Alright everyone, it’s finally time. Exams are over, we just finished our June exhibition and now it’s time for another blog post, the last one of the school year.
This time our exhibits focused on two main ideas. The Vietnam War and Conceptual Art. We began our studies with a trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery in order to gain a deeper understanding of what conceptual art really is.
One of the most important things I took away from this little excursion was the truth behind the medium of concept art. The actual medium is relatively insignificant to the art itself. Its sole purpose is to communicate the concept of the art to the viewer.
As I’m sure you have deduced by this point, since we were studying the Vietnam war, one of the goals of our projects was to create a conceptual piece about the Vietnam War. However, we took the project even deeper and worked to have our art piece portray an ethical judgment about the Vietnam war.
To do this, we needed to conduct quite a bit of research into the Vietnam War. We spent weeks studying things like the reasoning behind governmental intervention of the Vietnam War and the Geneva Conference.
Once we had completed our reaserch, it was time to create our concept. The artists concept behind their art is also known as their statement. You can read mine here:
My installation, on the surface, appears to be just a look at the effects of Vietnam War. It shows how the Vietnam War was more detrimental to the U.S. than to any of the communist country’s involved. But if you dive deeper into my display, you’ll find it tackles ideas past just the Vietnam War, the key idea it embodies is “judgment”. The message I have tried to communicate in my display is that of questioning everything. Question the decisions made by those in power without blindly excepting the story they provide.
The actual physical build of my project was a masking tape body cast holding a gun pointed at a Vietnam flag on one side and an American flag on the other. I like having my audience try to decipher my work without my explanation but here are the metaphors and representations. The man holding the gun is the US government deciding to fight in Vietnam. The Vietnam side of the flag, represents America’s perception of Vietnam as a fight between Communism and Democracy. In actuality, the way, itself, began as a fight between Nationalism (Vietnamese) and Colonialism (French). The American side of the flag represents the deterioration of American Exceptionalism, which is the idea that Americans are always the ‘good guys” liberating oppressed populations. The reason why I refer to it as deteriorating is because the Vietnam War was one of the first wars in which media received full access. Media showed the extent of the cruelties perpetrated by Americans, thus demonstrating they were not necessarily the “good guys”.
This was a really fun project and I enjoyed learning new things about Vietnam and the war. This learning also taught me how to read about today’s wars with a more skeptical eye, to realize there is not always good guys and bad guys and that what lead to a war is as important as what is going in in the war in the moment. Also if you ever wanted to make a body cast like this one, I’ll leave a link to a tutorial bellow.