Video Chat

Recently, I've attended 2 shows that incorporate current internet chat programs, such as Skype, as an integral tool in installation and performance works. The first was "We build up.", by Marilyne Blais and Kate Moss; the second was "Some things should remain in Silence.", performed by Emilio Rojas.

The links provide more information:

Installation blog of "We Build Up." by Marilyne Blais and Kate Moss:

I included an apparent "installation" piece for performance discussion because the mirror image of similarly constructed spaces instigated a series of similar actions, performed by artists participating in the same work, but in separate locations. This set of actions created both the culmination of a real space and virtual space that encouraged public interaction with those present, throughout the work’s construction and at the show, up to the last day.

The conversations that ensued often commented on the similarity of construction and the allusion of extended deeper space. The treatment of the virtual space as an extended space was reinforced by the treatment of the screen as a window that precipitated communal interaction, rather than a surface to simply be viewed. The guided direction by those on the other side (pointing out elements), prompted further construction. The performers in this work were the artists and viewers alike.


Performance documentation of "Some Things Should Remain in Silence." by Emilio Rojas:


In the work of Emilio Rojas, the interaction is limited to his confession of many secrets, his own and other people’s, to his mother in Mexico. Emilio confesses secrets into a microphone, in Spanish.

Because the secrets he divulges are mixed with the secrets of others, it is improbable that she knows exactly which are his, although this is not important. It is not important because, as the title of the work states, “some things should remain in silence”. The secrets are, in a sense, irrelevant. We all have and keep secrets from our mothers, and it rarely, if ever, prevents them from loving us, in their own motherly way.

His mother acts as a stand-in for all mothers. When he confesses, she is the stoic, ever-present pillar that resembles the countenance of mother earth. She is the mother of all humanity, rather than a single child. She listens and absorbs the information of all children. She looks down upon Emilio as compassionate, concerned, afraid, and ultimately the void of the unknown, where the secrets eventually find their home. The audience is complicit in this sea of secrets.


-- Connie Freitas

Post Internet?

An anonymous box of found images, the immateriality of internet art, an increasing reliance on the audience, the rejection of hierarchies, and the shift away from traditional (and actual) white wall galleries, all define an emerging digital age art manifesto I find myself responding to. I feel like we need to come to a collective realization that artists are constantly reinterpreting each others work.  Although I find many artist to create "original" content, it's impossible for them to claim an absence of influences. Through the internet we're able to directly and rapidly share ideas. Brad Troemel, originator and curator of TheJogging.com (an online “exhibition” space) is consciously blurring the lines between life and art. In one interview he states, “if everything is art, the only thing artists do is draw attention to what is more relevant to being alive than everything else” (Counterfeit Mess). On his site The Jogging he states; "Because the objects we use are re-purposed as art, not purchased or originally intended that way [ ], their being art is just a brief part of their life that ultimately ends by being recycled (naturally  or synthetically). The point of re-functioning them is to show their fragility, their ability to be manipulated or changed, their ability to have their function removed with the flick of a wrist" (I Like This Art).  But while sometimes this internet art tends to de-emphasizes text and emphasizes image, I would like to point out that it is very important to be able to articulate your choices, be critical, spend time with the works that speak to you (and figure out why they speak to you) and to consider the literary elements of the work.  How we view art and how it reaches an audience has forever been changed by the internet and our generation has had the privilege to see this transformation within our lifetime.  Seth Price asks the question in his essay Dispersion; "Does one have an obligation to view the work first-hand? What happens when a more intimate, thoughtful, and enduring understanding comes from mediated discussions of an exhibition, rather than from a direct experience of the work? Is it incumbent upon the consumer to bear witness, or can one’s art experience derive from magazines, the Internet, books, and conversation?"  Our challenge is to "surf" through all this information, instead of spending meaningful time with one thing. 



