When Did Shaving One's Head Become ART?

Yesterday, April 20, 2011 apparently.  Anh-Thuy Nguyen, who is currently enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts Program at SMU, invited any and all people to her art performance in which each participant cut off a small part of her hair in front of a video camera. After about 6 hours, broken up into three segments throughout the day, the performance culminated with the final participant completely shaving Anh-Thuy's head.

Anh-Thuy's concentration in her arts program is predominantly working with visual arts, specifically photography and video. All participants were required to grant her a release/licence to use their image from the performance so, presumably, she will be making a digital video art project from the recorded footage.

Why would someone shave their head as an art project and why have strangers cut off all your hair  little by little before actually shaving your head?  In 1965, Yoko Ono performed the "Cut Piece" in Tokyo where participants came up on stage and cut off her clothing piece by piece. At the time, she suggested that this performance was an outward communication of her internal suffering and a commentary on personal identity. 

On April 10th of this year singer Chrisette Michelle announced just before performing her hit entitled "Fragile" off the Epiphany album that she had shaved her head in direct defiance to the entertainment industry's practice of dictating how performers should look and to send a positive message to young girls about what is considered beautiful in today's popular culture.

Anh-Thuy's art performance yesterday was unquestionably about self-identity. Human beings, especially females, are very attached to the hair on their heads and spend billions of dollars a year to maintain it, style it and change it to conform to the current social norms of the culture in which they live.  By having friends and strangers cut off Anh-Thuy's hair lock by lock and bit by bit, she is forcing each participant to examine their own identity and feelings about hair and, in her own words,  "delve deeply into the maelstrom of conflicting emotions, feelings, and thoughts through the portrayal of strikingly strange yet hauntingly beautiful visual manifestations of gain and loss" (in this case the main loss was of Anh-Thuy's hair!).

What The Heck Is BioArt?

BioArt is a part of what is being called "New Media Art" a field that includes digital art, computer animation, virtual art and computer robotics. A BioArtist, however, makes art with live tissues, bacteria, living organisms and life processes instead of computers. It sounds gross, but if you look at this image that has been created with 8 fluorescent proteins, it's pretty cool. Fluorescent proteins were first isolated from jellyfish, but have since been mutated to create all the different colors that you see in this image that looks like a neon beach sign. Science, art and technology are getting so intertwined that Harvard University's Department of Cell Biology encourages anyone to submit works that they believe posess scientific or artistic value. While this sounds more like science fiction to me, it is the real world we live in today  - a world that is changing rapidly all around us.

Is This the Age of Enlightment for China?

Only time will tell, however the opening exhibit "The Age of Enlightenment" of the now largest art museum in the world situated in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing China is promising. China, who spent nearly $400 million dollars to remake the National Museum, now has 2 million square feet under roof.  That is big, really big.  You would think with that much square footage it would be hard  NOT to cover the entirety of China's history in art, but there are some gaping holes. For instance the Cultural Revolution that tore the country apart from 1966 and 1976.  Apparently, there is only one photograph of that era along with 3 lines of text. It is also very discouraging that one of China's most successful artist, AI Weiwei was detained this week without cause in the apparent larger government crackdown against dissidents. Why then would the opening exhibition that will run for one year in the Chinese National Museum be "The Age of Enlightenment"? The New York Times article today suggest "The Enlightenment show, although tantalizing, will also avoid overt mention of the political ideas - such as universal human rights - that drove that period of European history. That means themes of individuality or rights will be alluded to in paintings or furniture but not explicitly discussed."  Does not sound promising and only time will tell if this exhibit will help bring about the Enlightenment of the Chinese people, but it is a step in the right direction I believe.To see more pictures of the museum click here.

What Do Babies Dream?

Adele Enersen has started a new career with the help of blogger.com. She was a copywriter and concept designer in the advertising business in Helsinki, Finland who started a blog in 2005.  While on a recent maternity leave, she began posting photos of her daughter that she created while the baby was sleeping.  As a hobby Adele would quickly set up a fantasy scene around her sleeping daughter and then take photos with her new Canon IXUS 750.  Her blog and photos got noticed by a lot of people.  As a result, Adele now has a new career as a photographer and story teller. Her book entitled "When My Baby Dreams" containing her photos and fantasy stories is being published by Harper Collins in all English speaking countries as well as in Italy, Germany, Brazil and Israel in January 2012.  The images she posts on her blog, Milasdaydreams.blogger.com, are fun and fantasy filled with everyday objects that make us believe that they are the dreams of her sweet daughter and not the artistic creations of her mom.

