sundays I talk about art

So a couple sundays ago I mentioned that Bansky, the British graffitti artist now famous for smuggling pieces into New York museums, was one of my heroes specifically for the museum stunts. I also mentioned that I have a general dislike of art museums in general and said I'd elaborate some other sunday, well today is that sunday.

Obviously I go to museums, and I always find a lot of art that I'm really into when I go, I prefer to go to gallery showings far more than I like going to the Met or the Louvre however and the reason is that art museums don't really foster the kind of visceral experience with the art. Museums are all about hero worship of what a select few have decided are the artists and works that you simply must be excited about. There's no real sense of democracy or personal reaction to them. They say, these artists are simply the best, and that's how it is, we're the exclusive group. Museums seek to take art from the people and make it snobbish and exclusive and the artist who manages to get his or her works accepted is placed on a pedastal.

I think the reactions of the museums who were "hit" with Banksy works really speaks volumes to me about how removed from the common man and self enshrouded in an air of superiority the art world has become. The general feelings of those in the illustrious power seats viewed what Banksy had done as an affront to art, a slap in the face to the legacy of greatness, that how dare just anyone think they could hang a work in a museum for the public to see. But what could be more appropriate than "just anyone" hanging work in a museum? Doesn't it challenge us all to consider what exactly it is that makes a work of art something for all times and what makes it minor? Doesn't it inspire us to consider the whole nature of art and what it is? To consider all the groundbreaking rebelliousness of art particularly in the 20th century and beyond? I'm by no means saying that the works that Banksy hung are the kind of works that will endure for any length of time as great art (in fact I was less impressed with most of them than with the bulk of his graffitti pieces) but to me what was important and groundbreaking and art about what he did was the fact that he did it at all, it was the intorduction of populist pieces into the patrician world of illustrious museums, it was the attempt to shake up the neurons of the art spectator.

That's one of the things that I like about the guerrilla art movement, that much of it is really about getting people to take a peep outside their tunnel and really look once again at the world that actually surrounds them, to view for a minute the places they've trudged through everyday for ten years to the point that they don't even notice they are actually alive there anymore as a tourist does on his first visit, to interact with their lives again. It's about reclaiming one's life again in a world where we've given it up for habit and mechanisation.

You'll note that I really don't think that enough attention is being given to guerilla art, everyone is so damn focused on smooching up to 'outsider art' (a term which i hate to the ends of the earth)not that there aren't a lot of great outsider artists, but I think too much attention is paid to that, when there isn't even really any such thing as outsider art, this so called movement is built up of self-taught artists and folk artists, which are right there two serparate forms of art and not something you ought to just lump together under some pretentious word that someone thinks sounds better.

But anyway, yes I don't like museums because they foist an opinion on you about the works in them, and really never give you much of a feel into the world into which these works and movements sprung forth. And I like to form my own opinions, even if often they aren't at the same eye level as the critics :)

sundays I talk about art (maija fiebig)

ok so technically it's monday,so I'm late :) I'm always running late.

No dissertation on art today simply some of the work of one of my favourite artists Maija Fiebig. I actually discovered her art on one of my link trolling days when I was flipping through the goods that Velocity had to offer. volocity's Maija Fiebig pages

Now I'm absolutely in love with her stuff, I wish she had her own homepage, but alas. One day when I'm rich enough to afford to buy some full priced art, I'm going to buy a few of hers. Also her work has really influenced my my linoprint work, and to some extent my painting, though there's always been a bit of a simularity in our pattern and texture, the influence of textiles. Anyway finish babbling and commence showing art...

sundays I write about art

I've been increasingly fascinated with the concept of public art, not so much the decently funded and group organised public art projects you see like the "painted figure" phenomonon that seems to have invaded a number of North American cities simultaneously (Toronto had it's painted moose, Hartford it's cows (why cows in someplace as urban as Hartford/West Hartford CT, I'll never know, maybe they got their figure shipments confused iwth Omaha) Omaha had its John Doe project, sort of shapeless little men. Somewhere else I think had bison, I'm sure there were countless others, those were just the cities I've seen the end result in. Oddly each city's figures though done quite independently by local artists seemed to have a really similar result in terms of decoration and themes for the most part.

I'm more interested in the guerrilla side of public art, and yes that includes grafitti, though I have a love hate relationship with graffitti because a lot of what goes up is not art just grafitti and a lot of the people doing graf art seem to have no respect for the art of architecture. I guess that's not so much a problem with actual graf artists as it is with a bunch of losers who try to hide behind the edifice of graf art when they aren't any better than uncreative vandals making it infinitely harder for real graf artists to both practice their art and to be taken seriously as artists.

I'm drawn to the whole temporary and democraticness of public art. How so much of it seems to be things that people just thought would be a cool thing, or how it's in a sense designed to make those who witness it rethink the area where they see it. It makes people at least for a couple minutes become more aware of their surroundings and the context of an area they probably passed through a thousand times without even looking at it, and maybe pay attention and take a look around the world they inhabit more often.

Some of the stuff people have been doing that's caught my eye lately (on the web or through artist lectures anyway as there hasn't been too much of that stuff popping up lately where I live) has been graffitti painted ceramic decoy geese ("urban camoflauged geese") left in a park in Denver gnerally overpopulated by migrating geese(sorry no photos, the artist said he left them on his way out of town),
mario question blocks created and hung by a cool fellow from Toronto. (I've been seriously considering making some of these myself and hitting at a minimum campus in the fall), now pretty much world famous banksy's Met stunt. In fact to be honest beyond being amazingly cool, the stunt made Banksy one of my personal heroes. One day I'll write an entry explaining why, but it has to do with a sort of general, let's call it non-preference, I have for art museums. Also I'm totally Enamored with a capital E with the work of Songyi Kim, she happens to be in a residency at the Bemis Centre which is Omaha's progressive art centre, which is how I got hip to her. She's primarily a video artist and performance artist, but I to an extent consider it to be public art since some of her video projects have been about the same sorts of reactin from the public that I think the other projects I've mentioned are about.

Most recently I've been wowed by the storker project's clear babies Made out of clear tape, these infants have been dropped in several eastern cities. I like that sometimes they seem to be left quiet randomly, sometimes there is a really very powerful social context between their surroundings and them, and sometimes their placement is just sheer amusing whimsy like this: