Week Four

My hair is something I have struggled with for years, having curly hair isn’t the easiest thing to deal with there is so much care and time that needs to go into it. Throughout my high school years and even some of college I would not know how to take care of it, my hair is part of me part of how I look, and my image. I used to either not care about my curly pattern or just let it do what it wants to do. Now I take so much time and effort to fix and understand what I couldn’t before. I would take pictures of how it was before because I knew one day, I'm going to be able to fix it. In John Berger's Ways of Seeing, he says “Showed how something or somebody had once looked-and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people.” That was how at one point I looked to someone that’s all they remember me by how I looked before but not how I changed. Everyone has a different perspective now. He also mentions “Although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.” when I look at those old images my view is so different going through the different stages was so different because at one point it was a big part of my insecurity. After helping my hair and healing it in a sense I started doing my sister's hair and helping her. For my project, I'll be creating a video of me doing my sister's hair.  

Quotes: “Although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing. 

 

Quote: “Showed how something or somebody had once looked-and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people.”

Berger, Ways of Seeing: 

 Quote: 

“The entire art of the past has now become a political issue” 

Response: 

People view art in many ways and everyone's perspective changes on what they see. The concept of how the art was viewed back then for example as a simple painting of a woman laying down is currently an issue of a woman being sexualized. Many people have seen those paintings for many years and have had many different opinions about them and understanding of them. People started explaining what they see wrong in those paintings and involved politics in their issues, now the paintings have problems with it when at one point it was just considered art.

Quote: 

 “Each image reproduced has become part of an argument which has little or nothing to do with the painting's original independent meaning.” Response: An artist creates an image and has a meaning to each image. With each image an artist makes he or she creates meaning behind it or a story as to why the image was made. With many people looking at the image the meaning behind it goes away with different opinions getting told. In the chapter, there was an image of the Van Gogh painting on one page under the image it said it was a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it, on the next page it says that the painting was the last painting he painted before he killed himself. 

Khan Academy Performance Art an Introduction (website - look through the various sections of this online course): 

 Quote: 

“For feminist artists, in particular, using their body in live performance proved effective in challenging historical representations of women, made mostly by male artists for male patrons. In keeping with past tradition, artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Valie Export displayed their nude bodies for the viewer’s gaze; but they resisted the idealized notion of women as passive objects of beauty and desire. Through their words and actions, they confronted their audiences and raised issues about the relationship of female experience to cultural beliefs and institutions, physical appearance, and bodily functions including menstruation and childbearing.”

Response: 

 The live performances of representations of women made by male artists are such a powerful statement to show to the world because it is always women having to explain that they do not just want to be looked at like objects just for their beauty or what they can do for their bodies to improve it, but they are so much more than that. I believe those live performances gave confidence to females to show themselves without the females getting judged for it, and to create more of those live performances.

Quote: 

 “Following World War II, performance emerged as a useful way for artists to explore philosophical and psychological questions about human existence. For this generation, who had witnessed the destruction caused by the Holocaust and atomic bomb, the body offered a powerful medium to communicate shared physical and emotional experience.” 

Response:

A live performance to show how World War II affected many people and changed perspective on how hurtful humans can be to one another. Reading about World War II and the Holocaust is different from having a live performance of emotions and seeing the pain in someone's eyes. 

A 24-Hour Love Letter to Performance Art: 

 Quote: 

“I feel my Black body being consumed every day. I’m within my comfort zone so long as I have agency over the poetics of that consumption. But here, I wanted to let go of that, just to see what would happen. This is real physical pain — it always is — but this time, that pain isn’t wrapped up in metaphor, or delivered to you as a poem; it is a specimen.” 

Response: The artist always covered her skin color and would use makeup to cover up, in this performance she made she felt like she need to be free, she wanted to show off what she has been hiding and be herself. She explained how she wanted black existence needs to have more presence in the world but in a positive way where they are looked at and viewed not just imagined. 

Quote: 

“By Hour 22, that state had finally set in. The pain totally disintegrated, and I think I experienced, for the first time, true inner silence. From there, I started to dance, which took me totally by surprise because I don’t even remember deciding to do so.” 

  Response: In the live performance, the artist created he experienced many different emotions in the 24 hours he was performing, it was very deep to him, because it was something he had to push his body to do, and after a certain time he even started dancing without realizing he did, after hours of him on the treadmill he stopped thinking about everything because he had nothing else to think about it. His brain was fully relaxed. His performance meant so much to him without him realizing it until he finished.