Class Comments 3/12/08

These two are truley inspirational artists...
Cai Guo Qiang you know I loved his work, and his philosophy. I am very drawn to Eastern ideas and methods, they seem so much more thoughtful and aware than western ideologies. Also there is a concerted lack of control like when Qiang says he lets the gunpowder lead him sometimes and how he enjoys having obstacles to overcome. I really liked what he said about his art being about those "other things that you don't say " directly, this is intrigueing cause it infers there is more going on than what meets the eye. What he says aboutt he power and beauty of destruction and the aesthetic of decay show an incite into the underlying nature of the universe and his thoughts on the " aesthettic of pain" in reference to the tigers. amazing concept that you can make people feel pain just by what they are looking at. I think advertisers knew this along time ago, and ahve been using it to control the masses for awhile now.
Tim Hawkinson has to be one of the quirkiest artist I've been exposed to. It is important no crucial that thre are people like this who think so far outside the box that thebox doesn't exist to them. to tim I imagine anything is possible and he can probably build it. his environments really seemed to engage and inspire people of all ages to wonder and delight in the world.He truely has a freshness when looking at the world that even some children do not seem to have. i wonder what it is about our culture that kills this wonder in so many of us? I wonder if we could all be abidextrous had we not been told to "choose" a hand to write with? Why is imagination such a dangerous thing to some people? Why do we allow ourselves to be lead and blindly participate in someone elses reality instead of creating our own?