My Performance Art

For my performance art project I chose to do an activity in a public place so that the reactions of other people could be used as part of the art. I felt that a public bathroom on campus that gets a lot of use would be a prime setting to be able to use the reactions of spectators as part of the performance. I thought there would be ironic humor in having a romantic date in the bathroom and would tie in perfectly with our discussions of decontextualization. I set up a table and chairs complete with a waiter and flowers and filmed our date as people entered and reacted, with mostly laughs or confused looks. We ate food and drank wine and engaged in as much conversation as we could amidst the interruptions from people entering and exiting. There were a couple of toilet flushes too which was especially humorous. Once people caught on, they would run get their friends or even faculty to come see what we were doing.

Nam June Paik and The Residents

I'm glad we talked about Nam June Paik the other day because I have often heard his name as influential in art, but never knew exactly what his influence was. Turns out he was one of the main pioneers of video art and electronic music. I found it interesting that he was classically trained in music, yet opted for a more non traditionalist approach to creating more abstract, atonal electronic music using synthesizers. My favorite piece of his was where he was dragging a violin along the ground by a string. It ties in perfectly with the decontextualization we have been talking about as well as the examples of performance art we have examined. It's saying, "Here I am, playing the violin. Why do I have to play it the expected way with a bow? This is creating a sound just in a different way." Like any great art, it forces people to think of things in a different way.
I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't know who the Residents were until this class because they seem to have been such pioneers in the realm of music videos. Coming from a generation who has grown up watching music videos, it seems important to be exposed to this group. Like the Gorillas who we watched last week, they concealed their identities from the public by using animation and costumes/masks to hide their faces. Even in public they wore the eyeball masks and top hats. It seems they are performance artists as well as avant garde experimental musicians. There music videos were definitely trippy and disturbing but it's interesting to finally be exposed to truly the first music videos.

Look but Don't Touch

The New York Times article about the performance art piece at MOMA was very interesting. It's truly an example of how simplistic the artist's concept can be and how the reactions and involvement of the viewers can contribute greatly to the art itself. The naked man and woman stood facing each other while visitors walked through the narrow passage way between them. I found it shocking that despite the warnings about improper contact and touching, people still violated the performers. It seems that the art piece proved to be very telling of human nature and allowed not only the audience to be participants, but it allowed the performers to be spectators of the audience members. It seems that the performers would need to very comfortable with their bodies and being violated in unexpected ways. It's especially interesting for me because the participants were regular performers outside of the performance art piece: dancers, choreographers etc. and it stretched them as performers to have this experience because the audience reaction is quite different than that of a regular performance; they are part of it and the performers learn something about the nature of the spectators.

What is Performance Art?

What is performance art? I still don't know. We spent the last week exploring it in class and I have to say I am a little nervous to have to create my own performance art piece. It seems that all are so starkly different that nothing can be wrong...or can it? Santiago has repeatedly told us that performance art is different from performing arts. It seems like unlike performing, it doesn't seek to be accepted or even understood by an audience. The audience brings its own thoughts and interpretations to the piece and that creates part of the art. Many seem to make some sort of political or societal statement of critique. I particularly liked Tom Geogenan's "Strange Fruit." At first glance, I thought it was something absurdly bizarre that had no context, but after listening to Billie Holiday's song of the same name about the lynching of slaves, it took on a new meaning. While it's message isn't clear, maybe it's just to make people think and develop their own interpretations, but the context definitely helps. Same goes for French performance artist Orlan's televised lyposuction performance art piece. Why she chose to film herself getting the surgery seems shocking and strange but one can only guess it can be interpreted as some statement about beauty. I was a little uncomfortable with the performance pieces where people used their own blood or mutilate their bodies as art. But they are saying they can do what they want with their body including using it as a canvas. It echoes Deuchamp who claimed that anything even the most mundane of objects (such as a urinal) could be deemed art by the artist declaring it so.

Xerox Project

This was my xerox project. It ended up being fun to do even though I think I missed the point of the assignment a little bit. After seeing the rest of the class' project, mine lacked detail and a real creative concept. Mine was not outside of the box enough. I was afraid mine would be a bit too literal, afterall it was the only collage that actually used the parts to create the structure of a person of sorts. I played it "safe" but it was still fun. And I felt like a badass laying on the xerox machine in the library :)

Pop Art and Andy Warhol

Last class we talked about Andy Warhol and boy, was he a character. He came across as such a complete pompous asshole and it was rather amusing. Emerging in a time when the reactionary beatniks were lashing out against society, pop artist Andy Warhol and his followers said "hey, let's just embrace it." His art completely mirrored commercialism and the media at the time. Much like Marcel Deuchamp, his paintings of ordinary objects (such as the campbell's soup can and the coca cola bottles) were decontextualized, taking out of their natural contexts and deemed art. Someone even was quoted in the documentary as saying that Andy Warhol would point his finger and say, "That's art!" I also had no idea that he produced the music to the Velvet Underground...pretty cool! Toward the end of class we watched a bit of video footage on Yves Klein who was one of the first examples of performance art. He would have women put blue paint on their bodies and press themselves up against a blank canvas, creating imprints. I thought the work of Rachel Whiteread was really interesting. She would make molds of the empty space of objects such as chairs, staircases, bookshelves etc. So she would make say a mold of the inside of a house and all of the empty space would create the mold. I thought it was a brilliant idea.

