Lee Walton:

If you had to sum up this action in one instructional sentence or formula it would be something like:

Use your hands to feel a diverse range of things in the city.

Notice he takes the common expression “Getting a Feel for Things” literally in this work, and feels things. See how he uses common expressions, and simple instructions as a formula for creating in the following videos.

If conceptually informed artworks are ones in which an idea determines the work, as opposed to the artist’s masterful technique, or the perfect handling of materials. In fact, when you follow directions, things might even turn out badly, things can break down, fail, fall apart. There is tremendous tension in this – when we really don’t know how things are going to go. Watch Jon Sasaki play with attempting to do something, and the possibility (and sometimes the reality) of failing, falling, or otherwise destroying everything.

Kelly Mark:

Sniff:

https://kellymark.com/V_Sniff1Video.html

Hello/Goodbye:

https://kellymark.com/V_HelloGoodbyeVIDEO.html

I love Love Songs but Angry Music Makes me Happy:

https://kellymark.com/V_ILoveLoveSongsVIDEO.html

Jon Sasaki:

Ladder Climb:

http://www.jonsasaki.com/index.php/work/ladder-climb/

Dead End, Eastern Market, Detroit:

http://www.jonsasaki.com/index.php/work/dead-end-eastern-market-detroit/

Harrison and Wood

Michelle Pearson Clarke:

https://michelepearsonclarke.com/suck-teeth-compositions

Lenka Clayton:

Human Beings. 1-100 (2006)

“This is first in a series of four films – People In Order – commissioned by the UK’s Channel 4 in 2006. The concept behind our films was simple: we asked ourselves if you can reveal something about life by simply arranging people according to scales. Three minutes is a very short time to communicate something – perhaps too short to tell a story, or to get to know a character – so we wanted to make this series by setting ourselves some very straightforward rules, and then following them through over a long trip. The rules had to be simple so it would take the audience virtually no time to understand them. We established what scales we’d look at, and then chose how each film would be framed. Then it was a case of getting in a campervan and driving round Britain, filming as many people as we could over 4 weeks in February, coping with microphones crackling and our camera refusing to work.

The experience was exhausting but also life affirming. In our whole trip we were struck by how happy people were to help. Only a handful of our shoots were arranged in advance. We relied instead on the kindness of strangers – and we found that everywhere, from deprived urban estates to rural aristocrats.

The resulting films are like a list of government statistics where the citizens they are referring to have broken out from behind the figures on the page. The people on the screen stop us from seeing them as numbers.

Adad Hannah:

Blackwater Ophelia:

https://adadhannah.com/2013-blackwater-ophelia

The Russians:

https://adadhannah.com/2011-the-russians-videos

arina; Ulay, «Rest Energy», 1980

Standing across from one another in slated position. Looking each other in the eye. I hold a bow and Ulay holds the string with the arrow pointing directly to my heart. Microphones attached to both hearts recording the increasing number of heart beats.

Rineke Dijkstra

Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz
‘Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley),’ 2005

Breitz’s experiments in the field of portraiture can cumulatively be described as an ongoing anthropology of the fan.

In each case, Breitz first sets out to identify ardent fans of the musical icon to be portrayed, by placing ads in newspapers, magazines and fanzines, as well as on the Internet. Those who respond to this initial call (typically numbering in their hundreds) are then put through a rigorous set of procedures designed to exclude less than authentic fans of the celebrity in question, in order to arrive at the final group of participants.

The individuals who appear in these works have thus stepped forward to identify themselves as fans, and have been included purely on this basis: all other factors – their appearance; their ability to sing, act or dance; their gender and age – are treated as irrelevant for the purpose of selection. Each of the selected fans is offered the opportunity to re-perform a complete album, from the first song to the last, in a professional recording studio. The portraits evoke their mainstream entertainment counterparts (such as American Idol or Pop Idol), but also take significant distance from their reality television cousins: Breitz promises her subjects neither fame nor fortune. What she offers them is an opportunity to record the songs that have come to soundtrack their lives in whatever way they choose. The non-hierarchical grids that she uses to organize the final presentation of the fans in each portrait, allow Breitz to deliberately sidestep the question of who has fared better or worse under the conditions that she has created for these quasi-anthropological visual essays on the culture of the fan. Whether the fans who pay tribute to their icons in her portraits are victims of a coercive culture industry or users of a culture that they creatively absorb and translate according to their needs, is left to the viewer to decide. If the dignity of the portrayed fans remains surprisingly intact, it is because rather than prompting us to laugh at the fans that she lines up, Breitz forces us to reflect on the extent to which pop music has infiltrated our own biographies.

