While we have discussed many artists in class, there was a lot of information to take in and a lot stuck out. The first artist that distinctly stuck out to me was Marina Abramović. She was from Serbia and did not have the easiest childhood as she was sometimes abused in her own home. She went off to school where she met another artist that she fell in love with. While they were together they decided they wanted to work together and that's where things started going bad. They had broken up but Marina still stuck to her visual form of art and had an exhibit at the MoMa. The exhibit was called "the artist is present" where she sat down at the head of a table with an empty chair on the other side allowing strangers to come sit across from her. We were shown a small video of this during class and although there were many, many people that came to sit down across from her to get that once in a lifetime impression of a contemporary artist, the day came where one of the strangers that came to sit down was not a stranger to her after all, it was her ex boyfriend she had met in art school. This scene was filled with so many emotions as he sat down across from her for the first time in many years, keeping eye contact as they cried and bystanders stood and enjoyed this very special moment for them.
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| Marina and her ex boyfriend Ulay, The artist is Present in the MoMa |
Another very well-known contemporary artist is the one and only Judy Chicago. Judy produced a lot of art for people to look at and appreciate but her piece "Dinner Party" that took almost five years to create. Now located in the Brooklyn Museum where a lot of my classmates went to go see it, the piece of art is in it's own, dimly lit room with a triangle table personally dedicated to 39 women artists while another 999 women artists were appreciated on the floor around the dinner table. This piece of art was so important to feminist artists because it was, of course, a big piece of art specifically dedicated to the women that risked what they had to for women artists to be able to prosper in the way they did. This specific piece of Judy's, pictured below, was something that symbolized the equality, unity, and strength within the women through the triangle shape of the table.
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| Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, 1974-79 in the Brooklyn Museum |
Barbara Kruger, a Newark, New Jersey native, was another artist we spoke about. Her art work is mostly in black and white with captions laid on top of the picture. She, like many other contemporary artists, uses her platform to address the issues of race, politics, gender, etc. Barbara uses the mixture of pictures and words because it allows the "ability to determine who we are and who are aren't". In other words, her art shows how words can change and manipulate a lot of things. Many of her pieces involve her signature white bold text in a read box on top of an image of a woman.
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| Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face), 1981 |
Maya Lin, a Chinese-American sculpture is an icon and has a piece of art that thousands of people see probably almost everyday and would not guess it was made by her. Maya is the artist behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that is located in Washington, DC. This memorial takes a shape of a V that also cuts into the ground as the names are shown and at the meeting point of the V, goes back up to street level. While the committee was looking through their choices of what the memorial could look like the chose Maya's, not knowing it was hers. One could only imagine what their reaction was when they found out they chose a woman and not a white male like they were expecting to. They tried to pull it back and say they made a mistake but they knew they wouldn't be able to pull that off. They ended up going through with it, obviously and Maya Lin was able to design her memorial. Along with the distinct V shape, she changed the way the people's names were listed. It was too traditional for them to be listed in alphabetical order because that's how all memorials operate. Instead, she chose to list the names in the order they died in essentially. There are some exceptions, though, such as those missing in action or never found and presumed dead, but many people would say Maya Lin put a lot of thought behind her memorial, pictured below.
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| Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC |
Lastly, the final artist I would like to point out is Shirin Neshat. She is an artist that was born in Iran who was well known for her feminist art. Shirin used photography as well as video production to get her point of how women are seen and treated in not only Iran but in the rest of the world as well. I feel like she used her Iranian culture to her advantage in sense because women are not treated equally in many places, one of them being Iran. One of the ways she displayed this was through a video that we watched in class called Turbulent which showed a split screen with a man singing to an audience full of men on one side and on the other side was a woman signing in an empty auditorium and I think there is a few hidden meanings in that video that not a lot of people recognize right off the bat. The most important thing of that video is that the woman is alone. No matter what she says when she calls for help, there is no one there even listening to her while the man on the other side of the screen is having a good time singing to a small group of people. That was one of the things that Shirin focuses on with her art and personally I think she does a really good job in how she portrays the issues women still have to face, especially relating it back to her own culture.
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| Shirin Neshat, The book of king series, 2012 |
Works Cited
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