Artist Presentation: Aisyah

Candice Breitz

     Candice Breitz is a South African artist who works primarily in video and photography. She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1972 and is now based in Berlin. She has been a Professor of Fine Art at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2007, and is represented by White Cube (London), Kaufmann Repetto (Milan), and the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg and Cape Town).

     In 1993, Breitz received her B.A. degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She then got her M.A. in Art History at the University of Chicago in 1995. Then, in 1997 she did an independent studio program at the Whitney Museum (New York) and received her M.Phil. in Art History at Columbia University (New York). In 1998-2002 she also did her Doctoral Candidate in Art History at Columbia University.

Residencies/Stipends:

• 2000   Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf (Wiepersdorf)
• 2001   O.K Centrum für Gegenwartskunst Oberösterreich (Linz)
• 2002   Artpace International Artist-in-Residence Program (San Antonio)
• 2002   Künstlerhaus Bethanien International Artists in Residency Program (Berlin)
• 2003   IASPIS International Artists' Studio Program (Stockholm)
• 2005   Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris)
• 2006   Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead)
• 2013   OCAD Residency: Nomadic Residents, Ontario College of Art & Design (Toronto)

     The most prominent theme amongst Breitz's pieces is her exploration of the identity production through the circuits of mass media: "I think of myself a little bit as a “translator”. I’m very interested in the cultures in which we grow up, the countries in which we grow up, the political system, the social system, the family system. I’m very interested in how we are shaped and sculpted by the very particular ingredients that make us who we are." (Goodman Gallery, 2012). In some of her videos, she would either interview her subjects (Factum series), use found footages from movies (Soliloquy series, Treatment, Her & Him, etc.) or stage/script a performance (The Woods trilogy, A Portrait of... series, etc.)

     Breitz's work can be found in the collections of Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Fonds National D'Art Contemporian (Puteaux, France). Over the past few decades, she has had a steady rise in international recognition — she has had solo exhibitions since 1994, as well as group exhibitions since 1995, and they've been exhibited in many places including America, Japan, Australia, Italy, England, Holland, and many more (list can be found here).

     One of her earliest work was the Factum series (2010). Breitz conducted intensive interviews with seven pairs of identical twins and a single set of triplets in and around Toronto during the summer of 2009. (Link to the series is: https://vimeo.com/album/259786).
     The most recent work she did is Treatment (2013). Here, she took three key scenes from The Brood (1979), a film that David Cronenberg often described as his version of KRAMER VS. KRAMER (also released in 1979). The piece explores the emotional strain experienced by a couple (in The Brood) as their marriage disintegrates and ensues a custody battle for their five-year-old daughter, Candice.
(Link to the piece is: https://vimeo.com/album/2534445/video/80470221).
     Although Breitz does not have a lot of artworks, the evolution of her pieces is still apparent. In her earliest days, she opted to interview identical twins (and triplets) to show how apparent each individual's voices, attitudes, body languages and views on the world are, no matter how identical each set of twins (or triplets) look. As she progressed through the years, she started becoming more interested in using found footages from movies (i.e. Hollywood films) to tackle/explore identity production.

Sources:

• Her vimeo account
• Artnet
• Goodman Gallery
• Art Forum
• Kaufmann Repetto
• Candice Breitz Official Website
• White Cube

Yoko Ono(Yukun Liu)

Yoko Ono is a Japanese American musician and avant-garde artist. She was born in Tokyo in 1933 to a rich, noble family. Until the start of the Second World War, her family traveled back and forth between Japan due to her father’s job as a banker. Thanks to this experience, she was exposed to not only different cultures and religions, but also to a more liberal Western lifestyle. During her college life, her bohemian lifestyle was not approved by her parents. In 1955, she dropped out of university and moved to New York City in search of her own artistic style and the freedom to work with diverse artists. However, Most of people know her because she is the second wife of John Lennon and her influence to Beatles. In the early 1960s, Yoko Ono has been someone of avant-garde art area. In 1964, for the first time she performed her most famous performance art, Cut Piece. And in 1966, when she did Cut Piece again in London, she met John Lennon. Since then, her art has been known by more and more people.

Since she dropped out of school, she didn’t get formal art education. She concentrates in music and performance art. Cut Piece, as her most famous performance art, people were invited to the stage to cut her clothe off until she is naked. And she developed her own genre of music which combined Avant-garde, rock, pop, electronica, Shibuya-kei, and Fluxus.

After married to John Lennon, they collaborated on art, film and musical projects, and became famous for their series of "conceptual events" to promote world peace, including the "bed-in" held in an Amsterdam hotel room during their honeymoon in 1969. Yoko Ono focused on world peace all the time. Also, she thought that what limits art is the genre, and she said that she doesn’t belong to any genres. It was the genres, movements and organizations limit the modern art.

Yoko Ono is the witch of art. She is still active these days and fighting for world peace through her art work. Unfortunately, her art couldn’t be accepted by most of us these days. We can find video of her singing online but most comments are talking about they don’t understand the art.

