Ty showed us her journey through the art world the first week of ART111, it was an unconventional but totally acceptable and innovative way of creating expression. She likes distortion and altering reality and presented us with work that had energy that audiences could feel. Whether that energy hurt your stomach or got you motivated it definitely made everyone in the room feel something.
I think that Ty’s work intertwines well with the introduction and first conversation that we had to read from Suzi Gablik’s book Conversations Before the End of Time. Ty’s work is a prime example of where art is now and where it wasn’t so long ago. Could you imagine walking into a church or museum with a giant screen of her doing push-ups till she passes out? Sadly because of Western civilizations purist views of art they would of never let this be considered an art piece, it would have been looked at as inappropriate (mostly because she is a woman) and would be banished from religious like museums. But today it is quite a different story. Ty’s art represents the progress popular culture has made by denying the ability to give art definition or boundaries, art is no longer a commodity but a social engagement through aesthetics, it is a conversation. The push-up video Ty showed us also tells a story similar to the one that Suzi tells us in the book, first I’ll tell Ty’s story (what I interpreted from it). Here Ty is at the beginning of the video doing to her body what most anyone could do; a few push-ups. Then it starts to hurt and you can hear the suffer and the pain, where logically most people stop… but no she keeps going and this vicious cycle where each push-up and each yelp of pain becomes louder, longer, and more destructive to her body but she keeps going and going and going. The audience begins to think that she’s going to stop but instead she keeps building up this momentum of destruction… keeps exuding and abusing all the energy out of her body until BOOM, its over, its ended… There’s no more yelling, there’s no more breathing, there’s no more progress, there’s no more push-ups, there’s no more life—she passes out. Is that not an artistic way of telling her audience, hey look at what I am doing to my body, is this not ultimately what we as a civilization are doing to our planet? Just as Ty was abusing her body to create something we are constantly abusing our planet to create something too. Ty created a momentum of destruction just as civilization is too and just as Ty ignored the signs leading to her “death” are we not ignoring our planets signs of an ultimate apocalypse as well? I think this is what the first conversation piece was about with Suzi and Ellen. Art cannot stay the same and they both hope it won’t and that through our enlightenment of realization new art will emerge that show us more explicitly what we are doing to ourselves and to our earth, and that with this new radical ways of expression will come social change and no end to a story that would be cut short otherwise. An art piece open to question, allowing conversation, creating new perspectives, and hopefully enlightening a culture so consumed in itself to get past preconceptions and evolve away from all this empty progress we've made to realize whats real; life and not the materials in it.
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