Sidetracking

Hello hello hello, have decided to move away from the scents idea as to get away from the chance of me expanding my topic too much and lightening the strength of the final piece. With keeping my topics to a minimum I am inevitably going to make my work stronger and more concise without blabbering on about hundreds of other concepts. This will take a lot of concentration as to not get sidetracked but I believe I can do it.

I have decided to look back at my initial research and work from the investigation I did on eugenics, may attempt to look at the Galton argument that smarter people had bigger hat sizes. This is due to me knowing the average head diameters of the atta ant colony and also being able to measure the sizes of humans heads.

Until next time, keep watching the skieeeeeeeeeees

Degenerate art

The art around the nazi period with any great merit was generally classed as degenerate art, it was seen as an enemy of the state and in some cases destroyed.

Its a very interesting topic censorship, still very important today with the ever increasing world power of China. It can also be seen in Britain with painting, sometimes art can go too far, like in the case of the Myra Hindley portrait by Marcus Harvey which had ink and eggs thrown at it, many people wanted it removed so that feelings weren’t hurt, but then what kind of art world would we live in if that were the case.

Degenerate art included a variety of different artists including among the most famous Otto Dix (picture below right), Max Beckman, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc and Mondrian. It was however very imporant that these avant-gardists were exiled because if they hadn’t maybe New York wouldnt have become the capital of the art world, and maybe conceptual art would not have come to fruition.

Many artists, musicians, actors and writers however were given the opppurtunity to not go to war as their art was seen as helpful to the state. They were written on the Gottbegnadeten List: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottbegnadeten_list

yes I know its wikipedia but its useful, okay.

Here is an example of one of the artist, Arno Breker’s, work.

The classic style was very in at that time, as it was used to invoke a nostalgic view of the power that Germany used to be and encourage patriotism. With this is used lots of Eagle insignia, red for passion, and of course the swastika.

This classic degenerate style was very unlike anything that would help Hitler promote his country to the people, many artists were exiled, and those who werent left anyway.

In a way this makes sense to the perfect world, art is necessary in many ways, entertainment, evolution, and documentation being some. But to Hitler’s ideals it only distracts from the way in which he saw the world. The classic style is very strong and would help promote patriotism, and this is precisely why he used it.

In H.G. Wells fantastic book “The first men in the moon” he talks of the alien life forms that live inside the moon, they are very similar to an ant colony as they all have different specialisms, and thats were art comes in, an artist is used to draw things realistically, documenting the way in which they live and help translate for the doctor character who I’ve forgotten the name of which is really quite bad considering i read it a few weeks ago.

Nazi propaganda

so in order to make a comparison between the ant kingdoms perfect colony to the aryan race I think I need to look into the way in which Nazi Germany was influenced to creating such violent acts and what part the aryan race played in it. Turns out the party were very interested in reliving the old way of life, uniting the country by the history of Germany, this broke down class divisions and due to this a scapegoat was needed. This is were the Jewish community came in. They were seen as to dilute the master race and were to be disposed of during the Holocaust, a terrible act of mass murder.

Here are some examples of Nazi propaganda:

This old family vision was hugely influential at the time in order to restore a nostalgic feeling with the countryside. I wish I knew what each of the posters said in order to see which techniques the government used to promote the nazi sensibility.

Its really ironic that Hitler didnt have any of the Aryan traits.

Monoprinting

today we did some monoprints, it was so fun and really opened my eyes to new ways in which I could experiment with my sibject matter in the graded unit.

I started off with simple pictures of ants, being printed onto simple sheets but it escalated to printing images of ants on to nazi symbols, clocks onto ants and ants onto clocks. I found it really interesting, communicating messages about the perfection of the superorganism through the parallels with them, clocks, and my favourite phobia, ants.

Here are some examples of the work I did today:

apologies for the poor quality of the photos taken, I must say I’m not a photographer. See y’all soon

p.s also sorry for the layout of this page, I realise now its going to look bad.

The Graded Unit

Yes, it is that time of year, and its oh so very exciting, it time for our graded unit.

We were given five briefs to choose from and they’re pretty open to every option you could go for. I decided to opt for The Natural World as I’m reading a lot of HG Wells right now and it seemed only natural to go for something which I was interested in and even scared in the case of where I’m looking into (pun intended)

Am pretty sure I have a phobia of ants which is why I chose to study them, the mix of fear and intrigue is certainly a combination which will develop a great artwork. I am also looking into the development of eugenics, the study and practice of human evolution and implementing how we will evolve, and how Darwin’s theory had been used to justify the Holocaust, White colonisation and thousands of forced sterilisations around the world for such reasons as feeble-mindedness. Its all a very interesting topic. And on top of this I am looking into the process of Democracy, the human interpretation of the collective mind something that colonies of social insects do so well.

All in all, am incredibly exciited about where this topic could go, leading me into deeper realms and maybe even changing me as a person, the course itself has already had a huge impact on my life.