I've chosen Mark Dion to post about because he is doing an interesting thing with his work that is similar to my end goal for Art V. He puts together cabinets full of found objects that represent his iconoclasm. He presents these regular objects as part of the art, and uses it to "question the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society." His work typically focuses on nature, and he collaborates with natural history museums, aquariums, and zoos, and other buildings that are required to provide public information about nature and natural history. His work is similar to what I want to do because I intend to create a final exhibition of found and made items that describe a fictional woman's life and create some fictional narrative around her. Mark's work however, is more of a social commentary than mine.
I watched a short documentary on "The Woman in Gold" by Gustav Klimt. Due to it's short length, there was not too much detail about it, however, from what I've gathered, the painting has a rather dramatic history involving affiliations with Nazis and Hitler himself. I was interested in learning more about this piece because I'm doing a bit of research into art nouveau and he is a famous painter from that era, this being one of his most famous pieces, along with "The Kiss." From here, I want to learn more about how this stylistic era influenced architecture and fashion, things that are more functional and three- dimensional. Klimt had a certain fascination with gilded things, and particularly gold, which is why we see a bit of his later things in sparkly gold colors. This adoration sparked from a visit to several Byzantine churches, where important figures in the art were surrounded with gold, so he painted Adele Bloch-Bauer, a woman who was important in his life. I want to know more about his relationship to Adele, and why she was a subject of so many of his paintings. My over-all question about this and the art nouveau movement would be, "how was it inspired by styles that came before it, or how was it reeling against them?"
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