Pat Keck

Although I generally find Pat Keck's sculptures to be very eerie, I find this particular piece to be quite funny. There is a lot of implied motion in the sculpture. Peck achieves this successfully by placing the figure of the man in the act of motion next to a fixed object, which i believe is a shower head. In the figure of the man, his body weight all seems to be shifted toward his lower back and the pressure of this weight seems to be focused on the heels of his feet. The ends of his hair all point in the same general direction. The hairs follow in a line that is not completely horizontal, but is diagonal in a slightly upward direction. The motion implied here, is of water, or some other force (like air?) that rushes downward onto the figure and disorients his balance. For some reason this piece reminds me of the gags that are seen in the old-school "Three Stooges" flicks.

Motion Artist

Elijah Gowin's series focuses on giving the audience a sense of falling. The billowing gown of the man in the photo accurately reflects movement. The lighting of the piece gives it a religious sense to me and confuses my senses in a way that makes it seem as though the man is being blown upwards towards heaven, or maybe a UFO.

"Ascending" by Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang is the guy who did the fireworks for the Beijing olympics. He likes explosions and military history. He does incredible pieces with cars or bones or big things suspended from strings. This is a pen drawing, with a ladder that's cropped at the top of the canvas, the crop adding a sense of immediacy and motion. There are aerie spirits floating around it, and there's something like a ball of string. It's as if we're looking at the heavens from below.
It's not a neat drawing. There are splotches. It's as if the image has been rained on. The splotches complicate the meaning of the work. It prevents the image from being too picturesque.
The things in the image are heavenly, but also down to earth. Guo-Qiang is an artist that loves motion, but this drawing is a deviation from his ordinary form. It's in motion, but not really.

Motion Artist: Elijah Gowin

In Fall5, Elijah Gowin very strongly suggests anticipated motion. Combining the viewer's prior experiences both with gravity and with going swimming, one knows that this man is not simply hovering in the air, but in the midst of some sort of jump, drop, or fall, the result of which will be his plunging into the water. The shape of the man's body also suggests downward motion: the u-shape he makes points down toward the water, indicating a fall. 

Cai Gou-Qiang

Cai Gou-Qiang's sculpture uses twisted human forms to show motion. The front figure is leanign towards one side and it is balanced by having its left leg lifted up. This figure shows motion because viewers anticipate his fall. It is an anticipated motion since the figure's upper body is shifted all the way to his right side and the weight is over his right leg. This week, we learned about the illusion of motion. This figure illustrates the idea that even though it is a still sculpture, viewers can feel the anticipated fall.

Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp does an excellent job of using different techniques when it comes to creating a feeling of motion. Here, the bodies are cropped, repeated, and overlapped to make it seem like the man is walking down the stairs. Our eyes immediately follow him, in a downward motion. Very beautiful piece.

Motion Artist

Marcel Duchamp - "Sad Young Man in a Train"

In this piece Duchamp uses several techinques to imply motion. Of course, there is use of the multiple images. The figure of the "Sad Young Man" is repeated many times across the piece, each one a snapshot of a slightly different time. We perceive this as one motion much like a video or flip book. He also makes use of blurred edges to further communicate the movement.

Elijah Gowin: Falling in Trees12

Elijah Gowin utilizes several techniques to create the illusion of movement in his 2006 work “Falling in Trees12.” There is little question about the fact that the viewer gets the sense that the boy represented is actively falling in this image. The artist conveys this idea by using anticipated motion. Much of the motion we seen in art comes from our own memory and experiences. Therefore we have a good idea of what should happen next in this image or what further movement is to follow. Gowin’s work also exhibits blurred outlines and fuzzy details, which is frequently used to suggest fast movement. (We know that when photographing a subject in fast motion the resulting image is often blurred.) Lastly, the plant’s stalk on the right serves as a line of force. Its verticality shows the pathway of movement and seems to pull the boy towards the bottom of the page.

Marcel Duchamp - The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even

While this piece is notoriously abstract, I think Duchamp has done an excellent job of evoking a sense of movement and energy in this piece without implying any discernible objective forms. The cracks in the glass provide the viewer with lines which seems to travel diagonally from right to left across the top of the first frame and vice versa in the bottom, implying both a sense of motion as well as potentially the passage of time. This is reinforced by the varied repetition of the cones in the bottom panel, which like multiple-exposure photographs evoke the sense of a figure rotating through space and time.

