Perhaps because I was so completely taken by the Marina Abramovic exhibit at MoMA last week - I'm still thinking about it and still bring it up in conversation with friends back in California - I found it difficult to process all of the information thrown at me at the Whitney Museum's Biennial show last Friday, April 30th. Only almost a week later have I been able to reflect on what I had seen and what struck me and remained imprinted on my memory.
I showed up at the museum equipped with the knowledge of one, maybe two of the artists whose work was on display, completely unfamiliar with the rest of the pieces and the artists in the show and completely unassuming in what to expect. I'd heard a lot of hype, namely that this year's show was the best in ages, but digesting this hype felt similar to times when friends have told me that a film is "amazing" or "hilaaarious!" - I knew that expecting too much could potentially disappoint. I suppose that since this show is supposed to be the show that features the next big stars of the art world I should have done a bit more research - but honestly, wandering the labyrinth of temporary walls and installations with a map and a checklist wouldn't have done me any good at all. Instead, coming in blindly allowed me to stay longer when I wanted to stay and move on quickly when something didn't catch my attention or peak my interest.
Having the collective experience of viewing the Bruce High Quality Foundation's piece I Like America and America Likes Me was a unique moment in the visit, being the first and last time that all seven of us experienced a piece together through interaction and conversation. I don't know that everyone was equally intrigued by this piece, nor am I asserting that everyone will remember it - but from this point on, after viewing the BHQF's Hearse converted into an ambulance with the windshield functioning as a screen for a slightly distorted video piece, each of us will have a unique selective memory of those pieces of art that matter the most to us for one reason or another. For that first shared experience, we all were able to experience something together, although this is not to say that all of our experiences were the same nor that all of our memories of the shared experience will be the same.
Fascinating, though, how each of us will come away from this and write something different about potentially disparate or potentially the same works. After we all parted ways and completely lost track of each other, each of us were able to take as much time as we needed looking at every piece of art that interested us, in a way being allowed to choose the most desired path for our own unique experiences. I had several passing moments with everyone, "dancing" with Susana a few times, sitting silently next to Caldwell during Kerry Tribe's video piece HM (which I fully intend to write more about once I feel that I can effectively compare it to Bergson), but rarely speaking with any of them in the hopes of maintaining our own unique, uninterrupted experiences. I don't necessarily enjoy conversing at a museum anyway both for fear of being rude or disturbing other patrons and the desire to quietly contemplate and live in the moment. This is why I agree with Sam's point that museums and art in general are sometimes best experienced alone - I think that Brian trying to be friendly and speak to a completely engrossed and therefore barely responsive version of myself while I was watching Abramovic's Rest Energy at MoMA is a testament to the point that art is sometimes best experienced in solitude - but, this is not to discourage the potential for an enlightened, collaborative conversation afterward.
..Katharine
Showing posts with label Katharine Relth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Katharine Relth. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
The Artist is Present: Marina Abramovic and Relational Aesthetics
It was nothing short of a profoundly unique experience to witness Marina Abramovic's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday, April 24th, 2010. I say this not just because of the profound impact that her work left on me for the days after witnessing the re-performances and re-presentations of her literal "body of work"; this experience was novel as it was the first time MoMA has curated a retrospective on the oeuvre of a performance artist.
I had an inclination of what to expect after having lunch with my artist friend on the Wednesday prior to visiting the museum. She explained the piece that Abramovic herself was to be performing on the second floor of the museum, The Artist is Present, as the artist's ultimate work. My artist friend's explanation served to be a far more modest, cursory description of the performance, as the experience is far more serene yet grand than she made it out to be. Upon entering the museum and ascending the stairs to the Marron Atrium that exists as a space traditionally in constant flux exhibiting temporary collections, large-scale pieces, and video installations, one encounters massive floodlights at each of the four corners of a large square marked off on the floor by tape, the square almost the size of the space itself. In the center of the square sits Abramovic on a chair at one end of a wooden table wearing a long, red gown that is simultaneously confining her body and yet somehow cascading around her legs and onto the floor, making herself at once separate from and one with the chair on which she is positioned. There is a chair positioned at the other end of the table facing the artist in which museum visitors are invited to sit and engage in an unspoken dialogue with the artist for an indeterminate amount of time. Her body appears in this same position every day for the length of museum hours until the retrospective closes on May 31, 2010.
