Zeitgeist Magazine

Premiere Issue of Zeitgeist has finally arrived! Pick up the May 2009 issue, today!

Zeitgeist is a new monthly magazine geared towards to high school students. To receive issues, teachers can request a subscription for an entire school year. For $9.99, classrooms will get 10 issues of Zeitgeist, which will be scheduled to arrive the first week of each month.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents (1pg)
Q&A column (2pg)
Exhibition review (5pg)
Interview with a new teen artist (3pg)
Review of an interactive museum exhibition for students (2pg)
Monthly glossary of contemporary art terms (1pg)
Profile of an art teacher (1pg)
Monthly art events (2-3pg)
Art project you can do at home (2pg)
Games and puzzles (1pg)

Letter from the Editor

Dear Art Teachers and Students:

It is with great pleasure that I bring you Zeitgeist. For years, public schools have been supplied with glossy, thin magazines to distribute to students and use as a teaching device. From personal experience, they were either too confusing or the administration failed to distribute them during the appropriate month. It was such an unfortunate occurrence that such learning materials were considered trivial and not properly planned into a students’ curriculum.

Having spent Kindergarten through senior year of high school in public schools focused on the arts, I had the privilege of receiving supplementary magazines focusing on the arts every month. Although this sounds like an improvement compared to my academic classes, several flaws still sneaked their way into my art classes. First, the magazines were written using vocabulary most students never heard. Even when a article looked fascinating, it would take way past the allotted class time to fully understand the thesis. Second, newer issues of the art magazines were almost impossible to find in classrooms. Teachers constantly reused the same October and Art in America issues from the 1980s. Although they were interesting, when I could understand them, it was frustrating that I could not read a magazine focusing on the art of my time. Having such little exposure to current art trends, I focused most of my art on traditional and classical examples since they were much easier to come across in books and magazines. Post-modern and contemporary art were almost foreign topics to me when I graduated high school.

It was not until college that I realized I knew almost nothing about mod-late 20th century art. This is when I got the idea to create Zeitgeist. This monthly magazine was to be distributed monthly to teachers of art classes of Junior High and High School levels. The narrow audience I am reaching is purposely done to lower costs, thus allowing me to provide the magazines free of charge. Articles and columns will be written with vocabulary consistent with the students reading levels. Nothing will be convoluted. I want the students to completely understand the message of the article instead of getting sidetracked by the confusing language.
Monthly columns will include a question and answer section for both teachers and students. It will be refreshing for students to hear answers to questions they may have themselves been pondering. The articles will be focused on current exhibitions and artists of contemporary art. Also, to facilitate better understanding, I am including a glossary after each article to define terms that may be too difficult.

My personal favorite section of the magazine has to be the Do It Yourself pages. As artists, these students can try a modified version of an artists’ work and get a first-hand experience on contemporary art. I believe that only through experimentation can one truly understand something. Students and teachers will be allowed to submit stories of how their projects worked as well as feedback and questions concerning the activity.

I want this magazine to be an interactive tool for art students to gain a better understanding of the art of their time. This is how the name Zeitgeist came into play. Defined literally as “spirit” and “time”, the word exemplifies the purpose of my magazine. It will address the “spirit” or art of “our” or students time.

Proposals for Remnants Review

Sorry for it being late, but apparently Blogger didn't show my post...

Since its’ opening in 1998 , Angelina Gualdoni is the third artist to have a solo exhibit at the Kavi Gupta Gallery located in downtown Chicago. Open only until May 9th, "Proposals for Remnants" is an awe-inspiring exhibit based around the notions of the entropy of debris in spaces abstracted by Gualdoni’s use of paint and textures.

My initial reaction to the exhibit was one of surprise. Gualdoni’s materials are conventional and traditional, the use of oils, acrylics and canvas are uncommonly used in the “textbook definition” of contemporary art. Being introduced in a highly technological age, contemporary artists pride themselves on incorporating these new technologies in their artwork by using photography, film, computers and sculpture to express their messages.

Although her materials are common, her innovative use of paint and canvas in relation to the subject matter of her artwork is vital in expressing her message about materialism and society today. In her work Proposals for Remnants, for which the title of the show is named, is comprised of a layered pile of random items, most of which are unidentifiable. From what I can decipher, it looks as if the items in the painting are a collection of scrap paper, possibly some yarn and a few other items that would be used for the purpose of arts and crafts. These objects all relate to a somewhat childlike atmosphere, one similar to programs designed to teach arts and crafts to young children or even these materials remind me of a grade school classroom. Whichever it may be, Gualdoni’s image focuses a great detail on the arrangement of the paper; everything is strewn about and disorderly, but the environment is blocked out from the image. There is no sense of life, except from what we can imagine. Therefore, an imaginary force could have facilitated the disorder and chaos of the paintings objects. The lack of perspective and depth further the idea of an imaginary world, as does the ethereal painted background done from using paint mixed with a higher concentration of medium.

The backgrounds of the paintings are all done using the same technique of a thinned out paint, which creates a watercolor effect. In March through April, Gualdoni applies her “watercolor effect” to the background of rocks and other various unknown objects, piled together. In regards to the background, it is interesting to see that she chooses to leave a border around the canvas. The negative space is in direct contrast of the sort of “bubble” Gualdoni creates with her objects placed in the middle.

In March through April, the area around the objects is painted as If to suggest an expansion of space. Gualdoni does not chose to paint a harsh outline around the object’s space, but instead she paints an ambiguous shape with the gray paint that is allowed to enter the negative space of the border in forms of drips fading. Although it looks unintentional and just a cause of the thinned paint, the surrounding area is meant to drip off the edge of the canvas and enter the negative space. The stringy lines exiting the canvas are very similar to a spider’s web and the painted image in the middle is like a creature stuck in the web. Probably a stretch, but the title of the painting and the rocks in the painting all point towards spring and nature, which can be linked to a spider web.

The entire canvas is comparable to a Polaroid photograph. An ambiguous background that is trying to envelop the entire area of the canvas, similar to a photograph being developed, surrounds the image. Gualdoni’s paintings are like snapshots of the developing process, the image is striving to complete itself and fill the canvas. The subject matter can then be read as a reflection on the current social situation where randomness and disorder are “taking over” society just as Gualdoni’s images are trying to fill the canvas.