Finding a Voice

In the 1970's the role of women in society was in a flux like it never had been before in recorded History; despite their clear presence and importance, women had been ignored, and cast into specific culturally defined roles.¹ Judy Chicago's massive multimedia sculpture, The Dinner Party, was her attempt to rectify and draw public attention to forgotten women, their roles, and the struggle to gain equal rights and recognition.² Like Cindy Sherman's use of herself as a model in her Untitled Film Stills series to focus attention on the way society looks at women, literally, Chicago used the dinner tables as a comment about how women were expected to fit into a domestic role, but she set the tables for women of note.³ Her original idea of “a feminist Last Supper” with 13 places gave way as her research showed that the number of important, but disregarded women was far larger than it might seem, which led her to include 39 settings and 999 tiles each representing one specific ignored woman.⁴ The repeated patterns of the triangular tiles in the triangular floor ringed by tables produces an effect not unlike Magdalena Abakanowicz's 80 Backs fiber sculpture, which symbolically depicts individuals being “lost in a crowd” and speaks to the marginalization of the women both individually and collectively.⁵

Bibliography

Abakanowicz, Magdalena. “80 Backs.” 1976-1980 (Museum of Modern Art, Dallas). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-26. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

Chicago, Judy. “The Dinner Party.” Multimedia, including ceramics and stitchery, 1979 (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-24. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

Kleiner, Fred. Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

1 Fred Kleiner, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), 438-9.

2 Ibid., 439.

3 Ibid., 439.

4 Ibid., 438-9.

5 Judy Chicago, “The Dinner Party,” multimedia, including ceramics and stitchery, 1979 (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-24. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), 438.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, “80 Backs,” 1976-1980 (Museum of Modern Art, Dallas). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-26. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), 440.

Kleiner, 438-40.

Gears, Clocks, Pipes, and Urinals: Art as the Psyche

          The generation of artists that were making art during the beginning of the 20^th century saw many drastic changes in society. The machine-like nature of modern life led to the machine-like nature of the first World War. The basis of this new oil and blood-soaked life caused several strong reactions in the art and general academic worlds. New theories about what was, and what should be abounded. Among this furore of new ideas, two artistic movements captured aspects of modernity in completely novel ways. Dadaism and Surrealism, while aesthetically different, share many commonalities, and are rather similar, even in their differences.

          As if a magazine had exploded and cutout images and words had floated down onto a canvas, Hannah Hoch's Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany first appears to be an eclectic photomontage that defies everything that art had traditionally been.¹ Rational explanation seems to fail this work as the bits of this and that seem to share little obvious relationships. In the top center of the frame a large cog sits beneath a picture of a row of buildings, a dancing couple, two letters “nf”, a man's head pasted onto a woman in a checkered bag dress. The cog overlaps and is overlapped by bits of people, machinery, elephants and things less identifiable. One might stare at this work for ages, and without a complete mastery of the culture and people contemporary to that age, one might never be able to identify the objects that make up the composition. Even when one is able to name the object, like “artist Kathe Kollwitz's head float[ing] above a dancer's body”, no rational reason as to why the elements were so composed might ever be forthcoming.²

A Car Darkly

          A poster-sized framed ink-jet print of Charles Harbutt's 1971 photograph titled “Car in Alley, Leadville, CO” is being shown until June 1, 2014 as part of his “Departures and Arrivals” collection at the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography.ⁱ The black and white print is a wash of grays with only a few small patches of solid blacks and very little white.ⁱⁱ The effect is like tenebrism flipped on its head. Instead of strong contrasts between localized highlights in a generally dark composition, or chiaroscuro-like use of tonality to produce depth in the work, the grays of the print offer a neutral palette from which sparkling white highlights and deep blacks burst forth.ⁱⁱⁱ The effect is as equally dramatic as any of the classic masters' drama and tension achieved with the contrasty techniques, but the conflict is completely driven by the gray-tones.

          From the muted illumination, a portion of a chromed bumper and grill of a late-model Cadillac seems to creep out of a back alley. A brick wall obscures half of one of the headlights, most of the hood and the rest of the car. Just in the frame-within-the-framed print, the chromed windshield wiper, and driver-side mirror can barely be seen. The organic lines of the car's hood, accentuated by the chromed front fin, and the center-hood crease, draw the eye back to where the driver would be, but the wall, every so slightly in soft-focus, denies the viewer the ability to see the human implied by the photograph.

No Impact Challenge

As part of the University of Arizona's course, Our Human Footprint, the students were given the challenge of living for a week as close to having no impact on the environment as possible.  The inspiration for this challenge was from the movie, No Impact Man. (If you haven't seen it, the link is to Hulu, where you can watch it for free.)  This blog post is my report on my experiences during the No Impact Challenge and what it has inspired me to do.

I am choosing to do a blog post in a conversational, decidedly non-academic tone, because I am convinced that if we are going to make the changes necessary, we need big solutions, like already-familiar solar farms, innovative algae solutions for fuel production, and even the truly monumentally ambitious new projects on the horizon.  However, there is a good chance we're all going to die (not to put too fine a point on it) waiting for big, expensive solutions that require political and financial support.  So we're going to need a lot of small, personal solutions as well.  I think we get the best small solutions from tapping into the tinkering power of regular people.  To that end, I do not want to bury my own work behind the walls of an academic institution on something so important as fixing the environmental damage we've all done.  I am really writing this post, not as a fulfillment of a final assignment of a class, but as the first step in a long journey; this is more of a personal commencement charge than a report.  It is a necessary step that we're all going to have to take sooner or later.

So back to the challenge.  The idea wasn't necessarily to replicate the Beavan family's efforts, but to really examine our own daily lives and find what we do that has negative environmental impacts that we don't need to do.  The week was meant, as best as I understand it, to get a taste of what that life would be like to demonstrate that it isn't the end of the world or even particularly difficult if it is planned out right.  If the Beavan family, in the heart of New York city, can turn their electricity completely off, give up cars, hand-wash their clothing, compost all their scraps, stop using plastic containers, eat locally grown food, and find low to no impact solutions to household and daily needs for an entire year, then we could try it for a week.