Klein's Performance Art

Total art is a type of art that “reaches beyond the studio and the art gallery and into the public domain.”  Artists that use total art attempt to gain inspiration from everything around them, and often use random people as part of their work.  Generally, these artists are more concerned with the process of making the piece of art rather than the finished product.  Performance art is a type of total art that Yves Klein made famous with his work, Anthropometry.  Klein had two naked women covered in paint drag each other across a canvas as “human brushes” to complete the piece.  Obviously, the final product of making that piece wouldn’t matter that much, because the more artistic part was actually how it was made.  I have a hard time accepting something like this as art.  I believe art should take talent, and while there may be talent in coming up with an idea as crazy as that, it took no real talent to create the piece.  And in fact, Klein himself didn’t even make it, he chose two women to carry out his idea for him.  This painting reminded me a lot of the works of Jackson Pollock.  He would randomly splatter paint on his canvases, not caring how the painting would actually turn out.  He was more concerned with enjoyment of the process than the end product.  Since Anthropometry might look somewhat like Pollock’s works when it was finished, I imagine Klein didn’t care much about what it looked like either.  The artistic part to these artists was actually in the creative process, and the outcome didn’t really matter.

Mass Persuasion

With the rise of the Information Age came two of the most important inventions of our time; the computer and the television.  Both computers and televisions are easily accessible to most Americans, which makes these a technologies a perfect way for companies to advertise.  Americans are bombarded with thousands of advertisements every day, but we don’t realize how regular advertisement has become in our daily lives.  French sociologist Jacques Ellul thought that advertisement was the greatest assault to human dignity and that by allowing advertisement, television was creating a “mass man.”  We have become a society of people that are all programmed to want the same things.  The television tells us to buy things, so we buy them.  The advertisements we see on the television and our computers are only those of the companies that can afford to get their product or service advertised.  Therefore, we end up seeing advertisements for many of the same or similar products.  These advertisements tell us that we need these products, that everyone else has them, and that if we don’t get them we will certainly be unhappy with our decisions.  We are a “mass man,” we buy and want all the same things.  I believe Ellul though this was an assault of human dignity because the ads we see teach us that conformity should be looked at as a good thing.  We trade in our individualism for the assurance that we will be like everyone else and won’t feel excluded.  I understand Ellul’s position, but I think it may be a little extreme.  Americans can recognize when they’re seeing an advertisement on the television and if they don’t want to buy something they have to power to turn it down.       

The House of the Spirits

One of the major themes of The House of the Spirits was change, and the entire book emphasized the contradiction of the old and the new.  The Trueba family seemed to represent the old way: a family that had traditional values and did what was expected of them.  Ferula was always very religious, prayed regularly for herself and the people around her, and upheld her very strict morals.  Esteban had the traditional idea that his peasants at Tres Marias needed a strong leader that would provide enough for them to survive and that if they started to get ideas of revolution in their head it would only make them lazier and would eventually lead to his own downfall.  He shared similar views of women, thinking that they needed a man to control them and any sort of abnormal behavior (like that of Clara’s mother, Nivea) needed to be suppressed with a beating.  This, clearly, was not a value also held by the del Valle family.  They represented a new way of thinking.  Their uncle Marcos was a traveler that had been all around the world and who was always planning some strange scheme.  Nivea, Clara’s mother, was an outspoken political supporter of women’s rights, which was still a new idea at the time and made her an easy target of gossip.  Clara, of course, was a clairvoyant that put more time into her psychic abilities than forming strong relationships with the people around her.  As the book goes on, we learn more about Esteban’s political involvement and see towards the end that his Conservative party is overthrown by the Socialists.  In a way, the Trueba family and Esteban’s traditional ideals reflect the Conservative party, while the del Valle family reflects the Socialist party.  The Socialist party gained recognition and brought new ideas to their country, while the del Valle family, especially Clara, brought their new ideas and values to Esteban.