Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Elvis, 1965

In 1965, Bob Dylan went to Andy Warhol’s Factory to do his “Screen Test.” Dylan’s career was just picking up, slowly becoming a household name. Warhol was the biggest name in pop art (although Campbell’s Soup 1 was still three years away). Many celebrities and “beautiful people” of the world including Salvador Dali, Allen Ginsberg, and Edie Sedgwick took part in dozens of screen tests, but to me, this single image is the most striking. You see Elvis Presley in a classic Americana cowboy pose. You see always androgynous Warhol in his patented turtle neck, and the Bohemian hero Dlyan, each in their own way living the American Dream. This image, much like the minds of the three icons who are framed in it, is much of a mystery. With so many people in the Factory at a given time, and all of them having cameras, the author of this image is shrouded with mystery. The use of light and dark, shadow and flash leave the viewer with an eerie feeling about the characters in the image.

Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again. - Andy Warhol

I have this photo hanging on the wall in my hallway. It reminds me everyday that I need to question what is normal. There is hope out there for the underground. Each member in this photo is a pioneer. A voice of a generation in their own right, and to have shot them candidly in this fashion is astounding to me.

Here is a link to The Dylan Screen Test (someone has added the Velvet Underground's Heroin as the soundtrack): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M--oHOn4a0U

Screen Tests: http://edu.warhol.org/aract_screentest.html

Mike Fox

Jenny Saville, Passage, 2004

As a central principle of Western Art, realism seeks to "give a truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life." (Nochlin, 13) This idea has endured and developed since the nineteenth century as artists' desire to convey the honesty and sincerity of subject matter has grown. Therefore in connection with the recent class topic of gender and representation, I chose the image Passage as a realistic portrayal of contemporary society.

Jenny Saville's painting Passage depicts a modern portrait of a transsexual. It is a dramatic expression of a body that challenges traditional canons of beauty. It also considers the artificial construction of the human form. In an interview conducted by Simon Schama, Jenny Saville said the following of her work:

"With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between
genders. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The
transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts.
Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn't have existed and I was looking for
a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a
visual passage through gender - a sort of gender landscape."

Contradicting standards of the female form is a theme throughout Saville's work. She is seemingly obsessed with translating paint into differing states of flesh. Observing plastic surgeries, medical specimens and forensic science images, Saville generates sensations of the body. She confronts the viewer with images of obese, deformed, and mutilated figures that explore the physicality of the form as well as the psychology of human suffering. I fell that she superbly marries abstraction with contemporary realism to redefine beauty as it exists in our society.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/jenny_saville_passage.htm

Homage to the Square

Homage to the Square

It was an incredibly hot summer day, and I was sitting in a concrete room. It was my very first day in color theory, when I saw this image. I chose this image, a painting by Josef Albers, due to the fact that it changed my life. If you have very had an “AhHa !” moment this was mine. As a painter, I respect color above all else. If I were to define this image, I would say that this 21.7 inch square painting that displays four colored squares placed inside one another in order to explain the relationship of hue, value, and intensity. The hue of the outer square is yellow. However, it’s important to note that it’s not just yellow but yellow that leans towards blue. All color is not pure. Any certain hue will lean towards a primary. The hue of the inner square is blue, a blue that leans toward yellow. A blue that leans towards yellow and a yellow that leans towards blue are already set up to love each other. These two squares that never touch each other are equivalent in value. However they are only equivalent in value due to the influence of the other hues around them. Removing the relationship would change their interaction. The intensity of the second square is only elevated due to the relationship of the less intense colors around it. Think for a moment how different these colors would be if they were on a red background. The red would pull all of the green with in these colors to the surface and would change all of the relationships. Color is such an amazing tool that is so easily manipulated. This image is 21.7 inches of why I am a big art loser.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Edition Keller IC, 1970.
Screen Print
Of an edition of 125
Height: 21.7 inches
Width: 21.7 inches

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers

F*** Mother Nature! (Transformation Project: Lindy S.)

In my last semester of college I participated in a mentorship class based on the changing norms of femininity and the ways in which gender distinctions have become less defined due to the emergence of the mass media. During our discussion the Tampax Pearl advertisements "against Mother Nature" were brought to my attention. When I was flipping through "Women's Health" magazine (from which this ad was taken) I stumbled across a new version of the ad and felt it was an extremely appropriate focus for this particular project.

