Anger Management Interpretation

Rico Nasty's Anger Management

"Laughing Skull" by Julia Balestri 4/28/19

"Just as the reading of the modern text (such at least as it may be postulated) consists not in receiving, in knowing or in feeling that text, but in writing it anew, in crossing its writing with a fresh inscription" (Barthes 153). 

I like Rico Nasty's new album Anger Management because I feel like I can relate to certain aspects of what she is saying, like when she speaks with confidence about being the best version of herself she can be and owning her craft. I especially admire that she shows she has anger and can be "nasty" because those aren't things that our society vouches for our women to be yet. 

Rico released Anger Management on April 25th, 2019 (three days ago) and since then I have only listened to this album on repeat and nothing else. When I was looking at this prompt for a project that said to design artwork based off music but doing so without listening to it I knew I had to make something based off of a song from Anger Management. Rico's music in general but specifically this album makes me feel like the anger and fire energy that I have inside of me can be harnessed to do productive things, like fine tuning my crafts or developing myself into a better person. 

I made digital art based on how the song "Cold" specifically makes me feel, which is sort of the power in angry laughing and knowing that people can or are actively doubting you. I made a gif of a skull laughing because I felt that the grit of the skull and fire combined with the humor of it would accurately depict how I feel while listening to the track. 

Listen to the track "Cold" from Rico Nasty's Anger Management below:

Visiting Artist: Faythe Levine

On April 17th, Faythe Levine visited our class and gave us opportunity to have face-to-face conversation with her. Levine is a middle aged working artist that was born where I am from, Minneapolis, Minnesota. She currently works as a Assistant Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. Before this job she worked as a gallery owner, wrote books, directed films, and general art maker.

I wish I had been more awake for the talk with her, as I would have been able to come up with more questions on the spot about things I am curious about in the art world. Regardless, I feel like I still gained a lot from the discussion we had with her as a class. One thing that I had already assumed about working in the art field but she solidified is the concept that an artist must be constantly networking in order to make a name for them self. One thing she suggested was to bring a token of appreciation to an artist if you go to a lecture or art opening of theirs. This shows that you care about them and think about their work while also setting you apart from other show goers. She also mentioned that you could contact them online, which I feel like the modern usage of this would to be to follow them on social medias and message them through there. You could also get someone's phone number for a more intimate access to their message board.

Overall I did like what she had to tell us but I feel like the scene that we as graduating students are going to be entering is so incredibly different than the one that older artists have grown in. The use of social media and constant access to cameras that take high quality photos and videos creates a completely different realm of interaction that an older artist cannot help us navigate. I appreciate all advice that any veteran artist can give me. I still carry respect for my elders and know that they have experienced life in ways that I can learn so much from. Regardless, the honest truth is that I really need to hear what the scene is like RIGHT NOW because that is the world I can be apart of, not the one that functioned decades ago. I need to understand how to market myself online as much as I do in person. To act as if the social platforms that have become so integrated into human activity cannot be used as a tool for success is an outdated and ignorant belief. 

The Death of the Author Experiment

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing
a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-
God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a 'variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (Bathes 146).

For my experiment I chose to combine the old style of artistic expression, blackout poetry, with a modern form of sentence formation, predictive text. Predictive text is a tool that many current day smartphones use to help users form sentences faster. These programs build custom dictionaries based off the typing habits of the user which allows them to promote the use of words they would most likely want to include on their own without having to type them out.

I had students pair up and use one phone with predictive text between the two of them. They then got to decide how they would go about forming a run-on sentence by choosing different words or phrases suggested by the smartphone. After they made a sentence they were to write it down in large font on a piece of paper. Then the papers were passed to the partnership to the left, and those people chose to blackout certain words or emphasize others with highlighters.

The end result were poems made in correlation by humans and artificial intelligence with an allocation of power to the heavy hand of human choice.

Here are the three poems we collectively created.

A Message Without a Code

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a meme as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" as well as "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media." Memes have become a large part of internet culture today. They are a way of sharing information (typically in a comedic way) that allows people to connect over a shared sense of humor.







This digitally crafted image is a crossover between a popularized meme and a television show. The source is unknown, but the image carries an immense amount of information regardless. The person depicted is Parker Dinkleman, one of the two main characters featured on the television show "Mr. Meaty" which was aired on Nickelodeon from 2006 to 2009, composed of 20 total episodes.










The background of this image is taken from a popular meme that originated in 2014 from Lucky Luciano with the caption "You know I had to do it to em" This quickly became a source of humor, image manipulation, and inspiration for other works of art. People photoshopped all sorts of parodies of this pose and even traveled to the site to take pictures of themselves doing the same pose in the same place as this iconic photograph.

This digitally crafted cross over meme juxtaposes a photograph which Roland Barthes states in Image-Music-Text is a "message without code" with a coded representation of a person (Barthes 43). This collage of imagery is culturally significant in that it demonstrates the power of the internet to circulate seemingly abstract information in ways that allow for specific derivatives that only niche groups of people can fully appreciate. Parker's pose perfectly mimics that of Lucky's which furthers the concept of the internet's power to create new truths.


If this were to be shown in an art museum or gallery I think it would make sense to print it on a canvas and hang it with a large, intricate, dark stained wooden frame. The reason this makes sense to me is that it would legitimize the digitally crafted image as a form of art that can be admired in the same sense as the paintings and drawings that would presumably be shown in the same space.

Artist Talk: Owen Schuh

Schuh flipping the pages in his notebook for some students.

A visiting artist, Owen Schuh, came and gave a lecture on his work hanging in the Wriston Art Gallery. His work is all mathematically based which was something I hadn't prior been exposed to. To me, his most amazing works were the ones where he mapped out the different ways in which you could cut a cube. I was thoroughly confused during multiple periods of his lecture. He would state which theory or type of math he used in a piece but didn't explain how it worked so the technical jargon didn't help my understanding of his works much. This doesn't mean, however, that I didn't form a deeper appreciation of his work through the context he gave it. He likes the idea that there is no correct way to cut the cube he uses in his work, which is something I wouldn't exactly expect from such a technically based artist. Schuh even admitted himself that his explanations do not help to understand the process of achieving the images he makes but that his notebook does. I haven't seen an artist's notebook in a gallery installation in a while, and I liked seeing his. I try to keep a sketchbooking practice and understand how important the doodles and half formed sketches are to creating greater works.