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Lately, I’ve been exploring language and its role in our perception and understanding of art. I thought I would dig through some Wittgenstein text to whet my appetite for some much-needed philosophical art writing I’m working on. Here’s an excerpt of what I’ve been noshing on… We are handicapped in ordinary language by having to describe, say, a tactile sensation by means of terms for physical objects such as the word “eye”, “finger”, etc. when what we want to say…
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Funny how a picture (any kind of picture) is a mere representation. I wrote a couple of posts about perception some time ago. One on eye anatomy and the other on eye anatomy related to mental capacity. So, it was great to see a Calamities of Nature comic strip paying homage to Magritte (and Foucault). Recently, I had a conversation with someone about new media not being able to escape language, which is one of the reasons why painting is not…
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Associated with the sixth edition of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ triennial exhibition “Bay Area Now” — a varied roundup showcasing artists inspired by the region and beyond — is a presentation by the performance troupe Big Art Group called “The People: San Francisco.” The site-specific outdoor extravaganza, which loosely recreates the story of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia,” combines live theater with real-time, large-scale video projection and features interviews with locals who voice their thoughts about democracy, war, terrorism and justice.…
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The days of happenings and Fluxus signaled a pivotal transition and a prophetic glimpse into Post (Post) Modern art. Such progression into participant based art within art history entailed the coining of Relational Aesthetics. The times when artists sat around and drank beer ushered its way into the cannon of conceptual fine art. Also known as relational art, relational aesthetics encompasses an art practice within a social context and the creation of the art dependent on the exhibition visitors and participants within a specific environment.…
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Currently working on a piece about New Media work by Joseph DeLappe and the Tool Shed Days art collective. Quite honestly, I’ve been working on this piece for the past couple of weeks off and on because I wanted to explore the notion of the new media artists re-interpreting virtual space as a public place for protest and civil disobedience. I believe I’m onto something. In any case, I need to get the piece done and with a fairly open Sunday,…
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Artists and writers must be brought back into the bosom of the community, or at least, if the latter is considered to be ill, they must be assigned the task of healing it. ~ Jean-Francois Lyotard, French Philosopher and Literary Theorist
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Last weekend, I watched Full Metal Jacket. Being a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick and a sucker for a well done war film, the movie was phenomenal. Naturally, I thought of the various ways war has been depicted in the visual and new media arts. Admittedly, I’m not huge fan of political art; HOWEVER, when it’s done well, it can be powerful and truly engaging. From visual to performative, the artists below have created some of the most memorable pieces.…
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In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstructing them according to the work’s own law. Only through such transformation, and not through an ever falsifying photography, does art give empirical reality its due, the epiphany of its shrouded essence and the merited shudder in the face of it as in the face of a monstrosity. The primacy of the object is affirmed aesthetically only in the character of art as the…
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In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstructing them according to the work’s own law. Only through such transformation, and not through an ever falsifying photography, does art give empirical reality its due, the epiphany of its shrouded essence and the merited shudder in the face of it as in the face of a monstrosity. The primacy of the object is affirmed aesthetically only in the character of art as the…
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writer | artist | scholar
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. 