I most say that the panel was amazing. It was great to hear what placing color means in different majors. Placing color in space is critical to an anthropologist. How space was used in the past and how it is used now is something that is important to the understanding of human nature. Time plays a big part in how that space was used. Color is also important in soil because the different colors help anthropologies determine where artifacts were found. Miss King wonders what color meant to people in past compared to how it is interpreted in modern times. For instance, did the color red mean life in the olden days compared to what we interpret it as today?
In Physics color is the wavelength of light you are looking at. Without color space will not exist. Color can be unseen to the human eye. We do not see all the colors that are out there in the world. The seeing of color has all to do with the way light hits an object and how it goes into our minds and how we process it. It is the recreation of what we see, which is not, what is really out there. A way a physician sees these paintings has a lot to do with the passing of time that was used to make the layers and the way it relates to the measurement of color put into the paintings.
In Philosophy color is an experience or movement in the world and how it affects us. For instance, changing habitual ways makes us perceive that world or environment differently. Color, space and place is more of the exploration of ourselves within the environment and less of the atmosphere.
After listening to all these distinctive areas of study, I realized that the meaning of the paintings comes from outside. Meaning the people’s culture and traditions through time. Things have meaning to us because we choose to agree that it has meaning. There is a lot of things happening around us that we don’t know or choose not to do or get anything about it. Looking at the paintings for the third time, I notice that I associated myself with these colors because of the symbolic meaning they carry in my culture. I started counting in my head the number of times I thought the painter might have added layers in one section of the canvas. I went from side to side, stepped away and came up close. This to me created meaning and added to the layers of the painting, which I thought brought out the meaning of architecture.
I have to say that I was a little disappointed in the panel discussion. When I first heard about it, I was thrilled. I thought it was a fabulous idea and a very unique experience. It would be unlike anything else I have seen at this school. Unfortunately, while it did yield some very intriguing insight into the show, I feel it was very rushed and disorganized.
I was expecting each panelist to take center stage a little more. I guess I overlooked the word, "discussion." I wanted each person to speak more in depth about their discipline, the show specifically, and even their own personal interpretation of the show. I completely understand that a discussion could have been a very intriguing means of conducting this event, but since there was really not much audience interaction anyway, I think the "discussion" would have been more effective as a series of gallery talks or lectures. There was just not enough time for a real discussion to take place. There were too many panelists and disciplines and far too little time to address all the issues that were of interest to me. I spent so much time just trying to keep up with all the jumping around and interpret what the panelists were talking about that I couldn't even begin to formulate questions for them.
I love this concept. I would like for it to happen again for future shows, but I think it should be done differently. I certainly do not think there should be any fewer disciplines involved, but I do think each representative should present their material in a more direct fashion. I feel as though some representatives were much more thorough than others. There needs to be a little more consistency so that as an audience we are getting enough information to really compare and contrast the different responses of the respective disciplines.