Grid Art and Surrealism

This is my grid art project. I used a scrabble board as my grid and decided to do my own take of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." I based my picture of the central swirl of wind in the painting and using mosaic tiles I followed the grid, yet simultaneously broke it in order to achieve the circular motion. I used sequins to create the moon and different stars. It ended up being a fun experiment and unlike anything I've ever done.
Class was very interesting on Wednesday. We focused a lot on the artwork of Marcel Deuchamp. He starts as an impressionist painter who fell on the side of more realistic art and transitions to more abstract surrealist cubism and installation art. He is famous for turning ordinary objects into artwork such as R. Mutt: the photograph of a urinal turned upside down. I must admit I had a hard time seeing the value until Santiago talked about how it was decontextualizing a familiar object by taking it out of its natural place and exposing the beauty of simply the object out of its expected context. Boy does he have a sense of humor too! His piece where he has drawn a mustache on the Mona Lisa includes the initials L.H.O.O.Q. which when pronounced phonetically in French translates to "Her ass is on fire!" It's hilarious to think that artists were being this subversive this early in the 1900s.
Un Chien Andalou was very trippy. It was like a car crash that you cant turn away from. The images that stuck out as memorable were obviously the famous eye cutting sequence, the graphic sequence of the man trying to molest a woman, bugs eating their way into a man's hand, and a moth with an image of a skull on the back of its head. It seemed like a nightmare. I'll be interested to see if we talk anymore in class about what the hidden meanings could be.

Triumph of the Nerds

The documentary we watched last week, "Triumph of the Nerds" was pretty interesting. I learned that the microprocessor was pivotal in the development of computers. It essentially held millions of transistors and was the beginning of personal computers as we know them today. Before the microprocessor you had to flip a switch to input each byte of information and the microprocessor allowed users to type in programs rather than flipping switches. The story of Steve Jobs and Apple was pretty amazing. His hobby of computer programming escalated so quickly that by the time he was 25 he was worth 100 million dollars. Apple was the leading company of a revolution of smaller computers that became very successful. I also found the idea of reverse engineering really interesting. This is essentially what happened with IBM. The personal computers they began manufacturing were very successful and the name created high demand, so in order for other companies to be successful they would have to clone IBM's technology. In order to do so they would have to work backwards and find out what makes it work. IBM's PC was easily cloneable. Not sure why they would want to do that...

Flip Book

Here are some excepts from my flipbook. It ended up turning out well I think. It was drawn in a "Grapes of Wrath" book and was all about a grape that comes to life and eats people. It then turns back into and bundle of grapes and finally a glass of wine.

I listened to a radio broadcast on otr.com. It was Flash Gordon based on the comic. I can tell how important music was to drive the plot and dictate the mood. It served to make the story engaging to the audience. Many of the characters had very distinct voices or accents so that it was easy for the audience to know who was talking. The villain had a deep, sinister voice. Flash Gordon's voice was strong and confident. Sound effects like explosions were used whenever appropriate and the narrator filled in any information that was lost in the dialogue. So much was done in an effort to convey a story when simple visuals weren't there for the audience to see the action. It's almost hard to listen to having grown up in such a visual age where TV is much more common. I, like much of society today, have a harder time keeping my attention on something where visuals are not presented to me.

Sci-Fi

I finally finished my flip book project and am a little nervous to share it in class. My drawings aren't particularly good because I'm not much of an artist. I think the idea is good though. If I had it to do over again, I would use a different book that flips better. Last class we watched clips from various Sci Fi movies. On the scale of realism, almost all senses up to this point had been experimented with in film. The only thing left to do was break the fourth wall which separates the audience from what is going on in the film. This is what the film "Videodrome" was an example of. That seems to be what all the 3-D movies of today are trying to accomplish: making the audience feel apart of what's going on in the film. It's interesting to look at the futuristic technologies of movies such as "Artificial Intelligence" and "Minority Report" and how we can already sense that the idea that there will be screens everywhere is starting to be an accurate prediction.

Just Singin, Singin in the Rain

Last week's class was my first taste of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" and as I had been prepared for, it was indeed pretty twisted. The irony is overt in this film about young men hopped up on drugs that beat and kill innocent people and closes with the familiar cheery tune, "Singin in the Rain." Oddly humorous it's almost more disconcerting than had the music been dark because we immediately make the connection that just decades ago, this song is sung by a man who was "...happy again." The stark contrast between the music and the mood is just one of the few things that differentiates the classic hollywood movies of "Singin in the Rain" era from the edgier films of today like "A Clockwork Orange" and more recent ones. Also, a huge thing in film that has changed over the decades are the production codes that used to be very conservative back in the days of early hollywood movies. Actually camera shots of murder were not allowed so even suspense/horror film directors like Alfred Hitchcock had to find ways around explicitly showing murder. The amount of restrictions on films of that time vs. the amount of liberties directors now take with the subject matter of films today is mind boggling. This is due in large part to the events such as the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s and a great deal more experimenting with drugs. The altered psychedelic state of drug use could now be shown with cinematic advancement in color and special effects. "A Clockwork Orange" is proof that through the technology of film today, there is little left that can't be shown.

