Reading 2: Situationist Reading

         Everyday life is often seen as a tedious, negative, and indifferent thing. The author believes that the modern daily life has been organized into an overall part of production and consumption. The depressed difference constitutes the basis of modern everyday life. Capitalism political rule and ideology have been penetrated into every corner of everyday life. Everyday life has been completely alienated and ruled by the combination of technology and bureaucracy.  Individual increasingly far away from the society, people become more and more estranged. It is maintaining the bureaucratic society of capitalist consumption control.

         The Situationists believed that the forms of capitalist culture, which they referred to as "Society of the Spectacle,” kept revolutionary energy in check by making everybody bored. People critique everyday life from the perspective of everyday life. Every life is the foundation of political activity and artistic activity. The nature of our society depends on everyday life. People are shaped by everyday life. The critique of everyday life deeply affects the Situationist, so the study of Situationist definitely returns to everyday life situation of the Situationists.

         The new capitalism’s rule for everyday life is not only reflecting on the material production and the field of consumption, but also implicitly exist the comprehensive control of people’s spiritual and cultural psychology. Therefore, it is necessary to critique and reconstruct everyday life. A process of reveal bourgeois ideology which is to expose the constantly progenitive everyday life in order to achieve the revolution of everyday life and make everyday life return to the original appearance. 

Reading 1: Dada Manifestos

         Hugo Ball wrote the “First Dadaist Manifesto” in 1916. Tristan Tzara stated his “Dada Manifesto” in 1918. Hugo Ball believed that Dada means hobby horse. The meaning of Dada is very simple and easy to understand. Dada means anything and everything. However, Tristan Tzara explained that Dada means nothing. Dadaism is the manifestations of Modernism. Dada is an international art movement, which is anarchist and anti-war. Dada tries to find the true reality through the abolition of traditional culture and aesthetic forms. It leads by a group of young artists and anti-war activists who express their despair on bourgeois values and World War I through anti-aesthetic works and protests. As one of famous western art schools in 20th century, Dadaism overthrew the self-discipline of art by doubting everything and opposing the way of adhering to certain form. It challenging and critically analyzing the authority and mainstream opinions.
         The action principle of Dada is destroying everything. It advocates deny, destroy, and beat everything. It claims that the writer's literary and artistic creation should be like baby learn language to exclude the interference of thought and express the impression that organ can touch. Therefore, Dada is the manifestation of nihilism in the literature. It reflects some youth depressed psychology and empty spiritual state during the World War I. Although Dada is anti-art, it is an important genre of modernism. Dada as an annotation of art, it becomes a kind of art. Dadaism takes the attitude of nihilism on all things. The purpose and desire for new visual and new content, indicating it uses critical concept to re-examine the tradition and tries to extricate itself from the counterculture. Traditional art usually wants to deliver some necessary, suggestive, and potential information. However, the creation of Dada pursues the state of “insignificance”, non-rational state, and rejects conventionalized artistic standards. The interpretation of Dada works entirely depends on viewers’ own appreciation taste.

Project 2: Performance Art

       This video shows the concept of vegetarian. An increasing number of environmental activists are appealing to everyone to stop eating meat because there are some benefits to eat vegetarian. For example, vegetarian can reduce the risk of heart disease, make you live longer. It helps reduce the emissions of pollutants and toxic chemicals. I think vegetarianism can save animals, improve the terrestrial and marine environments. People are kind to all things if they are vegetarian. I use bacon to form a word "vegetarian" and attach it on the glass in the video. Slit meat into pieces as a means of resisting. The concept of vegetarian let people understand respect life and always pursuit the harmony between human and nature.

Project 1: Artist as Appropriator

       For this project, I found a painting from Assistance League Thrift Store. The painting was beautiful which includes ocean, sand, and stone. I chose some images from art magazines and added them to the painting. These images are related to ocean and most of them are animals. The collage endued a busy sight for the painting and provided the painting with rich imagination space. I tried to convey the idea that the sea and the warm sun make people feel on the top of the world. Finally, I took the work back to Goodwill and silently put it into the basket.