Enthrapy

,         The new movement in 3-D art is conceptual, experimental, and confusing. It is based on the idea of time and promotes purposeful confusion to the viewer. Most works includes allusions to the past while hinting the possibilities of the future. Theoretically, the universe head towards enthalpy, the action towards chaos; however, it is the universe’s natural characteristic to find stableness, or equilibrium.  The artists that were introduced in this reading forced themselves to create art that promoted enthalpy, or chaos; but, because in order to observe enthalpy or entropy, it needs the factor time, the artist incorporate time into their artwork. They combine parts of both the old and new ideas in their artworks.

            After reading the excerpt on Lewis Carroll’s interpretations on laughter, I began to understand that his artwork was a play on words. He believes that the fourth dimension was laughter, rather than time, which most physics around the world has agreed on. In order to convey his belief that time was laughter, he split up the different levels of laughter by the complexity of 3-D crystal systems. For example: a generic laugh would be shown as tetragon, while a guffaw would be in a Triclinic shape. Laughter, according to Carroll would be “matter-of-laughs”(21). I disagree with Carroll’s belief because it is laughter is obviously not to be seen in a plane field. He based his understanding of the fourth dimension without any evidence or scientific report. His artwork doesn’t incorporate the idea of time or space in anyway. Laughter does not have any connotations linked to enthalpy or entropy; thus the excerpt “[t]ime and disorder of the fourth dimension could be set between laughter and the crystal-structure” (21) cannot be possible, even on his own terms.

            In conclusion, artists that explore the enthalpy in their artwork create works that simply places a shock factor towards the viewer. The video Yonkers by rapper, Tyler, the Creator, in parallel to recent popular culture, helps clarify this new movement in art. In the video, Tyler, the Creator, eats a cockroach, vomits, and then hangs himself. His video won an award at a MTV Music video award. Many people analyzed his music video/film stating that eating the cockroach meant something deeper, but in an interview a couple months later he stated that he did all that because he thought it would be cool. These artists are similar in a way that they provide a shock for the viewers, creating unlimited interpretations, while the artwork itself, although aesthetically pleasing, has little conceptual meaning to it.

            Three Questions:

1.     If immortality is stressed in an artwork, how could it combine time if immortality is a concept?

2.     Does “dislocation of meaning (23)” mean randomness?

3.     Could these artworks be explained and created without the incorporation of time?