Vanishing and becoming/Introduction to Video Art
I found this reading to be really interesting as it brought up a lot of ideas I haven’t necessarily thought of. I found the concept of shadows being the first true form of art rather than drawing very cool, using shadows to capture a moment in time or using it to tell stories are super interesting ways to think about it. I found the work of Melanie Klein to be very interesting, the idea of projecting emotions onto others to keep it from destroying yourself. Using toddlers as a prime example was quite strange to me, they aren’t even aware of the things they are feeling so how could they project onto others? To take the ability and project inner life onto external objects as an element of human development is rather surprising but in a way it does make sense. Plato’s smile is a troubling piece of art for me, as interesting the concept is it makes me feel sick to my stomach. Though through this a new vision for art was created, using projections to change one's perception of what is truly reality. I suppose that’s what it’s like in modern day times through the use of television and the internet. It’s all projections of what someone else wants us to think reality is, in a less brutal way.
Introduction to video art:
Video art is not something that I would normally think about, but after learning more about it I find it to be a very interesting form of art and it really takes talent to truly capture it in a way that a lot of the artists in this reading did. I found Bruce Nauman’s use of video art to explore and show the process behind an artist's process using his own body as a medium to convey it. It’s very interesting how this piece is considered performance art even though it’s not something we could immediately categorize it as, but after thinking about it more in depth it’s easy to see that it still counts, it’s just a different medium and means. Another piece I found extremely interesting was the video collagist in Christian Marclay’s The Clock in which a projector plays a looped mash up of clocks from many popular movie scenes and with each scene the clock in the image matches up with the actual time of day. Truly innovative to use time as an element in a work, and to use it as a functional clock is such a cool concept!
