work borders the line between performance art and what sculpture is, with exhibits involving one or the other. Her favorite tool is using her own body in her artwork. She does installations and exhibits. 

Main Body: 5 examples of her work:

• Graft
• Touch 
• Loving Care
• Wean
• Mortar and Pestle

Summary: Janine Atoni's style is transforming everyday activities such as sleeping and eating into art, using her body as a tool most of the time.

Assignment #8

Bill Viola

  Bill Viola, born January 25, 1951, is a famous video artist. He creates video installations, each with their own message, that you can think of as visual poems. With his exhibitions, he aims to create an internal world where the viewer is submerged. An artist is an artist no matter what tools he uses. What's important about his art is that he brings an awareness and clarity to the human condition in a new and different way.  His work has focused on the ideas of fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness. 

   In one of the videos Bill Viola made in 2008 named Acceptance, he uses powerful imagery. The water creates a beautiful light on the suffering woman. She struggles against the water which most likely represents her struggles in life. At the end, we can finally see her clearly, not suffering anymore and without the painful water. He believes art is something universal and provides inspiration, and a sense of mystery. With this, his art gives a viewer a glimpse into a world of spirtuality. 

"Surrender" is another one of his works of two people who are shown seperated and upside down. This is a work about sorrow, loss, and feeling something very deeply. He is said to believe that in today's world, people don't really experience things very deeply. These two people eventually disappear in a kind of cloud or stream of water, where they will be flipped over to the other side. This repeats over and over again, establishing a connection between tears and water. This work also shows the destruction of the self in order to create a new self and you see the distortion that happens when you think you're fine and understand. But you don't really understand, and it seems like the soul is traveling through these bodies to find a new center and will go on searching until they've become still. This is called Surrender because there are many things in life that you need to surrender to, even if it is painful. 

In the same video, another piece is shown. These people have just gone through something really, really difficult and it was threatening to destroy them. The beauty is that after this destruction, when the dust settles, when everything clears, and you return your mind to emptiness then you will see that they have made it, they didn't die, they didn't get destroyed, and they have broken through. This common theme is one that Bill Viola follows closely, which is the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that's going on constantly. The experience they had is something that all of us would not like have. In the piece, they begin to realize what happened and that is the most important moment - it's the moment after the big explosion/disturbance, that's the time when you can begin to open your eyes again and to understand what happened so that you can move and continue to experience and to continue understanding the world in both its positive and negative aspects. 

When Bill Viola was in art school, he was always only interested in the future and didn't think about the past or the world's past. He was interested in only moving forward and was exploring a new medium at the same time, where he didn't really acknowledge old masters in art. When he got immersed in something like he did at that time, it gave him a lot back. Even as a young person, there was a lot of information and deep emotion he was absorbing. One day his mother died and his whole world was turned upside down. It was very frightening and disturbing to him and came to him as a shock. He had this experience of something being taken away from him, one of the most important things in a person's life; a mother. That started to teach him something even greater, that life is precious and that you never know when it will stop. We should use our time wisely to help ourselves and others. Getting back to art, there was always a seperation between old masters [of art] and new technology. People have begin bringing contemporary art into a museum with old mediums. One of Bill Viola's goals as an artist is to have that gap between old art and new art be connected because he believes all art is contemporary art.

Assignment #7

Cubism and Surrealism

Cubism was a style of modern art that comes to life through geometric shapes and hard lines.
The artists responsible for this kind of art were Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques. Cubism 
 was the first style of abstract art that came out at the beginning of the 20th century. 
 The cubism painters had the idea of breaking the traditions of Western art with the
  aim of developing a new form of art in the modern age. A typical Cubist painting is a
 representation of real people, places or objects, but not from a fixed viewpoint. Cubist artwork
 can be seen from different angles, planes, shapes and colors. The idea of space is reconfigured
 on the front, back and sides of the work and these items can be exchanged in the design of the work.

Les Demoiselles is an artwork of the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso painted in 1907, oil on canvas
 and measures are 243.9 x 233.7 cm.

  This artwork shows the key reference to discuss cubism, in which the Spanish artist is the
 best example. This was a new starting point where Picasso eliminates all sublime tradition, 
breaking with Realism, using the canons of spatial depth and hitherto existing perfect female body, 
reduced all the work to a set of angular planes or spatial perspective bottomless, in which 
the forms are marked by light-dark lines.The fulcrum of the whole work is the naked women, to
 demonstrate the fact that major changes in mentality are played on the way to represent the human
 figure.

