Research for Foundation 2D Project 2 beneath the break.

1. Dada & Hannah Höch
   

   Indian Dancer – Hoch

   Intentionally offending, Dadaism, often referred to as anti-art was a movement of rebellion. Much of the work produced under this movement were often critical, cynical and/or brutally shocking; reflective of the times when the movement was conceived.

   

   German Girl – Hoch

   Hannah Hoch, designated reference artist for this project seems to embody this somewhat bitter era through her own personal life and status as the sole Dadaist in Berlin. Aptly, she seems to be the poster child of Dadaism, being the very first artist example given (other than that one urinal or the Mona Lisa one) as I was researching the art movement.
   
   Primarily done through photo montages, her works seems to revolve around juxtaposing wildly different subjects with each other, as pictured. I personally found the works where she cut and pasted features of odd stone statues and facial parts of the wrong sizes over photos of women especially amusing as they are reflective of the movement’s “the world isn’t pretty so the art we make shouldn’t be pretty either” stance.

   I won’t even pretend to understand or be able to interpret the Dadaist works as majority of them seem to be a wild mish-mash of deliberately contrasting subjects and styles purposely blended together for the sake of being odd. I do find these works visually inspiring for the upcoming project as I imagine it would be interesting to collage say a photorealistic image with a cartoony one in my work.

2. Surrealism & Postmodernism
   

   The Collective Invention – Magritte

   As a derivation of Dada, Surrealist works seem to be a friendlier incarnation of the Dadaist movement: retaining (if not, upgrading) the weird but toning down the offensiveness by a lot. Both movements rely heavily on the method of juxtaposition which I believe would be a crucial part to our upcoming assignment especially if the chosen rhyme is something already well known or already holds a strong imagery that it would be difficult to break away and come up with something different or unseen.

   

   Babara Kruger

   Aside from the imaginative surrealist works, I feel that Postmodernist works , specifically the collages are worth taking a look into as well.

   One such artist would be Babara Kruger (as pictured above and also best known for inspiring Supreme’s logo). I find her works fairly relevant as we are interpreting text into graphics, there is value in studying how her chosen photographs correlates to the text she places over them. If it falls within the project specifications, it would also be worth experimenting including the text into the graphic as well.

   

   Gladiators – Rosler

   Conceptually, all 3 aforementioned art movements revel in being weird for the sake of being weird, but at the same time, this weirdness opens the work to more interpretation and discussion.

   Pictured above is a photomontage by Martha Rosler whose works can be somewhat Martha Hoch-esque but more 21st century-ish. The strange collage of unrelated photos are often done in realistic proportion. Despite the visual realism, the works are still strangely dream-like and the situations depicted always seems to be part of a bigger story as there are so many things happening all at once.

3. Application of Visual Techniques
   

   Personal Values – Magritte

   Aside from juxtaposition, another way to make the mundane stand out that is common throughout these artists seems to be playing around with the principles of design.

   Evident in Magritte’s Personal Values and Hoch’s German Girl, playing with the scale and proportion of the image’s subject can lead to some visually interesting results. These techniques will allow us to achieve more with the flat black and white images such as portraying a sense of depth through playing with scale and can add dimension to our work.

My Rhymes:

Initially I was keen on working with familiar songs I enjoyed such as Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity and Imagine Dragon’s Radioactive and I thought, why not gather a few more songs about the future or different possible futures of the Earth. However, I hit a roadblock as I could not decide whether I wanted to portray a futuristic world, an apocalyptic world or bring in themes like taking care of the Earth or war and conflict.

Other than the songs, I have also researched more on one of my favorite poems, Howl by Allen Ginsberg. An incredibly long performance poem with 3 parts that details sights and stories Ginsberg have witnessed and heard in 1940s America, the poem was the subject of various obscenity trials. Funnily enough, the poem has a line about “throwing(threw) potato salads at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism.”

A setback with choosing this poem however is that I have already watched the 2010 film starring James Franco and the film contains a brilliantly executed animation that somewhat depicts the happenings in the poem. Despite that, I feel that there is merit in re-interpreting the poem and visually adapting it to that of my own context, from the perspective of an artist instead of a poet.

Visually, the 2nd and 3rd parts of the poem focuses on a beast-like figure named Moloch and a psychiatric hospital called Rockland respectively that would be interesting to interpret as a graphic as well. The poem has numerous of exclamations on how monstrous Moloch is but little direct descriptions on it’s physical appearance and the monster itself may as well be a metaphor for various different things and would thus be fun to play around with by juxtaposing various symbolic subjects together to form the monster Moloch.

Similarly, there are little descriptions of Rockland as a place but the 3rd half of the poem is filled with descriptions of Carl Solomon’s (a character in the poem who’s institutionalized in said hospital) awful experiences there. The 3rd part of the poem especially could be depicted through Martha Rosler-esque graphics that tells of a situation: Solomon’s and Ginsberg’s experiences in Rockland.

The poem is a difficult and long one so moving forward, I shall continue to study it to make better sense out of it as well as to form my own interpretation of the Howl and contextualize the poem for myself.