Beuys Beuys Beuys!

?

When we were first introduced to the artist Joseph Beuys in class at the beginning of the week, I was not totally sure how I felt about his work.  After watching a video about the artist, I am even more confused.  For one thing, the video itself was really weird, and kind of seemed like the person who made it was forced to include all of the iMovie special effects presets. That might be unfair, and I'm sure that the video was cutting edge at the time, but me it just seemed a little silly.

As for Beuys, I am still not totally sure what he was saying... What I got was his idea that everything in the world can be seen as art, and that life itself is art.  I think that is a very poetic thing to say, and I agree with him to some extent, but at the same time that seems like kind of a cop-out thing to say... But now we are coming back to the ever-present question: WHAT IS ART? Again, that is a question too big for this blog post.

I thought that Beuys' constant use of felt and fat is really interesting.  It was fascinating to hear about how he was rescued by Tartars from a plane wreckage and how much that experience has affected his art pieces.  It seemed to me like he was creating sculptures that sort of idolized the materials that had surrounded him and saved him from the cold.  These materials must have imprinted very heavily into his mind when he went through such a traumatic experience when he was younger.  Would he have become such a distinctive artist had this experience not happened?

In the video we watched a woman was asked about one of Beuys' pieces and she thought that part of the point of it was to be a little confusing.  Ambiguity is something I would like to try to avoid in my own work.  Since I am making an informational documentary, I have a specific message that I want to get across to the audience.  In addition, there are a few language obstacles I am trying to overcome, so I have to make my message as straight-forward and understandable as possible.

BRUNO=CHICKEN

Over the past week we watched the film STROSZEK twice. Once with commentary, and once without.  The first viewing was with commentary playing, and though I felt overwhelmed at times trying to listen to what the director Werner Herzog had to say while simultaneously reading the subtitles of the film, I thought it was very interesting to learn the behind-the-scenes relationships between the director and the actors.  

The end of the film (Which we did not see in our first viewing) is left rather ambiguous, with a distraught Bruno running from the law into an empty carnival.  Inside, he puts some coins into a machine that signals different animals to perform for him.  While there could be many interpretations as to what exactly the significance of the chickens and rabbit was, I assumed it was a representation of the three main characters in the film. The fire truck that the rabbit jumped onto had its siren blaring, much like the police car that took Scheitz away just minutes beforehand. The fire truck also foreshadows the next scene. I thought that the dancing chicken was a representation of Eva.  The policeman in the following scene says over his police scanner that he can't stop the dancing chicken. This is similar to the behavior of Eva, who couldn't stop prostituting herself even after moving to America.  The piano-playing chicken seemed to symbolize Bruno, both because it's playing the piano, and because it was the only animal out of the three that really looked like it was behind bars--the other two were in glass cages.  Since Bruno spent much of his life in and out of institutions, and in fact begins the film in prison, this seems like a fitting comparison.

I'm not entirely sure how much of this I can apply to my own project, since I don't have as much artistic freedom to develop an inner landscape like Herzog has, and like some of the other students in the class may be trying to do, but maybe there is room to try.

Over the past week I have finally sent out some interview clips to be translated from Cebuano by a schoolteacher from Green Bay.  Now we just need to find someone who speaks Tagalog too...

Herzog

I thought Werner Herzog's position about artists in the modern day was very interesting, though I don't entirely agree with him.  In the article about Herzog, "Herzog on Herzog", Herzog, Werner Herzog that is, says:

Herzog being too badass to look at the bear behind him.

"I truly feel that in the world of the painter or novelist or film director there are no artists.  This is a concept that belongs to earlier centuries, where there was such a thing as virtue and pistol duels at dawn with men in love, and damsels fainting on couches"

He takes the position that he is not an artist, and none of his work should be considered art.  Rather, he considers himself to be more like a craftsman, and feels there is no room for the artist in the finished product.  Herzog says:

"To remain anonymous behind what you have created means your work has an even stronger life of its own, and the work is all that is important.  I have always felt that the creator is of no intrinsic importance, and this counts when it comes to my own work as well."

I really like his idea that the art piece should stand alone and not be influenced by who it was who made the piece.  As a totally unknown artist, this idea would give me hope for my own work, though in reality I don't think that this attitude has really taken off in today's world.  So much of what is considered great art has just as much to do with the artist as it does with the piece itself. Often even more so.  While I agree that the celebrity of an artist can certainly change how people feel about their pieces, I think that stating that there are no more artists in today's world is a bold claim, and one that ultimately forces you to ask what art is, which is too big a question for this post.

Andy Warhol

Very few people would argue that Andy Warhol was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, but having that point drilled constantly into your head in Rick Burns' documentary about the artist kind of loses its effect after a while.  In the film, Warhol was portrayed as a perfect deity of the art world.  It seemed that every decision and action he made was incredibly dramatic.  I thought the driving intense music in the film was actually kind of funny after a while.  I feel like some of the stuff that was portrayed as super dramatic may not have been accurate representations of what happened...

Though I don't think Warhol was as god-like as the documentary portrayed him to be, I think he did have some interesting ideas.  I like his strategy of trying a little bit of everything, from painting to photography to film.  It certainly reinforces his idea that business is the best art.  His constant producing of various pieces makes him akin to a factory pumping out a product, in this case his art pieces.

I've been trying to relate Warhol's work to my own project, but to little avail.  In Warhol's work, there is little narrative, while I am trying to tell a story.  Many of his pieces evoke emotions while remaining quite vague, while I am trying to convey information and a specific message to the audience.  Obviously I am creating an artistic piece, but at the same time it is ultimately a conservation documentary that will be used as an education tool.

Conservation Documentary

This past summer I accompanied my advisor on a trip to the Philippines.  Along with another student and a small field team, we went to a small island called Siquijor to survey and observe the condition of cave-roosting bat species on the island.  My job was to film the trip, and ultimately to produce a documentary highlighting the threats these bats are facing and promoting cave conservation.
I accumulated over 14 hours of footage from caves and the forest.  Over the past several months, I have logged all the footage and slowly begun editing.
You can see a rough cut here:

It's far from finished, but it gives you an idea of what the final product will be like.  I don't think the translations are very accurate and will likely be changed later. For now they are just placeholders.