Another Romance

 
 2 things struck me about Vivian Maier,how poor she was and how poor she let herself to be. Being really update to camera equipment was the only reason and I do not see why she was doing it. I wonders in black and white photography how much room was there for a significant improvement.
 
    Rather than that I am fond of her universal, free-spirited artist mind.The fact that she guarded her talent to her own was almost the most romantic thing I have ever heard, must be a true treasure to unearth someone\s work like that.

   But I couldnt help but wondering, would things be different if she was public about her works while she was alive?

Aesthetic autonomy

Listen to Mark Dion, the celebrated artist/archeologist/collector/author/naturalist/teacher talks about himself and his ideas in this clip!

Born 1961, Dion has been working in the art world for more than 2 decades. He is a site-specific artist that does installations that remind people the relationship between human beings and nature, more or less. He really is a passionate archeologist who does a lot of digging and sorting as many of his works show. But what I really found interesting about his approach is that he finds his aesthetics in the process of disconnecting objects from the identities they acquire with the established procedures of archaeological knowledge. He is a cross disciplinary adventurer who softly introduces his way of breaking the cliche statement that "modern artist are only trying to break through the scientific boundaries", he embraces both in and out of context.

Dion now teaches at Columbia University, NY.

About Carol Emmons

     Carol Emmons was a hilarious person to listen to --- she definitely has a sense of humor.
However, the postcards she showed in the lecture were somewhat hard to look at for me. But her installation in the Wriston Art Gallery was different, the large scale installation was consisted of several parts, each part was distinct on its own yet all of them were harmonious in aspect of arousing the same sort of emotion, it leads me to think about the space around me, the relations I have in relation to objects and space.
   

I was particularly drawn to this reflective metal sphere-like object that was placed in the middle of the room. It was surrounded by all the other parts of her works, but unlike others that were placed mostly on the ground, this was up high, it allows us to see it as it is--and ourselves too, as we seeing it, from a quite special angle. I could definitely see the physiological narrative she embraced in her Art works, though subtly it works for me too. Last time I was looking at a sphere from this angle was in my winter astronomy class, 3am in the morning through the huge telescope they set up in front of Briggs Hall. And through the lens, on the other side, there were galaxies that were thousands of million light years away, and Saturn and its beautiful ring. And I have not recalled that experience for a while, until I was there looking at this.