Final Project

       In Jerry Saltz’s article “Clusterfuck aesthetics”, he gives some examples to explain chaos theory through artists’ pieces and installations. The work of Mike Kelley and Jon Kessler instantiate the chaos theory, Saltz sates: “Installations come on in waves of wall-to-wall pandemonium and will strike many as unbearable. The echo architect Renzo Piano’s idea that harbors are “imaginary cities” where everything keeps moving. Clusterfuck aesthetics is a particular form of art and some artists use chaos theory in their artwork.” 
       One of the examples is Mike Kelley’s piece. His works colligate multimedia device with large-scale paintings. These devices are combined with his own text, sculpture, image, and performance. Another kind of form elements is always existed in his art. A state of mind or an attitude has also been retained which is the infatuation of chaotic state associated with youth culture. At one level, his works are sendup for the tendency of such as minimalist aesthetics. At the second level, people make the sentimental features that Kelley found in popular culture as a target. From the third level, the dolls with a faux suffering and the destroyed works about desire for warmth are innocent metaphor that represents the extreme trauma of juvenile delinquency. In the mid-1980s, Mike Kelly gained publicity around the U.S. and even the world-wide. Kelly used garbage to create works; mocked religious art and underground politics through imitation. He combined local traditional arts and high-end art through historical, cultural, and psychological research. His work once made people get confused, but also brought inspiration to the countless young artists at the same time.
       Saltz uses other example of Jon Kessler to explain the chaos theory. Jon Kessler’s new site-specific installation work “The Palace at 4 A.M.” was made for the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. The installation includes more than one hundred monitors with a lot of cable, posters, and sculptures. It is a political work that shows the global paranoia after the Iraq War and 911 terrorist attacks. People can see the meaningful images about the war through walking into the installation. Jerry Saltz explains: “Kessler’s exhibition is like an apocalyptic joyride through the news by way of Nam June Paik’s video psychedelia, Cady Noland’s pulverized historical vignettes and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. It is a pell-mell kaleidoscopic mishmash that reveals a schizoid utopia where all hell breaks loose all the time and human life is twisted as readily as metal. Where Kelley locates himself between high art and folk art, psychic phenomena and the psyche, Kessler casts his line into an ominous philosophical abyss.”
       The work of Paul McCarthy’s visual style usually has oppressive feeling and insight, which make people feel shocked. Although his work is prone to violence, it has a good sense of humor. However, this apparent confusion of his work is not from his thought and nervous’ frenzy. In fact, all of his works are let us seeing the trauma of American society and culture. It makes people have to face their long time pent-up fear and desire. The New York artist Sarah Sze’s work focuses on the idea of how we can put ourselves in the space. We always find ourselves in the space and chaotically swing between two states by find direction and get lost. In each location, we can experience a period of evolutionary history’s company. Her works have a very high sensitivity for the work environment. Those works are always mixing collected materials at different times in different places.
       I did some research on Jon Kessler’s work to help me to understand the meaning of clusterfuck aesthetics. I am interest in his exhibition “The Blue Period”, the exhibition was considered as an immersive device that features movable machinery, surveillance cameras, displayers, and cardboard silhouette carved life-size figures. The exhibition with full of video showed Jon Kessler’s interest in the supervision, alienation effect, and visual spectacle reached its peak. In this exhibition, Jon Kessler built a circumstance that completely in his control. The social relationships spread through an assembly type and inaccessible realistic picture. Camera captures some true and false of the audience, then display their images on intricate displayers. These players and the wall with a blue spray shape pattern produce a shared recourse and interconnected feeling of transience. Processor uses wave instead of the blue after every face looks like wave ups and downs, which makes audience to result in a sensation that they are floating in the real and imaginary sea. This kind of sensation is fleeting and then the audience begins to fall into a large amount of stacking images that seems like they were locked in a passive position and stuck in an infinite loop with peeping Tom.
       In the center of the exhibition is a reversed model that showed with small video camera. This is the gallery in the gallery. Jon Kessler completed many large portrait collage works are hung in the wall in the Dieu Donné program. This would support his portrait is considered as creative metaphorical point of view. The huddles of monitors like a box watch some familiar actors with blue faces. These figures also unwittingly become a part of the work. Watch this kind of behavior and be watched become the actual theme of work. 
       Saltz says: “Kessler’s exhibition is like an apocalyptic joyride through the news by way of Nam June Paik’s video psychedelia. Cady Noland and William Burroughs’s work reveals a schizoid utopia.” For the final project, I used Photoshop to create a psychedelic scene through a dancing girl and many colorful and dark backgrounds. My intention was to make the picture effect looks like very amazing, colorful, and motivated. The image contains some fantasy lights, beams, and a layer of cloud background. Add color gradient overlay to the whole image. The girl seems like lost in a make-believe world and may be it is an illusory world in which nothing belongs to her. I tried to convey a vain feeling to viewer and make the image looks like a little bit chaotic. I make light strips in order to express the ethereal and mysterious feeling.

