Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Laura and Afton's article for Friday 3/9
The article is called "the Crisis in Geometry" and here is the link, http://www.peterhalley.com/. The article is the 4th one down under writings. If you read the post from yesturday, please disreguard.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Heather and Stevie's Article #2 Fridays class 2/29
Off Campus magazine: August 2007
Alison Coleman
Learn to love the bomb
Even wars have brands now. The “War on Terror”, “Operation Desert Storm”, “Operation Infinite Justice”. We live in a culture of metaphors, where the feeling is the message, and where one third of the world’s wealth is reportedly located in people’s heads - as brands.But it’s not all one-way traffic. Today’s advertisers face the most hostile customers since the Spinning Jenny kicked off the Industrial Revolution. “Give us our brains back,” chant anarchists outside global leader forums, and Mum and Dad at home applaud. We’ve grown up with popular culture, and we’re aching for relief from the unrelenting march of slogans.“Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs / Mucking up the scenery, breakin’ my mind Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign,” sang Tesla (the band, not the inventor).Adbusters, the global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to “advance the new social activist movement of the information age” put it this way: “Corporations are in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we walk on. They are in the food, the clothes, the cars, the speed, the music, the cool, the hype, the sex.”Yes, I agree wholeheartedly, and feel deep concern, even though I’ve worked at the heart of the evil advertising beast. I’ve read a couple of books lately which have explored both sides of the design story. Adbusters’ latest publication - Design Anarchy - a huge tome in the tradition of the Phaidon art series - deliberately avoids any kind of design aesthetic in its page design (which, in itself, gives the whole thing a ‘look’) and I found it jarring and unpleasant. Surely you can go to work every day to topple existing power structures and still be permitted to lay out a page elegantly?A stark contrast was provided by the book written by a former creative director for one of Australia’s most successful advertising agencies. It’s a collection of entertaining one-liners by a man with no soul. He crows about Nike’s anti culture-jamming strategy, but makes no comment on the sweat shop revelations which inspired the original negative publicity. “Sweat shops,” he exults, “became old news.” Yup. Social justice campaigners and community groups don’t usually have the advertising budgets to combat huge multinationals on an ongoing basis.Murray Bookchin, the great anarchist thinker who died last year, wrote: “The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capitalism.” I don’t think we’re going to get our spirits, or our brains, back any time soon. To paraphrase Bookchin, speaking of limiting advertising under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as speaking of limits to warfare under a warrior society.I started off intending to write an angel’s advocacy of advertising, based on the simple premise that I believe today’s best ads are a form of modern art, and the more self-centred reason that I’ve worked in the industry, on and off, for years. I love the creativity, wit and subversive talent which go into good advertising. I once worked for an agency which produced a spoof ad of our biggest client’s product. It was hilarious until, in the daily chaos, it went to the client in place of the real thing for approval. Inevitably, our adbusting for beginners was ruthlessly crushed underfoot by management, although it was probably one of the most purely creative pieces of work we’d produced that year. Design Anarchy tells me I could be among the first up against the wall when the revolution comes, along with all the other sad would-be artists who became graphic designers, prostituting their ability in order to sell spaghetti and bank loans.However, I don’t think that advertising agency staff are really the best target when you’re advocating a radical change in 21st century thinking. Advertising agencies are, rather, an inevitable symptom of the capitalist free market economy in which we find ourselves. My advice - if you’re serious about change, Jack - is to strike at the root of the beanstalk, and the giant will come tumbling down. Does that sound a little… violent? Well, perhaps we can persuade people to love the idea by giving the whole concept the right brand - “Battle for a Real World”, perhaps?Sound stupid? It’s not. Strong emotion has become the living, beating heart of the brand. “Today’s brandscape is commodified and saturated to hell,” our own expatriate son, Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, told a conference in April 2005. According to him, the time of “lovemarks” has arrived - creating ‘consumer loyalty beyond reason’ by creating an emotional connection between customers and brand.A month earlier, Roberts had been invited to the US to advise the Pentagon how to spin the war on terror. His advice? “Call the struggle the “Fight for a Better World.” We can, apparently, even learn to love war.