The placing color panel was one of the more important developments of interdisciplinary dialogue I have seen since my time here. I have reiterated my own desire to see the disciplines act collectively in an effort to find a more holistic understanding. In my experience, especially between the natural sciences and the humanities, that we work in silence next to one another to accomplish common goals. To have such a barrier be broken in the context of the gallery, a setting that is characteristically more specialized and introverted than other academic positions, is an exciting moment for those of us searching for new answers. The contributions that most of the panel members gave were with a muffled tone of giddy empowerment, while the rest of the panel was wide eyed and apparently fascinated by the perspectives of their peers. I may be embellishing a bit, but I truly believe that for most of the panel and the audience, such conversations are few and far between. The insight that Brad Park gave to the discussion I found the most compelling and relevantly linked. His specialization of phenomenology was extremely helpful for me to get a better grip on the movement, and I think it was a refreshing voice to be heard next to many research scientists trained in objective analysis. The physical and psychological perspectives were right on target as well, and followed as I saw it, quite harmoniously with the more abstract philosophical discussion. Of the most important parts of the discussion for me was the question that Brad Park posed, if someone were to ask you your name, and you said yellow, the answer would be rejected because it does not qualify, to you the questioner, as an answer. This is an extremely important statement, especially among this group of people who all frame questions differently with different methods. As artists or psychologists or anthropologists or physicists, we always ask questions with predisposed parameters as to what could qualify as an answer. It can only be then, when collectively discussing the parameters of a question, can we even get close to allowing for open answers. I also greatly enjoyed the conversation of purpose driven perception, seeing what we need to see, for the sake of our survival, as a sociobiological fundamental to perception in general. Then what is the enjoyment of music, what is the enjoyment of focused, fabricated visages that do not read as necessary. There is no deer in the crosshairs within the placing color exhibition. Unfortunately the anthropological discussion I found to be lacking except for the comment about community investment in art and the value of destroying a powerful work of art as an even more powerful work of collective decision making. But I pose the question to Julia, at the same rate why not collectively destroy historic St. Mary’s City, or any other heritage site? Is its value not created by community investment?
The panel brought up a lot of different things I’ve been thinking about and I had a few important realizations during it. The first is: phenomenology is difficult for me to take in sometimes because eventually it just sounds like “blah blah blah,” and up until the panel I couldn’t figure out why I felt this way. The thing is, phenomenology is trying to explain how we experience. My immediate thought was “Why do we need to explain? Can’t we just live it? Just live life and be there for it?” And thinking about it more, I think we do need to explain how we experience if we are going to talk to one another intellectually about how we live in the world. Yes, for some this would help, but less so for me. I would say that we can share our experiences in other ways, not just in jargony language and obtuse explanations. I’m hoping that my paintings present another way to relate my experience other than by trying to say it in words. I’m finding words difficult in my artist statement because our experiences aren’t always capable of be translated in this way, and that’s where phenomenology falls short for me.
The word “truth” came up a number of times, and it, too is something I’ve been considering a lot lately. To a physicist, truth is the object without the perceiver, to the phenomenologist, it is the perception of the object. As I see it, there are as many truths as there are perceiving beings in this world. In a way, it is impossible for anything to be untrue. No one can ever get anything wrong because fundamentally, everything is experience—it’s both internal and external, not one or the other.
I did agree with the comments about abstract painting being satisfying because it never comes to resolution and that unknown, or many knowns (if we have many associations) is actually what engages us with it. Rather than seeing something strange and it becoming familiar, abstraction allows us to go the opposite way, seeing something familiar and making it looser, more unknown, making it “strange.” So in looking at abstract painting we have a shifting, in-between experience, where it’s never “done” but instead is ongoing, and always different each time we approach the painting. This is partly what interests me about painting. I guess it is just good to keep in mind that some people want that resolution and that they may not be satisfied with abstract paintings. It’s okay—no particular kind of art is for everyone.
However, in the discussion, the resolution//abstraction idea brought up the idea that “making sense” out of an abstraction—the resolution of the unknown—is a necessary thing for us to survive, so these paintings are about survival. I agreed with Carrie when she commented that perhaps we have non-survival experiences of vision. I certainly do. Painting isn’t about eating, finding shelter, avoiding predators. Painting is about seeing and about beauty and communicating our experiences, reflecting them back visually, questioning them, processing them, wondering about them. I agree with Carrie that painting and seeing can be like listening to music. We choose the music we want to hear because we have a desire to hear particular harmonies or melodies or sounds. We each see differently, delight in sights differently, and can choose what we wish to see, as well. It is not about the resolution, not about survival, but about a satisfaction in seeing something that engages us. This is very important.
The last thing is that I found Colby’s comment at the end to be very true—there is really no such thing as representation or abstraction. It’s what I was thinking during a lot of the discussion, and I’m glad someone said it. Really, there’s neither abstraction or representation or else they’re the same thing because experience is always made up of both taking in from outside and also our perception and our letting out of what’s going on inside. Making distinctions between abstraction//representation or inside//outside is pointless. This is funny because it comes to the issue of dualities, which in Buddhism, are said not to exist. And they don’t.
