Luka's Arts In NYC

Music, to me is any sound that creates emotion to a person. I think that music can be anything from the tapping of a window sill to the sounds of the subway. The most important thing is that it brings emotion and evokes something in a person. There also has to be a rhythm to music. Music has to follow a certain flow to me. This rhythm is part of what affects people. It is what helps them groove to the music. Whether it be the swiping of metro cards on a train or actual singing for me to consider it music it has to follow some sort of rhythm or time. A lot of people have definitions of music that are similar to noise, but to me music and noise are different because of this rhythm. And this rhythm is what sets the type of emotion or reactions that people get from the music. If the rhythm is up tempo and upbeat people will feel more of the need to dance to it and it is more uplifting. If the tempo is slow and chilled out it will relax people and make them want to just sit down and listen to it.  So i guess what I’m trying to say is that music is noise with a rhythm.

LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1928. He took classes for art as a child in the Wodsworth Antheneum. He graduated from Syracuse University in 1949. Then in the summer of 1950 traveled around Europe. Afterwards he was drafted for the Korean War and was assigned to make posters for the war. He then worked for an architect named I. M. Pei as an architectural draftsman. he is considered one of the most important and influential artists of his time.

His art is very geometric. He works with patterns and cubism. He does both painting and sculpting. His color palette including really bright colors, or white. His pieces were never different from the colors of the rainbow or black and white.  He was considered part of the Minimal and Conceptual art movements.

Tomaseli is still around and currently doing a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He was born in Santa Monica, California in 1956 and grew up there. This place is near Disney Land. He graduated from California State University in 1982 with a B.A. in painting and drawing. he currently lives in Brooklyn.

His work is usually associated with psychedelia and drugs. For example, the piece we saw had many drugs and marijuana leaves imbedded into it. And it also had a creature made out of almost human eyes. He also does this work on wood panels. He is very big on psychedelia since he grew up during the 60’s and 70’s in a town so close to Disney Land. A lot of his work reminds me of space because it has a black background and these colorful dots all over it. a common theme that has seemed to appear in his piece is this idea of space and also a use of circles is very vivd in his piece.

The sources of inspiration for all these pieces in these five galleries are technology and the advancement of man, as he grows older. They all focus on some sort of depiction of either old, vs. new or nature vs. industry. This is shown through the materials or subject matter that the artists use. For example, Roxy Raine’s Distillation blends aspects of nature with industry by making natural things that connect with these gigantic industrial pipes. He creates mushrooms and kidneys, for example, to go along with these gigantic pipes. Also, in Mary Temple’s Screentests she uses a five-dollar bill and silk screens Obama’s face on it next to Lincoln’s. It portrays this contrast between the old and the new, the old being Lincoln and the new being Obama.

The reason why they do this? It is because this is a common theme in society. Are we destroying the world as life goes on? As man progresses and invents more and more technology does it not make the world worse itself? This is what the artists want to get across to people. They want to show this relationship in their piece. They want to show that as we progress we pollute.

They also look at this theme of throwing away anything old. For example, in the piece Waste_Generation by Chris Doyle, there is this image of a junkyard of used outdated computer and technology. It gives the audience this sense that we get rid of something as soon as it is old. That regardless how old it is as soon as something new comes along we throw out what’s obsolete.

Since i did this with basketball i decided to eventually throughout this course do it with all the main team sports as well as some other sports such as snowboarding and swimming. So my next sport is football.now do i consider football a sport. In my opinion in a way it is a sport because there is this constant give an go between defense and offense. There are these complicated formations, which are similar to formations in dance, where each person is supposed to start off. There are certain positions and roles you have to fill out and work differently, which reminds me almost of an orchestra. For example, the conductor of the orchestra in the case would be the quarterback. He is calling the shots and saying, based on the defensive patterns of the opposing team, what they should do and is ultimately deciding where the ball goes. Like all sports this sport reminds me of improv dancing, because you’re going in with a basic idea of what you’re supposed to do. You don’t go in their not knowing what you’re role is. But whether you get to achieve that role and how you achieve it varies with each possession.

With football there’s a very solid argument on why it would be considered a form of art. One part is fluidity. There are so many breaks in football that it doesn’t really seem like a fluid piece of motion but rather stagnant pieces broken together. But in my opinion each play is like a song in an opera. The songs often connect to each other if they are in the same act and without one often the other would seem out of context. This is the same in football., Without the play before you wouldn’t be making the current play because you wouldn’t be in the same position that you are in. Football almost follows a story. Where you start off in the beginning and constantly fighting to reach the end.

Another argument is again that it is to regulated. There are so many rules on what you can and can’t do in football that it seems hardly the same as art where you’re really allowed to run free with no rules to hold you down. But these rules work as form to help define a specific genre that is “football”. Just as Blues in music follows the same outline throughout every song, so does football. But you would hardly say that all blues is the same, just as you would argue that no football game is ever the same as the last.

The last is that it lacks content. There is no deeper meaning to football supposedly. But in my opinion there is. It shows the pure primal nature of human beings and how brain(plays) has to work wiht brawn(the players) in order to truly succeed. In football the great teams win because of both their players and the coach that is calling the plays. So i do think football is an art form.

I would have to say that my favorite piece in whole play would probably have been the Kleinzach piece, which was in the prologue and epilogue. It was a very comical piece, but in the epilogue, when you realize that the main character Hoffmann makes himself Kleinzach, who is a dwarf. This piece happens when Hoffman, the main character of the opera, enters the bar. This piece is a bar song. The whole ensemble in the bar sings it but Hoffman leads it.

