Major Assignment #1: Found Object Deconstruction / Reconstruction

Due: Wednesday, February 4th 

In-Process critique: Jan. 28th (bring objects and ideas to class for discussion)   

This assignment focuses on transforming an everyday functional object – one that normally has a purpose other than art – in order to create a sculpture. This will involve altering the object’s purpose, either by changing its function or making it altogether nonfunctional.   

An object’s meaning in every day life is usually derived from its context – the way we normally use it or interact with it. By altering an object’s context or form you will change its meaning, or conceptual content. What will this new meaning imply? How can an ordinary object be made into something more significant?   

The artist Sol Lewitt said, “Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.” So, keep it simple!   

Resources for finding/buying interesting objects: 

Unwanted household items you already own (clothes, furniture, trash, etc.) 

REPO (in the Harder Hall Parking lot, 11am-1pm Mon-Fri)

Ivan’s 

Salvation Army 

Eerie Line Antique Store (Hornell) 

The Op Shop (Tuesdays 12pm-6pm)

Learning To Love You More - Ben

Ben Dworski-Riggs:

Assignment #42

List five events from 1984.   

The first Macintosh Apple goes on sale.   

Presdient Reagan wins reelection   

The Indian government begins operation blue star, the planned attack on the Golden Temple.  

Hezbollah car-bombs the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut, killing 22 people.   

Hezbollah militants hijack a Kuwait airlines plane and kill 4 passangers     

Assignment #61
Describe your ideal government.   

My Ideal form of government is a decentralized republic. Major governmental power should be held by  local communities with a centralized federal system to regulate trade and uphold the founding constitution of that country. A three branch system with a series of checks and balances like the U.S has is ideal. A multi party system should be active with limits on amount a single party can control the legislature in order to prevent a one or two party system from taking over, and allow changes in the values of society to be accurately represented in government. The party system could be partially based on that of Turkey because their party's are very representative of the people. Towns should be work like kibbutzim in Israel. I believe in the theory of local socialism based on shared community assets but with a measure of private property. All community decisions should be decided by a board of locally elected officials with a paid mayor and staff. Major decisions should be voted on by all members of the community. Industry in the community should also be regulated by this board. 

Learning To Love You More - Kelly

Kelly Kant:

Learning To Love You More - Shawne

Shawne Porter:

Learning To Love You More - Jenny

Jenny Omilanowicz:

Assignments #10, 16 and 62:

Learning To Love You More - Kat

Kat Russell

Assignment #51: Describe what to do with your body when you die. 

“I just heard some real bad news” and 

“I find it hard to tell you. . . 

but people run in circle. . .” 

as “My face turned to stone” 

so “I’ma make it easy” to 

“Hold me so tightly when we say goodbye” 

and feel the “Love from a stone” 

because “This is just how we do it around my way.” 

“I am the stone that the builder refused,” 

so “You should tell me your deepest thoughts, 

you should tell me whats bugging you.” 

I know “it’s a very very mad world” 

so feel free to use my ears to 

“Bleed the Freak” cause “I wanna pay for it. 

all this shit.” And when you’re done, 

“take off my shirt, loosen the buttons and undo my skirt” 

give them away. 

and my body? 

“Burn it up . . . like the roof is on fire” 

and learn to say: “I’ve gotten over living without you.”

Artists quoted: 

“Rhianna” 

Kanye West 

MSI 

Asheru 

Lloyd 

R. Kelly 

The-Dream 

Alice In Chains 

Michael Andrews 

Assignment #35: Ask your family to describe what you do.

Jess Russell (sister):
Ok here goes...
     At the moment I am picturing the sun coming through the window on Kat sitting at her computer desk working on an engineering assignment. Although she is diligently working, there are other things going on in this picture. She is sipping an orange juice, spiked with something nice. She is clapping her hands and stomping as she reads or thinks about her assignment. Then she stops to write. Sometimes she turns her head and talks to her fishy. Overall the assignment gets done in time, and she walks out of the room with a perfectly matching outfit. 

Susan Russell (mother): 

10% studying 

40% class 

20% sleeping 

10% eating 

15% socializing - dancing, partying 

5% shopping 

Andrew Russell (brother): 

Kate does Step in her spare time. I'm not sure what that is but it looks cool. It involves a lot of slapping, clapping, and tapping to the beat of music - as well as wearing odd neon shoes. There are Step competitions and performances, and at least one dance is in the dark. I think Kate will win them all. Also, Kate parties a lot, and goes out with machete-wielding guys with one leg.  

