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@cataloguedthoughts
By medical definition, the word dysraphism means the incomplete fusion or malformation of a seam or junction. When breaking down the term, dys comes from the Greek word meaning “badly” or “ill” and raph comes from the Greek word for “seam”. Therefore, in literal terms, the expression represents an “ill-seaming” or “ill-seemed”.
Anything that can be mapped is done so by illustrating cohesively the spatial properties of an area, object, or a theme. However, an intrinsic issue with spatial mapping is that a city, region, or country is portrayed as unified when these placed are inherently contaminated with divisions and contrasts despite physical proximities.
Dysraphism of London #2 attempts to demonstrate, through spatial audio and imagery, juxtapositions within the single mapped city of London, Ontario. Although classified as a fused city, London is known as socially divided into two areas; East London and West London. London suffers from a dysraphism.
(Please listen using headphones or other physically separated speakers to decipher east from west, represented by the left and right speaker)
remember nature.
The Loop Closes, Rob Sheridan, 2013
I was fortunate to be introduced to this video by a friend. The band How to Destroy Angels features Trent Reznor, his wife Mariqueen Maandig, Atticus Ross, and Rob Sheridan. The current project from Nine Inch Nails frontman, Trent, uses artist Rob Sheridan's artwork for the bands music videos, album artwork, and all around atmosphere. Using purely analogue sourced material, this specific song, The Loop Closes, is presented through this static-heavy video full of VHS-found footage, razor’s edge close-ups, and distorted images.
Found material, reappropriation, and ultimately repurposing of old media is fascinating. Maybe this resourceful style will emerge prevalent in the near future if finding the new is just impossible... or maybe it's just the patterned repurposing of an older decade. Either way, Sheridan's appropriation and a band's appreciation and focus on visual art is refreshing. He may not be the lead in terms of the bands music, but the band isn't just a band; I'd consider to equality between visual and audio art melds into something new.
I hope to incorporate some of these themes into my own work.
Experimental sound/video/audio
Art Which Can't Be Art
Art Which Can’t Be Art (1986) Alan Kaprow
It’s fairly well known that for the last thirty years my main work as an artist has been located in activities and contexts that don’t suggest art in any way. Brushing my teeth, for example, in the morning when I’m barely awake; watching in the mirror the rhythm of my elbow moving up and down . . . The practice of such an art, which isn’t perceived as art, is not so much a contradiction as a paradox. Why this is so requires some background. When I speak of activities and contexts that don’t suggest art, I don’t mean that an event like brushing my teeth each morning is chosen and then set into a conventional art context, as Duchamp and many others since him have done. That strategy, by which an art-identifying frame (such as a gallery or theater) confers “art value” or “art discourse” on some nonart object, idea, or event, was, in Duchamp’s initial move, sharply ironic. It forced into confrontation a whole bundle of sacred assumptions about creativity, professional skill, individuality, spirituality, modernism, and the presumed value and function of high art itself. But later it became trivialized, as more and more nonart was put on exhibit by other artists. Regardless of the merits of each case, the same truism was headlined every time we saw a stack of industrial products in a gallery, every time daily life was enacted on a stage: that anything can be estheticized, given the right art packages to put it into. But why should we want to estheticize “anything”? All the irony was lost in those presentations, the provocative questions forgotten. To go on making this kind of move in art seemed to me unproductive.
