Category: October 10 (Page 3 of 3)

Fabricated Value

October 17, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Tuesday, with the guidance of Shalini Le Gall, we toured a number of installations aimed at (or tangent to) the Origins theme at the Colby College Museum of Art. The majority of the work we discussed was displayed in the Davis Curricular Gallery, which (aside from a few bird-centric pieces) has been furnished to serve this year’s humanities theme. Shalini encouraged the group to meander about and eventually select a piece or two to share a few thoughts on. Among the works in Davis gallery were a handful of acrylic paintings, some photography (of varying dimensions), and a number of works composed of less common media, such as artistically amended pages from books and works including paper money.

One piece particularly stole my attention: a giant steel frame (roughly 4’x6’) covered in rows of carefully arced tickets of colored paper. While the piece as a whole was pretty hard to miss, with its steel construction and hundreds of colorful paper slips, the details could have slipped by you if you weren’t careful. Each row had been assembled with different paper currency. I’m still not entirely sure of it, but most currencies on the piece appeared obsolete, although in pristine condition. The antique Polish Złoty gave it away on first encounter, followed by spottings of a number of now defunct regimes.

The name of this rather grand, bright, and eclectic piece was “Wall of Lamentation XIII”.

[On a side note, the piece had been gifted to Colby College by the artist, Santiago Montoya. I hope he was able to sell the previous twelve walls of lamentation… They cant have been cheap to make.]

The name is pretty much where I stop agreeing with Montoya on his philosophy surrounding the piece. According to Shalini, Montoya says his recent work is inspired the increasing disuse of cash in modern society. He disapproves of the abstraction of legal tender and is upset by the loss of cultural heritage which comes with cashlessness.

I see the point Montoya attempts to make. But to me, his ‘motivation’ seems almost like an afterthought to an overwhelmingly aesthetically pleasing piece. Let’s be real, this thing is beautiful. A solid stainless steel block filled with bills in mint condition (ha). I’m sure he knew this thing was going to look good when he dreamt it up (for the 13th time). If that was his intent, let that be known. I don’t think there’s any shame in that.

However, with a title so powerful and a selection of beautifully illustrated currency from regimes not limited to the DPRK, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, and CCCP, I feel that Montoya misses out on a massive opportunity to make a statement on how centralized currency is a leash on the public for as long as it is functional. Centralized currency and artificially fabricated value leave the fate of a nation’s people at the fingertips of those who control the source. Additionally, paper money, with its ornate designs depicting either figures or objects of cultural heritage, is essentially propaganda (for better or for worse). The Wall of Lamentation deserves to be about the suffering caused by the bills it displays. Few people lament over a slimmer wallet and using plastic over paper. Billions have suffered at the hands of regimes starving their citizens of nourishment, education, healthcare, free agency, and freedom of speech.

The Value of Origins

October 17, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Today, our exploration to seek origins extended to our familiar place which is the Colby Museum. Through the museum tour conducted by Shalini Le Gall, we discussed the theme of origins in each artworks displayed at the museum from different perspectives of artists.

 

I was especially inspired to think about origins by one of the artists called  Ai Weiwei. He is one of the powerful Chinese contemporary artists and his talents cover a lot of fields in art such as photography, architecture, sculpture, curating and film. He calls his attention to people with his criticism towards to society, politics and culture in China throughout his art pieces. The Colby Museum displays one of his great artworks at Lunder collection called Colored Vases (2006-2008). You can see several beautiful vases colored pop and vividly by several patterns against the original brown color which we can see partially underneath of those bright colors.

 

The base of the vases itself looked old at a glance but I was surprised to be told that those urns are, in fact, very old antiques which made in roughly 5000-3000 BC during the Neolithic era in China. We started our discussion about the idea of “offensive” somehow we felt when we were looking at those vases. People may think that this offence comes from the action he covered this “precious” vases with colors and he “ruined” them. It is deeply offensive because we can see the marks underneath which give us the information about the label which we can recognize of age as BC, otherwise we are totally fine about this whole project. He claims about those people’s reaction on original things which have been suddenly removed from any kinds of contexts or circulations and are valuated and capitalized by people just in terms of age.

