Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement began in the early 1920s, which developed out of the Dada activities during World War I. The most important center of the movement was Paris. It is best known as the movement for visual artworks and literiture.Surrealism was initially a literary movement, where writers and poets focused on the expression of subconscious mind. They wanted to freely express subconscious thought through surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur.

Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the world, eventually affecting the visual arts, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.

In the 1930s, surrealism become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain. Their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.

 

The characteristics of this style—a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological—came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".

 

Salvador Dalí(Spanish, 1904-1989)

 

The Persistence of Memory. 1931

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Persistence_of_Memory.jpg

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

Respon to week3 lecture and week 4 tutorial^ ^

At the beginning of the lecture, Linda discuss about the experimental art with us. Can experiment work treated as  art? When I was in secondary school, I studied principle of account. There is a condition that if a product cannot be finished on the date of sale, we call it "work-in-progress". That raised an interesting question: should art work completely finished as the selling product so that we call it "art"? However, how can we define a work as completed? In my opinion, it is really hard to find a fine line between "work-in-progress" and completion especially in the aspect of art world. Art is always subjective, different people can have distinct view on the same piece of art. There is no a single rule or regulation that tells people an art work is completed or not.

Moreover, an experiment is not just for creating something, but also for accumulating experience in order to do better and better. It is, more importantly, an evidence of  artists' acheivement. It can prove the effort the artist made.



In the lecture class, Linda explained that art should not be confined by anything. Not only can experiment become a kind of art, art can beyond the figuration, representation and even abstraction. Hence, she showed us the works by Lucio Fotana, who tried to break the limitation of picture frame such as time and space through the destruction. This gave me a new concept of art---- expanded painting. Painting is not only on the paper or we called “surface”, it can be inside and outside the surface, it can be in anywhere.

Here are some of Lucio's works:

 

On the other hand, art has no a specific format, intermedia is also a way of making art, just like Robert Rauschenberg, he was good at combine paintings which mixed up with painting and sculpture.  Even though poem can be combined with drawing, music, dance etc. Therefore, in this week Linda introduce Kurt Schwitters to us. However, I ve got no idea about him and his works so I did some research about him.

According to Wikipedia, Kurt schwitters was German artist. He worked in a wide range of genres and media like Dada, constructionism, surrealism, sound, poetry, graphic design, typography, installation art etc. He was well known of his collage named Merz picture.

The building designed by Kurt schwitters which shown in the lecture was also called "Merz". It is one of kurt's greatest works. Kurt first started of his work on Merzbau in his home in Hannover, and the second one began in his new home in Norway after he exiled from homeland. Then he created his own Merzbarn in England. Unfortunately, his all Merz buildings were distroyed by different reasons ----by war, fire and time
. There were only a few photographs left.

http://www.merzbarn.net/hanovermerzbau.html

 



Merzbau is a work that typically represent Kurt's concept of Merz, which was his own perception of Dadaism. Merz has been called "psychonogical collage". Kurt wanted to express some invisible context by assembling many visible fragmenst. For example, his Merz picture/drawing consisted of text fragments such as newspaper, advertisement, announcement etc. So Kurt continued to use this kind of art form to build the Merzbau. He made use of found objects(e.g rubbish, wood pieces, part of dolls) as  materials so that installed them to the building. The most interesting thing is that he even collected something that visitors left in the house and put those things as a part of the whole installation.

Kurt firstly began his work in his private studio, after that he expended the construction work to his whole apartment; it finally transformed 6 rooms into one. Besides, the building was not just built out of geometrical shapes; it included Kurt’s little collections like dried flowers and toys. As a result, Merzbau seems more related to daily life but not only an art work. By the way, Kurt had never thought about introduce this marvelous works to the world, he was just enjoying the process of exploring art.

 

Apart from Merzbau, Kurt did some interesting poem too. Those poems weren’t written of meaningful words and sentence, it was all meaningless words with strange pronunciation and tone. This was the typical performance of Dadaism which we call it non-sense. Nevertheless, does this kind of performance have no meaning at all? No, it doesn’t. I think it does have meaning deeply inside the poem. For me, the tone, the facial expression and the rhythm of the performer have delivered the passion and the emotion hidden in the poem to the audience. We cannot say that it is nothing. As in today’s tutorial class one of my classmates said that meaningless was also a meaning, when an artist is creating something, he can’t be thinking nothing and don’t know what he has done.

