Monday, December 17, 2007
I am currently very excited for this exhibition to start: The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image Part I: Dreams from February 14, 2008 - May 11, 2008 and Part II: Realisms June 19, 2008 - September 7, 2008. Obviously the basis for this show epitomizes one strong tangent of the sub-dialogue that is going on at Uarts. I am curious to see Washington, DC's reaction. My experience, now that I have spent a little time away form my city is that DC gets and plans fantastic cutting edge 'special' exhibitions. On the other hand permanent installations and institutions presenting cutting edge, challenging exhibitions do not exist on the same level and caliber as other cities. This city really does feel beat down on a cultural level, why?
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The other day I tried to defend "grey areas" to one of my professors. This paper should have worked my ouvre into the history of sound art and instead ended up being about numerous kinds of grey areas-in sound, in media, in thought. Here is my final paper for semester #2 of this grad school thing. I personally think it is a conflicted little screed-I try to take on too much at once, much like almost everything I do.
In semester #1 the final paper assignment for this class was to write about your own work in the third person. Want to know a secret? After weeks of false starts and diddling around I actually had to type in bold 26 point letters at the top of my paper draft "YOU ARE DEAD, WHY DID ALL THE WORK YOU DID MATTER?". Macabre, but I recommend it to any artist as a jump start if they are feeling kind of dumbed down. After reading about the history of sound in art, and once again I was feeling pretty dumb, I analyzed just one of my own works in this piece in a affort to challenge myself-to make two years of work matter. Forcing yourself to matter, even if it's just on paper-it's a good exercise. You should try it.
Art of the Rallying Cry
Like a crack of light creeping into a pitch black room, sound defines the shapes, tones and objects in the three dimensional world, but do we pay close enough attention to realize it? Unlike a prism that scatters white light into component colors right in front of the eyes, the human physiology experiences and processes sound in a very intimate and magical way. According to Marcel Duchamp “One can look at seeing; one can’t hear hearing” (qtd. in Kahn, 9). The philosophical, psychological, and physiological nature of looking that allows visual things to perceptually register at a distance contrasts starkly to the internalized nature of the perception of sound.
The use of sound in art is scattered into forms as numerous and varied as painting, sculpture or photography. Artists have been extolling the use of sound in art for almost a century alongside these inaudible, static practices. Now, more than a hundred years after sound was first recorded surround sound technology is in more homes than art galleries, promising unrivaled realistic experience. It would seem we know no fear of being in the midst of recorded sound; letting it be inside our head, letting it represent all manners of loves and horrors. Or are we just adapting ourselves, learning with the help of technology to keep sound at a distance too? Representational focus on perception and medium in art appreciation and criticism cannot do justice to the use of sound and technology in art. These technologies are still struggling to lead art back into the realms of the experience of communication rather than the appreciation of objectification.
It is within the interstices between distance and nearness or immediacy in all media that communication occurs. Given the complex nature of perception and how we understand and interpret it relative to communication, it is hardly surprising that objectifying experience has been the overwhelming concern of many humanistic disciplines for thousands of years now. In the essay “Hermeneutical Experience”, Hans-Georg Gadamer posits that:
The understanding of a text and the understanding that occurs in conversation-is that both are concerned with an object that is placed before them…. In the successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding with one’s partner in dialogue is not merely a matter of total self-expression and the successful assertion of one’s own point of view, but a transformation into a communion, in which we do not remain what we were. (515)
The artist that employs sound, of both spoken word and non-linguistic ambient nature, is relentlessly pushing the boundaries of the traditional “conversation” with the viewer, to attain a similar communion that we look for in text. Objectification may serve as a means to an end, but is not the goal.
Early on in his book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts Douglas Kahn notes that modern recording technology, like the ancient human inventions of language and writing, removed the nature of speech from the person, place and time that it was spoken; as well as every other sound that was available for the taking (9). Sound in an art environment creates an unavoidable perceptual appreciation of the dimensions of time and space through judging simultaneity, reverberation or echo, loudness and softness of a sounds place in space. Because of this, sound can attain an exceptional sense of virtual realism, if such a presentation is desired. Recorded sound maintains great swaths of its original dimensional quality: the time it takes to play, inflection in spoken language, even effects of the space the recording was made in depending on the quality of the equipment used and the amount of effort put into the arrangement of recording devices. Of course, like two-dimensional media, sound can also be manipulated to suit other purposes than those just described.
Reflecting on the appreciation and understanding of the place of sound as part of a video or stand alone amplified sound in an installation environment, sound is an integral contemporary tool used to confront the subjective perspectives and objective stances taken in the dialogue that is forming contemporary understanding of culture. When asked about the role of sound in their art installation projects, artist Emilia Kabakov, Ilya Kabakov’s installation collaborator, thinks we find it easy to appreciate paintings because we have thousands of years of cultural experience looking at them. In order to be good art, an installation must be complex and viewers have to learn to spend time with an installation to appreciate it. Sound lends an integral dimension of complexity to any art installation, and installation art is integral to understanding culture (“Kabakov”). Given individual desire to fit into a context greater than themselves while still remaining unique and ‘whole’, innate confusion regarding the objectivity of perception is often brought to bear in all communicative pursuits as the transmission of narrative information becomes imperative no matter how disjointed the presentation.
