Project 3- Performance Piece

For my performance art piece, I chose to recreate a screenshot from Santiago Sierra's performance,‘160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People.’ This performance was created in 2000 and intended to address social responsibility and political ideology. Sierra challenged the system by looking beyond the current status of the subjects he tattooed. He is a Spanish artist that emphasized the pointlessness of menial labor jobs throughout many of his pieces. In this performance, Sierra paid four prostitutes the price of one shot of heroin in exchange for tattooing a single line on their backs. The tattoo machine mimicked the needle through which the amount of heroin will be administered and spans the entire width of the prostitutes' backs. The piece also touches on the permanency of the tattoo versus the short-lived impact of heroin. Sierra also comments on how problematic society has become that people actually became so desperate that they allowed the artist to exploit them. In the performance, four women are seen sitting topless facing a blank wall. You see two figures measuring their backs and setting up the tattoo machine. Sierra chooses not to show his face on camera. For this project I took a screenshot of two of the women getting their backs measured for the tattoos. I decided to use charcoal and keep the entire thing black and white because I wanted to emphasize the dark meaning behind the piece. Before starting this piece, I researched many of Sierra's other projects and they all seem to correlate around the same themes. Another performance that I found really interesting was one where he sprayed four Arab men with hardening foam, essentially so they were plastered to the ground. He challenged the way his audiences thought about different concepts and I really appreciate that he thought outside of the box to illustrate that. 

https://publicdelivery.org/santiago-serra-tattoos/#160_cm_Line_Tattooed_on_4_People_2000

https://delphiangallery.com/santiago-sierra/

Reading 3 - Olivia Collins

Olivia Collins
Trauma, bodies, and performance art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing is an article that discusses how performance artists address the idea of trauma through their work by using their bodies. Through performance art, people redefine what it means to be a “traumatized body” and hope to move toward an ethical spectatorship. Oliver makes the argument that trauma studies correlate with unwanted spectatorship and how performance art tries to take this back from the viewer. She explains that performance art openly problematize these issues. Oliver says that it is discomforting when the audience of a performance pieces will observe and ignore. I can see how this would be discomforting but I also feel that it comes with the medium that you can not control how people react. While there are many performance artists who make art in reference to trauma in life, not all performance artists do. To say that you need to experience or react to trauma to become a performance artist is not accurate. It also seems that all of this only applies to women. Female bodies are automatically seen as political so I can see how this idea of trauma can be used with all the example of women performance artists. As far as this reading with our class, it clearly is in reference to our current project and drawing performance artists counts as drawing the human body.

Project 3, Performance Drawing

Olivia Collins

I decided to base my drawing off of an image Marina Abromovic’s performance piece Point of Contact that she performed with her then partner Ulay. The image shows the two of them standing across from each other wearing similar clothing. They both have their index fingers extended and pointing at one another. The photo captures their two fingers almost touching, with a slight gap that separate the two people. It also shows the difference in their height which helps the eye move through the piece better rather than if they both were at the same level. 

The body is the most important aspect in this piece and all performance pieces as a whole. They are the figures in the work. The piece is an interaction between the two people, the photo just documents this. Abramic describes this specific piece as very minimal. This piece is supposed to show the energy that is shared between the two performers. This energy is captured by them making direct eye contact with each other and almost physically touching but restraining. 

This was actually the first performance piece that came to mind to transform into a drawing. This performance in particular is something I have found successful due to the lighting of the environment. The lighting makes the gap between their two fingers glow which shows the intense energy between the two performers. Point of Contact is a unique piece by Abromovic since they are both wearing the same formal attire. 

