Week 4 Fibers and Flying Wolves

Hey world Cis is back here again to talk about what we learned this week in Contemp Art class. This week our guest Professor Rabinowitz and the topic for this week was "Fibers". Now I'm not gonna lie I was one of the late ones in class that day so when I showed up I was a little behind catching up to the lecture, but when I finally caught on I finally realized that the Professor was talking about the wonderful world of Fibers. To tell you the truth I had no idea what Fibers were, but as the professor kept talking to the class she explained that Fiber art is relatively new to the art world, traditionally fiber is taken plants or animals like cotton, wool, or silk. Since I sat in the back I  couldn't hear the professor as good as I should have. But there is no doubt that i did pay attention to the slide show and the images of the work done by artist using Fibers. One in particular that we focused on was an image that looked like hair coming down from the ceiling I didn't get the name nor the artist's name but it was a long strand of hair like material coming down from the roof and it reminded me of a woman's body the way it was shaped all curved- like. I felt it was a piece that symbolized to relax and in life you just have to let you hair down. But when Professor Rabinowitz finally explained to us that the piece was all full sexual it All MADE SENSE. She told us that the art piece resembled a woman's genitalia, as soon as I heard that it all clicked in my head.
As our guest speaker went on with her presentation I struggled to keep my attention set on her until I came to another image that caught my attention it was a piece by Cai Guo- Qiang and it was a "rainbow of running wolves". I know its hard to picture, I feel like its something right out of a dream. Almost makes you wonder if Mr. Qiang was on something when he visualized it. Picture wolves all running together in a pack dozens of them and running in the air and crashing all together, crazy right? Turns out that Mr. Qiang made every single one of those wolves with Fiber material, if that’s not amazing I don’t know what is. I later decided to look into more of Mr. Qiang and he has pieces in museums of full scale cars exploding. I see that the artist is into making action scenes into still projects which I find one of the more difficult things to recreate. But nevertheless still another good week of Contemp Art now i will leave you with work of Mr. Qiang.

Week 3

I really enjoyed our guest speaker this week. Michael Salter is an art instructor here at the University of Oregon. One thing that really stood out to me was that he had a very unique way of talking to a class, he had a way of not saying much but at the same time saying a lot, (if that makes sense). I loved how he started off by showing us images that have caught his attention all around the world even here in Eugene, he also mixed in some of his work and designs in the slide show and asked us what we thought. When he told us that he designed for a number of brand name companies it caught me by surprise, I would have never thought that our guest speaker was a designer for such companies like Billabong and other name brands. When going through his slide show he would only say what he needed to say and just let the class ponder and stare at the images so we can take in what we felt about the images. Mike went into more detail about his work and explained to us how he felt about the industry, that one minute your work is the hot cool trend and the next minute your seeing your work being on clearance or getting shipped out to another country. I thought that was fascinating how someone that actually worked for the industry decided that he wasn't happy going through the corporate world and just stopped. My favorite piece from Mike was definitely the stryobots, just because i can relate and I too grew up playing with legos as a kid, and when he told the class that after every art show he would have them tossed out or destroyed it made me a little annoyed, but what can you do it's art.
As for the reading this week I thought it was interesting how the whole reading was in comic book form but I really didn't care much for it. As I'm used to reading some Dark Horse version of Star Wars usually packed with violence and excitement, as for this comic strip it was just another 36 pages of art and art and more art images. Sorry Ty but I'm still trying to get over the last 46 page reading from last week. There was one thing that caught my attention for a minute and that was the section when our little cartoon host explained how a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, than introduced us to the wonderful world of icons. Which by than the comic strip reading lost my attention. By far still a good week in my contemporary art class, know excited for next week’s guest speaker.

Week 1

This week’s guest presentation was by Laura Vandenburgh who talked about drawings specifically. She talked about many different ideas and one of the first things she said that caught my attention was that there is nothing that compares to drawing because of how straight up and immediate it is. Then she started showing examples of maps, diagrams, doodles, and a variety of other quick drawings that present information in a quick visual way. When I think about an artist who uses drawing as a media, I think of images of detailed portraits. Laura was stressing the point that drawing is a tool that everyone uses in their everyday lives, one of the most effective ways of describing something to others without using words. Laura later went on to say that “things can be visually worked out at the speed of thinking” which I couldn’t agree more. For example the other day at work my boss ended up making a quick sketch of directions to get to his house and he made sure to add small details a recognizable landmarks and it reminded me of what Laura was talking about a drawing being direct. Laura also had a good point about how drawing is the beginning to everything. I strongly believe that every time someone is going to create something that by drawing a quick sketch or outline is the best way no matter what type of media.

            The reading that was assigned for this in class was 46 pages long and had a lot of content that was thrown at you without getting that in depth with any topic it was a little hard to get into. In my opinion they should’ve called it Art Theory for dummies. One piece that really caught my attention was the American Art Export article on page 19, I really learned a lot about the post war period, for example during the Cold War the CIA arranged exhibitions across Europe of New American paintings, as propaganda to spread American values and ideals. It really makes me wonder if some artists have bad intentions to influence people with their art.

            During the week we saw a video of a unique artist named Margaret Kilgallen who does all of her art handmade. One of my favorite parts is she talked about street art she went into very good detail and explained how the idea of the art is made, she explains how the barrage of images we see everyday, especially in advertising how billboards are everywhere and no one takes the time to jus actually sit there and observe them. To wrap up everything I said I concluded that Laura’s presentation and ideas have impacted me more this week than the readings. I hope next week we have a just as good guest speaker if not better.

Cis's First entry

Hello World ..........before I begin to write my opinions  about contemporary art and media I wanna share with the world these beautiful rare Air Jordan Retro 3 White / Cement that I'm about add to my collection of Shoes designed by The Great Tinker Hatfield (former University of Oregon Track athlete and Alum).