Inspiration through Video

This week I mainly worked with video since I haven't been able to experiment with this approach at all. I did some research in order to gather inspiration from other video artists and I ended up stumbling upon the work of Yorgo Alexopoulos. The work in his exhibition Transmigrations immediately caught my eye because of the color schemes and its unique format. 

 Images © Yorgo Alexopoulos

I also found myself responding to symbols such as the large red/pink circle behind triangular shapes, which instantly reminded me of Japanese art and its characteristic minimalism. I also immediately thought of the country's flag, and these associations reminded me of semiotics and how this ability to recognize symbols relates to language.

At first, I planned to solely focus on the aesthetics of certain video projects because I felt uninspired with respect to my own work. However, after discovering Alexopoulos's work and reading more about it, I feel greatly inspired to pursue something like this. In his installations, the artist creates an immersive experience by combining different mediums within the video, specifically paintings, drawings, video footage, and found images. I have personally wanted to produce a mixed media project since the beginning, and I think that exploring this artist's work would give me an invaluable source of inspiration.

In terms of my own studio practice, this past week I recorded Spanish phrases that I want to work with later on. I wrote down anything and everything that came to mind in order to have a lot of material to experiment with. As I examined what I came up with this week, I noticed that since I am working with language, I can use that to my advantage and work with different creative formats like poetry. After looking at the work in Yorgo Alexopoulos's Transmigrations exhibition, I wonder whether it would be worthwhile to consider having two separate video pieces: one with the imagery and the other with the text, both simultaneously shifting and responding to each other.

The Hyperreal

This week I was intrigued by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his ideas of the hyperreal. I thought that examining those aspects of our lives that provide ideals of reality relates closely with what I am studying about language. Both have to do with instances of objects that are meaningful only because we give them meaning. 

"Baudrillard, following Barthes and others, argued that fashion, sports, the media, and other modes of signification also produced systems of meaning articulated by specific rules, codes, and logics."

"The realm of the hyperreal (e.g., media simulations of reality, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, and other excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior."

Baudrillard's theories made me think of language as something that could also be considered to be part of that hyperrealistic realm. These ideas relate to my own questions about the impact of language on thought. I wonder whether or not languages limit us just as much as they allow us to effectively express ourselves to other people. In order to navigate through our world, we attach meaning to the languages that help us communicate with each other. But does this mean that the truth language makes of reality becomes more "real" than what it actually is? 

Language as Semiotics: The Role of Meaning in Human Thinking

This past week I was mostly intrigued by Sky Marsen's The Role of Meaning in Human Thinking. Marsen distinguishes between formal and natural/conventional language, the former denoting the use of "numbers, equations, and algorithms to communicate, based on precise measurement and unambiguous reference," while the latter encompasses "verbal signs we use to communicate in our everyday interactions" (Marsen 2008). Formal languages are universal and exact, while conventional language is varied and abstract (Marsen 2008). Although I am clearly working with natural language in my thesis, it can still be useful to establish this distinction in order to properly talk about the communication of everyday life and its effects/implications.

This article elaborates on language as negotiation, drawing upon Saussure's established relationship between the signifier and signified. Marsen explains that by agreeing that a word like "tree" can be used to signify things other than the object it denotes, speakers create a code that can only be decoded by those who can decipher the patterns without referring to the natural world. According to Marsen, this demonstrates the "negotiative part of language" and "underlies artistic expression" (Marsen 2008). Clearly, the human ability to attribute meaning allows the very idea of art and the conceptual frameworks that compose art to exist. Furthermore, language's negotiability allows for the interpretation of objects like art, which also demonstrates the possibility for different opinions and perspectives through the use of conventional language.

With these ideas in mind, I thought of the word 'mañana' in Spanish and how the meaning of the word changes with the use of either 'la' or 'el' as the word's gender identifier. "La mañana" means "the morning," while "el mañana" means "the tomorrow." I thought it was interesting to make this distinction between English and Spanish because while English also has words that have more than one meaning, homonyms in Spanish are more often identified by the word's accompanying article while English homonyms are identified by the context of the sentence. 

I also thought it was interesting that simply saying "mañana" means "tomorrow," but the word changes in meaning by adding a gender article, becoming "la mañana" (the morning). Even by using "el" to make "mañana" mean "tomorrow," the word takes on a more philosophical notion of tomorrow (not just "tomorrow" but "the tomorrow").

I used the Spanish phrase "la mañana le da la bienvenida a el mañana" (the morning welcomes the tomorrow) to showcase the effect of using 'el' and 'la' for the same word. I think it would be interesting to experiment with this type of 'coding' in the future.

Inspiration from the Grid

I was inspired this week by artist Louise Lawler and her piece Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry? Lawler purposefully placed two photographs of the same artwork directly across from each other with different titles, which completely changes how you view the same thing. The title of the original piece, Does Marilyn Monroe Make You Cry?, was meant to draw the viewer's focus primarily to the actual painting of the movie star. However, the title Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry? shifts the focus from the woman depicted in the piece to the artist that created that depiction. Each title provokes different interpretations and questions that concern the same piece. 

Lawler's work re-contextualizes images and provokes the viewer to consider how art is impacted by who owns it and how it is displayed. It explores how the reception of art is shifted and framed by each person who looks at it. I thought this was a good example of the way in which I want to use language to make my viewers consider the extent to which language influences what they think. The extent to which the titles of Lawler's works implicate different meanings provides a very useful of example of how I hope to showcase the influence of language on our engagement with the world. 