Our desire that the resulting contexture of the experience of hearing be culturally objectified is of overwhelming concern in any listening situation. William S. Burroughs’s reframing of the internalized subjective nature of hearing through the prism of language and the human propensity to invest language into noise of all sorts is a frightening visualization of one aspect of the experience of listening. Even in the ‘signature’ contextual jumble of his essay “It Belongs to the Cucumbers”, this conflict is simply and poignantly expressed in the lines: “Some time ago a young man came to see me and said he was going mad. Street signs, overheard conversations, radio broadcasts, seemed to refer to him in some way. I told him ‘Of course they refer to you. You see and hear them’” (53). In the type of complex art installation experience that is called to mind by Kabakov, both the artist and the audience create parallel, poetic space and time when sound and spoken word is used. Instead of being a harbinger of mental illness, the representation of ‘hearing things in your head’ establishes an existential proving ground, a subjective necessity for finding ones place and relationship with objective experiences of the world.
This attitude of a space or place for magical poetics was ascribed to shamans, religious rite and artists for millennia before our Modernist antecedents, who more recently enjoyed the analytical mantle of “self expression” which afforded a culturally appropriate place for the cognoscenti to work out their existential anxiety. Instead of becoming a powerful, accessible, mnemonic device that records and represents the present for use in the future, the ability to record and transmit sound and image to a popular audience enforces our confusion about perception and objectivity in these spaces and places. According to artist Bill Viola’s musings on “idea spaces and memory systems”:
“We view video and film in the present tense-we ‘see’ one frame at a time passing before us in this moment. We don’t see what is before it and what is after it-we only see the narrow slit of ‘now’. Later, when the lights come on, it’s gone. The pattern does exist, of course, but only in our memory” (318-319).
The sounds and pictures that come out of our televisions, computers, cell phones and some artists are like a medieval morality play or Victorian hymn. The modern equivalent is still selling you a now that is part of a contiguous life everlasting, achievable through obedience to an earthly church. As long as you approach it all with a healthy dose of naïve fear and don’t ask yourself too many questions the sounds and images of the media can be blithely perceived and appreciated as an active parallel reality; another now that will also pass on into the gaping past of memory.
Karen Joan Topping’s installation Build It Up, Knock It Down (Figure 1) is a work that combines a somewhat theatrical experience with the technology of recorded sound, resulting in a surprisingly complex experience of psychological and philosophical overtones. Walking into a room with muted lighting that has had the walls painted the same color as the floor in an effort to create a horizon-less environment we see an unremarkable tableau of a pile of sand, a child’s sand pail and a single sand castle in a spotlight. The objects remind of childhood memories, the spotlight resembles a cinematic flashback and the starkness of the interlocking trapezoidal forms of the castle and bucket strongly evoke a minimalist art aesthetic.
Figure 1. Build It Up; Knock It Down. Karen Joan Topping.
While the very real pile of sand unassumingly references visual and literary images of sands of time and unfathomable vastness, and the child’s pail refers to play and building as well as psychological metaphors of vessels and carrying or spilling, in the end all they are is terminology that the viewer is familiar with, the ‘hook’ that they feel easy and comfortable with. Real sand, real pail, real words and the sounds of real surf, yet the sum parts add up to a complex nexus thinking and language and hopefully communication.
Appended to this simplistic, referential sculptural installation is a roughly seventeen minute performative recitation of repeated phrases layered and alternated with the recorded sound of the lapping of ocean surf. The repeated phrases “Build it up; knock it down; go ahead; you know you want to; you’ve done it before” coupled with the babbling of the relentless waves of the ocean brings to mind an interior monologue as well as the inexorable exhortation of outside voices. The addition of this recording to this installation creates an environment that transcends the aesthetic and perceptual qualities and clearly attempts to investigate issues of control and creativity on the part of the individual. The constant repetition that is so apparent in the craft of the artist, making and remaking objects and ideas in an effort to communicate them more effectively is the real ‘text’ of Topping’s tableau.
The struggle and violence inherent in grasping to communicate our hearts desire is what is experienced in the presence of Build It Up; Knock It Down. While his focus is textual analysis, the words of Gadamer suits the experience of understanding this work of art; he describes the nature of language as “So uncannily near our thinking [that] when it functions it is so little an object that it seems to conceal its own being from us” (514). Part art and literary reference, part theatrical performance, part sandbox, Build It Up; Knock It Down uses the media of sound to shift the appreciative focus to philosophy rather than technique, by displaying objects that require no ‘technique.”
