Gabriel Orozco

For Gabriel Orozco, the camera equals awareness. His focus is walking down the busy city streets, always aware of what is going on, and using his camera to capture the most minute details. He is unusual in that he doesn't have a studio that he goes and works in. He does not want to isolate himself from reality. To me, this kind of sets him apart from other artists. He also works with spaces a lot, altering them, and altering the amount of space between objects, like crunching the car together or put a pond in the middle of a ping pong table. He also likes to be a novice or hobbyist. He wants the art itself to be down to earth, to be something everyone can do.

James Turrell

I could easily figure out that James Turrell focuses his energy on working with light in an artistic way. It is kind of a combination of physics and astronomy with art. I liked the idea of certain rooms in his crater channeling light from distant stars. He called this "old light" because it came from stars so far away that it may have taken hundreds of years for the photons to meet our eyes. That's a pretty awesome concept. In his Quaker meeting house, he designed the roof so that "the sky is brought down to you." It illustrates his concept of what his grandmother may have meant when she said they were going inside to greet the light. He works it into the physical sense by making the sky-light, but also demonstrates the spiritual sense by the location. A house of worship is a place to meet the Lord, who many call the Light.

Mel Chin

I wasn't quite sure what to think of Mel Chin. He was supposed to take an old abandoned house in Detroit and make it so it would pivot over the basement. He would grow nightcrawlers in the basement to sell to fishermen. Did he ever complete this project? Was it even real? He also made the videogame KNOWMAD using patterns from carpets made in the Middle East. The "revival field" was one thing I could understand and did like. It's a creative way to perform bioremediation. He says that he's not much into politics or anything, but his projects seem to have humanitarian roots.

Sally Mann

Sally Mann is a photographer, but not one who takes photographs for news stories or the average family portrait. Her work has a greater level of depth to it. Her favorite element to incorporate into her pictures is ambiguity. Sometimes it's hard to tell what your looking at in one of her photographs, and it could turn out to just be a dog bone. She takes pictures of a lot of everyday objects, and she does collections of them. For example, she did a series on the dogbones, using different bones and techniques to develop the photographs. In regard to her art, she is pretty down to earth. She says she just does it for fun, even though critics will try to dig deeper than she intends. To me, her pictures look like antiques. Her portraits of her children look like they came out of a fantasy.

Matthew Barney (Part 5 of 5, "Art:21")

Matthew Barney - A sculptor, filmmaker, and performer, he is probably most famous for his five part "Cremaster" series of films that depict biological conflict and evolution through history, violence, and sexuality. The clips from his films shown in the documentary indicated how extravagant and complex his work is. Barney plays many roles in his films wearing elaborate costumes and makeup. The most interesting characters to me were the horses in "Cremaster 3." I could not find a picture of them, but they wore full-body latex suits designed to make the horses look like corpses. They made the animals look extremely grotesque, but also highly intriguing.

Bruce Nauman (Part 4 of 5, "Art:21")

Bruce Nauman - I don't really know what to say about him. His work is some of the strangest I've seen. He watches infrared videos of one of his rooms where mice come in and out every night. Their entries are so subtle that he advises you must not watch anything so you can be aware of everything. In other words, watch everything so you can observe what you seek when it is least expected. The only thing I saw from him that I would try to call art are his stairways. They are long and unecessary, set on gentle slopes that people could easily scale without them. But of course, they still do. The heights and lengths of the steps are uneven, so when someone walks on them, they can't produce a rhythm.














Untitled, 1998-99

Ann Hamilton (Part 3 of 5, "Art:21")

Ann Hamilton - Not the typical artist most people think of. She does embroidery, sewing, knitting, and makes art with words. One of her philosophies I found attractive was the idea that cloth is made up of individual threads. The threads make up one big whole, but you can still see each tiny one, and without them, the cloth wouldn't exist. It's much like the world we live in. Shown below is Lineament, 1994. The objects are lines taken out of a book and spun together into a ball like thread. The purpose of this piece was to take two-dimensional objects, words on the page of a book, and turn it into an object with three dimensions, the ball of thread. It reminds me of how people would always say you can't touch words, you can only touch the ink and the paper, but it still seems like they are there. This project makes them all the more palpable.

Elizabeth Murray (Part 2 of 5, "Art:21")

The Sun and the Moon, 2005

Elizabeth Murray - For Murray, painting is an extremely physical exercise, like squeezing the paint out of the tubes. The paint is fluid and out of control, and it is her job as the artist to harness it via "my mind letting my arm make the decision." I found that she had many metaphors to describe art in a way that I could understand. Being an artist is like being a safebreaker listening for the click. She describes her cartoony work as shapes onto each other like a weird lattice with intense color. However, she takes each piece very seriously. She doesn't want her work to be too descriptive, rather, she wants to leave room for the viewer to interpret and reflect. That ideal is a key aspect of what art is. To me, she appears to be a fairly intense person. She relies on her children to help take her mind off herself. She works in isolation as many serious artists do. Art is about the self. It is an activity of intense reflection and often social isolation for many individuals.

Vija Celmins (Part 1 of 5, "Art:21")

Vija Celmins - My impression of her personality was that she seemed very abstract and scatterbrained. However, she seems to have a good work ethic. The painting of the stars is a project that she is determined to see through to the end until she is satsified with it. She has worked on it so many time, painting over it again and again, that she feels the work has its own memory. To Celmins, her job is building a painting. Every project is a significant undertaking. She seems to be guided by routine and repetetivity. She created several pieces that were inspired by waves, making the same general image, but with subtle differences in medium and finish. Featured below from the left are Untitled (Web 2), 2001, Web #1, 2001, and Untitled (Web), 2000. Note how she features the same topic in several images, while finding different ways to portray it each time.