Tag Archives: Helena-Anne Hittel

Loading the Canon #8: The Marine Corps War Memorial

03 Thursday Oct 2013

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Loading the Canon #8 by Helena-Anne Hittel

The Marine Corps War Memorial

By the time all of you fellow Drunken Odysseans read this, I will be in Parris Island, South Carolina. My little brother, Jeffrey Hittel, reported here for boot camp on July 8th, 2013. 12 grueling weeks later, on October 4, 2013, he graduates and joins the ranks of the United States Marine Corps. Naturally, I’m extremely proud and excited about this event, so this week, I’ve elected to load your canons with something military flavored (and no, I don’t mean the food). I’m writing this week about an iconic image and time in America’s history that most everyone has seen or learned about at some point in their lives. Today, I’m going to give you some history about the Marine Corps War Memorial at Arlington, Virginia.

There are many other memorials I could have elected to write about-in fact, a Vietnam Memorial was installed in Veterans’ Memorial Park in Winter Park, Florida. I also could have chosen Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial in Washington, DC, of which I am a huge fan. Instead, I opted for something with a specifically Marine Corps-related history.

The Marine Corps War Memorial, also known as the Iwo Jima Memorial, was born of a photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945. Five Marines and a sailor were forever immortalized raising the United states flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. The sculpture, cast in bronze by Felix de Weldon, was officially dedicated on November 10, 1954 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The statue is located outside of Arlington National Cemetery. In addition, there also happens to be a scaled-down copy of this specific memorial on the base at Parris Island, as well as multiple others at different sites in the United States. The closest one to any of you in Orlando is in Cape Coral.

The six men are depicted over life-size at 32 feet tall, hoisting a 60 foot tall flagpole.The base is granite and bears two inscriptions: “In honor and memory of the men of the United States Marine Corps who have given their lives to their country since November 10, 1775,” and, “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

The terms “art” and “war memorial” are not usually adjacent to each other in my mind. That said, the photograph and resulting monument are iconic moments in American history and even American art, that were brought on by times of war. If you don’t believe me, consider the photograph V-J Day in Times Square by Alfred Eisenstaedt. We remember what moment in history that photograph belongs to. Art, in this case, is not only what you find in a museum. An artist will paint, draw, sculpt and photograph what they know. It’s a living timeline. The six men raising the stars and stripes over Iwo Jima are permanently immortalized in bronze doing just that. We may not remember who these men are in specific and which one is which, but we remember the moment they represent.

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Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.

Loading the Canon #6: Jamali

19 Thursday Sep 2013

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Loading the Canon #6 by Helena Anne-Hittel

Jamali

He’s brilliant, with an MFA from the University of Florida in painting and sculpture, an MA in Advanced Economics, and Faculties of Science in Chemistry and physics. He’s a visionary, contributing to the art world with his mystical expressionism. Best of all, he lives in your backyard–if you live in or near Winter Park, Florida, that is.

Jamali, or Faiz Aqdas Hussain Khanjamali Yousafzai, was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1944. He graduated from the University of Peshawar with a Bachelor’s in physics, then moved to the United states where he studied painting. He received a Bachelor’s in Sculpture and a Master’s in Fine Arts in painting from the University of Florida. His sales amount to over $35 million, and he has created over 60,000 works in his collection Art and Peace. Jamali has had 100 solo exhibits, published 8 catalogs and 600 pages of work, and his art is in over 3500 private collections, including the UCF Art Gallery. And, if that wasn’t enough, he’s got facilities in New York, Denmark, and (of course) Central Florida.

Mystical expressionism, according to Jamali’s website, is a blend of ancient artistic tradition and contemporary consciousness. His gestural techniques call back to Jackson Pollock’s action painting. Looking at his oil works, you can see where it fits in. The layers of his paint are thick and uneven, but that’s part of what makes his work interesting.

