Yes Men, Cindy Sheehan, Nikky Lee

I really dig the Yes Men's work. It's a really funny and smart way to get people to start thinking. I like the fact that they don't just go for the obvious route of making obvious, blatant statements like "WTO is bad'. They wrap their message in the authority of the WTO and present it as an official package. This is the ultimate subversion. My only possible beef with their approach is that they do not give solutions to the problems they present. After people start asking questions, what's next? Then again, there are no easy solutions to these problems. I think it would have been great if the Yes Men had included some practical information into their performances.

Nikki Lee's work also involves impersonation. I think the process of her work, adopting clothes and mannerisms of a culture, raises alot of interesting questions about identity. Can you become someone else, just by acting like someone else? Is identity merely a series of performances? The authenticity conveyed in her photographs is what gets me. Along with the well-researched exterior, Nikky seems to have adopted the physical attitude of her target group. The way she carries herself is different according to the group. It really sucks to think that "I" is that mutable. How do you define someone if personality is just a compilation of transient traits?

Cindy Sherman's work is along the same lines as Nikki's. Sherman photographs herself in various makeup and clothing. Her work also brings up the same questions about acting. Is a human just a mixture of props, clothes, and hair? Her mimicry of movies also calls into the question the nature of reality. Her photographs have the quality of a constructed movie-reality, yet is reflects the real world. What's real, the object or the perception of the object?

Sell your dreams, thoughts, conversation.
Cash perfume.
Sell your heritage.
Stock market souls.
Company that adopts sells kids for higher price.
Make religion.
Government whorehouse

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Nikky Lee
Cindy sheeman
Yes men

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This is my magazine ad. It features Maya Angelou and its by Target. It's main appeal is Maya Angelou's endorsement and focuses on race. I think it's pretty tacky that a massive corporation like Target used Maya's image and heritage as a means to sell assorted products. I have a couple ideas for this ad.
1. Replace Maya with this:


Photoshop the kid's sign to become a red Target logo. I think it would be fitting because the original ad talks about the future of youths today.

2. Photoshop the picture of Malcolm X holding an AK and then have little Target tags hanging off everything, including the AK. The kind of tags that tell you what store you bought your clothes/furniture from.

3. Take a photo of a smiling African American kid and super impose a target on him.



This is my political Brochure. It's Chap Petersen and Mark Warner at a meeting, smiling. The layout is pretty simplistic to connotate a personal feel. I was thinking about playing off the caption by photoshopping Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel's god finger in place of Mark Warner.




My third thing is Peter Pan Peanut Butter. This is targeted at kids and adults, referencing the nostalgia of Peter Pan and childhood. Maybe I could photoshop the fairy to look like its trapped inside of the jar. Maybe have the fairy drowning in the peanut butter.

Obey

I like the concept of the random Obey GIANT stickers. The stylistic similarities to old-school propaganda make the viewer pause for a second and wonder what the hell it means. It brings up questions about the spaces we live in and the bombardment of visual communication we endure. I liked the effect of the stickers on billboards. The large, repeated "obey" subverts the advertisement completely.

Banksy

http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/images/newerrats/RAT1.jpg

I really like this image. It's a rebellious but playful gesture. It made me question exactly how much of our individual rights and activities we hand over to anonymous signs. I also like the whole rat-race metaphor and how Banksy manages to subvert the negative connotations of deceitful, treacherous rat, into the symbol for an oppressed population that is FORCED to make deceitful and treacherous decisions.

Adbuster blog

The article I'm blogging on can be found here:
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/74/Legacy.html

This article is a short piece on Vietnam War-era unexploded ordnance in Laos. The author, Amy Wahbe, alleges that the unexploded ordnance prevents farmers from farming and developers from developing. Wahbe implies that the bombs have single-handedly crippled Laos.

Wahbe also tacks on a paragraph describing the oblivious tourists and natural, unexploited beauty of Laos. She closes the article with a few sentences about poverty-stricken Laotians and finally leaves us with the information that although there are a few groups clearing the mines, it will take hundreds of years to remove all of them.

Overall, I'm slightly skeptical of this article. I am not a fan of overt emotional manipulation, which this article has in spades. Wahbe is constantly exhorting the lush greenery of Laos and the Laotians as if the poor peasants of Laos aspire to being nothing but idyllic farmers. Wahbe uses the paragraph on tourists to evoke feelings of resentment towards the economic gap.

I am not saying that what Wahbe wrote was incorrect, but simplifying the situation to black and white only promotes ignorance. I am absolutely positive that there are more factors involved in Laos's economic destitution than unexploded ordnance.

It is a real tragedy that Laotions have to deal with and die from unexploded ordnance. However, I think that an article that took in the multiple factors of the Laotian environment, and explored the multiple drives behind the factors, would have prmoted a more practical awareness of the Laotian situation. An awareness that could actually be funneled into action.

Irene Clouthier

It was very interesting to hear Irene Clouthier speak from a working artist's point of view. I was a little disappointed to hear that she had to freelance as a graphic designer to support herself; that's just part of the game. Mrs. Clouthier mentioned that she has to divide her time between marketing her material and making her material which is also another gut check for aspiring artists. Mrs. Clouthier also spoke on how unpredictable the flow of creativity can be.

