AnnaBunnell-Assignment 2

1.
Jonathan Kirk
Richard Notkin


2.
1-Are you doing something you enjoy? Did you ever plan on doing something different?
2-Did you have a good idea of what you wanted to be from a young age?
3-How did you combine art with working/supporting yourself? Has art become your main job?
4-Is art your main source of income ?
5-Do you feel like you've "Made It?".... in art, financial, life etc.

3.

QUESTION 1. What art “converted” you to your art? What fragments or reverberations of that inspiration/dialogue show up in your work? Where was the "quotation" from, and how did you alter its meaning by putting it in a new context?

When I was in my early teens I remember attending a youth activity with my church. We went to the art museum at Brigham Young University. There was a painting I came across of two chairs that were talking about the resurrection of Christ. I remember being interested in the piece not because of its religious aspects but because it could symbolize so much with an image of two chairs and colored sashes. It was an abstract thought that I could understand and that interested me. 

I picked some quotes out of the articles that I felt I resinated. They relate to work and also are questions I am interested in.

 The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close contact with the matter that made up their world.

When damn near everything presents itself as familiar — it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

With no registration requirement, every creative act in a tangible medium is now subject to copyright protection: your email to your child or your child’s finger painting, both are automatically protected.

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.

The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

QUESTION 2. What is Lethem driving at here? What is he suggesting the artists' “imperative “ is? What "signs" do you particularly attend to? How do you interpret, translate or illuminate those signs?

People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. 

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

 The truth lies somewhere in the vast gray area between these two overstated positions. 

We're surround by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them

Reincarnation of everyday materials

The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they’ve been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended. Artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. Art that matters to us — which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience — is received as a gift is received. Even if we’ve paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.

QUESTION 3. What would a healthy public domain look like? What would happen if artistic achievement was seen as a “cultural achievement” and not an singular individual expression?

Thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language.

Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology is exposing those restrictions as bizarre and arbitrary. When old laws fixed on reproduction as the compensable (or actionable) unit, it wasn’t because there was anything fundamentally invasive of an author’s rights in the making of a copy. Rather it was because copies were once easy to find and count, so they made a useful benchmark for deciding when an owner’s rights had been invaded. In the contemporary world, though, the act of “copying” is in no meaningful sense equivalent to an infringement — we make a copy every time we accept an emailed text, or send or forward one — and is impossible anymore to regulate or even describe.

The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions — marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.

QUESTION  4. This loops back, to a degree, on the first question, but broadens it from the instance of a "work of art" to artists themselves - please write at least one short paragraph about an artist who has influenced you - talk about what attracted you to them, and how you’ve adopted some approach, insight, process, or outlook they’ve expressed, while putting your own “spin” on it.

Joseph Beuys has become one of my biggest influences in art. I was attracted to the oddness of his work, his untraditional materials, and the way he made me questions how I see life and art simultaneously. The materials he uses as metaphors and I have adopted the  symbolism In my own work. Using different forms as metaphors I try and ask a question about life and the structures instilled in our societies.