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Week 5

I like the concept of Xu Bing, the self-invented Chinese characters can really confused the audience who can not read Chinese characters. However, I think that it is not so great to the people who actually know Chinese characters.

Some of the characters in the work are actually English word which are transformed to "Chinese characters". But I think Chinese characters is more than that. This type of transformation eliminated many special properties of Chinese characters, which is also interesting and can be challenged by creating new characters.

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Discussed about Dada. At first I thought that it was an English name of a certain artist, however, from Wikipedia,

"Origin of the word Dada
The origin of the name "Dada" is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words da, da, meaning yes, yes in the Romanian language (the word ultimately derived from Slavic) (Engl. equivalent: yeah, yeah, as in a sarcastic or facetious yeah, right). Still others believe that a group of artists assembled in Zürich in 1916, wanting a name for their new movement, chose it at random by stabbing a French-German dictionary with a paper knife, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada in French is a child's word for hobby-horse. In French the colloquialism, c'est mon dada, means it's my hobby.[7] According to the Dada ideal, the movement would not be called "Dadaism", much less designated an art-movement.[8]"

So it's strange.

It sounds to me that Collage, Photo Montage, Assemblage, and using Found Objects to create another piece of artwork is little bit "玩到無野好玩", therefore invent some new ways of "Playing". When conventional art has bored them and methods have been tried by so many people before, they start to think out some new ways of creating an artwork/what so ever.

Especially for found objects, it is an obvious evidence that Art is affected by the society.

It is hard to imagine that back to the Reinasance that period of time people would cut paper or use found objects to create artwork. I think the development of "Dadaism" also symbolizes the change of the human society that when it comes to 20th and 21st century, people started to have "Excess" products. We now create more rubbish than ever before.

That why they can develop such an Art using "Found Objects", that means actually everyday we are dumping USEFUL things out to rubbish bin, they can be recycled, they can be re-used, but we chose to throw it away immediately.

In the past people don't have enough clothes to wear, now cloth are so excessive that you can pick it up and made artwork.

The power of found objects makes me think of how we waste our resources.

Of course found objects need not to be human-made, it can be natural like leaves, rocks, etc.

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Thoughts after the lecture in week 2

Experimental Action

Artists are naughty. Artists like to have their own playground and play whatever they want to play, in an usual or unusual way. They have so many ideas in their mind and would like to try it out in order to see how it would turn out in the end. They don't even know what will come up finally during the process.

In this Chinese New Year break I watched "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea" two times, one in Cantonese and one in Japanese. Animation like this are facing extinction. Miyazaki's could be interpret in many ways in each of his work. Basically signifying the ironic nature of childhood innocence and adults' complicated mind.

Many people accused him this time not being able to produce a piece of work that can be understand by the audience. Neither do I understand the whole story clearly. However, I appreciate movies or animations which allows me to think aggressively. There are many hidden plots and metaphor in the animation and I only understand half of the movie after second viewing.

Artists central idea or main reason of producing the work may not be so important compared to how the audience interpret it. In the end the artists may just want to create something he wanted without thinking of how the audience would react.

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Week 2 - Brief notes

Automatism
Self-driven / Involuntary
Invented by the Surrealist

Experimental Action
An artist's thought, wants to try out something in his mind.

Representation / mimesis (to imitate)

Automatism is a kind of experimental action

Rule -> simple action -> Frottage -> pattern -> intuition