1. Art & the Body: "Thus these apertures of ingestion and emission work to constitute the notion of the subject, of the individual body and ultimately the self. What is both inside and outside the body (feces, spittle, urine, menstrual blood, etc.) tends to become taboo because of its ambiguous and anomalous status." (What about babies?!!) Are these substances taboo also because they speak so clearly of our animal nature, that despite years of civilization and culture, nothing can dress up our basic biological functions?
2. Art & Identity: Nikki S. Lee is a Korean woman who remakes herself and then"infiltrates" certain groups of people (i.e. The Tourist Project, The Hip Hop Project, The Ohio Project, etc.). She moves fluidly between social and cultural groups. This provokes the question, how stable is identity? Is it just a social construct? Yet, as good as her disguises are, she can't escape her identification as a Korean woman. By always finding an "in" with a group, is Lee subverting her marginalized identity? Not only is she accepted by these groups, she's also the only one that knows her intentions. It's an empowering position, but does it also constitute a betrayal (especially in The Schoolgirls Project where she is essentially being duplicitous to under-aged girls)? Although interesting as a social experiment, do these one-dimensional representations of identity reinforce stereotypes?
3. Art & Identity: How do we define our identity? Why do we have to? Is Faith Ringgold a black artist or a woman artist or a black woman artist? Does she have to be any of those things? By defining our identity, are we categorizing ourselves to our detriment? Does highlighting identity art, art predominantly created by marginalized individuals, divide us? Or does highlighting our differences bring us together as humans and equals?
4. Art & Identity: Linda Nochlin writes, "Indeed, in our time of instant communication, "problems" are rapidly formulated to rationalize the bad conscience of those with power: the the problem posed by Americans in Vietnam and Cambodia is referred to by Americans as the 'East Asian Problem,' whereas East Asians may view it, more realistically, as the 'American Problem'; the so-called Poverty Problem might more directly be viewed as the 'Wealth Problem' by denizens of urban ghettos or rural wastelands; the same irony twists the White Problem into its opposite, a Black Problem; and the same inverse logic turns up in the formulation of our own present state of affairs as the 'Woman Problem.'" How does this relate to the idea of "otherness"? By using the term "other," are we presupposing an inverse, a "whole"? Is otherness a social construct?
5. Art & Identity: Since Nochlin's article "Why have there been no great women artists" was published in 1971, how have our institutions changed? Is the article still relevant today (Where the Great Women Artists Are Now)? In my personal experience as a printmaker, studio art classes tend to skew more towards women than men. Is this a sign of a shift towards equilibrium? Or will those statistics falter faced with unyielding social institutions?
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
.jpg)
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Art & Abstraction / Art & Nature and Technology
1. Transhumanism & Posthumanism: "The use of glasses or contact lenses to correct vision is an example of a commonly employed augmentation. Yet this intervention is only correcting a deficiency, returning the individuals function to species-normal levels." What defines "species-normal levels"? Are these levels defined by potential or averages? Do these levels fluctuate as species evolve?
2. Abstract Art Now: "A better model for abstraction is perhaps the hypertext, where the line between A and B goes out in a million possible and ever more complex directions, where artists along the line from A to B find that A' or A" is a window opening onto an entire universe." This is an interesting comparison to the Altermodern Manifesto where Bourriaud uses the same hypertext analogy. He writes: "Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history."
3. Abstract Art Now: "Abstraction has been less a search for the ultimately meaningful, as I have described it, than a recurrent push for the temporarily meaningless: that is, things that are found not often in exotic realms but rather on the edges of banality, familiarity, and the man-made world." What is the "temporarily meaningless"?
4. Transhumanism & Posthumanism: "The first assertion of transhumanist thinking is a rejection of the assumption that human nature is a constant (Bostrom, 1999). There is nothing sacrosanct about nature in general, or about human nature in particular. Criticisms of attempts to modify nature as 'playing God' or as the ultimate human hubris are therefore rejected as inappropriate." If human nature isn't a constant, then what defines human nature? What are its inherent characteristics?
