Lecture Reviews

Paho Mann Scatter and Heap

Paho’s view for his art was of humans in a massed produced world. He took pictures of his own personal belongings and made a mass grid of everything that he owned. He also began to take photos of the junk drawers of people he knew and eventually random strangers in order to get a feeling to the person’s personality and character just from looking at their various junk drawers.
I can understand where he’s coming from with trying to catch one’s personality from just the junk drawers that they have in their houses, yet I am still skeptical on how he does it. He posted ads on Kraig’s List asking for those strangers to allow him to take photos of their drawers. When doing this, the people are essentially being warned ahead of time that of an event that they can alter. People can clean their junk drawers for fear that they will look like slobs once Paho took the pictures. In that sense the junk drawer is no longer a junk drawer because it has become organized and neat. I feel that he could have done a more candid method, not breaking into people’s houses, but just another way.
He also took many photos of different Circle K buildings, both previous stores that were closed and remodeled as different businesses and of the few last standing Circle K stores. For this he traveled around the country and took his photos from the same general position in order to compare the businesses with one another.
I enjoyed these photos more than his previous works because to me it seemed like he took a lot more time and effort for it. Traveling throughout the country and locating old and current Circle K’s and marking them on a map, taking pictures and comparing them, it has a nice travel through time feeling. Showing that nothing lasts forever and things always change.

Mark Tribe Performance Mediation and the Public Sphere

Mark Tribe’s works were first created without purpose and after he creates his piece, then he tires to find where in what category his artwork falls into and the theories that come from it.
For his first piece he showed how he, along with other artists, collaborated with many people to organize a college’s parking lot into a palate of colors. They guided cars throughout the college to their proper parking lots, i.e. blues cars with blues, red cars with red, etc. They were told not to worry if a few cars went into the wrong parking lots and to just let them be. The end result was an entire color wheel that could only bee seen from the sky.
I was very impressed with the piece. I thought it was very beautiful and it was a perfect example to show how when many work together so much can get done. It shows seamless collaboration and participation that I did not think was possible. It really gave his presentation a good start, however I did not know that I would be disappointed down the line.
For his later projects he had actors reenact famous speeches with a crowd watches. It was supposed to give a feel for what it was like to be at those speeches when they first came out, a step back in time one could say. However I felt like how he did it was a little bit too easily. I wish that he could have reconstructed more of the speeches, such as people holding up signs, having false guards, or even requiring the speakers to wear formal suits. I wanted to be impressed with the speeches, but unfortunately I was not. Truthfully it made me wish that I could have had the knowledge just to leave the presentation when Tribe had me feeling impressed from his first work.