Saturday, February 27, 2010
Shimabuku
Shimabukus Fish & Chips 2006
"In 2000 Shimabuku gave an octopus from Akashi a tour of Tokyo. Far removed from its natural habitat, the octopus experienced a series of encounters that were, quite unquestionably, historical firsts. In his search for new value in the everyday, Shimabuku's works begin with simple, often surreal, ideas that are meticulously realised and documented. The narratives that occur throughout their production are as central to the final work as the original idea.
Visiting Liverpool the artist discovered Scouse, the dish made of lamb, onions, potatoes and carrots that gives locals their name. Curious as to how its component parts, each from different counties within Great Britain, first came together, he sampled various recipes in eateries throughout the city. Pondering other British dishes he came to the nation's other great contribution to global cuisine – fish and chips. His film for the Biennial documents the fictional first encounter between the dish's constituents and sees the artist diving with fish while potatoes mysteriously fall from above. With the octopus, Shimabuku introduced the sea to the land, now it is time for the land to meet the sea. This seemingly absurd encounter ultimately encourages a questioning of the mundane elements of daily life".
Text taken from the Tate website follow this link for more info: http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/liverpoolbiennial06/artists/shimabuku.shtm
Mel Chin
"Unconventional and politically engaged, his projects also challenge the idea of the artist as the exclusive creative force behind an artwork. “The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others’ ideas to be realized,” says Chin, who often enlists entire neighborhoods or groups of students in creative partnerships. In “KNOWMAD,” Chin worked with software engineers to create a video game based on rug patterns of nomadic peoples facing persecution. Chin also promotes “works of art” that have the ultimate effect of benefiting science or rejuvenating the economies of inner-city neighborhoods".(text taken from Art 21 artist bio. Go to the following link to read more: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/chin/index.html#)
Monday, February 22, 2010
The Radicant: Vocab
proletariat |ˌprōliˈte(ə)rēət| (also archaic proletariate)
noun [treated as sing. or pl. ]
workers or working-class people, regarded collectively (often used with reference to Marxism) : the growth of the industrial proletariat.
the lowest class of citizens in ancient Rome.
heterogeneous |ˌhetərəˈjēnēəs|
adjective
diverse in character or content : a large and heterogeneous collection.
• Chemistry of or denoting a process involving substances in different phases (solid, liquid, or gaseous).
The Era of Commitment: what is lost?
“nothing counts, since nothing really binds us or requires us to commit ourselves. . . . ”The Nietzschean question of eternal return: are you willing to relive for all eternity the moments you are experiencing now?” This question requires a commitment to values and therefore is a question that is no longer asked”. (Bourriard, The Radicant, 80)
“The era of commitment has passed, we find it pathetically difficult to retain anything at all in a cultural environment that is marked by its volatility” states Bourriard. If one agrees with this mindset, there are no enduring values by which art can and should be governed.
While not committing can be seen as a type of freedom we should ponder what is lost.
what is lost?
what is a radicant artist?
The radicant artist is not easily defined, baring the label “alter modern” it is a synthesis of modernism and post modernism. It is therefore broad and varied, encompassing many ideas. Diversity, flexibility, movement and changeability, are its most overarching characteristics. In the introduction of this book by Nicholas Bourriard it is described as an organism that grows its roots and sets them in motion advancing as an ivy vine would. The Radicant, being a densely layered book with complex ideas, I have chosen and outline form to distill the main points.
What is a radicant artist?
