Finals Pressure? Art Relief

I’m certain that there is nary a student at the University who is not feeling the stresses, pressures, and struggles that final exams present. You’re either a freshman, going through the insomnia for the first time, unsure what to expect, where to study or how much to study. You’re a sophomore, and you now care about your grades, you regret not caring nearly as much when you were a freshman, and now you realize you need an internship and well, your grades matter. You could be a junior and, well, reality has likely struck and not only are you intimately aware that your grade matters, but potentially, whatever internship you had this coming summer could offer you a job, and bingo, here life swings.

And there then are the seniors. A fourth are graduating this semester, a fourth are taking a kind 9 credits, and a fourth already have job offers. And there then is the last fourth, the fourth that is applying to graduate school, petrified that their grades of this semester will be the final decision makers, or those who do not yet have jobs and are just as terrified that these grades will be the ones that will or will not ensure their job placement. Of which, the latter fourth, I am a part of.

It’s my seventh time dealing with the finals grind, but somehow, it’s never gotten any easier. Instead, it only seems to get more and more overwhelming – the insurmountable pressures that hold for seniors, realizing that real life is around the corner, every grade, every test, every moment matters.

And so, just when the pressure is about to make me burst, I remember the one thing that I can always count on to make me happy – art. I’ve created a folder on my desktop of my favorite works, over 100, that I just sift through when the pressure makes my throat constrict, my palms sweat, and my knees shake. I hate finals, but hey, at least there’s beautiful art to lessen the pain.

Modern Day Doodling

Boredom strikes in the midst of a most arid lecture. Abandoning this desert of interest, you vicariously dive into the seas of social media, but soon grow ill of surfing Tumblr. Twitter is no longer piquing your creative interest. You wish to build, to construct something clever; something more than a witty one liner and ironic hashtag. You search your backpack and find nothing by a laptop charger and a wireless mouse. There is a graphing calculator without games in the front pocket. Oh god! Oh pi! How could this be?

You find yourself paperless. You carry no notebook—the class notes are posted online. You bear no pen—your fingers type away anything else you have to say. You realize you no longer possess dexterous artistic ability, from all those hours staring at your computer and not setting pencil to sketchpad. But you have an undying desire to doodle. And no, creating an easy scheduling experience on www.Doodle.com does not suffice. Editing photos or scrawling random words into a .txt document is not the same. You need to draw pointless things in the corner of your document. But you don’t have a stylus with interactive digital ink. The ‘Draw Something’ app on your iPhone has simply lost appeal. Appeal…Your fingers, poised above the keyboard, become attractive to your eyes—the mirrors to your soul, the container of your ideas. The metaphorical light bulb goes off. You draw a stick man.

…O

/  |  \

./   \

The idea incites you.

The symbols on your keyboard dissolve all meaning. Letters and numbers become new shapes. Various symbols become tools to be employed. You chuckle at your ingenuity and become absorbed in the possibilities. Your fingers dance across the keyboard and soon your mind is racing to discover new and clever ways to turn the text symbols into pictures. Slashes and bars become your best friends, O’s and underscores become your guilty pleasures.

Soon, the class empties and you remain in your seat. The absence of fellow man is barely recognized. You remain locked to the screen and your newly fabricated flow state continues. Seconds tick by and minutes melt into hours that go extinct. Before long, clever you has created several side-splitting variants of cows. You chuckle. You chortle. You gurgle and titter.

You have created a new art form.

This digital graffiti (Nyan Cat!), or modern doodling, is growing in brilliance around the web. With the evolution of online media, we transform the handful of characters and symbols we are bound to from shackles to tools. A new medium to paint images.

Shameless Promotion

This coming Friday at 6 pm in the Tappan basement is the History of Art Honors Symposium.  I happen to be one of the poor suckers presenting, so here is a brief explanation of what my fellow thesis writers have been working so hard on:

Genevieve King, “Ideology and the Idyllic: Painting Anarchy in Paul Signac’s Au Temps d’Harmonie”

Gen’s thesis is on a beautiful topic that, frankly, I am pretty jealous of (I had originally wanted to do something similar).  Her’s deals with a Signac painting called In the Time of Harmony and its relationship with anarchist Utopian thought at the end of the 19th Century in France.  Its a complicated subject, as anyone who has even glimpsed at the constantly changing politics of 1800’s France knows.  Her thesis has a landscape, it has propaganda by the deed, it has the Paris Commune.  Its got everything.

