Industrial Art

[someidiot]

I'm all for public art, but generally feel that banal, mundane art isn't worth doing, let alone paying for. Yes, I get the concept that the German "artists" who did it (for about $500K) were arguing; I just think it's stupid. It's a circle that you're supposed to think, I gather, is a kind of "portal" that encloses a great variety of views, depending on what angle you're looking through it from, and that's supposed to represent Calgary's diverse character.

Bollocks.

I can make the same argument for my glasses (or the windshield of my car), and that either is a much more successful piece of art because the range of views taken in through them has been so much broader than this one exhibits.

In fact, try this on for size: I got this pair of Art Glasses (iIrc, $250 from Ollie Quinn, covered by my insurance, .05% of the cost of Traveling Light - which is a paltry and undistinguished single circle, whereas my Art Glasses are two) shortly before going to Paris for a couple of days to see Christo's wrapped Arc de Triomphe. So I immeasurably bettered Calgary's expensive piece by viewing a truly great piece of public art through my Art Glasses, an act that I now declare to itself have been a performance piece. So just try to count up all the art that took place during that trip - Christo's work, my glasses, my viewing of the Arc through my glasses. Makes that thing on the overpass seem pretty lame by comparison.

Honestly, if you're going to bother making "art", how about making sure it's "value added"? Give us something we can argue about (other than the price, of course). Make it funny. Make it offensive, or scary, or loud and hot and greasy, just something - anything - other than a thing you can mistake for a drain. I mean, Duchamp already gave us one of those, but at least he had the wit to surround it with a urinal.

So screw that thing.

On the other hand, how many people around Calgary are familiar with Dennis Oppenheim's "Device to Root Out Evil", which is installed in the East Village? If you don't know about it, please make a point of visiting it, because it's pretty good for a piece of sculpture. And I'm saying that despite the fact that the artist behind my old group, Mark Pauline, once publicly challenged Oppenheim to a duel of machines after, I think, the latter had the temerity to build some mechanized piece that Mark considered an affront to what we were doing at SRL. (I can't find anything on it online at the moment, but I can dig up the copy of the letter if anyone's interested.) Mark, in typical fashion, declared himself the winner after Oppenheim failed to rise to the challenge.

Anyway, if you like big dumb circles, I recommend "The Hudsucker Proxy".

 

[Chicken lights]

I was last in Chicago about 10-years ago when I visited the Bean. I really liked the architectural boat tour where the guide is typically an architecture student. Lots of amazing architecture to see!

The boat tour is great, I think the guide can make or break it. The guy I had was funny as all get out and I quite liked the tour. I tried to do a similar tour in Boston but the weather didn't cooperate. Seeing the harbour where the tea party kicked things off was cool

I don't really like art but I like architecture, because it's design/art meets function.

Cadillac Ranch was cool because it's an icon, that people could leave a part of themselves there. The nuts and bolts of burying 6 caddy's is kinda dumb, but what it's turned into I think is neat. If that makes sense

 

[architect]

I don't really like art but I like architecture, because it's design/art meets function.

Cadillac Ranch was cool because it's an icon, that people could leave a part of themselves there. The nuts and bolts of burying 6 caddy's is kinda dumb, but what it's turned into I think is neat. If that makes sense

You know the type of art you like, and the stuff that you don't! I draw some parallel to food where it's an incredibly vast world of subjective experiences and what the viewers and artist each brings that may or may not match up. Some rather experience a 15-course French tasting menu with a waiter explaining the process before serving each course, while others like the strew their grandma made for them during childhood. The former are institutionalized forms of culinary practice and education that sets dominant trends and movements but shouldn't be set in opposite against long-standing tradition of home cooks, which is the source of lot of culinary practices.

There are many grass-roots movements that produce community-engaged participatory art experiences that you described.

There's also something to be said about challenging one-self to experience things off the beaten path! Might take a few tries before one acclimatizes or grow into something!

 

[someidiot]

while others like the strew their grandma made for them during childhood.

Now that sounds interesting! What - she threw it around the room and you got to eat it off of whatever it landed on?

 

[Sqought]

I don't really like art but I like architecture, because it's design/art meets function.

"fine art" is the general term for art made for aesthetics/expression without a practical purpose. I find it's usually at least a little pompous - even the name is pretentious.

I agree, I find art like architecture, industrial design, cooking, entertainment, etc. to be more relevant, interesting and insightful.

 

[someidiot]

"fine art" is the general term for art made for aesthetics/expression without a practical purpose. I find it's usually at least a little pompous - even the name is pretentious.

I agree that the term is pompous and pretentious, but I disagree on its application to "art... without a practical purpose". That can characterize any art at all, including the very dirty performance art I engaged in, and nobody would ever mistake us for "fine art". In fact, that was explicitly part of our work - that the machines we were making, and what we did with them, intentionally served no practical purpose at all, and were in many respects built to mock "useful" machines.

 

[architect]

Art is such a messy thing to try and pindown.

Everyone enjoys art to some extent. No one calls the painting or photograph hanging on the wall or the music they listen to "fine art" but that's what it is based on the Western tradition of aesthetics and individual creative expression. What practical use is music? Architecture has always been "fine art" (poetics of space) just look at buildings of people with cultural existence longer than the narrow span of industrialization. Architects, sculplturs, and painters just had different canvases in the Western tradition.

Fine art is also a term used to capture art of a particular time and place, and today most often used for collection of classical works. There aren't many modern, young painters today that would call what they do "fine art" unless they just want to seen as part of particular old-timey market of traditional private art auctions and collections. Just like no one says "fine dining" anymore even if they go out to a "nice restaurant".

Group of Seven made "fine art" of literal things. Their contemporaries of the time explored the aesthetics of wilderness, and helped champion and established Canadian landscape and identity. Landscape art seems less pompous because we imagine them in common practice and display in everyone's home. But in a different context making or enjoying landscape painting can appear very pompous as well.