Cabaret Crusades the secrets of Kabala – MOMA PS1 Final Project

Cabaret Crusades the secrets of Kabala – MOMA PS1

Wael Shawky is a 44 year old Egyptian artist who born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1971. He studied fine art at the University of Alexandria before receiving his master’s from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000.

In 2010 Shawky shows his remarkable third and final film of his trilogy called “Cabaret Crusades” a film made out of puppets. These marionettes are made out of a material called “Murano glass” a glass that is made on the Venetian island of Murano, Italy. The Murano glass comes in different colors and this could be shape into any type of object that is desire for the glassworker. In the film “Cabaret Crusades” Shawky created and uses marionettes made of Murano Glass making his film especial from others.

In the year 1167, the caliph of Cairo struck an unlikely alliance with the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem against impinging Turkic forces. Clinching the deal, a Christian delegate asked to shake the bare, ungloved hand of the caliph, a request that scandalized the Egyptian court.

This film was inspired from a 1983 book called “The Crusades through Arab Eyes” made it by a Lebanese historian named Amin Maalouf, this film span the period from the Pope Urban II’s council of Clermont, Which called for the First Crusades in 1095, to the Venetian Doge’s sacking of Constantinople in 1204. Shawky recounts these chapters from the Arab perspective using puppets. Shawky version of the Crusades is not based on a sentimentalize history, what he shows is the simplify story of a battle between Islam and Christianity. Making the viewer’s feel and see the ambiguity and contradiction of the humanistic missions of both sides. Among Muslims and Christians there is a wave of violence that are motivated by vanity and cruelty.

The dialogue of Crusaders is made in Classical Arabic, the language of the Koran. Once I went to see “Cabaret Crusades” for the first time complete I could say that I did not understand the language that they were speaking during the film. However, the film have subtitle in English in which made my life a little bit more easy to understand.

At the end of the film the viewers can appreciate a room of all Shawky marionettes that he used on his three film made it by him. Even a copy of the castles that he made with clay can be seen in this room. P.S the only marionettes Shawky didn’t created was the one made out of “Murano Glass”. I felt really interested in the way of how modern artist like Shawky implement a unique technique of using puppets in his film to narrate the history of the Crusaders in a simplify version. Even though Shawky touch a topic of two religion the Islam and Christian, this could be easily be a cliché and can be ethnic, and really problematic to those who are extremely religious. 

In here i'll show you couple of pictures from the MOMA PS1 "Cabaret Crusades"

Oral Report Outline Assignment #9

Tim Hawkinson

Tim Hawkinson was born in San Francisco, California, in 1960. He is known as a sculpture that made installation art. The source of inspiration for Hawkinson art has been the re-imagining of his own body. He make self-portrait of his new fictionalized body.What makes Hawkinson special is the way of how complex his sculptures are, but at the same time how his art work is simple to understand. 

Outline

• Tagalong
• Animal treasure
• Pentecost
• Aerial Mobile
• Emoter

Sources

http://www.art21.org/images/tim-hawkinson/emoter-detail-2000-0

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/reviews/karlins/karlins2-23-1.asp

http://www.acegallery.net/artwork.php?pageNum_ACE=75&Artist=1

http://www.acegallery.net/artwork.php?pageNum_ACE=75&Artist=1

Bill Viola Assingment# 8

BILL VIOLA

Bill Viola is a video artists who born in 1951, he is consider a pioneer in video art. When Bill Viola was 6 years old he felt into a lake all the way to the bottom, which for him was seemed like a paradise. Viola says “There’s more than just the surface of the life” “The real things are under the surface.”

As a child Viola felt that the world inside his head was more real than the outside world. When Viola discovered video was in 1969. Where he says that the blue light from the first camera that he experienced remained him of the water from the beautiful lake where he almost died in when he was 6. Viola used to felt that home videos should be kept separate to his artwork, but after the death of his mother’s and the difficulty of understanding this transition of life disappearance, he slowly changed his point of view realizing that things could not be kept separate. For Viola “Cameras are soul keeper”. Where people will play this videos probably five, ten or even hundreds years from now, because this media will continue to evolve until is gone. For him cameras hold our life making us humans think that what we see is something is real or even though it doesn’t exist anymore.  

“Nantes Triptych” was created in 1992 this was Viola video artwork where he take the form of the triptych, usually used in western art for religious painting to present through the video his contemporary form of spiritual iconography. The three panels of Viola triptych shows a video footage of birth on the left, in the middle he shows a body floating in water and on the right side he shows the death of his mother. This three footage are accompanied by a soundtrack of crying, water movement and breathing in a 30 minute loop.

