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- snarke (
snarke) wrote,
Work of Art, 2.2
Watched episode 2 of "Work of Art." I am mystified by Bayeté's selection as winner. I am entirely in agreement with the three lowest positions. [Addenda: having read judge Jerry Saltz's blog entry, I'm much less mystified. He specifically emphasizes that Bayeté's piece, seen on television, 'looks like nothing,' and also felt that runner-up Michelle's piece fails to come through in the broadcast.]
What would I have done? Well, if I were on Team Digestion, I would probably have done something with waving villi, but I thought that theme was terrible. For "Migration," I was all set to have five or six sets of footprints setting out from a common point. One would be bare feet, there's be a set of sneakers, some boots, some high heels, and so on. One set would walk out of the gallery. One set would fade away. One set would end in some kind of explosion. I didn't figure out what the others would do, because that's when Simon made them scrap their themes. "Migration" turned into "Playground," and I had a lot more trouble with that. In the end, I came up with a swing (hopefully suspended from the ceiling), set to swing left to right, with some kind of really nasty {splat} on the wall in front of it, as if somebody had let go at the top of the arc and plastered into the wall. The swing would have been weighted to be as heavy as possible to cause it to stay swinging for long periods of time. I didn't like that one nearly as much as the "Migration" idea. Title: 'Higher! Higher!" Hmm. It just occurred to me to add "bloody" footprints leading away from the splat. Uneven, staggering, and fading out as the 'blood' wears off the shoes, leaving the final fate of the rider unknown. That helps a little.
On the other hand, I really liked what I came up with for "Circles" or balls or loops or whatever, the "Digestion" team's (lame) new theme. A large container of some sort, maybe a five-gallon bucket?, with a tube rising up, then a track spiraling downward from it that eventually led back to the container. At random intervals, an Arduino board would close a relay, sending a ping-pong ball out of the container, up the tube, and onto the track. The ball would roll down the track and back into the container. The balls would have words on them: "run," "fly," "leap," and such would be written in green, "fall," "crash," "trip" would be in red. The track would be inclined so that the balls moved slowly enough for a viewer to see that there were words on them, but fast enough to make them difficult, or impossible, to read. Title: "I Need to Get Out More."
"Higher! Higher!" would have been a fairly weak piece on the winning team, and "I Need to Get Out More" would have been the only piece actually demonstrating motion on the losing team, so I think, either way, I would have been safe from elimination. But, as always, one never knows.