Untitled (Televisions/Found Footage)

Link to video: Untitled (Televisions/Found Footage)

The installation for which this video piece was created changed drastically since I first envisioned it 4 months ago. The video was created specifically for the installation after it had been set up. The installation consisted of 4 large televisions, wrapped in amorphous plastic bags, placed amongst a patch of trees. On each television the 20-minute video was looped continuously. Due to the fact that the installation was outside, the daylight caused some difficulty, and the visibility changed throughout the day. The piece was most effective at night, but seeing the difference on the screens between day and night was quite dramatic as well.

While not originally intended as an environmentalist piece, the materials took on a life of their own. I guess it is inevitable, though, when placing televisions, wrapped in plastic, in the bushes around trees. In the daylight, without video, it ended up looking like piles of garbage in the bushes. While frustrated with it, I decided to make the video specific to that theme.

I have an enormous collection of found-footage 8mm and 16mm film on my harddrive, and have come across many odd things over the years. For the piece I decided to stick with images of nature and humans mistreating it. As the piece was by a walkway, I wanted the message to come across quickly, yet I did not want a short, monotonous loop of the same footage. I montaged a selection of choice camping, hunting, fishing, and hiking footage, with clips of children visiting zoos, traffic, mining operations and animal abuse. The combination of these images successfully made everyone quite uncomfortable. I also produced some sound to increase the uneasiness, but unfortunately the speakers only worked on one of the four televisions. The sound is available on the clip on the Internet, but not as effective as it would be if it had been playing on the televisions.

While the video as a stand-alone piece is not quite as effective, it still has some of the intended message. The juxtapositioning of grotesque imagery, with zoos, and other abuses of nature, successfully causes the viewer to question our relationship to nature, and how we have disturbed it so greatly over the years. It was much more effective when walking across campus at night, being confronted with piles of plastic with glowing screens. While I rarely attempt to make any political art, I feel like this piece was successful, and the images appropriate to the installation in which they were played.

Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around Bruce Nauman

Link to video: Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman’s work has been some of the most influential in my development as an artist. As a conceptual artist, he has no specific style, and works in any medium. In the 60s he worked primarily in performance and video, combining the two through documentation of his performances, while working with attributes specific to the medium of film or video. His video explorations of three-dimensional space are exemplified in Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, in which he walks extremely slowly, with exaggerated hip motions, heel-to-toe around a square taped onto his studio floor. For long periods of time he is outside of the frame, forcing the viewer to think about video as a frame, and the world outside of that. He has placed a mirror against the wall at the back of his studio, so that you can see some of his motions when he is not in the shot himself. However, the mirror is very small, and you can only see a small portion of the performance in it.

For one of my classes this quarter we were required to re perform a piece. In addition to the performance, I decided to replicate Nauman’s video. As mentioned before, Nauman has created a great variety of work, and WWU’s campus happens to have one of his sculptures, Stadium Piece. I felt it would be appropriate to incorporate this piece in my tribute to his work. The piece also interacts with space in a similar way to his video. It takes something we see in daily life (stairs/walking) and distorts it, exaggerating the line and angles usually associated with it. By walking up and down the stairs, your view of the staircase is obscured, and in forcing the visitor to go up, then down, then up and down again to reach the other side, he forces an exaggerated walk and an extended length of time to experience the piece.

My performance was in combination with two other people, so we decided to walk on and around the piece. By walking on it, as already mentioned, the performer was obscured from the camera’s view, and their travel pointless. As for myself, I walked around the base, and through the larger of the openings in its side. I was only visible to the camera for half the time, because the rest I was either behind the sculpture, or underneath it. The camera was also set up at a slight angle, to obscure even more of our movements. The building in the background works similarly to Nauman’s mirror, in that, it allows the viewer to see glimpses of our movements that would otherwise be hidden from the camera.

Interview

About a month ago I interviewed Anne Hirsch, the video / performance artist who made the Caroline YouTube persona and went on Frank the Entertainer (Her blogs about the experience: http://www.bust.com/searchall.html?ordering=&searchphrase=all&searchword=shaming+famewhores)

I just got the tapes back, so i thought I'd post a transcribed version of it on here.

Enjoy!

Interview with Anne Hirsch

Me:

Could you describe Caroline and how you got interested in the “famewhore”

Anne:

I talk about the cam whore and the fame-whore as being distinct, different versions of the same thing. I first became interested in the cam-whore because that was a super easy way that any woman can gain an audience, any woman can go on the internet and broadcast herself and if she’s willing to do that she’ll have an audience, it doesn’t matter who she is. So I was interested in that phenomenon and how women were presenting their sexuality and for what ends. With youtube and the phenomena of the cam-whore, all of a sudden women’s desire for attention became much more visible in our society, whereas before it existed, but it was so much harder for women to cultivate an audience.