For my drawing off of this performance I decided to use charcoal as the medium. This seemed like the obvious choice since the lightning is so important as previously mentioned. The overall process of this drawing was standard to a charcoal piece, I decided to tone the paper myself instead of having a pre-toned paper so I could control the exact shade of the background. I sketch using vine charcoal but most of the drawing is done in charcoal pencil. I also wanted to use white charcoal which is typically not used on paper you tone yourself but I feel it is important to the glowing aspect of Point of Contact.

https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3122

Point of Contact

Reading Response 3

Lilly Stene
Life Drawing

Reading Response 3

This article addressed themes of how there is an issue regarding an unethical viewing of the traumatized body in the theory and displaying of performance art. It addresses how it is important for a viewer of performance art to have a self-perspective of them being part of the performance by simply being the viewer of the trauma, while not just trying to relate to the trauma in some way. The article also addresses how “spectatorship of traumatized bodies is” problematic in the sense that it creates potential to cause “objectifying and voyeuristic ways” of viewing someone else’s suffering. Lindsey French and Janet Jacobs mention how there is risks involved when using naked bodies in performance art. An example of this is how images of semi-naked and starving women may have others read the visual text in a sexualized way. Karen Goertz, a concentration camp survivor, notes how pornography exists of concentration camps, and that one having power over another person “arouses feelings of pleasure”. I think that this article was important to our next project in class, where we are instructed to illustrate performance art. I had never thought of performance art being sexualized, but after reading this journal I realized that it unfortunately can, and will keep that in mind when creating my piece for class. It is extremely unfortunate and sickening that some people sexualize art that is not meant to be sexualized, but I still think it is important for artists to create pieces regardless of the risks from a small population of people that could possibly misinterpret their work and use it for pleasure.

Reading Response 2

Lilly Stene

Life Drawing 311

Reading Response 2

            This reading addressed themes of race and how it integrates into art through literature, dancing, and social situations. The first segment of the article addressed how a Columbian college student expressed his frustration with his professor about his parents not receiving his coming-out well, and saying that taking a Gay and Lesbian literature class was a waste of money. When the professor told the student to just stop talking to his parents, the student told him that he wouldn’t understand because it wasn’t an option for a “kid in a Columbian family” and that the professor wouldn’t “get it”. Personally, I didn’t understand this statement that being Columbian is related to being able to disown or not disown one’s family, so would have liked to learn more about why this student felt this way and perhaps he could have explained to his professor why it wasn’t an option because he was Columbian. In the second segment of the article, it addressed how there was “tension between white modern dance and black modern dance”. I also agreed with this statement, because there were predominantly white dancers who starred major roles in my pre-professional ballet program I was involved in for 13 years. Because many of the African American girls were more curvy, they were not placed in certain roles . There was a modern dance school that I transferred to because of body image discrimination, and coincidentally a lot of the black girls who went to my first dance school transferred there as well. There was no tension between black and white dancers at the second school because all cultures and races were accepted and celebrated in the different styles of dance that we performed; including African, Contemporary, and Ballet. I wish that the author of this article would have had the chance to visit predominately black dance schools to gain a better perspective on the issue they were writing about. There is a lot of dance schools that celebrate all races, cultures, and backgrounds where there is no tension between “white modern dance and black modern dance” as the author stated, and focused on throughout the majority of the article. Misty Copeland is the top ballet dancer at American Ballet Theatre, and she is African American. I think Misty Copeland becoming the first African American female to join ABT has inspired other young black dancers to continue their dream despite people telling them that it will be difficult because there is “tension” due to the fact they are black. Even though she was African American, she didn’t let any tension stop her from pursuing her dream in modern dance and ballet. In the last portion of the article it talked about how an artist did a performance art segment in which they directed people to separate themselves into categories. While I understood the reasoning in the point they were trying to convey, I personally believe that art should unite people together despite differences, and not separate people into specific categories based on whether they are a virgin or not or black or white.

