Political art

Marcel Duchamp's urinal/ fountain

I choose to write on the topic of political art. The article that I choose to write about is about recycled art. Recycled art can also be called cause art or found object art. This article was written by Carlos Alcala of the Sacramento Bee.

This article discusses the use recycled materials in art. The quote from the text referring to recycling in the art world that “Recycling is nice, but art's the goal It's the vision not necessarily an effort to go 'green' driving the creative process, artists say” is to me a very interesting and fun way of looking at garbage/recycling. This to me also seems like a political statement in that we are creating so much garbage/recycling that we cannot keep going at this rate so why don’t we just use the garbage/recycling as art or other useful substances such as art.

This article also discussed the concept of making art your own and not listening to other people to decide what is art and what is not art. A great, humorous, and unique example of not letting other people’s opinions decide what art should be is when Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal into art in 1917 to make people “question the concept of art”. A cording to the text is that” a tradition in art using discarded materials for art has a long tradition dating back to artist”. Another example of this is when Picasso used a bike seat and handlebars to make a bull. This emphasized the artist's vision. Contemporary gigantic artists like Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg also included found materials in their art works. An up and coming recycled art artist and associate director of Verge Gallery named Liv Moe created a chair made from an old chair and some Rolling Stone magazines that someone had given her. She tore the pages into strips and then sewed them together. At the point when she had a good amount of them together in a “long, looping mass,” it started to take on the appearance of a “figure draped on a chair” according to the text.

There are now even art completions for recycled art at the California State Fair. The exhibit is called Sacramento's Second Saturday. It has had a recycled-art category for at least 10 years. This year, the category will have its own division with its own competition. The top work will have a $700 prize. Recycled art entrants at this fair can have many environmental motivations but it can change from artist to artist. Although this all does depend on people’s political views, personalities, feelings, and other emotions/views.

In closing I would like to say that I thought that this article was very interesting. It made my interest for recycled art grow. It also sparked some new interests within me about recycling and recycling in the art world. This article also gave me a new appreciation towards Marcel Duchamp. I have heard of him before but now I have a new and improved interest for him. I will be very interested in finding more out about him and his works of art and to find out about all of the ways he made people question the concept of art. I am also interested in appreciating other/new works of art that people make out of recycling or found objects. I have a genuine concern for the environment and I think that it is a truly good idea to incorporate recycling into art. Well, you know what they say “another man’s trash is another man’s treasure!”

Written By Gutter Chic of Gutter Chic Inc. 2010

Author(s):	Carlos Alcala
Document types:	News
Section:	LIVING HERE
Publication title:	The Sacramento Bee. Sacramento, Calif.: Feb 22, 2010. pg. D.1
Edition:	METRO FINAL
Source type:	Newspaper
Document URL:	http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1968236661&sid=2&Fmt=3&clientId=8493&RQT=309&VName=PQD