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“The Artist is Present” by Marina Abramović moved me deeply. Specifically her 3 month performance piece at MoMA. I would have never imagined that such a simple, wordless moment could impact people so much. I wonder if the people who cried were followers of Marina and were just in awe of her presence or if they were passersby taken in by her gaze and the shared intimacy between them. How could you even explain this piece to anyone? It was powerful beyond explanation. I was thinking, this 3 month piece would have been completely different if she had done it in her 20′s. There was something about her bringing all her life's experiences and pain with her sitting there vulnerable in that chair day after day.

I have to admit, I didn’t really understand nor could I appreciate her earlier works of slapping, cutting, bleeding and thrashing naked bodies. Regardless of my understanding of these earlier works, she is a bold female voice and I admire her. I love that she uses her body as medium.

I did like her piece of the two naked bodies in the doorway. Here I can see her intention: the awkwardness of brushing up against a strangers body, especially naked and especially causing no reaction. Beautiful. I also liked her reclined male with skeleton laying on top because it made me ponder the frailness and temporary nature of life and beauty.

She is an inspiration to me both as a female in the art world, but also as an older accomplished artist.

ecastelart

To Scream, To Cry

For my performance artwork I focused on the verbs to scream and to cry. I recorded myself faced against a photo of president Trump behind a tarnished American flag projected on to the wall. I added audio from West Side Story’s America along with audio of immigrant children, who have been separated from their parents at the border, crying. I then Yelled” build that wall” along with a cry of my own, “donde esta el ninos “ English: WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN. I placed several roses in my hair which is often used to portray Mexican heritage in art. I was playing the role of the immigrant mothers and fathers who do not have a voice, who are afraid and desperately wanting to know where their children are. I put the audio of the immigrant children loud because we need to hear them, their voice must be as loud as ours. As the granddaughter of immigrants I feel very passionate about this cause and I hope I can share that passion with you.

morgangracelove-blog

I can feel how passionate you are about this topic. Great job, you get your point across very well.

mokenjirip

Cool. I’m glad you brought up a hard topic to swallow.

andrewbissell

Project 4 First, my performance has to do with preparation. From laying, for the most part, the materials I would use within the performance space, to having to utilize them in certain ways and in a certain order. I also wanted to focus on the idea of caring for something fragile. In this case, a piece of tempered glass. Had I just set the glass on the ground or not put cardboard in front of the pallet so that an errant nail or some other debris could impact the glass, the breaking would been an accident. I wanted to meticulously clean the piece of glass. I also deliberately wanted to have to exit the performance space to gather additional materials to be able to clean the piece of glass before the end, to draw on resources outside of the performance space. The end is then about taking steps that completely counteract the preceding actions, as in shattering the glass after having handled it carefully and cleaning it. I would say then that overall the piece is about waste. Wasted time, wasted energy, wasted potential, wasted work. But, I obviously knew while planning, arranging, and staging this performance that what would happen when I hit the glass with the sledgehammer was nearly certain. So, was it a success?

ecastelart

Wow! This is mind blowing and so awesome! I think this was a complete success you owned your space and I felt your actions were clear and full of intent. I was listening to this with headphones and the sound was so cool it was crisp but quiet and slowly built up to a massive climax! Really excellent!

mountainorbit-blog

Love this! love that you cleaned the glass! It’s sorrowful and successful at the same time.

therealsyntax-deactivated201808

Project #3 - Video Art (with critique)

For this assignment I chose to take a music video by Linking Park, “Take Out All the Rest,” and mash it up with a song by Starset, “Dark On Me.” I found this to be very appropriate considering the lighting and the mood of the song. It tells a story about someone who has been hurt and is trying to find their way through space metaphorically through life and finding your way back. The lighting in the video is amazing and sets the tone for the story while the music simply amplifies that tone. The major difficulty was using clips from another video that I could not extend shots of that would have been easier for editing purposes. Enjoy!

WARNING: My audio is loud and it is opera, so turn your volume down to begin, but do listen as the music is nice.

I learned SO much by making this piece which represents: To Unravel.. First, if I ever did this again I would choose a KNITTED blanket instead of a CHROCHED blanket! It would have gone so much faster and smoother. That was mistake #1. Next, I learned that I could not spin very much as it made me nauseated! I had to shift gears mid shoot and let friends and family unravel the blanket onto me. While I was standing there (this shoot took just under 2 hours!), I thought about how cool it would be to be standing in a public place with the blanket at my feet and let people come up and spend some time unraveling it on me. I suppose the video I watched of Marina Abramović made an impression on me. I found her 3 month performance piece 'The Artist is Present’ incredibly moving. Because this was a crocheted blanket it would have taken over 6 hours to unravel. As much as I would have loved to unravel the entire thing, I had family over this day and no one wanted to unravel for 6 hours...

kathleennyoung-blog

Project #3- Vanishing and Becoming

This is a combination of a Charles Bukowski poem The Laughing Heart and the rhythm that is night and day (and night again).

