Burning Man is more of a community rather than a group. Every year, thousands of people gather together to create a work of art or a show. These shows are all about bringing many peoples ideas together to make one work of art. These pieces are very elaborate and very creative and are usually created around a predetermined theme. The theme in this picture below seems to be death.
This particular piece is called " The Bone Tower." It consists of (yes you guessed it) lots of bones that are fastened to a metal frame. These were made of various types of animal bones from different animals. The Bone Tower looks more like a gateway to me. It makes me think of death and how every creature eventually dies, leaving only bones remaining. It is as if the gateway is all the dead animals, crying out for us to join them.
Nogichi was a very skilled sculpture who loved working with nature and things in our natural surroundings. Most of his works are done in outdoor settings. Sculptures that usually consist of stones. He has also created some famous gardens that are still intact today.
This piece that he did required a great deal of skill. His attention to detail in his sculptures are amazing. The sculptures in this picture are made out of paper. I chose to write about this piece because it is a few different statue looking things in an indoor setting. This was not his usual art piece but it struck me. It still appears like a rock sculpture so I still get that outdoor feel inside.
Cattelan is an Italian sculptor who is known for his dark, humorous sculptures. He is considered a contemporary artist. A lot of his pieces make fun of old artworks. He has made sculptures of giant middle fingers, foosball tables that are ten times larger than normal, and the pope being hit by a meteor. These are funny sculptures but they also take things from our everyday life and make them humorous.
In this sculpture, Cattelan put a taxidermised horses body (not including the head) on a wall with the body sticking out. I really like this piece because it makes me think of what a mounted head looks like on the other side. Many people mount heads of animals on their walls. Cattelan has given us a new type of mounting. He is thinking outside the box. We are often drawn to the bizarre and unusual, which is why this piece is so funny.
Stelarc is an Australian performance artist who has done many works with robotics, suspensions, and movements of the human body. He has constructed many prosthetics limbs that work along with his body to make himself a biotechnological work of art. Stelarc has a fascination with the movements of the human body. This fascination has turned into a love for robotics. Another thing he has done is suspend his body in the air with hooks and strings going through his skin up into the ceiling.
To be honest, I don’t really understand most of his work. I think it is very strange. The prosthetics part is very interesting but I do not understand the hooks in his skin thing. For that reason, I have posted a picture of one of his robotics works. I like how he is working to improve the movements and ability of the human body through the use of robotics technology. It’s like he is trying to skip a stage in the human evolutionary process. He has made some other limbs like robotic ears, legs, and a head.
Bracken is an artist in Toronto, Canada who has created many different public art installations all over major cities in the United States and Canada. The purpose of these large installations is to promote free events in public space while bringing people together with fun events. A lot of these events have also been used to raise money for charities.
These installations have included giant pillow fights, lightsaber battles, and giant games of capture the flag across downtown areas. These are really amazing because they bring life and fun to the urban life. Often times people (especially in the Metropolitan scene) are so busy. Cars, trains, and people are always going from place to place as people work, work, work. These events put a pause on all that. People can come together and be silly for a little while. They can live life and enjoy being a kid once again.
This picture is of their International Pillow Fight Day in New York City. 5000 people participated in over 150 cities.
Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) was founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. It is a group of around 50 creative technicians based out of the Bay Area in California that spends their time taking machinery that would normally be used in the fields of science, industry, and warfare, and then using them in different artistic fashion. They regularly put on shows that involve robots interacting with one another along with some cool special effects. Around 4 of these demonstrations have been done all across the United States and Europe since 1979. SRL has been considered the pioneer of industrial performing arts much like groups like burning man and the cacophony society. Their shows feature a lot of machines destroying each other. This has created a lot of criticism. Many art lovers say that they are merely putting on "art shows of technological violence." But while to many it is pure violence, to them it is a way of bringing attention to the destruction that machines cause in industry and war. These shows are dangerous,noisy, and definitely entertaining. They have created some really cool machines. Examples of these are a six-legged running machine, a shockwave cannon (a cannon that shoots a shockwave of air, shattering glass remotely), and the pitching machine which a machine that launches two by four pieces of lumber. They pride themselves on taking old useless trash and making these really neat machines.
To some people, this group is a bunch of crazy, anti-Christian war mongers. Some say they have killed live animals in some of their shows. SRL denies these claims. Other people believe that this group is trying to bring attention to technological violence. Everyone agrees that these guys are kinda crazy in the brain. Some of their works have featured animal skins animated by mechanical endoskeletons. Weird!!
I'm not quite sure what to make of this group. Many people have different beliefs about this group. Maybe that is what they want. These shows have something in them for everyone. These shows fulfill the small desire within all of us for chaos and destruction. They capture our attentions with the noise and violence. The shows make us have an adrenaline rush. We love violence! In fact, if they were to make mistakes during their shows, people could die! I also think that they are trying to bring attention to machinery and how it affects our lives. Are machines good for mankind or are they bad? They take machine parts that we would consider safe and useful and they turn them into these mindless killing machines. For this reason, Mark Pauline the creator is considered an artist. He actually doesn't even consider himself an artist.
Duchamp was a famous post-impressionism artist. Many of his works reminded me of Picasso and that Cubism type of art. I thought this piece was particularly interesting. It is called, “Portrait of Chess Players.” Duchamp was fascinated with chess and cubism.
This painting is cool because it looks three-dimensional. It looks like everything is directed at the center of the image. In the middle we can see chess pieces. We can see faces and art pieces all mixed in throughout the piece. I think Duchamp created this piece to show his two loves, cubism and chess. It is an interesting piece because it appears as though he took two different images and put them on top of each other. I don’t believe this piece has anything to do with his normal “anti-war” demonstrations. I just think he created this piece in a time in his life when he liked chess.
