Art 21 Reflection One

This is some of her art.  As you can see, lots of lines :)

The episode "systems" includes art by Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, Kimsooja, and Allan McCollum.  Julie Mehretu is an abstract artist, and she calls her old style of painting "maplike" and her new style of painting "atmospheric."  Her goal is not to explain one of her life stories or show people a message, so she doesn't say what her art is about.  Instead, she tries to make the paintings interesting and make the viewer "feel" where she is coming from.  Her paintings are massive, and she even has a 21 by 84ish painting that takes a year and a half to make.  She works in a team with several other people, and each has a self-assigned job.  A lot of her influences and ideas come from another artist she lives with (I'm not sure if they are married or anything like that.  Maybe...), Jessica Rankin.  They give each other ideas and feedback and look at each other's work all day.  Even though I don't understand it, I think I like her art because it is huge, it captures my attention, and I can appreciate the fact that it took years and many people to make it.

You never know, maybe someone actually does like this.

John Baldessari is another abstract artist (almost all of them probably will be).  His main idea is that he would like to challenge the popular beliefs about what art is and is not.  He tries to push the boundaries of the subject and broaden the people's ideas about it.  He doesn't paint anymore because he thinks it is too much based off of opinion and he prefers a systematic approach.  Mr. Baldessari uses photos, often more than one per piece, words, and colors in his work.  His studio is littered with photos that he edited or colored over.  He is crazy, but I guess artists are allowed to be.  I am mostly saying he is crazy because he looks like one of those dwarves from the movies.  I do not particularly like his art because they look like photos with crayon colored over them, but maybe some people are into that kind of thing.  I do like the part where he helps out the art students, though.

This is the one with lanterns.  I don't know which side is
 the ground, but it looks interesting..

Kimsooja is an artist who uses the environment, music, sounds, lights, videos, and more for her work.  She often does installations, or pieces that were made for a certain space.  Her main idea is that she tries to find peace and enlightenment, I think, through her work and tries to give the audience the same things by seeing/hearing it.  She believes she is always making work and that her whole life is one piece of art.  She took videos of her standing still with people passing by, calling herself a "needle woman."  I like her work the most so far, but I still think she is a little "out there" (not really a bad thing, just different).  To me, in order to make art like that, a person has to work differently than others.  S I thought the "needle woman" part was boringish because they were videos of her standing there, but I guess she found meaning in it.  I like the installation with the thousands of lanterns because, if I was there looking at it, it would capture my attention for longer than the needle woman videos.

Each one of those framed pictures is the symbol of a person.

Alan McCollum is an artist who took a lot of influence from his uncle, who ran a television program called "Learn to Draw" (guess what it's about!).  He made massive quantities of pencil drawings of symbols for various things for an installation.  He tried to make shapes that symbolized everything on the planet.  I really like his work because I think that it is a really interesting concept to work on.  I don't know why, but the room full of framed shapes was interesting to me.  Maybe if I knew his system for symbolism, I could find a symbol for myself.  He explained how thousands of things to look at is awe inspiring and overwhelming to people, and I think that it is great.