The meaning for me, is how each day begins the circle of life. The night will bring on the day which brings light to the world and keeps it spinning. When I think of the sun vanishing into the horizon as nightfall is brought to us, it is a time to reflect on the time that has passed. The life that is created. The moments that are captured. This is not to say that darkness does not bring any of these magical events, because it can do just the same. The projection of light gives life on earth the power to grow. “Tomorrow is a new day.” Nature thrives on this more than any human being ever could.

This poem was fitting for me for the idea of nature and light/dark movements throughout time lapses. It gives me a sort of inspiring outlook of the world, and I hope it gives others the same feelings.

“you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be.”

“Light” doesn’t always have to be a physical attribute. It can be an illusion in our minds towards further progression. We have to use light to capture the image of someone, whether that be their photograph, silhouette, or simply their face in our mind. Without light, we wouldn’t be able to see them for who they are physically. However mentally, the light is the notion of a positive perception in our brains to discover how we want to perceive life. Is that our way of reality? Maybe every human mind see’s something different than the other but we will never know. An illusion to one could be the real thing to another. It’s all relative.

(Videos used were of 4k footage of different areas around the world)

trudylovato-blog

The motive and concept really come through when combine all the elements. It flowed really well. Nice work.

mokenjirip

Perfect. I’ve also decided you’d be a perfect video editor. Add that to your awesome skillsets. :)

Project #4 Excercise

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApqgBjTyKgo) friend of mine.

Exercise #4 - My 20 verbs:

To ensnarl To render To slip To unravel

To expand To splash To cover To peel

To blend To drip To reveal To amuse

To consider To elevate To pace To mash

To evoke To run To evacuate To breathe

The 3 I choose are: to DRIP, to UNRAVEL, to SPLASH

I enjoyed reading our assignment for Reading #4, by ROSELEE GOLDBERG Performance: A Hidden History. I learned that performance often preceded major art movements. In all my studies for my BFA and MFA, I had never come across this information. This is very intriguing. Partly because to me it may mean that inspiration comes from action, from moving/creating in time. It is also intriguing to me because performance art is hard to document since no artifact is created. I knew about the Parisian art Salons, and I had thought that nothing like that exists anymore. But perhaps other iterations of it do exist. I’m thinking now of the Flash Mob movement, and pop up art experiences. I see theater going from the traditional stage out to other public places. Also, I really enjoyed learning that art movements come in waves responding to social and political trends. This helps me to understand that maybe art isn't dead, maybe it is in a lull, or building momentum. There will be future art iterations as there will always be social and political shifts. I am drawn to the philosophy that performance art tends to resist Art establishment doctrines. Yet another form of expression taken out of the gallery walls.

andrewbissell

Project 3 - Becoming and Vanishing The historical research and discussion in the reading we were to use as a prompt for this project, Sean Cubitt’s “Projection: Vanishing and Becoming,” was very intriguing to me, but the part that stayed with me the most was his coming back to and reinterpreting the story of the Corinthian maid drawing the outline of her soon-to-be-gone lover. In the original telling, she does this so that she may have an image (of a sort) to remember him by, but in a later telling, informed by “History of the Shadow” by Victor Stoichita, he explains that what she’s actually captured and is displaying is a reminder of her lover’s absence. So, for this project I decided to keep in mind both the idea of light being able to illuminate objects and that objects blocking or obscuring a source of illumination is equally capable of triggering emotions and memories, even if only abstractly. I took the video I’ve edited together while travelling through Southern Oregon and Northern California in the winter of 2010. I chose to use it because of the contrast between the amount of light being reflected by the snow-covered mountain and the passing trees in the foreground, as well as the positioning of the cloud and the shadow it’s casting on the mountain beneath it. The contrast between the stillness of the mountain scenery and the rock walls along the road, that are passing by so quickly at the beginning and end of the video that they’ve become a random pattern of passing shapes, is also very interesting to me. I wanted to further highlight this contrast by slowly bringing the color back into the video the longer the mountain is in view, before removing it again when the mountain fades from view. I recorded the music for the video after coming up with my final edit for the video using a device called the Grendel Drone Commander and a tenor guitar run through various effects.

