Friday, December 10, 2010

Point: Explorations


            As this semester comes to an end, the time has arrived to come clean. I’ve never been a huge history buff. The information just never seems to stick and I find it difficult to recognize relationships between one of the time periods to the next. This semester’s class for me was a bit of a challenge because of this. Majority of our assignments, such as these points and our counterpoints, were meant to help us make comparisons and connections to the past lessons and methods we’ve learned. How can I achieve that if I find it difficult to come across these assessments? I will say that my fellow classmates were a huge help. A simple conversation or short discussion was usually what I needed to steer my thought process in the right direction. I would also like to thank Patrick for making this experience an enjoyable one. Never have I experienced a teacher with so much enthusiasm and fondness of a particular subject. I learned that in every class, expect the unexpected.
Our last section was entitled Explorations. If ever there was a disregard for the regurgitation of design ideas and methods, as well as, new rules and systems written, this was it by far. With all the information and visuals available to us as designers I can’t seem to understand why we’ve seem to become lazy in a sense. The artifacts, spaces, buildings and places being designed today, in this time we call modernism, don’t explore the knowledge we have from the past. The minimalism and simplicity are cop outs to what we are truly capable of. On every corner we’re surrounded by these cookie-cutter style homes that are merely stuck in a spot and described by the name “suburbia”; these homes that possess no personality or deep sense of importance.
The idea of commodity, firmness and delight are no longer in use. These new “modern” style spaces and objects ooze with delight and, with our technological knowledge, are as sturdy as a rock, but lack any sort of commodity. As a reminder; commodity referring to a specific use, firmness referring to the stability of a structure and delight referring to the overall feeling given by an artifact, space, building or place. Modernism has been described as sterile, cold and putting no thought into human beings. In class we discussed our crisis where it’s believe that design is no longer for everyone. Design has formed an eliteness intended for only certain people. The world is more interested in the individual rather than the interest of the community and because we have the power to transport goods and services from all over the world, we do it, and fill spaces with no consideration to themes. We collect items, whether they go together or not. Finally, because of this eliteness, our interest in individual vs. community and our collecting, there is no longer a specified proposed language, there is no “right way” of doing things and there’s a loss of design vocabulary. 

"Suicide by Modernism" -- Mark Kostabi (2005)

I chose this picture entitled “Suicide by Modernism” by Mark Kostabi because I feel it sums up how most people feel about this idea of modernism; where multiple ideas are thrown into one piece of work or the past ideas are left on the ground to fertilize the earth. Notice how the “old school” styles are in black and white laying on the ground while the colors and vibrancies are celebrated hovering over them. Hopefully one day, with our generation of designers, we can spin the design continuum back in the “right” direction.

Friday, December 3, 2010

rEading cOmprehension 7...

**Within the theme of the exhibit assigned to your group, select ONE work and draw a diagram of the
work, using the principles and elements of design. Write a 250-word annotation for your diagram to the
themes of the EXPLORATIONS unit and the readings assigned for this unit. In your annotation, analyze
and include at least one other work of art in the theme you have been assigned, make 3-5 appropriate
citations from the readings, and consider SCALE (artifact, space, building, and place) as you complete
your work.

--
According to dictionary.com, one of the definitions of art is “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.” Although we are all people, I feel that’s the only thing majority of us have in common. We implement different personalities, difference in opinions and difference in expression.  I believe that this definition is also a characterization for the modernism movement. During this time, as we discussed during history class, our crisis is we now possess this confidence where we believe individuals to be more important than the community. Design is now for the elite and well off. We’ve lost any sort of design language.
The Town & Country theme of the Greensboro Collects show in the Weatherspoon Art Museum was an expression on how smaller towns and countries have yet forgotten about the community. Concentrating on the piece titled “Friday Night at the Ozark Airdome,” by Walter Barker, the idea of community is still relevant in this image of the town watching a movie outside. With its contrast in colors and textures, this work of art expresses the audience as almost one large form. The individual people can only be distinguished by the various colored tinctures. The simplicity and scale of the house in the background and wooden fence express how we’ve lost sight of the minimalism of the past and are more focused on how much more an individual can realize before the other. One thing is for sure, the idea of commodity, firmness and delight are present within this piece in the balance of colors and whites, repetition of similarities and scale of the piece as a whole.


The work of Deborah Grant also caught my eye. Entitled, “By the Skin of Our Teeth,” it’s a mixed media piece made of collaged paper, ink, and oil. Although multiple types of media were used it’s still a very simplistic piece. It “stresses purity of form and sleekness of surface while increasingly exploiting the expressive power of the irregular form introduced into an otherwise insistent structural grid,” (Roth, pg. 569). Richard Meier, a designer who drew influenced form Le Corbusier, concentrate the use of pure white geometric forms and pipe railings, as in the Douglass House in 1971-1973. Similar to the design style of Richard Meier, this piece expresses “minimalism and reduction of materials.” (Roth, 570)  

"By the Skin of Our Teeth #2" -- Deborah Grant (2006)

Douglass House by Richard Meier