Titling the series of works as she does, Breitz asks that we locate these multi-channel installations within the genre of portraiture, and prompts the question of how they in fact relate to this most humanist of genres. (From the artist’s video channel)

Pipilotti Rist:

Zoe

Experimental Films of Andy Warhol:

No survey of the second half of the twentieth century would be complete without mentioning Andy Warhol. More commonly known as the pop master of the silkscreen painting, Warhol was also the maker of over 400 films. From the early minimal works such as Sleep and Blow Job, to the later epic The Chelsea Girls, Warhol was a highly active disciple and proponent of the moving image, at least from the time he acquired his first film camera in 1963. Shot in 1964, and lasting a soporific five hours and twenty minutes, the film Sleep was one of his first experiments in film making and consists of Warhol’s lover at the time, John Giorno, doing nothing other than sleeping. Described by Warhol as an “anti-film”, he would later extend the same filming and cutting technique to eight hours for his subsequent film Empire, constantly solely of footage of the Empire State Building.

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist, widely considered to be the founder of video art. From 1962 he was a member of the avant-garde art movement Fluxus, and was the first proponent of utilising television sets as the principal material component of his sculptural assemblies. He is credited with one of the first video works in the mid-Sixties after the introduction of hand held video recording equipment for the general population, making increasingly elaborate stacks of video monitors and television based sculptures from the 1970s onwards.
If conceptually informed artworks are ones in which an idea determines the work. You can think of some of the works below as a response to a simple, one sentence instruction. (From https://magazine.artland.com/history-of-video-art-part-i/)

Bruce Nauman

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

William Wegman

Marina Abramovic

Abramović was raised in Yugoslavia by parents who fought as Partisans in World War II and were later employed in the communist government of Josip Broz Tito. In 1965 she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade to study painting. Eventually, however, she became interested in the possibilities of performance art, specifically the ability to use her body as a site of artistic and spiritual exploration. After completing postgraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1972, Abramović conceived a series of visceral performance pieces that engaged her body as both subject and medium. In Rhythm 10 (1973), for instance, she methodically stabbed the spaces between her fingers with a knife, at times drawing blood. In Rhythm 0 (1974) she stood immobile in a room for six hours along with 72 objects, ranging from a rose to a loaded gun, that the audience was invited to use on her however they wished. These pieces provoked controversy not only for their perilousness but also for Abramović’s occasional nudity, which would become a regular element of her work thereafter.

Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful is one example of how, in the early years of performance art, female artists used their own bodies to challenge the institution of art and the notion of beauty. Marina has said in an interview that during the 1970s, “if the woman artist would apply make-up or put [on] nail polish, she would not have been considered serious enough.”

Breathing In/Breathing Out:

‘We are kneeling face to face, pressing our mouths together. Our noses are blocked with cigarette filters. I am breathing in oxygen. I am breathing out carbon dioxide.’

In their performance piece Breathing In/Breathing Out Marina Abramovic and Ulay blocked their noses with cigarette filters and clamped their mouths tightly together, breathing in and out each other’s air.  After seventeen minutes they both fell to the floor unconscious. The viewers could sense the tension through the sound of their breathing, which was augmented through microphones attached to their chests.  Is it a beautiful romantic gesture or a comment on how relationships absorb and destroy an individual?

“Something tender and violent at the same time emerges from the performance: the couple are decided to stick together despite the effort, the danger, the damage; but as is the case with human relations of this kind of intensity, they end up with violence, pain, and a part of each other ‘dead’. It is the idea of interdependency portrayed to its extreme.” Interartive

Source

AAA-AAA (performance RTB, Liege), 1977

AAA-AAA centres on the relationship between two lovers. They started from an equal position to end up outdoing each other.

