         
Emily EganRocker, Emily Egan.
First of all, the space looks really great. I don't know who arranged the window areas but it's great! If I were a passerby I would definitely stop in for a look. While being in the rock shop I read the flyer that was sitting on the table, I think it is from "New Branded World". It's talking about no spaces and about how coporations have developed not products but brands, brands with personalities. They different brands have different emotional attachments and marketers use that as a ploy to get people to buy things they make. I think this is just another example of how culture can be manipulated. All of the things that we see daily are a part of our culutre and the feelings we have about them just encourage and support that culture......
April 4th While in class on Friday I was thinking about how I could incorporate my idea of cheesy posters with out of context quotations with our dealings with towne and club. I thought about the differences between the quotations and the images in towne’s and in clubs. ( I now only write town with an “e” at the end, and the spell check hates it.) The images of a kittens or a rainbows with a message on them, found in public places like schools, are just as cliché as a fake impressionist paintings in clubs, such as, golf clubs. Neither of those types of examples have a unique or specific quality to them. They both support the expectations of the status quo. It would be interesting to switch the two around and put the things usually found in townes in clubs and vice versa. What would the average golfer do when they went into the locker room and found a huge smiling chimpanzee in place of the landscape they use to have? What would elementary school children image when they had realistic looking landscapes and impressionist paintings to engage with? Thinking about these ideas and the expectations of aesthetics in relation to different places makes me more observant of and curious about the kinds of things I like to surround myself in. Do my interests in art give me a hint as to which social organization I would rather be a part of? It’s interesting, I really like the development of ideas are having. There are so many levels and meanings associated with just those two words.
April 1st After talking with Anthony last Friday we both got really interested in the idea of tools. Because the rock shop is going to be turned into a hardware store and because the idea of tools has so many layers to explore we wanted to do something with that. He wanted to explore the idea of tools specific to Creston, but has since changed it to souvenirs. I wanted to explore the idea of “social tools”. The word tools has so many meanings, one of which is “Something regarded as necessary to the carrying out of one’s occupation or profession. ‘Words are the tools of our trade’” That definition makes me wonder what other tools do we apply to a social, not physical, context. Tools are things which we use to create things and to change things, how can we be more aware of the social tools with which we engage? Exploring the idea of social tools led me to connect the quotations that I had gathered in hopes that they would inspire something. The quotations are soundbytes of ideas or concepts that influence our thinking. I wanted to apply them to some sort of visual image, probably ones of us working maybe manipulated to compliment the ideas in the text. While working on this ( thanks to all Jules and other kids who introduced me to the world of “photoshop” and “illustrator” both great great things) I kept running into the idea of cheesyness. I wanted to avoid the corny posters which you find on walls in highschools of monkeys or kittens with phrases like, “Hang in there”. Also, I am working with the Creston highschool and so I am going to be surrounded by those sorts of images. The popularity of these images is evidenced by the familiarity we all have with them. Why are these so popular? The kitch phrases which have resonated so much with our mentality have all but become meaningless. They now serve, not to inspire or spur creativeness but to support outmoded ways of thinking and the status quo. I would like to bring these two concepts together. The cornyness of those images with the unsettling, thought provoking (at least I think so) quotations, could turn into some interesting things. My problem with this right now is that I don’t feel that it bits too well with the themes we are addressing now. Leisure, Public/Private, Pop, Region, Souvenirs, Community, How does this fit in? I have an some idesa but I would like to clarify them more. I went to a training today for the volunteer work I want to do at Creston High School. The things I learned were amazingly depressing. I was told that the amount of negative things which underprivliged children hear from adults are tens of times more than children from middle or upper class families. I also learned that a large amount of the highschoolers at Creston read at a 3 or 4 grade level....... How did they make it this far? Our amazing education system.
I went to the rock shop on Sunday and after a quick adventure involving a musk ox skull Jenn and I had a great talk. The things that we talked about helped me understand the class more. She broke it down very simply. I think that part of the problem I¡¯m having is that I think all of the past civic studio ideas or projects were these really advanced, highly theoretical things. When actually, they could have started off as a joke or simply something someone was interested in. I also realized that I have to make some goals for myself. In order to get the most out of the class I have to do certain things which I know help me, if they are required or not. ¡°This class is like life, you put into it what you get out of it¡± !!! (the three exclamation points are the written version of my mind going Pshaing! Pshaing!) As far as my studio work goes, I think that Jenn gave me a new direction in that as well. I still would like to do the drawings but only as a secondary project. I think that it would be fun to do it, but it¡¯s not necessarily the media (goo) that I want to work with. The problem I find is that I¡¯m most comfortable just writing, reading, talking to people, and that sort of thing. I wonder if I could document these kinds of things, because that¡¯s when my mind goes ¡°!!!¡± the most. In one of my other classes we always talk about the art of listening and I think it¡¯s an interesting concept. What kind of art form is that? What goo is involved in that? In that class we also have to do a research paper where we have to describe the methodology of the research. We can use a social science methodology such as questioners and data gathering, or we can use a science methodology that would involve asking questions and problem solving, or a philosophical methodology where we just ask questions and think. I wonder what an artistic methodology would be like? Would it be a mixture of all the methodologies with a presentation of a finished product to summarizes it? What is the process of art, specifically public art?
