Monday, April 8, 2013

Installation Art

I was really interested by the part about surveillance, and how when someone is watching TV, the TV also seems to be watching the viewer. I thought that an interesting take on TV was Nam June Paik's 1963 Wuppertal exhibition piece in which he projected distorted images off TV's and said that "TV has attacked us all of our life, now we're hitting back". I appreciate the message, however I think that the way in which TV has negatively affected people is their own fault. A TV and the power it has over us is our own fault as we empower it by turning it on and paying attention to it. So, instead of just ignoring the TV I think Paik is just empowering it and being contradictory to his own message. Even if we are watching distorted images they are still images that Paik put in the TV and therefore when someone else looks at them its just drawing us more towards an artificial image.

I am posting a short clip about the negative effects of TV on the mind, but I really think that it shows how people refuse to take responsibility 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXne72RyX78

Installation Art

While reading Michael Rush's chapter on video installation art, I was struck by the confrontational nature of each piece he described. Virtually every installation recounted in the chapter is aggressive and invasive, hostile toward the spectator and toward the practice of video watching. Is this sort of hostility necessary to in order to transform the context of art into its content? Must a reflexive piece mean an antagonistic point of view?

Last week, I was disappointed by Rush's admonishing view of popular culture, advertising and television, and this week I was let down again. He presents television and video installation as though they were opponents. For Rush, Installation art is the noble crusader battling against television's tirade of brainwashing, artistically void mass media sludge, and I so disagree. Growing up, I was kind of a solitary kid. I had friends, I just preferred at moments to take time and recharge by myself, and who was my companion on afternoons when I was all alone in my big empty house? It was the TV. Some of the time I watched programs, but some of the time I just needed the noise on in the house to not feel alone. I'd curl up with a "chapter book" and my dog, Willy, and would just enjoy the ambience of the television running.

 For my link, I've included another advertisement. This specific ad for Samsung TV features a unique form of installation art, one that exists outside the museum; and yes, it is art.


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LD2fVZDG8VI

Interactivity in Installations

Installations focused around surveillance, especially live ones, reliant on interactivity with its audience like Dieter Froese's, are interesting in the way the embody the art/audience relationship. All art, by necessity, has to be viewed for it to have an effect, and viewed by a wide audience in order to achieve the status that allows it to be discussed and analyzed. (The only exception to this being other works that are viscerally aware of the necessity of this relationship, and choose to attempt to break it down in some way.) '

Rush says, on page 131, after discussing Froese's piece Not A Model For Big Brother's Spy Cycle, that from around this time "video installations took an active role in energizing the viewer to respond to the object viewed." It's a role that video can play more effectively than any medium of art previously, because of the numerous ways it can be used to achieve liveness and be in a constant state of change and flux. The question is whether this liveness -- parallel, in a number of discussions, to realism -- is something all video art should be striving to capture, simply by virtue of it being unmatched in other media.

Reading this brought to mind this post that I was linked to by a friend. The post itself is situated as a joke, obviously, but when thinking critically about performance art and large-scale installations like this, it becomes dramatically more interesting. The matching of the piece and the clothing is complete coincidence, and likely only to happen once in the entire course of the installation, but other museum-goers, many of whom probably recognize it as additional to the piece, see it as art.

Installation Art

Installation art, in my opinion, seems to be the meeting point of cinema and video art. To me, the main difference between video art and film(cinema) is that going to see a movie, one is not just going for the experience of seeing that particular movie, they are going to take in the experience of "going to the movies' as an idea itself. Video art does not have this same romantic experience. Video art installations thus prove themselves to be what the movie theater is to film. It is not just that one experiences watching a video, it is the experience of the environment in which one watches a video. It is pretty clear here in Bill Viola's piece "An Ocean Without a Shore"

Video Installation Art

Two topics I found to be very interesting in this chapter were the surveillance art installations and the broadcasting installations. Firstly, I thought the idea of surveillance art installations to be extremely cool. I had never really thought about the fact that the television has a mind of its own, and when we watch TV it is also watching us in return. This would completely turn the tables, making the television a voyeur into our lives rather than us practicing voyeurism into the lives of others (through the TV). Our voyeuristic tendencies when we watch TV are therefore "invaded" and are no longer private, causing us to be the ones watched, not the television.This article (http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com/2010/12/interactive-surveillance-live-digital.html) is about a surveillance art installation that incorporates the viewers into the world of the installation, transforming them into the viewed and not the viewers.

I think a related subject to surveillance art installations are installations about broadcasting. Broadcasting is all about making stories public and sharing them with the world. When we watch the news we are voyeurs looking into the lives of other people around the world, but it is also interesting to think of it as the other people around the world looking into our lives. We could just as easily be broadcast to people of other countries, making it seem as though we are constantly being watched.

