Definition: something or someone that provides a source of happiness
“I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again”
Mark Twain (American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer 1835-1910)
“Joy is the feeling of grinning inside.”
Melba Colgrove, author
This investigation started from the point that I'd like to make work that gave people joy. Not sure if there's a universal possibility to that, I gave myself the liberty to classify the below artists into one or both of two categories: apparently giving joy to people, and giving to joy to me. All of the below give me the feeling of "grinning inside", the sense of happy wonder that filled me as a child seeing the Christmas tree lit for the first time. Whether or not the work gives other people a similar feeling is impossible for me to tell without asking them, which would be quite difficult tracking down all the people who have viewed/experienced these bodies of work, but I can make an educated guess by the response to the work.
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Part 2
Lucky Dragons
Paragraph Explanation of Reason for Choosing this artist:
Lucky Dragons, their interactive music performances bring together whole rooms of people, who find themselves working together, exploring each other and their relationships through touch. Music and novelty break down interpersonal barriers, uniting and compelling a group to work with each other. They seem to be celebrating the process and quite happy doing so. Does this bring them joy... I'd venture a yes.
"Make a Baby", 2005 - on-going, interactive music, variable size
"Make a Baby", 2005 - on-going, interactive music, variable size
Outside Review of Artwork/Interview
“Everyone playing Make a Baby has to form a bridge between each other for it to work,” Rara says. The device produces a series of tonal progressions based on different levels of electrical resistance. The progressions are created by the number of people who touch each other and the way they touch each other.
Adding more layers of meaning, Fischbeck and Rara describe Make a Baby as a game and a ritual. “There’s a lot of magic in these performances. [It’s] asking people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily think made any sense,” Fischbeck says.
In one part of the performance, audience members move rocks inside a magnetic field generated by turning the sound box up all the way. The laptop produces feedback, translating very small changes in energy into notes. In turn, these ritual games transform strangers into band mates. The technical aspects may require some explanation, but the aim of these performances is simple. “It’s a totally unnatural situation that people have to leap into,” Rara says. “It results in a lot of genuineness and people taking their guards down.”
Lucky Dragons ‘Make a Baby’ with electricity and audience participation, By Beverly Bryan, Venus Zine, May 6th, 2008
Alexander Calder
Paragraph Explanation of Reason for Choosing this artist:
Calder's gravity-defying mobiles move gracefully, quietly through the air, almost magically. While the ideas of balance and low-friction movement are easy points to begin the understanding of the work by, they lack in explaining just how wonderful I feel when viewing these. I almost feel like anything is possible... if there's a man that can balance sculpture like this, then perhaps world peace and a clean environment is attainable after all! A bit of a stretch I know, but that's inspiration, right?
Vertical Foliage, 1941, Sheet metal, wire, and paint, 53 1/2" x 66"
The S-Shaped Vine, 1946, Sheet metal, rod, wire, and paint, 98 1/2" x 69"
Calder didn’t start out with ambitions to be an artist; if anything, he was pulled in the opposite direction. He watched his father, a professional sculptor, fret over commissions and struggle with money. So when it came time for college the young Calder chose an engineering school in New Jersey over art school.
But of course he was an artist, a natural. He may just not have known at first what that meant. Even as a child he was astonishingly inventive. The tiny figure of a rocking-horse-style bird shaped from brass sheeting is, for economy of form and conceptual daring, one of the more radical works in the show. He made it when he was 11.
He made stuff all the time. He was one of those people with nonstop eyes and hands: every scrap of stray matter was a candidate for transformation. Give him some wire, clothespins and a scrap of cloth and, presto chango, you had a bird or a cow or a circus clown: nothing, then something, which is what magic is.
Calder at Play: Finding Whimsy in Simple Wire, by Holland Cotter, New York Times: Art Review, October 16, 2008
Martin Kersels
Martin Kersels is, for me, an example of making lemonade from lemons. Here's a man who's overweight state of being became a empowering point for great art. If a man literally bouncing his friends off his stomach doesn't make you smile... well... it makes me smile. His friends seem to be enjoying as well.
Tossing a friend, Color Photograph coupler print, 26.5 x 39.5 in., 1996
Falling photo 4, Gelatin Silver Print mntd on board, 34 x 62 in.,1994
In the end, the work of most artists is intimately bound up in their identities. But this point has rarely been made as forthrightly or as humorously as in the work of Martin Kersels, a young Los Angeles artist who is having his first show in New York. Mr. Kersels is large: he weighs more than 360 pounds, stands 6 feet 7 inches and looks like an out-of-shape offensive lineman. Much of his Conceptually based work, which seems to lean deliberately toward visual slightness, circles deprecatingly around this bulk.
In a sense, Mr. Kersels seems intent on filtering various aspects of recent art or popular culture through the distinguishing characteristics of his size and appearance. Reliving the task-oriented fixations of early Performance Art, he has himself photographed tossing various male and female friends into the air.
