Dia de los Muertos

Day of the Dead is a holiday widely practiced in Mexico. Families come together to honor dead loved ones and encourage their sprits to visit with various gifts. Evidence of ceremonial rituals meant to attract the spirits of the dead and honor them can be traced back to Pre-Colombian times. Aztecs dedicated a month long festival starting around August to the goddess Micteozcihuatl, the precursor to today’s Catrina. Over time beliefs of the indigenous peoples combined with Catholic beliefs, producing a three day celebration that starts on October 31st and lasts until November 2nd. Each day holds specific significance. On the first night, called Dia de los Inocentes (Day of the Innocents) children make altars for the angelitos (spirits of young children or babies) encouraging them to visit. The next day called All Saints Day honors adult spirits and on the last day, All Sous Day, families gather in cemeteries to decorate the graves of relatives and friends who have passed. The traditions of this festival spread through out the region and now similar holidays for the dead are practiced in Spain, Brazil, and some areas of Europe, Asia, Africa and America.

There are specific icons that make up the visual lexicon of Dia de los Muertos. The most readily recognized being sugar skulls (calaveras de azúca) placed onto graves as oferenda (offerings). These decorations made of sugar and can be bought, but are often homemade. The sugar is shaped into a skull and brightly decorated with patterns in multi-colored icing, shiny foil, sequins and glitter. These are not morbid items, but are cheerful reminders to the dead of the love their living relatives still have for them. Marigolds are the flowers of the dead and are thought to attract spirits. The flowers and sugar skulls populate art inspired by Dia de los Muertos themes. Faimlies also paint their faces in a likeness of the sugar skulls and wear marigolds in their hair.

Altars made for the dead can become large and complex, filled with sugar skull, paper decorations, food and drink favored by the deceased, candles, flowers, toys and pictures. These altars are made to attract the spirits during the days of the holiday when they can visit. Special bread is baked called pan de muertos (bread of the dead) and also placed on graves. These elaborate alters are quite beautiful and reenforce the celebratory themes of the holiday. Below I have attached some pictures of altars and other items from Dia de los Muertos. Later this week, my work place will participate with Dia de los Muertos by having private and public altars for the community to visit. I am very proud to be able to contribute to this long tradition as well as excited to be a part of it. I will try to take some good pictures of the altars to share later this week or early next week.

Thanks for reading guys, and whether you chose to celebrate Halloween or Dia de los Muertos or both, I wish you all the best.

 

Art Term: Perspective

perspective

The term perspective used in the graphic arts is an approximation of distance/depth/space on a flat surface (2D) of an image as it is seen by the eye (3D). The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects are drawn smaller as their distance from the observer increases and foreshortened (the size of an object’s dimensions along the line of sight are relatively shorter than dimensions across the line of sight). All of the angles within the image will converge together as an imaginary point in the distance replicating the effect of the vanishing point of a horizon line.

Another way to think about linear perspective is to imagine looking out a window. Within the painting, linear perspective mimics light passing from the scene through the “window” (the painting), to the viewer’s eye. Except the image is created on the flat surface of the canvas or paper, and there is no receding background, just the illusion of depth. The adjustment of size between objects and the trick of angling edges of objects toward the “horizon” creates an illusion, ergo perspective, of depth and distance.

Before the practice of perspective, early paintings and drawings sized objects and characters hierarchically according to their spiritual or thematic importance, not their distance from the viewer, and they did not use foreshortening. This is called “vertical perspective” in which the most important figures are shown as the highest and largest in the composition. They are devoid of space and indicate relative positioning of compositional elements with overlapping and flattened figures. This common in paintings from the Parthenon Marbles and in palace paintings of Ancient Egypt’s royal families. Members of the royal family and gods would be the largest among the figures and distance can only be suggested by placing the “nearer” figures below the larger figures. Byzantine paintings also follow the design of vertical perspective.

While linear perspective was known to the early Romans and Greeks, the means of employing this art device were lost to the Italians. It was only in the early 15th century, right at the start of the Italian Renaissance, that linear perspective became the standard. The architect Filippo Brunelleschi is credited with the “discovery” of the mathematical laws of linear perspective. Brunelleschi observed that when you have a fixed, single point of view, parallel lines seem to converge at together at an imaginary point in the distance. He then applied this idea of a single vanishing point to a canvas, and discovered a method for calculating -and drawing – depth. He was able to demonstrate its basic principles, including the concept of the vanishing point, with two panels and a mirror. The first panel was a painting depicting the Florentine Baptistery as viewed frontally from the western portal of the Palazzo Vecchio cathedral (at the time it was unfinished), and second shows the Palazzo Vecchio as seen obliquely from its northwest corner. 

