"Visual World"

This weeks guest lecturer was very interesting. He is a professor here at UO and his name is Jack Ryan. He has only been teaching here for 2 years. He also teaches in New York in the summer and he has been working there for 8 years. He is also in many other artist groups as well as working for the musical department. Professor Ryan was very interesting and engaging to listen to. He connects his art to the world which he calls a “visual world”.
He started off as a fisherman in Alaska. He lived in a tiny cabin and the only way to get there was by boat or plane. It look very isolated, or as he called it sublime. He began comparing the cabin he lived in with that of Thoreau and Kaczynski. Possibly because there was a double homicide in the cabin about a year before he moved into it. Kind of comparing the sanity of his cabin with theirs. This essentially started his career. He began drawing and examining his world. He showed us some of his earlier work. Drawings of Kaczynski and random other things. He had an exhibit names “Blue Skies: Thar She Blows”. which displayed many things including a table set up with a projector of the news cast of a beached whale in Florence, Oregon in 1970. It was extremely humorous because these people had no idea what to do with this whale so they decided to blow it up! What a logical decision! (NOT). The whale blubber went way further than anyone anticipated and drenched many people as well as smashing the top of a car in. I thought this piece was amazing. It was incredibly funny and it was a real issue that had occurred. I felt like it arose awareness of what happened. I didn’t know!
Next Professor Ryan showed us Scriabin's Mustache which I didn’t fully understand so I wont talk about it. He began skipping through his slides fairly quick so that he can show us some of his newer stuff. He showed us this thing called Fugitive Video Project. I am not sure that I agree with this group of videos. It seemed very….out of the ordinary in a not so great way. I suppose that I am not capable of defining what art is but I feel as though I wouldn’t consider all of that art. Some of it was really great but I think the other might be a little too perverse for me.
I think I can relate Jack Ryan’s work more to our second reading for this week called “Ten Thousand Artists, Not One Master” and it was an interview with a man names Satish Kumar. I think I can relate these two things more because they are both more free flowing along the lines of art. Both Kumar and Ryan believe that art is conforming and changing and all of it is great. The first reading for this week was called “No Art in the Lifeboats” an interview with Hilton Kramer, an art critic. He seemed very set on his ways. It seems as though he is not even slightly interested in modern art. Kramer named a couple artist that I absolutely love but other than that I completely disagree with his view points. I love new art and different ways of creating it. Here are a few of the painting that I think Kramer and I would agree with:

 These are done by Rickard Kiebenkorn

This work is by David Salle