Iconography

source : http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikebiz.jhtml?page=5&item=origin

I think the Nike swoosh is a great example of effective iconography. In one line of varying thickness, the energy that is associated with sports-ware is captured flawlessly. You can tell from the swoosh that Nike is a company that is concerned with speed and quality, evident through their solid and minimalistic economical logo.

Sign - Something that is representative as something else and often has special meaning.
Logo - Something that is representative as a something else as a whole and should be easily recognizable and distinguishable from other things.
Symbol - Something that stands for itself, but also has a deeper second meaning.
Icon - Something that represents something that is of greater importance.

Museums in the Future~

Museums are some of my favorite places to be in the Washington D.C. area. I make special trips to see exhibits that I want to see and try to keep up with what is going on in the shrines of free entertainment that line the mall. There's a feeling that I get when I stand in front of an inspiring work of art that I can't get anywhere else. Recently, I saw the Morris Louis retrospective exhibit at the Hirshhorn; it was after a stressful day of class, and standing in front of the massive pools of color in a nearly empty space made all of the troubles that I'd just experienced go away. So, you can see why I would think that this new expansion of museums is both exciting and disheartening: exciting because it allows for me to expose myself to new things more easily, but disheartening because the idea of experiencing these things while packed in with hundreds of other people is very off-putting.

I believe that the problem of large crowds in museums is an over-blown one. I have yet to experience a time in a museum where I haven't been able to see what I want to see because of large crowds. Perhaps that's because I haven't been to any large museums to see internationally talked about exhibitions; however, the fact remains that I've yet to truly be uncomfortable in a museum, and I like it that way.

If museum expansion were to stain my experience at museums, I would stand whole heartedly against it. However, part of that experience is the vast collection of works that you're able to see in one space. If expansion is able to accomplish this, then I don't have a problem with it. Expansion allows for more space which helps to alleviate the problem of congestion. Some people also complain about the architecture of the expansion, claiming that new minimalist constructions distract from the more traditional collections inside. However, I think that this is a problem that could be easily fixed. When you're inside of a gallery, you're not viewing the outside of the building. The architectural facade can be as interesting as the architect can imagine; the only thing that should be constrained is the flow of spaces within the building... which is not that much to ask of an architect.

I believe that the biggest threat to the museum experience is the digital world. I think it's important that museums have a digital catalogue of their works and I find it frustrating when I can't find images of what a museum has in its collection on their websites. However, if the museum were to do this, it would completely take away from the museum experience. With traditional art, you have to experience a work in person in order to understand it the way the artist intended. Seeing an Agnes Martin painting on the internet doesn't fill you with the same overwhelming sense of serenity that it would if you were able to see the image hung on a wall and in full size.

So what is the future of museums? America is a country that's becoming less and less concerned with personal education and enrichment. It seems as though people no longer seek pleasure in learning or more ephemeral experiences, instead offering to rest in compartmentalized spaces that appeal to a larger, more social experience. Art and museums in general are stoic and somewhat solitary institutions that aim to please and educate the individual, and individualism is waining. It's uncertain where the museum will end up in the 21st century. With such extreme expansion, it's obvious that there are people who still feel the necessity for them, but will this over expansion, do the museums have enough structure beneath them to sustain themselves in the long run? I hope so. With more expansion, quantity increases, and I believe that the more we take in, despite the quality of those works, the more we can begin to synthesize and understand.

The Large Glass -- The Enormous Joke

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even
Reproduction by Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton

Marcel Duchamp’s construction, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even is completely daunting. It resembles cubist painting mixed with elements of Joan Miro and Hans Arp. In the explanation given by Andrew Stafford on his website “Understanding Duchamp,” the piece is animated and shown to be a sort of “love machine.” The article by Calvin Tompkins also mentions this, but offers other theories as well. Apparently, Duchamp took laborious notes in a haphazard manner and released them to the masses. He was a playful artist, so he did this by reproducing these notes in the exact same way they were first created, cutting and tearing each little bit as it had been originally. This meticulous attention to the scattered uninterpretable nature of the work leads me to believe that Duchamp intended for any one meaning of the work to be completely intangible.

The panes of glass are stacked one on top of the other, so it looks almost as though they are components of a sliding window. In the top register we have the bride, who looks nothing like a bride at all. Duchamp describes her as being her “true” self… which is apparently a jumble of pseudo-geometric shapes and forms. This reminds me a lot of Miro and Arp; Miro because of the extreme dreamlike-abstraction and minimalist nature of the form, and Arp because of the element of chance that abounds in the piece. Duchamp’s notes say that the bride speaks a made up language out of the cloud with 3 clear squares in it, sending orders to the bachelors below.

In the lower register, the nine bachelors are merely shells of themselves – they too are abstracted and don’t appear as anything immediately recognizable. They’re positioned behind a paddle-wheel. This, as said in Duchamp’s notes, spins and moves the scissors that are connected to the chocolate grinding wheel. Above this wheel there are a series of cones that seem to arc. This is entirely reminiscent of his “Nude Decending a Staircase,” or works by cubists like Braque, or futurists like Umberto Boccioni. All of this mechanization is visually intimidating. It seems as though Duchamp wanted you to know immediately that you were not going to understand the piece. Then, you go on to learn that it was created alongside a series of meticulous notes. One would assume that the notes would explain the work, but they don’t. Instead, apparently they offer made up physics and inconceivable explanations of how this “machine” works. In doing so, it seems like he is playing a game on the viewer – getting a rouse and a good laugh even in his grave over the confusion that the piece likely musters in the minds of many.

The articles said that Duchamp worked on this piece for 8 years before finally abandoning it unfinished. I think this serves to show that ultimately, even artists aren’t sure of what they’re creating. The piece brings to mind the process of creation. The mechanical elements of the work remind me of the elements of my own thought process – I don’t know exactly how it works, and there’s no way I could ever truly explain it to anyone else. Duchamp’s notes claim that it’s about love or erotic desires, so perhaps it’s a depiction of the scattered and mysterious nature of these things – there’s no true explanation of how they work. Duchamp takes the idea and morphs it, eventually deciding to just create his own playful imagination of these concepts. In doing so, he gets lost in his own idea or process of ideas, and that’s completely fine because that’s essentially what artistic creativity is.

That’s not to say that artists get lost in their ideas – but rather that the idea becomes something that, despite whether or not it is understandable to others, must be executed or explained in some form. Duchamp does this with his notes and the enormous piece. Even together, they are not entirely understandable, but it’s evident that there is some intent… somewhere. Whether Duchamp is intentionally playing with us or not, this piece works on many levels. It draws you in to question the nature of art and ideas, how visual art and written text can work together to form or influence those ideas, and how your mind can construct or attempt to construct meaning through what it takes in. I think this is very interesting and hope that it’s intentional. I hope the entire piece is a joke by Duchamp – an attempt to make something so convoluted and abstract that it’s essentially a joke on artistic theories and analysis altogether.

Image from www.tate.org.uk