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...

Flip Book

Here are some excepts from my flipbook. It ended up turning out well I think. It was drawn in a "Grapes of Wrath" book and was all about a grape that comes to life and eats people. It then turns back into and bundle of grapes and finally a glass of wine.

I listened to a radio broadcast on otr.com. It was Flash Gordon based on the comic. I can tell how important music was to drive the plot and dictate the mood. It served to make the story engaging to the audience. Many of the characters had very distinct voices or accents so that it was easy for the audience to know who was talking. The villain had a deep, sinister voice. Flash Gordon's voice was strong and confident. Sound effects like explosions were used whenever appropriate and the narrator filled in any information that was lost in the dialogue. So much was done in an effort to convey a story when simple visuals weren't there for the audience to see the action. It's almost hard to listen to having grown up in such a visual age where TV is much more common. I, like much of society today, have a harder time keeping my attention on something where visuals are not presented to me.

Sci-Fi

I finally finished my flip book project and am a little nervous to share it in class. My drawings aren't particularly good because I'm not much of an artist. I think the idea is good though. If I had it to do over again, I would use a different book that flips better. Last class we watched clips from various Sci Fi movies. On the scale of realism, almost all senses up to this point had been experimented with in film. The only thing left to do was break the fourth wall which separates the audience from what is going on in the film. This is what the film "Videodrome" was an example of. That seems to be what all the 3-D movies of today are trying to accomplish: making the audience feel apart of what's going on in the film. It's interesting to look at the futuristic technologies of movies such as "Artificial Intelligence" and "Minority Report" and how we can already sense that the idea that there will be screens everywhere is starting to be an accurate prediction.

Just Singin, Singin in the Rain

Last week's class was my first taste of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" and as I had been prepared for, it was indeed pretty twisted. The irony is overt in this film about young men hopped up on drugs that beat and kill innocent people and closes with the familiar cheery tune, "Singin in the Rain." Oddly humorous it's almost more disconcerting than had the music been dark because we immediately make the connection that just decades ago, this song is sung by a man who was "...happy again." The stark contrast between the music and the mood is just one of the few things that differentiates the classic hollywood movies of "Singin in the Rain" era from the edgier films of today like "A Clockwork Orange" and more recent ones. Also, a huge thing in film that has changed over the decades are the production codes that used to be very conservative back in the days of early hollywood movies. Actually camera shots of murder were not allowed so even suspense/horror film directors like Alfred Hitchcock had to find ways around explicitly showing murder. The amount of restrictions on films of that time vs. the amount of liberties directors now take with the subject matter of films today is mind boggling. This is due in large part to the events such as the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s and a great deal more experimenting with drugs. The altered psychedelic state of drug use could now be shown with cinematic advancement in color and special effects. "A Clockwork Orange" is proof that through the technology of film today, there is little left that can't be shown.

Film and More Opera

I watched "La Boheme" the other day for my Opera Paper. It was very similar to the musical Rent with a few differences in the relationships and occupations of some of its characters. La Boheme means "The Bohemians" or people who live an alternative lifestyle. I found it interesting that back in this century it was seen as against societal norms to be a painter or a poet. For the modern day rendition, Rent, the cast is made up of not only literally starving artists, but many of them are homosexual, one is a drag queen, one a stripper, one an in your face political activist and many are suffering from AIDS, rather than in La Boheme when there is only one character dying from sickness. I'm brainstorming ideas for the paper but am nervous about it. I'm not used to classes where I don't receive much direction or guidelines. I know that was Santiago's intent and that the paper is meant to push us to think outside the box. We'll see what I can come up with!
The other day's class was interesting. I didn't know about the concept of hand coloring in early early film, even before it was projected on a screen. It was beautiful! Also the Daguerre pictures were fascinating. I had no idea pictures of dead people were the precursor to film. Again, nervous about the flip book assignment but we'll see how it goes!