Research : Dane Cook

So when I started my research on stand-up comedy I came across Dane Cook. The name wasn't exactly unknown to me nor its well-known. I came across him from a movie a couple of years back and it is a PG18 movie titled "Good Luck Chuck". I advice you to not watch it if you're the type to feel uneasy with explicit contents, but otherwise the movie was good. So this Dane Cook guy is actually an american stand-up comedian and has released several comedy albums.

I took a look at some of his videos to get some inspiration on the upcoming Stand-up Comedy Assignment, and boy was he good!

I realised through the videos he tend to interact more with jokes that relates to people, jokes that actually make sense and that it happens in our everyday life. There was this show on "The friend Nobody Likes" and when he voices out the thoughts that people are actually thinking when they're not talking, is the best part of it all. (Scroll down to the end of the post to listen to the podcast version) It suddenly makes a lot of sense, that we all think the same thing but act the other way round. We all know the same thing but decides to be oblivious about it. The intonation of his voice are what highlights the point of his whole comedic story and he just goes with who he is.

I think its very important that we connect who we are to what we're doing, to how we should be able to reach out to an audience. If we can't be true to the people around us then we as aspiring designers would have a really really hard time trying to fit in with the rest of the world. This time it may be comedy but in the future we'd have a larger array of expectations to meet, a larger crowd to please.

THE MOULDING FACTORY

"The Moulding Factory"

What exactly made me come up of this concept of "The Moulding Factory" is based on my personal experience where most of the time the people I interact with have this "me" that they picture in their head. And it came to a point where people expect you to act exactly as the person they have created in their minds. So what if you don't act accordingly? Well. They judge, and so you get to sit at a corner dumb-founded. For me, not having to live up to people's expectations really does hit me and have at certain points in my life. So I thought, what better way to try telling  "I feel like a puppet" without having to actually tell it? This identità assignment.

I have done some research on one of my favourite artist (in painting), Frida Kahlo. Its her artworks that gave me much more inspiration and the idea of "surrealism". There was a particular painting that I chanced upon and was greatly inspired : The Dream (1940). It made me think twice to the idea I first had and decided to go another level and make it much much more personal, to me. Here I quote,

"Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, i have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself." -Frida Kahlo.

I have incorporated some magazine cut-outs and that shows that I'm actually made up by a little bit of everyone. There were other tools like the female figurine, the pizza cutter, the blender, etc. and all of it plays a role. The female figurine is the "me" the people around me are building, and the photograph of my face-then-pasted on the clay actually is about how my expressions doesn't always go on par with my feelings. If you notice the "recipe" on the cork board I guess everything would have made more sense.

Image is photographed using a Canon 450D camera and went through photoshop.

Making of : The Moulding Factory

Research : Judy Chicago on Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo.

Judy Chicago on Frida Kahlo : The power and originality of F.K's paintings. She expanded the scope of art, making room for the private, the shameful, the hidden, and the ignored, demonstrating that these are all aspects of the human condition. Kahlo was able to transform her private reality into universal truths, thereby transcending the rallying cry of 1970s feminism-that the personal is the political. Instead, her work teaches us that through art, one person's private universe has the capacity to reveal many people's experiences.

See : Kahlo's work on "The Dream" (1940) Oil on canvas.

Kahlo : "Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, i have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.

Kahlo belongs to that small group of artists for whom the absence of conventional training is not a drawback.

See : Portrait of Luther Burbank by Kahlo (RIGHT) (pg69 on Frida Kahlo : Face to Face by Judy Chicago )

Frances Borzello : "Self-portraiture has a long tradition of being used by artists to speak about themselves and their concerns. With modernism, the tradition expanded to include the depictions of psychological and emotional states, a development which interested the women who became artists in the twentieth century."

Research : Conceptual Art

• In some sense Conceptual art represents an extension of the urge to self-reflection and self-criticism in modernist art. Artists since Manet had been questioning various aspects of their art - its material support, the character of its audience, the institutions which conferred value upon it. Conceptual artists merely pushed this further, abandoning traditional media in the process.
• An important characteristic of most Conceptual artworks is their radical 'dematerialisation.' Artists who pursued this path were often influenced by the simplicity of Minimalism, but wished to do away with the bold and bulky forms of Minimalist sculpture and find an art of the barest essentials, one that need not take any physical form at all.
• Conceptual artists link their work to a tradition of anti-aesthetic artwork whose greatest exponent was probably Marcel Duchamp. Abandoning the traditional notion of the art object as something beautiful, finely crafted, and highly finished, Conceptual artists sought to trouble the category of art itself.
• The analysis of art that was pursued by many Conceptual artists encouraged them to believe that, if the artwork was begun by the artist, it was in some way completed by the audience. This idea later gave impetus to what has been called 'institutional critique,' in which artists turned their attention to the institutional contexts in which art is exhibited, and hence to the social, political, and cultural values of society at large. One famous example of this is Hans Haacke's MoMA Poll (1970), in which he used a poll taken from visitors to MoMA to criticize one of the museum's trustees.

info from : ehow.com

"One and Three Chairs" by Joseph Kosuth

Stephen Wirtz. Ph by http://www.artbusiness.com/1open/firstth0908.html

Pascual Sisto

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