Mirzoeff Chapter 6
“If you were born after 1985, you have never known what the pre-climate-changed world was like. Your body knows nonetheless that the drought, the floods, and the rising seas are out of joint with past experience. It just feels wrong.”
“The desire to live in the modern city was so great that it anesthetized the senses, or at least allowed people to disregard what they saw and smelled in the water.”
This chapter focuses on the lasting effects of the industrial revolution and climate change on the earth and how our view of the world has been affected by it. Climate change is complex and while there is no singular way to measure it, everything we’ve studied up until now about it proves that the CO2 levels have gone up and has changed the natural world. With the rate of industrialization, humans are now causing changes to the natural world in a singular lifetime that used to take eons. One notable change this is making is the decreasing bird population as humans either hunt them for sport or settle in their natural habitats. This change due to industrialization was noted in art history as early as Monet in the late 1800’s incorporating urban and industrial settings into his work in a way that felt natural, and to an extent contributed to our desensitization from the pollution of cities. Coal pollution has seemingly become expected with modern life despite how much it truly lowers our quality of life. It’s up to artists to capture this change in their work.
Amy Sherald on Making Breonna Taylor’s Portrait
“She sees you seeing her. The hand on the hip is not passive, her gaze is not passive. She looks strong!...I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it kind of reminds me of Lady Justice.”
“…painting someone posthumously, I wanted it to feel ethereal but grounded at the same time.”
The Amy Sherald Effect
“The subjects make eye contact with us. They can seem mildly interested in how they are beheld-they wouldn’t have bothered dressing well if they weren’t-but with dispassionate self-possession, attitude-free.”
“The standardized hues put race both to the fore and to the side of what’s really going on-an address to Western pictorial precedence, freezing a debate in the present to thaw a conversation with the past and future.”
Kehinde Wiley Puts a Classical Spin on His Contemporary Subjects
“For the moment depicted in the painting, the men are protected and invincible, inhabiting an Arcadian realm far removed from the grit of the artist’s childhood.”
“For me the landscape is the irrational. Nature is the woman. Nature is the black, the brown, the other.”
Kehinde Wiley on Painting Masculinity and Blackness, from President Obama to the People of Ferguson
“Even the smallest details, things such as the open collar, the absence of the tie, the sense that his body is actually moving toward you, physically, in space, as opposed to feeling aloof. All of those subtle things go into what a portrait means.”
“How do we create images in a world where there’s an eternal return and eternal sense of transformation? That image is different for each person. New commentary is layered on. So, as opposed to running from that, I think as an artist in the twenty-first century your job is to fold that understanding into your intentions, using it really as another color on your palette.”
No comments:
Post a Comment