Luka's Arts In NYC

The Artwork:

Andy Warhol “Orange Disaster 5”:

The image is of the electric chair. I think he found the image and then by silk-screening it made it his own. He repeats the picture 15 times. This makes the picture almost seem vague, like a brick in a house. At first glance one doesn’t see each individual picture and sees the piece as a whole, but as you closer you see the image and subject matter. I think the title is meaning to show how sinister the image is. The image is sinister, with the orange making the electric chair seem even more eerie and creepy, and since the electric is by itself it shows the solitariness of one who has to suffer from this. It is also saying that this isn’t the only disaster. The image is one of five.

Robert Rauschenberg “Untitled”:

Subject Matter:

. Radio

. Advertisement

. Rocket

. Buildings

. Shady Characters

I think he found these images in mostly newspapers. They all seem very much about the current events of the world during that time. I also think he got a couple of them from magazines, like the Coca-Cola billboard advertisement. The meaning of this work, I feel, is that the current would is chaotic and that the only things in the world that can be distinguished from the chaos are the aspects of life that control the chaos such as the images of shady characters (politicians), advertisements, technology and corporations

Materials:

. Paint

. Paper

. Plastic Container

. Hand Dryer

Sarah Charlesworth ”Herald Tribune”:

The relationship between the white paper and the images is confusion. In a lot of the images the people are making faces of confusion or faces of someone who doesn’t fully understand a situation. The white pages add to the confusion because there is no explanation of the images, so the observer is forced to focus on the images by themselves. The artist took out the body of the text. The layout is almost like a linear timeline, as if the piece seems to be following a storyboard of sorts. There are 25 pages. What this tells me is that the piece is trying to tell a story without the words. It shows the piece has a chronological format, which seems to add order to the otherwise confusing and somewhat random pictures.

Materials:

. Marble

. Concrete

. Gold Metal

. Tinted Glass

. White Paint for the inside

. Red Paint for the Elevators

For the inside the architect chose white as the main color, while the outside was mainly a gray/ off-white. The sidewalk seems to have an alien-like quality to it. It is very futuristic. It reminds me of almost crop circles. The ground on the inside is the same. It seems as if a bunch of pieces of a puzzle are coming together. The shape of the main building is a round cylindrical spiral, whereas the extra building is rectangular. The inside is the same in shape. The elevators are also shaped in semi-circles.

Shapes:

. Circle

. Square

. Cylinder

. Cone

. Semi-circle

. Spiral

. Rectangle

My Experience in the Building:

I walked up the ramp as I moved through the exhibition. There were a lot of people from each angle as you went up because as you curved around you could see the previous levels. When I walked it the ramp made it feel like I was staying on the same level as I was going up because even though you’re going up the level are smoothly transitioned and connected. They are not separated by stairs. Plus the incline of the spiral is not strong so it does not feel as if you are walking up. The lighting as you go up seems to get darker, as if it were making the transition from day to night. I was alone when I was walking. In the Guggenheim I heard walking, people dragging their feet, indistinguishable chatter from all around and an echo similar to that of when you are in a gigantic cathedral.

I was sitting watching a game of basketball the other week and started thinking, is basketball an art form? In my opinion it is. When i watch it some of the plays are so beautiful. The dribble moves, the cross overs, in between the legs, spin moves, post moves, all seem as much art as a dance move is to me. The dunks and the shots is almost like watching people doing back flips in dancing. I think basketball is almost a form of interpretive dance. And when someone performs some of the moves the players in this game perform they are not described in any other way other than aesthetically beautiful. There is constant conversation between two players and between two teams. And the audience almost becomes the score of the piece.

Now some would argue that this is wrong for several reasons. One of these reasons is that it has rules. Basketball has strict guidelines that you have to follow or else you get punished for them. But to me these rules are the same thing in art as following a style. When you draw cartoons,for example, you follow a certain style. Obviously a lot of cartooning differs from one another, but they do follow basic similarities. Same with singers. When you are a singer in an opera you follow your certain pitch, whether it be tenor, soprano, bass, etc. In basketball each players style also differs even with the rules. For example, Lebron James has a very pass oriented game. he doesn’t want his own shot unless he has to. he is also an extremely fast and athletic player so he drives into the lane a lot more, whereas Ray Allen is more of a shooter, working off of screens to make the three point shot as much as possible. he doesn’t have the ball in his hand a lot.

Another argument might be that it doesn’t look to convey a message. Often art looks to convey a message or deeper meaning behind it that is up for interpretation. I think basketball does do this as well. As a sport in general it tries to convey the message of teamwork and competition. it tries to convey the idea that one cannot succeed without teamwork, and the idea that you are always competing against someone in the end. I also think it conveys the idea of unpredictability. That you never know what life will throw at you. And this is shown in basketball through injuries, upsets and who ends up being in the finals.

In conclusion, i think basketball is a form of art because it is a form of entertainment that engages an audience and is aesthetically pleasing and stimulating to a certain sense.

The way that the photography exhibit changed our perception of art is that it showed it as a process that is lengthy. It isn’t a process that can be necessarily finished in the matter of seconds or days or hours, which is interesting because photography to people who are not very familiar with the subject make it seem like it takes a second. You take a picture and then you’re done. But the pieces in the photography exhibit changed this perception for me. For example, the piece that was in the back section of the exhibit where it was a

This was the first image in the Photography piece

portrait of a woman as she grows up. It gives the viewer this sense of insight into a person’s life in a way that you can almost experience how she grows up in the matter of seconds. The set up is also very interesting, at least for me, because it was set up from left to right in chronological order, but when you walk towards it from where we entered we see the steps backwards so its almost we see the end result first. It gave me this sense that art is not chronological and that although you might know the end result there is so much more that goes into it.