Instead, I decided to pay attention to brushing my teeth, to watch my elbow moving. I would be alone in my bathroom, without art spectators. There would be no gallery, no critic to judge, no publicity. This was the crucial shift that removed the performance of everyday life from all but the memory of art. I could, of course, have said to myself, “Now I’m making art!!” But in actual practice, I didn’t think much about it. My awareness and thoughts were of another kind. I began to pay attention to how much this act of brushing my teeth had become routinized, nonconscious behavior, compared with my first efforts to do it as a child. I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed; that my mind was always somewhere else; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each minute were ig- nored. I guessed also that most people were like me in this respect. Brushing my teeth attentively for two weeks, I gradually became aware of the tension in my elbow and fingers (was it there before?), the pressure of the brush on my gums, their slight bleeding (should I visit the dentist?). I looked up once and saw, really saw, my face in the mirror. I rarely looked at myself when I got up, perhaps because I wanted to avoid the puffy face I’d see, at least until it could be washed and smoothed to match the public image I prefer. (And how many times had I seen others do the same and believed i was different!) This was an eye-opener to my privacy and to my humanity. An unremarkable picture of myself was beginning to surface, and image I’d created but never examined. It colored the images I made of the world and influenced how I dealt with my images of others. I saw this little by little. But if this wider domain of resonance, spreading from the mere process of brushing my teeth, seems too far from its starting point, I should say immediately that it never left the bathroom. The physicality of brushing, the aromatic taste of toothpaste, rinsing my mouth and the brush, the many small nuances such as right-handedness causing me to enter my mouth with the loaded rush from that side and then move to the left side — these particularities always stayed in the present. The larger implications popped up from time to time during the subsequent days. All this from toothbrushing. How is this relevant to art? Why is this not just sociology? It is relevant because devel- opments within modernism itself let to art’s dissolution into its life sources. Art in the West has a long history of secularizing tendencies, going back at least as far as the Hellenistic period. by the late 1950s and 1960s this lifelike impulse dominated the vanguard. Art shifted away from the specialized object in the gallery to the real urban environment; to the real body and mind; to communications technology; and to remote natu- ral regions of the ocean, sky, and desert. Thus the relationship of the act of toothbrushing to recent art is clear and cannot be bypassed. This is where the paradox lies; an artist concerned with lifelike art is an artist who does and does not make art. Anything less than paradox would be simplistic. Unless the identity (and thus the meaning) of what the artist does oscillates between ordinary, recognizable activity and the “resonance” of that activity in the larger human context, the activity itself reduces to conventional behavior. Or if it is framed as art by a gallery, it reduces to conventional art. Thus toothbrushing, as we normally do it, offers no roads back to the real wold either. But ordinary life performed as art/not art can charge the everyday with metaphoric power.
Response:
The way Kaprow frames art in a modernist but non-pretentious way is astounding. Most art-as-context is, as he mentions, Duchamp-esque and simply makes the same repetitive elitist statement. I admire artist who contest this and transform a classic idea into something relatable. For Dysraphism of London #2, I am indeed trying to make a critical statement about the two separate sides of the city. However, my method (random, inclusive, and attemptedly unbiased) proves that there is a stark difference in the social economic spheres of both East and West; however not as stereotypically different than one would assume. There aren't steady gunshots on one side and sounds of children laughing consistently on the other. There are subtle, yet telling differences such as the sounds of differently priced cars, and conversational dialogue. There are certainly sounds of gunshots and children laughing on both sides.
Essay/Article Response
Re-Contextualizing Well-known Cultural Artifacts vs. Ambiguous Appropriation
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/weekinreview/28kennedy.html?_r=0
Is there a difference between re-conceptualizing well-known cultural artifacts and ambiguous appropriation? Is the later too vague and inconspicuous? Dishonest?
This conflict remains not far from my mind when using appropriation methods in my own work. This NY Times article maintains that it is certainly on the mind of many others when Warhol's soup cans are accepted and Helene Hegemann's book is rejected.
Hegemann's book borrows from many other literary artists and writers, including famous individuals as well as bloggers. Those who were appropriated didn't seem to mind but others are worried this is the beginning of a slippery slope.
With all the information now readily available to anyone surely supports this sort of thing will only increase so maybe it's time to accept it and appreciate it as it won't be going away anytime soon. From my perspective, the possibility of expanding copyright laws could only harm artists who aim to critique.
Essay/Article Response
Tan Lin, Powerpoint and the Perfume of Reading, 2012
Over the past 15 years, poet, novelist, and filmmaker Tan Lin has been at work creating an "ambient" mode of literature that engages a set of practices including sampling, communal production, and social networks, addressing issues such as relaxed copyright, boredom, plagiarism, and the commodification of attention.
He has written 10 books, most recently Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking; Insomnia and the Aunt; and HEATH COURSE PAK. His video work has screened at the Yale Art Museum, Artists Space, the Drawing Center, and the Ontological Hysterical Theatre. He is currently finishing work on a novel, OUR FEELINGS WERE MADE BY HAND. He teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University.
(exerpt from interview below)
"What are the differences between your PowerPoint works and your print books?"