 

Well, this is the end of my weekly response. Last but not least, I have learn many new terms about art in this week such as Dada, Merz, sense and non-sense, installation……How a satisfactory week! Haha^ ^

sources:
 http://litspat.medialoperations.com/2010/03/30/kurt-schwitters-merzbau/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merz_Pictures

Media computing: Making photosop effects!!!

Here are some experiment works that i made after the tutorial class of Into to media computing in week3 .

exercise in class>V<

The process of doing the assessmentB and the others exprerimental works

original picture:(downloaded from blackboard)

Add rain effect

 

 

Other funny effect:

I think i ve made it too fantasy... HAHA...

 

 

 

GE1302 Online Art Diary 1 (week3)

Diary one

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1968

This painting was created by Mark Rothko (1903-1970), who is a famous abstractionist from America. He was originally born in Russia and he moved to America in 1910. He was impoverished in his early ages hence he took part-time job for paying his tuition. He used to be actor, reporter, waiter, teacher and painter. Because of his tough life, he started taking drug and drinking in order to ease his pressure and depression. And finally he committed suicide in 1970.

 

Even though Mark Rothko’s life was not easy and full of difficulties and failures, he still became a very successful painter. He was a wise man. He tried to express philosophy thinking through abstract painter. Most of his works are impressive and debatable. He always used the color,  structure, shape especially in rectangle and layers to present his works. This became the personal style and also as a breakthrough in the history of abstractionism painting.

 

Why do I choose his work? It is because his painting was introduced in the class of Creative media studio. I found that Mark’s painting were very interesting as most of them were painted in simple color and composed by several rectangular shapes which made his works special. When I saw his painting I can think of Yves Klein’s art work introduced in the tutorial class. His Blue Monochrome was painted in single color which is even simpler than Mark’s one.

 

The painting shown above was painted by oil color and had no title with it. Mark said that he wanted to use the simple expression to present the complex thought. So he was not confined by complicated line and composition. Alternatively, he liked to use the most simply and easy way to show what he was thinking. I remember that in the lecture of the science of art, we learned how people eyes brain work when they see, touch, taste and smell. Interestingly people’s brain react almost the same when they see something that defined as ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’. In secondary school, I learned about cold color (e. g blue) and warm color (e. g red) in visual art lesson. I don’t know why it works but I believe that it is also relating to how our brains operate. The painting above is mainly painted in gray, purple and red. We can feel the darkness, depression and despair. The color created an atmosphere of pressure and fear. The reason why I have such kind of feeling about this painting is because the dark and gray colors usually represent the negative emotion in our mind. Mark’s bad experience led him to the way of destruction, we can see this in his drawing. Besides, his works are also relating to space, although his drawing has no perspective. As the drawing is very big, if audience looks closely into it, they can imagine that they are a part of the painting. On the other hand, there is a question haunting me: whether should I describe these rectangular shapes in the painting as empty or full?

 

Mark’s paintings always give me space of imagination, the visual effect of his works are also wonderful too. When you look at his works you can feel the emotion immediately and directly. This’s why I love them so much.

 

Source: http://www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/

 

Diary two

9evenings: theatre and engineering

Open score

http://www.9evenings.org/

http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=642

 

 

The Open Score is a documentary film taken by Robert Rauschenberg showing the series event of 9Evenings: theatre and engineering which held in 1966 at the New York 69th Regiment Armory by 10 New York artist including Robert Rauschenberg. This event was about diverse art performance such as music, dance, theatre etc. in the 1960s and some of the performance were mixed up with the advanced technology at that time. For instance, wireless, infrared camera and FM transmitter were not yet the common technology that applied in the daily life in that age. More importantly, it was a very first time for artists and scientists and engineers collaborated and cooperated together working in the same purposes. They worked over 10 months to construct technological equipment and system that were used in art performance. It was a remarkable moment that artist combined technology with their art works—led to the generation of new media art.

 

Robert Rauschenberg recorded this historical moment by using his camera and then titled it as Open Score. He divided the video into three parts, each part represent one event. The first one is a tennis match between two players; the interesting thing is that the focus point of the match is not the match itself, but the two players and the rackets they used to play the game. The rackets were installed an electronic bell which could detect vibration from hitting the ball and then produce huge bang sound. Therefore, when they played the game, it just liked playing music. Also, the installation on the rackets could transmit signal to a receiver. So every time the ball hit, one of the lights in the court would be switched off. Finally, the court became totally dark. This experimental art combined elements of music, dance (movement of two players) and technology.

