Final project!

Ok! That's it, we're done with the final project, and it turned out pretty good. We changed it last minute, and I felt that our piece was in a constant flux. What we eventually changed it into wasn't necessarily the 'final' output, because we so easily could have changed it again ... and, sure enough, one hour later our piece was in flux again! This time it was divided into smaller portions between the group members, and brought home as a memory of what once was (while most of it ended sadly enough into the dustbin), and what once could have been. Very interesting, challenging, demanding, fun, useful, learning experience. The process itself is somewhat documented in this blog, but can never be fully documented, just hints of experiences and thoughts, glimpses of collaborative effort that made this thing realize itself. I have no doubt in my mind that this thing were in much more control over us, that we ever had over it. The good thing is that we actually acknowledged that at a relatively early stage, and thus did not have any grand expectations (maybe secretly hoping for some wanted result in some weak moments, but never for long) of what should come out of the kiln (if we even would be able to get something in the kiln in the first place!) ... Anyways, we understood that this project would not be finished until after the critique, and that was a good thing.

End part 1 ...

Sketches / images

More images on my flickr account ...

Retrospective note ...

I thought I could gather my writings from my non-digital diary–slash sketchbook–slash research–slash notes–in this blog, so that it all will be in the same place (i.e. more convenient). So, this means that it should be read as something that I said early in the term, not necessarily (hopefully) what I will say now, at the end of the term.

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1 entry:
CLAY:

• can simulate soft or hard materials pretty easy
• goes through a process itself from soft/wet to hard/dry
• is a material used for "art for art's sake" but also as a material that was very important in making pottery (i.e. containers for water, grain, food in general)
• has a very long history in both artmaking and wares (I think many times this was interchangeable)
• is used pretty much all over the world ... (?)
• has no special symbolic meaning (except maybe tradition/usefull/sensibel/flexibel and so on ... [ not quite sure what I was thinking of right here :) ]
  

2 entry:
MASKS:

Masks has a long tradition in all cultures through history. It can be used to hide your identity or it can give you an identity. It can be used to change your identity, what you are, and what you represent. It can represent magic, death, good, evil, happy, sad, ...

[ I think that these scribblings best represent an idea of something I would like to research more at some point. Clay would be a nice material to use for this, but is only one of many options ]


3 entry:
THE SACRED:

What is sacred to me? Life is sacred. I don't believe in life after death, so we have to spend our time wisely. Also, for me personally, it is important to stay alive and be healthy so that I can support my child as he grows up. My mom died of illness (leukemia) when I was three years old, and my dad died of cancer when I was 13. My dad's illness was a self inflicted one, something he actually could have done something about [ he claimed he didn't know about the risks of smokeing when he started, which might, or might not, be true ... ]. I think having these experiences have made me more aware of life, but also of death, and I [ think I ] almost have a cynical view of how that 'works' ...

4 entry:
BASE MATERIALISM:

The good thing about clay, in contrast to say, shit, gold, plastic, is that it doesn't have a strong 'hierarchical' connotation to it. That should make it easier to focus on the material's 'base' properties, and to further explore these. What I have found so far, is that clay change its plasticity pretty rapidly when you're working with it, and thus make it a less useful material for 'clay motion' ... unless I actually wanted to focus on how the material itself changes over time. This could be used to represent my notion of 'sacred life' (albeit a cliché one). I was also going to incorporate light (the sun as the ethernal sign/symbol of life), and again, I can't seem to get away from looking for metaphors or symbols to communicate something. Is Bataille's goal to completely get away from that? A sort of 'non communicative' art? What does that communicate? [ Sorry for being somewhat cryptic in this post, I'm not even sure what I was trying to say my self ... :) ]

5 entry:
SACRED:
(ideas for the assignment)

• religion
• control mechanism
• patriarchal
• putting themselves in a 'holy' position (i.e. the Pope etc.)
• use of shrines
• using the best symbol for man = testicles (maybe not the best symbol, but ...)
• a shrine with testicles on a pedestal (has this been done before, I wonder?)
  

Shrines: Exists in several religions . Use as a place to contain the 'most sacred of the sacred', often itself contained inside a sacred or holy place ... ---> Reliquary ...

Inscription on the box?
man = vir ...
these holy parts from man ...
= illa sanctus secui ex vir
these testicles give us hope ...
= illa testis dat nos spes
and control of all the people
= quod imperum totum populus

[ quasi latin from a translater page ... ]

other notes:

comment on how the western world has changed from religion (life and death) to materialism ...

Some thoughts about the group project ...

There is still very much a mystery how our piece will turn out (will it even get remotely dry enough to be fired?), but as a group, I think we are ready for whatever will come out of the kiln. We know that whatever comes out of that kiln is not the 'end product'. I think that all our uncertainty around this project has made us think much harder and longer on this (i.e. what we are doing, trying to achieve, how the group dynamic works, how we communicate etc) than we otherwise would have. It is very interesting to see how the feeling we all had in the beginning that we had to 'control' this thing, the process, each other, the outcome, and how we now can look at this as a 'happy accident', a work of art (of course it is), a successful, collaborative, entropic piece of art that does exactly what it is supposed to do (i.e. surprise us with its outcome). I very much look forward to the final stages of what we have to go through with this piece, and I can already say with certainty that this has been the most interesting and fun piece I have worked with the whole term.

Duration ...

