Weegee

In the author’s discussion of two photographs by American photographer Weegee, I found the contrast between a photo of a crowd’s reaction to a murder, and a photo of a murdered boy, interesting. Both scenes, figuratively taken 180 degrees from one another, can be very powerful.

“The role of images in providing views of violence, and of voyeurism and fascination with violence, is countered by a history of using images to expose the devastating aspects of violence” (Sturken and Cartwright, 11)

The writing style of the author is formal and informative. Quotes, pictures, and examples are used to back up their ideas. Inclusive pronouns such as ‘we’ are used to include us in the text, and make us connect with the author and their meaning.

Works cited:
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. “Images, Power and Politics”. Practices Of Looking: An Introduction To Visual Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 9-11. Print.

Visual Literacy Discussion

I watched the second part of 2005 five-part BBC One documentary series How Art Made the World, presented by Nigel Spivey. It described how pictures began, and how they’ve been used to change the way the human race has thought, acted and developed.

One idea from the documentary that relates to Robert Smithton’s Spiral Jetty, is how development in technology changed the way art is made.

The archaeological site Göbekli Tepe in Turkey consists of massive stone pillars. When the site was built, 12,000 years ago, workers didn’t have the machines to lift heavy rocks that we have today. We can only imagine how they erected these pillars. Spiral Jetty, made in 1970, also required heavy earthworks to be transported into location. But Smithson made use of modern dump trucks and tractors to build his piece.

This contrast is an example of our conquest of nature, and how, as we’ve developed, the Earth has become more malleable to us.

Works cited:
Spivey, Nigel. “The Day Pictures Were Born”. How Art Made the World. BBC. 3 July 2005. Documentary.

Visual Analysis

Smithson, Robert. Spiral Jetty. Earthwork. 1970. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake.

Production:

• made in 1970
• made at Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah
• made by American artist Robert Smithson
• used two dump trucks, a large tractor, and a loader to move the 6,650 tons of rock and earth required for the piece
• the jetty is a 460 metre long spiral, and its visibility depends on the water level of the Great Salt Lake. Sometimes it is under water
• Smithson developed an idea of sites and non-sites. Sites were outdoor locations where his art was shown, non-sites were places like galleries and museums
• Spiral Jetty is an example of Smithton’s sited works
• the piece is owned by the state of Utah, who received complaints after they announce plans for exploratory oil drilling in the lake close to the jetty
• there has also been controversy over the preservation of the piece. Exposure to the elements has caused the black basalt to become white which some people think is a shame, but statements by Smithson indicate that he intended this work to replicate the natural destruction of the environment

Image:

• the spiral is made of mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks and water
• in 1969 Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and the shape of Spiral Jetty could be a reference to space or a galaxy
• it also mimics something like a koru or shell
• the spiral is anticlockwise, as if going back in time
• the viewer’s eye is drawn to the scale of the piece. The form can only be fully appreciated from a helicopter or from on top of the hill at the edge of the lake
•  the site was chosen because it contains remnants of oil rigs, a pier and Golden Spike National Historic Site, which commemorates the first Transcontinental Railroad, and Smithson thought these industrial remnants were beautiful
• the water is 27% salinity which bacteria and algae thrive in, and as a result the water is a blood-red colour
• Spiral Jetty is a large-scale sculpture and unlike durable stone sculptures, it is made of perishable materials which Smithson knew and wanted to see degrade in the environment
• I think it’s a comment on how we’ve come to a time when manmade structures are needed to remind us of how important nature is

Audience:

• the jetty was submerged from the early ’70s to 2002. Since then it has gone in and out of visibility as conditions fluctuate and the water level drops and rises
• the piece can only be observed in its current site, unlike paintings or photographs which are constantly moving around different galleries all over the world
• because it’s so large, it generates a feeling of being dwarfed by nature
• a 32-minute film of Spiral Jetty’s construction was also made
• on the instructions on getting to the jetty and what to do there, it asks visitors to “leave no trace, by carrying out anything they bring with them. Please leave the natural environment exactly as you found it; this means not painting rocks, leaving black fire pits, or stamping on vegetation.” And yet, Smithson completely changed the landscape with his art. Where do we draw the line between art and environmental destruction?
• the audience is invited to walk upon the spiral, but this has caused problems with erosion

Visual Text Resources

 

Hammond, Bill. Watching for Buller. Oil on canvas. 1994. Wallace Gallery, Morrinsville.

Smithson, Robert. Spiral Jetty. Earthwork. 1970. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake.

Friedrich, Caspar David. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Oil on canvas. 1818. Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg.

(Click on images for MLA references)

Watching for Buller is by a local artist, Bill Hammond from Lyttelton. It is a comment on human’s treatment of animals. The native New Zealand birds are rigid as though they have been stuffed. They face towards a cliff edge that is being eroded by the water below. Soon the birds will fall into the abyss and become extinct.

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is a long curved jetty out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The spiral mimics something like a koru or shell, and being so large it generates a feeling of being dwarfed by nature. We’ve come to a time when manmade structures are needed to remind us of how important nature is.

The painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by German romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich depicts a man standing tall, looking down towards fog as though at long last he has conquered nature. However, he is so insignificant against the expanse of fog that maybe we can never truly conquer nature.

Visual Literacy

After watching ‘Visual Literacy and Critical Thinking’ and ‘Martin Scorsese on the Importance of Visual Literacy’, I have a better understanding of visual literacy and the importance of being able to critically analyse in an art or design practice.