Surrealism & Pop-Art Assignment# 7

Surrealism

The surrealism was cultural movement that began in the 1920. These was created by a group of writers and painters aiming to resolve contradictory conditions of dream and reality. The surrealism perceived a deep crisis in western culture and responded with a revision of values at every level by getting inspired by the psychoanalytical discoveries of Freud and the ideology of Marxism.

In this image called “The Menaced Assassin” created in 1927. Rene Magritte provide an enigmatic clue where we can see three distinct perspective of view, where we can appreciate in the outside of the small room three men’s watching the inside of the room from the outside, probably looking amazed the dead body of the women in the couch or either the man listening music so calm. Also we seen two men’s in the inside of the room by the wall, on the left side we can see a man with a cudgel on his hand and on the right side a man with a net. What makes this painting be part of the Surrealism is that the environment inside this little room looks very intriguing and so calm at the same time, creating a feel of thrill by making us the viewers have a mystery that would never be solved.

"The Menaced Assassin" Rene Magritte 1927

Oil on canvas 

Dimension: 59 1/4" x 6' 4 7/8"

Pop Art

Pop-Art was an art movement in painting, sculpture and printmaking that started in the mid-1950s in London. People like Richard Hamilton defined Pop art in 1957 as something popular, expendable, mass produce, sexy and glamorous. Pop art used to present traditions of fine art by including popular culture Ads, celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and news. In other words Pop art used to made fun of advertisements, billboards and comics.

One of the most important artists of pop art who became popular around the half of the twentieth century was Andy Warhol an American artist who led the figure in the visual art movement. One of his famous art work was called “Campbell’s Soup Cans” which consist in thirsty-two canvases of different varieties of can soup of different flavors. In this art work Warhol shows how American were out of mind with this mass consumption of can soup. Also we can appreciate how Warhol repeat the same image with the same scale making the canvases uniform and ubiquity of the Campbell’s can creating visual repetition showing how advertisements used to repeat this product name.

"Campbell's Soup Cans" Andy Warhol 1962

Each canvases dimension are: 20 x 16"

Material was Synthetic polymer paint.

Assignment# 6

RAYMOND PETTIBON

Raymond Pettibon was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1957. He is an American Artist who lives and 

works in New York City. Pettibon earned a degree in economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. After getting graduated from college, Pettibon worked as a high school math teacher, but soon he set out to launch a career as a professional artist.

Pettibon went to prominence in the early 1980s in the southern California punk rock scene, creating posters and album are mainly for groups on SST Records, owned and operated by his brother Greg Ginn. Pettibon acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists by working with drawing, text, and artist’s book’s.

Pettibon works primarily with India ink on paper and many of his drawing are black and white. It is says that he sometimes introduce or use colors through the use of pencil, watercolor, collage, gouache and acrylic paint. His art works focus on the American culture that shows the deviances of marginal youth-culture to art, literature, sports, religion, politics and sexuality. His art include suffers, baseball players, homicidal teenage punks, Elvis Presley, and a cartoon figure called Gumby. Gumby is an American clay animation franchise, centered on a green clay humanoid and modeled by art Clokey the creator of this series.

In the 1990s, Pettibon extended his artwork beyond the print page and onto walls of the exhibition space, creating wall-size drawing and collages. His artworks have been shown at Philadelphia Museum of art, Santa Monica Museum of art, and the Museum of contemporary art, Los Angele.

Raymond Pettibon has received numerous awards and prizes were in 1991 he was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award for which a catalog produced. In 2004 Pettibon create an installation of drawing for an exhibition at Whitney Biennial. Most of Pettibon Collection are in many institutions worldwide located in Chicago, Los Angeles, Canada, Switzerland and other places.

Here are some Pettibon Art Works

Assignment# 5

"TigerHawk Vs Star eye"

Impressionism and Post-Impressionism Assignment# 4

Impressionism

The Impressionism was an art movement that started in France around the 1870. During this period artists use to do there paints very quickly to help capture the images that was being seen. Also during this period the artists started to take their canvas outside to catch what their eyes used to see. In the Impressionism the artists saw the beauty of the world as a gift by having an objective and emotional manner. We can start to see that painters started to have their inspiration from people from another culture, and they start to adapt this new knowledge art form into their paints to create new techniques.

Paint by Claude Monet, Soleil Levant(1872).

Post-Impressionism

The Post-Impressionism started around 1884, but this art movement was totally developed between the 1886-1905. In the Post-Impressionism artists used to believe in the free interpretation of nature where painters use to see through their paintings, not just the paint in general or less saying the superficial of it. During this period Van Gough was the first in develop a new sense of design in art and started to apply this knowledge in his paints. Same as the Impressionism the artists used to paint very quickly by just sketching what they see and create a movement in the images.

Paint by Vincent Van Gough, The Sower(1888).