 Does Marilyn Monroe Make You Cry?

           

Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry?

This week I attempted to change my approach from having the drip paintings as part of a diptych type  setup to creating pieces for my thesis that draw upon other functional artworks I have produced. I made a square composed of small canvases that are meant to formally denote the different perceptions surrounding one object or idea. After completing it, I think this was the most successful piece of this past week because it allows me to play with both color and minimalist aesthetics that I personally enjoy, all while combining these into one work. 

However, in this piece I definitely feel like I moved away from a discussion of different languages and instead focused only on English. I wanted to experiment with having words that imply the object represented instead of stating the word itself, which I knew could be easily done using only one language. I think it would be interesting to implement the technique utilized by artist Louise Lawler and switch out the middle piece with some other text to change the meaning of the entire work. I think the challenge for me right now is to figure out how I can make people understand the connotations that may result in languages that they don't understand. Perhaps I can simply state that in my artist's statement or it can be implied in the title. 

Neurology and Language through Art

This past week I continued testing different drip methods and color schemes in my studio time. In order to re-contextualize the familiar drip paintings I was producing, I decided to draw a brain in order to emulate neurological studies done on people that centered around language. When I examined the paintings I made, I kept thinking about how the little intricacies that resulted from the paint reminded me of human anatomy (such as blood vessels and tissue). This in turn made me look at the paintings as zoomed in images of the areas of the brain that light up in response to language. In some of my previous research, I learned that the degree to which someone's brain responds to specific words in a specific language depends on how early in life that person learned that language. Thus, this indicated to me that any word in a person's first language holds memories, meanings, and associations unique to that individual's experience. Consequently, languages learned later in life do not contain the same weight as those that have formed the individual's first communication capacities. For this reason, I thought it practical to draw connections between the paintings I produced this week and the idea of a single word provoking a "colorful" response.

This week's research mostly consisted of "The Neuroscience of Language" by Friedemann Pulvermuller. In Chapter 4, "Words in the Brain," the book discussed the different reactions that subjects had to words and pseudo-words. Responses were indicative of the imbedded meanings held by actual words used in every-day conversation as opposed to the lack of such a reaction for the pseudo-words. This indicated to me that words themselves are relevant to communication and understanding not just because of their explicit meaning, but also because of their existence as 'empty;' as vessels that carry meaning only because we endow them with meaning.

Communication: The Importance of Shared Attitudes

According to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in order for a system of communication to work, the members of that system must agree on their attitudes towards the things around them. Regular use and application of those concepts thus form part of language and its successful implementation. I found this profoundly interesting because it made me think of the way speakers of a language "share a brain." It reminded me of the changes I see and feel myself going through when I transition from English to Spanish (for instance, when I suddenly have to change my speaking from English to Spanish, I hear my voice get higher, I feel lighter, more open and extroverted). In this sense, the idea of shared attitudes is something that I would love to further explore; it shows the extent to which language can affect our behavior and our perceptions of ourselves.

But can this hinder us just as much as it helps us? Does the idea of an individual life-form, a simultaneously isolated and liberated being, have anything to teach us about the complexity of language? I think that those agreements speakers of one language have act as the basis for the unifier that is language. Though it is undeniable that language forms part of a culture, are people willing to believe that part of this truth lies in the fact that everyone - mostly - unquestioningly agrees on logical truths based simply on the structure of the language they communicate in? Does this take away our autonomy to a degree?

In my studio time this week, I produced this abstract piece with the initial sole intention of experimenting with acrylic ink. The process of creating this and the final piece kept reminding me of the elaborate birth of a new world or being. The disorder of both the process and the final product reminded me of the spontaneity with which many things are created. This also made me think of the creation of languages: although they hold for us a sense of order and logic, they were once nothing more than experiments in communication, created just as circumstantially as something in the natural world. What would an image like this mean to someone who has specific words or phrases for the flow of the paint across the canvas, or for the way the paint acts differently along each corner (some sections blend together, some indicate movement, some appear to exist as interruptions within the piece)?

Language of the Sublime (?)

After reading some theoretical texts about the concept of the sublime and the different meanings and interpretations surrounding it, I started to think about the effect that scale would have on the work I produce. I created a piece in which I tried to replicate the sudden awareness of our lack of knowledge.

The more I think about this piece in relation to language, the more I see it reflecting my own relationship with knowing and not knowing language. Since I am bilingual, I understand the feeling of being able to express yourself more adequately in one language over another for certain situations (when you feel a word or phrase has more weight/significance when said in a specific language). However, I also realize that in not knowing other languages, I miss out on the type of self-expression or thinking that those languages have to offer. The piece I created reminded me of that because it reflects the ambiguity with which we are forced to think about certain things, since we sometimes cannot express what we perceive with the language that we communicate in.

For instance, some languages have words that illustrate concepts that English does not have specific words for, such as the German word treppenwitz, which describes the failure to come up with a good comeback during an altercation only to think of one long after the argument takes place. It is this type of simplification that differentiates the thinking around a similar event for speakers of different languages.

As such, I think this version of the sublime is one that focuses on absence, not of a total absence of language, but rather of a lack of the awareness, appreciation, or knowledge brought on by the mastery of multiple languages.