Sunday post 09/14/2008

1. Sunday Entry:

Highlight an artist of interest that relates to your work. Provide the following information:

- Artist Biography and brief explanation of work (can use quotes from critics or galleries)
Ana Mendieta
1.
The photographs of Ana Mendieta document private sculptural performances enacted in the landscape to invoke and represent the spirit of renewal inspired by nature and the power of the feminine. In her Silueta series (begun in 1974), created on location in Iowa and Mexico, Mendieta carved and shaped her own figure into the earth to leave haunting traces of her body fashioned from flowers, tree branches, mud, gunpowder, and fire. A typology of Siluetas emerged, including figures with arms held overhead to represent the merging of earth and sky; floating in water to symbolize the minimal space between land and sea; and with arms raised and legs together to signify a wandering soul. By 1978, the Siluetas gave way to ancient goddess forms carved into rock, shaped from sand, or incised in clay beds.
An exile from Cuba, Ana Mendieta was sent from her native homeland to an orphanage in Iowa at age 12. This traumatic experience had a tremendous impact on her art. She felt that, through her art, her interactions with nature and work in the landscape would help facilitate the transition between her homeland and new home. By fusing her interests in Afro-Cuban ritual and the pantheistic Santeria religion with contemporary aesthetic practices such as Earthworks, Body art, and Performance art she maintained ties with her Cuban heritage.
2. (another slightly different take)
Cuban-born Ana Mendieta produced work in the seventies in which she used her own body as a medium. In opposition to the predominant modernist theories of the time, this concept was being used by several other women artist as a feminist assertion of female body as a vehicle for personal and social expression. These women's emphasis on the female body as a realistic tool for the woman artist, challenged the male tradition of the idealized female nude; and was a precursor to the direction toward the refiguration of the body in the rest of the art community during the eighties.
Mendieta sought to establish a "dialog between the landscape and the female body return to the maternal source." She envisioned the female body as a primal source of life and sexuality, as a symbol of the ancient paleolithic goddesses. Between 1973 and 1980, Mendieta created her signature series, entitled "Silueta" or silhouette. Here, Mendieta used her body or images of her body in combination with natural materials. The pieces were transient, created and then photographed just before or during their destruction. The materials used were highly symbolic. In one work from the "Silueta" series, she outlined her figure with gunpowder, creating a shape reminiceint of prehistoric cave paintings. By setting it alight, she incorporates the ritualistic use of fire as a source of exorcism and purification. Mendieta also used flowers as mediums in her series, quoting the folk traditions of Mexico. Her primary material was the earth itself. In her "Tree of Life" series, she covered her naked body with mud and posed against and enormous tree. Ridding herself of her color and form, she is visually united with the tree, arms raised in supplication.

Tragically, Ana Mendieta died at age thirty-six, the result of a fall from an apartment window in New York in 1985. She left over 200 photographs documenting her body works, and a generation indebted to her innovation and ideals.
- 4 images and / or video/sound clips of artwork

- a link to an interview with the artist or a review
http://www.offoffoff.com/art/2004/anamendieta.php
- link to gallery representing artist
at the time of her death- http://www.galerielelong.com/
-artist website
NA

Thursday post 09/11/08

Did anyone critique your work this week? If so, what were their impressions?
No
What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?
Finally not being sick and able to work-to find 6 books that are actually relevant to my practice.
What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
Tie up the loose ends in my new work
What did you achieve in your studio this past week?
To create those loose ends
What has been an artistic failure this week?
My last shoot wasn’t effective enough-I need to shoot more.
What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?
That I was able to tie in Edward Hopper to what I want in my studio practice.
If there was a visiting artist this week, what is your impression of their work and process in relation to your own?
NA- But next week!

Sunday post 09/07/2008 pt2

Highlight an artist of interest that relates to your work. Provide the following information:

- Artist Biography and brief explanation of work (can use quotes from critics or galleries)
Pia Linderman
Born in Espoo, Finland, Pia Lindman received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Finland, and then as a Fulbright scholar received a Master of Science in Visual Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She now lives and works in New York City.

