22nd May's lesson

Pretty interesting lesson today. Discussed some really avant-garde works, like Catherine by Sean Scully, The Carpet Told Me by Jeroen Kooijmans and Radioactive Cats by Sandy Skoglund.

I like Mrs. Tan's methods of teaching here - she lets us use our gut instinct on only seeing the artwork, sometimes even without the title, year or any kind of contextual knowledge, and really put our interpretation skills and creative juices to the test. Only when we cannot squeeze out any more will she explain the background of the artwork, and even then the artist's intentions are not explicitly stated.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS ONLY SPECULATION DONE BY AN AMATEUR. DON'T TAKE IT AS A SERIOUS TEXTBOOK DEFINITION OR...if you do don't blame me if you write this as an analytical report and fail terribly.

Apparently, "Catherine" was about the artist's relationship with his wife called, um, Catherine. (Go Google the artwork for an image.) After much deliberation it was finally revealed that what was shown as a whole picture...was actually two separate canvases placed side by side. Some of us interpreted each canvas as representative of Sean and Catherine as individuals "fused" through marriage, others (like myself) thought of the left canvas as the early stages of marriage (since usually a bride wears white and a groom wears black, and they are opposites on the colour wheel so they are probably vastly different because they haven't rubbed off on each other enough yet) and the right side as the later stages (red symbolizing more passion, anger etc).

Erm, haha. Ahem.

The Carpet Told Me was done in response to 9/11. The poor artist witnessed the whole thing from his apartment. Again, his intentions were not explicitly stated, but all of us agreed that the serenity depicted was a stark contrast to the incident itself. So the general idea was along the lines of "Keep Calm and Carry On." The work was done six years after, so it also had a sense of "accepting and moving on".

Finally, Radioactive Cats. Mrs. Tan got us to write a short story from the perspective of one of the elements in the artwork, be they the cats, the woman or the elderly man. That was a fun activity, hearing different perspectives from different people.

None of these artworks had a specific meaning or concrete message to them, which allowed for free interpretation. It could be a good thing, since people relate different elements in artworks to different things, like how I related Radioactive Cats to be the aftermath of a nuclear plant leak and the affected residents nearby, while some others in my class thought of the cats to be a figment of the old man's imagination and that he was going insane.

But some artworks out there are left untitled. Absolute free expression, but no guide to your thoughts, which may not be a good thing especially if viewers end up thinking in the wrong direction from what the artist wants to convey.