Project 4: Light Box

       For the light box project, I used my picture of ancient China interior design to fit it. I used Autodesk Maya software to create the picture. I made the dark background and highlighted the center of the picture to create a feeling that the light come out through the light box. I actually made a light behind the wall in the picture under the Maya operating system, so the two lights shine seem as from the same device. I created the lattice door and ancient frame divide the pattern space. I wanted to use the porcelains and the distinctive fool lamps serve as an ornament as well as the light that create a veiled and elegant atmosphere.

Project 3: Curatorial Project

       My project for the curatorial project is flying butterflies. The theme of the curatorial project is monochrom. My thought was inspired by “The Butterfly Lovers” that is a popular Chinese folktale. It tells us a beautiful but tragic story. The two main characters Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai are a couple in the tragic story. The ever-lasting folktale of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai represents eternal and pure love. Flying butterflies becomes a Chinese love symbol, which represents people’s yearning for the pursuit of freedom love. Love is a sincere belief and a forever subject for human beings. True love should last forever. Butterflies are also a symbol of happiness and give people encouragement, intoxication, and yearning. I used Photoshop to make some pink butterflies with light pink background in order to show and convey the folktale of love between Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. It is said that butterflies have only one partner for life and are emblems of love and loyalty. Butterflies are hailed as a symbol of auspicious and better, such as they symbolize sweet love that often used for a happy marriage. “The Butterfly Lovers” is the top of the Chinese classical tragic, which express the eastern pure love perfectly. In the folktale, the man and the woman finally choose to become butterflies in gardens.

       My plus one is a graphic design form my friend. I chose it because I think it can fit the show’s theme well. The show contained various type works which not all of the works use the same color. The works were arranged uncluttered in the room and the show successfully displayed to viewers.

Exhibition Review 2: Melissa Melero: Numu (Paiute)

       The Numu(Paiute) exhibits at Artspace at UNR, which is created by a professional artist Melissa Melero. It is mixed media abstract paintings on canvas inspired by the landscape and Northern Paiute culture in Nevada. The work is about Northern Paiute culture because the artist is Northern Paiute enrolled with the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe and grew up in Nevada. She is inspired to use various mediums such as oil pastels and watercolors to create her work with photography and mixed media. Featuring a range of media including painting and sculpture, depict the life and culture in Paiute. The primary product of the Paiute people is willows, cattails and pine nuts. The materials of Melissa Melero’s paintings fuse sand, organic objects, acrylic washes and rice papers that describe the Paiute people’ life. She made her painting in a figurative sense in order to rep resent the Paiute culture and nature. 
       The exhibition includes contemporary mixed media paintings of abstract images. Melissa Melero’s work combined objects and images to create her culture as well as beautiful landscapes. The painting was made by an expanded canvas with a thick papers and paste layer. The cycle of life, the four directions, and the petroglyphs form her Northern Paiute Tribe in Nevada. The cycle of life is about the process of the plant, animal, and human being from birth to death which expresses the spatial perspective theory. She believes that the paintings as a personal collaboration of her tribe. Moreover, she added a lot of bright color to the image and abstract images brought different visual impacts to people. The works as Melissa Melero’s contribution to her Paiute culture and he devotes more attention to create some highly textured images to show the history development and her personal life.

