Arts and Concepts

The Threepenny opera

2004-12-03T21:20:00.000-08:00

Die Dreigroschenoper was a revolutionary piece of musical theatre. Written by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht in colloaboration with the composer Kurt Weill in 1928, it was hugely succesful. It was as much a musical comedy as it was an opera and with this in mind, I found it to be somehow related to Baz Luhrmann's 2001 film "Moulin Rouge", starring Nicole Kidman.In the Threepenny Opera, Mack the Knife marries Polly Peachum and the Polly's displeased father who controls the beggars of London endeavoures to have Mack the Knife hanged. In Moulin Rouge, Christian falls in love with beautiful Satin and this upsets Satin's father named Zidler, the owner of the Moulin Rouge. Moulin Rouge is also a musical comedy; the music and its lyrics and dancing are both comical and entertaining. The Threepenny Opera and Moulin Rouge both depict a celebration of truth, freedom, and love.

Bauhaus

2004-12-02T19:56:00.000-08:00

The school of Bauhaus is considered as the most important school of architecture, design, and art of the twentieth century. Just how is that possible when it only has a short lifespan of about 14 years? (1919-1933) And how is it that it still has a huge impact on every aspects of art: architecture, typography, and furniture design to name a few? I think the credit should go to Walter Gropius, the founder of the school, who set out the school to create a "consulting art center for industry and the trades." The combination of art and technology and the method of covering variety areas such as advertising art, stage planning, photography, and typography all contributed in making the Bauhaus ideals the precedent forms of study which are still used even today.

Degenerate Art Exibition

2004-12-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

The terms "Jewish", "Degenerate", and "Bloshevik" were used to describe almost all modern art and were condemned by the National Socialist Society for German Culture in 1927 - 1937. When you look back at the exhibition of degenerate art, it is almost comical in a sense that such thing is unthinkable in today's society. This was an another way that H used art as propaganda to reinforce the values promoted by NSDAP: order and respectability.

This in some way reminded me of the Guerrilla Girls, a group of feminists who raised their voices against the discrimination of women in male-dominant art field and society. Their voices were heard and by the 70's, women were leaders in the evolving art forms of performance, video, and many more. You don not have to condemn existing works nor burn everything condemned in order to get your points across. Rather, the destroying of the modern arts by H caught a huge public attention public and failed to destroy their essence as they had been embraced by many artists after the fall of his reign.

See Guerrilla Grirls's work!
http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/images/naked.gif

The Flaneur

2004-12-01T18:25:00.000-08:00

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. (Baudelaire)

Flaneur is the figure who, with the eye of the artist, takes pleasure from the hustle and bustle of the city streets. He is the "idle man-about-town". To evoke the essence of city is his aimless goal.
What a luxury most of us cannot afford!!! Even the richest man who appears to have nothing he cannot do will fail to perform as the flaneur, not even one day. We live in a society where idleness cannot be tolerated. Time is money. It is not to be wasted. But is it a waste? To be of a free spirit wondering about the city, and notice every details of the corners where most of us will busily pass by, and go unnoticed?

Epic Theater

2004-11-29T22:16:00.000-08:00

Epic theater was a theater movement inextricably licked to Bertolt Brecht in 20th century. Although Brecht was credited as the founder of the Epic Theater, many concepts involved in it had been around for years, even centuries. It was Brecht who unified and developed the style which became popular from then on. I think this is also the case of photomontage when its concept was introduced way before the Weimar culture but artists of Dada recognized it first and popularized it by labeling it a new form of art.
The concept of Verfremdungseffeck (alienation effect) practiced in Epic Theater reminded the audience that they are alienated from the characters and what they are seeing is not real. Just why did Bretch introduced this new concept? Well, Brecht argued that while most theater's intent was to make the audience forget that the play was not real, his intention was to show the audience a true form of theater without concealing its identity. This will in turn, according to Brecht, cause them to think about the issues raised in the play and not allow them to be involved or identify with the characters.
I think this is very similar to the concept of early Modernism. There was a decisive turning point in early twentieth century by painters who abandoned traditional styles or techniques of old masters. Paintings were no longer the means to achieve correct visual representations with the advent of camera and film. Confused artists thus questioned the true identity of painting and came up with a new style that showed what is unique about painting; "Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else." (Clement Greenberg)
This was why Manet's Olympia was considered as the first modernist painting!! Not only did he embrace flatness of the surface (of canvas) but it also placed the viewer outside of the picture frame; the viewer is a client looking at the prostitute lying on a bed but nothing more. Isn't this quite the same effect the Epic Theater tried to convey???

Manet
Olympia
1891

New Objectivity

2004-11-23T16:00:00.000-08:00

The New Objectivity (new matte-of-factness) arose in Germany in 1920's as an art movement in opposition to expressionism. Dr. Wickens, during her lecture on October 15, explained how "Neue Sachlichkeit" was embraced with enthusiasm by artists who celebrated "what is"- "It is what it is". However, I was surprised at George Grosz's works (fig 1, 2) and his use of grotesque imagery of figures, extreme distortion of body parts, and intense colours; which made the new type of art seem more like a rage-driven movement and not something of celebrated spirits.
Even the works done by other artists such as Otto Dix (fig. 3) and Rudolf Schlichter (fig 4) resemble the works of Grosz. The style of New Objectivity, I assume, must owe its severity to the recovering period of Weimar Republic in which they faced constant hardships and frustrations.

In this case was true, a similar attitude could be found in art works of Post-Modernism. The Post-Modern artists' primary concern is "content" and they usually depict contents of issues or concerns of today's world such as riots, victims, issues with gender, terrorism, etc,. For example, Leon Golub's works, the interrogation series, are as much disturbing and appalling as those of the New Objectivity.
VIEW GOLUB'S "INTERROGATION III" --> http://www.delacruzarts.com/controversy/golub.jpg

Figure 1

George Grosz
Remember Uncle August the Unhappy Inventor
1919

Figure 2

George Grosz
Metropolis
1917

Figure 3

Otto Dix
Cardplaying War-Cripples
1920

Figure 4

Rudolf Schlichter
The Rooftop Studio
1922

The Art of Photomontage

2004-11-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

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What is the art of photomontage?
Photomontage appeared shortly after the World War I in Berlin, Germany. It was embraced by a group of artists who recognized it as a truly new art form. This group was known as "Berlin Dada". The expressive means incorporated in creating photomontage attracted the Dada artists who were looking for something quite different; something that will enable them to convey as much meanings as possible. Photomontage was the answer that ended the search of the new.

The advantage of photomontage, the ability to say much more than any other pictures, soon became a popular method in public communication. We can easily see that the trend continues to this day. Pop artists who emerged with the outbreak of post-modernism used the juxtaposition of magazine photos and texts. Advertisers adopted the concept of photomontage as the number one method for commercialization and graphic designers were no exceptions.

A British photomontagist who turned to photomontage when he was dissatisfied with the lack of immediacy in painting was Peter Kennard. In a video called "Photomontage today: Peter Kennard", he talked about his own practices and how photomontage could aptly provide "a critique of the reality represented in conventional advertising and the media." Other photomontagists, such as John Hearfield and Hans Staek, also made political statements by juxtaposing images. Political activism was another generator of the continuous practice of the art of photomontage.

As a fine arts student, I found works by Sean Hillen really interesting.
You can see more of his works if you go to http://seanhillen.com/

Sean Hillen
The Lia Fáil of Waterford, IRELANTIS
1997

Sean Hillen
St. Christopher Appears In London
1992

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