Jamali has amassed quite a collection of figural oils, pastels and sculptures, mostly human faces. There’s a bit of a familiarity about them, in color and in appearance. They look a bit, to me, like an echo of Willem de Kooning’s Woman, but with crisper lines and a more defined shape. His works look like something you’ve seen before, but there’s something about them that you don’t recognize. What is that face in the canvas? Is it you? Jamali? Or simply a face? Some of them look as though they’re looking over at something. Or that they know something you don’t know. They probably won’t look at you as you pass…but you never know.

Now that you’re sufficiently freaked out, you’re probably wondering why a man with so many degrees in science decided to follow a career in the arts. His spiritual background is a rich one, comprising of bits of Hinduism, Shamanism, Sufism and Buddhism, which he strove to express in art over thirty years ago. Ever since then, he’s used both his scientific and spiritual sides in his art. Not only has this made his works more interesting-his work on cork, for instance, a substance which at once absorbs and resists the pigment placed on it-his works are made using a spiritual approach. Painting is his meditation. He uses the outdoors to inspire and even interact with his works. So, a little dirt got into his painting, or a few leaves. Even better! Jamali lets his surroundings help him create his art.

Jamali’s works are at once undeniably original and strangely familiar.

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Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.

Loading the Canon #5: Sensing the Artist

12 Thursday Sep 2013

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Loading the Canon #5 by Helena-Anne Hittel

Sensing the Artist

I’m an art historian. I study art. I am expected to know what the work is called, what it is made of, who made it, when they made it, and (depending on the professor) maybe even the dimensions of said work. In short, if it still exists, there’s a good chance that I may have studied it. I haven’t seen everything, and I never will, but every class, I’m confronted over and over by the same feeling: this art on the screen in the lecture hall actually exists.

I’m currently taking a class about Greek Art and Architecture. We recently looked at a tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus near the ancient Bronze Age site of Mycenae. This tholos, or circular, tomb was built some time between 1300 and 1250 BC, is (according to my notes) 43 feet high, 48 feet in diameter, and made of stone blocks. The resulting monument was then covered in dirt. It amazes me how these ancient Mycenaeans were able to construct this. In Bronze Age Greece. Without the use of cranes and backhoes and all of our modern construction machinery. There wasn’t even any mortar used in the construction of this building, and yet, it has stood the test of time (see also: the Pyramids of Giza).

Sometimes, as the spectator, we tend to take art for granted. It hangs on the wall in a gallery, and it’s nice to go in and look at it for a while, but we forget that the name on the label next to the artwork belongs to an artist. In the cases of well-known artists such as Van Gogh, Dalí, and Magritte to name a few, their works are reproduced and used so often and in so many places that Starry Night fails to impress. The Persistence of Memory no longer gives you goosebumps, and Ceci n’est pas une pipe just isn’t as pithy anymore.

Allow me to remind you: the image on your calendar, coffee mug, tee shirt, or whatever is more than just that. The copy of Starry Night that you see is a copy of an original painted by a man named Vincent Van Gogh in 1889. Meaning, this man was alive to create this image. He drew breath (however briefly, poor Vincent) in front of this canvas. He mixed his paint this way and applied it that way to get this effect, and though it wasn’t popular during his lifetime, look at all the attention it’s getting now. It’s aesthetically pleasing, yes, but the real one is in the Museum of Modern Art. You could reach out and touch it (God help you if you do), and know that paint that you touched was put there by Van Gogh himself.

Woah.

Whenever you look at a work of art, remember this: the artist was, or is, alive. A living, breathing human being painted/sculpted/designed this work. It’s not just the image on a calendar or a mousepad. The Treasury of Atreus is not just a round building made of stones. The White House did not spring up out of the ground to be the home of the most powerful person in the nation. Someone had to put it there first.

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Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.

