MY RESEARCH.
John cage
music composer
experimental
unique/different
daring
touched on religion/influenced by religion beliefs
unpredictable/nonsensical
observant
greatly influential work
Cage’s work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller, on the power of technology to promote social change.
During the seventies and eighties, Cage's compositions took on a variety of guises, from the overtly political and polemic Lecture on the Weather (1975- based on the texts of the naturalist-anarchist author Henry David Thoreau), through to the hyper-virtuosic- an example being the Freeman Etudes (1980), initially composed for the violinist Paul Zukofsky. Cage conceived the latter as a useful social demonstration of the performer practically surpassing his own abilities. Given their immense difficulty, such pieces can be considered to be a forerunner of the New Complexity movement.
They deconstruct operatic form, yet are not merely parodic.
Cage was also highly prolific as a writer, producing a series of increasingly experimental texts that were largely incorporated into several books published during his lifetime.In these books, featuring writings ranging from straightforward essays to diary entries to wholly experimental writing. For example, he invented the mesostic, a type of poem in which Cage ‘wrote through’ texts such as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Cage employed chance methodologies to create texts which were often presented spatially on the page in a striking variety of font sizes, typefaces and layouts- an approach towards creating an increasingly visual dimension to text, perhaps inspired by the experimental poetry of E. E. Cummings and lettrism.
Samuel becket
Irish writer
poet
dramatist
dark humor
daring
Experimental
share personal opinions indirectly by writing.
Beckett's work is stark and fundamentally minimalist. As a student, assistant, and friend of James Joyce, Beckett is considered by many one of the last modernists; as an inspiration to many later writers, he is sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is also considered one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called "Theatre of the Absurd".
Beckett is publicly most famous for the play Waiting for Godot. In a much-quoted article, the critic Vivian Mercier wrote that Beckett "has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice. Beckett worked on the play title En attendant Godot
The play was a critical, popular, and controversial success in Paris. It opened in London in 1955 to mainly negative reviews, but the tide turned with positive
Beckett's earliest works are generally considered to have been strongly influenced by the work of his friend James Joyce: they are deeply erudite, seeming to display the author's learning merely for its own sake, resulting in several obscure passages. The opening phrases of the short-story collection More Pricks than Kicks (1934) affords an representative sample of this style:
He explores the themes of insanity and chess.
The novel's opening sentence also hints at the somewhat pessimistic undertones and black humour that animate many of Beckett's works: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new'. Watt, written while Beckett was in hiding in Roussillon during World War II, is similar in terms of themes, but less exuberant in its style. This novel also, at certain points, explores human movement as if it were a mathematical permutation, presaging Beckett's later preoccupation—in both his novels and dramatic works—with precise movement.
basically, he realized that his art must be subjective and drawn wholly from his own inner world—that would result in the works for which Beckett is probably best remembered today.
Beckett produced four major full-length stage plays: En attendant Godot (written 1948–1949; Waiting for Godot), Fin de partie (1955–1957; Endgame), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1960). These plays—which are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in the so-called "Theatre of the Absurd"—deal in a very blackly humorous way with themes similar to those of the roughly contemporary existentialist thinkers, though Beckett himself cannot be pigeonholed as an existentialist. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same name; Beckett and Godot were centerpieces of the book. Esslin claimed these plays were the fulfillment of Albert Camus's concept of "the absurd"; this is one reason Beckett is often falsely labeled as an existentialist. Though many of the themes are similar, Beckett had little affinity for existentialism as a whole.
Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and, indeed, incomprehensible world
Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett's work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He, more than anyone else, opened up the possibility of drama and fiction that dispense with conventional plot and the unities of place and time in order to focus on essential components of the human condition.
Francis bacon
1st Viscount St Alban
English philosopher, statesman, and essayist.
He is also known as a catalyst of the scientific revolution.
Daring
experimental
creative
different on how he views certain issues/subjects
Not afraid to touch on sensitve issues.
and shares personal views by writing
Bacon published an essay that reveals a version of himself not often seen in history. This essay, a lesser-known work entitled, "An Advertisement Touching an Holy War," advocated the elimination of detrimental societal elements by the English and compared this to the endeavors of Hercules while establishing civilized society in ancient Greece. He saw the "extirpation and debellating of giants, monsters, and foreign tyrants, not only as lawful, but as meritorious, even divine honour.Laurence Lampert has interpreted Bacon's treatise An Advertisement Touching a Holy War as advocating "spiritual warfare against the spiritual rulers of European civilization.”
Derived through use of his methods, Bacon explicates his somewhat fragmentary ethical system in the seventh and eighth books of his De augmentis scientiarum (1623). He distinguishes between duty to the community, an ethical matter, and duty to God, a religious matter. Bacon claimed that any moral action is the action of the human will, which is governed by belief and spurred on by the passions; good habit is what aids men in directing their will toward the good; no universal rules can be made, as both situations and men's characters differ.
