Extra Credit

 Me 

One afternoon on a rainy day I decided to once again go to the Hammer museum. Thanks to this class I have found a new place to spend time studying, spinning on chairs, or looking at art. That day I saw Jeanine Oleson's Conduct Matters. Out of all of the exhibitions I have seen, this was by far the weirdest one. In the background, different man made sounds were playing while a clip of four people wearing similar clothes were standing in a line with one hand raised and a strange headband. In the middle of the room there was a huge plaid blanket. 

On a different screen, there was a clip of an ice-like block with wire running through it. Upon further research, I learned that the blanket was hand woven and that the piece played around with copper as it is something that is in our everyday lives that we take for granted. While I do agree that a metal like copper is in many things we use such as our phones and computers I still cannot fully grasp how this is all tied into the blanket and the video I experienced. Perhaps it may be because as a STEM major I don’t think my mind processes works of art in the way someone more in tune with their creative and artistic side would, but I was not very impressed by this work. Even doing more research on this work did not satisfy me because the artist herself never really explained what point she wanted to convey was. Rather, it was a broad description of what the art itself was and how it was creative. On the other hand, I think maybe this piece is not exactly a piece with a direct message but rather one that is left up to the interpretation of the viewer without any persuasion from the artist on what you are to take away from it.

This exhibition did change me in that now I do not think all art needs to have a message right away. Some will sometimes just take a while to settle in and maybe one day I will be strolling through the park and look at something that unlocks a message about this work. It does frustrate me not to know what this work means to me but this only makes me want to think more about it which in the end may be the artists mission.

Works Cited

Oleson, Jeanine. Conduct Matters. 2017. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.