Beyond what we see

This week’s post is the last and we’re very upset because this means that a fantastic year is about to end. The topic of this final post is the 80s famous series “Angels in America”.

First of all, in order to complete this task, we need to contextualize this mini-series. It portrays the North American society of the 80s decade, mainly in New York City, Salt Lake City and San Francisco, focusing on polemic themes like politics, racism, religion, homosexuality and AIDS. In terms of religion they concentrate more on the Mormons and Jews, which are the religions of the leading characters.

The story is about two couples (one gay couple and other couple with a gay man and a straight woman) whose actions and relationship shows frustrations motivated by the themes that we presented above in the most varied perspectives as the story evolves. In this tale the conservatism and greed are demonstrated as the main characteristics of the society.

Both couples are formed by Jewish and Mormon people, which despite being of different beliefs they have some points in common for example the fact that they are against homosexuality and the fights that Jewish and Mormons had so that they could be accepted in the society and stop discrimination towards them, this fights includes innumerous migrations that characterize this people.

Alongside this, the gay movement started to gain more and more strength. Who doesn’t remember Harvey Milk, one of the leading men behind the gay cause (around the 70s)?

In the series, the need of change moved by the discriminated ones (Jews, Mormons and gays) that wanted to achieve a better world, more socially stable, fair and tolerant was opposed by an angel that didn’t want this change, he wanted stagnation. This character represents the majority of American people at the time – Catholics and conservator ones – that didn’t accept other cultures and ways of life like the homosexuality.

In this decade the society was ruled by Catholicism and the angel defends that it should continue this way, he was afraid that a mentality change could give more power to other religions or beliefs and, with this, the stability that the community had would be questioned. In the other side, we have the Jews, Mormons and gays that, in order to achieve the better world that we describe earlier, had to appeal to the change, if not the years of suffering, oppression and confinement would continue. A symbol of the gay fight is the city of San Francisco that stands for liberty and equality, a place that seems to be close to the ideal world of the minorities.

The interpretation that we make of the title is that in this case the “Angels” doesn’t refer to the catholic ones but instead the minorities that survived to injustice until the breaking point in the people’s mentality that is pictured in this series.

BEYOND WHAT WE SEE is the title of this post and it reflects all of the posts that we’ve been doing along the year. We’ve been studying a big variety of themes on the blog in a deep way because we go further than what everyone can know. And after all this was the purpose of this task: widen our knowledge, not superficially but profoundly, and providing information so that we can share with you, readers, some important facts.

Thank you for following, it has been very pleasant, but now we need some rest!

Bibliography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_in_America:_A_Gay_Fantasia_on_National_Themes

Text written by the authors of the blog:

Cristiana & Margarida

POP ART

A post-war cultural movement started in America and quickly spread to the United Kingdom and it was called POP ART. And why would it be called POP ART? The name says it all! This kind of expression movement is directed to the masses, the whole population, it consists in turning the everyday objects into art, it can be a painting, a sculpture or an installation, the newest type of art in the 60s decade.

This artistic flow was characterized by being simple, original, concrete and having low-cost prices, which brought the attention of a big portion of people. POP ART soon expanded and became a mass hit in the cultural industry.


We’ll show you a short list of the main POP ART boosters…

Andy Warhol

Campbell's soup

Aloha

Roy Lichtenstein

Jasper Johns 

The Seasons (Summer) 

Just what is it that makes today's 

homes so different, so appealing?

Richard Hamilton

Robert Rauschenberg

Combine

Claes Oldenburg

Spoonbridge and Cherry

This week our task was to choose a piece of POP ART (painting, sculpture, collage, installation) and the one that we chose was “Binoculars” by Claes Oldenburg.

Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm (Sweden) in 1929 but he and his family moved to Chicago (USA) seven years later. He took classes in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and started to make his own art works, initially sculptures of ordinary objects and after he added to his art range the installations. Many of his pieces were made with is soul mate, Coosje van Bruggen who died three years ago.

“Binoculars”, an installation is one of his most known works. This work had the collaboration of his wife and was made with the purpose of becoming a commercial office building – initially called the Chiat/Day Building, since the company that occupies it at the time was TBWA\Chiat\Day (a division of an advertising agency responsible for the advertising campaign of Apple Inc.); nowadays is called Binoculars Building and it’s occupied by Google.

As we can see by the pictures it’s a very innovative building even to nowadays. The structure of the binoculars is accompanied by two other constructions also with a very suggestive design – on the its left there is building with similarities with a boat and on the right a building similar to a tree. Unlike almost all works of art of his time, Binoculars, are also an architectural structure, since it has "activity" inside it:

Two tall unusually shaped rooms, created by following the curves of the binoculars, opened onto a conference room, the ceiling of which was covered with a version of Gehry's signature snake form. The two curved rooms were intended to serve as places of retreat. Each was furnished with a huge elongated lightbulb of resined cloth, suspended from the ceiling, softly glowing, as in comic-strip representations, the sign of a luminous idea.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

Like the companies that have become lodge in this building, Binoculars represents the turning point in art – turning towards the future, being associated with this installation two works from what come to be  modern architecture in which ends up entering the structure of Binoculars. So, like his piece, Oldenburg is visionary, easily interpreted by the function of binoculars – to see beyond what is possible with the naked eye.