Jessica Larson (me), “Shear Power: Scandalous Women and the Coiffure à la Titus”

– My thesis is on a short-lived haircut from the French Revolution.  Originally men wore it in an attempt to imitate ancient Roman emperor styles, but women took it as their own and chaos ensued.  Surprisingly, men in 18th Century France didn’t like it when women cut off all of their hair.  And Napoleon definitely didn’t like it.

Sarah Rabinowe, “Illuminating Jurisprudence: Judges and Judgement in the Wolfenbüttel Sachsenspiegel

Sarah’s topic is crazy complicated and I am so impressed with anyone that does something outside of Modernism.  As my stupid, Modernist mind understands it, her thesis presentation is on how judges are portrayed in a specific medieval legal code.  There are lots of parallels between the gestures of judges and those in Christ imagery.  It is very exciting and the images are amazing.

Melinda Stang, “Rally Round the Flag: Propaganda in Britain During the First World War”

– Melinda’s thesis presentation is on the English propaganda that was produced by Wellington House during WWI.  It is very nice to see someone doing a thesis on something English and post-1900 for once.  Her presentation largely deals with the ways in which the English propaganda bureau manufactured ideas of nationalism through visual imagery.  It is very well done and has crazy diagrams.

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Flarf.

Inspired by my fellow blogger, Mark Bruckner’s fascinating last post on internet poetry, I’m going to take a moment and plug for one of my favorite 21st century poetic movements – flarf.

Flarf poetry…is…well it’s a….well why don’t I show you a flarf poem real quick.

This is “Why do I hate flarf so much” by Drew Gardner

She came from the mountains, killing zombies at will. Some people cried “but that was cool!” and I could only whisper “we should NOT be killing zombies!” What have you gotten yourself to do? Did it ever occur to you that you may in fact hate yourself? I know I do . . . I’m not nearly high enough yet—and you’re not helping. My group got invited to join the Flarfist Collective, set up some hibachis and do what we do best, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this writing if it were a library and I checked out the entire world as if it were a single book. Strike “helpful” off your list. The 4th quarter gets pretty intense and the announcers are usually trying to figure out who is going to become overwhelmed by their own arrogant nightmares. It would upset the stomach of the balance of nature. I always go red over the stupidest things and I have no clue why. Whether it’s speaking in front of the class or someone asking me why I think I have the right to say anything. Why do I need an enemy to feel okay about what I’m doing? Observe yourself as you browse with sophistication through the topic of Authorship & Credibility. Why do I hate the surface of the world so much that I want to poison it? Why do I hate this so much? Well . . . you Hate Your Fucking Dad! Why is the screen so damn small? And why does the car turn so sharply? And why is the only sound I hear the sound of a raft of marmosets? BECAUSE I’m fucking ANXIOUS AS HELL about EVERYTHING.AAAAAAAAARGH. It’s even worse: “I’ll tell you later.” The medium is literally made of thousands of beautiful, living, breathing wolves. Why do I hate the moon so much? Unpublish your ideas in reverse. People hate any new way of writing. My girlfriend really hates it. There is not so much daytime left. Life is like spring snow tossing off mercurial Creeley-like escapes from life-threatening health problems. In summer we love winter in winter we love summer—all poetry is written in social mercurochrome. Since I hate the abridgement of life, a function of needing to please unpleaseable parents is more what this is about. Hate and love—if those are the options I just want to love and hate lobsters. The oddity is not so much that Blake held these eccentric views for most of his life, but that in modern civilization they not only extend the hand, so that it could not complain about complaining about something it hadn’t even bothered to read, and instead formed a halfway decent indie rock band. I’m actually starting to get much more interested in white people than I used to be. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because it is against everything good this country once espoused. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because of the awful conflict it places the law-abiding or police-fearing poets under.

Alright! That was a bit long, but hopefully you hung in there and it was worth it. That is flarf. Flarf is an umbrella term. It encompasses a group of poets who use the internet and new technologies to generate poetry. It’s really more of a found poetry than the traditional “sitting on a beach late at night looking at the stars being emotional” kind of poetry. The most famous flarf technique is to google something and use the results (and the text on those pages) to generate poems. Other techniques might be something akin to using google translate on a poem to transform it into a mass of confusing word structures and interesting double speak.

