Thank you James Turrell!

"The artist's job, I believe is to either recreate an image or experience in a way which asks the viewer either to use these methods of looking, whether that be a re-contextualization of space and/or materials or by consciously forcing the viewer to consider different ways of looking. For an image or experience to become art it must have an artist behind it with an intention of it being perceived as art. And based off the above description of what art is, that means the artist must make the viewer look at the image or experience with his or her "art looking lens", paying attention to both intellectual and aesthetic intentions. The other option for the artist is to make the viewer conscious of how he or she is looking and create a space which forces the viewer to look differently, possibly in which looking then becomes a sensory or emotional experience as opposed to an intellectual or solely optical one."

I wrote this as part of an essay I wrote about what art is. I wrote how the viewer's perception of something being art becomes just as important as the artists' intention of creating a piece of art. While anything can be artful, it takes an artist to present an image, object, or experience in a way in which the viewer(and a general mass of viewers- not just an individual) can then perceive it as art. The traditional way of re-contextualizing images, such as in ready-mades, is to bring an object into a gallery space or another setting which defines it as art, or to put a frame around it, declaring it art. Yet, I am particularly impressed with artists who re-define the way we look at images, objects, or experiences as opposed to relying on prescribed ways of art viewing.

This weekend I finally saw the James Turrell piece, Meeting, at P.S. 1. The piece, described on P.S.1's website "is composed of a square room with a rectangular opening cut directly into the ceiling. Carefully calculated artificial lights produce an orange glow on the white walls of the room, permitting the viewer to appreciate the intensity of the sky’s color." The room is only open one hour before dusk and on clear sky days. I was so lucky to come on a beautiful day: crisp air, clear sky.

As I entered the room, I could feel the air from the outside, not in the form of a breeze but rather as a damp cool and crisp air that permeated the space. There was a sense of both camaraderie and solitude between strangers in the space; some sitting on wooden benches attached to the walls, reminiscent of sauna benches, others were laying on the floor. Everyone's eyes were up at the ceiling, staring intently as the square hole in the ceiling subtly changed color. It seemed as if some people stayed there for hours, meditating on this ephemeral yet permanent image of an abstracted sky or of a natural modernist painting.

And I thought to myself: this guy did it! James Turrell succesfully created a piece of artwork which did not just recontextualize something artful yet mundane (like the sky) to make it art, but he did it in a way which forced the viewers to experience it differently than they do other artworks. We were sitting or laying; we were looking up; we were there for minutes or for hours; it became a sensory experience with the weather from the outside permeating the space. The viewers were also forced to acknowledge one another, sitting across or next to someone within this square room. The viewers become part of the work, along with the weather, the sky, the lights, the seating. It was really exciting. And yet, Turrell did not abandon all of traditional art viewing: the frame of the sky is a square, there is a clear object to look at, the viewer is still passive: all eh has to do is look. Turrell used these traditions of art viewing to his advantage to manipulate the viewer to then experience this work in a totally sensory and experiential way.

So this is a hip hip hooray to James Turrell! Hip hip......HOORAY!

a little review and bitch session of Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video Art, which closed Jan 14

The Broolyn Museum had an exhibit that just ended a few days ago: Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video Art. It was shown in The Elizabeth Sackler wing for feminist art and was in a small corridor next to the loud and in my opinion, over-rated The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. I recently wrote a paper on this video art exhibit and have been talking about it for the last month. I was pretty impressed with the collection of works; the videos seemed to preserve a historical tradition of video art being simplistic and being a form of documentation and reflection. The works were all short and very few could be considered narrative, although they all did tell a story. They were all organic and each video represented the artist herself. Within these limitations of video art tradition, there was a large range of low-tech video techniques: black and white and color videos, soundtracks that included field recordings and cinematic music, minimal editing and cheesy graphics, performances for the audience versus videos that were captured as voyeuristic insights.

In particular, I really enjoyed Klara Liden's video, Bodies of Society(2006) and Cathy Begien's, Blackout(2004), which both playfully explored universal ideas of control, power, and relationships without being heavy handed.  Both artists use the medium of video to their advantage, using it as a tool to document and record as well as to communicate with a larger audience.  

