Keys to the Koop: Humor and Satire in Contemporary Printmaking

For those of you in Art 5: here's something that pertains to our lecture on Tuesday! :D



Keys to the Koop: Humor and Satire in Contemporary Printmaking
August 23 - October 9, 2005
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 10, 4-6 p.m.
Pamona College Museum of Art

"Keys to the Koop: Humor and Satire in Contemporary Printmaking” features 60 works by 16 contemporary American and British artists from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation. The artists use wit and provocation to comment on contemporary art, fashion, food, religion, politics, and other aspects of popular culture. Some of the artists are amused by what they see, others are disturbed by it. Some direct their commentary at social issues, while others lampoon art itself.

Artists include: Mark Bennett, Enrique Chagoya, Roy DeForest, Tony Fitzpatrick, Ellen Gallagher, David Gilhooly, Red Grooms, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Gene Gentry McMahon, Claes Oldenburg, Tad Savinar, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and William Wegman. The exhibition includes work in a variety of printmaking media—etching, aquatint, drypoint, lithography, photolithograph, woodcut, and screenprint.

The exhibition is organized by Terri M. Hopkins, director and curator at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University, and John Olbrantz, The Maribeth Collins Director at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, in consultation with the Schnitzer Family Foundation.

Don't quit your day job.

For many artists, a day job is not just a way of keeping body and soul together—it also feeds and sustains their creative work.

It was the best kind of training,” says James Rosenquist, recounting his days in the 1950s hanging from a scaffold and painting a mammoth advertisement for Castro Convertible sofas on the side of a building. Rosenquist entered the art world after seven years of working for Art Kraft, the leading billboard company in New York City, and the grand scale and bright colors of those massive signs clearly influenced his later work. But, he explains, the job taught him a lot more than merely how to approach a wide-scale canvas. “It was a school of learning that doesn’t exist anymore,” he goes on to explain—“a union-trade schooling in how to be a professional, making paintings for real people, not for graduate school.”

Rosenquist is only one of numerous artists of his generation who look back with nostalgia on their first jobs, positions they held long before they could dream of supporting themselves through their art. Mark di Suvero, a welder and licensed crane operator, worked in construction, and Robert Rauschenberg decorated department-store windows. Wayne Thiebaud worked for Disney and Rexall Drug Company, training as a commercial artist, and Andy Warhol, of course, got his start in advertising. Robert Ryman, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Brice Marden did stints as security guards at institutions including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Jewish Museum.

“Today, it is a very different problem because the cost of living is higher,” says Alex Katz, who worked as a carver at a fine-art frame shop two or three days a week for ten years before his first commercially viable show at New York’s Stable Gallery in 1960. “I lived on a shoestring, so it paid the rent. Today, it would be impossible,” acknowledges Katz. He has often said that it takes a decade for an artist to mature, “but now it would be impossible to be an absolute failure for ten years and survive.”

“Don’t quit your day job!” used to be a derogatory remark, thrown at amateurs. No longer. True, while a number of young artists today achieve instant success straight out of art school, most artists are survivalists who know enough to find a day job that can sustain them through the ups and downs of a long-term art career.

~ By Barbara Pollack, complete article at ARTnews

What do you think?

Red Cross

I know many of us are worried about friends and family that were in the path of Hurricane Katrina. We might feel helpless and not know how to direct our energies in a productive way. If you are looking for a way to help in this time of need, I suggest starting with the Red Cross.

Donations will provide clean water, food, and shelter for disaster victims. But, if you'd prefer to be more directly involved, local Red Cross chapters are organizing volunteers to travel to affected areas. You can find more information through these links.

Anthropology Museum

Through a Chaffey College summer study abroad program to Mexico, we took an excursion to the Anthropology Museum located in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. Going to the museum is a highly recommended educational experience. Within the interesting architecture of the building you will find room after room with expositions. They cover the diverse ethnic groups of Mexico including the cultures of Teotihuacan, Xochicalco, the Toltec, the Mexica, the Maya, ect. You are transported through time and place into the world of the pre-Hispanic indigenous peoples. You will definitely learn a lot.

