Joey Nebiker ------Blog 3 - #3 Fantasy

Jeff Koons was the first artist on the Fantasy video. He makes very few paintings every year because it takes a long time to make each one. He feels a sense of community in his studio, and relies on a lot of other people to help him create his art. He wants a certain sense of communication and interaction in his art. Everything in his art is done through maps, Jeff makes maps and the artists that work for him use the maps to recreate his computer art through paintings.

Three people work on a painting at one time and it takes generally six to eight months for each painting. Jeff works on the computer most of the time, but he also comes in daily to organize the work for the group.

He works with a lot of different materials from inflatables, to wood and metal. In his video they show his exhibition at Versailles. He got to put his sculptures and art inside and outside the space. His pieces ranged from paintings, to flower arrangements and sculptures made out of various materials.

Mary Heilmann was next on the video. She started off by saying she always wanted a lot of attention from the time she was a little kid. She was very good at pottery in her early art career at Berkley. She talks about how she realized that art was about communicating through her artwork. She wanted to be original and go against the grain. She eventually switched over to become a painter. Her paintings are objects first and then after she paints on these objects, they become something else.

She began writing about her artwork and she noticed that when people read about her art they were more interested in her work. So now the writing and giving titles to her art is a part of the process. She explains that the titles have become three word poems for her work in a way.

Florian Maier- Aichen was featured next on the video. He takes images that he finds images and recreated them or finds ways to work his way up from them. He talks about postcards and how they represent an ideology more than an actual image. He likes to work with that type of idea.

He uses photography to document an idea and then he works with the image from there. He likes to take things that he’s inspired by and then make them into something else. Maybe not something else better but he changes the images into something new or something he wishes it looked like. He’s creating fantasy from reality through his work. The video shows him as he goes through this process of inspiration and creation. He becomes inspires, takes pictures, and creates something new and different from these pictures. He likes to work with the photos by creating a feeling of abstraction.

He takes these images and recreates them digitally on the computer. There he can really experiment with the abstraction he strives for in his images.

Cao Fei was the final artist to be featured on the Fantasy video. She fell in love with hip hop music through street culture and likes to approach the world with a sense of humor.

She uses music as a major part of her artwork. She felt like she could critique reality through her artwork in her early work. In her later works she changed and showed society in a different light. Her later work was more realistic. Most of her work is video accompanied by music. She likes to expose reality through her work, in an artistic way. In her one video she has people dancing inside of a factory. The video is supposed to show that these people are living out their fantasy’s inside of a factory and it’s contradictory to the way the corporate world works.

She made a documentary in a program called “second life”. It was very interesting to see this online world and the artistic approach she took in order to create her documentary. She created an entire city in the second life world. Her city was based on the idea of fantasy with staples taken from reality. The video shows that in her online world, she’s free to create whatever fantasy she chooses. Cao Fei uses the internet as an outlet for her artistic expression.