Department of Art Honors Glass Box Gallery Exhibition: Alter Altar November 9-20

What: Department of Art Honors Glass Box Gallery Exhibition: Alter Altar

When: November 9-20. Reception Monday, November 9, 4-6PM

Where: Glass Box Galleries A, B & C

Who: Petula Jamieson, Yaeli Dukler, Amani Jordan, Melissa Jauregui, Cydney Ongpaucho, Isabel Kaufman, Lucas Gasquy, Ito Garcia and M Taylor

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Rachel Corry on Monday, November 30

Artwork Courtesy of Rachel Corry

What: Art 1A Artist Talk featuring Rachel Corry

When: Monday, November 30 @ 9:30AM

Where: in TD-W 1701

Instagram:

@rachelseessnailshoes

@attachmenttoearth

Website: www.rachelcorry.art

Artist Bio,

Rachel Corry (1982) is an artist, shoemaker and poet. After studying painting and sculpture at UCLA in the early 00s, she stumbled into shoemaking and focused on refining and teaching that skill for 15 years with her brand Rachel Sees Snail Shoes. Rachel is now a 2nd-year MFA student at UCSB working primarily in sculpture- making functional art-objects for domestic space: quilts, lamps, and furniture. 

Rachel's current work represents a more whimsical, idealistic world where objects are handmade, personal and idiosyncratic. These often contain repeating motifs, symbols and references to her values of biophilia and multi-species justice. She pays close attention to folk and alternative cultures, literature, early cinema, fairy tales, indigenous teachings, Zen, music, comics, Jungian psychology and dreams. Color is used as a sign of hope and collage offers clues to connections. Materially, Rachel enjoys using what's been left behind, 'making do' and being light on the earth. She hopes her work can offer a vision of a more ecocentric world. 

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Yaroslav Golovkin on Monday, November 9

All Images Courtesy of Yaroslav Golovkin

What: Art 1A Artist Talk featuring Yaroslav Golovkin

When: Monday, November 9 @ 9:30AM

Where: in TD-W 1701

Instagram: @yyy_rrr_ccc

Artist Bio:

Yaroslav Golovkin (b. 1995) is a cinematographer, filmmaker, and moving image artist from Russia. After graduating from the GITR Film and Television School and the Moscow School of New Cinema, he has continued working in Los Angeles as both a cinematographer and director, drawing methods, technologies, and production processes from cinema into his artistic practice.

Films he has shot have screened at festivals including New/Next Film Festival, Kraków Film Festival, Frameline, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

His current practice centers on time-based works and multi-channel installations, experimenting with 16mm film, its materiality, and modes of projection. His research engages questions of distributed accountability, plant relocation, new media theory and media teleology, life within climatic and social disasters, memory, and the fragility of the moving image. Characterized by a raw and expressive visual language, his work investigates trust in the image itself, leaving the viewer with a persistent question: How was this image produced, and can it be believed?

Fictional & Documentary Space: Vivian Sobchack and Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game

This week we will be exploring Vivian Sobchack's discussion about the real and the irreal in her essay, "On the Death of a Rabbit in Fictional Space: Extra-textual Knowledge and Documentary Consciousness." 

If you are interested in reading more of Sobchack's analysis about the hunting scene from Jean Renoir's film, Rules of the Game, please refer to her book Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (UC Press, 2004) 

Write a 1-2-page summary of: Vivian Sobchack's Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Discuss what she means by the "real" and the "irreal." She discusses the irreal on p. 241 (reader p. 199) and Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game beginning on p. 245 (reader p. 203).

  Film Still from Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939)

According to the Criterion Collection,

Considered one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis’ country château lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances. The film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the premiere audience in 1939, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II; it wasn’t reconstructed until 1959. That version, which has stunned viewers for decades, is presented here.

