Theory and Methods ARH 411

Indigenous Epistemologies Joaquin Villegas, God the Father Painting the Virgin of Guadalupe, mid-18th c.      The Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have been made by the hands god and the image above is to represent this story. The way we learn of the importance of this image came from an indigenous man who had a vision and this image had appeared naturally, she became a strong religious figure for the indigenous people. The way knowledge is shared varies from place to place and Kovach discusses the Indigenous epistemologies that show exactly that we can learn from many places and learning is infinite and can mean much more than what we are normalized to learn within our society knowledge can come from many sources.      Kovach describes indigenous epistemologies as being a different way of learning that is very strongly connected to the beliefs and practices of the indigenous people. These practices compared to western epistemologies are viewed as being extr...

   Phenomenology Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960      During our reading we read about the idea of a reciprocal relationship between the viewer and the object/person being viewed. We learned that not only do we as the viewer experience an interaction with the object but the object/person being viewed also has an interaction with us. An example in the class discussion was our interaction with a coffee cup and how we feel and experience that moment the object is also having a forced interaction of being picked up, carried, sipped from, and put down. These interactions create a type of story and when this idea is put to art you’ll understand that these artworks are interactive and we can feel emotions from something that we view; This idea plays on all of our own personal experiences and that is how we interpret art work, how we see it, and how we interact and feel about an art piece. Not all people will feel exactly the same about one piece but many may relat...

Difference: "A Special Third World Women Issue" -by: Trinh T. Minh-ha From Trinh T. Minh-ha's Naked Spaces - Living Is Round This week we read Difference: “A Special Third World Women Issue” by Trinh T. Minh-ha in the reading she discusses the struggles for equal rights for women and how it expands to those women of color as well, and at points women of color experience extreme resistance due to stereotypes and how these stereotypes may affect the approach some women have on fighting for equal right, and she even talks about the ideas of inclusion. When thinking about the idea of equal opportunity it is meant to be seen as something good, but sometimes these opportunities are helping to continue the cycle of oppression by using terms within a type of guideline that are made to include a diverse amount of people by meeting certain criterias to fall under that inclusive title, causes problem by making these companies seem as though they are an open minded and an inclusive ...

AUTHORSHIP      The creation of arts comes in many forms, and with those arts come their creators, us as a society view these arts and use the authors or creators to understand their pieces. We can become very invested in the creator's life. Our collective obsession with biographies and celebrities hinder the interpretation of art by getting the viewer invested in the personal life of the creator of an art piece or text. This affects the way we interpret art because we start to learn the history behind the creator and use their history to try and understand an art piece. This obsession we create is simply our fascination with the artist; we want to understand them possibly even try to be them by learning their life stories we can understand the creator better and why they make something if we generally have an idea of who that creator is as a person, what struggles they faced and how they lived their lives. This would help us as viewers create interpretations of the art s...

The Black Female Spectators Written by-Aurianna A      To start off Bell Hooks writes about the expectations of film and tackles the concept of the oppositional gaze. Specifically through the lens of black woman. Bell hooks talks about black viewership of film by explaining how films can play on the stereo-types of black people and even go as far as to target black women in films. In these films they use black woman as a negative prop within the film and so that the audience can relate with the film's black male character and laugh at the black woman. The filmmakers do this by creating the black woman as a nagging, mean character that doesn’t give support to the male but instead appears to be an annoying character, Hooks states; “She was even then backdrop, foil. She was bitch-nag. She was there to soften images of black men, to make them seem vulnerable, easygoing, funny, and unthreatening to a white audience. She was there as man in drag, as castrating bitch, as someone...

Film Gaze   "Rear Window”. PG 1954 ‧ Thriller/Mystery Directed by Alfred Hitchcock   We’ve all watched a movie in the movie theater, you know that feeling you get; being in the dark room, a big screen, some snacks and surrounded by strangers. We watch these moving images in “awe” completely engaged by images moving on the screen. Film was made for us to engage into; for us to follow a story, a plot. The creation of film history dates back to the late 1800’s and traditional cinema was made for the ideal white male and it was meant to feed his alter ego, give him something to look up to and admire something to desire. Yet 1 “ Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist ” Laura Mulvey states this in her essay, she’s basically calling men out to be these attention seekers yet they hide this through their roles in film, 2 “ Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of advancing the story, making things happen. The man controls the f...