Nowhere is the traditional artist-viewer conversation that has centered on formal and representational concerns in the modern, western idiom, torn apart more directly or effectively than in the words of artist Martha Rosler. In the appreciation and analysis of contemporary art that employs recorded media there could be no worse sin than to confuse questions of aesthetics and perception with questions of influence and philosophy. In her essay “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” artist Martha Rosler succinctly lays out that she sees a warmed-over art historical paradigm of “distinctly modernist concern with the “essentials of the medium”” applied to “video artists” (463). She concludes that this “formalized approach… portray[s] artists in the act of objectifying their element, as though tinkering could provide a way out of the power relations structured into the apparatus [of media]” (Rosler 471). Rosler, prophetically, warns against this mystical approach to video art:
Formalist rearrangements of what are uncritically called the ‘capabilities’ of the medium, as though it were God-given, a technocratic scientism that replaces considerations of human use and social reception with highly abstracted discussions of time, space, cybernetic circuitry and physiology; that is a vocabulary straight out of old-fashioned discredited formalist modernism. (472)
The argument rings true in regards to technologies of sound as much as its application to video art. The battleground of new cognoscenti looks beyond magical “idea spaces” and the scientific objectification of psychology and the senses to, in Rosler’s words, “who controls the means of communication in the modern world” (473). As technology blends more and more seamlessly with human product and principle, we can no longer afford to monopolize the discussion of art with our perception of technology.
Rosler thinks that artists must do better than the museums, better than the media; saying that “surely [artists] can offer an array of more socially invested, socially productive counterpractices [sic], ones making a virtue of their person-centeredness, originations with persons-rather than from industries or institutions” (473). In Bill Viola’s even simpler terms, the tool of technology cannot be allowed to infringe on “development of self” (325). This investigation and investiture of oneself in communication, context and culture is a far more urgent rallying cry than perception and appreciation for artists working in all mediums, not just sound and technology.
Karen Joan Topping
12/5/07
University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Works Cited
Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: First Arcade. 1993.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Hermeneutical Experience.” Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. 3rd ed. Ed. Joseph Margolis. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987. 499-517.
Kabakov, Emilia. “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Conversations with Artists 2007-2008, Artistic Partnerships.” The Phillips Collection, Washington. 14, Nov 2007.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History Of Sound In The Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Rosler, Martha. “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment”. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz, eds. Berkley: University of California Press. 1996. 461-473.
Topping, Karen Joan. Build It Up; Knock It Down. Collection of the Artist. Washington, DC.
Viola, Bill. “Will There Be Condominiums In Data Space?” Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Packer, Randall and Ken Jordan, eds. New York: Norton. 2001. 316-326.
In semester #1 the final paper assignment for this class was to write about your own work in the third person. Want to know a secret? After weeks of false starts and diddling around I actually had to type in bold 26 point letters at the top of my paper draft "YOU ARE DEAD, WHY DID ALL THE WORK YOU DID MATTER?". Macabre, but I recommend it to any artist as a jump start if they are feeling kind of dumbed down. After reading about the history of sound in art, and once again I was feeling pretty dumb, I analyzed just one of my own works in this piece in a affort to challenge myself-to make two years of work matter. Forcing yourself to matter, even if it's just on paper-it's a good exercise. You should try it.
Art of the Rallying Cry
Like a crack of light creeping into a pitch black room, sound defines the shapes, tones and objects in the three dimensional world, but do we pay close enough attention to realize it? Unlike a prism that scatters white light into component colors right in front of the eyes, the human physiology experiences and processes sound in a very intimate and magical way. According to Marcel Duchamp “One can look at seeing; one can’t hear hearing” (qtd. in Kahn, 9). The philosophical, psychological, and physiological nature of looking that allows visual things to perceptually register at a distance contrasts starkly to the internalized nature of the perception of sound.
The use of sound in art is scattered into forms as numerous and varied as painting, sculpture or photography. Artists have been extolling the use of sound in art for almost a century alongside these inaudible, static practices. Now, more than a hundred years after sound was first recorded surround sound technology is in more homes than art galleries, promising unrivaled realistic experience. It would seem we know no fear of being in the midst of recorded sound; letting it be inside our head, letting it represent all manners of loves and horrors. Or are we just adapting ourselves, learning with the help of technology to keep sound at a distance too? Representational focus on perception and medium in art appreciation and criticism cannot do justice to the use of sound and technology in art. These technologies are still struggling to lead art back into the realms of the experience of communication rather than the appreciation of objectification.
It is within the interstices between distance and nearness or immediacy in all media that communication occurs. Given the complex nature of perception and how we understand and interpret it relative to communication, it is hardly surprising that objectifying experience has been the overwhelming concern of many humanistic disciplines for thousands of years now. In the essay “Hermeneutical Experience”, Hans-Georg Gadamer posits that:
The understanding of a text and the understanding that occurs in conversation-is that both are concerned with an object that is placed before them…. In the successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding with one’s partner in dialogue is not merely a matter of total self-expression and the successful assertion of one’s own point of view, but a transformation into a communion, in which we do not remain what we were. (515)
The artist that employs sound, of both spoken word and non-linguistic ambient nature, is relentlessly pushing the boundaries of the traditional “conversation” with the viewer, to attain a similar communion that we look for in text. Objectification may serve as a means to an end, but is not the goal.