Alison Coleman
Learn to love the bomb
Even wars have brands now. The “War on Terror”, “Operation Desert Storm”, “Operation Infinite Justice”. We live in a culture of metaphors, where the feeling is the message, and where one third of the world’s wealth is reportedly located in people’s heads - as brands.But it’s not all one-way traffic. Today’s advertisers face the most hostile customers since the Spinning Jenny kicked off the Industrial Revolution. “Give us our brains back,” chant anarchists outside global leader forums, and Mum and Dad at home applaud. We’ve grown up with popular culture, and we’re aching for relief from the unrelenting march of slogans.“Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs / Mucking up the scenery, breakin’ my mind Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign,” sang Tesla (the band, not the inventor).Adbusters, the global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to “advance the new social activist movement of the information age” put it this way: “Corporations are in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we walk on. They are in the food, the clothes, the cars, the speed, the music, the cool, the hype, the sex.”Yes, I agree wholeheartedly, and feel deep concern, even though I’ve worked at the heart of the evil advertising beast. I’ve read a couple of books lately which have explored both sides of the design story. Adbusters’ latest publication - Design Anarchy - a huge tome in the tradition of the Phaidon art series - deliberately avoids any kind of design aesthetic in its page design (which, in itself, gives the whole thing a ‘look’) and I found it jarring and unpleasant. Surely you can go to work every day to topple existing power structures and still be permitted to lay out a page elegantly?A stark contrast was provided by the book written by a former creative director for one of Australia’s most successful advertising agencies. It’s a collection of entertaining one-liners by a man with no soul. He crows about Nike’s anti culture-jamming strategy, but makes no comment on the sweat shop revelations which inspired the original negative publicity. “Sweat shops,” he exults, “became old news.” Yup. Social justice campaigners and community groups don’t usually have the advertising budgets to combat huge multinationals on an ongoing basis.Murray Bookchin, the great anarchist thinker who died last year, wrote: “The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capitalism.” I don’t think we’re going to get our spirits, or our brains, back any time soon. To paraphrase Bookchin, speaking of limiting advertising under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as speaking of limits to warfare under a warrior society.I started off intending to write an angel’s advocacy of advertising, based on the simple premise that I believe today’s best ads are a form of modern art, and the more self-centred reason that I’ve worked in the industry, on and off, for years. I love the creativity, wit and subversive talent which go into good advertising. I once worked for an agency which produced a spoof ad of our biggest client’s product. It was hilarious until, in the daily chaos, it went to the client in place of the real thing for approval. Inevitably, our adbusting for beginners was ruthlessly crushed underfoot by management, although it was probably one of the most purely creative pieces of work we’d produced that year. Design Anarchy tells me I could be among the first up against the wall when the revolution comes, along with all the other sad would-be artists who became graphic designers, prostituting their ability in order to sell spaghetti and bank loans.However, I don’t think that advertising agency staff are really the best target when you’re advocating a radical change in 21st century thinking. Advertising agencies are, rather, an inevitable symptom of the capitalist free market economy in which we find ourselves. My advice - if you’re serious about change, Jack - is to strike at the root of the beanstalk, and the giant will come tumbling down. Does that sound a little… violent? Well, perhaps we can persuade people to love the idea by giving the whole concept the right brand - “Battle for a Real World”, perhaps?Sound stupid? It’s not. Strong emotion has become the living, beating heart of the brand. “Today’s brandscape is commodified and saturated to hell,” our own expatriate son, Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, told a conference in April 2005. According to him, the time of “lovemarks” has arrived - creating ‘consumer loyalty beyond reason’ by creating an emotional connection between customers and brand.A month earlier, Roberts had been invited to the US to advise the Pentagon how to spin the war on terror. His advice? “Call the struggle the “Fight for a Better World.” We can, apparently, even learn to love war.
Heather and Stevie's Article for Friday class 2/29
Commercial Rebellion
Advertising's voracious appetite for underground culture swallows another victim: culture jamming.
By Warren Berger
Asher & Partners' billboard (below) takes on Marlboro, a traditional culture jamming target, by reproducing their iconographic style but altering the text. The Reactor Jeans ad (in green) by Gyro Worldwide, is designed to look like one of the unintentionally campy Newport cigarette advertisements.
