Wk 12: Teach One!

Activity 12: Teach One!

We’ve reached the end of, I hope, a great summer! One more thing to do before we go: teach something about art to someone else! Full details on the Teach One page.

No Late Work

IMPORTANT NOTE: There is no late work for Week 12! Unlike past weeks where you can turn work in up to a week late for partial credit, after this coming Sunday night at 11:59pm I won’t be able to accept any late Wk 12 work. To accept late Wk 12 work would mean I’d have to delay posting everyone’s final grades to Brotman Hall for an extra week. I’m pretty sure both you guys and Brotman Hall wouldn’t be too happy about that, so please be sure to turn in Wk 12 on time!

Discussion Groups

Like last week, instead of discussion groups, I’ll ask an extra “Question 4” to get some feedback about the course from you.

Discussion Questions

One
Teach One
There is no question one! (other than making your video or other media and explaining a bit about what you’re trying to teach and how you’re going about it)

Two
The Art of Our Time
What have you learned and experienced about art and your life this summer?

Can art be a part of your personal experience of life? Can art be a part of your professional and career activities? By art in your career I don’t mean painting or going to museums exactly, but the idea of different perspectives, of examining figure and ground, and the other ideas we’ve thought about, being applicable to problems you might face in Aerospace Engineering or Nursing or Marine Biology or Physical Therapy?

May 1, 1965: Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Chuck Wein & Gerard Malanga in bed in a Paris hotel while waiting for Warhol’s Flowers show to open at Gallery Sonnabend.

Three
Andy Warhol
We often identify artists by the media they work in, “painter,” “video artist,” “performance artist,” and so on. Andy Warhol worked in virtually every media he could get his hands on: He was a a very successful commercial illustrator before beginning his fine art career, and continued to do commercial projects for much of his career. Warhol painted, screen printed, created sculptures, public art, films, videos, produced a rock band, staged multimedia events, published a magazine, hosted a TV show, had small parts in film & TV, and worked for a modeling agency. He even created some early computer art. He experimented with engineers like Billy Kluver to create works like Mylar Balloons. And the art-as-life performance art of Andy Warhol’s Factory was for many, his greatest work of all.

Do you think of Warhol in terms of one media? Like pop paintings of Marilyn Monroe or Campbell’s Soup Cans? Or films? Or? Do you think he was more successful or more impactful in one media?

Hollywood produces a wide range of artists and styles. Yet compared to Warhol, Hollywood is constrained by traditional “entertainment” tropes. Warhol just turned a camera on and put people in front of it. He didn’t zoom or stage or edit. The less Warhol did, the more powerful his films were. Think about all the Hollywood films you’ve seen. Think about all the GoPro video tricks you’ve seen on YouTube. How would you do something truly different? Not simply a more amazing explosion or a more incredible trick, but a rethinking of the media itself. What would it be?

I said that Warhol was gay, yet Art History ignored that essential piece of his identity for a long time. What about other artists or cultural icons or politicians or people in your own life? Is there some real, and solid, and knowable identity that people have? Or is it always a negotiation of perceptions? Is Warhol or Picasso or Lady Gaga or Obama or your boyfriend or girlfriend a real and knowable identity? Or a constantly negotiated construct filtered through your own needs and perceptions?

Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, KW ICA, Berlin, 2004 — in this installation Warhol Screen Tests & other films are presented as a sort of subtly moving portrait gallery.

Four
About Art110
Last week you all provided a lot of valuable feedback on the Discussion Groups. Many of you thought that they had some or a lot of value, but as I look over everything you all said, it looks like they’re going to be out for next summer. I’m still tallying your feedback and will LYK the final results, but that’s how it’s looking so far.

This week I’d really appreciate your thoughts on the rest of the course.

• What were your 3 favorite activities? Why?
• What were your 3 least favorite activities? Why?
• What was the best part of the course and should definitely stay?
• What was the not-so-best part of the course and should maybe go?

I’d also like to get your thoughts on the ePortfolios / Websites / Blogs. As you know, I’m really hoping these will become valuable tools for you guys. Some of you were already doing great portfolio/blog work before the summer started. Some of you have built the start of something powerful this summer. But for others of you, it mostly has been a “place to turn in my homework”. And no doubt for some or many of you it will never go farther than that.

What do you think about ePortfolios?

