I would like you to consider how your own identity, background and personal history have shaped your values in art and art making. How does who you are affect what you respond to and what you make?
From my earliest experiences, I remember having a love of art, making, reading, and storytelling. My elementary school in Kansas did not have an art program, but my Kindergarten teacher did have an art center in her room. There were no instructions, just boxes and boxes of fabric and wallpaper scraps, yarn, paper, and a few scissors, crayons, and glue. I don't remember any artworks that I made, but I do remember the feeling of making in that space. When my siblings and I would play, we developed narratives, stories, and characters. It was all based around creativity and imagination, even if it wasn't specifically making art. My father was a photographer and always had a camera with him. He also liked to draw and would make little cartoons in our holiday cards. My first experience of art history was in my elementary TAG program. Our teacher did a unit on Impressionism, and for the first time I saw Mary Cassatt's work. I was so captivated by the richness of the colors and textures and by the people depicted in the paintings. Since then, Impressionism has always been my favorite art to look at. Now I realize, it has informed a lot of my own painting, which focuses on portrait, color, and texture. In high school, my biggest interest was trying to replicate the colors within skin, not just flesh-tone, but the the blues, purples, golds etc. The video on Kary James Marshall, gives me a new perspective on this time in my own work. For the last few years, I have rejected work from that time as being too focused on realism and lacking meaning. In the video where he talks about how to be able to get in the game, you have to be able to play like those at the highest level and the only way to do that is to "know what they know and do what they do." Looking at my work in that context helped me see it in a new light. I can see now how my love of the Impressionists and their technique with paint was coming through in my work. My first brush with contemporary art was in college, when Krit Streed showed us art21 during painting class. It was the first time I had experience artists as people and not as gods like was mentioned in the "Why are there no Great Women Artists?" article. I have found since, that I am maybe more interested in artists than I am in art. I prefer seeing work in articles, or in videos than in a museum or gallery, because I am really interested in the stories of the artists and how they bring their thoughts and investigations into their work, than I am in the work itself. I also enjoy finding art on The Jealous Curator and Colossal. I find that my taste leans toward, collage, layering, color, texture, and portraiture and these elements are the ones that carry through in my own work. How have mechanical techniques affect the notion of craft and skill in art production?
I think the variety of approaches to skill and craft in the videos show that contemporary artists approach craft and skill in many different ways. There are also important distinctions in the role of the audience and how the artists treats them or thinks about their participation in the artwork. Andy Warhol is an interesting character because while he was very focused on the idea of celebrity and branding, his populist approach made his artwork have very different meanings. I believe Warhol's craft was in curation, or in crafting his persona. There is also a level of craft that must occur to create the precision that makes these handmade objects look mechanical even with a screen print. There is a craft to getting that even ink application that looks perfect. I couldn't help but think of Kim Kardashian when watching this segment, as I think in some ways she is the ultimate expression of the ideas that Andy Warhol was playing with in terms of celebrity and glamour. I also see connections in the ways that Warhol's work was considered low-brow in the same was that Kardashian is deemed trashy, and the ways they created a brand around their larger than life persona that they have created. Jeff Koons is an interesting contrast with Andy Warhol because Andy's outlandish personality seemed matched by his art. Koons looks like a very average dad who shops at Banana Republic in contrast to his very flamboyant and over the top artwork. You can definitely see the craft and skill in his segment, and it is clearly something he finds important in his own work. If craft were not important to him, he would just use prints of his digital collages, rather than having assistants make painstaking hand-made reproductions of them. The balloon creatures could just be purchased and displayed, but it is important to Koons to create these highly detailed, hand made reproductions of objects that you can just go out and buy. It definitely made me question why his process is the way it is. I think Koons also touched on something important when he discussed that art and being an artist are very powerful things that can be wielded in positive and negative ways, as explored through the piece "Bear and Policeman". This touches on an important reason why many people are averse or distrustful of contemporary art. There is an authenticity to Warhol and Koons that treats their audience as intellectual equals. This is lacking in a lot of the works from the formalist artists and in the works by Richard Prince. To me, Prince represents taking Koons's idea of artistic power to an immoral level. His work exemplifies to me what people don't like about contemporary art: That it is about the artists' egos, controversy, and bullshit artistry and not the artist's creative vision. While I don't particularly care for Warhol's work, I can see how he used ego and celebrity as a way to bring up others and spread the idea that they too could be artists. Prince's pieces seem to be about his own power. That this visual imagery is not art until someone with his level of power and status touches it and declares it so. Prince's Instagram piece takes away the agency of the artists he has taken from, while Warhol tries to give artistic agency to the everyday person. There is much meaningful commentary to be made about the visual culture of social media, and how smartphones have put creative tools into the hands of everyday people. Prince seems to miss all this and manage to make artwork all about him. I think it this narcissism that people reject, and not his lack of skill or craft in his work. |
AuthorMorgan Singleton is a secondary art educator with a Master's degree in art education. Archives
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