Exhibition Revie1: Dada

       Dada movement was a revolution in the history of art, which broke the established aesthetic values and made the boundaries between work and life become blurred. Dadaists defied traditional art and they were innovative. Dada movement was led by a group of young artists and anti-war activists who expressed the disappointment with bourgeois values and the First World War through the aesthetic works and protest.
       The Dada exhibition is curated by Brett Van Hoesen that displays some Dada works by local artists and past artists which including Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Duchamp was one of the important representatives of Dada movement. His work aroused considerable controversy. Fountain was seen as elegant art because its name changed people’s perspective on art. He believed that art has nothing to do with art, any item can be a work of art, as well as art should be plebification and popularization. Fountain was intended to question people about what is the concept of art. 
       There are few things to make people think about what art actually is. People just assume that art is either painting or sculpture, so few people regard Fountain as a work of art. Fountain presented a thorough negation and criticism for the entire traditional art concept. The previous art schools at least acknowledged that art must have the artist’s creative process and in general art should be express beauty. However, Fountain’s appearance denied the mere concept of art. Duchamp’s subversive influence was art can be non-art and art can be not beautiful. The intention was to eliminate the superiority of art and negate the traditional art that showed Dada’s nihilistic attitude.

Artist Lecture Review 2: Barry Bauman

       Barry Bauman gave a talk about the conservation of paintings. He graduated from the University of Chicago and worked at the Art Institute of Chicago’s conservation department as the associate conservator of paintings. Barry Bauman established and operated the Chicago Conservation Centre for over 20 years. He stated that the Chicago Conservation Center as a resource facility which including the conservation of paintings, mural works, paper works, and frame works. Most of the works are the conservation of flood-damaged paintings. Barry restored a portrait of Mary Lincoln that was featured on the New York Times.
       Barry Bauman explained some valuable experiences to us on the restoration and conservation of paintings. The restoration and conservation of artworks is a professional process in order to protect them. The aim of protect artwork for fewer restore, restore artwork for better protection. Both protection and restoration are indispensable. He as a conservator must have the enough vision to deal with these paintings such as comprehend and reveal the purpose of the painter. There are several historical and technical discoveries made by Barry Bauman. For example, exposed hidden signatures and dates as well as put paintings below other works. 
       The conservation of paintings refers protect and repair them because the painting damages as time goes by and the environment changes. Any a painting begins natural aging process while it complete. This is decided by the material and structure of the painting itself and influenced by various environmental factors. The conservation and restoration of paintings is a appropriate human intervention to stop or reverse the aging process in order to achieve the purpose of conservation.

Artist Lecture Review 1: Maria Calandra

       The artist Maria Calandra gave a talk at Cuddleworks. She uses a combination of social media and formal technique to create her drawing. The artwork and studios of her contemporaries is her drawings’ subject. Pencil in the Studio includes drawing, writing, and photograph. She visits artist and has a conversation with them in their studios. She takes photo and draws the life of artists. She said that her visits become an intimate look inside the artist’s space, both physically and psychologically. Her drawings are a study of detail that from the rag that slips under the corner of a painter’s table to the hidden collaged element found on the multi-layered surface of a canvas.
       Maria Calandra showed the work of EJ Hauser studio. She described the details of the artist’s studio and felt excited to draw. She agreed with the artist’s opinion that you have to keep close your childhood interests when you sit in the studio. The artist used text to tell Maria Calandra through her various paintings. She also presented the Christine Hiendle’s studio. She explored the process of the work with Christine; put forward some questions and approaches. The artist gave her an explanation about the painting makes her feel like the walls are closing to her. She had the same feeling after drawing in the studio. Maria Calandra usually spends some time to talk with artists, shared their experiences, and talk about some new methods about the painting. She believed that Christine and her painting as her inspiration after for many years. The studio has significant influence to her and helps her to produce some unique style drawings. She is good at observing, talking, and drawing, make her work naturally distinctive.

Reading 6: Moyra Davey

       Canadian artist Moyra Davey discusses the meaning of photography through some artists such as Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and Janet Malcolm. Moyra Davey’ works contain photography, film, and writing in the field of artistic creation. She uses the daily time and objects, her penetration of literature that create some kind of familiar visual space of the “prose”. Accident, coincidence, and daily circumstances are the core of her works. She expresses the meditation and exploration on the historical and literary world through a modal accumulation and intimate way that internal connect with Davey’s family and friends. She uses her photography to stimulate people to think about the slighting details of everyday life. 
       I did some research on Moyra Davey and her works. For example, her exhibition “Life without sheets of paper to be scribbled on is masterpiece” held on the Camden Arts Centre. Davey’s scene focused on the overlooked places which including dust, books, piles of newspapers, empty whiskey bottles, and empty coffee cups that are easily abandoned and disappeared stuff. Her photograph presents stories and anecdotes from her collection books. She interweaves the stories and anecdotes with her daily life to reflect the relationship between her and her family, the influence of the literature, analysis the spirit, travel, and environment.
       Moyra Davey other exhibition “Subway Writing” can be described as the first collective presents her recent works. This group of 75 photographs records the scenes of the New York subway riders written on the subway, which reminds people of the history of communication art. Her solo show “Ornament and Reproach” is about Jael Boscawen’s memorial tablet. The word from the memorial tablet arouses curiosity; it also includes post pictures and music works that specially designed for piano.

