Carol Duncan's The Art Museum As Ritual

This reading was interesting. Duncan begins by comparing museums to religious/ceremonial places. “Eventually, the separation of church and state would become law.” Museums are secular places – “the secular truth became the authoritative truth.” And churches (and the like) are religious places – “religion…kept its authority only for voluntary believers.”  Secular truth is known to be rational and verifiable à “objective knowledge.” Duncan continues, describing the differences between secular and religious entities. She says that in the secular/religious terms of our culture, ‘ritual’ and ‘museums’ are antithetical. Then she notes an argument that there is disguised ritual content in secular ceremonies. She argues the ritual character of the museum experience in terms of the kind of attention one brings to it and the special quality of its time and space. “Museums resemble older ritual sites not so much because of their specific architectural references but because they, too, are settings for rituals. I thought it was a good example of this when she pointed out how one is expected to behave with certain decorum in both museums and religious places. She examines the term “Liminality” in terms of the kind of attention we bring to art museums. Throughout her argument, Duncan uses historical figures as examples. Turner and Schmidt are just two such examples. “Others, too, have described art museums as sites which enable individuals to achieve liminal experience- to move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane existence, step out of time, and attain new, larger perspective.” Then she moves onto the element of performance. In museums, it is the visitors who enact the ritual. Then the ritual experience as it has a purpose, an end. It is seen as transformative. And finally she looks as art museum objects. It was interesting to hear that the concept of putting objects in settings designated for contemplation is relatively new. It was a newly discovered aspect of the “visual experience”. The reading goes on to discuss a lot of tension between aesthetics and museums. “In philosophy, liminality became specified as the aesthetic experience, a moment of moral and rational disengagement that leads to or produces some kind of revelation or transformation.” There was and still is a lot of controversy over aesthetics verses purpose, etc. Duncan closes with the invitation to take Germain Bazin’s argument even further: “in the liminal space of the museum, everything-and sometimes anything- may become art, including fire extinguishers, thermostats, and humidity gauges…

Visual Essay Experience

This experience of writing a visual essay was very different from anything I have ever done before. In fact, I doubt any of us have ever done something like this before.

Personally I really like photography, so I was excited to take pictures. I didn’t expect it to be so hard to get the photos to actually "write" though. I really didn’t know what to take pictures of at first so I just went out and started shooting. Somehow I found pictures I liked...oddly enough the photos turned out to be of fences. When I started arranging them in a sequence I realized how important it was and I had a hard time deciding on a particular theme too. When I came down to boundaries, it was settled!

I have really enjoyed everyone else's presentations so far too. In particular Hyun Ki Lee's presentation on trashcans has changed my perspective on them forever. He had a very interesting presentation that kept me interested the whole time. The sequence of his photos was a completely logical progression.

I also found it interesting that people did their projects on places other than Atlanta. The Charleston photos, Chicago, even Asia! - They were all so intriguing.

more on photomicrography!

Today, I found this awesome article on yahoo about photomicrography! I first heard about photomicrography on a classmate's blog just a fews weeks ago and found it completely intriguing! This article has some more beautiful photos and interesting information!

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/greenpicks/292/rare-images-beyond-the-naked-eye.html

Milwaukee Museum Looks At Everyday Objects As Art

MILWAUKEE -- Many people may own a few of the items in the Milwaukee Art Museum's new exhibition.

It includes mass-produced, everyday items like watering cans from Ikea, a Dyson vacuum, a fax machine and forks, along with rare pieces the average person may be more likely to consider art, such as a chair made of rags, a porcelain vase that resembles a sea sponge and two white shirts with light bulbs behind them.

The exhibit, "European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New Century," presents nearly 200 pieces of furniture, metalwork, glass and other products from about 100 European designers, juxtaposing fine art with everyday items. It runs through Jan. 9.

"This is the first time anyone has ever looked at this body of material from '85 to 2005 and tried to assign it art historical words," said Mel Buchanan, the museum's assistant curator of 20th century art design. "So instead of it all being contemporary art, they are saying like, 'OK, now let's look backward. Let's treat this like historians. This biomorphic, this is neo dada.'"

Organizers hope museum-goers ask, "What leads design, artistic concept or function?"

keep reading at: Milwaukee Museum Looks at Everyday Objects As Art

This article struck me! It talks about the European Art Exhibit I went to the very first time I went to the High Museum! I remember wandering that day how a vacuum cleaner could be considered art...and this article somewhat addresses that!

Harkness Table

So I found this interesting article about art at Philips Exeter Academy: 

http://www.exeter.edu/documents/Exeter_Bulletin/Art_harkness_sp07.pdf


At first, I didn't even know what a harkness table was... Below is a picture, just in case you didn't either.

I guess the whole purpose of a Harkness table would be for everyone to be more engaged in whatever activity, meeting, conversation, etc. is going on at this table. So what are your thoughts? Do you think a Harkness table can improve learning? Or is it more helpful to get up and moving about the world in order to learn? A combination of both?

Save Public Art

More from the following interesting article about public art can be found at:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-02/iuso-ilu021810.php

IUPUI launches unique global project to save world's public art

		IMAGE: This is the Herron Arch I by James Wille Faust (2005). Click here for more information.

