Cute. kitschy? bad? good?

So I've been reading this article called "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde" by Sianne Ngai.
Jim Brittingham brought it up, I absolutely did not come up with that on my own.

I've recently been struggling with the question of whether or not my soft-sculptures, or more honestly, what  I call my "plushies"of gears and pipes and wires and other representations of machinery and infrastructure, should or should not be "cute", and if that's even a bad thing.
I don't want to be Kitschy. No one wants to be known in art school for making "kitschy" objects. I'm not even sure how I ended up in this place, really. I used to make really ugly paintings, paintings that people really liked because they were raw and less personal.
But i didn't want to anymore. I didn't want to paint lines and abstract marks on a canvas anymore, and as a result I've resorted to making graphic drawings of patterns and such on post-it notes, then on a big paper, and now I'm making... stuffed animals?

So it was very refreshing for me to read an article that dealt with "cuteness", things that are "soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine", things that lack defined edges, are smallish, blobby, malleable, capable of being handled, compact, simple, pliant...
All of these are words I picked out immediately and related to.

So, bad?

No.

Takashi Murakami with his DOB paintings deal with the play between kawaii and kowaii. Kawaii meaning cute, and Kowaii meaning scary. I keep talking about being scared of my plushies... maybe I'm not really scared of them, I'm more scared of the ideas that they represent, but I know "scary" is somewhere within the language I want to use. The problem is, I don't think people are really getting that idea at all. Mostly people are only getting "i want to jump into that pile of stuff. It looks so cute". And maybe that's not that bad to me! But somehow "scary" seems essential to the message I want to portray in my project.

I'm trying, now, to incorporate fabrics that are extremely porous and net-like and see through so you can see the materials inside the plush pushing up against the walls and trying to exit. There are zippers to force things together. The scale, it's getting bigger... the colors, bolder, not as... lets say docile and innocent anymore. they are not gendered and are starting to not look like anything at all,
I'd say its getting there. I'm pretty happy I think I'm in a good place. I think the pushing of the definition of cuteness is what I needed. They are moving from simple to complicated, small to large, compact to expansive, helpless to aggressive.

Cute should not necessarily mean precious or safe.

drawing is...

its interesting that people have so much trouble defining what exactly drawing IS. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that drawing has existed even before communication was developed (let alone writing, which started out as a form of drawing

painting though, most people would not consider what I do painting. I guess that is fair, but what is paint other than a bunch of pigments bound together by some sort of medium. What is painting other than the application of such bound pigments onto a surface. Why cant my surface be a wall, the floor, the air. Why can't my pigments be buttons and beads and thread and fabric? why not use wire or string to bind it all together...

I don't think i like the idea of talking about my artwork as being either drawing or painting or sculpture... I feel as though a lot of what it is called has to do with which way is more interesting to converse about an object. A painting can be a sculpture, but its not very fun to talk about something that is simply four 2x4 planks of wood being stapled together and glued and wrapped over with canvas in a rectangular pattern. It's more interesting to talk about what's on it. A sculpture can be a painting, but it's not necessarily interesting to talk about it in terms of its one-color-ness. But it could be. Either way, I think it's a matter of perspective. Nothing is quite set in stone...

we do, after all, still need money to live

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/861579/the-banksy-brand-how-the-elusive-street-artist-played-the-art

is it about the art? or is it about the money?

how important is being rich and famous?

does this make you uncomfortable

because it should.
http://instagram.com/p/VnAgmuFq2l/

:)

maybe its an art thing

ITS THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT!

I mean, I guess its fair to say I'm a little late with this epiphany, in light of the recent "the worlds going to end on 12/21/2012" failure. But I mean, I was a little worried that the world really was going to end! Like, seriously, hurricanes are turning into SUPERSTORMS and stuff like that.

Not to mention that the fluctuation between temperatures on a weekly basis is giving me HIVES. 10 degrees F one day, and the next day... 50 DEGREES F!

There are wonderful articles on how not only humans, but also DOMESTICATED CATS are killing off the world (meaning, stray domesticated cats in 'merica are killing off all the birds and squirrels and all those other animals that you might not care about, but perform a very important role in preserving the natural balance of what we call "the circle of life")

And maybe the world should end.

Now, I don't mean it in the sort of way that you think I mean it. I don't want to die. I know I will eventually, but I don't want the world to end quite yet. There are a lot of things I would like to see happen before then, but I'm just saying...

I remember as a child not having cable. We had to tune dial my tv to get any sort of picture visible. I remember typing up papers on typewriters and then having to white-out my typos, or even worse START OVER. I remember when it was a big deal to have MORE THAN ONE LAND LINE for your phone, just in case you needed to use the internet at the same time as someone is calling about an emergency. If i wanted to meet my friend somewhere, we would say "3 o'clock by the school parking lot" or something like that, an sure enough both of us would be there, and we didn't need to call or text to announce "I'm here! where are you? did you get stuck in traffic? lol" Now, I get lost more than ever. If (god forbid) I forget to add an event to my phone, I will probably miss it. I don't remember birthdays, but i have an app that brings me right to facebook and it will take me less than 3 seconds to find out. That is, if there is WiFi around. OH YEAH! WIFI! EVERYWHERE!!!!!
 Did you know that scientists have already discovered that it IS possible to implant a MICROCHIP in your BRAIN like MATRIX-STYLE to give you INTELLIGENCE? And they are working on finding a way to market that. But, guess what? With new stuff like that, means less privacy.

Like Gregg Bordowitz said to Amy Sillman, the walls are swiss cheese.

What does it mean to be the first and the last of our kind of people?  And I'm specifically referring to Katy Siegel's written work "Since '45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art".
What does what's happening to the Earth, and even more precisely, what's happening to America, have to do with my art? Am I responding to it? commenting on it? Making anyone think about it? I don't know... I want it to, but I'm not sure quite yet. Soon, maybe.

I hoping this will all flesh out before May... :/

the makings of

these photos are not necessarily chronological, they are just grouped by year.
Freshman year: (2009-2010)

and then

and after that...

and finally, last semester...