Public Art - Art Event 1

Last Friday I attended the Panel about Public Art. The most important feature of Public Art is that it defines the area it is in. Everything from Professor Sheer's sculptures, to the memorials in Paris, to graffiti on posters, public pieces are all art artistic expressions of their area or they define how one should view the area. The panelists defined public art as having three different functions:

1. Beautification: such as a Professor Sheer's leaf sculpture at the otherwise concrete and cold metro station.
2. Direct Protest: such as Princess Hijab's "Veiling art" in Paris, to poke fun at fashion and a direct protest against the negative stigma toward Islam.
3. Demonstrating new ways to see the world: Paris streets that lead directly to a memorial, establishing French identity. Or Professor Sheer's sculpture out from the the New York Courthouse, a visual representation of the courthouse. And even Princess Hijab's veiled artwork demands the viewer to look at public posters differently.

Professor Sheer also described how an artist should consider three important things when creating a public piece:

1. The Identity of the place: What meaning does the place have? For example a courthouse has a very different meaning than a metro station.
2. The people who interact: Who is going to walk by your art and look at it? How are they going to relate to it?
3. The physical site: Are there trees around it? What does the architecture look like? How can you mold it into the already existing area or make it stand out?

With all this in mind I considered what Professor Friebele described as the NEW public space- the internet. Just like how Graffiti allows an artist to share their work with no price tag internet websites like YouTube, DeviantArt, Facebook, and Blogger allow you to share your work with anyone who happens to be passing by for free. The internet is one giant digital metaphor to a public space; a forum like a public square, game sites like arcades, amazon and ebay like thrift stores and auctions.

I believe the internet is even more flexible with sharing "public art" because a lot of Public Art has to be created with the permission of whomever owns the land otherwise the artwork is illegal. This keeps many artists who cannot receive permission to work in a given space from publicly displaying their artwork. Only those bold enough to break the law are seen. The internet, however, has websites (such as Blogger, DeviantArt, and Youtube) dedicated to everyday people sharing their information to the world or whoever happens to be passing by. Anyone can create a free account on these sites and share their work!

The panel made me look at the internet and art on the internet different. Each function of public art I listed above can be applied to art in the internet as well. This has inspired me to look at my artwork differently. I will especially focus Professor Sheer's specific list of what an artist should consider while making art for some of my internet sites in the future.

"Self Portrait"

Mike Stimpson

Imagine Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Eisenstaedt's "V.J. Day Times Square", or René Magritte's "Son of Man" except with Legos...



>> http://www.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2008/08/gallery_legophotog

Mike Stimpson's works are extremely easy. A photographer, he simply sets up the Legos to resemble a famous work then takes a picture of them. Even my friends who have no artistic talent can probably pull this off. Often art critics will say that they appreciate a work that required a lot of hard work and talent. They appreciate something that they themselves could not do making Stimpon's work questionably "art".

I found an article about him from Wired magazine, and well, here are some of the comments:

"All this guy did was buy some toys and then get a magazine desperate for content to publicize it. He didn't "create" anything. At least replace the word "creation" with "approximation" in the story. Wired is getting pretty weak!"

"These really aren't at all good are they.
Still, it's pages like this that prove that even the uninspired and talentless can have their few minutes of fame."

I would instead like to point out that it is not the artistic talent but the idea behind these pieces that truly makes this art. The art itself may be simple but the idea was fun, imaginative, and creative. I would even go as far to say it is original; sure he is copying famous pieces but who would have thought to recreate these pieces with Legos? It is a new way of looking at the famous artworks and even at photography.

Most importantly it is fun and something that people would enjoy looking at. Even those who do not believe this can qualify as art can admit that this is fun. I personally enjoyed browsing through his gallery and seeing famous pieces portrayed with blocky Legos. So I ask, isn't that what art is all about anyway? Looking at a piece and wanting to see more?

I feel this relates to Digital Art because it reminds me of Dadaism where a urinal was placed in a museum and labeled as "art". There wasn't any "talent" behind it in making the piece for it was a readymade, much like these legos, and it raised quite an uproar. I feel as if Dadaism and Stimpson's work teach me to look at the common world differently, to look at art differently. Digital work is going to have to be viewed as a completely different medium than painting and drawing and to make truly creative digital works digital artists have to look beyond conventional art. There is still so much opportunity for creativity with the digital medium.

In closing, I am curious and going to ask anyone who happens to be reading this, do you think this is art?

Color Correction

Chicken: Before


After


My Own Picture: Before


After

I sure do love pictures of my little sister don't I?

Mushroom: Before


Okay so after messing with this mushroom I finally decided there was absolutely no hope for it ever being a "good photo". And thus, I call this Psychedelic Mushroom.

Digital Civil Disobedience

Our everyday world is being transformed into electronics; we read off of kindles instead of books, watch TV over the internet, become famous on youtube, and now you can even perform sit ins over the internet.

The Electronic Disturbance Theater established a website specifically meant for civil disobedience; http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html

They set a day for their protest (as you can see on their site, the last being in 2008) and protesters download an "applet" which essentially continuously tries to load non-existent pages on someone's website.

"For example, participants were asked to input the names of Zapatistas killed by the Mexican Army in military attacks on the autonomous village of Acteal, forcing targeted servers to return an error message each time one of these "bad" URLs was requested. In a deft conceptual gesture, this process inscribed the "bad" URL in the server's error log as a way of symbolically returning the dead to those responsible for their murders. If enough people had run the applet simultaneously, they would have overloaded the server, so that when a regular visitor tried to access the site, pages would have loaded slowly or not at all." Mark Tribe Link

This makes the website almost impossible to load and navigate.

This introduces new possibilities for civil disobedience in cyberspace. I know I myself have signed a couple of petitions via internet. I have also learned in Political Science that social networks like "Twitter" have become the newest resource of organizing rebellions across the world.

Not only protests are changing but all different kinds of performances. I remember reading over other such performance art like The World in 24 Hours where artists from all over the world shared artwork via fax, telephone, and other forms of communication. Christiane Paul Reading Both of these examples show a new kind of "performance" by bringing people together, all in different places around the world, to "perform" a show together.

This is just another example how performance art is also changing with digital media. You don't have to demonstrate in the town square in front of people driving to work, but you can perform by sitting on your computer alone in your room "performing" to people traveling through cyberspace.

St. Mary's Photo Project

CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP WITH A SODA ON THE SIDE