Reading 5: Clusterfuck Aesthetics

       Clusterfuck Aesthetics is is a very special type of art. The artists use chaos theory in their artworks. For example, Paul McCarthy’s work’s visual style usually has oppressive feeling and insight, which make people feel shocked. Although his work is prone to violence, it has a good sense of humor. However, this apparent confusion of his work is not from his thought and nervous’ frenzy. In fact, all of his works are let us seeing the trauma of American society and culture. It makes people have to face their long time pent-up fear and desire. He uses behavior as device and transforms props into sculpture. In his opinion, the process of painting is more important than its object properties. In the category of pop art, he embezzles a large number ready-made and visual image from the consumer society especially for the use of ketchup make it more or less became Paul’s “brand”. 
       Other artist Sarah Sze’s work use of everyday objects is created by the conceptual collection. The New York artist’s work focuses on the idea of how we can put ourselves in the space. We always find ourselves in the space and chaotically swing between two states by find direction and get lost. In each location, we can experience a period of evolutionary history’s company. Her works have a very high sensitivity for the work environment. Those works are always mixing collected materials at different times in different places. She uses extremely detailed handwork and color to compose. Sarah Sze attracts the audience to swing in the micro and macro world. Time, sport, and sailing are the most important experience in her work and exhibition. There is no single vision in her works. A series of visual experience are created along with the every step of reality and meaning’s change. 

Reading 4: Maria Lind

       In Maria Lind article “Returning on Bikes: Notes on Social Practice”. She attempts to demonstrate artwork can form a community. The art works are implement in kinds of social forms which including mobilize communities and social activism. Social Practice art work pays attention to the interaction between the social activism and audience. Maria Lind gives the social practice example of “Returnity” to explain and support her point of view. She says that “Returnity” was an art project based on the social-on interaction between people-which provided an entertaining activity for locals and visitors alike. 

       Social practice is regarded as a medium to create art and get people involved in it through the artist’s thought. She uses bike to let people participate in the activity and communicate with each other. Artist employs social practice in the project by got communities together. Social practice in art as an art movement and primarily deal with the “mirror” strands in the field of art, which objects the “major” strand about mainstream organizations. The minors of the art world are the source of the new artistic thought and they have a certain distance from the “major” strand. 

       I think art shows the different artistic charm through different behavioral pattern. The artistic behavior is one of the important and basic ways to cognizes and realizes the world. Art behavior is acquired in real life through social art practice. It finally achieves the creation of artworks through constantly social art practice cognition and art behavior. Art social practice must enter into the social life with a kind of art aesthetics, a thinking of vision and form to observe the real life. The essence of art is to realize the experience of the reality through participation in art activity.

Reading 3: Hito Steyerl Reading

       Hito Steyerl discusses on the topics of the media saturation and image overflow in the Internet age. In her article “In Defense of the Poor Image”, she explains that poor image is a copy in motion, has a bad quality and substandard resolution. The poor image is widely used in today’s society. Steyerl states that the circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and essayistic and experimental cinema—to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. For example, the poor resolution images are very common in people’s life. They can use cell phone to make some low quality images or videos and publish them to the Internet.
       Hito Steyerl concerns how network affect the image and asks how the image is constantly spread, recycle, and re-create in this day and age. She uses a complicated image combination to explore the political image. At the same time, her emphasis on the “Poor Image” which is the poor resolution image can be more flexibility to shuttle between the social media and social networking in order to affect the relationship between human and image. The poor image sacrifices its quality for accessibility. Steyerl believes that the speed of communication as an important aspect for the value of an image. The poor image helps people broaden their horizons and it is their window into a global network. It has a solid position and plays an important role in people’ daily work and life. For instance, although a lot of classic movies with low image quality, it is still popular among the people.