Week Fourteen Video Review

I have to apologize for this posting, I have a terrible cold and I’m having a little trouble focusing. I’m afraid this may not be up to my usual standards. For this weeks video review there are four videos to watch. The first one I watched was “The Lowdown on Lowbrow: West Coast Pop Art”. This was a pretty cool video. Like past videos, I liked this because it was narrated by the artists themselves and gave good insight into their motivations and influences. I liked the various names the artists go by, like Shag, Brain Eater, 12midnite and The Pizz. Lowbrow art was developed as a reaction to highbrow culture. Robert Williams, who says he invented the term, doesn’t like the term or feel it’s appropriate. The genre revolves around naked girls, hot rods, pop culture and TV shows. Lowbrow art has not been well received by the established art society but lately has been received better. The art work is interesting and some of it is recognizable from album covers and posters. A pretty cool film, all in all.

The Second film I watched was “Bones of Contention: Native American Archeology”. This seems more like a scientific film as opposed to an art film, but I definitely found it compelling. It is about the movement of native Americans to retrieve the bones of their ancestors that are being kept in museums like the Smithsonian. In 1971 a native American women named Maria Pearson was upset when human were remains found by a construction crew, the remains of white people were moved and reburied but the remains of an Indian women and a small Indian girl were sent to a museum for study. The film goes into some of the history of American oppression of the Indians and discusses several different responses by various tribes in the country regarding the return of remains. It discusses the differences the tribes and the scientific community have regarding how the remains should be used. I liked this film it’s very interesting.

The third film I watched is “George Eastman House: Picture Perfect”. This film is about the Eastman Photography museum in Rochester New York. The museum is located in the home of George Eastman, the founder of Kodak. Some interesting facts I picked up from this one are that motion picture film \was invented by Eastman and Thomas Edison. Eastman introduced his Brownie Camera at the turn of the 19^th century for one dollar and it gave regular people access to photography. The film goes on about the contents of the museum, including works that represent 14000 amateur and professional photographers, the camera used by NASA in the sixties to take pictures of the moon and 3 million motion picture items in their collection. This was a descent film. Some of the history of the camera was a review of material that we covered earlier in the semester, but aside from that this was a good learning experience.

The fourth film I tried to watch was “Displaying Modern Art: The Tate Aproach”. Unfortunately, the film keeps cutting out on me a few minutes in. I did manage to learn that the Tate museum has moved away from the traditional approach of displaying art established in New York. The New York museum displays its art in chronological order on white walls. The Tate has decided to display items by four different categories; landscape, still life, history and the nude. That’s the best I can do for this one.