When Craft Gets Sloppy

Pedagogical=of or relating to teaching.

I really like the idea of making something sloppy on purpose.  I think about doing that myself because usually, the projects I do are really perfect.  Sloppy is hard for me.  But I have a feeling if I tried to make something sloppy it would look, planned out sloppy.  

Abject=extremely bad, unpleasant, and degrading.

Prodigious=remarkably or impressively great in extent, size, or degree.

"The lack of evident skill somehow implies the presence of concept." - this may be true sometimes, but I really don't think that is the case always.  I know that when I see something well made, I do think about the smarts that it takes to build it.  I know that doesn't touch on the conceptual aspect of it...  A piece of art that is well made would probably have to be in a museum/gallery type setting for there the be a conceptual aspect expected.  

Celerity=swiftness of movement.

Investing in the Object

Pejorative=expressing contempt or disapproval.

I really don't think there will ever be a definite way to define art, craft, or the mix of the two.  I think every one has their own style.  Their work may be easy to define but it may cross the art or craft line either way.  I think it is a compliment to say that something is well made.  I don't think in any way that it takes away from the concept behind it.  I do think it can be both.  

Atrophy=wasting away.

Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge

Interpellation = bring into being or give meaning to.

"He (Lacan) was most concerned with how human beings come to imagine themselves as unique individuals even as they are given identity within the social structures of Western capitalism."

• This is funny.  Is it saying that we are ridiculous to think we are unique?  In some ways, I think so.  There are so many of us, is it really possible to be truly unique, probably in very slim amount of cases.

"Docile bodies of the modern state - citizens who participate in the ideologies of the society through cooperation and desire to fit in and conform."

• I have to face it, I am a docile body...

"Photography has been used to document foreign cultures since its beginnings, and hence to provide visual codes of difference between the anthropologists and their subjects."

• Is this a bad thing?  Yes, there is a certain amount of power in saying that what you do is different, so then you automatically compare what you do to what others do and then decide which is better.  But I think there is more power in looking at another culture and just simply thinking that, well we all do things differently, so what?

"We believe we know what culture is because we can identify  its opposite (nature), thus difference is essential to its meaning."

• I like this definition.  It is very true that we identify the differences between each other.  So that is how we identify what we do differently.

Clearing the Ground

"Do you think that basic physiological demands - organic functions, as you call them - are external to social life, to culture, to civilization, and are thus unchangeable, or relatively so?  Such a postulate would be highly debatable and highly dangerous."

• Basic physiological demands are separate from those things, only in the thought that they are necessary functions in order to survive.  But they are also fully engrained into social life, culture etc.  I don't think they can ever be completely taken out of those social aspects.  For example, what we eat is part of culture.  Why is it dangerous though?

"Everyday life is an aspect of history, an interesting one, maybe, but minor.  To study it in itself and for itself entails certain dangers."

• Why does he like that world, danger, so much?  Why is that dangerous.  "Everyday" life is part of culture and life.  It can't be taken out of that.  It may not be newsworthy, but it is part of us.  It is there, so why not study it?  I find little quirks that people have to be extremely interesting.

Praxis = practice, accepted practice or custom.

"Critique of unfulfilment and alienation should not be reduced to a bleak picture of pain and despair.  It implies an endless appeal to what is possible in order to judge the present and what has been accomplished."

• I really like this explanation.  I have often worried about what I haven't done with my life so far, I guess it just shows that I am willing to change my situation.  

Response to the article by Herrell Fletcher

I really liked this little excerpt.  I love that he chose people for his inspiration in art.  I always want to talk to people more.  I have always been a shy person so it is really hard for me to open up.  I have been trying to force myself to do so a lot lately.  I think people are the best inspiration.  We all are so very amazing and you should open yourself up to meeting everyone you can.  I feel that every person has something to offer, good or bad.

"For What and For Whom?"

More definitions...

Ubiquity = present, appearing, or found everywhere.

Tonnage = weights in tons. (I like this word, anything with 'age' on the end it great)

Deputisation = 

Skulduggery = underhanded behavior (this word is just fun to say)

This article is about the expansion of the duties of the curator to the general public.  But that is only a new developing form of curating.  And that it can never replace the actual profession of curator.  

I really like the idea of the every day person participating in curating.  But it definitely should not take away from the education and knowledge required to be a professional curator.

"Curating doubt"

This is one I had to read twice, so I will mostly just have definitions...

Neologism = a newly coined word or expression.  (Good to know, I make up words all the time...)

Demarcation = the act of fixing the boundary or limits of something.

Hypertrophied = become enlarged (I don't know why the author used this word, the author already used 'expanding' right before it...)

