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Mariel

Consumption among Artists


The next hour of PBS's Art 21 documentary series focused on four artists' uses of consumption. Michael Ray Charles, Matthew Barney, Andrea Zittel, and Mel Chin all contributed to the theme of said episode. Michael Ray Charles creates work based off of old (now racially insensitive) advertisements and blackface, to show how the black stereotype has been consumed by other races all over the country. MRC is actually trying to show the beauty of the black culture, not the image we've grown to consume and accept as reality. Mel Chin creates contemporary work that creeps its way into burned homes, ecological disasters, and video games to promote social awareness of problems in today's society. He uses technological bases to feed the hunger of new technology, health advances, iPods, computers, etc. Matthew Barney is a filmmaker, who is best known for creating a series of short films (with undertones of violence, sex, and fear) named after the male reproductive organ that rises and falls due to temperature, excitement, and nerves. People all over the world are obsessed with horror and sex, and Barney gives the viewers what they like to see, but in a more "contemporary" way. Andrea Zittel
creates and transforms all the daily human essentials: home, bath, water, food, and space, to show how our society is obsessed with perfection.

The artist that stood out the most to me was Andrea Zittel. She was the more contemporary and experimental out of the artists and really thought the most of what she was creating. One of her projects, "The Uniform Project", involved her creating one knitted garment to wear for a 4-6 month season. She started the project after having an office job requiring a respectable outfit to wear, but she was lacking in money. "Most of the time we can afford one fabulous outfit that you really love to wear". She created one fabulous outfit to wear everyday, and would do so for a season. It was part of her aesthetic for simplicity and necessity. The project made her and any curious people know how wearing one outfit all the time is very simple and thrifty, but how it also is constraining, since it is forcefully repetitive and makes one look a little unstable. Obviously, someone who didn't know that this was a project would have a negative reaction. How often does one see a woman walk past his house in the same dress every day? However, I appreciated the bravery she had to constantly emerge in public wearing the same tattered garment. I also loved the message behind it: simplicity is a restraint. When you don't have a plethora of necessities, it can feel like a barrier, but sometimes you have to live with it. Her message to me is that we have to control how much of one thing we consume daily.

The Uniform Project really inspires me to take a deeper look inside my everyday life to decipher what its really all about. Everyone else in the world, artist or not, should do the same.


WordWord:


Lightning Wrench.


Lightning Wrench is a very interesting piece. The word "Lighting" is in a basic OCR A STD font, very similar to American Typewriter. Wrench is in the font "Silom", which is bolder, making it look slightly larger than the previous word. "Wrench" is bolder and larger because when one says it out loud, Wrench is has more emphasis. Both words are in white, simple fonts. The words do not need flashy fonts to get the point across. The simple type makes the viewer think more about the possible word play behind it rather than the style of the fonts. The word play I chose was off of "Lightning Bolt", and you tighten nuts and bolts with a wrench. However, another way of looking at it would be to think of Lightning Rod (as far as sounds go), but instead, Wrench takes the place of Rod, leaving a more harsh, spiny, jagged image, since Wrench doesn't sound like a soft word.



ImageImage


The two images are of a straight, rectilinear, industrial tower contrasted with the flowy, free fantasy feathers of a peacock. The image of the peacock evokes the feeling of freedom and effervescence. On the other hand, a building encloses workers and files, and is more dark and bland in tone, leaving it to seem almost as a prison (for lack of a better word). Peacocks are colorful, and, as stated before, most, if not all the buildings we've seen are bland and gray in appearance. The two pictures leave a humorous course, when the tower is moving up vertically, and just as it is about to end, a peacock erupts from the peak, making a striking, interesting hourglass shape between the two images.


ImageWord


The image is interesting on its own. The torso of a man in a bold white-and-black striped shirt is in the corner, and behind him you can see a long stretch of black nd white checkered tiling, leaving two patterns contrasting to trick our eyes. The word over the image is "Focus". The "Focus" of a picture would be a focal point, a really obvious place where your eye takes you. However, when you look at the image, your eyes react in a strange way to the contrasting patterns. Which part of the image IS the focus? There is no absolute focal point in the image, leaving an ironic piece.

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