So then, working on the same ideas, I saw reality television as just an extension of that, and women going into that had bigger goals, they had much loftier than just an internet audience. It just seemed like a normal extension of the work I had been doing.

Was Caroline your first investigation into these issues?

Yeah, I think she was the first one

How did you start Caroline? Was it a personal exploration or an assignment? I was wondering if you could also talk about the feedback you get

I was making sort of You-Tubey confessional-type videos about trauma. Some were real trauma and some were made-up trauma. So for me, it was kind of like why am I making Youtube style videos but not putting them on Youtube? On instincts, I wanted to start creating a persona on YouTube, it just sort of happened on a whim as an area I wanted to explore and also as a method of self-exploration.

My initial idea that I began to see on YouTube was that there these sort of two genres of women, and pretty quickly I went away from the whole trauma thing and went more towards other things, there was sort of the naïve young vlogger types and then there was these tons of women shaking their butts in your face, and these two genres rarely, if ever, mixed. The booty-shakin girls just wanted to be objectified, and the talking heads girls couldn’t show her sexuality because she wouldn’t be taken seriously as a Vlogger.

So I was wondering why couldn’t those two women exist? Why did sexuality and intellect have to be two separate categories or things that a woman could own? Which seems like a very old idea, but on YouTube these things weren’t mixing. For myself and potentially others, I saw YouTube as a relative utopia of sorts for women to be able to express their sexuality in a relatively safe forum, kind of idealistic.

One of the most interesting aspects your videos for me was when you were in the Caroline persona and responding to the very real problems that people would send you. It seemed like whether or not those letters were real, you were trying to address serious issues but through this naïve persona which made for this interesting talk where you address heavy things in intellectual ways but trying to do it in a way that wouldn’t undermine the Caroline persona. Did you feel that you were perpetuating her persona too much and so trying to smarten her up? What was that like and why did you decide to do it?

That’s a really good question. The first wave of fans was all these guys, and the second wave were a younger group of fans which I was not prepared for. The horny guys, was like “ok, that seems typical,” but the female tween fan-base, that was very bizarre. When I first started getting messages from them girls saying “I wanna be just like you when I grow up” and they were making videos imitating me I was like “oh my god, what have I done?” I had a Miley-Cyrus moment, like do I really want to be a role model for these girls?

So I had a back and forth with some of them saying things like “stay in school” and I started thinking about the role of role models like Paris Hilton and all these girls getting their image tarnished by sex tapes and Miley Cyrus, and I began to ask why we were censoring sexuality for young girls. Sexuality is a part of us I think even when we are young, so the fact that we are admonishing women for engaging in sexual behavior is actually not doing justice to young girls; it’s actually hurting their future. So I began to see myself as actually a positive role model and saying “you know what, I’m going to express my sexuality in the way that I want, and it’s a positive thing” and encouraging girls to do the same in their own way.

That tender age of eleven, twelve, thirteen is really when it’s going on and when that struggle begins, and for girls to ever feel ashamed for wanting to be sexual or sexy, I think that’s a bad thing. So even though my big-sisterly inclination is to say “Don’t be like me!” really I think that sexuality shouldn’t be so off limits to girls at a young age. The idea with Caroline was that everything Caroline says is true; it’s just said an insincere manner.

Do you read the blog Hipster Runoff?

No why?

Because I think that he’s doing the same thing by saying things that he believes in, just in an incinsere tone. A lot of people read it as irony or satire, but it’s not really that. I still have yet to really figure out what it’s doing, it’s almost like a self-doubt, being critical of one’s own thought, it’s being truthful to these thoughts that are ingrained in you but saying in an incincere manner because you’re critical of those things you’re taught or believe in, or you’re critical to the antithesis of those things. So it’s more like catching yourself or being critical of one’s self. Because everything I say I believe, but don’t necessarily believe believe.

It seems like a way to embody a persona at first to critique it, but at the same time critique more how it’s seen and not so much what it is.

Yeah, that’s basically what I’m saying.

That get’s to my next question. You have seventy or so videos of yourself dancing to Animal Collective, Dan Deacon, etc. Did you see that as more a way to create what you saw as a role model for girls, an investigation into the persona, or just an attempt to build this persona in a realistic sort of way?