When I first heard about the Placing Color Panel Discussion I was really excited by the idea of listening to experts from different fields discuss and explain their take on ideas about color theory. Color theory is something that really fascinates me because I personally find that color has a great deal of influence over my mood and how I relate to certain objects, rooms, foods, etc. Therefore, an in depth discussion of this field centered around the Placing Color exhibit which I found fascinating and engaging really excited me.
However, I was disappointed. I thought the style of discussion chosen for the panel was too loose and the conversations that ensued were not accessible to a general audience. I feel as though there should have been more guided and prepared questions that dealt more specifically with topics that the audience could understand and connected with, presumably the art in the gallery or topics surrounding it.
That being said, there were points in the conversation that did take place that sparked my interest. I found Brad Park’s discussion about satisfaction and unease when viewing abstract works of art interesting. His statement approximately said that with abstract art viewers don’t get the satisfaction of complete perception of “knowing” what a painting depicts, or how it relates to world. This is unsettling because viewers are used to perception coming to some sort of order.
This panel discussion was one of the more captivating artist lectures I have attended at St. Mary’s. We are always hearing a singular artist discuss their work and process, so to hear from professors from all disciplines was really exciting. This is a liberal arts community - so I think these kinds of public conversations are important in providing a complete and applicable education. Brad Park’s input concerning the phenomenology of non-representational art was one of the more intriguing parts of the discussion to me – while some of the physics discussion was a kind of confusing (I’m still trying to figure out how a rainbow sorts color by space, but nonetheless it was cool to hear this professor discuss this aspect). At the beginning Park said that we tend to experience art and color through to objects – that there is this input and output of color. Park said that phenomenology studies these feedback mechanisms and how they can vary between individuals. Color and the experience of objects in art is able to teach us about ourselves. Also, that non-representational work is able to change habitual ways one relates to the world – a constructed condition in which objects reveals itself. I am not sure the object has to be completely finished or complete in its perception, but that is fine. The answer is not complete – because for most of the work at Placing Color I think that goes along with the purpose. Seeing the work from Placing Color in this way, is closest to how I interpreted the work before the discussion. I do try to make some sort or order out non-representational art – usually because I know that the artist grounded their work in specific sources and decisions. The “order” is usually not complete in non-representational – there is constantly changing interpretation based on the viewer’s experience. Carrie added that the goal of her work may be a specific activity rather than a visual representation – and that there are several layers and levels of meaning. I thought the development of discussion at the end was an interesting way to end – is there such thing as abstract art?? The fact that this multi-disciplinary panel was able to discuss this exhibit in depth, spanning disciplines, shows that this work is indeed not abstract. I wish the panel would have talked more about the artists work more specifically – comparing the way they are constructing a place and how their experiences are translating the work. Its interesting- this concept of art that is more truthful, though never totally finished/done. There was comment made by the physics professor (?) - that concerning Bakers installation piece, he was more interested in the light and space off of the canvas. I would have liked to hear more conversation similar to that this - around the works that surrounded the panel. It’s really exciting to witness people outside an art discipline can appreciate these artistic decisions just as an experiment or subject within their own scientific specialties – I saw people at this discussion that I had never seen at an art event before, so hopefully it demonstrated the endless possibilities of art. Hopefully other people were able to grasp these connections –the discussion may have veered too much around this question about whether non-representational art truthful? Discussion may have gotten too broad and too far away from the space and color actually on the walls. This discussion helped to explain why exactly I was drawn to this kind of work and non-representational art is general. Every time I come back to the work – my experiences have changed – so perception is never finished and the work can be a constantly changing, active experience in itself.
