Thursday a.m. Idea Post 10/01

The idea of taking part in a performance…All of the components that are involved are important to the future success of my work. Seeing your performance from an outsider’s perspective is something that I have been thinking a lot about lately and how it can change the experience of the audience while attending a performance. The shape of the frame could potentially aid in explaining to the audience where they are and also be the deciding factor in how displaced they may feel from what is going on. When in reality they are the ones who have created this framing device and viewpoint. When I set my mind more on the audience and concentrate on what they see, I am finding that it really makes me want to incorporate the outside life and its dynamic environment into my performances. I am envisioning an upcoming performance set in a fast upbeat environment such as a very busy intersection on a main road in Richmond. With this vision, I am seeing how the performer reacts and interacts to the changing environment that is ultimately being created by the performer’s audience. The first installment of this collection from last semester was set in controlled settings where there were usually one or two people who made up the audience. What about making these performances public and gaining momentum and energy from the audience involvement? How can it bring about many unexpected changes to what I think will be the end result in my performances?

Monday a.m. Artist Post 9/28

Miranda July works include video, performances, web-based projects, and writing and directing plays. Miranda July was born on February 15, 1974 in Barre, Vermont as Miranda Jennifer Grossinger. She now works under the name Miranda July. As a young child, she moved to Berkley, California where she would grow up and start her visual and performing arts career. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Biennale, Cannes Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival to name a few. She currently has an interactive sculpture at the Venice Biennale titled “Eleven Heavy Things”.
Miranda July has made several films and done her fair share of performances starting with her collaborative performances in the early 90’s with music groups like Sleater-Kinney, Chicks on Speed, and Dub Narcotic. Other performances she is known for is one titled “The Swan Tool” from 2000-2002. This performance consisted of video, performance, live music, and helium. It is about a woman who cannot decide whether she should live or if she should die. While performing this on a narrow catwalk between two screens, she created an illusion for her audience that she was digging a hole in her backyard to bury herself in. Another one of her interactive works that I have found to be a strong one is titled “The Hallway” and was commissioned by the Yokohama Triennial in 2008. This project was made up of a 125-foot hallway and it was lined with 50 wooden signs with text inscribed. “The text acts as an internal voice saying, ‘It’s too late to go back now but the end seems far away’” as the viewer walks down the hallway that serves as a metaphor for the paths of life that we travel down. “And like life, the hall is filled with indecision, disappointment, boredom, and joy- and it does end”. I enjoy this piece a lot because the viewers can all have different experiences with this piece, according to how fast they read, how fast they walk, how patient they are, and if boredom sets in on them while they are walking down this extremely long hallway.
Her film “Me You and Everyone We Know” is July’s first feature length film and has gotten a good amount of positive feedback. Created in 2005, her first feature length film won a jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. From an excerpt about July’s film on her website states that “In July’s modern world, the mundane is transcendent and every day people become radiant characters who speak their innermost thoughts, act on secret impulses and experience truthful human moments that at times approach the surreal. They seek togetherness and through tortured routes and find redemption in small moments that connect them to someone else on Earth.”

Artist Website
Article on July
July's Web Project Website

Spencer Finch Lecture: 09/24/09

Visiting artist, Spencer Finch, was born in New Haven, CT in 1962 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Hamilton College Clinton in NY and a MFA in sculpture in 1989 from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. Before embarking on his educational path in the US, he attended the Doshita University in Kyoto, Japan from 1983-1984.
The painting and printmaking department put this lecture on and I went into this lecture thinking we were going to be looking at slides of oils, pastels, and two dimensional work. I was completely blown away when he not only began showing several slides of his paintings but he got into the science of his color making strategies and how he incorporates that into his sculpture. With a good amount of his work that he showed today, Finch would visit a natural area, soak up his surroundings, and either measure the light with instruments to get the right intensity and color or he would simply take his paints out to the site and patiently sit, mix, and compare until he got the color. One of his works that he spoke of for measuring the light and color was his piece titled Walden Pond. Finch went out to Walden Pond and measured the natural scenery by comparing the colors to swatches from a Monet painting. Finch uses his influences like Whitman, Dickens, and Monet to power the ideas in his work.
Currently, Finch is working on a project for the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He is working on the facades of both the child and adults wings creating an affect from the outside using specific colors of tinted glass. When he spoke about this project he said it was more about the construction and design aspect than creating a concept and making a piece from that concept. Another sculpture that he recently just completed was an installation at the Highline Park in NY, NY. He spent an entire day on a boat on the Hudson and matched the colors of the Hudson throughout the day. He then recreated the colors of the Hudson using colored glass and installing it square by square in a portion of the Highline Park.
I really enjoyed his lecture. I felt that he spoke intelligently about his work but still maintained humility and did not get ahead of his audience. I find it very great and rewarding how much travel and research he does before he even begins a new piece. It is clear to viewer that he solidifies his ideas beforehand and has a solid ground underneath each piece before he even begins production. Good choice Painting and Printmaking Department!