I was trying to do a few of those things. I was trying to build a persona in a realistic way. If I kept producing, then I would maintain the fanbase and also have it keep going. Each video had the potential to be more viral than the last. I was also kind of like a VJ in a way in appropriating different kinds of music, with each video hitting different niche markets. And also I enjoyed it, I liked doing it, I had a lot of fun.

I could definitely tell you were having fun, especially with things like the My Butt music video.

That one was the most painful. [laughs] No that one was a lot of fun, much more work, but a lot of fun.

To go back to the pre-caroline, when you describe your friend committing suicide and these very intense things where you’re crying, it’s like you’re in a confessional booth. What did you see yourself investigating with those videos?

With the one with my friend committing suicide, that was part of the original trauma videos. My original idea was to combine those trauma videos with this girl who’s dancing. She would be dancing and expressing her sexuality as a way to ease the trauma. So we’ve got this weird juxtaposition of a girl who’s gone through a lot, with this other crazy nymph.

I had three other videos up that I’ve since taken down. One was a story of rape that I told that happened to my friend, another was an elaborate lie about being anorexic. That was really the very beginning stages of the project. Then after a month I started going away from that. The newer videos that I think you’re talking about are the one’s where I’m talking about how I hate boys?

Yeah

To me that video’s hilarious. In between the dancing and whatnot, I wanted to have these interludes about “who is Caroline” because I get all these messages saying “we want to know more about you!” so occasionally I’d throw in a confessional for sort of the “true fans”. It was a lot of performance. At first it was just me putting stuff out there and it was just out there. Then over a period of time I was getting a lot of feedback, so then the performance became about this constant back and forth between how my performance was changing based on the feedback I was getting. And so I had been getting a lot of horny requests and stuff like that, so I just thought I would address them in this way.

Did you anticipate any of those lude requests? Was that part of the reason why you did it? So you could find some of those trollers? Or was it just kind of a surprise that you didn’t feel that surprised about?

That was a surprise that I didn’t feel that surprised about. I didn’t think I would elicit any attention because I didn’t think I was particularly good looking or interesting. Obviously that doesn’t matter. Anyone can get attention from anyone, there’s someone out there to give everyone attention. But it made sense when it happened.

With the videos though, I wanted to present a woman who was contradictory. She’s expressing her sexuality but at the same time she’s having doubt and having shame about it.

It brings up how when you’re talking about being a role model for all these girls, and that it’s healthy to have people expressing their sexuality at young ages and have that not be repressed, do you think YouTube is a good place for it or more of a dangerous place because of the amount of goons trolling it?

Like any other place, there are good things about it and there are bad things about it. It is a reality, instead of banning it or trying to get kids not to go on it, the problem isn’t with YouTube, the problem is with how we view sexuality—how it’s taught in schools, on a familial level, on a societal, cultural level. If that became a better dialogue, I don’t think YouTube would present a problem. However that’s not a reality, it’s very unlikely.

As is, I think now today, kids are finding out much earlier about sex and seeing sex much earlier because of the internet. I know it’s true with me, everything I know about sex I know from the internet. There was no other way for me to get that information. And now it’s been taken a step further.

When I was young, about twelve, I was going around on the internet and talking to random people and having cyber sex and stuff even though I didn’t know what the fuck any of it meant. And that was very formative for me; I had internet relationships with older men who I didn’t know. Did any of them come kill me or stalk me? No. Were they fairly innocent relationships? Yes.

Yeah there is a very parental fear of internet people coming to stalk and kill you, while most of it is a lot more innocent than spooked out parents would think. I was wondering if we could switch to Frank the Entertainer. How did you get this opportunity? Did you have it in mind as a thesis project? How did this happen?

Well I’ve always loved reality TV and I’ve always fantasized about being on it. I was always wondering what it was like to be on it—I wonder what it’s like to be on that, I want to be on that—but I had a boyfriend for a really long time so it was never really an option—to go on a dating show when you were seriously dating someone. Then I took a reality TV class here and my theoretical interest in reality TV was renewed, I was obsessed with it now. It fits in perfectly with so much of my other work—there were so many crossovers of themes.

Then I was at a residency in Florida, and I had signed up for the casting for Tough Love on a whim, and through that casting list I saw the casting call for Frank the Entertainer and was talking to another artist at the residency who was also obsessed with reality TV and she said “this is the show for you” so I sent in an application with a video. They called me the next day so I drove out there and did an in person interview and then a month later they called me and wanted me to come out to NYC. I had no idea if I was going to get onto the show, so I didn’t know for sure if that would be my masters thesis, it just happened to work out that way.

Who was the artist you were interning with?

