This set of questions is posted under course documents as ENG 295 Art Response--note that completing these questions will set you up for essay draft due Monday! Whoever does not come with me needs to attach Brooklyn Museum stub to essay :)
Follow this sequence in responding to your chosen piece (take good notes)
1. Experience:
What are your feelings when you look at the image? Write your reactions including any
personal experiences that you can relate to the image.
2. Literal:
Describe exactly what you see in the image or artifact. Be as precise as you can, noting colors, materials and textures, gesture, expression, mood (Is it sad, playful, dramatic, lyrical?). Also notice the way space is used within a painting, around a sculpture. . .
3. Interpretation:
Describe exactly what you see in the image or artifact. Be as precise as you can, noting colors, materials and textures, gesture, expression, mood (Is it sad, playful, dramatic, lyrical?). Also notice the way space is used within a painting, around a sculpture. . .
3. Interpretation:
Draw a conclusion about what is happening in the artifact or
picture and why it is happening: what meaning does the imagery (all the
elements of the image) convey? You
may have more than one idea here, but try to connect them.
4. Evaluation:
4. Evaluation:
What world-view is conveyed in the image? In other words what kind of judgment
does the image or artifact make about society or reality? How does the image connect to ideas we
have been discussing in our class, if any?
With each step, as we do in our discussion of literature,
remember to give specific evidence from the image to support your claims. This structure may be used to expand
your reflections into an essay.
AT the exhibit, choose one image or artifact to write about
using this guide. The information
you record will become your essay for English 295: Connecting Postcolonial
Ideas to Images, due October 31.
So I went today. The gallery is in the 4th floor, and note that we aren't allowed to take pictures. But I asked and they said it's okay to take pictures of the plaques. Have fun tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info!
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ReplyDeleteWalking around Wangechi Mutu's exhibition made me feel angry especially when I entered the party room. Seeing all those dishes there, simple objects we use for a moment without caring about it for more than what they are simple tools. It drives me mad to think that men can so easily think that about women, that they are simple objects to satisfy men's desires. That's what the dishes were symbol for, each with a clear or a complex image of a vagina, telling us how we can just play around with them, use them and through them away as simple tools. The rest of the exhibition made me think about how obsessed we have become with technology and everything related to futurism but still we can't get rid of our machismo.
ReplyDeleteThere was a paint that really challenged my ideology and even my beliefs for their complexity way of presenting themes. The paint was called "Humming 2010", it was a human plant hybrid, which was a woman covered in cheetah's skin with feet similar to roots in a brown grass. There is another woman with her legs opens showing her private part and where her head should be there was a pig flower reaching all places and some weird looking birds with human eyes around it. This picture suggests how the relationship between people and nature should be, closer, depending to each other and in many ways converged into one. The flower symbolizes the fertility of women for many cultures and in the same way a flower is delicate a women is too and many of us were though that way but at the same time our system also suggests that is fine to objectify women. This idea takes any respect for women away creating a violent treatment towards women. The birds in the picture have human feet which suggest that these birds are the men who come to the flowers and take their pollen with or without their permission. Birds rape the flowers the same way some men hurt not just one but many women and Mutu did a good job at emphasizing it in her paint.
This aggression against is not just physical aggression but verbal and mental aggression from people in high social positions to family members. Mutu's art work focuses in how culturally wrong we are at treating women as objects from early times to post-colonial times and even in more contemporary periods.