Line Drawing: Artist Statement
Project 1 focuses on the concept of capturing movement through simple line drawings using weight, direction, and in my case, graphite. One of our examples, Lee Walton, uses this concept to show the implementation of lines of symmetry and patterns to express personal experiences and observations. My line drawings, on the other hand, focus on the Super Bowl Champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, and their offensive play-calling during Super Bowl LIV. After reading Michel de Certeau’s chapter, "The Practice of Everyday Life: Walking in the City”, I was able to see the players footsteps as more than individual steps but rather pathways. In his chapter he explains these movements as “intertwined paths [that] give their shape to spaces”. I took this into consideration as I watched the game, paying close attention to these movements and routes that the Chief’s receivers followed on specific passing plays. A passing play is defined as the successful delivery and completion of a pass from quarterback to an intended receiver. These created my pathways. The lines of my drawings show the directions and angles of where the players run, and the note card represents the width of the football field. The routes, drawn with graphite, show the different assignments that the players have during the game. Because this is a game in itself, the organic movements described by De Certeau do not really apply in that the players do NOT “follow a path and have followers” but instead attempt to do the complete opposite. On each of my notecards, there are five or four trajectories that each player follows in accordance with the play being executed. To implement another factor into my project, I paid close attention to each player and identified the players that had a crucial role in the Chief’s victory against the San Francisco defense. After identifying each player, the thickness of the lines on each note card show the individual effort of each player in each play, which emphasizes the roles and importance of each individual. One of the drawings also shows incomplete, unsuccessful pass plays that did not gain any yardage for the Chiefs. After understanding synecdoche and asyndeton as used in De Certeau's context, I see my project as more of a synecdoche in which all of these different plays come together to create the game as a whole. Small details such as the note card representing the whole field, or a line depicting a player's movement serve as examples of this in my project. Asyndeton, on the other hand, would be seen if I documented the general movement of a player, omitting how they got there and emphasizing these key points in their movement.
WWW Reading
In the technical reading of Tim Berners-Lee and his WWW (World Wide Web), we learn about the creation that allowed for people across the entire world to share and expand on human knowledge by using independent projects to discover new findings. “This allows existing data to be put ‘on the Web’ without further human effort”, in other words, it is self expanding. Likewise, in Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel, the library - or universe - he speaks of has a mirror, representing infinity. The library is endless, just like the web. From its creation in 1991 to 1994, the Web doubled constantly every four months. All of this boundless information intended to be easily retrieved by people like you and me. However, what is behind this information is anything but easily understood. A system of code that was once created by humans has taken over and now controls what we have access to. This is similar to the concept of Borges’ library, in that it has always been there and it is so perfect thus it must be controlled by a god, similar to the code controlling the web. The books within this library are all written using only 25 symbols which come together to read as nonsense having nothing to do with the titles. We then learn from a footnote that these 25 characters are the 22 letters of the alphabet and comma, space, and period. Only once has a chunk of this writing made sense and when it did, the writing contained “examples of endlessly repeating variations”. This content explains the library, as well as the Web, in that there are no two books or sites alike - all just different variations of symbols or code. This has caused people within the library and within our world to feel a sense of uselessness in that everything that has ever needed to be said has already been said and our contributions are limited. Borges ends his story by saying that the library really isn't infinite, rather it repeats itself making us question the limitations of the web.
Newspaper Project: Artist Statement
For my second project, All the News that’s FIT to Print, I was inspired by the example video of Siebren Versteeg’s Daily Times performance and decided to create a work of art using newspaper text as well as paint. To begin my project, I took different newspapers - all published in the last year - and dug through the pages, searching for articles that pertained to my chosen focus: the #MeToo movement. Nate Lowman, an NYC based artist who was featured in “The Last Newspaper: Artist in Conversation”, was said to have cabinets filled with categorized newspaper clippings which motivated me to cut up the headlines and articles that fit my category, creating a set of several instances in which women's rights were disregarded. When scanning through these pages and pages of print, I could easily relate to Lowman’s feelings in that “This isn’t like art, it’s an archive”. However, after listening to photographer Sarah Charlesworth, who is also featured in this conversation, I began to see this “archive” as an artform: “The art of relooking”. I too wanted to create a way of visualizing what was right in front of our faces through something bigger than just paper which is why I chose to use a canvas. Covering the majority of this canvas is a collage of different texts, letting what's already there in the newspaper make the statement itself. Because I wanted the text to speak for the artwork as a whole, I added what seems to be meaningless patches and splashes of oil paint on the upper right hand side fading in. Although not obvious to the viewer, these dark colored paint patches are supposed to represent the men who masked up their crimes and are now slowly being exposed by women and the media. The large hole located amongst the color patches indicates the specific individual, Harvey Weinstein, who caused this whole movement to resurface and blow up (literally) in 2017.