NY Times Article on Finch

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 09/24

After last week’s individual meeting and idea blog posting about how confused and out of sync I am with my work, I have spent the last six days contemplating many aspects of my life and how they are affecting my work. When I think of performances, I think about change, a process, a transition from one thing to another, progression or digression, movement, and action. Performances occur on a daily basis all around us and we may or may not choose to take part in the act. But performance for me has so much to do with what is changing in the action and ironically it’s the changes in life that I cannot swallow. I cannot handle when the norm that I have been accustomed to for so long is switched and I must adapt to a new habit. However, changes that don’t seem to affect me much I always notice but am not emotionally brought down by them. For example, tonight when I went into the bathroom at the restaurant I went into the third stall and the seat on the toilet was slightly pushed over to the right. This did not affect me much as you just sit wherever there is a seat. Nonetheless, I thought that was weird. Before I left the restaurant I went to the bathroom and used the same third stall and the seat on the toilet was slightly pushed over to the left. This stuck in my head. Me maneuvering around the cock-eyed toilet seats at the restaurant this evening was an act or performance in itself.
When I ask myself why I do performances my reasoning has come to be this: I do performance art because it is something I’m familiar with. I think of myself as a child as a non-stop performer. I loved the attention. Now, as an adult, I find myself still a daily performer but with different motives. I perform on a daily basis in an attempt to mask parts of who I am and if I’m very uncomfortable the performance almost becomes me conforming to whomever I’m around; all including my language, character, and my conversations. Really, we are all performers. Some of us are on the stage more often than others and some of us too naïve to believe we aren’t being true to who we really are when we act in ways other than ourselves; naïve or maybe just unwilling. I’m not sure if it’s more comical knowing you perform your life away and not doing anything about it or performing and pretending just to come to each closing day same person you woke up as. I want to grow. Becoming an artist, going to art school was my attempt and my vehicle away from my old ways and into a new life I want to make for myself. I want to tell the truth. In my youth, I was a happy performer. In my middle and high school years when obligations started to pile up, I conformed into the person/role model every one wanted me to be with very few outlets where I could simply be myself. This is not I complaining. This is a realization.
So I am either going to take part in the performances or be a part of the audience. I have been watching this tomato that sits in my kitchen window steadily decompose. It started out as a bright red, smooth skinned edible vegetable. With each day that moved forward, the tomato sat on the same windowsill in the same daily sunlight but steadily transitioned into a new form. I passed by this tomato every day, 10 or 12 times, and never felt the need to throw it away or do something with it. I just let it stay there and take shape into what it had already began to transition into. I was the audience for this performance. As the audience, I did remain passive but I was attentive and aware of the change that was going on. I would like to continue to explore situations where I can choose to be the performer or the audience.

