Week 1 Sound and Vision - Video and Installation

Video and Installation

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

• Installation and video art, two
areas of artistic practice, whose
core ideas and core terms still
ghost contemporary discussions
of new media (speciﬁcally ideas
around interactivity, immersion,
active spectatorship etc. )


The Roots of Video and Installation art

The Threat of New Media

Kenneth Noland, Gift 1961-2


The singular viewer in solitary, quiet meditation

• “The ideal modernist spectator was a disembodied eye, lifted out of the ﬂux of life in time and
history, apprehending the resolved (‘signiﬁcant) aesthetic form in a moment of instantaneity” Paul Wood


Ideology of the Modernist White Cube


THE MODERNIST BREAKDOWN


THE MODERNIST BREAKDOWN

• “If I could sum up the shift that
occurred in art and criticism in
1967, it would be the widespread
assault on the dogma of
Modernism as an exclusively
optical, art-for-art’s sake, socially
detached, formalist phenomenon
that inevitably tended toward
abstraction’

• Barbara Rose, The Critical Terrain of High
Modernism

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Installation and Video Art

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Surrealism
Dada Pop

Pop

• Marcel Duchamp, Installation for the
exhibition of First Papers of
Surrealism, 1942

Happenings

Kaprow wasn’t installing
anything to be looked at..but
something to be played in,
participated in by visitors who
then became co-creators.


Main staircase and fresco painted by Tiepolo. Wurzburg, Bavaria, Germany


Popular Gesamtkunstwerk aka total art work

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Minimalism ‘For the first time, I was
forced to recognise the
entire space, and the
people in it..Until
Minimalism, I had been
taught , or taught myself,
to look only within a
frame; with Minimalism
the frame broke, or at
least stretched’

Vito Acconci

Robert Morris Installation at the Green Gallery (1963)


The Feedback Loop

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15


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Installation Art
• The viewers focus is shifted from
individual autonomous art objects
(on walls or plinths) to the context
within which artworks are exhibited.
• Installations employ a range of
materials. They are hybrid,
adaptable artworks, allowing artists
to use a variety of forms, many of
which traditionally would have been
seen as incompatible (sculpture
and painting and video etc.) .
• The form of the installation rejects
technical specialism (deskilling).
• Installations are temporary in
nature.
• Installations frequently invite and
encourage a narrative reading.


Feminism and Installation
Installation art’s multi-perspectivalism
was viewed as emancipatory and
in contrast to single-point perspective,
which in its centring of the viewer
in a position of mastery was for feminists
marked by patriarchal power relations.

• Judy Chicago Dinner Party 1974 San Francisco Museum of • “This discourse of decentring has
Modern Art had particularly influence on the
writing of art critics sympathetic
to feminist and postcolonial
One of the first openly female- theory, who argue that fantasies
centered art installations,
Womanhouse - a series of fantasy of ‘centring’ perpetuated by
environments exploring the various dominant ideology are
personal meanings and gender masculinist, racist and
construction of domestic space - was
created by students of the Feminist conservative; this is because
Art Program along with a number of there is no one ‘right’ way of
local Los Angeles, CA artists, first
conceived by Paula Harper and
looking at the world, nor any
spearheaded by Judy Chicago and privileged place from which such
Miriam Schapiro. judgements can be made.” (Bishop, C,

Installation Art, p 13)


The decentred
viewer


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The Active Spectator

• To see yourself seeing. To engender a critical,
self conscious, reﬂexsive attitude to the activity
of looking at art in a space.
• An active viewer - directly addressed. The
interdependence of the work of art and the
viewer :

• “the active nature of the viewer’s role within
[installations], and the importance of ﬁrst hand
experience , came to be regarded as an
empowering alternative to the pacifying effects of
mass-media.” (Bishop Installation Art)
•


Active
Spectatorship
“This activation is, moreover,
regarded as emmancipatory, since
it is analogous to the viewers
engagement in the world. A
transitive relationship therefore
comes to be implied between
‘activated spectatorship’ and active
engagement in the social political
arena’
(Bishop, C, Installation Art, pg. 11)

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It is common in installation
art to remark that the viewer
completes the work. Their
presence is essential to the
functioning of the work, -
they ‘activate’ the work
through their literal
presence in the space.

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"The main actor in the
total installation, the main
centre toward which
everything is addressed,
for which everything is
intended, is the viewer."

Ilya Kabakov
On the Total Installation


History of video art
• Late sixties - early video
cameras appear on university
campuses - they are large and
bulky.
• Naim June Paik uses Sony
Portapak Camera
• Early history closely connected
to recording of performance -
camera is stationary
• Key first generation video artists
or artists using video -Dan
Graham, John Baldessari, Joan
Jonas, Martha Rosler,Bruce
Nauman, William Wegman, Vito
Acconci....


Video Art
• A time based medium.
• Experiencing the changing
patterns of form of video over
time is frequently a central
aspect of its character.
• In theory an infinitely
reproducible, non auratic
medium. The hope that
technological innovation would
lead to democratic
transformation in the
production and consumption of
art. Another instance of the
dematerialisation of the art Martha Rosler “Semiotics of the Kitchen”

object - and anti-form.
• The exhibition of video is fluid -
from large scale projections
filling a space, to single free
standing works on domestic
monitors. It is a migrant
medium.


• Video art frequently positions itself
in a ‘dialogue’ with mainstream
television or film.
• An interventionist practice - not
only did it have the potential to
reach far bigger audiences, it also
had the possibility of offering a
critique of the values and forms of
commercial, mainstream TV and
film- to turn TV /film against itself
• A deconstruction of the
mechanisms of manipulation,
seduction and the resulting ‘rituals
of passive consumption / one way
transmission’.
• A form capable of offering
alternative narratives in alternative
spaces http://www.ubu.com/ﬁlm/acconci.html

• A new form. No artistic or critical
history.


“From it’s beginnings in the 1970’s counter
culture, artists’ video and film has
sidestepped the hypnotizing conditions of
narrative cinema precisely in order to critique
the dominant culture’s most thoroughly
passivizing entertainment genre.”

Brandon Taylor
Art Today


Martha Rosler
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zSA9Rm2PZA&feature=related

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Laurie Anderson

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SirOxIeuNDE
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hhm0NHhCBg

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Bruce Nauman, Violent Incident, 1986, video, installation, Tate Gallery, London.


Bruce Nauman
“ANTHRO/SOCIO 1991.
Projection on three walls and six monitors -
the head screams “Feed Me, Help Me /
Anthropology..Help Me / Hurt Me /
Sociology…”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxmm16gqRis&feature=related


“ Whereas for McLuhan media such as books and cinema are not
truly interactive, for Manovich quite the reverse is true: they are
more interactive (higher in participation) than digital media forms
precisely because they demand us to create a mental
accompaniment. Manovich, [..] sees media such as painting, books
and cinema as succeeding by depriving our senses of high level or
complete information. They work because the demand us to ﬁll in
the gaps in visual or audio narratives and to construct our own
readings, images or even dialogues through interaction with the
medium in question. “

pg. 91 new media

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Week 1 Sound and Vision - Video and Installation

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