Feel free to use any of these pictures for your own documentation of your work.
Author: Diane
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Week 12
REMINDER: All blog posts due – including a post documenting your buttons with a title, description and images of the button in action/situ.
FINAL DEADLINE IS WEDNESDAY DEC. 4th, 2024 by 10am.
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Week 11
MONDAY
Critique for Conceptual Portraits
WEDNESDAY
Critique for Conceptual Portraits
Lecture for Artist Buttons:
Make your own ARTIST BUTTONS*
Since the 1950’s artists have been making inexpensive, accessible works in a series/edition intended for wider distribution than singular objects in museums. These have served to critique commercial/market aspects of the art world, and the myth of an expensive “original”. Artist multiples have been made as prints, small, manufactured sculptures, pins, artist books, magazines, postcards, t-shirts, zines and other commercially reproducible media. They are sometimes given away for free, traded or sold for low cost in bookstores, independent art galleries, libraries, convenience stores, activists’ gatherings, and more.
Artist multiples are sometimes playful and mischievous – exploring new and surprising manifestations of commercial media – and often convey ideas and meaning against expected commercial, social, and political goals.
Develop some ideas for unique, artist buttons and post your thoughts and drawings/designs on the blog.
Consider how artists use conceptual strategies to make buttons into art including:
- a button that acknowledges its own button-ness/materiality, is self-conscious and knows it’s a button
- buttons that work together to create a final work
- a button that creates social interaction
- a button that gives instructions/provokes
- a button that reveals things usually hidden
- a button or series that completes a sculpture
- a button that speaks to the body directly, that knows it’s on a body
- a button that creates a performance act by wearing it
- a button made with unexpected materials
In class we will learn to use the button maker together with the appropriate materials. Create a single design, or a series of buttons.
Consider fonts, design, colours, images to make a professional quality artist multiple. You may use up to 15-20 buttons for your final project, plus a few tests.
*See schedule for work time and critique dates.
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Week 10
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”
— Toni Morrison —
MONDAY
More examples of Conceptual Portraits
Reading : Documenting the Lives at the Border – On Tom Kiefer’s Photographs
Combs and Brushes – Tom Kiefer (from the series of objects confiscated at US Border) 2021 
From the series: The American Dream, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/arts/tom-kiefer-migrants-exhibit-boise.html
https://www.tomkiefer.com/el-sueno-americano
Discuss ideas in a class brainstorm session
Work in progress due for discussion in next class!
WEDNESDAY
Schedule for the rest of the term:
Sign up for critique slots: Monday/Wednesday next week
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