Advertising is expected to be upbeat in tone and slick in style. But in the past few years, some of the messages emanating from Madison Avenue have turned ornery. And they've been looking a bit ragged. A few seem like they might possibly be subversive. Consider an ad campaign that was created for Amstel Lite beer: The copy, printed in blocky, uneven lines of type, consisted of an angry rant seemingly written by an enemy of the brand, who urged the public to "Avoid Amstel Lite at all costs!" Then there was a recent series of print ads for California Pizza Kitchen, which, like the Amstel ads, adopted a low-budget, homemade look and an angry tone. Complaining (with tongue in cheek of course) about the unusual choices of pizza toppings offered by the chain, the headline blared, "Stop the madness!"
When not playing the role of screaming anarchist, other advertisers have become graffiti artists?targeting their own ads. Brands like Captain Morgan Rum and Reactor Jeans have created ads in which headlines are crossed out and fake mustaches are scribbled on the faces of fashion models. One clothing designer, Moschino, recently started cluttering its own elegantly photographed ads with stickers bearing cryptic messages like "No one is all black. No one is all navigation_elements/white. Therefore no one is all gray."So what's going on here? Have the top ad agencies been stormed by insurrectionists? On the contrary, ad agency creative executives themselves are wreaking this faux-havoc as part of the industry's latest attempt to co-opt underground culture and cloak itself in the style of the street. It seems that the great blob of advertising?having previously absorbed rock-and-roll, Beat poets, hip-hop gangstas, and indie filmmakers?has just swallowed its latest counter-cultural morsel: the phenomenon known as culture jamming.
The underground movement first bubbled up in the 1980s and gained steam in the early 1990s. Small renegade groups like San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) and New Jersey's Cicada Corps of Artists drew attention by subverting ad's messages (usually on billboards), changing the words in headlines or playfully altering imagery. The jammer groups sometimes had a political agenda (tobacco ads were a favorite target), but in many cases, jamming was a form of creative expression, an opportunity to make ads funnier and more candid than the original versions. When the BLF, for example, took an Apple "Think Different" ad featuring mogul Ted Turner and slyly altered the headline to read "Think Dividends," it began to seem, for just a moment, as if advertising had started telling the truth.Initially, advertisers viewed culture jammers as their enemies. In a few instances, outdoor-ad companies tried to discourage the practice by prosecuting the billboard guerrillas, but it didn't do much good. Gradually, however, some advertisers stopped fighting the rebels and started imitating them. "Culture jammers have had a big influence on the look and tone of advertising in recent years," says Annie Finnegan, an executive with the Arnold Communications ad agency in Boston. Finnegan, who has studied and lectured on the phenomenon of "guerrilla advertising" (the industry practice of disguising ads or putting them in unexpected places), notes that a number of advertisers have become highly adept at imitating not just the look of anti-advertising but the whole rogue spirit and attitude of it. "A lot of advertisers now have become almost like pranksters," Finnegan says.
Indeed, the agencies are trying all kinds of tricks that one would expect from underground troublemakers, not ad executives. For example, when the New York agency Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners needed to promote a new cocktail, the agency hired attractive actors, planted them in bars, and had them engage in conversations that included frequent mentions of this particular drink. Down in Miami, the ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky (CP & B) hired teenagers to play pranks and place crank phone calls targeting tobacco executives; some of the stunts ended up being used for the anti-smoking TV commercials that CP & B produces. Finnegan reports that a Swedish ad agency placed an ad for travel insurance in a wallet that was later glued to the sidewalk of a busy street to capture the attention of passersby. The Los Angeles office of the agency Deutsch recently fooled many people in that city with a series of fake billboards for "topless traffic school" and other nonexistent businesses; when curious or outraged people called the number in the ad, they were connected to the advertiser that sponsored the campaign. If that sounds like a recipe for confusing and possibly alienating potential customers, it just might be.Finnegan says that guerrilla advertising can backfire because "sometimes people become angry when they discover they've been tricked by an advertiser." But advertisers seem willing to take that risk?to deface their own ads, to engage in pranks, to do whatever's necessary?because there's a sense that anti-advertising is the only way to connect with today's cynical audience. Kirshenbaum Bond co-founder Richard Kirshenbaum argues that consumers have developed a foolproof radar that can spot an ad immediately and tune it out just as quickly; to get "under that radar," Kirshenbaum contends, advertisers must disguise their ads. One way is to make an ad look like a piece of underground communication. The audience figures out pretty quickly that the ranting poster or the street prank is really an ad?but by then, the thinking goes, the advertiser has scored points for having an ironic sense of humor. Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University, says that anti-advertising's primary purpose "is to appeal to the irreverence of the adolescent mind. These ads nudge us in the ribs and share a smirk with us."
