Videos to Accompany Chap. 7 in Making Art, and Chap. 7 in Ways of Seeing

Chapter 7 in Making Art: Words and Text - How they're used in Art
Watch the following video on contemporary artist Ann Hamilton.

Contemporary artist Nick Cave (who is mentioned in Chapter 7):



And lastly, you can watch portions of the original BBC television series "Ways of Seeing" from 1972 online:



Post comments responding to all three videos.

Ways of Seeing - Chapter 7 (part 2) - post for 9/26

Address the following questions based on your reading from the second half of Chapter 7:

1) According to the author, who is the working class and how are they addressed in publicity images?
2) Even if you, the viewer, never believe the promise of the ad will come true and know it to be false - how do ads still work on you?
3) Which ads work on you and why?

Ways of Seeing Chap. 7: post a comment for 9/19

Artwork by Penelope Umbrico, Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr, 2006-ongoing, 1440 chromogenic prints.

Ways of Seeing was published first in 1972. In what ways have publicity images changed since 1972? Consider this specifically:
1) Have the images themselves changed in a significant way?
2) Have the delivery methods for publicity images changed in a significant way (in other words, where do you see publicity images and how might it be different from 1972?)
3) Has the number of publicity images that people see every day changed? How and why?
4) How do you know the difference between a publicity image and an artwork?

Answer by commenting on 1-4 below.

Ways of Seeing - post a comment for Wed 9/12

This week you are reading from Ways of Seeing by John Berger. It is an influential set of essays not just on how week see art, but how we see all images (family photographs, newspaper images, advertisements).

After reading Chapter 1, comment on the proposed question below:
Below is a well-known image from the Depression era in the United States. You may have seen it used before in many different contexts. When Dorothea Lange took this photo, she was working on a set of photos funded in part by the Farm Security Administration, an effort to help poor farm workers. (More here and here.)

(Lange's 1936, Migrant Mother)

Make some observations about the image, in light of what you read in Chapter 1.



Lesser known are the images that Lange shot on the same roll of film, but which have not been published widely:

 

(click to enlarge)

How would the essayists of Ways of Seeing ask us to interpret the first image? What would they say is revealed in the second and third images? What would they say about cropping, context, and the dissemination of mechanically reproduced images?

Write on these thoughts, and discuss with each other, before next class.