Early on in his book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts Douglas Kahn notes that modern recording technology, like the ancient human inventions of language and writing, removed the nature of speech from the person, place and time that it was spoken; as well as every other sound that was available for the taking (9). Sound in an art environment creates an unavoidable perceptual appreciation of the dimensions of time and space through judging simultaneity, reverberation or echo, loudness and softness of a sounds place in space. Because of this, sound can attain an exceptional sense of virtual realism, if such a presentation is desired. Recorded sound maintains great swaths of its original dimensional quality: the time it takes to play, inflection in spoken language, even effects of the space the recording was made in depending on the quality of the equipment used and the amount of effort put into the arrangement of recording devices. Of course, like two-dimensional media, sound can also be manipulated to suit other purposes than those just described.
Reflecting on the appreciation and understanding of the place of sound as part of a video or stand alone amplified sound in an installation environment, sound is an integral contemporary tool used to confront the subjective perspectives and objective stances taken in the dialogue that is forming contemporary understanding of culture. When asked about the role of sound in their art installation projects, artist Emilia Kabakov, Ilya Kabakov’s installation collaborator, thinks we find it easy to appreciate paintings because we have thousands of years of cultural experience looking at them. In order to be good art, an installation must be complex and viewers have to learn to spend time with an installation to appreciate it. Sound lends an integral dimension of complexity to any art installation, and installation art is integral to understanding culture (“Kabakov”). Given individual desire to fit into a context greater than themselves while still remaining unique and ‘whole’, innate confusion regarding the objectivity of perception is often brought to bear in all communicative pursuits as the transmission of narrative information becomes imperative no matter how disjointed the presentation.
Our desire that the resulting contexture of the experience of hearing be culturally objectified is of overwhelming concern in any listening situation. William S. Burroughs’s reframing of the internalized subjective nature of hearing through the prism of language and the human propensity to invest language into noise of all sorts is a frightening visualization of one aspect of the experience of listening. Even in the ‘signature’ contextual jumble of his essay “It Belongs to the Cucumbers”, this conflict is simply and poignantly expressed in the lines: “Some time ago a young man came to see me and said he was going mad. Street signs, overheard conversations, radio broadcasts, seemed to refer to him in some way. I told him ‘Of course they refer to you. You see and hear them’” (53). In the type of complex art installation experience that is called to mind by Kabakov, both the artist and the audience create parallel, poetic space and time when sound and spoken word is used. Instead of being a harbinger of mental illness, the representation of ‘hearing things in your head’ establishes an existential proving ground, a subjective necessity for finding ones place and relationship with objective experiences of the world.
This attitude of a space or place for magical poetics was ascribed to shamans, religious rite and artists for millennia before our Modernist antecedents, who more recently enjoyed the analytical mantle of “self expression” which afforded a culturally appropriate place for the cognoscenti to work out their existential anxiety. Instead of becoming a powerful, accessible, mnemonic device that records and represents the present for use in the future, the ability to record and transmit sound and image to a popular audience enforces our confusion about perception and objectivity in these spaces and places. According to artist Bill Viola’s musings on “idea spaces and memory systems”:
“We view video and film in the present tense-we ‘see’ one frame at a time passing before us in this moment. We don’t see what is before it and what is after it-we only see the narrow slit of ‘now’. Later, when the lights come on, it’s gone. The pattern does exist, of course, but only in our memory” (318-319).
The sounds and pictures that come out of our televisions, computers, cell phones and some artists are like a medieval morality play or Victorian hymn. The modern equivalent is still selling you a now that is part of a contiguous life everlasting, achievable through obedience to an earthly church. As long as you approach it all with a healthy dose of naïve fear and don’t ask yourself too many questions the sounds and images of the media can be blithely perceived and appreciated as an active parallel reality; another now that will also pass on into the gaping past of memory.
Karen Joan Topping’s installation Build It Up, Knock It Down (Figure 1) is a work that combines a somewhat theatrical experience with the technology of recorded sound, resulting in a surprisingly complex experience of psychological and philosophical overtones. Walking into a room with muted lighting that has had the walls painted the same color as the floor in an effort to create a horizon-less environment we see an unremarkable tableau of a pile of sand, a child’s sand pail and a single sand castle in a spotlight. The objects remind of childhood memories, the spotlight resembles a cinematic flashback and the starkness of the interlocking trapezoidal forms of the castle and bucket strongly evoke a minimalist art aesthetic.
Figure 1. Build It Up; Knock It Down. Karen Joan Topping.
While the very real pile of sand unassumingly references visual and literary images of sands of time and unfathomable vastness, and the child’s pail refers to play and building as well as psychological metaphors of vessels and carrying or spilling, in the end all they are is terminology that the viewer is familiar with, the ‘hook’ that they feel easy and comfortable with. Real sand, real pail, real words and the sounds of real surf, yet the sum parts add up to a complex nexus thinking and language and hopefully communication.
