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A visit to America The late 1970 - 80s Video, Electronic, and Performance Art Introduction to American Art and Visual Culture – Lecture 8
A visit to
America The late 1970 - 80sVideo, Electronic, and Performance Art
Introduction to American Art and Visual Culture – Lecture 8
America in the 1980s:USA boycotts Olympics in MoscowBrooke Shields’ Calvin Klein adRonald Reagan electedTurner Broadcasting 24 hour newsLaunch of the first space shuttleBirth of MTVPac Man invented“Thriller” by Michael Jackson sells 20 million albums (82)Home camcorder introducedAIDS virus discover (84)Martin Luther King Day celebrated for the first time (85)Prozac introduced (88)
Early Video and Electronic Art
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faK9HUvH2ck&feature=fvw
McLuhan coined the phrases: “The Medium is the Message” and “Global village”
He also said:
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
Affluence creates poverty.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
1984
Nam June Paik
Read more: http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2586
On information superhighway with Nam June Paik
"I used the term information superhighway in a study I wrote for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1974.I thought: if you create a highway, then people are going to invent cars. That's dialectics. If you create electronic highways, something has to happen."
“Processing the signal”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MZ4U41PSuo&feature=related
A multi-part (YouTube) Documentary on early video art
Fluxus Film: Zen For Film (Nam June Paik, 1962-1964)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z1sOsIrshU&feature=related
Nam June Paik “TV Buddha” (1974)
Nam June Paik (1994) Enlightenment Compressed
Nam June Paik (1971) TV Bed
Nam June Paik (1971) Gertrude Stein
Donna Haraway declared in The Cyborg Manifesto, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
Nam June Paik installation
Nam June Paik (1970) TV Bra
• "As the Happening is the fusion of various arts, so cybernetics is the exploitation of boundary regions between and across various existing sciences.”
• -- Nam June Paik (1965)
• "The real implied issue in 'Art and Technology' is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium, which is progressing rapidly -- too rapidly. Progress has already outstripped ability to program...TV Brassiere for Living Sculpture (Charlotte Moorman) is also one sharp example to humanize electronics...and technology. By using TV as bra...the most intimate belonging of human being, we will demonstrate the human use of technology, and also stimulate viewers NOT for something mean but stimulate their phantasy to look for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology.”
• --Nam June Paik (1969)
Peter Campus
Laurie Anderson
A lot of the work in United States is highly critical of technology. I'm using 15,000 watts of power and 18 different pieces of electronic equipment to say that.
– Laurie Anderson
Robert Wilson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b26E0D2pm1c&feature=related
Mixed Categories
Eva Cassidy “Wade in the Water”
Take a break
11 second promos for MTV
http://www.livevideo.com/media/playvideo_fs.aspx?fs=1&cid=F4C07C0F8E15443BA13262636FB9BE19
William Wegman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vOP6WTqRn0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6afbl--ze8
Adrian Piper
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUJ8MhXTwtI
Vito Acconci
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYQAcHsgIwY&feature=related
Bruce Nauman
Art 21 http://video.pbs.org/video/1237561998/chapter/3/#
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtRpUB7J1tU&feature=PlayList&p=02A6F4464DB9AF33&index=0&playnext=1
Performance
"ART SHOULD NOT BE DIFFERENT THAN LIFE, BUT AN ACTION WITHIN LIFE.”
-- JOHN CAGE
What are the characteristics of Performance Art?• Performance Art is live.• Performance Art has no rules or guidelines. It is art because the
artist says it is art. It is experimental.• Performance Art is not for sale. It may, however, sell admission
tickets and film rights.• Performance Art may be comprised of painting or sculpture (or
both), dialogue, poetry, music, dance, opera, film footage, turned on television sets, laser lights, live animals and fire. Or all of the above. There are as many variables as there are artists.
• Performance Art is a legitimate artistic movement. It has longevity (some performance artists, in fact, have rather large bodies of work) and is a degreed course of study in many post-secondary institutions.
• Dada, Futurism, the Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College all inspired and helped pave the way for Performance Art.
• Performance Art is closely related to Conceptual Art. Both Fluxus and Body Art are types of Performance Art.
• Performance Art may be entertaining, amusing, shocking or horrifying. No matter which adjective applies, it is meant to be memorable.