Kate also occasionally does schoolwork, such as making really cool art thingies. She is working to be an engineer, possibly in materials science.  Sometimes, she brings home neat and slightly toxic materials for her family to play with. Kate is super brainy and fun, and she makes a habit of enchanting my girlfriends with her wily charms, as only Kate can do. <3

Learning To Love You More - Kayla

Kayla Summerville:

Stay Strong 

Remember who you are and what you believe in 

Erase your dad after he blames you for everything 

High school isn’t everything and it doesn’t define who you are and will be 

Not everyone will let you down even though it seems inevitable 

Live in the moment 

Live for yourself

I stepped on a needle when I was in 3rd grade.  I didn’t actually step on it… I rolled my ankle on to it.  It got stuck in my foot so I went to the hospital and they were unable to remove it.  They said that if it started to bother me, then I would have to go see a specialist.  My senior year of high school, it started to hurt again, so I had new x-rays taken.  The needle shifted and was pinching some nerves.  The specialist removed the needle in less than half an hour, and now I have a scar on the top of my foot.

Goodbye Pappy 

Everyone misses you 

Goodbye Angels 

Hannah 

Meredith 

Bailey 

Sarah 

Katie 

Everyone talks about how nice you were but 3 of you made high school a nightmare for me Goodbye Dave A. 

You made everyone smile and laugh 

Goodbye Sadness 

You waste so much of my time 

Goodbye thoughts of “You’re never going to make it.”

Learning To Love You More - Will

Will Smith:

5 things from 1984:

1.) Marvin Gaye Died on April 1 1984

2.) Reagan Beats Mondale in Landslide victory on November 6th

3.)Kathryn D. Sullivan is the first woman to spacewalk on October 11

4.)Cosby Show premiers on September 20

5.) Longest Major league baseballl game in history lasted 8 hours and 6 minutes, between the Whitesox and the Brewers on May 8

Learning To Love You More - Kendra

Kendra Mallory:

Assignment #51:

Post Mortem Disposal of Kendra Nisena Mallory

As most likely stated in my will, there is to be no burial of my body.  I am to be cremated, burnt to ash, and scattered to all the places I have loved in my travels: Macchu Picchu, Hong Kong, India; to Cozumel Mexico, to the backyard of my grandparents house in Tampa, Florida, to Alfred University in New York, to Napilli Kai resort in Maui, Hawaii, to Italy and Spain.  My ashes are to be scattered to all these places, and only a small pinch of me is to be kept by my family and done with as they please.  Whether they bury me in the backyard of the house I grew up in with my old cat Black Kitty or whether I am fed to the deer, rabbits, birds, and consequently the predators of that area, I care not.  I will be happy everywhere I rest.

Assignment #32

"Where the Red Fern Grows" - burial of Dan the Redbone

Learning To Love You More - Cory

Cory Hill:

The significance of the outfit is that i wore this to the first professional soccer game i ever saw during a trip to England.  

Learning To Love You More - Michelle

Michelle Adams:

Learning To Love You More - Jamie

Jamie Troy:

“Starting a lecture series.” -

a. The generation of new ideas. Draw from history i.e. cultural diffusion. 
 i. The individual as a conscious conductor of experience with respect to one’s memory, intuitive will, and ability to wonder. 

 ii. Competition, conflict, conformity, morals, and rebellion. 
 iii. Technology and the Human. 
 iv. Education. Art. Sharing without the medium of material profit. Things can be (should be) valued differently than how they are valued today, like how all types of human creativity should be expressed rather than suppressed. Education can be more interdisciplinary in order to complement the vast potential for the human to be knowledgeable aware...and with that, harmonize with the earth and with themselves!... with an altruistic appraoch before our prospects of health will manifest itself in the effect.

b. The Imagination and Film.

“Re-read your favorite book from 5th grade” -

A Boundless Moment, Robert Frost (1920s New Hampshire)

He halted in the wind, and--what was that 
Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost? 
He stood there bringing March against his thought, 
And yet too ready to believe the most.