Of course, not everybody appreciates the humor?particularly the billboard guerrillas and media pranksters, who now find it difficult to mock advertisers that are already mocking themselves. The rebels jammed the culture?and now the culture has jammed them right back. Pedro Carvajal of the Cicada group finds that some ads from Madison Avenue look so authentically underground that, he says, "When I see some of them I have to admit, it looks like something done by a culture jammer." Jack Napier, one of the cofounders of the BLF, adds: "When I see ads that cross out their own headlines and write in something self-mocking, my first reaction is, they should be paying residuals to the BLF." But Napier has his own way of dealing with this problem: mounting counter-strikes against the co-opters. For example, he once encountered a Plymouth Neon billboard on which the oh-so-clever advertiser had made it appear as if a spray-can vandal had drawn a Mohawk haircut on the car's roof and changed the original headline from "Hi" to "Hip." "First, I was taken aback, and then I was pissed off," says Napier. "And then I thought, 'Shit, I'm not going to let them get away with that.'" Before long, he was up on the board in the wee hours, changing "Hip" to "Hype" and planting the image of a skull on the car's grill.In effect, the jammers and the agency co-opters are now battling to see who will control the communication of the streets. But it's interesting to note that the two sides in this war really aren't that different from one another. The young agency creative executives that tend to produce anti-advertising ads share the same irreverent attitude and off-the-wall sense of humor as the jammers. And many of them insist their pseudo-attacks on their own ads represent an attempt to modernize advertising by making it more candid and self-aware. Steve Grasse, who runs the Philadelphia agency Gyro, echoes many of the ad business's young turks when he insists, "I hate almost all advertising." (Except his own, naturally.) Grasse tends to produce rough-around-the-edges, highly sarcastic ads that ridicule the phony feel-good imagery of conventional cigarette and beer ads. Asked whether that approach constitutes something of a rip-off of culture jammers, Grasse barks: "Who the hell are the culture jammers? I haven't taken anything from the underground culture. All the stuff I create is original." Finnegan observes that both the underground rebels like Napier and the young ad-agency hipsters like Grasse "are products of the same advertising-drenched culture and have the same sensibilities. They just went in opposite directions."
There's one crucial difference between them: The ad guys have the money?and the upper hand. These days, they usually manage to think of pranks before the pranksters do. For example, the BLF had every reason to expect that Madison Avenue would be shocked when the guerrilla group recently jammed a Levi's billboard campaign by inserting a sticker with the visage of Charles Manson on the ads. Imagine?Manson as ad spokesman! But the fact is, Steve Grasse and Gyro had already crossed that Rubicon a couple of years earlier when the agency featured Manson in advertising for one of its clothing clients?scoring a hit with consumers. "I feel kind of sorry for the culture jammers," concludes Finnegan. "It seems like now, whatever they try to do, advertising has already gotten there."Warren Berger is author of Advertising Today (Phaidon), scheduled for publication next year
Advertising's voracious appetite for underground culture swallows another victim: culture jamming.
By Warren Berger
Asher & Partners' billboard (below) takes on Marlboro, a traditional culture jamming target, by reproducing their iconographic style but altering the text. The Reactor Jeans ad (in green) by Gyro Worldwide, is designed to look like one of the unintentionally campy Newport cigarette advertisements.
