Bibliography and Outline for Oral Report

May 22, 2015

HUA 101

                                                        Bibliography

"Exhibitions: Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui."Brooklyn Museum: Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 May 2015.

"El Anatsui - Jack Shainman Gallery." El Anatsui - Jack Shainman Gallery. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 May 2015.

"El Anatsui: Gawu | Artworks." El Anatsui: Gawu | Artworks. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 May 2015.

May 22, 2015

HUA 101

                                                    Outline for Oral Report

    Presenting the artworks of El Anatsui

 Introduction: El Anatsui is an internationally renowned Ghanaian contemporary artist/sculptor who uses metal and wood to transform appropriated objects into site- specific sculptures and installation art. He converts found materials into a new type of media that lies between sculpture and painting combining aesthetic traditions from all things familiar with him and the global history of abstraction.

           Anatsui’s metal wall artworks created with bottle caps from a distillery from his hometown Nsukka are pieced together to form colorful, textured hangings that take on radically new shapes with each installation.

Main Body:  I will show these artworks—

·         Red Block

·         A piece from Gravity and Grace exhibition

·         Adinkra Sasa

·         Crumbling Wall

·         Wastepaper Bag

Summary: El Anatsui’s style is dedicated to his traditional Ghanaian beliefs. He includes materials from his hometown as well into his work to bring the effect of his beliefs into play.

Postmodern and Global Art

May 17^th, 2015

HUA 101

                                                  Online Assignment #8

          Bill Viola is a contemporary video artist and is seen as a leading figure in the generation of artist whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in New Media. The artwork that I’m going to discuss is The Reflecting Pool.

        The Reflecting Pool by Bill Viola: Bill Viola describes the Reflecting Pool as a collection of five independent works which, taken as a whole, describes the stages of a personal journey using the images of transition from day to night, time to timelessness etc. Violas’ videos which includes sounds and video installations, focus on spirituality and explore multiple levels of human consciousness. The video illustrates the shift from stillness to motion. A fixed camera captures a man approaching a pool of water through trees and lush bushes. The only sounds in the video are those of nature-- branches rustling and the water rippling. It represents mediation, calmness and soothing sensations. The man momentarily stands before the pool before jumping into midair over the water and freezing. The water beneath him continues to ripple. There are passing reflections of other people walking around the pool, although you can’t see them doing so physically but through the reflection of the pool. After a series of similar perceptual and time-based fragmentations, the man’s frozen image in midair fades out, only leaving the pool there. In the final cuts of the video are suggestive of baptism, as a nude man emerges from the water and retreats into the woods as a sign of rebirth and new beginnings. Viola stated, “The piece concerns the emergence of the individual into the natural world—a kind of baptism.” 

MoMa Vist; Surrealism and Pop Art

May 13, 2015

HUA101

                                            Online Assignment #7

       Surrealism is the artistic and literary movement led by French poet Andre Breton from 1924 through World War ll. Breton sought to overpower what he perceived as the oppressive rationalism of society today by evaluating the “sur realisme” which means the superior reality, of the subconscious, drawing on the theories of Sigmund Freud. Breton reasoned for an abandoned mode of expression resulting from the mind’s involuntary mechanisms, particularly dreams, and called on artists to explore the unknown depths of the imagination with essential new methods and visual forms. The Surrealist movement contained multiple artistic techniques. Photographs and odd combinations of objects were also central to Surrealism. Artists disrupted common, everyday images and things to reveal the troubled sexual and psychological forces buried beneath the surface of familiar reality.

          This artwork is called The Menaced Assassin. The Menaced Assassin is a 1927 oil on canvas painting made by Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte. The measurement for the painting is 4’11” x 6’5”. The colors are dull: a lot of black, white brown, maroon, a little red and tan. The story behind this artwork is, a bloodied naked woman is shown laid out on a couch. The assassin, a well-dressed man, is preparing to leave as you see his coat and hat on a chair and his bag near the corridor. However, he is held back by the sound of music. In a calm, sedately manner, the man listens to a gramophone. ON the other hand, two men armed with a club and a net await for the assassin in the foyer to trap him as three onlookers watch the scene from over the balcony.