 

The second part and the third part were both performed on stage. There were more than 500 people invited to stand on the big stage where had a darkness environment, listened to Robert’s command, and did the thing that they were told to do. The whole process would be taken by an infrared camera.

 

I only know Robert Rauschenberg recently in the class of creative media studio and now he becomes one of my favorite artists. He innovated ‘combine painting’ which mix up painting and sculpture. He made a lot of contribution in contemporary art. This set of video is not just showing the combination of science and art, but also the achievement of Robert Rauschenberg.

Respon to week2 lecture + tutorial in week 3

My new life in university is beginning, there is full of excitement, unknown and curiosity. To be honest, I am even confused about what I am doing and what i am going to do, especially I am studying a subject that I have never expected to participate in called Media Art. However, it is no way for me to escape from this situation so i have to try my best to deal with it. And then I did find something interesting that really motivate me to keep moving on. In the first meeting of Contemporary & New Media Art , Linda raised a very inspiring question to us: What is art? Actually, I got no idea about it at that time. Although I like drawing and interested in studying the skill of drawing, I seldom think of the definition of art. After the lecture , I was eyes opened. This is the very first time that I really step into the art world.

 

So what is art? Linda gave us several ideas:

Art object is a debatable object.

Art is constructed by history and criticism

Art as archiving

Art as field study

Art is about maximizing one’s tools

Art can ask a question.

Art can be a concept.

Art is about philosophical thinking.

A work is also a work in progress……

 

Well, it seems complicated and honestly I am still thinking of this question but Linda did provide the basic concept of art to us which encouraged us to think deeper. Linda also show us some impressive art works to explain her ideas like the comparison of mermaid between different artists.

                                                   

                                                    A Mermaid (1900)
                                                    by John William Waterhouse
                                                       (1849-1917)

 

                                                  Mermaid, Rene Magritte, 1935

Wow, they really shocked me when i first time saw those pictures. And then i realised art works are presenting the way of artists thinking! We should not just define art by whether it is beaultiful or not, Art, definitely, is more than that!Now I know that art object may not be beautiful but it‘s always meaningful and it can make people pay attention to it. Every thing about the art work can raise question such as the material it used, the angle it took, the means of presentation it applied etc.

 

Moreover, Linda told us to do some research of  Robert Rauschenberg and his work:Open Score(

http://www.9evenings.org/)

which is a documentary of the 9Evenings: theatre and engineering event series. I found that Robert Rauschenberg was not just a painter, he was also working with sculture, photography, printmaking, papermaking, performance etc.He innovated his art works as "combine paintings" whick means he used painting and sculture at the same time in one work.

For example:

                                                  Robert Rauschenberg , monogram

It's quite interesting. I am wondering why he named it 'monogram'.Is this Robert's signature or something that represent himself?What 's the meaning of the goat?why it's stuck in a tyre?

 



The Open Score performed several works produced by Robert Rauschenberg and other artists, engineers and scientist. The video divided into three parts, it began with a tennis match. In the game the two players didn't use the normal rackets to play the game, their rackets installed with a device that can make the bang sound when hitting the ball. Also, every time they hited the ball, it would transmit a signal by the Fm transmitter then a light would be switched off. Finally the court became totally dark. The second part performed by 100 people standed on a stage with no light and listened to Robert's command to do something strange, the process was taken by a infrared camera . The third part of the video showed a perfomance which Rorbert himself took part in.

 

The 9 evenings event revealed that art and technology can be incorporated, it 's in fact a breakthrough in that generation as the technological things were just spring up. They also pointed into the future that technology such as Video projection, wireless, sound transmission etc would become more and more common and artist can apply it on to their art works. It represented a new age of art--the age Contemporary and New Media Art. I am really excited about it which makes me want to know more about new media art.

 

Then in the tutorial lesson, we were told to form a group of 5 people and choose a peice of art work to explain why it is art. Our group picked a series of photograph taken by Man Ray named Mr and Mrs Woodman.

We thought the posts of the two wooden man and the interection between the couple were interesting. Also, their action seems to be making love, but sometime we can see that they are fighting together, or we can say that they are dancing. What are they doing indeed? There are always some questions in my mind when I look at these photos.What does the woodenman represent for?

 



 

Finally, if you ask me again what the art is, i can tell you that i don' know yet but i am going to know it in my rest of life.

Testing

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