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This is a graded discussion: 50 points possible due Jul 10 at 8am

Online Report 2: Art in Our Midst

Online Report 2: Art In Our Midst

Original Reports must be posted on time; Original Reports submitted late will not be accepted for evaluation.

Bonus Follow-up Posts will be accepted up to 72 hours (3 days) after the due date for Original Reports.

Link to the complete instructions for Online Report 2

You may review the Evaluation Rubric for this assignment here.

It can be hard to be the first person to start a discussion; so, to help things along, I've posted my "Art In Our Midst" report to start the conversation. ----- Janet Hartranft

Art and ... ART

Image 1: Two of the metal sculptures (the first is in the foreground, the second is in the distance and a bit harder to discern).

Image 2: The "Face"---the object no one sees as "art."

The work that I chose to focus on for my report is located in my garden but is situated in a way that is very "public"---easily seen by visitors but also by passersby from several vantage points on public walkways and streets. The history of the sculpture (Image 1) and how it came to be a work of art is really interesting. The sculpture began as a piece of industrial waste---I found the main panel in a pile of steel (Cor-ten) salvage material located on the grounds of a friend's welding shop. I was so taken by the abstract quality of the panel that I immediately asked my friend if I could have it (as well as two other, related pieces of steel). No problem---the pieces of metal would have just been sold for scrap metal. I then asked if I could have the pieces welded onto "bases"---additional solid pieces of steel. My friend, who does not see what he does as "art making" in any way, asked "Why?" I explained that I wanted to re-purpose the flat, abstract pieces of steel as sculptures for my garden. But, he said, they're just pieces leftover from a project we worked on for the University (he had created several large-scale gates for Penn State). Yes, I responded, but I'm going to use them (the waste pieces) in a way that redefines them.....as art in my garden. Ooookay.....he said.

I brought the pieces home and placed each of them in a different location, moving them around as I

decided where I liked them best. At this point, I had no goal for others to "see" these objects as art....it was a purely personal project and one in which I had no intention of identifying myself as the "artist" of these pieces...I saw myself more as an interventionist who had "re-purposed" pieces of metal as sculptures. For me, the metal sculptures challenged the organic nature of their environment---an environment that I had designed and built over 20 years, replacing a flat piece of lawn with series of landscapes built from rocks, plants, and trees. Where the piece in the front (of the picture) is located is next to a dry stream my husband and I built to channel storm water that runs through our property during intense storms. The sculptures also mimic the verticals I've incorporated into the garden via tall specimen trees---deliberately upending the notion of "flatness" that appears in so many suburban gardens.

I never expected other people to see these sculptures as art in the way that I did---more metaphoric "challenges" to my garden than as discrete sculptures placed in a landscape setting. What I found, however, is that as people would visit the garden (or catch me as they passed by on the streets and pathways that surround my house), they would ask how the "sculptures" had come to be placed? Who was the artist? Where did they come from? Within a couple years, the metal pieces were transformed into objects accepted as sculptures by the audiences that see them.

I have another piece of art in my garden that is "art" in a more traditional sense (Image 2). It's a large face created in concrete. This is far more easily described as "art" because of its representational qualities. It rises above common garden "kitsch"---like gnomes and frogs and metal cranes---but I've always hesitated to refer to it as art but fully expected others to see it as art because it was representational and because it is not something commonly seen in gardens in this area. Yet, over the years, no one has ever referred to the "face" as art----people like it, to be sure, but "like" it as a piece of garden statuary. The metal pieces---abstract and Cor-ten rusty---are always referred to as "art" or "sculpture" and with the customary "awe" we associate with works of art. It's always been somewhat amusing....and I enjoy asking people why they see the metal pieces as "art". Many times people will say "What else could they be?"....meaning, because they are abstract, they have to be "art", right? It is a humorous hold-over from the responses of many audiences to the abstraction of the 1950s----if I can't make sense of it (an object), it has to be art, no? Are the sculptures art? Yes...by creation (my intention) but also by recognition by the audiences that see them. The "intentions" or understandings of the audiences for the works are very different than mine and, as an art teacher, I definitely challenge the "if it doesn't make sense, it's gotta be art" kind of interpretation. But, that is a place to start a conversation...

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Image 3: This is the sculpture in late summer. The image above was taken in late summer 2016 and you can see the change in the plants and how they grew during the summer.

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