I most say that the panel was amazing. It was great to hear what placing color means in different majors. Placing color in space is critical to an anthropologist. How space was used in the past and how it is used now is something that is important to the understanding of human nature. Time plays a big part in how that space was used. Color is also important in soil because the different colors help anthropologies determine where artifacts were found. Miss King wonders what color meant to people in past compared to how it is interpreted in modern times. For instance, did the color red mean life in the olden days compared to what we interpret it as today?
ReplyDeleteIn Physics color is the wavelength of light you are looking at. Without color space will not exist. Color can be unseen to the human eye. We do not see all the colors that are out there in the world. The seeing of color has all to do with the way light hits an object and how it goes into our minds and how we process it. It is the recreation of what we see, which is not, what is really out there. A way a physician sees these paintings has a lot to do with the passing of time that was used to make the layers and the way it relates to the measurement of color put into the paintings.
In Philosophy color is an experience or movement in the world and how it affects us. For instance, changing habitual ways makes us perceive that world or environment differently. Color, space and place is more of the exploration of ourselves within the environment and less of the atmosphere.
After listening to all these distinctive areas of study, I realized that the meaning of the paintings comes from outside. Meaning the people’s culture and traditions through time. Things have meaning to us because we choose to agree that it has meaning. There is a lot of things happening around us that we don’t know or choose not to do or get anything about it. Looking at the paintings for the third time, I notice that I associated myself with these colors because of the symbolic meaning they carry in my culture. I started counting in my head the number of times I thought the painter might have added layers in one section of the canvas. I went from side to side, stepped away and came up close. This to me created meaning and added to the layers of the painting, which I thought brought out the meaning of architecture.
I have to say that I was a little disappointed in the panel discussion. When I first heard about it, I was thrilled. I thought it was a fabulous idea and a very unique experience. It would be unlike anything else I have seen at this school. Unfortunately, while it did yield some very intriguing insight into the show, I feel it was very rushed and disorganized.
ReplyDeleteI was expecting each panelist to take center stage a little more. I guess I overlooked the word, "discussion." I wanted each person to speak more in depth about their discipline, the show specifically, and even their own personal interpretation of the show. I completely understand that a discussion could have been a very intriguing means of conducting this event, but since there was really not much audience interaction anyway, I think the "discussion" would have been more effective as a series of gallery talks or lectures. There was just not enough time for a real discussion to take place. There were too many panelists and disciplines and far too little time to address all the issues that were of interest to me. I spent so much time just trying to keep up with all the jumping around and interpret what the panelists were talking about that I couldn't even begin to formulate questions for them.
I love this concept. I would like for it to happen again for future shows, but I think it should be done differently. I certainly do not think there should be any fewer disciplines involved, but I do think each representative should present their material in a more direct fashion. I feel as though some representatives were much more thorough than others. There needs to be a little more consistency so that as an audience we are getting enough information to really compare and contrast the different responses of the respective disciplines.
The placing color panel was one of the more important developments of interdisciplinary dialogue I have seen since my time here. I have reiterated my own desire to see the disciplines act collectively in an effort to find a more holistic understanding. In my experience, especially between the natural sciences and the humanities, that we work in silence next to one another to accomplish common goals. To have such a barrier be broken in the context of the gallery, a setting that is characteristically more specialized and introverted than other academic positions, is an exciting moment for those of us searching for new answers. The contributions that most of the panel members gave were with a muffled tone of giddy empowerment, while the rest of the panel was wide eyed and apparently fascinated by the perspectives of their peers. I may be embellishing a bit, but I truly believe that for most of the panel and the audience, such conversations are few and far between.
ReplyDeleteThe insight that Brad Park gave to the discussion I found the most compelling and relevantly linked. His specialization of phenomenology was extremely helpful for me to get a better grip on the movement, and I think it was a refreshing voice to be heard next to many research scientists trained in objective analysis. The physical and psychological perspectives were right on target as well, and followed as I saw it, quite harmoniously with the more abstract philosophical discussion.
