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Yes, this is a total cop-out but hey, it’s finals week. I saw this Daily Show video about the art of gerrymandering and wanted to share.

Last week’s Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series lecture at the Michigan Theatre brought UK artist Antony Gormley to town, who is redefining sculpture as we know it. His vast amount of work was accurately portrayed by the few installations he discussed, exploring the relationship between human beings and the spaces we interact with.

 

Drawn introduces us to this particular “genre” of spatial figure sculpture, flipping the roles of art and viewer upside down – and sideways. The eight identical bodies cast with modern industrial techniques shrink into the corners of the gallery as far as possible, avoiding the probing stares of visitors, who become the real vehicles of Gormley’s concept.

Horizon Field Hamburg and One and Other reinforce audience interaction as the door to Gormley’s “open space of art”, operating as two different approaches to the relationship between individual and collective responses. Horizon Field Hamburg explores the lack of control a single person can have in public spaces with a large, black-mirror platform suspended thirty feet in the air by six metal cables. The platform is capable of swinging six feet in any direction, which is constantly influenced by viewers moving around on the glossy painted surface. Conversely, One and Other highlights the power of the individual, by quite literally placing its singular form on a pedestal. Volunteers signed a schedule securing their one-hour on the plinth, which also stood at thirty feet tall. Coincidence? I think not. These brave “living sculptures” were given complete creative control, and the perfect stage to make a statement of their choosing. The crowd that gathered at the base of the plinth was subject to whatever the person decided to show them, whether it was an act of humor or sincere emotion.

  

Installations like Breathing Room, Blind Light, and Model directly challenge the viewers’ perceptions of space and self by initiating a more intimate conversation with the senses. By constructing architectural forms intended to be occupied, the form of these sculptures is both vital and secondary at the same time, emphasizing the fact that art doesn’t “happen” in objects or images themselves, but in the creative spaces of the mind. The sculptural objects – or “systems” in Gormley’s case – are only there to lead the viewer’s wandering thoughts in the right direction.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The importance of these works is in the way they highlight the transformation of an art object into an art experience, defined by the appropriation of the power inherent to public sculpture. Gormley is able to transcend the traditional techniques of expression through the figure, exploring its place in an age of mechanization. His work embodies the transition from an object that relies on the coherent story of representation, and towards “objects” that are spaces to be explored creatively and critically.

 

 

To me, Antoni Gormley is one of those artists whose work you discover and experience the excitement of finding a new major influence, with an undertone of jealousy for having made such incredible objects (or experiences). I’m currently in my “making other people” phase of figure sculpture, and bumbling through the mess that is oil paint, so Gormley’s approach to “recycling” the traditional elements of art really struck a cord with me. We have to look back to move forward. We have to know our context in this strange creative space of culture that art occupies, in order to continue making relevant work. The way that Gormley simultaneously refers to and contradicts the traditional notions of space help to place him in conversation with his ancestry of sculptors, but also with everyone who is alive to experience his work in the present.

 

The entire hour of Antony Gormley’s lecture is available here:

Penny Stamps Lecture Series Antony Gormley

 

But due to the length and some technical difficulties, I’d recommend watching this one explaining Model instead, to get an equally enlightening understanding of what this guy is all about.

Model

Nelson Mandela was one of the most influential figures of our time. His peaceful and nonviolent defiance against the South African government during times of racist policies exhibited behavior that was inspiring to the world. Becoming South Africa’s first black president in 1994 and destroying the apartheid system within the country were great feats within World History. In light of Mandela’s passing, many artistic tributes (some made before and after) have been revealed to commemorate the life of a man who taught the world the true meaning of global peace.

This piece was made by sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik at the Golden Sea Beach in Puri. This tribute stood out to me because of its utilization of sand, and the way the artist shaped Mandela’s face into the flag of South Africa. The attention to detail is remarkable, and the feeling of joy one gets from Mandela’s smiling face amidst the bright colors of his country’s flag, is immediately felt.

Phil Akashi paid tribute to Mandela in his own unique way, taking 27,000 punches with the chinese letters for freedom, Akashi painted a monument to pay tribute to the great leader. Akashi told Designboom.com that “[Mandela] sacrificed his own freedom to fight for the freedom of others and therefore represents a fantastic source of inspiration for the entire world.”

Social media was a frenzy sharing thoughts after Mandela’s death and photographer Miguel Rios made a visualization of some of the tweets sent out in regards to Mandela. The media is such an influential aspect of the youth today, and I thought it was very interesting to merge the voices, opinions, and thoughts from today’s society into a piece of an influential leader within history.

This is a mural painting of Nelson Mandela that can be found in Cape Town. The overlapping blues of the sky, the building, and the head of Mandela flow into each other, depicting Mandela in a way that almost makes him a part of the sky and a part of the atmosphere that will forever surround South Africa.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.        

                  -Nelson Mandela

We’ve all reached that point now; the pile of missed readings has stretched into something that more closely resembles a mountain; powerpoint slides of past lectures clutter our desktops and the library becomes a room to eat, drink, study, sleep, youtube, repeat. The stress, or perhaps more accurately, the familiar regret at not having paid better attention the first time around in discussion section, can be enough to warrant unhealthy amounts of caffeine intakes and a diet of vending machine snacks. However, once the initial panic disappears, the routine of studying for finals becomes comforting, a pattern of checking off to-do lists, exercise, cooking and note taking. There’s something fulfilling in reaching, albeit potentially minimal, clarity at the end of a course. Something liberating about walking out of each final, ticking them off one by one.

At the time when we are most often alone, most often operating on our own studying-based schedules, there is no greater need for a quality playlist. Enjoy these few tracks while you settle into your ziplocked granola and highlighters; the sounds of studying.