'Oh, that's the Paradise-in-bloom,' I said; 
And truly it was fair enough for flowers 
had we but in us to assume in march 
Such white luxuriance of May for ours.

We stood a moment so in a strange world, 
Myself as one his own pretense deceives; 
And then I said the truth (and we moved on). 
A young beech clinging to its last year's leaves.

“Take a picture of the sun.” -

Learning To Love You More - Tom

Thomas Wilcox:

First, i drew the news, but instead of a person i chose a topic.  Second i photographed an important outfit, it is important because i wear something almost the exact same as that every day, and the amount of important things that have happened in the outfit are not only numerous, but still happening. 

Learning To Love You More - Alex

Alexandra Beall:

61) Describe Your Ideal Government  

I was never the type of person to want to deal with anything politically related. I wasn’t partial to it in one way or another and I did little more than listen and nod when people would discuss current events of interest. Yet, in 2005, something political caught my eye that, to me, didn’t revolve around politics: the banning of horse slaughter. Suddenly government and politics had a purpose to my uneducated and uncaring mind.  

As a result my ideal government would focus around many different points than most people. I would see a government that had higher penalties for the inhumane treatment of people and animals. There are too many people sitting cozy in cells that would be forced to lead worse lives outside whose only crime is substance abuse.  The economic crisis would be dealt with in a way that hasn’t been addressed in most fronts. Someone should need a license to breed animals of leisure (dogs, horses, etc.). There are simply too many animals and not enough resources to deal with them. Similarly the new idea to tax farmers for their cows is ridiculous. Start taxing the people who have more money than they know what to do with and not the people who are helping to support what little food the United States manages to make on its own accord. I know little about dealing with more, but think our resources are better spent not adding to the enormous amount of dept we’ve managed to get ourselves into. The United States will fall if we cannot get our own economy underway before we try to start influencing everyone else and resolutely bring them down with us. 

27) Take a picture of the sun

70) Say Goodbye

Goodbye childhood.  

Goodbye Skaneateles.  

Goodbye Pride. 

Goodbye Old Hickory Farm.  

Goodbye Flotren.  

Goodbye North Salem. 

Goodbye paralyzing fear of the unknown.  

Goodbye naiveté. 

Goodbye Sebastian. 

Goodbye high school drama.   

Goodbye high school. 

Learning To Love You More - Mandy

Amanda Mantelli:

Here are my three projects I did for our first Mini assignment.  I really did enjoy doing this.  I especially enjoyed making my own assignment, I had many ideas but I liked this one the best, and it didn't come to me until yesterday.  I hope you enjoy them too.  
 Assignment 44 (Make up my own assignment)

Take a picture of 1-2 abadoned animals and write a story about their lives before and after they were abadoned in their words. 

My name, well I really don’t know what my name is.  I remember when my people first got me, there were two kids and two adults.  I was just a kitten then.  The kids told the parents that they wanted me.  I felt so lucky and proud.  They took me home and loved me.  They loved to play with me too.  I would chase strings and balls all over the house.  As I got older I would lay in my owners laps and play with the kids.  I would eat and lay by the warm fire on cold nights.  I loved my life.  I loved to be pet by my owners, it was my favorite thing in the whole world.  Then one day they put me and my dog friend in a little kennel.  I couldn’t understand why.  I thought maybe we were moving, I did see boxes around, but when they took us out of the car they set us down somewhere, it got really cold really fast.  I heard footsteps and then the car door shut and the car start up and drive away.  I wondered what was happening and I was really scared.  My dog friend was more scared than I was, but she tried to put up a tough front about it.  Later on I heard more footsteps, I thought it might be my people coming back to get us, but it wasn’t.  The footsteps went right by into a building.  Then two people noticed that we were there.  They picked the cage up and took it into the building where I saw other people walking in and out of earlier.  They put us on a table to look at us, but my dog friend was to scared and wanted to bite the people if they tried to touch her or I.  Finally after a long day in the kennel, one of the people got me out of the cage but my dog friend still didn’t want to come out.  I was sad my people left, I didn’t understand why they left, but maybe these people will love me like my people did when they first got me, I do love attention and these people pet me and talk to me so it helps me feel more comfortable in my new place. Maybe things won’t be that bad after all, now if only my dog friend could see that too, unfortunatley she’s still to scared to let anyone touch her, I don’t know what will happen to her. 