On Installation Art

This section of the book has been the most interesting to me so far since Rush spends the most time comparing cinema and video art portrayal. Since cinema is what sparked my interest in video making, I am very interested in the dichotomy between the two. Before taking this class I was not so much aware of the differences between creating video "Art" and what is portrayed in cinema. Rush explains that it is important to create a viewing experience that is less based in the sort of "romantic" portrayal that the cinema gives you. I'm not sure to what extent I agree with him separating these two into such different categories because regardless of what the video's intentions are, the same people viewing movies are the same people viewing the video "Art" that is created. I understand that sounds abstract and may not necessarily mean that they should not be separate, but my point is that an artist is involved in both processes and I believe that the separation may sort of be like separating someone who does sketches from someone who paints. It is still art, it is an image portrayal, and digital progression has been making great strides to make both pretty similar.

I also enjoy how he talks about manipulating space. In installation art,  the way that objects are laid out affects the way that they are perceived. In brain and cognitive science, this is a common and well known study topic. The brain has a method of creating an interpretation for each piece of information as it comes into the brain, and the context that it is coming into the brain is very important for interpretation sake.

What I am including is a video on interactive installation video art. I think what the artist is talking about here is a good representation of how Rush speaks on the art becoming an expression of yourself. The artist wants the art to be an expression of him connecting to people and those people connecting to other people and so on. They are able to do so through the cognitive experience of manipulating their own space that the artist has created for them.

On Video Installation Art

       Video installation art seems to be less about the video and more about the feeling and impact it has on the viewer. It focuses on the personal and physical experience of the viewer at that exact moment they view the art. So it is not only the subject of the video but the atmosphere and environment around it, it is as if the viewer enters another world completely. This is also why installation video art is not something easily found on the internet, and why it is isolated by changing technology. For example, a video installation art piece, if it were to be found on the internet and watched on a phone while the viewer rides a bus it loses all of its impact and the "viewer becomes the performer" aspect. In his Tijuana Projection, Kryzsztof Wodiczko united the video with the physical space and in this interview explains how he merges the skin of the person with the skin of the building.
       Throughout the chapter Rush shows how video installation art arises with the artists and general public's political preoccupations with surveillance and personal privacy. This is interesting because the role of video and television is reversed, and it is used to watch instead of to be watched and the artists tried to incorporate the viewers image into the piece. Video installation art evolved towards the tendency of the artists projecting themselves in their pieces with the ever-recurring themes of perception of the self and of time, the mind, human body, sexuality, and personal identity. One of the few pieces in this genre that is represented semi effectively though a youtube video clip is Pipilotti Rist's "Ever is Over All" because the video of her installation tries to simulate the perspective of the original viewer.
       Lastly, I want to highlight this quote which, I thought I strongly disagreed with, but the more times I read it I am changing my mind. "What separates the media artist, as defined here, from the commercial filmmaker is the intention behind the work and the intensely personal (some might say private) nature of the work which excludes it from mass consumption. In order to remain viable, video artists will have to maintain their unique connection to video as an art of 'real time' and not try to mimic the illusion of cinema." I understand video installation art as an alternative cinema which is not a group experience but a one to one connection with the artist.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Video Installation Art

Until now, I haven't really ever considered the manipulation of space and how it effects art. I'm familiar with installation pieces, but the idea that "context becomes content" is novel to me. I'm hyper-aware of space and how it is utilized within the frame of a work, but I rarely consider how pieces themselves are placed in space. The one exception I can think about is the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia. Albert Barnes collected art, mostly impressionist pieces, and became obsessed with how laying out the pieces could affect how they are perceived. The museum maintains his layout, which I personally feel is cluttered. While it slightly undermines the value of each individual piece, subordinating it to Barnes' overall vision, the house itself is a unique piece of art.
I dislike how Rush tries to distinguish video and cinema, perpetuating the art vs. entertainment "dichotomy," which is, in fact, a continuum, if any distinction can be made. The past few years have made this especially apparent, as both large-scale and independent productions have begun to shift to digital production. I also resent that he tries to make a distinction, but then talks about Steve McQueen, who embodies the continuum between video art and cinema. I saw his Deadpan at the MoMA and it was presented as an homage to Keaton, a filmmaker. Another work in the chapter incorporates part of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, yet Rush still finds a difference between video art and cinema.

The clip I've included is from David Cronenberg's Videodrome, a surreal criticism of modern television culture that deals with many of the same issues about the nature of television that some video artists discussed early in the chapter were commenting on.

Video installation art

In this chapter, the part the interested me the most was the video installation that involved viewer participation; viewers are not only audiences but also a part which created the whole art piece. After reading this part, what I understanded was viewers and the installation art here was making a cycle alternatively. With the help of surveillance technique, it's like a "mirror" that you can recognize yourself and it can recognize you also in the surveillance installation art, "you" and the art piece can not be separated from each other.
Many of Bruce Nauman's works represent these kind of art. I found one of his work, an exhibition shown in a gallery pretty interesting and has the same idea as the ones introduced by Rush. But Bruce Nauman used hundred of fish instead to produce this piece. 

