Today’s lecture will mainly focus on social scenes. We will look at how a variety of different artworks and forms can portray social situations, even though they have no sound or movement. These social scenarios can form from the creation of the art, be portrayed in the actual work, or be a part of the viewing process. Overall, we will be looking at how social life is involved in artwork in general. We will discuss the different ways social relationships and conversations can be visually represented in an art form, the unique places they can occur, and even how social scenes are involved in the process of creating the artwork. A variety of different styles of art and subjects can be included, but they all relate back to portraying a social environment or situation. After analyzing these works, you will hopefully be more aware of how social scenes are involved in all art works and you can analyze and think more deeply about them when you go to a museum or when we look at other art forms in class. We will also expand our understanding of “contact zone” in art work. “Contact Zone” negotiates the terrain that extends between people living in different places or “worlds”.
The Man with Pipe painting was the subject of my formal analysis. Before completing the paper, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to focus on for my final project, but after studying this painting, I was intrigued by the way social scenes, which are usually highly dynamic and are depicted in more auditory mediums, can be shown through still paintings and other art forms. This was my inspiration for this new learning module.
VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL
This memorial is considered funerary architecture. In 1981, a private organization consisting primarily of Vietnam Veterans announced that the winner of a design competition would be the creator of the memorial that would be positioned on the Mall in Washington, DC. Maya Lin, a Chinese American student at Yale University, who was only 20 years old at the time, submitted the winning design. She was chosen based on her submission of a site that was reflective and contemplative, harmonious with the surrounding monuments, and included a list of all the soldiers killed during the war. It becomes a sacred place for veterans and their families
The monument is extremely simple, just consisting of two triangular walls meeting at an obtuse angle in the Earth. It is of minimalistic style. All the names of the active military at the time of the war are carved into the reflective black granite. The process of finding the names is an extremely personal experience, because they are listed in the order of which they died, not alphabetical like you would expect. This creates a degree of difficulty and effort to search for the names, as you show respect for those who have passed. If you are looking for a family members name, it might become a social, bonding experience that you do with your loved ones or a collective mourning experience with strangers who are also visiting the site, as it is visited by over 3 million people each year. It is best known as a reflective, contemplative place and the atmosphere is intended to be protective and quiet.
The Vietnam War Memorial can be considered a contact zone, because it brings together two worlds, present day and the time of the Vietnam War which was approximately November 1955 to April 1975. Without this sculpture, there wouldn’t be a place for this generation to go back to that time and put themselves into the shoes of the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War. This memorial creates a space, where people can come together and maybe have a conversation with someone who was in the war and was at the site mourning the fallen soldiers, or just talk to people who also had lost a loved one in the war. The openness of the site allows for many possibilities of social scenes, while also bringing people from all generations and states together to interact.
The social aspect comes into play with the healing power that the memorial eludes. The reflective surface allows you to see the other viewers of the memorial and imagine how or why they are there and if they lost a loved one in the war. The reflective nature of the material allows you to consciously see your mirrored face in the marble behind the etched names and shows a deep realization of the reality of the trauma the veterans suffered. As you stare at the names in the granite, while seeing your reflection in the granite, you become one with them, making it a collective, social experience. The memorial becomes “a free, highly visible yet anonymous, and publicly accessible means to begin the mourning process. Through artful design, the unthinkable is made tangible, and thus approachable. The wide-open landscape around the memorial creates a safe place for viewers and veterans to slowly warm up to the site and prepare themselves for the experience and remembering. Everyone comes to the memorial for a different purpose or reason, but everyone can find some similarities and comfort in each other as you
mourn together.
