Another fabulous Friday Afternoon Challenge: Art “Happens!”
Art happens in unexpected or new locales when artists take a fresh look at places where it can be created and/or exhibited. Can you identify these places/events?
...and, dear gentlefolks, please do not cheat and “guess”...
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Not that I know who or what he is. . . . 
Whether it DOES or not is another.
And then the third question is does it succeed.
In fact, I wrote a paper on it a few years ago --
"The picture is political: Art and the power of disempowerment."
(Remember, I told you I'd taken a couple of "art appreciation" courses, though my major is sociology.)
Picasso's "Guernica" is certainly political. Virtually all of Sue Coe's is political. Kathe Kollwitz. Goya's "Third of May, 1808."
And so I wrote:
. . . The pictures shocked. The lush-shadowed Renaissance light on women’s faces, the forceful fountain of blood from the man’s throat. Strength in the female figures, determination without hesitation, without fear. Exquisite skill from the artist’s hand, unexpected. Later, the head in the basket like a ripe melon or fresh loaf of bread, the glances over the shoulders, the sword held comfortably with an eerie familiarity.
Artemisia Gentileschi painted five aspects of the biblical story of Judith, the beautiful and wealthy widow who did God’s bidding and saved her people from the tyrant Holofernes. But Artemisia’s Judith looks nothing like an obedient handmaiden; she challenges conventional notions as much today as she did in 1614. She dares assert woman as strength, woman as actor, woman as victor.
And then I closed the paper with
The picture shocks. The pun is on the Fauves, the beast in the livid color. Wolf-mother, starving even as she provides suckle to those who are gone. Hands, the tool of the human, guillotined by the inhuman. Rights – and lefts – severed.
The image comes to us as a whole. Worth far more than a thousand words, it strikes us visually and viscerally. We can turn away, but we cannot erase. If we do not turn away, we may think. We may explore. We may learn who the artist is and what she or he has meant to convey. But first we must look, and many of us choose not to.
Instead we take our art in manageable portions that do not disturb, do not shock, do not make us think that we are wrong or that they make us wrong. We look at Guernica and we do not understand. We see the pieces and parts, the dismembered and the disembodied, and we do not know that this is reality. We cannot know, we cannot allow ourselves to know. To know is to become part of the horror, the truth, the awful and terrible and hideous. They, who wield the power to have and to hold, cannot let us see the horror that they make of and for us, for then we would see the horror that they are and we might turn the power against them.
And even we who do know and do see, we are afraid, for they still wield the power. We do not yet know how to grasp Judith’s sword, but we must learn, or it will sever our hands.
My Whitney Chadwick's "Women, Art, and Society" is on the bookshelf to my left, and I have a copy of Frederika Jacobs "Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa" around here somewhere. I discovered it and used it as a resource for one of my "Women in Art" papers, and the professor then adopted it as a text for future classes.
I'm not so sure it was a "female gaze" so much as a "female experience" Gentileschi brought to her work. Instead of painting FOR a male gaze she painted FROM a woman's experience, and that's what made her really radical.
But don't get me started, because eventually I'll get into territory I really know nothing about and then you'll know me for the intellectual fraud that I am!!
I swear, I don't cheat at these things.
(but I do keep the thread kicked
)
I realize this is a bit "out there." But I often do classic stuff which I love and I know lots of other people love. Do come back! I have a pretty broad background in art and I love the old classics. It will be fun for you I think...
You know, that guy? Who does that one sort of thing? If it is that guy, and it was that sort of thing, then for people who like that kind of stuff, this is the stuff they would like. Unless it's that other guy, and not that first guy at all. In which case I was probably looking at something else entirely.
and it ain't lemon peel...
And a good friend of ours filmed the installation of the one in Paris. I just happened to be watching a video of it the other day (huge crane thing, or cherry picker, helps to pile the clothes that high). And I know Boltanski's work very well. Last year I made everyone laugh at a party (full of artists), because the hosts had put a big coatrack near the door and it collapsed, sending winter coats falling into heaps on the floor. People were shocked at first, but then I said: "Oh look, a Boltanski piece!" and everyone cracked up.
They are all wonderful!
Thank you for bringing these terrific threads to us every week, my dear CTyankee!
There are many wonderful things in this world to behold.
And no, it's no fair to cheat 
Rec
I hope ya'll enjoyed this Friday's Challenge.
Another one for next Friday is already being cooked up for your delight/torment...hope you can visit it!