Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists. Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life. Confronted with the question “What to do?” in his studio soon after leaving school, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”

Source

https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s1/identity/

start at 2;20, 13 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7DWz_jMtR4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOB5L89cC8A

 

 

Untitled (three large animals), 1989

Untitled (Three Large Animals) is one of a series of works Nauman has made using ready-made taxidermic molds which are normally used in modelling stuffed animals. It is closely related to Untitled (Two Wolves, Two Deer) (private collection) which was made earlier in the same year, and constructed from the same animal parts. In both works the artist has created hybrid creatures of impossible anatomical structure using the disparate sections of the two animals, wolf and deer. By using thin wire to join and suspend the animals in a circular formation, Nauman creates a sense of delicacy at odds with the brutality of the processes evoked by the animals’ severed and reconstituted forms. Connecting predator and prey on an equalizing level, the hybrids propose all animal life as similarly vulnerable.

La Brea/Art Tips/Rat Spit/Tar Pits (1972)

For his 1972 retrospective, Nauman proposed an outdoor work that would encircle the walls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which stands adjacent to a famous prehistoric site, La Brea Tar Pits. The piece included the name of the site along with two anagrams of these four words depicted in neon tubing. This work is an indoor version that Nauman made in the same year. Throughout the early 1970s Nauman created several more luminous signs that used a combination of witty word games and bold colour to disturb the meaning of everyday phrases and expressions.

Violins Violence Silence (1981-2)

This wall-hung work comprises the words ‘VIOLINS’, ‘VIOLENCE’, and ‘SILENCE’ spelled out in coloured neon tubing. Each word appears twice; one of each pair is written left to right while the other is presented backwards from right to left. The six words are composed to form a loosely triangular shape, the horizontal bottom of which consists of two instances of the word ‘SILENCE’, one overlaid on top of the other so that the individual letters are barely distinguishable.

“Art critic Gregory Volk has detected links between the words in the form of a narrative, noting that ‘violence often results in violins, as in funeral music, as well as in silence: The silence of victims and the silence of those who chose not to bear witness or to oppose’ (Ketner, Kraynak and Volk 2006, pp.71).”

Violent Incident (1986)

In 1973 Nauman employed professional actors for the first time in his videotapes, previously having used his own body. He then stopped working with video for twelve years, returning to it in 1985 (see Good Boy, Bad Boy Tate T06853). He has said that the confrontational work he made around this time stemmed from his feelings of ‘anger and frustration … My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other. It’s not that I think I can change that, but it’s just such a frustrating part of human history.’

Artworks sourced from the Tate website

 

Short Video on his process…

Erwin Wurm is a contemporary Austrian artist working across media with a critical approach to visualizing present-day life. Often featuring comic or absurdist elements in his mix of sculpture, painting, performance, video, and photography, the artist acknowledges that “[for me] humor is primarily a method for getting people’s attention—it should ultimately prompt people to look at things more carefully,” and places the viewer’s engagement as the most important ingredient in his art. Born in 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria, Wurm follows in the tradition of Joseph Beuys with ideas around “social sculpture” with his popular One Minute Sculptures series of short performance pieces, inviting audience participation and interaction in a manner similar to Ernesto Neto’s immersive installations.

Source

One Minute Sculptures (on going)

In the series ‘One Minute Sculptures’ by Erwin Wurm viewers are asked to do more than merely look at the museum artworks surrounding them, but to experience the artworks and themselves in new ways. In the form of drawings or brief written directions, the visitor is instructed and encouraged to become an artwork – a ‘One Minute Sculpture’ – for the duration of sixty seconds.

Source

Do it, 1996

Psycho III, 1996

Double Bucket, 1999

Theory of Hope, 2016

Discipline of Subjectivity (2006)

 

Melting Houses (2005-2010)

 

 

Sourced from Erwin Wurm’s Website

 

Born in 1973. Lives and works in Toronto.

Jon Sasaki’s multidisciplinary art practice brings performance, video, object and installation into a framework where expectation and outcome never align, generating a simultaneous sense of pathos and fun. His work employs reason-based approaches reminiscent of conceptual art while investigating romantic subjects; in this juxtaposition, Sasaki creates humorous, self-exhaustive systems caught in cycles of trial and error.

