The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away

I found this reading to be very interesting. I have never read something like this before so I was intrigued the whole time. The idea of collecting things for most of your life really connects with me. I am a big collector. I find it very hard to get rid of my material possessions so over the years I have collected so many useless things that have value to me in someway. Now I have so much stuff that it’s hard to even remember why I kept the item in the first place. I’m sure as the years go by I will slowly start to get rid of things, I hope at least.
The quote that stuck out to me the most was “ Moreover, strange as it seems, I feel that it is precisely garbage, that very dirt where important papers and simple scraps are mixed and unsorted, that compromises the genuine and only real fabric in my life, no matter how ridiculous and absurd this may seem from the outside.” I feel this quote is very true. What may look like garbage to other people may be the only “real fabric” in your life.
This reading went along really well with our collections assignments because I feel with this and the discussions we have had in class, I have a really good idea of what a collection is. It also helped me put together my final project in a way that I am happy with.

James Darwin

I chose to do my collection on a fiction character named James Darwin. The poster is a advertisement for his estate sale. Each of the items posted represents a different stage in his life. His story is from rags to riches and I feel that it accuratly represents the character pictured in my mind.

I would post the zine but my only other copy, besides the one my teacher has, is lost on a school computer somewhere.

Culture of the Copy

I really enjoyed this Tshirt assignment. It gave me the opportunity to think outside of the box and allowed me to use medium that I have unfamiliar with. For my tshirt I decided to use the image of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln has a very unique face and top hat that is recognizable to anyone that has an education. For the front of my shirt I would spray paint Abe and his top hat. On the back I would spray paint Abe with a beanie on. I wanted to show how Presidents used to have to be rigid and follow strictly to social norms but now we have a president Obama who is breaking all social norms, and that is why I chose the beanie.

Cooley Galley Visit

I really enjoyed the class visit to the Cooley art gallery in Reed College. I have never been to Reed, let alone the Cooley Gallery so it was a great experience. The curator, Stephanie Snyder, did a good job explaining to us her role as a curator and what it entails. At first it seems like it would be very easy but after listening for awhile I have come to the conclusion that it takes lots of hard work and time to create an exhibition.
I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibit. I thought that the layout was very unique and the room flowed well. It really made me want to concentrate on each section of the exhibition individually but by the end of the exhibit I was able to understand why these pieces were put together in this exhibit. My favorite piece had to be the video of the guy writing on the walls throughout china. He wrote the same thing everytime and no matter how many times he got in trouble he would continue to write. I really enjoyed how their was the video and behind the tv screen was the passage that he continuously wrote. It went together very nicely.

Collecting - So normal, So paradoxical

I really enjoyed this reading, a lot more than any of the Practices of Looking chapter because I feel it was telling a story rather than listing out information. The chapter mainly talks about collecting, the different ways of to do that and what it entails. Everyone collects whether they realize it or not and this was the fact that stuck out most to me.” Before the trash is carried outside, it is collected and perhaps even sorted. The trash itself is made up of whatever is defined and treated as trash.” This quote is an example of how we even subconsciously collect and sort things as we go about our everyday lives. Collecting is also very animalistic; birds and squirrels survive off of the process of collecting, so we should understand that it is a very natural process. “Prior to all conscious reflection, the human view organizes its field of perception and collects what is scattered into groups or connected formulas. Collecting can be loosely compared to the ongoing movement of our normal waking consciousness, Collecting is the imaginative process of association turned material.” This quote accurately describes how the act of collecting occurs.

The collection that really caught my eye was the online Andy Warhol collection on the MOMA website. I have always been a big fan of Andy Warhol’s work and this collection has a wide variety of it. It features his paintings, films and even has vintage reviews on his work.

My favorite of Andy Warhol has always been his soup cans because I feel they are very simple but very creative at the same time. This collection features early soup cans drawings and then the pieces that incorporate the can.

Mark Dion

I attended the Mark Dion lecture apart of PSU’s Monday night lecture series. I found his lecture to be very interesting and I really enjoyed his use of pictures throughout his talk. I find his line of work fascinating. I never realized that his kind of art was considered, well art. I love how he has art pieces around the world, and has done excavation places outside the US such as Italy and England.
When I first got to the lecture I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have never been to a Monday night lecture so I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a boring class lecture or what. It was in fact quite the opposite. My friend and I were very surprised about how enthralling he was and how well his pictures went with his speaking. His lecture was more of a series of stories rather than a professor rambling.
I found his most interesting work to be the excavations of the themes and the river in Venice, Italy. I used to live in London so I was very fascinated with this. I had no idea there was a bank that you could walk on along the themes. The artifacts that he discovered and the way that he conducted the research I found very intriguing. Who knows what a person could find on the bottom of a river. The Venice one was also very intriguing. For centuries people have been dumping in that river so the amount of artifacts a person could find could be endless. This idea of goin through a river I feel is a very ingenious one.
Overall, I enjoyed the lecture greatly. I look forward to maybe one day visiting the tree in Seattle and maybe seeing him talk again. I also hope to return to a PSU Monday night lecture.

Visual Technologies, Image Reproduction and the Copy

Even though this chapter may have had some boring material I feel that I understood it the most. I have never been good with understanding theories like realism and perspective, so this issue of copyrights and things associated with it really stuck to me. Copyright has always been a confusing issue to me because it is really hard to define what is copyright and what isn’t. This chapter goes through methods of reproductions and issued that involve copyright itself.
“In theories of visual culture influences by Marxist theory, the term reproduction is used to describe the ways the cultural practices and their forms of expression reproduce the ideologies and interests of the ruling class. In this view, the reproduction of ideology through media also reproduced the political order and its episteme” pg 183. I feel that this quote describes this chapter quite well. It explains how reproduction is used to please the people of modern days of society and now there are so many ways of reproducing it is hard to keep up. This quote also indirectly talks about copyright but reproduction has everything to do with it.
Photography is a good example of reproduction because it can be a toll used to reproduce a moment in time as well as a piece of art. Photographs can be of an event that could never be reproduced again. The photograph is therefore a way of reproducing the event, without actually doing it. Photography also is controversial in the copyright world because when you take a picture of an art piece is that breaking copyright laws? Your not actually replicating it but you have the exact piece of art in a picture.
Copyright definitely stuck out to me the most out of anything in this chapter. It’s such a confusing and controversial topic that it can be frustrating at times. “The rights to the expression of the idea, as well as rights to reproduce, to distribute, and to make derivative works from the object, all remain with the artist. Within terms of copyright law, reproductions of the painting are considered reproductions of the expression of the idea and not simply reproductions of the physical object.” Pg 205 I feel this quote explains the reason why some people get confused with what copyright really entails. Its not just actual reproductions of peoples works, but also the expression themselves.