In the Waiting Line

A Month of Drawings in the Cursive Style (no. 9)
By Roy McMakin (2002-2003)

A Tale of Two Cities
By Chris Burden (1981)

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

smoking girl
By pukilin (07/23/2012)

A Point of Interest
By Steve Schrepferman 

Water Lilies
By Claude Monet (1920)

“In the Waiting Line,” is a show for the people that will spend hours standing in line waiting outside of room C-107 at LaGuardia Community College, before the Spring 2015 semester.  The hallway outside of room C-107 is full of students every day for weeks before the beginning of each semester.  I think that it would be very uplifting for the people standing there, waiting forever to have a five minute conversation to have something interesting to look at besides their cell phones.

The first piece, “A Month of Drawing in the Cursive Style (No. 9)” by Roy Mcmakin, will greet you at the start of the line.  The piece is a drawing that is full of erratic and crazy lines.  There are a few shapes and some letters, and there is what appears to be a scroll with the words “hi there” centered about 2/3’s of the way up.  This will serve as a pleasant greeting for each person as they enter the line.

The next thing they will see is a very large installation called “A Tale of Two Cities” by Chris Burden.  This piece is what looks like two warring cities made up of a huge assortment of old toys set up into several battle scenes on a beach/mountain land scape made of sand and plants.  This piece will run almost the entire length of the line and will be against the wall on the other side of the hall from the line.  I chose this installation because it is large so it won’t go unnoticed.  There is no way to avoid it and it is a very visually engaging piece.  I saw it in person at the New Museum and spent easily 45 minutes looking at it and could have spent another 30 minutes without getting bored.  The piece has so much going on and so much to look at that it should keep people’s attention for much longer than a smaller, simpler work could. 

The next piece will be hanging on the pillar that is next to the doorway to the waiting room.  It will be a black-and-white photo of a woman smoking a cigarette called, “smoking girl” by the Flickr user pukilin.  This piece is basically there to be a siren calling to the smokers in the line and trying to tempt them away from the line they’ve been waiting in for so long at this point.  I know this isn’t the nicest thing ever but maybe they’ll have a friend to save their place in line.

The fourth item in the show will be a sculpture of two horses looking at something called, “A Point of Interest” by Steve Schrepferman.  This will be sitting on a stand right outside of the door, and positioned in such a way that the horses are looking into the doorway.  This is to peak the waiters’ interest as to what’s going on in the room they’ve been waiting so long to get into.  This is also to try to act as a counter balance to the temptation of leaving the line for a cigarette that the last piece stirred up.

The final work will be on the inside of the waiting area.  It will be “Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond” by Claude Monet.  It should take up the entire wall and I want it to be inside the waiting room because there is still a good deal of waiting to be done after you’ve been called in.  I chose this piece because I find it to be very calming and I also find that I need to be calmed after I’ve stood waiting in line forever only to be called into another waiting area.  The deception of getting all the way to the end of a line to see that you’ve only made it to the beginning of another line is quite frustrating and I think that having this huge, calming, and beautiful work of art there to meet you will do a lot for people’s spirits.   

Post # 8

 I went to the Mmuseumm, which is an art museum that was built into the bottom of an elevator shaft in a building on Cortlandt Alley.  The entire thing is the size of the footprint of a normal sized elevator so it is at capacity when there are three people there.  The whole thing is a tiny square room that is lined with glass cases, each one has several shelves inside holding an array of strange things that I never really though might exist.  The items that are usually on display are pretty strange things that you wouldn't normally see in an art museum like MoMA or the Met.  I've been there twice and each time I saw things that shocked and horrified me, I saw things that made me laugh, and I saw things that I was totally in awe of.  This time there were things like a plastic spoon from Honduras that was filled with some kind of treat and wrapped in plastic and ready to be sold I'd imagine.  There was a collection of peep show coins, which I found funny and at the same time pretty scummy and gross.  The first time I went there was two years ago and there was an exhibit of voice mail message transcripts from Al Goldstien, they were all pretty funny, most of them were absolutely ridiculous and generally inappropriate.  Last time I was there they had an exhibit of things that were made by prison inmates.  Again most of that stuff was pretty offensive there was a lot of neo-Nazi and white power stuff that was mostly carved into bars of soap.  The craftsman ship and detail of a lot of it was really impressive but the content was so off putting that it was very difficult to appreciate the time and effort that was put into it.  Some of the stuff was more light-hearted and funny like a post cart saying “San Quentin, wish you were here.”  The obscurity of most of the things in the museum and the strangeness of the museum itself really go quite well together and although there is pretty much always something that is pretty repulsive there the over all experience is a good one, because you get a refreshing sense of how strange people can be and the breadth of what people are making out there in the world.

