Lecture structure overall
1) Duchamp: basic ideas
From http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/feb/09/art/print
[As] a visual form, [the urinal] is bizarrely lovely, so white and incongruously ethereal,
and as art it is ... well, there's a question already tripping me up. Is it art?
The eminent New Yorkers who ran the American Society of Independent Artists
decided in April 1917 that it wasn't. The Independents congratulated themselves on
championing all that was new and progressive in art, and to ensure openness to the
new they agreed to the idea of one of their directors, Duchamp himself, that anyone
who paid a $6 fee should be able to show in their inaugural exhibition. This meant
that technically there were no grounds to refuse the mysterious R Mutt's last-minute
entry of a men's urinal entitled Fountain - for he had paid his fee. An emergency
meeting nevertheless rejected it.
The next month, a little magazine called The Blind Man, which was co-edited by
Duchamp, defended Mr Mutt's Fountain: "Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made
the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of
life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point
of view - and created a new thought for that object."
These words resonate as excitingly, provocatively, philosophically today as they did
in the early 20th century. A vast proportion of 21st-century art traces its origins to
these words, that pissotière. The editorial in The Blind Man - whose authorship
Duchamp never formally acknowledged, any more than he officially owned up to
being R Mutt - is actually more important than the urinal itself, which was not his first
"readymade" work of art. Rather, it allowed him to make explicit an idea that until
then was only a private musing. How did he come up with such a notion?
This, it seems to me, is the question no one asks about Duchamp. His big idea - that
any ordinary "readymade" object can be chosen by the artist as a work of art - has
sunk so deep into modern culture that he is imagined almost as a biblical prophet, a
remote figure of authority. It's as if contemporary art history begins with him. Art is
steeped in tradition - today, there is a tradition of the readymade - and to make a
painting, a film, a photograph is to know you are contributing to a form that has been
shaped and defined by predecessors. Even the most radical film is a film. But
Duchamp did something for which there was no precedent. Love or hate the art that
claims him as ancestor, you can't deny the originality of the thought itself, which I
suspect was all that mattered to Duchamp. The readymade was a new concept of
art, rather than just an ingenious and idle way of making it. No wonder that most
serious discussions tend to assimilate it to philosophy, from Richard Wollheim's
famous 1965 essay that took the urinal as a paradigm of "minimal art" to more recent
ruminations on Duchamp and Kant's aesthetics. But I think we need to stick to the
simple problem: how did anyone ever have such a wild idea?
Bicycle Wheel was recognised later by Duchamp as his first "readymade", though he
hadn't yet come up with the term or finalised the idea. Nor did he think of exhibiting
the piece. He just liked to have it in his studio: "To set the wheel turning was very
soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than the
material life of every day ... I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at the
flames dancing in a fireplace."
From http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/Duch.html
Duchamp Quotes
The ideas in the Large Glass are more important than the actual realization. The "Large Glass"
constitutes a rehabilitation of perspective. For me, it's a mathematical, scientific perspective, based on
calculations and on dimensions.
Everything was becoming conceptual, that is, it depended on things other than the retina. What we
were interested in at the time was the fourth dimension. Simply, I thought of the idea of a projection,
of an invisible fourth dimension, something you couldn't see with your eyes.
"The Bride" in the "Large Glass" was based on this, as if it were the projection of a four-dimensional
object. I called "The Bride" a "delay in glass."
A tactile sensation which envelopes every side of an object approaches a tactile sensation of four
dimensions. Consequently the act of love as tactile sublimation could be felt as a physical
interpretation of the 4th dimension.
[…]Octavio Paz wrote: "It is above all the rigorous unity of Marcel Duchamp's work that surprises
anyone reviewing it in its entirety. ... He was fascinated by a four-dimensional object and the shadows
it throws, those shadows we call Idea, but the Idea is resolved at last [in the Philadelphia assemblage]
into a naked girl, a presence."
[…]Duchamp's 4 Oct 54 statement:
"... the Bride or the Pendu femelle is a 'projection' comparable to the projection of an 'imaginary entity'
in 4 dimensions in our world of 3 dimensions (and even in the case of flat glass to a reprojection of
these three dimensions on a surface of 2 dimensions)."
http://www.marcelduchamp.net/who_is_md02.php
Nowadays, it is clear that the majority of Duchamp's Cubist paintings were mostly
experiments and preliminary rehearsals for The Large Glass, the seminal work that
consumed his attention between 1913 and 1923. Like all subsequent works by
Duchamp, The Large Glass - the complete title of which, La mariee mise a nu par
ses celibataires, meme, is best translated as "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even" - is notorious for being enigmatic and impenetrable. In reality, it is
no more so than any other great work of art. It is part painting on glass and part
fantastic machinery.
The complicated mechanical works in The Large Glass obey a subverted and ironic
logic: a series of outlandish devices, among which are a chocolate grinder and a
water mill, enable a group of nine masculine archetypes ('malic" molds or
"bachelors" in Duchamp's words) to slip off the dress of a bizarre feminine
mechanical entity ("the Bride") which, in the process, undergoes a boisterously lewd
transformation. The machine, of course, produces no result, and its significance
issues precisely from the comic disproportion between such enormous display and
so slight an outcome. As well, The Large Glass is not exactly the machine itself, but
rather, a very unlikely representation of it. Speaking of the nine bachelors, Duchamp
once said that they were "the projection of the main points of a three-dimensional
body." This type of intellectually reductive operation is quite common throughout the
artist's oeuvre."
Page 5, Excerpt from Great Modern Masters — Duchamp General Editor: Jose
Maria Faerna, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1996
----The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, commonly referred to as "the
Green Box," is a green-flocked, self-hinged cardboard box containing one color plate
and 93 facsimile reproductions of notes, drawings, and photographs of the painting
of the same name. Marcel Duchamp, under the guise of his alter ego Rrose Sélavy,
produced 320 of these green boxes (of which 20 are deluxe editions) in 1934. Both
regular and deluxe editions are known as the Éditions Rrose Sélavy.
La MariéMise àu Par ses Cébataires, Mê TheThe original painting, La Mariée Mise à
Nu Par ses Célibataires, Même ("The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even")
was left unfinished. In 1923, after working on it for nine years, Duchamp abandoned
it. (The painting consists of two large panels of glass, one above the other,
displaying the top and bottom of an intricate mechanical diagram. It is usually called,
simply, the Large Glass.) "All along, while painting [the Large Glass], I wrote a
number of notes which were to compliment the visual experience like aBride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even - 1923 guide book." (1) These notes were
intended "to accompany and explain (as might an ideal exhibition-catalogue) my
painting on clear glass." (2)
Michel Sanouillet, one of the first publishers of Duchamp's writings, pointed out that
"[t]he relationship of the notes to the Large Glass becomes clear if one bears in mind
that the Glass, in Duchamp's own words, is both 'a wedding of mental and visual
reactions' and 'an accumulation of ideas.' The point is that 'some ideas require a
graphic language if they are not to be violated: this is my Glass. But a commentary
[made up] of notes may be useful, like the captions that go with the photos in a
Galeries Lafayette catalog. This is the raison d'être of my Box.'" (3)
----Concept of readymades also coexisted with the kinetic motion and play of light in the
Large Glass. Duchamp's interest in science, especially the interplay of light and new
theories of the universe appearing in the early 20th century, were embodied in this
piece as well.
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even / Large Glass 1915-23
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=4029
2) Influence from the Bauhaus: Pedagogical Sketchbook (Klee)
From: http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/artist26.html
In his often incomprehensible Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee struggled to link
abstract symbols to natural processes. He describes the arrow (a symbol that
appears frequently in his works) as an icon of energy, physical effect, and spiritual
yearning: "The father of the arrow is the thought, how do I expand my reach? Over
this river, this lake, this mountain? ... It is the contrast between power and prostration
that implies the duality of human existence. Half winged, half imprisoned — this is
man! Thought is the mediary between earth and the universe. So the two arrows
might symbolize a variety of oppositions: the upward radiating but dying light of the
sun and the descending gradations of night, spiritual ascent and physical decline,
perseverence and lethargy, creativity and dogma, the present and the future.
3) Calder's work in more detail
http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3ATA%3AE%3Acal
der%7CA%3ATA%3AE%3Acalder&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1
Calder first gained public recognition and acclaim for wire sculptures he made in
Paris in the late 1920s. "I think best in wire," he once commented. Known for
carrying a roll of wire over his shoulder and a pair of pliers in his pocket, Calder bent,
pinched, and twisted strands of wire to fashion this distinctive tribute to Josephine
Baker, one of the most celebrated performers of her day. Wire's appeal, Calder
explained, is that it "moves of its own volition . . . jokes and teases," is "deliberately
tantalizing," and "goes off into wild scrolls and tight tendrils"—a description that suits
this exuberant portrait particularly well.
