Thursday a.m. Idea Post 2/26

I googled the word "balance" and a laundry list of phrases appeared in the browser. Starting with balance sheet, balance scorecard, balanced diet, balance of payments, balance transfer to balance board, balance of power, balance of trade, and balance beam. Balance plays a particularly popular role in the lives of humans today on many different levels. Because balance is so key to each of my performances, I am particularly interested in the science of our abilities to maintain our center of gravity; literally and metaphorically speaking.
An ability to maintain the center of gravity of a body within the base of support with minimal postural sway scientifically explains balance. A human's vestibular system, eyesight, perception of pressure from the somata sensory system are mentioned as key players in one's ability to maintain balance for periods of time. The vestibular system helps contribute to our spatital awareness and is very much interconnected with cochlea and auditory system. Each person has a different limit to their stability and each person has a different limit of balance figuratively speaking. Our breaking points or our points of falling over after our limit of stability has expired very much describe what kind of person we are and how we function in amongst others in the world.
When comprehending the word balance literally, I think of how challenging it is for me to balance on my left leg with my right foot off the floor. However, when I switch to balancing on my right leg, all my issues I have with maintaining balance for a period of time disappear. My most recent performance occurred three days ago and it involved me balancing on my left leg on a rickety wooden ladder while peeling off layers upon layers of clothing and also holding all the disrobed layers in my arms. This performance became a true testament to the importance of internal and external balance in my performances. Frustration overcame me quickly into the start of the performance and containing myself became part of the challenge and struggle of visualizing these layers of clothing as layers of a struggle that I am keeping close in my arms and staying fully aware of.

Balance
Childhood Balance
Vestibular System

Monday a.m. Artist Post 2/23

Born in 1935 and a native of New York City, Eleanor Antin is a performance, filmmaker, and installation artist. In Antin’s three decade long stay in the art world has created a great name for herself in the performance art world and is permanently being showed at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery in New York City. Currently, Antin is living in San Diego with her husband poet/critic David Antin and son. Antin is the Professor Emeritus in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. Antin’s work has been compared to those of Carolee Schneemann and Judy Chicago and has been characterized as one that is “largely concerned with issues of identity and the role of women in society” (Wikipedia site on Eleanor Antin).
One of Antin’s most well known works is the 51 postcard series titled “100 Boots.” This piece lasted between 1971-1973 and involved masses amounts of these specific 51 postcards being sent to people around the world. Quoted from PBS Art 21 Antin made a statement about her “100 Boots” series. “Somehow it came to me in a dream. There! Black boots! Big black boots. I got them at the Army-Navy Surplus then I printed them up on postcards. Over the course of it- finally two and a half years- fifty-one cards were mailed out to about a thousand people around the world. Now it is a piece that I see as a kind of pictorial novel that was sent through the mail, came unannounced unasked for. It came in the middle of people’s lives.” Showing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1973 the show has been described as changing the way art functioned in the 70’s; the American Vietnam Era. In the photos on the postcards, these boots go from every day American tasks to anti war situations that would later on appear as legendary icons of the specific time period documented.
An early piece of Antin’s that I found amazingly striking was titled “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture.” With this progressive piece, Antin photographed her body at different stages of her month long crash-dieting experiment. L.A. performance artist Cheri Gaulke described Antin’s piece as performance that existed between July 15 and August 21 of 1972. Antin put herself on a strict diet and photographed her body each morning from four different angles. This piece was very much about using her body as a material and tool but also doing so while maintaining her Greek sculpture aesthetic.
Most of Antin’s other works are performances where she creates a specific time period and uses parts of history and recreates the moment. In an interview with Linda Montano Antin talks about how and why her work has such a great historical presence within it. She talked about how she grew up reading and researching great people of the past. She dreamt of victory and power and decided that is what she enjoyed most while her performances were being put together. Because she works at the University she utilizes her unlimited access to the school’s library when researching and creating her time period for her next performance.
I felt more attached to Antin’s earlier performance work and am into her process of documenting her performances. Antin has a strong idea of what she wants her to performances due to the heavy amounts of research she completes before beginning each performance. Even though I admire her exact awareness of all that goes on in her performances, I have found that I thoroughly enjoy the surprises at the end of each of my works.

