Blog II

The “Buddy” Exercise:

I found the work On the Edge of Night at the Kellogg Gallery to be appealing. This painting displays plant life, a lake, and a field with mountains behind it. The wolves in the scenery may be the subjects. What I find attractive about the work is the acute border between night and day. The border is so acute that it can almost be a thin line. At the bottom of the canvas, where the wolves are, it is night, so day is present on the rest of the canvas. Where it is night, the painting absolutely looks like night with the way the minimal light disperses and how every nocturnal thing is blue. Near the night are trees in darkness, but this darkness is not a result of the nighttime; it is attributed to shade from sunlight. Some light from the sun shines on some trees further from the night, so these trees have some parts with a morning glow. There is not much shade on the lake, and the sun shines intensely on the field and mountains. In addition, I noticed all of the wolves, except the one howling, looking at something off canvas.

I asked an employee at the gallery what he saw in the painting. He said that he didn’t see much, that it is what it is: wolves howling in the night. It is direct and it is well painted. It is not appealing to him because he prefers abstract art and the representational art he does prefer is of an alternate subject matter. He likes crude drawings and artworks displaying people in abnormal settings. His taste is oriented towards what he calls works with subjects out of context, where a subject is shown against an unusual background. An example he stated would be a photo of a nude girl in the middle of New York City. The nude girl is out of context because nude photos occur in private locations and the girl is in public, where she can be arrested for indecent exposure.

Blog I

The Art Colony

Introduction:

There seems to be a “game” amid the visual art community that I was supposed to witness and I was supposed to attempt immersing myself into. This game may entail the comprehension of and the openness to art variety or it may consist of the interaction amid players in the presence of art. It may involve judgment or mass similitude in art partiality. Whatever it is, I doubt I witnessed it, and I would be justified in stating that I certainly did not immerse myself into it. This game of visual art is not something I have the capacity to play or even sense. The closest I can come to participating in an art game is the analysis of western music, essentially European music from the baroque and romantic periods where my music bias is strong.

What is “hot?”

The gallery one can classify as “hot” was undoubtedly the dA. Its prominence or enticement was incredibly overt during the later evening. This gallery became the most crowded one in the art colony. The density of people inside the gallery was so immense that I was able to see the thick crowd from far outside of the building. I even noticed rockers who most likely were at the colony to visit night clubs enter the dA.

The reason why this gallery was “hot” is not so obvious if one wishes to know the reason with absolute certitude. It was clearly evident that the majority of people in the gallery gravitated towards the live music performed by a band that blocked pathways to certain paintings, but did the people come to witness the band or to witness the art? What if the people came to see the art and found the music more interesting? What if the people came to see the band and happened to browse the art? From some observation, it seems that some people did come specifically for the music because some of the people visiting the dA were acquainted with the band members.

There was only one work that I discovered to be “hot,” and that discovery was only possible through a student’s inquiry. One of the students of this Philosophy 301 class asked the man who opened up the OBJCT Gallery (I assume this man to be David Shearer) what work was popular. He said the Eggplant Table by Greg Lynn was the popular work of this gallery. This creation, like the other creations by Greg Lynn in the gallery, was derived from toys. The artist, who is an architect, welds recycled toys into some mass of plastic while adding other material to the mass. The man I assume to be Shearer said the artist uses architecture materials for the formation of the art.

Eggplant Table:

It is possible that two works by Thomas Mat Ranga were “hot” due to encouraging comments I happened to overhear. These works were displayed at the Main Street Gallery, which is located in the second floor of the Pomona Frame House. The first work is a photograph titled Resting Place. The other work, a photograph titled Road Trip, seemed to capture even more interest. I found these works to be appealing, but I don’t remember why. The images I captured of the works are insufficient as a means of reminding me why I favored these photographs of Ranga. What I do recall is that I liked Resting Place because of its colors, especially the red of the sky.

Resting Place Road Trip

Through observation, I was not able to determine what works were “hot” with confidence. I noticed people assembling around certain works of art, but those throngs moved from one art work to another, disassembling into other groups, paying no excessive attention to any specific artwork. I also did not observe any types of works being “hot.” The different art types faced equal treatment as the individual works did.

Artist Interview:

I encountered no artist to interview.

The Generalizations:

I detected no general criteria for the fondness or opinion of the art. The works vary, but being unable to distinguish what was desirable or “hot,” I have no way of determining what characteristics of the art made works attractive or repulsive, inferring that the characteristics are the essential elements of some general criteria.

It seemed to me that gallery taste-sets were conspicuous and thus visible. However, according to my inadequate perception, taste-sets were not present throughout the entirety of each gallery, and I noticed no taste-sets at some galleries.

