Posts Tagged ‘performance’

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Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Kevin Bewersdorf was doing okay for himself.

1. He was a co-founder of the Internet surf club Spirit Surfers.

2. He was developing a prolific and popular collection of photography, texts, performance pieces, and music on his website maximumsorrow.com.

3. He had (amongst other exhibitions of his physical work) a solo show at the V&A Gallery in New York, and a two-person show with Guthrie Lonergan at the well-known And/Or Gallery in Dallas.

In short, Bewersdorf was building an impressively dense archive of work with a strongly growing reputation both on and off the Internet.

(He had good “stats.”)

What, then, to make of his decision in early 2009 to take this archive of work off of the Internet, destroying it as well as whatever traces he could find of it left, and replacing it with a single work – an in-progress performance piece he calls PUREKev?

PUREKev is a highly-focused, three-year long performance in which Bewersdorf very gradually diminishes the size of his artistic avatar – a looping clip of over-exposed home video footage depicting a firecracker flickering – against an (International Klein?) blue field over which it flickers.

There’s something poetic about this idea which draws one to its premises and, then, carries one beyond the auto-destructive act which preceded it.

Still, though, what justifies the relatively extreme length of three years?

Would one, after a year, of watching Bewersdorf’s little light growing smaller and smaller, still care?

And, indeed, that’s the gambit of the work:

Bewersdorf made a wager that there is something to his gesture which – despite its simplicity – is intriguing enough for one to follow and keep following, each return a new wave of illumination into the work’s significance.

In my own experience of the work, this is – so far – true.

I can’t say that I look at purekev.com everyday or even every month, but I do return to it every now and again on a somewhat regular basis (as in a pilgrimage) and, when I do so, I never leave satisfied or dis-satisfied, but, rather, pleasantly held in suspension – not sure where to put my finger, but interested in fingering it nonetheless.

When I go to the site today (April 6th, 2010), I – at first – don’t view the flickering light at all.

Rather, I view a blue void through which I scroll to – then – find the little, flickering light at the bottom of the page, surrounded by blue.

As I’ve followed Bewersdorf’s performance, its value to me has begun to reside less in the tracking of his flickering light and more in its tracking of the field upon which it flickers.

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Monday, April 5th, 2010

Some of the key differences between magnetized (that is, pre-digital) videotape and celluloid film are the quantitative shifts in the following three categories:

1. Memory storage capacity.

Videotape, as a media storage device, holds more temporal information and affords un-interrupted recording.

2. Affordability.

Videotape is less expensive then celluloid film.

3. And mobility.

Video cameras are lighter than film cameras and videotape is more robust in more light conditions then celluloid film.

That is to say, automatic moving image reproductions were – with the onset of magnetized videotape in the 1960s – no longer quite as precious.

Just shoot – shoot a lot; shoot at your house; shoot at the park; shoot down time, not just up time – just shoot.

This change in the relationship of moving image technology to the representation of time became a point of interest to many artists.

Bruce Nauman, for example – in a particular series of videos from the late 1960s – pictures the artist not as one who represents an act of creation, but rather as one who (through the technology’s ability to depict greatly extended units of un-interrupted time) represents creating.

One views Nauman stomp on the ground of his bare artist studio in a rigorous rhythm for approximately 60 minutes.

Or one views him adjust a piece of wood, never quite getting it right, for the same amount of time.

These projects can be read as allegories about creation.

The artist never gets it quite right; every stomp or every movement of the wood is a failure.

What is more important is the evolving process of creation.

In the wake of videotape technology, though, a further series of media storage mutations have come and gone.

The result is the end of material storage devices such as videos or hard drives and the birth of the virtual data cloud – the immaterial field of code transformed into information signage – both private as well as public – hovering in, out, and around one’s physical locations in space.

Each one of these generational mutations, then, has necessitated subsequent mutations in the pictures artists draw of their own body performing actions through time.

Kari Altmann, for example, considers her work to be located not in individual works (as meaningful as they may be), but rather in her avatar inside the data cloud wherein one views her perform the excavation and molding of her own artistic archive in mutable cloud-space, cloud-time.

Sometimes she’ll just add an image for research or edit an older project; sometimes she’ll list, but not show new projects she’s working on; sometimes she’ll add a new video; sometimes she’ll take a video away; and so on and so on and so on and so on in a plethora of permutations one follows the artist play with her own cloud data:

Change, evolve – not to “better” data, just different data – data occurring in an ecological network of additional data networks which are – as a whole – growing and becoming self-reflexive, becoming visible to themselves.

The performative focus here, then, is not on the physical body repeating an action, but rather on the virtual body mutating its own archival network.

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Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

The exhibition READY OR NOT IT’S 2010, organized by the Jogging collective and virally announced just one day ago (March 30, 2010), is an open call for artists to post work or link to themselves en masse through the stream of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Facebook Wall right now (today – March 31st, 2010).

The point of the show is to resist the hierarchical historicization and canonization of contemporary art by art museums and other art institutions.

In the words of the exhibition’s announcement text:

[…] digital artists should take the task of historicization into their own hands.

*****

And:

The manipulability of art museums’ Facebook walls allows artists the chance to wrest curatorial control back from institutions empowered by years of exclusionary practices.

*****

As one begins to view the exhibition, the impressively active and continually growing stream of art posts on the LACMA Wall by a broad spectrum of artists seems like an event – a “happening” right there in the virtual space of a collecting museum.

However, as one continues to watch, one might begin to grow anxious about all of this happening.

What is happening?

Is this really the emergence of a Web 2.0 resistance to art world gatekeeping?

Or is LACMA’s authority is simply re-inscribed?

As one continues to view the exhibition, the artists and artworks may come across less as liberated individuals expressing their individuality and more as ammo – data – or, in Jaron Lanier’s lingo, “gadgets.”

This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing interesting happening here.

On the contrary, one begins to take-in an alternate point-of-view regarding the way in which art might work in the network:

That is, as a stream.

The art occurring on the LACMA wall right now is not found in the individual posts (as interesting as many of them are), but rather in the visibility of the stream of posts itself – the curatorial gesture by Jogging.

A stream.

In an interview on the Counterfeit-Mess Tumblr, Jogging’s most visible member Brad Troemel speaks to this very understanding of contemporary creative practice as an ongoing, publicly-visible, and remotely-followable stream:

A couple years ago when I became a Photographer-hater, I realized that you can’t possibly explain the world through a single tool. I feel that way now in regard to The Art Project, that 10 projects can’t explain everything or anything either. All you can do is have a constant engagement with art, trying to find meaning. On Jogging, we, the creators, are the art and artists.

*****

And:

Creating this way makes assessing/accessing our work on the whole difficult.

There’s no fitting “grading rubric” for everything at once because the intent of the art is multiple.

So, you can either assess every single work individually, or, you can assess us, ourselves, as the work.

*****

With this in mind, READY OR NOT IT’S 2010 becomes another status update in Jogging’s own publicly-visible stream.

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Monday, March 29th, 2010

In the film Greenberg, Ben Stiller’s character sees the world as false and meaningless and he’s bitter about this, resulting in a form of nihilism.

In the same film, Greta Gerwig’s character sees the world the same way, but, instead of bemoaning this or going on a quixotic quest for truth or certainty, her character seems to say you that you should rather begin with the knowledge that you’re obviously, automatically just playing at reality and then mean that playing as if it was real.

By acting with conviction (meaning what you say to the best of your ability), your actions then become real and this is the only way to deal with things.

According to the film critic A.O. Scott, Greta Gerwig herself is:

embarked on a project, however piecemeal and modestly scaled, of redefining just what it is we talk about when we talk about acting.

*****

He says:

She will play – that’s what acting is – but she will also mean what she says.

*****

In a key scene from Greenberg, Gerwig recounts a story, which is told like a dream, in which she and a friend play (or “like, are”) these “slut” characters who let themselves be picked up by random guys at a bar.

Her point (as broken and dream-like as it sounds) is that she is not really that girl, but when she played that girl like she meant it she became that girl because that’s what happens when you mean the part you play.

