Monday, March 31, 2014

Patty Chang - EELS

Video on Vimeo -- clip from performance called EELS

Still from Patty Chang, Eels

Friday, March 28, 2014

Joan Jonas on Feminism

We have not explored Joan Jonas' work in class, however, she is in the text. I think some of you may like her video/performance work.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Chris Burden Documentary on UBU.COM

http://www.ubu.com/film/burden_newport.html

Chris Burden - Through The Night Softly (1973)

Chris Burden uses 10 second TV spots to disrupt complacent television viewers.

In 1973 Chris Burden conceives the work Through the Night Softly, to be inserted during 10 seconds amongst the regular Tv advertisements, "4 times a week for 4 weeks".

Yves Klein. Anthropométrie de l'époque bleue (1960) black & white

Blue Women Art - Yves Klein (1962)

Klein directs them from afar with his "creative genius". This was originally done in 1960. This performance was in 1962.

Yves Klein's Anthropometries 1960

Performance artist Nate Hill talks about the White Power Milk project 07...

Marina Abramovic on FEAR

"What you are afraid of is exactly what you are supposed to do. When you do things you like, you never change."

The Other: "Rest Energy", 1980 - Marina & Ulay

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Marina Abramovic on Rhythm O, 1974

Marina Abramovic on Rhythm 0 (1974) from Marina Abramovic Institute on Vimeo.

BED PEACE starring John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Artist's Shit 1961 - Piero Manzoni

TATE - Piero Manzoni and his Artist's Shit

Artist's Shit 1961, Piero Manzoni

Allan Kaprow - How to Make a Happening

Who Is Allan Kaprow?

TATE and Performance 101 -- Alan Kaprow and the Happening

Kaprow may have made the term, and the idea of blurring the boundary of art and life, popular but he was the first to admit that he wasn’t the only one or the first working in this way.

The happening had its roots in Hugo Ball’s Dada Cabaret Voltaire,Surrealist performances and the Italian Futurists in the early years of the twentieth century. Creating art out of life was first proposed as the gesamstkunstwerk (total art work) by Richard Wagner (yes, Wagner the opera composer) in the Art-Work of the Future in 1849-50.

John Baldessari Will Not Make Any More Boring Art

John Baldessari

Born 1931 - USA

Throughout his career, John Baldessari has defied formalist categories by working in a variety of media—creating films, videotapes, prints, photographs, texts, drawings, and multiple combinations of these. In his use of media imagery, Baldessari is a pioneer "image appropriator," and as such has had a profound impact on post-modern art production. Baldessari initially studied to be an art critic at the University of California, Berkeley during the mid 1950s, but growing dissatisfied with his studies, he turned to painting. Inspired by Dada and Surrealist literary and visual ideas, he began incorporating photographs, notes, texts, and fragments of conversation into his paintings. Baldessari remains fundamentally interested in de-mystifying artistic processes, and uses video to record his performances, which function as "deconstruction experiments." These illustrative exercises target prevailing assumptions about art and artists, focusing on the perception, language, and interpretation of artistic images. These demonstrations provide an introduction to the major preoccupations of Baldessari's work, and the linguistic and aesthetic philosophies that inform it.

Go to http://www.vdb.org/artists/john-baldessari for more clips

We have a dvd (and books) in the library about him with some of his video work included. PBS has a very good film online to watch about him and his work: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/john-baldessari

A Brief History of John Baldessari

A Short Video About Sadie Benning

Video above is a biography of Sadie and is created in the style she became very well known for using a Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera. The bio below was taken from Video Data Bank. You can view short clips of Sadie's work online http://www.vdb.org/artists/sadie-benning

Sadie Benning

Born 1973 - Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Sadie Benning is a lesbian videomaker who began making videos when she was 15-years old, using a Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera. Benning's early works were made in the privacy of her childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity. Evoking in turn playful seduction and painful honesty, Benning’s floating, close-up camera functions as a witness to her intimate revelations, and as an accomplice in defining her evocative experimental form. Her work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult—with all the honesty, humor, and desperation of a personality just coming into self-awareness, trapped and uneasy. Her more recent work moves beyond the Pixelvision camera and into animation, film and installation.

