Ty's Photo Blog: January 2011

Professor Brooks Dierdorff Tyler Yokoyama

Due January 26^th, 2011 Summaries

Winter 2011 ARTO 354

Chapter 1 Summary

In chapter one, Charlotte Cotton introduces some photographs that initially pushed the boundaries of art, bringing on conceptual and contemporary art. “Conceptual art played down the importance of craft and authorship” (Cotton 21,) which “emphasized that it was the act depicted in the photograph that was of artistic importance” (Cotton 21.) Such artworks that would not be considered traditional art include Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal signed and dated as though it were a sculpture, Oleg Kulik’s “two-week performance as a dog in New York, entitled I Bite America and America Bikes Me” (Cotton 25,) and Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures where he asked friends, family, actors for hire, and strangers to act out a simple and unusual performance for a photograph.

In Jeanne Dunning’s The Blob, “the blob embodies the embarrassment and vulnerability of human physicality” (Cotton 27.) The conceptual part of the piece is not just to look at the grotesqueness, but to imagine yourself needing to lug around this blob and attempt to dress it, or seeing a smaller version of this blob and embraces your own embarrassment.

China was home to the Beijing East Village, a “short-lived and politically prosecuted” (Cotton 24) artists’ group that put on performances and photographed them. Even though they may be short-lived, there have been imitators that come together on the Internet that do performance art. There are groups that create vandalism while others exist to create good experiences such as a group of engineers that noticed a trend in subways that 97% of the population used the escalators when the stairs are more accessible (due to the limitation of the number of people that can ride the escalator at once. These engineers made walking up stairs more fun by turning it into a giant sized piano, which in turn increased the portion of stair-goers from 3% to 66%[1].

Contemporary art does not need to be necessarily aesthetically pleasing, when in fact that usually gets in the way of the main concept. When a photograph loses its need for an author, it loses its preciousness and becomes a more easily read vessel for the concept the artist is trying to portray. The concept can be perfectly beautiful without being aesthetically pleasing to the eye, which I find exciting and motivating.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_8gxh76iM