Advertising is expected to be upbeat in tone and slick in style. But in the past few years, some of the messages emanating from Madison Avenue have turned ornery. And they've been looking a bit ragged. A few seem like they might possibly be subversive. Consider an ad campaign that was created for Amstel Lite beer: The copy, printed in blocky, uneven lines of type, consisted of an angry rant seemingly written by an enemy of the brand, who urged the public to "Avoid Amstel Lite at all costs!" Then there was a recent series of print ads for California Pizza Kitchen, which, like the Amstel ads, adopted a low-budget, homemade look and an angry tone. Complaining (with tongue in cheek of course) about the unusual choices of pizza toppings offered by the chain, the headline blared, "Stop the madness!"
When not playing the role of screaming anarchist, other advertisers have become graffiti artists?targeting their own ads. Brands like Captain Morgan Rum and Reactor Jeans have created ads in which headlines are crossed out and fake mustaches are scribbled on the faces of fashion models. One clothing designer, Moschino, recently started cluttering its own elegantly photographed ads with stickers bearing cryptic messages like "No one is all black. No one is all navigation_elements/white. Therefore no one is all gray."So what's going on here? Have the top ad agencies been stormed by insurrectionists? On the contrary, ad agency creative executives themselves are wreaking this faux-havoc as part of the industry's latest attempt to co-opt underground culture and cloak itself in the style of the street. It seems that the great blob of advertising?having previously absorbed rock-and-roll, Beat poets, hip-hop gangstas, and indie filmmakers?has just swallowed its latest counter-cultural morsel: the phenomenon known as culture jamming.
The underground movement first bubbled up in the 1980s and gained steam in the early 1990s. Small renegade groups like San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) and New Jersey's Cicada Corps of Artists drew attention by subverting ad's messages (usually on billboards), changing the words in headlines or playfully altering imagery. The jammer groups sometimes had a political agenda (tobacco ads were a favorite target), but in many cases, jamming was a form of creative expression, an opportunity to make ads funnier and more candid than the original versions. When the BLF, for example, took an Apple "Think Different" ad featuring mogul Ted Turner and slyly altered the headline to read "Think Dividends," it began to seem, for just a moment, as if advertising had started telling the truth.Initially, advertisers viewed culture jammers as their enemies. In a few instances, outdoor-ad companies tried to discourage the practice by prosecuting the billboard guerrillas, but it didn't do much good. Gradually, however, some advertisers stopped fighting the rebels and started imitating them. "Culture jammers have had a big influence on the look and tone of advertising in recent years," says Annie Finnegan, an executive with the Arnold Communications ad agency in Boston. Finnegan, who has studied and lectured on the phenomenon of "guerrilla advertising" (the industry practice of disguising ads or putting them in unexpected places), notes that a number of advertisers have become highly adept at imitating not just the look of anti-advertising but the whole rogue spirit and attitude of it. "A lot of advertisers now have become almost like pranksters," Finnegan says.
Indeed, the agencies are trying all kinds of tricks that one would expect from underground troublemakers, not ad executives. For example, when the New York agency Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners needed to promote a new cocktail, the agency hired attractive actors, planted them in bars, and had them engage in conversations that included frequent mentions of this particular drink. Down in Miami, the ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky (CP & B) hired teenagers to play pranks and place crank phone calls targeting tobacco executives; some of the stunts ended up being used for the anti-smoking TV commercials that CP & B produces. Finnegan reports that a Swedish ad agency placed an ad for travel insurance in a wallet that was later glued to the sidewalk of a busy street to capture the attention of passersby. The Los Angeles office of the agency Deutsch recently fooled many people in that city with a series of fake billboards for "topless traffic school" and other nonexistent businesses; when curious or outraged people called the number in the ad, they were connected to the advertiser that sponsored the campaign. If that sounds like a recipe for confusing and possibly alienating potential customers, it just might be.Finnegan says that guerrilla advertising can backfire because "sometimes people become angry when they discover they've been tricked by an advertiser." But advertisers seem willing to take that risk?to deface their own ads, to engage in pranks, to do whatever's necessary?because there's a sense that anti-advertising is the only way to connect with today's cynical audience. Kirshenbaum Bond co-founder Richard Kirshenbaum argues that consumers have developed a foolproof radar that can spot an ad immediately and tune it out just as quickly; to get "under that radar," Kirshenbaum contends, advertisers must disguise their ads. One way is to make an ad look like a piece of underground communication. The audience figures out pretty quickly that the ranting poster or the street prank is really an ad?but by then, the thinking goes, the advertiser has scored points for having an ironic sense of humor. Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University, says that anti-advertising's primary purpose "is to appeal to the irreverence of the adolescent mind. These ads nudge us in the ribs and share a smirk with us."
