Ch 4 Judy Pfaff’s Cirque, Cirque vs. Jennifer Pastor’s Sequence 6 from Flow Chart for "The Perfect Ride" Animation

Judy Pfaff’s piece Cirque, Cirque took 3 years (1992 to 1995) for the
artist to construct. It is made up of automobile paint, steel and
aluminum tubes, hand-blown glass orbs, primer, cable, and other
materials. This is Judy’s Pfaff’s most famous piece, and it is
actually nine miles of metal tubing spread over a huge span of 70,000
square feet of space.  It is permanently installed in the Pennsylvania
Convention Center in Philadelphia. I think the piece as a whole gives
a feel of some sort of sci-fi adventure in space. The twinkling blue
and yellow shaded glass spheres and the great looping lines in the air
used in "Cirque, CIRQUE" give you a strong feel of being on an ocean
bed, with light and life on land forming the layer far above, near the
water's surface.
Jennifer Pastor’s Sequence 6 from Flow Chart for "The Perfect Ride"
Animation was created in the year 2000. There is a still shot in the
Living with Art book drawn in simple black lines. The bull undulates
and torques against a bright void white background, while the cowboy,
hat on, arm waving, is holding on. The lines in the piece are flowing
through the rolling motion of a generic cowboy on a furiously bucking
bull. A perfect ride in a rodeo, or for that matter in surfing and
skiing, combines recklessness, danger, power, elegance, and beauty. In
the perfect ride, one finds the point of dynamic equilibrium just at
the tipping point into chaos and loss of control.
The similarities I find between the two pieces are that they both rely
on lines to give life to their artworks. The reason I decided to
compare these two is because I thought it was an odd coincidence that
Judy Pfaff’s Cirque, Cirque has a large piece of a copper metal
flowing through the sky that is almost the exact shape as the lasso
shown in Jennifer Pastor’s The Perfect Ride Animation. Both of these
shapes center the pieces and when you look at the two together it
makes the very different works show a resemblance. The differences are
the artists use of color, materials, and space.