Identity project

For my Identity project I chose to illustrate the two sides of the cosmetic industry- beauty and animal testing. I chose this topic because after working as a makeup artist over the past summer, I realized that there are still many high end brands of makeup that unfortunately test on animals. Even though the images I found online of animal testing were very graphic, I wanted to illustrate this concept in a way that was still graphic enough to grab the attention of viewers, but that wasn’t too graphically disturbing so that people wouldn’t want to look at my piece. I began my project by researching art projects that depicted animal testing to gain inspiration. I found many pieces that just depicted the animal being tested on, so I decided it was important to illustrate the human face so that people could personally connect with the message being delivered. I chose to do this by incorporating an image of a mirror into my piece. The mirror symbolizes how our actions of using non cruelty free makeup reflects back onto the animal’s pain, and how something as simple as putting on makeup can have major consequences for the animals.
I began my project by sketching out the compact mirror, and the woman’s face with graphite pencil. I then sketched out the lab assistants figure and the rabbit, and added the details like the chair, lab outfit, and makeup on the rabbit later. I searched for images of women looking into mirrors to gain inspiration and to make sure I proportioned the face correctly. This was challenging, because I needed to make the woman’s face a lot larger than the photos on the internet. I also searched for close up photos of eyes to make sure I illustrated the details of the eye accurately. I first began to add color to my project by using drawing pens to color in the woman’s eyes, eyeliner, and eyelashes. Then, I used color pencil for her skin tone and to add value to her face. For her lips I used brush tipped markers, and a clear one to blend and add value to her lips so that they looked more realistic. Her hair was challenging to make look realistic because the image was very blown up, and I still wanted her hair to have fine strands. The lab assistant was difficult to illustrate because there wasn’t images of actual people testing on animals, so I didn’t have a human figure to reference in that specific position that I illustrated. The rabbit was the easiest to illustrate since I purposely exaggerated its features with makeup and fur. I used the same materials to color and blend to add value to the rabbit and lab assistant.

Sources:
https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation/animals-used-experimentation-factsheets/animal-experiments-overview/

https://www.hsi.org/news-media/about/

https://www.pcrm.org/ethical-science/animal-testing-and-alternatives

https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/23203/1/the-artists-pushing-animal-rights-further

https://thevegandatabase.com/animal-rights-artivism-30-talented-vegan-artists-to-follow-now/

Images:

Reading Response #3

In this paper, Trauma, bodies, and performance art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing, the question of how to witness the suffering of another person due to a traumatic experience. Oliver starts out her paper by referencing Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who can reflect on his experience of how the Nazis viewed him as an object, and watched his suffering with no emotion whatsoever. The article then goes on to talk about how we can imagine one suffering, specifically a traumatized body, in the most ethical way. We see so much of this in art, yet we never really think about the background of where this suffering stemmed from. Oliver states that theorists, "Would find it useful to consider some of the theoretical insights about experience, embodiment and spectatorship developed in the field of performance art" (Oliver 120). She explains that this way of seeing is "ethical" because it forces us to take some response-ability towards the body being viewed. Performance art is a different way of seeing the atrocities portrayed in the piece in three core ways: reinterpreting the notion of ‘ethical spectatorship, rejecting the distinction between active artist and passive spectator that forces us as viewers to acknowledge our own role in the performance of representation, and challenging us to view the traumatized body in new terms, opposing our preconceptions of the body as object, alien, other and asserting the significance of the corporeal as a site of resistance and expression in the face of trauma. Oliver admits that performance art is not a way to fix the trauma, but rather illustrate it in a different way that may directly address the problems that cause trauma, rather than just show the end result of the trauma. She then talks about how psychologists have connected this to "sense memory" which can be defined as "a mode of remembering that registers ‘the physical imprint’ of trauma rather than its facts." We relate this to our moral emotions and empathy, which is why Oliver thinks this way of seeing through performance art is more ethical.

