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