revised

"Control"

Lisa's revised video

Hansen's Revise Video

Jung Yoon Kim Traces of Time Revised

Homework #3 - Carolee Schneemann

http://www.cepagallery.org/exhibitions/workspace/schneemann.html
^link to a gallery showing the 36 images

Active across several decades, Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist interested in the interactions between body, gender, and sexuality. A piece that caught my eye in particular is her piece Eyey Body: 36 Transformative Actions, created in 1963. In this piece, Carol uses her body not only as a mode to construct the scenes, but also as part of the scenery. Her naked body is a canvas for a variety of markings and even a snake, emphasizing her body as "an integral material" (1) of the work. As Irvin Sandler noted, her work aims "to free human sexuality" (2). And this work most definitely explores sexuality and its ability to be more than erotic. Carolee shows the viewer through this piece that the body is not simply sensuous or desirable. It is also a natural part of any landscape where humanity has been.
Documented on 35mm film, the images were shot by the Icelandic photographer Erro. Although there is not a video of this performance, it can viewed through the thirty-six successive shots taken by Erro as Carolee painted herself literally, and figuratively into the environment surrounding her. By exploring nudity as a means for expression, and capturing her interactions with the scenes she set up around herself, Carol has integrated her body with the set in a way both unsettling and erotic. Unsettling because it has not been done before in that way, and erotic because it is done in that way.

1. quote by Carolee Schneemann
2.  article by Irvin Sandler for The Brooklyn Rail

Blue Man Group!

My favorite performance artist group, the Blue Man Group is an organization founded by Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton. Production of theatrical shows and concerts with experimental music and diverse media.
The piece I chose is I Feel Love, featured by Jay Leno, or Venus Hum as an artist name. The performances of the Blue Man Group are usually comprised of drums made out of any materials, and in this particular piece the singer appears with the blue men and adds some tunes and lyrics to the performance. This piece has been performed many different times, slightly restyled each time. The performance artists, or the Blue Men, act or play music in excited manners, often in comic ways. The types of instruments the Blue Man Group plays are unlimited and unique, ranging from tiny bells to giant cluster of intestine-like pipes called “monster tubulum.”
They thoroughly fill the stage or the space of their performance by constantly moving around and acting, and they do not fear involving a variety of materials or media in their performance, providing the audience with surprise and excitement. There are videos of their performance all over the place, and I actually went to one of their concerts few years ago. The most unique feature of their performance is that they always incorporate the audience into their performance, intensifying the audience’s excitement and an opportunity of extraordinary experiences. 

Carol Schneemann, Up to and Including Her Limits, 1974

Carol Schneeman is an American performance artist who had created many mixed media art during the 1970s and 1980s. One of her performance art pieces, Up to and Including Her Limits was performed at the University Art Museum in Berkeley in 1974. This event was a combination of performance, installation and video, which she began when the museum opened and ended when it closed. She hung naked from a swing, perpetually moving in space and drew and wrote on paper that she had installed on the floor and the wall around her.

She saw her marks as hypnotic tracking devices and an automatic writing or drawing that interpret her sensations and thoughts into words and images. She connected her artistic and physical processes in time to feelings, sensations and need that she could also show it to the public. She was interested in finding a way to make a monumental drawing with her body. Also, she was reacting to monumental and male dominated history of abstract expressionism and action painting. The video is recording of the artist actually making this drawing. 

Perry, Gillian, and Paul Wood. Themes in Contemporary Art. New Haven: Yale UP in Association with the Open University, 2004. Print.

Schneemann, Carolee. Carolee Schneemann. [New York?]: Max Hutchinson Gallery, 1982. Print.

