Week 3

Today we looked at the Reading by Darren O'Donnell. His reading shows his idea that Art can be very difficult to create as a single person, but can be created on a large scale by a small group of people triggering certain events that increase it's size. He says that art has great impact on the world and we discussed and questioned whether individuals have power or not. Some of the art he mentioned address political concepts or disrupt ordinary situations in the way that they are performed. Some of the examples he mentioned are:

Artigas- This took place in California on the Mexican border. It involved two football teams and two basketball teams playing their games on the same pitch at the same time. This relates to O'Donnells reading in that it questions the laws of borders and could create potential political controversy.

Library Freeze- In this Performance, people froze in a public library at a certain time to show appreciation for books. Only a certain amount of people knew about this therefore this art disrupted the verisimilitude of the library to make a statement.

We looked at the image of a person covered in scrunched up newspaper which was by Ian Breakwell (Episode in a small town library) and in small groups we came up with our own interpretations of what this image could be portraying. We were given newspaper, scissors and cello tape and were asked to produce our own performance based on this picture.

Our group decided to create a symbolic piece based on the idea that an individual can gain so much knowledge from the UEL library and sometimes it can be overwhelming. One of our group members sat at a desk working, while the rest of us walked up to her at different times and stuck a few pieces of newspaper on her. We did this until she was completely covered in the paper, just like the image from Ian Breakwell's work. As some students in the library were not aware of what we were doing or the reasons for it, they became very confused. For this reason the ordinary situation was disrupted, and as Darren O'Donnel believes, this can be one of the most effective ways to create art as it makes a big impact. Below are some photos of our interpretation of Episode in a Small Town Library: