Mein Art Diary II
This is the sequel to Mein Art Diary for the seminar Performing Culture by Dr Jondi Keane.
Lecture
Week6 (written 31.08.09)
In this week the Master Students had to present artists they chosed before. Daniel McKinnon and I went for Banksy. We prepared a handout, showed a video from his newest exhibiton and three performing acts in particular.
After a general summary of his life and the way he works – without a clear name, often illegal – we had a look at three fields of his work.
1) Graffiti
Banksy drew this picture on top of a underground station in London. Despite its high popularity overpainted the City the picture. Banksy then came back and drew this one on the same place.
Another Sprayer destroyed it and died a few months later while through a driving train while spraying in a train station. Banksy overpainted his second Pulp Fiction Graffiti with a memorial for the dead sprayer.
On his website he left this message:
2) Banksy sneaks since several years his own art in museums all over the world.
He protests against art reception and the definition of art. He created a caveman with a shopping trolley which remained in the collection of the Tate Gallery.
His Art sometimes remains for days or weeks in the museum until it gets removed. This one lasted 8 days in the Brooklyn Museum.
3) Banksy sprayed on the wall which divides Israel and Palastina.
Again a very controversy action because with his Art he makes the wall “beautiful” as an old palastinian man told him and the last thing the palastinans want to have is a beautiful wall.
Banksy is a very controversal artist. A creative workaholic on the one side, a criminal on the other who encourages many young people to vandalize in the cities.
His message that you have to attack advertisment and wrong political decisions on the streets are very understandable. Banksy became also a brand and earns nowadays a fortune with his art. It will be interesting how long he still can be authentic.
The others presentations of the day:
Week7 – More Artist Presentations
Idea for my Final Performance, written 21th September 2009
In week 8, 14.09.09, Jondi brought a friend and colleague to class, James Cunningham, to tell us something about his performances and art work. We had a look at his recent work, which was influenced by a motorcycle accident James had. Since the accident his left arm and leg are not working completely anymore and he included this in his art. His idea based on how we construct the image of our body.
His “Body in question” looks at how selfconscious and reception by others changed after the accident. The website gives a very good insight in this piece and contains a video of the performance.
Unfortunately did James only explain his complex installations, ideas and performances through words and still images and it was difficult for me to follow most of his work. I don’t know if it is due to our reception education that we follow video better than just pictures with explanations but I got the conclusion that for this idea a video would have been definitely better.
James wanted to draw away attention from the artist towards the object and therefore reduce himself. By remaining silent and motionless he disappears in his own performance.
I will try to combine the disappearing artist with the impact of sound, Tim Humphrey suggested to us in the following week, to create just a dark world of sound.
Tim Humphrey has been our guest lecturer for week 9 and is a musician and composer.
His website is very basic but with a little bit of work you can find videos and concepts of his art. For example his Megaphone Project.
My idea will be to place different audio (and maybe video) devices in our lecture room, darken it completely and let the visitors experience a forrest of sounds, talking, music and noise. I will move around with a camera, set in nightmode and film the atmosphere, reaction of visitors towards the sound (and maybe film) installations and the presence of me.
I would be visitor of the visitors, participant and outsider at the same time. Duration shall be 5 Minutes.
I will propose my idea to Jondi via email and hope he likes it, so that I can start soon working on the details. During the one week vacation between week 9 and 10 I will constantly carry around a mp3 recorder and hopefully capture some interesting sounds and ideas.
His reply came very fast:
HI Michael
The ideas sounds very strong.
It does lack however, a more focused notion of the performative, in which you might appropriate actions from your everyday life to present to us. I realise the movement of the camera is a performative notion but in the dark it allows you to be out of sight rather than in plain view. Part of the idea for the course is to re-enter that space of our everyday actions to se if it can be used to offer insight back to our gagthering.
Be sure to work out what you need, tech wise
Have a think , certianly it is a great idea as it is
cheers
Jondi
The Neverending Story of Group Work, written 25th September 2009
For week 10 we are supposed to deliver a Group Performance. I decided carefully who would be in my group because I am just tired of not working group members. I thought I had sorted all out, but in the end it was the usual mess. Only one of my three work colleagues turned up or participated regularly and so I decided to plan the performance on my own. As sad as it is, but I am used to it.
Together with the remaining other student of my group we presented the idea of an interaction in four different languages to our guest lecturer for week 9, Tim Humphrey.
We will use Spanish, Italian, Polish and German to introduce us to each other and explain something. English will not be involved. The performance partner will not know what we explain or declare and has to guess and respond or try to force his language and object he wants to show on the partner.
We choose randomly two out of the four languages to “collide”. We will repeat that in different constellations three times, each round takes exactly one minute.