Art 21 Website for Eleanor Antin

University of California Press Interview with Antin

Ronald Feldman Fine Art Gallery

Article about "100 Boots" Series

Art 21 on "100 Boots" Series

Cheri Gaulke's Article on Feminist Performance Art

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 2/19

“Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with your intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative.” Quoted by Henri Cartier-Bresson, that statement helps me clearly identify the exaction of my process with my camera and aids in the sequencing of my movements when planning and carrying out these performances. The idea of my performances is very much what happens right when the shutter closes and not much else. With these sequences I have control over the constants in the piece. The rest is left up to what happens in that single moment due to the constants. The decisive moment, as it is also called, is a term in which Cartier-Bresson is known for and published a book with that title in 1952 of 126 photos along with a 4,500 word philosophical preface. Also called “stolen images” these are ones that have caught a specific moment in time and cannot be reenacted.
Last semester when I began working in this performance style aesthetic, I did not pay much attention to the specific moments that were caught by my camera of my performances. When I go through the large amounts of photos taken from each performance/shoot I am unaware of what it is that I actually shot. This semester I have become more aware of the fact that not having control over every part of my performance is quite beneficial and adds strength to sequence as a whole. I am enjoying the mystery that happens when I am in front of the camera performing while the documentation that is taking place may not be what I want I let it happen anyways.

Website on Henri Cartier-Bresson & the Decisive Moment

The Decisive Moment Book Online

Monday a.m. Artist Post 2/16

Born in 1969 in Genoa, Italy, performance artist Vanessa Beecroft has shown in numerous galleries around the world and worked with labels like Louis Vuitton and Kanye West. Beecroft is known for her performances with dozens of nude females that are often accessorized in wigs, high heels, or body paint. Beecroft has a very particular eye for which girls she uses in her performances. She wants to emulate a certain physical and mental metamorphosis with her models during the performances. Taken from an article from the Sundance 2008 website by Sheigh Crabtree, Beecroft explains the process she intends for her models to undertake. “Standing there for hours, they go from beautiful to miserable to exhausted. The melancholy and the uncertainty and embarrassment is what I look for”(1). Beecroft is known to give specific directions to the models and one of those each time is to not speak a word and the rest the girls determine whether to abide by or deviate from. From the Metro ArtWork Website Beecroft’s performances are described as “a complex fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models (often nude).” Beecroft documents her performances with video recording and photography with the intention of later on using the moving and still footage for separate pieces of art away from the performance that it’s involved with.
Recently Beecroft and Kanye West collaborated and used West’s listening event where he debuted his 808’s & Heartbreak album to have one of Beecroft’s live performances present. This musical and performance art collaboration event had great success for both artists. Written about in Fader Magazine, the event occurred at the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles and began with about forty nude women, most wearing masks made out of faux wool, standing in the middle; the white girls were in the back and the black girls were in the front. During this part of the performance, Kanye’s entire album played without an introduction of him or his work. Colorful strobes were used to backlight the girls who as the performance continued on for quite some time began to sit down. Once the performance was completed and Kanye’s album played through in its entirety, West introduced Beecroft and spoke about how his album is about “the freedom to do what you want to do…”. Also he said that the album was about emotional nakedness, which helped tie in Beecroft’s performance with his album.
Vanessa Beecroft’s work and mine are very different in ways, however I find myself attracted to her distinct use of color and movement with her models. Looking at the images from “VB60” of dozens of nude and red robed Asian women on a staircase has a way of keeping the eye moving from model to model. I have looked at it several times and am interested in the way that because of their positioning my eye seems to wander in and out of the image and am very pleased with how the composition affects me. I want to incorporate use of color in my performances so I can attempt to achieve not only her aesthetic but also her unique way of forming a very dynamic and sound image of a performance.