New York Times: Art in Review, By Roberta Smith, September 27, 1996
The Hood Internet
The Hood Internet, two guys who take their love of music to a new level, mashing together seemingly quite disparate groups and songs into catchy, clever reexaminations. Most often hip hop with indie rock, the results are given away FOR FREE on their website. The fact that this has been going on for 3 years shows that they've been received well enough to find support to continue their work. Hearing these tracks fills me with a "No Way! THIS IS AWESOME!" sense, and evidently i'm not the only one, the Facebook lists at least 9,928 others that "like" them.
The Hood Internet - Save Me Concubine (Ghostface Killah x Beirut) by hoodinternet
The Hood Internet - Can You Hear My Kids Now (Lil Kim x MGMT) by hoodinternet
Except for the fact that the audience for each consists mostly of white young people, hip-hop and indie rock don’t seem to have much in common. Hip-hop can be loud and brash, while indie rock tends to the quiet and precious. But the two-month-old Website The Hood Internet is mashing hits together from both genres, and the resulting songs are variously funny, unexpected, and really good.
The mashup is nothing new, but The Hood Internet does it better than most, producing songs that often sound like actual collaborations. And the Photoshopped images of each hypothetical new group — see R. Kelly fronting indie darlings Broken Social Scene — extend the fun of these surprising juxtapositions a nice bit further. [...] Maybe we can all just get along.
"A new, labor-intensive blog that creates cool rock-meets-hip-hop mashups", A Very Short List, May 22, 2007
Yak Films
Paragraph Explanation of Reason for Choosing this artist:
The dancing in these films is incredible.. when i first came across this video, it was completely out of context, and i only read it as a documenting of amazing dancing. Seeing what looked like gangstas with stunning moves almost seemed bipolar, not the type of crowd i'd expect to see with this kind of talent. Investigating further, turns out it's a film group that uses dance as a means to promote peace and harmony through the world. An amazing mission for a group that got started in Oakland, one of the toughest cities in the USA. These people dance to remember their murdered friends, and to promote peace.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title,Year, Medium, Dimensions
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title,Year, Medium, Dimensions
"It really didn't exist on the Internet before we started making videos," says Savion, 25. Working with young people including Armstead at Oakland's Youth Uprising, Savion and his partners shot so many videos of Turf Feinz, they got their own YouTube channel. Most videos have hundreds of thousands of views, including one memorializing a gang member shot and killed by Oakland police. But the "RIP Rich D" video really pulls viewers, even dance experts, in.
"They're so close to the pain they're feeling," says Sonya Delwaide, head of the renowned dance department at Mills College, also on MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland. "I really believe, fundamentally, that this is a form of expression, and they are expressing what they are living in this East Oakland community. That's the beauty of dance. It really is a way to purge or express something. It's a way to resolve the problem."
"Oakland turf dancers light up the Web", By Laura Casey, Contra Costa Times, Posted: 10/25/2010
6. Artist Name: Willi Dorner
Paragraph Explanation of Reason for Choosing this artist:
Brightly clothed groups of dancers cramming themselves into the nooks and crannies of a city, what's not to like. There's an absurdity that springboards into an examination of the body, the city, and places that are so common they're overlooked until a mass of people cram themselves into it. With performances building audiences of over 500 people a day, I'm not the only one who likes this; but whether those people are finding joy here? Hard to tell... where they grinning on the inside? I'd venture that at least a few where. Does a "WTF?" with a smile count?
http://www.ciewdorner.at/index.php?page=start
from the "Bodies in Urban Spaces" series, 2010
from the "Bodies in Urban Spaces" series, 2010
For sheer magnetic excitement, the Vienna-based choreographer Willi Dorner set in motion on the streets of Center City one of the most engaging public performances seen in recent years.
Dorner’s Live Arts Festival work, free to the public, hurled 20 Philadelphia dancers— many from the alternative contact improvisation community— through the city streets from LOVE Park into and onto buildings, winding up in Rittenhouse Square, during which time varying groups of performers set up sculptural tableaux at perhaps two dozen locations, where they remained for five to eight minutes to be eyed and awed. In each case the audience tripled to more than 500 during the course of the performance, as passersby joined the Pied Piper pull of this extraordinary event.
"Willi Dorner’s Pied Pipers of Center City", Jonathan Stein, Broad Street Review, 9/23/2010
Skyler Page
6 months ago Skyler Page posts a 4 minute 45 second animation he made for his second year at CalArts. fast forward to present, he's got 169,000 views racked up, and comments like the below. I might be too sensitive to find myself smiling outloud, but yeah, 169K... got to be some joy in there.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title,Year, Medium, Dimensions
Crater Face from Skyler Page on Vimeo.
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title,Year, Medium, Dimensions
Outside Review of Artwork/Interview: A 2-3 paragraph quote
http://vimeo.com/11414910
Matias 6 months ago
Wow, gave me goosebumps. Really exciting!
Greetings from Argentina!
