Damien Hirst

I figured I should get one more blog in about the text book before finishing with the House of the Spirits, and once I saw Damien Hirst's art I knew that was what I should blog about.  His "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" was a piece that truly got me thinking, much more than perhaps any other piece of art we have discussed so far this semester.

 

One of the first thoughts that came to mind was the way that Hirst was able to capture the horror of a creature that is known for its dangerous and ferocious and yet still find a way to bring that to display.  Even though the shark is dead and cannot physically harm us, I sort of feel that the sense of fear still remains with the shark.  The way that the shark has been placed with its mouth wide open as if it was about to strike its prey sends  tingle down the observers spine.  I feel that Hirst did an excellent job conveying that sense and allowing the public to witness that.

Another impression I got from this piece is that Hirst might have been conveying that death in itself is its own form of art.  There doesn't have to be life in a work to be art, or maybe a better way of saying it is death brings life.  If the shark was still alive and swimming freely in its box (or as free as a shark can swim in a small box), that would not give off the same artistic feel that a deceased shark would.  Perhaps the reason is that a dead shark cannot rearrange its position, thus permanently freezing it in the desired position.  Whatever the explanation, I feel that this reason is why I enjoyed this piece so much.

Op Art Sensation

As I was reading through the text book, Bridget Riley's "Current" on page 139 stood out to me.  Before even reading the section about it, my mind jumped backed to 6th grade when we learned about optical illusions and such.  When I read what Op Art was all about, I found the concept really interesting.  Like most pieces of art, what a person sees is truly in the eye of the beholder, but here it isn't as much as what you see as how you see it.

 

What I took out most from this piece, or perhaps even the whole style of op art, was that any artist or person can give someone a picture, but they cannot tell them what to do with it.  It is up to the viewer to decide what to make of it.  With op art, to adequately determine what to make of the art you have to look at it in your own special way (even though that sounds kind of cheesy in a sense).  For example when I look at this piece above, I see a valley with two parallel streams running through it.  It's kind of hard with this picture because the lines are bigger but if you look in the book you might see what I'm getting at.

Another aspect of op art that I found fascinating was its capabilities to make it look like the piece has movement within it.  When you stare at an op art piece long enough, the lines seem to vibrate or move ever so slightly.  I think that gives the art a sense of added life.  Sure, technically it isn't moving and will never really move, but just the sense that it appears to be moving is enough.  Op art to me contains more life within it than most other works of art that we have studied so far.