If Larry Busbea can condense Adolf Loos’s essay “Ornament and Crime” to “Everyone who likes decorations is a sissy-baby,” then I can make my design history essay’s outline look like this:

Rise of Industrial Revolution
Eminem (Marx + Morris)
Loos bein’ a hater.

I finally got my final typography project back from last semester. We created a book of all the work we had done in the class, including sketches. It was expensive to print, and I hand-bound this book, but I got 100/100 points for it. I’m glad I have a good archive of my work.

Normally in class I take wonderfully helpful notes. I didn’t sleep last night, so today I just took wonderful notes.

—
Secession building, 1898, Olbrich
“Ver Sacrum” rights of spring. Name of their joural
Produced like Kemscott press model (Karen) of normal flesh
Ver Sacrum
Meant to be an art object, and it deflated in NY twice

Hoffmeann and Mose wanted you to regard the fork as a iece of art

Germany
Henry van de velde
Eptiomy of Art Nourveau magazines.

–

Interpretations:
>>Produced like Kemscott press model (Karen) of normal flesh
Means: Kelmscott Press model> printing press > Karen Zimmerman let me use a printing press > models have normal flesh (?)

>> Meant to be an art object, and it deflated in NY twice
Means: Deflated twice> a reference to this work by Claes Oldenberg that was vandalized. The piece inflated and deflated, and the twice refers to the the pre-vandalism and post-reconstructed forms.

I love involuntary typing. I wish that I could type up my dreams as I dreamt them, outside of class.

My internship with The Caliber Group starts tomorrow. I feel like I don’t know how to do as much as they think I know how to do. I guess we’ll get to know each other.

School starts Wednesday. Courses include: Design II, Typography II, Contemporary Drawing, Design History, and Contemporary Art History. Today I spent 5 hours working on the first assignment for Design II, and I’m only a quarter finished with it. It is due on the first day of class. I’m going to die.

A photo diptych I made will be in the Four Seasons show in February and March. The show features art about women made by women artists (just in time for Women’s History Month). Last November I completed a series of diptychs that explored the differences between how a woman is viewed and how she would prefer to be viewed, so the show came up at the perfect time. It is a juried show, and I still don’t know how I feel about juries, but I think the show will be really great. Four Seasons will be in a couple different galleries and there will be a panel discussion and opening parties and such. I’ll let you know more about that later.

I was talking with Andrew Ling the other day, and I told him that I had never made an html table before. Though I’ve been playing with html for a long time, I’m part of a CSS generation. In my web design class, tables have never even been mentioned. They’re a nightmare from the past.

fruit, my fictional smoothie restaurant, needed nutritional information presented in a simple, clear way.

I made a table.

fruit, at the location for critique: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~wilhelma

“Create a subversive advertising campaign. Choose ad campaigns and create 4 ads that are a mutation of the original advertisement. You can subvert the advertisement by exposing the underlying logic of the ad, or contradicting it.”

When I saw this Gatorade ad, I realized that all Gatorade did was slap their logo on a photo that could be a Nike ad. By removing the other two brands represented in this advertisement, I deconstructed the image to emphasize what is really being advertised.

This ad is an invitation to compare yourself to others. I highlighted what message the ad is really selling.

This ad was originally a two-page spread, and I purposefully cropped out the hint of jeans in the image. My instructor recommended Pop-Porn: Pornography in American Culture for further reading.

My version of this ad can be read a variety of ways, but I don’t have a problem with the original ad. I was thinking more along the track of NAMBLA, with the phallic reference in the background and the lone duck in the foreground.

In my ceramics class, our final project was to create a ritual involving clay. I eat oatmeal every morning, so I suppose that’s a ritual for me. I carved a cup of oats out of clay and let the clay dry until it was leather-hard. Then I made a time lapse video of the clay dissolving. The video is about 00:40, but it covers 5.5 hours of time. I filmed the clay beginning at 5:30am to correspond with the rising of the sun.

In her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Linda Nochlin cites one reason is that historically women were not allowed to draw from the nude figure (restricting them to landscapes and still lives). Nude women, prostitutes, posed for male artists. I wonder if the models were respected by artists, if they were used and abused, or if relationships developed.

There is an anomaly that exists between the way an artist thinks of a model and the way society thinks of a model.

In the art classes that I’ve had with nude models, the models are highly respected, their wishes are granted, and students bite their tongues when a model wiggles too much. They aren’t paid very much for what they do, and they do a lot.

“Today we are drawing this person,” Rosen said she tells students. “That’s what’s so interesting about drawing from life. … Somebody’s willing to sit there for us. They’re sacred. And they should be treated as such. They’re a gift.”

“In society at large, it’s quite misunderstood,” said Corrado, who is now the assistant to the director of human resources at a Chicago company and a working artist. “For example … people I tell [that she used to model], they look at me funny, they look at me weird, like, ‘Oooh, a sex worker.’.” (Source).
 

The above article also talks about how models in the Chicago community know or know of each other. I don’t know if the models in Tucson talk to each other, but art students know who all of the models are.

Sandy always looks stiff and uncomfortable, doesn’t talk much, and is perfect for those ever-tempting macabre narratives.

Theresa is energetic, has wonderful full-body expressions, and even though I’ve seen her dance naked around a room of 20 people, she told me she was nervous about singing at an open mic in a coffee shop downtown.

George (or maybe it’s Stan, I forget) already has large features so he’s great for caricatures. 

Merlin always pulls the narcissistic Captain Morgan pose. I feel like he has a strange fetish for a room full of people staring at him for three hour periods. 

I never know what to do when I recognize a model on the street, fully clothed, going about with their personal life. Do I stop and say hello? Do they want me to say hello? Would I want a student to say hello to me if I were a model? One time I did stop and say hello, and it was refreshing to have a normal conversation (normal as in both of us were fully clothed), but the whole time I was thinking, I’ve seen you naked. The only reason we are having this conversation right now is because I have studied the mole on your lower back, the zit on your cheek, the crooked toenail on your left foot and the tattoo on your breast. Also, in my house I have multiple drawings of you, and in those drawings you are naked.

Here are some photos from the glaze room. The glaze room is a covered area that’s outdoors, adjacent to the ceramics studio. Large shelves that store old, crusty containers of glazes line the perimeter of the area, and bins of finely ground minerals are stored underneath the stainless steel glazing table.

All of the pieces of my project are bisque fired (the first firing) now, so I’m starting to glaze them. The project is almost done! I’m glazing the cogs with a glaze that should come out looking copper-esque, but those won’t be fired until the end of next week. 

In ceramics, our current assignment is called “Function/non-function.” We must build two of the same item, but one must work and the other must be dysfunctional. 

You’ll have to wait to see the finished project to understand what I’m making, but today I built the bases and part of the handles. There is a bisque firing on Monday, so I need to have all of the pieces ready.

See more photos here.