KM project (includes images, live links or videos, description and notes)
Notes on Katja Heitmann article
Field Trip Blog Post
Comprehensive blog posts contribute to getting the full grades for your assignments. The blog in general (especially articles and notes) will be evaluated at the end of term to contribute to your participation grades.
Discuss Field Trip:
Charles Campbell, How Many Colours Has the Sea?Lap See-Lam, Floating Sea Palace – The Power PlantLiquid Gold, Alex McCleod – Harbourfront Centre
Present video art ideas with your group in a roundtable brainstorm
Studio bookings for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and for next class on Monday and Tuesday
Each group must have footage to work with and edit by next week WEDNESDAY – when we do an editing demo.
You will work with a partner to make three videos 1-2-minutes (MAX) each in length each.
Your videos should be shot at the studio in controlled, illuminated conditions.
Pick your FEAT. You will repeat variations on your “FEAT” in each video below.
Your FEAT should be an everyday gesture or activity that you can push to its limits. Push yourself to your limits. Push a material to its limits. Do not take ANY risks with your safety – subtle, quiet, funny risks are better and more interesting anyway. Just watching someone smiling as long as they can as hard as you can is fascinating and even painful to watch for its duration.
Examples of gestures from past students include: Eating something, Juggling, Kissing, Blowing up a Balloon, Smiling, Holding an Awkward Pose, Reaching for Things out of Reach… etc.
It might be an absurd thing – something pointless, or an impossible feat that you can’t actually do
The object is to try to do the thing, not to “act” – and what happens… happens!
You, your partner, or someone else may perform. Maintain your concentration and explore how a simple gesture becomes interesting when performed with commitment and intention.
NOTE: Add a title to some of your videos, and they should be approximately 1-2 minutes in length MAX.
Video #1: The One-Shot
The video will consist of “one shot” – there will be no editing, other than a black screen to mark the beginning and end of the video. You may focus on camera function, unusual points of view, and framing. You will also add titles and end credits to your videos.
Video #2: The Sequence
The object of this video exercise is to shoot a series of shots with the intention to edit them into a sequence. It may require 5 minutes, an hour, a day, or a week, and you can show it in a series of stills or a time lapse. Edit your footage to be less than two minutes.
Video #3: The Loop
The object of this video exercise is to create a video that is meant to be played over and over again indefinitely, without stopping. Consider the content of the video when you are shooting your feat, and use looping to complete the meaning of the work. Don’t make a short GIF type video – think of a longer loop – something that could play in a gallery on repeat without end.
Edit your loop footage to be less than 2 minutes long, and then play on a loop for the critique.
Videos will be graded by the degree to which students demonstrate:
Understanding of the key concepts in the assignment
Clarity and originality of ideas
Investment of time and contributions to the group
Focus in performance and intentionality about everything in the frame
Technical success using lighting and professional camera equipment in works, and technical success using editing software and exporting gallery-quality video
Presentation and openness to feedback during critique
Students are also expected to post a final work (including any revisions after critique) to the class blog with a title, artist names, and a short description of the work within ONE WEEK of the critique for final marks.
Videos will not receive a grade until a
READ: NYT Dance Article
Turning the Gestures of Everyday Life into Art, Katja Heitmann
Describe the work discussed in the article and the unique challenges – as well as the unique gifts- that come with attempting to archive personal movements?
Discuss one or two examples of movements in the article – what strikes you about them?
Describe the habitual movements/unconscious gestures, tics etc. of 3 people you know well. How do individual body parts move, and how does the whole body interact? What about facial expressions, and emotional valence of the movement? How does body type inform the movement?What do these examples of small movements mean and imply?
WEDNESDAY
FRIDAY JAN 24th EXPERIMENTAL FIELD TRIP
9:30 AM to 6PM – Toronto Museums
Here is the eventbrite link for students to purchase tickets:
Mandatory: Create a FIELD TRIP blog post illustrating, describing and responding to two art works from each museum. How are these works relevant to your own research interests and practice? What did you notice, learn, or take away from the experience of the works in the gallery?