Reading Response #2

This reading from BOMB magazine discusses the politics of race within the contemporary art world. Gutierrez reflects upon his experience as a queer Latinx choreographer in a prominently white dance world. The article begins as the author reflects upon a time when he was sitting across from his "hot" professor of his Post-Structuralist Literary Theory--Gay and Lesbian Literature class. He explains to the professor that his parents disapprove of his lifestyle, but divorcing his family was not an option since he comes from a Colombian background. Gutierrez then continues to reflect on times where he has attended other artists' events all around the world that also discuss race within the art world. He thinks about how people of color, women, queer individuals, etc. are portrayed from an outside perspective and what kind of image that creates. The part that stuck out to me the most was when Gutierrez said, "I am at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my new boyfriend. We’ve come to see the William Eggleston show. As we walk through the museum, I think about what sort of picture we make. He is young, skinny, black. I am older, thick, ethnically ambiguous. I think about what people, my friends, or even I myself think about our age difference, about our differences in general." This stuck out to me because of how two normal people have to walk around in fear of what others might think of them. Everyone else's subjectives are normalized, but because Gutierrez and his boyfriend are of different ethnicities, ages, and stature, they feel as if they are being watched everywhere they go. When Gutierrez looks at a piece of art, he sees the world in which he longs to belong to. He feels that people considered "minorities" are constricted by society's social norms and wonders when he will feel free of this and, so to speak, where this feeling of acceptance goes when it's not in a frame.

Project 2

For my second project, I chose to create a drawing around the topic of discrimination; more specifically, discrimination of women and nonbinary individuals within the realm of high performance athletics. The subject of my piece is Caster Semenya, a South African runner who dominates in the 800m event. Semenya has won two Olympic gold medals and numerous world championships, but since her first big victory in the 2009 World Championships, Semenya has been subjected to sex testing, racial discrimination, and forced withdrawals from competition starting just at the age of 18. It has been an uphill battle for Semenya over the last ten years, as many call into question her scientific classification as a woman based on her testosterone levels. She has been placed on numerous suspensions while juries determine her eligibility to compete, and in her most recent trial has lost to the IAAF, who have said she is ineligible to compete unless she starts hormone therapy to lower her naturally occurring testosterone levels for at least six months. When Semenya's legal team responded to this ruling calling the decision discriminatory, the IAAF responded saying "such discrimination is a necessary, reasonable, and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF's aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics." I chose these words as the text-based portion of my piece because I think it highlights the absurdity of the thinking of the powers that determine who is and is not able to compete as a woman. Such a ruling has been met with backlash from many, who say it is specifically targeting Semenya as the hormone level rules apply only to the one mile event and lower. The thinking behind this is that increased testosterone would give female athletes an advantage over others because it raises the force output of muscles for shorter duration events. If this were true, other events such as javelin and shotput would be limited too as this theory would apply more to those events than running. However, this thinking is totally unjustified as a study of over 600 Olympic-level athletes determined that 13.7% of the women had testosterone levels that would be classified as "too high" whereas 16.5% of men had low testosterone levels. Not only does that study prove the irrelevance of testosterone levels in athletic performance, but it also raises the question of why hormone level limits are not imposed on men as well. Overall, Semenya has faced more discrimination than is deserved, and the IAAF's attention is in the wrong place when doping is such a prevalent and ongoing occurrence that largely goes unnoticed. Semenya is the face of a victim of an issue of unjustified discrimination and ignorant reasoning for it. I wanted to not only honor her but bring attention to a problem that will no doubt be a continued uphill battle which most have not heard about.

Project 2 - Olivia Collins

For our second piece I chose to focus on the climate change protests. I wanted to pick an issue that is important to me since it is something that affects everyone globally. The issue of climate change has been prevelanet with the media right now with 16 year old Greta Thunberg leading the march. With different parts of Earth suffering due to the centuries of human mistakes it is important to demand change. For my drawing I wanted to focus on the younger generation participating in the climate change protests. These younger kids in my drawing are supposed to emphasize that it is an issue that will affect them their whole lives and ignoring it is not an option. The children symbolize hope since older generations chose not act on these issues. Something that was crucial to me with this piece is choosing children from all around the world. I started with a photo of two students protesting in South Africa, these two are in the middle of my piece. Then I went with a photo of a little boy from the Netherlands and placed him next to them. The last image is from a protest in India which was also centered around students participating. The text is found on the signs that each of them are holding, none of the text is in the same language since all these children are from different countries. I also felt that this piece would be stronger in color since black and white drawings can sometimes symbolize the past and I wanted the figures to look like they are in contemporary time.

