Bringing back physicality to something we view so digital.

Many of us view the internet as a limitless entity.  This is its foot print and its fragility.

Article from DailyMail,  Inside the internet: Google allows first ever look at the eight vast data centers that power the online world.

Link to video Explore a Google Data Center with Street View.

Jay-Z and Marina Abramovic

Last summer, Jay-Z performed at Pace Gallery in New York.  The performance is inspired by Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present.   Like Abramovic's performance, Jay-Z has his viewer come and experience his artistry, rapping one on one.  The six hour marathon of rapping is distilled down to his music video Picasso Baby from his most recent record album Magna Carta Holy Grail. 

Jay-Z creates a parallel with rap and hip-hop with art and art fame.  The two are "cousins" both starting from humble beginnings of the street and the real.  But "when art started becoming part of the gallery, there became was a separation between culture."  Jay-Z believes the similar has happened in hip-hop.  There is a sense that once a rap performer reaches a level of fame, that those artist are "too bourgeois."  This one on one attention he gives each viewer  is akin to the one on one that Abramovic give to her viewer in The Artist is Present.  An intimate exchange of energy, a reminder of the real and the need to "bring the worlds back together."  Curator, art critic and supporter of performance art Roselee Goldberg told the New Yorker "both performances, Marina's and Jay-Z's, encourage you to look somebody in the eye, which we don't do enough, and it's daring to do that.“

The list of viewers that come to participate in Jay-Z's performance includes writer Judd Apatow, designer Cynthia Rowley, actor Alan Cumming, artists Marcel Dzama, hip-hop artists Fab Five Freddy, art dealer Sandra Gering and of course Marina Abramovic herself who speaks at the end about her experience with Jay-Z and his performance.

I think I get you a little more Amelia Jones.

Amelia Jones in Postmodernism, Subjectivity and Body Art: A Trajectory seeks to revise the 1980s views of body art.  As a starting point, Jones uses artists and theorist Mary Kelly’s anti body art argument as the start of her argument.  Mary Kelly, artist and theorist.

Mary Kelly, Installation view of Interim Part I.
Bellow detail of Menace from Interim Part I.

Kelly makes the argument that body art is problematic referring to body art as “naïve essentialism,” fetishsizes the human form, specifically perpetuating the objectification of the female form and as body art enters into the mainstream is generalized as allegorical.   Kelly uses Ana Mendieta, performance artist work Silueta as an example.  According to Kelly, Silueta is essentialist in that Mendieta’s work embraces her female form for what it is, “take my body for what it is” all the while the nudity in her work seduces the viewer, further perpetuating the objectification of the female form.  And lastly Mendieta’s Silueta is interpreted through the allegorical lens, Mendieta being associated with Tiano goddesses of the earth. 

Ana Mendieta's Silueta.

Jones understands Kelly’s warning but strives to argue that even within Kelly’s artwork, which completely excludes the female form is more akin to Mendieta’s Silueta. 

Body art, the body art that Kelly was referring to in her argument is using the body as the medium. Jones argues for a broadening of the definition of body art.  One way to broaden the definition is to understand that majority of how body art is viewed is not in actual performance but rather in documentation through photographs and film.  The artist is not actually present then.  And instead the artist is instead embodied in the photographs and film.  Jones argues that this is similar to Kelly’s work, that she her self is embodied into the tattered and worn purses in her series Interim Part I: Corpus.  Jones goes as far to argue that Jackson Pollock’s work is body art.

Jones also believes that Kelly’s blanket statement that body art should is essentialist and or allegorical is detrimental. Jones in response, “Kelly’s wholesale rejection of all body art as necessarily essentialist, while it was strategic at the time, failed to account for Kelly’s own investment- as an embodied artists and critic reacting to the messy and , in her view, ideologically problematic effects of other artists’ bodies in performance – in interpreting them (essentializing their meanings) in this way” (30).  

Jones lastly argues that body art should be allowed to be seductive, radical and harness the positive power of narcissism.   Especially for feminism, the female form needs to exposed, needs to be seen, must become public, “the personal is political,” and furthermore the importance of women taking control of the image in which they disseminate into society. 

I kept Jones’ argument in mind while watching the Marina Abramovic documentary The Artist isPresent.  Much of Jones’ argument is echoed when Abramovic explains the body art she had done in the earlier part of her career.  To Abramovic, her body is a stand in for us, for society and is often a projection of our own ideas and thoughts.  In her performance The Artists is Present, Abramovic  specifically states “I am the mirror of their own self.”