Tim liked the idea and suggested that we should use the languages, with which some of the other students won’t be familiar with as sound and that we use gestures a lot to make our performance interesting and also easier for the audience and the performance partner to understand.
I had a practice round and it is very difficult to talk one minute “against” someone who does not understand and responds in a language we don’t get.
Actually I look forward to the presentation. I just hope that the two remaining group members won’t start to discuss the idea in the last minute.
During the Semester break between Week 9 and 10, one of the group members came up with quite a heavy modification of the idea. We agreed to follow her idea:
We would dance four 30 second sets of Waltz, hearing the instruction in four different languages. Beginning with English, we would continue with German, Polish and Spanish. A video camera would film and project our dance steps and the audience is able to understand when we miss the right step.
The idea is quite alright. I was happy that someone from the group finally came up with something and I followed the idea in the first place because this would provide some higher involvement in the group.
During my search for a Waltz Song, I came across a very nice youtube video which uses the Waltz we finally choose.
It has been constantly a problem for us to meet up and when we finally decided to go for a rehearsal on a Wednesday Morning I knew that I would not show up.
I just wasn’t enough in the project to spoil a whole morning with it. I wrote an email to the others, that I couldn’t come out of personal reasons and sent them my Waltz mp3 with German dance instructions. I will just follow the decisions the rest of the group has made on this day.
I have been tired of the group work.
09.10.09 – I really hate Group work. Normally I try to get lazy group members who don’t mind, so I can do my thing and they just stick around. This time my co-workers come up with new ideas every day, expecting them to be implimented in the final product. This morning I tested with one member the video gear we want to set up. It was difficult for her to record her Waltz version (which should have been done by her earlier anyway) in the set time frame. And she got angry and started cursing. I told her to stop it or I would end our work on the spot. She did not and we packed our things. At the moment we four write wildly emails to each other. Monday will be a big surprise.
12.10.09 – A happy end
Listen to our Waltz here: 4 languages Waltz
Everything went perfect. The prerecorded mp3 with our instructions in different volumes and lengths came out very well and supported our performance very well.
We danced behind the audience which saw us on a big screen. We were blindfolded and had to rely on each other, our memory of the Waltz steps or simply understand the language the instructions were given in.
It’s funny that after all the work and the struggle it went so well. We felt that the performance is good and we got positive feedback from Jondi and the class. Have a look at it:
Performing Culture Reader
I wrote down my notes from the Reader of the seminar “Performing Culture”. You can download the full reader here.
The Triumph of Anti-Art
World War II and its aftermath let many artists decide that there is no such thing like civilization, which opened two new directions. A flood of color which nearly drowns everything else and the absence of figures, implying the end of humanity. Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Paintings. “There seemed little difference between a world that had weltered in its blood and a world that had drowned in beauty. Finally, some survival response set in. Now there must be an attempt to wash the world clean of color for a while. The need for anti-art began to come clear once more.”
Its three stages:
Abstract art, especially of absolute color
Antithesis, eradicating the sufferer along with the suffering
Synthesis, a resolution of oppositions
Called: Modernism, anti-Modernism, post-Modernism
Modernism featured the idea that the aesthetic faculty was autonomous of or separate from the rest of the personality. Only shapes and colors could enter into a work of visual art. No ideas, words or representation of things were to be allowed; no references to the world, no extra-aesthetic feelings such as anger or pity – in short, nothing that refers to anything beyond its own presence as a shape or a color. This was abstract art.
The obvious problem was that an expanse of color has to have some shape. So shapes should be dismissed or ignored in themselves and tolerated only as necessary vehicles for color.
The post-War-art locked itself into a closed room rather than deal with the painfully disappointing world out there.
Tiny but seminal works of the 1950s – in the United States a blank canvas, four minutes of silence, a hand erasing a page; in Europe a wordless poem, an empty gallery, an exhibition of garbage – linked the earlier and later eras of anti-art and would later be called Conceptual Art and Performance Art.
Performance Art focused on the everyday and the body. The cognitive faculty became the basis of Conceptual Art, with its believe in a more rational future, while the ethical faculty, with its yearning for a pre-rational mode of existence, became the basis of Performance Art.
What is performance?
It is an essentially contested concept, such as art and democracy, which have disagreement about their essence built into the concept itself. A performance stands in and of itself as an event; it is part of the process of production. A production is generally composed of a series of performances. We may do actions unthinkingly, but when we think about them, this brings in a consciousness that gives them the quality of performance. Performance Art is both historically and theoretically a primarily American phenomenon. Postmodern is the quest for a contemporary subjectivity and identity, the relation of art to structures of power, the varying challenges of gender, race, and ethnicity.
