Entry #5: Ron Graff

Ron Graff, our speaker this week, was the first lecture we’ve had with any member from painting.  He was very fun to listen to because I found a lot of his opinions on his views of the art world very intriguing.  He started off by telling us about his background, explaining that he failed out of high school, and with no degree, entered the service.  When he returned, he enrolled at Weed Community College in California, where he studied to be an engineer like his brother.  However, he soon decided against that profession and attempted to be an artist.  There, he met Professor Wilbur, who Graff was fascinated by because the professor had the ability to correct the contrast, colors and shades of a painting to make it easily resemble the actual scene.  Ironically, Wilbur was fired the same year he received the Teacher of the Year Award from the Art Institute.  I thought that Graff’s insight on the matter was spot on, observing that there were too many rules now-a-days of what you can and cannot do in relation to art, that it makes it almost impossible to teach.  It seems that people are afraid that someone’s feelings will get hurt if their art is corrected or altered, because in their eyes, everything is “art”.

The thing that Ron Graff said that had the greatest impact on me during this entire term of class, was that you needed to paint something you hate, and you won’t hate it anymore.  You have to reinvent it for yourself.  An example of this within his own work, was his paintings of flowers.  He called his first few pieces “stupid” because they never turned out the way that he wanted them to, but when he moved to Oregon there were flowers EVERYWHERE, and he began painting them all of the time.  I, myself can recall hating my mom’s craft parties and the times she would ask me to make things with her, but this summer when I tried mod podge, I was hooked.  This goes without saying, that Graff’s idea is relative to a lot more things even outside of art.  Hearing about popular television shows or movies can make you despise them because you never think they’ll live up to the hype, but when you actually watch them, you fall in love.  There are other instances like watching sports teams.  You may think they are the most boring thing in the world, but when you actually try it, chances are there is going to be one that you think is fun or become passionate about.

The readings this week had a lot to do with identity politics, which I learned are basically the political arguments focusing on self-interest and perspectives of minority groups.  This related well to both of the readings in discussing America’s colonial past.  In Searching for the Essence of Art, Arthur Danto refers to our society as a sinking ship where everyone is trying to kill one another.  In laymen’s terms, we’re all being selfish while our planet is being destroyed.  Danto’s concern is what is happening to earth and how much more it’s able to handle.  Besides the complexities of overpopulation, much of it has to do with how cultures have impacted the environment.  Coco Fusco stresses how important the past is in her interview in Two Undiscovered Aborigines Dancing on the Wound of History.  She said that “in a moment where some- not everybody, but many people- involved in making contemporary culture are really interested in transforming what we understand as art.”  I found this interesting because it seems as if we are trying to understand our past but are unable to.  Fusco seemed very frustrated by this.  In her exhibit where she posed as an aboriginal inhabitant from an island in the Gulf of Mexico, she was treated poorly by spectators; beer bottles of urine were tossed at her, teens attempted to burn her with cigarettes and grown men treated her as an animal by making gorilla noises directed at her.  What she did was very bold, because she wanted to represent her body as an image of what should be the endlessly recycled colonial motives that our country was formerly based on.