Thing I learn with preparing of my thesis show

My experience in preparing for my thesis show is that of preparing ahead of time... I set my show to be in a Jewish temple in December I spoke with the Temple director and he approved my show but did not give me a date. After many weeks of pursuing a finite date, and feeling at ease since he approved the show, I pursued his but did not worry about it. After pressing him after not getting a set date for two month he replied to day that he showed my work to the Temple board and because I use burned human hair in my work they would not approve having my show at the Temple. (Being that it create a connotation of the Holocaust). What do I do now? My work is site specific, and has to be created for the space it encompasses. This is a big problem, and being that is now February now... time is ticking down. I spoke to many friends and through out a large net for anything available. In the end it past to have good friends, and family. I was given a beautiful space in a church (where I know the Pastor). It is a huge glass walk way! The difficulty is that it is a high traffic area, and for that reason and being that my work is completely destructible I set my show up in two days, had my opening and then removed it that same evening. It was beautiful, perfect space for my work, but took a great deal of preparation and planning to pull everything off and well. In the end it all worked out! Thank God! But my advise and lessoned learned is be clear with people, don't be afraid to ask for specifications, be clear, direct and set a date early!

Copy rights!

Space and Power:
Who creates space, and moratorium, can we culturally see the image that we create within our work? Woman could at one time only do work about woman within a framework of personal ideals. Who is granting space? It exposes the underlying power. Recontetualization and plagiarism, it’s based on the idea that we are all free and equal it is the idea of capitalization… do “I” agree with that? Are we all equal as individuals, gender is that true? What is personal equality of individuals based on? How is equality grasped or is it a utopian idea of appropriation? Copy rights for your work… is there any real protection for my art work, since art really is so conceptual is there any way to protected your thoughts. Although your thoughts can your right to be protected since, your thoughts tie into your individual identity. So, how as an artist can your work be protected? That is an interesting thoughts and one I have to say I have thought about but have no resolution, I have really also not had enough experience to have a strong opinion about. I am sure soon that will change and with making pieces for local businesses is that was one thing I began contemplating because I had spent a lot of my time investing into my drawing in proposing the work I would like to do for them. One of the thoughts I had is that I just handed over my time, idea and sketch to this business and really they could take my design and go to someone else with it and have them create it. What right would I have against that happening? Looking at Creative Copyright is something to explore! That is a good idea, and I will explore that further!

It is truly a cultural experience… and influence. What you have grown up experiencing will shape your understanding of gift. Being an American I have grown up giving gift that I spend time and energy and sometimes agonizing on what the person that I am looking for a gift for would appreciate. My boyfriend on the other hand is from Nigeria and his experience of gifts is very different gifts are expected… but they are given regardless if the person likes it or not. It is more about the sentiment, the fact that the person thought of you, it does not matter if it is something you did not like at all. Gifts are more about the sentiment. Gifts are an interesting thing because what is a gift really about, what embodies a gift? Is it the sentiment, the sacrifice… is it about ownership or continuity of exchange. Gifts become new things, or increasing in value with continuity of giving. What makes a gift/commodity? Is there an expectation of return? What are the ways gifts are given and how does that pertain to us as artists? We as artists learn and are given skills within our profession and the only way to increase the value of our skills as an artist is to use the talent you are given. If it remains stagnant then that it grows. A gift is an exchange of action and energy… yet in the book it is romanticized notion of giving… but could this be promoting power or obligation of them what you’ll receive. In giving a gift is it wrong to give a gift that you take please in because you know that the person receiving it will receive pleasure from it. As an artist is my art work a gift that I “bestow” on society… when many people may not want or even like it. Isn’t that glorifying artists to an unrealistic level.
Gift are sometimes just the right thing to do. The gift is viewed in different lights, in a grander scheme; a gift is a foreign object that one is projecting onto someone else. A gift should be understood as establishing contact because a gift giving is culturally bound. What is considered a gift in one culture is not in another.