According to my discernment, the taste-set at the front of the dA was women. The subjects of Yolanda Gonzales were women. The paintings of Athena H. Hahm consisted of an image of a woman covered with upside-up and upside-down capital letters that formed readable sentences, but there were works I found to be more interesting. These were two creations of Leslie A. Brown. The first one was titled Sweets for the Sweet, being a painting with attached accessories. It was the accessories which I found to make the painting interesting. I saw cloth, ribbons, a mirror frame and what seemed to be Popsicle wrappings on the canvas. The other painting, called Birth of the New Consciousness, which is composed of three canvases next to each other with the illusion of being one canvas, had a woman as the central subject with a woman at each of her sides. The center woman was reminiscent of a warrior because of the mask she wore that had long horns. There were painted shapes of wood on the canvas and leafless tree branches were attached to the canvas.

Sweets for the Sweet Birth of the New Consciousness

I perceived no taste-set for the rest of the dA, but that is attributed to my ignorance. The name of the rest of the dA’s exhibition was “In Front of the Real Thing.” This entails works by local artists who were invited to create new art inspired by whatever works they selected from the Pomona College Museum of Art’s permanent collection. In addition, even the taste-set I identified at the gallery’s front was false due to my ignorance. One who is informed (Professor James Manley) indicated that the taste-set of the dA’s front was “new traditionalism” created by women. Because I don’t know what that is, I will use information from the internet in an attempt to describe the taste-set. For one artist, “new traditionalism” is the challenge of mastering representational painting and the formation of indistinctness on the canvas, but there is also the combination of pop culture and everyday people into the art.

The taste-set of the OBJCT Gallery was what I can only describe as unconventional art. Most of the larger sized works present in the gallery were the aforementioned creations of Greg Lynn. There was an entire project room dedicated to the works of Lisa Segal. I can only describe her works as large white shapes made of plaster. One of her works called Casanova was based on a flower. In addition, each of Cassandra Tondro’s paintings was an abstract display of colors dispersed on multiple canvases. Moreover, the works of Gabriel Gonzales were entities composed of adhesive tape and other materials that reminded me of miniature cities or landscapes on another planet. Furthermore, Domestic Bliss III by Kimberly McKinnis was not conventional as well but I found it impressive. It was a display of silver dishes and cut glass, where the severed glass containers were fused together.

The works of Lisa Segal:

Domestic Bliss III:

The taste set I perceived does not grasp the essence of the gallery. According to David Shearer, the quintessence of the OBJCT Gallery’s exhibition is “Re-Appropriate: Thinking Beyond Appropriation.” The art of this gallery is a response that manifests itself in the form of combating environmental harm and current societal values. The response is the generation of art composed of disposed commercial waste, i.e. the reuse of materials that were considered obsolete, making the materials useful again, but it is not that simple, for some consider the disposal of old items that still possess use an acquisitive perspective, something which may create decadence in values, so there is an ethical component to the art.

My Partiality:

The works I utterly favor in the entire art colony were displayed in the Winebar Gallery. These are the glorious works of Lenny Stitz. One of the Philosophy 301 students who accompanied me into the gallery described the art as “crazy.” This “craziness” is his description of the artistic characteristics I found to be exorbitantly enticing, perhaps beyond what I have ever experienced before as a response to visual art.

The portraits created by Stitz produced the illusion of agony that seemed to be conveyed by the “mutilation” and the “oppression” of the subjects. A simple example of the “mutilation” was dripping paint: one can see that some of the paint making up the subjects dripped down the canvas while still wet. The paint trickles produced the appearance of the subjects melting and the trickles were reminiscent of blood flowing from an injury. Other examples of “mutilation” were alterations to the subjects’ bodies. Some bodies were fragmented, with similitude to dismemberment, while others were partially transparent, sometimes “merged” with other subjects as if the people combined were the victims of a mad scientist’s experiments.

Examples of “oppression” were the backgrounds. The vague backgrounds were suggestive of dungeons, caves, desolate sanctuaries, or strange temples. In addition, the capacities of the subjects were “deprived.” Some paintings have rectangles covering the subjects’ mouths. The interpretations of the meaning and purpose of the rectangles can vary, but this is my interpretation: The mouth covered by a rectangle signifies muteness, i.e. the subjects’ faculty of expression through speech has been decimated. Another removed capacity is shown in the work where a woman’s eyes are covered with grey (which looks white in my poor quality picture) paint. I find this to signify inflicted blindness, as if an oppressor used red hot pokers to burn the subject’s eyes.

Some works of Lenny Stitz:

My taste in art remains the same: I prefer realistic (photograph like) portrayals of subjects. I prefer a use of color that I am unable to describe. I prefer images of women, and I prefer grotesque works exhibiting overt pain in a brutality that I cannot generalize. If there was a contingency that my leaning in visual art was supposed to expand due to my art colony visit, the contingency did not come true. I do not possess the minutest predilection for the toy alterations by Greg Lynn or the white shapes by Lisa Segal. My distaste for abstract art remains in existence. The closest I have achieved in the advancement of art appreciation is the observation that my affinity for grotesque works extends to visuals that can be classified as abstract, but my new penchant may have been influenced by the sight of Stitz’s portraits. If I viewed Stitz’s abstract works before I viewed his portraits, there is the likelihood that I would have found his abstract works unappealing.