Of the most important parts of the discussion for me was the question that Brad Park posed, if someone were to ask you your name, and you said yellow, the answer would be rejected because it does not qualify, to you the questioner, as an answer. This is an extremely important statement, especially among this group of people who all frame questions differently with different methods. As artists or psychologists or anthropologists or physicists, we always ask questions with predisposed parameters as to what could qualify as an answer. It can only be then, when collectively discussing the parameters of a question, can we even get close to allowing for open answers.
I also greatly enjoyed the conversation of purpose driven perception, seeing what we need to see, for the sake of our survival, as a sociobiological fundamental to perception in general. Then what is the enjoyment of music, what is the enjoyment of focused, fabricated visages that do not read as necessary. There is no deer in the crosshairs within the placing color exhibition. Unfortunately the anthropological discussion I found to be lacking except for the comment about community investment in art and the value of destroying a powerful work of art as an even more powerful work of collective decision making. But I pose the question to Julia, at the same rate why not collectively destroy historic St. Mary’s City, or any other heritage site? Is its value not created by community investment?
Placing Color Panel Reflection
ReplyDeleteThe panel brought up a lot of different things I’ve been thinking about and I had a few important realizations during it. The first is: phenomenology is difficult for me to take in sometimes because eventually it just sounds like “blah blah blah,” and up until the panel I couldn’t figure out why I felt this way. The thing is, phenomenology is trying to explain how we experience. My immediate thought was “Why do we need to explain? Can’t we just live it? Just live life and be there for it?” And thinking about it more, I think we do need to explain how we experience if we are going to talk to one another intellectually about how we live in the world. Yes, for some this would help, but less so for me. I would say that we can share our experiences in other ways, not just in jargony language and obtuse explanations. I’m hoping that my paintings present another way to relate my experience other than by trying to say it in words. I’m finding words difficult in my artist statement because our experiences aren’t always capable of be translated in this way, and that’s where phenomenology falls short for me.
The word “truth” came up a number of times, and it, too is something I’ve been considering a lot lately. To a physicist, truth is the object without the perceiver, to the phenomenologist, it is the perception of the object. As I see it, there are as many truths as there are perceiving beings in this world. In a way, it is impossible for anything to be untrue. No one can ever get anything wrong because fundamentally, everything is experience—it’s both internal and external, not one or the other.
I did agree with the comments about abstract painting being satisfying because it never comes to resolution and that unknown, or many knowns (if we have many associations) is actually what engages us with it. Rather than seeing something strange and it becoming familiar, abstraction allows us to go the opposite way, seeing something familiar and making it looser, more unknown, making it “strange.” So in looking at abstract painting we have a shifting, in-between experience, where it’s never “done” but instead is ongoing, and always different each time we approach the painting. This is partly what interests me about painting. I guess it is just good to keep in mind that some people want that resolution and that they may not be satisfied with abstract paintings. It’s okay—no particular kind of art is for everyone.
However, in the discussion, the resolution//abstraction idea brought up the idea that “making sense” out of an abstraction—the resolution of the unknown—is a necessary thing for us to survive, so these paintings are about survival. I agreed with Carrie when she commented that perhaps we have non-survival experiences of vision. I certainly do. Painting isn’t about eating, finding shelter, avoiding predators. Painting is about seeing and about beauty and communicating our experiences, reflecting them back visually, questioning them, processing them, wondering about them. I agree with Carrie that painting and seeing can be like listening to music. We choose the music we want to hear because we have a desire to hear particular harmonies or melodies or sounds. We each see differently, delight in sights differently, and can choose what we wish to see, as well. It is not about the resolution, not about survival, but about a satisfaction in seeing something that engages us. This is very important.
