Stelarc!

This guy is pretty darn interesting.  So my name is Stelarc and I am going to put an ear on my forearm.  Eventually I plan on putting a microphone in between so that everyone can hear what my third arm is going to hear.  WOW! What a concept.  This really just shows that he is seeing things in a totally different perspective and I like it.  I don't fully understand it but I enjoy thinking about it.

Looking at things in a different perspective is definitely something that I would like to start doing myself.  As most people I am pretty narrow minded.  Things are what they are.  Whatever is in front of you is what it is.  But this is so not true especially with art.  This gives art a different meaning.  My goal is to look at things daily and try to view it as something else.

Improv Everywhere!

First of all, I think this is absolutely hilarious.  This is probably the most entertaining art that I have ever seen.  In this mission they decided to go into a McDonalds and have a butler in the bathroom.  They wanted to make a fast food place more "upidy" and "richy."  So this butler guy would greet the people after they used the restroom and offered there services.  They had better soap then the McDonalds and paper towels instead of the hand dryer.  They had essentials that they also could use ranging from floss to gold bond, to condoms.  GENUS!

This form of art is free.  They are opened to do what they desire and I think it is most interesting because they get a lot of feed back from the audience.  If a painting is hung up on a wall in a museum the artists does really get to see how others are responding to it unless they have a camera or they are there.  With Improv Everywhere they are there and see everything. They get to capture all the expressions from there audience.  I think its great :)

Andy Goldsworthy

This piece is called Rives and Tides.  Andy Goldsworthy does his pieces for interesting reasons.  I like the fact that you can't really display his work because its almost temporary.  I say almost because if it wasn't for earth, wind, or fire, then they would last forever.  He doesn't worry about the world destroying his pieces because that is nature, and I admire that.  

I like this piece a lot because it is so unsteady.  Any extra movement, little flinch, or wind will destroy this piece.  He spends so much time creating his pieces.  I like how abstract this piece is.  I can just stare at it because it consists of so many little sticks.  Each line leads to another almost like a maze.  I enjoy looking at his work.

Marina Abramovic

This piece is called Rhythm 0, by Marina Abromovic.  This picture is only capturing her piece but is not the actual piece.  She is a performance artist.  This piece involved a table with 72 different items on it ranging from a feather to a gun and bullet.  She was really testing not only her audience but her self too.  She was very passive in this piece and did little to no movement.  The audience was the performers and were able to do anything with the stuff on the table to her.

I think that Abromovic is a very brave women.  I like how creative she was with her piece.  No one, I can think of, would have enough courage to do this.  I find the results very interesting.  The audience started off tickling her and later became quite vulgar.  The fact that the audience was told to do act open her, I guess, gave them less liability.  I think that it is terrible that they would do such things to this poor women because they can get away with it.  It really shows how society is, which disappoints me.

Cancer Sticks

I am not sure if I would consider this Performance Art or Earth Art or even a Happening.  What I did was have my friend and his brother "plant" cigarettes into a plastic container where beautiful flowers once were.  Planting the smoking cigarettes demonstrated how instead of growing into a beautiful flower they die and get smaller and smaller until they are a bud.

I am definitely not a fan of cigarettes.  I hate them in every way.  I did this because I believe that cigarettes are becoming a bigger fad every day.  Younger and younger kids are starting to smoke them because they look "cool."  I think they smell bad, it looks gross, and they are horrible for you.

MAYA LIN!

She considers herself an artist and an architect.  She does studio work, architectural work, memorials, and large scale installations.  She takes micro and macro views of the art and translates them into her installations.  She does this because she wants to see "how we relate and respond to the environment, and present new ways of looking at the world around us."

The artist-architect first made a name for herself in 1981 when, as a junior at the Yale School of Architecture, her pioneering design—two long black granite walls, partly submerged in the ground, incised with names of dead and missing soldiers—won a national competition to become the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. "The effect of onlookers' reflections superimposed over the 58,000 engraved names attempts to symbolically integrate past and present."

Lin is also considered an environmentalist, she as consistently focused on environmental concerns, promoting sustainable building design in her architectural works, while making the environment the subject of her artworks. She is "deeply committed to focusing attention back to the environment and to ask us to pay closer attention to the natural world." 

Lin is currently working on what will be her last memorial, entitled What is Missing? which will focus on bringing awareness to the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss. "It's about revealing things that are diminishing from nature, and from the natural world, that you might not even know about," she says, "as well as focusing on the extreme, sixth extinction of the planet—caused not by an asteroid but by the actions of a single species." She means us.

Fun Facts:

She graduated from Yale University.  In 2005 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.  She has been featured in Time Magazine.  She had a documentary written about her, a biography, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision.   This won a Academy Award for Best Documentary. Lin and her family traveled to South America, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, India, Southeast Asia, and China.