I chose The Power of Art: Rothko because he is an artist whose pieces I used to strongly dislike, but I'm slowly accepting them more the more I am exposed to his life. I chose Uncertainy: Modernity and Art because it seemed good to watch a video that was more a general overview of 20th century art. I chose Andy Warhol: Images of an Image because, while I have seen plenty of Warhol works, and I've read about him, I've never really seen him speak for himself. Lastly, I chose Isamu Noguchi: The Sculpure of Spaces because he is an artist that I am completely unfamiliar with.
The Power of Art: Rothko tells the life and art of the famous Abstract Expressionist painter of Mark Rothko. In 1970, when the world had turned away from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, Rothko killed himself. The world was sick of his solemness. His paintings, once seen, however, would pull the viewer in to an unknown space, powerfully transplanting the viewer. While he had been considered by many to be one of the world's greatest painters, he was tormented by figuring out how much art could do. When asked to create paintings for a Four Seasons restaurant, the exorbitant price they were willing to pay him did not make him happy, but concerned about his role in American capitalism. He was born in Russia, and escaped to America to get away from the anti-Semitism, only to find it in America as well.
In 1958, Rothko gave his last insight into painting in a lecture. He believed his paintings were of and about the world, and contained elements of the world within them, such as irony and tragedy. In the Four Seasons paintings, Rothko wanted to show the weightiness of human tragedy. The work exhausted him, and he came to see the people that would be dining under his work as his enemies. They had been inspired by Michelangelo's library walls that he had visited years before, which made the dwellers feel trapped. The finished pieces were vibrant, pulsating, and seem to have some sort of force field about them. American culture now proved itself to not just be shallow.
Rothko's paintings were softly defined, rectangles floating on flat colors. They were very deep, and very emotionally charged. He wanted his paintings to elicit real human emotional reactions, not just to be beautiful. Because of this, he wanted to create art in a public space, where his artwork would not just be viewed in the rich's interiors. In the end, he turned down the huge commission and never hung his paintings on the restaurant's walls. He may have seen it as a failure, but it was a triumph of art over money. He began to be obsessed with creating some sort of chapel, which he would decorate with his own paintings. His work became darker at the same time that the rest of the world wanted light hearted Pop Art. In Texas, 1965, he was commissioned to create artwork for a chapel. He created very dark paintings that no longer showed any movement. It feels like a funeral for Rothko and his idea of art.
Uncertainty: Modernity and Art presents how modern art reflects the state of our civilization, just as it did for the Greeks. Modernism is fast-paced, consumerist, and so, therefore, is the art. Matthew Collings states that for the past century we have been living in an age of uncertainty. Our art is now restless, questioning, always reflecting our changing values and mired in controversy. The movement really took off with Picasso, who changed what reality looked like. Hitler even had a Modern Art exhibit, but he labeled it as "degenerative art," and explained how "deformed Jews" created "deformed art." Hitler was trying to battle against Modern art by clinging to a very simplistic, heroic art that no longer, and never did, reflect reality. Picasso's Guernica, on the other hand, approached truth in a new, different way. While it is less realistic, it feels far more human.
Piet Mondrian's works are gridded, similar to cities, but they are not supposed to be city blueprints. Their geometrical patterns are more timeless than that. Abstract Expressionists were a more critical look at modern life and consumerism. The images are much more stark than the whimsical Paul Klee created earlier. Pop Art, on the other hand, openly embraced modern life and consumerism. The 1960s celebrated the surface rather than depth. Andy Warhol in particular used pop culture icons in the way that a previous culture might have portrayed religious icons like Jesus.
For a long time, Chinese art was government propaganda. Now, however, they create contemporary art that is joined to western contemporary art. The problem is, Modern Art is now more interested in its market value in the very consumerist world that it is commenting on, and has become far less personal. Everything is illusion--where is the self?
Andy Warhol: Images of an Image studies Warhol's Ten Lizes in order to understand Andy Warhol and Pop Art. After having no ambitions for being an artist, he was inspired by Rauschenberg to begin cutting out newspaper ads, cropping them and blowing them up in the form of artworks. Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor became subjects for his silkscreens, though really they were objects. Ten Lizes shows Taylor not as a person, but as a commodity that the people consumed. The distorting of the silkscreen was like the distortion of Taylor from real person to icon. Warhol was also quite narcissistic, and created many self-portraits in the same style as his Monroe and Taylor paintings/prints.
