Untilted Fall '95 by Alex Bag

This video is the progression of an art student interrupted by short character sketches. The character sketches, while funny in their own offbeat way, seem like they were just made to amuse Alex when she was feeling bored. The study of the art student's progress was a very funny caricature of the cliche art student. Speaking in a series of buzzwords and generic observations on art school, the Alex establishes the art student as the strength of the video.

The New Museum

Emory Douglass: Black Panther
These lithographs and silkscreen images often used a graphical style reminiscent of 1960's comic-book art that visually I found pleasing. The racially-charged content of the imagery, the quotes from revolutionaries and equal rights or empowerment vocalists gave the exhibit a bitter twist for me.

Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt
There were many photographs taken of the South African setting, mainly showing the impoverished lives of the subjects. There were hints of Apartheid and the AIDS epidemic in this gallery, but nothing overbearing. The most effective piece in this gallery was an installation called"The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice." It visually simulated a prison, with cramped walls, jail bars and a very high ceiling. There was a plaque on the floor that read "1972" and then, at the top of the very high chamber, a plaque reading "2009." Next to the prison cell was a pie chart, with "23 Hours" written inside with the appropriate proportion represented in the pie. Very powerful.

Para Schizo by John Bock
This is a video that is actually two videos. One is of a woman farming what appears to be rice on a bright, sunny day, while the adjacent video is of a man crawling around and stumbling in a darkened woods. As the woman tends to the rice, the man calls her "filthy" and appears to be in pain. As the woman completes her chores, the man dies. I wasn't able to grasp the message, but I was left with an impression that nature would see farmland as a perversion of it's assets.

A Bucket of Blood

I took this film as a satire of the general artist's struggle to win acceptance in the art world. Of course, the need for him to make each of his pieces better than the last becomes a complication when he has to commit murder to produce art. There was the very real issue put into the film of how one actually becomes a "real artist" and the need for encouragement from his peers.

I'm not sure if the untimely demise of the main character was meant to be a metaphor for the short string of time some artists can be appreciated, but if nothing else, it was a moral to the more literal parts of the story.