Sundance Article

MetroArtWork Website & Article

Vanessa Beecroft's Artist Website

Fader Magazine Article

2/11 Artist Lecture: Paul Shambroom

Photographer, Paul Shambroom, was born in New Jersey and currently works and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Shambroom’s series work heavily deals with power and its distribution among many aspects of life. Paul began working for a magazine and found himself very interested in the aesthetics of industrial environments. He started working with the aesthetic of chaos and clutter in these environments and focusing on the certain moments in which his camera captured. He looked to Lee Friedlander because of his use of decisive moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson. He started working on series where that specific moment is what charged the image and made it successful.
Shambroom’s series titled “Nuclear Weapons” was completed between 1992-2001. With this series Shambroom spoke a lot about access to certain places and how imperative it is to be well written in order to obtain permission from various places to use their space. Because he was shooting weapons that belonged to the military, the process was more difficult than others because of how tight security is with government run buildings. These images deal with the question that he asked to his audience; What makes the U.S. so powerful? Because Shambroom grew up in the height of the Cold War he was very familiar with nuclear warfare and his interest continued to grow stronger the older he became. This series he shot landscape style and paid close attention to the lighting and how it affected the look of the powerful weapons.
My favorite collection of his was the “Meetings” collection that he completed between 1999-2003. He started out photographing very important official meetings. For example, he spent a good amount of time shooting multiple congressional meetings in D.C. He realized that those meetings were not the ones that he really wanted to capture. Instead, he began traveling around the county and photographing community meetings and very intimate settings during the decision making of towns. His use of the large format camera and color negative film in this series works so well for the colors and the palette of the image. The feeling of the meeting is translated well through his use of perspective and color.
I thoroughly enjoyed Paul Shambroom’s lecture and felt that he spoke very well to us students and the faculty. He answered questions in a comical witty way that helped the lecture not become dry and mundane. He seemed to be a very interesting person and I will continue to look at his work now after listening to his process and how he carries his work out to completion.

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 2/12

So much of what kind of person and how I function creatively began in my early years of elementary school. While developing my creative skills early on, I remember relying heavily on how the teacher would compose things on the board, what colors she used, and how she would cut things out and mix them with other art utensils. Each assignment and activity there were always certain creative and visual skills that were tested; the basis of our future in the visual world. However, with recent changes in our country’s economy the public school system has taken the hardest hit in this drastic downfall.
Starting this year, 2009, Chesterfield County in Virginia will be cutting about 500 jobs from the public school system in order to survive this economic crisis. The first of those 500 jobs that will be cut are teachers who have yet to meet their tenure year; the fourth year in a teacher’s career at one school. The teachers that are fresh out of college and eager to pursue their career in educating the young minds of our future. This is where the problem is presents itself. Who will be left to teach in the school system? With all of the first to third year teachers out only leaves the jaded or semi jaded middle aged teachers who lack that certain amount of enthusiasm that help children thrive.
What could this mean for not only the future business world but also the visual arts world when our children are being taught by teachers who don’t necessarily want to be in the education profession anymore? I have recently spoken to a few teachers in Chesterfield County to get a feel for where they stand on the issue. There are a few teachers in their late twenties who will reach their tenure year next year and now go to teach each day with that rotten feeling in their stomachs that this could be taken away from them any day. There are a good amount of teachers who are approaching retirement in roughly two to three years who think it is more appropriate to make a retirement and severance package deal for those and leave the existing jobs for the younger teaching generation. My sister is a kindergarten teacher in the county and like several others at her school her job is up in the air. When I talked to her about it she voiced her concerns about how the environment in the schools would change for the kids when class sizes doubled and teaching quality was lowered.

