I’ve finally written up some of the many things I’ve been working on and thinking about in an updated version of my Proposal.
This continues with work I’m doing now and will continue during the Final Show but I’ve only really worked in some basic thoughts for the next month or two.
I’ve got a note-book or two on the go, with more details in, as a working document but basically it’s a time to Test, Review and Refine.
My main difficulty at the moment is my poor old phone which has no disc space left despite deleting everything possible and my Periscope broadcasts are pixelated.
Odd that anyone watches at all…more of this later..
New phone in the offing I think.
The proposal also includes a lot of references to other artists that I should continue to look at as I review what I am doing…
One of the most interesting references is this below
This is an exhibition of experimental narrative film and video made since 1968 addressing ideas of community and the changing nature of social relations. It reflects the overlapping and entangled histories of cinema, video and television. They all describe the destruction of community, the limits of activism and leftish subcultures. All of them use narrative to explore these issues.
Because there is fifty hours of material, any visitor can only see a fraction of the works, but can make connections can be made between the works.
it was fascinating just wandering from room to room, staying sometimes ( rarely) for a complete work but just ‘browsing’ and not feeling as is this was a ‘bad thing to do’.
A bit like watching Periscope Streams! I couldn’t really do it justice as I had to move on to the Lecture at Whitechapel. I had no idea there would be so much. There were timetables so you could check what you were actually seeing and schedule in other visits.
I loved the confusing, fragmentary nature of the total summary narrative that you are left with, and the remnants of the powerful individual storylines from the individual works . Interesting.
I particularly enjoyed Luke Fowler, Johan Grimonprez,
Anne Charlotte Robinson Selections from 5 year Diary
and Lav Diaz Melancholia ( 2008)
Electronic Superhighway
I visited this exhibition after seeing The Inoperative Community and going to the James Bridle Lecture. Trying to squeeze far too much into my time. By the time I got to this exhibition I hadn’t got time before it closed to look closely at everything, and Boy! was there a lot to look at! I browsed around and ended up making Vines of bits of Naim June Paik’s work Internet Dream and some of the other works….but even managed to get those on the wrong axis, I was so tired….interesting though
Also good to see Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose work I saw at Modern Art Oxford in Summer 2015 and Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg.
Here’s a review of the whole show from The Guardian
Allan Kaprow Hello
Of all the works in this significant and somewhat overwhelming exhibition I kept returning to this., Allan Kaprow Hello. Probably because of the elements of human interaction.
Kaprow created this interactive video happening in 1969 for TheMedium Is the Medium, an experimental television program with five television cameras and twenty-seven monitors connecting four remote locations over a closed-circuit television network.
Groups of people in the various locations were given instructions to say on camera, for example “Hello, I see you” seeing their own or a friend’s image. Kaprow acted as a director in the studio, the picture suddenly switching randomly so that there was not only the process of communication , randomness and chance,
Kaprow was interested in the idea of ‘communicationsmedia as non-communications‘, the most important message being the idea of “oneself in connection with someone else”. Hello was a the disruptive way that technology mediates interaction by metaphorically short-circuiting the television network, and demonstrating the connections made between actual people. Kaprow did suggest a global form of Hello, interconnecting continents, languages, and cultures in one huge sociological mix, much as Periscope operates today demonstrating contemporary simultaneity.
(Adapted from: Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken , MISSING IN ACTION: AGENCY AND MEANING IN INTERACTIVE ART) and Gene Youngblood: EXPANDED CINEMA, 1970, [PDF /4.6 Mb] pp.343-344
We looked at a couple of things for our discussion with Ed Kelly on Thursday.
One was a TedTalk about network from a neuropsychologist ( ?) talking about the brain as a network, showing some illustrations and art work that had come from this idea. She is using these to think differently about her work. I enjoyed the lecture but had a couple of difficulties with it…
One was that I think it is easy to made work which is very literal about networks and this becomes illustrative and diagrammatic. Another from a personal pov as I find it hard to look at this subject objectively. I often think of my own brain as a failing network , especially when I am feeling fatigued or symptoms are overwhelming. When fatigue is really severe and I am struggling with various aspects of cognitive function it feels as if the Mac ‘spinning wheel of death’ is in my brain...and the screen is frozen... not a network analogy exactly but more a hardware problem.. I can just feel the messages not getting through… the struggle the impulses are having to make progress along the neurone and to the next synapse and junction on the network. Sometimes they stop there or arrive too late to be any use.