Well the artist that I was referring to was Kristina Long, she is mainly a performance based artist based in LA, and we were both there studying under our “master artist”

Heather Woodbury who is in between art and theatre and performance in a pretty interesting way.

That brings up how people like Maya Stirken and Vito Acconci write a lot about the difference between video as performance, installation, etc. I always saw you as performance that needed to be on video and in very specific settings. So it was kind of performance, but the medium of YouTube was definitely necessary because they wouldn’t have had the same impact if you were watching them in the museum or something.

Yeah

To come back to Frank though, in the last Bust article, you write about how the producers have some role in perpetuating stereotypes—how by the fourth episode, the four minority characters were cast off for example. I was wondering how much of a role the producers actually have in the show, or if it just kind of ends up like it does and the editors just chop it up to make people look stupid?

Well first of all, I don’t really know what the hell is going on in terms of production. You’re kept so in the dark that everything is kind of a mystery. But what I’ve gleaned from looking back and talking to some of the other people, is they have an agenda in terms of how everything should go, in terms of elimination. It’s not like production is saying to anyone “you do this, we want this, etc.” It’s more of a cajoling, because as soon as they tell someone directly to do something, that person can say “this isn’t real!”

They’re incredibly nice people on the outside; they appear to be very, very nice. But they’re incredibly manipulative and they manipulate through their niceness and make you think they’re on your side “we’re trying to help you, we want you to not only find love, but get famous!” And maybe at some times that cajoling became more forceful than other times depending. Also, most of the people they’re dealing with on these shows aren’t terribly bright, typically because they haven’t been educated so they’re easy to control. They’re also people who are willing to play along because they want to get famous, so they’re at the mercy of production in hopes that it will further their career goals.

Didn’t one of the girls actually have a video blog similar to yours where she sang in the bathroom and stuff?

That’s Carey, that shit cracks me up. I’ve been realizing that everything I’ve been doing in terms of my web presence for the show, even my Caroline persona, all these girls are doing legitimately, and I’m doing an imitation of that.

How was it living with all these girls who you were simultaneously critiquing, did that have a role in your decision to drop your persona after the first few days?

Well first of all, I dropped the persona as soon as I got in the house. I never had a persona on the show. We had an interview before we got in the house, and that interview they told me was an audition, even though I was on the show. So in that interview I was really hamming it up, but it carried through the first few episodes. In the house settings though, I was never in character, I really wanted to be real.

How was living with the girls that you were kind of critiquing in a way? Did you feel guilty at all, or did you feel you were building more empathy in a more investigative, anthropological kind of way?

I went on that show thinking I was going to get beat up. But the best thing about that experience was meeting these girls and being like “these are real, normal, nice, smart, pretty women” and then seeing them be completely butchered on television. It just made me completely rethink the way I’ve been watching these shows, thinking “oh my god these girls are such trash”, they’re not. It may appear that way, maybe they’re a little bit superficial in the way they present themselves, but if they weren’t that way they would never get on TV.

How much of a roll did Frank have in deciding who would be kicked off?

He had a role, but he did not have a presidential veto by any means. The girl who he picked in the end, he really did have feelings for in some capacity. In terms of the other girls, he could care less who would be kicked off. So it just became a show game, about what would be best for the show. It’s interesting though because the producers can also put things in Frank’s head because they want him to have real emotions. I knew who was going home every night, that’s how I knew I was going home.

What were you trying to do on the show? Were you trying to research reality TV, more of a performance, both?

It was both. I went in knowing I had no idea what it was going to be like, and it’ll be what it’ll be, but at the same time have it be a performance. I knew it would be an organic process, because I can’t plan because I have no fucking clue what it’s gonna be like and I was right that I had no idea.

What do you think was the most valuable part of what you got from your experience on the show?

Seeing just how little we’re aware of the construction. Because we think we’re so smart “oh I know it’s fake, it’s all fake”, but really we have no clue how much we as the consumer completely buy into what they’re setting up. And the majority of that is in thinking that the people on the show are trashy and stupid, and the way they’re caricatured we generally do believe that about them and it’s completely wrong. Also, in how complicated the fabrication is. It’s not this real-or-fake binary. Now when I watch reality shows it’s a pretty different experience.

What do you see yourself doing in the future? More internet videos? Or are you done researching art in relation to the internet? What do you see yourself perusing?

If I were ever to be in a situation where I had more resources, I’d like to produce my own reality show

I would definitely watch it. Thanks so much Anne. Bye

Bye

Video installations / field trips!

