Environmental Art.

This week, our guest speaker, Carla, talked about environmental art. When she first introduced this topic, I couldn’t really imagine what she meant by environmental art. The only thing I imagined was art about nature. This didn’t seem very interesting. However, my opinion changed when I found out what she meant by environmental art. When art is brought up, I have never thought about things like making a line in the grass by walking back and forth. This was very interesting to me. It brought a whole new perspective to what art is. I thought her artwork was different. I didn’t really know what to think about it. Having ants walk through ink and create marks isn’t something I would typically think of as art. I can’t say I particularly liked it. There was one piece that she showed us about an artist who learned to tightrope walk. She then went to the Bahamas and set up her rope on the beach so when she walked over it, she was walking on the horizon. I thought this was beautiful. The scenery and the idea were both very impressive. 

We learned about the artist Kiki Smith. She seems very down to earth and as if she knows exactly who she is. There aren’t many people like that. I enjoy her views on life. In the interview “Family History and History of Objects,” she talks about how the perception of beauty changes throughout our lives. “You always have to be shifting your idea of what beauty is to make your life wonderful.” I like this idea a lot. It makes a lot of sense to me. If you don’t change your views of what beauty is, your life will be spent trying to achieve this beauty that may never happen. In her other interview, “Learning by Looking: Witches, Catholicism, and Buddhist Art,” she talks about how art comes from your insides. “And art is in a sense like a proof: it’s something that moves from your insides into the physical world, and at the same time it’s just a representation of your insides.” It as though you’re sharing yourself with the world by creating art and that the art has a specific person.

On the other end of this spectrum, there is Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author.” This basically says that the author dies when the reader sees what they want to see in work. It is like the author is creating something with no intentions and the reader sees what they want to see in it. In class today, we looked at a picture of a man sitting and holding a dog. We then discussed how everyone in the class would come up with a different story for this picture, thus creating the birth of the “reader.” We don’t know the intentions of the author, therefore there aren’t any.

We also watched the video “Anything is Possible,” which is about William Kentridge. There was something he said that tied into the ideas of “The Death of the Author.” He said something along the lines of “My job is to draw pictures, your job is to figure out what they mean.” This is exactly the same. By saying this he basically said that he has no intentions with his work, and people should think of it what they please. I particularly enjoyed his view of his opera, which was basically that he was creating drawings. I have never heard anyone refer to an opera as drawings. I really liked his drawings where the mirror was used to see the actual picture. The drawings were just an assortment of lines that didn’t appear to make much sense until looked at in the mirror. This was a really cool idea. I was kind of baffled with trying to figure out how he could draw these “mirror images” so well.

The tightrope walker that Carla showed made me think of the documentary “Man on Wire.” This is about Philippe Petit and his quest to tightrope walk across the world trade center towers. When I had watched the movie, I didn’t really think of what he was trying to do as art. I just saw it as an intense goal that he wanted to complete. After Carla’s presentation, I saw this in a new artistic light.