Elijah Gowin

This photo is part of Elijah Gowin’s series “Of Falling and Floating.” The focus of the photo is on the man, who is falling from an undetermined point to the water below. Everything about this photo conveys motion. The man is in mid-fall, and the fact that the viewer cannot see where he fell from implies that the motion occurred before the picture was taken. The effects of gravity ensure that the motion continues after the snapshot. His stretched arms and spread legs imply air resistance. The water below the man is choppy, implying the motion of waves moving up and down. Even the lines running through the photograph and the blurred edges imply fluidity that is associated with motion.

Muybridge

Muybridge's Animal Locomotion evokes the idea of motion. By using the technique of repeating figures, the elephant appears to be moving from one frame of the image to the next. Each piece shows the elephant in a slightly different position from the previous one, and the viewer gets the feeling that the elephant is slowly walking.

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge's Animal locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement, 1872-1885 included this work showing a walking elephant. By using multiple images and the repeated image of the elephant, there is a clearly implied motion in the work. Muybridge pioneered this aproach to showing movement that led to the development of the motion picture. I like this work because of the subtly of the walking and especially the movements of the elephants tail.

Cai Guo-Qiang

This work, though captured in its visual interest in this photograph, is greatly misrepresented two dimensionally.  Cai Guo-Qiang's exploding car series is ineffably brilliant in person.  The scale alone of this work is something at which to marvel, suspending life size cars from the ceiling in dynamic positions.  Not only is motion purely captured in this installation, but the force of gravity is seemingly highlighted as the star of the show.  He utilizes many tools to create this intense, imminent sense of motion and flight.   For each individual series (only one captured here at the Guggenheim), identical cars were used in repetition to create the illusion that a single car was spinning through the air.  The particular placement of the cars in space also provides a time line to the car's trajectory, a sequence to its descent.  The neon lights emanating from each car add to the overall dynamism of the piece.  They act almost as lines of force for the energy of the car, which seems to be trying to escape its metal confines.  Interestingly, Guo-Qiang's work does not evoke a sense of destruction despite the logical consequence of the car's trajectory.  

Eadweard Muybridge "Head spring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering"

Eadweard Muybridge used miltiple camers to capture motion. I think this piece is interesting because you can really see how the bodies moves it balance. I also like how he put the pigeon in the photo which gives just adds more motion to the work.

In this work " Future Perfect", artist Brendan Fernandes implements the technique of blurred lines to emphasize motion. The blurring effect is used in the light coming from the storage containers as well as in the outlines of the figures in the foreground. As a result, the image seems to be one frame in the midst of a strange phenomenon that only the viewer is experiencing rationally (as the figures in the foreground are blurry themselves and the one man isn't even looking). In this way Fernandes not only shows motion but provides the audience with a specific viewpoint.

Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge's photographs are often of ordinary motions, but the pictures are taken so rapidly that the viewer can clearly see the minute stages of motions that are normally overlooked. This is the figure repeated method of showing motion, as the same subject appears in a different position in different frames. However, the temporal placement of the frames is more like the multiple image method, as it shows the tiny differences in motion; the images just aren't overlaid. I think that it's fascinating to see detailed views of what movement looks like frozen in time; it makes even the most mundane motion seem interesting when you can see the small individual muscle movements.

Cai Gou-Qiang

Head On by Cai Guo-Qiang

This work by Cai Guo-Qiang just wonderfully captures the feeling of motion. It can be viewed in several different ways. For instance, one could see it as a few images repeated to create the idea of motion, a technique we discussed in class. On the other hand, all of these animals (which I think are wolves) are positioned in such a way that it seems as if all of them were running into this wall and time just froze, as if a truly 3D picture was taken. Though I didn't quite get the apparent intention of the work (which the Guggenheim website claims was to conjure the now-destroyed Berlin Wall), I do enjoy it for its aesthetic qualities and the thought that goes into interpreting it.

Fortune

Pat Keck uses motion in the literal and figurative sense. In this piece, he has included a motorized spinning top on the table which turns the woman in circles. With her arms and legs spread wide, it is as if she is trying to keep her balance on top of the table. The circles painted on the sides of the table also symbolize the motion of spinning in circles because of the rotation of the yellow design inside each consecutive white circle. I also really enjoy this piece because of the colors used. 

Elijah Gowin, Fall5

This photo uses anticipated motion to get the viewer to sense that the man is falling. Also, his body's outline is a bit blurred, helping to create a sense of downward motion as well.

I really like the red wash/streaks over the photograph, giving it an old feel.