Alexander Calder. (American, 1898-1976). A Universe. 1934. Painted iron pipe, steel
wire, motor, and wood with string, Overall: 40 1/2 x 30" (102.9 x 76.2 cm). Gift of
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (by exchange). © 2008 Estate of Alexander Calder / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
"Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions," Calder
stated shortly before making this work. One of Calder's first mechanized mobiles, A
Universe presents his abstract vision of the cosmos. A small red sphere and a larger
white one suggest planets and move along curved wire paths at different speeds,
completing a full cycle in forty minutes. Calder constructed a motor that propelled the
spheres' movements, using his training as a mechanical engineer.
Reflecting on his work of this period, Calder commented, "At that time and practically
ever since, the underlying form in my work has been the system of the universe." His
personal fascination with the solar system was part of a wider phenomenon,
prompted in part by the discovery of Pluto in 1930. Calder's interest in astronomy
and physics was not one-sided, however. When A Universe was first exhibited at the
Museum, Albert Einstein reportedly stood transfixed in front of its slowly moving orbs
for the entire forty–minute cycle.
The existentialist philosopher Jean–Paul Sartre extolled Calders mobiles. He
described the mobile as a "lyrical invention," inhabiting "a half–way station between
the servility of a statue and the independence of nature. Each of its evolutions is the
inspiration of a split second. One sees the artists main theme, but the mobile
embroiders it with a thousand variations."
Mobile circa 1932
Metal, wood, wire and string
unconfirmed: 1500 x 2000 x 2000 mm
sculpture
By suspending forms that move with the flow of air, Calder revolutionised sculpture.
Marcel Duchamp dubbed these works ‘mobiles’. Rather than a solid object of mass
and weight, they continually redefine the space around them as they move. Calder’s
subtle balance of form and colour resulted in works that suggest an animated version
of paintings by friends such as Joan Miró. This very early example was acquired by
Julian Trevelyan when he first got to know Calder in the early 1930s.
4) Tinguely and Kinetics
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2046&page
=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio
Swiss sculptor. He began experimenting with mechanical sculptures in the late
1930s, hanging objects from the ceiling and using a motor to make them rotate. In
1940 he began an apprenticeship as a window-dresser and also attended art classes
at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule, Basle. From 1941 to 1945 he studied there with
Julia Ris (b 1904) and discovered the work of Kurt Schwitters, which made a deep
impression on him. After World War II he began painting in a Surrealist manner, but
he soon abandoned painting to concentrate on sculpture. In 1949 he met Daniel
Spoerri. In 1953 they created the ‘Autothéâtre', a ballet of colours and movable
décor, made up of coloured forms in motion. Here there was no difference between
actor and spectator, and actions were performed on stage without the participation of
actors, the spectator being the same as an actor, much like the later Happening. The
same year Tinguely moved to Paris. There he produced his first abstract spatial
constructions, which were gradually equipped with moving mechanisms that could
be set in motion by the viewer. These early machines, which Tinguely called ‘metamechanical' devices (e.g. Meta-mechanical Automobile Sculpture, 1954; see fig.)
were characterized by their use of movement as a central element in their
construction. Some of them took the form of series paraphrasing the idioms of other
artists, for example the Meta-Kandinsky series (1955) or the Meta-Malevich reliefs
(1954), in which geometric shapes were made to rotate at constant, but different,
speeds with the aid of spindles and pulleys against the background of a black
wooden panel. In 1955 Tinguely participated in the exhibition of kinetic art, Le
Mouvement, at the Galerie Denise René in Paris, and in the late 1950s he produced
the Meta-matic painting machines (e.g. Meta-matic No. 17, 1959; Stockholm, Mod.
Mus.). These were portable machines with drawing arms that allowed the spectator
to produce abstract works of work automatically. They were first exhibited at the
Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1959; not all of the Meta-matics functioned properly, and
Tinguely destroyed some of them. He then began to incorporate electric motors into
his works, taking as his models the ‘roto-reliefs' created by Marcel Duchamp.
In 1960 Tinguely's friendship with Arman, César, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein and
other artists, and the art critic Pierre Restany (b 1930), led to the founding of
Nouveau Réalisme, which aimed at a reassessment of artistic form and material. His
involvement with the group led to the Baluba sculptures, a series of primitive figures
incorporating rags, fur, feathers and wire, animated by a motor (e.g. Baluba XIII,
1961; Duisburg, Lehmbruck-Mus.), and also to the Poor Ballet (1961, priv. col., see
Bischofberger, p. 120), an assemblage of objects and clothes suspended from a
ceiling that could be made to dance, again by means of a motor. The Transportation,
on the other hand, a public procession of sculptures from Tinguely's studio to the
Galerie des Quatre Saisons on 13 May 1960 that included the scrap-assemblage
Gismo (1960; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.), showed the influence of the Fluxus group,
while his self-destructing works should be seen in the spirit of neo-Dadaism. These
included the Homage to New York (1960), which burst into flames outside MOMA,
New York, the Study for an End of the World 1, which was set to self-destruct in the
grounds of the Louisiana Museum, Humblebaek, when the exhibition Bewogen
Beweging (Movement in Art) moved there in 1961, and an exploding sculpture of a
bull for a fiesta in honour of Salvador Dalí in Figueres.
In the mid-1960s Tinguely produced his first monumental works for an urban setting.
Welded together from scrap metal, they seem like monuments to the decline of the
19th-century cult of steam. Eureka (h. 8 m, 1963/4) can be regarded as the most
important work of this period; produced for Expo 1964–Schweizerische
Landesausstellung, Lausanne, in 1964, it is now next to the Zürichhorn Casino by
the side of Lake Zurich. In 1964 he began living with Niki de Saint Phalle, and in
1966 he collaborated with her and Per-Olof Ultvedt on the monumental sculpture
She (12 m×8 m×28 m; ex-Stockholm, Mod. Mus.; destr.). Throughout the 1960s he
continued to work collaboratively with, among others, Arman, Martial Raysse,
Edward Kienholz, Bernhard Luginbühl and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1970, to
celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of Nouveau Réalisme, he built a
gigantic phallus (h. 8 m), which he exploded outside Milan Cathedral.
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=14336&sear
chid=9966&tabview=text
5) The art of light: Flavin, Nauman and Turrell
Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin: 1933-1996
http://www.diaart.org/exhibs_b/flavin/essay.html
By 1963 Flavin had come to eschew any medium of painting or collage in favor of
simple, unadorned, commercially produced fluorescent light fixtures and tubes. And
by 1965 he had effectively summed up the major components of his art:
In time, I came to these conclusions about what I had found in fluorescent light,
and about what might be done with it plastically: Now the entire interior spatial
container and its parts—wall, floor, and ceiling—could support this strip of light but
would not restrict its act of light except to enfold it. . . . Realizing this, I knew that the
actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of
real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition. For example, if
you press an eight-foot fluorescent lamp into the vertical climb of a corner, you can
destroy that corner by glare and doubled shadow. A piece of wall can be visually
disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light
from edge to edge on the wall; that is, side to floor, for instance. . . . What has art
been for me? In the past, I have known it (basically) as a sequence of implicit
decisions to combine traditions of painting and sculpture in architecture with acts of
electric light defining space.2
Despite his dedication of each untitled work to a person or a personal reflection, and
his own deep awareness of the historical symbolism of light in art,3 Flavin always
refused to attach any symbolic or referential significance to his works:
It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else. . . . Everything is clearly, openly, plainly
delivered. There is no overwhelming spirituality you are supposed to come into
contact with. I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is
no invitation to meditate, to contemplate. It's in a sense a "get-in-get-out" situation.
And it is very easy to understand. One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but
I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.4
Flavin's simplified formal vocabulary can be related to the work of contemporaries
such as Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, and Donald Judd, all of whom have been
called Minimalist artists for their reduction of formal devices, their emphasis on serial
and rational rather than gestural forms, and their promotion of phenomenological
rather than symbolic or narrative strategies. These artists had gained much of their
inspiration from the fundamental structures of certain modernist predecessors, such
as Constantin Brancusi. Flavin's admiration for Brancusi's Endless Column (1918)
was made manifest when he dedicated his first work in fluorescent light, the diagonal
of personal ecstasy (the diagonal of May 25, 1963), to the Romanian artist. "Both
structures had a uniform elementary visual nature, but they were intended to excel
their obvious visible limitations of length and their apparent lack of complication," he
wrote.5 The systematic repetition of form seen in Endless Column persisted in
Flavin's work, albeit usually oriented horizontally, as in untitled (1970), a large-scale
barrier in red and blue light (the first version of which was made for Judd's loft on
Spring Street, New York). Flavin had invented the "barrier" in 1966 as a freestanding
series of fixtures that physically block a passageway or a segment of a space with
light.
