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.

Paloma Mendez
Professor Harmon
HUA- 101
Assignment #4

Renaissance and Baroque Styles

During the trip to The Metropolitan Museum I observed two different types of artwork, Renaissance and Baroque. Also I want to to explain in detail what is the Renaissance and Baroque syle.

 Renaissance artwork is the painting, sculpture and decorative art and Renaissance art is a kind of art that reflects the illusion of depth and space of that period of European history. Renaissance art, perceived as a royalty of ancient traditions, marks the transition of Europe from the medieval period to the early modern age. The Renaissance style emerged as a distinct style in Italy in about 1400, in parallel with developments which occurred in philosophy, literature, music and science.

 Baroque artwork is very ornate, done in a big scale with the colors chosen being very dark. Baroque art also describes a fairly complex idiom, originating in Rome, which flowered during the period c.1590-1720. This period embraced painting, and sculpture as well as architecture. Baroque painting illustrated key elements of Catholic dogma, either directly in Biblical works or indirectly in mythological and allegorical compositions.

This is a Baroque artwork. The title of this piece is The Denial of Saint Peter by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who was an Italian painter and this artwork was created in the year 1610. Also in this artwork Caravaggio used oil on canvas and the scale of this art is 37 x 49 3/8 cm.

In my personal opinion I think Caravaggio used a dramatic effect of color and lighting with a dark background. We can also see in this painting that the people are pointing towards each other, with the soldier pointing a finger and the women pointing two fingers at the man on the far right.Caravaggio paints Peter denying Jesus after Jesus was arrested and is one of the last works he made. 

This is a Renaissance artwork. The title is Madonna and Child. The artist is Filippino Lippi, who was from Italy and created this piece in the year 1485.

In my personal opinion, through this artwork Filippino Lippi made it purposely rich with color and as detailed as possible with the landscape and still life portrayed. There is an emotional tenderness shown here between the mother and child.

 Renaissance and Baroque styles both are different, for that reason it is important to mention a few important points that mark the different between these artwork styles. Renaissance art began early in the 1400s, while the Baroque art style came later in the 1600s.

 Renaissance art works did not completely depict human emotion, while Baroque art focused more on showing them. Finally Baroque style is characterized by creating drama with its asymmetrical balance while realism is an important aspect of Baroque art. The lines help to convey movement and were often presented in baroque pieces. Drawing lines to create the illusion of extension in space contributes to the sense of movement of Baroque art whether asymmetric, vertical or horizontal, this technique can fool the eye and give space to the piece. Formally, Renaissance art is characterized by naturalism, the use of expressive gesture, linear perspective, atmospheric perspective, and chiaroscuro. In painting, figures are placed in a three-dimensional, believable space, and their posture and gesture is part of a complex formal arrangement.

The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

Baroque Style

Venus Rising From the Sea by Tiziano Vecellio

Renaissance Style

Assignment #2

 1. Describe several ways that artists unify their artwork. 

Find an example and describe how it is unified. 

Artists unify their artwork by making certain elements bigger and larger, attracting more attention. Other ways to unify artwork is by using warm, geometric colors and repetition of colors and things in the artwork. Similar shapes and colors unify and create variety in art. Pattern also provides a unifying structure. When artists unify their artwork, they bring all the elements together. 

In this artwork, the artist uses a dark colored background to make the horse stand out more. The horse is also lightly colored, so there is more of a difference. The horse is also in the center, so your eyes pay attention to it. The horse is also painted big enough that it covers a lot of the artwork. 

2. Describe how an artist creates asymmetrical balance- post an artwork of your choice and explain how it is balanced asymmetrically. 

In an asymmetrical balance, the artists makes the left and the right not the same. An artist creates asymmetrical balance by balancing according to clothes and the size of forms. Large forms can be balanced by smaller forms, and a large form can be in the center. Warm colors are also heavier than cool colors. There is also a complex asymmetrical balance, with a strong sense of depth and space. Artists also use directional forces, where your eyes look at the center and then follow whatever figures are next to it.

In this artwork, the artist Van Gogh uses asymmetrical balance. It is balanced asymmetrically because the main objects in this art work are not centered. The sun is in the right corner, and a large black structure is on the left. And the starry night takes up a large part of the painting in the background, and it is the main thing you look at it. This painting is not centered at all.

3. How can scale change the meaning of an artwork? Use a visual example of your choice as an example and explain how the meaning is changed by scale.

Scale is the size relation of one thing to another. One of the most important decisions artists makes is how big things will be. We experience scale in comparison to our own size. Many artists distort scale for visual effect. It can be used as humorous or for different purposes. By making figures very large, it surprises people. By making figures very small, it makes people feel more powerful because they are bigger. In this artwork, the people are made very small and so are the trees. This meaning is changed by scale by making the people see something so small, they think it's funny. 

Online Assignment #1

Paloma Mendez

HUA 101

Professor Harmon

14 March 2015

Egyptian and Greek & Roman Art

In the online video at Youtube that is called HarmonIntroEgyptianGreek, we can get important infromation and knowledge about what is Egyptian, Greek and Roman art. In Egyptian art, gods like Ramses who were half-sheep and half-man were carved. They also used compact figures, with a frontal position for royal people. Besides Ramses, cats were worshipped as gods of happiness and the sky god was an eagle with a cobra on top meaning it was a pharoh. In a lot of Egyptian art, the ankh symbol was used to symbolize life. In Egyptian art, people were shown with their left foot in front of the other.

Greek art showed people in more relaxed poses, capable of movement. Artists did Greek art with actual observations and calculations. Goddesses were drawn nude and art was more sensual. Goddesses like Aphrodite, goddess of love and sexual repture, were drawn half nude. Greek art also emphasized restrained emotion.

Roman art reflects more of a pratical nature, it was less idealistic. Roman portraits showed imperfections and old age because they emphasized physical accuracy. In the video, one of the Roman pieces shown, they used pigment to paint it. However, Roman attitudes began to change, and artists started losing confidence in the material world and turned to spiritual values that religions like Christianity offered. A huge 8 foot portrait reflected the changing attitudes.

This is an example of Egyptian art, showing a scene from the Book of the Dead. The symbolism in this art is from Egyptian art facilitating human passage into the afterlife. The Book of the Dead was written in hieroglyphic script on a papyrus scroll. Almost every Book of the Dead was unique, with different spells and order. These were made in preparation for a person's death.

This is an example of Greek art. It's a figurine called the Bell Idol and was made of terracotta, since clay was used often in these statuettes. It was a small statue with mobile legs. Tombs known as "hero's" had thousands of these small figurines. 

This is an example of Roman art. In Roman art, portraits were common. This one is a portrait bust of an old man. The head is covered suggesting it could be a priest. This portrait bust was made of marble, mid-first century BC. Portraits were made like this to depict people accurately, wrinkles and all. 

Finally in this essay we have learned that each art style is from a different part of the world such as Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Also it is easier to find the differences between each kind of art in size, material, color, gesture and symbolism. Although they are different, they still share the similarities of worshipping gods and making portraits of others.