 

fig. 1

Brunelleschi drilled a hole drilled through the centric vanishing point of the Baptistery panel allowing the viewer to peer through from behind. Brunelleschi intended that the viewer stand in front of the real Baptistry with a mirror in between the scene and the panel. As the mirror was moved into and out of view, the observer saw the striking similarity between the actual view of the Baptistery, and the reflected view of the painted Baptistery image. Moving the mirror proved perspective through virtual overlay; through the lack of change between the image and reality. On his panel, Brunelleschi used silver leaf in the sky to portray its luminosity and drifting clouds. Brunelleschi wanted his new perspective “realism” to be tested not by comparing the painted image to the actual Baptistery but to its reflection in a mirror according to the Euclidean laws of geometric optics. This feat vividly showed artists how they might paint their images, not merely as flat two-dimensional shapes, but more like three-dimensional structures just as mirrors reflect them. Daly, both panels of Brunelleschi’s have since been lost.

Here is a link to a youtube video that demonstrates Brunelleschi’s experiment:

 

Abdulnasser Gharem

Abdulnasser Gharem

“I want to change that text culture to a visual thing, because the people here they didn’t used to the visual or to the images because it was prohibited”— Abdulnasser Gharem

I am obsessed with artist Abdulnasser Gharem for two reasons. First, he is brave enough to use art to challenge censorship traditions in a culture greatly controlled by its government and second because he lives a double life as a Major in the Saudi Arabian Army.

Whoa.

So I was checking NPR’s recent articles— ’cause I am weird and prefer reading them to listening to them— and I stumbled upon an interview Gharem gave to NPR reporter Renee Montagne. Immediately I am impressed with how boldly Gharem expresses himself in such a censored  and conflicted country. I’ll put the link at the end of my gushing because I am sure you will want to read it.

One of the first questions Montagne asks regards one of his first performances in 2007 delivered in his home town of Khamis Mushait (near Abha) in which he wrapped himself and a tree up in plastic. Performance art was an early solution to the problem of reaching people with his art. He said that there was no art in his city, no museum, no gallery, nothing for him to exhibit in. So Gharem asks himself, “Why should I wait for them? Why don’t I just go to the main street of my city and just do the performance? Just go and connect with a real audience.” I love it! He puts the situation in his control and just strolls on down to the main street of his hometown and wraps himself up with a tree. His performance that day was a criticism of the government; he was challenging their decision to plant a foreign trees that were now sickening native trees. This kind of political criticism is nothing new in the US where we have so many people involved with activism that there we’re bombarded with a “Rights for [any cause]” promotion until we’re apathetic to pleas, but these organizations do not exist in Saudi Arbia. So Gharem’s actions are very radical and possibly dangerous. But he goes further, he is trying to actually begin a tradition of visual art in Saudi Arabia.

You see, even since ancient times  Middle Eastern culture forbade the use of images. In their religion, images are regarded as idols so instead of a culture of imagery what developed was a rich artistic tradition of nonobjective design, such as elaborate floral motifs on tapestries, colorful complicated patterns on walls, beautiful illuminated manuscripts, and of course amazing feats of architectural engineering. But images, short of gods and important political figures in historical and religious texts, are very rare and follow very specific guidelines. Talking about censorship Gharem admits that, “I’m trying to be careful with these things. You know, with the social media, I think no one now can block anyone or not letting anyone to show what he want. But I’m a little bit worried. I can’t do that sort of show — the one I just did in London — in Saudi Arabia. I think it would not be allowed, to be honest.”

So Gharem’s efforts to bring a new art culture Saudi Arbia is as ambitious as it precarious. A lot of his work he has to show outside of the country, such as his instillations and recent exhibition of paintings in London where he is allowed more liberalism. Gharem has achieved international fame for recently becoming the highest selling living Gulf Artist when his instillation “Messege/Messenger” made history at an auction in Dubai by selling at a record price. The artist, staying ever true to his goal of encouraging visual art traditions for his homeland, donated all the proceeds to the art education organization Edge of Arabia, of which he is a founding member.

“Rubber Stamps”

Aside from instillations and performance art, Gahrem also makes art that comments on international events and his duties as a part of a bureaucracy. His three-foot tall stamps are larger-than-life interpretations of the bureaucratic seals he employs in his day job — as a lieutenant colonel in Saudi Arabia’s army. He was inspired by the authority stamps give to documents that receive their marking. In his country, anything that is of importance— birth certificates, licenses, marriage contracts, vacation documents,anything asserting value— gets a stamp marking its importance. He uses stamps often in his work for the army and noticed that the younger generation rebels against the requirement to obtain approval through stamps. This piece illustrates a gap dividing the youth and the elderly, and blames bureaucracy for creating the divide. He also has a painting commemorating the 9/11 attack in America. Bearing the titled “Pause” the painting is very but very moving. It is simplified to the extreme in a very flattened perspective using only graphic shapes, two shades of grey, and a streak of yellow. But it simplicity allows you to immediantly recognize what is happening in the image; literally it forces you to stop to consider the event for a moment. I am just going to paste what he said in the interview right here because I could not summarize what he says about this painting and maintain the same impact:

“Pause”

“That painting, I call it “Pause” because it’s related to 9/11. You know, in that moment, I think the whole world were like someone pushed that button: pause. And the 19 who were in the airplane, most of them are from Saudi Arabia, and two of them, I was studying with them. They were with me in the same schools. … They were with me in the high schools, and I was wondering why did they choose this path while we have the same knowledge. We were in the same school, we were sitting next together, and I don’t know why did they choose that path. It was a crazy thing, to be honest.”