Transporting this interpretation to our blog, this piece applies flawlessly. Claes Oldenburg with his work conveys the idea that sees beyond what is visible to the naked eye. In our blog we try to make all posts to be visible from a historical perspective. And in order to achieve this we try to expose as much the contemporaneity of the topics that we address. And for that we do not just look with the naked eye, we need to go further... So, every week we write something, we do not just write something, we spend a few hours looking through binoculars!

Bibliography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_art
http://oldenburgvanbruggen.com/largescaleprojects/binoculars.htm
http://oldenburgvanbruggen.com/largescaleprojects/lsp.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claes_Oldenburg
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_maestri/gallery.php?lang=pt&id=702
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_maestri/image.php?id=505&id_img=553&catalog=pitt&lang=pt&letter=&start=&name=
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_maestri/image.php?id=459&id_img=507&catalog=pitt&lang=pt&letter=&start=&name=
http://pt.scribd.com/doc/33517072/Richard-Hamilton-Pop-Art
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_maestri/image.php?id=1479&id_img=1501&catalog=pitt&lang=pt&letter=&start=&name=

Text written by the authors of the blog:

Cristiana & Margarida

Tiffany & Co.

This week's post is about a very well known diamonds' store: Tiffany & Co. (or just Tiffany's).

We are going to approach this theme because we just started to study a book called Breakfast at Tiffany's from the author Truman Capote.

At first we didn't know what was "Tiffany's", we even thought that it was a coffee shop! But then our teacher explained us that this was a jewelry brand and told us to explore it. Besides approaching mainly an historic view (textually), we'll show you through videos and images the influence that this company has on society and its symbolic meaning - luxury. 

Tiffany's was founded in the "Big Apple, the city that never sleeps", which is New York in 1837 by Charles Lewis Tiffany and a school friend, Teddy Young. Initially the store only commercialized stationery items. In 1841 they extended the market to Bohemian Glass and porcelain, also starting to produce their own jewelry, this expansion resulted in the change of the name to Tiffany, Young and Ellis. In 1853, Charles Tiffany took over total control of the brand and gave it a new structure by changing its name to Tiffany & Co. and starting to sell another type of products like jewelry, it was in this decade (50s) and in the next one (60s) that this brand reached the international market, with stores in London and Paris, for example. Also in the 50s, they relocate the main store to Fifth Avenue, in New York as well.

Charles Lewis Tiffany (left) in his store, about 1887

Tiffany & Co., Union Square, storage area with porcelain (about 1887)

Tiffany and Co.'s flagship store at Fifth Avenue

At the time this, most of the people thought that this kind of business wouldn't last long due to the high poverty levels, but, against all odds, their industry survived and with a lot of success, and they even turn on the lights in a dark moment by making the most of the American Civil War (1861-1865) providing swords, flags, etc., to the Union Army, and gaining profit with it.

Meanwhile, the original owner - Charles Tiffany, died and his son Louis Comfort Tiffany became the first official Design Director, in 1902, continuing for a long time his father's legacy with high quality and high price products. However, in 1978, Tiffany & Co. was sold to Avon Products Inc. and started to drop the products and services standards.

Obviously, Avon's bet went wrong because people didn't want to have this kind of products trivialized so they were "forced" to sell the brand. The investor was a group led by William Chaney, that restored wealth times to the company.

In the 90's, America faced an economic crisis that brought to the company the need to widen their public spectrum, so Tiffany started an advertising campaign focused on the mass sell to attract more people, without losing quality and maintaining the elevated status of the brand.

So what we thought it would be a coffe shop, turned out to be a really huge international company of high-cost products... 

We guess that with this knowledge we are finally ready to go to New York, maybe in the next senior trip!

Bibliography

http://www.tiffany.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_%26_Co.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lewis_Tiffany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Comfort_Tiffany

Text written by the authors of the blog:

Cristiana & Margarida

Teens' revolution

Following the viewing of the 1955 film "Rebel Without a Cause," contextualized by the topic studied this week "The 50s", we chose, in this post, to focus on some ideas about the differences and similarities between the contemporary youth of this film and the youth of today.

As a starting point for this analysis we highlight the fact that in the 50s, the adolescence started relatively later and finish earlier than in these days. “Why does that happen?” that’s the question that rises.