It's been a little while since our the last post on here, between now and then Maia and I have packed our weeks with work a video installation, another viewing of videos, Andy Warhol's Screen Tests at the SAM, and Fiona Tan's video installations at the VAG. The video installation we worked on for the old Innate space, a dual streaming projection onto the floor and ceiling, created vortex-like images designed to invite people to interact with their space as it related to the images they see of it. Viewers would be in the images only if they got close to them, creating a cylinder of space from floor to ceiling for people to play in. We didn't have any Allan Sekula-like manifesto to pair with it, the installation was more a piece that we hoped would encourage people to experience their surrounding space in a different way.

A few days later, Maia and I went down to the Seattle Art Museum to see Andy Warhol's Screen Tests. Thirteen of them, each a four and a half minute portrait-like shot of a person, generally a celebrity. The four and a half minute time comes from Warhol shooting each Screen Test on a 3 minute reel at 24 frames a second, and playing them back at 16, creating a dream-like speed between real time and slow motion. In many of them, Warhol would turn the camera on and leave as the subject would be sitting in front of the camera for three minutes. Most were celebrities, used to being filmed and having their picture taken, but both of those are very different interactions with the camera than Warhol's Screen Tests. Pictures are quick, instant flashes that a person can pose for and be done with, in films a person puts on a similar but extended act to a role they are supposed to be playing. With Warhol's Screen Tests though, there is no real role or pose for the people behind the camera to be acting to, they simply sit as the camera sits across, staring at them.

The films remind me of Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present and Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera. They are like Abramovic's piece in that a sitter sits silently across from a looker for a period of time, but in these pieces they are simultaneously sitting across from both no one and everyone. No one in that it's just a camera and the subject; everyone, because the actors knew Warhol's films would probably be shown to anyone who wanted to see them in galleries like the SAM. This no one/everyone effect caused the actors to behave like the people Vertov filmed in Man With a Movie Camera. In front of Warhol's camera, some like Lou Reed feign apathy, some squirm, some return the camera's stare, most are a variation of these.

Maia brought up the fact that these weren't necessarily video installations because Warhol made these pieces on 16mm film. The images may have been on film, but the camera-gaze effect on the actors would have been the same regardless of if the medium was film, tape, or DV. This brought up questions about medium specificity that Maia and I answered with a concrete "I can't really explain it, there's just something different about them." Obviously, there is a lot of difference between tape, DV, and film, but we were stumped as to whether or not Warhol's films would have had a different effect if they were in video.

A couple days after we got back, Maia and I had another video viewing where we watched some of Warhol's commercial work (eating a hamburger and a Japanese TV commercial) and all of John Baldessari's videos on Ubu Web. In an interview, Baldessari lamented his involvement with early video art because in his opinion early video art tended to be boring, which spurred him to make his video "I will not make any more boring art" where he monotonously writes the title over and over again for thirteen minutes. His next video "Six colorful inside jobs" is a time lapse of his painting a room a different color each day of the week, stretching the line between art and work. As a video and because of intention, it's art, but at the same time Baldessari has to spend a long time everyday in a house painter's uniform to paint these rooms, taking a smoke break or two in the middle of each color. Instead of showing us a room in 6 different colors, he takes us through the work required of it.

In true to his conceptual art perspective, Baldesarri's next video Title breaks down a film into its component parts--objects, characters, narrative, etc. Most of Baldessari's work deals with removing information to make us focus on what he wants us to think about and Title is no different-- he removes characters, sound, and narrative to show us a shot of the objects; objects, characters, and narrative to show us landscape; etc. These different units are used to create and manipulate meaning in something of a Kuleshov effect (longing look + sandwich = hunger). Baldessari works with this theme of creating meaning again in his video The Meaning of Various News Photographs According to Ed Henderson. In it, Baldessari hands Ed Henderson various news photographs stripped from the context of their story and asks Henderson to guess what's happening in them. Baldessari hands the photos to Henderson in a calculated order to see how he can manipulate what Henderson thinks the images mean. These meanings, though, are doubly skewed in that Baldessari is taping Henderson which again puts the Man With the Movie Camera effect on them, causing him to create more lavish stories than he otherwise would have if he weren't consciously being turned into an art piece.

The other videos we watched of Baldessari's (The Way We Do Art Now and John Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt) were both ironic jabs at what people were considering art in the early 70's-- the former by making his own tiresome "exploration" as to what constitutes art, the later by making fun of his own medium in singing Sol Lewitt's Sentances On Conceptual Art. While Fiona Tann isn't a conceptual artist in Baldessari's tongue and cheek manner, the work we saw by her in the VAG today was more contemplative than formal. The major pieces we saw were Rise and Fall, Provenance, Island, and A Lapse of Memory.