Loading the Canon #4: Marcel Dzama

05 Thursday Sep 2013

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Loading the Canon #4 by Helena-Anne Hittel

Marcel Dzama

“Marcel Dzama’s work is characterized by an immediately recognizable visual language that draws from a diverse range of references and artistic influences, including Dada and Marcel Duchamp.” Oh man. The moment you give me Marcel Duchamp, I kinda want to scream (although, if we looked at the manifestos of the Dadaists and their opposites, the Futurists, I would fall into the Dada camp). Dzama, however, doesn’t give me a shovel and call it “In Advance of a Broken Arm”. No, we get melty snowmen. And sad ghosts. And elegant, balletic, rifle-toting terrorists.

Dzama was born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Canada. He studied art and earned his Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba in 1998. He has exhibited in the U.S. and overseas, and his artwork is held in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery in London, and The National Gallery of Canada, to name a few. He is currently represented by David Zwerner in London and New York. Dzama works in many mediums, from ink and watercolors to sculpture. You may even recognize his work from the cover of Beck’s 2005 album, Guero. Dzama has published 8 monographs so far, his most recent being Puppets, Pawns and Prophets. A new monograph is in the works for this fall.

Anyone that knows me knows that I’m really not a fan when it comes to Dada. As I’ve said before, even though I’d ideologically fall into their camp, the artwork doesn’t interest me. Marcel Dzama’s works seem different and refreshing to me. Dzama is like the illustrator of fractured fairy tales. His work is reminiscent of the Bayeux Tapestry, only far more modern and slightly more chaotic.The only things the two seem to share are the simple backgrounds and the simplified human shapes. His imagery has more meaning than just what you see. When presented with artwork from The Infidels (published 2010), hooded rifle-wielding girls reference American current events (“the kind of stereotypical terrorists with AK-47s”). The aforementioned “melty snowmen” were inspired by autobiographical drawings of his move from Winnipeg to New York.


Art gets pretty introspective and heavy in subject matter. Artists, after all, draw from the world around them, so what better subject matter than what’s happening today? However, it’s almost fun to consider, even though these scary hooded girls are pointing guns in your general direction. Dzama’s art looks so childlike and fun, but in muted, hushed tones, almost like the drawings in the caves at Lascaux in their palette. It’s so unlike the Dadaists of old that he draws from, I’m almost compelled to give them a second look. This would make the Futurists I mentioned earlier angry, of course, those artist who focused on banishing the past completely. I think, however, that without the opportunity to view what’s come before us, there’s little way to make new ideas. Marcel Dzama has given us new, exciting work and adapted an “old” style to fit a “new” era.

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Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.

Loading the Canon #3: Hell is a Studio

29 Thursday Aug 2013

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Loading the Canon #3 by Helena-Anne Hittel

Hell is in a Studio

Art gets serious once you get into the universities. That’s because this is the major you’ve chosen to pursue, and your school determined to produce artists finer than those at other schools BECAUSE UCF IS MORE ARTISTIC THAN ALL OF YOU SIMPLE PLEBES. Or something like that. This semester, I’d like to call out to all those just beginning to venture into this major with an inspiring (?) story of my own: how I overcame adversity to prove to myself that being an artist isn’t easy, and ensure that future generations don’t take it for granted.

In the spring of 2012, I enrolled in two art classes I needed for my degree- Fundamentals of Drawing I and 2D Composition and Fundamentals (the building blocks of fun!). After freaking out over the price of supplies, I was ready to start. 2D art wasn’t that bad, despite having to mix your own black for the first assignment (an infuriating process that I won’t bore you with). I liked to think that, as an art historian, I could be sensitive to color. After mixing several shades of black that turned out to be very dark blue, I quickly found out how wrong I was.

This was not the problem, though. Throughout the rest of 2D, I learned many things that would be more than useful to my study of art-color saturation, hierarchies, different types of composition, etc. Drawing I was where I struggled, because studying art is vastly different from making your own. Should you walk into that studio, abandon all preconceived notions that you are the next Picasso/Dalí/Leonardo da Vinci to walk the earth (though, by all means, use them for inspiration). In Drawing I, everything you thought you knew was wrong.