ecastelart

For my video art project I used footage from 3 different time lapse videos of flowers opening and closing that I found on archive.org. I used instrumental music by the Piano Guys and I recorded myself reading a poem I found online. My goal was to use the flowers and their opening and closing process as an interpretation of vanishing and becoming. As the flowers are closed this is the state of vanishing and as the flowers open they are becoming. The poem is about a woman who is escaping reality and leaving her physical body and discovering a new world made of her inner desires and dreams. I felt that this poem and the flowers transformation, which all occur in one minute, shows how abstract reality really is. Even when we have an empirical sense of reality we immediately question it. I think it is hard for us to understand what is real or believe something is real unless it is our own reality. After completing this project and reading Vanishing and Becoming I have decided that reality is totally subjective.

For my Project #3, I chose to respond to Gorky’s ‘Kingdom of Shadows’. While reading his impression of B/W silent film, I was reminded of winters during my time in Wisconsin: a stormy winter grey sky blending into a grey earth, monotone and colorless. The first half of my video, I have captured images that had an absence of life. For my main audio track, I used NASA’s electromagnetic sound waves of Saturn’s rings as this was the loneliest, most distant and lifeless sound I could imagine.

From here I focused my theme into ‘becoming’. The B/W image starts to move, first monotone, then burst into color. I sampled parts of a U2 song, looping a musical phrase and layered lyrics on top of it, choosing key lyrics that I thought would support my response to Gorky…”So many ways of seeing, this is no time, not to be alive”.

andrewbissell

Exercise #3: Journey Through The Past For this exercise, we were tasked with creating a music video. For the music, I selected a live solo version of the song “Journey Through The Past” by Neil Young, from his album Live at Massey Hall 1971. Inspired by the piece “Projection: Vanishing and Becoming” by Sean Cubitt that we were tasked with reading, for the visuals I decided to find old home video footage on Archive.org. I found three separate 10-15 minute long pieces that I then sorted through, choosing small clips to edit together. Coupling these specific visuals from the past with the melancholic subject matter of the song, that comes through strongly in this version, as well as timing the pacing of my edits to the music I think both re-contextualizes the visuals and accentuates the song.

mountainorbit-blog

This was moving!

andrewbissell

Project #2: The Loop

The first thing I decided when figuring out what to do for this project was that I wasn’t going to create animations by capturing video (from a movie, television, etc.), but didn’t know what to do from there. It was while looking for inspiration that I came across a book that I received as a gift years ago called Masterpieces of Japanese Screen Painting by Miyeko Murase. It’s a beautiful, large book showcasing artwork created on screens that were both functional and purely decorative by Japanese artists between the 14th and 19th centuries. With many of the screens, both large- and small-scale, one can find that a story is being told through the interactions of different elements of the paintings. In this, I saw the potential for capturing one part of the screen at a time using the camera on my phone, and assembling them in order to animate the stories being depicted. In some of them, the ones that are purely landscapes or nature scenes, I have created a simpler panoramic scan across the scene, still creating movement for the viewer as the images change and then start over. For one of the animations, the sixth one, I used a short video capture that I then only used every 10th frame of.

The specific sources for each gif created are as follows:

1: “Flowers and Birds” Genga, early Sixteenth Century. Ink and color on paper; pair of six-fold screens. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

2: “Tales of the Hogen and Heiji Insurrections” Anonymous, late Sixteenth Century. Ink and color on gilded paper; six-fold screen. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

3: “Pine and Plum Trees in Snowstorm” Katsu Jagyoku, 1774. Ink on paper; six-fold screen. The Shin’enkan Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

4: “Irises and Bridge” Ogata Korin, Edo Period. Ink and color on gilded paper; pair of six-fold screens. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

5: “Teika’s Poems on the Minade Villa” Anonymous, Seventeenth Century. Ink, color and gold on paper; six-fold screen. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Leighton Longhi, New York.

6: “Bridge and Willow Trees” Anonymous, early Seventeenth Century. Ink, color and gold on gilded paper; six-fold screen. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

7: “Waves at Matsushima” Sotatsu, Edo Period. Ink, color and gold on paper; pair of six-fold screens. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

8: “Cherry Blossom Viewing at Yoshino and Itsukushima” Anonymous, Seventeenth Century. Ink and color on gilded paper; pair of six-fold screens. The Mary and Jackson Burke Collection, New York.

9: “Tales of the Hogen and Heiji Insurrections” Anonymous, late Sixteenth Century. Ink and color on gilded paper; six-fold screen. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

10: “Dragons” Sotatsu, Edo Period. Ink and light color on paper; pair of six-fold screens. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.