State of Media Making

Today's art world is so inclusive that anything can be considered art, and this prevents it from evolving.

Michael Wolf: 500 Words 11.14.08

Photographer Michael Wolf begins his essay reflecting on his challenge of working in Chicago. He says that it is a conceptual difficulty. But he found Chicago it be visually stimulating. So he begins to find rooftops that allow him to look into the adjacent buildings. Even though his focus was on the architecture of the buildings, he found in one photo, a man giving him the middle finger at the precise moment he took the photo. Keep in mind Michael was on the rooftop of another building for twenty minutes. This inspired him to look at every photo he took at 200 percent magnification to find other unique events that are happening in his photos. Here we have another issue of privacy invasion by a photographer. Even though he is taking a photograph of a building, he is still able to look into the buildings with enough accuracy to be a government spy. Michael Wolf does mention at the end of his essay that, “Despite the unpredictability of my process, I have very specific images in mind as I work.” This leads me to believe that he doesn’t mean to spy on people, but I still feel uncomfortable that an artist is not concerned with the privacy of others. It is as though he thinks it is funny. Michael Wolf is just one step away from becoming paparazzi.

Patty Chang: Fountain

In this piece, Patty Chang looks at her own reflection in a mirror that has a small amount of water in it. She bends down to suck the water from the mirror, looking as though she is kissing herself. Then she begins to make the loudest, most disgusting sounding slurp I have ever heard. The imagery is clear and calming, but that sound, that sickening sound. I could almost hear my mother’s complaints when I was a child slurping my soup, if the slurping weren’t so loud. The sound made this piece hard to watch. But she was tenacious in her goal of sucking all of the water out of the mirror. I guess that is what is considered to be “pushing the limits”.

Jesper Just: Bliss and Heaven

Projected onto a surprisingly large screen, Bliss and Heaven portrayed an emotional connection between to extremes of masculinity. In it we find, a younger man with ready-for-Hollywood good looks, and an older truck driver, who looks as though life has not been kind to him. When the younger man enters the truck driver’s trailer, the trailer is turned into an ornate theater. In the theater, the truck driver is performing, in a deep voice, Olivia Newton-John’s “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting.” The majority of the video is silent until this point making the deep voice of the truck driver a bit jarring. Usually when a male character is performing in drag, hilarity soon follows. However, there was something more sensitive happening in this performance. If the truck driver were just lip-syncing, the performance would have come across as – this may be stating the obvious – fake. I mean fake as insincere. The singing is off-key, and the dancing awkward, but the emotion is there. This whole scenario is ridiculous, but there is honesty in the truck driver’s voice. There might be a few chuckles while watching this video, but the solitary, standing ovation by the younger man is in congruence with sincerity of the truck driver’s performance.