Appended to this simplistic, referential sculptural installation is a roughly seventeen minute performative recitation of repeated phrases layered and alternated with the recorded sound of the lapping of ocean surf. The repeated phrases “Build it up; knock it down; go ahead; you know you want to; you’ve done it before” coupled with the babbling of the relentless waves of the ocean brings to mind an interior monologue as well as the inexorable exhortation of outside voices. The addition of this recording to this installation creates an environment that transcends the aesthetic and perceptual qualities and clearly attempts to investigate issues of control and creativity on the part of the individual. The constant repetition that is so apparent in the craft of the artist, making and remaking objects and ideas in an effort to communicate them more effectively is the real ‘text’ of Topping’s tableau.
The struggle and violence inherent in grasping to communicate our hearts desire is what is experienced in the presence of Build It Up; Knock It Down. While his focus is textual analysis, the words of Gadamer suits the experience of understanding this work of art; he describes the nature of language as “So uncannily near our thinking [that] when it functions it is so little an object that it seems to conceal its own being from us” (514). Part art and literary reference, part theatrical performance, part sandbox, Build It Up; Knock It Down uses the media of sound to shift the appreciative focus to philosophy rather than technique, by displaying objects that require no ‘technique.”
Nowhere is the traditional artist-viewer conversation that has centered on formal and representational concerns in the modern, western idiom, torn apart more directly or effectively than in the words of artist Martha Rosler. In the appreciation and analysis of contemporary art that employs recorded media there could be no worse sin than to confuse questions of aesthetics and perception with questions of influence and philosophy. In her essay “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” artist Martha Rosler succinctly lays out that she sees a warmed-over art historical paradigm of “distinctly modernist concern with the “essentials of the medium”” applied to “video artists” (463). She concludes that this “formalized approach… portray[s] artists in the act of objectifying their element, as though tinkering could provide a way out of the power relations structured into the apparatus [of media]” (Rosler 471). Rosler, prophetically, warns against this mystical approach to video art:
Formalist rearrangements of what are uncritically called the ‘capabilities’ of the medium, as though it were God-given, a technocratic scientism that replaces considerations of human use and social reception with highly abstracted discussions of time, space, cybernetic circuitry and physiology; that is a vocabulary straight out of old-fashioned discredited formalist modernism. (472)
The argument rings true in regards to technologies of sound as much as its application to video art. The battleground of new cognoscenti looks beyond magical “idea spaces” and the scientific objectification of psychology and the senses to, in Rosler’s words, “who controls the means of communication in the modern world” (473). As technology blends more and more seamlessly with human product and principle, we can no longer afford to monopolize the discussion of art with our perception of technology.
Rosler thinks that artists must do better than the museums, better than the media; saying that “surely [artists] can offer an array of more socially invested, socially productive counterpractices [sic], ones making a virtue of their person-centeredness, originations with persons-rather than from industries or institutions” (473). In Bill Viola’s even simpler terms, the tool of technology cannot be allowed to infringe on “development of self” (325). This investigation and investiture of oneself in communication, context and culture is a far more urgent rallying cry than perception and appreciation for artists working in all mediums, not just sound and technology.
Karen Joan Topping
12/5/07
University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Works Cited
Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: First Arcade. 1993.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Hermeneutical Experience.” Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. 3rd ed. Ed. Joseph Margolis. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987. 499-517.
Kabakov, Emilia. “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Conversations with Artists 2007-2008, Artistic Partnerships.” The Phillips Collection, Washington. 14, Nov 2007.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History Of Sound In The Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Rosler, Martha. “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment”. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz, eds. Berkley: University of California Press. 1996. 461-473.
Topping, Karen Joan. Build It Up; Knock It Down. Collection of the Artist. Washington, DC.
Viola, Bill. “Will There Be Condominiums In Data Space?” Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Packer, Randall and Ken Jordan, eds. New York: Norton. 2001. 316-326.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20005-3970
September 21 to December 16, 2007
If you could create a museum exhibition of over 300 works of art, spanning the years of 1965 to 1980 by 118 artists from five continents, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, film, performance, installation and documentation of conceptual projects-how would you organize it? What cultural milieu present over a decade ago would guide your selection of such a diverse array of art and artists? In an unprecedented manner, the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, a traveling exhibit now at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. does all of the above using art made overwhelmingly by women. Take note of the carefully worded title; this is not just a show of women artists and not just a show of feminist art. To quote from multiple museum brochures and other exhibit paraphernalia it is “the first comprehensive exhibition to explore the formation, development and impact of feminism in postwar contemporary art” and it does it on a global scale ("wackatnmwa.org").