The most obvious difference is that when you read a book or codex, the only thing moving is your eye; with the PowerPoint works, both text and eye are moving. In this sense, PowerPoint makes reading autonomous and it sets it in motion, literally: Individual slides are animated, slide transitions are animated, and the piece overall is software that is processing information. That’s why we turned out the lights during the screening and projected large: No one expects to go to the cinema and read a book on the screen, one word at a time, but that’s kind of what I wanted to do. The most beautiful thing is a book that could read itself! So reading is a kind of integrated software or the frame technology that manufactures software, and a book is the software application that is manufactured. But I think there are a lot of similarities between digital and print-based reading experiences. The PowerPoint pieces, like my books, all bracket reading in a larger perceptual (and social) field that includes smells and sounds, i.e., they situate reading in a larger geography or reading environment. People tend to forget that reading is a kind of all-over experience, and it takes place in a particular room or in a particular moment of childhood. So the idea was to not confine reading to a particular object (book) or platform (PowerPoint) but allow it to expand outwards into the social space around it. I was more interested in what might be called the general mood of reading: the overall atmosphere or medium in which we experience our daily thoughts and perform actions—what Heidegger termedStimmung and the psychologist Daniel Stern calls affective or amodal attunements. Bibliographic Sound Track is a mood-based system, but so isHEATH. And these mood-based systems, which are common to Zen meditative states, are bottom-up, non-directed, allotropic modes of general receptiveness rather than top-down, attention-based focus on specific objects or things. A book, at bottom, is a very general and very generic thing (that we happen to be reading).
I first came across this video while investigating the future of books and books as technology for a university paper. I find Tan Lin's execution of subjected reading or revolutionary book quite interesting and maybe a new future. Lin enjoys to comment on the future of books quite often in interviews: "My question is: Can a book be made to look like the authoring of such software, caught in a complicated licensing and development system? I think so! Maybe that’s the future of the book: to look like a licensing agreement regarding the future dissemination of its own information."
Experimental film/video/sound response
Alexis Silaidis, Delphi
Dafen, Shenzhen; Revolutionary or Destructive of Originality?
http://artradarjournal.com/2012/03/05/original-art-struggles-in-shenzens-dafen-copy-village-interview/
Founded in 1989, Dafen produces 60% or worlds cheap but hand painted replica paintings. There are between 8000 and 10000 artsts work in Dafen making on avrg 20-30 paintings a day. These artists are those graduated from art school but could not break into contemporary art world. Beneath the apparent catering to western orders, those who support the activities in Dafen believe this city represents a different approach to copying; Western reporters tend to use words like fake, knockoff, and piracy, while Chinese artists and gallerists use the word replica, and "original creation" and see the works as original because of the lack of mass-production and the use of trained skill.
Wang Zeng Chun, a prolific original artist who has operated from Dafen for nineteen years was interviewed for this article for Art Radar Asia. As an original artist working in Dafen, he expresses his frustration with the culture and the fear of his work being replicated as well.
Are the economic constraints and a capitalist society interfering with artistic intentions negatively or is Dafen a revolutionary place for artists to survive? Is the influx of Chinese art created for the sole purpose of investment and economic gain penetrating society negatively and devaluing traditional artistic values? Maybe we'll have to wait a few years to analyze the outcome. Dafen, a conflicting place, perhaps can't be judged but maybe it will end up the blame.
Essay/Article Response
Can Appropriation Artist Claim Copyright Over Artwork Appropriated From The Same Original?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100507/0231219332.shtml
This article addresses the appropriation of the originally piece appropriated in Roy Lichtenstein Kiss V into the album cover done by artist Brittany Pyle for the band Elsinore.
Perhaps copyright should evolve to protect meanings instead of images and words. When appropriation takes place, the meaning is altered; so is it really the same thing? Copyright seems to just complicate artwork as in the appropriation debate between Lichtenstein's estate and artist Brittany Pyle.
Essay/Article Response
Of Appropriation, On Appropriation
On December 11 2009 six one sentence statements originated by the "artist /author" for the purpose of this piece were mixed, in a container, with eighteen one sentence quotes taken from various other sources; each sentence was printed onto a separate piece of paper. Eighteen statements were drawn by "blind" selection and, in the exact order of their selection, join altogether to form the "statements on appropriation", for the presentation at Stichting Perdu, Amsterdam.