Monday a.m. Artist Post 9/21

Zhu Ming, born in 1972 in Changsha, Hunan Province, and then moved to Beijing to pursue his arts in 1991. One year later, Ming hooked up with several other young Chinese artists to form the group the Beijing East Village. Other artists who make up this group are Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan and photographer Rong Rong. Some of his solo exhibits include two in 2008 at the Chinese Contemporary Gallery in Beijing and the other at the Galeria Estiarte in Madrid Spain. In 2007 Ming had another solo exhibit at the Chinese Contemporary Gallery in Beijing and in 2006 his “Without Boundary” performance was shown at the PYO Gallery in Beijing as well. In 2003 another one of his performances, the Liquid Sea, was at the Contemporary Museum of Sydney and another performance at 1995 titled The Anonymous Mountain Raised by a Metre Beijing, China.
Ming does a lot of different kinds of work but I have found his performances to be very interesting with a solid conceptual base. His work has been described as one “that deals with the passage of time, physical extremes, isolation, and attempts at communication or the futility and ephemeral nature of these attempts”. One of his performances, May 8 1999 he uses himself as a tool inside a large balloon. His tools include Chinese ink and fluorescent paint. An exerpt from an article by the Chinese Contemporary Art Gallery: “His body is covered with a fluorescent paint (probably toxic) and he paints the inside of the balloon with Chinese ink. The atmosphere inside the balloon causes the ink to disappear almost immediately and the artist’s time in the balloon is constantly limited by the slow and steady filling of the balloon with water”. The Chinese ink that he used is a symbol in historical Chinese art for both rebellion and tradition. As a member of the young art movement in Beijing, Zhu Ming’s work was very familiar with the concepts of rebellion and tradition in the Chinese culture.
Among the great amounts of experimental work the Beijing East Village has created their piece titled “The Anonymous Mountain Raised by a Metre” is their most famous. I was not able to find any images or documentation of this piece however much of Zhu Ming’s work is viewed very controversial in traditional China. Because of that, a good amount of his work and the work of the Beijing East Village is only shown abroad. “Zhu Ming’s performances, through his raw display of his naked body, are controversial works that call attention to the vulnerability and aloneness of all humankind. During the first decade of his performances, his works were banned from public display in Mainland China because it was believed that Zhu Ming’s works were polluting to the general public”.
Ming’s imagery and documentation of his performances are very strong and have a striking appearance at first glance. When I was going through the several images online I found that, while being a means of documenting his performances, each image had a gorgeous aesthetic to it. Each image could easily stand on its own not just as a part of the performance but also as a single conceptual piece. I find it very helpful to see a performance artist make pieces that can stand by themselves and not be dependent on the performance itself.

Chinese Contemporary Art Gallery

Chinese Culture Article

Chinese Contemporary Art Article on Zhu Ming

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 09/17

While in my public library today I noticed in the photography section the only books to choose from were the over published now cliché’ “Photography for Idiots” books and the entire collection of Anne Geddes photographic history. A bit disappointed, I selected a book published in the 80’s titled “How to Compose Great Photographs: Learning to see creatively”. The first line said “Photography is a way to bring your imagination to life on film…” After a thorough 45 page explanation of lenses the section titled “Elements of Design” dug right in and stated “…powerful compositions stand in sharp contrast to most pictures taken by amateur photographers. In their haste to record the image, many end up with pictures that have too many points of interest. The resulting confusion alienates the restless eye, motivating it to see visual satisfaction elsewhere.” Instead of having too many points of interest in my images, I am struggling with having too many confusing parts to my concept therefore weakening my final product. The text’s solution to solidify the many pieces is to pay close attention to line, shape, form, texture, pattern, and color. My performances are known to be with clean lines in the subject and the background. Occasionally the object is what is off and constantly in transition. The shape and form depend on the act of the performer is doing. For example a performance from last semester started out with most of the weight in the top portion of the image (while the clothing was still on me). By the end of the performance the balance had shifted and now most of the weight was in the lower half of the frame creating a thorough transition from top to middle to bottom. When thinking of texture, pattern, and color I have a hard time responding because usually the garments on the subject are not what is important.
Knowing all of this I am still having struggles with the amount of confusion that is present in my new work. In my meeting blog I spoke a lot about the anxiety I am feeling about just creating and producing. I listened to a mini lecture by Jeff Koons and he explained that when he was young he used to feel that “art was a vehicle that created anxiety…it was about performance in a way. Once you start becoming aware of other artists and how you can relate to them…” breaking down those anxieties becomes more accessible. In Mike Figgis’ book Digital Filmmaking, he explains the struggles and frustrations he had when he moved from the stage to behind the camera. “Before I came to film, my background was performance and music, so I was reared on the idea that whatever I did creatively, I would have a direct relationship with my audience… Then I started making films and I realized that your role as director put you many steps removed from this possibility of an instance response. You do a lot more planning, you set it all up, but then you kind of watch from an angle. And the main relationship from that point takes place between the camera person and the actors.” This is exactly how I feel. I feel completely detached from what I am doing that sometimes I think that maybe my presence is not even necessary. And because I feel that way, the streams of ideas have come to a screeching hault and I am becoming bitter and ambivalent towards my work. I have a small obsession with having things be straightforward and resolved before I part with them for the night. I have not been able to resolve much with my work yet, so I guess I will be sleeping with it tonight.

