I don’t know if it’s because I’m an art student studying to be a teacher, or because I’m an artist, but it seems like art education these days is so fast – as soon as you finish a project, you reflect, and it’s time fore 3 more assignments! The final project for my Painting for Meaning class is to develop a series of at least 3 paintings that accumulate to 40 hours of work. The theme and subject, process and methods, are entirely up to me. So much freedom! I’m hoping I can find some artists in this research journal to inspire me.
If you’re an art educator, there are some awesome artist and thematic investigations to inspire you on Art21.org. I remember my high school art teacher, Jack Watson, first introducing the platform to me through our lessons.
The first artist is John Baldessari. He is an American conceptual artist known for his work with found photography and appropriated images. He combines photomontage, painting, and words to create strong visual juxtapositions with words to illuminate, confound, and challenge meaning. He breaks traditional functions of an image by instead focusing on small details, negative spaces, etc. His work creates both humor and dissonance within the viewer. I really like the collaged and juxtaposition in his work, although I would be interested in how it creates conceptual meaning beyond just contradicting formal visual standards.
Stephanie Syjuco is up next. She is a US conceptual artist and educator. . She was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1974 and currently lives and works in San Francisco. I appreciate how Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade to digital editing to explore the tension between the authentic and the counterfeit, challenging deep-seated assumptions about history, race, and labor. Her work is very much activism in my mind, and serves a function to change culture of consumerism. Check out her website here.
Here is a description of the artist’s work – “Cargo Cults (Cover-Up),” 20″ x 15 – in her own words: “This photographic series revisits historical ethnographic studio portraiture via fictional display: using mass-manufactured goods purchased from American shopping malls and restyled to highlight popular fantasies associated with “ethnic” patterning and costume. Purchased on credit cards and returned for full refund after the photo shoots, the cheap garments hail from the distant lands of Forever21, H&M, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, Target, The Gap, and more.”
Next we have Thomas Hirschhorn. As an artist he is interested creating art that serves in public discourse in political discontent. As an artist he rejects elitist aesthetic criteria by posing questions about aesthetic value, moral responsibility, political agency, consumerism, and media spectacle. Again, I appreciate his overt rejection of aesthetic norms to challenge power structures. He has described his decision to use everyday materials as “political” as these materials “don’t intimidate, they are universal, economic, inclusive, and don’t bear any plus-value”.
Last but not least we have Elliott Hundley, who is a painter and collage artist from Greensboro, North Carolina. His multi-panel tableaus, with family and friends, found images are anchored to bulletin-board-like surfaces, and built up with materials such as cutup magazines, string, plastic, gold leaf. He recycles leftover scraps from one work and uses images of completed paintings as substructures for new projects,
creating continuity between old and new. I appreciate his effort to collage layers of materials, meaning, and time into his work.
MONICA HEISER 