Week 1 Sound and Vision - Video and Installation

Video and Installation

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

• Installation and video art, two areas of artistic practice, whose core ideas and core terms still ghost contemporary discussions of new media (specifically ideas around interactivity, immersion, active spectatorship etc. )


The Threat of New Media

The Roots of Video and Installation art


Kenneth Noland, Gift 1961-2


The singular viewer in solitary, quiet meditation

• “The ideal modernist spectator was a disembodied eye, lifted out of the flux of life in time and history, apprehending the resolved (‘significant) aesthetic form in a moment of instantaneity” Paul Wood


Ideology of the Modernist White Cube


THE MODERNIST BREAKDOWN


• “If I could sum up the shift that occurred in art and criticism in 1967, it would be the widespread assault on the dogma of Modernism as an exclusively optical, art-for-art’s sake, socially detached, formalist phenomenon that inevitably tended toward abstraction’

• Barbara Rose, The Critical Terrain of High Modernism

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THE MODERNIST BREAKDOWN


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Installation and Video Art


Dada

• Marcel Duchamp, Installation for the exhibition of First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

Happenings

Kaprow wasn’t installing anything to be looked at..but something to be played in, participated in by visitors who then became co-creators.

Surrealism

Pop

Pop


Main staircase and fresco painted by Tiepolo. Wurzburg, Bavaria, Germany


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Popular Gesamtkunstwerk aka total art work


Minimalism

Robert Morris Installation at the Green Gallery (1963)

‘For the first time, I was forced to recognise the entire space, and the people in it..Until Minimalism, I had been taught , or taught myself, to look only within a frame; with Minimalism the frame broke, or at least stretched’

Vito Acconci


The Feedback Loop

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Installation Art• The viewers focus is shifted from

individual autonomous art objects (on walls or plinths) to the context within which artworks are exhibited.

• Installations employ a range of materials. They are hybrid, adaptable artworks, allowing artists to use a variety of forms, many of which traditionally would have been seen as incompatible (sculpture and painting and video etc.) .

• The form of the installation rejects technical specialism (deskilling).

• Installations are temporary in nature.

• Installations frequently invite and encourage a narrative reading.


• Judy Chicago Dinner Party 1974 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

One of the first openly female-centered art installations, Womanhouse - a series of fantasy environments exploring the various personal meanings and gender construction of domestic space - was created by students of the Feminist Art Program along with a number of local Los Angeles, CA artists, first conceived by Paula Harper and spearheaded by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.

Installation art’s multi-perspectivalismwas viewed as emancipatory and in contrast to single-point perspective, which in its centring of the viewerin a position of mastery was for feminists marked by patriarchal power relations.

Feminism and Installation

• “This discourse of decentring has had particularly influence on the writing of art critics sympathetic to feminist and postcolonial theory, who argue that fantasies of ‘centring’ perpetuated by dominant ideology are masculinist, racist and conservative; this is because there is no one ‘right’ way of looking at the world, nor any privileged place from which such judgements can be made.” (Bishop, C,

Installation Art, p 13)


The decentred viewer


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The Active Spectator

• To see yourself seeing. To engender a critical, self conscious, reflexsive attitude to the activity of looking at art in a space.

• An active viewer - directly addressed. The interdependence of the work of art and the viewer :

• “the active nature of the viewer’s role within [installations], and the importance of first hand experience , came to be regarded as an empowering alternative to the pacifying effects of mass-media.” (Bishop Installation Art)

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Active Spectatorship

“This activation is, moreover, regarded as emmancipatory, since it is analogous to the viewers engagement in the world. A transitive relationship therefore comes to be implied between ‘activated spectatorship’ and active engagement in the social political arena’ (Bishop, C, Installation Art, pg. 11)


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It is common in installation art to remark that the viewer completes the work. Their presence is essential to the functioning of the work, - they ‘activate’ the work through their literal presence in the space.


"The main actor in the total installation, the main centre toward which everything is addressed, for which everything is intended, is the viewer."

Ilya KabakovOn the Total Installation


History of video art• Late sixties - early video

cameras appear on university campuses - they are large and bulky.

• Naim June Paik uses Sony Portapak Camera

• Early history closely connected to recording of performance -camera is stationary

• Key first generation video artists or artists using video -Dan Graham, John Baldessari, Joan Jonas, Martha Rosler,Bruce Nauman, William Wegman, Vito Acconci....


Video Art• A time based medium.• Experiencing the changing

patterns of form of video over time is frequently a central aspect of its character.

• In theory an infinitely reproducible, non auratic medium. The hope that technological innovation would lead to democratic transformation in the production and consumption of art. Another instance of the dematerialisation of the art object - and anti-form.

• The exhibition of video is fluid - from large scale projections filling a space, to single free standing works on domestic monitors. It is a migrant medium.

Martha Rosler “Semiotics of the Kitchen”


• Video art frequently positions itself in a ‘dialogue’ with mainstream television or film.

• An interventionist practice - not only did it have the potential to reach far bigger audiences, it also had the possibility of offering a critique of the values and forms of commercial, mainstream TV and film- to turn TV /film against itself

• A deconstruction of the mechanisms of manipulation, seduction and the resulting ‘rituals of passive consumption / one way transmission’.

• A form capable of offering alternative narratives in alternative spaces

• A new form. No artistic or critical history.

http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci.html




“From it’s beginnings in the 1970’s counter culture, artists’ video and film has

sidestepped the hypnotizing conditions of narrative cinema precisely in order to critique

the dominant culture’s most thoroughly passivizing entertainment genre.”

Brandon TaylorArt Today


Martha Rosler• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zSA9Rm2PZA&feature=related

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zSA9Rm2PZA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zSA9Rm2PZA&feature=related

Laurie Anderson

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SirOxIeuNDE• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hhm0NHhCBg

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SirOxIeuNDE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SirOxIeuNDE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hhm0NHhCBg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hhm0NHhCBg

Bruce Nauman, Violent Incident, 1986, video, installation, Tate Gallery, London.


http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/T/T06/T06732_9.jpg

http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/T/T06/T06732_9.jpg

Bruce Nauman“ANTHRO/SOCIO 1991. Projection on three walls and six monitors - the head screams “Feed Me, Help Me / Anthropology..Help Me / Hurt Me / Sociology…”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxmm16gqRis&feature=related




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“ Whereas for McLuhan media such as books and cinema are not truly interactive, for Manovich quite the reverse is true: they are more interactive (higher in participation) than digital media forms precisely because they demand us to create a mental accompaniment. Manovich, [..] sees media such as painting, books and cinema as succeeding by depriving our senses of high level or complete information. They work because the demand us to fill in the gaps in visual or audio narratives and to construct our own readings, images or even dialogues through interaction with the medium in question. “

pg. 91 new media


Week 1 Sound and Vision - Video and Installation

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