As she tells this to Greenberg, she looks at him with equal parts longing and hysteria as if to say:

I’m sorry I’m telling you this, but this is – to the best I can tell – my situation – my un-real real situation.

*****

This is her philosophy.

NOTE: This post was inspired by Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971).

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Friday, March 26th, 2010

Since April 28, 2008, Joel Holmberg has posted one hundred and seven (and counting) questions to Yahoo! Answers.

If one skips back to the first of the chronologically-organized questions posed by the artist in early 2008, one views three general, relatively straightforward questions regarding the subject of coffee in a category termed:

“Non-Alcoholic Drinks.”

However, in his following (often funny, koan-like) questions posed throughout the course of his performance, Holmberg branches-out his performed investigation into multiple question categories such as, for example, “Other – Society and Culture,” “Laptops and Notebooks,” and “Other – General Health Care,” which each catalyze a different set of responses to the act of “answering” a question.

The “Philosophy” category, for example, is more logically precise than the “Religion and Spirituality” category which is more emotionally-charged than the “Etiquette” category which is more polite than the “Other – Internet” category which is more nerdy than the “Other – Visual Arts” category which is more artsy than the “Men’s Health” category and so on and so on and so on and so on.

Throughout his performance, Holmberg explicitly explores these categorical-discrepancies by asking the same question in multiple categories.

For example, he asks the question “How do you occupy space?” in the “Physics,” “Other-Environment,” “Other-Internet,” “Military,” and “Wrestling” categories.

In each category, one views a unique approach to language and the act of “answering” a question.

The work, in the end, may be less about showing one answers and more about showing one the different answer categories we constantly shift in and out of through our lives.

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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

The art collective Jodi’s J_O_D_I Delicious account contains – as of the publishing of this blog post – 3,512 bookmarks collected between February 20, 2008 to the current day – March 16, 2010.

This averages-out to between 4 and 5 bookmarks marked by the artists per day – everyday – for the past 2 years or so.

Today J_O_D_I has, thus far, bookmarked 16 sites.

Each site depicts images or conversations about images related to the archiving of imagery.

Whether it be in an online database, art collection, or photographic contact sheet, the thread running through the subject matter of each of these bookmarks is image archiving.

By making an archive of images that refer to image archives, they make a work of self-reflexive art.

As time goes on and one sees Jodi’s bookmarks refer to the same theme again and again, one sees not bookmarks, but the apparatus of the entire del.icio.us platform: an archive.

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Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Watching feature length movies shows one “the two hours,” “the hour-and-a-half,” and “the three hours” and if one views enough feature length movies one begins to develop a picture in their own mind(s) regarding these lengths of time. “This is what two hours feels like.”

Thus, when a feature length movie is successful it perfectly corresponds with the picture in one’s own mind of “the two hours,” “the hour and a half,” or the “the three hours.”

(That is to say, it finishes at the same you do.)

But what about other lengths of time?

Well, television figured out that we could be trained to picture “the hour,” “the half-hour,” and “the thirty seconds” and it began to regulate these particular time-units vigorously.

Thus, the joy of good television is the spasm of correspondence between the episode or commercial’s account of “the hour,” “the half-hour,” or “the thirty seconds” and one’s own trained picture of “the hour,” “the half-hour,” or “the thirty-seconds.”

When one downloads an entire season of Mad Men, for instance, one begins to get off less on the content of the individual episodes and more on the rhythm of the individual episodes in succession as each one fills in “the 48 minutes” again and again and again and again as versions on a theme.

What time, though, does the digital network picture?

On the one hand, everything’s gotten shorter:

Blog posts are short, videos are short, news articles are headlines.

However, on the other hand, everything’s gotten longer.

One blog post is merely a version on a theme developed in an ongoing performance inhabiting “the several months and years.”

Does the digital network, then, polarize one’s desires for time – make you crave for both the instantaneous and the epic?

Make it schizophrenic?

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Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

50 50 by Oliver Laric is a version of the 50 Cent track In Da Club composed of 50 other versions of the song culled from YouTube user videos. In each of the videos, a user (or users) performs a homemade karaoke performance of a pop song in front of a home video camera or webcam.

