Blek le Rat: Spray Paint Art

          
          Blek the Rat, born Xavier Prou, is an internationally famous street artist. He is known as being the pioneer for use of life-size stencil characters in graffiti. He started as a Parisian who attended Beaux-Arts, studying fine art and architecture (Forbes). With these credentials, one would think he would turn out more like Frank Ghery. How did he turn to graffiti art?

          Before he even graduated from Beaux, Prou took a fateful trip to New York in the 70s. During this trip, he became very interested in the art that had developed on the streets of New York City. He has said, ‘”I was so impressed it took me 10 year to digest what I saw”’ (StencilRevolution). After those ten years of NYC’s street art stewing around in his mind, inspiration was triggered once he saw youths tagging a building. He decided to pick up graffiti art.

          At the time, graffiti was not considered an art form at all—it was more an act of rebellion. Rather, le Rat can actually be credited for inspiring graffiti as a form of expression of urban themes. Before le Rat and others like him, graffiti was less an art and more a mark of possession, used by gangs to denote territory. Therefore, not only was le Rat’s art creative, it was also revolutionary. Blek le Rat helped graffiti art gain legitimacy, changing it from an image of fear and violence (StencilRevolution). Because of his efforts on the streets, spray paint has become the modern paint brush.

          Below is a video where le Rat paints using his typical stencil method, and explains some of his creative process. Most of his stencils are created by hand, with themes inspired by each individual location. He has even been known to tweak images that he has done in order to adapt them to the city he is painting the piece. He travels from city to city and tries to present the tones of each individual city’s atmosphere. The city atmosphere dictates one of the key stylistic features of his art: the black and white stenciled images.

          Compared to other famous street artists, such as Banksy, Blek le Rat’s motivations have remained pretty intrinsic. From the start, Prou said he just wanted to “free himself from the feeling of anonymity caused by living in a major city” (Stencil Revolution). Although this may seem like an extrinsic motivation for fame, Blek le Rat stayed anonymous until the police actually released his identity after they had arrested him.

          Also, compared to Banksy’s pieces, one of which was sold for over a million dollars, Prou’s art is sold at much lower rates. According to Forbes, at his shows le Rat’s prices range from $300 to $4,000 depending on size. The more affordable prizes are not based on skill level, either. Rather, Banksy has actually been accused of plagiarizing some of le Rat’s work. The similarities are particularly striking between le Rat’s TV helmet piece (top) and Banksy’s TV heads piece (bottom) (StencilRevolution). 

          Although he says his motivations are not political, he has more recently painted images of Barack Obama and the homeless. For his work portraying the conditions of homelessness especially, it appears le Rat has altruistic motivations. By painting life-size images of homelessness on the streets, le Rat brings attention to a serious issue in urban areas. While people generally avoid the homeless, they are willing to stop and contemplate a painting of homelessness. This project especially is distinct from his other images of less serious urban themes (such as the TV helmets and tango dancers for which he is known).

          There is a significant cost to his illegal art, however. He has been arrested numerous times, and has to paint quickly so as to not be caught. With such a mental cost, and relatively little artistic payoff (after all, he can’t take the walls with him and he has to paint very quickly), le Rat describes himself as “weary” (StencilRevolution). His motivations are becoming more extrinsic, as a desire for retirement is setting in. I wonder if there will be a noticeable change in his artwork, as his motivations shift? 

Works Cited:

http://www.stencilrevolution.com/profiles/blek-le-rat/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2014/10/20/forget-banksy-meet-blek-le-rat-the-father-of-stencil-graffiti/#55eb0c3440f0

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFTNhdVf-kY

A Paradigm Shift in Gender Violence Issues

Jackson Katz is a middle-aged, self-proclaimed anti-sexism educator. In his 2012 Ted Talk, he opens with the statement, "I'm going to share with you a paradigm shifting perspective on the issues of gender violence." In a random moment of procrastination, I watched this Ted Talk because a friend had posted it on Facebook. The minute I heard the first words of the talk, I couldn't help but think of my Psychology of Creativity course. A Big-C Creative is someone who proposes paradigm shifts and culture-changing ideas. In his Ted Talk, Katz argues that gender violence issues are not women's issues, but a men's issue. Sexism is a gendered act, but it is not in the hands of one gender. Before I continue, Katz's talk is worth a watch: 

In a university dominated by an overwhelmingly female student population, discussions of sexism and feminism are present everywhere around us; it is nothing new. Last year, the Damen Cinema was one of the only theaters in Illinois to show the documentary, The Hunting Ground, which discusses the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses. I have the privilege to be educated about these things at Loyola, and I hardly think of this privilege as ground-breaking or paradigm-shifting, until I heard the Ted Talk by Jackson Katz.