Source

Abramovic, Marina; Ulay, «Rest Energy», 1980

Standing across from one another in slated position. Looking each other in the eye. I hold a bow and Ulay holds the string with the arrow pointing directly to my heart. Microphones attached to both hearts recording the increasing number of heart beats.

Rineke Dijkstra

Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz
‘Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley),’ 2005

Breitz’s experiments in the field of portraiture can cumulatively be described as an ongoing anthropology of the fan.

In each case, Breitz first sets out to identify ardent fans of the musical icon to be portrayed, by placing ads in newspapers, magazines and fanzines, as well as on the Internet. Those who respond to this initial call (typically numbering in their hundreds) are then put through a rigorous set of procedures designed to exclude less than authentic fans of the celebrity in question, in order to arrive at the final group of participants.

The individuals who appear in these works have thus stepped forward to identify themselves as fans, and have been included purely on this basis: all other factors – their appearance; their ability to sing, act or dance; their gender and age – are treated as irrelevant for the purpose of selection. Each of the selected fans is offered the opportunity to re-perform a complete album, from the first song to the last, in a professional recording studio. The portraits evoke their mainstream entertainment counterparts (such as American Idol or Pop Idol), but also take significant distance from their reality television cousins: Breitz promises her subjects neither fame nor fortune. What she offers them is an opportunity to record the songs that have come to soundtrack their lives in whatever way they choose. The non-hierarchical grids that she uses to organize the final presentation of the fans in each portrait, allow Breitz to deliberately sidestep the question of who has fared better or worse under the conditions that she has created for these quasi-anthropological visual essays on the culture of the fan. Whether the fans who pay tribute to their icons in her portraits are victims of a coercive culture industry or users of a culture that they creatively absorb and translate according to their needs, is left to the viewer to decide. If the dignity of the portrayed fans remains surprisingly intact, it is because rather than prompting us to laugh at the fans that she lines up, Breitz forces us to reflect on the extent to which pop music has infiltrated our own biographies.

Titling the series of works as she does, Breitz asks that we locate these multi-channel installations within the genre of portraiture, and prompts the question of how they in fact relate to this most humanist of genres. (From the artist’s video channel)

Divya Mehra

Selections from Ryan Trecartin

Source

Ryan Trecartin (b.1981) is a contemporary American artist who works largely in video. While his work often incorporates ideas and images related to social media and technology, he claims that he is interested primarily in relationships and the ways in which the Internet has changed how people relate to the world and one another.[1] While Trecartin often posts his movies online and draws recurring themes and motifs from Internet culture, he also builds sculptural environments and installations in museums for showing his work.[2] In What’s the Love Making Babies For, Trecartin employs digital manipulations, extreme editing, and chaotic dialogue in a way that is characteristic of his artistic style, creating a world that is “hyper-saturated with media.” [3] More relevant to the concerns of this program, he also engages with ideas of authority, expertise, and the dissemination of information, as his characters forward their often warped and sometimes indecipherable ideas surrounding “reproduction, sexuality, and contemporary moralities” by engaging with traditional formats such as the TV commercial.[4] However, Trecartin roots his movie in the digitized Internet landscape, thus evoking questions surrounding how modes of communication and information transmission transform and morph in the digital age. (From [1] Calvin Tomkins, “Experimental People,” The New Yorker, March 14, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201…. [2] Ibid. [3] “What’s the Love Making Babies For,” Electronic Arts Intermix, accessed December 14, 2015, http://eai.org/title.htm?id=12291.he

Monday:

Introductions

Syllabus

Tour of lab and equipment

Class blog – invites, demo post

Lecture: Intro to Conceptual Art

Intro to Conceptual Art and art forms we explore in Experimental Studio:

Assignment: Make a KILOMETRE

Make a KILOMETRE*

______________________________________________________________________

Bring in a KILOMETRE next week.

Document a kilometre. Walk it. Sculpt it. Talk it. Write it. Draw it. Video record it. Perform it. Get your mom to perform it. Conjure a kilometre in any media.