1. a synthesis between modernism and post modernism
2. tracing lines in all directions of time and space with the present as a reference point
3. a voluntary confusion of eras and genres
4. nomadism; three kinds; space, time, among the signs
5. “being uplifted by an immense wave of displacements, voyages, translations, migrations of objects and beings”
6. diaspora, migration, exodus
7. resulting from global dialogue (not just Western)
8. a significance that transcends cultural divides
9. not merely object based but a significant network with connections orchestrated by the artist
10. no boundaries for artistic language
Wafaa Billal
8pm March 8th to 8pm March 9th, 2010
…and Counting:
Tattoo is latest medium for acclaimed Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal in New York live performance
Wafaa Bilal's brother Haji was killed by a missile at a checkpoint in their hometown of Kufa, Iraq in 2004. Bilal feels the pain of both American and Iraqi families who’ve lost loved ones in the war, but the deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public.Where: Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
Blackburn 20/20
323 W39th Street 5th Floor NY, NY 10018
Contact: Phillip Sanders, phil@efa1.org, 212-563-5855
Artist contact: w.wafaa@gmail.com
Project Director: Christine OHeron:christineoheron@gmail.com, (860) 782-1030
…and Counting addresses this double standard as Bilal turns his own body – in a 24-hour live performance -- into a canvas, his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell. The 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by red dots (permanent visible ink), and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties are represented by dots of green UV ink, seemingly invisible unless under black light. During the performance people from all walks of life read off the names of the dead.
Also, Bilal is asking each visitor to donate $1 which will go to the group Rally for Iraq, to fund scholarships for Americans and Iraqis who lost parents in the war. Based on official numbers of casualties, one dollar for each would mean $105,000 in scholarship money.
(text and images taken from the following web site: http://www.wafaabilal.com/index.html)
Katie Paterson
21st December 2009 - 14 February 2010, weekdays 5-9pm, weekends 5pm-11pm
Deal Pier, East Kent, England, CT14
*Last night of viewing February 13th 5pm-8am*
At any one time there are around 6000 lightning storms happening across the world, amounting to some 16 million storms each year. Such dizzying statistics are useful to hold in mind while experiencing Streetlight Storm, a new artwork by Katie Paterson. For one month on Deal Pier in Kent, during the hours of darkness, the pier lamps will flicker in time with lightning strikes happening live in different parts of the world.
Katie Paterson creates poetic artworks exploring landscape, space and time, using technology to bring together the commonplace and the cosmic. Streetlight Storm deftly harnesses everyday technology to connect with vast natural phenomena, collapsing the distance between us and remote meteorological events. Lightning signals from as far away as the North Pole or North Africaare received by an antenna on the pier and translated into light. As the pattern of lightning strikes changes, so the pier lights oscillate correspondingly, with a subtlety that contrasts with the power and drama of the storms they reflect.
(Text taken from website: http://www.katiepaterson.org/streetlightstorm/info.html)
Ruth Ewan
Did you kiss the foot that kicked you?
"Give me the making of the songs of the nation, and I care not who makes its laws".
Andrew Fletcher, 1703
"Music is doing something to everyone who hears it all the time".
Arnold Perris, Music as Propaganda, 1984
Ewan MacColl wrote Ballad of Accounting in 1964.The lyrics follow a simple structure, considered to be unique among his three hundred compositions. The song offers criticism as self-reflection, repeatedly posing provocative and direct questions:
Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?
Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest?
Government records released in 2006 through The National Archive show that from 1932, security service MI5 held a file on MacColl. One report claims that he was ‘a communist with very extreme views’ who needed ‘special attention’. The file also states, as a cause for concern, that MacColl had ‘exceptional ability as a singer and musical organiser’.
Ruth Ewan's Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? involves the co-ordination of over one hundred buskers around London. Performing both under and above ground, the buskers incorporate Ballad of Accounting into their usual repertoire. Their individual acts share a collective purpose. The week-long series of performances slips quietly into the rush-hour routine, as the scattered recitals filter into the subconscious of those passing by.
Busking is about something other than just being an able musician or a street entertainer; it is a raw performance, an autonomous act.
(text from the following website: http://www.balladofaccounting.org/about.html)
Riyo
"Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s work is characterized by a quiet, intimate interrogation of contemporary urban life. Exploring cinematic conventions, temporality and subjective experience, her short films and installations recreate specific moments in which individuals intersect with places." (text taken from the following website: http://www.bard.edu/ccs/exhibitions/museum/sodiumdreams/artists/gonzalez/)
Dominique Preciado-Foerster
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: chronotopes & dioramas
September 23, 2009 - June 27, 2010 (project commissioned by Dia)
"Commissioned by Dia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s latest project offers an annex to the world renowned research library at the Hispanic Society of America. Titled chronotopes & dioramas, it expands and updates the historic collection with a range of twentieth century literature by some forty authors, whose texts will be installed in a trio of dioramas by reference to their place of origin in one of three distinct geographical regions: the desert, the tropics and the North Atlantic." (text taken from the Dia Art Foundation Web Site, http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/main/100)
Mike Kelley
Monday, February 15, 2010
the unexpected art encounter
Gabriel Orozco rearranged items in a grocery store. This unexpected arrangement causes people to pay attention to the ordinary things that surround them and how they are arranged. His art is imbued with playful exploration.