            Pop Art: By the early 1960’s Americans had enjoyed several years of economic prosperity and political stability. Televisions were global, and families across the nation gathered in their homes to watch certain programs and were pierced by commercials for Tide Laundry detergent and Lucky Strike cigarettes. For the first time, Americans were joined together most powerfully but not through their local communities—by broadcast images, which helped to define a new popular culture. Using imagery from television, comic books, and print advertising, the works in the gallery tested the conventional values of the era. This included the natural notions of femininity and domesticity put out by the mass media. Rebellious and bold, Pop art led in a new decade of cultural revolutions that would restructure American society.

              This artwork is called Pin-Up. Pin-up is a 1961 oil, cellulose and collage on panel made by Richard Hamilton, a British painter, collage artist and one of the founders of Pop art. The measurements for the artwork is 53 ¾ x 37 ¾ x 3 including the frame. The colors of the painting are peach, black, tan and off white. The image of the woman takes up almost the whole panel. Hamilton took this theme directly from popular culture, using pictures from Playboy and other men’s magazines as his sources. While the art mentions pervasive photographs of sex symbols, it is also a modern treatment of a conventional subject of painting- the odalisque or reclining nude. Hamilton approaches that tradition through a variety of pictorial modes. The hair is a stylized cartoon, the breasts appear both in drawing and in three dimensional relief, and the bra is a photograph applied as a collage. “Mixing idioms is virtually a doctrine in Pin-up” said Hamilton.

Artist pick - El Anatsui

May 2, 2015

HUA 101

                                            Online Assignment #6

           The artist that I chose to do my assignment on is El Anatsui. El Anatsui was born in Ghana. His mom died when he was a toddler. He went to art school in Ghana. In school, Anatsui said that the letter “G” was so intriguing to him more than the other letters. There were some wooden people that Anatsui created and he took a group photograph of it. He when you’re taking a group photo, you’re thinking about kinship and it has to be close together. He preferred clay and wood which was used to make objects based on traditional Ghanaian beliefs and other objects.

        Anatsui has cut wood with chainsaws and blackened it with acetylene torches. More recently, he has turned to installation art. Installation art is an artistic genre of three dimensional (3-D) works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Some of his work looks like woven cloths such as kente cloth. Anatsui includes uli and nsibidi into his work along with Ghanaian motifs.

       In the interview from Art 21, Anatsui watched over young studio assistants who worked with him to create sculptures made from bottle caps. He was focused on making sculptures. He began to work with it for aesthetic properties of the caps which also can allude to the role of international commerce in African history. The materials he has used are metal, ceramic and wood. He wanted to change the art into something you contemplate, not something you used. Every piece of the art is different. That’s the whole idea—change.

       Another one of his artworks was a broken pot. In Africa when a pot is broken, that’s not the end of its life. It’s a regeneration. It’s bringing about a new life. Destruction= prerequisite for new growth. It was made at a time when the economy of Ghana was at the lowest point so making the ceramic artwork was a point for positivity. Going back to the bottle caps, the colors of the bottle caps were not intentional. They just happened to represent the colors of the kente cloth fabric which is traditionally red, black and yellow. People were looking at the art like textiles and no meaning beyond that so it became a problem. The meaning behind the bottle caps is that it was liquor bottle caps. Liquor came into the culture when the European traders came to Africa for the first time. They brought items to trade with. One of the items were drinks. Eventually drinks were traded for slaves who were brought to America to grow more cotton and sugar cane to make more drinks and then shipped to Europe.

 bottle cap artwork    El Anatsui        

     group photo of wooden people     bottle cap artwork 

     ceramic broken pot