Flavin also proclaimed respect for the work of other modernist abstract artists, most
notably perhaps the innovators of the Russian avant-garde, particularly Vladimir
Tatlin, to whom he dedicated his most sustained series of works, "monuments" for V.
Tatlin (1964–90). The far-from-incidental relationship of these works to Tatlin's
illuminates both formal inventions in Flavin's work and its context within the history of
art.
Tatlin's first major public work was the sculptural installation of collaged industrial
materials that he displayed in a 1915 exhibition with Kasimir Malevich's painting
Black Square. Both works were installed in corners of the gallery, thereby claiming
the unused margins of their exhibition space, while also overtly referring to the
religious icons that traditionally hung in the corner of a room in many Russian
homes. Tatlin's and Malevich's occupations of the corners with their new abstract
"icons" were an attempt to create a radical, unique, and dynamic artistic vocabulary
that expressed the human aspirations of the impending industrial and social
revolution of the twentieth century. Flavin's career-long preoccupation with the
corner of the gallery implicitly echoes the Russians' gesture of engaging spaces
traditionally not utilized for painting and sculpture; nevertheless, his corner works
refute the simultaneous religious symbolism and utopian social ambition that are
epitomized by Tatlin's sculpture.
Tatlin's greatest work was Monument to the Third International (1920), the planned
but unrealized spiral tower for which Flavin's "monuments" are named. Yet Flavin
noted, "I always use 'monuments' in quotes to emphasize the ironic humor of
temporary monuments. These 'monuments' only survive as long as the light system
is useful (2,100 hours)."6 Flavin presented his appropriation of commercial light
fixtures—quintessential products of our industrialized society—not as a timeless
celebration of a revolutionary culture, as Tatlin's work was intended to be, but as
ontological fact, tangible and temporal. He used his humorous historical reference to
Tatlin precisely to separate his work from the kind of symbolic significance to which
Tatlin aspired. At the same time, though, he clearly revered Tatlin as a tragic human
individual, and his "frustrated, insistent attitude to attempt to combine artistry and
engineering.”
http://www.diacenter.org/ltproj/flavbrid/essay.html
In 1979 Dia Art Foundation purchased the former First Baptist Church of
Bridgehampton to create a gallery for changing exhibitions and a long-term exhibition
space for the art of Dan Flavin, a resident of nearby Wainscott. Originally built as a
firehouse in 1908, the building operated as a church from 1924 to the mid-1970s.
Under the direction of Flavin and the architect Richard Gluckman, Dia restored and
renovated the building to acknowledge both of these former functions. Changes to
the exterior and painting the newel post in the entrance hall fire-engine red
referenced the building's first use. Similarly, the original church doors were moved to
the entrance of a small exhibition space on the second floor, which contains
memorabilia, including a neon cross, collected from and about the church during the
renovation. While the building has been made into an art gallery, it still holds these
traces of its former functional and spiritual uses. This conversion parallels Flavin's
transformation of light and fluorescent fixtures from spiritual associations or
mundane service to contemporary "icons" depleted of religious or utilitarian
significance.
Flavin's early use of fluorescent light is represented in this exhibition by untitled
(1962), the final working drawing for icon IV (the pure land) (to David John Flavin
[1933-1962]). This drawing documents one of a group of "electric light 'icons'" that
Flavin made in the early 1960s. These icons, made from boxes that hang on the wall
with attached electric lights, mark his rejection of an earlier gestural style in order to
develop an art—now considered a cornerstone of Minimalism—that uses standard
fluorescent lights in simple, matter-of-fact presentations.
This drawing also alludes to a less commonly recognized aspect of Flavin's lights:
their presentation as memorials, monuments, or tributes to various individuals.1
Although Flavin abandoned the personal as connoted by expressionistic means,
most of his artworks were dedicated to friends, relatives, curators, or historical
personages. An autobiographical record was thereby incorporated into his work in its
commemorations. But these personal tributes neither monumentalize individualism
nor particular individuals; they are ordinary objects that lack the permanence of
conventional monuments. While turned on, they have a magical presence, turned off,
they don't exist.
In 1963 Flavin began to use only standard fluorescent fixtures and tubes mounted
directly on walls. Marcel Duchamp's invention of the ready-made and Jasper Johns's
use of everyday objects in an artistic context—most notably in his bronze light
bulbs—were certainly precedents for Flavin's use of fluorescent lights. Nonetheless,
as a medium for an ongoing body of work, fluorescent light was new. To provide
context and to give it formal structure, Flavin used elements from painting, sculpture,
and architecture. The six works in the second-floor exhibition offer a brief survey of
Flavin's development of this chosen medium.
red out of a corner (to Annina), 1963, a single eight-foot-long red lamp forming a
vertical line enveloped by a corner, recalls the vertical "zips" in fields of color in
Barnett Newman's paintings. Like Newman, Flavin used simple, straightforward
composition and large scale to convey an immediate nonillusionistic presence. A
more general (and humorous) reference to painting is made by untitled (to Katharina
and Cristoph), 1971, an eight-foot-square construction placed symmetrically across a
corner. The structure provides a kind of picture frame for the green light illuminating
the real space in back and front of it.2 The constructed hallways of untitled (to Jan
and Ron Greenberg), 1972-73, and untitled (to Robert, Joe, and Michael), 1975-81,
blocked halfway through by barriers of light, similarly function as frames or
containers of light. By using corner spaces, as with four works exhibited here, Flavin
integrated his light constructions directly with the architecture. This device, borrowed
from Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, activates the walls into structural
elements to work with or against. In red out of a corner, the dramatic red column is
enclosed by the walls of a corner; in the later untitled (to Katharina and Cristoph),
1971, the architectural scale of the lamps and the intensity of light transform the
cornered space into a wash of green. The exhibition space's fabricated corridors do
not offer passage but, rather, support the fixtures and provide surfaces for the
reflection of colored light.
Whereas pictorial conventions and architectural structures offered Flavin a
framework in which to consider his medium, he worked without precedents in dealing
with the light and color specific to fluorescent tubes. The red, for example, in red out
of a corner was originally intended to pull out space, like red paint on canvas, but in
making the piece, Flavin discovered that red fluorescent light does not radiate much
from the tube. Fluorescent light is produced by the transfer of invisible ultraviolet
light, created by burning gas, to visible light by a variety of phosphors, which coat the
inside of the tube.3 These phosphors radiate at different wavelengths within the
visible color spectrum, producing different colors with different levels of illumination.
Green is the most luminous. No mixture of phosphors make a true red, so red light is
made by tinting the inside of the glass tube, thereby inhibiting the amount of light
cast by the lamp. Red is thus subdued, as in red out of a corner, while green is so
bright, especially when multiple lamps are used, that it fatigues the eye and appears
white. This phenomenon becomes evident in viewing untitled (to Katharina and
Cristoph) and the back side of untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg). As the green
becomes white, the daylight through the windows looks pink. Colored light does not
mix like pigment: the primary colors are red, blue, and green. Green mixed with red
makes yellow light, and all the primaries mixed together make white. These effects
are perhaps most apparent in untitled (1976), an eight-foot pink lamp backed by
green and blue lamps, which lean into the corner. The pink light forms a line
highlighted by an intense blue and green pyramid of color on the wall. As blue mixes
with pink light, it forms a purple band, and green with pink makes a yellow area.
untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977, is Flavin's fullest use of color in this
exhibition. In an eight-foot gridded construction across the corner, pink, blue, green,
and yellow lights mix in pastel squares on the wall, but the overall ambient light is
white.
In 1972 Flavin added circular fluorescent lights, which produce varying qualities of
white light, to his inventory of materials. untitled (to Jim Schaeufele) 1, 2, and 3
(1972) in three different colors-cool white, daylight, and warm-accommodates the
existing architecture by providing necessary illumination in the stairwell.
Image 1: Dan Flavin, untitled (to the "innovator" of Wheeling Peachblow), 19661968.
Daylight, yellow, and pink fluorescent light. 8 ft. (244 cm) square across a corner.
Image 2: Dan Flavin, untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977.
Pink, yellow, blue, and green fluorescent light. 8 ft. (244 cm) square across a corner.
Image 3: Dan Flavin, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), 1963.