For me, the interview with Martin Scorsese got its point across to me the best. This was because it was a real world example of how an artist can critically analyse their own and other’s works.

An important idea I learnt is that while a base knowledge of visual literacy is achieved subconsciously by everyday exposure to images, to completely understand how visual texts work and how to use them to convey meaning one must actively work to get better at it. “You need to know how emotions and ideas are expressed through a visual form” (Scorsese). A good way to get a more comprehensive visual ‘vocabulary’ is to analyse and replicate other people’s works.

I would recommend this video to others because it is quite humbling to see such a prominent director talk very personally about their own views on visual literacy.

Works cited:
Toledo Museum of Art. ‘Visual Literacy and Critical Thinking’. Youtube. Feb. 2015. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.

Scorsese, Martin. ‘Martin Scorsese on the Importance of Visual Literacy’. By Edutopia. Youtube. June 2012. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.

My Ideas

The essay question I have chosen is about ‘The Changing World’ (Mirzoeff, Chapter 6, 211-252). For my essay I am required to explain who or what the ‘conquest of nature’ involves, and discuss how artists and designers acknowledge the impacts and influences the human race has on the environment.

Some ideas and examples that Mirzoeff doesn’t touch on are:

• First-hand experiences of global warming and climate change have a much greater influence over people’s beliefs than scientific information.
• Maybe climate change is something we have to give in to, and it’s a sign that the human race has come to a point where we should ‘use up’ planets and then move on to different ones.
• There are three strategies that artists and designers have used to discuss climate change: representations of climate change (communicating, e.g. a painting); performances (viewer is immersed in the experience, e.g. public installation); and interventions (getting people to change their behaviour, e.g. new devices for monitoring climate change).
• HighWaterLine is a public art instillation  by Eve Mosher. Originally produced in New York, HighWaterLine has since been installed in Miami and Philadelphia. For the artwork, Mosher drew a 70 mile line of chalk along the coast to mark predicted water levels in a ‘100 year flood’ (that was now predicted to occur every 3 to 20 years).
• Bill Hammond, an artist from Lyttelton, conveys issues about humanity and endangerment in his painting Watching for Buller. The painting is a reference to ornithologist Sir Walter Lawry Buller, and depicts native New Zealand birds as stuffed, rigid beings on the verge of extinction.

Resources

These are some texts I will use for my Communication in Creative Cultures course. They are relevant to my topic because they discuss how artists and designers are drawing attention to the effects of human influences on the environment. The sources are credible because they are academic sources. They identify the qualifications and expertise of the writer, credit the sources they’ve used, are peered reviewed, and are objective. All but one of the sources were written in the past four years.

• Buckland, David, Chris Wainwright, and Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain), eds. U-N-F-O-L-D: A Cultural Response to Climate Change. Vienna, Austria: Springer Wien New York, 2010. Print.
• Chammies, Bill. “Art Makes Environmental Change Real”. Conservation. University of Washington, Jan. 2014. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.
• Gabriella Giannachi. “Representing, Performing and Mitigating Climate Change in Contemporary Art Practice”. Leonardo 45.2 (2012): 124-131. Project MUSE. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.
• Gaddis, John Lewis. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
• Kayla Anderson. “Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art and Design Face the Anthropocene”. Leonardo 48.4 (2015): 338-347. Project MUSE. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.
• Miles, Malcolm. Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change. London, England; New York, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Print.
• Smith, Terry. ‘Climate Change: Art and Ecology’. Contemporary Art: World Currents. London: Laurence King, 2011. Print.
• Query, Patrick. “Building Pictures: Hiroshi Sugimoto on Visual Culture”. Postmodern Culture 16. 2 (2006). Project MUSE. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.
• 
  Mosher, Eve. HighWaterLine. Miami.
• 
  Hammond, Bill. Watching for Buller. Oil on canvas. 1994. Wallace Gallery, Morrinsville.

Let’s Brainstorm

This is my word cloud using key ideas, quotes, phrases and concepts from ‘The Changing World’ (Mirzoeff, Chapter 6, 211-252).

This is my mind map using key words from the essay question, key ideas and issues raised by Mirzoeff, and my own ideas and findings.

What’s in a Paragraph?

As Mirzoeff points out in the opening paragraph of ‘The Changing World’ (Mirzoeff, Chapter 6, 211-252), human interactions with the environment have upset the balance of gases in the atmosphere, and effects from human carbon emissions will continue even if emissions stop (Mirzoeff, 213).

Works cited:
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Changing World”. How to See the World. London: Pelican, 2015. 211-252. Print.

Free Writing

Climate change: How human race has had negative effects on environment through pollution, not taking Earth into account. Only thinking about themselves. “It won’t happen to us”/”It’s a while away yet”.

Sea change: Sea rising, ice melting. Rivers overflowing; comparison between Mississippi flood map showing natural flooding and army corps straight line map. As if they’ve conquered the river.

Birds: Species extinction. Image of birds feeding, that species now dead.

Olympic designers using steel, coal for major sculptures, stadiums. Material extraction and use having bad effects on environment.

Swimming in the East River – people don’t mind pollution now it is the norm. Forty-two kids.

Exploitation: Congo slavery in mines. Children slaves. Photographer series of people in mining uniform/setting. What was the artist’s message?