Lindman takes the site-specific art tradition as a point of departure. Her work evolves around the themes of social context and space, as well as the performative aspect of making and experiencing art. By engineered social contexts like the Hybrid Sauna at M.I.T. in 1999 and Public Sauna at P.S.1 in 2000, Lindman aims to provoke members of the audience to perform and experience a particular social practice, forcing a re-evaluation of notions of corporeality and public sphere. Lindman’s approach to drawing is informed by the tradition of performance art. After videotaping herself re-enacting gestures of mourning captured in photographs in the New York Times, she traced these gestures from video stills with pencil. By exhibiting both the tracings and the enactments, she tries to illuminate some of the relationships between a photograph, its mediation, and the idea of original content, in this instance human emotional reaction to terrorism.
Lindman has mounted solo exhibitions and screenings at “the lab”, N.Y.C., Galleri Leena Kuumola in Helsinki Finland; the Institut Finlandais in Paris, France; Artist-in-Akiya in Tokyo, Japan; Kluuvi Gallery in Helsinki, Finland; and Galleri FABRIKEN in Gothenburg, Sweden. She has been included in group exhibitions and screenings in New York such as: “Premieres” at the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y.C., “BLIND DATES” at Sculpture Center L.I.C., "The Suburban Backyard" at Socrates Sculpture Park L.I.C., "Lobby Projections" at Museum of Modern Art in Queens; "New Views, World Financial Center", with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the World Financial Center Arts & Events; and "Greater New York" at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, L.I.C. Her video series Thisplace is in the MoMA collections. She has shown internationally in galleries and art institutions such as: Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Austria, Millais Gallery at the Southampton Institute, U.K., San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, SF, FIAC with Luxe Gallery, Paris, France, Kunstbunker in Nuremburg, Germany, Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art, Finland, and Beaconsfield in London, UK. She has lectured widely, among other at Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, New York University School of Visual Art, Institut Française d’Architecture in Paris, France, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has received numerous awards, including those from AVEK (The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture in Finland, FRAME (Finnish Fund for Art Exchange), the Council for the Arts at MIT. Lindman’s work has been reviewed in many periodicals and journals including: Times Higher Educational Supplement, PRINT Magazine, Rethinking Marxism, Artforum.com, Brooklyn Rail, Art Press, The New York Times, The Village Voice, ARTnews, Technikart, Thresholds, Time Out New York, and Time Out London.



- 4 images and / or video/sound clips of artwork






- a link to an interview with the artist or a review
http://www.re-title.com/artists/Pia-Lindman.asp
http://www.m-cult.org/performingplaces/presenters/lindman.htm

- link to gallery representing artist
http://www.luxegallery.net/web/default2.asp?active_page_id=166

- artist website
http://web.mit.edu/pialindman/

Sunday post 09/07/2008 pt1

- Artist Biography and brief explanation of work (can use quotes from critics or galleries)

Chris Burden (born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946) is an American artist.

He studied for his B.A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine from 1969 to 1971.

Burden's reputation as a performance artist started to grow in the early 1970s after he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the performance piece Shoot that was made in F Space in Santa Ana, California in 1971, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Burden was taken to a psychiatrist after this piece. Other performances from the 1970s were Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Deadman (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), TV Hijack (1972), Doomed (1975) and Honest Labor (1979).

Several of Burden's other performance pieces were considered somewhat controversial at the time: another "danger piece" was Doomed, in which Burden lay motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass, with a clock running nearby. Unbeknownst to the museum owners, the concept of Doomed was that Chris was prepared to remain in that position until someone from the museum staff interfered in some way with the piece. Forty-five hours later, a museum guard placed a pitcher of water next to Burden, thus ending the piece.

In 1975 he created the fully operational B-Car, a lightweight four-wheeled vehicle that he described as being "able to travel 100 miles per hour and achieve 100 miles per gallon". Some of his other works from that period are DIECIMILA (1977), a facsimile of an Italian 10,000 Lira note, possibly the first fine art print that (like paper money) is printed on both sides of the paper it is printed on, The Speed of Light Machine (1983), in which he reconstructed a scientific experiment with which to "see" the speed of light, and the installation C.B.T.V. (1977), a reconstruction of the first ever made Mechanical television.

In 1978 he became a professor at University of California, Los Angeles, a position from which he resigned in 2005 due to a controversy over the university's alleged mishandling of a student's classroom performance piece that echoed one of Burden's own performance pieces.[1] Burden cited the performance in his letter of resignation, saying that the student should have been suspended during the investigation into whether school safety rules had been violated. The performance allegedly involved a loaded gun, but authorities were unable to substantiate this.

In 2005, Burden released Ghost Ship, his crewless, self-navigating yacht which docked at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 28 July after a 330-mile 5-day trip from Shetland. The project cost £150,000, and was funded with a significant grant from the UK arts council, being designed and constructed with the help of the Marine Engineering Department of the University of Southampton. It is said to be controlled via onboard computers and a GPS system, however in case of emergency the ship is 'shadowed' by an accompanying support boat.