Statements on Appropriation (2009) Michalis Pichler
1. if a book paraphrases one explicit historical or contemporary predecessor in title, style and/or content, this technique is what I would call a "greatest hit" 2. Maybe the belief that an appropriation is always a conscious strategic decision made by an author is just as naive as believing in an "original" author in the first place. 3. It appears to me, that the signature of the author, be it an artist, cineast or poet, seems to be the beginning of the system of lies, that all poets, all artists try to establish, to defend themselves, I do not know exactly against what. 4. Custom having once given the name of " the ancients " to our pre-Christian ancestors, we will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with us experienced people, they ought properly to be called children, but will rather continue to honor them as our good old fathers. 5. It is nothing but literature! 6. there is as much unpredictable originality in quoting, imitating, transposing, and echoing, as there is in inventing. 7. For the messieurs art-critics i will add, that of course it requires a far bigger mastery to cut out an artwork out of the artistically unshaped nature, than to construct one out of arbitrary material after ones own artistic law. 8. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. 9. Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century 10. Certain images, objects, sounds, texts or thoughts would lie within the area of what is appropriation, if they are somewhat more explicit, sometimes strategic, sometimes indulging in borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating... being influenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed, quoting, rewriting, reworking, refashioning… a re-vision, re-evaluation, variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvisation, prequel... pastiche, paraphrase, parody, forgery, homage, mimicry, travesty, shan-zhai, echo, allusion, intertextuality and karaoke. 11. Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it. 12. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite. 13. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original 14. The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. 15. 16. The question is: what is seen now, but will never be seen again? 17. Détournement reradicalizes previous critical conclusions that have been petrified into respectable truths and thus transformed into lies. 18. No poet, no artist, of any art has his complete meaning alone.
Appropriation is an interesting subject. This poem, to me, summarizes so many of its inherent conflicting ideas. Wonderful and arresting piece of appropriation, on appropriation.
Essay/Article Response
Inspiration #3 for my next piece: Dysraphism of London
Representing a city through sounds in something I’m also very interested. The 1984 album Neighbourhood Rhythms (Patter Traffic) features sounds, song, and poetry, and stories from people in LA during the 1980s. Compiled by Harvey Robert Kubernik, this album features some of the work by well-known artists Henry Rollins, Chuck Dukowski, John Doe, and Michael Steele.
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Have a listen: http://www.discogs.com/Various-Neighborhood-Rhythms-Patter-Traffic/release/690627
Inspiration #2 for my next piece: Dysraphism of London
Another creative cartography piece. This one by Yanko Tsvetkov explores an alternate way to map out Europe.
For more stereotype maps by Tsvetkov visit: http://alphadesigner.com/mapping-stereotypes/
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Inspiration #1 for my next piece: Dysraphism of London
The project, Gangs and Cupcakes, by Danya Al-Saleh, maps out Mexico City in terms of gang territories and cupcake shops. Mexico City is a difficult place to understand in terms of “good” neighbourhoods and “dangerous” ones, because property values don’t necessarily reflect this as they do in most cities. The city’s real estate values and social economic values of a neighbourhood don’t match up. The complex gentrification of the city has left it confusing for people moving there. This project illustrates the areas undergoing intense gentrification in terms of “hipster” qualities like cupcake shops and that these neighbourhoods are also within gang territory.
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Repeat Repeat Repeat… (original artwork by me)
Inspiration:
Mark Bradford, by most standards, would have been considered apart of Los Angela’s low culture. He, like the others in his family, considered art and practices like it apart of high culture and not to be concerned with. Bradford has said, “We were self-employed, working-class people and although we were very dynamic and creative we were geared toward making a living”. After spending many years traveling and partying, Bradford decided being a hairdresser was not for him and he would pursue art. He began attending CalArts and it was there he discovered that there are liberal, alternative and non-traditional ways of thinking and doing art.
Bradford’s determination to represent the social class he comes from and his neighborhood in South Central Los Angela’s can be seen in his work. Signage and advertisements he thinks represent his political view are a staple in these works: “My early works used socially loaded material but I was always interested in abstract painting. So my first gesture was to combine the two. Later I learned that I didn’t have to combine them on the same pictorial surface”. Bradford has said, “I’m always fascinated by things that fall between the cracks of the middle-class. The middle class shuffles along, but the lower and the higher classes are dynamic—both are irreverent and are risk-takers”. This is what inspires him to collect posters of self-run businesses to add into his work. Using these, he creates abstract collages and installations using layered paint, twine, and glue, and then he repeatedly sands it down.
