CHANGE ME

This weeks readings and guest lecture were very conflicting for me. Our guest lecture Tannaz (no last name provided) was a very strong and opinionated Iranian women. Which makes perfect sense to pair her with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, another strong and opinionated women who discusses culture a lot while Tannaz bases all of her work off of culture. I have made this connection on how they are similar and I know that we are expected to talk about these two women and related them in a cultural form but this not the most evident similarity for me.
At this point I have not finished the reading but by the end of this blog I will have. I had to stop reading and start writing about what these women seem to be screaming at me. This whole class has been one huge theme that for some reason just slapped me in the face ridiculously hard. All artists experience change in their work, desire change, and rely on change for their work to become successful to them. Throughout Tannaz’s presentation I was intrigued by how much her work progressed in only five years. She showed us specific pictures, read us an exert from a short story, and gave us very descriptive objects of all the things that had inspired her work. I personally know nothing about the Iranian culture and I felt really lost in her work, it was all visually appealing to me, and it is apparent that she is a very intelligent women, but I just did not get it with my severe lack of background knowledge. At the end of her presentation I was kind of hoping that I could get more insight into her opinion of her culture but instead she opened my eyes to something else. I asked, “Which one of your pieces did you personally find most successful?” I assumed she would reciprocate with which ever piece she most successfully got her political message out but instead she said, “[M]y most recent is always the most successful to me.” This punched me. Her work changes as the world does and her inspiration comes from all these things she has come across that have changed her.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett wont stop talking about contemporary and contemporaneous and in the introduction Suzi Gablik was quick to point it out as well. Contemporaneous means existing right now, contemporary means existing at the same time period. She really stresses these words as she talks about how culture is related to art. She is a strong believer in art changing with the cultural world. She thinks that all art is political mean it has to change and form as contemporary art does, She and Gablik discuss this matter and she becomes rather heated.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: All these distinctions are meaningless to me. They’re meaningless because all art is political. Some art makes political issues an overt subject, but don’t  tell me that formalism’s not political. To suggest that some art is political and some art isn’t-
Gablik: What about the notion that some art is aesthetic and some art is not?
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: Also bullshit, if you’ll pardon me for saying so (420-421).
People express how they feel according to the conditions they are living in. As the world changes so does art.