 In Bodies of Society, Liden stands in an empty room with the sunlight lighting the room and performs a ritualistic act of smashing her bicycle with a long metal rod. The bicycle becomes a second presence in the room along with Liden. In the opening of the video, the bicycle is still while Liden walks around it, acting almost as a police officer, observing and evaluating the object while hitting the metal rod against her hand as a baton. As Liden begins to beat the bicycle she reacts to its movements and sound that is amplified over the soundtrack of circus like music, emphasizing the spectacle and cautiousness of this act. 

 Blackout documents Begien as she verbally recalls a night of partying while blindfolded.  As she tells the story, other characters walk around her visually describing her words and handing her props to enhance the story.  This duplicity of remembering while re-enacting creates a tension in the video.  Begien's physical activity is controlled by her friends' handing her drinks and cigarettes.  These actions though are controlled by Begien's narration of the story.  To add to this theme of power and control, Begien's story describe events in which she is powerless.  The title Blackout further describes this experience of a loss of control or an unawareness one is not in control of.  While there are tense themes being explored in this video, it is created with a sense of playfulness, the video ending in a Hollywood teen-movie like credit roll in which each actor dances to popular music.

The other exhibited artists(Kate Gilmore; Jen DeNike; Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn; Shannon Plumb; and K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood) also showed works which were playful, insightful, and simplistic in nature.  Unfortunately, by declaring these works to be feminists, the curators of this exhibit must have felt it necessary to justify this work as feminist, using wall text which explained the work to specifically be about women's issues and politics.  In relationship to Kara Liden's Bodies of Society, the text states that although Liden claims that this work was created in response to her bicycle being stolen, the work also is made to express her discontent of society in relationship to the way she is treated as a women.  This dismissal of the minimalism within the work is the weakest part of the entire exhibit.  Considering the purposefully simplistic nature of this work, the videos should speak for themselves.  What makes this exhibit so satisfying is its ambiguity of the word feminism.  The work in it is all relatable, straightforward, and free of art-world jargon.  If its curators had accepted this fact instead of trying to justify its presence in an art museum by over-analyzing the works' meanings, this would have been a stellar show, exhibiting honest and incomplex works by contemporary female artists.    

























 

a rant about: has the museum become the new church?

So I have been reading this Marina Abramovic book and this Christian Boltanski book my brother and his girlfriend got me for Christmas.  And as I was reading today, I realized that these two very different artists from different places, who started working at different times, are quoted saying almost the identical thing in interviews in the books:

"The new princes don't build cathedrals anymore; they build museums.  Museums have today become the new churches" -Christian Boltanski

"People don't go to the temples anymore.  They go to the museum"- Marina Abramovic

So I started thinking, is this true?  Has art become the new platform for spiritual experience?  And it first made me think, why do people go to church?  I think a large part is tradition, another is this idea of paying respects, of doing what you need to do to get closer to God and therefore to secure a place in heaven for yourself (if  we are talking about Christianity).  And I don't know if the museum fulfills those needs, a need for ritual and a need for security of our place after we die.  I mean, we can look at going to the museum being a way for one who considers him or herself an artist or of high culture to secure his place in high society or secure the title and identity as artist.  Maybe since looking at art educates the artist, he then becomes closer to creating artwork which secures his position as a good artist, simply because he will then make better art?

Or maybe my whole view of religion and of the church or the temple is a contemporary and somewhat cynical view.  Maybe my view itself is what has made the church less important- that it has become obligation or tradition instead of a space which higher knowledge is being spread.  And maybe since as a culture, we hold successful artists(those which we see in the museums) in such high regard, we go to the museum for a kind of knowledge that we cannot grasp in another space.  Christian Boltanski says something pretty awesome in this interview:

"...I do think that the earliest relationship we have with art is when we first go to church.  Not because painting is there, but because of the presence of the priest, whose words and actions by some sort of abstraction tells us something very important."

  

What makes me curious about this quote is what is the abstraction Boltanski is referring to?  What about the priests' actions and words emit some sort of importance?  And how does the museum or the artwork in a museum do the same thing?