The creators of flarf initially had a listserv and created these monstrous poems only for each other’s enjoyment. But somewhere along the line something really interesting and maybe even beautiful(?) came out of it. Flarf is profane, disgusting, devoid of poetic gesture, inane, heartless, and sometimes total nonsense. But it’s also fascinating because of those very reasons. Comparisons are often drawn to the artistic movement know as Dada, for both the similarities in the nonsensical name and also the anarchist and joyous artwork that was produced. And I think that’s why I love flarf. It is anarchy at its best. A love and a disregard for everything.

Whether you love flarf or hate it, it certainly has character and offers a really interesting take on this weird post-modern world we are a part of. Check out some more flarf here. Make your own flarf poem! Recite some for friends! Family! There is no better gift for a loved one than a flarf. And may yours days be filled with rewarding and confusing google searches.

On Publicizing [Homo,Hetero,Confused,Everything Gray] Sexuality

In evaluation of artistic blockbuster themes of summer 2012, the idea of “examining the visibility of queer bodies within mainstream culture,” as stated by the curators at the Brooklyn Museum, is one that resonated with me most closely. Not because of my personal sexual orientation, which becomes more and more grey despite my fairly defined personal orientation, as venues such as the Brooklyn Museum continue to put forth toward main stream culture, but because of the political and social climate defined in the past year.

A. L. Steiner: Inverted triangle with flames on top of itOn May 9, 2012 during an interview with ABC News, President Obama stated that he believes same sex couples “should be able to get married.” This was the first time that any Presidential candidate has publicly announced support for this topic.  Ironically, two years prior to this government endorsed idea, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., a government sponsored institution, was the “first major exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture” as stated by NPR. The exhibition titled “Hide/Seek” featured work by famous artists such as Warhol, Whitman, and Johns, and featured the highly controversial video by the late artist David Wojnarowicz, titled “A Fire in My Belly.”

Two years, six states, and one presidential endorsement later, the openness of questionable sexual orientation has manifested within and outside the art world.  From the eyes of a fairly irregular and untrained arts patron, I have personally stumbled into four different exhibits this summer featuring the questioning and publication of sexual orientation in a public light without the intention of doing so. These resonated with me so greatly because each touched on a different aspect of sexual orientation that opened the conversation to more than merely accepting homosexuality, but rather  showcasing many voices on a topic that has separated our culture despite every other way we are similar other than those we decide to love. They shed light onto the idea of open and less defined sexuality that spans more than personal preference, but what it means for the human race, emotional health, and perception of ideas in mainstream culture.

From highly provocative images of multi-partnered sexual relations at a gallery opening filled with dirty Brooklyn hipsters drinking PBR in Chelsea, to political justice exhibitions at the Whitney Museum on the upper east side showcasing a voice over of a protest for equal rights for homosexual citizens and the social stigmas that follow, to the depths of Brooklyn at the Raw/Cooked exhibit where Brooklyn based artist Ulrike Müller asked fellow female artists to define their interpretation of lesbianism through multiple mediums, to the discussion of redefining sexuality through early education at the New Museum in SoHo all show that sexualization in popular media probe further than what we see in Rent! or portraying homosexuality as a counterculture. Instead, these works showcase the shades of grey and redefine sexuality as something that should be more open for discussion and less of an avant-garde or counterculture dialogue.

By presenting 360 degree view of sexuality to the public, we can be defined less as gay, straight or lesbian. We can become reeducated on the ideas of the role, or lack of role, in the public eye, and become more accepting of everything different (or the same) from ourselves.

My Favorite Film Accents

Accents are tough.  But when executed properly they can add a depth of reality to characters that no antiquated diction ever can.  Christian Bale in fact, makes it a point to use a different accent in all of his films.

For this week, I’d thought I’d post a Top Five List of my favorite filmic accents.  Some of which are based on real, identifiable accents (like Brad Pitt’s in Snatch) and some are just whatever the actor felt like doing (like Martin Short in Father of the Bride).

Sarah’s Top Five Favorite Accents in Film

1. Brad Pitt’s pikey accent in Snatch

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2. Martin Short’s made-up accent in Father of the Bride

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3. Benecio Del Toro’s clipped syllables as Fenster in The Usual Suspects

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4. Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus/Sg. Lincoln Osiris in Tropic Thunder

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5. Alan Rickman’s Russian and American Accents in Die Hard

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