Yellow fluorescent light8 ft. (244 cm) long on the diagonal.
Flavin at MoMA:
Dan Flavin. (American, 1933-1996). Pink out of a Corner - To Jasper Johns. 1963.
Fluorescent light and metal fixture, 8' x 6" x 5 3/8" (243.8 x 15.2 x 13.6 cm). Gift of
Philip Johnson. © 2008 Estate of Dan Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York
Not on view
Gallery label text
2007
Made the year Flavin began to use commercially available fluorescent light tubes,
this work marries color and light, bringing them into three dimensions. In dialogue
with the surrounding space, the vertical pink tube simultaneously illuminates and
obscures the corner—a location not typically used for displaying art. Though the light
emitted transcends its physical encasement and transforms the surrounding space,
Flavin rejected any characterization of his work as sublime. "One might not think of
light as a matter of fact, but I do," he stated. "And it is...as plain and open and direct
an art as you will ever find." This work is dedicated to the artist Jasper Johns, who
similarly blurred boundaries between real objects and their representation.
=======
Nauman:
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/nauman/work_1.htm
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. He works in a diverse range of media including sculpture,
video, film, neon, printmaking, performance and installation. Nauman continually
questions and reinvents his artistic practice, concentrating less on the development
of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can
transform or become a work of art.
Confronted with ‘What to do?’ in his studio soon after graduating, Nauman had the
simple but profound realization that if he is an artist, everything he does in the studio
is art. This early revelation is fundamental to understanding his creative output, and
particularly relevant to an exploration of Mapping the Studio where the artist’s
immediate environment – his studio - becomes the subject of the art.
““If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio
must be art."
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue2/soundwaves.htm
In his recent installation, Raw Materials, 2004 the fifth commission in the Unilever
Series at Tate Modern, Nauman explores his interests in speech and language.
[Return to this in the context of Sound Art]
Turrell:
http://www.orbit.zkm.de/?q=node/311
http://d-sites.net/english/turrell.htm
http://www.henryart.org/pastex/pastex2003.htm#turrell
"Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something
so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile. I like to work with it so that you
feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space. I want to
employ sunlight, moonlight and starlight to empower a work of art."—James Turrell
http://www.kultureflash.net/archive/102/priview.html
Interview:
Yes, started when I was 23.
SS: 23?
JT: Yes the first one was made in '66, those were the Stu for Afro; these ones are
right across the corner. Then I figured out how to do it with projectors, the first show.
Len Picus, LP associates, Len is a gem of a man, he fronted me the projectors.
SS: Do you feel strange re-visiting your work? About what… 40 years later?
JT: 36, it is interesting.
SS: Do you see changes in your work?
JT: Yeah, it's interesting to see. They are in a way… old friends, but some of them I
look at and wonder what was I thinking. And some colours too. But you know these
are the beginnings and you start out with a fresh naivite.
SS: Now reflecting back, they seem closer to Minimalism -- as if light were a solid,
physical entity. In your more recent work, the light is more painterly… that is more
immaterial.
JT: Well, in a way this is the most painterly, in the sense that I looked at the room
itself and the framework of the room as the picture plane, so that when you put the
light on the wall it cannot lie on the same plane as the wall, it either lies in front of it.
Or it has the quality of going through it, or some of the pieces here make a kind of a
hypothetical space that is sort of three-dimensional, but if you notice the form does
not really solve the three-dimensions, so there is a strange dimensionality. And in
that way this comes out of painting predominantly as opposed to sculpture, although
architects talk about enlivening the space between or making it positive, which I've
rarely seen. So I make these spaces that somehow contain or apprehend the light
and these first ones were much more painterly -- almost like Malevich, and he talked
about laying on the paint so that it was almost like without dimension. Well, paint has
much more dimension than light, so you really get this quality of just light making the
space and if you see the white one it really falls off to the right and becomes quite
deep and attaches itself to the other wall. It has this plastic malleability that is
amazing to me so you know it took me a while to know about that. When I was at art
school they teach you the colour wheel; we should really teach the spectrum. People
think you take blue and yellow together you make green, but if you put blue and
yellow light together you get white, which is a shock to many because it's not how
you think of it, and the more colour you put together in paint the more muddy you get
and you never get black, more mud quality…
http://d-sites.net/english/turrell.htm
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/clip1.html
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/card1.html
From EGG interview
EGG: How did light become your medium as well as the subject of your art?
JT: I was really interested in light. I was trying to find out what to do with it, how to
present it, what place in the culture to bring it out. It was a little bit difficult. We teach
the color wheel, but we really should speak about the light frequencies of each eye,
and then the context of vision in which they reach the eye, because that's how we
perceive. So I studied perceptual psychology and the psychology of official
perception. And that was a way I came to this and then took this into the art world.
EGG: Did you reach this conclusion through more traditional media, like painting or
sculpture?
JT: I haven't had anything to do with either sculpture or painting. I have done works
that look painted or works that have form and look like sculpture. I make these
spaces that apprehend light for your perception. In a way, it's like Plato's cave,
where we are sitting in the cave looking at the reflection of reality with our backs to
reality. I make these spaces where the spaces themselves are perceivers or in some
way pre-form perception. It's a little bit like what the eye does. I mean, I look at the
eye as the most exposed part of the brain, as something that is already forming
perception. I make these rooms that are these camera-like spaces that in some way
form light, apprehend it to be something that's physically present.
EGG: What happens when you use space this way?
JT: This results in an art that is not about my seeing, it's about your direct perception
of the work. I'm interested in having a light that inhabits space, so that you feel light
to be physically present. I mean, light is a substance that is, in fact, a thing, but we
don't attribute thing-ness to it. We use light to illuminate other things, something we
read, sculpture, paintings. And it gladly does this. But the most interesting thing to
find is that light is aware that we are looking at it, so that it behaves differently when
we are watching it and when we're not, which imbues it with consciousness. Often
people say that they want to touch some of the work I do. Well, that feeling is
actually coming from the fact that the eyes are touching, the eyes are feeling. And
this happens because the eyes are quite sensitive only in low light, for which we
were made. We're actually made for this light of Plato's cave, the light of twilight.
EGG: How does light relate to space?
JT: Through light, space can be formed without physical material like concrete or
steel. We can actually stop vision and the penetration of vision with where light is
and where it isn't. Like the atmosphere, we can't see through it to the stars that are
there during the day. But as soon as that light is dimmed around the self, then this
penetration of vision goes out. So I'm very interested in this feeling, using the eyes to
penetrate the space. In the piece "Sky Space," a daylight space brings the sky down
to the top of the room. This idea that the sky actually comes down right on top of us
and that we're at the bottom of this ocean of air is a feeling that I like to create. I do a
lot of building first to make these spaces that hold and contain this fragile material.
As in "Sky Space" at P.S. 1, it's strange because this is New York, where you don't
usually see the sky like that. But then you come in and hear the sky -- and this is
New York sky -- and it's terrific. You know, it's beautiful. New York sky is beautiful.
http://conversations.org/story.php?sid=32
http://www.soum.co.jp/mito/art/95/turrell/release-e.html
From the pbs.org slideshow:
"The Light Inside"
1999
Electric lights, wires, metal and paint, site-specific permanent installation at The
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
"[The Quaker] George Fox talked about the light, both in a literal and a figurative
sense, or allegorical sense. And a lot of it is the revelation, which is a light, as in a
bright idea can light, but it always says this image of light, and so I was very
interested in this literal look at it, actually greeting this light that you find in
meditation, and following that. But, that's not its entire meaning, and I think that that's
why I just express it that way. But it's certainly something that I've related to and
like."
- James Turrell
"Afrum-Proto"
1996
Quartz halogen corner projection, installation at Art Tower Mito, Japan
Collection of Jeanne and Michael Klein
Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York
"In thinking of light, if we can think about what it can do, and what it is, by thinking
about itself, not about what we wanted it to do for other things, because again we've
used light as people might be used, in the sense that we use it to light paintings. We
use it to light so that we can read. We don't really pay much attention to the light
itself. And so turning that and letting light and sound speak for itself is that you figure
out these different relationships and rules."
- James Turrell
On Roden Crater:
"Roden Crater," East Portal Entryway
2000
Roden Crater Project, Flagstaff, Arizona
Photo by Dick Wiser
Courtesy The Skystone Foundation and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
"I wanted to use the very fine qualities of light. First of all, moonlight. There's a space
where you can see your shadow from the light of Venus alone- things like this. I also
wanted to gather starlight that was from outside the planetary system, which would
be from the sun or reflected off of the moon or a planet...you've got this older light
that's away from the light even of our galaxy. So that is light that would be at least
three and a half billion years old. So you're gathering light that's older than our solar
system."
