Week 7 Environmental Art & Death Reading

 

This week we learned about the connection between environmental art and humans. There has always been a gap between humans and nature that’s around them. Most people when they think of environmental art they think of landscapes and forests but through this lecture this week I have learned that it is much more than that. Our presenter for this week was Carla Bengston, she came into our class and told us that she was a painter at first but as she went on with her lecture she never mentioned anything about her paintings. Instead she talked to us about how we feel, and reacted with nature based art. We also discussed the relation humans have with starring at pieces of nature-based art, and she also ended up asking us how we felt towards the pieces. We looked at artist like DeMaria and Daniel Buren; and what I liked about them is how they physically used themselves with nature to create art. There’s a difference between painting a picture of landscape but to use the environment to paint the picture is incredible. When I say use the environment I mean the artist shaping the movements by simply molding them little by little and using the ground as a canvas was really fascinating. The Earth room I must admit is personally one of my favorites from the presentation, the idea of putting “earth” inside a modern building was quite amusing and out of the ordinary, I liked it because it broke the rules and was edgy.

            We also read about Kiki Smith, we got a first look at her ideas about art. One thing that really stuck to me was a quote she said, “Art is just a way to think”. Which if you think about it, it really makes a lot of sense art is the way the artist thinks and visualizes life. I really enjoyed how she was explaining how art was to her in her point of view. Her response in the video towards re doing a sculpture was priceless, how she refused to not start over but keep going at the wax sculpture. She seems a little un-normal with her dead animal gallery but isn’t that what art is, being out of the ordinary. 

            The Death reading that Ty assigned to us was really self-explanatory, I mean the title says it all and during class Ty even warned us that it was going to be one of the hardest readings you will do. So this week we read from Roland Barthes “Death of the Author”.  The reading was horrible and I’ll admit it I skimmed through it and I’ll also admit I didn’t finish it. But I did take a couple things from it I tried to make sure that this assigned reading benefited me in some way. What really helped was the next day after the reading in class Ty showed the class a picture of a man and his dog and asked the class what does it make you feel? After listening to peoples responses I finally got it; it became obvious and Ty explained it to us to that the picture had a life of its own and we can respond to it in any fashion we wanted. In the reading there was a constant artist to viewer debate on what the work represented. In the reading they had this saying of letting go of your art and it will build a life of its own. When you connect all the readings, the presentation, the movies and, the lectures it all makes sense(almost like Inception).