Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Watching: A Finished Product



The time has finally come for our images to be displayed in a Mudd Gallery Art Show! The Mudd Gallery as a venue is unique. I feel that it is nice to have a space that allows students to show their work but also limits the artists to the space given to display work. It’s nice to have the Mudd Gallery as an introduction to gallery settings because if you become an artist, you will have to work with all different kinds of spaces with various size limits. The gallery works towards giving students a ‘sneak peek’ into the powerful art world. I do, however, wish the gallery was located somewhere more prominent. I feel the gallery would have more people interested in going to see artwork if it wasn’t on the third floor of the library.
Mary Ann Doane’s article: Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity was a very challenging article for myself to read. I don’t feel I could wrap my head around everything presented in it, but I can comment on what I did understand. The full concepts of “medium specificity” have a way of not being relevant in today’s world because of the digital age and our way into the post-medium world. Digital technology and electronic reproduction in the digital media lean more towards immateriality. Technology is taking over the mediums of art and what use to be done with pen and paper can now be done faster and more effectively on a computer. Although some people still work as medium specificity artists, the numbers keep slowly decreasing year after year with as all the new advancements in technology keep appearing.

4 comments:

  1. I agree that the Mudd provides a challenging and yet appropriately-sized space for young artists to exhibit material. It is not overwhelmingly huge so we do not feel like we have to create an enormous amount of work, but it is not too small that it feels like our work is unimportant. I think we are lucky at Lawrence to have the space.

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  2. I like that you bring up the idea of medium-specific artists and the fact that because of constant technological advances they are becoming more and more rare. Other than this digital processes class, I have very little experience with utilizing "technology" within my artwork and find it both worrying, in a sense that I feel behind the times, and also exhilarating, in that this technology opens a whole new world of possibilities for me as an artist.

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  3. I am on the same page as you with the Mudd Gallery. It really is an interesting process to be a part of setting up the show before the opening and provides a great basis for undergraduate artists to see how the behind the scenes will work in the future. It would also be nice if it were in a different area. I also had trouble fully grasping Doane's article, but it is interesting to consider how she addresses digital media versus medium specificity artists. I worry someday my favorite types of medium will disappear entirely due to the digital age.

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  4. That making a drawing, painting or even printing a photograph in a dark room require touch and hand manipulations provide a vastly different experience for both viewer and artist. Press the button, we do the rest was a mantra coined by Eastman Kodak in 1888 and it is not so far from how we can produce/output prints, magazines and other objects from our immaterial digital files...

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