Note: Students who are not able to attend the field trip must visit one of these Toronto museums, in addition to the AGG exhibition and create a blog post based on this field research.
More examples of student videos:
*Reading notes due on blog
Sal and Ava – 2023
(SEE DESKTOP for 1 minute examples – lemons, hugging, denim…)
For the one kilometer project, I chose to record the audio of running for 1 kilometer on the treadmill at my local gym. I decided to name this project ‘EXP. 1K Interlude’ as it is the first work of many in This Experimental I class I will create. It represents the beginning of an album of works that will be recorded, filmed, built and completed in this class.
The work is an inventory of collected gestures and movements acted out by a team of 10 dancers. In attempts to authentically mimic the movement of volunteer participants (gesture donors), a dancer discreetly shadows the volunteer for an hour, studying and adjusting their posture and form to resemble the their body language– “from the curve of their spinal posture to the turnout of their feet.” (The New York Times 2) The meaning made from this performed 5 hour installation is to create a visual diary of the unique body gestures of many people. A unique gift this installation has is to identify the absent-minded habits or gestural expressions to a person. That seeing a specific tick or habit can induce feelings of nostalgia, melancholy, awareness of another person.
An outcome from this installation I found extremely fascinating was the intensive practice of these gestures becoming unconsciously reenacted by the dancers because it was ingrained in to their muscle memory. But the gesture was not a habit of the dancer, it “belonged” to another woman she studied. Another remarkable moment was how in memory of her father, Heitmann’s dancers performed his movements that were not particularly significant but were a more memorable expression of who her past father was than the physical paraphernalia and documents she has as what was left of him. 3. When my dad is pensive he bites and sucks hard on his lower lip, a way of suppressing his frustration. It’s so common to see him doing this when situational conflict is increasing and its a small gesture that immediately indicates and informs me of his internalized stress. When my old roommate would get very excited in conversation, she would shake and flick her dominant hand side to side. It was specifically a happy gesture and very cute when she did it because she was seriously French and this kind of positive response felt very rewarding to experience. And when my friend (who’s first language is Spanish) spoke English, she would put a thumb up, gesture it towards and then away from her chin before another hand gesture she just made to communicate with her hands and assist her English. It always seemed like a gesture she did like she was trying to push the words she was looking for from her lips then continue speaking.
Our Feat – Lamiss G. and Riya V.
Bridget Moser’s My Crops are Dying but my Body Persists.
Reflection:
Some of her props are generic goods like ceramic/glass decorative bowls and shelf decor. In the braiding spaghetti piece, a glass infinity twist mini sculpture, a gold-reflective ceramic balloon dog, a gold fork, and other objects are meticulously spread around the table. Aside from being goods associated with consumerism and aesthetics, there’s a sense of the randomness of the objects not correlating with each other. Typically, decor like this is purchased for aesthetics and aesthetics only.
In the clip of the La Mer moisturizing cream being spread on the bread, the bowls are arranged decoratively in the background to ground the foreground where the action is being done. I associate the placement of these decorative objects with flat lays to aestheticize a product promotion.
Physically, the piece provokes many sensory responses while initially holding an unsettling awareness of how touch can provoke discomfort. Some of the slower gestures like the caressing of objects, and sliding of her entire body against the porcelain white room, feel awkward and absurd for why she’s intimately interacting with them.
The interactions elicit unease because they employ various textures with gestures to evoke those feelings. The prosthetic teeth fell out of her mouth but fell out in pooling spit, which heightens associations of fear and disorientation of losing teeth and visceral disgust of seeing bodily fluids being pushed out to exaggerate the feeling of discomfort.
Absurdity plays a role in destabilizing the viewer’s expectations; for when you see the familiar, you shouldn’t expect the familiar to happen next. This forces the viewer to reflect on their perception of the work and consider whether what they observe is unsettling, humorous, contradictory (to the default assumptions of associations to these objects), or critical.