This is my dog friend.

(True Story, at least the abandoned part, not sure about the rest of it.) 

Assignment 53 (Give Advice to myself in the past)

Dear Me, 
I am writing to you at age 27, I know you are only 16 now and I know you are confused and high school isn’t everything you thought it would be.  Life isn’t fair, people aren’t fair and that foreign exchange student we have there isn’t very nice.  Don’t worry about her, she will leave soon.  Now about your crush and why you think life isn’t fair, you will have this crush on Dylan for many years, but nothing comes of it, so don’t chase something that will never work; besides he ends up marrying someone else from our class.  It’s ok though, you meet a wonderful man that you will marry as well.  He’s better than Dylan will ever be.  He understands your needs and wants and he wants and needs those same things.  You will finally have your own horse, at first it’s Raine, but then you realize what you really want in life and sell her, but you keep the baby you were going to sell to begin with, don’t worry, it’s the right decision.   

Now the advice I give to you is don’t fight so much about not wanting to be like mom.  She’s not all that bad.  Listen to your friends when they tell you that you should be a vet tech and most of all listen to your heart.  Be the best friend that everyone one wants to have.  Always be there for the people that are closest to you and listen to the people who aren’t as close to you.  They have good things to say as well.  Appreciate every waking moment up at Grandma and Grandpa’s camp; you won’t be able to go up there for as long as you do now and trust me there will be times that you wish you could be up there for a month.  Look at scholarships when you plan on going to college, because you will go to college.  Make sure you get some of those scholarships; they will help in the short and long run.   Most of all just enjoy the times you have with your family and friends because you won’t have them forever.  Listen to the sounds and enjoy the smells and sights around you, be happy you are who you are, there are many things to be happy about in life, love every bit of it.

Love, 

You

Learning To Love You More - Mary

Mary Geiss:

I picked three assignments to do: #63 Making an encouraging banner, #28 Edit a photo album page, and #51 Describe what to do with your body when you die.   

#63: The banner was placed over by bed in Joel's House.     

#28: The album page is entitled, "My Little Pieces of Sunshine: Abby, Carrie, and Ayden."

#51: What I want to do with my body when I dead?   

I want my organs to be donated if possible to anyone who needs them and my body donated to science.  Then I want my body cemented.  I want some of my ashes to be placed in my mother’s grave along side of my father.  Then I want the rest to be put in Skaneateles Lake by my family’s camp.

Learning To Love You More - Jaz

Jasmyne Gales:

The first mini assignment I did was number 69, which was to climb to the top of a tree and take pictures of the view. The tree I climbed was on campus right in between first year dorms Tefft and Reimer. The next assignment was number 67, which was to repair something, and I chose to repair my glove.

Learning To Love You More - Stephon

Stephon Galka:

The reason I chose this outfit is because this is the day my team and I won the King Kamehameha  pig skin classic in Aloha Stadium.  But with the good there was also bad it was that very same day my brother died. 

I chose this scene from Friday night lights because in this scene his father finally accepts what he did on the football feild this image applies to me because my father is the same way I never did anything on the feild that was good enough for him.

