I recently noticed that most Moncler jackets have comic pictures showing how one should go about washing and drying their jacket. I think it is an effective way to grasp users’ attention and make sure the washing procedure is done correctly. I wonder if it has any other purposes besides giving those instructions.
The Tilted Arc was a Minimalist steel sculpture created by Richard Serra. Its creation was commissioned specifically for the Federal Plaza in 1981. I thought that this sculpture would be an interesting piece to talk about given its reception and impact on how people interacted with their environment (which is similar to what we are doing in Project 4).
The piece was very controversial due to the negative public response. Since it was very large and bisected the Federal Plaza, it was seen as imposing and disruptive to many workers’ daily routines. Many people called for the piece to be removed or relocated. However, the relocation of the piece would destroy the artwork as a whole. Tilted Arc was specifically made for the Federal Plaza; any other location would ruin its meaning. In this case, Tilted Arc was meant to redirect the flow of traffic within Federal Plaza and cause normally-hurried people to slow down. Relocating Tilted Arc to any other place would render the entire piece as useless.
After a trial of the piece, Tilted Arc was ultimately removed, deconstructed, and stored. For more information on this piece and its controversy, click here, here, or here.
As our last project wraps up, I wanted to look into other famous interventions in the art world. One small but powerful one that I came across was a protest staged by Parker Bright. The protest is in reaction to a piece created by Dana Schutz. The painting depicts an abstracted shot of Emmett Till’s face and torso in an open casket. This piece was displayed at the Whitney Biennial, but sparked controversy due to the fact that the artist who painted it was white and had abstracted an otherwise serious subject matter.
In response to this piece, Bright and a group of five to six people stood in front of the painting for the entirety of the Whitney’s opening hours, completely blocking the piece from view. They also wore shirts with the with the words “black death spectacle” written across them to convey their opinion of the damaging nature of the painting.
For more information on the protest, click here.
Rozendaal is a New York based net artist with a focus on the accessibility of art. Each piece he does exists in its own web domain as a stand alone piece. He is opposed to the idea of art being purchased by the elite and embraces the idea that art should be shared with everyone. He only allows people to purchase his work by selling the web domains that his work is on. The people who purchase the websites must still keep them accessible so that his work can be seen by all.
floatbounce.com and openthatwindow.com are examples of his work. They are interactive and do different things when you click/drag the mouse.
The influential concept behind this project by Mark Dorf, called Transposition, is that oftentimes people view things in our world as independent of each other. Things such as nature and technology or landscape and city. His idea is that none of these things that people view as separate could actually exist independently of each other. His goal is to demonstrate ways that these concepts interact and portray these categories not as separate, but as a spectrum that reveals the influence each has on the other.
There is a project done by Human Element Inc./Philipp Schmitt in which somewhat of an intervention is placed at a bus stop. The concept is that while people wait for the bus they engage with a machine that tasks them with things that advance computer knowledge on human behavior. It is not completely an intervention because it is just a machine, people only choose to engage if they go up to it and interact with it. The incentive for people to participate is that they will earn a small amount of money for each minute they spend completely these tasks. The machine may just tell the person to stare into the camera it possesses while it shows different images on the screen. This is so that the computer can obtain information on how the persons expression may change depending on what they are viewing. It is a super interesting idea I think and there are two other parts of the project that also involve collecting information on human behavior for use by computers.
The Z is a 10 story parking garage in Detroit that encompasses the work of 27 different street artists from around the world. It is a collaboration between the Library Street Collective and Bedrock Detroit. Inside there are murals 130 feet wide and cars can drive into the garage to view the art. The project encapsulates the building that is in since it is street art in what was originally just a regular parking garage. The murals all vary in style, some very bright while others are just black and gold.
The Face2Face project (2007) is to make portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides.
JR pasted these paired portraits up in locations on either side of the Separation Wall. The artist did not annotate the images, and so passers-by had to guess which face belonged to which side of the conflict. Despite the huge perceived differences, JR proved that little, visually, separated these two communities.
Beneath Dignity was performed in September 1971 by artist Stuart Brisley, who had worked the previous year in a community of miners. This is what influenced Beneath Dignity, which reflects his sympathy and empathy for the miners that he worked with and their lowness and loneliness. The materials which he employed were water, chalk, powder (flour) and paint (black and white), and his work was spread out over 5 days, during which he amassed a large audience.
Foundations of Art, Design, + Digital Culture 