Dada Photomontage

My piece is a modern adaption on the concept of the anti-art movement, which was obviously a big part of Dada. The whole idea of anti-art Dadas was to call out the perceived pretentiousness that came with established art. In my piece I’m using what are clearly poorly drawn animal pictures and saying that they are art, as a way to say that art is not nearly as difficult as people try to say it is, and that what a first grader draws is art as well. The composition guideline that I used for this was framing. I positioned all of these very awful drawings around the word “Art” to clearly illustrate the message that I am getting at with this piece, and these ideas of clapping back at the “rules” that somewhat encompass what we define as art. I would say that framing the word “Art” with what are very awful drawings really drives home the point that is being made by this piece, and the message is loud and clear. I think using framing for this piece was probably the best idea. When I was thinking what to do for this piece, I was struggling to figure out how to best incorporate these drawings, and I realized that what better way to make the statement clear than to just have the word “Art” on a background and just have these drawings framing it. So, I think that the message definitely helped with the effectiveness of the composition guideline. Another that I was kind of thinking about when doing this piece was the “The Fountain” by Duchamp. I felt like that piece was the pure embodiment of anti-art, by just taking a literal toilet turning it upside down and calling it art. That was kind of what I wanted to capture when I did my piece, just clearly showing how the most ridiculous of things can be passed off as art.

For my futurism project on adobe illustrator I tried to go along the lines of anti-academy and to demonstrate that I used images of academic trophies that were traced and greyscaled and made it look as if they were falling into a dumpster that was also traced. As far as principals go, I tried to use both movement and contrast. The movement I tried to achieve making multiple copies of the images and then reducing their opacity and then having them layer over each other to make it look like the trophies are falling into the dumpster. The contrast, I attempted do by tracing the images in greyscale so that it would stand out from the green dumpster. I thought that the greyscale, would help articulate this idea of anti-academy by making it seem as if its uninteresting and lacks a certain color about it. I tried to kind of draw upon some of the design aspects of Charge of the Lancers(1915) by Boccioni, as I felt like that such an effective example of futurism. As far as the technical aspects organizing the layers was particularly important mainly if they didn’t overlay the way that I wanted them two a may not have come out great. I feel decently good about what I did. I kind of thought of an initial idea early but trying to execute was more difficult than I thought it would, I was going to try to change the concept, but I was too far deep into what I had already started and so I just tried to make something work the best I could.