Endurance is a large part of Marina Abramovic's presentation of her body/of work. Sitting or standing for hours at a time, subjecting her body repeatedly to collisions with other objects, beatings, lashings or deprivation, Abramovic tests the limits of human comfort with acts of tedium, stress, and concentration. As she submits her body to these series of acts – examples can be drawn from her three parallel pieces from 1977 entitled Freeing the Memory, Freeing the Body, and Freeing the Voice in which she speaks, dances and screams until she has pushed her body to the point of failure – Abramovic seeks to push her body out of its comfort of stasis and stagnant, un-becoming being. In committing to performing these acts in front of a live audience (or at times the future audience implied in the act of filming the performance), the artist insists on creating a dialogue with herself and her audience, creating herself as both the subject and the object of her body/of work. Much like her piece The Artist is Present, Abramovic questions the notions of object and subject and of artistic and audience.
If, as Nicolas Bourriaud asserts in his text Relational Aesthetics, "each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world" (i), then Abramovic's aim of blurring the line between artist as subject and audience as object (and vice versa) lies in her confrontation of her body with the spectator. Consistently appearing nude without engaging in sexual acts and subjecting her body to the will of her audience like she did with Rhythm O – asking the audience to use one of 70 or so different objects, some of them potentially lethal, on herself and taking full responsibility – the artist is confronting her audience's notions of the body and of the traditional work of art while at the same time dispelling concepts of sexuality and humanity.
"I didn't have verbal communication. It was only with the eyes. I became so sensitive that – it sounds almost religious – I had this amazing opening of the heart that hurt me. This is why I believe time is so necessary: the public needs time to get the point. When I spend 12 days in a gallery, its energy is changed. Artists have to serve as oxygen to society, and that is what I do" – Marina Abramovic, from an interview for ARTnews.
Katharine Relth
(i) Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. France: Les presses du reel, 1998 (22).
(ii) Ibid, 15.
I had an inclination of what to expect after having lunch with my artist friend on the Wednesday prior to visiting the museum. She explained the piece that Abramovic herself was to be performing on the second floor of the museum, The Artist is Present, as the artist's ultimate work. My artist friend's explanation served to be a far more modest, cursory description of the performance, as the experience is far more serene yet grand than she made it out to be. Upon entering the museum and ascending the stairs to the Marron Atrium that exists as a space traditionally in constant flux exhibiting temporary collections, large-scale pieces, and video installations, one encounters massive floodlights at each of the four corners of a large square marked off on the floor by tape, the square almost the size of the space itself. In the center of the square sits Abramovic on a chair at one end of a wooden table wearing a long, red gown that is simultaneously confining her body and yet somehow cascading around her legs and onto the floor, making herself at once separate from and one with the chair on which she is positioned. There is a chair positioned at the other end of the table facing the artist in which museum visitors are invited to sit and engage in an unspoken dialogue with the artist for an indeterminate amount of time. Her body appears in this same position every day for the length of museum hours until the retrospective closes on May 31, 2010.
Endurance is a large part of Marina Abramovic's presentation of her body/of work. Sitting or standing for hours at a time, subjecting her body repeatedly to collisions with other objects, beatings, lashings or deprivation, Abramovic tests the limits of human comfort with acts of tedium, stress, and concentration. As she submits her body to these series of acts – examples can be drawn from her three parallel pieces from 1977 entitled Freeing the Memory, Freeing the Body, and Freeing the Voice in which she speaks, dances and screams until she has pushed her body to the point of failure – Abramovic seeks to push her body out of its comfort of stasis and stagnant, un-becoming being. In committing to performing these acts in front of a live audience (or at times the future audience implied in the act of filming the performance), the artist insists on creating a dialogue with herself and her audience, creating herself as both the subject and the object of her body/of work. Much like her piece The Artist is Present, Abramovic questions the notions of object and subject and of artistic and audience.
If, as Nicolas Bourriaud asserts in his text Relational Aesthetics, "each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world" (i), then Abramovic's aim of blurring the line between artist as subject and audience as object (and vice versa) lies in her confrontation of her body with the spectator. Consistently appearing nude without engaging in sexual acts and subjecting her body to the will of her audience like she did with Rhythm O – asking the audience to use one of 70 or so different objects, some of them potentially lethal, on herself and taking full responsibility – the artist is confronting her audience's notions of the body and of the traditional work of art while at the same time dispelling concepts of sexuality and humanity.
