As the fabric of time continuous to be sewn, unnecessary cultural patches are placed to cover the nature of the true textile itself. The patches are placed to censor the “unacceptable” art forms, such as words, images, and philosophies. In Rumbrant Peale’s, an American colonial artist, painting, Venus Rising from the Sea, he decided to censor the nude figure of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, by placing a suspended white sheet in the foreground. Though the art-piece was flawlessly executed, the audience did not seem to have any interest, since Venus’ purpose was now covered. Censoring artworks such as paintings, films, and images from the socially unacceptable material can cause their intentions to not be delivered as effectively. In …show more content…
today’s society, it is more important to silence the “taboo” than to recognize its intentions. Professor Hoffman once gave details on her lecture about how great scholarly literature has banned from schools due to cultural socially unacceptable words. Education councils have determined that it is more important to keep it “child friendly” than to expose them to analytical masterpieces. Recognizing and accepting the socially unacceptable material in a film exposes the viewer to an enhanced picture. Important films do need socially unacceptable context to enhance its story, emotional reactions, and memorable images. For many ages artists have been exploring into unseen crevasses to come up with original formats and ideas to narrate their stories, whether is done through drama, suspense, horror, comedy, etc. Socially unacceptable context allows the artist to narrate great films, and in many cases allowing viewers to see and in some extents experience what otherwise would have not in real life. In the film No Country for Old Men directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, they decide to focus on the irresistible hunger people have for money by using unacceptable behavior. This film contains the combinations of violence and drugs, while presenting it in a suspenseful way. A calm yet death-machine (centered protagonist) sociopath decides to kill anyone who decides to get in his way, in order to get to a money case. A. O. Scott, New York Times critic, explains how the film “[W]ill feed many a nightmare, but the most lasting impression left by this film is to be the deep satisfaction that comes from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task.” Amores Perros (love’s a bitch) is another significant award winning foreign film that shows the brutal struggles through poverty, and narcissism, which typically led to violence. Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu craftily directs the lives of three distinct characters living with different money and relationship situations, ultimately ruining all their lives in a single centered car crash—love’s a bitch. Comparable to the well written dialogue Pulp Fiction, a drama film directed by Quentin Tarantino, loosely narrates the lives of four mob related characters. The narration is cleverly done with some racial slurs, violence, and exploitation in order to keep the drama consistent. These films show how socially unacceptable context can improve the story. One of art’s major qualities is the ability to provoke emotional reaction. The socially unexpected material itself is powerful enough to cause emotional reactions, though, it can only improve when context is surrounding it. For instance, a great film where emotion is shown is in Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station. Coogler’s film is based on a real life racial injustice event, where he “examines his subject with a steady, objective eye and tells his story in the key of wise heartbreak rather than blind rage… disengaged from the painful, public implications of Mr. Grant’s fate” (Scott). Though the film contains many heartwarming scenes, the most powerful scene was when Oscar Grant was defenselessly laying under the officer’s foot. It was not until the viewers hear a gunshot, where the characters were left speechless, since they were struck with fear and guilt. Not only were the film characters shocked, but the disheartened audience knew that Grant’s life was hanging by a thread. In a parallel note of violence caused by racial discrimination, American History X directed by Tony Kaye, sought a way to temporarily emotionally paralyze his audience with a gunshot. A different film where strong emotions were displayed through socially unacceptable was Roman Polanski’s’ Chinatown, specifically in the scene when Evelyn reveals to detective Gittes the incestuous incident between her and her father. One cannot not only help but to feel the sympathy/empathy of the abused, and killed characters. The socially uncensored material is needed to send a powerful message through emotional reactions. Great movies are known to shift audience’s viewpoints, and what better way than placing the viewers in the character’s shoes, best done through imagery.
Strong imagery is known to be memorable, whether it depicts a tragic, fantastic, or any emotional scene. In the film Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg, one is shown plenty of gruesome imagery with, “phenomenally agile battle sequences and contains isolated violent tragedies in between, its vision of combat is never allowed to grow numbing. Like the soldiers, viewers are made furiously alive to each new crisis and never free to rest” (Maslin). Imagery portrayed in Saving Private Ryan is in no doubt uncensored, because of the necessity of disturbing depiction towards war in reality. One of the most memorable scenes was the aftermath of the beginning battle where the viewers are able to see the aerial perspective of dozens of dismembered corpses laying on the bloodstained sand, while the scarlet red waves wash the bloody torn flesh away. Stanley Kubrick’s film that incorporates culturally unacceptable imagery is Clockwork Orange, where blood is represented as beauty to a sociopath named Alex. This film uses explicit imagery, such as raping, stealing, and killing to strategically show the importance of freedom of will over ordered society. The film examines the extremes freedom of choice comes with, nevertheless, it proves how those extreme choices are more human than being censored. The last film is produced by Roman Polanski named The Pianist, a vivid imagery of the holocaust, showing Mr. Szpilman walking past by starved corpses like if it was nothing. This explicit imagery paints the whole picture of how unhuman the situation was (placing the viewer into his
shoes).