Film and More Opera

I watched "La Boheme" the other day for my Opera Paper. It was very similar to the musical Rent with a few differences in the relationships and occupations of some of its characters. La Boheme means "The Bohemians" or people who live an alternative lifestyle. I found it interesting that back in this century it was seen as against societal norms to be a painter or a poet. For the modern day rendition, Rent, the cast is made up of not only literally starving artists, but many of them are homosexual, one is a drag queen, one a stripper, one an in your face political activist and many are suffering from AIDS, rather than in La Boheme when there is only one character dying from sickness. I'm brainstorming ideas for the paper but am nervous about it. I'm not used to classes where I don't receive much direction or guidelines. I know that was Santiago's intent and that the paper is meant to push us to think outside the box. We'll see what I can come up with!
The other day's class was interesting. I didn't know about the concept of hand coloring in early early film, even before it was projected on a screen. It was beautiful! Also the Daguerre pictures were fascinating. I had no idea pictures of dead people were the precursor to film. Again, nervous about the flip book assignment but we'll see how it goes!

Musical Theater

This was my favorite class yet! I love musical theater and learning about how it has evolved throughout the past century. I remember learning all about Vaudeville and Burlesque as well as the minstrel shows and more recent musical theater productions in my "Development of Musical Theater" class, but I had forgotten much of it. I liked that in this class we talked more in depth about the cultural events that shaped the turn entertainment was taking, like how the strict rules and laws during the prohibition era led to the popularizing of jazz music, seeing as more and more people were visiting these underground clubs where the minorities were playing their culturally inspired music. Burlesque was a direct result of the brothels that were a very popular form of entertainment at the turn of the century. The increase in immigrants during WWI gave rise to a new melting pot of music as different cultures introduced new styles and instruments. Even today, musical theater is still a reflection of the times with shows like "Rent" that is based on an opera but deals with young adults batting with AIDS and La Cage a Faux that deals with gay relationships and acceptance. We even delved into the evolving technology of the shows, from the extravagant sets and costumes of the Burlesque era to the interactive setting of "Cabaret", the was the show was engineered visually was very important to the show's entertainment value. I'm so glad we watched clips from the PBS broadway series because it's so informative but never dull.

More on the Evolution of Operas

This class we talked more about some of the famous operas throughout the past few centuries and how they have evolved with the changing times: from Wagner to Strauss to the turn of the 20th century when the radical ideas of the time (ie Sigmund Freud and the Oedipus and Elektra Complex) played out in more bizarre operas such as the biblical story of Solome and her obsessive love for John the Baptist. It was interesting to be able to associate familiar opera tunes that I have heard countless times before with the opera they are actually from, such as the "Flower duet" from Lakme's Elektra.

Oops...I forgot...Apple!

So I forgot to post on the article on Apple and Steve Jobs. I saw the article as an interesting look at how technology plays in meeting the needs of consumers and how Apple has succeeded due to its ability to meet consumer wants and needs. Although I'm not a Mac or iphone owner, all I hear from people who are is that for how technologically advanced they are, they are so easy to use. A friend of mine said of her Mac book just the other day, "it works how you would think". The appearance of Apple products is certainly no accident either, sleek and clean to attract the appeal of consumers. I have faith that this tablet will be a hit as well and am anxious to see what it will be like.

Baroque and Opera

I found yesterday's class fascinating. Once again we explored more about music and theater in the Baroque period. I have been fortunate enough to learn about theater trends in the past century during Dr. Luter's "Development of Musical Theater" course on campus as well as about the earliest theater productions in ancient Greece (the performance space, types of productions etc)in Marguerite Bennett's "Ancient Greek Theater" course. The way theater evolved all those years in between was something I had little knowledge of. I was able to appreciate the way the structure of the theaters were evolving and how for the first time, all the technical inner workings was hidden to the audience, how things were controlled, painted, manipulated to look real or to give a certain illusion to the audience. It was also interesting to learn that the theater trends were representative of the societal situations of the time. Because of the new "fruits" we had stumbled upon in the discovery of America, we had an abundance of wealth which was reflected in the saturation of color and use of extravagant technology and spectacle. So, technology became more important that the story lines of the theater pieces. The evolution of music was also interesting...how music was sacred until the influence of Mozart and how he was the master of polyphony. Anyways...anxious to see what we'll be talking about tomorrow!

First Blog!

So this is the first blog I've ever written! I'm anxious about starting this class (Art 211): excited to test my creativity yet a little nervous about what to expect. From the first day's lecture it seems like a class I won't mind putting the extra work into because it will be something I enjoy. As a performing arts and comm major I took this class initially because I knew it would satisfy a comm credit and my last honors credit and I had a few friends who had taken it and loved it. I didn't expect that we'd be talking about opera. the baroque period and musical theater! Now I'm even happier I decided to take this. My only fear is that I won't think of creative enough ideas for the various projects. But I guess we'll see what happens!