- 4 images and / or video/sound clips of artwork




- a link to an interview with the artist or a review
http://artforum.com/diary/id=8299- link to gallery representing artist
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/chris-burden/
- artist website
- NA

hey

hey hassan i'm up!  now what do i do?  

visual grammar of suffering-Grad Research Assignment: Discussion Questions on Article or Essay

From: THE VISUAL GRAMMAR
OF SUFFERING
Pia Lindman and the
Performance of Grief
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - PAJ 84 (Volume 28, Number 3), September 2006, pp. 77-92

(This article refers to "the New York Times" performances by Pia Linderman)

"She does not address particular site-specific issues, such as genocide or mass rape in Sudan,
terrorism, human rights abuses of prisoners in Iraq, etc. Instead she draws on images
of people who have suffered abuse or the violent death of loved ones to explore how
the representation of vulnerability calls on us to react. I read her work as paralleling
the discourse of Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero who have turned away from
arguments based on the notion of feminine experience to explore how any “structure
of address” introduces its own “moral authority.”4"

1. Is this a question of how does one remove the question of personal/secular bias on the part of the artist?

I find it interesting that points were brought up in this article concerning bias of representation as Lindman's work questions representation and the authority of re-representation. This is something that I do not have much background in questioning or considering. I have always come from a point of view of the "artist." That the artist has a viewpoint- and orientation, a grudge if you will. It seems that to use race and gender or other sujects deemed as unequal in current power structures invites by default a sense of victimhood. So it would seem here in Lindman's work it is preferable to avoid such subjects to get at the meat of the matter- not to let the specifics of wheather it is a korean monument or a vietnam memorial- the polotics of/ the history of get in the way of what she is trying to highlight.

1. How does one get to the point where one can strip down all the elements to what Kevin Everson refered to a fighting weight?

I am not exactly sure yet. I am unsure of how to make my own work that is at once personal, make it accessable as universal but not be specific about it to land it in a trap where it gets mired down and exploited? I believe thatt one of the things that I believe in art is that everyone should have a voice, both in art but also in life. So I tend to come back to art that speaks for those who can not speak. I could not speak for a time, and then I fear I spoke too much. This speaking too much is that trap. I do not wish to do art that speaks to victim hood rather bears witness to it and can speak outwardly to everyone.

"The journalistic photograph lies precariously between empirical evidence (the witnessing of the Other’s pain) and outright propaganda (the manipulating the way we see). The image also cultivates a public awareness of the plight of the Other. It constitutes public taste and the aes-
thetics of Otherness. In the process, it tells us not only who the Other is, but how
to read the Other. Through an intricate process of identification, “we” are addressed
as a virtual subject and then are asked to witness “events,” experience these “events”
by proxy, and ultimately react to such “events” by giving consensus."

Pia Lindman lecture at MIT

Thoughts of interest – Sometimes you find wierd coincidences and-but even moreso on the web.
One of the terms/ art vocab thown around last year was the myth of Sisiphus. The implication for my work and others was the idea of unending or fruitless tasks. I raqndomly found a website called "The Sisyphus Files -Climbing up the mountain again and again…" so if you want you can go there if you want a brief recap about who Sisyphus was:
"He was a king punished in the Tartarus by being cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, and repeat this throughout eternity. Today, Sisyphean can be used as an adjective meaning that an activity is unending and/or repetitive. It could also be used to refer to tasks that are pointless and unrewarding.”

You can also go there to find out what the author thinks of artist Pia Lindman!? Funny and small internet world of blogging. Paul posted something on Pia for me the other day so I could check her out. And I have!
- Answer the following questions:

• Did anyone critique your work this week? If so, what were their impressions?

I have had no such contact

• What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?

Oddly enough Kevin Everson may have been the most motivational and the National Portrait Gallery was the most creative moment-well in addition to the Native American Museum. The NAMU is crazy contemporary in it's attention to...well being contemporary. Everything is looking forward while looking back. Usually you might expect a curatorial direction of "primative." So that we as visitor can come look at the corpse of native american. This is quite the oposite- we are encouraged to see the past present and future possibilities of the Native American Indian.

• What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?

To do something else other than read and write!

• What did you achieve in your studio this past week?

Nothing of note other than read, check out book and read..I mean watch videos.

• What has been an artistic failure this week?

Succumbing to the sicknesses of the flesh.

• What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?

That I shouldn't let criticisms infect the direction of my work, and I need to define that for myself.

• If there was a visiting artist this week, what is your impression of their work and process in relation to your own?

N/A
- Post 1 picture, video, etc. of your choice

Grad Research Artist Statement and New Semester Work Documentation

My work explores the fears, frustrations and alienation that occur in institutional settings. The institutions: the office, the school, the hospital, places that are historically thought of as umbrellas for the masses. Harboring each individual with their own sense of history, culture and sense of self. The specter of the institution has proven often to be just the opposite. These spaces that should canonize acceptance, care and guardianship are in fact a place of ostercization, humiliation and conformity. These are surrogate spaces that attempt to function as homes might have.
Issues of repetition, restlessness, tasking without resolution, boredom, confusion and complacency are all themes that are found in my work.
The use of video allows the viewer to experience the weight of time as well as the actions portrayed in each work more effectively that the single photograph. Contrived sound is integral as well as it allows the viewer auditory clues and prompts offering tools to better interpret the visuals spectrum.
Institutions such as hospitals, high schools, churches and factories are fundamental contributing factors in the history of progress. However, in the same breath these same institutions have resulted in many grievous wrongs against the history of the human condition.