Death was a main theme for Warhol. He produced images of electric chairs, suicides, and plane and car crashes. He created Monroe portraits after she had died, Taylor portraits after it seemed she was going to die, and Jackie Kennedy portraits after her husband died. Ten Lizes, in fact, feels like a death portrait of Taylor, whose "glow" has been deleted through the process of the rough silk screening. The ten portraits that make up the artwork vary from one to another, each showing its own deformities.
Isamu Noguchi: The Sculpure of Spaces is about the artist and his sculpture gardens, from the artist's point of view. Self expression is not enough for him--if it was, he would be a painter. He studied Japanese gardens, which he saw as a form of sculpture, and began making his own sculpture gardens. The Unesco Garden in France was his first opportunity to do this, which he calls an homage to a Japanese garden. He says it was a "humanizing" of both space and sculpture, for it didn't distance the artwork from the viewer, but instead they interacted with each other.
He had an American mother and a Japanese father, and moved to the US from Japan during his childhood. He believes he became a "typical American," lived in some poverty for a time, and got by by creating stone heads. He created sets for productions by Martha Graham. After decades of success, Noguchi was commissioned to design Bayfront Park in Miami, which was controversial because he was demanding increasing amounts of money and the destruction of a library. He believed that the artist should be a dictator, not compromising his vision. He then would experiment using water in his sculptures by creating fountains. After that, he created playground sculptures, showing how he believed that art should not just be in museums, but it should be useful to the people in public.
He did not try to make his sculptures perfect, for he was trying to imitate nature. As he said, imperfection was better than perfection. He also believed that the scale of sculpture should be the scale of "man." The person and the sculpture both can interact with each other. When creating the sculptures in Jerusalem, the project meant a lot to him, for he felt a connection with the Jews who had finally found a home, as he had. His final work he worked on in his eighties, never slowing down. This sculpture space was for Moere Numa Park in Japan, a return to the country that he first grew up in. Unfortunately, he died before his creation was realized, but the park was created after his passing. His friends still feel like Noguchi is just traveling, and will return to his home of peaceful solitude any day.
The Power of Art: Rothko delves into Abstract Expressionism from the point of view of one artist, whereas the textbook could only afford a few paragraphs for the movement as a whole. While it is still not the same thing as looking at the paintings in person, it was nice to see so many of his paintings in the video. A few examples in a book can't compare to seeing the paintings in the video, where their size and texture are more evident. I was curious about the scenes where an actor plays Rothko--were his monologues things that Rothko had actually written and said? In Uncertainty: Modernity and Art, we see how Modern Art was a reflection of modern society. Sometimes the art criticized the consumerism of the modern world, and other times it reveled in it. It seems that videos like this one are less objective that the textbook is. We are hearing and watching the interpretation of art from one man's perspective. The text, of course, has to do this to some extent, but it seems like it does not go as far as the videos do.
In the text, there is a mini, one page biography of Andy Warhol. I was hoping that the video would end up giving a more personal account of Andy Warhol, but this was not really the case. In this instance, it seemed like the text was actually more in depth than the video. The video focused a lot on the technical aspect of Warhol's works, which is less interesting to me. I was hoping to actually watch some interviews with Warhol, but apart from a quick clip in the beginning, there were none. Perhaps this is because interviews with Warhol were hard to come by, or at least ones where he showed his true self. After all he said, according to the video, to only look at the surface of his prints and paintings to understand him--there's nothing underneath.
Isamu Noguchi: The Sculpure of Spaces was about an artist that I know has been discussed in the text, but I honestly did not have a great recollection of him or his work, so it was good to learn about him in this video. This video relates to the final section of the final chapter in the book, where Getlein takes a look at artists who are a part of more than one culture. This, too, is the case for Noguchi, who is half American and half Japanese. While he creates artworks in America, he is largely inspired by Japanese Gardens. The video allowed us to see the life's work of someone who is influenced by the multiple cultures he grew up with. While at times the artist seemed rather selfish (such as the destruction of the library and the demand for high amounts of money), at other times his concern for creating art that interacts with nature as well as with people seemed very heartfelt.
No comments:
Post a Comment