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Shelbi

Consumers of what?


Our culture today has turned into a society that consumes everything. We are viewing the things around us as ours, it is meant to be ours, and it was created to be ours. We as humans are consumed with ourselves, so naturally we become consumed with everything around us. Consuming can be described as wanting, taking, devouring, going through, things that we do as people. We want money, we take sex, we devour food, and we go through technology.
In the pbs broadcast of art: 21 consumption, Michael Ray Charles, Matthew Barney, Andrea Zittel, and Mel Chin are interviewed about their works and reasons involved in creating them.

Michael Ray Charles incorporates the beautiful qualities of the blackface into many of his paintings. His pieces incorporate these images because he hopes to destroy the stereotype we place on the black culture. The black face is placed where society does not recognize it in such. He says, "I've been called a sellout. People question my blackness. A lot of people accuse me of perpetuating a stereotype," One might think that he doesn’t want you not be consumed with the ideal image of the black people, but to view them as they always should have been, beautiful and powerful.

“A system that has an internal object, Freudian narratives—consumer and producer, violence, sexually driven, NFL films—these are the things I think about," says Matthew Barney. He hits the point right on, we as consumers have an internal objective, to consume, but what? I believe that is what Matthew Barney tries to uncover in his series of “Cremation”, when violence is brought into being a form. (Pbs: consumption) Are we consumed with these things because they are interesting, or they catch our attention, or is it something more?

Andrea Zittle talks about her “seasonal uniform” project where she only allows herself to wear one garment at a time. She states that “most of the time we can afford only one fabulous outfit that you really love to wear”. I believe in all of her project she tries to get a crossed that we should control our consumption of things, even the things we need in our daily lives.

Overall the artworks and the artists themselves look at how society today is consuming so much day by day, from food to money to sex. Mel Chin believes “consumption is what to eat and what to fear.”
In one of his resent projects, Mel Chin takes old century patterns of nomadic people and places them in the 21st century technology. Tribal patterns are rarely seen and the culture is becoming extinct, but our own video culture is thriving. (PBS: consumption) People today are consumed in the next best thing concerning our technical advances, cell phones, I pods, computers, video games, today’s phenomenon’s being viewed by ages 6 – 30.

He explains that “Knowman is a digital re-weave of patterns that have been around for thousands of years, that we may know nothing about, but perhaps in a videogame we might have the desire to know what they might have been, more than just decoration, because they are about people.” (PBS: consumption) Taking one of the many consumed objects in society and intertwining it with the patterns that have been around for thousands of years, Mel Chin hopes that we will learn to respect the history they represent, the people they represent. I believe that if we stop being consumed with ourselves or the things society consumes maybe we can recognize what we are missing out on.



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Word-word!

(lust/children)
When you imagine the word lust what do you see? The image I created is of the word Lust that is in front and center of the piece. With its large font it captures the eye immediately, what you don’t see as quickly is the word children beside it. This word is in a smaller font and seems to remain under the word Lust. At first when you see the word lust you don’t expect to see the word children next to it. This makes the piece contradictory. You envision what the words portray and it’s not a good thing, which makes you want to argue with the image to go away. Children are not supposed to be an object of lust. Children are not the ones that lust. No matter how you view it the piece seems disturbing, which might be its most powerful purpose.

Image-Image!

(soldier/man)
This piece consists of two pictures side by side. One piece is of a soldier holding his rifle getting ready to shoot, it looks like he is just doing his job, what he was trained to do. The other picture is of a young man who is sitting in a chair curled up, he seems like he might be crying because his head is in his lap. The images are ok by themselves but being placed side by side your mind automatically creates a connection between them. They form an interesting story; you can see the images playing off one another, so your mind draws the connection and it’s unnatural. They conflict with each other; you don’t normally see a soldier pointing his gun at an innocent man crying in the corner, but the images suggest this.

Image-word!

(conditioned/scale)
The image of this piece consists of an old-fashioned scale. The scale itself is used to compare and contrast the weight of two objects: if they’re even or if one object is heavier or lighter than the other. The word chosen is Condition, which is a concrete noun. In a sentence it may be used as: Man's condition could be better or worse. To the viewer of the piece, condition is separated on each side of the scale where con is on one half and dition is on the other. The image may bring along many trains of thought. They used the word condition to represent the condition of the scale. The image portrays the drastic decisions of weighing the pros against the cons. It may be weighing a condition someone has proposed; one thing against another. It makes the audience find these hidden meanings and view the image longer than expected.

Shelbi Hicks
Consumption

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