Regarding faith, in De augmentis, he writes that "the more discordant, therefore, and incredible, the divine mystery is, the more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith." He writes in "The Essays: Of Atheism" that "a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion."
Bacon contrasted the new approach of the development of science with that of the Middle Ages. He said:
"Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world."
Scott walker
singer/ song writer
reclusive
daring
There were also early indications that this concentrated attention was not conducive to his emotional well being. He became reclusive and somewhat distanced from his audience. During this time, he combined his earlier teen appeal with a darker, more idiosyncratic approach hinted at in songs like Orpheus on the Images album.
Known for being private and reclusive, Walker's recording activity has been sporadic since the late 1970s
james Augustine Aloysius Joyce
very open on sensitive issues.
Hence encountered censorship problems.
shows how daring and he is.
Irish expatriate writer
Best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its highly controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
Dubliners
greatly influenced by what he gone through in this life.
Daring/brave
Not afraid to touch on sensitive issues.
Ulysses
this publication encountered censorship problems in the United States; serialization was halted in 1920 when the editors were convicted of publishing obscenity. The novel remained proscribed in the United States until Judge John M. Woolsey lifted the ban in 1933.
The year 1922 was a key year in the history of English-language literary modernism, with the appearance of both Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land. In Ulysses, Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and virtually every other literary technique to present his characters.
Reaction to the work was mixed, including negative comment from early supporters of Joyce's work
Joyce's method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations was pushed to the limit in Finnegans Wake, which abandoned all conventions of plot and character construction and is written in a peculiar and obscure language, based mainly on complex multi-level puns. This approach is similar to, but far more extensive than that used by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky. If Ulysses is a day in the life of a city, then Wake is a night and partakes of the logic of dreams. This has led many readers and critics to apply Joyce's oft-quoted description in the Wake of Ulysses as his "usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles"to the Wake itself. However, readers have been able to reach a consensus about the central cast of characters and general plot.
Joyce's work has been subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types.
Eraserhead
david lynch
horrific
dark
out of the norm
experimental
imaginative
daring
different
nonsensical
exaggerating
Eraserhead focuses much more on imagery and mood than any kind of coherent plot. As such it is considered a difficult film to understand and is open to various interpretations. For example, the review at DVD Verdict offers at least three interpretations.
The story does not have a strictly linear plot, it is punctuated with fantasy/dream sequences of differing lengths, and the boundary between these sequences and the primary narrative strand is often blurred. Many have interpreted it as a visual-sound experience rather than a narrative or story, a film that is more about conveying a very specific and powerful mood and atmosphere.
As is the case with most unconventional artwork which has no explanation from the artist, there are many who believe the film to be highly over analyzed, and maintain that aside from the small basic script, Lynch filled the film with random and shocking elements simply to create a mood, leaving the difficult task of interpretation to critics and viewers.
With that in mind, a consistent pattern still emerges.
He acts solely from a will to powerlessness: his only aim is neutralizing his self-expression.
He implicitly re-fuses mutualism and commensalism.
Thereby, his world-view is severed from time causality is experienced singularly as symbiosis.
Fransico de goya
daring
experimental
Not afraid to touch on sensitive issues.
The sleep of reasons produces monsters
being a criticism of "human errors and vices," although the subjects are often obscure and interpretation purposely difficult. Lampooning both political and religious figures.
The Sleep of Reason is a self-portrait of the artist, surrounded by demonic-looking animals. It was intended as the frontispiece for the series, but Goya soon thought better of this, probably because the subject related too closely to two plates in Rousseau's 1793 Paris edition of Philosophie at a time when the very name of Rousseau was anathema to religious and political leaders in Spain. Instead, Goya created another, more traditional, self-portrait as the frontispiece and buried The Sleep of Reason well within the series, as plate 43.
In Los Caprichos Goya begins to push the boundaries of the intaglio process to achieve a sense of ambiguous space coupled with a modernist sensibility.
Mark gertler
marry go round
when emotion conquers logic
painted based on how he felt on big sensitive issues.
observant
This work was painted at the height of the First World War, which seems to be its subject. Men and women in rigid poses, their mouths crying in silent unison, seem trapped on a carousel that revolves endlessly.Gertler was a conscientious objector. He lived near London’s Hampstead Heath, and may have been inspired by an annual fair held there for wounded soldiers. The fairground ride, traditionally associated with pleasure and entertainment, is horrifically transformed into a metaphor for the relentless military machine. He explained, ‘Lately the whole horror of war has come freshly upon me
With its harsh flickering restlessness the painting seemed to be a comment on Mark's life in the various scenes through which he had passed - Whitechapel slum, young artist's Bohemia, fashionable society, the Garsington intelligentsia. It was impossible too to look at these mechanical soldiers going round and round without recalling the horrors of the deadlocked Western Front....." William Rothenstein, Men and Memories 1942.
his words:
" You ask what is the matter with me ? Well, it is something serious - the greatest crisis in my life - and you know what I have already suffered in the past. I fact for the time being I see no solution - the trouble is- my work - what is my value as an artist / What have I in me after all ? Is there anything there worth while after all ? That is the point - I doubt myself - I doubt myself terribly - after all these years of labour and you know how I worked - so so hard with my blood and I have lived and fed up my work - my work was by faith....." letter to William Rothenstein, c1925. September 1939, dies by his own hand.