In terms of Mrs. Clouthier's work, I think it was interesting to see what she created within the technical limitations of the past. Alot of her work has a surreal, collage feel.

Movies

Dislocation

For the 10 second dislocation clip, I'm going to try to play around with reflections within reflections like mirrors facing each other and expand on that theme.

Disembodiment

For disembodiment, I was thinking about taking a bunch of clips of my friend breakdancing and overlapping/ghosting them together with clips of nature/ animals.

Disconnection

Maybe film a card trick and cut that up with different people doing the same trick, maybe even hanging locations.

dislocation: 2.	the act of disrupting an established order so it fails to continue. - dictionary.com

This pretty much sums up my definition of dislocation. Because we're trying to separate dislocation from disconnection and disembodiment, I think dislocation is specifically disrupting an established place. Something that messes with spatial relations is dislocation. Dislocation might be tied in with time; visually, it would be hard to tell if something in a picture was not supposed to be there in the first place. It would have to be a before and after series.

Example: A series of vacation photos of one person in different locations.


Disconnection

Disconnection is the complete lack of conceptual association between two things; two completely different ideas. Disconnection may also be tied in with what we expect and what we actually see. The separation between reality and our perceived reality.

Example: Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Disembodiment

Disembodiment is the lack of concrete form for abstract concepts. A shapeless idea. Disembodiment is probably the one out of the three terms that relies most on outside references. To be disembodied is to be simultaneously dislocated and disconnected.

Example: An inkstain on a desk.

Martina Lopez stated that her artwork springs from events and happenings in her life, like a visual diary. The re-contextualized figures gain new meaning by means of the fantastical landscape. There's a feeling of sadness in her work conveyed through the use of muted colors. The figures in "Bearing in mind" seem to be filled with a painful past. I think this may be due to the cathartic nature of her work.

Ken Gonzales-Day states that the purpose of Bone-Grass Boy was to critique the avant-garde's hypocritical approach of using everyday objects ,which embodied the very thing they were trying to undermine. Ken digitally manipulates the images, creating the look of a pre-modern painting. The incongruency of the she-male lends a humorous air to what I think are supposed to be tasteful and elegant pictures. The images of atrocities contrast deeply with the she-male pics, creating a really disturbing effect.

This is the first in my series of vectored erasure images. My basic concept was that authority transformed people into a force or a presence; the individual becomes an impression.

This was a photo of a policeman in riot gear standing in the middle of a crowd. The people around him paid him as much attention as they did to the sidewalk or the street; he was a fixture.

I believe this is because he carried institutional authority. The policeman was a physical manifestation of an institution. He was not human.

I made the silhouette of the cop black because black meshed with the large areas of black in the other people, reflecting his unobtrusive nature. I though this blend gave him an anonymous vibe, whereas a white silhouette would have drawn too much attention to him.


This is a photo of Nixon in his Oval Office. I chose this photo because of the strong authoritative connotations of the Oval Office. I liked Nixon's body language and how the composition drew my eye towards Nixon.

I silhouetted Nixon in black because it contrasted nicely with the grainy figures surrounding him. The crisp lines of Nixon's figure reinforced his strong presence. I also wanted to establish black as a motif for institutional authority.




This is a photo of a protester confronting riot police in Dublin. To me it appears that the protester has control of the situation, for the moment, and the cops are reacting to him.

In this photo, I wanted to flip around the concept of institutional authority and show some good old-fashioned alpha male authority.

I silhouetted the protester and his weapon in white to clearly differentiate his presence from the previous examples of institutional authority. I think the white space gives the viewer more room to interpret the protester's motivation.






This is the first in my clone-stamp/patch erasure series. My basic theme was to display the things that we leave behind with our names on them and how that reflects on identity.

It's a photo of someone's bookshelf. Most of the books are written by famous men: Hume, Einstein, and Thoreau.

I erased all the words off the covers of the books except for the authors. I was going for the idea that these books were essentially reflections of the people who wrote them. Their entire lives were bound into books and stacked side-by-side.



This is a photo of a headstone of a deceased policeman. I was trying to convey that a rock with a name is what most people leave behind physically. The connotations of a head-stone was a big reason I chose this picture. I erased the fraternal order of police emblem and the inscriptions below in order to draw the focus to the name. I wanted to erase the identity of the policeman, letting the viewer invent a past for the head-stone.


This is a cropped and clone-stamped xerox of someone's criminal record. I was partly influenced by that saying "everybody in life does three things: die, pay taxes, and have painful dooks." This image is a statement of the bureaucracy that we have to endure most of our lives.

I erased all the personal information except the name in keeping with my theme, but also because telephone numbers and addresses change relatively often compared to our names; our personal contact info isn't associated with identity as much as our names are. I blurred the name a little bit to contrast with the straight edges of the criminal record form. I was trying to suggest that our lives and identities are a little bit more organic than the legal forms we define them with.

Presence/Absence

Cohen's view on the presence of absence was a new concept for me. His play on the participation/observation modes through the removal of a figure in the "analogtime" series was particularly interesting. It's strange to question how much of ourselves we actually project into the blank space of his art. To me, Cohen's art makes me think about what I put into that white space, and how it affects the art. It also makes me curious as to what his work means to different people, since they're basically inventing their own image or design to fill the void. With the simple absence of an expected figure, Cohen manages to raise questions on how we observe art, and to what degree do we participate in it.