Her colleagues talk about the charismatic, seductive nature of her personality, and how Abramovic uses that to pull in her audience, to make her viewer fall in love with her, to bring them in.  Abramovic describes making ones own charismatic space. 

What difference greatly from Jones argument and Abramovic is the real.  The performance is everything to Abramovic.  There is an intimacy and an intensity she strives for her in her performance.   In the documentary The Artists is Present, Abramovic is talking with her gallerist about her meeting with illusionist David Blaine and how he proposed the ending to her exhibition.  Blaine wanted to stage Abramovic’s death at the end of her exhibition.  Her gallerist advised her that she should not because the thread that ties her work is the real, what makes her performance captivating and powerful is that it is real.  Working with an illusionist, staging an illusion would take away from the realness of her performance.  Abramovic agrees instantly. Telling him that he is right and drops the idea immediately.  I understand the power in the real for Abramovic.  The documentary includes the workshop Abramovic hosts for the 30 artist who will reenact her previous performances for her retrospective that coincided with her own performance pieces. 

Abramovic states, “in performance you have to have an emotional approach. It’s a kind of direct energy that with the public and the performer.  And if you are performing in that way, that you are there, in this 100%.  There is an emotional moment arrives to everybody.  There is no way out.  Everybody feel. “  The performance, the interaction with viewer the energy that is being shared by both parties is what is most important, a feeling that cannot be transcended through photographs and even film.

At the point, I am torn with whether to include performance into my own work.  The more I research performance art the more I become frightened with the idea.  I appreciate the Abramovic’s physical and emotional stamina.  It is something I cannot fathom doing.  The level of intimacy is daunting; being so vulnerable both physically and mentally makes me anxious.  Another reason I straw from using my self/body in my work is because although my work appears to lack the personal (my work being more akin to Kelly’s) all the works steam from a personal experience.  In a sense, each piece is autobiographical, but I have actively decided to remove my self/body from the work.  For me including my self/body would be too much.  My aim is to talk to a broad demographic; to be inclusive with my message and using my self/body makes me feel like the work is only autobiographical.  

Marina Abramovic, Nude with Skeleton.

One of thirty artists asked to recreate Abramovic's performance works for Abramovic's retrospective at New York MOMA.

janine antoni, x 2

body / performance art, Nauman / Abramovic

from hand to mouth, 1967


the artist is present, 2010

Las Meninas by Velazquez, 1656 Writing by Foucault

The first gaze mentioned in the reading is in the first paragraph, it is the gaze of the painter, "The skilled hand is suspended in mid-air, arrested in rapt attention on the painter's gaze; and the gaze, in return, waits upon the arrested gesture." (1) We can't see what he is painting. Foucault describes the way we see the painter as, half way between visible and invisible, he is both representing something and being represented.  We look at the painter looking at us and it creates a reciprocal relationship. It appears as though he is looking at whomever is viewing the painting, and painting the spectator.  However, we also see that he is painting the Spanish Royalty from the little picture int the mirror. "We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Through greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself." (3) However, he goes onto explain that his gaze can accept any number of spectators. The gaze keeps going back and forth between, "suject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles infinity." The painting and essay both seem to describe a constant unending back and forth between gazes and subject matter.

When Foucault discusses briefly how mirrors, "play a duplicating role", and were traditionally used in Dutch painting I immediately thought of the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait painting, with the mirror behind them. I am really left wondering who is the most important part of the painting and whether or not it is important that we know after looking. Since the Princess is the only whole figure showing in the painting, is she the main subject? The optional reading seems to describe the painting's subject as being the experience of an encounter. Are we all equal to each other as far as the gaze goes? What is the point of this kind of painting and it's back and forth gaze implications?

Walter De Maria: Earth Room

(ode of sorts)

Earth sign

In 1977

De Maria filled a room  in NY

with earth

Miwon Kwon Site-ing

I will be talking through ‘One Place After Another’ by Miwon Kwon. It’s really a survey/history of the site specific movement, and is a long and winding road. I’ll attempt to reduce the article to it’s most important points.

