Hi, Peggy Nola.
My name's Gary Nola.
And I'm Sarah Urist Green.
And today, we're here to discuss your responses
to the "Art Assignment" episode Under the Influence.
Peggy and Gary Nolan have generously
agreed to review your responses and talk
to us from Kansas City.
We all really enjoyed your contributions.
And if we talked about them all, it
would be like a five hour long video,
which no one wants to see.
So we've chosen a few that we thought
it would be fun to discuss.
One of my first favorites was the "Pong Shirt"
by Spencer Welch.
I thought it was really cool, because his take on technology
and the game Pong, which is really
nostalgic for a lot of people, including myself,
I thought was really innovative.
One of the things that I thought was especially
nice about his contribution was in sharing the code that he
had written for his Pong shirt.
I thought that that was incredibly generous.
I think that that's a hard thing sometimes,
when an artist's ego gets involved about ownership
of a design or a process.
And I think that it's especially inspiring to not have
that be a part of your process.
My favorite piece was by Anonymous Prisoners.
It reminded me of the work of one
of my favorite artists, Anselm Keifer,
and the kind of brutal vision of the landscape.
But this artist presented a brutal vision of the landscape,
but it was done so delicately and so lightly colored.
We received a fair number of music and composition responses
to this assignment.
And I especially like this one by Cortlandt Matthews.
[MUSIC - CORTLAND MATTHEWS, "UNDER THE INFLUENCE FOR STRING
QUARTET"]
SARAH GREEN: He experiments with techniques by Lamont Young
and Philip Glass, among others.
And we see him work through a variety of ideas.
It's almost like this assignment has given him
permission to play, permission to copy,
a rare privilege in this, the age of copyright infringement.
In general, I found that to be one
of the most productive aspects of this assignment--
that you're given the freedom to copy in a world
where it's usually frowned upon.
One of my favorite responses to the Under the Influence video
was Tania Drewitt's video of her painting
Picasso's "Two Women Running on the Beach"
with Adventure Time characters.
And I watched your video, and I thought
that it was really sweet.
I'm glad that you gave yourself permission to kind of just
start from a place of being unsure of where
your influence was coming from, or if you were copying
Picasso's or why you were influenced by it,
and just let yourself do it.
Because what you came up with was something really beautiful,
and I feel like sincere to you and your stories
that you told while you were making the video.
You've obviously illustrated that our references are coming
from all different types of history
and all different types of medium
and are nonetheless important.
The Hole in the World submitted a knitted piece
about Monet's water colors.
I was intrigued by the switch over of the mediums
on the original, the oil painting.
And when you look at it in the history of what we were finding
out about the path of light in the late 19th century,
and what the Impressionists were doing as far
as the science of optics, to me acted
as a metaphor about how light hits the surface of a painting.
Next up is a video by Pixels by [INAUDIBLE]
about his friend and fellow camp counselor, Alex Chibante.
I thought this was extremely charming.
And I was less struck by what exactly
they were making than their motivations for doing so.
Alex speaks really wonderfully about how great
it can be to give art to someone,
and how special it can make them feel,
and also about the patience needed to do ceramics.
This tribute video shows me how much joy Alex
takes in handling material.
And I loved how unpretentious and warm of a studio
environment he clearly creates.
Jade Aria had another submission that I really liked.
I liked what you made and reading about why you made it
and how friends with you gave you
an opportunity to see artwork in a fun and happy way.
And I think that sometimes, we can take ourselves
too seriously, and it can get really heavy and really
complicated sometimes, for no good reason,
and can actually stop you from making things at all.
And so I liked how far you went with your project,
that you gave it a set and that you
were very thorough in using what you had around the house
and not making it too hard.
And so that was something that was
inspirational to me as well.
I also liked the work that My Year By Design put up.
He or she asked if any of us remembered
the come ons for drawing lessons in the bubble gum wrappers
and in the backs of comic books.
I think that was the first time that I thought maybe art could
be an occupation.
Another favorite of mine was My Year By Design as well.
It's funny, because my dad and I didn't
talk about the submissions before making this response
video.
So I remember being a kid and watching
reruns of whatever show was on at the time
and seeing this commercial come on in between about Tippy
and Pirate and Tiny and funny little turtles.
And similarly, to my dad, that was my first exposure
to thinking, like, whoa, I guess like someone's actually
sitting down and drawing these characters.
Although I never sent away for a Tippy turtle drawing,
I definitely remember being influenced by that.
So I was happy to see that other people found that nostalgic as
well.
I really appreciated the series of photographs
by Roses On My Windowsill, influenced by the artist
Jenny Saville.
Saville is known as a painter.
But she collaborated on a series of photographs in the mid-1990s
with Glen Luchford of bodies pressed against glass.
Roses On My Windowsill cleverly just pressed herself
against a scanner to create these photos.
But I can't help but think here is
how lovely these images are in contrast to how disturbing
and hard to take Saville's paintings and photographs can
be.
But what I enjoy about these images is not just
their beauty, but that they make me think about the body
and how we present our bodies, and how far we're
willing to take our bodies in the name of art.
In a somewhat similar line of thought,
I enjoyed these photos by Jenny that she
made in the style of Warhol's Polaroids.
These are deliberately deadpan, deliberately
made with harsh lighting.
This artist doesn't explicitly say that these
are images of herself.
But I make that conclusion anyway,
because they feel very honest and straightforward.
But then again, I could be wrong.
To me, in the gaze and in the style,
she's captured the original Warhol photographs impeccably.
I have another response to one of the YouTube comments.
And I thought about this a great deal.
It was Courtney Gibson's comments
about looking at artwork versus making the artwork.
And I too have been in that sort of position,
especially in this digital age, when
so much artwork is available to us all over the world.
And it becomes non-productive.
I had a couple of thoughts about that.
And one of them involves Sol Lewitt's letter to Eva Hesse.
Sol Lewitt wrote a letter to her to encourage her to get going.
His basic message to her was just
to do, just to get out and do the work.
So as far as an artist just working,
getting the pencil to the paper or the images made on video
or whatever the medium is, we have
to bring forth those qualities that make us who we are.
It seems like creativity is like a twofold process.
It's bringing forth the qualities that we have,
which will be influential in and of themselves,
and then, to quote Sol Lewitt, we just have to do.
We just have to get in and do the work.
I love that Gary mentioned that letter from Sol Lewitt
to Eva Hesse, because actually, it's been on the bulletin board
in my office for quite a while.
I think it's tremendous inspiration
to not overthink, to just do, to experiment and try new things.
We are so grateful for all of your responses
to this assignment.
And now, Ode To My Day is going to take us out
with their song made under the influence of John Darnielle
and The Mountain Goats.
[MUSIC - ODE TO MY DAY, "GOING TO ITHACA"]
(SINGING) The first time I saw you in the Lotus Eater's lair,
you looked usually lovely with your dark, dark hair,
your sisters all around you with flowers in their teeth,
and I stammered and I stuttered, but then you heard me speak.
What is this place where the sky's dark green
and the skin in all your bodies has this sweaty, glowing sheen.
And it's beautiful and terrible in its own way,
but I know just from looking that I cannot stay.
Going to Ithaca.