Artist Presentation: Bill Viola (Sean Strelow)

Bill Viola is a video artist who focuses on experiences that everyone can connect to as humans, such as birth and death, often in a religious context. He was raised in Queens and Westbury, New York, and graduated from Syracuse University with a BFA in Experimental Studios in 1973. Upon graduating, he was involved in both music and visual art. Viola joined David Tudor in his music group “Rainforest” from 1973 to 1980. He also lived for 18 months in Florence, Italy, where he joined one of the first video art studios in Europe, Art/Tapes/22, as the technical director of production.

His fascination with ubiquitous human experiences is pervasive throughout all his work. Throughout his early career, Viola recorded various actions already taking place in the world, from recording classical performing arts in such places as Bali and Japan to, later, journeying to the Sahara desert to record mirages. His recording of classical performing arts represents his desire to reach the core of the various cultures he traveled to, to get at the very essence of human nature. Viola’s Sahara desert mirage work, too, shows his draw to explore happenings that everyone, regardless of culture or background, can understand. We have all experienced heat before. He takes this basic concept and probes it further, looking at extreme heat and the environment, and making it abstract.

Early in his career, Viola focused heavily on a performer as the subject of the piece, evident in his recording of classical performing arts as well as in films such as Reflecting Pool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHdX7sApIMc

Here, we see Viola using innovative technologies with the still frame as the man jumps into the pool. The key, though, is that the performative action of the subject is what draws the viewer into the piece. The image of a man resonates with the audience; we can all connect to him on a basic level. Then we see him jump towards the pool, but freeze in mid-air. Our expectations subverted, our concept of time and specifically memory are called into question. Perhaps, Viola wants us to focus on this moment in between actions, the moment after the man decides to jump but before he hits the water. This in between space seems to be the point of the piece. It could not be achieved, however, without the focal point of the subject, emerging from the woods and captivating our attention.

In Viola’s later work, Chott el-Djerid, however, we see that he moves from a subject focus to a more abstract focus. The landscape of the piece serves as the primary focus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh-XDid9j7Q

We see that Viola chooses to begin in snowy, Midwestern landscapes. Toward the end of that section, a person emerges, but one very obscured by the snow and quite far away, coming towards the camera. This subject falls down, signifying the failure of the subject to control our attention in Viola’s progression from people-oriented works to abstract, landscape-driven ones. And then we cut to the desert, including a horizon-line match to the Midwest section, and equally as barren, this time without any humans in sight.

Recently, Viola has returned to more of a subject focus in his work, as we see in his piece Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), which was installed in St. Paul’s Cathedral in May 2014.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntj83U4ihf4

Here, Viola brings religious imagery together with four subjects. The second one becomes a kind of inverted Christ figure, hanging in a cross-like pose upside down with water raining down on him. The background a pitch black, this piece focuses entirely on the subjects and the elements that berate them, focusing on their struggle.

            Viola’s next work, Mary, will function as a second part to Martyrs and also be displayed in St. Paul’s Cathedral. His more recent works have trended towards being displayed in museums, from his early days of pure videotape. This makes his art have a relational aspect to where it is stationed; before, people could watch his videos anywhere, and now, while that is still possible, the place affects how viewers think about the video and vice versa. The religious connotation of St. Paul’s Cathedral brings to mind the inverted Christ figure of the second martyr, which we may not have noticed otherwise or, perhaps, not as readily. It brings the idea to the forefront of our heads; it primes us for thinking about his work in a religious context. Viola has returned to his human-focused style, but still manages to innovate with new video technologies and relational priming based on the location of the piece, all the while maintaining his interest in religious imagery and ubiquitous human experiences.

Sources:

http://www.billviola.com/biograph.htm

http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/bill-viola-installations-and-videotapes-poetics-light-and-time

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/108765

https://www.stpauls.co.uk/history-collections/history/bill-viola

Andy Warhol- Karina Banda

Andy Warhol was an American artist born in August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with parents that emigrated from Slovakia. His family were Catholics and went to church regularly. His father was a laborer and worked in a coal mine.