Provenance is the first piece in her exhibit.The piece consists of 10 filmed portraits on individual screens. Like Warhol's Screen Tests, we sit across from a subject, studying them. However the feeling in these pieces is more of an intimate observation than Warhol's scrutinizing camera. These films move slowly, panning up a child's body, watching a man peel an orange, sitting with an elderly woman. The people in these are Tan's friends and relatives, filmed in their natural environment; this pre-established relationship between Tan and the subjects gets extended to the viewer as well, allows a strong feeling of intimacy between you and this stranger.

The next work in the show Rise and Fall is a dual screen projection about time, memory, isolation, and our world's ephemerality. Two women make up the story— one young, one old—and are suggested to be the same, distanced by time. With two women, two realities (reality and our constructed memory of it), and two time periods, the dual screens form another layer of these dualities as well as creating a conversation between the two screens. The screens tend to show the same scene, but they always differ slightly from one another, and because we never know which one is “real” and which is “constructed”, we are left with the experience of negotiating between the two.

Rise and Fall’s narrative, if you could call it that, is about the life of a woman who has lost someone, presumably her lover, and is working through what it means to have lost as well as the looming end of her own life. Tan illustrates the ebb and flow of human life with her interspersed shots of Niagra Falls. The enormous screens slowly pan from water to water fall, overwhelming us with its monumental size, sound, and metaphorical value. Tan’s work feels extremely patient, giving the space to think as well as feel her topics.

Isolation and memory are also at the core of her next work in the show, Island. Tan filmed the piece on the same Swedish island that Tarkovsky filmed The Sacrifice, and is composed of various austere images with a Chris Marker-like narrator who tells about a woman on an island as well as various musings about life such as “we do not remember dreams, but construct them” and “gaining distance is sometimes the only way to get closer to what matters.” Those two quotes embody so much of Tan’s work—both intensely solitary and contemplative. This monastic feeling is again embodied in her last work in the show A Lapse of Memory, about an amnesiac man living alone in a palliative home.

The home is actually the Royal Pavilion in Brighton; filled with Asian tapestries, the narrator tells us about the man’s youth as a worldly traveler named Henry but going by Ang-Lee. Henry’s character is almost Jean Pierre Jeunet-like in his eccentricisms—stringing construction lights along the floor, pounding his body for morning yoga, studying the globe with a flashlight, etc. His amnesia serves to further Tan’s conversation about memory, but in A Lapse of Memory it works to blur the borders of East and West because Henry/ Ang Lee doesn’t know his past and is surrounded by its stand-in objects. I don’t think Tan is trying to make a “we are the world” kind of piece here, but instead tries to ask us how to construct our identity in relation to, or in Henry’s case without, memory and origin. This relation is further complicated self-referential narration that reads us the shooting script as well as narrating Henry’s life. This contrasts with her other work that pulls you into her questions, while A Lapse of Memory’s self-referentiality pushes you back to view Henry more than sit with him as you would in Tan’s Provenance portraits. This doesn’t make the piece any less beautiful, especially because the palace drowns us in rich color, A Lapse of Memory is simply more of a character study than her other pieces—using this character as a device for examining questions about memory and identity.

Warhol videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUQlpOhnxlE - Richard Rheem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In1c5O3bNeg&feature=related - Edie Sedgwick

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhYfCWd5XQ0&feature=related - Ann Buchanan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaf6zF-FJBk - Warhol eating a burger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x82gWQFEpQA&NR=1 - TDK commercial

John Baldessari

http://www.ubu.com/film/baldessari.html

http://fora.tv/2009/07/09/John_Baldessari_A_Print_Retrospective

http://www.altx.com/vizarts/conceptual.html - Sol Lewitt's sentances

Fiona Tan

http://fionatan.nl/works/4 - Excerpts of all her works

absurdity, quick culture, and bodies

Maia and I are on the same page in terms of not being sure what to think about Ryan Trecartin's work, but it seems a lot of museums and organizations are stuffing him full of money and attention so he's doing something right. My idea of Trecartin is that he has a small theoretical base for his films, using the absurdity of his work to elicit intense theoretical readings by art critics. In one interview he describes this insanity as a product of technology and culture moving faster than they themselves, along with us, can really comprehend:

"The first brainstorm for the movie was in celebrating the messy transition of an accelerated crash into a world nature 2.0 that jumps into use before we have the time to ease into it with no culture space to form general understandings of new collective manners and appropriateness or codes of conduct. I love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people. It’s like the jumper being jumped before the onset of “jump”—and the whole world is doing that, like tradition out and unmarketable."*

This warp speed progression makes sense in his work, reflecting a culture that, in the constant and exponential search for the new, has quickly moved so far from any comprehensible reality. Bjorn Melhus is another artist we watched last week who creates surreal/ eerie/ hilarious videos to critique contemporary culture. Instead of stressing the insanity of quick culture though, Melhus engages with the homogeneity of mass culture. As the subject of most of his videos, he stands in as a nondescript body with shaved head, miming voices from shopping networks, music, and the news. Melhus takes on a neutral pre-formed clone body image to represent these variations of our culture as a way to stress that the personalities we see delivering these lines to us are equivalent to programmed clones.