Works from this era done in what we still think of as traditional mediums are presented alongside concept and content laden, collectively fostered, authority challenging, un-saleable work; all are players in this theater of feminism, presented against a backdrop of civil rights, peace and other prominent political agendas of the time. Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark’s Cabeça colectiva (Collective Head) represents the revolutionary nature of the break with tradition and the redefining of Modernism. Collective Head is a simple suspended structure of balsa wood and netting, in which the author invites the community of passersby to build the work of art by leaving a token object in its structure. Given the forbidden territory of touching or interacting with art that is still a necessary part of most art venue visits, this piece commands special reverence. Just one thorough and curious visitor accepting the museum’s clearly encouraged and sanctioned invitation of Clark, deliberately poking at the work as they decide where to nestle their memento, activates the “Head” in a new and exciting way for anyone else in the room that is watching. At first this art work is jarring in its shaggy visage and desire to be touched. Rather than just being looked upon like so much of art, it ends up bearing an eternal quality of making, collecting and community that overcomes the works ultimate temporarily through a deliberate invitation to experience.
In this show, much of the work draws attention to just being looked upon as a problem, challenge or gross oversimplification. In a remarkable and sensitive work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha called Passages Paysages three TV monitors play a finely choreographed show of grainy, tonal images of places, objects, paintings and people. Each set of images has a different audio meant to be heard simultaneously, so all the audio is amplified into the gallery. Floating words, written and spoken in English, French and Korean in both a male and female voice, along with the pictures forms a narrative, even without a real beginning or a climax. Susan Jenkins refers to Cha's "investigations into the relationships between language, memory and culture” in the Artist Biographies section of the exhibition catalog (222). In the mesmerizing ten or so minutes it takes to fully experience "Passages", it is made clear that the complexity of this art is not just a simple matter of ‘seeing’ connections, but of combined internal, descriptive, meditative, focusing quality of the sound (which includes a musical motif) alongside the metered litany of ever rotating still photos, all adding up to an experience that like speaking and remembering, is far from simple and transcends feminism in its investigation of human perception.
But as might be expected from a show with Feminism in its title, the work in this show most often challenges the specifically male oriented vision that monopolized representations of women in art and the explosion of postwar mass media. Ironically, hundreds of the strongest, most challenging, bravest artistic efforts to disassemble or demolish this vision cannot be seen at first glance in "WACK!". Lurking behind an untold number of dangling headphones, numeric push buttons and DVD menus idling on TV monitors an untold number of transferred films, videos, audios, slide shows and performance documentations capture innumerable brazen images that challenge objectification along with countless other beliefs and conventions. You might never see Ulrike Rosenbach's Don't Believe I'm an Amazon, you must toggle a push button and put on headphones to hear the thwacking to understand. This piece depicts a filmed close up of the artist's face superimposed on a reproduction of a painting of the face of Gothic Style Madonna, at which the artist proceeds to shoot arrows from a bow, as if the halo was an archery target for her own face. While targeting chauvinistic, simplified depiction of women as virgin martyrs or fallen angels in society, this work also takes aim at the roles of religion, violence and self immolation in the parsing out of images of women with remarkable depth that belies its simple format.
To experience WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution in 2007 feels far from the vacuum of the bell jar that feminism got stuffed into as the 1980’s progressed. The proximity of the work of more well known women artists making paintings, sculptures or working in other more classical craft techniques next to more revolutionary, confrontational projects shows visually and viscerally better than any words could ever tell, how important and all encompassing the dialogue that feminism engendered during this period was. Walking from a room of colorful portrait paintings (by Mary Beth Edelson, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh), into a room documenting Carolee Schneemann, standing raised above her audience as naked as the day she was born, unfurling from her birth canal a “feminist manifesto” like a living and speaking AP wire machine, most effectively drives home one of the key premises of this exhibition. Even without extensive knowledge of the artists, the era, or any attachment to an identity as a feminist, it is easy to appreciate that the ideas and impulses behind all of the art included in this show was critical to elevating the most intimate, unconventional, redefining ideas in art after the mid-century mark. As we enter a new century, it remains to be seen if the profound ideas and instincts that continue to inform us culturally can be as popularly applied as the revolutionary beginnings and attributes that are documented in this show.
Karen Joan Topping
10/30/07
Works Cited
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Passages Paysages. University of California Berkley.
Clark, Lygia. Cabeça colectiva (Collective Head). Colecao Familia Clark/MAM- RJ.
Jenkins, Susan. "Theresa Hak Kyung Cha." WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. 222.
Rosenbach, Ulrike. Don’t believe I'm an Amazon. Courtesy of the Artist.
Schneeman, Carolee. Interior Scroll. Collection of Peter Norton and Eileen Harris Norton.
Schneeman, Carolee.Scroll 1: “Women Here and Now Festival”, East Hampton, New York, August 29, 1975. Courtesy of the Artist. August 29, 1975.
