RoseJohnsonaccount+Spring+2018

Hello my name is Rose Major: International Affairs I have no experience with computers/ software other than utilizing powerpoint and Microsoft word for school. I love art and going to art museums (specifically modern art) but I myself am not very artistic although I do enjoy photography/ nature photography. I enjoy sports and I have ran two marathons. Modern art, photography: David Hockney, Cindy Sherman; I like the nature photography competition at the Smithsonian every year.

Week One Homework: This comic outlined the logistics of copyright laws, public domain, and fair use. The comic focused on the copyright laws, public domain, and fair use debates regarding documentaries. It is important tounderstand and abide by these laws in order to preserve art and also keep one self out of legal trouble when utilizing other people’s art in their work. This comic discuses the concepts of trademarks and copyrights which display how they are a necessary evil in the art world because if they are not utilized art can be stolen at a drop of a hat but utilizing it gives artist immense obstacles that can sometimes prevent them from producing as much art as possible. Stolen work prevents an artist from making a profit from their work. People can profit from other peoples art and this comic reminded me of the huge debate regarding Shepard Ferry and the Obama Hope “Change” poster. In this debate Shepard Ferry created a print of a photo of Obama adding the words “hope” and “change” to the bottom of the page. These posters became a huge hit and eventually the Obama campaign hired him to produce posters for the campaign. After Shepard Ferry’s immense success a reporter sued him for utilizing his photo without proper credits. This was highly debated due to the fact the photo Shepard utilized was generic and could have been anyone’s photo. Additionally, the print he created differed so much from the original photo that people even questioned whether the photo was in fact the same. In the end Shepard Ferry ended up paying a great deal of money in court for stealing the photo despite harsh criticisms from the public that Shepard should not have lost the court case. This story related to the comic because it shows how tricky artistic copyright laws can be. The comic doesn’t directly address the issues with copyright laws on the Internet. I think this is necessary to discuss because it definitely present a grey area especially with how fast media moves through the Internet. I can see how hard it would be to profit off of art published off the internet due to the fact it is so easy to copy an image and post it on your own social media. Additionally, I think many people do not understand copyright laws and post things to social media that they may not necessarily understand is technically illegal to post without proper citations. I also see how hard it must be for smaller production companies to be successful in an industry like film to produce material when larger production companies have entire teams working to make sure nothing has been reproduced without following copyright laws. Over winter break I visited the Disney company as well as Lionsgate productions and both companies discussed how they have entire teams of lawyers who’s entire job is to both double check copyright laws and issues as well as find material that people are trying to profit off of that they own.

Exercise 1: Presence and Absence I started out with this painting of a village girl from Spain. When I saw this picture I knew I wanted to incorporate aspects of Spain in the surrealist picture to link the history of the painting with my final project.
 * Project 1: Surrealist Composite**

I used this photo I took in Barcelona as the background. I wanted to utilize it because in the painting the girl looks like she's from a poor village and I thought placing her in a modern but similarly gritty atmosphere would be interesting. I added these houses as well in the background to add to the grittiness of the setting and make it clear for the storyline that she lives in a rather poor neighborhood. I then took another photo I took in Barcelona and decided adding a water element would be cool because so many cities in Spain have such a large connection to water and the original painting of the girl had a water jug. I ended up placing the water in the city as an interesting surrealist addition. I think adding the water changed the storyline of the photo because now the girl is in a setting that is quite chaotic. She lives in her dingy village/city but she's looking out into the ocean. I wanted to add a ship to the setting so the girl would be looking at something significant. Later I decided placing her in a nighttime setting with a large full moon and replacing her water bucket with a lantern would add to her story as she now portrays a poor spanish lady looking and waiting for something more in the night. She stares at the ship hoping she can leave with it. Picture of my original photo layered and colorized My final photo shows the combination of all the images above. The ship in the water represents a hopeful future for the girl who spends her nights watching and waiting for ships to pass so that one day she can get on one and leave her desolate city. It is titled Lantern Girl because the lantern like the ship represents the girls hopes as she grasps on the lantern not to light up her village but to get attention of the ships passing by.

