Weekly Roundup

Hey, I found this really cool link where people are playing the piano while being in their piano.  I know it sounds crazy but check it out on Weekly Roundup.  Laurie Anderson is helping to promote this in Chicago sometime soon!

Joseph Beuys

         Joseph Beuys was not always an artist.  In 1921 he was born in a small northwestern, German city called Krefleld.  He was interested in medicine, but ended up volunteering for the military where he worked with piloting and aircrafts.  Beuys was seriously wounded many times and even survived a major crash.  At the end of the war, he was held as a prisoner in a British interment camp.


     When he returned he pursued his interest in medicine, and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. When he graduated in 1952, he spent most of his time drawing and reading.  He was offered to become a professor at Düsseldorf.  While he was teaching, he grew intrigued by the work of Nam June Paik and the fluxus movement.  His work was also heavily influenced from the images he collected from war time.  

         His first exhibit was in 1965 called, "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare."  It featured a man with his face covered in honey and gold coloring.  He explained his drawings on the walls to the dead hare he held.  Beuys also experimented with sculpting and installations. 
        He believed art to be a healthy way.  Joseph Beuys took risks and wanted his art to provoke people.  He did not want to create something beautiful, he wanted his audience members to question his work. As an art theorist Beuys also believed in conserving the environment.  He planted 7,000 trees in Kassel, Germany.  Unfortunately, he died in 1986 but his risks have transformed what we consider art today.  

Performance Art

                    My video does not want to upload at all!  Check out this link from my facebook, to see the video since it wants to only upload on there?  I passed out in front of starbucks, and within the first 10 seconds someone wanted to call the cops and thought I was in a drunken stupor from the night before.  I tried so hard not to laugh!! No one really helped me though, everyone just kind of stared and laughed or seemed very confused.  I tried to look prego too, as I stuffed a balloon up my dress.  I also put a wine bottle and a pack of cigarettes next to me.

Is Fluxus the new Dada?

    Marcel Duchamp's notion of readymade influenced the fluxus movement immensely.  Artists started to use themselves as art and interact with resources that were already available.  The Fluxus movement emerged right after the Dada movement in the 1960s.   It was an international avant garde style, which artists wanted to connect everyday life items to art.  They achieved this through film, music, collages and writing.  The earliest Fluxus movements occurred in New York at the AG Gallery in 1961 by George Maciunas.   Important performers that erupted out of this movement are also street performer Yoko Ono.  Fun Fact-she was married to John Lennon!
 
         I watched a video of her on youtube which was called her "cut piece" performance art.  It seems like many of her performances were very interactive with her audience.  In her piece she had each viewer cut a piece of her clothing off.

            Street art started to become more and more familiar, and live art was the latest trend.  Artists started to question what exactly art is.   Flux musicians such as John Cage, believed connect theater to media.  "Happenings" was a new term that evolved out of this period,  they were long performances that were meant to make the audience interact with the artist performing.  Artists started to eliminate the screen between them and their audience.

Xerox Project

        I spent a lot of time thinking about what part of my body I wanted to scan.  Since there was no censorship and I did want to go out of the box, I decided to do my vagina.  So I scanned it and then distorted it a little and made it extremely dark so you could barely see anything.  I didn't really want the whole world to see my vagina up close and personal.  I was inspired by the dada movement, and all the collages so I did a collage of words out of a magazine I thought reminded me of sex and the body in media.    I kind of placed the words so they appear like teeth on the lips I made out of a folder and FedEx box pieces.  I used the top of my desk, I was supposed to build months ago and I know I will never build it so I tiled the scanned pictures of myself and then wrote out what is the value on the bottom.  I finally made the lips pop off the board.  I think it looks pretty sweet.

Bahaus!

     Bahaus seemed like a fabulous institute! Bahaus literally means "house for building."  It featured most avant garde art of its time!  Bahaus was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919.  Gropius was a famous architect who wanted to bring people together through art.  Bahaus originally started in Weimar, then Dessau and ended in Berlin in 1933.  Each time the location changed, so did the directors.  Each director focused on a different concept.

Monochrome in Lincoln, Massachusetts built by Walter Gropius

      The schools focused on students ability to experiment and thing out of the box.  There were many different types of classes available as well such as pottery, carpentry, sculpting, weaving, printing and varieties of painting.  Architecture classes were also available but not initially, which I thought was ironic considering Gropius is an architect mastermind.
  










          Many art movements erupted from the institute.  One of the artists who taught at Bahaus was Wassily Kandinsky.  He was an art theorist who created completely original modern designs.  I attached one of his works called, On White II.  I really liked all the different figures and shapes combined together.  

(1923, Wassily Kandinsky)
I did not realize how influential Bahaus really is.  A lot of the modern furniture I have recently been viewing, has been influenced by Bahaus.  Also many buildings have been influenced by Bahaus architecture. Bahaus was much more than a school.  It was a community where artists could experiment with new ideas.  

Andalusion of A Dog?

      

 Whoa, I did not expect that movie to be so weird.  "Andalusion of a Dog" is a sixteen minute, black and white film produced by Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dali.  It emerged from the Dada movement around 1929. The movie is totally silent and in black and white so you have to concentrate more.  The music was not anything to pry about.  Fun Fact: This movie was also financed by Luis' mother.  The actors throughout the film were naturally extremely corny and over dramatic. It was cool to see what innovative technique would be used to change the scene.    

      I appreciated the constant fluidity within the film, it worked extremely well.  The film was very creative and had many unusual transformations.  One of the transformations I thought was cool was how the ants in the man's hand changed into armpit hair, then something that looked like a tumbleweed and finally a hand.    The scenes were pretty random, especially when the man was pulling two pianos with dead horses on them.  Check out the first part for yourself!