I hate to say this but the Sanford Biggers lecture was painful for me to get through. It may have been because I only had about five hours of sleep the night before or because the artwork just really did not speak to me at all. His success as an artist is fantastic though. He is currently teaching at Columbia after teaching at VCU for a few years.
Bigger's work is highly conceptual and focuses primarily on race relations and is mixed as far as its medium ranging between video, music, sculpture and performance. The first piece that he showed was a media montage that showed a juxtaposition of African Americans in media beside clips of Caucasians. The clips were of old Hollywood arial dance numbers v. images of the blacks in the 1970s, which is a time when their role in television/film really began to change. I believe his goal was to show the heavy contrast between the two as far as media portrayals.
Perhaps I just completely missed the mark, which is highly possible because performance work is something that I knowingly do not understand. Overall though, I thought the work was all over the place and within one piece, there were so many things going on, it was confusing for the viewer. Either that, or like in his piece were he collaborated with his female friend from Connecticut, very obvious. Overall, the pieces that I felt were the most conceptually strong and visually interesting were Lotus and Cheshire Smile. These two pieces were both haunting and memorable. Though if I saw it, I would have no idea what it was about, my favorite piece that he showed was the sculpture of the tree growing though the tree. His technical skills are dead on, perfect. I didn't see it in person but from the images he showed, the detail was flawless.
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