Challenging Art Essays

Camp: Notes on Heathers

Two am had done no favors for my raging headache, clouded eyes glazed by a kaleidoscopic fever dream of roughly masked green screens and cartoonish zoom backgrounds. It’s not the first all-nighter I had pulled that week, in preparation for opening night of an ambitious virtual…

Jenny Saville’s “Propped” (1992)

In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, film theorist Laura Mulvey demonstrates how…

Poetic Amateurism

Taking place in New York City, Tall Enough centers around an interracial romance between two photographers: one being a Black…

Challenging Capitalistic Spacial Experience

Preface:

Water Walk

Challenging the “Amateur”

A Thousand Ways: A Phone Call is an interactive remote performance by 600 Highwaymen performed by two strangers over a phone call, lasting approximately an hour. This specific performance occurred on April 2, 2021, at 5 pm PST. The performance sounded distorted by the nature of the…

Challenging the Liminality of Museums

Before we enter the San Diego Museum of Us (formerly known as Museum of Man), we are greeted…

Carving: A Traditional Sculpture

Eleanor Antin is an American artist who specializes in conceptual art, performance art, and feminist…

Mistikôsiwak

It is December 19th, 2019 and a being in a tipi-shaped dress strides down the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The dress…

The Dangers of Challenge

CW: This essay contains the discussion cannibalism, blood, and gore.

Camp in Satie’s Embryons Desséchés

You may recognize the Impressionistic composer Erik Satie for his Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes. There was also a period of time where he wrote numerous humorous suites, subverting Romantic traditions using quite the methods. Check out the ending of his Embryons…

The (im)Perfect Portrait

Artwork: Portrait of Bill Clinton
Painter: Nelson Shanks
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Date: 2009
Dimensions: Stretcher…

The Perfect Human

The Perfect Human is a thirteen-minute, standalone short film written by the Danish director Jørgen Leth. The film is about a couple who are analyzed by a third-person narrator as they perform basic functions such as dressing, walking, jumping, and eating. They are described as the perfect…

The Getty Central Garden

The Getty Central Garden is an art piece made by Robert Irwin. It is located at the Getty Museum, and was…

The Blue Wall of Violence

Created by Dread Scott, an artist whose professional name comes from the enslaved man who successfully sued for…

The Meaning of El Greco’s Laocoôn

“-for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the…

Kino-eye — Challenging Cinematography

Maya Deren describes a motion picture camera as “the most paradoxical of all machines, in that it can be at once independently active and infinitely passive”. Truly, cinematography as an art practice is largely constrained by the camera, as its process of…

“Is this your legacy?”: Hamilton as a Challenge to the Institution of Theatre

Hamilton, the Broadway smash-hit musical by songwriter and playwright Lin Manuel-Miranda, was something I spent years obsessing over, dissecting its lyrics and listening to the cast album on a…

Water Walk