skin: the final cut

Making a one minute video given no additional prompts or ideas was difficult for me. I had a lot of ideas, but for some reason one kept coming back to me. I love painting and experimenting with colors (as anyone who has met me may have noticed...) and I am also a psychology major, so I decided to make my final project reflect these interests. I asked several friends to help me with this project; I gave them a palette full of acrylic paints and had them paint their own faces. I asked them to paint how their emotions on their face, without a mirror, for one minute. Everyone who participated ended up enjoying themselves and relieving some stress. I had people paint their faces to make a comment on beauty ideals and makeup. I tried to keep it pretty open-ended and subtle, and not bombard my viewers with messages. For music, I was at a loss. I ended up making some loops on GarageBand and overlaying it with my own voice reading a poem by John Keats called "A Thing of Beauty." I did it just to add a bit more interest to the background sound, so I intentionally made it hard to hear. I wanted the viewers to focus on the subjects of my video, not the poem.

skin

title: skin
A video about beauty and emotion, and how we express them.

Another Day, Another Medium

 Perfect Disease, a video about the pathologization of homosexuality

Making a video from found footage was exciting for me because it combined two things I've always enjoyed - video editing and collage. I found the project to be more difficult than I thought it would be. Layers of video and music and sound clips easily gets to be too thick and overwhelming. However, it allowed me to explore ideas of appropriation, theft, and fair use. Taking video clips out of context and using them for my own concept, I was able to construct a whole different meaning out of something that already existed. Should I get credit for my own ideas? I think the answer is yes. Lawrence Lessig illustrates this point with a comparison to writing; he questions why it is okay to borrow quotes and ideas from other writers in essays and dissertations in order to illustrate an idea- yet the same rules do not apply to making art. When media are borrowed from culture without permission it is considered illegal. We live in an age where it is no longer realistic to always create truly original works - this is why we borrow from preexisting works and from culture. Negativland expresses these views in an article called "Fair Use", pointing out the flaws of these copyright rules and the idea of fair use (which they describe as "the only nod to the possible need for artistic freedom and free speech in the entire copyright law"). Given all the current flaws with copyright law and fair use, I find Negativland's proposal to be a good idea; they support the intent of copyright law, but would have "the protections and payments to artists and their administrators restricted to the straight-across usage of entire works by others, or for any for of usage at all by commercial advertisers."

Humor Says it All

Kalup Linzy is a contemporary artist who uses new media in a primitive, but thorough way. Many of his works can be found on his YouTube site, making them accessible to viewers. Linzy is best known for his soap operas, which he produces in a very low-budget, gritty way; he acts out the parts of many of the characters, and uses his own voice for voice-overs, varying the pitch using a modulator.  Voice-overs and cuts between scenes are often poorly edited, which adds to his general aesthetic.

Linzy grew up watching soap operas such as Guiding Light with his grandmother and aunts; he says that soap operas were a part of social life in Stuckey, Florida, the small community that he grew up in. His soap operas have some similar qualities to the soaps he grew up with, such as themes of family and drama and sexuality. He often uses and builds upon the stereotypes and archetypes of these traditional shows. However, his soap operas take it to the next level by integrating more serious themes of homosexuality and culture and the art world. For instance, characters struggle with “coming out” in a community that is not supportive of homosexuality. Other characters deal with the struggle to “make it” in the art world. Linzy's use of drag and stereotypes of "black culture" are the most obvious aspects of his art that sets it apart from traditional soap operas. At the same time, Linzy uses soap operas and music videos to blur the line between pop culture and contemporary art.

Importantly, Linzy uses humor in all of his works, which makes the serious topics more approachable, as does the gritty, low-tech quality of his work. As Ralph Rugoff puts it, "if something feels homemade, you associate it more with a particular person and less with a general statement. you can see through the low-tech. You're not awed by the sophistication of either the language or the production. So, in a way, you're able to deal more freely with the ideas" (Wolff, Rachel. "Carry a Big Shtick." Artnews 107, no. 8 (September 2008): 128-131. Art Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost.)

Digital/Media?

This week I took my photography to the next level of physicality. After selecting and printing ten 8X10 inkjet photos, I had to narrow it down to four to enlarge to 11X14. I then chose two of those four to display in the Watching exhibition at the Mudd Gallery. This process of preparing for an exhibition was new to me, but I found it to be interesting and fun to put together.