The last thing is that I found Colby’s comment at the end to be very true—there is really no such thing as representation or abstraction. It’s what I was thinking during a lot of the discussion, and I’m glad someone said it. Really, there’s neither abstraction or representation or else they’re the same thing because experience is always made up of both taking in from outside and also our perception and our letting out of what’s going on inside. Making distinctions between abstraction//representation or inside//outside is pointless. This is funny because it comes to the issue of dualities, which in Buddhism, are said not to exist. And they don’t.
When I first heard about the Placing Color Panel Discussion I was really excited by the idea of listening to experts from different fields discuss and explain their take on ideas about color theory. Color theory is something that really fascinates me because I personally find that color has a great deal of influence over my mood and how I relate to certain objects, rooms, foods, etc. Therefore, an in depth discussion of this field centered around the Placing Color exhibit which I found fascinating and engaging really excited me.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I was disappointed. I thought the style of discussion chosen for the panel was too loose and the conversations that ensued were not accessible to a general audience. I feel as though there should have been more guided and prepared questions that dealt more specifically with topics that the audience could understand and connected with, presumably the art in the gallery or topics surrounding it.
That being said, there were points in the conversation that did take place that sparked my interest. I found Brad Park’s discussion about satisfaction and unease when viewing abstract works of art interesting. His statement approximately said that with abstract art viewers don’t get the satisfaction of complete perception of “knowing” what a painting depicts, or how it relates to world. This is unsettling because viewers are used to perception coming to some sort of order.
This panel discussion was one of the more captivating artist lectures I have attended at St. Mary’s. We are always hearing a singular artist discuss their work and process, so to hear from professors from all disciplines was really exciting. This is a liberal arts community - so I think these kinds of public conversations are important in providing a complete and applicable education.
ReplyDeleteBrad Park’s input concerning the phenomenology of non-representational art was one of the more intriguing parts of the discussion to me – while some of the physics discussion was a kind of confusing (I’m still trying to figure out how a rainbow sorts color by space, but nonetheless it was cool to hear this professor discuss this aspect). At the beginning Park said that we tend to experience art and color through to objects – that there is this input and output of color. Park said that phenomenology studies these feedback mechanisms and how they can vary between individuals. Color and the experience of objects in art is able to teach us about ourselves. Also, that non-representational work is able to change habitual ways one relates to the world – a constructed condition in which objects reveals itself. I am not sure the object has to be completely finished or complete in its perception, but that is fine. The answer is not complete – because for most of the work at Placing Color I think that goes along with the purpose. Seeing the work from Placing Color in this way, is closest to how I interpreted the work before the discussion. I do try to make some sort or order out non-representational art – usually because I know that the artist grounded their work in specific sources and decisions. The “order” is usually not complete in non-representational – there is constantly changing interpretation based on the viewer’s experience. Carrie added that the goal of her work may be a specific activity rather than a visual representation – and that there are several layers and levels of meaning. I thought the development of discussion at the end was an interesting way to end – is there such thing as abstract art?? The fact that this multi-disciplinary panel was able to discuss this exhibit in depth, spanning disciplines, shows that this work is indeed not abstract.
I wish the panel would have talked more about the artists work more specifically – comparing the way they are constructing a place and how their experiences are translating the work. Its interesting- this concept of art that is more truthful, though never totally finished/done. There was comment made by the physics professor (?) - that concerning Bakers installation piece, he was more interested in the light and space off of the canvas. I would have liked to hear more conversation similar to that this - around the works that surrounded the panel.
It’s really exciting to witness people outside an art discipline can appreciate these artistic decisions just as an experiment or subject within their own scientific specialties – I saw people at this discussion that I had never seen at an art event before, so hopefully it demonstrated the endless possibilities of art. Hopefully other people were able to grasp these connections –the discussion may have veered too much around this question about whether non-representational art truthful? Discussion may have gotten too broad and too far away from the space and color actually on the walls.
This discussion helped to explain why exactly I was drawn to this kind of work and non-representational art is general. Every time I come back to the work – my experiences have changed – so perception is never finished and the work can be a constantly changing, active experience in itself.