Gina Pane performed The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973). Pane lay on a metal bed above lit candles for approximately thirty minutes. Her suffering was apparent to the audience, who witnessed her wringing her hands in pain.
Marina Abramovic's Performance of Gina Pane's The Conditioning, first of three phases in Self-Portrait(s) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York November 12, 2005 Duration: 7 hours
7000 Year Old Woman (1977)
• The Sculptor Betsy Damon created the 7000 Year Old Woman in NYC in 1977. She wanted to transform public spaces by utterly disrupting the expected role of women within them and to try to imagine an alternative world experience in which the roles, behaviors and assumptions that define gender were otherwise or not prescribed.
• She painted herself white from hair to toes (wearing white shirt and knickers and black lips) and had multicolored bags of flour attached all over her body. Her collaborator(s) painted or marked spirals in sand on the ground or sang in a protective circle around her. The 7000 Year old Woman then slowly walked these circles and broke open or handed out the colored flour bags attached all over her body.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ck89kh2vht8
Paul McCarthy
An Interview about performancehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPBqv3mkL9I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPBqv3mkL9I
GAAG• On a November afternoon in 1969, two men and two
women began to wrestle in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art until they were prone in a pool of blood, then suddenly got up and left, scattering behind them papers printed with the demand that the Rockefellers resign from the museum's board. The papers claimed that the Rockefeller family used art to ''disguise'' its involvement in the manufacture of weaponry for the Vietnam War. They were signed ''The Guerrilla Art Action Group,'' or GAAG; the acronym was a pun on gag, both as in joke and as in constraint to speech.
Lynda Benglis• Throughout the video, Benglis asks "Now?" and
"Do you wish to direct me?" and repeats commands like "Start the camera" and "I said start recording." As in On Screen, she makes faces and sounds in reply to the images on a monitor; at one point she appears to kiss herself. The word "now", used as both question and command, focuses attention on the deceptive "real" time of video, and reveals the structure underlying her presence in the video. Her first color tape, Benglis experiments with the effect of unnatural color, turning up the levels until the colors are high and artificial—which diffuses the idea of video as an impartial or "direct" medium.
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?NOW
Eva Cassidy “Wade in the Water”
Take a break
Painting Superstars of the 80s
Jean-Michel Basquiat
More: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/basquiat/street-to-studio/
Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist born in Brooklyn, New York City. He gained fame, first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a highly successful Neo-expressionist artist in the international art scene of the 1980s. Many recognize Basquiat as a leading figure in contemporary art, and his paintings continue to command high prices in the art market.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1982) Untitled
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1983) An Italian
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1984) Flexible
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1981) Skull
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David Salle
David Salle (1980) Untitled
David Salle (1980) Untitled
David Salle (1980) Satori Six Inches within Your Heart
Julian Schnabel
Jenny Holzer
a little knowledge can go a long waya lot of professionals are crackpotsa man can't know what it is to be a mothera name means a lot just by itselfa positive attitude means all the difference
in the worlda relaxed man is not necessarily a better
mana sense of timing is the mark of genius
JENNY HOLZER:TRUISMS
a sincere effort is all you can aska single event can have infinitely many
interpretationsa solid home base builds a sense of selfa strong sense of duty imprisons youabsolute submission can be a form of
freedomabstraction is a type of decadence
JENNY HOLZER:TRUISMS
http://mfx.dasburo.com/art/truisms.html
www.jennyholzer.com
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger
Also on Art 21:http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/kruger/card2.html
Susan Rothenberg
Art 21: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/rothenberg/index.html
Pontiac (1979
Untitled (1974)
Red (no date)
Faith Ringgold
Cassie Louise Lightfoot, eight years old in 1939, has a dream: to be free to go wherever she wants for the rest of her life. One night, up on "tar beach" --the rooftop of her family's Harlem apartment building--her dream comes true. The stars lift her up, and she flies over the city. She claims the buildings as her own--even the union building, so her father won't have to worry anymore about not being allowed to join just because his father was not a member. As Cassie learns, anyone can fly. "All you need is somewhere to go you can't get to any other way. The next thing you know, you're flying above the stars."
Dancing at the Louvre
The Men: Mask Face Quilt #2 (1985)