The music for this piece is repetitive, as in it follows the same groove and melody thorughout thewhole piece. The Vocals are conversational; when Hoffman says something the audience repeats the last word/phrase. The sound of the music is very playful but and reminds me of a bar scene.

The reason why this was my favorite piece was because i liked how the music went along with the vocals and the performance on stage. I like how the motions imitated the content and noise from the vocals. I also just thought it was a very comedic, yet sinister part of the piece that was very entertaining to me.

David Ellis is a painter and in a way a movie maker as well. He usually paints huge canvases on floors and walls, as well as does his own structures. His art honestly to me is probably the most diverse and original type of art. When I met David Ellis at the Macaulay building i was simply blown away. He has a very urban influence, which makes his style refreshing and i recognized one of the groups that interviewed him. His style is also semi cartoon-style which adds this youthful sense to his art. But i also love how textural his art can be. Often there are pieces that are very detailed and have many layers.

The thing i like about David Ellis the most is his ability to combine different mediums. For example, he had a piece that was set up in this gallery at RICE University in Texas where he made this painting on these oil drums and paint cans and made these devices so that the cans would be hit to make a sort of beat. He incorporated music into art. To me this is amazing. I think this idea is extremely unique and very innovative. It also must’ve taken a lot of talent in many different fields.

David Ellis believes that art isn’t permanent. In his movies he often paints and repaints over a work and never has really a set image that he keeps. He’ll make a painting and then painting it white and paint a completely separate thing. This philosophy to me is admirable, but i don’t know how he doe it. If there was a piece that i did where i thought it was really good, i wouldn’t be able to bring myself to paint over it, also with this policy he often does a painting in one swoop, which means there really isn’t room for extreme error. He doesn’t draft his work.

Since we saw David Ellis for class I have to say that he has been one of my favorite artists. I love his style and love the way he approaches his work. He also seems like a very cool guy. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this trip and i might have been my favorite out of all the trips that we have gone on.

This is the piece made out of oil drums

“Vistaar”

Choreography by Madhavi Mudgal

Music by Madhup Mudgal

Costumes by Madhup Mudgal

Choreography – With this piece I really enjoyed the choreography. The performers often moved as one unit make different almost geometric shapes. The dancing was also a part of the music since the costumes had beads or coins attached to the dresses their movement worked as a sort of percussion instrument. The dancers were all female. There were five of them. They each had an outfit that was the same except for the color.

Set/Stage and Light Design – The light played a big factor in this. It helped set the focus of the audience by shifting around the stage from musicians to dancer. The rest of the stage is dark except for the one spot light and there is not backdrop. The costumes were traditional very traditional and heavy looking dresses with things that made sounds on them.

Music – It sounded like traditional Indian music. Every person on stage is a part of the music from the dancers to the musicians. There is a lot of movement in the music and it is very up beat. It was live. The relationship was that they all moved in unison, dancer and musicians. The dance was part of the form of music.

The feet of the Monument

The narrative of the film follows the rise and fall of the Empire of a man named Soho Eckstein who bought half of Johannesburg. Soho Eckstein is a greedy man, who is always wearing a dark suit and is portrayed as angry, over worked, isolated from regular society and glutinous. Another of the main characters is Soho Eckstein’s wife. She is represented as often bored and unattended to, which leads to her promiscuous affair with Felix Tittlebaum. In the end though, after Eckstein’s empire falls, he ends up back with her. Felix is viewed as a captive. He is forced to be where he is and wants to escape it as much as possible. His only way of escaping it is by his affair with Mrs. Eckstein. Only when he is with her is he truly happy. I think Felix and Soho represent two parts of the artist, the workaholic and the more natural one. When he is at work he must neglect everything he loves. He therefore is more angry and greedy and is darker of a human. But when he is with the person he loves he is happy and less dark. But only when he can destroy his original corporate work can eh go back to what he loves, in this case it was a woman. I think that woman in the artist’s mind represents art. I don’t fully know Kentridge’s biography so I’m not sure if this is the case, but he might have done this by just saying that this dilemma follows every person. Only when one person can shed and destroy the shackles of skyscrapers and corporate world can one go back to what they enjoy most about life. That is what the big fight between Felix and Soho is. It is the dilemma between these characters of whether a man should be married to his job or the woman he loves.

My favorite part of all the four movies was the monument. When it showed this man bound to be under a burden that he may want to break but can’t because it weighs him down while bound him by the feet I thought this was a great metaphor for how in the modern world often people are forced by the corporate and capitalist world to pursue careers that are more profitable instead of more enjoyable. People seem to ask themselves nowadays what is a better career choice instead of what they truly enjoy doing. And the monument represents the mistake the man has made by focusing on this career. Now he is shackled and bound, never to be able to pursue his true dreams and to only be carrying the burden of a job he doesn’t enjoy.

Miranda Lichtenstein

This is my favorite piece of the exhibit because i love the way it plays on reflection. The way the water reflects the face of the woman adds a surreal edge to something that almost seems trivial, like swimming. This piece i think truly embodied the exhibit because it symbolizes the idea of finding oddity in everyday life. That there is this sense of uncanny within us lying underneath the surface. i also love the vividness of the water because the color almost seems painted on. It almost adds an uncanniness because the piece almost feels like it blends between panting and photography. Also the way  the water distorts the edge of the pool makes it seem almost like a landscape. So in this way it is also nature vs industrialism, where the wall is industrialism and the water  is nature.