Art21 and my appetite

Once, while at the MCA, my friend described art viewing as appetite. Although a lover of art-viewing, he said his appetite for art-viewing is small. It is very easy to get full all at once. Sometimes it is nicer to eat in smaller, tastier meals.

I am interested in how short the Art21 film segments are- just enough information to provide an idea of the artists' work, but short enough that it is not intimidating to my schedule.

I am trying to find just the right kind of snack/meal during long days at school. Something that, when I am a little hungry, I can savor and enjoy. I would like for it to be nutritional. I would like it to be satisfying, but not ruin my appetite.

These are the kind of in-between a meal and a snack that I am talking about and would like to have someone gift me while I am at school all day:

-A small slice of pie (apple is the best, but I like almost all pies)
-A piece of toast with peanut butter, banana, and honey
-Pizza tortilla (yes, I like to think I made this up even though I know pizza is basically a flavor. See pizza chips, pizza hot pockets, pizza toast, pizza bagel)
-Salad rolls
-A cup of cubed watermelon
-Chicken strips
-A yogurt parfait
-1.5-2 tacos
- A tea sandwich (I am interested in egg salad, but it doesn't always look good to me. Also, I carry things in my bag without refrigeration for too-long periods of time)
-Meat/Cheese/Crackers   (specifically, salami/gouda/fancy looking ritz)
-One scoop of frozen yogurt with a topping such as chocolate or berries.

Artist Statements from Threewalls:

Artist Statements can look very different from one another. I am still trying to figure out my own one-paragraph statement...


Aay PrestonMyint is an artist, printmaker, and educator based in Chicago, IL, and has exhibited nationally in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Memphis, and New York. He loves pie, but is less partial to cake, and similarly enjoys the beach, but not the ocean. He spends most of the day thinking about things like Futurity, Slime, Pageantry, Exploring the Possibility of Radicalizing Contemporary Queer Night Life, Body Hair, Doubt, the Problematics of Aestheticizing Community, Labor vs. Value vs. Reward, and "Projects" vs. "Objects". In addition to his own work in interdisciplinary media, he does collaborative programming with No Coast and Chances Dances, and edits an online and print journal called Monsters and Dust. He might send you a mixtape sometime if you ask nice.


A native of Southern California, Marissa Lee Benedict is a sculptor, researcher, writer, explorer, teacher, student and avid amateur of many fields and disciplines (coming from the French “lover of”). Motivated by a sense of critical wonder, Benedict’s practice is an ongoing investigation the complex – and ever evolving – relationship between humans and the material world. Whether communicating via sculpture, installation, performance, video or the written word – or a hybridization thereof – she seek to articulate Jane Bennett’s philosophy of “vibrant matter”, fore-fronting the “force of materiality” to create both a physical and intellectual understanding of networked interconnectivity. Benedict is interested in participating in processes which reinvest material with agency; processes which allow equal space for planned human action and uncontrollable biological, chemical and physical reaction.

Cauleen Smith (born 1967) is a filmmaker whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the black imagination. Smith’s films have been featured in group exhibitions at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; and the New Museum, New York. Beginning in 1994, she wrote, directed, and produced her first narrative feature film, Drylongso (1998), which was selected for the American Spectrum of Sundance Film Festival, and won best feature film at both the Urbanworld Film Festival and the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival Smith earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Flags: Walker Art Center Blog

Whaat?! This is the front page of the blog for the Walker Art Center's blog list.

While I was thrown-off at first by the many flags that look like they are secretly for testing things having to do with psychiatry or intelligence, I think I like this page. It is different than all the other museum pages we have perused this season.

I may or may not be interested in creating my own flag-symbols for things in my life and language.
It might look like:

Breakfast: Would be a grey flag with a light blue stripe and a small gold crown in the center.
Tea: Would have a frilly light-orange circle on a cream flag.
Animosity: Would have a large, blue downward pointing triangle touching tips with a smaller bright orange, upward pointing triangle on a navy background.

Exploring silent film plots: I had no idea

No dialogue= can still be a heavy plot! Whoa!

Modern Times portrays Chaplin as a factory worker employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where he screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a nervous breakdown and runs amok, throwing the factory into chaos. He is sent to a hospital. Following his recovery, the now unemployed factory worker is mistakenly arrested as an instigator in aCommunist demonstration. In jail, he accidentally ingests smuggled cocaine, mistaking it for salt. In his subsequent delirium, he stumbles upon a jailbreak and knocks out the convicts. He is hailed a hero and is released.

Outside the jail, he discovers life is harsh, and tries to get arrested after failing to get a decent job. He runs into an orphaned gamine girl (Paulette Goddard), who is fleeing the police after stealing a loaf of bread. To save the girl, he tells police that he is the thief and ought to be arrested. A witness reveals his deception and he is freed. To get arrested again, he eats an enormous amount of food at a cafeteria without paying. He meets up with the gamine in the paddy wagon, which crashes, and the girl convinces the reluctant factory worker to escape with her. Dreaming of a better life, he gets a job as a night watchman at a department store, sneaks the gamine into the store, and even lets burglars have some food. Waking up the next morning in a pile of clothes, he is arrested once more.

Ten days later, the gamine takes him to a new home – a run-down shack that she admits "isn't Buckingham Palace" but will do. The next morning, the factory worker reads about a new factory and lands a job there. He gets his boss trapped in machinery, but manages to extricate him. The other workers decide to go on strike. Accidentally paddling a brick into a policeman, he is arrested again. Two weeks later, he is released and learns that the gamine is a café dancer. She tries to get him a job as a singer. By night, he becomes an efficient waiter though he finds it difficult to tell the difference between the "in" and "out" doors to the kitchen, or to successfully deliver a roast duck to table through a busy dance floor. During his floor show, he loses a cuff that bears the lyrics of his song, but he rescues his act by improvising the story using an amalgam of word play, words in (or made up of word parts from) multiple languages and mock sentence structure while pantomiming. His act proves a hit. When police arrive to arrest the gamine for her earlier escape, they escape again. Finally, we see them walking down a road at dawn, towards an uncertain but hopeful future.

From IMA's website...

Whoa! IMA has a silent film series. I wonder what kinds of sounds play during the film series... or if there is a piano player of some sort?

But really, all I could think about was...

How is it possible that this silent film has such an intense plot? 

Art Quotes?

Art quotes are kind of weird sometimes...

(from the ArtsEdge website)

This

http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/students/features/understanding-art/rebellious-streak.aspx#fuller