Art Event #1
Artist Viewing: Martha Rosler’s Films
Wednesday March 3, 2010
Martha Rosler has been a very influential feminist artist since the 1960s. In her broad range of works she uses photography, sculpture, video, and installation. The central theme of her work is the representations of women, work, and home. She deals with gender conformity, as well as war and homelessness. Her works are very influential, and her video “Semiotics in the Kitchen” is recognized as the touchstone of early feminist video. This video, filmed in 1973, appears to be a cooking show in which Rosler is alphabetically listing and demonstrating the use of mundane kitchen objects, such as spoon and fork. She says each item in an abrupt, sharp monotone as she aggressively demonstrates how to use them. This performance piece is a critique of the traditional women’s roles in the household. She intended this video to challenge the domestic industry because she believes that women tragically become part of the system. Her aggressive motions are meant to show her frustration towards cooking hosts such as Julia Child who are portrayed as the “happy housewife.”
Another video that was shown Wednesday evening was “Born to be Sold.” This documentary follows the story of a surrogate mother who is fighting for her reproductive rights. In this documentary she is trying to show that women are defined as incapable of having power. The surrogate mother was treated “not as a mother, but a rented uterus,” which angered Rosler. She continues to criticize reproductive technologies that have become a business industry and likens the companies to pimps who are selling reproductive rights.
Rosler created another chilling documentary, “Domination and the Everyday,” in 1978 in response to events inChile. She was outraged with the idea that people are disposable, and sometimes have no control. In this documentary she juxtaposes scrolling text, film, speech, and separate speech so that your senses are overloaded. This makes you choose what to attend to, and since the film is repeated multiple times, you can chose a different element each time. The overarching message of the film is that no one can really be replaced, but there will always be more of us struggling to take control of our lives.
Art Event #2
Artist Lecture: Martha Rosler
Friday March 5, 2010
Martha Rosler’s films are very powerful in their simplicity and complexity, and it wasn’t until I attended her lecture that I fully understood the depths of her work. Not only does she create films, but she makes montages, videos, stuffed sculptures, and performances. Rosler is an “artist-activist” who not only creates art, but also writes about art and culture. Her work not only deals with the oppression of women and women’s issues, but also the influence of the media on our environments. Joe Lucchesi said that she “ is singularly influential in developing and promoting the idea of video art as a vehicle of political commentary and protest.”
A lot of her work focuses on antiwar issues because she doesn’t see the logic of living in a war society, so she feels that she must in some way struggle against it. She describes her work as “agitational”–– she wants more forward action, meaning that she wants the public to do something as citizens. She is a firm believer that public education produces an active middle class that is capable of producing change. One of her projects is taking her collection of books and making them open to the public. This library project involves over 7,000 of Rosler’s books that are transported to universities, and vacant buildings. Her goal is that people will stop and read her books, and therefore become informed about important issues. She has also worked with a politically active group of homeless people, called Homeward Bound, that register people to vote.
Rosler has also done influential sculptural work in Münster, Germany. Based on the military history of this region, Rosler took important symbols and displaced them so that their meaning was made apparent. For instance, she took a Nazi eagle symbol and put it in front of a shopping mall so that it looked like a Nazi building. The residence hated it, and this installation caused a lot of controversy. Rosler laughed about the amount of dislike her installations caused.
In the reception after her lecture I was able to sit with Rosler and ask questions. She is an extremely insightful individual who has very passionate views. She stressed the importance of voting and having your voice heard. Her art always has a purpose and is meant to reach people and stir up political action.
Art Event #3
Artist Lecture: Mark Iwinski
Monday April 5, 2010
I was really excited to attend this lecture while we were focusing on the site and place unit because Mark Iwinski does a lot of interesting site-specific work. He is St. Mary’s spring Artist House artist-in-residence. While he is staying in the Artist House, Iwinski is working on a project for the State House involving the American Chestnut Land Trust, and another project at Annemarie Gardens during EcoWeek.
His work deals with environmental issues, such as deforestation and conversion from a natural to an asphalt landscape. He begins his process by doing a lot of photography research on what is missing in our “forgotten landscape”. He noted that barely any of our forests are untouched––he called these terrains of absence ghost forests. To put these ideas into concrete visualizations, Iwinski creates prints of organic structures such as tree stumps that have been left behind. He uses pigments to capture the chainsaw marks, the bark texture, and the sense of time held by the rings in the wood. He also does on site castings of the tree-stumps to capture the organic shapes and masses. He feels that these castings, called ghost stumps, capture the void left by deforestation. Since they can stand alone, they can be relocated to galleries, which changes the context, and emphasizes the feeling of “ghost stumps.” Iwinski also played with using gold leafing on stumps as a way to imply the lost value of the forests.
Apart from his work with tree stumps, he spent some time creating sundials because he wanted his work to be connected to both time and space. In 1994 he created what he calls an armillary sphere out of parts of a tree. Influenced by science, he also did work with geometric shapes and implied “voids.” More recently, he has been working with photo overlays in the city to juxtapose past and present. He takes an old photograph of a modest building that used to exist in a space and lines it up with the current structure to show how much has changed. In the photographs people from both the past and present are intermixed, which creates an interesting effect that emphasizes how the past and the present are strongly related.
Art Event #4
SMP Presentations
Tuesday April 20, 2010
I was beyond impressed with the amount of work that went into the St. Mary’s Project presentations I saw. These seniors spoke eloquently about their work and how it related to other artists and to their lives. I was moved by their speeches, and intrigued with the uniqueness of their work. They expressed themselves extremely effectively and answered questions with ease. I admire their poise and level of professionalism in their presentations.
Laine Donovan’s presentation had an excellent flow as she started from her childhood influences that got her to where she is today. She explained how she has always felt connected to nature and has loved the outdoors–– the colors, the textures, the shapes, and the patterns. This innate bond is very apparent in her work. She expresses the intricate patterns of bark in oil paint with grace, and uses a wide range of natural colors to add visual interest. I especially liked the way her work was arranged on the wall in the linear pattern because it was reminiscent of how trees create linear patterns in a forest. I completely saw where she took inspiration from Georgia O’Keeffe, but was glad that her work was not a direct copy and that she took her own spin on magnifying organic shapes. I think her work was very cohesive and very true to her personal visual aesthetic.
Montse Ferrer also did a fantastic job with her presentation. As one of my peers, I was interested to see how she talked about her 2D work. I liked that her work evolved from being representational, then figurative, and finally more abstracted. This journey made her work more significant, and more of her own artistic voice. I think that the way she abstracts shapes is not only extremely beautiful, but also very calming because the shapes and colors are fluid and graceful. Her smaller works that were displayed in a gridded format are delicate and intricate; however, I prefer her larger works. I can really feel the way her brush moved along the canvas and how the paint naturally moved and dripped. I found it interesting that her favorite color to paint with was grey, because her works have such a wide variety of colors. Also, I liked how her 2D work relates to her linear sculptural installations. Like Laine’s, Montse’s work was really cohesive and held together extremely well in the gallery setting.