Scavenger Hunt Project: Title: Traveling Man

GIF Project:

Short Video Project: media type="file" key="IMG_0896_1.mov" width="300" height="300" Conceptual Strategy Project: Artist: Cindy Sherman Title: Untitiled#94 date: 1981 Conceptual Strategy: dress up and take picture of self Artist: Cindy Sherman Title: Untitled # 465 date: 2008 Conceptual strategy: Artist: Cindy Sherman Title: Untitled #210 Date: 1989 Conceptual Strategy:

David Hockney David Hockney

Krauss Response: 4/9/18 Krauss argues that the medium of video is narcissistic and that the medium of video art is the psychological condition of the self split and doubles by the mirror reflection of synchronous feedback. When she states this she first acknowledges how the medium of video in comparison to other art forms is very different. She explains that the belief that video is narcissism is a statement that explains a psychological condition over a physical condition. She states this because she believes the medium of video has more to do with objective and material factors particular to a form. She also acknowledges that video is dependent on a “set of physical mechanisms”. She discusses how video is a medium and she states “the simultaneous reception and projection of an image; and the human psyche used as a conduit”. Video differs from other types of art because it has the capability of recording and transmitting at the same time which produces instant feedback. The camera and the monitor are essential elements. Kraus explains the particularly weird connection video has to text. In video the performance ties itself to something that existed before because their had to be some form of text to choreograph the what is and will be shot by the camera. In her examples she discussed she concludes hat in all the examples the nature of the video performance is specified as an activity of bracketing out the text and substituting for the mirror reflection which results in the presentation of a self understood to have no past and no connection to any objects external to it. Later in the essay she questions how video has a rift with other art forms. She first questions if the mirror reflection is just a new technique to achieve continuity. She explains that reflection is a strategy to achieve a radical asymmetry while mirror reflection implies the “vanquishing of separateness” also known as an inherent movement toward fusion. She talks about the institution of a self-formed by video feedback which differs from the real situation that is happening in the art world at the time. Although she supports her statement with examples she also recognizes three phenomena that counter her thesis. These include: “tapes that exploit the medium to criticize it from within”, tapes that represent the physical assault on the video and installation forms of video that utilize the medium as a subspecies. If this article was written today I think it would be very different due to the normalcy of videos. Today artists and people alike utilize video. Although I don’t necessarily disagree that utilizing video may be narcissistic it may be hard to argue the complexities of her argument in todays world when video is utilized so often. I was think the technologies surround video we have today are so different from before that the art of videotaping has been completely transformed and that it cannot really be characterized and defined as being one thing. Despite this her argument is interesting and she would probably still find the usage of video different from other art mediums today.

Conceptual Strategy Final Project Essay: In my piece I chose Cindy Sherman’s art as an inspiration and conceptual strategy to follow. One aspect of Cindy Sherman’s artwork that stands out to me is how she utilizes simple normal props to “dress herself up” as a character. Despite using normal props in every photo due to her editing something is always off in the photo. Instead of being a normal picture of a lady the picture is almost gross looking and nauseating. In my video of Wildwood, New Jersey I decided to take elements of a normal video clip of wildwood, new jersey and I chose pieces and film clips that in essence are normal but together paint an almost gross picture of what Wildwood, New Jersey would be like. I also took some inspiration from old skateboard videos from the 80s and 90s that always had unappealing, gnarly clips of kids at the beach skateboarding with slightly blurry videos. I thought a platform like this would be good to use to illustrate the beach because although the clips are normal they are also gritty and unappealing. On top of this Cindy Sherman often recreates famous works of art with her theme of being in the image herself. I wanted to mimic the set up of what a commercial for the beach may look like with an intro of the name of the city, pictures of the beach, pictures of the night life, and ending it with the name of wildwood which would most likely be the same set up as a regular commercial but instead I took blurry slightly off clips of the beach that made wildwood, New Jersey look like itself but off. With a conceptual strategy project it is sometime difficult to not just try to mimic the artist so I shied away from creating an image of myself and dressing myself up. I wanted the essence of her work to be mimics through the way the person feels when they see the artwork. When I see many images from Cindy Sherman I feel confused and slightly gross out. This is how the clips I chose to put together of Wildwood, New Jersey. The beginning shows a dingy flag of Wildwood and is followed by a kid being toppled by a wave instead of having fun in it. It ends with nightlife of Wildwood, which is quite literarily nauseating to watch. All these clips together I think give the watcher the same feelings as when a person views a Cindy Sherman image.

original photo: Outlay 1: No one in the shower (harder to edit out than it looks) Had to use a lot of different layers to make it look real Outlay 2: Naked Man (cut out from photoshop; used gif version on HP Reveal so only the man would show up not the white background)
 * Final Project:**

Outlay 3: Shower water on (shower water gif would not work on phone so I only incorporated a non-moving version of this)