Brad Troemel, Fountain, Sprinkler, Rain (2009)
The Jogging Archive >>  http://bradtroemel.com/thejoggingbackup/


Guthrie Lonergan >> http://www.theageofmammals.com/
pioneer in "Internet Aware" art and created 'nastynets' - an internet surfing club >> http://nastynets.com/

VVORK >> http://www.vvork.com
online exhibition site

Computers Club >> http://www.computersclub.org/club/ 
computer generated/based artwork 


 
Jon Rafman, Willem de Kooning Condo (2010) >> http://brandnewpaintjob.com/


Post-Internet >> http://122909a.com/ 
Gene McHugh received the "Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts' Writers Grant" to create this stream-of-consciousness blog, filled with his loose essays reflecting (as he is quoted) on, "...art responding to an existential condition that may also be described as 'Post Internet'-when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps this is closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'-a term that I’m sure I will be thinking through here sooner or later." 

POST BY - Ashley Marie Howe 

Incomprehensible Scattershots of Dubious Half-Explained Insight(?)

 Does anyone remember the blogs? You know, one of the only four assignments that were mentioned for this class? Well hopefully they don't because I have pretty much nothing to say. Case in point:

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Something I noticed after Ashlea Conway pointed it out, is that Maria Callas both looks and sounds quite a bit like Marina Abramovic. Here's an example.It's kind of interesting; that one article stated that Callas is a hero of Abramovic's of some kind, despite her apparent hatred for theatre (which opera ostensibly is). I would certainly call Callas not "only" an actor/singer but definitely a performance artist. She inserted a lot of depth and sincerity into the roles she took (which she often carefully chose). She put a gigantic amount of herself into her performances. That's a thing that I think connects all (great) art: it is invariably extremely personal. Whether with carefully tempered tones or sitting perefctly still, if it's some expression of self, that's good enough to call it "Art" as far as I can tell.
All that said, if I was putting on some kind of production of Shakespeare's Macbeth in New York I would hound at Abramovic to be Lady Macbeth. If she could do anything, she could definitely pull off Lady Macbeth beautifully and strikingly and with depth.

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I take back what I said about performance artists hating on actors/singers/dancers being like sculptors hating on painters-- it's more like watercolour painters hating on oil painters.

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As for film-acting-as-performance-art, a good example is Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond:

In the portrait of hollywood, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. Swanson's performance is rife with references to her own life, her downturn from fame with the invention of "talkies", her mannerisms and ways of working, and her strange relationship with her butler, the director who gave Norma Desmond her start-- who is played by Erich Von Stroheim, the director who gave Swanson her start. If the only thing that turns a random performance into performance art is direct connection to one's life, this all certainly fits as much as any of Abramovic+Ulay's relationship-referenced art pieces.

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Is what seems to offend performance-artists about acting/singing/dancing how abstract they are not? I mean, some basic trend with most performance art I've noticed is that there's a lot of really abstracted actions, metaphors within metaphors, whereas with acting, there's almost always a concrete reference. With an abstracted action (let's say with Vito Acconci burning off his chest hair and then pushing his shoulders together to make it vaguely appear he has breasts-- I can't remember the title), the action becomes much more transparent, the theory and ideas behind it easier to get at-- with something like John Cassavetes and Peter Falk in Mikey & Nicky, the personal and philosophical aspects are represented through reference to something fictional, and a little bit buried underneath, for lack of a better way to put it, something more lifelike. Sort of like with abstract painters saying that what they are doing is more "pure" than representational art. Then again, where does that leave the position that performance art came about as something like a battle against abstraction-- to bring human representation back into art in some new way? I guess that'd say that the old veils are harder to cast off than it looks.

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Is it just me or is that one artist's vehement desire to not have any documentation extremely pretentious? I can't remember his name but he is the one who did "Progress" and rolling-around-the-guggenheim-kissing pieces. Even if making actions-as-art like that (supposedly) kills the commerce of object-based-art-- it does nothing for the exclusivity of it. It feels like saying there should never be prints of Madame X or Starry Night. All it does is keep a wider audience from viewing the work for extremely arbitrary reasons-- and by being paid for these things, the whole anti-object-ness of it just becomes a moot point, so why not make them more accessible and let people not near major galleries and museums to see the work and experience it on some level (in text or photos or video)? It doesn't diminish the piece to allow it to be seen by people not in some kind of elite. It's better to have recordings of Maria Callas and have some semblance of her presence than to have just said "it is not the same just hearing a recording and it minimizes the power of live-performance" (which are both correct points) and let her voice just die with the ages. I should shut up though I can't think of how to better defend this point and have probably said something stupid by now.

