No way that’s gross! Three strange art history facts, (that are true!) _By: Marissa Moore
 |
| Damien Hirst -Black Sun, 2004, Cummer Museum - Made entirely by using real dead flies in resin - Marissa Moore |
Art history – those two words are often met by sighs and eye rolls by most. To be fair, the first mental pictures you might imagine when thinking of the words art history are probably of an old professor of yours droning on and on about the techniques the old masters perfected during the Renaissance. (Which to be fair, were pretty awesome).
However, there is so much more to the art world than just what you’ve heard in class. The Renaissance, although a great period of study, is not the only major event of the art world.
The art world is full of larger than life characters set on introducing us to their inner worlds. It’s really no surprise then, that some of those inner worlds may shock or disturb us.
Today, let’s take a step into those strange worlds and introduce three strange facts about the art world, and the artists who helped create it, I’ll bet your teachers never told you.
1.
Gustav Klimt Used Cat Urine to Preserve his Work
Gustav Klimt is famous
for his beautiful painting The Kiss featured
above, as well as many others. However, you may be surprised that his actual life may not align with
the idealized perfection of his art. Klimt was famous for strictly wearing muu-muus
with nothing on underneath and keeping his studio completely overrun with his
many cats.
Klimt was the artist version of the classic stereotype the ‘Crazy
Cat Lady’. He went so far as to use his own cat’s urine as a fixative for his sketchbooks.
He would often coat his pages in his cat’s urine, a distinctly smelly and messy
application, as he believed it would preserve his art for years to come.
However, the urine would, as you might have already guessed, steadily destroy his works over the
years depriving us of works that would no doubt be worth millions today.
2.
Sandy Skoglund Once Filled an Entire Room with Raw
Bacon
 |
| Skoglund in Studio |
Skoglund will work on filling a room overwhelmingly full of a particular subject, in this case raw bacon, alongside furniture on a set. The colors will usually be bright and intentionally mesmerizing to the eye. These sets will often take months to complete. After fully covered in her preferred subject, Skoglund will invite actors to preform within the stage, covered in the selected object as well. She snaps a picture and the memory of the installation lives on in that way, (even if the raw bacon, as in the case above dosen't), perhaps even as new inspiration for your own room if you’re brave enough.
3.
Cai-Guo Qiang Creates Art with Fireworks So He Can
Talk to Aliens
 |
| Cai-Guo Qiang-Firework Display |
 |
| Cai-Guo Qiang |
Haven’t you ever wondered
if there is other life out there somewhere among the stars? Cai-Guo Qiang is a
Chinese artist who has based some of his most outrageous and incredible art displays by utilizing
his lifelong interests in contemporary social issues and pairing them brilliantly
alongside Eastern philosophy to explain that we are not so alone in the universe.
His works are often nonrepresentational,
as we have seen many previous examples of in my last post, which spoke about similar abstract and
abstract expressionist artists. Cai-Guo Qiang is well known for using nontraditional methods alongside the
more traditional Chinese materials such as paper, porcelain, silk and even gunpowder for his many explosive art pieces done during a series of live ignitions. He himself calls his presentations
Non-Brand (非品牌), in reference to
his idea that these figurative works lack the “brand,” or the sought-after,
recognizable style associated with other famous artists.
Cai-Guo Qiang was one of
the artists commissioned for the 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony in
Beijing where he set off an array of pyrotechnics in a firework show named, Footsteps. It is said he aimed these
explosions to be temporary markers of universally recognizable symbols representing communication without barriers for the audience while also simultaneously communicating with the possible alien life
watching from the stars.
Sources used for this
post:
Comments
Post a Comment