Essay #2

Kay Hassan

Takashi Murakami

I think that the main thing that sticks out to me about our walk through the galleries last week was the amount of installation pieces for sale.  I was expecting to see a lot of paintings and photos of different sizes and probably some sculptures.  I was not, however, expecting to see an installation, 'Moun Room,' the size of most people’s apartment at the first gallery we stopped into.  I also did not expect to see two quite large tents covered in paintings set up in the last gallery we went to.  I was kind of confused about what would prompt someone would buy one of these things, especially the first installation, and what they would do with it once they owned it.  Aside from the confusion about that stuff, I was really impressed with the collages by Kay Hassan that we saw.  They were all so detailed and the colors were so well matched and used very well.  The pieces looked like painting from a little ways back and the fact that he was able to do that with all found material is even more impressive.  After having done the collage assignment and seeing how difficult it can be to make a collage that looks like something more than a bunch of pictures thrown together.  I was impressed the most by that exhibition.  The exhibition that I enjoyed the most was the Takashi Murakami exhibition.  I really liked his use of bright colors, repetition and variety, and how simple a lot of the designs were but how detailed he managed to make almost all of the pieces.  The two huge statues were also very impressive in their size and detail.  The size of his work, while it was similar to the ‘Moun Room,’ made more sense to me.  I think this was because, even the three-dimensional pieces, you could only view from out side of the piece.  You could go inside the tents and the first installation and to me that somehow makes it less usable/movable.  I couldn’t imagine ‘Moun Room’ anywhere other than that huge empty room it was in when I saw it.  I can imagine one or both of the Takashi Murakami statues in many other places.  Overall I think the main thing that I came away from this trip was a broader idea for what art is being created, bought, and sold right now.  

Portrait

Midterm

The artist that I was assigned is Paul McCarthy, he does all kinds of art really.  He looks to be in his mid 60's and mainly does installation pieces, sculpture, and large scale vinyl inflatable pieces.  Earlier in his life he did a lot of performance art and short films.  Although the films were quite abstract and he likes to make very large installations where you can view loops of the film that are started at different times, side by side.  He said that he thinks of his films more like a painting than a regular film because there is next to no narrative in the sense of a story line but you can extract a narrative form the madness much like a still painting.  His process seems to have evolved slightly from what it was when he was a collage student doing performance pieces to some of the things that he does now.  He said that when he was younger he would just grab what was in front of him and find some way to use it.  He would wrap his head in scotch tape and cover it in butter.  There is a video of him crawling face down on the ground behind an open bucket of paint and smearing the paint with his face and body.  In some of his more recent works he said he has done a great deal of planning for certain parts of it to get a desired result.  He also said that he still just dives in and things sort of take shape in the middle of everything.  One idea that he says he took on in one of his short videos was the idea that people become their parents when they have kids.  He said it was being conditioned by your surroundings.  The video was just him and another person acting like a dis-functional father and son, where he was playing the father.  So he seemed to pretty much just come right out and say that he felt like he had become his father.  Some of his newer works are quite large sculpture installations and a lot of the subjects of the sculptures are large figures in American politics.  He says that he thinks of these people as real people at times and as caricatures or cartoon characters most of the time.  He has made bobble head looking sculptures of President George W. Bush that look like he's having sex with a pig.  I have seen some of his installations and I’m not really a big fan of a lot of his work.  A lot of it seems to be vile and disgusting for no reason other than to be vile and disgusting.  He did say one thing that I thought was very well said and made a very good point.  He said he doesn’t feel like he has a responsibility to his audience, his responsibility is his idea.

Blog Post # 6

 

The drawing that I chose to write about is called "Large Walchensee Landscape" the medium is dry point and the artist is unknown.  This piece creates space quite well.  The artist did a very good job of creating a lot of depth while only using one color and not a lot of detail.  The foreground is the hill that extends towards the viewer in front of the patch of trees in the center.  The middle ground encompasses everything from the patch of trees to the base of the mountains.  The background is the mountain range in the far back of the work.  Because the artist only used black there is not a lot to say about color as far as atmospheric prospective goes.  Even though there is not a tremendous amount of detail the artist does a very good job of using diminishing detail to create atmospheric prospective.  The mountains in the far back are lighter than the mountains in front of them, which is the only way that you can tell there are multiple levels of mountains.  Overlapping is also well used to show that the trees are in front of the mountains and relative size really helps to show how far the mountains are behind the clump of trees.  This is another example of how just because there aren't a ton of photo realistic details that doesn't mean that a work isn't detailed or doesn't have depth.  I really have a great appreciation for works like this because I think that it's really difficult to make something that seems really from what are basically scribbles.

Post #5

This is a felt-tip pen and ballpoint pen drawing done by Brian DeGraw in 2003.  This is pretty 


This is an oil painting done on paper by Peter Doig in 2003 called "Study for Lapeyrouse Wall."  The figure in it is slightly abstracted but not so much that you can hardly tell what it is.  It is clearly a man holding an umbrella and walking away from the viewer.  The feet seem much to large for the rest of the figure and the legs seem to be bent a little bit in a weird way.  A major clue to show that the painting is stylized it that the figure's face isn't shown.  He's walking away and his head is even obscured by the shadow from the umbrella.  There is a basic sense of what is going on in the painting but there doesn't seem to be any great effort to put a lot of detail into the work.  There is an almost perfect symmetry even though for some reason it feels heavier on the right side to me.  That is most likely because he is facing and walking in that direction.  But the figure is pretty much right in the center of the painting and the umbrella is pretty much directly on top of the figure's head.  The background is pretty even from on side to the other although there are some weird splotches about 1/3 of the way up the painting and I'm not sure if they were intended to be something and I just don't see it or if it's just how things came out or maybe they were intentional but not really meant to be anything. Overall I think this a good work.  It is stylized and abstracted just enough so the lack of detail doesn't seem like poor skill and it isn't boring to look at. 