The morning is a great time to draw the rock shop. I would like to do a series of drawings of one corner of the room. The drawings would all have the same background consisting of the walls and the ceiling and floor. It would be a sketch that would be consistent in all of the drawings. The alteration would be what fills that space and it would be different in every picture, sort of like how it is different every hour we are in the rock shop. Some of the things that would change would be: people, tools, wood, walls, time (maybe some would include things that the original rock shop would have had) weather outside the window, the corner of the building itself and a lot more... This is my expression and understanding of how easily objects are manipulated and how people, and relationships between people, are similar to objects in the fact that they are also chanbeable. Realizing that things can be moved facilitates the realization that social groups and communities are also maluable. This idea also highlights the main connection between the objects- the space that they occupy. The objects that are in the space are there completely by chance. There is no inherent quality they have which makes them in Creston rather than in Tokyo. Similarly, people have been grouped together by chance and just happen to share the same space. If they are in a specific place, then that simply means they are there by chance and it has no more meaning. The way they occupy and form relationships and connections with the space and objects in it, is all created by them.
It’s all I can think about. Usually my classes have some common themes and a synergy occurs between two or three of them, but right now my classes are ridiculously connected and all revolving around the conception, connotations and possibilities of one word. Space. In my Edward Said class we are studying about the connections of space and prejudice. He wrote about Orientalism and how we as ‘westerners?conceptualize anything that is geographically located in the ‘east?as having the stereotypical mystic, exotic, even barbaric characteristics. He believed that space was a virtue. I understand his concept of space, or has he calls it critical space, in two ways. First, the intellectual (as opposed to the academic) must maintain critical or distant space from the status quo. There must be a mental space which allows questioning and reframing. The second is physical space, which inherently embodies things like culture and traditions and even weather. This type of space requires a critical distance as well. Because of how culture indoctrinate us as to what is ‘normal?or good we need to have different cultures and spaces with which we can counterpoise our thoughts and perceptions. He believes that a nomadic lifestyle is good, and says that we should feel at home nowhere, because then we are more at home everywhere, and because we are less likely to feel a blind and thoughtless allegiance. This is different than what chapter six talks about (but I haven’t finished it yet). The book speaks of the nomadic feeling more as a postmodern dilemma but Said believes it to be a more characteristic which gives critical insight. And also? In my Senior seminar class we are talking about the importance of public space and how more and more of it is being both privatized and commercialized. Hannah Arendt says that if we do not have a fully protected public life we do not have a safe private life. Understanding this also means realizing that public space is critically important for thought and self identity. We are social beings and with less and less social and public space we lose our way of understanding ourselves through others (not to mention understanding others). On a side note about space?I was thinking during our conversation about private and public space and about the city and the suburbs. Understanding that there is more public space in the city because there is a need for people to be in the same space at one time, and that the density of people is greater there is a greater occasions for interacting with others. As a class we seemed to simply accept that this interaction was a good thing but I started wondering why it was a good thing, why this public space was a good thing. (I wrote some notes about this idea that if I had them I would explain it more clearly but right now I’ll just go with what I’m thinking? What are the connections between artists and the city, why do they prefer it? I think that, despite the economic reasons, artists prefer the city because of the fact that there are more occasions of interaction. There are more experiences in the city which are unplanned, spontaneous, exciting, and unexpected because there is more public space. The suburbs leave the experiences to be completely planned, protected, and boring, very inartistic. I’m not sure where I’m going with all this, I wish I could come up with some definite conclusion of what public space means and why it will lead to a fricking revolution! (I loves the revolutions.) I think that public space is artistic space because public spaces are where things happen. Real things, not Santa Clause pictures or shoe sales. When real things happen they are experiences that are remembered, meaningful and impacting. They are, what I believe to be (and yes, I’m taking this from Dewey) aesthetic experiences, or more simply, art. |