Jackson Katz is a creative because he breaks the barrier between current cultural ideas of gender and how to handle gendered violence; he argues a point and then argues a solution.

Often in implicit cognitive processes, we perceive race to mean black, and we understand gender to mean female. Katz diagrams a sentence which proves his point, "the way we think...keeps the language off of men." People have become implicitly creative in defending the traditional stereotypes of gender. As a Social Work and Psychology student from a conservative catholic family, I have heard endless reasoning from "It's just the way God made men and women" to "The cave-men needed to hunt and the women raised the kids, it's how it's always been." Katz does not accept this. Katz argues that women are neither solely responsible, nor the sole victims of gendered violence. He says, "We are both victims of men's violence." This is familiar of Sternberg's element of perspicacity (meaning a quality of questioning societal norms and is willing to take a stand).

Taking a stand is Katz's solution. Creatives don't just have an idea and let it simmer into something great, they have the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to find a solution. Sexism is a problem. Gendered violence is a problem. It's a men's issue. Katz proposes the Bystander Approach, and says "silence is a form of acceptance." It doesn't seem all that creative to say, "Speak up!" but in male culture, silence is common. The other part of the paradigm shift is the leadership component. Katz calls on adult men with power to take lead in this paradigm shift. While Katz may be intrinsically motivated by his passion and interest in gender-equality, not all men are like this.

I think men are often afraid to speak up for women because they think they cannot understand what it is like to be the victim of gender-based violence. This is the final reason I think Jackson Katz is a creative--why I think Jackson Katz has perspicacity. Currently, his video has almost 1.3 million views on Ted's website and over 1.5 million views on YouTube.  He is using his environment--his resources--to propose a shift, to argue a point, and shift a culture.

Fighting sexism may not be ground-breaking, but how we go about it? It's time for men to take a stand. Gender Violence Issues are men's issues.

Works Cited:
https://www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue
http://www.thehuntinggroundfilm.com/
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sexism

Thinking Inside Out

When you think of Pixar, you don't usually associate the animation studio with the word failure. Hit after hit, it seems that they can do no wrong. One of their latest films, Inside Out, is arguably one of the most creative animated films of our time. So, what's the secret to their success?





To begin, the story of Inside Out follows 11-year-old Riley as she navigates through the challenges of being a pre-teen. The narration of the film switches between reality and the perspective from inside Riley's mind. Five emotions - Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger - are portrayed as human-like characters who reside in a control room referred to as "headquarters". Here, they attempt to maintain the emotional balance of the young girl. Inevitably, the characters face challenges that lead them onto a fascinating, but terrifying journey

The depth of development in this film is undeniable. It took 6 years to complete from start to finish, with the entire team working endlessly during all of those years. Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen created the original story line and also directed the film. Docter also wrote the screenplay with the help of Josh Cooley and Meg LaFauve. Now, these are only a few of the people who made up the creative team, but they are very representative of all of the great minds that work at Pixar. Development for the film began in late 2009 and was triggered by the personal experiences of Docter. As a child, his family had relocated to Denmark, which was very challenging for him. Much like the character Riley, Docter struggled with his new surroundings. Many years later, he saw many of the same emotions that he felt in his own daughter. The simple idea of emotions and how they work inside the mind intrigued Docter and caused him to delve deeper into the subject. In an interview, Docter said "I got thinking about the human body, and realizing I've seen traveling through the bloodstream [depicted] and into the stomach and things, well, what if we did this in the mind as opposed to the brain? So instead of blood vessels and dendrites, what if it was consciousness and dream production and that would allow us to have characters that represent emotions and that felt like — man, that's exactly what animation does best: strong, opinionated, caricatured personalities — and that just got me excited."

While the idea of the film itself is creative, but there are so many small details that take the creativity even further. One of my favorite parts of the film is the explanation of why certain tunes, whether a song or from a commercial, randomly pop into our heads. Outside of the headquarters in Riley's brain is long term memory storage. Everyday, memories are created and sent to long term. In this area, there are certain maintenance crew who dispose of old, unneeded memories. They are also there to recall certain pieces of information via a recall tube. Occasionally, the workers decide to send the jingle from a gum commercial up the tube just for fun. When this happens, the memory of the gum commercial and the song play automatically in the headquarters to which the emotions that reside there become annoyed with. This was a simple explanation for something most people experience on a daily basis. Although it is not the true, scientific explanation, it is a funny and clever way to solve one of the mysteries of the mind. 

