Tag Art

The hardest part of this project was trying to come up with a "tag name." It seemed as though the people in the video were creating identities that they felt represented the way they wanted the outside world to see them. I'm not yet sure how I want the world to see me, but I created a name that represented my life/social scene today.

I chose "Green and Dumb" as the name I wanted to use. It seems as though my life is in transition. A transition that I have not previously experienced. My surroundings are changing. People are graduating and moving, getting engaged and moving, starting new phases of their lives, while I seem to be stuck in a very constant state of uncertainty about my own future. "Green and Dumb" is the name of a song by Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers. It too seems to be a song about the uncertainty of life. It is also a song that I most closely associate with one of the people in my life who is moving on, someone who has also made a very profound impact on me learning how to find myself.

I chose to create my peice out of the pages of a book called "The Kite Runner." This book is one that helped me decide one of the only things in my life I know with certainty, I want to work in the Publishing Industry when I graduate. It was highly influential in my life. I also wrote the lyrics that one of my roommates wrote about me before he left across the words. They aren't profoundly deep or moving, but he wrote them about me. He too has had a deep impact on who I am, and I thought that it was only appropriate that his words be included. I feel like words are the best way to understand someone, and I thought that it was important that I included a lot of words in my peice.

To me, this peice represents the uncertainty that currently exists in my life and in my social circle, but also the path that can be found in uncertainty. It represents the impact that people can have on your life, and the way you can show their importance without saying much at all.

Rivers and TIdes

In the film “Rivers and Tides” Goldsworthy spoke of “obsessive forms.” From watching the footage, I understood these to be forms that are recurrent in nature. It seemed as though he related a lot of his artwork to the shape of the rivers that he was working near, at times it was a snake-like form and at others it was a tide pool form similar to that of the salmon hole. He then spoke of being uprooted and creating new roots. I interpreted this to mean that his travel caused him to be uprooted, and then he had to create new roots for himself by immediately throwing himself into his artwork without researching his new environment. It seemed as though this related to the bodies of water that he based a lot of his work off of. The tides are always changing, and because of this his art transforms as well.

When Goldsworthy begins to create a work on a rock with icicles, he begins to talk about potential and the excitement of discovery. I thought it was interesting because when the sun began to shine, it shone on both sides of the rock, unexpectedly illuminating the ice on both sides. Even though he was excited about the unknown potential of his piece that was then revealed to him, he also knew that the same thing that brought his work to life will also cause its death. The sun was going to eventually cause the ice, that was in the shape of a frozen river, flowing around the rock, into water. Another time this happened was when he was creating the tide pool-like structure near the salmon hole. The land provided the wood he was working with, and the salmon hole provided the inspiration, but later the salmon hole took the piece back. However, the salmon hole wasn’t destroying the work, it was taking it off onto another plane and turning it into another work.

When nature eventually takes his works back into itself, he doesn’t feel like it is destruction. It seemed to me that destruction is a word that seems to imply an intentional or malicious act. With the works that Goldsworthy is creating, they are only meant to last for as long as nature will allow. I thought a good example of this was when he created the egg like structure near the water. When the tide came in, he spoke of how he didn’t create it to be destroyed by the sea but to be a gift to the sea. He thought that he still had a connection to the piece and that the sea would make more of it that he could have. He thought that this was the same with life, sometimes there are upheavals and shock, but they shape a person as a body of work, shaping them in a way that they would not be able to do on their own. I think this was also shown when he was creating the work that came off of the tree almost like a curtain. He spoke of how there is a beauty in the balance of taking a work to the edge of collapse. Even though it eventually was pushed too far, I think this is also the same as in life because in order to know something’s true capacity for what it can hold it needs to be pushed to the edge.

When he was working on the beach, he spoke of how the beach has always been a great teacher about time. The tide causes restrictions on how long a work can be created. The beach also showed him a sense of uncertainty. The materials he was working with didn’t allow him to complete the work that he was creating because either the dampness of the sand or the weakness of the rocks kept causing it to fall. This didn’t seem to deter him, he instead spoke of how he liked working in situations where total certainty and structure was not available. He said he felt this way because total control can be the death of a work. The stones taught him that the real work was in understanding the stones. The stones grew in proportion to his understanding of them. Because of this, his failures gradually taught him about the importance of understanding the place and the materials that he was working with.