- James Turrell
"Roden Crater," Southwest View
2000
Roden Crater Project, Flagstaff, Arizona
Photo by Dick Wiser
Courtesy The Skystone Foundation and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
"This is really beautiful when the sun hits it in the afternoon because you really get
the red and the black, that separation of the two craters from the west side. And it
really stood out. The nice thing about it was that it was off by itself, so it didn't have
other volcanoes that would be in the horizon when you were inside it....I spent seven
months flying the Western states, sleeping under the wing of the plane, and every
third night staying in a Holiday Inn, to clean up. And every site that I saw that was
interesting generated new work, or new ideas."
- James Turrell
----------Wide Out, 1998, shown at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2005
From http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_155_3.html
Manipulating light as a sculptor would mold clay, James Turrell creates works that
amplify perception. Unlike pictorial art that replicates visual experience through
mimetic illusion, Turrell’s light works—one cannot call these shimmering events
”objects“ or ”images“—give form to perception. Each installation activates a
heightened sensory awareness that promotes discovery: what seems to be a
lustrous, suspended cube is actually the conjunction of two flat panels of projected
light; a rectangle of radiant color hovering in front of a wall is really a deep,
illuminated depression in the space; a velvety black square on the ceiling is, in
reality, a portal to the night sky. With such effects, Turrell hopes to coax the viewer
into a state of self-reflexivity in which one can see oneself seeing.
Turrell has consistently utilized the sparest formal means to perpetuate the
consciousness of perception. As demonstrated by the projected geometric ”cube“ of
Afrum I, in which light creates the illusion of volume, the artist’s work derives its
power from simplicity. Turrell’s early inquiries into the psychological implications of
perception involved sensory deprivation. In 1968 he participated in the Art &
Technology program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With scientist
Edward Wortz, who was investigating the perceptual alterations encountered in
space travel, he studied the visual indeterminacy of the Ganzfeld—an optical
phenomenon in which there is nothing for the eye to focus on—with the goal of
observing his own retinal activity.
Such phenomena are manifest in works involving structural cuts into existing
architecture that allow outside light to penetrate and inhabit interior realms. Lunette
is an opening to the sky at the end of a barrel-vaulted hall flanked by hidden
fluorescent lights that accentuate the nuanced tones of dawn and dusk. This and all
of Turrell’s skyspaces hark back to ancient building techniques that deployed natural
light—and the cycles of the cosmos—to create symbolic architecture. In other spatial
interventions, such as Night Passage, Turrell uses wall partitions with rectangular
windows opening onto contiguous areas filled with pure, colored light. Standing in
what Turrell has called the ”sensing space,“ the viewer encounters a Ganzfeld, the
volume of colored light on the other side of the partition collapsing into what appears
to be a floating, luminous plane with no surface or depth. The illusion is destabilizing
yet mesmerizing; it is a tangible example of the artist’s endeavor to produce
sensations that are essentially prelingual, to create a transformative experience of
wordless thought.
Nancy Spector
6) The birth of holography: Benyon, Patrick Boyd, etc. Mention Op Art and Riley first.
http://www.art-in-holography.org/intro/sessions.html
http://www.jrholocollection.com/catalog/index.html
http://www.jrholocollection.com/catalog/boyd.html
http://www.jrholocollection.com/collection.html
http://www.holonet.khm.de/benyonarchive/top/writrevs.htm
http://www.holonet.khm.de/benyonarchive/top/writrevs.htm
http://www.holonet.khm.de/benyonarchive/gallery/costext.htm
http://www.holographyschool.co.uk/index.html
http://www.apepper.com/
http://www.apepper.com/content/writing.html
7) Laser art
============
Nam June Paik and the start of video art
From http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=paiknamjun
Nam June Paik--composer, performer, and video artist--played a pivotal role in
introducing artists and audiences to the possibilities of using video for artistic
expression. His works explore the ways in which performance, music, video images,
and the sculptural form of objects can be used in various combinations to question
our accepted notions of the nature of television.
Growing up in Korea, Nam June Paik studied piano and composition. When his
family moved, first to Hong Kong and then to Japan, he continued his studies in
music while completing a degree in aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. After
graduating, Paik went to Germany to pursue graduate work in philosophy. There he
became part of a group of Fluxus artists who were challenging established notions of
what constituted art. Their work often found expression in performances and
happenings that incorporated random events and found objects.
In 1959 Paik performed his composition Hommage a John Cage. This performance
combined a pre-recorded collage of music and sounds with "on stage" sounds
created by people, a live hen, a motorcycle, and various objects. Random events
marked this and other Paik compositions. Instruments were often altered or even
destroyed during the performance. Most performances were as much a visual as a
musical experience.
As broadcast television programming invaded the culture, Paik began to experiment
with ways to alter the video image. In 1963 he included his first video sculptures in
an exhibition, Exposition of Music--Electronic Television. Twelve television sets were
scattered throughout the exhibit space. The electronic components of these sets
were modified to create unexpected effects in the images being received. Other
video sculptures followed. Distorted TV used manipulation of the sync pulse to alter
the image. Magnet TV used a large magnet which could be moved on the outside of
the television set to change the image and create abstract patterns of light. Paik
began to incorporate television sets into a series of robots. The early robots were
constructed largely of bits and pieces of wire and metal; later ones were built from
vintage radio and television sets refitted with updated electronic components.
Some of Paik's video installations involve a single monitor, others use a series of
monitors. In TV Buddha a statue of Buddha sits facing its own image on a closedcircuit television screen. For TV Clock twenty-four monitors are lined up. The image
on each is compressed into a single line with the lines on succeeding monitors
rotated to suggest the hands of a clock representing each hour of the day. In Positive
Egg the video camera is aimed at a white egg on a black cloth. In a series of larger
and larger monitors, the image is magnified until the actual egg becomes an abstract
shape on the screen.
In 1964 Paik moved to New York City and began a collaboration with classical cellist
Charlotte Moorman to produce works combining video with performance. In TV Bra
for Living Sculpture small video monitors became part of the cellist's costume. With
TV Cello television sets were stacked to suggest the shape of the cello. As Moorman
drew the bow across the television sets, images of her playing, video collages of
other cellists, and live images of the performance area combined.
When the first consumer-grade portable video cameras and recorders went on sale
in New York in 1965, Paik purchased one. Held up in a traffic jam created by Pope
Paul VI's motorcade, Paik recorded the parade and later that evening showed it to
friends at Cafe a Go-Go. With this development in technology it was possible for the
artist to create personal and experimental video programs.
Paik was invited to participate in several experimental workshops including one at
WGBH in Boston and another at WNET in New York City. The Medium is the
Medium, his first work broadcast by WGBH, was a video collage that raised
questions about who is in control of the viewing experience. At one point in a voiceover Paik instructed the viewers to follow his directions, to close or open their eyes,
and finally to turn off the set. At WGBH Paik and electronics engineer Shuya Abe
built the first model of Paik's video synthesizer which produced non-representational
images. Paik used the synthesizer to accompany a rock-and-roll soundtrack in Video
Commune and to illustrate Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. At WNET Paik
completed a series of short segments, The Selling of New York, which juxtaposed
the marketing of New York and the reality of life in the city. Global Groove, produced
with John Godfrey, opened with an explanation that it was a "glimpse of a video
landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth
and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book." What followed was a
rapid shift from rock-and-roll dance sequences to Allen Ginsberg to Charlotte
Moorman with the TV cello to an oriental dancer to John Cage to a Navaho drummer
to a Living Theatre performance. Throughout, the video image was manipulated by
layering images, reducing dancers to a white line outlining their form against a wash
of brilliant color, creating evolving abstract forms. Rapid edits of words and
movements and seemingly random shifts in the backgrounds against which the
dancers perform create a dreamlike sense of time and space.
Nam June Paik pioneered the development of electronic techniques to transform the
video image from a literal representation of objects and events into an expression of
the artist's view of those objects and events. In doing so, he challenges our accepted
notion of the reality of televised events. His work questions time and memory, the
nature of music and art, even the essence of our sensory experiences. Most
significantly, perhaps, that work questions our experience, our understanding, and
our definitions of "television."
-Lucy Liggett
Allan Kaprow – Hello (for the TV programme The Medium is the Medium), 1969
Allan Kaprow
«Hello»
In 1969, Kaprow created «Hello,» an interactive video happening for «The
Medium Is the Medium,» a thirty-minute experimental television program with six
visual artists. Five television cameras and twenty-seven monitors connected four
remote locations over a closed-circuit television network.