Her Cut Piece video of 1965:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ3dPwa2tI

Video of her singing Fireworks by Katy Perry (2012):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrJz9Dh5MsM

Ryan Trecartin (onnolee)

Ryan Trecartin was born in 1981 in Texas. His introduction to video art came when he received a Sony Handycam for his 17th birthday and began to bring it to school. It had a night-vision lens, which allowed him to capture a lot of the youthful mischief that continues to permeate his later work. The Blair Witch Project had recently come out when he received the camera, and it ended up being an interesting way to make friends - he moved around fairly often as a kid (his middle school was geared specifically towards the arts, but for high school he went to a standard school in Ohio). He had already built up a portfolio of drawings, paintings, scuptures, and photographs that got him into RISD, but when he got to RISD he ended up focusing in video and animation, and making several friends who have continued to collaborate with him.

His work tends to either instantly ping viewers’ understanding of reality, or repel and disgust them - and fortunately for him, many art critics have fallen into the first camp. His art deals with him being something of a bridge - he was born at the same time technology and the Internet was advancing at an extremely rapid pace, and was changing the way people his age interacted with each other. He also deals intensely with issues of identity - in one of his pieces, many of the characters are named Jenny, and all of them are trying to live up to their own ideas of the archetypal arch-Jenny. People are painted ridiculous colors and deliver their lines in a stilted, nearly robotic way, while overwhelming the viewer with 8 trillion different stimuli - some have called his films an ADHD simulator, which isn’t at all inaccurate (coming from someone with ADHD). The first time he worked with a fully-written script, he didn’t actually let any of the actors or actresses read it, he would just tell them their lines and have them repeat back until he heard something that worked.

His aesthetic has progressed into a strange fusion of Geocities-esque net-art and early 2000s MTV, while continuing the theme of evolution through technology and what that means for identity. Where he exhibits his work is difficult to explain - his non-video work has been a part of many gallery shows, but his video work has been requested all over the place, from film festivals to art shows (including the MoMA) to niche aesthetic forums on the internet.

His senior thesis, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), is available here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5nclmEYkqk

HIs most recent project, Center Jenny (2013), is available here.

https://vimeo.com/75735816

I adore him. It's difficult to explain why - his films capture my attention in ways nothing else can, and it feels like he's speaking an incredibly specific language that I can understand.

Jack Scardino Artist Presentation - Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham grew up in Suffolk in England.  As a child, he loved films such as Alien, Blade Runner, and The Elephant Man.  “I was obsessed to the point where I could have told you who worked as the gaffer on those films,” he said.  Cunningham also developed a passion for electronic music, likely influenced by his father who played him Pinky Floyd and Tomita records when he was young.  “I immediately connected with the tones and the textures and the fact that you were entering a parallel world when you listened to them.”

Cunningham’s career started in the mid-1990s with work on animatronics and costuming for the 1994 film Judge Dredd.  His work on the ABC Warrior and Mean Machine impressed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who sought-out Cunningham for an upcoming film that Steven Spielberg would later finish (A.I.).  After working on this project, Cunningham left to pursue directing, and broke-through with the music video for electronic musician Aphex Twin’s song “Come to Daddy”.  Cunningham has primarily directed music videos and other short films since 1997, many of which feature Aphex Twin’s music.  He also produces and writes music today.

Many of Cunningham’s works maintain a dark, disturbed, or distorted sensibility to them.  He says he enjoys visuals that are stripped-down and minimal, which he attributes partially to his growing-up.  The house he grew-up in was not a heavily populated area, and was also close nearby an active air-force base.  In a way this is the opposite of the setting of Blade Runner, yet as Cunningham explains the atmosphere of the film is such a strong statement: “So melancholy, and the strangest feeling of nostalgia for a place and time that never was.”  This understanding of setting and the relationship between visual pacing and sound is something that Cunningham maintains in his work.  Many of his videos including those for “Come to Daddy”, “Windowlicker”, and Rubber Johnny, create distinctly unsettling feelings due to the marrying of visual and sound.  Cunningham also has a strong affinity for the human form, which he features in many of his works including the video for Bjork’s song “All Is Full of Love”.  (Incidentally, it is worth noting that the android featured in the Bjork music video was conceived of and created years before the popular Will Smith film I, Robot was made.)

            Cunningham has had his art featured in galleries such as Barbican Centre (London), Royal Academy of Arts (London), the Venice Biennale (Venice), and 5^th Gallery in Dublin.  He has also directed some commercials for brands such as Gucci, Levi’s, Nissan, and PlayStation.  Many people have been able to view his work online, particularly his music videos for artists such as Bjork, Aphex Twin, the Auteurs, Squarepusher, Portishead, and Madonna.

Chris Cunningham is known for being very experimental, and there is variance in the visual styles of his works.  He has also pursued many interests, and at the age of 44 he has created props for feature films, directed music videos, edited videos, and written and produced music of his own.  As such, describing an overarching artistic “evolution” is difficult to do, but here are two popular pieces that appropriately represent Chris Cunningham as an artist.

“All Is Full of Love” – Bjork, 1999

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0cS1FaKPWY

An excerpt from the short film Flex, featuring music by Aphex Twin, 2000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb2kKjnCA6A

Finally, I recommend looking-up the music video for Aphex Twin’s song “Windowlicker”, which is essentially the reason why I chose to study Chris Cunningham.  I find it both hilarious and ingenious on multiple levels.  Notice: You might not want to play it at work.

