Asses_The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari vs Nosferatu

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari_expressionism film set design and lighting (1919)
The art direction of the film was given by Walter Reimann and Walter Roehrig, old components of the "Der Sturm group" Berlin Expressionist movement. Both created an original atmosphere and fantastic film that fills the delirious atmosphere and emphasizes the protagonist's mental self-destruction.

Interior/exterior Doctor´s home

In the street

Nature spaces

Exterior/interior Doctor´s cabinet

.Task

.Description of why this work is an example of Modernism.

The irregular geometry of windows and doors, stairs, roads and roofs, streets that are lost obliquely, and asymmetrical house fronts. Most of these elements are arranged as oblique lines which are crossed, twitching action and directing the viewer's gaze.
Closely related to the sets, is the lighting and shadows, which is a main feature of Expressionism. The contrast between light and shadow highlights the dramatic intent of the action and the qualities and moods of the characters. It is so important that even the paint on the sets light and shadow to have total control over it. They are used indoors, small and claustrophobic,heavily decorated to transmit to the spectator the feeling of restlessness and discomfort.

.Description of the work and its context.

It is impossible to ignore the historical moment it was made "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" because it is the key to understanding the proposal raises this film. Made a year after the end of the First World War, Robert Wiene's film materializes the tension of a humiliated country, aggravated by a severe economic crisis, and a frenzied political and social agitation, showing a distorted reality, altered, constantly located the edge of chaos.

.Artist´s intentions for, meanings of the work.
Caligari's dominance over his sleepwalker / zombie Cesare is easily interpreted as a metaphor for fascist and authoritarian regimes that emerged in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The film expresses symbolically the events that occurred as a result of post-war and had the vision of the events that effectively occurred as a result of that first great war.

.How reflects the period in which it was made(social, political influences).

Expressionism is an art translation, despair and fear of the German people in a dark age. After the First World War, and even the height of Nazism in the early 30's, Germany was the birthplace of a new style of making films based on the stylistic features of the expressionist movement, such as the use of chiaroscuro, dreamlike atmospheres and exaggerated angles and compositions.


.Nosferatu set design and lighting (1922)_ Nosferatu is distinguished over other works of its time in telling a story unreal, full of symbols, in a real, real sets, shaking the viewer using signs everyday that recognizes and turn against it. The most noticeable change in Nosferatu was the real locations and outdoors.

Although the exteriors, Murnau also recharge the frame with thick forests, castles with jagged towers, roads oblique fronts actual buildings give the feeling of asymmetry for the same effect of anxiety and discomfort produced in Caligari. It is precisely the use of external and real spaces in Nosferatu which increases the feeling of a gloomy and frightening environment, making it more real for the viewer.

Another aspect by which Murnau innovations was the lighting.Exaggerated lighting, reserved only for the particular light of Count Orlock(Nosferatu). Murnau reserve the main characteristics of the expressionist films to describe the vampire´s supernatural universe . On the contrary, everything that does not belong to that world is treated with an almost documentary naturalism.

A very characteristic technique is the use of light as a building, in some scenes of sudden enlightenment of the characters leave the rest of the decor in the dark. The shadows also serve to tell the story.Example of this would be the scene where you see the shadow of Count Orlock climbing the stairs of the house of Nina or after that scene where the shadow of the hand of Count Orlock is reflected in Nina's body and pretend to squeezes the heart.

Era Cinema_Alicia Roxanne East Waking Dreams: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Weimar

http://www.filmnirvana.com/howto/how-analyse-%E2%80%98mise-en-scene%E2%80%99/4098

Art and technology

Jean Tinguely(1925-1995)_through his art satirized the mindless over production of material goods by the advanced industrial society and with it technology.

Optiko Echoes of Light, is the projection of light rays, color animations and will interact with the tunnel and people that cross, creating a mind-boggling, magical sensory and transports them to a different dimension to daily living. An artistic experience. A proposal, designed by architect and visual artist Ignacio Saavedra Guerricabeitia.

LAb[au] f5x5x5_by using a combination of aluminum, Plexiglas, LED lights, determination, wit, stepper motors, critical thinking and IR tracking technologies, the f5x5x5 sculpture was created. Dubbed a "kinetic and luminous framework," the installation is part of a larger '16n' project designed to confront architectural problems (like congestion and flows) with spatial sensing technologies.

Contemporary Art_Tokujin Yoshioka

Tokujin Yoshioka_ 
Snow_create spatial designs made from artificial materials, giving the viewer the sensation of experiencing light, snow, storms and other phenomena in a huge space of 15m in width, fine feathers are blown up by wind and shower down as if real snow does.

Stellar_ The crystal illuminated sphere descends from the sky lighting the exhibition space with rays of light. Tokujin brings together the explorations made in his previous work with the intention of creating a ‘star’.

http://www.tokujin.com/en/

Contemporary Art_Yayoi Kusama

The Japanese artist born in 1928 in Matsumoto plays one of the most important roles of post war art from a feminist perspective, realistic and raw.

Her career was launched 10 years ago when the polka dots and created impressive painted watercolors. In 1957 she left her homeland to live in the United States where she showed her great and original ideas such as sculptures or sculptures soft exterior mirrors and electric lights. Also participated in various festivals in full 60's psychedelia and closer to pop art.

In his works you will recognize not only her talent but obsessed strokes caused by mental illness. The artist returned to Japan in 1973 to live permanently in a psychiatric hospital.