Antecedent = a thing or event that existed before or logically proceeds another.

Segue = a uninterrupted transition.

Cadre = a small group of people specially trained for a particular purpose or profession.

Elision = the omission of a sound or syllable when speaking.  

Hegemony = leadership or dominance.

This article is of course about the uncertainty of the definition of a curator or curating.  I don't particularly identify with this topic; I guess I just have never thought about it.  I didn't realize there was such ambiguity within the profession.  I guess if I was ever put into the position of a curator, I would probably have a lot of self doubt too.  Will people like this?  Do I like this?  Does that matter?  It could go on like that forever.  I don't think there will ever be a real definition for this though.  Art changes all the time.  Every artist is so different as well, that how are you really supposed to know what will sell?  There should be a prerequisite to be an Anthropologist to be a curator.  This is all related to our next assignment!  Oh wait, I have an Anthropology degree....

Response to "Album" and "Images of the Everyday"

"Album"

Okay, at first I had no idea what was going on.  Of course the second reading cleared that all up a bit.  

"At 4 pm on the street I am always surprised by the indifference of the people crossing each other's paths."

• I think this just about everyday.  I think that on the bus on the way to school.  When someone sits next to me, I think, the person is so close, why don't we talk?  Usually listening to your ipod allows you to avoid that question...  Also, the only time that someone talks to me on the street is when I am with the little girl I nanny for.  Something about a cute little kid opens people up.

"Images of the Everyday"

"The habitual manners of behaving, (which were) governed by custom, passed on by tradition, had to be replaced by rules"

• Ahh oh my gosh, why do people think they can have that much power?  I guess because they do.  It's amazing how easily it is to "trick" people in to behaving in certain ways, even without them knowing it.  But making them think they are taking control, when there really don't have any.

"For him, women as homemakers enter into his model simply as the means for transmitting middle class values to the working class.  He does not consider how the home economics classes - because they were taught to and carried out by women - shaped the subjectivity of women in particular."

• Just another example of how people think they should be able to have this kind of power over others.  

"By portraying herself within these stereotypes, Messager acted out how advertising had influenced her.   Yet her drawn activities appear exaggerated and highly unnatural, providing a parody of the stereotypes and rising above the media immersion, signaling a critical perspective that Lefebvre would have thought women could not attain."

• I really like that Messager did this.  In a really simple way, she was able to say so much with just sketches.  She admitted that advertising has an affect, and it does.  But she was of course, able to rise above it and make fun of it.  Women are not pawns, it is easy to see through the attempts of advertisers to trick women into buying certain products or ideals.  

Response to "The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away"

Deluge = a severe flood.

"should everything, without exception, before his eyes in the form of an enormous paper sea, be considered to be valuable or to be garbage, and then should it all be saved or thrown away?  Given such a relationship, the vacillations in making such a choice becomes agonizing."

• I feel this way every time I feel it necessary to do major cleaning.  It does become amazing to realize how much you keep when you actually take the time to clean it up...  Why is it so hard to throw things away though?  That bank statement from six years ago, really does not need to be kept any longer...
  

"In our memory everything becomes equally valuable and significant.  All points of our recollections are tied to one another.  They form chains and connections in our memory which ultimately comprise the story of our life."

• Memories can be so vivid and important to use.  I definitely would not want to forget everything that happened in my life.  But why do we get so attached to them?  And attached to the things that bring them up?  Memories are just that, memories.  What happened does not exist anymore.  It happened, but is now over.  They aren't really anything to be attached to.

"To deprive ourselves of all this means to part with who we were in the past, and in a certain sense, it means to cease to exist."

• This is an intense sentence.  How can you not exist because you get rid of garbage?  It seems a bit silly to me.  You are not the garbage that you keep around!

Response to "Equality Celebrates the Ordinary"

Response to “Equality Celebrates the Ordinary”
“…all sounds should have equal opportunity to be heard and appreciated.” Pg.113
• I love Cage’s thought of every little thing, non human thing, should be appreciated. It’s just a way to slow down, and listen.

“Noises, too had been discriminated against; and being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises.” Pg. 114
• This is just so cute and funny. To care about something like that so much. Does noise need someone to fight for it? Or is he just talking about everything that we don’t normally take time to appreciate? Not just noise, but germs or smells.

“Encomium” pg.115
• A speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly.

“For in examining them – activities which everyone engages in, but does differently – the simultaneous variety and unity of human life seemed evident. And this in itself seemed a form of equal representation.” Pg. 117
• I love this stuff. I studied Anthropology and took many classes about just what people do in everyday life, but do differently in other cities, states, countries… It is so cool to me to find out those things.

