Assignment art

My graduate students and I investigated assignment art yesterday.

We started with Yoko Ono's instruction pieces, but none of her instructions (from Grapefruit) were practical to implement.

We then moved on to Erwin Wurm's One Minute Sculptures and Sculptures to Embarrass (circa 1997). The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Can't Stop music video incorporates several of Wurm's sculptural assignments.

Here are our implementations of Wurm's sculptures.

Shani:


Rachel:

Trotsky:

Seung Ae:


And myself:



What I find most interesting about his work is the decision of what aspects of his sketches are key and what aren't. It reminds me of when I was learning Japanese katakana and hiragana. It was often difficult to determine what is a key trait of a character and what is an eccentricity of the particular font. For example, here are two different renderings of the hiragana for "fu."


Finally, we took a look at Harrell Fletcher (who introduced me to Erwin Wurm when I was in grad school) and Miranda July's Learning to Love You More website.

We choose their Assignment #23 Recreate this snapshot. Here is the original photograph:


And here is our recreation: