Thursday, November 12, 2009
Enlightened mapping
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Death and Life

Gustav Kilmt's painting Death and Life is saturated with imagery. The composition is broken in to two pillars of activity on the left and on the right. Unlike many of Klimt's other works, the background is a relatively flat, eery green color with some texture added through the use of brush strokes. On the left is a figure with a skull for a head and a bony hands that hold an object that looks like a flute or a recorder. The left hand figure represents death. His body is shrouded in pattern containing the catholic cross that is highlighted by the pattern but interior shows through to the background. The colors on the shroud are dark and ominous.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Ultramarine (walker post)

The Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo cane shroud) comes from artist Yves Klein. To the eye this painting looks simple and hurried. The blurred images congeal to form outlines of bodies engaging in activity. The brashness of "brush" stroke and high contrast of ultramarine blue on white was interesting to me, The painting seems unfinished yet brazenly complete.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
how to "ADD ELEGANCE TO YOUR POVERTY"



Take one stark, white wall; add black spray paint text and outline of a picket fence. Artist Monica Bonvicini obviously had a message in mind when in 2002 she created the work “Add Elegance to your poverty”.
The image size is variable due to the nature of the design. The artist can transfer the work only by re-painting the image in a new viewing space. This allows for a different visual affect each time the piece moves galleries possibly suggesting the transient nature of poverty in and out of people’s lives and the different ways poverty is seen in people’s lives. Bonvicini’s piece in the Midway Contemporary Gallery stands roughly 7 feet high and 14 feet wide. The text is written in plain text and all capital letters. There are 12 long, thin and pointed rectangles below the text that I assume to be a portion of a picket fence. The overall appearance is impressive with an in-your-face message.
Monica Bonvicini is an artist who always likes to make a statement with her work, which includes everything from 3-D constructions of toilets to flat installments of text or photographs. Bonvicini comments on a variety of social inequalities and perceptual sexual discrepancies. One piece displays large photographs of construction workers engaging in homosexual, pornographic acts. The fuel for this racy installment came from a trip that she took to Italy that she ended abruptly because of the harassment she received from the construction workers there. Bonvicini takes the idea of hard-bodied construction workers as being the ideal portrayal of masculinity and then asks the question “why are construction workers so appealing?” The work is ongoing and accompanied by a series of questionnaires that she hands out to Construction workers, including questions such as “what does your wife think of your dry cracked hands?” Bonvicini is obsessed with the relationship between building and sexuality. Another of Monica Bonvicini’s favorite topics is the inequality that women architects are subject to in “boys club” of building. She created “Stairway to Hell” seemingly to mock the male architects of the past. With her staircase Bonvicni comments on her inability to move in a desirable direction on social “staircase” among her male counterparts. The staircase has the dimensions of up and down but the chain-link that surrounds the structure suggests that either way one goes hell is the future.
It seems that Monica Bonvicini always has something to say. In “Poverty” the only visual clue to what is being said, is the white picket fence below the text. Perhaps Bonvicini is saying something about the old American Dream of having a nice house with a yard and a white fence. It seems she alludes to this dream becoming a standard for living, a necessity today instead of a nicety. The appearance of someone or something has become much more important than the internal stability of these things. Bonvicini could be commenting on the poverty of the soul that many people try to fill with material things. Following her trend of commenting on the sick nature if building, Bonvicini could be commenting on the poverty of ingenuity in the field of construction and architecture.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
mining the museum




I have selected four paintings for this assignment. The paintings would be hung on the walls of a jail cell. There would be a sumptuous bed in the middle of the cell and nothing else. I want the paintings to say something about women using their sexual powers for violence and other evils.