My first response is that what makes church special, what makes the experience so important is the performative aspect of it all: the costumes, the lighting, the sounds, the stage and therefore the separation between the priest and the pews.  There is a purposefulness in the words spoken by the priest, he has written and practiced and used his environment to express ideas that are holy; he uses language to translate ideas established by God, by an unknown but holy presence. 

So maybe the artist does the same thing: the artist use his tools and materials to communicate abstract ideas to a large audience.  And if we say that artists create the culture which we live in, we can parallel that to the idea of God as the ultimate creator.  The artworks themselves becomes parallel to the priest:  a sort of medium for the artist(God) to communicate with the audience.  And the formal properties of the art are the words he uses ; he uses color and composition and form and media to create a piece of work which not only communicates a concept but also compels the viewer to look or listen(in the same way a priest will carefully write a sermon).  And the museum, with its own costuming and acoustics and purposeful aesthetics, helps aid in the audience's acceptance that these works are in fact expressing sacred ideas(and often, universal ideas).  Like church, the museum has established itself as a space separate from the rest of one's environment, a space dedicated solely to one type of communication; a controlled atmosphere. 

So if we accept this sort of offensive and slightly contrived comparison as true, then the question is why has the museum become a more important (or more attended) space of communication than the church or the temple?  And I think that the answer is in the comparison itself.  When church was the center of culture and community(and politics), it made sense that that was where one would go to not only learn of God but learn of their own culture, since the two were so closely related.  Yet, when we now live in a culture which is a mix of different religious beliefs and when religion no longer defines your habits or social circles or country or neighborhood, we must rely on a space which holds the definitions of our culture.  And in a society which is so rich in visual communication, in the media and in advertising, it only makes sense that we pilgrimage to a space which is dedicated to visual communication.

Artist statement created 1/9/09 for another installation proposal

In my work, I am interested in creating a non-verbal (or verbal, if necessary) dialogue between the artwork and the audience.  I am interested in work that changes with its viewer and its environment. As each idea generally begins from a reaction to a personal experience, I am often present in my works to further explore ideas of personal versus collective experience.  Like Joseph Beuys' I am America and America is Me, I do not delineate between myself and the artwork.  I ask the audience to share a moment with me as I am experiencing it.  I am interested in creating work which is interactive, which by looking at or interacting with it it, creates a new active experience instead of a passive one.  By using non-artists' materials, I am able to convey these ideas in a way which is playful and has a context outside of the art world.

 

In my recent work, I am interested in creating symbol-like objects: simple single images intended to hold and communicate complex and emotional ideas about identity and human nature.  Once again, I find these works to be similar to Beuys' fat sculptures which are both minimal in form and highly conceptual and emotive.  I also draw from the video work of Kate Gilmore, who creates straightforward and dangerous, yet playful, scenarios to communicate her ideas. 

For my proposed backyart piece, Found Clothing Flag, I am interested in exploring ideas of identity, disregard, and the personal versus collective experience.  By finding pieces of clothing on New York City Streets, I am confronted with ideas of discarded personal identity.  yet, by one throwing away this piece of clothing which may have identified them, these objects then become part of the city's identity: describing and defining our environment.  In return, city goers become affected by their environment, including what may have been trash to someone personally.  By quilting together these articles of abandoned clothing, I am weaving together these pieces of identity one has thrown out to create a sort of city scape, and thus weaving personal experiences into a collective one.  Furthermore, by creating a flag or a quilt, both items which have connotations of clan, tradition, and security, I am exploring ideas of disconnected community and ultimately, trying to reconnect the community that is lost within the narcissism of being a New Yorker.  

Artist statement created 1/9/09 for installation proposal

In my work, I am interested in creating a non-verbal (or verbal, if necessary) dialogue between the artwork and the audience.  I am interested in work that changes with its viewer and its environment. As each idea generally begins from a reaction to a personal experience, I am often present in my works to further explore ideas of personal versus collective experience.  Like Joseph Beuys' I am America and America is Me, I do not delineate between myself and the artwork.  I ask the audience to share a moment with me as I am experiencing it.  I am interested in creating work which is interactive, which by looking at or interacting with it it, creates a new active experience instead of a passive one.  By using non-artists' materials, I am able to convey these ideas in a way which is playful and has a context outside of the art world.

