Susan Kruegar and Sunnie Bybee and Professor Joseph Ostraff, Visual Arts
“The tool of the spirit of yesterday was the ‘academy.’ It shut off the artist from the world of industry and handicraft, and thus brought about his complete isolation from the community. In vital epochs, on the other hand, the artist enriched all the arts and crafts of a community because he had a part in its adeptness and understanding as any other worker…” These sentiments were written in the beginning of the 20th century by Walter Gropius in The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was a German art school that revolutionized the ideas of art verses craft. It formed an alliance to a large degree, between art and industry and thus brought its art to the public in a very sophisticated way.
Gropius despised the isolation of the 19th century art academies. He felt that they were not integrated enough into society to have significant influence. Gropius made these assertions at the beginning of modernism. We stand now in the midst of what is termed “Post Modernism” and are confronted with the same dilemma. Art has separated itself from its audience once again.
High/Low Brow was a group exhibition that involved roughly 16 people in total. The initial concepts of the show involved placing art work in untraditional contexts. Billboards, postcards, magnets, quilts, and t-shirts were all discussed as alternative supports for our images, thus addressing the issues of what constitutes “High” or “Low-Brow Art”. The only restrictions made, as far as our images were concerned, were that they had to be formatted to fit the surface or interior of a cigar box. Each artist could decide on the content and appearance of their individual images. These boxes were to be displayed in a gallery in Phoenix, while reproduced images would be displayed elsewhere.
Our images were incorporated into quilts that were made and then donated to a Phoenix Women’s shelter. T-shirts and magnets, with our combined images, were also made. Some of these were displayed at the opening of our show in the Marshall Gallery in Phoenix; others were given away, randomly. Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford the billboard idea.
It was our hope that as the images were taken out of the traditional gallery setting, that we could somehow form an alliance with what the masses are the most familiar with: Pop Culture. However, in all honesty, we found that the t-shirts and magnets and quilts were not really a symbol of pop culture and High Art coming together to elevate the masses as much as they were a symbol of the experiences we had doing the project. What we had idealistically proposed entailed a great deal of debate, discussion, and compromise to a healthy degree, among the group members. It was a major undertaking, and it was successful because it actually happened, friendships were made, and because a few people in Phoenix Arizona are walking around with our T-shirts or magnets from our show.