Art | 21: Systems curtis.gessner

The second video I watched was the systems video. This video was interesting to me because it dealt with technological advancement and systems. The first thing that the first artist said was that it related to mapping. I found this to be incredibly amusing.

The first artist interviewed was Julie Mehretu. She worked mostly in painting, making huge murals in Germany, and working with a variety of other artists. The first couple of pieces are actually kind of similar to the latest exhibition at the Haas center, she used watercolors. She basically commissions other artists to complete her pieces, making all of her works completely collective. Almost all of them are complex, and have excellent stories behind them.

The next artist in the video is John Baldessari. He uses extreme contrast in his pieces, and some of them are what he calls ‘absurd’. The first example shown is a black and grey photo with a very bright orange outline of a human on top of the picture. He’s an interesting looking man with longer white hair and a white beard. In his pieces he will remove pieces of information and replace them with a single color. 

The next artist was Kimsooja. She is called ‘a needle woman’. Kimsooja also works with reflection a little bit. She is quite diverse and combines several different styles and several different expressions in all of her pieces. Most of her work is enormous pieces of glass done through windows, representing organic forms. 

Allan McCollum is the next artist in the series. He definite had an interesting introduction. His explicit intent is to be able to create something similar to the ‘color by numbers’ pieces that were popular. He does not want to create anything that is not easily reproducible. He uses premade shapes in his paintings, and makes massive quantities of similar things using these shapes. For example, the color by numbers pieces he does are only black, organic shapes, and the exhibition of these was an entire wall of these facings. It was more than 1000 of these creations mounted on a wall. In a word, it was breathtaking and enormous and overwhelming.

The art exhibited in these videos is more interesting than the videos themselves in my opinion. Some of the connections are hard to make, but all in all they are very enriching.

And despite the less than one hour between these posts, the entire video was viewed. Albeit on seperate occasions, on which I took notes.