The readings this week were interviews from Richard Shusterman and Carol Becker. Both artists seemed to be saying the same thing: that art should be removed from it’s current context (only being viewed in the gallery by a limited audience) in order to broaden our perception of what art can do for a society. They both agree that art in other societies is viewed differently, and Carol Becker goes into detail on how she feels we should fix this problem. She describes the relationship that modern artists have with their community with words such as disconnected, isolated, and disinterested. She puts a lot of blame for this phenomenon on art schools and the way they are structured. “I think art schools should be structured around ideas, not around physical matter or what tools you’re going to use. Maybe they should be more like departments of narration, departments of political art, figurative art, abstraction, and so on- and then whoever wants to work in whatever medium would think about ideas first, and then find the medium at any given moment through which they could fulfill them. But it would be the ideas that would frame the school.” (Carol Becker p. 375) There are a lot of aspects of this idea that I think are great. She backs this idea of working from the idea rather than the medium by saying how many modern artists work with different mediums depending on the subject matter. The idea that they stick with one is outdated. This whole idea caused me to think about how I would structure my own art school if I was given the chance. The only thing I would add to this structure is to require students to take prerequisites that teach them formally how to work with different mediums available before allowing them to use anything they want in the classes that are only based on ideas.

Our speaker this week, Terri Warpinski, is a good example of someone who has experience with how other cultures view art versus our own. I can’t speak for her, but I would guess that she would agree with Carol Becker. Much of Terri Warpinski’s work focuses on human’s relationship to the landscape. She explores this theme by traveling and photographing evidence among many different cultures. For this reason (and her telling us she used to work on archeological sites) I see her work as anthropological in a way. Her work focuses on the topic of the relationship that humans have with the landscape, and then to the even more specific topic of the boundaries that we have created. She compared a lot of her work to one another when man-made boundaries were what the pieces had in common. Her speaking style made it very easy to see the common themes. Her work shows us that many cultures leave physical evidence of political and cultural similarities. By calling herself a landscape artist, it challenges the viewer to ask themselves exactly what that means. Do physical barriers made by humans constitute landscape these days?

This is my favorite piece because I love the mark-making on top of the photograph. I enjoyed her explanation of her struggle between painting/drawing/printmaking and photography because she has come to a very nice compromise with herself by including these aspects in her photography.