The son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was also a master of his medium: cinema. After making his mark in the early thirties with two very different films, the anarchic send-up of the bourgeoisie Boudu Saved from Drowning and the popular-front Gorky adaptation The Lower Depths, Renoir closed out the decade with two critical humanistic studies of French society that routinely turn up on lists of the greatest films ever made: Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game (the former was celebrated in its time, but the latter was trashed by critics and audiences—until history provided vindication). After a brief, unfulfilling Hollywood stint during World War II, Renoir traveled to India to make his first Technicolor film, The River, and then returned to Europe in the early fifties to direct three visually dazzling explorations of theater, The Golden Coach, French Cancan, and Elena and Her Men. Renoir persisted in his cinematic pursuits until the late sixties, when, after the completion of The Little Theater of Jean Renoir, a collection of three short films, he decided to dedicate himself solely to writing, leaving the future of the medium to those who looked to him in reverence.

  Film Still from Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939)

Vivian Sobchack's essay isn't an in-depth analysis about the narrative cycle in Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game, but instead it explores the way in which there is a disruptive collision between the real and the irreal within the space of this fictional movie. She posits that this very disruption prevents the spectator from re-engaging in the immersive experience of the fiction once they recognize that real deaths occurred in the service of the fiction. While the real deaths are birds and rabbits– instead of people– does this shift the way that you respond to the film?

What is the irreal, about which Sobchack speaks? How would you define the irreal or irreality? How does the irreal differ from the real?

The Irreal: The best way to contextualize the irreal is that it is an illusion of reality created within a fiction, and that it takes its cues from the real world. In other words, it is a fiction that looks like reality, and such a device is a very useful tool in film because it creates a cohesive space within the fiction that allows the spectator to temporarily suspend their disbelief in order to engage in the immersive space of the narrative.

In Rules of the Game the irreal is the fictional story that is being told and the real refers to the death of the rabbits and birds that were actually killed in the hunt scene that you will watch below. 

Sobchack argues that once we understand that these real animals were actually killed in the service of this fictional story that the space of the fiction is forever ruptured and cannot be repaired. She claims that the subsequent actions in the fiction, and the eventual death of a character in the film, which is foreshadowed by the deaths of the animals, become irrelevant. Thus, the death of the irreal person (a character in the film) is displaced by the real deaths of animals. Therefore, the irreal death is overtaken in importance by the real deaths of the rabbits, and as a result the seamless space of the fiction is broken.

Questions to ask yourself while viewing the clip of the hunting scene:

1) Does the fact that these deaths occurred 85 years ago in any way desensitize your response?

2) Does knowing that these animals actually died in the service of this film shift the way that you respond to the scene?

3) While reading Sobchack's essay, one has the impression that only a single rabbit died– when in fact it is clear that many rabbits and birds died in this hunting scene. Is there a singular moment to which she appears to be referring? If so, identify it and the precise moment in the clip (cite the time- i.e.: Renoir, 01:15 - 02:00).

4) Do you agree with the premise of Sobchack's argument after watching the scene to which she refers? Why, or why not?

Jean Renoir. Rules of the Game film clip.

Assignments to Clear Unexcused Absences from Art 1A

If you have missed a lot of classes, with unexcused absences throughout the quarter, then you should do these assignments to clear them. As you know, 5 or more unexcused absences will result in failing the class. However, if you had emergencies, and can provide me with a note from your doctor, from Student Health, or from your CAPS, DSP, CARE Counselor (for the specific dates in question)– then those absences will be excused. These are not extra credit assignments to improve your grade. These papers are due no later than Thursday, December 3 by 5:00 PM. Submit them to your TA via email.

Please note: If you did not go on the museum field trips, or the alternate museum field trip, then you have 2 unexcused absences for each of the trips, and you will also be missing the graded weekly assignment those weeks.

To clear unexcused absences: Watch the recorded Arts Colloquium Artist Talks found below, and write a 2-page Artist Talk response. Each talk and written assignment clears a single absence. Therefore, if you need to clear more than one absence you will need to do more than one of these assignments. 

You may submit up to 3 assignments total:

1) Tia-Simone Gardner: Recorded Talk

2) Nicholas Galanin: Recorded Talk

3) Alisha Wormsley: Recorded Talk

TRANS/FIX First Year MFA Exhibition at the Glass Box Gallery

Scholarly Research Training & Mechanics of a Formal Research Paper Workshops

Scholarly Research Training Workshop: Monday, October 19 in lecture with Heather Nisen.