Dear Ron,
Sitting in this Fridays class discussion was agonizing. It was sad to hear how you feel and how you took the frustration that you are experiencing...it was miss directed and miss taken. My frustration with Grad seminar is not with your class. There has been no structure, organization, or direction with the class in general. It has been a hodge podge of imput and patch job of making something of nothing because no one has directed it or made it worth while. Going through this program for the past two year we have started with Colonial theory, them something applicatible: personal/artistic developement, them critics with all the class when all of the class could not even fit into the studios... to your class. Which you have devoted your time, energy and insight into the class but the frustration is not to your valid effort. It is that there has been a chaotic disorganization of lack of interests and yet we are require to be here... It could have been beneficial time that has been wasted. That is not your fault it is a lack of care/concern that our required time has been given. I am sorry you got caught in the cross fire.

3/2/07

Authentic culture vs. rehashed one how is it determined? How is it defined? This is the dense piece of writing in this class. The main point is the discussion of bordo, he is commenting on our culture and how education is required to discuss cultural symbols. For example U-tube you were you can put anything weather it is crap or not. At art opening there is an array of people but are they not people who digest the culture the upper class/educated? To use the Internet as an example again, art becomes completely conceptual because all the work behind it is unseen, art is selling an idea. We are switching from pretensions art to culturally relevant work. Or is it just over load of communication? We are infused with information, are we really able to digest it? Can we really fallow the culture being filtered? Mega corporations like Google buy things like U-Tube to control communication. Art can be reduced to all one form. It is democratization of art into academia. Anything can be art… think of Dechamp. Higher intellectual art can be filtered into culture where it may not be understood how controversial it is but within mass culture it is subverting. Folk culture was macro may, but now it can be seen as the Internet, or rap. Is it equalizing our response just because there is more of is or is it a tool of dissemination? Art for art sake: What is an art gallery suppose to be within society. Yet this article is so bias the information is time sensitive and the information so subjective.

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Just alittle beauty to insire your sight with the readings! There is so much of it around but often times with the mundane tasks of life it can be lost. Enjoy!

2/2/07 readings

The difficulties of being an artist: this essay is tiered and dreary, although within the scope of reality. It is a dreary drink of realism without hope. It equities illuminates the struggles of students without any hope for change. Is it artist vocation to struggle and then tot graduate school to teach? Boy, on the eve of my final semester with no desire to teach what does that mean for me? Shall, I just starve then… that must be my lot.
Art & Fear: “Artists, it turns out, area crafty lot and surprisingly adept at getting the system to foot the bill for letting them do exactly what they wanted to do anyways. This is a far cry from the difficulties of being an artist. To do what you want to do you must be able to convince the patron that you alone know the right way to make the piece.” Art is a self-imposed discipline. “The arts network is there to handle all those details not central to the art making process.” In the discussion of teaching…”one way or another you have to preserve time both for making art and for sharing that art making process with your students”… Go back to apprenticeship where one could learn all they needed by living it and seeing the artist in action. This is an ideal but not without it’s own problems, propaganda, dictation…”Art and Money are very much alike, in both embodiment and conception. To put it simply: Art and $ are cultural fictions with no intrinsic value.” Really this is funny it is so true. It’s a commodity autographed by an individual that has indefinable value.

