EXTRA CREDIT Event #4

For my fourth event, I decided to attend Judith Hopf’s gallery at the Hammer Museum.  If I am being totally honest, I am not very experienced in observing, analyzing, or interpreting artwork.  So naturally, I was pretty intimidated when I entered into Hopf’s gallery.  She set up her artwork throughout an all-white room.  At first, I was not sure how I was supposed to navigate through the space, or interact with the pieces.  To me, it seemed disjointed – with pieces sitting here and there, a short brick wall built down the middle that separated the room into two sides, as well as ropes hanging from the ceiling and poking up from the ground.  My first instinct was to watch the film on the television screen that was mounted on one of the walls, hoping that it would provide some sort of answer to what this exhibit was about.  However, the film played on the screen just made me more confused – because I did not see how dancing mummies could relate to the rest of the items in the space.

As I started to settle in, I began to realize that perhaps Hopf wanted to evoke this sort of confusion and sense of ridiculousness with her artwork.  I first noticed it with the ropes hanging from the ceiling and coming out of the floor. They seemed very out of place – but this was a museum, so I felt it was safe to assume that everything in that room was there for a reason.  I feel that she put those ropes there to make viewers uncomfortable at first, and then force themselves to ask why their immediate response was that they didn’t belong.  I felt that this work especially played into what our society has deemed to be “normal,” and I think this tied in nicely with work done by other artists we have discussed throughout this quarter.

I was also intrigued by the other pieces in the room, mostly constructed of red brick.  These pieces were especially interesting because I had never seen brick configured in such ways – sculpted into a ball shape, as well as a figure that mimicked a child.  There were also pictures of laptops on the walls that had been given human features.  The use of anthropomorphism in both the brick pieces as well as the artwork on the walls tied into the topic of technology and art we have been discussing in this course.  I feel that Hopf was intentionally giving these inanimate objects human like qualities to highlight how much technology has taken over our lives.  I also liked a quote from the pamphlet I received from her exhibit explaining her motives behind it. It said, “By animating the inanimate, [Hopf] imbues it with the potential for purpose and agency.”  I thought this was really cool because she uses a medium like brick to sculpt pieces that people normally don’t think could be made out of brick.  I think Hopf’s ability to bend the rules and push the limits of what society believes is normal and appropriate is very noteworthy, and although hesitant at first, I really enjoyed her exhibit.