The way it changed my perception of New York is that it gave me this sense of continuity within the city. Like the picture book laid out that was just two strips of a city block stretching out for easily 30 pages of cardboard. When I looked at that piece I thought it showed how truly connected the city is. If you’re from the city you don’t say I’m from the city. You say you’re from a specific neighborhood. The city doesn’t seem cohesive but more staggered and separated, but what I think the photographer was trying to help us see is that we all are connected. We are part of this city and therefore all connected in that way. Although there may be separate boroughs and neighborhoods they are all part of the same city.

The way that this photography changed my perspective of the museum is that I think it added a relevance to the city for me. When I looked through the other exhibits I didn’t really see anything that focused on New York. It wasn’t until I saw a few of the photography pieces that I truly saw that this place fits in New York.  For example, I remember walking through the halls and seeing all these ancient roman statues and these French Broseries. Then we went and saw Bambu, which didn’t seem to me that the subject matter was the city. But then we went to this exhibit and I saw the city block book and I remember seeing a picture of underneath the outside subway stations in Brooklyn and feeling that I could actually connect with this piece. I could say wow I know where this is, or this place looks familiar. Until then it didn’t seem to me that this museum really had a deep interest in the city that it was built in.

I think that Sigurdardottir changed my perspective of art by showing that it is never truly finished. She did this because she re-created pieces that were made previously that were hundreds of years old. She repainted them and put them in different set ups and made these pieces have a completely different visual affect and tone than the originals. For example, the room that she painted all white with mirrors was completely different from the original version. The older version was very colorful and had a sense of old age. It gave this sense of the eras when kings and queens still existed. The piece stuck out. But for her version she made it all white with mirrors. This first gave the room this sense of the stereotypical future. Everything is white and bright. But it also gave this sense of uniformity. In the original one while there was a pattern there was a general color. Whereas when she painted it she made the room completely white as if to say that there is nothing to distinguish it from any other room. She was proving that art changes with time and that by changing a few simple things, such as color; art can be formed into something completely different.

The way that the Boiseries changed the way I looked at the museum by messing with my idea of space. You never think of a room being able to fit inside of a room. She was very good at making space almost seem like an illusion. Like when she did the piece where every wall got small and smaller it give you the sense that the room that you are in is huge because it can fit this whole mass of a room in it. She really made the space of the Met seem different and made our interpretation of space warp with the difference in the size of the room and the size of the piece. Rooms are supposed to be large and life scale, but these were at most a few inches taller than me and not very wide at all.

I don’t really see how this piece in particular changed the way we viewed the city except for if we use it by saying since the piece represent the idea of ever-changing and never permanent, you can say the city is like that. The city is never permanent. There always people moving in and out of it. There are always store closing and new stores taking place, the MTA changes the schedules even. There is no such thing as something in the city that is completely unchangeable. I think that is what this piece is saying. Nothing is ever truly finished. Nothing can ever truly stop changing.

I think the way the Starns brothers changed our way of art is that they changed the way we experience it. In a lot of art you’re usually able to see the whole piece at one point at least. In the Big Bambu piece it was impossible to see all of it. There was no upper level and it was too big to see all of it from just one side. For example, when you first walk in you see the wave, which is the main part of the whole piece. But as you go into it you see every individual branch of Bamboo and how they differ. You see different shades, different thickness and even different strings that were used to tie up the piece. It changed our perspective of the piece because it gave into the idea that there is more than meets the eye.

The Starns brothers change our perspective of the city by making it a backdrop of the piece. When I walked through the whole bamboo structure and looked at it from the other side what I saw was the city. It seemed as if it was the background of the actual piece and as much a part of the piece as was the bamboo that it was built on. But the city also in this case takes a secondary role. It is a tool as opposed to a focal point. When we think of the city we think of it as big, something that would be focused on and less complimentary and more taking away from other things, but in this case it is complementary. I think the reason why the artists did this was to show that the city is really a tool that can be used whichever way you want it. They are saying the city is what you make out of it and how you utilize it is your own choice.

The Starns changed the way we perceive the Met because they gave the museum a new layer. Big Bambu added a whole new floor almost to the Met. Not only that but it added almost like a roller coaster amusement ride type of feel to the Met. It didn’t feel as if that part of the museum was more like rather than like something similar to the Wonder Wheel or the Cyclone. Like the fact that you had a line for the elevator that went up to it gave me this sense of waiting online for a roller coaster. The anticipation and excitement of waiting to see what you were going up against and the simple fact this was a huge wooden structure adds to that similarity in correlation.

While looking at the “Big Bambu” I saw a piece of art that was not only art but a representation of the city. It was a ride for children to play on. A Jungle gym of sorts and this really made me see that art can be literally interactive. When I saw this piece only one thing truly came to mind. It was this Jungle gym in front of the Guggenheim Bilbao. It was very well done artistically. But it was also a playground. I’d put this type of art in a genre. I would call this physical art. In a lot of forms of art the audience has visual interaction with the piece. In music you have audio interaction. But there are very few pieces with physical interaction.

This is only the side you see when you first enter the exhibit