MIDDLE FORK (CASCADES)
John Grade’s large-scale sculpture, Middle Fork, echoes the contours of a 140-year-old western hemlock tree located in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle. He started the project by making a full plaster cast of the living tree and then invites volunteers to come to his office in Seattle and they use the plaster mold to recreate the tree’s form out of thousands of individually measured, trimmed and sanded pieces of reclaimed old-growth cedar. All his projects are designed to change over time and often involve collaboration with large groups of people. In most his works, Grade was interested in skins. This specific work creates the “skin” of the tree, while some of his previous works have been skins of humans, such as himself. The casting and construction of the sculpture took one year and involved hundreds of people to fabricate. John Grade in an interview says, “I wanted the project to be a means of engaging anyone who had interest in participating in making it literally people walking in off the street – not just artists. The assembly process needed to be simple enough for people with limited skill, yet complex and compelling enough to keep more skilled people interested or a lure for people to hone skill by working on the project for a long time. My assistants led and organized the volunteers but each person that participated chose how they thought the form should echo the molds we produced”. You may expect that some people wouldn’t be good at this kind of art and design and Grade anticipated that would happen and made a branch just for the some of the failures, which shows he was willing to let everyone participate, regardless of how good or bad their work was. There is a high degree of subjectivity involved, because each volunteer is free to make their section as they wish; this makes Middle Fork (Cascades) highly unique. The social aspect of this artwork is the facture and manufacturing process. We learned in lecture that the process of creating these “skins” involves joining the community together and combining all the volunteers’ work and separate pieces into one collective tree. Some volunteers came for just a few hours and some came every day, so you can imagine what it was like to meet new people every day you came or spend day after day with the same people working together on the same thing. A social setting is created in this process, where volunteers can interact while they work.
SUNSET PORTRAITS FROM SUNSET PICTURES ON FLICKR
At first glance Sunset Portraits from Sunset Pictures on Flickr by Penelope Umbrico just seems like a collage of pretty sunset photos, but when you read the title, you learn that the photos were collected from a social networking site called Flickr. The title itself becomes a comment on the ever-increasing use of web-based photo communities, like Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr. The artist, Penelope Umbrico is best known for appropriating images on the internet from sites like Flickr and Craigslist, which she then manipulates to construct large-scale images or installations according to a minimalist aesthetic. This one is found at the Carnegie Museum of Art here in Pittsburgh. Coincidentally, this collage of photos is in “Strength in Numbers: Photography in groups,” at the Carnegie Museum of Art where visitors can “explore what a group of photographs or multiple images can do that a single image cannot”. Umbrico selected these photos from Flickr specifically for the Carnegie Museum and then had the prints made at a local drugstore, just like everyone used to do before digital photography became popular, and then they taped them to the wall side-by-side.
Sunset Portraits from Sunset Pictures on Flickr by Penelope Umbrico shows the relationship between the “collective” and the “individual”. The social aspect here is that the photos are all taken from a Social Media site, where anyone can share their photos and tag them with words that are in the photos, such as “sunset”. This compilation utilizes the web-based photo communities and shows a reflection of the collective content there. Most likely, everyone has taken a sunset photo at one point in their life, so the sunset photo becomes a cliché almost, but the power of collective photography brings us all together.
MAN WITH PIPE
Man with Pipe, by Jean Metzinger, is displayed at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Gallery 9, the Scaife Gallery. The artist was known for creating Cubist portraits, which explains why this painting is so geometrical. He developed the 'mobile perspective' to portray the subject of each painting from a variety of different angles. The sitter’s face, clothes, and hat are observed from a succession of spatial angles or locations resulting in a complex series of profile and frontal views seen simultaneously. The lines make up cubical shapes that are clustered in the center and add up to create the man’s body. The colors and patterns in the painting are visually appealing, as they are rich and vivid; they create an animated quality to the man.
The social aspect of Man with Pipe is that the subject of the oil painting is sitting in a café, which is commonly known as a social setting, where people go on dates, have job interviews, or just meet new people as they sit and enjoy coffee. The café scene elicits curiosity as to why is the man sitting alone in the café? Is he meeting with someone? Why is he dressed up so fancy, as shown by the black top hat? You can infer a lot about a person, just by looking at the objects and setting around him.