INDIANAPOLIS –- Students and faculty from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) have developed and launched the nation's first organized effort to document public art information in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Saves Public Art (WSPA), a growing collection of articles prepared for the online open access encyclopedia, makes monuments and outdoor sculpture – from the famous to the overlooked – accessible to all. It is a unique and major step toward sharing and preserving an often underappreciated segment of the world's cultural heritage.

"No other university, museum or municipality has created a public art collection within Wikipedia—this is a first, even though Wikipedia has been around for almost a decade and now has over 3 million articles. Our effort is also unusual because we have included global positioning system (GPS) coordinates in all of our articles, which allows linkages via location-based computer applications like Google Maps," said Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, Ph.D., assistant professor and public scholar of visual culture at IUPUI, who has spearheaded the project.

Even before the pharaohs built the pyramids, public art has engaged and enriched its audience – the individuals who view it. In the 21st century the potential audience for public art – sculptures, monuments, and other works in public spaces, some tourist destinations and others long forgotten or barely noticed by passersby – can extend far beyond those viewed from a sidewalk. Through the Internet, the audience can expand to anyone with Web access, provided information about the piece is shared online.

That's where IUPUI students and faculty from the School of Liberal Arts and Herron School of Art and Design come in. They are researching, cataloguing, photographing and writing articles on public art pieces in Indianapolis with the hope that the movement will expand exponentially across the nation and around the world. Dozens of Indianapolis public sculptures, many from the IUPUI campus (seeen.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPUI_Public_Art_Collection), have been documented through WSPA. Already, representatives from Milwaukee have shown interest in following this model to represent their city's public art collection in Wikipedia. Mikulay and Richard McCoy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who co-conceived WSPA, report that they are hearing a buzz of excitement about the concept at international meetings they attend.

"As we write Wikipedia articles on public art works from Indianapolis, a metropolitan area which local cultural organizations rank second only to Washington, D.C. in its number of monuments and outdoor sculpture, we are creating a working model to show people how to preserve public art in the 21st century. Public art is one of the most accessible art forms, and Wikipedia is one of the most accessible forums for information, so they make a perfect match," said Mikulay, whose own research focuses on public art's civic role.

"Wikipedia is open to covering all kinds of topics, including art, all the time, but this is the first coordinated effort to get public art information into Wikipiedia. This is truly making public art available to much wider publics," she added.

Mikulay and McCoy came up with the name Wikipedia Saves Public Art as a way to demonstrate the project's linkage to the burgeoning open access computer movement, with its promise of enlisting large groups of people to contribute information about public art anywhere in the world, and to harken back to Save Outdoor Sculpture! (SOS!), a joint project of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Heritage Preservation.

The full value and potential of social media as an educational resource has not been tapped, according to Mikulay, in part because students are not taught how to link this new technology to research interests. She believes that if students and others can become more critical users of Wikipedia and other digital media, they will be in the position to utilize it for the preservation of cultural heritage.

As the IUPUI students and faculty generate and share information about the outdoor sculpture and monuments around them through WSPA, they are showing the way for others down the street, across the nation, or around the world to see and save the public art around them.

Visual Essay Theme

I am considering doing my visual essay on a festival theme. This time of year, there are lots of farmers’ markets, and art festivals. This weekend, there is The Atlanta Pride Festival. (See below for more information of this festival.) The following are forms of public art that seem to fit the festival theme:

•                Festival cities.

•                Cultural tourism and public display.

•                Festival and ritual.

•                Global festivals.

•                Ethnic arts festivals.

•                Regional festivals.

•                Theatre festivals, genres, regions and Shakespeare.

•                Music festivals.

•                Visual arts festivals and biennales.

•                Cultural diversity and festival development.

•                Festival and event management.

•                Book festivals.

•                Film festivals.

•                Festivals and civic engagement.

•                Economic impact and festival development.

•                Why create an arts festival.

•                Rural festivals as social life.

•                Olympic festivals – of real and imagined proportions.

Atlanta Pride 2010

October 9-10, 2010 - Piedmont Park - Midtown Atlanta Georgia

From October 9^th through the 10^th, over 300,000 People will gather in Atlanta for the annual Atlanta Pride Festival to participate in the march, spectate, or simply walk around the fun Vendor Areas in Piedmont Park.

p.s. - my topic/theme could very well change as I actually start taking pictures (just the way a thesis of a paper often changes when one starts writing!)

Public Art

When trying to define public art, provide examples, describe the audience/themes and explain the purpose of public art...I found that all these things kind of run together. Public art to me seems like art that is displayed (and maybe even made for) the public. This is not to say that it appeals to everyone in the public but I would definitely say a vast majority. It may be there to inform people of a certain area or give the area an identity. It seems like public art is important in politics because it may differ from culture to culture. Public art certainly tends to draw attention. It often times spurs communication (which could be advertising). Think about that really strange piece of art you may have seen one time...didn't it make you talk about it? Or at least ask questions about it? Often times public art represents something. For example, I am from Sandy Springs, GA. In my community, there are painted turtles all over the city. These turtles were auctioned off for charity. This brings a sense of togetherness to our community and kind of gives it an identity. Other examples of public art that came to mind include: the Bellagio Fountains, statues, the Palm Tree Islands (in Dubai), landscaping, and graffiti.

One of the Sandy Springs turtles!