Photographing Silence: Juan Rulfo’s Mexico

Venue: BYU MOA

Dates: 20 Jan – 29 May, 2006

Caspar David Friedrich

Venue: BYU International Cinema

Release Year: 1986

Length: 84 Minutes

Director: Peter Schamoni

Language: German (with English Subtitles)

This is the story of an artist who was not appreciated by the people of his time. The excuses they use is that his pictures are to unorthodox. He paints landscapes. Sometimes with a religious twist, but focuses more on the landscape than the religion so it is unorthodox. People turned to God’s creations, because they surround us, rather than to God, because it was the great apostasy. Now religious paintings focusing on the religion have returned, just as the fulness of the Gospel has. The movie was very slow and boring. I would not recommend it. It did have some interesting lines about how to understand art, but they seemed more like cliched artist junk than anything insightful. I did not really understand this movie very well. Possibly because I am not familiar with the historical setting (Germany under Napoleon), and because the historical setting continually changed from when Friedrich was alive, to immediately after his death, to 50 years after his death and there was not a good way of figuring out which characters belonged to which time period, and if they belonged to multiple time periods, which time period they were in at the moment. Another reason I may not have liked this movie was because I do not really understand art. As much as I want to be an artist, there are lots of famous pictures that I do not have a taste for and many less famous pictures that I think are amazing. I do not know if this shows that I am thinking out of the box because I have not reached the box yet or if it is because I have gone through the box and out the top.

Adam’s Dream: The Photographs of Rodney Smith

• Venue: Brigham Young University Museum of Art

• Dates: 28 July 2005 – 16 January 2005

• My Notes:

• “at first everyone seems happy and content, they are at peace with their surroundings. that is something we all are trying to achieve. if you look at the pictures more closely, nobody is very happy. nobody is doing anything they are passionate about. the ballerina’s are probably the best ones in the world but they are not passionate about it anymore. being at peace with your surroundings is key, but interactions with others are the point of the gospel. we are here to serve each other, to help each other, to befriend each other. we cannot be truly happy, no matter how at peace we are with our surroundings, without being at peace with those around us and being content with our friends and family

• the pictures depict people who are alone or separated. the one smiling guy is smiling as his hat floats above his head. the black and white accentuates the loneliness, as does the fact that everyone is wearing a white button down shirt and black suit. many of them also wear black bow-ties and black hats and it is reminiscent of a funeral.

• you never see the sun in any of his photographs and the background is usually out of focus or misty. the pictures are either in nature, manicured nature, or big cities. these are places where people can be alone, either they are alone in nature, they live alone and spend time in their gardens, or they simply get lost in the crowd in the cities.”

• Pamphlet Notes:

• “Smith interprets Adam as everyman and his work, while evoking harmony between people and environemnt, suspends the viewer in an imaginative space between desire and experience, where aspirations of refinement are realized in the reverie of the photograph.”

• My Thoughts:

• I agree that Smith’s artwork does depict everyone and a harmony between people and environment. I also agree that the viewer is suspended between desire and experience, we desire to be at one with our environment in the beautiful environments Smith depicts, but we are rooted in the experiences of our parents and our life so we cannot ever see the realization of that desire. I disagree that aspirations of refinement are realized. While we do see ourselves in those settings and desire the feelings the photographs evoke, running away and being alone is hardly a refinement. Life is about our relationships with others and if we do not focus on that, if we do not desire that, if we want to run away and be alone, our lives will be much more miserable than if we enjoy the people around us and the experiences they provide.