To sell your artwork is it unproductive labor, is it useful to society?! Socialist ideas is driven out of social needs, it is the care of all individuals yet art is not valuable within this system or ideal. How is art valued? Is it through the concept? Socialist value is found within labor driven needs, it is functional. Is art not valuable since it is not necessarily functional? Does every human function have to be productive? Does conceptual ideals have any social value? According to Marx everything that is not functional is invaluable, when Marx wrote his piece it was a different time, a different structure. In the 1800’s it was a utopic ideal. Yet one might say that artist are elevated above mundane jobs, is this cultivated through the value of one’s education. Artists are expressive, and create work that evokes an emotional response; it cultivates communication that is a lost art. Artists express ideals, which my subvert cultural ideas, it may challenge what is accepted, spark individual thoughts. What is your ideal of value, how is intellectual ideas valuable. Just as the reading equate intellectual worth like drinking champagne because it does not mean that artist is not valuable, so is it just accepting the obvious it is personal choice. Marx raises issues, he does not say that art has no value, and everything serves a function. There is a underhanded implication within Marx’s writings, he speaks with “ifs’” speaking of music as a product, it maybe that he is talking of the disparity of value, due to one’s career, and such… He is questioning how things are valued, and to raise that idea it raises the question of how is art valued today? How do we value art? If you look at a broader scope value is derived through layers of cultural understanding, aesthetics’ to give some examples. Art is a product of supply and demand within the American cultural value system. Value can be a question of comprehension, if someone does not understand what performance art is would they pay to go and see it… no, for there is no value without identification. Is art valued by the connection it creates to one’s work? Value is ethereal based value, is value formed through cost of production is material value increase the value system of work? Richard Cierra’s work being huge steel forms can be valued at say a million dollars, and a small hand drawing of Picasso’s can be of the same value. What does that do to the economy? Paying for art is paying for the social contextual expression of the time.

readings 2/8/07

What is success for you in the arts? What does one define as successful? Is it fame, is it money, or is it purely conceptual? It can be defined as personally conceptual expression, to be able to articulate what is it one thinks, feels and has experienced. It is the mergence of personal expression and achieves transcendental financial means. Success does include being able to do what it that I want to do…using the materials necessary to achieve that esthetic. Why do we pursue our MFA’s? It is the expensive, yet necessary tool to function within artistic society, plus working with other artist can assist one in reaching one personal conceptual growth within their work. The benefits of the university facilities draws one as well since it lends one to technical growth by providing resources financially unreachable other wise. A University is a “pressure cooker” since it refines one political as well as one’s social relevance within society since that is questioned and scrutinized. This also builds one’s contacts that are necessary within the artistic process. Or is the university a “sweat shop” are we the tool of the bureaucratic realm? Is it a pyramid scheme? Students do perpetuate the universities growth and creates the “need” for more students by the means of financial gain with little return to the students themselves. The university is a dogmatic dictatorship… that leaves little choice to the students as to what they want to learn being that those choices are laid out before the students. Does the university “sweat shop” just prepare one for the true realm demands within life? Being given responsibilities lean itself to personal growth. If Jack Welpott’s theory of becoming a “flake” allows one to teach outside the bureaucratic rules! Meeting and paper work are one means to an end but there are other ways. Since we are all flakes can’t we all anarchistic-ally get along together?

What makes art worthy of a financial fiscal value? Is artwork valued by past pre-requisites financial value? How is artwork valued? Is it for personal satisfaction; is it for financial gain, or social status? Does this go back to the idea within the reading that artwork is the same commodity value as money. This is a romantic, idealistic notion of art but does it with stand within society? I would have to say, sorry a little cynically no, since material values are defined socially within the bureaucratic system. It is a material substance signed by an individual. What is a public perception of artists? Does this tie into financial value? Do artists have social responsibility? Or are the drunken poets that are self-gratifying flakes?

Artist as skilled workers, the artist as virtuoso, the artist is a rule breaker as well as an intellectually (scientific in a way, inventors) this creates a myth of a genius. The artist is also an entrepreneur this notion gives the artist a fiscal substance and negates the mythical theory of the starving artist. Artists are social healers, artwork is expressive of the social needs within society giving weight to the needs within society: addressing, expressing and offering social relevance by offering solutions to the needs of society.

To summarize in the words of our Andy W. “Be the artist that you are!”
Every artist embodies the ideas within the stereotypes and roles alluded to within the readings. Any profession has a mythology surrounding it stereotypes can be placed on someone or to take on their image such as Andy W. projecting the personal that he used to sell his work. The artist view one person’s personality vs the content of their work, which become historically documented. Is judging one’s professional persona easier to judge once they are dead, since the artist can be seen within the force of their work on the social realms. Part of the mythology of Van Gogh is the madness of his work, and the story of his ear being cut off. Andy W. created his own myth to promote himself appeared to be that he entertained himself. Andy W. was a charlaton, he made a game out of prosperity and his work, that takes gumption to bring that up within his work. Andy W. work after he died the value of his work dropped showing that his persona was of more value and further interest. He was a very calculating person, he was the mark and he was his own promoter.