Edward Gorey
out of the norm
nonsensical
smart
odd/ different
experimental
daring to be different
He is typically described as an illustrator, but this merely scratches the surface. His combination of words and pictures has led some to classify him as having been a cartoonist, while others regard him primarily as a writer who drew, or an illustrator who wrote. His books can be found in the humor and cartoon sections of major bookstores, but books like The Object Lesson have earned serious critical respect as works of surrealist art. His endless formal experimentations—creating books that were wordless, books that were literally matchbox-sized, pop-up books, books entirely populated by inanimate objects.
Gorey classified his own work as literary nonsense.
Gorey seemed to love the precision involved in this genre, and, in response to the accusation of being gothic, he stated, "If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense
Much of his work fits rather well into the genre of literary nonsense, yet there is no one category that can encompass the great variety of style and subject in his many books.
different
experimental
daring
out of the norm
Matthew barney
experimental
daring
exaggerating
very imaginative
surrealist
brave
not afraid to touch on sensitive issues
Barney has mentioned the phenomenon of hypertrophy as a metaphorical inspiration for much of his work; several of his performance pieces have involved Barney restrained or somehow encumbered while attempting to execute a drawing. The performance aspects of Barney's work have been described as predominant, while the resultant drawings have been called "[not] very interesting in their own right." Some have criticized Drawing Restraint 9 for what has been termed a superficial treatment of Japanese culture combined with an undesirable awkwardness in the actors/performers, including Barney.
Barney's work has provoked strong critical reaction, both positive and negative. Calling his work a "snooze", The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl criticized Barney as being "a star for attaining stardom."
Another critic in the same magazine characterizes elements in Drawing Restraint 9 as "an unabashed display of Oriental kitsch that makes Memoirs of a Geisha look like an ethnographic documentary."
Jed Perl has described Barney's work as "phony-baloney mythopoetic movies, accompanied by Dumpster loads of junk from some godforsaken gymnasium of the imagination".
Others have defended his work, comparing Barney to such canonical performance artists as Chris Burden and Vito Acconci and arguing that his art is simultaneously a critique and a celebration of commercialism and blockbuster filmmaking. Commenting on the Cremaster series' enigmatic nature, Alexandra Keller and Frazer Ward write.
Others have asserted Barney's works are contemporary expressions of surrealism.In the words of Chris Chang, Barney's Cremaster films, though "completely arcane, hermetic and solipsistic ... nevertheless periodically provide some of the most enigmatically beautiful experimental film imagery you'll ever see."
critics:
"Barney is the real thing. When he brings his boundless imagination to a subject he goes down to its depths to create images and implant ideas that stay in your mind for ever" writes Richard Dorment in the Telegraph.
In conclusion,
every one of them are very daring,brave. open
Not afraid to address issues that are known to be sensitive to most.
That sets them apart from the others. different.
by sharing different views thru their works.
However,my favorites among all is matthew barney and eraserhead.
cause they create the most impact on me probably because how loud their images are.
how exaggerating their works are.
both are very imaginative and experimental with their work. Very daring with their visuals that looks really odd. Out of the norm. Hence not pleasing to the eyes.
other then that another favorite artist of mine that i think fits in this category really well would be mark ryden. his strange use to visuals may seem unpleasing yet sets up a mood. Happy yet gloomy and dark.
hence i've picked them as my artistic influences.
to be loud experimental with visuals and idea. like me touching on politics for no.4
on a well known classic children's novel and distort the ending for no2.
and no.1 on satanic rituals and believes.
WHAT I’VE PICKED.
1. Inside body mutation is salvation of the soul
2. The secret garden is nothing but a toilet bowl
4. The emperor wears his invisible clothes walking proudly in his kingdom capital
full of dogs and monkeys.
I haven’t decided which im going to do. But I’ve thought of what to do.
Synopsis
1. It seems like it’s the only way for him to gain power. For redemption.
To fill him up to make him feel alive. He had to do it. Horrfic.
2. Based on the story of secret garden. A humorous twist at the end of the story.
whereby “ Only the good things happen. “ Really nice and sweet at the start which lead to a total unexpected ending.
4. Regarding politics. How useless george bush turns out to be to some. An indirect humiliation. A way to play with filthy politics. With him george bush as a monkey and humans as americans. Dogs and monkeys as other liberals and defence force.
WAR WAR WAR, CASH MONEY OIL,DEATH,BLOOD,PEOPLE.
BANANAS?
Matthew barney-cremaster cycle.
