Subject:
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Re: The pseudo-intellectual ramblings of a cool-guy wanna-be.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Mon, 6 Jun 2005 16:19:47 GMT
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Viewed:
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808 times
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In lugnet.general, Leonard Hoffman wrote:
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I think Pop Surrealism might be a good label for it - if for no other reason
than the example of the artists that you linked to. But I think one of the
key parts of this new LEGO Art is using the medium of LEGO (brightly colored
children’s building blocks) to rebuild the bizarre and sometimes dark side of
reality. An example of this might be at the link above. There is a picture
of Mr.Ham, a robot made out of LEGO, smoking a bong. While I’m not going to
say that drug use is good or bad, but it certainly isn’t the high point of
our civilization.
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Sure it is. If it’s not a *high* point for Ham, he’s using the bong
incorrectly.(1)
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I think the picture is outrageously funny, and I think the
humor comes from the odd juxtaposition. Using LEGO (a child’s toy) to make a
robot (a technological wonder) who spends his time smoking (not a very galant
use of time).
There isn’t any grand message there, but that is part of the point. Art
doesn’t have to be about the big things in life. I think that Art
shouldn’t be about the big things - by doing that, we make Art too big for
our ordinary lives. And Felix made the point all too well, Art is around us
all the time. Humans have a propensity to surround themselves with Art
constantly, from commercials to cleverly colored cell phones. I might call
this “art” (lower case a) because it isn’t trying to make any point at all,
but it is still art. I think the style of the “popular” - the language of
imagery that is common to the ordinary person - is the most potent ones
available to an artist today.
I see a number of LEGO Artists around who do similiar sort of work. Work
that draws the line between sculpture and something else - that focuses on
both the ordinary and the extraordinary (Space Monkey smoking a cigar is a
great example) and just touches on the humorous. A lot of what could be
qualified as this ‘New LEGO Art’, most people (including the artists) would
say isn’t actually Art. But I think they’d say that because it doesn’t have
the quality of pretention and false depth that most people attribute to Art.
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Art is in the eye of the beholder. If a piece does the things that art is
supposed to do (instill emotion, make one think, make one wonder) it’s art.
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I’m really glad you wrote this post Felix because it has started me
considering the artistic movement that I have suddenly found myself in the
midst of. I think this is very exciting, and I’m interested in what new
directions this could take.
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I think may have heard me and others expound that LEGO is a medium, just like
clay or oils or pastelchalks, it’s fun to explore the limits of the medium. One
of the greatest things about Micro and about Vignettes are that they both (in
different ways) impose additional constraints beyond what we normally deal
with... (2)
Great thread. Felix is on a roll! Maybe that’s his role?
++Lar
1 - you know I had to do it!
2 - conversely this is why I’m down on 8 wide and on Miniland scale (if only in
fun)... they both lift the limits that others deal with, and in a sense, are a
cheat. (not that it’s wrong, if it feels good, do it...)
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