"...it is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through...It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion" (ii)None of Marina Abramovic's works exemplify this quote from Bourriaud more literally than her piece The House with the Ocean View (2002), a space constructed for living out a minimalist existence in the hopes of purifying the artist's body and mind. Consisting of three rooms with nothing more than a shower, a toilet, 12 changes of clothes and gallons of purified water, Abramovic lived in this elevated space for 12 days with three ladders made of butcher knives offering her only chance for escape. While the artist was only present in the space via a filmed projection of one of her performances of this work, the stark space, beautiful in its modernist simplicity and austerity, the picture below offers one glimpse into her 12 day experience in the performance space.– Nicolas Bourriaud
"I didn't have verbal communication. It was only with the eyes. I became so sensitive that – it sounds almost religious – I had this amazing opening of the heart that hurt me. This is why I believe time is so necessary: the public needs time to get the point. When I spend 12 days in a gallery, its energy is changed. Artists have to serve as oxygen to society, and that is what I do" – Marina Abramovic, from an interview for ARTnews.
Katharine Relth
(i) Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. France: Les presses du reel, 1998 (22).
(ii) Ibid, 15.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Thoughts on Bernard Cache's Earth Moves
Beginning his text announcing that "architectural images seem to be a good starting point" (2) for distinguishing between and navigating around the myriad visual elements that are present in our daily lives, Bernard Cache continues his text with an exploration of the philosophical and formal nature of architecture. But delegating the text to this definition - assigning Earth Moves the category of a "formal and philosophical study of architecture" - would be far too limiting, for he indeed discusses a great deal more than just forms and thought. Architecture is indeed inherently about forms and shapes, and is therefore also about geometry and mathematical interests. Cache discusses the city of Lausanne, a Swiss city located near the shores of Lake Geneva. The topography of the city has been profiled by filmmakers like Godard, who in a short film about Lausanne describes the city to have a visual problem or inconsistency that is to him Cezannian in nature - broad, disconnected spaces that make navigating the terrain problematic.
Cache chooses to profile the city of Lausanne due to its unique topography and geography that somehow dictated the construction of roads, buildings, works of art, and so on. However, Cache goes on to remind us that "in no case does the identity of a site preexist, for it is always the outcome of a construction" (15). For Cache, no destination has a predetermined future or path along which it necessarily will or must follow, an assertion that should strike a familiar chord with readers of Deleuze: one of the French philosopher's key concepts is a subscription to process ontology, which privileges being as becoming, as transformation, as constant change. Gilles Deleuze tends to prioritize difference over identity, a concept that is almost directly paraphrased in Cache's affirmation that once a being is defined or once a place has a definition, it is no longer capable of evolution. Remembering Todd May's definition of Deleuze's main question "how might one live?", Cache's own question regarding the development of architectural projects on a topographic space could possibly be summed up as "how might this space be altered?"
After attending class and discussing, albeit briefly, Cache's text and its significance to the world of critical architectural theory and Cache's relationship to Deleuze (they were contemporaries, even though Cache's text was not published until almost 12 years after it was written and only because Deleuze cross-referenced Cache's ideas in his own work, thus giving him notoriety), I found myself developing a new appreciation for Cache's approach to architecture and the interrelated realms of science, mathematics, and representational art. It was interesting to learn that not just Deleuze's ideas on the individual - or what he would call the becoming-human (so in this case, the becoming-site?) - are what influenced Cache, but also Simondon's embrace of individuation and his subsequent rejection of preformism, a rejection that he came to after his studies of physical matter led him to dismiss this idea of substance. A rejection of preformism can also be said to be a rejection of the preexisting identity of a geological site, something that Cache adamantly repeats throughout his text and his argument. I must say that this idea is quite appealing to me, especially because it expresses the possibility of unlimited potential, a potential that one would not normally assign to an inanimate object. In some ways, a rejection of preformism and an embrace of individuation opens the door for so much creativity, even if the site is already altered to a certain specification or a temporary definition of what it is at that moment; once a concrete structure is formed on a specific site, this does not mean that the structure is permanent or the only way to define the site. Instead, defining a site as capable of endless possibilities allows for impermanence, creativity, and growth in the eternal becoming-site.
You can also find this post on You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet!, my personal blog.
..Katharine R.
Cache chooses to profile the city of Lausanne due to its unique topography and geography that somehow dictated the construction of roads, buildings, works of art, and so on. However, Cache goes on to remind us that "in no case does the identity of a site preexist, for it is always the outcome of a construction" (15). For Cache, no destination has a predetermined future or path along which it necessarily will or must follow, an assertion that should strike a familiar chord with readers of Deleuze: one of the French philosopher's key concepts is a subscription to process ontology, which privileges being as becoming, as transformation, as constant change. Gilles Deleuze tends to prioritize difference over identity, a concept that is almost directly paraphrased in Cache's affirmation that once a being is defined or once a place has a definition, it is no longer capable of evolution. Remembering Todd May's definition of Deleuze's main question "how might one live?", Cache's own question regarding the development of architectural projects on a topographic space could possibly be summed up as "how might this space be altered?"