It could be a walk down the street, a path down an intestine, a line going up into the air, a kilometre’s worth of rocks. It can be a kilometre made of chewing gum. Made of telephone conversations. Made of complaints. Made of a walk with a cat. Made with light. It can be a distance between two points. It can be imagined, traced, documented, listed, performed, evidenced on the bottom of your shoe, rolled up into a ball.

Make sure to measure your kilometre in some way, and be prepared to discuss your process, and justify how it is precisely a kilometre.

You have up to 5 minutes next week to present your kilometre to the class.

Bring it, or show us documentation of it.

IT MUST BE PRECISELY A KILOMETRE – EXPLAIN HOW YOU KNOW IT IS!

Due for discussion on MONDAY next week.

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Wednesday:

Marina Abramovic Watch the film: The Artist is Present, Marina Abramovic Popcorn and discussion on Performance Art at the museum.

CONCEPTUAL ART

“Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.” (From the Tate)

Some works are reflections on language and semiotics:

Artworks that ask us to think again about what we are really looking at, to be aware of form, signification, illusion, and ideas…

Which one is the chair? Are any of them chairs? What else in the museum is what it appears to be?

“A chair sits alongside a photograph of a chair and a dictionary definition of the word chair. Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one: a visual code, a verbal code, and a code in the language of objects, that is, a chair of wood. But isn’t this last chair simply . . . a chair? Or, as Marcel Duchamp asked in his Bicycle Wheel of 1913, does the inclusion of an object in an artwork somehow change it? If both photograph and words describe a chair, how is their functioning different from that of the real chair, and what is Kosuth’s artwork doing by adding these functions together? Prodded to ask such questions, the viewer embarks on the basic processes demanded by Conceptual art.

“The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art,” Kosuth has written. “Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept ‘art,’ . . . Fundamental to this idea of art is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction.” Chasing a chair through three different registers, Kosuth asks us to try to decipher the subliminal sentences in which we phrase our experience of art.
“The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art,” Kosuth has written. “Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept ‘art,’ ” From MOMA

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Some works use text as an image, and to convey ideas in interchangeable forms:

As a gesture of peace activism during the Vietnam war, Yoko Ono and John Lennon created this graphic image/declaration – blaring like a headline – to provoke thought. It has been re-made in various forms, in different locations, including non-gallery locations. Text is both an image, and an idea. And the artists explored the effects of bringing artwork outside of galleries, and made it circulate in the mainstream as billboards, newspapers, cheap, accessible posters/buttons etc.

Is there an original artwork here? What is the most important aspect of the work? Who is the work for? What does it mean if it’s copied and multiplied?

Jenny Holzer: A contemporary artist who uses text in public that circulates in different media/locations

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Some works are produced with a system, or even a set of instructions – and the final realization of the work is less important than the idea:

For Sol Lewitt, the IDEA is “the machine that makes the art”

“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.  When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.” SL from Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.

“Incomplete Open Cubes demonstrates an artistic technique integral to the art of the 1960s: seriality. Generally speaking, serial art is generated through the application of premeditated rules or plans. In this case, LeWitt systematically explored the 122 ways of “not making a cube, all the ways of the cube not being complete,” per the artist. LeWitt might have taken all the necessary steps to realize each of the 122 solutions to his query, as seen here, but the work can hardly be understood as finished in the conventional sense. It would be more precise to say, according to LeWitt, that  Incomplete Open Cubes “[runs] its course,” ending abruptly. Moreover, to the extent that the cubes frame and, by extension, incorporate elements from the surrounding space, they muddy the boundary between art and world.” From the Met Museum

Erwin Wurm: A contemporary artist who uses instructions for an audience/performers to interpret

Erwin Wurm – see: Public Delivery article

What kinds of everday materials does Wurm use? Do you normally associate these objects/environments with the museum?

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Art that is made with a system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO49s8WlUis

I will not make any more boring art – John Baldessari

Micah Lexier

39 Wood Balls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0YslbcvdXo

—

What is the formula, task or recipe that these works begin with? Does it matter if they are impossible to realize perfectly? How might you compare this way of working to scientific methods?

