Journal #6 (Word Count: 442)

My first assemblage, the bare one, is from a young artist by the name of Ivana Ranisavljević. In this piece, she is sitting on a white stone floor that's covered by the only thing that she's wearing: a long white skirt. In this picturesque assemblage of her performance, she is carving a mantra into her bare chest that reads, "I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you" in Serbian.  The mantra itself is in reference to the ritual for reconciliation and forgiveness, which comes from the old Hawaiian practice of Ho'oponopono. The language she's writing it in, however, seems to be her own. She accompanies the carving with the rhetoric of the mantra being continuously spoken for hours. 
















My ethical assemblage holds an equally heavy theme. Since Vonwong knew that pollution was a trite topic, his goal was to find an engaging and effective way to bring it back to the forefront of our minds. He did just that by captivating the minds of millions with this art. This assemblage depicts a mermaid washed up on a sea of plastic bottles with the objective of calling attention to plastic pollution on today's society.

These each contribute different things to their audiences. The first conveys a heavy feeling attributed to the fact that the artist is literally carving her art into her body. The second creates an exigency more intertwined with the whimsical parts of our souls which is what makes it so enthralling. In my opinion, we should respond to hurtful assemblages with strong knowledge and voice; not one that is, in return, hurtful, but definitely one that reaches our targeted offender. I believe that Fair Use does help protect against bare assemblage but not enough. Take the popular meme of Pepe the frog for example. Matt Furie, the author,  intended him to be a fun-loving frog in a comic but over the past couple months, through repeated assemblage, he became a widespread hate symbol. The Fair Use act didn't stop Furie's originally "chill" piece of art from becoming something he ultimately was ashamed of.  It's because of this type of assemblage and remix that I firmly believe that circulation can effect an assemblage's ethical status. Ultimately, an assemblages circulation and distribution determine the "feeling" that you get from an author. I think everyone can agree when I say that you start to feel like you know an author through his or her work. This applies to all types of work including, literature, photos, drawings, ect. The circulation will therefor tell you about the author's audience which, again, relates back to the author, their subjects, as well as their readers.