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 “The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.”         
“What is important to me is not the truth outside myself, but the truth within myself.”
~Konstantin Stanislavski. Sounds like performance-art to me.

THERAPEUTIC EFFECT AND EXPERIMENTAL REACTION

THERAPEUTIC EFFECT AND EXPERIMENTAL REACTION

There are two distinctive features in Neda Razavipor’s Self Service  and  Amir Mobed’s  Come and  shoot  me: “Therapeutic effect” and “experimental interactions”.

Both artists choose performance/happening and are unaware of the exact outcome of the work. Their works interacts with the spectators and take into consideration an array of features, including political, social and cultural. A repressed surge of violence was released in both works. Also, the time and social conditions within which Self Service and Come and shoot me was performed were certainly a key element of the idea embodied in the works.

Self Service (2009) was a happening. The performers of which were the audiences.The artist covered the Azad Gallery’s floor in Tehran with hand-made carpets.You can see the images of this happening here:

http://www.nedarazavipour.com/Home/projects/self-service.aspx

As you see there were a number of pairs of scissors and blades by which visitors were to cut a piece of carpet and take it with them. They could take a piece only if they themselves had cut it out. Then the artist will take the torn piece of the carpet and put it in envelop on which part of the fourth book of Plato’s republic, where Lantheus has a struggle within himself where to see the bodies of executed people in Piracus port, had been printed. Once the visitors, performers managed with considerable difficulty to cut a piece of the carpet and received it in an envelope and as soon as they read what was printed on envelope, the therapeutic effect of the work was triggered. In two days what was left at the gallery floor was only dust the dust that was part of the most famous hand made Iranian carpets. Such a process and mechanism deals with the second feature -experimental interaction without the least knowledge of the impact of this work on audience, Razavipour put it on display, thus experiencing a fresh cycle of unexpected reactions.

Having the two features in mind lets take a look at the Mobde’s Come and shoot me.

You can watch the videos here:( the videos are in Farsi language but the concept and process is clear to watch)

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdJAaSWT5QE

As you see in videos these two features happened through the situation that Mobed instructed for audiences. Come and shoot me creates questions and discussions about violence as well. In this work the artist body is involved .Mobed’s performance is based on the most well-known act from the time 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which Chris Burden was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters.Mobed is doing this performance with difference. Chris Burden somewhere asks his friend to shoot him and Mobed on another part of the world imitates him. Mobed asks people to shoot him but he covers his head.His issue is more colorful, happening in a different social context. His performance also takes place at Azad gallery and public had a permission to shoot in the gallery. They have to follow the instructions. Most of the people resist shooting but small group of people shoot a lot. The performance will continue till one audience shows unpredictable reaction and breaks the gun. Mobed plays the role of victim and the impact of this performance for audiences turn into an experience that evokes the pain and violence. Giving the disguising nature of the experience, the therapeutic is temporary and can only act as a painkiller, for the imposed social structure is still firmly in place.

Under the Bridge Performances for Winterruption.

This past Friday I was walking down to the island and happened to see the three sets of ten-minute performances created for the Winterruption Festival. This was the first time I had seen this event, and while it’s always nice to see public art being performed for the public, I didn’t especially find any of them innovative (except for the last piece). The first performance was titled Aeriosa: Cold Hands Warm Heart Too. This piece was choreographed by Julia Taffe and involved four women using ropes and harnesses to create what could be called an aerial dance to the sounds of classical music. It was entertaining to watch these performers use the ropes to gracefully twist, turn, and stretch. However, this aerial stunt work evoked more of a Cirque du Soleil theme that has been done so many times before. I felt it was unoriginal and not quite as dazzling as they set it out to be.