I guess I could examine this in my work but I don’t want to...not at the moment anyway. I’ did this drawing once fairly soon after diagnosis and it sort of shows a network but of nerve transmission within my body, mainly sensory and therefore, going into, not away from my brain….
I want my work to be about something ‘outside ‘of me and I’m afraid that I can’t think of brain function anymore without thinking of mine and the way it doesn’t always work.. and I have to put in a lot of ‘work’ ( actually the opposite…) to help it repair and form new networks. Up to the present day I am making enough new ones to function OK if very slowly sometimes and with lots of ‘wasted time’ in bed or just recovering.
I also think of networks as essentially involving people and ‘bodies’- an embodied social network and so this is more the line that I would take ( have taken but possibly not made sufficiently explicit) in my work. Networks of narrative and embodied documentation passing things on are central to what I think about in my work.
I looked again at the Whitechapel Book Networks which I bought some time ago and read the piece about Alan Kaprow’s work with Marta Minujin and Wolf Vostell. Simultaneity in Simultaneity (1966).I can’t find any images but this is from Marta Minjuin’s website. She’s still working today it seems..
This is her with Andy Warhol, more recently:
Marta Minujin e Andy Warhol – Foto: Acervo MALBA
Simultaneity in Simultaneity October 13 and 24 1966 was the local episode of the international project Three Countries Happening, between Minujín, Allan Kaprow (from New York), and Wolf Vostell (from Berlin). Part of the happening consisted of three events in three cities at the same time. Minujín defined her happening as “environment signal”.
The first phase “Instantaneous Invasion”, consisted of an event to be simultaneously transmitted by radio, TV, telephone, and telegraph.
One hundred and twenty preselected people whos had been photographed, filmed and recorded in their homes, were “invaded” by media. During ten minutes, said Minujín, they were “captives of the communications media.”
The second phase, “Enveloping Simultaneity”, Minujín invited sixty personalities from the cultural and journalistic world, whose were photographed and filmed, while they sat down in front of a TV set with a transistor radio.
When they went out, each was asked to give their opinion of the event and of the media in general. Eleven days later, the same sixty persons came back to the Institute. As they went to their corresponding seats, they watched themselves (their images, their gestures and movements) reflected on the screens of their TV sets and in slides which were proyected at the sides, while they listened to them own voices transmitted over the radio.
That society is increasingly viewed and treated as a ‘network’ rather than a ‘structure’ ( let alone a solid ‘ totality’): it is perceived and treated as a matrix of random connections and disconnections and of an essentially infinite volume of possible permutations.
I can’t really comment further as I’m afraid I started to read the book on my way to the Funeral… see next post and didn’t get very far….
Another for the further reading..
At some point I’ll actually start to make some work… The Theory is taking over not the making… Not Good!
BOTANY
So the second lecture was very dense in content and involved a lot of work on Botanical specimens…some at RBG Kew With Rob Kesseler. HIs images are very evocative and especially his use of colour and I like the ceramics, although I do find his ‘ dinner parties ‘at the site where he took material from a little too ‘token performance’ and not the same as for instance Rirkrit Tiravanija though it is silly to make a comparison.
Kessler’s practice is not performative and the ‘ dinner parties’ are to use his ceramics and display them in use…not the work , itself. Remediating the images through performance but…because of my previous and some concurrent ‘paid’ work this botanical work was very much of interest ( and my previous work with the oral history project, Ethnomedica, at RBG Kew)
I thought though, how I would struggle to work as an artist working in this field. If I went back to work in a lab the way he did, I feel I would go back to ‘being a scientist’ and thinking in that way... a different way to use imagination and exploration. I would find it hard to do what I do as an artist in that environment. My way of thinking is very different in each capacity. I have only done one piece of work that was botanically related and that was ‘Wise or Wicked at Gunpowder Park.
I have though about incorporating plants as part of a reference to ‘place’ and these lectures reminded me of that…
This was in my past Research Proposal and now it maybe time to bring it back in again…
Rhiannon Evans MA Fine Art Digital 