The Art of Ideas and the Media Generation
1968 to 1986
In 1968 the mood was one of irritation and anger with prevailing values and structures. The gallery was attacked as an institution of commercialism. Artists re-evaluated their intentions for making art. If the function was an economic one, then conceptual work could have no such use. Although economic necessities made this a short-lived dream.
Performance became an extension of such an idea: although visible, it was intangible, it left no traces and it could not be bought and sold. Finally, performance was seen as reducing the element of alienation between performer and viewer. Audience and performer experienced the work simultaneously.
Body artists used their own persons as art material, making human sculptural forms in space, assumed poses and wore costumes, created “living sculptures”
By 1972 the enthusiasm for social change and emancipation had been dampened. World monetary and energy crisis subtly altered both life styles and preoccupations. The institution of the gallery, once rejected for its exploitation of artists, was reinstated as a convenient outlet. The new performance became stylish, flamboyant, and entertaining.
The French artist Bernar Venet posed questions by implication and proxy: he invited specialists in mathematics or physics to deliver lectures in their subjects to art audiences. Such demonstrations suggested that “art” was not necessarily about art only, while at the same time they introduced audiences to current questions in other disciplines.
Telling Secrets (1971) took place in a dark deserted shed on the Hudson River in the early hours of the cold winter morning. From 1 to 2 am Vito Acconci whispered secrets – “which could have been totally detrimental to me if publically revealed” – to the late night visitors. Again this work could be read as the equivalent of a poet jotting down private thoughts which once released for publication could be detrimental in certain contexts.
Oppenheim believed that body art was limitless in its application.
At the same time artists were working on their bodies as objects, manipulating them as they would a piece of sculpture or a page of poetry, others developed more structured performances which explored the body as an element in space. Or the audience could actually see the process of making a sculpture. The artists hoped that these didactic demonstrations would change the viewer’s perception of their own physical reality.
Video equipment: Artists were creating the performance, but they were also passive spectators in that way that they were watching themselves performing. The viewers would see before them what what they had recently performed but also knew that any further actions would appear on the video as “future time”.
In contrast to performance which dealt with formal properties of the body in space and time, others were far more emotive and expressionistic in nature. Those of the Austrian artist Herman Nitsch, beginning in 1962, involving ritual and blood, were described as “an aesthetic of way of praying”. A typical action lasted several hours: it would begin with the sound of loud music – “the ecstasy created by the loudest possible created noise” – followed by Nitsch giving orders for the ceremony to begin. A slaughtered lamb would be brought on stage by assistants, fastened head down as if crucified. Then the animal would be disemboweled: entrails and buckets of blood were poured over a nude woman or man, while the drained animal was strung up over their heads. Such activities sprang from Nitsch’s belief that humankind’s aggressive instincts had been repressed and muted through the media. Even the ritual of killing animals, no natural to primitive man, had been removed from modern-day experience. These ritualized acts were a means of releasing that repressed energy as well as an act of purification and redemption through suffering.
Installation Art in the new Millennium
The most compelling forms of Western visual art were often works by artists who critically engaged with the experience of human perception, who tested its limits and expanded its possibilities.
For many centuries, representational techniques like perspective and printing exemplified the standardization as well as the replication, storage and circulation of perceptual experience.
There is a awareness that the current spread of communication networks is not generating a trans-national community with a shared set of aesthetic and perceptual foundations. Instead, there has been the spread of relatively self-sufficient micro-worlds by affect, meaning and experience, between which intelligible exchange is less and less possible. The amount of information available today works powerfully against the possibility or even the ideal of shared knowledge. Instead, electronically accessible data can be used in the service of any point of view, regardless of how extreme or absurd.
Suspensions of Perception: Attention, spectacle and Modern Culture
Listening, looking and concentration has a deeply historical character. Individuals define and shape themselves in terms of capacity for “paying attention”.
The ways in which modern experiences of social separation and of subjective autonomy are both intertwined within the resplendent possibilities, ambivalent limits, and failures of an attentive individual.
By the 1880s, perception for many, was synonymous with “those sensations to which attention has been turned”.
Ideas about perception and attention were transformed in the late nineteenth century alongside the emergence of new technological forms of spectacle, display, projection, attraction, and recordings.
Within modernity vision is only one layer of a body that could be captured, shaped, or controlled by a range of external techniques: at the same time, vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture and of inventing new forms, affects, and intensities.
Philosophy, art and science come into relations of mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons, provides a way of thinking in simultaneous but autonomous coexistence of disparate cultural artifacts, outside of mechanical or biographical notions of influence and worn-out distinctions between “high” and “low” culture.