Laric cuts these versions together to create a single, seamless performance of the track which has less to say about In Da Club and more to say about the fact that the world of images in 2007 – the year the video was initially uploaded – is composed of versions of In Da Club as much as it is composed of the original track.

When one searches for a pop song on YouTube, more often than not one will find versions of the track produced by rank-and-file YouTube users as opposed to an “original” version.

And if one does find an “original” version of the song, it will still be versioned anyway through the video’s visual component – say a slide show of thematically relevant imagery or a static screen of text and graphic elements advertising whatever it is that the user sells.

This ecology of versions is what 50 50 shows me.

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Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Parisian Love is a television commercial created by Google.

Visually, the entire ad takes place in either the Google search field or in a series of Google search result fields.

One views the protagonist, an anonymous computer user, manipulating a cursor and pointer, searching his way through time – from, for example, “study abroad paris france” to “impress a french girl” to “long distance relationship advice” to “churches in paris” to “how to assemble a crib.”

Underscoring this narrative is a driving piano anthem collaged with sound effects such as an airplane taking off, a “How to Learn French” tape, church bells, and, finally, a baby laughing.

In each search, a dramatic tension rises as the user types in her queries word by word, performing the act of searching.

It begins when the user types in the word “study.”

Before typing in another word, however, Google instantaneously supplies him with a plethora of likely options such as “study island,” “study abroad,” “study Spanish,” “study skills.”

So, study what?

“study abroad”

Again, Google spits out an instantaneous list of “study abroad” options.

We’ve got “study abroad scholarships,” “study abroad programs,” “study abroad italy,” “study abroad australia.”

So, study abroad where?

“study abroad paris france.”

Is this what you were searching for?

It is.

Search it.

Google does so and the user moves his pointer around the first two search results:

1. “Study Abroad in France, Search Study Abroad Programs in France”

Or

2. “Study abroad programs in Paris, France – Study French in France – CEA.”

We cut in close as the protagonist is forced to choose between the two options.

Which will it be?

He’s unconventional, so he goes with the second one instead of the first.

The sound of an airplane taking off appears as the piano changes key and we jump forward in time as the user searches for “cafes near the louve.”

A list of search results appears along with a question posed by Google:

“Did you mean: cafes near the louvre”

And so on and so on and so on and so on and so on until we are faced with a blinking cursor on a blank text field as the user spells out the query:

“how…”

“to…”

“assemble a crib”

Google it.

The next thing one views is the slogan – “Search on.” – (an updating of Nike’s “Just Do It”) as it cuts in over the sound of a baby laughing.

On the one hand, the ad shows us that our lives can be marked by Google searches.

But, on the other hand, on a perhaps deeper level, it shows one that life can be marked by endless searching, never doing it, but working towards it and changing it as one grows and learns.

As the user enters search queries, one views less the drama of action (just do it), and more the drama of evolution (search on).

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Friday, February 26th, 2010

Untitled (The Birds without the birds) by Martijn Hendriks is an ongoing performance in which Hendriks digitally removes every image of a bird from every frame of the film The Birds.

By taking the birds out of the film, Hendriks suggests that terror is psychological.

Terror is Tippy Hedren – the icy blonde with everything in control – being mercilessly stalked by her own fear of losing this control.

A key to the project is that Hendriks digital elimination of the birds is not seamless, but rather highly present. There are sort of digital scars that foreground the fact that something has been taken out.

Also, he didn’t remove the birds from a single frame of the film (which he could accomplish in a day), but rather performs his removal of the birds from every frame of the film in which a bird appears – a performance he has been continually working through since 2007.

He writes:

[…] I’ve realized that I like this performative dimension best when it introduces a kind of questionable or unproductive element, so that I really need to believe in something to go through with it. Making an art work is also about believing in something enough to follow it through, to stick with it even when that something lacks all credibility or value.

*****

If the work was a one-liner dashed off quickly or with a tool that did it automatically, it would be less meaningful and I wouldn’t want to follow it.

But I do find it an idea worth following because of this performative element and the sheer, absurd labor of it all.

It’s the time implied in the work that makes it beautiful.

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