Rephrased: everything I thought I knew was wrong, and ART IS NOT EASY.

I took class with two professors (I’ll call them Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). I was in Guildenstern’s class, but the two taught side by side. After I fought with a masonite board (about half my size, vertically), a pad of newsprint (a few inches shorter than that, but nonetheless cumbersome), a toolbox (for everything else) and an easel, I was told to display what had been the homework from the night before. This week, we were to draw a cow skull. Guildenstern gave me some pretty constructive and useful criticism. He taught me things I could do to improve my line quality (“Hold the pencil like this instead”). I was to look at the actual object, not the drawing itself. I tried to improve every assignment. By midterm portfolio, I had a C- in the class, but Guildenstern was seeing improvement.

Rosencrantz, however, was more cryptic. “You need a Christian Bale to your Mark Wahlberg from The Fighter, you know?” he said. Having never seen The Fighter, I thought I should watch it in an effort to understand him better. That wasn’t the last time I’d hear Rosencrantz say this, though, and by the end of the week, I didn’t give a damn who either of them were in what movie.

I was seriously freaking out by the time Midterms were over. My weeks ended with hours in the drawing studio. I wore black so the charcoal wouldn’t show on my clothes. I painted my nails every week out of necessity because I couldn’t get the charcoal out. Hell, the classes spent so much time in the studio we breathed the stuff in. Despite all of this, though, Final portfolio arrived. I hung all of my work on the wall and prayed, because that was all there was to do. I got a C- on the midterm, after all. Guildenstern pushed me to do better, and Rosencrantz pushed me over the edge. All I wanted was for the semester to end. All I needed was a C.

I finished the class with a B+.

Art historians and artists aren’t really all that different, though our chosen areas of study are. I spend more time writing and researching than I will ever spend at an easel, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the blood, sweat and tears that go into the creation of a work of art. I described Drawing I as a soul-sucking hell, but after it was over, it made me appreciate my major that much more. You can’t have Art History without art, and you can’t have art without the process.

The moral then, is this. The next time you see a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, or any other piece of art, revere it for what it is. This art is the blood in the artist’s veins. Respect the artist. Respect the artwork. Have an opinion of it, but respect it for the work it took (yes, even you, Duchamp). Yes, you could’ve created something akin to Jackson Pollock’s works. The fact still remains that you didn’t.

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Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.

Loading the Canon #2: Untitled

22 Thursday Aug 2013

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Loading the Canon by Helena-Anne Hittel

Untitled

Untitled, by Cy Twombly

It isn’t always required of an artist to have a title for a piece.

This is one of the art world’s many liberties. Art without a title can leave a lot to the imagination. It doesn’t mean that an artist has given up. People look at pieces differently when given a title. If you’re told something is there, you’re bound to look for it, after all. Untitled art is different. It’s like cloud watching, or a Rorshach test. Everybody’s fluffy white inkblots will look different to different people. Art is completely subjective, and that’s why it’s so much fun.

That said, as a volunteer in an art gallery, I CANNOT stand it when pieces don’t have titles.

I know, I’ve just contradicted myself. However, sifting through a collection  inventory where 2⁄3 of the works are “untitled” makes my head spin, even when the artist was kind enough to number about 20 of said works. This specific collection consists of 107 pieces.

In a gallery setting, pieces have accession numbers. This is a godsend when it comes to the situation I’ve already mentioned. When so many works don’t have titles, the only way to successfully catalog these pieces is to give them all accession numbers. If you were to ask me to find a specific piece from UCF’s vault by giving me a number, I can do it. Tell me the title, and you may not be so lucky. Tell me that it’s untitled, and I may hurt you.

