THE MODERN GODDESS

Today, we made a Goddess which suited our own sensibilities and also sort of embodied the modern era. I drew the Nature Goddess in her modern form.

The crown on top of her head signifies that she is the modern day queen who fights to save the world from pollution. 

The naked torso embodies the fact that she is a confident woman that refuses to be brought down by anyone which is the case with almost every woman in the 21st century.

The the sort of Aztec jewelry that she's wearing emphasizes that she is one that has changed herself according to changing times and doesn't wear the heavy gold jewelry that her much older counterparts wear.

The plain sari on her bottom half talks about that fact that she is an Indian goddess and that she is very simple in her tastes and doesn't need extravagance to survive. 

 

ARTIST REVIEW PART 2: MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Towards the late 1950s, as abstract art began to lose impetus, many artists across the world began to embrace performance art. Performance had been a feature of avant-garde art since around 1910, but Marina Abramovic's work is typical of the aims of the new generation in her eagerness to avoid traditional, object-based art materials (such as paint and canvas), and to cut down the distance between the artist and the audience by making her own body the medium. Born under Yugoslavia's repressive Communist dictatorship, and raised by parents closely tied to the regime, Abramovic's dramatic and dangerous performances often seem like cathartic responses to these early experiences of power. She has produced a quantity of sculpture, but she remains best known for performance, and she remains one of only a handful of performance artists of her generation who have continued to perform late in their career.

Marina Abramovic's work is typical of the ritualistic strain in 1960s performance art. It often involves putting herself in grave danger and performing lengthy, harmful routines that result in her being cut or burnt, or enduring some privation. She views her art almost as a sacrificial and religious rite, performed by herself for a congregation of viewers. And the physical ordeals she endures form the basis for exploring such themes as trust, endurance, cleansing, exhaustion, and departure.

We might interpret her work as having displaced art from traditional media such as painting and sculpture, and moved it directly on to her body. Yet far from conceiving it as simply a surface, she has said that she thinks of the body as the "point of departure for any spiritual development."

Between 1976 and 1988 she collaborated with the German-born artist known as Ulay. The performances the pair created during this time often exploited their duality to investigate ideas such as the division between mind and body, nature and culture, active and passive attitudes, and, of course, between male and female.

One of Abramovic’s most famous performance arts is Rhythm 0. Abramovic was lying on a table and next to her on another table were 72 items like, scissors, honey, band aids, blade, knives, etc. the spectators were allowed to do whatever they wanted to do to her and there was also a sign which said that the people would not be responsible for their actions. It was then that the true nature of people came out. By the time the performance was over, marina was covered with cuts, gashes and tears were coursing down her cheeks. The moment she stood up and got down from the table, the participators fled from the room. She has a moral or a purpose attached to every performance that she stages. In this case it was the fact that though 90% of humans on this planet are extremely cruel in nature when given free reign, they cannot stand the fact they were able to inflict such torture on another person. They realized that they can’t look themselves in the eye.

Marina Abramovic, according to me is an extremely optimistic person. Even after what was inflicted on her by the participants, she did not lose faith in the fact that people were a good bunch and still spent time trying to convince them of the same fact. She tried to give as much love as she could to them, with every atom of her being, as she had once quoted in an interview.

It makes me feel good about the fact that there are people like Marina Abramovic living in the world as she restores my faith in mankind.

DIGITAL ART: GIF MAKING

This is my first gif that I made along with a friend of mine!
CREDITS: Mini Banerjee (Bhaswati) and Vikrant Mishra

ARTIST REVIEW PART 1: BARBARA KRUGER

She writes words on walls. We read them. That's it. This has been Barbara Kruger's iconic way of working for more than 40 years, and it has brought her international fame. Her art is terse, assertive, argumentative, pithy and always directed straight at your face. They have the status of overheard speech, of shouts from the crowd or disembodied rhetoric, of urgings, rebukes, demands and counter-demands, and they work against each other all the time. At best they may inspire thought, analysis, and debate; at their worst they are hectoring banalities on the lowest level of phatic speech.