“The moment you label something, you take a step – I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabelled… The mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting.” Pg. 118
• Have you ever tried to just look at something, like you were looking at it for the first time? Like a chair, you know it is called a chair. But they are only called that because we decided it would be. It doesn’t really have a name. It’s just there. And once you know the name of it, I think the wonder goes away. It is definitely harder to see it again as something new and refreshing.

Response to "A Short History of Photography"

“…the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us.” Pg. 58
• I have often thought about this too. Does a painting have as much magic as it once did? I actually think it does. Photography is a different medium. You can take amazing pictures of course, but the skill that goes into making a realistic painting is astounding to me.

“Physiognomy” pg. 62
• A person’s facial features or expression.

“The amateur who returns home with great piles of artistic shots is in fact no more appealing a figure than the hunter who comes back with quantities of game of no use to anyone but the dealer.” Pg. 63
• Is this true? What if the hunter came back with a bunch of squirrel? I would take the amateur pictures over squirrel.

Response to "Beauty Knows No Pain"

“And why do so many art critics and historians no longer consider the judgment of beauty to be a valid exercise?”
• I didn’t know that was true… Beauty is such a huge part of life. People judge, there is no way around that. So why isn’t it valid?

“Modernism in particular is reproached for rendering beauty outmoded, for sending the beautiful into “banishment” or “exile” so as to promote the experience of the sublime.”
• This is a good way to describe modernism. I don’t think it’s bad to put beauty aside, in order to explore something else.

“Whereas this total collapse of the difference between copy and original requires an entirely new category of cognition and conceptualization, contemporary musing on the beautiful…”
• This is very interesting. I have always wondered if we will be able to get back to natural and true beauty. Rather than photo editing pictures to make them look ideally beautiful.

Response to "Death of an Author"

Castrato= a male singer castrated in boyhood so as to retain a soprano or alto voice. The practice of castration was banned in 1903.

“The author is a modern figure, a product of our society in so far as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’.” Pg. 41
• What were people called before the Middle Ages that wrote? It is interesting that the author emerged out of a time when religion was being questioned and knowledge was more accessible to poorer people. People were then allowed to think for themselves.

“...it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’.” Pg. 42
• How does the language perform without the author? We put the words in order to make sentences, paragraphs… why is writing impersonal? Most think of it as very personal.

(this guy is punctuation-happy)

“Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” Pg. 44
• I actually agree with this. Is you know who the author is or where the came from, you immediately judge or put a social context on that person, and then probably judge the writing that way as well. I once had a teacher that would not let us read about the author at all before reading the book.

Appropriation Artist: Barbara Kruger

BARBARA KRUGER

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. After attending Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, and studying art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York, Kruger obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. Working for Mademoiselle Magazine, she was quickly promoted to head designer. Later, she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. This background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground." Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. As well as appearing in museums and galleries worldwide, Kruger’s work has appeared on billboards, buscards, posters, a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and in other public commissions. She has taught at the California Institute of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in New York and Los Angeles. (From Barbarakruger.com)

Response to "The Practices of Looking"

“Looking involves learning to interpret and, like other practices, looking involves relationships of power. To willfully look or not is to exercise choice and influence. To be made to look, to try to get someone else to look at you at something you want to be noticed, or to engage in an exchange of looks, entails a play of power.” Pg. 10
• I never thought of “looking” in this way. I don’t know if I believe it. Is telling someone to look at something really power or powerful?

“Yet it remains the photographer who frames and takes the image, not the camera itself. At the same time, despite the subjective aspects of the act of taking a picture, the aura of machine objectively clings to mechanical and electronic images. All camera-generated images, be they photographic, cinematic, or electronic (video or computer-generated), bear the cultural legacy of still photography, which historically has been regarded as a more objective practice than, say, painting or drawing. This combination of the subjective and the objective is a central tension in camera-generated images.” Pg. 16
• I don’t totally understand what this means….

“A photograph is often perceived to be an unmediated copy of the real world…” pg. 17
• What do you think of the myth of photographic truth?

“Digital imaging thus can be said to have partially eroded the public’s trust in the truth-value of photography and the camera image as evidence.” Pg. 20
• So what next? Will it get to a point to where we can’t trust any pictures?

“Whereas Newsweek used the mug shot as it was, Time heightened the contrast and darkened Simpson’s skin tone in its use of this image on the magazine’s cover, reputedly for “aesthetic” reasons. Interestingly, the magazine’s publishers do not allow this cover to be reproduced.” Pg. 24
• Sort of amazed by this, but not at the same time…

“Glamour is the quality of being envied.” Pg. 39
• Never thought about it in this way…

Response to "For an Art Against the Mythology..."