The reason I find this advertisement so relevant is that I believe it is teaching women--and girls--to hate their bodies and to view the things that make them feminine as disservices. It seems that the point of the ad is "wouldn't it be so great if your period didn't exist at all?" I disagree with this message wholeheartedly and would much rather see a world where women could embrace the things that make them distinctly themselves instead of attempt to shove them off in order to become more like the masculine. My transformation of this ad was to take it above and beyond the original message. I made the "Mother Nature" character into the devil and blocked off a week on the calendar as "hell week." I think exacerbating this image reveals the actual ridiculousness of what the ad is trying to say.

Lindy S.

Rayograph, 1927

The image I chose for this blog post is Man Ray’s Rayograph from 1927. I first saw this image while looking at a book about Man Ray during my High School Photography class. When I saw this image I was memorized by its tones and texture. After staring at it for a few moments I began to wonder where was this image take. Was it an abdomen building, or an attic of an old house. As I looked to the bottom of the page for the title all I saw was Rayograph, 1927. I soon learned that a Rayograph is an image taken without a camera and instead materials are placed on top of photographic paper and exposed to light. After seeing this image I spend numerous hours in the darkroom placing anything I could lift and find on photo paper to see what develops.

One of the things that this image made me realize is that for long as there has been photography their has been manipulation. It could be the photographer asking a woman to take of her wedding ring before photographing the woman and child, it could be to crop something out when you place the image in the enlarger, zooming in so you don’t show the environment you are in, or over/under exposing a certain area of a print.

This image not only made me want to explore the world of photography more, but it also made me realized that we never really know how a photographic image came to be unless we are the ones creating it. For me, even after all of these years it still amazes me that this image was created by dropped items on a piece of photo paper.

http://library.artstor.org.lesley.ezproxy.blackboard.com/library/welcome.html#3|search|1|Man20Ray|Multiple20Collection20Search|||type3D3126kw3DMan20Ray26id3Dall26name3D

Margaret

Jacob Holdt & the KKK

This is a photograph taken by Jacob Holdt, the work of whom I first encountered at the Louisiana Art Museum in Denmark in the Fall of 2009. I was immediately struck by Holdt's depictions of American life, especially of those outcasted by mainstream society. Holdt spent years befriending and living amongst members of the Ku Klux Klan and walked away from the experience convinced that those belonging to the major hate organization were actually creatures in desperate need of love and understanding.

Holdt writes, "And so I here learned my first important lesson on the Ku Klux Klan; that its need for love far, far surpasses its need to hate. Since then I have unremittingly preached that love is the only way to cure racism, but if I had not had it so dramatically demonstrated during my Klan-friend's powerful spiritual struggle and my own sweat dripping doubts that night, my words would long ago have sounded hollow in my own ears. For my trust in him was precisely not a matter of being "blind" or "naive", but a choice. A choice about not abandoning human beings in the very moment when they appear most terrifying--behind a gun in the ghettos or a burning cross in the woods--just when their shrill cry for help reveals that they need you the most."

This image is particularly important to me because I believe that it embodies my understanding of the threads that connect all of humanity. I recently graduated from an Evangelical Christian college and while it was not exactly the Ku Klux Klan I learned many of the same lessons there that Holdt did during his time with the KKK. I hold deeply to the belief that all humans are searching for the same love, validation, and redemption and lifestyle is often merely just a matter of whichever path seems to usher in these principles in the most effective way possible. I think that Holdt's photography embodies this understanding of the human condition in a telling yet remarkably simple way.

Lindy

Skymall Liberation and Others

The following pieces are part of a Power of the Image assignment based on an art project by Evan Roth called "Skymall Liberation". They were created by the Savannah, Georgia CAGS cohort for a media literacy assignment. Each group picked their own magazine. -sam smiley


GROUP 1: Candice, Hope, and Holly
MAGAZINE: National Geographic
COMMENTS:
As our group looked at the images from National Geographic, we noticed that the images represented a variety of ages, skin colors, and cultures. Therefore, we focused in on the positions and angles of each face. Many of images were facing forward so we decided to position them based on head orientation. We sorted the faces into distinctive groups that consisted of right facing images, left facing images, and forward facing images. We placed the forward facing images in the middle of the paper. Then we placed the other images on the sides according to the direction they were facing.

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GROUP 3: Rhonda, Becky and Triona
MAGAZINE: Good Housekeeping
COMMENTS:
For this project our group chose a copy of Good Housekeeping as a source for head collection. Unfortunately we did not get the date of the issue before we disposed of the waste paper. The assignment was to collect all the heads/faces from a magazine, then arrange them in an organized fashion on a support. After we cut out the heads we chose to arrange them on the page from largest to smallest. We put the largest head on the top left and the smallest on the bottom right. While we were working we noticed that the majority of the heads, especially the largest, belonged to white females aged between 25 and 50 years, most smiling and looking at the camera lens. The next largest group was children. A small group of minorities and men were also represented.