During his childhood, he often had to stay at home because he was sick and he sometimes had bouts of Sydenham’s chorea disease, which is a nervous system disease that causes involuntary and uncoordinated jerking movements. Since he stayed home a lot, he became an outcast at school but grew very close to his mother.  His constant bad health though made him hypochondriac, which means he had a fear of hospitals and doctors.

            As he stayed home a lot, he would draw, listen to the radio, and collect pictures of movie stars.  As a kid he also took free classes at the Carnegie Institute and received his first camera around the age of 9 and would develop his own pictures in his basement. Although his dad passed away when he was 13, his father had recognized and supported his talent and had saved up money for Warhol’s college. Andy ended up attending Carnegie Institute of Technology studying Pictorial Design in 1945 and wanted to become a commercial illustrator.  While he was there, he joined the Modern Dance Club, where he was the only male, and the Beaux Arts Society. He also served as the art director of the student art magazine, Cano, where his first published artworks are featured in. Here you can see a drawing that he did that was used as the cover for one of the issues: http://www.warhol.org/Warhol/Content/collection/art/earlywork/1998-1-1590/. The younger of his two older brothers also operated a small photo studio that had a photobooth machine and the customers would get the black and white product but also a hand-colored portrait. Warhol himself worked in the display department at Horne’s department store during his time in college.

After graduating from college, Warhol moved to New York City with his classmate Phillip Pearlstein to start working as a commercial artist. In September 1949, his work debuted in Glamour which you can see here: http://www.warhol.org/ArtCollections.aspx?id=1673. He had a unique style of drawing and he became one of the most successful illustrators during that time. His signature drawing style was the blotted line technique, which he developed during his college years. Warhol would ink an image in reverse and then put it down onto a clean sheet of paper, which resulted in unique and playful imagery.

            Starting in the late 1950s he devoted more time to his art through his paintings and 1962 marked the beginning of his celebrity status, which is when he did his famous Campbell’s Soup Can series (http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79809) . What he is most famous for are his silk screen printings. For these, he would pick an image and have it be transferred into a high contrast black and white image on transparent film, which he used as his film positive and his stencil.  You can view the whole process here: http://exhibitions.warhol.org/interactive/silkscreen/main.html.

Warhol was a man of many talents and his mediums included drawings, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, music, and computer generated art. He was a leader of Pop art, which is the art movement that challenges the traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture.  The theme surrounding his work was the effects of media as a dehumanizer. The basis of his critique was that something can be very beautiful alone but when there are multitudes of it, it decreases its beauty or value. In popular culture, the mechanistic and mass production of an image erodes its meaning and value.  He mimicked this in this work through his use of screen-printing as it provided an easy and fast way to reproduce an image. He also mimicked this in his way of working as he set up his workspace almost like a factory and did call it The Factory. He structured the work inside the Factory like an assembly line where his interns and other hired personals would help complete his works. It was also known to through many parties and Warhol himself frequently went out to clubs and meddled with drugs such as Adderall and heroin.

            Warhol got his first film camera in 1963 and from then until 1968, he produced almost 650 films.  The styles in his films differed from silent portrait films and full-length movies that were from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation”. Sexploitation films are films that exhibit non-explicit sexual situations and nudity. His early film works are more simple ones that recorded ordinary things with no plot. His first film was actually just a recording of a man sleeping for hours. Warhol liked to choose things that were icons, as the public share a meaning in it like Marilyn Monroe and coke cans.

In 1964, he came out with Empire, an 8-hour silent black and white film featuring footage of the Empire State Building at night (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqDHuaVFlyw). I actually was lucky enough to see this film while I was in NYC last year at the James Fuentes gallery but I did not stay for more than 30 minutes. The shoot was actually only 6.5 hours and shot at the standard 24 frames a second but is played in 16 frames per second because he wanted it to have a touch of unreality in it. The film, although very simple, keeps us thinking about the medium of film itself. As you stare at the image of the building, your attention is brought to the texture of the film’s image and flickering of the shot image. Most of the time with film, you forget you are experiencing it through a camera’s lens and the camera seems invisible but here it is brought to the center of your attention. Picking the Empire State Building also adds to the film as it is an American icon. You think of what it stands for and then you think of the building itself as a sculpture.