. . . to see things in new ways, to look more closely at our lives, to pay attention to the way the sunshine glows through a leaf. . . is one of the things that first drew me to art. . . it is one of the roles that art can have in the world.
What about putting art in unexpected places. . . so that people encounter it within their routines? I like that idea!!!
what is structuralist?
what is a structuralist? The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau
According to Alison Assiter, there are four common ideas regarding structuralism that form an 'intellectual trend'. Firstly, the structure is what determines the position of each element of a whole. Secondly, structuralists believe that every system has a structure. Thirdly, structuralists are interested in 'structural' laws that deal with coexistence rather than changes. And finally structures are the 'real things' that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism
Use of the art
In Rirkrit Tiravanija's work the meaning of the work is based on the use the exhibition visitors give to it. (Bourriard 47)
The viewer makes the work of art?
”it is the viewer who make the paintings,” Duchamp once said, . . . in the context of the an emerging culture of use, in which meaning is born of collaboration and negotiation between the artist and the one who come to view the work. wouldn’t meaning of a work have as much to do with the use one makes of it as with the artist’s intentions for it?” (Bourriard, Post Production, 21)
In what ways can the artist control the way the viewer looks at or uses the work of art?
"The quality of a work depends on the trajectory it describes in the cultural landscape". (Bourriard, Post Production, p 40)
By making this statement Bourriard is asserting that the aesthetic element is not in any way part of defining the quality of a work of art. The statement was made directly following this sentence re the idea that a chair is not a sculpture because you can't see it when you are sitting in it. Sot it's functional value prevents it from being and art object, "but I don't think that makes any sense" says Bourriard.
In other words, the function of an object does not detract from its value as art.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Gabriel Orozco
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/orozco/clip2.html#
"...The making of the work and the political implications of the making—how you make things—is part of the final result of the work."
"I'm thinking a lot about the pots as a space of transportation, conservation, everyday life, circulation."
Mike Kelley
"Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #s 2 through 32 (Day is Done)"
2004-2005
© Mike Kelley
"So all I have is this image, and then I have to write a whole scenario for it like a play, and then do the music and everything. Each one is just based on the look of the photograph that tells me what style it has to be done in..."
- Mike Kelley
Related Slideshows:© Mike Kelley
"So all I have is this image, and then I have to write a whole scenario for it like a play, and then do the music and everything. Each one is just based on the look of the photograph that tells me what style it has to be done in..."
- Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley - 2000s
Performance
Mike Kelley
"Balanced By Mass and Worth"
2001
Foam, paper mâché, wood, brass, paper pulp, tile grout, acrylic, miscellaneous beads, buttons, jewelry, 2 parts, 27 x 134 x 15 inches each
Photo by Nic Tenwiggenhorn
Courtesy Jablonka Galerie, Cologne
Thomas Hirschhorn
Thomas Hirschhorn
Sculpture direct
1999
cardboard, wood, aluminum foil, gold paper, adhesive, light bulbs, plastic, prints, ball-point pen, marker, stickers, 2 integrated videos : "Flowers", "Peluches", VHS, color, silent, 30'
Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel
© Florian Kleinefenn
Universal Gym Febraury 13 - April 11, 2009
Monday, February 8, 2010
Paul Chan's "Waiting for Godot"
http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/welcome.html
Paul Chan's production of Waiting for Godot.
"Chan's artistic involvement consisted largely of spending many months teaching as a volunteer in a local college, building close relationships with local community groups and grass roots organizations. . . (Anton Vidokle describes Paul Chan's project in October 130 p 42)
". . . contemporary practices that are not concerned with the production of masterpeices bu with reconciling art with other processes of life. . . " (Vidokle p43)
This kind of art does not necessarily fit neatly inside institutions.
Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do
something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed.
Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally
well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still
ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment o f time, all mankind is us,
whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us
represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!
What do you say?
—Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
A more recent work by Paul Chan is the 7 lights
http://www.newmuseum.org/paulchan/
more stuff from Walter Benjamine
c. "for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from is parasitical dependence on ritual". (Benjamin p 6)
this takes away the value of the authentic. . . or the need for the authentic, thus removing the aura (the connection with history and ritual that used to be important to art). It is now based on politics.
The work of art was made to exist for a specific purpose (not necessarily in order to be viewed), with mechanical reproduction the work's focus shifted to exhibition.
d. the internet, the jpeg
The Age of Mechanical reproduction
a. Walter Benjamin describes and authentic work of art as having an "aura". He uses and example of a mountain range on the horizon or the shadow cast by a branch.
It is the essence of a thing, it's history,"it's unique existence in time and place", its ritual function.
b. before the advent of film and photography most art had a ritual function. From the magical purpose of cave paintings (the animals being "birthed" into existence), to objects, images used in religious services and worship, to the portrait which is of the ritual of remembering loved ones.
Art has transitioned from having a ritual purpose to exhibition purpose. It is art for art's sake, that is pure and autonomous, not reliant on a social purpose. In film the audience becomes separated from the work itself and is seeing the work through the camera's lens instead of first hand experienced. The viewer becomes a critic.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Art of Today 2010
. . . Just started thinking about this. . . and have been reading Bourriard today so this quote I came across in my reading. I will edit this post soon with more thoughts (and hopefully some personal opinions)
“Experimentation, because being modern means daring to seize the occasion, the kairos. It means venturing, not resting contentedly with tradition, with existing formulas and categories; but seeking to clear new paths, to become a test pilot”. (Bourriard 16)
envisaging what would be the first truly worldwide culture.
Define Post Modern Art
Define the Post-Modern Art Movement:
1970s? 1980s?
a reaction against Modernism’s belief that reason can dominate the environment around us and by so doing guarantee us material progress. (p 96 Critical theory a Graphic Guide)
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-99) “incredulity towards meta narratives” 1979 book The Postmodern condition
An emphasis on difference, Randomness, Relativism, Skepticism and Cynicism
Cultural hybridization (dissolving genuine singularity) (Radicant, Bourriard,13)
cultural diversity or standardization?
reactionary: a theme of . . . liberating alienated minorities. . . emancipation, resistance, alienation. (Radicant, Bourriard, 15)
“The generation that came to maturity around 1970 had little faith in either purity or progress. . . a growing uncertainty about the future and art’s power to influence it.” p1153 Art History Stockstad, Marylin)
Artists: Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Carolee Schneemann, The Guggenheim Museum
Modern Art Movement
Define Modern Art Movement:
When did it begin? How did it begin? momentous changes in politics, economics, and science. The spread of democracy, capitalism, technological innovation. Western power, colonialism, World War I II, the Great Depression.
When did it end? 1980s?
rejection of conventions, a commitment to radical innovation, “the desire to make new (p1061)
by 1920 we would already be able to see almost all the different aspects of twentieth-century art: expressionism, abstract art, cubism, Dada, (Rookmaker 131) Fauvism, Futurism, Constructivism, Purism, Surrealism. . . manifestos
Abstraction
it was the necessary outcome of the long development that we have been tracing from the eighteenth century or even from as far back as the Renaissance.
“It is an expression of a reality: one in which God is dead and man too is dying, loosing his humanity, what makes him man, his personality and individuality.” (Rookmarker, 132)
What are the main principles associated with the Modern Art Movement?
The search for for the absolute and for absurdity
negation of traditional values
pan-eroticism
revolutionary
utopian ideas, radicality
universalism
Avant-Garde: the quest for the new
The Autonomous art object: a quest for purity
Who are the Main Artists, Critics Associated with it and what is the aesthetic character of modern art?
by 1920 we would already be able to see almost all the different aspects of twentieth-century art: expressionism, abstract art, cubism, Dada, (Rookmaker 131) Fauvism, Futurism, Constructivism, Purism, Surrealism. . . manifestos
Five pictures (examples of Modern Art)
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