essay about journal entries

Joseph Murphy

Art 80D

Section B

6/6/18

Journal 4

In Rodrigo Valenzuela’s lecture, the piece that stood out to me the most was “Prole”. The

piece “Prole” starts with a bunch of older men playing soccer and then they sit down and talk

about common problems and how the immigrant workers need to come together to benefit

everyone. The choice to have them talk and open up about their life and problems while

videotaping them was interesting and led to a lot of insight on their lives and struggles. It was

inspirational because I had not thought of hearing their voices in such a way. It showed the

immigrant workers in a positive light, showed their humanity, and let them speak their mind.

Another of piece of work that I enjoyed was the series of pictures he took during the painting of

his green room. The series is composed of pictures of the painters who painted his room green

while they are playing soccer. My favorite part about this work is that he removed the soccer ball

from the pictures and was left with these men making weird faces.

The artist’s project “Maria TV” was an interesting piece in which the artist had women

act out scenes from soap operas. I had difficulty following along with this piece because it was in

Spanish. I am not fluent enough in Spanish, nor I am familiar enough with the culture, for the

piece to have had a strong enough impact. I thought it was an interesting way to display mutual

feelings amongst the immigrants even though I may have not understood all of it. Valenzuela

talked about how his work was personal to him because he is from that culture and was an

immigrant who had to do hard labor to make in this country. Valenzuela came to America when

he was 21 and had nothing to his name, was able to work hard and put himself through school.

The “Maria TV” project had people who were also immigrants and then they reenacted soap

operas with passion. The soap operas were personal to Valenzuela because he had grown up in a

house full of women and had similar, if not the same, soap operas playing throughout the day.

The piece had a powerful connection to Valenzuela’s past and gave light to aspects of his

culture.

In relation to the word and topic of “Disruption”, Valenzuela wants to make people feel

differently and think about things in a new light. Valenzuela talked about how we are the

customers and it’s okay to call customer service, in fact we should be calling customer service.

He had a series of photographs that involved riots and people working towards change. He wants

people to not be afraid to stand up for what they believe in. These ideas were expressed also by

the picture series of the gas mask in which he made various home-made gas masks and applied a

reflective tape to highlight certain features in each individual mask.

The most impactful aspect of the the artist’s work was the “Help Wanted” piece. The

piece was created with the help of students who made tools and other household items out of

clay and worked together to create a giant drawing the size of a wall. The work was impactful to

me because it’s use of light as the subject and the beautiful landscape in the back are things that I

truly enjoy trying to capture. I have had experience in managing a team of people and can

understand the difficulty Valenzuela went through when trying to organize the drawing in the

back. Valenzuela discussed about how each of the people who worked on the drawing had

different drawing styles and opinions and it took him a while to get them to conform. If I had one

question to ask Valenzuela it would be, what is he going to do next?