The next performance was Firebelly: Two Lights. Again this piece was more circus act then artistic expression, although it was also combined with a type of dance. Two women in red costumes entered the stage from opposite sides and lit some flammable swords. They then ran at each other and staged a mock fight with their flaming weapons. After this first act they switched their swords with chains, which had two flammable balls on each end. They then swung them around on stage to create a type of light show with the fire.

The Only Animal-Hot Jazz with Flaming Instruments was the title of the last performance. This was the section of the show that I thought was the most unexpected and creative. Two men in costume stood on stage, one with a Trumpet, the other with a French horn, and began to play familiar jazz tunes. However, as they played, fire would blow out of their horns in between beats, turning it into a combined music and pyrotechnics display. They performed songs like Fever and the theme to The Pink Panther (my favorite). You could tell both musicians were devoting much concentration into the music as they blew and flamed together in melody.

Overall, it was entertaining to watch, but nothing particularly groundbreaking. It might have been nice if multiple performers had been involved instead of just pairs. If they ever decide to make changes to the performances in the future, it would be interesting to see what they would be.

http://www.granvilleisland.com/directory/under-bridge

Alerting you of a thing of small importance

Recently there was an internet sensation known as "Interior Semiotics" which was... some kind of performance piece.
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Interior_Semiotics
It is generally considered to be the worst thing.

Thank you for your time.

Podplays - The Quartet, PuSh Festival

Podplays – The Quartet was one of the main shows during the PuSh Festival. It consists of four radio plays that take you on an hour’s walk along the Waterfront to the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The walk commences in the atrium of the downtown SFU campus where pairs of two people take off every five minutes. We were sent an mp3 file through email ahead of time or we could rent Ipod players and headphones when we arrive to check-in. We were given a map and phone number to call the help-line in case we get lost.

The first story is about a couple reminiscing their relationship and each other. It takes you up the stairs and elevator to the parking lot. Through the parking lot is an elevator that takes you down to Gastown. From Cordova, you turn and cross the street and walk towards Main and Alexander where the next story would begin.

Each vignette provided a different atmosphere, narrator, and soundtrack. Occasionally, I would be told to observe the buildings, pubs, and streets around me. Sometimes the protagonist would describe some history of a building or some event that happened along the shoreline. Some parts of the story were quite abstract, merely a reflection of the character’s thoughts and feelings. Other parts allude to the environment or history of Vancouver.

My main highlight is the long walk in the underground passageway of Canada Place and the Convention Centre. The passageway was mainly for cars and it was quite dark. After a long time (just as I was feeling tired), we were led through an Easy Park parking lot and up the elevator. Once the doors opened, it was a bright view of the Plaza facing the Convention Centre. In contrast to the dark passageway, the tall buildings and paved ground was a beautiful and magnificent change that really motivated the remainder of the walk.

However, at one point during that underground walk, the narrator was being very annoying. He kept apologizing “sorry, sorry…” for about twenty times and I couldn’t quite follow the story because of the cars rushing by. Some parts of the walk were quite frustrating because their directions weren’t completely clear. At one point, they asked you to go to the corner but didn’t specify left or right. At another point, they expected you to stand still and wait for their story to finish unfolding. Then suddenly, they would tell you to sprint across another parking lot; stop; and look at the red fire hydrant. We would either be ahead or behind the narration during our walk. 

I felt that the stories were quite general and not particularly creative. Other than giving me commands to my direction, I felt that it could have incorporated more relevance to my walk, the area, and to the story being told. It's difficult to listen to people talk for such a long period of time while walking. But as an interactive show, I quite enjoyed the overall experience. As a performance show, the audience is a part of the performance act and has a lot of control. I can choose to stop listening, to pause the show, or to follow every instruction. It is also a unique way to familiarize myself with the area. I enjoy the overlap of sound- the cars beside me, the street, my confused comments with my boyfriend, and the music and story playing in my earphones. 

MP3 (It's 65 mins): I'm not sure if posting it up to share online is permitted because it is created by a team of artists but I have it if anyone is interested to hear a bit of it. I did pay $20 for it!
Main Website Link: PuSh Festival - Podplays
Other Reviews: GEIST