I have a tendency to forget to breathe when I'm sitting in my art history class. A double slide projector set-up shoots its characteristic artillery - bright colors, intense shapes, inscriptions in languages that are at times read merely as symbols by my untrained mind, archaic figures with bodies contorted like elementary school students on the recess monkey bars. I discuss Diego Rivera's "The Liberation of the Peon," Frida Kahlo's "Self-Portrait," and Anselm Kiefer's "To the Unknown Painter" with my classmates. The room is never silent as we marvel at these images. When the slide projectors give off that first glimmer of light, their Gatsby spot of a blurry green hope at the end of the dock, we depart on our collective imaginary field trips. The teacher doesn't need to coax, to pry, to pose multiple-choice questions. We are already on our way.
The earliest forms of art had made it’s mark in history for being an influential and unique representation of various cultures and religions as well as playing a fundamental role in society. However, with the new era of postmodernism, art slowly deviated away from both the religious context it was originally created in, and apart from serving as a ritual function. Walter Benjamin, a German literary critic and philosopher during the 1900’s, strongly believed that the mass production of pieces has freed art from the boundaries of tradition, “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependance on ritual” (Benjamin 1992). This particular excerpt has a direct correlation with the work of Andy Warhol, specifically “Silver Liz as Cleopatra.” Andy Warhol’s rendition of Elizabeth Taylor are prime examples of the shift in art history that Benjamin refers to as the value of this particular piece is based upon its mass production, and appropriation of iconic images and people.
Schindler's list premiered mere months after the inauguration of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, leading to a capitalising success on the American peoples cultural focus on historical voyeurism. The critical reception of Schindler's List is a intellectual discussion on the moral nature of a film through the ability to dramatize what was deemed impossible; critically selectively received with a social conscious, and a division on Spielberg's stylistic representation of the subject matter. The scholarship on Schindler's List only reaches one shared thesis that of its transitional nature in his cinematic career into a more self-styled seriousness with arching the blockbuster with sober artistic work (Grainge, Jancovich, & Monteith, 2012). Critical reception of Spielberg's work comments on the true nature of its testimony in memorial to the Holocaust with appropriate restraint or typical emotional manipulation, combined with arguments of the nature of film is artistic or entertaining. Temporal and spatial variations don't seem to affect the critics review, it appears to be more the view of Spielberg as an auteur and also their comfort in exploring such a sensitive historical memory. Deconstruction of the reception will discuss the stylistic nature of the film with a controversial documented cinematography, alongside Schindler's List's place among other works in regards to the subject of the Holocaust and Spielberg's handling of the digestible.
Saving Private Ryan starts out on June 6, 1944, which marks the beginning of the invasion of Normandy, in World War II. As learned early on four brothers from the Ryan family all go out to serve the United States, and in action three of the four are killed. This story follows a group of soldiers on their journey as they search for, the last surviving of the Ryan brothers, Private First Class James Ryan, and send him home. World War II is the deadliest and most extensive war in history that lasted six years. In World War II there were battles fought and rescue missions that took place, and the US Military showed their bravery as they went in to fight for our country.
Aristotle once claimed that, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Artists, such as Louise-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun and Mary Cassatt, captured not only the way things physically appeared on the outside, but also the emotions that were transpiring on the inside. A part no always visible to the viewer. While both artists, Le Brun and Cassatt, worked within the perimeters of their artistic cultures --the 18th century in which female artists were excluded and the 19th century, in which women were artistically limited-- they were able to capture the loving relationship between mother and child, but in works such as Marie Antoinette and Her Children and Mother Nursing her Child 1898,
GIs. He uses a close up shot when, he zooms in into a man's eye and
In the film Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg, Captain John Miller takes his men behind enemy lines to find Private John Ryan. Private Ryan’s three brothers have been killed in the war and no one knows if Private Ryan is alive or not. Captain Miller takes on the challenge of bringing home Ryan to his Mom so she wouldn’t lose all of her sons in the dreaded war. The story follows the journey and hardships Captain Miller and his men face trying to locate and bring home Private Ryan. Spielberg portrays the theme of sacrifice in the scenes when the group almost splits apart, they find Private Ryan, and Captain Miller dies.
Over the decades, art has been used as a weapon against the callousness of various social constructs - it has been used to challenge authority, to counter ideologies, to get a message across and to make a difference. In the same way, classical poetry and literature written by minds belonging to a different time, a different place and a different community have somehow found a way to transcend the boundaries set by time and space and have been carried through the ages to somehow seep into contemporary times and shape our society in ways we cannot fathom.