Mechanics of a Formal Research Paper Workshop: Wednesday, October 21 in lecture.

Heather Nisen (Art & Architecture Librarian):
hnisen@ucsb.edu
http://guides.library.ucsb.edu/art1a

(805) 893-3026

Here is the link to the plagiarism tutorial that the Teaching & Learning Department created:

https://guides.library.ucsb.edu/citation/plagiarism

Paper Format (PAPER TOPIC HERE): 

- 10 pages of text (this does NOT include the cover page, bibliography or images)

- Double-spaced

- Cover page

- Footnotes or endnotes

- Bibliography

- Images (at the end of the paper)

- Use at least 10 different research sources (including peer reviewed 
journal articles, books, exhibition catalogs, monographs, etc.)

- Use at least 10-15 citations

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN WRITING & EDITING YOUR PAPER:

1) Do I have the proper number of citations and sources?

2) Did I properly format my citations using MLA or Chicago?

3) Do I have a properly formatted formal bibliography?

4) Did I adhere to the proper paper length?

5) Do I have a clear, and specific thesis statement?

6) Does my thesis statement specifically relate to the final draft of my paper?

7) Did I run spell check (repeatedly)?

8) Did I carefully edit to make sure that I used proper grammar, and were my tenses consistent?

9) Did I formulate clear arguments and substantiate all of my claims with clear and concrete examples?

10) Did I avoid sweeping generalizations and vague assertions?

11) Did I use casual colloquial language in my formal research paper? If so, find more precise ways to describe the point being made.

12) Did I use scholarly research sources such as peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly articles and books rather than sources such as blogs, Wikipedia, encyclopedias etc (that are not acceptable sources for a formal research paper).

13) Did I properly cite quotes and summaries of other people's intellectual property (footnotes and in-text citations)?

14) Did I avoid excessive biographical information about the artist? Instead I should only include biographical information that is directly relevant to their artistic practice.

15) Would anyone reading my paper understand what I am trying to convey, or do I need to more clearly define the scope of my research and ultimately the point of my paper?

16) Did I place the pictures at the end of my paper? If I embedded them in the text, I need to remove them and place them at the end of my paper.

17) Did I remember to put my name, perm number and section time on my paper?

18) Did I remember to frequently save, backup and email drafts of my paper to myself (just in case my computer crashes)?

19) When I had questions, or needed help, did I reach out to my TA, professor or CLAS?

GENERAL TIPS ON WRITING YOUR PAPER:

1) The selection of a good thesis and supporting examples is an important part of producing a good paper. Be selective. The paper is about how to look closely at works of art and how your evaluation of objects and images is expanded by the specific context in which they are presented.

2) Write primarily with nouns and verbs. Avoid unnecessary (especially vague and imprecise) adjectives and adverbs.

3) Revise and rewrite. Proofread your work. Do not rely solely on "spell check."

4) Use the dictionary to refer to words you do not fully understand.

5) Do not overstate, or excessively use qualifiers (such as very, rather, little, etc.).

6) Use orthodox diction and accurate spelling. ("Its" is possessive; "It's" is a contraction for "it is," "Its' " doesn't exist. "Their" is possessive, "They're" is a contraction of "they are," There is declarative).

7) Be clear. Make references clearly. (Do not use the word "this" as the subject of a sentence).

8) Do not let your opinions get in the way of your writing.

9) Avoid using Wikipedia, blogs, newspaper articles and other materials that are not scholarly. These ARE NOT research materials for a formal research paper.

10) Get to the point quickly. Concentrate on quality of writing not quantity of words.

11) For help with formatting MLA and Chicago citations, visit Purdue Owl: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html

For help writing the paper contact CLAS at 893-3269. They have a writing lab that will help you with papers, and will even proofread your papers. They also offer help specifically to students for whom English is a second language. CLAS site: http://www.clas.sa.ucsb.edu/