Essay on the Blurring of Art and Life

Alan KaprowArt Which Can’t Be Art(1986)
It’s fairly well known that for the last thirty years my main work as an artist has been lo-cated in activities and contexts that don’t suggest art in any way. Brushing my teeth, forexample, in the morning when I’m barely awake; watching in the mirror the rhythm of myelbow moving up and down . . .The practice of such an art, which isn’t perceived as art, is not so much a contradiction as a paradox. Why this is so requires some background.When I speak of activities and contexts that don’t suggest art, I don’t mean that an event like brushing my teeth each morning is chosen and then set into a conventional art context, as Duchamp and many others since him have done. That strategy, by which an art-identifying frame (such as a gallery or theater) confers “art value” or “art discourse” on some nonart object, idea, or event, was, in Duchamp’s initial move, sharply ironic. It forced into confrontation a whole bundle of sacred assumptions about creativity, professional skill, individuality, spirituality, modernism, and the presumed value and function of high art itself. But later it became trivialized, as more and more nonart was put on exhibit by other artists. Regardless of the merits of each case, the same truism was headlined every time we saw a stack of industrial products in a gallery,every time daily life was enacted on a stage: that anything can be estheticized, given the right art packages to put it into. But why should we want to estheticize “anything”? All the irony was lost in those presentations, the provocative questions forgotten. To go on making this kind of move in art seemed to me unproductive.Instead, I decided to pay attention to brushing my teeth, to watch my elbow moving. I would be alone in my bathroom, without art spectators. There would be no gallery, no critic to judge, no publicity. This was the crucial shift that removed the performance of everyday life from all but the memory of art. I could, of course, have said to myself, “Now I’m making art!!” But in actual practice, I didn’t think much about it. My awareness and thoughts were of another kind. I began to pay attention to how much this act of brushing my teeth had become routinized, nonconscious behavior, compared with my first efforts to do it as a child. I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed; that my mind was always somewhereelse; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each minute were ig-nored. I guessed also that most people were like me in this respect.Brushing my teeth attentively for two weeks, I gradually became aware of the tension in my elbow and fingers (was it there before?), the pressure of the brush on my gums, their slight bleeding (should I visit the dentist?). I looked up once and saw, really saw, my face in the mirror. I rarely looked at myself when I got up, perhaps because I wanted to avoid the puffy face I’d see, at least until it could be washed and smoothed to match the public image I prefer. (And how many times had I seen others do the same and believed i was different!)This was an eye-opener to my privacy and to my humanity. An unremarkable picture of myself was beginning to surface, and image I’d created but never examined. It colored the images I made of the world and influenced how I dealt with my images of others. I saw this little by little.But if this wider domain of resonance, spreading from the mere process of brushing my teeth, seems too far from its starting point, I should say immediately that it never left the bathroom. The physicality of brushing, the aromatic taste of toothpaste, rinsing my mouth and the brush, the many small nuances such as right-handedness causing me toenter my mouth with the loaded rush from that side and then move to the left side — these particularities always stayed in the present. The larger implications popped up from time to time during the subsequent days. All this from toothbrushing.How is this relevant to art? Why is this not just sociology? It is relevant because devel-opments within modernism itself let to art’s dissolution into its life sources. Art in the West has a long history of secularizing tendencies, going back at least as far as the Hel-lenistic period. by the late 1950s and 1960s this lifelike impulse dominated the van-guard. Art shifted away from the specialized object in the gallery to the real urban envi-ronment; to the real body and mind; to communications technology; and to remote natu-ral regions of the ocean, sky, and desert. Thus the relationship of the act of toothbrush-ing to recent art is clear and cannot be bypassed. This is where the paradox lies; an artist concerned with lifelike art is an artist who does and does not make art.Anything less than paradox would be simplistic. Unless the identity (and thus the mean-ing) of what the artist does oscillates between ordinary, recognizable activity and the “resonance” of that activity in the larger human context, the activity itself reduces to conventional behavior. Or if it is framed as art by a gallery, it reduces to conventional art. Thus toothbrushing, as we normally do it, offers no roads back to the real wold ei-ther. But ordinary life performed as art/not art can charge the everyday with metaphoric power.

Mini Assignment #1: Learning to Love You More

Due: Monday, January 26th 

(must be emailed to Alicia by noon!)   

Your first assignment is intended to instigate a discussion about what is and what is not art (in your opinion). The aim of this class is to show you that art can be almost anything, but it always begins with an idea, and ideas usually come from being able to look at the world in a new way.    

For this assignment, you should visit the website learningtoloveyoumore.com, which was created by artists Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July. It was created to guide people through the process of turning everyday experiences into memorable art projects. It contains a list of assignments that anyone can complete and submit to their website via email.   

Your job is to read through the list of assignments and choose 1-3 that you find interesting and would like to “accept”. Note: it’s very important that you find those assignments interesting, and think they would be fun to do! You will be required to explain your choices in class on Monday. Some of the assignments are easy, like “take a flash photo under your bed”, and some are more involved, like “reenact a scene from a movie that made you cry”. Completing the assignments should take approximately two hours, so it’s up to you to decide how you would like to fill that time. 

Once you’ve completed your assignments, follow the website’s instructions for how to submit them via email.   Your emails submitting your assignments to learningtoloveyoumore.com should be copied to Alicia at AE1@alfred.edu. Alicia needs to receive your email by noon on Monday, in order to prepare for sharing and discussing them in class that evening.