I think the materials for this course have been fairly modest in price. Still, I’m sure you’d be happy to spend $18 less. I asked you to buy your own Domain Name (“me.com” instead of the free “me.wordpress.com”) for a few reasons. I think having your own domain name gives you a certain ownership over your site. I hope it gives you a feeling of empowerment. I also hope that some of you will maintain and expand these sites and make them powerful tools for your ongoing careers.

Of course I could also be wrong about all that.

Are you happy you have your own domain name? Or do you just wish you could have saved $18?

Happy Trails

This isn’t goodbye goodbye, I’ll send you another post in a week after all your A12’s are in. But it’s pretty close! Thank you all so much for putting time in on Art, and on Art110 this summer. I’ve enjoyed working through ideas with you and I’ve loved seeing your diverse and creative projects. And you have been diverse! Different projects, and lots of different opinions: some found discussions valuable, others thought them a waste of time; some found Joseph DeLappe’s work enormously important, some “didn’t get it” or found it offensive and would have kicked him out like some of the real players did; some of you thought Scene Completion was really cool, and some thought it was totally fake and meaningless.

In the end perhaps it doesn’t matter too much where on these wide spectrums of opinion and perception you came down, but simply that the ideas and artists we’ve looked at asked questions and made you think. Our lives can be so busy that we sometimes find thinking to be a burden. Just strap me to the tracks, fire up the engine, and let’s go down the tracks already!

For me, great art is art that asks questions. Art that questions my assumptions. Art that invites me, or demands, that I look at things from different perspectives. I hope the diversity of your perspectives on these many ideas means that “we” have asked a lot of questions and looked from a lot of perspectives.

For those of you who already “Walked” in May and Art110 was the last class in your CSULB career, CONGRATULATIONS!! I know there’s jobs and apartments and so many things to get moving on! But try to take a moment to savor what you’ve accomplished. It’s incredible! It’s fantastic!

For those of you coming back to CSULB, or Penn State, or anywhere else, for a year or four, best wishes! Sometimes being in college can seem like so many hoops to jump through and so many units and things to collect so you can get out already and move on to the next square in the game of life. I hope you can take a moment now and then to remember that in life the journey should be at least as important as the destination.

I’m sure you all know that Robin Williams passed away yesterday. I’m not a big fan of art being plundered to sell things, but I can’t deny that the Robin Williams Dead Poets Society iPad commercial that you probably saw replayed a lot yesterday, is just a great piece of poetry.

Happy Trails!

— Glenn

Glenn & Julia (with Julia’s JEM logo) at the Venice Beach Legal Art Walls, Summer 2014

Art Talk 12: The Art of Our Time

Art Talk #12 – The Art of Our Time from Glenn Zucman on Vimeo.

Artist OTW 12: Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol from Glenn Zucman on Vimeo.

On Nov 13, 2013 Andy Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold at auction for 105.4 million dollars. This interview was recorded in advance of the auction by Sotheby’s:

David Bowie wrote a song about Andy Warhol:

Edie Sedgwick was unquestionably one of Warhol’s greatest female film stars. Animated, beautiful, and trend-settingly thin, this unhappy child from a prominent New England family fascinated almost everyone who met her. In the mid-1960′s she became something of an icon, influencing popular style with her dark, heavily made-up eyes, cropped silver hair, elaborate dangling earrings, and long tights-clad legs.

Although the tragic and sometimes sordid details of her short life have been extensively recorded elsewhere, the most compelling record of Sedgwick’s personality , the best evidence of her particularly fascinating presence, are to be found in the Warhol films themselves. Sedgwick nearly monopolized Warhol’s camera for much of 1965, starring or appearing in every single sound film to come out of The Factory between late March and the shooting of My Hustler on Labor Day Weekend in September.

— Callie Angell

In 2008, 21 years after Warhol’s death, The Warhol Museum commissioned musicians Dean & Britta (Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips) to create Sound Series: 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

Screen Test: Ann Buchanan:

Edie Sedgwick died of a drug overdose in 1971 at the age of 28. 42 years later, in 2014 she had a Twitter Resurrection and filmed a new screen test of her avatar afterlife:

Edie Sedgwick, Screen Test #5 from Edie Sedgwick on Vimeo.

• Warhol Grave 24/7 Earthcam: warhol.org/figment