Goldsworthy created a lot of egg-like structures out of ice and stone. He spoke of how people often use stone structures as markers. When these works were placed in a museum, they still looked amazing because of the craftsmanship that I knew had to go into them. When I saw them in nature, they seemed more extraordinary. When I saw the tide and the plants overtaking the pieces, watched the elements cover up and then give them back, it seemed much more miraculous than the pieces did in the museum.

The sheep in the area the Goldsworthy lives have caused the land to become absent of trees. They have had a deep impact on the way that the land looks, but the people who live there have a perception of the sheep that is different than reality. This perception causes it to be hard to work with the sheep because they are perceived as simply being wooly animals, but in actuality they are very powerful animals. They have been the cause of political and social upheaval, people have been moved off the land in the past in order to allow the sheep to move on. It seemed to go back to the cliché that you cannot judge a book by its cover. The sheep seemed to be docile and unable to create change, but they have actually caused deep changes in that area.

It seemed like the absence of what was can be recorded in the landscape not only by what can be seen, but as Joe Sternfels pointed out, by what we can remember. Goldsworthy spoke of creating works surrounding holes. They show that life ebbs and flows, and it is wonderful to look into the darkness and see growth coming out of it. Looking at a landscape that no longer contains what it used to can show what may be to come.

Ephemeral Work

My intention with this peice was create something similar to the cirular peices that Goldsworthy created in "Rivers and Tides." His usually contained three colors and were all of one medium, though unlike mine, were created from natural materials found in nature.

This peice was created all from a variety of tabacco products that I found in my own backyard. Although these materials are not normally found in nature, I have found that they seem to be a staple of the makeup of our backyard. Rather than leaves and flowers, we seem to have an abundance of litter. I was amazed by the prevelance of cigarette packages I found in our environment, and I wanted to create a work with them. Living in an urban area, unlike the rural area that Goldworthy created his works, I found that I was much more likely to encounter man made substances rather than natural ones.

I too experienced the disheartening feeling that nature inflicts upon an artist while trying to create this peice outside. Much like the movie, everytime I got close to finishing my peice the wind would blow, and I would be forced to start once again.

This American Life

In the This American Life segment that I listened to, I really found myself drawn to the segment on sound. The man that was being interviewed spoke of the sounds that people do not usually pay attention to that are always present in their everyday life: the phone, the hum of the air conditioner, the sound of the telephone. What I found most interesting about this, however, was that he pointed out what musical note each object was in. He said that the sound of his office was in an augmented fourth. This sound was perceived by the Church to be a sound that was fearful. His microwave was making a noise in a C cord.

After listening to this interview, I sat outside with my roommate and we listened to noises that the city of Tucson makes. I found it amazing to sit and take in the sounds that people tend not to bother recognizing. The one the stuck out to me the most was the train. I have always found solace in the horn of the train, and somehow seeming to recognize this, my roommate informed me that the train was also in the C cord. While listening to the radio segment, it was said that this sound is one that symbolizes pleasure, friendship, and longing. I was amazed at how accurate this was. These are all feelings I associate with the train, and perhaps appropriately enough, I think these thing can also be related to the train.

I also found the segment related to touch to be an interesting one. The idea that someone could map out and become acquainted with a street by experiencing the variety of foods on it was fascinating to me. I also thought that when he said that the adventure he experienced in his own town soon became similar to the same thing he was looking for with a job in the Foreign Service. Pico Boulevard sounded like a foreign place to me. Each restaurant that he spoke of sounded as though it had its own culture and tradition. The foods and the people all seemed to have their own story to tell, and when each eating experience was described it was as though he was becoming reacquainted with a place he already thought he knew.

I was also amazed by the concept of maps in the segment on sight. When I used to think of maps, I thought of road maps. When the idea of being able to map anything was proposed, it showed a new side to me of looking at things. Mapping pumpkins on peoples porches, pools of light, and the amount of times people or places have been mentioned in the news were novel ideas to me. I found it really amazing that the pumpkins corresponded pretty directly to the places being mentioned in the news. I also thought that it was intriguing that no matter who lived in a house, some placed were mentioned more frequently than others. It was said that maps equal ways to describe the world. I really liked that they don’t simply have to be a way to show someone what the world looks like in terms of roads and lakes, but maps can also be a way to show the more personal and human nature of the world.