Monday a.m. Artist Post 2/09

Currently my work is very much performance based dealing with external and internal struggles. Only up until recently have I felt the need to incorporate more subtle ways of how someone struggles.
Kate Gilmore, a performance based artists, also uses the challenges and struggles in her works. Her challenges that she puts forth for herself are usually based around having to maneuver a way out of something while also being filmed. Because her documentation is film, the subject being challenged is revealed to the audience in the rawest form. Both Kate and myself are the subjects of our performance and choose to reveal certain coping methods when faced with problems.
I was first introduced to Kate Gilmore in October of 2007 at Bowe Street when she came as a visiting artist to lecture to the school of the arts. Her style and humor have stayed with my work and me for a couple years now but not until just recently have I started noticing how similar our processes and our intent for are.
Gilmore was born in Washington, D.C. in 1975 and received her B.A. from Bates College in 1997 and her MFA in 2002 at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York. Gilmore has showed at multiple galleries and museums like PS1 in 2005, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Haifa Museum of Art. She has received the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance in New York, New York, the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in 2005, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome to just name a few. Gilmore’s video performances are described as real life predicaments that are “sometimes painful and even potentially dangerous- but ones that she has created for herself” (vcu.edu/arts).
One of Gilmore’s performances that she showed in her lecture at Bowe titled “Cake Walk” follows along with her feminist style. Dressed in yellow and lavender, two feminine colors, Gilmore in roller skates tried to fight her way up a wooden ramp to reach a Bundt cake that is tempting her at the top. Her multiple attempts to make it up the ramp turns into a 10 minute gripping performance that has the audience feeling guilty to laughing all in that small amount of time. Throughout the whole performance there is a flow of blood coming down the ramp, while she is getting beaten and battered with each fall making it difficult for the audience to distinguish blood from the artificial red fluid. In an article from the Catharine Clark Gallery by Kenneth Baker, Gilmore’s “Cake Walk” mimics key parts of womanhood like the menstrual cycle and how it is an existential curse when she added in the flow of “blood” down the ramp. “Much of Gilmore’s work pertains to feminist cultural politics. And “Cake Walk” has an aspect of slapstick feminist critique in the artist’s girlie getup and the indignities her insistent quest for the cake visit upon her”(Baker 2).
This piece in particular is one that I remember seeing most because of how uncomfortable I remember feeling watching it; especially with her being in the room while we viewed it. Gilmore’s ability to affect the viewer that intensely is something that I would like to gain in my work. I am not sure what kind of affect I want to have on my viewer through my performances, but I do know that I want it to have the same lasting effect that Gilmore’s performance has had on me since 2007.

Catharine Clark Gallery Article by Kenneth Baker

Kate Gilmore's Website

VCU's article on Kate

2/05 Artist Lecture: Mark Dion

Mark Dion introduced his lecture in a lighthearted manner that caused me to be immediately engaged in him. Being an artist who collects objects for his work, Dion descriptively went through all of his installations he created and his collecting processes. The piece he created in Venice from the dredge of the local reservoir was quite comical and full of meaning. This piece required for him to deviate himself from being known as artist/archaeologist. He gathered objects that had been thrown out of homes and windows to them find themselves amongst a lot of waste in the reservoirs below. Once the work was installed, Dion got a call from Officials in Venice about some of the stuff that he found and since used in that Venice installation. They said that he did not have permission to those objects. I found it ironic that up until then no attention was paid to the lost items that lay at the bottom of the reservoir until they were made into a work of art and placed in a museum.
A lot of his work is so striking and intelligent while others are easily accessible on just the surface level. His piece that paid homage to the gulls of England was an over sized gull that towered over everyone on wheels. This comical piece helped shed a happy and friendly aura on the gulls to overshadow their poor reputation. His public art offers knowledge to the surrounding communities while bringing new life to certain objects that are often forgotten.

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 2/05

The specifics of mediums were very important during the Modernist period. For artists during this time, it was essential for them to be able to work in their medium superbly and flawlessly and not so much encouraged to incorporate other media in their realm. A viewer in a gallery looks at the traditional Modernist photographs created by artists like Ansel Adams and Minor White and sees a well done photograph that is aesthetically pleasing. Today, as we have progressed and moved into the post Modernist period artists, not only photographers, have opened up their media barriers and are well adept in creating multimedia works and are knowledgeable in not only one medium.
So why are the Modernist artists placed at this level of elitism above the very well read and practiced post Modernist artists that are still written about as second rate today. In a section of "The Crisis of the Real" by Andy Grundburg, postmodernism is described as one of the key factors that helped the art world open its doors to the contemporary art world for photography (14)." During the Modernist period photography in particular was considered a tool that one needed for record making; and that is what its main use was. The very simplified tool is now an art form that has changed the contemporary art world.
A great part of post Modernism that I feel sets artists of this time on a higher level is the great amounts of individuality that has come about. Postmodernism has helped the artist not be defined by the medium they are working in and also has lifted the stiff traditional air that resides around Modernism. Postmodernism has breathed freedom in the direction of art today and I feel that the talent in artists that are currently working and producing are on a level that is not comparable to Modernist work.