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Institutional Critique, and art that is self-aware, self-reflexive

The Baldessari print is based on an installation created at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, but not by John Baldessari’s hand. “As there wasn’t enough money for me to travel to Nova Scotia, I proposed that the students voluntarily write ‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’ on the walls of the gallery, like punishment. To my surprise they covered the walls.” Those same students made this print, but Baldessari wasn’t at the workshop when the print was made. In both cases, Baldessari gave scant instructions to the students from thousands of miles away, and he was not present to supervise, raising questions of authorship and the role of the artist.

Baldessari points out that language has made-up rules that we all agree to follow. Conventional notions of art may be as ingrained, passed down, and unquestioned as rules of language, but artists like Baldessari aimed to show that they are equally arbitrary, and open to interpretation. Baldesssari described his conceptual works as “what I thought art should be, not what somebody else would think art would be. You know, received wisdom, what you would get in school. And so a lot of my work was about questioning this received wisdom.” (From MOMA)

Piero Manzoni may not have lived to be 30, but he produced one of art history’s funniest gestures: Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), a 1961 project for which the Italian artist supposedly canned his own excrement. Reports from more recent years claim that some of the cans may have been filled with plaster, not poop, but Manzoni’s anti-art moves extended beyond that one conceit to others including abstract paintings made without paint. (From Art News)

From the article: https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/maurizio-cattelans-golden-toilet-in-the-time-of-trump

Enter Cattelan’s “America” (2016), the 18-karat gold, fully functioning toilet that was installed at the Guggenheim for nearly a year in a long-term, sculptural performance of interactive art. Like all of Cattelan’s most complex works, this sculpture is laden with possible meanings. There is the art-historical trajectory, from Duchamp and Manzoni to more contemporary artists like John Miller and Wim Delvoye, that traffics in scatological iconography. The equation between excrement and art has long been mined by neo-Marxist thinkers who question the relationship between labor and value. Expanding upon this economic perspective, there is also the ever-increasing divide in our country between the wealthy and the poor that threatens the very stability of our culture. Cattelan explicitly comments on this fact by creating what he called “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent.” The gold toilet—a cipher for the excesses of affluence—was available for all to use in the privacy of one of the Guggenheim’s single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms. More than one hundred thousand people waited patiently in line for the opportunity to commune with art and with nature.

Yet it was the Trump reference that resonated so loudly during the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim. When the artist proposed the sculpture in mid-2015, Donald Trump had just announced his bid for the presidency. It was inconceivable at the time that this business mogul, he of the eponymous gilded tower, could actually win the White House. When the sculpture came off view on September 15, Trump had been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril.

That Trump is synonymous with golden toilets was proven not at the Guggenheim but in a recent satirical pop-up “exhibition” in midtown Manhattan staged by Trevor Noah of the Daily Show that he called the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library.” In addition to framed tweet storms, visitors were treated to a “tour” of the Oval Office, where they could don a Trump wig and pose with an, albeit fake, golden toilet.

Cattelan’s “America,” like all his greatest work, is at once humorous and searing in its critique of our current realities. Though crafted from millions of dollars’ worth of gold, the sculpture is actually a great leveler. As Cattelan has said, “Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise.” Art-wise, the work reached a certain pinnacle of acceptability—or notoriety—when it was featured on the cover of the New York Post (September 15, 2016) with the headline, “We’re #1 (and #2!),” and an article titled, “The Guggenheim Wants You to Crap All Over ‘America.’ ” However, Cattelan’s anticipation of Trump’s America will, perhaps, be the lasting imprint of the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim. (from The Guggenheim Foundation)

Maurizio Cattelan – and the controversies of the art fair banana:

1. Conceptual Portrait Lecture and assignment
2. Discuss ideas and work in class/tech help

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1. Early crits, and individual discussion
2. Final critique and party in class!

CONCEPTUAL PORTRAITS: Systems, Series, Stand-Ins

1. Critique for button projects – should be fully documented and described on the blog.

1. Finish button critique
2. Audio Art Lecture and assignment

Audio Art – Lecture and assignment

Reminder:

Prepare to discuss your ideas in the next class!