Groups of people were dispatched to the various locations with instructions
as to what they would say on camera, such as «Hello, I see you,» when
acknowledging their own image or that of a friend. Kaprow functioned as
‹director› in the studio control room. If someone at the airport were talking
to someone at M.I.T., the picture might suddenly switch and one would be
talking to doctors at the hospital.
Kaprow explained that he was interested in the idea of «communications
media as non-communications,» and that the most important message was
the idea of «oneself in connection with someone else.» «Hello» offered a
critique of the disruptive manner by which technology mediates interaction.
It metaphorically short-circuited the television network, thereby calling attention to
the connections made between actual people.
(source: Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken , MISSING IN ACTION: AGENCY
AND MEANING IN INTERACTIVE ART)
From http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/hello-kaprow/
Thomas Tadlock – The Archetron (1966)
See here for films of the Archetron and other works, e.g. Paik’s TV Bra
http://www.eai.org/kinetic/ch1/creative/film_video.html
The Archetron - program notes for TV as a Creative Medium
by Thomas Tadlock, 1969
Thomas Tadlock studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, working with light
sculptures and eventually exploring the possibilities of manipulation of television
images. He was also influenced by some of Nam June Paik’s early works. The
Archetron was designed as a commission, and was a unique device. It accepts a
black and white broadcast television signal. A triangular pie-shaped section of this
image is removed, and then repeated around a symmetrical axis, visually similar to a
kaleidoscopic image. There were at least three units in the machine. For each b&w
signal coming in, there were knobs for color control over red, green and blue. The
color was generated by a mathematical relationships of the black and white signal
levels in the incoming signal. For each incoming signal there were three knobs - red,
green and blue. By combining the primaries, other colors could be created. There
was control over the “amount” or percent of color. The operator could perform with
the machine in real time, adjusting colors as the image changes.
The Archetron
“By means of a console with innumerable knobs, switches, dials and other
mysterious looking controls, three small TV monitors and a system of mirrors and
color filters, Tadlock is able to compose on a TV screen constantly moving and
changing colorful kaleidoscopic images. In accomplishing this, Tadlock uses all or
part of three separate live broadcasts. It is now possible for this artist (or any other
using the Archetron) in effect to create simultaneously works of art on TV screens in
countless homes, thus making Nam June Paik’s “Silent TV Station” possible. All that
is needed is for a broadcasting organization, a closed circuit TV company or cable
company to avail itself of this remarkable device. ‘In these years I developed devices
with patterns, sequences, motion, color, programmed to make the viewer get
involved in the unfolding composition, to relax and want more, to develop a new way
of seeing. As the requirements of this new art revealed themselves, a need for an
instantaneous, flowing, comprehensive device for expressing these images arose.
This vacuum was filled by the use of the color television tube as the readout device
for the program apparatus’.”
From http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/tools/ttool.php3?id=5&page=1
The Howard Wise Gallery and TV As a Creative Medium
TV As a Creative Medium: Howard Wise and Video Art
by Marita Sturken, May 1984, Afterimage, Vol. 11, No. 10 (part 1 of 2)
Ever since Marshall McLuhan has become a household name, people have
become aware of the tremendous force, both actual and potential; that TV is having
and will have on their lives.
The machine is obsolescent. Magazines, books, newspapers and other
publications making use of the written word as we have known it are threatened. The
relationships of nations, classes, generations and individuals are deeply affected.
Education will be revolutionized, schools transformed if not eliminated (why interrupt
your child’s education by sending him to school?). TV is at the cause, or at least at
the root of the cause, of all of these changes that are transforming our civilization.
Why has not art been affected by this pervading influence? Perhaps quite simply
because, up until now the time was not right. Perhaps it had to await the maturing of
the generation who were in their sub-teens in the 1950’s, those who were “brought
up” on TV .... As in every generation, some were artists. These have been at work
for two, three, five and even more years, scrounging around second hand shops for
parts, working with TV because they were fascinated by the results they were able to
achieve, and because they sensed the potential of TV as the medium for their
expression. (1)
-Howard Wise
Howard Wise is one of the people who is responsible for the idea of an alternative
television. (2)
-Frank Gillette
“TV as a Creative Medium” was a catalytic event around which a video art
community began to coalesce. New names and faces had appeared on the scene
every year since 1965, but until the Spring of ‘69 there had been no center, no real
cohesion, no sense of a community of purpose. After the show at the Howard Wise
Gallery, it was possible to identify oneself as a video artist, and to recognize other
video artists. (3)
-Davidson Gigliotti
The shape and direction of video art’s accelerated growth, since virtual nonexistence
in the mid-‘60s up to the present, has been influenced primarily by the priorities of
major funders - the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation,
the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. It has matured without the bevy
of individual collectors who support more established forms such as painting and
sculpture. Within video’s media arts centers and funding organizations, there are
many advocates, administrators, and curators who provide an infrastructure which
enables artists to produce and distribute work, often doing so with little publicity or
recognition. In this realm, Howard Wise stands out as an individual benefactor who
preceded and has supplemented private foundations and public movies. He has
been a central figure in the visibility, production, and acceptance of video art. For
almost 20 years, he has been one of the few patrons of video art.
On May 17, 1969, a show which was to become the seminal exhibition of video art in
the U.S. opened at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. That exhibition, “TV
as a Creative Medium,” effectively pointed to the diverse potential of a new art form
and social tool. Subsequently, the show became renowned for the inspiration it
provided for many artists and future advocates of video. The artists represented in
the show, a few of whom are still involved in the medium today, came from varied
backgrounds-painting, filmmaking, nuclear physics, avant-garde music and
performance, kinetic and light sculpture-and their approaches presented a primer of
the directions which video would soon take. Theoretically, they variously saw video
as viewer participation, a spiritual and meditative experience, a mirror, an electronic
palette, a kinetic sculpture, or a cultural machine to be deconstructed. Ripe with
ideas and armed with a heady optimism about the future of communications, these
artists used video as an information tool and as a means of gaining understanding
and control of television, not solely as an art form. In “TV as a Creative Medium”
alternative television was presented as a stepping stone to the promised
communications utopia.
Despite such non-aesthetic concerns among first generation videomakers, the
exhibition signaled the emergence of a definition of video as an art medium. By
1969, Wise had established himself as a central figure in what has come to be
known as the “art and technology” movement. His 57th St. gallery was one of the
main showcases for kinetic and light sculpture, and initially Wise looked upon video
as a kind of light work, an extension of kineticism. In 1969 he wrote, “Most
Americans already have potential kinetic art right in their own living rooms:
Television is kinetic art - it needs only to be ‘ordered’ by an artist.”(4) Wise’s step into
electronic art, however, was an irreversible one. Within a year and a half after “TV as
a Creative Medium” he closed his gallery and began plans for an organization
designed to foster the work of video artists and their use of new technologies. That
organization eventually became known as Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
See: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/people/pview.php3?id=33&page=1
Les Levine’s early work
A third early experimenter, and one who has remained steadfastly independent of
any group affiliation, is Les Levine. In 1968, after he had been working with video
tape for some time, he presented the first public showing of his work. As the
audience watched his prerecorded video tapes on such subjects as the destruction
of art and the nude model, they could also watch their own reactions on a closedcircuit monitor: Levine had a camera in the room. This is typical of his work - Levine
is not interested in traditional aesthetics, but with television environments, with the
movement of information within physical and temporal limits. He was quoted in a
New York Times review as saying that he hoped to help people form new images of
themselves by showing them their reactions to what they see. "They'll change as
they note their responses to various situations presented on the tapes... If you see
yourself looking self-conscious, for example, you'll be forced to think why."
Also in 1968, Levine produced his first "television sculpture", Iris. Once again, Levine
had the viewer confronting himself via television. In this case, all the hardware for the
closed-circuit system was contained in one eight-foot-tall sculpture-console.
Standing in front of this console, the viewer faced six monitors and three concealed
video cameras. The cameras shot the space in front of the console, and presented
views of the environment in close-up, middle distance, and wide angle. Each of
these cameras had its own monitor and the three others provided distorted images
that might or might not be recognizable. Thus, a viewer standing in front of the
console could see three different views of himself juxtaposed with other random
video information.
In this early work, Levine opened an examination of television as an information
system of great flexibility and complexity. This aspect of the medium has been
further explored with increasing subtlety and sophistication by several artists in the
years since Levine made Iris.
- Johanna Branson Gill: VIDEO: STATE OF THE ART, 1976
--LES LEVINE produced two installations, Iris (1968) and Contact: A Cybernetic
Sculpture (1969), which were important predecessors to Wipe Cycle, although less
complex. In Iris, six monitors in a grid show imagery of viewers in close-up, midrange, and wide angle; in Contact, the concept of Iris is extended with similar
imagery on 18 monitors (nine on either side), with images switching from screen to
screen.