Of course, not everybody appreciates the humor?particularly the billboard guerrillas and media pranksters, who now find it difficult to mock advertisers that are already mocking themselves. The rebels jammed the culture?and now the culture has jammed them right back. Pedro Carvajal of the Cicada group finds that some ads from Madison Avenue look so authentically underground that, he says, "When I see some of them I have to admit, it looks like something done by a culture jammer." Jack Napier, one of the cofounders of the BLF, adds: "When I see ads that cross out their own headlines and write in something self-mocking, my first reaction is, they should be paying residuals to the BLF." But Napier has his own way of dealing with this problem: mounting counter-strikes against the co-opters. For example, he once encountered a Plymouth Neon billboard on which the oh-so-clever advertiser had made it appear as if a spray-can vandal had drawn a Mohawk haircut on the car's roof and changed the original headline from "Hi" to "Hip." "First, I was taken aback, and then I was pissed off," says Napier. "And then I thought, 'Shit, I'm not going to let them get away with that.'" Before long, he was up on the board in the wee hours, changing "Hip" to "Hype" and planting the image of a skull on the car's grill.In effect, the jammers and the agency co-opters are now battling to see who will control the communication of the streets. But it's interesting to note that the two sides in this war really aren't that different from one another. The young agency creative executives that tend to produce anti-advertising ads share the same irreverent attitude and off-the-wall sense of humor as the jammers. And many of them insist their pseudo-attacks on their own ads represent an attempt to modernize advertising by making it more candid and self-aware. Steve Grasse, who runs the Philadelphia agency Gyro, echoes many of the ad business's young turks when he insists, "I hate almost all advertising." (Except his own, naturally.) Grasse tends to produce rough-around-the-edges, highly sarcastic ads that ridicule the phony feel-good imagery of conventional cigarette and beer ads. Asked whether that approach constitutes something of a rip-off of culture jammers, Grasse barks: "Who the hell are the culture jammers? I haven't taken anything from the underground culture. All the stuff I create is original." Finnegan observes that both the underground rebels like Napier and the young ad-agency hipsters like Grasse "are products of the same advertising-drenched culture and have the same sensibilities. They just went in opposite directions."
There's one crucial difference between them: The ad guys have the money?and the upper hand. These days, they usually manage to think of pranks before the pranksters do. For example, the BLF had every reason to expect that Madison Avenue would be shocked when the guerrilla group recently jammed a Levi's billboard campaign by inserting a sticker with the visage of Charles Manson on the ads. Imagine?Manson as ad spokesman! But the fact is, Steve Grasse and Gyro had already crossed that Rubicon a couple of years earlier when the agency featured Manson in advertising for one of its clothing clients?scoring a hit with consumers. "I feel kind of sorry for the culture jammers," concludes Finnegan. "It seems like now, whatever they try to do, advertising has already gotten there."Warren Berger is author of Advertising Today (Phaidon), scheduled for publication next year
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Rebecca and Kelsey's Aricles for Friday
The first article is from the book "Religion, Art, & Visual Culture" Edited by S. Brent Plate and the second article is a chapter from "On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art" by James Elkins.
Sorry it seems like a lot but I promise it's not too bad. I posted each page on a different post so that it might be easier to print, but there is so many that the first few pages are located on the next page of posts.
<3<3<3>
Sorry it seems like a lot but I promise it's not too bad. I posted each page on a different post so that it might be easier to print, but there is so many that the first few pages are located on the next page of posts.
<3<3<3>
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Links for this week's articles
This is an article on Liza Lou and her work, that you should print, read, and bring with you to class...
Creating Art, One Bead at a Time
This is a supplementary article from The Journal of Aesthetic Education on the distinction between art and craft. It is 16 pages, so assuming it's okay with Val I would say you don't have to print this but read it thoroughly!!
