Every moment is art

Joseph Beuys

The idea of Fluxus is that anything could be art and the field of art is a melting pot. I think Joseph Beuys is an epitome among all the artists like that. He takes every single moment/event in life as pieces of art, which could be a little on edge to me. I personally agree that every moment in life could be art. I call it the art of life. I think we should constantly keep records of any events happened in life, in other words, I also think people who write diary are all artist. Bloggers are like sculptors, sculptors make things out of life, and bloggers sculpt every moment in life into their blogs. That explained how I agree with Joseph on the subject that life is art. However, I am not fond of his works of fat. I just don't think it's worth to be exhibited in a museum because it's just unfair for lots of young artists out there who devoted their perseverance and time into their works and still could not get them recognized and on display in a museum.

About my project. We are going to build filming dolly. The song is done and we are looking forward to directing and making it.

Reality Check

Not every story has a happy ending, or not every story has an ending. This is just like that not everything/event in life would have a closure or resolution. Unlike most of the mainstream films nowadays that bring the audiences. into their fantasy world, Stroszek pulls the audiences back to reality and imbues them with depression and hopelessness. At least to me, Bruno in Stroszek is pretty much hopeless, he is either going back to the mental institution back in Germany or he is going to be arrested and immured by American policemen. The ending is ambiguous yet leaving the audiences a few possible thoughts including Bruno might be arrested, Bruno might escape from the police but still ends up being a poor hopeless maverick, and Bruno could die from the cold in the brutal winter of the Midwest. I kept wondering if this is that kind of reality that Werner Herzog talked in the interview where he told the host that being shot was kind of cool. And this is the reality we all have because we cannot predict everything in life and we cannot make things the way we want them to be sometimes. That is why life is full of sorrow and joy. I believe Stroszek is only the epitome of one of those bleak scenes in life and reality is not all about being hopeless because we still have films that are with happy endings.

Bruno Stroszek

The music video project is going smoothly. We planed the timeline out and the first day of shooting is around the corner. I'm just doing research on green screen technology and I found this super cool tutorial online today with Johnny.

being nostalgic dose not make art non-art

Herzog on Herzog left me one impression of Werner Herzog, which is that the guy is obviously living in the past. To better explain my idea, Herzog mentioned in the interview that he dose not think art exists in modern world and creativity is outdated and antiquated. Also when talking about influences, he mentioned numbers of musicians and novelist in the past. He even said that he'd rather bring the Oxford English Dictionary when trapped on an island. To sum all of those up in my understanding, Herzog's ideology still stays in the age when all art pieces were considered original and non-profit. I call that nostalgia. For example, people who watched the 1974 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when they were young think that film is a horror classic and the new 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is crap. If you check out the scores and message board on IMDB you will find lots of useless diatribes about how the new version sucks. They complained that the original was the best and the new one was changed a lot. This only means that those people who don't like the new version do not have an open mind for updated everything, thus they reject the creativity in the new one. Just like most people bitch about how much they do not like it when facebook updates its layout everytime. I completely disagree with Hezog's idea that there's no true art today just because he dose not see the creativity in modern days.


The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 (which is better than the original one in my opinion)

 
So about my project. I changed my plan from photographing sculpture pieces to making a music video with Kanesha. Unlike Herzog, I call this project art once it's done because it's all about creativity. We are still brainstorming ideas for the video and waiting for the beats finally to be finished. A music video is different from short films or documentaries because it , as being in the category of music video, has a special style. I've read an article on line before about techniques of making music videos and I cannot wait to try them out soon. By combining traditional techniques with new creativity, the work is going to be artistic and enjoyable. We are going to Chicago to take some shots of ghettos and liquor stores soon because the theme for the video is gentrification. I will think of more ideas once I listen to the music.

By the way, just compare the two trailers for the two version of "Massacre" and you will see which is better (clearly the new one is the best!)

1974 original one


2003 new and better one

Production log

I'm not amazed by the whole factory idea of Andy Warhol because of that when in film making, it could not be more normal that people with different backgrounds have to work together. Collaboration in art is especially important in film making because we need the person with cinematography background to film, theater background to act and direct, electronic background to set up the grid before filming, sound background do the sound engineering, etc. What caused my attention was that Andy Warhol's time capsule idea and the way he documented everything in his life. This really made me want to document my works in my sculpture class I'm taking this year. I'm planning on taking photographs of my art work in that class and make them into a book with my description. Documenting every details when I'm making my art behooves me not to be afraid of the loss of them in the future because they are captured permanently by camera.

Here's a picture of things I made the first week.

heels made out of cardboard

I checked out some of Andy Warhol's early work. I was surprised that he made lots of draft of heels just like I did. And the styles of the heels he designed are similar to mine. This gave me the inspiration of making heels. I will try to make all my sculpture art pieces relate to fashion and document them.

Here's a video of Fashion by Lady Gaga

Experimental Film

My project is an experimental film called A Schizophrenic Man on PCP.  A schizophrenic guy gets his own super power and fights the evil. In the video, I experimented some fun functions that final cut express provides.

pcp pills

Artistic Statement

As a psychology major, I'm really into psychological drugs and diseases. I have always wondered what would happen if a delusional schizophrenic patient takes some sort of hallucinogens. Schizophrenia itself creates hallucinations for the patients already and it gives the patient credible delusions, with the vivid hallucination that PCP brings maybe the patient will have super power.

My YouTube Channel

From one to more than a thousand

complexity of rhizome

In A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the comparison between writing and botanical roots made me think that human thought process is like a tiny computer system. This idea of rhizome in writing and thinking is kind of beyond my ability to comprehend. However, it did form a image of how our thoughts keep twigging into more and more branches and finally form into a certain types of ideology though the article stated that it's different from ideology. That is how I perceive computer programing: thousands of files are actually the derivative result of one single parent file. In my opinion, this could be similar to all the derivative result of new media like Internet, Web sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs, and DVDs as stated in Lev Manovich's article New Media From Borges to HTML. Through the development of new media, it gradually forms into this new system of rhizome.

Enjoy this new media art installation

Marina Abramovic-The Mirror of The Public

Before I started the research of Marina Abramovic, I slightly browsed through some of her works. My first impression was that there must be something wrong with this crazy woman. Since has when pain and agony become a form of art? When I saw the video on the article on telegraph.co.uk regarding her earliest work Rhythm 10, I started to understand her better. She said that the reason she was doing all those extreme form of performance is because that she wants to bring people's fear of dying, fear of pain, fear of suffering in front of the public. She symbolized herself as the mirror of the public, which means the audiences can see their own fear of suffering through watching Abramvoic.

Rhythm 10

Another work of her made me realize that this mirror also reflects our desire. In her work Rhythm 0, she was placing herself to the public to let people do whatever they want to do to her.

Rhythm 0

Her relationship with another artist Ulay is also interesting to look. They seem to both appreciate this agony as the form of art. Unfortunately, they parted after their epic walk on the Great Wall of China. In my opinion, the walk symbolizes the end of their chronicle cooperating journey.

The Great Wall Walk

Her most recent piece was in MoMA, NYC.  With Marina sitting in the middle of the room, any audience can choose to sit in front of her for as long as they can. Most of them ended up crying. Maybe through the mirror of this great artist, people got overwhelmed by their own agony. This made me realize that Marina's work truly let people to feel the existence of art itself and to literally relate the audiences to the piece of art.

The Artist Is Present