"The spectacle resembles something dreamed up by Magritte, a vision of fish swimming in the air during a heavy rain produced by the fish themselves"--The New York Times. The fish were hanged and filled the whole room, "swimming" in the water that pumped out from themselves, and that was also a "cycle" that similar to the idea I found out earlier in Rush's article.


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



Installation Art (Zoe Pruitt)

        What I noticed about this chapter is that the art tended to follow distinct themes. I suppose this is mostly due to the authors organization of artistic events, rather than describing installation art linearly he prefers to write categorically. However, the decision to write in this manner also suggests that video artists have subconsciously adopted a set of political topics to discuss amongst there work. 
The newsroom, for example, seemed to be a principle topic of discussion for many of the artists, especially artists who incorporated a physical television or the viewing process into there work. This is interesting when compared to last weeks section, which focused a significant amount on the influence and potential hazards of the television; having a strong opinion about an object appears to make it an ideal art tool. 
The prevalence of art about television could also be due to the Vietnam War. Many of the art pieces described were made in the 70s, and no doubt the presence of television was particularly salient at the time. The newsroom was the provider of war news about death, enemies, failure, and victory. People watched the news to become more globally aware and keep up to date on the status of their country men and loved ones. More importantly, it’s where people witnessed the horrors of war. And in the same way that art about the television newsroom reflected the period, pieces about feminism also began to become more prevalent during the feminist movement. Art about surveillance came into being after Olean, New York implemented surveillance cameras on the city streets. 
The most interesting thing about video art is that it is a perfect reflection of reality and real world problems; the medium and its reflection on reality lends itself to concrete, political, and everyday problems. 

Bill Viola- Silent Mountain 2001

Participation encouraged.

One of the most interesting portions of this chapter was the beginning  In summary, one of the main differences between video pieces and all other types of still media, is that a video piece can incorporate the audience. Several of the of the pieces described in the chapter rely on a portrayal of the audience as the actual subject matter of the piece. Interactivity with an art piece transforms the piece from a still and finished work, into a breathing and changing exhibit. For me, this quality allows art to reach a greater audience and domain. This piece, "Big Crank" demonstrates how a viewer can literally influence a whole piece's look, yet can do so with little effort on their part. Again ease of use allows this style of installation to have a greater impact.


 
Big Crank from Adi Marom on Vimeo.

Instillation - Kevin

Installation art is defined as an artistic genre of 3D works that are site specific and designed to transform the perception of a space.  This chapter in New Media is about instillation art and its creators.  One artist that caught my eye was Gary hill.  An American video and sound based instillation artist who has created many pieces from the 70's and on.  Hill likes to use large projections for his pieces like in Tall Ships.  In Tall Ships Hill projected images of people, some blurred onto a dark wall and when visitors to the piece walked into the corridor the people projected would then move (interactive).  I could not find this video online but I did find one of his pieces, Viewer.  In this video Hill's project is shown as he explains why he created it.
Personally I am very used to instillation art.  Museums like the MOMA or the Guggenheim, are mostly filled with instillation pieces.  Some I find ridiculous, ones that seemed too easy and random.  But many I have enjoyed and found extremely interesting.  At the Guggenheim there was an instillation piece where old cars were hung from the ceiling all the way down to the first floor.  Bars made of lights came out form the cars radially and the lights flashed on and off in order from within the cars to outside the cars simulating explosions.  This piece had my attention immediatly and I still remember it vividly even though I saw it years ago.
http://www.whitehotmagazine.com/UserFiles/image/Marika_Josephson/36_Inopp_Stage_One_Poster_3-5-08.jpg



Installation Chapter

Throughout this chapter, there were a couple of ideas that really caught my attention. Firstly, the conversion context into content through an installation is crucial to know in order to understand how important setting up something is and how it can impact the viewers. I never really fully understood how substantial planning is for installations especially when these become the work of art. For instance Rush explains how some artists placed mirrors for a specific purpose, and the order in which monitors are placed can affect the mood of people. When these factors begin to affect the piece of art, being a video that is showing or anything else, they become the piece of art themselves. Now it is not only about what is being displayed, but also about how it is being displayed for it directly impact the way an audience perceives the work of art. Another point that I really liked about this chapter and that I kind of mentioned last blog was the exploration of identities. Bill Viola expresses: “My work is centered on a process of personal discovery and realization. Video is part of my body; it’s intuitive and unconscious.” The idea that many of these artists find themselves through the making of a piece fascinates me. As an artist myself, I completely relate to this statement for every piece ends up defining who I am. I recently wrote an artist statement for a self-portrait that I did about a month ago. In it I included this piece was a self-reflection that allowed me to learn more about myself not only in a physical aspect, but also in a spiritual and personal one. Every time I look at myself I find something new and continue to learn who I am. It’s like my pieces are my personal diary. And because I can relate to this aspect, I seem to appreciate and understand it even more. Bill Viola was indeed one of the artists that I felt more connected with. He was known for his spiritually centered pieces and sought to understand the relation between nature and men through his pieces.