When we look at objects we are not necessarily thinking of about the object. We might might be thinking about how hungry we are, how we forgot to put out the garbage that morning, or what we are planning to do later day. Most likely though, whatever object we are observing, that object is an influence on what our consciousness becomes aware of. "If I'm just looking around while thinking of something else, every object that comes into focus will remind me of my life." (Just Looking p. 22) Seeing is not the only way specific memories are brought up either. "All we have to open the past are the five senses... And memory," Louise Bourgeois says (Black Hands interview) Bourgeois is a French artist who, for several decades, has based her art on her past. "Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history." (Biography) For as long as I can remember, I have always made gifts for my family as opposed to buying them. My gifts are highly symbolic, incorporating remnants of our lives together; pictures of us, ideas and jokes we've shared and objects used for many years. These gifts have always had another meaning behind the obvious, and it was up to my family to find what that was to them individually. The search for a deeper context. Bourgeois, while speaking of the Jane Adams memorial statues (Black Hands), mentions what she sees the hands really representing, "It is really our (hers and her helper's) hands, because it means how much I care about the whole thing. It shows how much emotion that is expressed is true. It's an emotion that has been lived and is real, its not something that's made up." (Black Hands video) Bourgeois wants people to look into the sculpture as if it was themselves. To feel what she's felt, to follow the rabbit hole further. "When I say, 'just looking,' I mean I am searching, I have my 'eye out' for something. Looking is hoping, desiring, never just taking in light, never merely collecting patterns and data." (Just Looking p.22) Sometimes when we look we are searching for those emotional memories to possibly learn more... about ourselves...about the human condition. Most times though, this is happening very discreetly under our own radar. "By pretending, or perhaps I should say deeply believing that vision is passive. In a word, we sometimes think that artworks provoke 'disinterested interest': we are engaged, but we don't want anything but ocular pleasure." (Just Looking p.24) This is probably because, seeing anything but something pleasurable brings up things that we might not be emotionally ready for. We, personally, have to come to our own emotional fruition to see beyond the object. "A work of art doesn't need to be explained... If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn't touch you, I have failed." (Black Hands video) Sometimes we don't see beyond the object, or reach its full meaning because the object stimulates long forgotten experiences that hold painful truths we purposely hid. "There is no such thing as an observer looking at an object, if seeing means a self looking out at a world." (Just Looking p. 19)
Richard Serra is another artist we looked at this week. However his work is reaching on polar opposites of Bourgeois. He is a sculpture who mainly works with steel and as steel is hard and cold, so is the amount of emotion that one might reflect from those pieces. This is not to say that his work is not amazing and wonderful, just not necessarily influenced by past emotional experiences, painful or joyful. His artistic process he claims is dealt with, "a verb list: to roll, to fold, to cut to dangle, to twist..."(Charlie Brown interview) unlike Bourgeois' work that deals with personal trauma. Serra's work is massive in size and so in order to observe it, one must physically move around and with it. His work seems to want you to be shocked visually as opposed to emotionally.
Amanda Wojick, our guest speaker, gave a lecture that so happen to include Louise Bourgeois as well as many other influential women sculptures through out the century. She mentioned how she had never before knew that art could be about an idea or about feelings. She was taken by Bourgeois's work, how vulnerable and how personal it was. She had always struggled to invent the art's meaning, where as Bourgeois used what was already inside her. "What modern art means is that you have to keep finding ways to express yourself. To express the pain...art is a way of always recognizing yourself and that is why it will always be modern." (Louise Bourgeois in lecture) Wojick also mentioned Magdalena Abakanovicz, a sculpture who's art represented in a sense the decayed and rotting, the aspects of life experience we tend to not want to acknowledge. One way she accomplished this, was by filling a room with giant potato or body part-looking pillows that just sat there sadly, all piled on one another in a compost heap Just like Bourgeois, reminding us of the painful experiences, but by doing so there is a kind of freedom of the past experience as well. Its like nurturing a baby, you wouldn't just throw the baby out just because its crying, you would console it and try to understand. "Art needs somebody to listen to its message, somebody to desire it, somebody to drink it, to use it like wine-- otherwise it makes no sense." (Magdalena Abakamovicz in lecture) In other words, "The observer looks at the object in order to do something or get something." (Just Looking p. 34)
Nicely done.
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