His theme is very clearly the economic struggle of his neighborhood and cultural discourse demonstrated through the view of someone who living it first hand. However, Bradford is quick to say when describing his work, “it’s not some romanticized view of community. It’s a very complex conversation and there is no closure. I think the conversation is what’s interesting”. I believe this is what sets his work aside from others who aim to do the same thing: the conversation.
Reflection of my own piece:
Finished work and all it's finality, is just makes me anxious. Between my first and last layer is where all the action happens but certainly doesn't conclude. The layering my newspaper collection about war and violence from different eras and the torn affect of the articles give the piece a sense of time. The painting was done on plywood and layered with newspaper, plaster, spray paint, lacquer, flour-water mixture and glue. With this, there is the affect of postings on a wall layered for decades. The lacquer adds an aged look- a sense of built up dirt.
With all that has changed in the past 100+ years, newspapers have not. Looking at recent newspapers from a critical perspective, the lack of difference between the early 1900s and now is noticeable. Being one who collects newspapers, it's something I've always noted. They may be increasing discrete about their persuasive intentions, but for each decade their goal is to sell newspapers to make a profit. Just like the people from the articles who are committing acts of violence for monetary purpose. Just like the physical layering of the piece, the concept is consistently layering with repetition. I also tied this in with the text repeat itself, for it repeats. A sense of time is also prevalent. It’s a piece with time woven in and through every aspect of it and through appropriation, alludes to a larger connotation.
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Product of my sexual love, this is my child.
Uneasy, simple representation of the mundane done so well. Like Wind Loves a Window, Andrea Bakers poem, accomplishes illustration through writing in a way I attempt to in my art.
"Baker avows that sight is visionary and that Vision is transformative. This is her 'massive simplicity,' a Blake-like virtue surely, in which the disruption of the eye by light, of words by breath (and by the breath-taking line breaks that are Andrea Baker's most beautiful signature) is a chaos becoming, quite simply, cosmic and wide"--Donald Revell, from his Introduction
Writers/Artists
Post-Industrial Complex - a MOCAD exhibit
The Post-Industrial Complex art exhibit showcased at MOCAD takes a closer look at the seemingly post-apocalyptic city of Detroit. Most believe Detroit is void of life but MOCAD curators Katie Grace McGowen and Jon Brumit have elected to showcase the culture that does exist in the motor city. Through the works displayed by the many diverse makers of their city, McGowen and Brumit successfully established that the auto industry is rooted in everyone here and from that has sprouted a self-made, resourceful spirit. It’s shown as a cyclical method; this technique of reaching inward as opposed to outward to create is also reflected in the curators themselves, reaching into their city for art instead of bringing art to their city. It all appears mutually beneficial but critically can this sort of contemporary exhibition be seen as a reinvented and unintentional form of—for lack of better description—‘blackface’ entertainment?
Putting objects on display and authoritatively allotting them value could critically be seen as a mistaken and accidental mockery. In no way is this a blow to Katie and Jon since their intentions were not as such; it is a society that has predetermined a value for these people and their things that makes it possible to view the exhibition in such a way. This is why it is impossible to argue that such a view determines elitism in the viewer; it is not an elitist view but a capitalist one. Before McGowen and Brumit distributed the application for this exhibition, the participant’s work was not as valuable. During the exhibition, these works were granted significance by the curators; this is an action that is not available to the participants and thus reinstates the capitalist structure at play here.
The consecutive question would now be if this dynamic is avoidable. Unfortunately it may be that the only way to avoid this analysis is if McGowen and Brumit were completely taken out of the situation and these people themselves were to put on an exhibit. The drawback to a self-made exhibit is that it would most likely not receive the recognition allocated to exhibits displayed at MOCAD. Again, this issue is attributed to capitalist patterns in society. Therefore unfortunately while trying to deconstruct traditional thought, Post-Industrial Complex only reinforces it’s existence.
This concept is one that has arisen in my consciousness as I make art about London Ontario. Am I simply representing the city in new ways or framing them from an elitist perception? Something I'll have to come back to.
http://art-design.umich.edu/news/rootoftwo_mocad
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