Monday a.m. Artist Post 2/02

Born on November 18, 1948, performance artist Ana Mendieta would soon be destined to change the worlds of 1970s performance art, early intermedia art, Latin American art, earth body-art, and feminist aesthetics (Dziedzic 1 of 8). Taken from an article by a SCAD MFA candidate who spoke very highly of Mendieta and her talent, Erin Dziedzic’s article titled “Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-85 One Universal Energy Runs Through Everything” expressed the thoughts and works of the late Mendieta well.
After arriving in America from her homeland Havana, Cuba, Mendieta received her BA from the University of Iowa and then went on to study under Hans Breder for ten years while earning a MFA in painting and a MFA in Breder’s intermedia program. While in Breder’s program, Mendieta created some of her most famous pieces including her “Siluetas”. She began these while she was in Mexico becoming close with pre-Columbian iconography and getting back in touch with her roots. These “Siluetas” are described as “richly developed, eerily symbolic works in which she cut, burnt, drew or otherwise shaped a human silhouette (usually her own) into an array of outdoor sites” (Jones 2 of 3). Kristen M. Jones, a writer for Frieze Magazine, wrote an article about Ana Mendieta’s show at the Whitney in December of 2004. The Hirshhorn described Mendieta’s “Siluetas” as her series that thoroughly studies ancient cultures and her great knowledge with themes of gender and identity (Viso 1). Not only was Mendieta well spoken and well informed on how to use themes and studies appropriately in her work, Jones’ Frieze article describes Mendieta as an artist who dedicated her whole life to her work and she considered each sculpture or performance as a means of private meditation.
The article by Erin Dziedzic discusses how Mendieta’s work explores gender and cultural identity while she made herself fit under the genre of “earth-body art.” The Hirshhorn article by Olga Viso explains that Mendieta’s genre is a “hybrid of two 1960s movements: earth art and body art” (1). Mendieta wrote that “there is nothing as beautiful and humanizing in a work of art than that which sharpens sensibilities and opens new worlds to man” (Dziedzic 1). One of her works that had an impact on me as an artist is her “Glass on Body Imprints” series of 1972. In this piece, she treats the body as a sculptural material and one that can be altered if need be. An interesting part to this piece for me was how each piece of plexiglass distorted her body in different ways depending on what body part she pressed it on.
Mendieta’s performance and sculpture aspects remind me a lot of my recent work and works that I am currently making. Her use of the body, hers in particular, is of most interest to me and her ability to manipulate her body differently each time really is incredible. I have always had an interest in gender and self-identity and would like to further that study and possibly use it in different ways that I have in the past.
Unfortunately, Mendieta had a tragic early death on September 8, 1985 when she apparently fell from her 34th floor apartment window in Greenwich Village. Currently the Galerie Lelong in New York City is keeping up her work.

Erin Dziedzic "Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-85 One Universal Energy Runs Through Everything"
Dziedzic's Article

Olga M. Viso "In Depth: Ana Mendieta" Hirshhorn Museum

Kristen M. Jones "Ana Mendieta: Whitney Museum of Art" Frieze Magazine Issue 87 November-December 2004
Jones' Article

Galerie Lelong Website

1/29 Artist Lecture: Alix Pearlstein

Introducing herself to us as a video artist with a background in sculpture, dance, and installation, Alix Pearlstein set herself up to me as being a very informative artist; one in which I felt I could gain a lot from. Five sentences into her lecture, myself and the row behind me became lost in her words and "ums". She began speaking about her early video work that surrounded post modern dance in which she herself was the performer. Along with her video clips she showed, she discussed in a round about way how they related to certain works, literature or even just certain time periods. Seeing what a great turn out this lecture had, probably the most students I have seen in attendance to one lecture, I was disappointed and hoped that the students who were in attendance for their first time, did not get a bad impression on what kind of artists the department chose for these lectures. I think what would have helped her lecture along, is less "ums" and being able to connect her work with us students on a level that we could understand.