Museum Essay # 1

The first piece that I found is "Water Lilies" by Claude Monet.  It is oil on canvas and was painted in 1919. The work is slightly abstract but I think that it still does a good job of representing what it is supposed to represent.  The brush strokes are kind of chunky in places and the colors aren't blended in a lot of places but you still see water lilies.  Some of the colors are enhanced or altered a little bit, but if you stand back a little bit it all looks perfectly natural.  Green and violet aren't quite complimentary but the color scheme isn't analogous either.  The pink that is in the clumps of lilies helps to soften the contrast of the green and the violet and also helps to balance the composition.  The work has an approximate symmetry with the green on either side of the violet and the patches of darkness near the left and right edges of the painting.  It also shows the rule of odds because there are seven clumps of water lilies in the painting.

The second piece that I found is "A Contest between the Shepherds Alcesto and Acaton" and it is tempera on wood.  It is part of a birth tray and is dated from around 1410.  This work looks like it is more representational but it seems a little cartoony.  Everything seems to be in correct proportion but there is a lack of detail.  The color scheme seems to be mainly variations of brown or tan although there is some variation like the man's red tunic and the woman's pink dress.  The boarder is also red and helps to tie the man's red tunic into the work.  The composition has approximate symmetry.  You can almost split it down the middle and you would have half of the woman in pink on one side with two other whole people, one and a half little trees, and half of the little hill in the foreground.  And you would have pretty much the same things on the other side too.  The rule of odds is also present in that there are five people and there are three little trees. 

These two painting are similar in a few of the basic principals of design and formal elements but I think they are much more different.  They both show the rule of odds and have a basic symmetry to the composition and neither one is close to being a photo realistic representation of the content.  "Water Lilies" is, in my opinion, much more detailed even though up close it looks more like random blotches of paint than water lilies floating on a pond.  If you stand back your eyes naturally blend the colors and the blotches of paint become a beautiful picture of lilies drifting on water with reflections of trees on it.  "A Contest..." shows a greater level of surface detail but there are major things that are left out that make it seem cartoonish.  The shading is very detailed in some parts of the piece, like in the woman's dress sitting in the foreground, but there are other places that look almost flat, like the man's tunic which has very little detail.  Also there are no cast shadows which makes it seem like everyone is kind of floating above the ground.  Overall I enjoy "Water Lilies" the most out of the two by far.  

Blog Post #4

This drawing is by Georges Seurat and was done in 1884 with Conte crayon.  It is called A Woman Fishing.  This drawing stood out to me because it is so simple but it is almost impossible to mistake what it is.  There aren’t any contour lines and there is basically no detail at all.  The figure is only outlined by where the shading stops but there is still an incredible amount of information that is given.  There is only a small variation in shading on the head and face but you can still tell where the head or neck starts and the dress stops and you can also tell where the face stops and the hair starts under the hat.   It looks like there is some cross hatching done on the lady’s hat and some around the edges of the piece but for the most part the shading is very smoothly done and does a great job of telling the viewer what they are looking at.  The use of implied lines and shapes is also present.  There is almost no difference in shade from the face to the background shading/negative space around it but your eye closes off the space the positive space from the negative.  The same thing happens around her feet.  There is very little change in shade from where her dress ends to the shading of the “ground” but you are able to tell where her dress ends and the ground begins because there is an implied line from the front of her dress to where her shadow begins and this lets serves as the boundary between the lady and her surroundings.  Works like this really stand out to me because it could very easily be just a dark blob in  the middle of some slightly lighter blobs, but it isn’t it’s a woman fishing.  

A picture of people

This is a collage made by Harry Callahan.  Right off the bat I see, Unity, Variety, Repetition, Balance, and Proportion.  There is a sense of unity in this work that comes from the fact that all of the photos are black and white, and all of the photos are of at least some portion of women’s faces.  There is variety in the sizes of the photos and in the scale of the features in the individual photos.  There is a feeling of repetition simply because there are small black and white photos covering almost the entire work.  I don’t think the same picture is ever used more than once but there are a lot of very similar photos and a lot of photos are used in similar ways.  This is also a unifying feature of the work.  The work is balance.  It has approximate symmetry the top corners seem to be slightly shaded, which makes the middle of the piece stand out a bit.  The clippings in the middle are smaller and more densely placed.  To me this makes the looking at the outer edges much easier than looking at the ring around the center.  As far as proportion there is a wide variety in the relative sizes of the different clippings.  Some of the larger clippings are zoomed in photos of lone features, and some of the smaller clippings are photos of whole faces.  So individual eyes and mouths are larger than entire faces, which is clearly not proportional.