Pipilotti Rist was the third video artist we watched, and is something of a stand alone in relation to Trecartin and Melhus. Rist's videos are 80's feminist pieces that explore how the body, especially the female body, is used in relation to media technologies (e.g. video). in I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much, she is constantly blurred, her voice accelerated, and image warped with occasional video tracking to accentuate how women are distorted by the those who record them, while in Sexy Sad I she turns the tables by using a naked man as the subject. In both cases, the subjects aren't supposed to appear as willing actors, but exploited bodies that get more and more furious as they continue to be filmed. Pikelporno, on the other hand, is an exploration of sexual bodies, starting with a female view of the male body, then switches POV to the man to take in the the woman. As a video that is essentially of two people having sex, Rist avoids their faces to not get lost in the personal aspects of sex, while interspersing metaphoric imagery to re-create the phenomenon of pure body lust.

*http://wexarts.org/wexblog/?p=299

Bjorn Melhus--
No sunshine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMgzfpb4fsw&feature=related
Captain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju18NziwTX4
Again & Again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ0t96m-hQw&feature=related
America Sells
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kekpx8SWf1g&feature=related
Deadly Storm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF0Ox9tOqFU&feature=related

Ryan Trecartin
K-Kora INK
http://www.ubu.com/film/trecartin_kcorea.html

Pipolotti Rist
Pikelporno
I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much
Sexy Sad I
http://www.ubu.com/film/rist_works.html

Trecartin's Schizophrenia

Forrest has the list of videos we watched last week, which included such artists as Pipilotti Rist and Bjorn Melhus. We also ended up watching some more Ryan Trecartin. While I could write a bit about the other artists, for some reason I keep being pulled back to Trecartin's work, especially with my recent reading of Frederic Jameson and J-F Lyotard, and ended up spending the weekend watching a number of them all the way through.

Ryan Trecartin is a very young artist, only having graduated with his BFA from RISD in 2004, and two years later participating in the Whitney Biennale. His works tread the fine line between intelligent critique and complete insanity, and for some reason are incredibly compelling. Upon first viewing, I was dumbstruck by overstimulation. The hyper-speed of his pieces does not allow for the brain to fully comprehend is happening, requiring repetitive viewings or at least a lengthy recovery time. Part of the draw to his pieces seems to be that experience overstimulation, and the sort of numbness it produces. At the same time, however, while there may not be much intellectual depth, there is a quality to them that demands further inquiry and serves as a critique on contemporary culture—even if we can never actually understand what he is trying to say (if he even understands it himself).

Narrative continuity is completely deconstructed in his videos (which he himself critiques, for example, in I-Be AREA, one of the characters states, “You are always trying to make things sound more special, and digital, and non-linear than they are. It’s stupid.”).

For example, in A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), it is hard to find discern a cohesive narrative at all, especially since Trecartin plays multiple characters. In the video, Trecartin is shown as the character Skippy, painted red, who has locked himself in a bathroom, melodramatically proclaiming his existential problems, while cutting himself with a bread knife, as his elaborately costumed friends (who are partying in the other room) try to get him to come out. The jump cuts between the two rooms do not make any logical sense, and the actions of every character are entirely unpredictable. They have drastic mood swings, and digressions that are frequently interrupted by random cuts, graphics, changes in color and speed, and conversations that are completely disassociated from everyone and everything else going on. Skippy finally comes out of the bathroom (I have no idea why), and has some strange interactions with his sexually inappropriate parents from which he borrows money. He then leaves the house, meets a documentary filmmaker, and gets hit by a car. At the same time, we meet a female character, named Shin (also played by Treacartin), who wears extremely exaggerated makeup in bright primary colors, and is a conflation of every sort of party girl/gay male stereotype. She is at a party at a house, and is told on her cellphone that Skippy has been hit by a car and killed. Jump cuts, sped up footage, and disrupted sentence fragments follow, during which Shin seems to be trying to tell her friends what happened. Any linear quality to be found in the beginning of the film is completely gone, and it is impossible to understand what is going on. There is a lot of yelling in sped up, highpitched voices, and once she is able to tell her friends what happened with Skippy, there are suddenly bands everywhere. Skippy rises from the dead, and they all go outside to shoot off fireworks (during which everyone continues to scream hysterically), and then run inside before the cops show up.

