Kaiser reading

Hey Guys.
I was having trouble getting hold of the Kaiser reading on e-sources and managed to get the one and only copy in the library so have photocopied it. The copy is in the humanities building on the infamous desk, to the right of the 3rd year essay tray. Due to expenses I could only make one copy so if you could keep returning it so hopefully it can get round some of the class.
See you soon

Allan Kaprow

In This ground breaking piece named "Eighteen Happenings in 6 parts" Kaprow synthesized his training in action painting with his study of Cages work. Working from a carefully manipulated scripted score. This Piece is undoubtedly time based as it is durational and is also non scripted. It is also interactive as the audience were given programs and three stapled cards, which provided instructions for their participation: ‹The performance is divided into six parts...Each part contains three happenings which occur at once. The beginning and end of each will be signaled by a bell.

There is also a strong sense of documentation to the work, as there is a semse of personal expressionwithin it which comes from the refremces to his earlier work, which were painted on panals.

In contrast to Cage, whose encouragement of the participation of audience members was motivated by his desire to relinquish authorial control, audience members in many of Kaprow’s Happenings became props through which the artist’s vision was executed

WEEK 8

Dear E-citizens and scholars,

thanks for the fascinating blog postings. Lets go through some of them tomorrow and don't forget we meet Tuesday at 10am in rm 19 in the Soc Sci building as per week 2 this term.

See you then

Ed

Richard Serra - Hand Catching Lead (1968)

1968's Hand Catching Lead was Serra's first film (youtube will try and tell you it was made in 1971, but that's youtube). Serra claims it was an attempt to break into the "intimidating" medium of film, inspired by the "great freedom" he saw expressed in Warhol's work and the "tentative, experimental" nature of films like Yvonne Rainer's Hand Movie and Line.

He was originally asked to document the making of his sculpture, House of Cards, in which huge sheets of lead are balanced against one another, held up by their own weight, but decied that a traditional documentary would not be able to capture the creative process. Instead, the work is a "filmic analogy" of the construction of the sculpture: his catching of the pieces of lead is a more refined representation of months spent lugging blocks of lead around his attic with Philip Glass.

Hand Catching Lead has been described as a "non-event" by critics. The single, continuous, soundless shot of a hand catching and immediately dropping pieces of lead is almost hypnotically repetitive but has no sense of purpose or urgency. The film is not building to any kind of climax, nothing we see is explained and there is no attempt to create the impression of a seamless 'performance' which isolates the images from the world around them (in the second half of the film, another hand is visible collecting and dropping the lead, while the hand hurries it along). Part of this can be explained by the fact that the film is supposed to be a recreation of Serra's creative processes, which he describes in very abstract terms:

If I define a work and sum it up within the boundary of a definition, given
my intentions, that seems to be a limitation on me and an imposition on other
people of how to think about the work. Finally, it has nothing to do with my
activity or art. I think the significance of the work is in its effort, not in
its intentions. And that effort is a state of mind, an activity, an interaction
with the world... The focus of art for me is the experience of living through
the pieces, and that experience may have very little to do with the physical
facts.

The visual style of the film is heavily indebted Serra's sculptures, which often use bold lines and a variety of different textures, just as high contrast lighting reduces the pieces of lead to flashes of light and dark and emphasises every crease in the palm of the hand.

The film serves as a kind of confessional documentary, chronicling a mental state in visual terms. It is interactive insofar as it was made to be watched, and the two hands play to the camera and are obviously aware of the fact that they are supposed to be creating a certain image. It is an objective action rendered subjective and expressionistic by context and authorial intent. It could be argued that the film is conceptual - the repetitive, almost hypnotic nature of the image is intended to represent the hit-and-miss struggle to create something worthwhile - but, given Serra's hatred of people judging his work based on his intentions, it is difficult to know whether people seeing it in 1968 would have been aware that it was an allegory of House of Cards, making it difficult to judge its original impact.

ONOchord 2004

ONOchord was created by the performance artist Yoko Ono, whose work was central to the fluxus movement. Before this module I did not know much about her work but after exploring her work on the internet I am completely intrigued! ONOchord may seem quite cringey to many but I think it is a beautiful work with a strong message and intention. I chose it because it was one of the most interactive video art that I had come across. In the documentary Yoko comments that the world is seeing a race between those who “want to destroy it and those who want to cover it with love”. She wants to cover it with love but comments that the opposition are faster. In order to beat them she encourages her audience to join her in the race, on her ‘team’. Her concept is communicated through media as well as a flashlight/torch. She does not even use her voice or facial expression just her thumb to make a huge statement. The benefit of using a torch means the message can be communicated “From ships, from buildings, using the buildings…to the sky, from the sky.” She is using the power of multimedia to win the race.

When she came to London’s Tate Gallery in 2004 she told her audience to take the flashlight home with them: “It’s nice to have a moment to think of love.” The success of her art is completely dependent on the interaction of her audience. The last few minutes of the documentary in Tokyo in October 2004, prove ONOchord to be a success. The image of all the lights flashing says such a huge statement in such a simple, unobtrusive way. Her art is not time-based but durational, so ...
I i
LOVE ii
YOU iii

"Frank Film" Frank and caroline Mouris

Frank Film is a 1973 animated short film. Co-creator Frank Mouris reads a list of words starting with the letter "f". This sound track is interwoven with the sound of his reading his autobiography. The visual is an animated collage of photos collected from magazines. Frank made the film with Caroline Mouris. The sound track was created by Tony Schwartz.


I like the layering of vocals, you can concisely tune into the two different dialogs. Mouris’s voice becomes musical due to the over-lapping of vocals, the two different rhythms work with each other. the effect of the speed in which images change makes them blend into one another with hypnotic results.

David Rokeby (2001): 'n-chant'

I came across this piece whilst looking at another David Rokeby installation on Youtube (Seen - which is also very good) as research for my practical project this year. It consists of a room a full of networked Apple Macs that use voice recognition and speech software to take audio stimulus from microphones and form a response to it. This stimulus can come from an outside source, such as the visitor, or the computers themselves. The image of an ear changes to indicate whether the computer is 'listening' or speaking (it can't do both at the same time, apparently). They fall into a chorus-like chant when left alone, and there's something inherently very sad about them that makes me really enjoy this piece. It's eerily inhuman, and yet at the same time I sympathise with the machines.

The piece is durational and has no narrative structure: visitors walk in and out whenever they like and stay for as long as they would wish. Whilst in the space the visitor is interacting with the piece: the microphones are set up to pick up speech in close-quarters with each machine, but the Macs may also respond to a visitor coughing, walking or, as shown in the video, clapping. The visitor is implicated in the performance by their presence, even if they remain completely silent: the lack of noise makes the computer network synchronise and chant chorus-like to the room. The artist's body does not make an appearance in the piece, but the body's of the spectators produce the inputs for the computers and the ears on the screens are video images of real people.

One might argue that the piece is conceptual, developing a thesis on what language, at its core, actually is by noting the differences between sentient human community and the artificial intelligence community as the two cope with language in totally different ways: the humans ask questions and use language in terms of what it denotes and connotes, whilst the machines cannot use this logic effectively (their replies are little more than paraphrases) and instead communicate most effectively (with each other) by examining the exact shape of the soundwave a word creates. Similarly therefore, one might also argue that there is a deconstructve element to the video piece in so much that its conceptual nature hangs in the balance between both an objective and subjective approach: like an experiment, the process is objective but the question is inherently formed from the personal.

However, one would struggle to find a confessional aspect to the piece. Five out of six points though, surely that makes it art???