Topic 7: Urgency

Significance:
The important questions: 1) what is your work about? and 2) what do you want it to do?
An example:
Sebastiao Salgado's Sahel: The End of the Road is a project he executed by sacrificing great amount of time and effort to dignify people who barely manage to survive in the aftermath of a natural disaster. His hope was to show this image in newspapers, magazines and other mass media in order to attract people's attention. The topic was extremely urgent and he hoped to make a difference. No publishers wanted to deal with so depressing matter and his effort went in vain. The outcome of his work was gallery shows: people gathered to discuss his masterful use of light, composition and capturing the right moment. Persons depicted in the photos became interesting characters rather than triggers of consciousness. Exposure is always good however that was not the exposure he wanted.


Quotes:
1) "I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation. The parks that surround some museums isolate art into objects of formal delectation. Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art . A park carries the values of the final, the absolute, and sacred. Dialectics have nothing to do with such things."
2) "A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world."
ROBERT SMITHSON: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS, 2nd Edition, edited by Jack Flam, The University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; University of California Press, LTD. London, England; 1996

Street Art: Joshua Allen Harris
Junk art or street art or environmental installation or social protest or a spectacle. Does it mean that if it's about many things it is about nothing?

Work

Aargon Neon (neon sign company),
Untitled (abu-ghraib), 2004,
16” high by 12” wide, black acrylic,
wire, neon.

Some nice funny decoration or urgency to engage the public in contemporary issues?
Who ordered that?