"Embodiment - 
The bodily aspects of human subjectivity. Embodiment is the central theme in European phenomenology, with its most extensive treatment in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment distinguishes between the objective body,which is the body regarded as a physiological entity, and the phenomenal body, which is not just some body, some particular physiological entity, but my (or your) body as I (or you) experience it. Of course, it is possible to experience one’s own body as a physiological entity. But this is not typically the case. Typically, I experience my body (tacitly) as a unified potential or capacity for doing this and that-typing this sentence, scratching that itch, etc. Moreover, this sense that I have of my own motor capacities (expressed, say, as a kind of bodily confidence) does not depend on an understanding of the physiological processes involved in performing the action in question.
The distinction between the objective and phenomenal body is central to understanding the phenomenological treatment of embodiment. Embodiment is not a concept that pertains to the body grasped as a physiological entity. Rather it pertains to the phenomenal body and to the role it plays in our object-directed experiences."
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition General Editor: Robert Audi. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

"Embodiment refers to the biological and physical presence of our bodies, which are a necessary precondition for subjectivity, emotion, language, thought and social intereraction."
Musical Identities, Macdonald, Hargreaves and Miell. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2002


The expression ‘the body’ has become problematized and replaced with term ‘embodiment’. This change "corresponds directly to a shift from viewing the body as a nongendered, prediscusive phenomenon that plays a central role in perception, cognition, action and nature to a way of living or inhabiting the world through ones acculturated body."
(Page xiv)

" If embodiment is an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience, then studies under the rubric of embodiment are not 'about' the body per se. Instead they are about culture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world."
p. 143
Thomas Csordas in Perspectives on Embodiment
by Weiss, G. and Haber, H., (eds.). Routledge; March, 1999

"Embodiment - 
The bodily aspects of human subjectivity. Embodiment is the central theme in European phenomenology, with its most extensive treatment in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment distinguishes between the objective body,which is the body regarded as a physiological entity, and the phenomenal body, which is not just some body, some particular physiological entity, but my (or your) body as I (or you) experience it. Of course, it is possible to experience one’s own body as a physiological entity. But this is not typically the case. Typically, I experience my body (tacitly) as a unified potential or capacity for doing this and that-typing this sentence, scratching that itch, etc. Moreover, this sense that I have of my own motor capacities (expressed, say, as a kind of bodily confidence) does not depend on an understanding of the physiological processes involved in performing the action in question.
The distinction between the objective and phenomenal body is central to understanding the phenomenological treatment of embodiment. Embodiment is not a concept that pertains to the body grasped as a physiological entity. Rather it pertains to the phenomenal body and to the role it plays in our object-directed experiences."
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition General Editor: Robert Audi. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

"Embodiment refers to the biological and physical presence of our bodies, which are a necessary precondition for subjectivity, emotion, language, thought and social intereraction."
Musical Identities, Macdonald, Hargreaves and Miell. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2002


The expression ‘the body’ has become problematized and replaced with term ‘embodiment’. This change "corresponds directly to a shift from viewing the body as a nongendered, prediscusive phenomenon that plays a central role in perception, cognition, action and nature to a way of living or inhabiting the world through ones acculturated body."
(Page xiv)

" If embodiment is an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience, then studies under the rubric of embodiment are not 'about' the body per se. Instead they are about culture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world."
p. 143
Thomas Csordas in Perspectives on Embodiment
by Weiss, G. and Haber, H., (eds.). Routledge; March, 1999

Embodiment

Greetings

Greetings and Salutaions to the void! I am now contributing to the black hole.