Sculpture.

We started this week with a lecture by Amanda Wojick. She discussed sculptures. I found her lecture very interesting. The way she approached it, by talking about nine women sculptors, was very intriguing to me. I had never thought of some of the sculptures shown as sculptures before, like some of Louise Bourgeois’ works. Obviously the spiders would be considered sculptures, but I wouldn’t have considered some of her works made of fabric as sculptures. I can’t really say what I would categorize them as, but sculpture wouldn’t be the first thing that came to mind. Out of all the artists covered, the one I found most interesting was Yayoi Kusama. I found it fascinating that she took her hallucinations and turned them into artwork. Instead of purely being frightened of her hallucinations, she recreated them and shared them with the world. It’s hard to say whether her art is representational or abstract. Obviously, to her, it would be representational because it is a recreation of her hallucinations. However, to others, it could be seen as abstract, because other people haven’t experienced what Yayoi has.

The first artist we looked at this week was Louise Bourgeois. I would really like to see one of her spider sculptures in real life, instead of just portrayed on a screen. I want to experience the ominous object hovering above me. It is kind of hard to talk about works like that that haven’t been seen in person. In her work “Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands),” objects are placed in a ‘cell’ and viewers have to look through shattered glass to view what is inside. I thought this was really interesting. It creates a delicacy between the viewer and the objects. The viewer has to look through this dangerous broken glass to view the beauty inside. Bourgeois thoroughly thought through how space interacted with her piece. If the piece could be viewed from any angle, it wouldn’t have carried as much meaning. She also must have thought through the space left open with the spiders. The spacing and placement of the spiders plays an important roll on how they are viewed. If the spider were placed in a corner, it would just be viewed. It wouldn’t really be experienced. Because the spider is covering the majority of the room, the viewer has to experience it. They have to walk under it and through its legs. Also, if the spiders were smaller in scale, they would be much less effective than a giant spider.

Another artist who thinks about the space of his works is Richard Serra. His work consists of giant pieces of steel placed so that people can walk in between the steel. Serra puts much thought into how the steel pieces will interact with each other to create a sort of feeling between them. In one piece, he talks about how someone can walk through one area and feel perfectly normal, but when they walk through another area, they feel as though they need to reposition themselves as to balance out the steel. I really want to experience this. I can’t really imagine what this feels like. The only thing I can possibly compare it to would be a fun house, where the floor is tilted. I imagine it would feel kind of like this, except there would be no tilted floor.

Our reading for this week was “Just Looking” by James Elkins. I was intrigued with it. I liked how it read kind of like a train of thought. He started just talking about looking, then moved to hunting, then moved to love and emotions, and it all flowed together perfectly. I can’t say I had thought about looking at things in this manner before. Now that it has been pointed out that basically everything that we look at elicits thoughts of other things, I have been noticing it more frequently. For instance, in class today, I found myself staring at Ty’s drink and it made me thirsty, which I immediately noticed. I feel like I wouldn’t have made that connection as quickly without this reading. Ideas like this are necessary in relation to art. If someone were to look at one of Bourgeois’ spiders, they wouldn’t just think “hey look, there’s a big spider above me.” Initially, maybe that would be their thought, but after that they would think of other things like maybe a spider attacked them so they are taken back to that time. Feelings and thoughts from when that happened would be brought up, just by looking at this piece of art. I find that really interesting.