Blog Number 8

Our guest speaker this week was a female sculptor by the name of Tannaz Farsi who creates different installations designed to make dull, or seeming-less boring objects contain meaning in a different setting and experience. Her first image she showed was of a man (I didn't catch his name) who had shown his eyes and mouth shut. She had carried this image around with her for two years in an almost experimental way to see how long it would take her before she was completely desensitized by this grotesque image. I would consider myself pretty desensitized in the sense that I have seen some pretty disgusting things on the internet, movies, and in video games, but this single image was easily one of the top 5 grossest, interesting, stunning, captivating, and experimental things that I have ever seen in my 20 years of being on this planet. I couldn’t imagine inflicting that type of pain on myself just for the sake of art.

Farsi was an extremely intelligent artist whose work reflected not only her intelligence, but also her passion, creativity and philanthropist views. She created sculptures and described them in an extremely powerful way which conveyed the meaning the sculptures were attempting to make perfectly. Her work reinforces our overall question this entire year (What is art?) because of the fact that it contains meaning through a different mode of expression. My favorite sculptures of hers were the fluorescent light ones. Being a college student at a university as large as Oregon’s, I am surrounded and immersed with these types of lights on an everyday basis. I’ll admit that I have never stopped ONCE and taken a second to look at these lights and think to myself if they are an artistic piece or not. Farsi took these lights out of the institutionalized areas that they are commonly in and put them into a gallery, changing the environment that the piece was originally attended for. I believe that these pieces of work she created supports her viewpoint on how government and society culture should, and needs to be, separated so that the government cannot institutionalize us anymore than they already have.

The readings/interviews this week I believe completely backed up Farsi’s idea on the idea of the separation between government and the world of art. The two interviewers were Suzi Gablik and Barbara Kishenblatt-Gimblett and when Gimblett was asked whether or not art should have an agenda or be political her response is that it is impossible for art to be removed from those. “Viewing itself as if it were a universal culture, the hegemonic never acknowledges how it marginalizes certain cultures and elevates others.” (p. 414). This quote only further supports Farsi’s ideas that government needs to be separate from the art world in order to maintain some time of balance between the two of them.

I believe this sculpture exemplifies our speaker and interviewees ideologies perfect in the sense that it describes political involvement in creating views that most Americans hold, holding us down and restricting our views on art and creativity. 

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