- Marita Sturken, May 1984, Afterimage, Vol. 11, No. 10
------------------------------------------------------- from: Gene Youngblood: EXPANDED CINEMA
"Machines that show the human organism itself as a working model," says Les
Levine, "may eventually destroy the need for psychology as we know it today."
Essentially an intermedia artist who works in plastics, alloys, and disposables,
Levine was among the first conceptual artists on the New York scene focusing more
on idea than icon. Naturally he turned to television, the most conceptual of all
creative media. As a video artist Levine is best known for two closed-circuit
teledynamic systems, Iris (1968) and Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture (1969).
In both works the motivation is somewhat psychological: Levine is fascinated by the
implications of self-awareness through the technologically-extended superego of the
closed-circuit TV. "I don't tend to think of my work purely in psychological terms," he
explains, "but one must assume some psychological effect of seeing oneself on TV
all the time. Through my systems the viewer sees himself as an image, the way
other people would see him were he on television. In seeing himself this way he
becomes more aware of what he looks like. All of television, even broadcast
television, is to some degree showing the human race to itself as a working model.
It's a reflection of society, and it shows society what society looks like. It renders the
social and psychological condition of the environment visible to that environment."
In Iris, three concealed cameras focus on an environment (one's living room, for
example) in close-up, middle-distance, and wideangle. These images are displayed
on six black-and-white TV tubes mounted in an eight-foot console that also houses
the cameras. Combinations and distortions of images interact from screen to screen
in a kind of videotronic mix of the physical and metaphysical elements of the
environment. Seeing three different views of oneself in combination with three others
is a unique experience.
From http://www.n3krozoft.com/_xxbcf67373.TMP/tv/les_levine.html
Steina and Woody Vasulka
Steina and Woody Vasulka
Steina was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1940. While studying violin and music
theory at the music conservatory in Prague in 1959, she met and married Woody
Vasulka.
They moved to New York City in 1965 where Steina initially worked as a freelance
musician. In their early collaborative work, the Vasulkas examined the electronic
nature of video and sound, developing specialized imaging tools and strategies while
also using the medium to document the city's expanding underground culture. "We
were interested in certain decadent aspects of America, the phenomena of the
time—underground rock and roll, homosexual theater, and the rest of the illegitimate
culture. In the same way, we were curious about more puritanical concepts of art
inspired by [Marshall] McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. It seemed a strange and
unified front—against the establishment." In 1971, with Andreas Mannik, the
Vasulkas founded The Kitchen as a media arts theater. In the same year, Steina and
Woody organized A Special Videotape Show at the Whitney Museum and
established the first annual video festival at The Kitchen. Working with skillful and
innovative engineers, the Vasulkas invented and modified video production
instruments for use in performances and installations as well as single-channel
tapes. They were among the first wave of artists to participate in the residency
programs offered through the public television labs. Steina has explored the use of
sound in creating and altering video signals (Violin Power, 1969-78) and the
orchestration of video in an installation context. In 1975, while teaching at the Center
for Media Study in Buffalo, NY, she began Machine Vision, a "continuing
investigation of space via machine systems and electronic images."
Woody Vasulka
Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1937, Woody Vasulka studied metal technology and
hydraulic mechanics at the School of Engineering in Brno and filmmaking at the
Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In 1965, he emigrated to New York City with
his wife, Steina. Working as a multi-screen film editor and designer, he began
experimenting with electronic sound, stroboscopic light, and video. "There are
various motives for people who stumble into video. In some cases, it was pure
accident; in some cases, it was hope. In my case, I had been in things I couldn't
work with. I was in film, and I couldn't do anything with it. É When I first saw video
feedback, I knew I had seen the cave fire. It had nothing to do with anything, just a
perpetuation of some kind of energyÉ" Moving to Buffalo, New York in 1974, he
taught at the Center for Media Study at the State University, and continued his
investigation of the machinery behind the electronic signal. After working with the
Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, Vasulka collaborated with Don MacArthur and Jeffrey
Schier in 1976 to build a computer controlled personal imaging facility called The
Digital Image Articulator. Vasulka wrote articles about video's particular electronic
vocabulary that were published in Afterimage.
From http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?VASULKAS
ALLVISION 1976
AN ELECTRO/OPTO/MECHANICAL ENVIRONMENT BY STEINA
ALLVISION incorporates and transforms physical space through video. In this
installation, Steina transfigures the viewer’s orientation: a constructed physical space
is engaged in conversation with the perceptual systems of the human eye and the
camera lens.
ALLVISION poses questions about the process of transcribing all-encompassing
space and the ways in which perception can be altered or exaggerated by a
mechanical interface.The machine allows a view of what would otherwise be
impossible to perceive; it privileges vision to experience the implausible and
fantastic.
— MARITA STURKEN
DESCRIPTION
A mirrored sphere, positioned in the middle of a crossbar reflects the image of
surrounding space. Two video cameras, attached to each end of the crossbar are
looking in at the mirrored surface. The crossbar — now an assembly of mirrored
sphere and two cameras — slowly rotates on the turntable with cameras orbiting the
sphere. Since each camera sees half of the reflected space, the whole space
becomes observable.
The turntable, which sits on a low pedestal, holds the driving mechanism for the
rotation — a slip-ring assembly and a DC motor. The slip-ring assembly provides
uninterrupted video signals from, and power to, the cameras. The video signal from
two cameras connects to two (or more monitors) arranged in the exhibit space.
From http://www.vasulka.org/Steina/Steina_AllVision/AllVision.html
Stations
Bill Viola (American, born 1951)
1994. Five-channel video (color, sound), five granite slabs, and five projection
screens, Overall, 20' x 50' x 50' (610 x 1525 x 1525 cm). Gift of The Bohen
Foundation in honor of Richard E. Oldenburg.
Stations is composed of five video projections (three are pictured here), each
displaying a nude figure suspended in water, accompanied by a lulling soundtrack of
underwater hums and deep basal drones. Floating heads down, the figures drift
slowly out of the image frames. Their reflections in the polished slabs of granite at
the foot of the screens give the impression of figures swimming in pools of dark
liquid. In this work there is no beginning or end.
Viola is an investigator of the world of illusion and its makeup. He feels close to the
visionary eighteenth-century poet and artist William Blake, and identifies with that
protean creator's metaphysical travails. The eight-hundred-year-old poetry of the Sufi
mystic Jalaluddin Rumi is equally important to him. Rumi proclaimed, "With every
moment a world is born and dies. And know that for you, with every moment comes
death and renewal."
Stations comprises five video projections, each displaying a nude figure suspended
in water, accompanied by a lulling soundtrack of underwater gurgles and murmurs.
Floating heads-down, the figures drift slowly out of the image frames. Their
reflections in the polished slabs of granite placed at the foot of each screen give the
impression of figures swimming in pools of black liquid. The thirteenth-century
Persian poet Jahal al-Din Rumi, a favorite author of the artist, proclaimed: “With
every moment a world is born and dies. And know that for you, with every moment
comes death and renewal.” Likewise, in Stations there is no ending or beginning—
every instant is a meditation on the continual cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
From MOMA:
http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A78
98&page_number=18&template_id=1&sort_order=1
David Hall, TV Interruptions, 1971
In 1971 David Hall made ten TV Interruptions for Scottish Television which were
broadcast, unannounced, in August and September of that year (a selection of seven
of the ten was later issued as 7 TV Pieces). These, his first works for television, are
examples of what television interventions, as they came to be known, can be.