In general, the demand level of children has been increasing significantly, thus visible a huge difference  at this level, mainly in terms of the variety of activities connected to the education that the teens are subjected. In this context, today's children should be worried about their future a lot earlier than the children of the other decades (like the 50s). Alongside this, the room for “face-to-face” fun with street games and plays is decreasing while the electronic games and the television is gaining space in children’s life in a warning way, because they start to interact with virtual characters instead of real people and that disturbs the social growth of today's youth. The television puts, prematurely, kids in contact with “adult stuff” like sexuality, violence or even drugs, and with this fact we can easily see that one of the aspects that influenced the attitude change of the young people is the appearance of television that occurred in the 50s. 

With the culmination of these various experiences, children are exposed in a radical way, to the almost absence of limits, such fact is accentuated by the lack of a proper education that parents can’t, or just don’t know, how to provide, making the assimilation of this symbolic message impossible, because kids won’t be able to distinguish what they see on TV and what happens in real life. 

The youth of the 50s changed the way that adolescence was percepted, subverting the relations with the body and sexuality. So, it was the 50s children that announced loud and clear that it was “forbidden to forbid”. It was in this historic context that occurred the first teen revolution, that proclaimed their rights to political intervention and confronted the big amount of hypocrisy and conservatism that existed in the previous generations.

Teens imagined that another type of world would be possible and to this end they needed to take over absolute control, not just the political control but the moral, ethic and aesthetic control too. To reach that goal it was necessary to break the bound of dependence that they had with their parents, so they became adults a little earlier than expected, in a conflicting but joyful journey because the 50s teens were very optimistic. They started to leave their parents house earlier in the search of their own independence and values, with the adventure and the pursuit of the unknown as main objectives. They flooded the job market because they were too many looking for a job that would give them enough money to live with quality alone or sharing the apartment with friends. 

All of these changes that occurred in teens' life and thoughts modified completely the concept of teenagehood and turned the process of adolescence a lot shorter.

Such fact influenced today’s youth in a different way because, though we start our adolescence very early, we finish it a lot later.

So, today we see a helpless generation because it still exists a big stack of information to filter due to the lack of parental support just like the 50s generation. But, if the 50s generation were fighting together for a better world, nowadays it’s not like that, because it’s everyone for oneself.

This has led to an egocentric society, away from public causes and solidarity, a society focused only on the individual good.

Bibliography

http://vadevintage.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/bad-boys-dos-anos-50/

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheFifties

http://analoganalogy.blogspot.pt/2007/12/teens-in-50s-are-thing-of-past.html

http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Role-American-Teen-50S-Now/81760

http://www.loti.com/fifties_history/Teenage_Life_in_the_1950s.htm

Text written by the authors of the blog:

Cristiana & Margarida

Oscar's magazine

One week after the biggest film event in the world, we will address some curiosities that marked the eighty-four editions of the Oscars – initially called Award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The first edition of the Awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences occurred on May 16, 1929 in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

The Birth of a Tradition: The first Academy Awards banquet was held in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room.

This event has already had several homes, like Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Coconut Grove of The Ambassador Hotel, Shrine Auditorium, Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Pantages Theatre, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion do Music Center and Kodak Theater – its current home.

The first edition wasn’t transmitted by any type of media. Only in 1930 a local radio of Los Angeles – KNX broadcast this event. The ceremony was passed on TV for the first time in 1953 and in 1954, forty-three million people, were already watching it. In 1965 was displayed the last ceremony in black and white. The event was transmitted in thirty-seven countries, with six hundred million viewers in 1969, turning into the highest rated show.

The Award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1936 starts to be called OSCAR. And, at this time, newspapers were receiving the names of the winners until 8.30 pm of the award night, and had to keep secret until the next newspaper edition.

There was a time on History that stole protagonism from the Oscars (World War II). However, the events were considered a success, though they had many factors against like the low budget (for example the statues are made of plaster instead of metal). In 1941, the American president Roosevelt even thanked to the cinematographic industry for being able to carry some entertainment and good times to the American people in a war scenario.

In 1942, Greer Garson after receiving the award for the best actress in the film “Mrs. Miniver”, delivered the longest speech in the history of the Oscars, with over forty minutes.  

Sidney Poitier received in 1963 the award for best actor in the film “Lilies of the Field", becoming the first black person winning an Oscar.

The theme of homosexuality and HIV/AIDS was considered taboo by the Academy, and only in 1994, Tom Hanks won the award for best actor with the role of an homosexual with HIV in “Philadelphia”.

The international conflict scenario (with USA and Iraq) struck again the normal procedure of the event with the photographers’ restriction and the cancel of red carpet festivities. However, this rule, in the event night, was ignored.

Top 5 – Most awarded films:

“Titanic” (with 11 awards out of 14 nominations) – 1998

“Ben-Hur” (with 11 awards out of 12 nominations) – 1960

“Lord of the Rings” (with 11 awards out of 12 nominations) – 2004

“The Last Emperor” (with 9 awards out of 9 nominations) – 1988

“Gone With the Wind” (with 8 awards out of 8 nominations) – 1940

Bibliography

http://oscar.go.com/oscar-history

Text written by the authors  of the blog:

Cristiana & Margarida