In Extremis
Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-84
Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh have engaged in living every moment as Art since July 4, 1983 when they were tied together at the waist with an eight-foot rope, declaring then that they would neither take the rope off nor touch each other for one year.
It’s like Life, only harder. “We can’t ask too much of each other,” says Montano.
They both shaved their heads and began the piece. Hair length would measure the passage of time. They have had difficulty seeing old friends and keeping old habits. Both must agree to do something before they can do it. On jobs, they found had totally different work styles. Montano was interested in issues like claustrophobia, and ego and power relationships.
One or the other wears a Walkman at all times to record whatever they say. They are conceptual art tapes and will never be listened to.
This is Tehchings fourth year-long performance. In 1978-79 he lived in an eight-by-nine-by-twelve foot cage in his loft, without speaking, reading, watching TV, etc. In 1980-81, he punched a time clock every hour on the hour every day, every night. In 1981-82, he lived on the street, never entering a building, subway, tent, or other shelter.
She said they were communicating with sounds now, for they had started with talking and yanking the rope, then moved to gestures, now to noises. They were down to about an hour of talking a day. “Eighty percent of the year was an incredible struggle,” says Montano. They simply said no to anything the other one wanted to do outside of the jobs they had to do for money. But they never considered “divorce”.
“It’s an experiment.” That’s become their standard response to the question, Linda said, because calling it Art “plays with that definition too much for a lot of people and then they get angry.” It may also play with their definition of Life.
Appendix- Introduction
Over a period of two weeks all of Michael Landys belongings were publicly destroyed for his installation Break Down. Artwork, Clothing, Electrical, Furniture, Kitchen, Leisure, Motor Vehicle, , Perishable, Reading Material, Studio Materials.
It raises important questions about the current position of the artist, material culture, exhibition practices and the role of the audience in Installation Art. “These days installation art seems to be everybody’s favorite medium,” wrote the influential American critic Roberta Smith in 1993. “Installations has become a series of conventions.”
Earlier attempts to define Installation art by medium alone failed because it is in the nature of the practice itself to challenge its own boundaries. A discourse which investigates the relationships between the artist and the audience. The relationship between the artist and the audience is closely linked to the continuing debate around “theatrical space”. If the gallery or site is likened to a stage, the question arises of how and why the viewer participates in the work.
The removal of the frame that separates stage from auditorium brings together the spheres of making and viewing.
The British collective Blast Theory have moved away from the constrictions of traditional performative spaces by engaging with the possibilities offered by new technologies. Their 1998 project, Kidnap, followed the popular format of Reality-TV where individuals were invited to compete for their own abduction. Two winners were selected and kidnapped by the group then taken to an undisclosed location where their captivity was filmed and could be watched as a live webcast.
The Mexican artist Stefan Brueggemann stated: “Who needs a studio? All an artist needs today is a computer and a phoneline.”
Stan Douglas “Der Sandmann” (1994-97), used two film projectors to create a split-screen effect. Douglas built two identical filmsets of a civic garden, one showing the garden in contemporary times, the other as it would have been in the 1970s. These were filmed using the same 360-degree-rotation in a continuous pan and then projected to form two halves of a screen so that one image always appeared to wipe out the other. The resulting installation uses this complex technique to represent the return of repressed memory and history which the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud describes in his essay “The Uncanny” (1919).
Interaction is not simply an opportunity to ensure the audience’s participates, but instead suggests a creative engagement with the content of the artwork which directly impacts on the evaluation of the museum itself.
Towards Installation
“Does all this need an explanation? Is there any other explanation than the context of a world devoted to advertisements, overproduction, and horoscopes?” Marcel Broodthaers
What is Installation Art? (Geczy and Genocchio)
Whether subtle or brash, it does seem simple, almost too simple, to be an installation artist. Take something, anything: no matter how big or small, with or without regard to its value, its origin, materiality, or use. Place it somewhere, anywhere: in a gallery or a store, in a street or on a mountain top, on your body or in your pocket. Strictly speaking, in the barest practical terms, you have performed or have constructed an “installation”. If this is art – at least in its minimal, thresh-old condition – then, to repeat a contemporary slogan, “art is easy”.
At the limit of its achievement Installation Art effectively disappears because it becomes the very medium of an environment. In a curious way, “Installation” is visible and critically accountable as an art form only so far as it fails to fulfill its destiny.
My final performance – 19.10.09
For my Final Performance I installed five Audio and one Video device in the completly dark room and invitated the other students to walk around and explore the different sounds.
You can listen to them here (the first 20 Seconds are always silence):
and watch the video here:
The audience wasn’t quite as active as I expected and my fault was, that the audio wasn’t loud enough. Nevertheless, my fellow students picked out quite a lot of my performance: The sounds represented parts of my life and character.