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution National Museum of Women in the Arts. 27 Oct. 2007
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20005-3970
September 21 to December 16, 2007
If you could create a museum exhibition of over 300 works of art, spanning the years of 1965 to 1980 by 118 artists from five continents, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, film, performance, installation and documentation of conceptual projects-how would you organize it? What cultural milieu present over a decade ago would guide your selection of such a diverse array of art and artists? In an unprecedented manner, the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, a traveling exhibit now at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. does all of the above using art made overwhelmingly by women. Take note of the carefully worded title; this is not just a show of women artists and not just a show of feminist art. To quote from multiple museum brochures and other exhibit paraphernalia it is “the first comprehensive exhibition to explore the formation, development and impact of feminism in postwar contemporary art” and it does it on a global scale ("wackatnmwa.org").
Works from this era done in what we still think of as traditional mediums are presented alongside concept and content laden, collectively fostered, authority challenging, un-saleable work; all are players in this theater of feminism, presented against a backdrop of civil rights, peace and other prominent political agendas of the time. Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark’s Cabeça colectiva (Collective Head) represents the revolutionary nature of the break with tradition and the redefining of Modernism. Collective Head is a simple suspended structure of balsa wood and netting, in which the author invites the community of passersby to build the work of art by leaving a token object in its structure. Given the forbidden territory of touching or interacting with art that is still a necessary part of most art venue visits, this piece commands special reverence. Just one thorough and curious visitor accepting the museum’s clearly encouraged and sanctioned invitation of Clark, deliberately poking at the work as they decide where to nestle their memento, activates the “Head” in a new and exciting way for anyone else in the room that is watching. At first this art work is jarring in its shaggy visage and desire to be touched. Rather than just being looked upon like so much of art, it ends up bearing an eternal quality of making, collecting and community that overcomes the works ultimate temporarily through a deliberate invitation to experience.
In this show, much of the work draws attention to just being looked upon as a problem, challenge or gross oversimplification. In a remarkable and sensitive work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha called Passages Paysages three TV monitors play a finely choreographed show of grainy, tonal images of places, objects, paintings and people. Each set of images has a different audio meant to be heard simultaneously, so all the audio is amplified into the gallery. Floating words, written and spoken in English, French and Korean in both a male and female voice, along with the pictures forms a narrative, even without a real beginning or a climax. Susan Jenkins refers to Cha's "investigations into the relationships between language, memory and culture” in the Artist Biographies section of the exhibition catalog (222). In the mesmerizing ten or so minutes it takes to fully experience "Passages", it is made clear that the complexity of this art is not just a simple matter of ‘seeing’ connections, but of combined internal, descriptive, meditative, focusing quality of the sound (which includes a musical motif) alongside the metered litany of ever rotating still photos, all adding up to an experience that like speaking and remembering, is far from simple and transcends feminism in its investigation of human perception.
But as might be expected from a show with Feminism in its title, the work in this show most often challenges the specifically male oriented vision that monopolized representations of women in art and the explosion of postwar mass media. Ironically, hundreds of the strongest, most challenging, bravest artistic efforts to disassemble or demolish this vision cannot be seen at first glance in "WACK!". Lurking behind an untold number of dangling headphones, numeric push buttons and DVD menus idling on TV monitors an untold number of transferred films, videos, audios, slide shows and performance documentations capture innumerable brazen images that challenge objectification along with countless other beliefs and conventions. You might never see Ulrike Rosenbach's Don't Believe I'm an Amazon, you must toggle a push button and put on headphones to hear the thwacking to understand. This piece depicts a filmed close up of the artist's face superimposed on a reproduction of a painting of the face of Gothic Style Madonna, at which the artist proceeds to shoot arrows from a bow, as if the halo was an archery target for her own face. While targeting chauvinistic, simplified depiction of women as virgin martyrs or fallen angels in society, this work also takes aim at the roles of religion, violence and self immolation in the parsing out of images of women with remarkable depth that belies its simple format.
To experience WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution in 2007 feels far from the vacuum of the bell jar that feminism got stuffed into as the 1980’s progressed. The proximity of the work of more well known women artists making paintings, sculptures or working in other more classical craft techniques next to more revolutionary, confrontational projects shows visually and viscerally better than any words could ever tell, how important and all encompassing the dialogue that feminism engendered during this period was. Walking from a room of colorful portrait paintings (by Mary Beth Edelson, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh), into a room documenting Carolee Schneemann, standing raised above her audience as naked as the day she was born, unfurling from her birth canal a “feminist manifesto” like a living and speaking AP wire machine, most effectively drives home one of the key premises of this exhibition. Even without extensive knowledge of the artists, the era, or any attachment to an identity as a feminist, it is easy to appreciate that the ideas and impulses behind all of the art included in this show was critical to elevating the most intimate, unconventional, redefining ideas in art after the mid-century mark. As we enter a new century, it remains to be seen if the profound ideas and instincts that continue to inform us culturally can be as popularly applied as the revolutionary beginnings and attributes that are documented in this show.
Karen Joan Topping
10/30/07
Works Cited
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Passages Paysages. University of California Berkley.
Clark, Lygia. Cabeça colectiva (Collective Head). Colecao Familia Clark/MAM- RJ.
Jenkins, Susan. "Theresa Hak Kyung Cha." WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. 222.
