burden and baudrillard and the realness of being shot

Chris Burden (1946-2015)

"Doomed" (1975)

The performances of Chris Burden are intentionally shocking and disturbing and have the capacity to affect "viewers" encountering them through their documentation and retelling. Burden creates an immediately real experience for his audience members; their life-threatening quality transforms their experience from an a viewer into that of participant and witness. I think this connects to the confusion of illusion and reality in the "fake hold-up" scenario that Baudrillard describes. In the same way "Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible” (Baudrillard, 38).

Many of Burden's pieces draw attention to real-world stuff such as person-to-person contracts and the brutality of war. Although his performances are meant to be ephemeral, their residue such as "relics" (nails, jackets) and documentation (photography and sound recording) are important factors in historicizing his work. Burden also raises the question of authorship-- why isn't the shooter in "Shoot Piece" (link contains footage Burden being shot in performance) or any other helper referenced besides him? Legal reasons or interest in anonymity? In my research I was surprised to learn how corporate this guy is—I had encountered him a number of times in reading but only with works like “Shoot Piece”. I didn’t know that he was the first artist to be represented at Gagosian Gallery and that he completely changed his work to large-scale sculptures mid-career (which evoke the “real” in a different, more subdued kind of way). It's challenging for me to articulate an opinion on Burden's work...I feel like it's bothersome but in a very boring way. I think I like the work Marina and Ulay much more because of the emotion and passion connected to them, whereas Burden is entirely monotone and robot-like about his pursuits. 

"Relation in Time" (1977)

documentation vs. transformation

Baudrillard's statement "We all become living specimens under the spectral light of ethnology, or of anti-ethnology which is the only pure form of triumphal ethnology, under the sign of dead differences, and of the resurrection of difference" made me think of the importance the West (generally) places on archiving, documenting and understanding artworks. Artists and makers in the present day are especially encouraged to create online presences for their work and arts experience in order to publicize themselves. In this project I was thinking about the possibilities of obscuring my work, that is originally intended to be three dimensional, by taking photos of it which I then photoshopped. To create these images I played around with lighting equipment and Photoshop layering. All of the lines in the images are made out of cut paper and I think that this is challenging to tell by looking at the photos. 

pattern & beauty

I had a bit of an "insider perspective" of Tony Orrico's work and the show "An Unnamed Need: Pattern and Beauty in Contemporary Art" since I am a Wriston Gallery intern and Tony visited my Studio Art Seminar class. As an intern, I helped out with some of the small details for the exhibition set-up such as hammering the plaques onto the walls with tiny gold nails, checking the screen that displayed one of Tony's past performances, and adjusting the insects, of Jeniifer Angus, that had tilted in the first room. In Tony's visit to my Senior Sem class, he discussed his practice and experiences as an artist and led an interactive activity with us. I engaged with him the next day over lunch and a critique session and got to take photos of his performance as a "photographer".

Since I am in a performance art tutorial with Professor Carlson, I have been thinking about Tony's work as they could be applied to different understandings of"performance art". I find it interesting that documentation/ the resulting "art object" and physical performance are both so crucial to his work, and also that he performs drawings in rotations--some drawings he has only done several times, and he does not practice them when not in front of an audience.

I really loved the show as a whole--especially with my interest in pattern and installation art. I thought the work was dynamic and worked really well cohesively. It is also so cool that we have work by Michelle Grabner, (one of the three curators at the 2015 Whitney Biennial and involved and numerous other cool-looking projects such as Poor Farm). I think I was most captivated by the first room--the colors of the insects are so vibrant and raw. Their ready-made/ assembled "wallpaper" nature of the insects made me think of Baudrillard's idea of the "museumized" and that "for ethnology to live, it's object must die" (13). I think Angus's work is effective because of the "real" color and the engulfing nature of the installation, and duality between beauty (design) and what is typically considered more grotesque (insects). I would like to learn more about her ethics for collecting.

the Hyperreal

This jacket is the Real deal. 

I'm glad that we are reading "Simulations" because I have actually been wanting to read more post-modernism/ post-structuralism theory/ philosophy. I really like thinking about hyperreal places and scenarios like Disneyland,  Las Vegas or other tourist attractions. I'm a fan of Borjes and Cindy Sherman, who both use these ideas in their work. I like the movie "Synecdoche, New York" which is a great example of the hyppereal.