Taylor Doyle Gillespie 6 months ago
happily heartbreakingly amazing
kris anka 6 months ago
Uuuuuggggh yeeessssssss
Patrick Harpin 6 months ago
fuckin great man!
Kristian Duffy 6 months ago
absolutely fantasmical, never judge a video by its thumbnail
Cady Wachsman 6 months ago
Epic joy awesomeness
Nathan Malone 5 months ago
That shot of the two rocks kissing while the ship explodes was brilliant. BRILLIANT.
Simon Boxer 5 months ago
Brilliant. Really moving animation with perfectly suited and music.
So hilarious, and so sad.
I love that it says so much without words. Your character expressions are beyond awesome. Being able to make people laugh and cry in the space of 4 minutes is a feat any animator would be envious of.
Zoosh 1 month ago
It's a "facial expression and body language tour de force"! How can anyone NOT be emotionally invested? Wow. Incredible work!
Jaycob Campbell 5 days ago
utterly genius!
Bibliography of Review
Yayoi Kusama
The queen of polkadots... her infinity rooms filled with colored orbs floating in space, closely relate to the sense of wonder at the lighting of the Christmas tree, as well as standing on the seashore, looking out to the horizon. Bright colors, funky patterns, immersive experiences, joy? Maybe just for me?
"Mirror Room (Pumpkin)", 1991, mirrors, wood, papier mâché, paint, 200?200 x 200 cm. Collection, Hara Museum, Tokyo
"Infinity Mirror Room (Phalli’s Field)," 1965, sewn stuffed fabric, mirrors, 360×360 x 324 cm. Installation, Floor Show, Castellane Gallery, New York
GT Within eighteen months of your arrival, you had your first solo show. The walls of the gallery were hung with five huge canvases covered with white-on-white Infinity Nets. Meticulously painted brush strokes created a lattice almost invisible to the eye. The show was praised by critics including Dore Ashton and Donald Judd—you were even compared to Pollock. This first success must have been exciting.
YK I said to myself, I did it! I began associating with comrades who were also developing new types of paintings. I became friends with artists such as Eva Hesse and Donald Judd.
GT It is interesting Judd was so impressed with your work, as your paintings presaged the Minimalist aesthetics he later championed. Did you consider yourself a Minimalist?
YK I am an obsessional artist. People may call me otherwise, but I simply let them do as they please. I consider myself a heretic of the art world. I think only of myself when I make my artwork. Affected by the obsession that has been lodged in my body, I created pieces in quick succession for my new “-isms.”
"Yayoi Kusama", by Grady Turner, BOMB 66/Winter 1999
Nate Frizzell
Nate Frizzell's work, for me at least, is about the innocence of youth, the awkwardness of growing up, and the desire to hold on to the dreams we had when we were young. As I encounter elements of the "adult" world- taxes, insurance, gas prices, my body falling apart, jerks in authority above me; the notion of clinging to my childhood dreams seems to freeing, so romantic. I know these dreams are fantastic impossibilities, but to set my heart to think about them again, to relive them, to allow them to rekindle some imagination and creativity in me, fills me with joy.
"To Fall For Flattery", Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches
"And Out Come the Wolves" 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 22 inches
LeBasse Projects warmly welcomes gallery represented artist Nate Frizzell for his new solo exhibition, Lost in the Thicket. In this much anticipated show, Frizzell introduces new themes of self discovery within his work. The gallery will complement Frizzell’s work with The Kids Are Alright in the Project Room; a traveling group show curated by gallery director, Beau Basse.
While Frizzell has always striven to create work that speaks about the human condition, Lost in the Thicket finds the artist’s scope narrowed to the concept of discovering one’s own identity and the obscured paths that follows. As a result, each painting becomes a metaphor for choosing different paths in life, while finding oneself.
Though his illustrative-meets-hyper realistic aesthetic always exhibits Frizzell’s tremendous technical merit, he aims to push the envelope even further in this collection in terms of both depth of subject and physical skill. As a result, Lost in the Thicket features stunningly detailed works in which a series of protagonists radiate from their surrounding environment with matched innocence and helpless confusion.
Bibliography of Review
Jeremy Geddes
Like Calder's hanging mobiles, Jeremy Geddes work in some cases literally protrates states of balance and suspension. These paintings again give me the feeling that anyhting is possible. Perhaps birds are cliché, perhaps these are more about loss, or memory, or pensive sadness. All rolled into that is a joy for me, a joy that there's a man painting these fantastical scenes of romantic sadness or peculiarity.
The White Cosmonaut, Oil on Board, 2009
The Cafe, Oil on Linen, 2008-2009
Jeremy’s paintings are highly detailed and often take months to complete. He starts with a preliminary painting where composition color and tone are resolved. Then the painting is drawn up and mapped out using washes of color, before painting begins. Once the main painting is completed, he then applies glazes, altering tones and adds depth to color and texture.
Jeremy is most well known for his paintings [below]. He is expanding on this theme in his next series of paintings; which will be completed in November 2010 for his second exhibition in Hong Kong.
-Fogged Clarity, an arts review
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