Charlene Lau says, “While Moser’s work has been described as prop humor, it also fleshes out the relationship between comedy and sex through an exploration of objects with fetishistic appeal.” This subliminal eroticism is evident in her performances: with her body on the sofa, caressing with hotdog fingers, and playing with the mannequin foot, slowly sticking her finger into a mannequin hand finger hole beneath the words of “Does this look like some kind of joke to you?” This again, highlights the gesture’s way to evoke comedic and unsettling associations, emphasized further by doing so with the absurd everyday bourgeois objects that hold implicit meaning.
Lau makes note of “the consumerist, bourgeois junk” Which is well understood from the objects we see to appear as the most purposeless form of the material object. “…Such as a rose-gold makeup mirror, white and gilt decorative ceramic objects, and a bottle of pink Himalayan salt—parodies displays of “Haute” consumerist taste.” As Himalayan salt is primarily an ingredient but is now often seen in decor sections for the trending aesthetic purposes. So the meticulous choice of decorative objects pertains to this profound sense of value (monetarily, to afford to consume goods to the extent of buying impractical objects) and the sense of pointlessness or worthlessness (that the object serves no function or necessity for anyone, yet we all have seen these objects before)
Furthermore, to see these idle, impractical aesthetic objects in pink, rose, and gold around seemingly idle, impractical gestures serves the idea that much of what we care to aestheticize has nearly no thoughtful impact on our lives. Nails, teeth, and a pink suede sofa with gold accented feet need to be aestheticized far before we think to just need them. I believe this ties in well with her opening monologue where she finishes by saying, “I want any feeling that helps distract me from–” As designing nails, whitening/straightening smiles, and choosing a seat for its visual quality benefits us through nothing more than a “feeling” of it being better than the most basic form it comes in.
Audio Art Project “Counting to Four Before the Candles”
Critique of Kilometre assignment – Bring in your kilometre for discussion, and/or make a post about your kilometre in any media on your Blog page.
Review on how to post to blog
BLOG Deadlines and expectations:
All blog posts should be up on the blog ONE WEEK after final critique, reading assignment, proposal assignment or class activity/trip.
Include work in progress, research and references to support your final projects.
For final projects, include the artwork, artists names, a title, and a short description of the work – why did you choose to make it this way? What does it consist of? How did you complete it? How might it work in the gallery or other context?
Note:
You must have at least one final blog post for each project, and you will not receive a grade (or a grade with a significant reduction) if a post is missing. Rich evidence of engagement with course materials will increase your grades on your work.
REMINDER:
FRIDAY JAN 24th EXPERIMENTAL FIELD TRIP
9:30 AM to 6PM – Toronto Museums
Here is the eventbrite link for students to purchase tickets:
“Seductive, fearless, and outrageous, Marina Abramovic has been redefining what art is for nearly 40 years. Using her own body as a vehicle, pushing herself beyond her limits and at times risking her life in the process she creates performances that challenge, shock, and move us.
This film follows Marina as she prepares for what may be the most important moment of her life: a major new retrospective of her work, taking place at The Museum of Modern Art. To be given a retrospective at one of the world’s premier museums is the most exhilarating sort of milestone. For Marina, it is far more: it is the chance to finally silence the question she has been hearing over and over again for four decades: But why is this art?”( From Film Summary)
Questions for discussion and blog post:
What are some of your first impressions of Marina Abramovic’s performance works, based on the documentary? Use an image/example of one or two works to describe aspects you admire, and aspects you might agree are problematic?
How would you answer the skeptical journalists when they express shock, confusion, and rejection of Abramovic’s work?
What have you learned about features of performance art based on Abramovic’s work? Name a few key features according to her precedents. Include an image to illustrate. Consider her quote “When you perform it is a knife and your blood, when you act it is a fake knife and ketchup.”
Discuss the ways performance art resists many museum and commercial artworld conventions. How does Abramovic solve/negotiate some of these challenges, and do you find these compromises add to, or undermine the ideas at play in her work?
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