Project 2

For this project I decided to touch on self-image. With conversations currently being had surrounding representation in media as well as body-shaming, I thought the topic was timely and relevant. Additionally, doing this topic seemed a useful opportunity for self reflection and examining the ways that I've built my own self-image, where I've succeeded in doing so, and where I've struggled. Putting the piece together was difficult as I knew what I wanted to see on the paper (bold colors, a nest of figures, and a larger figure over top) but I didn't know quite what it needed to say. I reflected on moments that marked major leaps in my self confidence and my idea of self and noticed that when I stopped (for the most part) attempting to compare myself to a larger whole, things improved greatly for me. This wasn't quite a matter of representation and so I chose not to go that route specifically. I wanted to steer away from themes surrounding representation because though representation is important, often the drawback is when presented with something or someone that represents an aspect of yourself the takeaway is that that representation is the ideal form of your identity. Because of this I chose to create as great a distinction as I could between my figure, and those behind me. With the green of the many bodies as a backdrop, I chose to leave large portions of white space on the central figure to both draw attention there and to highlight a few things.

I don't believe that self-confidence is believing you're flawless, I think there's much more to understanding and acknowledging your flaws and choosing to like yourself anyway. Things that at one point or another had an influence on my self image (little hands, button nose, knee scar, body hair, big hair, love handles, etc.)  received extra attention, and hopefully stuck out a bit more. The acknowledgement of many of the imperfections of the main figure are placed in contrast with the green figures, which are all some variation of the "ideal body".

The inclusion of text in a way that felt organic, not on the nose or preachy as I feel it often can, stumped me for a bit. Then as I drew I realized my body comes in with built-in-text (tattoos) and these tattoos both signify an aspect of my concept of self. 

Project 2: Political Statement Piece

For this project, the political issue I chose was Anti-semitism. This issue is directly related to me, being the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. Anti-semitism is still such a prominent issue today all around the world and there are frequent occasions where this is made public. According to the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), there have been 1,879 anti-semitic incidents across the country in 2018. This trend continued into 2019 where many other incidents have been publicized. The amount of incidents has increased by 27% between 2017-2018. One incident that really hit close to home was the vandalism of a Jewish synagogue in Irvine, California. The words "Fuck Jews" and a swastika were spray painted in red paint on the outside of the temple. This synagogue is very close to Chapman and occurred this year. These hate crimes have not stopped and do not look like they are stopping any time soon. For my project, I wanted to express this by combining both incidents of the past and incidents that happened this year. I decided to do a realistic portrait of Ed Mosberg, a Holocaust survivor that still wears his white and blue striped uniform every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day. He wears his original number that was given to him in the concentration camp, and says that everyday is Holocaust day for him. I had the honor of hearing the 92 year-old survivor speak in front of 15,000+ people inside Auschwitz-Birkenau. I found him to be so inspiring and will always remember the chills I got as I saw him walk on stage in his uniform. I decided to place him in front of the Irvine synagogue that was vandalized this year to contrast what occurred in 1945 with what still occurs in 2019. I drew him wearing his uniform and included his number, as well as copying the exact vandalism that was spotted on the temple walls. To sum up my message, I included the question, "When will it end?" I thought this perfectly sums up my statement because this is an issue that has been going on for years, and we have yet to see a stop in these hate crimes. I feel that this was one of my stronger pieces that I have created, and am very proud to bring attention to this political issue.

https://nypost.com/2018/01/20/why-this-holocaust-survivor-still-wears-his-concentration-camp-uniform/