The (un)structure of his videos is the epitome of the sort of schizophrenia Fredric Jameson talks about. The props, characters and themes of his videos are a pastiche of genders, nationalities, stereotypes and styles—a collection of unrelated, random signifiers that have been disconnected from their signification. His pieces are a heap of disparate symbols, collapsing past and future into an unstable present. It is hard to tell whether Trecartin’s pieces are a realistic critique of our experience in cybernetic techno-culture with its constant stream of images, sounds and words, or if it is complete nonsense, jumbled into a pile, played and edited at hyper-speed, and literally thrown in your face for 40 min to 2 hours. Or maybe that is the critique.

Trecartin has said about his videos that they are language.** They are not supposed to be a linear narrative film, they are designed, and transformed into pieces that mimic the way our brains work—the way they absorb, analyze and exchange information. While he scripts the videos ahead of time, the pieces frequently develop into something unexpected when the actors improvise, going off on tangents. As Trecartin put it, the videos are made through a process of “community web of share and tell.” The end resulting in a sort of emergence, in that, the piece becomes something of its own, an amalgamation of the group’s ideas and actions—a sort of collective consciousness.

I still do not really know what to think of Trecartin. Should I just blow him off as another wacky artist, or is he actually getting at some important truth about contemporary society. A lot of people seem to think he is pretty important, though, so maybe there is something there.

** For interviews see:
"THE Q&A: RYAN TRECARTIN, VIDEO ARTIST." MoreIntelligentLife.com

"Interview with Director Ryan Trecartin." Wexner Center For the Arts.

Feminism and Interactivity... Chatroulette?

The selection of videos we watched last week was very broad. In method and aesthetic, they were all incredibly different. However, they were all, in some form or another, a critique of popular culture and media. All of the artists were working within their specific cultural context, as well as their place within the evolution of feminist theory.

Lynn Hershman’s piece that we watched for the class was primarily about posthumanism and cybernetics, but a lot her other work (especially Lorna and her performance as Roberta Breitmore) is purely about construction of identity in mass mediated culture. Joan Braderman’s Joan Does Dynasty seemed to be more of a video essay (think Los Angeles Plays Itself), but with superimposed images of Braderman reading aloud her critique of the television show Dynasty—directly addressing the show and the audience. Braderman’s critique was placed distinctly within a 1980s feminist analysis of a popular television show at the time. Anne Hirsch’s project was more similar to Hershman’s performances, except in a contemporary YouTube context. Ryan Trecartin’s pieces were excessive (and make me want to add “hyper-” to “postmodern,” because I can’t begin to understand them), but in their excessiveness critique our immediate contemporary cybernetic culture. Following the evolution of feminist theory to include and address issues of trans-(cultural/gender/national/etc.) identities.

While we were supposed to be talking about interactivity that week, we did not really get a chance to really participate in any sort of interactive works. (Unless you take the view that simply watching a video is interactive and participatory.) Some of the projects however, were very interactive in nature, even if the part that we saw was not interacting. Forrest talked about Anne Hirsch’s YouTube persona, and the depths to which she went with her project. While the project was based in video, it was entirely dependent on feedback from her viewers. Her audience commented on the pieces, requested specific songs, created videos and sent her images in response. This sort of interactivity is new and specific to our current Internet experience, and it makes me think of Chatroulette.

Chatroulette adds a new level of immediacy to the meeting of strangers on the Internet. It is entirely up to chance with whom you will be paired (more frequently than one would hope, it is some guy masturbating), and if you don’t like the looks of someone, you can click on to the next one immediately. While not intended as an art project, its dependency on chance provides its participants with a unique experience of the Internet. While you are actually meeting strangers, the anonymity creates for interactions that would never happen in real life, or even through such a medium as YouTube. Since YouTube videos are uploaded for the entire world to see, there is censorship, they are still anonymous but linked to your account. With Chatroulette, participants are completely anonymous, yet the experience is oddly personal. It is a one on one interaction with a person—and that, paired with they anonymity, for some reason that means people are comfortable being sexually explicit. While it would be a different sort of project, much more ephemeral than Hirsch’s YouTube persona, I think it would be really interesting to explore Chatroulette from an artistic perspective. Such as, say, projecting it into a gallery.