Damian Hirst

Damian Hirst

    Of all the exhibit style artist we checked out in class, Hirst is by far the most interesting to me. I think it's hilarious how he can be an artist but flirts with the fine line of perverted insane guy. His whole style is super creepy and if he didn't do it as well as he does, I can only imagine that he would be committed. Damien Hirst was born June 7th, 1965 (classifying him as a gemini like myself,) in Britain. Hirst has done a lot of art with death as the center piece, mosty with dead animals. Because he's done such pieces with a dead shark, horse, and cow, this style became the definition of Britart in the 90's. Sadly, since the end of the 90's, Hirst has been criticized for plagiarism in his work. He also made a statement about the 9-11 attacks saying, "You've got to hand it to them on some level."  I think that statement is insensitive, but the guy was born to shock people and everyone is entitled to their opinion, in my opinion.

Annette Messager

Annette Messager

     Messager is a French artist who was born in 1943. Messager is known mainly for her installation work which, like Boltanski, includes photographs, prints and drawings, and various materials. Messager has done most of her work in a museum style. She is the partner of artist Christian Boltanski. Messager attended the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France but was eventually asked to leave because she spent her time at museums and movie theaters instead of going to school.

     In 2005, her work was featured in the French Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, where she won the Golden Lion for her Pinocchio-inspired installation that transformed the French pavilion into a casino. some of her most famous work is her exhibition the messengers(Mori art museum in Tokyo), which showcases a bunch of dead birds in sweaters which she knit herself, some of the birds heads were replaced by stuffed animal heads. She had a solo exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2007.

James Luna

James Luna

    James luna is a Mexican-American and Native American performance artist and multimedia installation artist who was born in 1950 and grew up in California. Luna started out as a painter but started to experiment in the performance/ installation art, that he's best known for, for the last 3 decades. 

    Probably his most popular piece of work is the one I've included above called "Artifact Piece" (1987.) In this piece, you can see that James Luna has placed himself inside a glass box and lay very still as if he is himself an artifact. Luna amazes me because of his unique way of putting together seemly unrelated types of art into a feasible project that makes an impression on most who stumble upon it.

Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski

   Christian Boltanski was born in Paris in 1944. His artistic career began when he left formal education at the age of 12, at which point he started painting and drawing. Since the 1960s, he has worked with the ephemera of the human experience, from obituary photographs to rusted biscuit tins. Several of Boltanski's projects have used actual lost property from public spaces.

    Boltanski has a very strange view on art that I think sounds fantastic. He believes that an artist should be lazy. His way of working is just hanging around waiting until some creative idea hits you, then he makes it happen in ten minutes. this works very well for my own way of life. In the mid 80's, Boltanski started doing museum-like installments with light as the essential concept. He takes old photos of people and tin boxes as you can see in the picutre above. "Chases School" has photos of jewish children from the 30's to sort of recreate history and bring a new light on the holocaust. Boltanski says,  "My work is about the fact of dying, but it's not about the Holocaust itself."

Molotov Man

"Joywar"

     The debate about what copyright infringement really entails will most likely get more and more heated as technology makes remixing any form of art easier and easier. When Joy decided to use a photo of a man throwing a molotov cocktail for a painting of hers, she probably didn't realize how big of a deal it was that she'd picked this particular photo. I think her technique of putting a bunch of google images into a folder for long enough to forget where she got them is asking for a lawsuit.

     As an artist, I understand where Susan, the original artist, is coming from. Her photo of the molotov man has been used and remixed so many times before Joy decided to do it. The one big problem is how far out of context Joy's photo was taken. You really can't do too much about your art being remixed these days and usually you get some credit for the original piece. In this case, Joy should have realized that she had painted a picture of an already famous piece. She's lucky that Susan didn't go through with suing her because what she did was an artist "no-no." If she used the same google that got her that photo in the first place, Joy would've quickly realized that this art piece had already made an impact in society.

Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton

      Ann Hamilton is a contemporary American artist best known for her installations, textile art, and sculptures, but also does photography, printmaking, video, and video installation. She is a very innovative museum artist who makes me wish I would've researched her before we did this museum project. She graduated at University of Kansas in textural design then got her Masters of Fine Arts at Yale for sculpture. 

     The exhibit I've posted is called "The Picture is Still" That Hamilton had showing in the Akira Ikeda Gallery in Japan. The gallery space is located next to the harbor and this installation includes the "Dry Ocean" created by more than 130,000 Japanese charcoals hung from the ceiling with threads, the DVD projection and sounds. As requested by the artist, this project was completed with the help of local volunteers. It took 2 weeks and 600 people were involved in the making. The size of the space is 15 meters in width, 27 meters in length, 4 meters in height. Charcoals are suspended through out the space down to 280 cm from the ceiling, that is 150 cm from the floor. In the center of the gallery, there are two tunnels, which are 12 meters in length and 2 meters in width. DVD projection is installed on both tunnels. This DVD was created for this show. The image is projected directly on the metal door using a projector. A digital camera following a black and white photograph of a child's face creates the image. During the filming, the camera was so close to the photo that one would not see the whole picture. The sound from the DVD is the artist whispering and a child whistling, but slowed down to create a drone.

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson is an artist who's best known for not creating art with his hands, but putting items together with a conscious idea of how the spacial arrangement with be and what the cultural statement is about. His whole artistic plan is to take kitche or sometimes racist objects and put them together in a new context.  The purpsoe for this is to show the audience how different objects can be when they're juxtaposed and make the viewer ponder on how each of these culture biases have shaped how we view history. 

An installation artist and political activist, Wilson's subject is social justice and his medium is museology. In the 1970s, he worked as a free-lance museum educator for the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Crafts Museum. Beginning in the late 1980s, Wilson used his insider skills to create a series of "mock museums" that address how museums consciously or unwittingly reinforce racist beliefs and behaviors.

Duchamp

       
       Marcel Duchamp was born in France to an artistic and musical family. Duchamp's early art works align with post-impressionist styles. He experimented with classical techniques and subjects, as well as with Cubism and Fauvism. When he was later asked about what had influenced him at the time, Duchamp cited the work of Symbolist painter Odilon Redin, whose approach to art was not outwardly anti-academic, but quietly individual. 
      I have posted Duchamp's "nude descending a staircase no. 2" because it was a painting he did that changed the course of his career. For whatever reason, this painting was very controversial in the early 20th century art world. He first submitted the piece to a Cubist Salon des independence, where one of the judges ask Duchamp's brother to have Marcel either withdraw the painting or name it something else. Duchamp came over to the salon in a taxi and took his painting back home with him. A year later he entered it into New York's Armory Show. Here the name stayed but the controversy stayed. The "realism" audience felt betrayed by his futurism view of a nude painting. this is why i think art show snobs are the strangest breed. Why can't art just be art? Anyway, Duchamp is super famous now so I guess controversy is always best.