Hands take three

I think I might need to make a special tag for hand posts.

One of my required classes for my art major is New Forms. This perfectly vague name is the best the department can do at defining a class that's whole purpose is to be undefinable. Basically, this class is supposed to teach us to think outside the box and communicate ideas visually in non-traditional ways. Is it ironic that the class that is hardest to explain is all about communication? Actually, my teacher would say that it isn't about communicating the idea to a viewer, it's just about the artist exploring the idea for herself.

  Oh post-modernism. It seems like a very lonely world, doesn't it? If my art doesn't connect me to people and help them understand something, how the heck am I supposed to connect with them?

So, we picked a concept and then did a whole bunch of projects in which we tried to convey that concepts. The catch for the final project was that we weren't allowed to use any traditional art material (paper and pencil, canvas and paint, plaster or clay) unless we had a darn good reason for it. So I used rice, Elmer's glue and wire mesh mostly, with some plastic gems and a few strings of those colorful party beads thrown in for good measure. My concept, basically, was poverty as a virtue. I guess you could call it gratitude, or simplicity, or something else, but I have been raised with the idea that somehow the poor are blessed. The whole thing changed quite a bit as I went along. It was a real journey, but somewhere along the way, hands got thrown in. I think it started because I was thinking about the idea of possession. We posses something only if we have the power to give it away, like freedom is the power to choose good, not the power to do whatever we want. So the gesture of giving or taking or 'Handing" something over lead me conveniently back to my oft repeated theme: the human hand.

 I'm not really sure if I succeeded in my unofficial goal of making something that I don't hate. Part of me is a cynic who constantly says "This isn't art, it's just post modern rubbish" but it is not completely void of visual pleasantness.
The whole thing was really interesting and I will draw on it in my other work for sure. I just probably won't use elmer's glue and rice in any more art projects.