Week Nine: Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller (link to his Bio) has been described as a philosopher, designer, architect, artist, engineer, entrepreneur, author, mathematician, teacher and inventor he considered himself a "Comprehensive anticipatory design scientist". I however consider him an explorer,  a visionary thinker ahead of his time creating a new frontier. 

He has inspired many to think outside of the box or inside the dome? Above all he was a inventor that inspired artist which makes me question why he has a exhibition in a fine art museum? What makes his work art to be museum worthy? Why is in not just theoretical architecture, very few of his ideas made it into production. Due to the fact that he refused for production to start after accepting orders because he was not convinced that the design was perfect, the lack of materials and also the lack of  acceptance from the general public as a norm for is advanced designs. So why an Art Museum and not a science or history museum? Is it because he has influenced so many artist and only a few scientists. That's were this weeks reading by Elizabeth A.T. Smith is lacking she skims over the top of the subject Fuller himself spouting out a bunch of names of artist and writers with little description to n

one of their work. She does little to talk about Fuller's own work except to name some of his concepts. I am interested to see the exhibit at the MCA this week hopefully it will give me a greater depth of his inspiration. 

week eight: What does a landscape mean to you?

After reading the catalogue Manifest Destiny/ Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape, I was left questioning the use of landscape as subject in art. Was a landscape painting ever just a painting or have artist been illustrating a hierarchy of nature all along?  Painting that I though were just landscapes have become so much more outlining the shift from Anthropocentric to Biocentric, man being in the middle to part of the circle. That we Euro-American

 have sought harmony with nature for longer than first though after we got over the wildness of the landscape and are entitlement and domination over it. 

Yet I wonder why we have come to retrace are foots steps and recreate images that have already been captured. As Mark Klett is doing in his work Yosemite in time, are there really know interesting view that have not been captured. He has included the images of past photographers which does not convey that there has been any change in these pristine landscapes, that is just that these landscapes are pristine there should be know change. So what is the point? look at me I can make the same image over?

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, Lake Teanaya, 2002 from Yosemite in Time

And what about this newer tendency to create artificial landscapes from objects takes from the landscape. Why are we using stand ins for the landscape? Have we destroyed and polluted so much of are environment that it is less interesting and even depressing to look at. 

Ernie Button, grape nuts dune #7, from Cerealism

Week six: we are connected

The Environmentalist and The Artist do they go together? In Every Corner is Alive  we get a glimpse  of a photographer  Eliot Porter as an environmentalist and his relationship with the Sierra Club. Photographs of nature give access without impact however what about the production of the image, Kodak was one of the largest polluters, the paper we print on has to come from some where. So it is easy to point fingers and hard to put a handle on the problem. So it is hard to justify environmental landscapes and not feel as though we are all part of the whole problem of pollution because we humans come first in are minds. (Its a survival instinct)

We must remember that we are all connected. And of special interest to ALL.

Eliot Porter

Ansel Adams

Terry Evans, Prairie

Terry Evans, Steel Work-Part Two

I find that Terry Evans work is interesting to contemplate about after this weeks readings. Almost all of her work has a quite stillness to it and is peaceful even though the Prairie is very different in contest to her Steel-Work. This extreme juxtaposition make  me hurt in side by the reality that my consuming attributes to is vast devastation of the earth. And yet to survive we continue to consume and the environment is the by-lines of are daily life.