Rosenbach, Ulrike. Don’t believe I'm an Amazon. Courtesy of the Artist.
Schneeman, Carolee. Interior Scroll. Collection of Peter Norton and Eileen Harris Norton.
Schneeman, Carolee.Scroll 1: “Women Here and Now Festival”, East Hampton, New York, August 29, 1975. Courtesy of the Artist. August 29, 1975.
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution National Museum of Women in the Arts. 27 Oct. 2007
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Still from Mircea Cantor
Deeparture, 2005.
Mircea Cantor: Black Box, a space for new media,
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
7th Street & Independence Avenue, SW
September 17-December 9, 2007
Wedged between the slamming of coat room lockers and the swoosh of flushing restroom toilets in the Hirshhorn Museum’s “Black Box” screening room is Mircea Cantor’s approximately seventeen minute, silent video loop of a single deer and a lone wolf in a blank, white-walled space which looks suspiciously like a gallery. Far from static wall décor, these animals are very alive. What does the artist mean for us to observe in what boils down to a highly edited, repeating, four to five minute nature scene? Given the artificial setting, it seems that we are precluded from observing anything ‘natural’ in this habitat. Is it a fable, or a parable then?
The Hirshhorn repeatedly offers in multiple print sources that accompany the exhibition that the title of the work “Deeparture”, according to the artist, is applied to “encourage viewers to use the work as a departure point to look deeper into themselves.” It seems like an attempt at a modern day bestiary- a rewriting of subjective allegorical attributes for the cloven and canine. Like the intricate curlicues of an illuminated, medieval manuscript, teasing meaning out of the repeated vignettes of Cantor’s video requires a cloistered atmosphere, yet this is almost unattainable due to the din of visitor activities occurring around the screening room. Has it come to the point that even in a museum, we must assume that silence is as unattainable as an attention span of more than thirty seconds?
The artist’s decision to include no sound suggests that it is in silence that we should view his work. I tried. It was only after forty-five minutes of intense scrutiny of the picture, approximately twelve to fifteen times (part of which I childishly plugged my ears with my fingers) that the repeated sensing and self-possessed reactions of both animals in the stark and silent space began to hold any level of allegorical influence progressing beyond the dialectic of predator and prey. Kelly Gordon, Associate Curator, instead briefly offers possible subjects like the post communist, dictatorial Romanian nationality of the artist, the environment, instinct, domestication and the contemporary work of other artists that use live animals in the text that is offered as a handout to visitors. On the surface, the decidedly condensed four minutes of Mircea’s “Deeparture” looks like all of the metaphors Gordon names, but a metaphor doesn’t necessitate reflection on a moral or a meaning, like an allegory or bestiary does.
In this story, after pacing back and forth and sniffing the ground, the wolf chooses to lie down and after only a moment closes his eyes to rest. While its eyes are not closed for long, the deer has no such luxury. The deer’s pacing, panting and defecation is so subtle to our human eyes, that it requires the extreme close ups used in film to get these facts across. The deer does not lightly show fear or weakness in this private, artificial hell. Is the artist’s intention to capitalize on the predator/prey relationship after all? The deer, the wolf and the gallery may be metaphors, but nobody gets eaten, or even scratched. Behavior carries the real allegorical weight in this work. The burden of proof is in seeing behaviors that are real, instinct or consciousness notwithstanding. This demands facing a truth that is apparent even in the most elementary diagram of the web of life. Even in a world where very real decisions are carried out in increasingly virtual time and space, we can’t all be wolves.
Karen Joan Topping
9/29/07
Works Cited
Cantor, Mircea. Deeparture. Mircea Cantor and Yvon Lambert, Paris, New York. 2005.
Gordon, Kelly. Black Box, a space for new media: Mircea Cantor. Washington, Smithsonian Museum and Sculpture Garden. 2007.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
This blog has been commandeered for my use in a Master of Fine Arts class. While the general idea is to be able to write intelligently about art, this class certainly seems to bring up a wealth of other cultural issues to write about, which is great. Screw "so and so has 20 colorful whatevers with strong compositions and sensual application of whatsit." Analyzing a host of broader issues through the lens of art practices; (rather than just talking about the art practices) that's the kind of writing that gets me to go see stuff.
Given the sharp technological turns my personal studio practice has taken recently (using sound and video), being able to roll with writing about the vanguard is an awesome challenge to embrace.
Referring back to my first baby steps with blogs, I remember how empowering it was to start groupiegirldc. Back then I wanted The Big Eye to empower my art writing in the same way, but I guess I just had to grow up first, (or I just needed more rock n' roll in my diet.) Check back soon to see what happens.
Given the sharp technological turns my personal studio practice has taken recently (using sound and video), being able to roll with writing about the vanguard is an awesome challenge to embrace.
Referring back to my first baby steps with blogs, I remember how empowering it was to start groupiegirldc. Back then I wanted The Big Eye to empower my art writing in the same way, but I guess I just had to grow up first, (or I just needed more rock n' roll in my diet.) Check back soon to see what happens.
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