He started with plotless films but as he progressed, he started adding soundtracks and sketchy scripts. One of his later films, the Nude Restaurant from 1967, is a 95 minute length film shot at a restaurant. There are different versions of this film: one all male, one all nude cast, and one with all the actors in G-strings. Here you can see part of the all nude one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87uqMzj3lsI. The film actually starts in a bathroom with the main women in a tub with a man and follows her to her waitress job at a nude restaurant. The only action is really conversation throughout the whole thing. His films became a form of cinema verite where the delight was in watching strange people doing strange things. In 1968 though, Warhol was shot by one of the Factory people and he withdrew from filmmaking. Instead, Paul Morrissey helped direct the rest of his productions.

Danielle Rennalls: Laurel Nakadate

Laurel Nakadate was born on December 15, 1975 in Austin Texas and raised in Ames, Iowa. In 1998 Nakadate graduated with a BFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University. She then went on to achieve her MFA in 2001 in photography from Yale University.

From a very early age Nakadate developed a passion for the arts. This passion was greatly influenced by her family’s love for telling stories and her father’s profession as an American Literature Professor at Iowa State University, ultimately deciding her faith as an artist. Growing up in the middle of nowhere Nakadate had to create her own fun. Though she participated in theater performance and dance, the only thing Nakadate dreamed of doing was working with photography.

Though most of Nakadate’s work involves her active participation, this was not the case during her undergraduate career. In her first project entitled “Girl’s School,” she documented girls from Wellesley and Smith Colleges doing ordinary everyday activities, using 35mm. This project sparked her interest in exploring the process by which girls become women. However after moving on to graduate school Nakadate found herself feeling lonely in a new City, as she knew no one. Therefore she became her own subject, placing herself in front of the camera ultimately changing her approach to her work, sparking her transition into video art.

Now in front of the camera Nakadate wanted to explore her options and move outside of her comfort zone, and her move to New Haven proved to be a great contributor to this. In Boston, Nakadate was invisible for no one bothered to stop to speak with her, however now in New Haven strange men stopped her all the time. Nakadate believed it was in her best interest to utilize each of these encounters since these persons were interested in her. Therefore in the year 2000 she decided that rather than brushing off the attention of unknown men who were constantly approaching her, she would encourage them. Her goal was to desire to connect with the strangers just as they had desired to connect with her. 

Upon meeting these men, Nakadate would propose to go home with them if they agreed to collaborate with her in the making of a video art. Nakadate’s reasoning behind this exchange was that she was fascinated by the encounter that occurs between two strangers when they are in a room together alone. The idea that anything can happen always fascinated her because she believed two people walking into a room can create a whole new world. She also believed this strategy was no less that what a documentary photographer does for a living, because she too was using the home's of strange men as her set in order to bring her story and ideas alive.

Nakadate’s first video was made in 2000 and was entitled “Happy Birthday”. In this video she went to a strange man’s home in a party dress with a cake she baked and decorated for her fake birthday. The strange man sang to her and they sat and ate the cake together.  In 2009 Nakadate made a photo series entitled “Lucky Tiger” where she took photos of herself in sexual poses and hired men on Craigslist to view them with ink on their fingers, which produced the smudges that appear on the images. In her latest work entitled 365 days: A Catalogue of Tears, Nakadate documented herself crying everyday of the year 2010. This project she says was inspired by surfing social media sites such as Facebook and realizing that every post that was made by her friends and other random strangers were all happy and content. She knew they were all faking this happiness because it was not possible that all 3,000 of her Facebook friends could be happy every day, all at once. Therefore she decided that she would fake her sadness since they could fake their happiness.

http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2011-interview-with-laurel-nakadate/2212

http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Artist-Laurel-Nakadate-at-crossroads-of-sex-power-2475514.php#photo-2037683

http://www.vice.com/video/laurel-nakadate

 The evolution of her work from 2000 to 2010 has demonstrated her desire to discuss issues and thoughts that others may have but not want to address. Each piece have drawn a deeper and more personal connection to her concept though they have different underlying meanings. Throughout the years, Nakadate has expanded the way she addresses issues by continuously raising the stakes and the emotions involved as she presents us with new issues. In all her work however, Nakadate took risks ranging from physical to emotional danger, because she believes that as artists unless risks are taken there is no sense in creating a piece. 