This article on SF Senior Chinatown Fashion seemed like a good example of the hyperreal. It sort of reminded me Kenneth Anger's "Scorpio Rising" in the way it documents a culture from an outsider's perspective. The article is about a photo project of two young girls called "Chinatown pretty", where they showcase the eccentric and colorful fashions of local senior residents. It seems like the girls are trying to make more of a story-telling project rather than poke fun at the style of the participants. I think this ties into "It is thus extremely naive to look for ethnology among Savages or in some Third World--it is here, everywhere, in the metropolis, among the whites, in a world completely catalogued and analyzed and then artificially revived as though real, in a world of simulation..." (Baudrillard, 16).

For my project, I made a short animation out of paper scraps. This could be thought of with "Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelopes the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum" (Baudrillard, 11). The animation is very simple and geometric in form. It isn't based off of a concrete image or idea but I was interested in creating a sense of movement, similar to movement that might be found in nature. For future projects in this class I would like to experiment with making projections that incorporate stop-motion as well as real elements.

Final project Akrasis video

For my final project I will collaborate with Max and Mark, the members of Akrasis, to make a video for a song on their upcoming album. I am not sure whether to call this an experimental video with soundtrack or a music video. The general concept of the music video will be "existential garbage". The song "Glad Tidings" that it will be for is a slower song on the album with lyrics like "I'm a liver filtering out poison so the greater organism stays intoxicated". Mark is helping me visually interpret the beats and I will use the lyrics in the song for visual references like "crash test dummies", "prosthetic blemish", "brain's all runny". The video will be about encountering mass amounts of decay and garbage with an accepting, unresponsive kind of attitude. Currently, the plan is to do a combination of experimental stop-motion animation and video. For the video part, I will film Max and mark walking around the nearby junk yard and in another more sterile location eating brightly colored ice cream with lots of sprinkles. I might use one of the rooms in the Hurvis building for photography.

Andrea Zittel and Art and Design

Who would have compared chicken breeding with interior decorating? It was a obvious connection to Andrea Zittell who makes the point that both are artificial and fabricated by humans. Through her artworks, Zittell likes to point out habits and qualities of humans that are shaped by the things around them. The goal of many of her pieces is to allow humans to gain a sense of freedom and escape through imposed structure.

I admire Zittel for how involved in her work she is and for her first-hand connection to her audience or purchasers. Her art also encompasses her life experiments and she shares personal stories and projects in the making on her  blog that she updates consistently. She blogs about normal-people things too, like making art on the kitchen table and having mice problems. Judging from her blog post and products she seems to have a demographic of buyers that is upper-class, trendy and interested in the outdoors. This is where it is hard to distinguish between "art" and "products". I could find similar items as the ones she makes in a hip furniture store in San Francisco. These wouldn't be called art though. I aesthetically like what Zittel is doing and I appreciate a lot of her commentary but I think her art can only be affective for those who buy it. How is the work of Zittel different from this new IKEA collection focused on furniture for small, unconventional spaces?

the Sensationalism of Vivian Maier

The work of Vivian Maier is intriguing on many levels and has gained mass appeal over the span of several years. Besides the role of social media, I came up a number of reasons of why Vivian Meyers is so compelling to a contemporary audience.

1. Her photography acts as a diary or visual case study. Her obsessive documentation acts as a lens of her life and of the world around her over the span of many years
2. She is a working class woman photographer when knowledge of and access to film was not as accessible
3. She was self-taught and had a strong eye of composition
4. The nature of her work raises many questions about her the story and story and conditions of her life/ known facts about her life raise questions about her work (such as location and access to cameras)
5. Her work has a historic quality, showing street life during the early 20th century

I am a fan of Vivian Maier's work but  my view of her work is also impacted by the "sensational" quality of her life. In my mind I compare her appeal to that of Henry Darger and Van Gogh. Henry Darger's work has an obsessive nature in it, he was a custodian, he was skilled and self taught and his work was discovered only after his death. Van Gogh is a classic example of the "suffering artist" that never sold a painting in his life and his work is a combination of self awareness and depictions of the country life surrounding him. These are just two examples of artists highly invested in their work that did not achieve fame during their lifetime but have a developed a posthumous type of cult appreciation.

I was very impressed by the research and connections made by Pamela Bannos, especially since she was not familiar with this kind of detective work before the Vivian Maier case. It amazed me how she was able to mark the date and location of photos by small clues and how she was able to draw on newspaper archives for evidence. The way that she tracked her movement of Vivian Maier on Google Maps, used her knowledge of culture and features of cameras of the period to understand Vivian Maier's use and access of them, how she was able to understand that by a subtle change in lighting  that a photo was taken from multiple angles and how a certain door occurring in several photos was the entrance to dark room--these all made me think of the kids of dots that are connected on shows like CSI.