Now, just because I’ve said I don’t like untitled titles doesn’t mean I don’t like the works themselves. I look at content, not just the title (or lack thereof, as the case may be). What’s inside the frame or on a pedestal is really what counts. I go by what is visual. Do I like the colors? What about the composition? Even the way that a piece is presented contributes to my opinion of it. As a spectator, untitled pieces aren’t really pieces that are missing something.

Artists do whatever artists want to do. This is their prerogative. Artists like to put things on display. It’s up to them whether or not they want the audience to remember the work itself. They want the audience to interpret and enjoy. No, it’s probably not essential to be able to tell the difference between Untitled #7 and Untitled #100. The artist hasn’t done anything to the piece by leaving a title off, with the exception of giving the viewing public a little creative freedom of their own.

For the sake of record-keeping, though, “untitled” just feels nowhere in a catalog. Museums and galleries like forms and paperwork. Maybe these institutions like them a bit too much, but there is a need them to keep track of collections, exhibits, loans, and donations. Bureaucracy is a necessary evil, and the more information a gallery is given, the better.

Untitled pieces can be fun. I don’t deny it. However, for those of us cataloging pieces and writing condition reports, “untitled” makes for a bit of a headache.

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Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.

Loading the Canon #1: Museum Glass

08 Thursday Aug 2013

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Loading the Canon #1 by Helena-Anne Hittel

Museum Glass

I don’t like art. I LOVE it. People look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them I go through museums or galleries in hours, maybe even days depending on the exhibit. I read every single label or bit of information presented and try to spend as much time as possible in front of a work before, reluctantly, I am forced to move on (and yes, sometimes, I have to be forced). It was no surprise, then, that when my family planned a trip to St. Petersburg, FL, I could not have been more excited. Why St. Pete, then? Simple. We were to go see the absolutely amazing Chihuly collection at the Morean Arts Center.

The first stop on this trip was almost accidental, but since the Chihuly collection was a short walk away, we dropped into the Museum of Fine Arts for a while.

Did you ever get a feeling, just thinking about the Acropolis in Athens, that if you were to walk there, you could very well have been walking the same steps Aristotle did? The MFA was a bit like that for me. I saw things on the walls in this museum that I had only seen in lectures and textbooks. I stood in front of Monets, a Cezanne, a Rodin, and so many others whose names are the stuff of legend. It was surreal to imagine that the canvas I stood in front of a few Saturdays ago was the same one in front of Paul Gauguin hundreds of years ago. It’s almost like meeting your rock stars. They actually existed. They drew breath and put paint on this canvas. They were HERE. Not in this location, but they were alive and in front of the same canvas.

I read every label and freaked out over every name I remembered from lecture (respectfully, of course. This was, after all, a museum) until it was time to go. We made our way across the street and walked into, finally, The Chihuly collection.

A few years back, I had watched a documentary called Chihuly in the Hotshop, in which my favorite eyepatch-wearing hero could be seen in action. There he was, making his amazing glass! The works were a sight to behold, but documentaries don’t do them justice. This got me wondering where I could see the real thing. Dale Chihuly lives and works in Seattle, WA, and has a gallery in Las Vegas. Apart form the impressive sculpture in the lobby of the Orlando Museum of Art, his works weren’t terribly accessible to me until 2010, when the Morean Arts Center opened a collection of his work to the public.

Fast forward to June 15, 2013. To say that this collection was amazing is a terrible understatement. The scale, the colors and the concepts were made all the better by the proximity. I was so close I could literally breathe on the glass, but I wouldn’t dare. It was the same feeling I got from the MFA. I had only ever seen these things from a distance before, and here the were now, in front of me.

I wasn’t able to hit the Dalí Museum on this trip. I had been in 2009 on a bowl trip with the Marching Knights, but I hadn’t been back since the renovation. My parents, who had planned the trip, had lived for some time in Washington, D.C., where museums were plentiful and admission was free. Not the case in Florida, sadly, but, admission fees or none, I’ll be damned if I didn’t have an amazing experience.

The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida

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Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.