So yeah, I am just kind of obsessed with this man and what he is doing for his country. Sometimes we really do not appreciate the freedom we have to create like we should. We can be artists, we can be writers, we can be performers, and we can be collectors of whatever kind of art we want. This is a great thing and when there is so much in life that we cannot control, at least we have art— in any form— to satisfy our desire for expression of whatever needs to be expressed.

Here’s Gharem’s NPR interview

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/08/243492165/saudi-soldier-questions-authority-with-art-and-plastic-wrap

And here is his awesome website:

http://abdulnassergharem.com

A Call to Examine the Ills of Selfies on Men

*I started this as a freelance assignment. I wanted to share a version of it here for you guys. Enjoy!*

A lot of contemporary selfie literature is just fodder for feminist arguments and claim that the selfie phenomenon is simply the latest form of the “male gaze”.  Such arguments accuse selfies of further de-humanizing women into sex objects. Ben Ager describes the trend as “the male gaze gone viral,” and women’s studies professor and anti-porn activist Gail Dines argues that selfies are vehicles for the normalizing of porn culture in our society.  Writer Andrew Kleen thinks this should be of great concern when it comes to girls and women, “unless women don’t care about being transformed into commercial pornography.” All the while insight gathered from selfie studies like these are used to measure the effects on women while claiming men are to blame.

While I do not question conclusions that accuse selfies of pressuring women, I do think that to approach the subject of selfies as though women are the only victims is flawed. In fact I am convinced that selfies are just as bad for men as they are for women. While reading these articles I noticed that the arguments are constructed from one direction and with one purpose in mind: to demonize the contemporary male gaze fueling a porn culture. Andrew Keen, Gail Dines, and Ben Ager have written about how vulnerable women are to feeling pressured to over edit selfies for a socially constructed expectation of perfection. Dines especially has interpreted studies with such a focused agenda— accusing selfies of teaching young women that to be positively received their pictures must meet a man’s expectations— that they overlook the harm selfies could pose to men.

Selfies are not new and have been around since the advent of the camera; even before the social media apps of today made it so easy to snap and share every moment of your day. I was able to find photographs of “selfies” taken by the “mirror” method— posing in front of a mirror and capturing the reflection— as far back as  in the early 1900s. The Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia took one of the first teenage selfies using a mirror and a Kodak Brownie camera to send to a friend in 1914, but even less famous people of Edwardian society have left us with photos of their reflections. This shows us just how much people almost instinctively obsess over how to preserve a present moment to document their lives. And these photos show that since the beginning of our media culture both men and women were active “selfie” takers.

So men take selfies just like women and edit them before sharing. In fact the main appeal of selfie sharing is that anyone with a camera on his or her phone is able to participate, not just women with low self-esteem. Sites like Instagram have premade filters that let users quickly edit lighting, quality, and saturation without having to tediously work photo-editing programs. This instant ability to edit a self-portrait to an acceptable perfection gives users a sense of control over their image, and this extends to believing they can control how they are socially perceived.  And while celebrities take selfies too, Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., faculty director of the media psychology program at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, points out because of selfies, “There are many more photographs available now of real people than models”. Selfies enable us to broadcast to hundreds of people a perception of ourselves that transcends into a definition of character and social relevance. For the “normal” person, posting a selfie through social media feels like an empowering act.

Both women and men are likely to alter photos with filters to “improve” their image. The user’s need to edit their image indicates the precarious balance between feeling empowerment and feeling anxiety over selfie sharing. In reality, control over your image reception is an illusion. According to Andrew Keen points, the user loses all control of reception once the photo is made public. Keen tells Straight, “It’s the opposite of controlling your own image.”  People post pictures of themselves looking attractive to generate more positive feedback. They become obsessed with accruing “likes” and comments on their photos. As a result, the process of making a selfie attractive has become very precise. In Grisham’s USA article he notes it has been shown that women will place the phone at high angles to make their eyes larger, cheekbones more defined, and we all remember the “duck face” trend in which women pulled their cheeks in and made “kissey” faces. And like women, men set up their pictures in very specific ways. Exploring these differences reveals insight into social pressures men possibly feel, and it is not a stretch to assume that a media driven porn culture would cause men to edit photos because they want the same validation women seek from selfie sharing.

