Final Website Link

mason.gmu.edu/~daiuto/avt280

Mariko Mori

Q: Mariko Mori in the series Pureland or Burning Desire explores a Relationship with Japanese popular culture, Elaborate on the use of parody by the artist.

            In the 1996 piece “Pure Land,” Mariko Mori is invoking Manga and Anime by presenting herself as a central character from the popular Japanese cartoon artwork.

            The work is a three-panel piece: in the first one she emerges from the heart of a lotus flower as an eastern goddess, surrounded by a pink sphere that incases her, and circled by six little imps suspended in their own pink spheres and playing musical instruments.  The scene is set in front of a rosy backdrop with a distant horizon suggesting a mysterious, undisturbed land.  She portrays Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.”  Mariko collaborates modern Japanese animation with western art.

            In the second panel, Mariko is flying in the sky with small, glowing “leaves/bubbles/flowers.”

            In the third panel, she is resting her knees on the lotus flower and is posed in an imperial, mystic stance.  In the background an unidentified object is reflected by the pink surface below, indicating its status as water.

            The effect is just what you would expect from a video game or a fantasy video, and at the same time, parodies eastern mysticism and western art.

10 photos

Picture 10/31/11

Danny Project 2

Teun Hocks

Q: Could describe how Teun Hocks makes his photos?  How may this be linked to the history of his country Holland?


I believe Hocks is using physical media (chalk, acrylics, etc.) for his background, and digital media (photoshop) to place himself in that background.

Hocks's exploration of different art styles symbolizes the nature of Holland's people to explore and travel.
http://www.hbs.edu/schwartz/items/hocksteun111.html

Map #1 Project 2

Erik Johansson

Q: What do you think are the concerns about the environment and landscape in this work?  Do you see the influences of Magritte and Escher in this work?  Name examples.

As man develops and expands, he damages the environment and shrinks edible living space for himself and other species.  Some pieces of Johansson's work reflect shrinking space and finding new territories, such as the one with houses outlining a sphere and the one with a piece of property in a glass box under the ocean.

There are pieces resembling those of Magritte and Escher.
-The fish with a house for a back resembles Magritte's "Castle in the Pyrenees."
-The lego triangle resembles Escher's "Relativity."

Intertextuality

a) Define Intertextuality

Intertextuality is the recognition that texts are not isolated events or story lines but are related to other texts that exist in multiple genres.  As an example, the phenomenon "Star Wars" started as a single movie that eventually became a trilogy, comic books, video games, novels, artwork, toys, a virtual reality ride in Disney World, and an entire universe created by thousands of contributors.  Eventually the original creators, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas produced three more movies that were the prequels to the first three, but were heavily influenced by the story lines created in the other media.  The intertexuality made "Star Wars" a richer universe, and references to "Star Wars" became a part of our reality through commercials and other fantasy styles.


b) In the following case, could you name the original reference in these images (pick 3), and describe how the original text influences (content wise) the new image.


"Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson)": The original portrait of King Philip II of Spain was created by Peter Rubens in the 17th century.  The portrait with Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop" was created by Kehinde Wiley.  The subtle differences in the Wiley portrait from the original are based on the contexts of Jackson's life, introducing themes such as racial equality (adding an African-american cherub), changing the horse's color from brown to white, adding a flower bush, and even changing a background of storm clouds to a blue sky.

"Colonel Plantoff and His Charger" evokes a classical military portrait but puts it in the modern context of an African American rapper in modern clothes.  The swirling pattern of vines that run through the picture are a nineteenth century decorative art style that surrounds a 21st century man.

The original "Christian Martyr Tarcisius" is a white marble statue created by French sculptor Alexandre Falguiere in 1868.  It depicts a young bog who was attacked either by his playmates or by Roman guards.  The modern piece by Wiley depicts an African American in casual modern clothes with the same hand gesture and lounging position as the statue.  I can imagine him as a victim of an attack either by his friends in the "hood" or by the police (the Roman guards of his time).  His clothing and the floral wallpaper are as garish as the original marble statue is cold and stark.  It raises the question "What did this modern man do that made him a Martyr in his time?"  "Could he have been a victim of a random act of violence, like a drive-by shooting?"  "Did he have a confrontation with the police?"  He is a symbol of young African American men who were victims.

Drop Dead Gorgeous

When I link the women, the objects, and their anxiety, the first thing that comes to mind in the case of the food is how it's said that women find pleasure in eating when they can't find it with a man.  The women presented seem so depressed like they have no one in their lives, and therefore resort to other activities like eating, art, bathing, reading, etc.  Perhaps the lifeless gestures in them refer to how the more they practice these activities the less they go forward in life.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In some way we humans have become more like machines, for example we focus too much on money making, business growing, and using resources at our own leisure, and forgetting our connection to the earth and each other, and how these actions impact and threaten our own existence through overpopulation, pollution, global warming, poverty, and the loss of the natural world, which contributes to the healthy world we need to survive, physically and emotionally.