Although the film is a fantastical version of the human mind, extensive research was done during the production of the film. Docter enlisted Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner, both psychologist who study human emotion in order to properly decide on what core emotions to use in the film. Ekman's six core emotions were anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise. The only one that did not make it into the film was surprise. Through this research, the creative team learned how each emotion plays a role in our lives and how they affect our relationships with others and with ourselves. If you've seen the film, the ending relies heavily on the importance of all emotions, even the more negative ones. This is an important example of collaboration. Without the input of the psychologists, the ending of the film would not have been the same.

Pixar, as a company, promotes collective creativity and collaboration. The president of Pixar, Ed Catmull believes that core of a creative organization is its people, not its ideas. Ideas come from people, and therefore, people must be guided and relationships need to be fostered in order for ideas to develop. At Pixar, there is a strong sense of community and that is one of the keys to their success. Catmull states that their philosophy is "You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone." He also says that taking risks is a big part of their challenges. As executives, they want to try and minimize risk, but at a company that needs new and innovative ideas, risks are the only way to create. He also states that "if you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people!" Risk and brain capital go hand in hand here. In the reading by Lubart, he says that "perseverance and risk taking have often been identified as important for creativity." Without taking risks, they would not be the studio they are today.

While, their success seems unparalleled, Pixar is not perfect. Many of their employees know better than anyone else that failure does in fact occur at their company. We may not witness these failures, but they do in fact happen, and very often at that. What is unique about Pixar is their ability to recover from failure. They take risks and they don't always work out, but they have the ability and courage to solve the problems in order to release the great films that we see in theaters.

Works Cited:

http://uutampa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Experiencing-Awe.pdf

http://websites.uwlax.edu/kincman/390%20Paperwork/How%20Pixar%20Fosters%20Collective%20Creativity.pdf

http://creativescreenwriting.com/is-this-the-best-story-we-can-tell-inside-out/

Thinking About Life: The Basquiat Revolution

I've been struggling to figure out what to write for this second blog entry since the day I uploaded my first post. Because I was so invested in the work of Gainsbourg and have been dead-set on the subject of my final post since the beginning of the semester (stay tuned folks), I decided to wait until something struck my fancy for this interim post rather than prematurely settle on a safe bet. And lo and behold, I found my muse in the most unexpected of places: last week, a student in my statistics class presented on what influences the increase in price of artwork sales in the United States and chose to focus on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The moment his photo came up on the projector, I knew I had found my man.


Whether it was his eye-catching hairdo (The Weeknd himself claims it inspired his own unique coif) or the gritty ambition of his artwork that first pulled me in, I was immediately struck by the magnetism of both his art as well as his very being. Much like my discovery of Gainsbourg, I felt rather sheepish to have just now stumbled upon Basquiat so late in the game, but eagerly fell down the rabbit hole of art blogs, scores of devotional Instagram accounts, and even lists of name-drops by various hip-hop artists to find out what made this guy such a legend.


Basquiat was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents. His rich cultural heritage allowed him to effortlessly come of age in 1970s multicultural New York; the allure of the city and his precocious artistic talent led him to leave high school and become a graffiti poet, signing his semi-surreal, neo-expressionist work with the tag SAMO – an abbreviation of “Same Old Shit.” By the late 70s he had achieved cult status among the East Village hipsters. It’s easy to see why – his wide array of interests ranged from French poetry to hip hop to baseball to modernist art and allowed him to tap into a vast expanse of ideas and thoughts regarding poverty, violence, history, and his own existence. He eventually moved toward fine art in the 80s which led to an even greater following and increased critical acclaim, most notably in the form of admiration from friends such as Andy Warhol and Madonna.

His art can best be described as individualistic paintings that utilized words, dabs of color, and crudely drawn cartoons to convey his thoughts and feelings of his own life and place in the world. This was a radical departure from the artwork of the day which instead focused on a minimalist, almost inhuman approach. He often gave his own interpretation of the classic works of Picasso, Da Vinci, and Van Gogh and made them distinctly his own. Basquiat's work is one of the few examples of how an early 1980s counter-cultural practice could become a fully recognized, critically embraced, and popularly celebrated artistic phenomenon, which can be seen as a parallel to the rise of hip-hop in that same decade. The youthful intensity and prolific nature of both his innate talent and seemingly natural gift to effortlessly draw upon a variety of influences and genres strongly echoes the early creative rise of Picasso. As Howard Gardner explains, this type of prodigiousness provides a beautiful example of the "Mozart enigma," or how such dazzling beginnings allow the artist to achieve even greater achievement and recognition as they mature (10).