Monday a.m. Artist Post 9/14

Recently, I was in the library and I came across a DVD about Bruce Nauman titled “Make Me Think”. This DVD moved the audience through the dynamic collection of Nauman’s work including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. A native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Nauman has been exhibiting since 1969 and has been said to film the viewer in a voyeuristic sense with different sizes and scales. Also, throughout the DVD, several fellow artists spoke about how he is aware and conscious to how you as a viewer respond to space and in some cases making you excruciatingly uncomfortable.
After studying mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Nauman received his BFA in art with William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California Davis. In 1966, he became a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute while simultaneously working in film with Robert Nelson and William Nelson. Nauman has a strong use of language in his work and believes “as the role of the artist as supposed communicator and manipulator of visual symbols” he explores the limits of every day situations in a playful in dept manner. He has shown at Nick Wilder’s gallery in Los Angeles, Leo Castelli in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum in New York. In 1993, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Arts and in 1999 the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Visual Arts in Japan in 2004. Also, in that same year he received the Beaux-Arts Magazine Art Awards for Best International Artist in Paris. Most recently, the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs selected Nauman to represent the United States in the 2009 Venice Biennale. Some of Nauman’s influences include Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass.
While watching “Make Me Think”, I noticed Nauman works with a broad range of size and texture. Compositions for his performance were either framed up tightly around the subject and object, or the viewer was pulled back from the act and seeing the performance as it scanned from one side of the space to the other. Described on the DVD, Nauman wants the viewer to question him/herself what it would be like in any different scale and how does the viewer imagine him/herself in relation to what’s around you. I like the fact that the audience can interpret his pieces according to the way they feel in a specific space. For each person, their feelings toward size and spaces will inevitably be different therefore creating a large spectrum of different conceptual thoughts for each piece.
For my upcoming pieces I would like to incorporate a stronger sense of playfulness while maintaining balance. I found his pieces that evoked tension and issues of morality were the most interesting. For example, he had one piece that comprised of a room with four white painted walls, a speaker on two walls barking strange noises back and forth, and reverberating sounds throughout the room. This piece had a strange amount of negative space that kept the viewer thinking something was going to jarringly appear in the foreground.

Video Data Bank
Sperone Westwater
Art 21
"Make Me Think" DVD Directed by Heinz Peter Schwerfel

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 09/10

Taking into consideration all of the comments I have received since my last meeting blog posting, the majority agreed that I need to maintain control of my performer in terms of their clothing but I should release them in the act so they can interpret with their own minds. However, after starting my subject, object, duration exercise, I am now feeling more confused as to where I am trying to get. In the past, I have not paid much attention or put much importance on whom the subjects of my pieces were. Also, the costuming has just been more of a blending method so the subject would not stand out from her surroundings; I did not want that to be a distraction. I began writing down people that I encounter on a daily basis as subjects, but then I started thinking those characters seemed arbitrary when the point of this exercise was to figure out why I do these performances. On the flip side, because of these bizarre and random subjects I was choosing, I did find an entrance into a new idea that I had not thought of yet. I imagined having subjects and objects in juxtaposition to each other; like having an uncommon act for one of the subjects to perform. On that point however, I am still thinking what would possibly work for that. I know the possibilities are endless but having too many options is my problem. I am finding it hard to work through the obvious to get to the acts that would be the most clear and strong.

After seeing Robin Rhode’s work and doing a good amount of research on him, I want to bring more of a comical aspect to my work. I am thinking that using my juxtaposition idea with the subject and object I could bring that humor into my performances using that direction. What I really liked about Rhode’s work is that he was able to use simple tasks and make them have meaning when it was all said and done. It was not just an act that was done. They were acts that symbolized his feelings about the past and present state of his home country.

I hope to include these thoughts in my next performance and also to incorporate an idea from one of my classmates on my last meeting posting. She suggested that I use a specific sentence and give it to my performers and then let them go from there. Basically, use their own judgments and capture the different directions they all take these prompts.