Sadie Benning is a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow.

Sunday, March 23, 2014

William Pope.L -- Performance Art / Community / WORK

WILLIAM POPE.L -- Wants Cleveland to PULL

http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2013/06/video-william-pope-l-wants-cleveland-to-pull/

“Art has utility,” he said. “In museums, it’s muffled, it’s protected. By taking it outside of its protective context, like a ball, you can get more out of it. It’ll get scuffed up, but you can fix it with duct tape.”

William Pope.L

Beginning in the late '90s, William Pope.L famously crawled along 22 miles of sidewalk, from the beginning to the end of Broadway—Manhattan's longest street—wearing a capeless Superman outfit with a skateboard strapped to his back. In varying fits and starts, the performance, titled The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street, took nine years to complete, with each installment lasting as long as Pope.L could endure the knee and elbow pain (often about six blocks). It is among 30-plus "crawl" pieces that he has performed over more than three decades of work as an artist. (taken from Interview Magazine)

In PULL! - A truck weighing 10 TONS, 25 miles, east side to west side, 3 days will be PULLED by community members in Cleveland. Theme of project is WORK. Make people think about Work and Pulling Together. A testament to the power of shared labor.

Pope.L and SPACES have solicited photographs and stories regarding work from Clevelanders from diverse economic and racial backgrounds. Photographs and images have also been created at six community workshops in various Cleveland neighborhoods. The photographs will then be woven together with black and white images from Cleveland’s history into a long video that will be projected onto a screen on the back of a mobile truck.

Pull! took place June 7-9 of 2013, as part of the 25th anniversary of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival.

Performance Art / Contemporary Art

GREAT links, photographs, video, etc. http://www.marthagarzon.com/contemporary_art/category/performance-art/

Rebecca Horn, Finger Gloves 1972

Rebecca Horn, Pencil Mask 1972

Rebecca Horn (not in photo) Overflowing Blood Machine 1970

Friday, March 21, 2014

Atsuko Tanaka, Guitai Group, Japan

Atsuko Tanaka, Electric Dress (1956)

Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1932, Tanaka was a member of the Gutai Art Association, the major experimental postwar Japanese art movement founded by a group of young artists in Ashiya in 1954. She was best known for sculptural installations made from non-art materials, such as Electric Dress (1956), a wearable sculpture made of flickering light bulbs painted red, blue, green, and yellow. When originally worn, the sculpture both made the body the center of artistic activity and masked it in a mass of light and color. This work, along withWork (Bell) (1955)—made of twenty electric bells connected by one hundred feet of electrical cord and a switch that viewers can press to activate a line of ringing sound—are prime illustrations of Tanaka’s interest in the application of intangible materials in art, namely electricity, and Gutai’s overall reaction to a modernizing Japan.

Shigeko Kubota, Japanese Artist, Vagina Painting 1965 (Flux Festival)

Shigeko Kubota, Vagina Painting 1965

Shigeko Kubota performed her Vagina Painting on 4 July 1965 at Cinemateque, East 4th Street New York during Perpetual Fluxus Festival.

In an act both evocative and critical of action painting, Kubota attached a paintbrush to the back of her short skirt and squatted to make painterly marks on a large piece of paper on the floor. In this way Kubota challenged the assumptions still prevalent in the art world at the time which connected masculinity with creative genius. This work is one of many feminist takes on abstract expressionism, a genre characterised by macho male practitioners.

Kubota’s work was part of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists, composers and designers, including Yoko Ono and George Maciunas, noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines. Fluxus takes its name from the latin word meaning ‘flow’ and is indebted to the Japanese movement Gutai which emphasized the artist’s body, gesture and the beauty of destruction and decay. (Taken from Perform Feminism)

Adrian Piper - MYTHIC BEING

This work from 1973 explores the artist's fascination with issues of identity including gender and race. This video documents her process and performance. She dresses as a man, goes into the street and experiences being a male rather than a female. How does one's gender inform who we are and how we are viewed?