Martin Creed HW#3

Martin Creed, The Lights Going On and Off, 2000. I’m not sure if this piece is necessarily a performance piece but it is in a sense a live piece in that it is created in the moments that the viewer engages with it. This work is in an empty room with white walls in a gallery in which the lights are on for 5 seconds and then off for five seconds. The timing of the on and off seconds is determined by the size of the room so that the viewer can walk through experiencing the light either turning off or on. What pulled me to writing about this work was a response on Martin Creed’s website by Maurizio Cattelan in 2004. From this simple piece Cattelan writes a very meaningful response of how a ‘simple truth’ of life is the roller coaster of ups and downs in a repetitious manner that never ends. He states ‘Are we afraid of the dark or just blinded by the light?’

 This piece won the Turner prize. It would be one of those pieces 90% of my friends would say ‘oh this is art?’ and walk away. But it was able to evoke profound meaning in a significant amount of viewers, for each creating a meaningful experience, as they took the time to engage. This engagement is what ultimately completed the performance of Martin Creed’s work. There was a similar work he did, the video of it looking quite ominous where the lights in a large building go on and off in the same way. I never thought of performance art as being something so simple but if taken the time to think about – it really can have a profound effect. Both of these works are documented by video, played repetitiously on his website.

Sources:

(1) Coles, Alex. "Martin Creed." Frieze Magazine. 2005: Issue 89. Print.

(2)Fer, Briony. Martin Creed. Vancouver: Rennie Collection, 2011. Print.    

Della Paul Homework #3: Coco Fusco

Trailer: The Couple in the Cage

Name: Coco Fusco

Title: Two Undiscovered Amerindians

Year: 1992

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist who, alongside her partner Guillermo Gunez-Pena created a performance piece called, Two Undiscovered Amerindians. The role of the artist’s body was to become what appeared as caged Amerindian from an imaginary island. Alongside her partner Guillermo Gunez-Pena, they dressed in leopard skin as well as Aztec-styled attire to appear as if they were linked to some native tribe. They traveled across Europe and America to explore and research the various reactions from the public. The title of the piece was design to interact with the audience so that, “once the audience became involved, the performance was supposed to reveal the critique at its heart,” (Byrd, 19). They found that in America, majority of the reactions were emotional and upsetting, as opposed to Europe who took it as a comical joke. In fact Fusco recalls that, “…their worst experiences with racism occurred in the very places where the history of the display legacy should have had the strongest resonance,” (Quinlivan, 96). Their study to watch their reaction soon turned on them as people actually thought they were native indigenous people. Their performance, “…became a reverse ethnography—or the mission of their observational performance was overturned—because Fusco and Gomez-Peña discovered that several audience members actually believed they were ‘real’ undiscovered Amerindians,” (Quinlivan, 95).

            Coco Fusco and Gunez-Pena were surrounded by a ten-by-twelve-foot cage and located themselves in various malls and museums around the world. This allowed their performance to be heavily spectated by the public, welcoming a plethora of reactions to this social experiment. They were documented through a video camera and created a film titles, “Couple in the Cage”, which combined,  “…archival footage of ethnographic displays from the past, giving an historical dimension to the artists’ social experiment,” (www.thing.net). The film helped engage the viewers and further portray the moralities of exhibiting human beings as well as its cultures.

Resources:

 Byrd, J. A. (2002). Colonialism's cacophony: Natives and arrivants at the limits of postcolonial theory. The University of Iowa). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, , 230-230 p. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/305515015?accountid=14667. (305515015).

Quinlivan, R. L. (2008). Corporeality and the rhetoric of feminist body art. The Pennsylvania State University). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, , 177-n/a. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/304506766?accountid=14667. (304506766).

http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/subpages/videos/subpages/couple/couple.html

Janine Antoni, “Loving Care”, 1993.
        In this piece, Antoni soaked her hair in dye and then mopped the floor with it. Antoni is using her body and her long hair (something more associated with women) to mop, but not clean, a space. This performance explores the role of women in society and the double standards that surround it. Antoni is commenting on how women are expected to embody both the effeminate characteristics of being a lady (beautiful, graceful, nurturing, obedient), as well as the strength and responsibility often associated with men, despite the myriad of physically and emotionally draining activities that household women are expected to perform on a daily basis (cook, clean, childcare, maintenance, etc).
        Antoni uses the space to quantify the amount of time and effort it takes to cover a floor in dye using your body as the applicator. She also uses the enclosed, gallery space to enclose her audience within her performance, drawing their attentions and preventing them from ignoring her. The piece is documented with photographs of the performance, and 20 years later, these photographs are so famous they have practically become pieces of their own.
 Sources:
Performance: Live Art Since 1960 by Roselee Goldberg
PBS series Art:21

Antropometire by Yves Klein.