Kruger keeps her finger tightly pressed to the pulse of popular culture. I look at Barbara Kruger’s art as “extract expressionism.” She takes images from the mass media and pastes words over them, big, bold extracts of text—aphorisms, questions, slogans. Short machine-gun bursts of words that when isolated, and framed by Kruger’s gaze, linger in your mind, forcing you to think twice, thrice about clichés and catchphrases, introducing ironies into cultural idioms and the conventional wisdom they embed in our brains.

Even with all of this, Kruger fails to impress or connect with me. She prints words that are shouted out by the media and protesters all over the world, every single day. Kruger’s only weapon is the fact that she puts it all in a very sarcastic and showy manner that makes people feel not only uncomfortable but also bad about themselves. Her work screams the fact that Kruger is and has always been desperate in a very childlike manner for attention. It makes me feel sad for her in a way because I think that Barbara Kruger cannot see the world as a livelier place where not everyone thinks or conducts themselves like that. To be honest, Kruger’s work depresses me to the core. They make me feel like there isn’t anything to be happy about in the world. They make me constantly scrutinize myself, looking for defects in me that might accuse me, in some way, of being the kind of person that Kruger criticizes or shames in her work.

Speaking as a person who had been depressed for the longest time, it is now that that I truly feel happy in my own skin, in the environment and the world that I live in. I have started seeing the world in a new light, one that makes me happy and content in a lot of ways. On the other hand, seeing Kruger’s work brings back the memories of the rough time of my life and I feel that she doesn’t really see or understand the world that she lives in and the people that she lives with. At the end there is very little to be happy about in Kruger’s work.

HOW ART MADE THE WORLD : EPISODE 1, MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN

The main theme of this episode is about how people have rarely created images of the body that are realistic. Through the ages artists have been obsessed with the human form. The range of bodies they have created is breathtaking, but yet they share one thing in common... none of these images resembles a real human being.

“More Human than Human” begins with the Venus of Willendorf and asks why human artists seem to have an inexplicable tendency, cross culturally, to create images of the human body that are exaggerated in proportions. The sculpture is a small Venus figure that have exaggerated breasts, hips and sexual organs. These exaggerations are clear symbols of fertility, however what is interesting is how the artist ignored other parts of the body, such as her face and arms. 

Moving forward several thousand years. The Egyptians, who valued consistency and order in their society, abandoned the exaggerations of their ancestors and chose to use a mathematical approach to creating images of the body. They chose to show each part of the body from its clearest angle, becoming their recognizable style and preserved this style for thousands of years.

When the Ancient Greek’s culture came into contact with the Egyptians, this ignited an artistic revolution across the Greek city states. The Greek culture wanted a more realistic representation of the figure of young men (kore), standing statistically upright, and was accurately proportionate. But it wasn’t long before the sculptors began to produce what we now think of as “classical” Greek bodies. What is so fascinating about the statues is that they aren’t proportioned naturally; rather, they are exaggerated proportionally (i.e., real human beings don’t look like that!). They abandoned this ultra-realism preferring exaggerated representations of the body based on the aesthetic theories created by Polycleitus such as the Riace Bronzes.

Anyway, in comes neurologist V.S. Ramachandran to explain how our brains respond to certain stimuli with pleasure. Spivey illustrates with a species of seagull from the west coast of Spain, whose chicks respond to a red stripe on their mother’s bill during feeding. The chicks respond more vigorously if presented with a dummy-head with three red stripes! In other words, it seems that our brains respond to certain aspects of our bodies, and they REALLY respond to those same aspects when exaggerated. It is a neurological principle known as the peak shift. In essence our brain is hard-wired to focus upon parts of objects with pleasing associations. So if you were an artist, the tendency would be to reproduce human figures with parts that mattered the most to you.

Prehistoric artists were clearly caught up in peak shift tendencies, creating exaggerated statues like the famed Venus of Willendorf. For their part, the Egyptians preferred a more stylized, order-obsessed human figure, only to have the Greeks break out and create fantastically heroic — but totally unrealistic — images like the Riace Bronzes.

The programme concludes by saying what we choose to exaggerate “is where the magic comes in” and the choice of what to exaggerate has changed over the centuries to match changing human values. 

I finally came to the realization that in reality, we humans don't really like reality - we prefer exaggerated, more human than human, images of the body. This is a shared biological instinct that appears to link us inexorably with our ancient ancestors. And so around the world, human beings produce art that is “more human than human.” Cool.