Monday a.m. Artist Post 9/07

After talking with Jeff on Thursday, I started researching Robin Rhode and his performance work. Rhode has specific reasons for doing each performance and knows beforehand why he is documenting the new art piece in the desired manner and also what medium his performance will take to be completed. These are key things that Jeff suggested I become aware of with my performance work in the future. I would like to figure out why I am documenting my performances this way and why I am using the subjects and objects that I do. But in the meantime, insights into how other artists figured out their work’s reasoning is great help into figuring out how to get to that point.
Born in 1976 in Cape Town South Africa, Robin Rhode became all too aware at a young age the challenges in life that he would have living in an apartheid South Africa. The apartheid in South Africa had began around 1948 and would last until around 1994. Rhode grew up in an area of great civil unrest and this upbringing would later on be the basis of all his art work. His early education includes a National Diploma in Fine Art from Witwatersrand Technikon in 1998. Also, Robin Rhode graduated in 2000 from the African School of Film with a degree in Television and Dramatic Arts in Johannesburg, South Africa. Rhode’s work has been shown in the Perry Rubenstein Gallery, The Wexner Center for the Arts, and various countries including London, Italy, Germany, Japan, France, and Spain.
Rhode’s ideas include every day activities such as basketball, skateboarding, and gymnastics and are carried out with “his signature method of attempting to playfully transform flat renderings of every day objects into illusory three-dimensional ones through his physical interactions” (llesamni Article). In that same article, Rhode is described as one who “approaches his multidisciplinary and unconventional art practice through the high energy of street inventiveness and youth culture…often drawing on the subcultural codes of hip hop, popular sports, film, and fashion to render the every day as art.” Drawing from his background, at the root of many of his performances are ideas/issues with culture, identity, history, and the past and present socioeconomic problems in South Africa. One of Rhode’s more controversial pieces is titled Park Bench and was completed in 2000. Because Rhode grew up in apartheid South Africa there is good amount of his work that responds to what his family, friends, and he went through several years prior. The performance titled Park Bench was Rhode’s creating a life size drawing of a bench on the side of the Parliament building which is an area that is off limits to everyone except white South Africans. Dressed in dark clothing, Rhode was arrested shortly after for being found damaging private property. Another performance that is well known is titled “Color Chart.” This performance was shot from above in a stop motion animation style. The subject was lying on its side and dressed entirely in white and is said to “slowly dispatch several enemies one at a time, with bricks”. Also said, “the photography and the way it’s animated has a powerful zen-like quality, similar to that from Rhode’s Stone Flag”.
Because I have been strongly considering changing my ways of presenting my performances, I find Rhode’s stop motion very attractive but also I enjoy his performances in grid like form as well. I think that for my next performances I am going to shoot them the same way I have shot my first two performances this semester but I am going to try out presenting them in grid like form and see what feedback I can get from that method.

Clip of Rhode's Performance
Perry Rubenstein Gallery Site
Cool Hunting Website with an Article about Rhode
Walker Art Center Article on Rhode

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 09/03

Today I shot the first two of my new performances for the semester and found it more difficult to stand back and watch the performer. These two performances were centered on uniformity and disarray and how the performer would get from one of those to the other with the specific tasks set forth. The time leading up to when I shot these performances, I felt in complete control because I was the sole creator of the concept and the rules that I would give my performer. I have spent a lot of time with how I thought it would turn out and even photographed a trial run of one of the performances and decided that I did not like the amateur lighting used. Because of that trial run, I decided to move all of my future shoots into the studio and photograph these performances in a clean, spacious, and bright space. I felt very much under control choosing the background color, selecting which strobes to use, the distance the lights were from the background and subject, the use of umbrellas, the position of the camera, and desired angle for the whole performance. Once I pressed record on my video camera to record the sound only of the performance I relinquished all power to my performer. There were specific moments during the 15-minute performance where I was getting restless, anxious, and just wanting for something to happen unexpectedly. For example, there was a point where I thought my performer was getting quite frustrated with her task and I was hoping for some sign or noise of that struggle. I wanted her to move around, make the shot interesting and dynamic. But then I realized that I was subconsciously attempting to fabricate the performance and my main intent for these performances is to have the performer perform; and not in my way. But, I wanted it. I really wanted that extra hint of what was going on within my performer’s head.
I have found myself relating my new performances to Sarah Oppenheimer’s “Lecture” performance and Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”. I admire these two women for their work but now especially I admire them for their ability to create work that they have little power over. I feel as an artist, my own work is something sacred and very much about who I am as a person. Therefore, naturally I would want to know exactly how my pieces are going to turn out and be done with it. This new spin that I have put on my work for the semester is serving up some different challenges for me. However, I am hoping these new challenges are strength builders in terms of me as an artist and me as a person

Ono's "Cut Piece" Article