After attending class and discussing, albeit briefly, Cache's text and its significance to the world of critical architectural theory and Cache's relationship to Deleuze (they were contemporaries, even though Cache's text was not published until almost 12 years after it was written and only because Deleuze cross-referenced Cache's ideas in his own work, thus giving him notoriety), I found myself developing a new appreciation for Cache's approach to architecture and the interrelated realms of science, mathematics, and representational art. It was interesting to learn that not just Deleuze's ideas on the individual - or what he would call the becoming-human (so in this case, the becoming-site?) - are what influenced Cache, but also Simondon's embrace of individuation and his subsequent rejection of preformism, a rejection that he came to after his studies of physical matter led him to dismiss this idea of substance. A rejection of preformism can also be said to be a rejection of the preexisting identity of a geological site, something that Cache adamantly repeats throughout his text and his argument. I must say that this idea is quite appealing to me, especially because it expresses the possibility of unlimited potential, a potential that one would not normally assign to an inanimate object. In some ways, a rejection of preformism and an embrace of individuation opens the door for so much creativity, even if the site is already altered to a certain specification or a temporary definition of what it is at that moment; once a concrete structure is formed on a specific site, this does not mean that the structure is permanent or the only way to define the site. Instead, defining a site as capable of endless possibilities allows for impermanence, creativity, and growth in the eternal becoming-site.
You can also find this post on You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet!, my personal blog.
..Katharine R.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Andrea Zittel and Relational Aesthetics
Andrea Zittel is a contemporary sculptor and installation artist whose work bleeds into the realms of both art and life. A quote from the New York Times article "Rethinking the World by Cutting it Down to Size" describes the majority of her oeuvre:
1991-2005
Her one-woman lifestyle company, A-Z Administrative Services, has created personal uniforms to alleviate the daily angst of "What should I wear?"; carpeting that can be used as furniture; dehydrated food for eating dry or cooked; elegant chamber pots; small habitats that can be built without permits and easily transported; and "escape vehicles" for inside the home that help the user tune out the external world. [1]Her habitats, such as the "A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit" (1992), were her attempt to create pre-fabricated spaces that could function as everything she needed in her living quarters. In his text Relational Aesthetics (English, 2002) Bourriaud mentions Zittel as one contemporary artist who encompasses his concepts surrounding the new realm in which contemporary art exists: it is no longer "a space to be walked through...It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through" (15). This notion of "a period of time" is exemplified in her personal uniforms that she wears during a four-month period as well as in her floating personal island project depicted in her film Gollywobbler.
Andrea Zittel
A-Z Personal Uniforms1991-2005
In constructing the first of her home units, Zittel believed "that when I made that piece and I had everything perfected that [would] solve all of my problems" [2] of living in the confined space of a storefront in Brooklyn. However, once she was done with the first unit she discovered that "when...it was perfect and there was nothing left to do to it, I felt completely despondent, very listless and depressed. At that point...I had this revelation that no one really wants perfection; that we're obsessed with perfection, we're obsessed with innovation and moving forwards, but what we really want is the hope of some sort of new and improved or a better tomorrow." [3] In this way, Zittel's home units encompass Bourriaud's concept of "learning to inhabit the world in a better way"; that the goal of contemporary art "is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real" (13). The fact that Zittel actually lives within her creations and encourages others to share in the experience of developing a relationship with her pieces makes her method of creation one that can easily exist in the contemporary art world defined by relations and conversations spoken of by Bourriaud.
Photo credit: Andrea Zittel/Andrea Rosen Gallery
"A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit, Model 003," a 60-square-foot living space.
It is no wonder that Bourriaud mentions her in his section entitled "The aura of artworks has shifted toward the public": her work includes "the presence of the micro-community which will accommodate it" (58) as well as his notions that contemporary art forms should have a conversation with the viewer by means of a bodily commitment, or at least the work's recognition of the viewer as subject. Zittel asserts that one of the main purposes of her work is to relate to other peoples' experiences with the world, which keenly aligns with Bourriaud's ideas that "art has always been relational to varying degrees" (15).
I feel as though my thoughts can be made more clear by actually seeing her work in person, but in any event I found Zittel's personification of Bourriaud's work absolutely uncanny.
..Katharine Relth
[1] NYTimes.com. Grace Glueck, "Rethinking the World by Cutting it Down to Size"
[3] Ibid.
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