AN EXTRA LETTER
Design101 ended on February 5th but maybe on February 10th an extra letter arrived.What's this letter about? It's about doing more blue flowers. (Oh, pleease!) This time students were asked to abstract and refine. I can understand that. I liked one student's flowers and commented with her that I wish I had her idea. My flowers were too close to reality. Giada's was surprised.
Instructors say two more extra letters will arrive for getting ready for the blaueblumen Berlin show. I'm out of the game. But I am follwing my fellow mates efforts as an observer. I am now just a simple bee flying from one blue flower to another!LOL!
This time is Lola, Design101's secretary, who's sending the message. She once again remembers Anne-Sophie's words: "already said, don’t think too much about the “voting”. To tell you the truth, our goal is to fill up the exhibition space with as many blue flowers as we can. And if we need to find a way to exhibit 300 blue flower beds...we will!" First, it was everything about the voting because there was no space, bla, bla, bla. Then, after people spending a lot of time uploading and voting both on the Arena and iversity Platform "voting" is no longer important.
Because of the "voting/competition process" I did not make any blue flower for the show. I just made the task as an ordinary hands on task. When I first read about the blue flower theme I did not get excited about it. But I had an idea. Until now I haven't seen anyone doing it. I would have liked to have it in Berlin. But it was complicated to execute. One week would not be enough. And, of course, they said it had to be done until the weekend and voted the next three days. But I decided not to vote anyone in or out of the show. In order to do that I could not make a flower and join "the competition". Now they say "the voting" isn't important. I feel like I've been toyed around. This is not "improvisation". This is bad planning. Inexperience. But I do not regret my choice. I had fun doing my plastic and pet flowers. I regret that they were such an amateurs at the end. The course was quite good. Fun. Interesting. But this end is a mess.
Now instructors asked for more flowers and again they gave instructions in this extra letter. One student wrote that she had the impression instructors did not liked the first batch of flowers. After reading the letter I got that same impression. They did not liked it and did not have 101 projects to fill a 101 projects exhibition. Perhaps another student was right also - projects were too crafty. Projects were to crafty to exhibit at some Art School Exhibit Space. Nevertheless I think that should not be an issue. I also think that students did so much better when doing homeworks. Most of the assignments themes were also better than the blue flower theme. But I believe that the dulliness of it just added to the challenge. So it was just a question of working a bit harder.
Some notes and links taken from the Letter:
Robert Smithson - “Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.”
The concept or idea of blue flowers is even more interesting than the “flowers” themselves.
Josef Albers - “Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.”
Jerry Saltz - “Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world (...) it brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.”
(From the course letter) He is a very important artist who concluded that only the abstract would offer him freedom and discipline to explore ideas about time, space, light and movement.Throught the “canvas”, he was the first one to truly explore the concept of space. He slashed canvasses with a knife to create new dimensions. He introduced the “space behind” them. For him, space, movement and time were as important as colour, perspective and form:
“I make holes (...) Infinity passes through them, light passes through them, there is no need to paint.”
Carol Bove’s organic shapes seem to sprout from the landscape like green grasses, trees and flowers!
Julia Lohmann's collars
Jennifer Maestre sharpened pencils.
During the weekend two instructors (Anne-Sophie and Stefano Mirti) were online giving advice to the students on Facebook. I had no energy, or patience or time to attend. I think that this should have been done earlier, not now. But it must have been quite helpful for those envolved. Also I did not see the point of it as I am now out of the game. I browsed the Arena on Sunday morning and found some interesting projects.
These projects two are some of new the proposals presented on iversity platform before the workshop.
Bojan Eftimov
Brigitte Ockers
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