JamesLuna: Identity

James Luna is known for pushing boundaries in his installations, where he engages audiences by making himself part of a tableau. James Luna is a Luiseno Indian who lives on the La Jolla Indian Reservation.  Luna has stated that "art work in the media of performance and installation offers an opportunity like no other for Native people to express themselves without compromise in the Indian traditional art forms of ceremony, dance, oral traditions and contemporary thought.  "His installations have been described as transforming gallery spaces into battlefields, where the audience is confronted with the nature of cultural identity, and tensions generated by cultural isolation, and dangers of cultural misinterpretation- all from a Native perspective." Said by,  Walter Phillips.  I think he addresses the mythology of what it means to be “Indian” in contemporary American society and exposes the hypocrisy of the dominant society.

My Identity Collages

                                        
                                        Just a few important things that have gone on in my life...

Beauty???

    Beauty...  what do we as a society perceive as beautiful? I really thought that the dove video we saw in class hit the nail on the head. Are view of beauty is distorted by all these images of what is beautiful and what is not. I thought this was a new thing and in the past they didn't have to worry about self image, but nope it was just as bad as it is now. Except back then they had to aspire to the beauty of the GOD'S...  yeah i know talk about setting the bar high. There were the few that didn't necessary think this was true like Aristotle he believed in real objects like art. Keats believed that beauty was all we need to know. And thouse are good ideas be i like the old saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" it's kinda corny but true.