The best example of this is his 1983 figurative painting "Notary." The canvas isn't stretched across a frame, but instead clings to three huge wood panels. According to Basquiat, this was his idea of a triptych: three interrelating stories spread across 13 demented, colorful feet. The raw impact of the work highlights his lack of formal training, but that is precisely what makes it such a masterpiece. It was as if he intuitively knew that any demonstration of formal technique – in other words, something learned and therefore copied – would create a barrier that impeded in the otherwise pure communication of his consciousness. The work also demonstrates evidence of the influence of the work of Matisse, Picasso, Miro, de Kooning, and Rauchenberg, as well as his use of African motifs in relation to his own genealogy.

Despite his untimely death from a heroin overdose at age 27 in 1988, his legacy lives on in pop culture and the art world at large. Most recently, the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child was screened at the 2010 Sundance Film festival and is now available to view on Netflix. His swift rise to fame, artistic themes, and sudden death personify the intensity of the hyper-commercialized way of life of the times; such immense ingenuity in such intense circumstances cannot sustain itself forever. As Will Gompertz wrote, “the impressionists made real life their central subject. Basquiat made his life the central subject.” And as the saying goes, far too often, life imitates art.

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTbykf5Fpl0
http://www.complex.com/style/2013/06/jean-michel-basquiat-hip-hop/
http://mic.com/articles/134936/the-weeknd-s-hair-it-s-more-than-an-homage-to-basquiat#.nSfgmlUrx
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/feb/12/life-art-jean-michel-basquiat
http://www.theartstory.org/artist-basquiat-jean-michel.htm
Gardner, Howard. "Chance Encounters in Wartime Zurich. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. New York: Basic, 1993. 10. Print.

Truisims

Have you ever heard a quote and thought ‘wow, that’s so true’? Jenny Holzer aims to captivate exactly that reaction with her art. This Neo- Conceptual artist has captivated her audience with what she calls ‘Truisims’ that often convey contradictory messages. These phrases touch on subject matters of feminist thinking, religion, politics, power, sex and all things controversial.

CRACK THE PELVIS SO SHE LIES RIGHT, THIS IS A MISTAKE. WHEN SHE DIES YOU CANNOT REPEAT THE ACT

Truisim displaying the idea of male dominance and their control of women

 I first discovered Holzer on a trip to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Displayed there is her piece entitled IT TAKES A WHILE BEFORE YOU CAN STEP OVER INERT BODIES, consistent of twenty- eight granite benches with phrases inscribed in them.

My personal favorite?, ‘WHEN YOU ARE ON THE VERGE OF DETERMINING THAT YOU DON’T LIKE SOMEONE IT’S AWFUL WHEN HE SMILES AND HIS TEETH LOOK ABSOLUTELY EVEN AND FALSE’ 

Holzer’s piece at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

She is able to reach her audience through the use of a technological framework. Holzer has tried to model contemporary society’s use of advertising practices. To a generation that receives much of it’s information through advertisements, Jenny has been able to transmit her messages in the form of electric soundboards, merchandise sales, and even condoms to reach her audience. 

Holzer truly is an example of what James C Kaufman and Ronald A. Beghetto would call an eminent creative or Big- C creative. Jenny Holzer was chosen to represent the United States in the Italy's Venice Biennale as their first female artist in 1989 and one the most prestigious that year of the Golden Lion. As part of her piece, Holzer sold hats, posters, and T- shirts displaying her Truisims in various languages. Since then she has received worldwide praise and recognition for her provocative and captivating work, signs Kaufman and Beghetto would agree make her a true Big- C creative.

But before entering into the rank of a Big- C creative, Holzer was a Pro- C creative. After moving to New York to pursue her career as an artist, Holzer printed her Truisms anonymously on simple white paper in black italicized script and post then on buildings, posters, and telephone booths. She then asked her audience to scribble any works or phrases her Truisims evoked and would then wait to hear the conversation that followed. The Public Arts Fund program realized her talent and funded her next piece of artwork, an L.E.D machine that would flash her words on buildings located in heavily populated places such as in Times Square, Washington, D.C., and the Guggenheim Museum. Her continuing popularity and recognition caused her to move from the realm of a Pro- C creative to a Big- C creative.

                                                                                                                                           

Sources:

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/contemporary/Jenny-Holzer.html

http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artists/jenny-holzer

Kaufman, James C., & Beghetto, Ronald A. (2009). Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity.