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...