The Fantasy Beyond Control Yukun

The first thing that came out of my head was magic when it talks about interactive work in The Fantasy Beyond Control by Lynn Hershman. It’s hard to believe anyone in this world doesn’t like magic. It’s a great interactive art but I’m not sure if magic counts for performance art when I try to link this to the other reading. Magic has a fairly low status compared to other forms of theatre. Jerry Seinfeld talked about it, “What is the point of the magician? He comes on, he fools you, you feel stupid, show’s over. You never know what’s actually happened. It’s like, here’s a quarter. Now it’s gone. You’re a jerk.” Unfortunately Seinfeld is right for the majority of magic performances. The issue of magic as an art form is often discussed by magicians, but not so much in the literature on performance arts. Magic is mostly seen as a second rate type of performance art with nothing much to offer beyond frivolous entertainment. Back to the article, one thing that the author mentioned is that “computer systems will eventually reflect the personality and the biases of users. Yet these systems only appear to talk back.” Human-computer interaction is a kind of interactive art. The author thought and interactive media is important because the perceptions became the key to reality. In Art as Performative Enactment, the sequence talked about playing the game attract me,” ‘I am playing the game’; ‘we are playing the game’; ‘the game is being played through our movements’; and finally ‘the game plays itself through our movements.’” This describes the key of playing a game. It shows the interaction between the game and the player as a round way trip. This is a simple piece of interactive art I found that can explain the idea well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCMhGRyUKaY.

Danielle Rennalls: Art as Performative Enactment

According to the article art as a performative enactment is an idea developed by Hans Georg Gadamer that consists of three elements; play (“…perfomative enactment through movement…”), symbol “(…[existence of] self-presentation that enables self-recognition) and festival/fest (“…enacting an experience of community in solidarity).

The purpose of all three elements in relation to art as a performative enactment and essentially what ties them together is the fact that they possess the qualities of a double-sided sword. In essence these elements do not work solely in one direction, but rather forwards and backwards simultaneously. Standing alone these elements lose there meaning, but together they build off each other creating the concept known as art as a performative enactment.

Take for instance the element of play. As stated by the author of this article, “Movement is the key to play – but only secondarily the movement of the player.” This essentially means that the main purpose of play is not player’s movement but rather it is the player’s interaction with the game with the intention of allowing the game to take over his/her movement. “The purpose of the game is simply to be played so that the game becomes master over the players…It is proper to say in sequence: ‘I am playing the game’; ‘we are playing the game’; ‘the game is being played through our movements’; and finally ‘the game plays itself through our movements.’” This illustrates the notion of the double-sided sword because the concept of play is not solely one directional from player to game, but rather works both ways generating a relationship from game to player as well. Essentially if the player does not allow the game to take over, they will have no success in their attempt to embody the movements needed to defeat the game.

Though the notions underlying symbol and festival may be different from that of play, the concept of needing interaction between the element, the artist and audience remains the same. Take for instance Steven Cohen’s performance in 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsx9gtQM8f8, this is one that I believe represents the element of symbol for it “…calls our being into question [and] transports us into another order of things…” His performance is in fact the existence of self-presentation.

Though I would never allow myself to do something so extreme, it is fascinating the lengths people go create a piece and to embody the elements of performance art.

Art as Performative and Fantasy beyond control- Karina

Art as a Performative Act presents Hans-Georg Gadamar ideas on art. He says that the “truth of art asserts itself when the work engages us and says something to us about what it means to be ourselves in the world.” The truth also originates from the three concepts of play, symbol, and festival. Symbol is by far the most recognized concept of art as art as “I see and have the thing itself, but only in materials that are not literally the thing itself”.  In performance art, the body is able to play the role of many symbols through the context that you build around it or the movement (play) you are making. If the art is a live performance art such as Marina Abramovic’s piece “The Artist is present”, it highlights the play and festival components of the art as people are asked to engage in the piece themselves or are a part of the spectating group. All art has the three components that Gadamar was talking about, but when the art is an actual literal performance whether it is live or not, these concepts are magnified because it calls for the viewer and the artist to be engaged in it on a higher level.

In the Fantasy Beyond Control, the author really stresses the importance of interactive media because it calls for more participation from the viewer. Lynn states “The very act of viewing a captured image creates a distance from the original event. The captured image becomes a relic of the past.” Lynn’s importance of interactive media is that it creates a changing timeline based on the interaction and “replaces some of the nostalgic longings with a sense of identity, purpose, and hope”. I agree that interactive media allows us not to get stuck in the past but I feel that some pieces that aren’t interactive, if done right, don’t get stuck in “nostalgic longings”. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYBXRwsDjY

For example, Olivier de Sagazan’s performance piece recording  is a recording with actions that will never change and it will always be the same, but what he does completely dissociated me from viewing the video as a video and engaged me fully. It made me feel uncomfortable to view what he was doing in front of me and brought me in visually but also emotionally though his outbursts and actions.