5. Abstract Art Now: "As I cautioned at the outset of these lectures, the less there is to look at, the more you have to look, the more you have to be in the picture." Art isn't purely optical. It's experienced physically, mentally and emotionally.
6. Art & Nature and Technology: What is the line between art and science? What makes Mel Chin's Revival Field art and not science?
6. Art & Nature and Technology: What is the line between art and science? What makes Mel Chin's Revival Field art and not science?
Monday, April 5, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
Treatise on Navigation / Art & the Quotidian Object
Words of the day:
indifference (Bourriaud) and disinterestedness (Iversen)
1. "The found object shares with the readymade a lack of obvious aesthetic quality and little intervention on the part of the artist beyond putting the object in circulation, but in almost every other respect it is dissimilar. The difference is attributable to Breton's positing the found object in a different space--the space of the unconscious. . . . The contrast between the Duchampian rendezvous and the Bretonian encounter should now be clear. While the readymade is essentially indifferent, multiple, and mass-produced, the found object is essentially singular or irreplaceable, and both lost and found" (Iversen 48-50). What, then, distinguishes the quotidian object from the the readymade or the found object?
2. ". . . Duchamp himself preferred to see his readymades as proof that art is in fact no different from anything else in the world. Instead of elevating the commonplace, this interpretation casts art off its pedestal and into everyday life" (Heartney 40). How does this compare to Bourriaud's quote: "With this radical gesture, which consists of presenting an everyday object of consumption as a work of art, the entire lexical field of the visual arts found itself augmented by a new possibility: signifying not with the aid of a sign but with that of reality itself" (146)?
3. "'When you make an ordinary painting,' [Duchamp] explains, 'there is always a choice: you choose your colors, you choose your canvas, you choose the subject, you choose everything. There isn't any art; it is a choice, essentially. There [with the readymade], it's the same thing. It is a choice of object.' . . . The beauty of indifference championed by Duchamp flies in the face of the purely retinal beauty of painting and sculpture: 'Instead of choosing something you like or dislike, you choose something without any interest, visually, for an artist. In other words, you arrive at a state of indifference toward that object" (Bourriaud 147). How do you arrive at this state of indifference? Simply by making a choice, aren't you engaging with that object?
4. "Appropriation, with its aggressive connotations, implies competition, a dispute over a territory that could equally well belong to any one of the combatants. Insofar as the readymade implies 'giving a new meaning' to an object, or more precisely removing it from its territory or place of origin, the notion of appropriation doesn't make any sense here; it doesn't really apply. Moreover, the readymade is in essence immaterial; it has no physical importance. If destroyed, it can be replaced, or not. No one owns it" (Bourriaud 147). Is appropriation competitive? Can it be mutually beneficial? When Sherri Levine re-photographs Walker Evan's work, doesn't this appropriation give new life to Evan's work while imbuing her own work with a past? Are either works diminished for it?
5. "Couldn't GNU/Linux be said to operate on the principle of the reciprocal readymade? It runs up against a certain fear related to being a user of technology. This fear stems from our panic at the prospect of reaching our threshold of incompetence. . . . We cannot conceive of manipulating objects beyond certain limits: the ideology of competence induces us unconsciously to refuse reading what we are not supposed to understand, operating machines without an instruction manual, making use of worlds that feel foreign to us; this is doubtless misguided" (Bourriaud 152-53). How do we overcome this threshold? Perhaps, by taking a seminar class and reading "what we are not supposed to understand" (i.e. The Radicant)?
7. "[Hal Foster] suggests that Breton's conception of the found object anticipates Lacan's objet petit a--the lost object which sets desire in motion and which, paradoxically, represents both a hole in the integrity of our world and the thing that comes to hide the hole" (Iversen 49). Explain. Please.
Heartney, Eleanor. "Art & the Quotidian Object: The Transformation of the Readymade."
Iversen, Margaret. "Readymade, Found Object, Photograph."
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)