Heidi Weber Museum, Lake Zurich, Le Corbusier, 1964-67
Didden Village, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (MVRDV)
Los Heroes building, Santiago, Chile
Museum of Contemporary Art, Castilla y Leon, Spain
Mitch Cope & Gina Reichert, Powerhouse, Detroit
Tiggerific Project, Detroit
Ice House, Detroit
Cemetary, Central America
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Tortola, BVI
Milton Glaser, 1972
Milton Glaser, 1975/2001
Ed Ruscha, He Didn't Care and Neither Did She, cherries on satin, 1974
Ed Ruscha, Actress, Rhubarb on Moire, 1974
Ed Ruscha
This project involves considering the way color functions in the public domain and shared imagination. How colors "mean". Urbanism is defines as "a focus on cities and urban areas, their geographical, economical, political, and social characteristics, as well as the effects on and caused by the built environment"*. The term built environment refers to human-made settings that are the setting for human activities. These may range from shelter, building, neighborhood, to cities themselves. The term also refers to the supporting infrastructures of such, including energy networks, dialogue, and cultural activities and their manifestations.
Much of our own urban environment is colored in fairly neutral tones. Look at the examples above of environmental color, and possibly create a proposal to create a structure, or to create meaningful color changes to a specific site, area, or building. Something like this this should have a high degree of detail and finish, as if you were presenting a real proposal to try to achieve an actual public commission.
Or consider working with color and imagery in the public domain, working with the popular culture canon. When an image becomes well-known enough to reach the status of iconic, it can be utilized to make a new image or work with a differing, sometimes contrasting meaning. Color often plays a large role in this form of constructing new meaning. Some of the above imagery are examples of playing with color in such a way. These can include appropriation, detournement, and "subvertising". Others borrow for the purpose of alignment or connection to the original.
Some are physical, concrete alterations in the environment (i.e architectural), while others are pictorial. Some are individually motivated, others come out of small collaborative groups, and still others come out of tightly-organized and legitimized groups such as architectural firms. Some are artistic, some are design, some are activist and some are professional or mainstream.
Your project will demand an understanding of the color codes, and associations particular to this place (you can define the place, it need not be strictly Chicago). Some of the images above simply illustrate how certain colors and color schemes are identified with specific eras and/or genres.
Your color choices should be pointed and have a meaning legible to a broad audience. This is about using color intelligently in art and design projects that work toward civic engagement.
Create an ambitious, interesting, cogent project in your choice of media.
This is a three-week project due Wednesday, March 30. For digital: bring file (on jumpdrive). For video, upload to Vimeo if possible. I do not have Quicktime (it strangely disappeared).
ADDENDUM: NOW DUE MONDAY, APRIL 4
* Wikipedia
** Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detournement
In détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original. The term "détournement", borrowed from the French, originated with the Situationist International; a similar term more familiar to English speakers would be "turnabout" or "derailment", although these terms are not used in academiasatirical parody, but employs more direct reuse or faithful mimicry of the original works rather than constructing a new work which merely alludes strongly to the original. It may be contrasted with recuperation, in which originally subversive works and ideas are themselves appropriated by mainstream media. and the arts world as they are inherently 'anti-art,' often involving the blatant theft and sabotage of existing elements. Détournement is similar to
In the United States, Frank Discussion is widely known for his use of detournement in his works dating from the late 70s through the present, particularly with the Feederz. Détournement's use by Barbara Kruger familiarised many with the technique, and it was extensively and effectively used as part of the early HIV/AIDS activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s.[1] Examples of contemporary detournement include Adbusters' "subvertisements" and other instances of culture jamming, as well as poems composed collaboratively by Marlene Mountain, Paul Conneally, and others, in which quotations from such famous sources as the Ten Commandments and quotations by United States President George W. Bush are combined with haiku-like phrases to produce a larger work intended to subvert the original source.
The Neue Slowenische Kunst has a long history of aggressive détournement of extreme political ideologies, as do several industrial music groups, such as Die Krupps, Nitzer Ebb, KMFDM, and Front 242.
Also see:
Recuperation, in the sociological sense (first proposed by Guy Debord and the Situationists), is the process by which "radical" ideas and images are commodified and incorporated within mainstream society, such as the movement for civil rights in the United States or the push for women's rights. It is the opposite of detournement.
A similar dynamic often occurs in the sphere of punk rock culture: many musical styles developed from punk rock (such as Grunge, Thrash metal, Metalcore, Post-punk, Indie rock, New Wave, Emo, and Pop punk) have garnered mainstream popularity; artists of these genres have signed to major labels, and have become household names in the mainstream culture. Kurt Cobain, in his journals, often expressed resentment at how his own band played into this situation. The formerly punk-rock group Chumbawumba, has attempted to subvert the recuperation concept by intentionally "selling out" but then using their earned money to donate to the radical causes that they still support.
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