Today Nakadate currently lives in Queens, New York. Her works have been shown in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey; and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. Her work has also been exhibited internationally at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the Reina Sofia in Madrid; and the Berlin Biennial. Her first feature-length film, Stay The Same Never Change, premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and was featured in New Directors/New Films 2009 at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center, New York. Her second feature, The Wolf Knife, premiered at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival, and was nominated for a 2010 Gotham Award and a 2011 Independent Spirit Award.

P.S. Nakadate’s best pickup line from a stranger: “Give me a call, let’s hang out, and if my mom picks up the phone just tell her you met me at the Home Depot.” It’s not really a pickup, but it’s a great line!

Christian Cieri - "The Fantasy Beyond Control" and "Art as a Performance Act"

Lynn Herchann’s “The Fantasy Beyond Control” spoke of interactive media, specifically on interactive systems where observers completely controlled their experience. For me, this raised a very important question on what exactly an interactive media was. In the instance of Lorna, observers could control what occurred with their experience, and ultimately became creators of this media. However, are they really observers anymore? They’ve created something new, as it’s different for every person. When I read interactive systems, I immediately thought of video games as being an interactive system I use each day. But this thinking was flawed; while the experience of the same video game is different for multiple people, and they control what occurs, the game has a set ending, or endings, that define the entire experience. Thus, video game players are still observers. But here, the interactive system users are becoming creators in that their experience, though it can be replicated by someone else, is totally unscripted, and can end in unexpected ways.

Klemm’s article “Art as a Performance Act” was rather thought provoking as well, as it touched along the same lines of Herchann’s, but in a different manner. Klemm’s main focus on how physical objects become more when interacted with is interesting to think about because it’s such a true fact that we always take for granted. An object is just an object until we interact with it; then it has definition and a purpose. For example, a chair is something we all sit in, and we know that, but when not actively sitting in a chair, it is just an object taking up space in a room. When we finally do sit on it, it has become something for us to use, and while it is still an object, we are interacting with it and giving it a purpose.

After reading these two artciles, one artist that stuck out in my mind was Andy Warhol, for his Brillo Boxes. A recreation of Brillo Boxes and nothing more, Andy Warhol took an everyday object, recreated it, and called it art. Empty boxes are these “objects” that have no meaning, but now that people have stopped to mentally interact with them, and think about them, they are art.

The Brillo Boxes can be found here:

http://www.warhol.org/education/resourceslessons/Aesthetics--Arthur-Danto/

Fantasy Beyond Control, Art as Performative Enactment Response (Lauren)

One thing I think both “Art as Performative Enactment” and “The Fantasy Beyond Control” had in common is the comparison between objectivity and subjectivity – the act of perceiving art and performance pieces in general.  For example in “Art as Perfomative Enactment” it talks about symbols and how they play a role in the art industry.  Symbols, similar to those used in mathematics, are not considered representative or expressive.  When subjectivity and perception is considered though, Hershman says reality and perception is verified by words and visual codes, meaning symbols could mean so much more if we choose to perceive them in a particular way. 

John Cage’s 4’33’’ is very representative of the message the two articles were conveying.  This famous piece involves 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence; if the viewer/listener were being objective, they would simply think it is silence – nothing more, nothing less.  But if we were to listen to the piece subjectively, the listener starts to understand that this piece is significant for several different reasons.  Each time the piece is performed it is different because a cough from the audience or a musician turning their sheet music is included into the piece, yet the piece as a whole is performed in the exact same way.  It has brought up the question “what is sound?” similar to the question “what is art?” and both questions will likely never have a definitive answer. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY7UK-6aaNA