1) It’s cold out. You’ve been sitting next to this window long enough to see the sun begin and end its descent out of sight. Before you rush through the frost-covered sidewalks, spend the last final minutes of studying against this unfailingly reassuring song. Jose Gonzalez will help the deep, calming breaths do their job. Long live bouncy balls. Heartbeats

2) This one’s for the intermediary moments of studying. The flash-card making. The notebook organizing. The productive tasks that gracefully don’t require much deliberate effort or attention. Allow Solange’s repetitive and soothing vocals apply gentle massage-like pressure to your overworked synapses. If you’re at all a Solange skeptic, still wondering whether she’s talented or just Beyonce’s younger sister, I’m right with you. But this track should definitely help sway your allegiance onto team Solange. Groovetown: Stillness Is The Move

3) You’ve earned a break. Put the pen down. Close powerpoint or your coding software. Throw on some headphones, lean back and imagine the ultimate dance party in your kitchen. I want to sing dance eat exercise sleep work and drive to this song all at once. I want to take it everywhere and play it as I walk through empty hallways. If you need to stretch a little, upper-body chair dancing is perfectly allowed. You can even get a little weird with it. Who the heck are Wookie and Eliza Doolittle, you ask? No F’ing idea. Get hype: The Hype

4) Time to ease back into the grind. As you make minor seat adjustments to make sure your legs will last another hour in this same chair, let the relaxing vibes and perfect harmonizing of BenZel and Jessie Ware guide you back into focus. If this is the first time listening, throw this one on repeat. You won’t get bored for at least a half dozen plays, and the consistency will save you from other distracting tunes. If You Love Me

5) Finally, for the long haul. Sometimes you just have to buckle down, throw away the headphones and start memorizing. But we haven’t gotten there yet. Before you forego all ties to human contact and socializing, finish the playlist off with a lovely little acoustic jaunt that will make even Virgina Woolf’s writing more pleasurable. Xavier Rudd has it figured out. Messages

Best of luck y’all. Head down until the finish line.

Last night, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit brought more than 90 artists to the exhibitions space to make art in a ‘part performance, part laboratory, part art bazaar’ called the Monster Drawing Rally. The live event and fundraiser started at 8pm and was divided into three hour-long shifts, each featuring 30 artists drawing simultaneously. As the drawings were completed, staff and volunteers picked them up, packaged them at a drying station, and hung them on the wall for exhibition and purchase at a uniform price of $40 each.

While the audience talked, mingled, and drank, the artists sat together at long tables set up in the open exhibitions room, practically bumping elbows as they developed their pieces. The sizes of paper provided by MOCAD were standardized, but the materials the artists brought varied widely– I noticed artists using pastels, charcoal, sharpie, micron pens, markers, stamps, collage materials, rubber cement, and the occasional ipod or laptop for reference. It felt oddly intimate to see the artists’ materials set out on their tables – the weathered pencil case, the folder of cut outs, the personal tub of rubber cement, so well known to the artists’ hands, minds and frustrations. Over the hour-long shifts, the audience watched the development of particular pieces. One artist used grids of tape to paint a perfectly geometric toilet plunger, another blew on globules of ink to create organic patterns, and another studiously sketched while glued to the eyepiece of his own personal microscope, which he was using to examine pieces of tape imprinted with what looked like tiny blue fingerprints.

The crowd favorite during the first shift was a blind contour artist named Hamilton, who was making sketches of people in the crowd. Blind contour is a method usually used to practice coordination between the eyes and the hands, so it requires the artist to keep his eyes off of the paper, forcing trust in the translation of visual perception to development on the page. Hamilton kept his subjects engaged, talking and laughing with them as his marker moved on the paper. The results were distorted, deliberately grotesque, but seeing the method added to my understanding – the lines were accurate, the placement deliberately wrong. During the second shift, the crowds gathered around Jonathan, who was making a piece out of chewed gum. “This is the clean bag,” he said, gesturing towards a plastic bag full of gumballs and chiclets. Audience members were encouraged to take a couple pieces, chew, and then spit into Jonathan’s gloved hands. A couple of children were at the front of the crowd, chewing athletically and looking a little bewildered. Jonathan held out his hand to receive a glob of chewed gum from a small girl, who looked slightly mistrustful of this manipulation of material, and he reassured her, “This is good. Look, it’s almost white. We need that color.” The air smelled sickly sweet in Jonathan’s vicinity; Ty, the pen and ink artist sitting next to him, looked less than thrilled.

Although a few artists engaged actively with their audience, most kept their eyes on the paper. One woman’s pen moved wildly as she glanced up and down from the faces of her audience to her paper, but she appeared to be drawing a minute, angled system of scaffolding.

Pieces changed quickly, and sometimes drastically, before our eyes. The black and white sketch of a man’s face – slightly mournful, classically handsome– was suddenly subtitled, in all capitals, ‘SAUSAGE FACTORY;’ a black and white sketch of an aggressively monstrous-looking bird was transformed as it was colored in with pastel markers, and titled in sloppy pen, ‘Compassion + Love are the seeds of hope!’ Many artist seemed to have a calculated plan for their hour – Tavi Veraldi, an artist and friend of my sister’s, confided in me that she was planning to draw an old man. “I’m super good at drawing old men,” she said, adding that she was hoping to dupe the crowd into thinking she was that good at drawing everything. It was a self-deprecating joke – Tavi is that good at drawing everything – but most artists did seem to be using the techniques or concepts that they were most comfortable with to create something coherent within the time constraint.

Even so, I enjoyed watching them at work. Observing a man labor on his sharpie drawing of an owl, I appreciated how his bold lines began as tentative marks – permanent and dark, but easily erased by incorporation. The bold line is presumptive, scary, and enduring, much like the piece of artwork declared, after an hour, ‘finished.’