Taylor's DTC 355 Blog

I like the concept of sort of multimedia performances, where traditional performance art meets technology. Having some sort of digital element providing an extra layer of performance to a piece elevates the experience for the audience I think. It adds to the immersive feeling that a performance is supposed to give you. I think it would be cool to include a digital element in performances, even if it is just an audio track or a digital background.

In this section, I was most interested in the section on the artist Orlan. As I've said previously, I really love Marina Abramovic's work. I know that she is known for really extreme performances and putting herself in dangerous positions and risking injury, but Orlan is a different kind of extreme performance artist. Her performances that involve using plastic surgery to sculpt herself into historical ideals of beauty is intense and powerful, not to mention expensive and I'm sure painful to go through the recovery period each time. It really makes me think about the lengths that people go to on a regular basis to try to achieve these ideal standards of beauty, but these standards differ from person to person, culture to culture, and era to era. Her work was really interesting to read about and I think I want to look her up more to see what other work she's done.

In reading this section about performance, I noticed a lot of names that are pretty familiar. I actually really enjoy performance art and learning about it, so I looked deeper into some of these artists on the internet. Upon searching up a few of them, I found out that in the early 2000s, Marina Abramovic actually recreated the performance pieces of several male performance artists, redesigning their pieces to be represented as more feminine than masculine. I found this really interesting, especially because I love her work so much, and I never knew she did this. Her recreations were a part of a performance series called Seven Easy Pieces.

This little section of the book was focused on performance and film. I thought the part about performance was super interesting and inspiring. I haven't done very much with performance art, but I think it would be really cool to experiment with in the future and improve my artistic skills when it comes to that. My performance assignments have been fairly simple in the past, so working on improving my performance concepts and stuff would be really interesting and beneficial for me I think. I was really interested in Joan Jonas. I looked her up and I found her work really intriguing and I will definitely be looking more into her stuff possibly for inspiration.

Reading this section was pretty cool because I know of Andy Warhol and I'm familiar with the type of art he put out to create social commentary on large corporations and commercialization. However, I am not familiar with much of his work, and reading about his art films he put out was really interesting. It seems like just about everything that Warhol did pushed the boundaries of "normalcy" for society and society views. It made me think that I should look more into Warhol's full body of work. I am quite interested in this.

For my Triptych, I chose the first letters of my sister's names and warped them (hopefully) beyond recognition. I used the pen tool to add anchor points on the edges without them. I used the extra anchor points to move and twist the letters around. Once I had moved the points and rotated edges to my liking, I rounded out all the corners to create a more flowing, organic shape for each individual letter. After all this was done, I used the blob paint tool in the same color as the background to draw lines at random intervals, dividing each shape into smaller pieces that add up to the whole letter. The color scheme was inspired by each sister's personality and favorite colors. I chose colors that reminded me of them and their interests. The middle section of the piece is probably the most recognizable as its original letter, but I tried to warp the shape in various directions to create something different.

I was scrolling through my recommended news stories and I found this one called "Faces of Frieze 2020: Picturing the art crowd at Los Angeles' premier fair," published by the Los Angeles Times . Frieze Los Angeles is both a collection of art installations and an appreciation of fashion. Many artists create paintings and other installations to show as backdrops for photos to be taken. The article included many prominent artists whose work was in the show. The new media portion primarily shows up because some of the art was created digitally. One piece was even a larger scale version of someone's work that was uploaded to Instagram prior to the event. Because people were taking pictures of the attendees, there is an additional digital/new media element to this event. The link to the original article is here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-02-15/faces-of-frieze-los-angeles-2020-photos