NYC Skyline

Matteo Pericoli

Being on the precipice of the 9/11 ten year anniversary I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about the New York City skyline. In my Technology in the Art Room class, my group happened to pick the skyline as an example of an iconic image and how it fits in with Walter Benjamin's theory of Aura. His description is somewhat ellusive, but many appear to take it as a form of 'authenticity'. That's hard to imagine considering experts go to great lengths to authenticate questionable works and authentication is often given in the form of a written document for a particular work.

A better analogue for the idea of aura might be 'presence'. The point being that the presence of a particular artwork is lost in the reproduction of that work. Eitherway, the New Yorker Magazine recently featured an artist specifically for his illustrations of the NYC skyline. They discuss in part how the loss of the twin towers affects his work. Could it be said the skyline lost some of its aura with the change?

Reflections on ARE 190 classwork

     

In class we worked on making a 'topic web' from the readings we each had the previous week. (I'm not sure of the actual term for it, but there were topics written on a large sheet of paper and we connected observations from the readings to those tops visually). Something like this with different topics of course...

Anyway, mine and another person's papers focused on globalization and the necessity of making students aware of it. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to really talk in any depth about the other readings my group had. They largely focused on interdisciplinary approaches to art teaching, and further integration of art into teaching programs.

Some of my work

That's just an overall view of some of my workspace. I think the zoomed out view and the context it affords is a statement about my work in general. Despite its various styles and levels of attention, most of my work has a distinct 'lived in' quality I think.  By which I mean, an apparent chaos concealing an underlying order borne out with time.