Pop Art and Andy Warhol

Last class we talked about Andy Warhol and boy, was he a character. He came across as such a complete pompous asshole and it was rather amusing. Emerging in a time when the reactionary beatniks were lashing out against society, pop artist Andy Warhol and his followers said "hey, let's just embrace it." His art completely mirrored commercialism and the media at the time. Much like Marcel Deuchamp, his paintings of ordinary objects (such as the campbell's soup can and the coca cola bottles) were decontextualized, taking out of their natural contexts and deemed art. Someone even was quoted in the documentary as saying that Andy Warhol would point his finger and say, "That's art!" I also had no idea that he produced the music to the Velvet Underground...pretty cool! Toward the end of class we watched a bit of video footage on Yves Klein who was one of the first examples of performance art. He would have women put blue paint on their bodies and press themselves up against a blank canvas, creating imprints. I thought the work of Rachel Whiteread was really interesting. She would make molds of the empty space of objects such as chairs, staircases, bookshelves etc. So she would make say a mold of the inside of a house and all of the empty space would create the mold. I thought it was a brilliant idea.

Grid Art and Surrealism

This is my grid art project. I used a scrabble board as my grid and decided to do my own take of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." I based my picture of the central swirl of wind in the painting and using mosaic tiles I followed the grid, yet simultaneously broke it in order to achieve the circular motion. I used sequins to create the moon and different stars. It ended up being a fun experiment and unlike anything I've ever done.
Class was very interesting on Wednesday. We focused a lot on the artwork of Marcel Deuchamp. He starts as an impressionist painter who fell on the side of more realistic art and transitions to more abstract surrealist cubism and installation art. He is famous for turning ordinary objects into artwork such as R. Mutt: the photograph of a urinal turned upside down. I must admit I had a hard time seeing the value until Santiago talked about how it was decontextualizing a familiar object by taking it out of its natural place and exposing the beauty of simply the object out of its expected context. Boy does he have a sense of humor too! His piece where he has drawn a mustache on the Mona Lisa includes the initials L.H.O.O.Q. which when pronounced phonetically in French translates to "Her ass is on fire!" It's hilarious to think that artists were being this subversive this early in the 1900s.
Un Chien Andalou was very trippy. It was like a car crash that you cant turn away from. The images that stuck out as memorable were obviously the famous eye cutting sequence, the graphic sequence of the man trying to molest a woman, bugs eating their way into a man's hand, and a moth with an image of a skull on the back of its head. It seemed like a nightmare. I'll be interested to see if we talk anymore in class about what the hidden meanings could be.

Triumph of the Nerds

The documentary we watched last week, "Triumph of the Nerds" was pretty interesting. I learned that the microprocessor was pivotal in the development of computers. It essentially held millions of transistors and was the beginning of personal computers as we know them today. Before the microprocessor you had to flip a switch to input each byte of information and the microprocessor allowed users to type in programs rather than flipping switches. The story of Steve Jobs and Apple was pretty amazing. His hobby of computer programming escalated so quickly that by the time he was 25 he was worth 100 million dollars. Apple was the leading company of a revolution of smaller computers that became very successful. I also found the idea of reverse engineering really interesting. This is essentially what happened with IBM. The personal computers they began manufacturing were very successful and the name created high demand, so in order for other companies to be successful they would have to clone IBM's technology. In order to do so they would have to work backwards and find out what makes it work. IBM's PC was easily cloneable. Not sure why they would want to do that...