Art 21 Identity THINGY THAT MAKES SENSE PDF

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Ingrid Rojas Art:21: Identity April 3, 2020

Contemporary art is a very culturally diverse type of art. It is any art produced during the late twentieth century up to the time period we are in now. Due to people being more accepting of other cultures, art is currently flourishing with new ideas and no set of principles in which an artist has to follow. Contemporary art includes sculptures, paintings, technology and anything else you can think of. This type of art has produced new unbelievable ideas that people other centuries could not fathom. One common feature that is used worldwide in contemporary art is how artists often depict their own identity in their artworks which is what the video I watched showed. The artists in these videos showed their process on how they made art and how they used their cultural backgrounds in their artworks. The first artist's name was Bruce Nauman. He believed that his art was not meant to be shown in larger audiences but rather to someone in his home. I believed he did this in order to see how the person will try and figure out what his art means. He explained that his art did not have any real function and the whole purpose of his art was for the person who was looking at his art to come up with their own function for it. I thought this was very interesting because it gives people an initiative to look entirely at the art and come up with their own meaning for it. The meaning of his work was to look at the art as a whole rather than to focus on small details that did not have specific meaning. Such as in his artwork Wisconsin, Nauman was very simplistic in making this by just including things that came from the state Wisconsin. He did not feel the need to include anything over the top in his artwork and just made it known that it was

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representing Wisconsin and part of his identity since he lived in Wisconsin. In his artwork Green Horses, Nauman used a video and put the audience in a chair in order to feel the way he felt when he was working and learning with the horse handlers. This artwork was meant to depict the difficulty he had working with cowboys due to him working with horses so late in his life. Bruce Nauman also made an artwork called Staircase. This piece of artwork definitely reinforces his idea that anything in life can be art. This is a very simplistic piece of art, but it also has a lot of meaning. Staircase depicted how people would need to figure out its function. It was made directly coinciding with the landscape it was built on and had used the mathematics Nauman had studied in college to figure out how big the steps were going to be which further used his identity. This artwork could be used to look at the landscape around it and to also focus where you are walking. I believe that this piece of artwork best describes his quote of “You have to kind of not watch anything, so that you can be aware of everything” (Nauman). The next artist in the video was Kerry James Marshall. He explained that even though art has evolved greatly, many principles that had been used thousands of years ago in art are still used today. In his artwork he used different artists' principles and ideas in order to make his own paintings except he tries to add a more modern touch to his artworks. In his painting Many Mansions, Marshall used one of his favorite types of painting structure in order to make it seem more historical. In this painting he uses black figures and shows them working. I believe that this painting was meant to depict how the people are working on a garden with no houses around. The name of this painting is also very ironic because Many Mansions does not represent the painting at all because it seems there are no houses and the people working on the gardens have business suits on showing they should not be in that position. The meaning of this work was to represent how the buildings in the background are where these people should be but instead they

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are working on the garden which probably means even if someone was working hard they could not reach the stage of living in the background towers. In the video Marshall described the black figures as an emblem of power and how he was trying to reclaim this saying. Marshall also introduced a structure of a house called Illusions of Eden. This structure was meant to depict how people could not see into other people’s homes and how people could become obsessed with knowing. I believe the meaning of this structure was meant to show how people always want to be involved in other people's lives and do not understand privacy. One of the last pieces of artwork shown in the video by Marshall was a comic strip where he was using African figures and making them seem like Marvel characters. In this comic strip he was using his own identity by using his cultural background of African descent and how he was amazed by the Marvel characters when he was younger. He is trying to bring into light the tradition of African culture and make people more aware of it in America. The next artist in the video was Maya Lin. She is an artist, but she also does some architecture. In her artworks she uses naturally occurring phenomena, geology, and natural Earth formations. In the ice-skating rink, she helped design and organize constellations and the three forms of water :ice, liquid water, and gas. I believe that she put the constellations in her iceskating rink in order to remind the people skating to look up at the sky and appreciate what was above them. I also think she used the three elements of water in order to capture more of the landscape around the rink. The meaning of this whole ice rink was to appreciate the Earth we are standing on while also having fun and enjoying skating. I love this idea on how she uses the landscape as a part of the art she is making. It brings everything more to life and instead of ruining the beauty of Earth she simply magnifies it. Lin also made the Vietnam Memorial in order to honor the people who died in the Vietnam War. This is a magnificent memorial due to

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how the soldiers' names are presented on a wall. This is a very minimalist artwork which has been praised due to how it doesn't take off the attention of the soldiers but rather makes them the center of focus. The last artist's name is Louise Bourgeois. She made some sculptures around the Jane Addams Memorial Park. Her sculptures include hands of children and women to represent how they both helped each other. Bourgeois did not want to add anything to the park that would take away from the building because it was the center of attention. This is why she did not make her sculptures that tall and so simple but also extremely meaningful. The hands are black in order to present friendliness. Bourgeois also used her own hands and some of her workers in order to make the sculptures because she wanted to show how much she cared about this project and to represent how much emotion was put into this project. The hands depict how the members in the Hull House worked together to help each other and further the feminist movement. Bourgeois used her identity in this because she related to the girls in the Hull House. Her mother told her women do not need to be craftswomen and she should never pick up the tool to become one. Overall, all these artists used their own identity in order to make their artworks make them feel like it had more depth. Contemporary art is an amazing thing because no one can discriminate against it and artists can do whatever they want. These artists in the video all showed great emotion when making their artworks which showed in their paintings.

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Works Cited “Identity.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/video/art21-identity/...