Choosing the final two photos was a challenging process, especially having to think about what they would look like together in the grand scheme of the exhibition. I decided to go with two highly saturated photos; the first choice was a close-up with rich detail in an indoor setting. The other was in an outdoor setting with less detail and a wider angle. I felt that these two went well together, and did a good job of representing my concept.

Seeing these photos framed and hanging in a gallery was a neat experience. Using digital photography as a tool to carry out an artistic idea has a different effect than more tactile media, such as painting or sculpture. Mary Ann Doane comments on the difference between index and icon in her article, Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity. She explores the notion that we live in a “post-medium” era, arguing that the digital’s specificity is really “the annihilation of the concept of a medium. ... the digital exudes a fantasy of immateriality, in contrast to the fantasy of referentiality of the indexical” (Doane, p. 10). Doane presents interesting ideas that I found to be highly relevant to my project. Making inkjet prints from my digital photos seems to make my artwork more "real"; possibly more indexical.

The Shroud of Turin: Index? Icon? Or Both?

In The Public Eye: Take 2, Published Edition

Using MagCloud to create a physical version of my photo series, In The Public Eye, was easy and pain free. Publishing a magazine of my photos seems to make my role as an artist more legitimate, at least in my opinion, because I am a very tactile person. Taking the time to choose my images and put them in an order that makes sense was a difficult task, but one that made me think a lot about the importance of order. Studying Robert Frank's The Americans also made me think more in depth about the significance a certain order can have. Frank ordered his images in a holistic way so that they blend together in ways that make sense and make people think. Sarah Greenough's article "Transforming Destiny into Awareness: The Americans" looks into some of the choices Frank makes in ordering his photos and how they are significant. He takes a number of approaches, including juxtaposition of subjects, and grouping ideas.
Ordering images isn't something I had put much thought into before, but after reading the article, I rethought the order of my photos in my magazine. I decided to group each of my photo shoots together. I used two, three, or four from each separate photo shoot. Within each group, I ordered it in a way that made sense and that flowed well together. Choosing the order of the groups was a little bit harder - I ended up choosing the order based on form, color, and composition. Many of my photos were taken in the same general area - so I also ordered them in a way that made it feel that you could walk from one set to another, since they were very close by. After ordering and reordering, I came up with my final product which I submitted to MagCloud through Flickr.

in the public eye

Today, everything we do has potential to become public display, redefining the standard of "privacy". Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow us to update others on the most menial episodes of our lives (whether others want to hear about it or not). Video cameras are standard in any public area, and we don’t think much about it.

While Facebook may seem like a far cry from “BIG BROTHER” and George Orwell’s 1984, the ideas overlap in the sense that "privacy" is becoming outdated. Philip Agre’s ideas about privacy and the increase in “computer-mediated domination” allow for what Richard Woodward calls “the erosion of the wall between a private and public self”

Today, everything we do has potential to become public display, redefining the standard of "privacy". Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow us to update others on the most menial episodes of our lives (whether others want to hear about it or not). Video cameras are standard in any public area, and we don’t think much about it.

While Facebook may seem like a far cry from “BIG BROTHER” and George Orwell’s 1984, the ideas overlap in the sense that "privacy" is becoming outdated. Philip Agre’s ideas in 1994 about privacy and the increase in “computer-mediated domination” allow for what Richard Woodward calls “the erosion of the wall between a private and public self.” Resources like Facebook make this erosion even more pronounced.

Woodward brings up in his article about self-exploitation that there is a “need to be recorded or to record one’s self.” Exhibitionism and voyeurism have been made easy with the advances in technology and the emergence of social media websites. He calls our generation (the generation with the ability to appear before billions of people), “Warhol’s children” – “a surveillance society and a wired world of voyeurs.” I myself am guilty of looking through the mundane photos of people’s lives.

My photo series relates to our society’s need to see and be seen. I took this idea literally, taking the private and making it available to the public eye. I chose to make my photos dramatic and life-like to make the viewer feel that they are actually there, experiencing something they feel they shouldn’t. I wanted both ideas of self-exploitation and voyeurism to show through in my work, so I chose to have models reenact private events in areas easily accessible to the public.