 

In my recent work, I am interested in creating symbol-like objects exploring the duplicity of feeling both extended and held back.  I have been making simple single images intended to hold and communicate complex and emotional ideas about the limitations of freedom.  Once again, I find these works to be similar to Beuys' fat sculptures which are both minimal in form and highly conceptual and emotive.  I also draw from the video work of Kate Gilmore, who creates straightforward and dangerous, yet playful, scenarios to communicate her ideas. 

For my proposed backyart piece, Sometimes it's a day, sometime's a week, I am once again exploring ideas of freedom versus confinement using a playful material such as balloons.  By using a material which has lighthearted connotations, I am interested in drawing in the viewer into a whimsical atmosphere, one which may remind one of a party or of childhood memories.  yet, I am interested in the ephemeral nature of this material, which lends itself to a bittersweet interpretation of the work: one which discusses loss, a lack of control over change, and once again plays with the idea of attaching one's self to so much that  one is then confined to a fate which he or she is not in control of.  The balloons' attachment to the surface in a large multitude represents one's many desires and therefore attachment to them.  The balloons' deflation relates to the idea of life moving along without you and of change that one is not in control of.  

Final artist statement in Nov '09 for Inward

In my work, I am interested in creating a non-verbal (or verbal, if necessary) dialogue between the artwork and the audience.  I am interested in work that changes with its viewer and its environment. As each idea generally begins from a reaction to a personal experience, I am often present in my works to further explore ideas of personal versus collective experience.  Like Joseph Beuys' I am America and America is Me, I do not delineate between myself and the artwork.  I ask the audience to share a moment with me as I am experiencing it.  I am interested in creating work which is interactive, which by looking at or interacting with it it, creates a new active experience instead of a passive one.

 

In this series of red string portraits, I was inspired by this feeling of being pulled in multiple directions; of feeling limited and stuck as a result of freedom and desire.  I found myself  creating symbol-like objects: simple single images intended to hold and communicate complex and emotional ideas.  Once again, I find these works to be similar to Beuys' fat sculptures which are both minimal and loaded.  I also draw from the video work of Kate Gilmore, who creates straightforward and dangerous, yet playful, scenarios to communicate her ideas.

Like Marcel Duchamp's 1 mile of String, this work also both plays with ideas of space and ideas myself as an artist in relationsip to my work and to the gallery. As I began to play with this material, I really fell in love with it.  The elasticity of the string, which allows for it to be pulled tight(which reminds us of lasers or man made materials) or it loose (which reminds us of a playful cat); the domesticity of textile materials; the red color which reminds us of bodily things; the idea of a string of yarn being part of a whole(sweater, or blanket); the fact that yarn loses its utility when strung and left loose instead of being knitted or crocheted: I got totally lost and enveloped in the material in a way that was both exciting and passionate as well as constricting and scary.   

First draft of artist statement in Nov '09 for group show, Inward

In my work, I am interested in creating a non-verbal (or verbal, if necessary) dialogue between the artwork and the audience.  I am interested in work which changes with its viewer and its environment. While I am often present in my works, the artwork becomes me, and me the artwork.  Yet, I use myself as a part of this larger piece in dialogue with an audience to further explore ideas of personal versus collective experience.  Fascinated by people as complicated and beautiful and bizarre and horrifying beings, I strive to create work which taps into the human experience.  Furthermore, I am interested in creating work which is interactive, which by looking at or interacting with it it, creates a new active experience instead of a passive one.

 

In this series of red string portraits, I was inspired by this feeling of being pulled in multiple directions; of being limited and stuck by wanting so many things.  As I began to play with this material, I really fell in love with it.  The elasticity of the string, which allows for it to be pulled tight(which reminds us of lasers or man made materials) or it loose (which reminds us of a playful cat); the domesticity of textile materials; the red color which reminds us of bodily things; the idea of a string of yarn being part of a whole(sweater, or blanket); the fact that yarn loses its utility when strung and left loose instead of being knitted or crocheted:  all of these properties of the material lent themselves to me in this exploration.