Craft & Methods of production

I like this week lecture. Why? Although my major is not art, most of the art works which Anya Kivarkis introduced to us are about jewelry. For most girls, these works are very attractive things, what’s more, they are the highly skillful jewelry—most of these jewelry we can’t see in our daily life. Among these amazing art works, Marilyn Minter attracted me most, and her work is from the category about handmade reproduction original copies. At first look, high heel is decorated with shining diamond attracted my all attention. The fantastic combination of splashing oil, bruised and dirty foot and fashionable high heels laced with rhinestones, it’s an iconic image viewed from a low angle, a larger than life paean to both pain and beauty. The third work of her we saw on the class is the sexy red lips bite the string of pearls which is covered with sweat, in a lurid display of ornamentation and ritual pain. All of them made me feel shocked deeply. I don’t know how to express my feeling more emotional in English, but that impact is not only visually, but also psychologically. In Minter’s work, makeup and jewelry work to highlight either imperfection or penchants for self-destruction and avarice. I remembered Anya Kivarkis said that the art of style of Marilyn Minter is ‘when everything goes wrong’. It’s really interesting. I searched the information about her online, seeing the sentences like this: ‘if you’re walking through Anya wondering what sort of fashion crisis could have spawned an ad campaign in which haute couture literally gets down in the mud, what you really will be experiencing is what happens when painting and photography collide with our perverse ambivalence toward fashion.’ From these words, I can get that it’s disquieting combination of the art works of Marilyn Minter, she deftly captures the fluidity and ambiguity of bodies that cannot easily be contained by standards of propriety and acceptable beauty.

Another art which Anya introduced to us in the class leave me a deep impression is from Karl Fritsch, which belong to the category—limited serial production. The rings which he designed are fantastic and best. (After looking, the shining, colorful, special, and super cute ring, I super want one!!!) The craft and method of his production is special, he used common gold, gemstone, iron, and emeralds, then he piled them precariously on top of one another, pressing them into roughly formed setting, pierced, unpolished, oxidized, or inserted into the eyes of small skulls. He created wholly unique and inspired renovations of traditional jewelry, in his own special feature to win applause.

The different methods Anya Kivarkis talked about were handmade production, reproduction, mass production, limited serial production and post-production with intervention. I can find some of those methods in John Feodorov’s work. After I saw his famous work, he is a funny man in my opinion. When I saw his art work, I think I can read the humor and some elements about religion from his work. One of his art work, Tyrras showed in Blackboard is the most interesting one. In this work, at first look, it’s funny for me to see 12different animals in different color and use feather as dividing line. But when I looked the work carefully, I can get the author’s opinion like that John Feodorov as a biracial artist—the Navajo and European American decent, thereby, his work comically confronts native American stereotypes, like this ‘Animal Spirit Channeling Device for the Contemporary Shaman’. I know that the principal of Shaman way is staying with nature in harmony, there is no level difference, and the 12 animals are their faith. In this work, I can see the method--post-production, which means when the artist takes something that they did not design and changes it some how to make it their own. Except the Shaman animals, he also took classic spin and adds feathers all over it, along with writing spirit under all the animal names.

The other piece of him I think cute is ‘Ted Bear’, the teddy bear was given totem spirit masks to wear in place of their original face, from here, I can get that John Feodorov used the method of post-production again to finish this work. He stated that the bear is spiritual and powerful in Navaho beliefs. But when you buy it, you still don’t have power to over it, the beliefs, faith, and wishes are priceless. In the ‘Office Shaman’, he did the same thing, putting spirituality into a capitalism idea of the office job and confronts it with something important and spiritual. I remember in his interview, he said that: "Western culture likes to castrate the powerful, maybe because it doesn't want to be less powerful than something else, that maybe it has to bring everything down to a level where...well, maybe it's capitalism really, to where it's a product, to where it's something that can be controlled by purchase, controlled by owning it and by owning, even in art." I think that the reason why his works are previous is that we can feel the depth of his minds in his work, and we also can’t buy these spirits when you buy his work.  

This work is from John Feodorov. From the girl’s perspective, this work is colorful and interesting. I saw a comment about these work, ‘Some have his characteristic puffy cheeked silhouette with various eccentric tableaux. The more you look, the more you wander off into some crazy land where nothing is quite as it seems.’ Yeap~The more I wander about this piece, it really a crazy land, at this land, I saw a lot of emotions, happy, sad, humours, helpless, powerful and some elements about religions. In brief, when I saw his work, I can feel warm and happy~~