Source

Jack Pine, 8′ Camera Crane (2010)

A sweeping 360-degree crane shot at the majestic vista where the notable Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson created his iconic Jack Pine (1916-1917.) Far more cumbersome than a paint box, the crane literally clashes with the subject with slapstick intensity. An affectionate critique of the ineradicable Canadian landscape genre, and a humourous look at the ways it can be incompatible with some tools of contemporary art-making.

Dead End, Eastern Market, Detroit (2015)

In Detroit’s rapidly-gentrifying Eastern Market neighbourhood, a white van approaches the fenced-off dead end of an alleyway, before beginning a laborious, tense and exhausting process of course correction.

The Romantic Journey Was Usually a Solitary One (2014)

The second seat of a two-rider tandem bicycle has been cut out and discarded, with the remaining components brazed back together, reconfigured as serviceable transportation for one.

Flyguy Triggering His Own Motion Sensor (2010)

A flyguy (one of the familiar dancing inflatables that wave people into carwashes and fast food restaurants) has been moved into the gallery and hooked up to a motion sensor. In this tragicomic installation, he writhes on the ground, making heartbreaking convulsions in front of the motion sensor. If he were to stop for a moment, the power would shut off and he would fall still forever.

Sourced from Jon Sasaki’s Website

Germaine Koh is a Canadian visual artist based in Vancouver. Her conceptually-generated work is concerned with the significance of everyday actions, familiar objects and common places. Koh was a recipient of the 2010 VIVA Award, and a finalist for the 2004 Sobey Art Award. Formerly an Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada, she is also an independent curator and partner in the independent record label weewerk.

 

Home Made Home: Core (2016)

Core is a concept for a versatile suite of large cabinets which contain essential living services. Built in multiples of a standard dimension, the units can be placed in various configurations. Each unit is built on casters for ease of shipping and deployment.The protoype is constructed of oiled plywood. The bed unit contains a fold-down bed, lighting, and a closet. A countertop unit may be customized as a kitchen or office. A WC shell may be customized and plumbed into existing on-site services. Integrated lighting plugs into existing electrical outlets

Gleaning (2014)

Gleaning is an interactive map of current and historic sources of food. It is a resource for information on public food sources, food production and circulation, historic points of interest related to agriculture and the food industry, community stories about food, and notes about the natural environment.
The project is largely built through images and text by neighourhood residents and users. In its first stage, Gleaning focuses on the Marpole neighbourhood of Vancouver, a now-residential area that was once farmland, and before that important within First Nations trade.

The map sorts this information into layers that may be turned on and off:
•    Public Food:  food trees and edible plantings in public spaces, berry patches, fishing spots, etc.
•    Community:  shared food-based resources, such as community gardens, soup kitchens, food-related neighbourhood services, and water sources.
•    History:  historical information about agriculture, trade, hunting, and gathering.
•    Environment:  information about the natural environment, geography and geology of the area.

 

GroundWaterSeaLevel (2014)

Five industrial metal pipes, sized like tree trunks or utility poles, rise from a planted area bordering a traffic circle. Each is perforated by a grid of hundreds of silicone-encased LEDs. The lit LEDs suggest two separate bands of light, one blue and one green, that extend across the five poles, at the same elevation on each pole. At times, the two colored bands appear to overlap to create a light blue band.
The lights, slowly but constantly changing over time, represent actual climactic conditions in the immediate area. The green band represents the level of moisture in the soil at the foot of the poles, while the blue band represents the flooding and ebbing tide level in the adjacent Burrard Inlet. Both levels correspond to the actual conditions as measured by physical sensors installed in these locations. Continually changing, the piece’s slow modulation will remind us of, and return us to, the pace of natural processes.

Fallow (2005, 2009)

Instead of displaying a crop of new work, for one exhibition period the space lies fallow. The floor space of the gallery is completely covered with soil and plant matter from nearby vacant land. Plants and seeds in the soil continue to grow over the course of the show, during which time the trade practices and commercial goals usually associated with an exhibition are slowed to processes of waiting and watching. Still, within this environment there may be a multitude of quiet and sensuous details to be observed, as well as wide-ranging opportunities for reflection — for example, upon the functions of productivity, or about the value and relatively endangered nature of open space. The temporary situation might give pause to consider that, like crop rotation, enforced downtime — time outs — may be an important part of a sustainable production cycle. Although withdrawn from “constructive” use, the exhibition space is far from empty, but rather full of richly non-productive time and process.

