Luka's Arts In NYC

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.

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

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.

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.

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.