 

How could we know that those original vases are really valuable? Because it is written? Because someone tell you so?  Because they have specific marks which prove that they are ancient artifacts? He also might argues those tendencies that we abandoned to see the real value of objects or goods itself but we tend to assess the things superficially and easily influenced by uncertain information such as prices, names or logo etc. Living in such a mass production world, how can we tell originals apart? It was interesting to think about the authenticity of manufacture and to aware that the origins can be created by someone without noticing. I could see those arguments of Ai Weiwei committed into this artwork.

 

Ai Weiwei did not deface those original old artifacts but he transformed them into new contemporary art by painting them with colors and tried describing the control value to the original things. Furthermore, he added another value on them which enable people to evoke origins and values for many years to come through his art pieces. Although I have been to the Colby Museum several times, it was good experience to see each art pieces from different perspectives in terms of origins.  

 

The origins: humans and the environment

October 10, 2017 / / 0 Comments

The tour in Colby Art Museum this afternoon showed me how artists carried out the idea of origins in different disciplines and expressed them in the form of arts. I was particularly interested in Gary Green’s photograph Prairie Fire #2 near Liberal, Missouri. Recently in my ecological history class, we have been discussing the pre-agriculture societies and early environmental management actions by humans. Slash-and-burn was a widely influential agricultural method that contributed significantly to early ecological history, especially on the American continent. Whether or not the Native Americans intended to burn the forests and plains to manage the environment has long been a controversial question to many scientists and historians.  Continue reading

Revolutions and Origins in Destructive Art

October 10, 2017 / / 0 Comments

First, a confession: I’m writing this entry a few weeks after our museum visit, thus my topic is heavily influenced by later lectures; namely “The Origins of Innovation”

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Handed a staggering number of art works, I initially felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity. A few had rather dubious connections to the larger origins theme, and many just skirted the topic.Two works struck me in particular however…

The first work that I felt truly captured the essence of our lecture series was an unassuming installation of photographs hanging just beside the door. They depicted a peaceful mid-western prairie, but, upon closer inspection, I noticed that it documented a controlled burn. This intrigued me, as the purpose of a controlled burn in twofold: to preventative and restorative. The former is intended to burn a path around the crops to prevent wild files from advancing beyond a certain point; and the latter is to return nutrients to the soil in fallow plots. This, I find, is the essence of finding order amid chaos. Facing the threat of destruction, controlled burns both ensure the fertility of the land below and define a boundary for the land beyond. Moreover, while fire itself is a chaotic entity, it is orderly — hence, controlled burn — and used to keep true chaos — wild fires — at bay.

The second work of art that I will discuss is Ai Weiwei’s vase collection. See, these ancient clay vases have survived millennia, only to be drenched in a staggering array of industrial paints by a contemporary artists. Many in our tour group referred to the art as vandalism, as if Wei Wei were a graffitti artists spraying over someone else’s work. In fact, Wei Wei hired a man to smash a few of these pots in an gallery in Miami. Oddly enough, the same individuals who claimed painting the vases was vandalism saw the pot smashing as performance art.

I care to argue that he was giving these vases a new beginning. These pots were originally created to serve a purpose, and are entirely utilitarian in nature. Claiming that they serve a larger academic purpose is largely a moot point, as we have already learned what we could from them. Now that they have lost their utilitarian purpose, they are essentially worthless (ignoring the rarity aspect). Now, they have lost all value in that sense. Weiwei has reinstated purpose with a contemporary twist. He is essentially giving them a second chance; an origin in the modern world.

But how are these two works related? I argue that they both mark second chances — a rebirth. In both cases, the prairie and vase have lost their purpose. The prairie has been drained of all nutrients and the clay vases are simply not practical in industry. By committing what to some feels like a desecration, these artists and farmers alike renew the world’s lease on these objects. Both the acts, burning and painting are a point of origin, or rather a node on the hierarchical tree of origins.

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