Juice
November 5, 2008
I believe that most of the time, people are asked to do things and produce when they don’t have any means to do so.
Great Works
October 8, 2008Reading Faulkner’s speech accepting a Nobel Peace prize, I was captivated by the ideas he presented and how relevant they were to the world I was living in, one that came long after he gave the speech. So I picked up his book The Sound and the Fury, expecting more of the same wisdom, but was given a completely different idea of what makes a great work of literature. Rather than focusing on the plot line or even giving readers a clear sense of what was going on, Faulker gives you a stream of conscious coming from a mentally retarded man. You get the same sense of confusion from reading that he has in his daily life.
This idea opened up completely new avenues of what literature or a work of art could do for someone. Not to tell a great story or put characters in situations that merit empathy, but just to let the reader get into the mind of another human being.
Along a different note, when it comes to visual art works created by Robin Rhode I consider to be great works of art. I consider them this because they are transcendent, I can look at them and feel that they are profound as well as my father, who knows very little about art, can look at them and get something out of them as well. There is one series in particular where you see a man up against a concrete wall and paint blobs that move in each frame to make it look as if he is juggling balls. My dad looks at it and sees someone with a sense of humor, who can sit back in the ordinary qualities of everyday and have a good laugh. I look at it and see a creative use of new materials as well as a statement that says even if I have nothing, I have something. That there really isn’t a difference between having certain materials since it all fleshes out to be the same.
Faculty Show
October 1, 2008
Nathaniel Rogers
Sin
Oil on Panel
2008
Drawing
I was first attracted to this image to the mixture of images chosen to be interacting together. Some are biblical, such as the winding snake and the apple. Others are historical, such as the knight outfit reminiscent of the crusades. What really makes the piece, for me at least, is the emotion (or lack of it) the figure portrays.
Chiptunes=Bizarre
September 24, 2008Went to go see the 8-bit festival of Baltimore. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, well, I barely have any clarification to give you. It’s a genre called “chiptunes”, which to the best of my knowledge is a mix of synthesizer and sound clips from video games. Take a listen.
I thought it was going to be a bunch of deathly skinny, Link obsessives, but in reality it was a gaggle of overweight balding men on an awkward stage. The rest of the audience looked deadly serious and into the whole “scene”. I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw them all performing. They were each staring at their individual monitors, interacting to make this music, but not communicating or acknowledging each other’s presence. Only one of the men was tapping his foot to the beat, and he was the one making the visuals. Being there was so bizarre, like I had slipped into another mindset, the music was strangely ambient but progressive. Like I was being sucked in a black hole, spiraling down watching images of waves crashing, while taking LSD and listening to pink floyd.
