The Artist as Provocateur

"To provoke means to evoke something. By making a sculpture with fat or a piece of clay I evoke something. I ignite a thought within me- a totally original, totally new thought that has never existed in history, even if I deal with a historical fact or with Leonardo or Rembrandt. I myself determine history- it is not history that determines me....every man is a potential provocateur." Joseph Beuys, from an interview with Willoughby Sharp, 1969, as quoted in Energy Plan for the Western Man, Joseph Beuys in America, compiled by Carin Kuoni, Four Walls Eight Windows, NY, 1993, p.86.

Beuys was involved in the Fluxus movement but was heavily influenced by Duchamp and the idea of readymade, taking objects and turning them into art by calling them art. Beuys believed that everyone is an artist and that art is not confined to the production of things that we call art and display in galleries but that art is the process of interaction that incites and provokes. His performance art was meant to make people think. His concept of "social sculpture" was the idea that the entire society should be seen as one artwork that every person should be contributing to.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl

Howl is a poem that epitomizes the beat generation. Ginsberg was heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac's On The Road. We tend to think of ourselves as an enlightened culture, free from excessive censorship, but when poem's like Howl are not allowed to be shown for fear of heavy fines by government sanctioned agencies we are confronted with the truth. We are probably the most heavily "protected" first world country. We are protected by the moral value system of a group of very conservative whitebread Christian people who I don't believe represent the majority of our population but seem to have a voice that counts more than everyone else's. These, I believe are the same people who blame non-white people for urban poverty and crime and gay people for HIV. Most of us believe we've come a long way in the past few decades in our more mature perspectives on issues of humanity and our interactions with others of variety, but quite obviously we have a long way to go when radio stations can't even broadcast what should be revered as a classic poem, not to mention that we still live in a society in which many freedoms are denied to large parts of our population, the least of which is to be able to express ourselves in words and have others hear them.

Grid Art-Chelsea Football Team

When I was deciding what to do for my grid art I was talking to my daughter who is a quite serious Chelsea fan. Most conversations don't go without some mention of a game or a player and this one was no exception. I had already decided to use different colored straight pins to make my grid but I hadn't decided what image to do, copy a work of art or create my own. So talking with her made me think of Chelsea and the familiar team emblem I've been seeing on all of her stuff for many years so I decided to use that as my subject. I bought all of the colored pins they had at my local Walmart. Some of them were white and the others were all multicolored boxes so I had to separate all of the pins by color. Then I realized that I wasn't going to have the proper shade of blue so I got nail polish in the right shade of blue and painted a bunch of the other colored pins. I had to stick them into styrofoam to paint them and it was quick drying nail polish so I had to stop every few minutes and seal the bottle up for a bit so it wouldn't dry out. Then I ran out of white and after a thorough search in every nearby store that might have colored pins I decided I'd have to paint some white ones with white nail polish to be able to finish. The pins are stuck into a round cut piece of styrofoam that's covered with dark blue cross-stitch fabric which provides a nice even grid to work on. The finished project has already been given to my daughter who says she is going to hang it up in her new apartment when she moves in in a couple of months.

Interactive Art & Rotary Glass Plates

In creating Rotary Glass Plates Marcel Duchamp was a significant influence in the beginning of performance art. He worked on this with Man Ray in 1920. It was a set of plexi-glass pieces shaped like wings that had stripes painted on them. These were placed along a rotating shaft. The user had to push a button and stand at a certain distance to see the effect as the glass rotated. Later he made Disks Bearing Spirals using the same model, this time attempting to make a three dimensional film out of it. This became Anemic Cinema, a film of alternating shots of text and spirals which were mounted on spinning disks. All of these endeavors used the effect of optical illusion that happens because our eyes retain images for a fraction of a second after the image is removed.

My Flipbook

Flipbook made for Art211 Spring 2011.

Xerox is an idiot

I used to work as a computer repair tech. I took a computer repair course and learned everything I needed to know about MSDOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows95. It was 1997 and the A+Certification test for computer repair was still testing on DOS and Windows 3.1 so even though Win95 was already out I had to learn everything about Win3.1 and Win3.11, which was the business version at the time. During that course we learned some computer history but since it was a pc repair course Apple was only mentioned as being a different course. The thing I don't remember being mentioned at all was Xerox having any part in computer history. We were told that Microsoft stole the idea of the GUI and the mouse from Apple, but not that Apple actually stole it from Xerox. This would have given me a whole new respect for Xerox as a company, except that they gave it all away. Now I see it as a demonstration of what happens if the people in control of a big company have no insight into technological advancement and the effects those changes are likely to have in society. They should have listened to their geeks!

Jeopardy and Watson

I watched when the two top human champions of Jeopardy's history played against Watson, IBM's supercomputer. It was an impressive display, not only because the computer won, but because the two human competitors kept at it and managed to do fairly well in spite of playing against an advanced computer with mega-speed. I wasn't surprised at the few times when Watson failed to come up with the correct answer or when it repeated the same answer that had already been deemed incorrect. These incidents demonstrated without doubt that Watson wasn't 'thinking' like a human, but 'processing' information, like a computer, which is what we expect our computers to do.
I think the biggest challenge to humans in our not so distant future will be to remember when confronted with computers that seem more and more like they have human persona's, that they are not lifeforms and that they don't have emotions and creativity and potential for intuitive leaps. We may end up with androids among us, but they won't be like C3PO, displaying emotions like fear and worry and cowardice or bravery. If we forget that and begin to rely on an advanced computer to use emotion based criteria in a decision it could lead to some really bad results.