Site specificity emerged in the late 60’s and initially took ‘site’ to mean an actual physical location where the art was situated, whether it be in the landscape or in architectural space. She says “site-specific art, whether interruptive or assimilative, gave itself up to it’s environmental context, being formally determined by it”. She refers to Michael Fried’s concept of ‘theatricallity’ that we discussed at length in class-“the art or event was to be singularly experienced in the here-and-now through the bodily presence of each viewing subject in a sensorial immediacy of spatial extension and temporal duration”. The idea was to relocate meaning from within the art object to “the contingencies of it’s context”.

She discusses the saga of Richard Serra and the Tilted Arc project, with its complex implications for the concept of site specificity and perhaps more importantly, of how public art is commissioned and installed. He stated “It is a site specific work and as such not to be relocated. To remove the work is to destroy the work”. It proved to be a lightning rod for controversy and was instantly polarizing, with the art world defending the project, and a large segment of the local population despising it. After years of in the courts, Tilted Arc wound up disassembled and stored in 3 pieces by the government.

Propelled by artists like Micheal Asher, site specificity morphed into a new phase. ‘Site’ became more than a physical location, it became a cultural framework defined by the institutions of art. Asher’s pieces commented on the mechanics of the art business- his piece might consist of a deconstructed gallery, where the interior walls were removed to show only the office space, ‘framing the institutional frame’. Asher also worked with the idea that site was ‘inclusive of historical and conceptual dimensions’. In 1979 in Chicago he moved a statue of George Washington from outside to inside a small gallery of 18^th century painting to show it in relation to it’s historical context as opposed to the exterior of the building.

Kwon then describes another phase where ‘site’ becomes more about process- “the “work” no longer seeks to be a noun/object, but a verb/process provoking the viewer’s critical (not just physical) acuity regarding the ideological conditions of that viewing. The insertion of social concerns (AIDS, racism, sexism) create a merging with the idea of ‘community art’, and a growing sense that the public should be involved in the process, as the process becomes paramount. Aesthetic and art-historical concerns have become secondary issues. “Different cultural debates, a theoretical concept, a social issue, a political problem are now deemed to function as sites”.

Kwon discusses the ‘unhinging’ of works created in the 60’s and 70’s, and how the art market has essentially figured out how to market these older works, leading to recreations of the work. This of course raises lots of interesting questions about the ethics of refabrication and placing the ‘site specific’ work in new physical contexts, and what rights the artists have to be involved. I thought this was one of the most interesting passages in the article. Kwon quotes Susan Hapgood- “the once popular tem ‘site-specific”, has come to mean ‘movable under the right circumstances’, shattering the dictum “to remove the work is to destroy the work”. Brilliant.

Kwon discusses the rise of ‘Itinerant Artists”, a new class who are paid to travel the world doing site specific work for institutions, and civic entities, and how these artists are actually used for local commercial purposes. “ The artist as an overspecialized aesthetic object maker has been anachronistic for a long time. What they provide now, rather that produce, are aesthetic, often “critical-artistic” services”. She uses the example of a site specific exhibition in Charleston, South Carolina, that was actually about promoting the city more than any of the art created there “what is prized the most is the ways the presence of the artists endows places with a ‘unique’ distinction”.

There are some of the highlights of the article, I really enjoyed it and certainly now have a more nuanced understanding of the movement.

Rick English

Mirror staged

After reading Lacan's mirror stage and study of the gaze it is hard not to hone in on the mirror(s) and web of gazes (much like Courbet's Burial at Ornans) found in Velazquez's Las Meninas.

In terms of mirrors, one could assume that, in order to execute this painting, Velazquez had to actually use a real mirror. Thus, in addition to the represented mirror at the back of the room which Foucault mentions and which reflects the image of the King and the Queen, there would be a mirror as device, not represented (but technically implied) in the painting. It would stand where the King and Queen, and, beyond their alluded presence, the viewers/spectators stand. If this were so we are sent back to the reality of what Velazquez was seeing, what was in front of him: not the royal couple standing before him for portraiture, but a mirror allowing the painter to depict: the back of his canvas, himself, the group of people standing to his left (the infanta, the maid, courtier, dwarf, etc.), the space of the room behind him (with its hung paintings, and, possibly, the mirror, empty of royalty), and the opened door at the back of the room (the man was probably added in as was the royal couple into the mirror).

If this is a portrait of the royal couple without the presence of the royal couple - who is it a portrait of, then?

What if the mirror, or its reflective function, was not only a technical device but was the subject matter itself of the painting? In this case, as viewers of the painting, we would be the mirror - we would be that which mirrors and returns his gaze to the painter. And the painter would be gazing at an implied or imaginary spectator while gazing at himself. The implications in terms of artist and viewer, subject and object seem far-reaching.