I'm not exactly sure what I was supposed to be doing with the duration assignment (I know: bad student! BAD student!), but I've been thinking about writing something related to clay and this class experience anyways ... First of all, this class has made me think more seriously about what it means to be an artist than any other class, thanks to the professors, the readings, but also my peers. I'm still horrified about the thought of defining 'art' and 'artist' to myself, though, something I think is essential if I will have any chance at becoming an artist. I was actually given two books concerning the very theme ('what is art?'), and only after reading just a few pages of the first book, I read things I thought was pretty wise, for example this: (from memory) "You know fate is in your own hands, but you feel your hands are week." Which is absolutely true for me. On the other hand, they say that "not everyone can be a Mozart, or a Picasso, and most of artistic achievements are through hard work, and not some God given 'talent' that only one in a million is given." I think I will like the rest of the book also ...

It is hard to put a finger on exactly what I feel like I have learned most about clay through this term, but I feel that I have learned a lot. Maybe not so much about clay per se, but how to think about what you are trying to communicate, and why, and what can happen when you do it. I like Elisa's comment from one of the talks over the readings when she says that art is (something like this) "something that makes your regular pathways in your brain stop, and they try to find other, unfamiliar, and new ways to get out ... "

I also thought Jeff had a great comment in his blog-report for the last reading–X Marks the Spot–with casts and negative spaces, and his thoughts about Pompeii: "Maybe the most surprising casts ever made, these empty cavities revealed the final moments of people dying from the volcanic eruption. Shocking and poignant, but there is nothing left of them but empty space…"

From my discussions with Brandon I remember best his reaction to me when I was saying "I think that art also is, you know, Art For Art's Sake" were he looks at me surprised, and says "oh? no ... I don't think you mean that ..." And that was a very interesting answer to me, and I'm still not sure why I shouldn't mean that. I mean, for me, Art For Art's Sake is a pretty harmless, selfexplaining, but also non-sensical statement that means nothing unless you first define what art is. 'Art For Art's Sake' is also, I believe, a response to the Arts and Crafts movement that was so strong at that time (late 1800), meaning it doesn't always have to be a decorated thing (commodity?) ... OK, I couldn't remember all my facts, so here is something from wikipedia:

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"L'art pour l'art" (translated as "art for art's sake") is credited to Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). Some argue Gautier was not the first to write those words. They appear in the works of Victor Cousin, ^[1]Benjamin Constant, and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe argues in his essay "The Poetic Principle", that

We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake [...] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: — but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.^[2]

Gautier, however, was the first to adopt the phrase as a slogan. "Art for art's sake" was a bohemian creed in the nineteenth century, a slogan raised in defiance of those who — from John Ruskin to the much later Communist advocates of socialist realism — thought that the value of art was to serve some moral or didactic purpose. "Art for art's sake" affirmed that art was valuable as art, that artistic pursuits were their own justification and that art did not need moral justification — and indeed, was allowed to be morally subversive.

In fact, James McNeill Whistler wrote the following in which he discarded the accustomed role of art in the service of the state or official religion, which had adhered to its practice since the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century:

Art should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like^[3]

Such a brusque dismissal also expressed the artist's distancing himself from sentimentalism. All that remains of Romanticism in this statement is the reliance on the artist's own eye and sensibility as the arbiter.

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It seems that this view (aesthetic and decadent movements) goes a little further to the extreme than I was aware of. Apparantly, the Arts and Crafts movement was not something the Aestethic Movement opposed, rather the opposite it seems ...

Oh, well ...

Can be useful ...

Xenophobia is a fear or contempt of that which is foreign or unknown, especially of strangers or foreign peoples.^[1] It comes from the Greek words ξένος (xenos), meaning "foreigner," "stranger," and φόβος (phobos), meaning "fear." The term is typically used to describe fear or dislike of foreigners or in general of people different from one's self.

Liquid Words Critique

So, today we had part two of the critique for our Liquid Words assignment. We spend a long time on each piece, which is good, since it is not so much about the pieces themselves we are talking about, but rather how to look at pieces in general, and how to interpret 'art' as a whole. At least, that is how I look at it. I think it is very important and useful to do it this way because of a couple of things. First of all, we are in a class room setting, wich means we are a group of people, each student possibly having a unique interpretation of each piece. To me, the most important part is actually to listen to all the initial (in particular) reactions to my own piece, since I will have a preconcieved notion or intent with what I am attempting to communicate. When those notions comes out as false, or if they would happen to be right, I learn a lot from that. This does not say that what I have made is good art or bad art, it simply tells me something about my own abillity to communicate my own ideas. Those ideas can be good, unique, deep, or they can be vulgar, shallow, superficial. There is little point in having brilliant ideas or concepts in your head, if you're unable to let them come through in your art. My point is, this is a unique opportunity we have as artists to listen so closely to what a whole group of devoted peers have to say about our own art. After school, you just might have to totally trust yourself, looking back at the 'classroom days' and whish you had a group of people telling you what they feel about your art again. It is pretty useful.

Another thing that comes to mind from todays critique was the question "What's wrong with english?", in other words, why didn't I just use english if I tried to communicate something through words? (I guess this might be obvious to some people, but I say it anyway) First of all, english is not my native language, so what is wrong with norwegian? Second of all, by using something other than english, I was actually communicating 'something' other than just what the meaning of each word 'means'. Third, Grendel–which was based on the epic poem Beowolf–was written in a language that was totally understandable for scandinavians of that time (700 - 1000 AD), and even today I can look at that text and more or less understand it based on my knowledge of norwegian, not english. So, what once was old english, has much more in common with scandinavian today than with english. This is for me a 'proof' that words and language is actually very liquid, they are in a constant flux, either you like it or not. True, some languages do not change as much as others, but they still change.