Reading Comprehension #7

Within the theme of the exhibit assigned to your group, select ONE work and draw a diagram of the work, using the principles and elements of design. Write a 250-word annotation for your diagram to the themes of the EXPLORATIONS unit and the readings assigned for this unit. In your annotation, analyze and include at least one other work of art in the theme you have been assigned, make 3-5 appropriate citations from the readings, and consider SCALE (artifact, space, building, and place) as you complete your work.

The piece I selected from the Greensboro Collects exhibit was Jitterbug by Louise Bourgeois done in 1998, and the media of this is lithograph.

[IMAGE]

Louise Bourgeois was a French-American sculptor and artist that was brought up in a dysfunctional family that affected much of her work. In the late 1990s Bourgeois began using the spider as a central common element in her work. She had one piece in particular that was called Maman that translated to “mother” in French. Like architecture, abstract art functions and can be interpreted many different ways. Roth talks about one of my favorite architects, Santiago Calatrava and he says this about Calatrava, “if his buildings look like works of sculpture, it is because they are, but a fusion of form perfected by engineering...” (Roth 577). Many of Calatrava’s structures having beautiful meanings and ideas behind them but much like art, people aren’t going to see the beauty behind it unless they truly have an interest is knowing what it stands for. In Bourgeois’s Jitterbug the spider serves as a autobiographical surrogate, and confronts issues of betrayal, anxiety and loneliness. Another piece that is comparable to Jitterbug is by Yasuo Kuniyoshi which unfortunately I couldn’t find an image of. But essentially it’s titled “Milkmaids with Three Cows”, and it is an entirely graphite image that is really just what its title implies. Finding commonalities with this piece is difficult but regardless they all stand for something bigger than there frame holds. In Yasuo’s work, the cows apparently resembled idyllic scenes of Americas rural past with the national ideology of the current time. Crossing into another realm, Roth states that “architecture is the art we cannot escape; it is over, under, and around us virtually every second of our lives.” (Roth 612) And I’d say the same about art... some may disagree but like architecture, art has been around just as long. Also art is accessible to anyone, and anyone and everyone can and will have their own opinions about both.