Naachtun

New website at the University of Calgary.

The ancient Maya city of Naachtun is still one of the most remote sites in the Yucatan peninsula, and one of the least known of all major Classic Maya centres. The site was re-discovered in 1922 by Sylvanus Morley, who named it Naachtun,"Distant Stone" because of its inaccessibility. Sadly, however, even though Naachtun is extremely isolated, most of the major mounds have been pitted and trenched by looters. The Naachtun Archaeological Project, which commenced in 2002, is undertaking the first scientific excavations of the site.

What is Art?

The word "art" comes from the Latin ars, which, loosely translated, means "arrangement" or "to arrange".

Webster's first definition of art is the quality, production, or expression, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

From Aristotle, art is concerned with imitation, the representation of appearances, and gives pleasure through the accuracy and skill with which it depicts the real world.

Plato states that the artist is inspired by the Muses (God, inner impulses, or the collective unconscious) to express that which is beyond appearances - inner feelings, eternal truths, or the essesnce of the age.

Immanual Kant concluded that art can only be judged by its own criteria and not by anything external to it. This was later popularized by Theophile Gautier as "l'art pour l'art" ("art for art's sake").

What do you think? How is art defined? Can it be defined?

Please, give your ideas and thoughts in the "responses" below.

Basquiat at the MOCA

Jean-Michel Basquiat's brilliant and dramatic artworks speak to a time in the grip of extraordinary change: the advent of hip-hop, the '80s art boom, and the revival of painting in the United States. An artist of stirring emotional depth, Basquiat once said that his main themes were "kings, heroes, and the street." He is recognized for the unique iconography he developed from urban culture, sports heroes, and jazz legends, as well as his ability to break down the boundaries between painting, text, and drawing. This major retrospective features over 100 works from throughout the artist's short but influential career.

Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)
Los Angeles
Grand Avenue
07.17.05 - 10.10.05


UPDATE 8/20/05: I went to this exhibition today. It is an excellent collection of the artist's work. If you are are taking my Contemporary Art class and are writing the optional term paper, I highly suggest going to see this show. I think I'll arrange a "field trip" for next month.

Okay, the date is actually October 1 :)

TUTANKHAMUN at LACMA

TUTANKHAMUN AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PHARAOHS

National Geographic, AEG Exhibitions and Arts and Exhibitions International, with cooperation from the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, will bring an extensive exhibition of more than 130 treasures from the tomb of the celebrated pharaoh Tutankhamun (King Tut), other Valley of the Kings tombs and additional ancient sites to the United States on a 27-month tour beginning in Los Angeles on June 16, 2005.

The exhibit includes 50 major artifacts excavated from Tutankhamun's tomb, including his royal diadem — the gold crown discovered encircling the head of the king's mummified body that he likely wore while living — and one of the gold and inlaid canopic coffinettes that contained his mummified internal organs.

More than 70 artifacts from other royal graves of the 18th dynasty (1555 B.C.-1305 B.C.) are showcased as well, including those of pharaohs Amenhotep ll and Thutmose lV and the rich, intact tomb of Yuya and Tuyu, parents-in-law of Amenhotep lll and great-grandparents of Tutankhamun. Yuya and Tuyu's tomb was the most celebrated historical find in the Valley of the Kings until Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun's undisturbed burial chamber in 1922. All of the treasures in the exhibit are between 3,300 and 3,500 years old.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
June 16, 2005–November 15, 2005

Join us on October 22.

The Photographs of Paul Strand

"Three important roads opened for me....My work grew out of a response, first, to trying to understand the new developments in painting; second, a desire to express certain feelings I had about New York where I lived; third...I wanted to see if I could photograph people without their being aware of the camera." —Paul Strand

American photographer Paul Strand (1890–1976) pursued his three roads throughout his lengthy career while simultaneously espousing his political, humanistic beliefs through his art. In an attempt to reach a wide audience, he published five books that combine text with images to convey his message. This exhibition surveys Strand's work from 1913 through 1954 with works from the Getty Museum's permanent collection.

J. Paul Getty Museum
May 10 - September 4, 2005