“The interests served by ideology are not human interests properly defined; rather, ideology serves society by shoring up its particular form of social organization.”
• I think this is the main point of the whole article. That all that we “believe” in is possibly a sham. Who is actually shaping our society?

“In our society, that ideology is held up as the only possible set of attitudes and beliefs, and we are all more or less impelled to adopt them…”
• I feel like this a lot. I sometimes don’t do something’s because of what people might think of me. I always know in my head that that is extremely stupid. But seeming ideologies can be a powerful thing.

“Television, for example, is, in its most familiar form, one of the primary conduits of ideology, through its programs and commercials alike”
• TV is such a huge part of a lot of people’s lives. I know I watch too much of it… Is it possible to ignore the ideologies presented on those shows or ads? I think some of it seeps in your mind no matter what you do.

“Cultural products can never bring about substantive changes in society, yet they are indispensable to any movement that is working to bring about such changes.”
• This hit me quite a bit. Something you create is just part of a possible change. That can take off a lot of pressure to create something amazing.

"My" Street

I live in the basement of a house, so the view outside my window is the backyard. I didn’t feel inclined to sit outside on the sidewalk, in the cold, to describe the street I live on. So I decided to head to a warm coffee shop and describe the view outside their window.

The street itself is worn. Two parallel lines show where countless cars have left their impression. Paint lines denoting crosswalks are barely visible. Every sidewalk has chunks missing from the edges, most likely from careless drivers.

Four posts define each corner. The two on the south side are old, made of wood. They bear hundreds of staples from past fliers posted. Many I am sure, didn’t get read. The two on the north are new, made of metal. Nothing adorns them. Was this choice of material intentional?

The southeast corner has a Hollywood video, where I am sure fewer and fewer people frequent because of the extremely convenient process called “downloading”.
On the southwest corner stands a chiropractic clinic. Every window is decorated with a plant box. Possibly the receptionist spent much time carefully watering each flower. Now, each flower has turned brown and brittle. The only one that survives is the biggest and ugliest one.

On the northeast side is the coffee shop I am in. And yes, it is a Starbucks. I know many don’t like this particular coffee chain, but I am not afraid to admit I am a sucker for the burnt coffee masked with milk and chocolate. Inside, blenders blare and crooners croon from the speakers.

Some come alone, like me, in order to get homework done, where distractions better known as a television and food are far away. Some sit in groups to finally get together and catch up on each other’s lives. One group consists of two women sitting quietly, listening to a man who has not stopped monopolizing the conversation for forty-five minutes. I can’t quite make out what they are “discussing”, but it must be very important for the man…

Also, one little girl, about one year old sits with two women. Both adults swoon over her every need, but she could not care less. She is more concerned with the cookie in front of her.

Lastly, the northwest building and most interesting to me, merely because of its history. The corner of the building is proudly stamped with a plaque stating that this is a historical site, circa 1912. The bricks are more worn than the ones on the other buildings. The banners are visibly faded and dirty. Through the window sits rows of “Hello Kitty” bobble head dolls. Which comes as a surprise to me because the rest of the shop holds Asian antiques. Did bobble heads exist in the 1800s?

Response to "The Street"

“At various points, remote-controlled cameras keep an eye on what is going on.”
I have to sit here and watch what other people are doing for this assignment. Who is watching me?
I get a bit creeped out by the thought of cameras around the city. The only obvious ones flash a bright light at you when you decide that a red light is just a suggestion. Other then those, you don’t always notice where the rest of the cameras are.  

“Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.”
I like that the author makes you think about this. What matters, and what doesn’t matter? Does it all matter? Every little thing that you may notice on your street, or anywhere, got there somehow. Whether by nature or man.

“The people in the streets: where are they coming from? Where are they going to? Who are they?”
I often wonder this myself. I try to slow down sometimes and wonder, how did this person get here? How did I get here?

“Nothing is happening, in fact.”
This line seemed a bit random to be. It stood alone in the article. Is it possible for nothing to happen? To me, something is always happening. People walking, tires rotating, flags blowing… He even describes things of that sort. What is his definition of “happening”?

Text and Picture Assignment

Quote from "Traveler's Tales: Japan", short story "Into the Denko Furo" by Jeff Greenwald, pg. 62

"Their faces wore expressions of the purest transcendence, like samurai warriors under torture."

This book is a collection of short stories written by traveler's experiences in Japan.

The paragraph the quote is in describes two tattooed men the author sees in a sento, a shared bathhouse in an apartment building.

When I read the sentence alone, it doesn't seem to tell much about the story.  But when read in the paragraph it makes a lot more sense, even though I wouldn't expect to find that this sentence was used to describe two guys in a public shower...