The Distinction Between Art and Craft
Creating Art, One Bead at a Time
This is a supplementary article from The Journal of Aesthetic Education on the distinction between art and craft. It is 16 pages, so assuming it's okay with Val I would say you don't have to print this but read it thoroughly!!
The Distinction Between Art and Craft
Friday, January 25, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
ok here is some clarity
OK theres lots of stuff on this site now, just wanted to be clear-
Jess and Diane have chosen an article on TOM FRUIN for you to read, and you can find this article at this link
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/museo/6/fruin/index.html
read this and print it out,
and read and explore the rest of the stuff on this page
call me or email me with any questions
Jess and Diane have chosen an article on TOM FRUIN for you to read, and you can find this article at this link
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/museo/6/fruin/index.html
read this and print it out,
and read and explore the rest of the stuff on this page
call me or email me with any questions
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
IMPORTANT!
Things I want from you guys for this-
please bring a printed copy of this article to class-
have questions and comments prepared
if there is any word or idea that you are not familiar with, look it up, and print that out too, and bring to share in class,
for example, i had never read Krauss's ideas about the Modernist Grid, which gets refrenced in the Fruin article, so I looked it up and pasted some blurbs about it below,,, you don't have to add new information to this blog for this, but you do need to bring it printed out for class to share with everyone! SERIOUSLY.
To really understand the article you must know what they are talking about- vocabulary and idea wise, so please please do this.
here is the link again to the article Jess and Diane has chosen for you, its really good, read it, read it twice, and print it
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/museo/6/fruin/index.html
please bring a printed copy of this article to class-
have questions and comments prepared
if there is any word or idea that you are not familiar with, look it up, and print that out too, and bring to share in class,
for example, i had never read Krauss's ideas about the Modernist Grid, which gets refrenced in the Fruin article, so I looked it up and pasted some blurbs about it below,,, you don't have to add new information to this blog for this, but you do need to bring it printed out for class to share with everyone! SERIOUSLY.
To really understand the article you must know what they are talking about- vocabulary and idea wise, so please please do this.
here is the link again to the article Jess and Diane has chosen for you, its really good, read it, read it twice, and print it
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/museo/6/fruin/index.html
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Supplimental Material (krauss)
Theory
"In the early part of this century there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition in the visual arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse."
"It is not just the sheer number of careers that have been devoted to the exploration of the grid that is impressive, but the fact that never could exploration have chosen less fertile ground. As the experience of Mondrian amply demonstrates, development is precisely what the grid resists. But no one seems to have been deterred by that example, and modernist practice continues to generate ever more instances of grids."
"In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back to nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final."
". . . the bottom line of the grid is a naked and determined materialism. But (. . .) that is not the way that artists have ever discussed it. (. . .) Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit."
"The grid's mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)."
From: Rosalind Krauss: "Grids" October 9, Summer 1979. [Reprinted in: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985, pp. 9-22. The quotes above are from pages 9-12; Eduardo Navas put a cut-up version of this essay online in his project "Grids".]
"In the early part of this century there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition in the visual arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse."
"It is not just the sheer number of careers that have been devoted to the exploration of the grid that is impressive, but the fact that never could exploration have chosen less fertile ground. As the experience of Mondrian amply demonstrates, development is precisely what the grid resists. But no one seems to have been deterred by that example, and modernist practice continues to generate ever more instances of grids."
"In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back to nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final."
". . . the bottom line of the grid is a naked and determined materialism. But (. . .) that is not the way that artists have ever discussed it. (. . .) Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit."
"The grid's mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)."
From: Rosalind Krauss: "Grids" October 9, Summer 1979. [Reprinted in: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985, pp. 9-22. The quotes above are from pages 9-12; Eduardo Navas put a cut-up version of this essay online in his project "Grids".]
For Fri 25th
Hey everyone!
This is the article for friday's presentation:
Tom Fruin
Please read it before friday so that we can have an open discussion. Its not that long and really interesting!
Sincerely,
Diana and Jess
This is the article for friday's presentation:
Tom Fruin
Please read it before friday so that we can have an open discussion. Its not that long and really interesting!
Sincerely,
Diana and Jess
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)