Women in pictorial history have often been used as objects; figures that passively exist for visual consumption or as catalyst for male protagonists. Anne Hollander in her book Fabric of Vision takes the idea of women as objects to a new level in her chapter “Women as Dress”. Hollander presents the reader with an argument that beginning in the mid 19th century artists created women that ceased to exist outside of their elegantly dressed state. These women, Hollander argues, have no body, only dress. This concept, while persuasive, is lacking footing which I will attempt to provide in the following essay. In order to do this, the work of James Tissot (b. 1836 d. 1902) will further cement the idea of “women as dress” while the work of Berthe
During the Art Deco era the calla lily became one of the most popular flowers around. Whether in florist shops or on artist canvases the calla lily became a recurring theme. Like many flowers before it the calla lily came to be more than a flower on its own but it represented the idea of femininity. The calla lily was used by artists such as Tamara de Lempicka, Diego Rivera and Georgia O’Keeffe as a symbol of femininity and feminism. Through examining their works, in relation to their own lives and the events of the day, I will explore how the calla lily came to represent a new type on femininity and feminism.
This investigation will examine a few key works by the anonymous female artist group know in popular culture as the Guerrilla Girls. In this essay it will reveal several prominent themes within the groups works that uncover the racial and gender inequalities in politics, art and pop culture with the use of humor. These collaborating artists work and operate with a variety of mediums, their works display a strong message concerned with activism connected by humor allowing the Guerrilla Girls to communicate and resonate a more powerful message to the viewer. The ways in which this collaborating group has employed many questions and facts against the hierarchy and historical ideologies which have exploited women and their roles in art. This investigation will allow the reader to identify three areas in which the Guerrilla Girls apply a certain forms of humor to transform society’s view on the prominent issue of gender in the art world. These specific ploys that are performed by the Guerrilla Girls are in the way they dress, the masks they wear, pseudonymous names of dead women artists and the witty factual evidence in their works. These are all examples to evoke audiences in challenging not only the art society which dictates the value and worth of women in art but also to confront yourself and your own beliefs in a way that makes audiences rethink these growing issues.
While studying art history in Pre-Industrial Visual Cultures this semester, one theme has become painfully obvious. There are few if any women artists included in the study of art history. If you dig deep into the books you can find mention of many unknown, unrecognized and often times very talented women artists from the past. Women in history are simply not recognized, and this is due to a large extent to their exclusion from the art world. My paper chooses to focus on a few female artists of the sixties and seventies who sought to make up for past history and ensure women were known. These women invented their own language for art making, which included sexual imagery, and left no doubt of their gender. These women made art as women, instead of trying to make art like men and be accepted. My paper therefore focuses on these women, who although werenít involved directly in pre-industrial art history were very much affected by the exclusion of women from it.
Though most works of art have some underlying, deeper meaning attached to them, our first impression of their significance comes through our initial visual interpretation. When we first view a painting or a statue or other piece of art, we notice first the visual details – its size, its medium, its color, and its condition, for example – before we begin to ponder its greater significance. Indeed, these visual clues are just as important as any other interpretation or meaning of a work, for they allow us to understand just what that deeper meaning is. The expression on a statue’s face tells us the emotion and message that the artist is trying to convey. Its color, too, can provide clues: darker or lighter colors can play a role in how we judge a piece of art. The type of lines used in a piece can send different messages. A sculpture, for example, may have been carved with hard, rough lines or it may have been carved with smoother, more flowing lines that portray a kind of gentleness.
The link between expressionism and horror quickly became a dominant feature in many films and continues to be prominent in contemporary films mainly due to the German expressionist masterpiece Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari. Wiene’s 1920 Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari utilized a distinctive creepiness and the uncanny throughout the film that became one the most distinctive features of externalising inner mental and emotional states of protagonists through various expressionist methods. Its revolutionary and innovative new art was heavily influenced by the German state and its populace in conjunction with their experience of war; Caligari took a clear cue from what was happening in Germany at the time. It was this film that set cinematic conventions that still apply today, heavily influencing the later Hollywood film noir genre as well as the psychological thrillers that has led several film audiences to engage with a film, its character, its plot and anticipate its outcome, only to question whether the entire movie was a dream, a story of a crazy man, or an elaborate role play. This concept of the familiar and the strange, the reality, the illusion and the dream developed in Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari, is once again present in Scorsese’s 2010 film Shutter Island.
These cultural strictures come in a number of forms. First, the artist attacks intellectual conformity, choosing art over all other means of self-expression even though it is not widespread in his or her society. Though it is not explicitly stated - and is perhaps even subconscious - the artist chooses art over either academe or high society. The artist questions society's customs, making this choice explicit in their daily actions. The artist rejects ostentatious displays of wealth and the cultural emphasis on money, replacing it with a frugal simplicity more conducive to authentic experience. Finally, the artist calls into question the cultural construct most important to any understanding of human interaction - the binary conception of gender.