We are spectators of both a work in progress - Velazquez in the act of painting, the surface of his canvas known only to him - and a finished work - Las Meninas. Two time frames appear simultaneously in a single act of viewing: the fictional and the real, Velazquez seen in the act of painting on the one hand, and a wall-hanging (or google image) painting authored by Velazquez on the other (an object, in a sense, an idea reminiscent of the debate between Michael Fried and the minimalists). Navigating between these two times that are in fact simultaneous is one of the elements that contribute to creating an uncertain relationship between viewer and work. It is as if we have to constantly remind us that what is on the canvas in front of Velazquez is not the finished painting we see simultaneously - or is it? The canvas in front of the painter which we cannot see is potentially mirroring us, a reflection mediated by the brush of the artist. Going further we can say that, we, the viewers, can be in a posture of both spectator and subject matter.

Since our eyes are caught by the sight of a canvas within the canvas (but one that "keeps its secret") and a number of gazes looking straight at us, we almost forget that we re looking at a painted canvas, a construct. There's illusionism here, not due to trompe-l'oeil or some technique to obtain a high degree of representational realism, but to trompe-gaze, leading to a psychological or phenomenological experience of the viewer. This gazing back of the canvas, of its represented scene, at the viewer - granted it may appear as a mediated gaze, perhaps a tamed gaze as Lacan would have it - disturbs our sense of distance and separateness.

That is until we identify the mirror in the back of the room as such and the two figures in it. Realizing that, we are almost relieved. We can "kick back" and just be normal spectators again: the missing link is not us, it is the royalty. However this realization introduces a third time, what we may call the time of mind or intention: what was Velazquez trying to accomplish with such a subtle play of gazes and mirrors? Perhaps it was a delay in our perception of and a specific reaction to the gaze.

Lacan (in evolution) the Eye and the Gaze

Levis Strauss’s Structural Anthropological approach connecting theories for psychoanalysis to the switch from the animal unconscious phase to the conscious  in the evolution of culture was, until now, my only substantial recollection of the applicability of Lacan’s theories.  

Lacan’s ideas, however, were particularly influential not only to the formation of the structuralist though of Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levis-Strauss, but in connection to a wide range of other disciplines. Therefore, a claimed freudian, Lacan used and reworked many theories and thoughts of his contemporary. He forward the idea of the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, setting the basis for his pragmatic approach and interpretation of psychoanalysis, over which he built theories such as that of the Mirror Stage attempting to explain the evolution of the I through self identification. 

The idea of the tree registers seems to set the stage and determine the basis for Lacan’s own rethinking. The imaginary, for example, is central of his account of ego formation in the mirror stage, and the imaginary is then dependent on the symbology. This dependency means that more sensory-perceptual phenomena (images and experiences of one's body, consciously lived emotions, envisioning of the thoughts and feelings of others) are determined by socio-linguistic structures and dynamics (the Imaginary and the Symbolic,when taken together constitute the field of reality).  These registers are also often mistaken for one another (e.g the real often mis-recognized as symbolic and vice versa)

With the essay on the Eye and the Gaze Lacan yet seems to add an additional layer to his logic. It seems that Lacan’s concept of the split is a rework of Freudian concepts of unconsciousness and the compulsion to repeat. The gaze is, on the other hand parallel to the castration anxiety and functions to determine the subjectivity of the human being within the scopic field. Lacan in this context also appropriated Merlau Ponty’s phenomenological model recognizing a reversibility in vision. The body becomes in this instance both object and subject, seeing and being seen. Lacan, however, changes this idea of reversibility adding the notion of the being observed (not only something see and it is seen but it is also observed from external gazes). Lacan entails that subjectivity is determined through a gaze placing the subject under observation, and causing (the subject) to experience himself as an object which is seen.  

The gaze alienates subjects from themselves by causing them to identify as the objects of desire, at the same time desiring scopic satisfaction. In constructing the human subject as the objet, the gaze denies the subject its full subjectivity. The subject becomes the object of desire by identifying with the desire (or object of desire) and become alienated from itself.

The intermediate space between the eye and the gaze is the screen- consisting in the in between space of projected images. Lacan imaginary space is the way subjectivity is mediated by the images appearing on the screen.

“man's desire is the desire of the Other.”