Sourced from Germaine Koh’s Website

Katie Paterson has become known for her multidisciplinary and conceptually-driven work with an emphasis on nature, ecology, geology and cosmology.  Many of her poetic installations have been the result of intensive research and collaboration with specialists as diverse as astronomers, geneticists, nanotechnologists, jewelers and firework manufacturers.

Source

Earth-Moon-Earth, 2007

 

All the Dead Stars, 2009

A map documenting the locations of just under 27,000 dead stars – all that have been recorded and observed by humankind.

Timepieces, 2014

A series of nine clocks that tell the time on all the planets in our solar system, including Earth’s Moon. The durations of the day range from planet to planet, from the shortest on Jupiter to the longest on Mercury. Each clock is calibrated to tell the time in relation to the other planets and to the time on Earth.

Mercury 4223 hours
Venus 2802 hours
Earth 24 hours
Moon 708 hours
Mars 24 hours 40minutes
Jupiter 9 hours 56 minutes
Saturn 10 hours 39 minutes
Uranus 17 hours 14 minutes
Neptune 16 hours 6 minutes

 

Totality, 2016

Totality is a mirrorball made with images of nearly every solar eclipse documented by humankind. Totaling over 10,000 unique images, these eclipses come together to reflect the progression of an eclipse across the room – from total through to quarter and half eclipses – mirroring the sequence of the Sun eclipsed by the Moon.

Hollow, 2016

Spanning millions of years, ‘Hollow’ is a miniature forest of all the world’s forests, telling the history of the planet through the immensity of tree specimens in microcosm. The sculpture brings together over 10,000 unique tree species, from petrified wood fossils of the earliest forests that emerged 390 million years ago to the most recent emergent species. The samples of wood span time and space and have been sourced from across the globe, from Yakushima, Japan to the White Mountains of California. From the oldest tree in the world to some of the youngest and near-extinct species, the tree samples contain within them stories of the planet’s history and evolution through time.

Sourced from Katie Paterson’s Website

Lee Walton is an artist with an expanded practice that includes drawing, performance and social practice. Walton experiential art works employ system of rule, chance and open collaboration. Lee works with museums, institutions, universities and cities from around the world to develops participatory public events, lead workshops, exhibit and educate.

Birthday Videos: For Friends I Don’t Really Know

Birthday Videos: For Friends I Don’t Really Know is an on-going series of intimate videos wishes for people I don’t really know. Personal information is culled from the recipients social media feeds and used to create the feeling that we are close friends. These videos are delivered to recipients on the day of their birthday.
These most recents Birthday Videos were created for the exhibition #awkward at Plug Projects. Special thanks to artist Jordyn Summers for her help.
Since 2002, I have been making these videos as a way to playfully examine the potential of one-to-one web-based experiences as opposed to the broadcasted one-to-many model. These videos also question privacy and how social media is changing the way we define and understand our relationships to one another.

Following “The Man of the Crowd

‘Following “The Man of the Crowd”‘ was a 24-hour walk in which Christina Ray and I, linked by text messaging, drifted separately through NYC in an alternating pattern according to the movements of strangers. Based loosely on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” and inspired by Vito Acconci’s 1969  “Following Piece,” Christina and I developed a collaborative performance that involved following strangers over a 24-hour period.
While one of us were following a stranger, the other was stationary and experiencing their present location. When the stranger could no longer be followed, a text message was sent to activate the other. This person then followed the nearest ambulatory stranger at that moment.  This alternating cycle was enacted for 24-hours.
The video above is the unedited raw footage.  During this experience, I cut my finger opening a can.  See the 5.10 mark in the above video.

 

Glimpse

Central to these experiences is the public who comes to participate in an unknown spectacle and a pair of customized goggles worn by one participant. The goggles open and close mechanically, revealing a temporary moment, book-ended before and after by pure darkness. A guide remotely opens the shutter of the goggles for the person wearing them. Like an on and off switch, spontaneous moments are framed for all to see. Glimpse heightens our awareness of what can happen in a micro moment.

The Glimpse goggles were designed in collaboration with Derek Toomes.

Sourced from Lee Walton’s website