 Surrealism is a literary and artistic movement that emerged in France from Dadaism, in the early
 1920s. Surrealism took some techniques from Dada art of photography and cinematography techniques 
and the manufacture of objects. Also, surrealism extended the principle of collage. Surrealism penetrated 
the activity of many European and American artists at different times. In 1938 the international surrealist 
exhibition held in Paris marked the apogee of this movement. Surrealism can make sense by itself in
 the vanguard movement. The imaginative capacity and the suggestion of his mental constructions meant
 undoubtedly a revolution in the art after World War One.

Surrealist painters try to free the imagination accessing the subconscious depths of the human
 being which surfaced through dreams. The purpose of the Surrealists was not making art, but to 
explore possibilities.

Its main theme was the world of dreams. Surrealist artists used the operator, which is to draw 
or write without apparent logic. He disoriented his audience by employing foreign objects, arising freely 
subconscious and employed other techniques given as photomontage, the found object, waste materials, etc. 
In particular, Max Ernst was a provacteur; a shocking and innovative artist who probed the unconcious mind as
 fuel for dreamy imagery that rebelled against social rules.
One of the basis themes in his work was that the world was irrational, which can be clearly seen here. Another
key aspect in his work is non-representational works without clear narratives and attempted to paint freely from
his inner psyche. He unleashed primal emotions and uncovered personal traumas, which became a subject in
his work.

Max Ernst is the artist Woman, Old Man, and Flower. This artwork was painted in 1924 with Oil on canvas and the measure is 97 cm x 130 cm.

In this art, to express the person full of rage after a war looking for ways to get all the rage, we can see this in the way that the hands are up trying to grasp the 

freedom he needed.

Online Assignment #6

Artist: Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni was born in Freeports, Bahamas in 1964. She later earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1986, and received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. She currently lives and works in New York, New York. Her work borders the line between performance art and what sculpture is, with exhibits involving one or the other. Her favorite tool is using her own body in her artwork. For example, to make sculptures, an example being "Lick and Lather", she made faces of soap busts in her appearance. An example of her performance art is in the video "Touch". She looks as if she's walking on the surface of water, which is an impossible feat but something accomplished with training for eight months to walk on the tightrope involved. She strung the rope at the exact level where the horizon is to create this illusion. At one of her solo exhibitions labeled "Within" at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she has numerous sculptures. The work there was inspired by something she has a fascination with - "milagros". Milagros are found in Portugal, Spain, Mexico, and Brazil and are small religious charms. Milagros can be small medallions, flat, in the shapes of body parts but also three dimensional. These often take the place of an ailing part of your body, for example, if you had a problem with your foot, you'd buy a foot. You would bring the milagros to church and have it hung from the ceiling. These ceilings would then be full of body parts. In the same video that talks about this exhibition and her fascination with milagros, she displays a sculpture of coccyx bone combined with a hand underneath it. This is unusual and impossible to actually occur but Antoni wanted to combine them together. She did this by grafting resin body parts together and the sculptures in the "Within" exhibit were combined/fused together pieces that had been sanded for days and days. Her goal with this exhibition was for you to imagine how they were made. In making her artwork, she wants to somehow find herself in relation to others and the environment. If her work resonates with someone, she doesn't feel as alone or as strange as she usually feels.

"Lick and Lather" sculpture

In the video "Touch"

Her sculpture

From the Loving Care performance

Assignment #5

Man with cat face

Online Assignment #4

Impressionism
Impressionism is a 19th century art movement. It was drawn using romantic and contemporary ideals. In this style, landscapes and ordinary scenes were most often painted. The painters would paint these quickly as they were happening. Claude Monet was one impressionist painter. Impressionist painters would paint using direct observation and having done studies in light. There was an emphasis on catching light accurately as it was changing. Small dabs of colors were used that viewers would see a vibrancy in these paintings. A common theme was painting middle class people who were enjoying leisure. Cropping the image almost made it more realistic.

Post Impressionism
In Post Impressionism, paintings were done with a free interpretation of nature. It wasn't how things were seen but rather seeing through them. Van Gogh is an example of an impressionist painter who had a Japanese influence from looking at Japanese prints in his art style. Post Impressionist painters also painted very quickly with lots of rhythm. Intense or unusual varieties of colors were used as well as abstract shapes.