Yayoi Kusama said "One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the table cloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle."

http://bombsite.com/issues/66/articles/2192
http://www.nonsolokawaii.com/art-file-yayoi-kusama-part-2/
http://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/2011/kusama_en.html

Contemporary Art_Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

The works of Robert and Shana Parkeharrison contain an enormous inspiration. Their pictures tell stories.

Their job is like a documentary of imaginary events. Their way of documenting is magical and surreal. These images combine performance, sculpture, painting and photography. Each image is a collage that connects with several of his photographs, wax and paint are added and this is how are these images that are extremely beautiful but also bleak.
The photos require long and elaborate staging, almost as if it were a film production, and once done ​​the picture, the process continues with digital retouching. The aged texture of the images and the dense atmosphere of these creations lead to images of immense melancholy.

The creations you can see the clear influence of literature, theatre,film and painting.

http://www.parkeharrison.com/
http://photographynow.net/robert_and_shana_parkeharrison/portfolio1.html
http://www2.oakland.edu/shatteringearth/artists.cfm?Art=37

Contemporary Art_Antonio Saura

Antonio Saura is known as the painter of informalism a tendency of Spanish Abstract Art. Along with artists like Chirino, Chillida and Antonio Tapies, formed the "El Paso" group (1957).

But here i am going to see his contemporary era, specially illustration and graphics. His work takes the negative of surrealism, the monstrous, the natural, violent and intuitive, the Action Painting, take the gestural nature of the creative process and the informality, the abstraction.
The repression of the Franco regime facilitates and provokes a highly strained in this years. The result is a highly politicized art. Economic development and increased consumer goods encourages the art market in the cities, which will begin to relate to the foreign market. Also develops other graphic works and production of works in series to satisfy the demands of the average buyer. This is an environment for the creation of new art galleries, as well as the consolidation of existing ones. It produces also a development of art criticism.

His work as an illustrator began in 1963 with a series of etchings and aquatints Träume accompanying the text of Quevedo. It continues with the illustration of texts of Cervantes, Kafka, Orwell and many more, culminating in the illustration of his own paper, Nulla dies sine linea. Merging with the text, illustration calls and reveals the repertoire of images that Antonio Saura, creates and develops.

http://www.antoniosaura.org/index.php

http://www.foroxerbar.com/viewtopic.php?t=6771

Post-Modernism_Blade Runner

Task

.Description of why this work is an example of development of Modernism.
Some further aspects considered to be key in postmodernism: skepticism about the faith in progress, science, or class struggle and a sense of apocalypse are also important postmodernist features. The effects of capitalism' and consumerism. Cristina Degli-Esposti also identifies several other features unique to postmodernism which include intertextuality, parody and pastiche, questions about what is perceived as real, the search for identity, and the idea of the fragmented self or a fragmented society.

.Description of the work and its context.
Blade Runner is a film that explores contemporary theories of the postmodern. The mise-en-scene combines the common domestic with the bizarre and unrecognisable, imbuing the scene with an eerie sense of the familiar, which raises questions about a disconnected sense of heritage. 
“Trash and waste, pollution and decay, are visualized as curious and beautiful, postmodern sensibility finding aesthetic pleasure and sublimity in the accumulations and transformative decay of the cityscape…” (Sobchack)

.Artist´s intentions for, meanings of the work.

What does it mean to be human?

What is reality?
What is the difference between real memories and artificial memories?
How does our environment affect us?
What are the moral issues we face in the creation of artificial people?
http://brmovie.com/Analysis/index.htm#Postmodern

.How reflects the period in which it was made(social, political influences).
Since its first release in 1982, Blade Runner has been taken by critics as a vision of a particular historical epoch, the period many people today are calling postmodernism.  Its portrait of ecological disaster and urban overcrowding, of a visual and aural landscape saturated with advertising, of a polyglot population immersed in a Babel of competing cultures, of decadence and homelessness, of technological achievement and social decay, has appeared to many people as prescient. (Jay Clayton)

Modernism-Postmodernism_Picasso

Pablo Picasso_(1881-1973)

.Task
.Description of why this work is an example of Modernism.
Picasso is no just a example of Modernism, he is the best example. In his work you can discover a range of styles of his time. He mastered all the techniques and evolved, started in the paint with realism, surrealism, symbolism, post-impressionism, modernism, cubism, expressionism, abstract art..

.Description of the work and its context.
The painter feels the drama that is living Spain, but also has his feet on the ground. He knows it's more useful for the Republic in Paris than in Madrid, so he decides to artistically express what he feels to the rebels and the war giving his report an universal value.

.Artist´s intentions for, meanings of the work.
.How reflects the period in which it was made(social, political influences).Spain was a backward country in the new artistic languages, but instead provide some of the essential artists of the century.

Guernica_is a manifesto against the war and any kind of human brutality.

Dream and Lie of Franco_It is a silent cartoon in eighteen vignettes between black humor and satire cruel allegorically described the devastating effects of the "crusade" Franco against the Spanish people.

The woman crying, Maya, Cat catching a bird, Night Fishing in Antibes_

It is a symbol iconography of the catastrophe that is the Spanish Civil War. Transmit an overwhelming tension that reflects the global state of the months before the start of World War II.

From reality to abstraction

Alfred H. Barr's diagram "The Development of Abstract Art"
Exhibition of 1936 at The Museum of Modern Art.







Barr assembled a linear and evolutionary history of modern art, as revealed by his diagrams, and the connections he saw in the development of art in the first third of this century. The rooms had from works of Cézanne to Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism.

.Activity