My artist is Yves Klein. In Korea, there is a museum called as Lium. When I first visited there, I met Yves Klein’s work. It was stunning. The color of blue was unbelievably amazing. The thing made me more surprised is that he uses human body as the pain brush. So I remembered of him as soon as I got this assignment. The art piece I choose is Antropometire series he did during early 1960s. He’s quest for pure color led him to paint in monochrome. So he started to develop international Klein blue. Klein considered monochrome painting to be an “open window to freedom, and the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of color.” Since Klein experimented with various method of applying the paint, he chooses to use body of women. In performances, women wear color of blue on their body and performance themselves on broad white canvas with music. The reason he had lots of spaces left on the canvas is that he wants the image to show absence. To performance freely, he chose to exhibit an empty gallery room to avoid everything but a large cabinet. His art works are minimal, conceptual, and performance art.

11/12/12 Bruce Nauman’s Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera)

Bruce Nauman’s Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera) 1991, he placed six monitors on three walls all with a showing shaved revolving head screaming “Feed Me/Eat Me/Anthropology. Help Me/Hurt Me/Sociology…Feed Me, Help Me, Eat Me, Hurt Me.’

The role of the artist’s body in this piece is having the spinning heads overwhelm the senses, thus becoming very powerful. The piece deals with the social body, and removing the audience from the outside world and desires. Robert C. Morgan said:  “Let yourself be fascinated by the spectacularization of power, or leave. RUN FROM FEAR.”

Sources:

Bruce Nauman

 by Robert C. Morgan

Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words

 By Bruce Nauman, 

Voina - Mordovian Hour

Last year during ADP I did research with a partner on performance artist group Voina (Russian for war), a group known for its politically charged and often very graphic performances. One of the more lighthearted works they did, Mordovian Hour, is one I didn’t get to look at last year, but still an interesting piece nonetheless. It is also one of Voina’s most important pieces in that it is the first piece they performed as a group (May 1st 2007). The piece itself is a protest of McDonalds workers being required to clock in on International Workers’ Day, a day that celebrates the international labor movement. Voina threw live cats over the counter into the kitchen area, to stop the workers from cooking more food, and “to break up the drudgery of workers’ routine day.” Unfortunately, Voina didn’t document this performance as well as it has others, and a few photos are the only evidence to be found.

Janine Antoni - Touch

Janine Antoni is an installation artist that was born in the Bahamas, which influenced her work. One of Antoni’s most known installations was a video titled “Touch” that she created in 2002 in the Bahamas. The Artist’s body plays a crucial role in this piece because it is a commentary on the human body interacting with the surrounding environment. Using herself as the performer made the piece personal especially since the surroundings, which she was performing at, was the view of the ocean in front of her childhood home. In the performance Antoni walks on a tight rope positioned to be a little bit above the horizon of the water and as she walks across the rope the illusion that she is walking on the very surface of the water for just a brief moment is created. “Touch” explores the subject of balance as well as perception, and human/environmental interaction. Even the title of the piece explains how instantaneous moments are because she is only on the horizon for just the instant that the touch is created. Antoni uses the space of an open coast and confines it to the rectangle of her camera’s view. This rectangle she is performing in creates a stronger piece than if it was a wide angle view or live because then the viewers eye-level would change the perspective of the piece and if the beginning and end of the tightrope were shown it would take away from the surreal illusion. The piece was documented through video and this allows Antoni to make factors like eye-level and composition permanent for the viewer; therefore allowing her to get her message across every time the way she intentioned it.