Although a number of interventions have subsequently been made by various artists,
the 7 TV Pieces have not been surpassed, except by Hall himself in This is a
Television Receiver for BBC TV in 1976, and Stooky Bill TV for Channel 4 TV in
1990...' (3)
'These works have come to be regarded as the first example of British artists'
television and as an equally formative moment in British video art...' (4)
'For [Hall].. the video medium was an unexplored territory for artists, its codes yet
uncracked. He argued that video art was integral to television and not just its
technical by-product. TV - and its subversion - was where video's vital core was
located, well beyond the ghettos of film co-ops, arts labs and art galleries. This view
opened an unusual space, somewhere between high art formalism (which it
resembled) and the mass arts (which it didn't). Anti-aesthetic and anti-populist conceptual art with a looser, dada streak...' (5)
A Situation Envisaged: The Rite II (Cultural Eclipse) 1988-90
A Situation Envisaged: The Rite II (Cultural Eclipse), video installation 1988/1990
'The installations of David Hall.. along with many of his videotapes, have
concentrated upon the physical reality of TV as a site of exchange, a creator of
illusion, a channel of information, or what Baudrillard terms 'a screen of ecstatic
refraction'. In several of his [later] installations Hall has presented the viewer only
with the back of the television sets.. In these works we are simultaneously denied the
pleasure of looking at a TV screen, given another view of television, literally the view
we never choose to look at, and reminded of the fact that television conceals as
much as, or more than, it reveals...' (6)
'The question was that of knowing how to introduce resistance into this cultural
industry. I believe that the only line to follow is to produce programmes for TV, or
whatever, which produce in the viewer.. an effect of uncertainty and trouble. It seems
to me that the thing to aim at is a certain sort of feeling or sentiment. You can't
introduce concepts, you can't produce argumentation. This type of media isn't the
place for that, but you can produce a feeling of disturbance, in the hope that this
disturbance will be followed by reflection. I think that that's the only thing one can
say, and obviously it's up to every artist to decide by what means s/he thinks s/he
can produce this disturbance...' (7)
From http://www.davidhallart.com/bio.html
Stephen Partridge
EASY PIECE
Installation 1974 - 1996 interpretation below by John Calcutt
"My first videotapes", Partridge wrote in 1979, "are 'structuralist' in nature, echoing
some of the notions prevalent in artists' films over the past decade, and work of a
conceptual nature of the early seventies. They are largely concerned with an
exploration of the video process, and attempt to define the medium and establish a
language, or syntax, both universal and personal."
"Easy Piece is a very minimal work which confronts the spectators' expectations of
visual information. The screen is blank for most of the time but is interrupted at
precise intervals by the image of the word 'easy', which is heard spoken in a rather
sensuous tone. After a few minutes the word is expected and awaited even though
its ambiguity becomes irritating and meaningless, contrary to its definition."
The 'structuralist' aspect which Partridge mentions above is a reference to Easy
Piece's self-referentiality - the fact that it takes the medium of video itself as its
primary subject matter, rather than trying to capture nature, tell a story, or illustrate
an emotion. Partridge achieves this by a variety of means. The static camera, for
instance, draws attention to itself by the artificiality of its unblinking immobility, so
unlike the familiar operations of television and film cameras - or the human eye, for
that matter. The same effect is further emphasised by the apparently random zoom
action of the lens - which, at the same time, is the only visual 'incident' throughout
the whole tape. The fact that the entire sequence has been captured in one
uninterrupted shot - along with the simultaneous recording of the soundtrack - is
another way of drawing our attention to the technical and 'material' aspect of the
piece. This takes on an added significance once we realise that the early reel-to-reel
machines with which Partridge had to work made editing a near impossibility. (It is
also, incidentally, typical of many of Andy Warhol's films of the 1960s, such as
Empire (1964) and Sleep (1963), indicating Partridge's relation to wider artistic
developments.)
From
http://imaging.dundee.ac.uk/partridge/www/steve_pages_sun/pages2/easy.htm#anc
hor53015
Peter Weibel Audience Exhibited 1969
Peter Weibel
«Audience Exhibited»
The visitors of an exhibition were interviewed with a video camera and recorded.
Simultaneously, these interviews run on TV sets in the rooms of a gallery such that
the visitors become part of the exhibition, become exhibited objects. On another TV
set a tape just made runs or some tapes are repeated by request so that the visitor
can review himself. The public of an exhibition becomes self exhibited, the viewers
are viewed; a dematerialization of the art object and a transformation of the art
concept; time experiences, psychological confrontations with his own image in a
public space, time delays.
Observing Observation: Uncertainty
From http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/d/texts/57_b?print-friendly=true
by Margit Rosen
Peter Weibel's 1973 closed circuit video installation Beobachtung der Beobachtung:
Unbestimmtheit (Observing observation: uncertainty) [1] is a complex
epistemological model of the preconditions for global observation and the
construction of reality. In this installation, Weibel also focuses on the social
dimension of the medium of video/television, which has fundamentally transformed
the structure of representation and with it the structure of society. The closed video
circuit is a model of the mechanisms that prevail in a media-dominated society where
anonymous and unlocalized observation enforces social compliance.
Three video cameras and monitors are arranged alternately in a circle in the room.
Facing towards the center, the cameras and monitors are switched in such a way
that the spectator who enters the circle can constantly observe himself, though only
from the back. As Peter Weibel writes: »Enclosed in a room, each point in that room
is its own prison warder, the perspective is his deadly fate.« [2] The idea of
perspective enables Weibel to locate the concept of »interactivity« in an art history
context and at the same time create a walk-in model that renders reality visible as
something constructed. To quote Weibel again: »Perspective always means
participation.« [3] For the illusory space of the three-dimensional representation to be
able to emerge at all, artists have always had to rely on the spectator's cognitive and
physical participation. »Perspective as a constructive principle«: this is a model of
reality that depends on the spectator's active orientation. Once the latter enters the
installation, he is at the mercy of the pictorial space Peter Weibel constructs by way
of the media. The dependence of perspective on the spectator, on participation,
turns out to be a form of subjugation. The spectator is a prisoner of perspective and
thus a prisoner of a heteronymous access to reality.
The title of this work explicitly alludes to Weibel's epistemological approach, which
goes beyond the perspective debate. The problem of observing the observer, which
he already addressed in 1969 and 1972 in the installations Das Publikum als
Exponat (The audience as exhibit) [4] and Video Lumina [5], is presented more
precisely in the 1973 video installation and at a more abstract level that refers both to
Heinz von Foerster's and Norbert Wiener's ideas on cybernetics, and to the insights
of quantum mechanics. Here too, as in the 1969 installation, the observing subject
becomes the observed object. The observer observes himself in his attempt to
understand and steer the system of the closed circuit installation. In view of the fact
that as an internal observer he is also part of the circular arrangement, he
unavoidably comes up against the limits of observation, i.e., the limits of selfobservation. Only a second observer can recognize the blind spot of the first
observer's perception. Only at the level of cybernetics of a second order, the
observation of observation as staged by Weibel, does it emerge that phenomena are
relative to the observer.
Tamara Krikorian, Vanitas, 1977
From
http://www.rewind.ac.uk/searchrewind.php?table_name=REWINDArtistDetails&functi
on=details&where_field=Artist_Name&where_value=Tamara%20Krikorian&Section=
Details&Name=Tamara%20Krikorian
Tamara Krikorian was born in 1944. She studied music and began making video in
1973 in Scotland where her campaigning helped establish the artform through a
series of influential exhibitions. A founder of the artist led distribution agency London
Video Arts in 1976, she was also an influential teacher at Maidstone and Newcastle.
She lives in Wales, where she runs Art Work Wales. Krikorian was an influential
artist during the 70's and one of the first female artists in the UK to work with video.
She made a number of key works in particular 'Vanitas', and 'Breeze'.
Krikorian also instigated collaborative shows of artists work; video conferences and
various art forums, and importantly published a number of texts.
"Tamara Krikorian was a founding member of LVA, and instigated collaborative
shows of artists' work including the first exhibition of video in Scotland, 'Video
Towards Defining an Aesthetic', at the Third Eye, Glasgow in 1976. She also
organised conferences and art forums, and wrote a number of key texts during the
early period. Krikorian's work was complex in its layering of meanings, and lyrical,
often exploring the blurred edges between representation and the real; the static and
the moving, and her ambient electronic installations explored technological
landscapes as well as the recorded images of landscape." - J.Hatfield
"Video Artist Tamara Krikorian, herself part of the founding modernist LVA group in
London, identified and summarised her own involvement with the emergence of this
tendency in a catalogue essay published in 1979:
'My own interest in video, and indeed in television, stems form a formalist position, a
formal analysis/decoding/construction of the medium, but it's not posible to consider
television without taking into account its structure, not just in terms of technology but
also in terms of politics. This led me to realise that the reference points in working
with any medium must come not only from the medium itself, following the modernist
approach of 'pure art', but from relationships between types of work, painting and
sculpture and video etc. The reference must also come from the artist's own
experince as mediator between what has gone before and the raw material and the
ideal, constantly restating and confronting the spectator with a discussion between
the old and the new".
Tamara Krikorian (1979) 'Some notes on an Ephemeral Art', Exhibition
Vanitas
"Vanitas came after seeing a French painting attributed to Nicolas Tournier at the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, An Allegory of Justice and Vanity . Vanitas is a selfportrait of the artist and at the same time an allegory of the ephemeral nature of
television." - T.K. - http://www.lux.org.uk/screening-room/vanitas-tamara-krikorianone-key-works-early-british-video-art