2011 TED Prize Goes to Street Artist

How does a street artist who pastes up giant posters of funny faces win the prestigious 2011 Technology, Entertainment and Design ("TED") Prize? He does it by changing the world though street art. JR, as he is known, lives in Paris, has traveled around the world in the last six years pasting up giant posters that he says are "transforming messages of personal identity into pieces of art". One of his first projects was Face2Face in the Middle East in which he used two images side-by-side of people in the same profession. One image was a Palestinian and the other was an Israeli. Hardly anyone could identify which image was which person. Another of his projects was set in Africa, Brazil, India and Cambodia where he honored the role of women which are often discriminated against in those countries. The TED Prize (past recipitents have included Bono and Bill Clinton) grants it's winners a wish and for JR that wish was to have as many people as possible hang posters of street art in as many places in the world as possible. This project of his is called "Inside Out" and is funded by TED. Today people are digitally uploading pictures of themselves (or of families or groups of people) free to the insidesideout.net website by the thousands. JR's team is printing them into colossal posters and then mailing them back to the participates to hang anywhere they like, legally or illegally, on the streets of the world. To read a recent article in the New York Times about JR and see JR's TED acceptance speech click here.

I Love Bright Colors

Brian Cole is doing something different with digital art.  He actually paints images he creates first with different kinds of paint including water colors, oils, acrylic and even fabric paint.  He then photographs the images and brings them into Photoshop to edit them on his computer.  Brian started painting in 1996 in his second year study at Brookhaven College in Dallas, Texas.  He continued his education at UTD and had his first solo exhibit in 2005. Brian's work has been published in the Dizionario Enciclopedico Internazionale d’Arte moderna e Contemporanea 2009 p. 188. and was recently awarded 2nd place in the digital non-representational catagory at the American Art Awards. He says he has been influenced by Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and Robert Williams. I love his bright and bold colors that are rendered even more intense by the digital media and think that he will go far in this new age of digital art. To see more of Brian's work click here.

Are my eye's deceiving me?

No, it is the images of Artist Erik Johansson from Norrkoping Sweden that are deceiving. Erik is a master of photo manipulation, making very unbelievable images believably real. He received his master's degree in computer engineering interactive design from Gottenburg University in Sweden in 2010. Computer engineering has not traditionally been a creative art, but Erik is writing computer code to solve visual problems in his photographs that make a very surreal image appear very real and his techniques are changing the way we see Art today.  In a recent interview for the UK news publication, The Independent,  Erik said that he gets his inspiration from surrealist artists like MC Escher and Dali and not from photographers.  In any case, Eric's imagery is changing the way we perceive reality in photographs.  To see more of Erik Johannson's images and read the full interview click here.

Digital Art in the Courthouse in El Paso, TEXAS?

Yes, it's true. A massive digital art piece by New York-based artist Leo Villareal has just been installed in the lobby of the newly built Antonine Predock-designed federal courthouse in El Paso, Texas. When you think of Texas and courthouses, digital art would NOT be your next thought. That is why I think Leo Villareal's digital art in such an environment is so ground breaking.  His constantly changing digital art pieces, comprising arrays of LEDs, are bridging the gap between digital animation and modern contemporary art. Villareal received a masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1994. He is using what he learned to create mathematical, logical and simple digital coding to give his LED light pieces the capacity to display 16 million colors that move and change in random sequence and in random periods of time that seems to communicate to the whole body of the viewer. Villareal also has a large permanent instillation above a moving sidewalk inside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.  He has had Solo exhibitions in Washington DC, New York, California, Florida, and Madrid, Spain. To see a large digital art piece in such a prominent place in a government building in Texas, to me, is a clear demonstration that digital art is being accepted as Art, and is here to stay. To see Leo Villareal talk about his work you can view a YouTube video here.