What I have observed is that men are far more likely to take a selfie at eye level showing their chests and arms than women. Typically, men photograph themselves at least from the torso up flexing their arms or abs to show muscle. Often they are shirtless while flexing, there is far less emphasis on their faces and much more so on their bodies which could reveal a desire to appear strong and play up their physical abilities. On a tumblr site titled “Selfie Boys” men, many of whom are gay (another category of selfie takers that has been marginalized), post pictures of their penis or in poses that allude to sexual acts. Looking at photo after photo of a penis with the “#selfie” tag makes it clear that men are suffering from powerful feelings of insecurity. It is evident from these photos that the porn culture we live in puts extreme sexual pressure on men, straight or gay, to the point that they would rather share an image of their a penis than of their face. How is that any less disturbing than a woman filtering her face? These men are hiding behind their “manhood” feeling so insecure and invaluable they chose to identify themselves only as a penis. Perhaps these men are just trying to send images that they believe others want to see?

But thus far no one has thoroughly explored the ill effects of selfies or of porn culture on men. Scholars, especially Gail Dines, have only generated a lot of persuasive buzz blaming men for creating a porn culture, not considering whether they too are victims of it. This could be because of the belief, extolled by Dines, that masturbation and pornography are men’s primary experience viscerally and bodily with the Internet. Dines argument proposes that women and girls only have one way of visibility, and that way is “fuckabilty”. But I am woman and selfie taker myself, I know that when I am framing a pose that I am thinking more about how my friends, both male and female, will receive my photo. I am not thinking about just my male peers and I think the same would apply to most women also. I just want to take a goofy picture and send it to a few friends because I wish they could be there with me. Additionally, this model perpetuates a prejudice that women are less sexual than men. I think it is shocking that many writers still draw their conclusions from gender distinctions founded on assuming that men have an inherently higher desire for sex than women. Biased assumptions like Dine’s lead to more assumptions, particularly that women take selfies only for men, which limit the scope of the selfie problem. After browsing the Selfie Boys website for only a few minutes I am persuaded to argue strongly that there are men who similarly feel that their only way to acceptance is through their fuckabilty.

When we acknowledge that men are also sensitive we can understand that there are some men only feel valuable when they are perceived as sexual, and selfies reveal that. It is a mistake to approach the study of selfies assuming that only half the population would suffer harmful effects of the social phenomenon. We live in a society in which, according to a Samsung survey, selfies account for 30 percent of all photos among people ages 18 to 24.  And 91 percent of teenagers admit to posting photos online. And with the staggering popularity of selfies, I ask how could selfies not engender similar abuse on men by pressuring them to take socially acceptable, or sexual pictures as well? Yet, because of gender biases we have assumed that women are more likely to suffer insecurity over their images than men, so thus far selfie criticism only enlightens us to the problems they pose for women.  I argue that men do have similar concerns about acceptance and it is worth exploring selfies because these sexualized portraits are equally troublesome. Perhaps cultural scholars will similarly find that men are sharing selfies to satisfy the demands of perceived masculinity, similar to women taking them for perceived femininity.

—Sharon Singletary

Sources

 Bussel, K. Rachel. “Dear Mrs. Hall: Boys and Men Can See Sexy Selfies and Still Respect
Women.” Medium.com https://medium.com/boinkology-101/e775d466b17c

Keen, Andrew. the author of Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing,

             Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, disagrees.

Lang, Ian. “Selfies: Why Taking Selfies is the Least Manly Thing You Can Do.” AskMen.com.
http://www.askmen.com/entertainment/austin/selfies.html

Murphy, Meghan. (April 3, 2013) “Putting the Selfie under a feminist lens.” Straight.com.
http://www.straight.com/life/368086/putting-selfies-under-feminist-lens

Nimrod Kamer. “Thinkfluencer Episode 1: Selfies video.” (August 29, 2013)
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2013/aug/29/thinkfluencer-episode-1-
selfies-video

Seville, Rachel. (July 23, 2013) “Can Men Take Selfies?” Four-Pins.com http://four-
pins.com/style/can-men-take-selfies/

Walker, Melissa. (August 2013).“The Good, the Bad, and the Unexpected Consequences of
Selfie Obsession.” Teen Vogue http://www.teenvogue.com/advice/2013-08/selfie-obsession

Sarah Anne Ward’s Dessert Art Is Definitely Good Enough To Eat (PHOTOS)

Sarah Anne Ward’s Dessert Art Is Definitely Good Enough To Eat (PHOTOS).

I thought that this collaboration between photographer Sarah Anne Ward and food stylist Heather Meldrom and Michelle Gatton looked good enough to eat share. They remade iconic works of modern art from food items, took pictures with a little editing had some cool  results. It’s just silly, but it is a Monday and  I figured we could all use some humor!