Action Reaction: Video Installations
Detroit Institute of Arts
July 3, 2009 – January 3, 2010
With the advent of video as an art form, artists began to capture the fleeting interval between an action and its effect. As time-based work evolved, art was no longer confined to the tradition of stop-action records used by painting and sculpture. Action Reaction highlights five videos that examine this causal relationship and document the evolution of video over four decades.
Video pioneer Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941) explores the body in space with Bouncing in the Corner, no. 1, (1968) contending that, “… whatever I was doing in the studio was art.” In two videos made near Oaxaca, Mexico, Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948–85) records performances using gun powder, fireworks, the human form and nature. The Swiss duo Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (born 1946), amuse and delight with their continuous motion installation using household goods in The Way Things Go (1987). Video master Bill Viola (American, born 1951) takes on issues of immortality and the conflict between human will and the autonomic nervous system in Nine Attempts to Achieve Immortality (1996).
When viewed in the context of one to another, these works pose questions about the temporal and mysterious nature of human existence.
Organized by the DIA, these installations have been generously underwritten by the Dr. and Mrs. George Kamperman Fund.
Filed under: Artists
Image: Carole Itter, Raw Egg Costume. Courtesy of the artist.
The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia and the grunt gallery, Vancouver, are delighted to announce the launch of Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties, an online resource and digital archive incorporating hundreds of photographs, press clippings, audio recordings and film clips. Drawn from private collections and archives as well as public sources, Ruins in Process brings together the research of many artists, curators and writers in an exploration of the diverse artistic practices of Vancouver art in the 1960s and early 1970s. Collaborative methods, interdisciplinary activity and an interest in emerging technologies are revealed in the selections of the contributors to this educational resource.
The website has a fully searchable digital collection, video interviews with artists Ingrid Baxter, Christos Dikeakos, Carole Itter, and Gary Lee-Nova, as well as a number of essays that contextualize the work in the archive.
Five project sites document in detail the work of specific artists and collectives and explore the relationships between artistic media.
Aboriginal Art in the Sixties, curated by Marcia Crosby and Roberta Kremer, examines the relationship of visual artists to broadcast and print media, political movements and the city.
Al Neil, curated by Glenn Alteen, combines documentation from performances, concerts and readings as well as photo-documentation of collage, assemblage and text by and about the artist.
Expanded Literary Practice, curated by Charo Neville and Michael Turner, looks at the relationships between writing and visual art and the merging of the two in concrete poetry.
The Intermedia Catalogue, curated by Michael de Courcy, archives the activities of this interdisciplinary collective of artists, musicians, writers, film and video makers and performers.
Transmission Difficulties: Painting in the Sixties, curated by Scott Watson, examines the many challenges to the idea of high art that were posed by electronic communication and psychedelic exploration.
Ruins in Process is produced through a partnership of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia and the grunt gallery, Vancouver. The project is managed by Lorna Brown, with technical direction and design by Jeff Khonsary and Courtenay Webber of The Future. Editorial direction is provided by Scott Watson, Glenn Alteen and Lorna Brown. Additional project site design by Dexter Sinister, Archer Pechawis, and James Szuszkiewicz.
Ruins in Process is made possible with the support of the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canadian Culture Online Strategy. We are also grateful for the assistance of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
‘Hello World!’ by Christopher Baker (USA)
Hello World! is a large-scale audio visual installation comprised of thousands of unique video diaries gathered from the internet. The project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard.
On one hand, new media technologies like YouTube have enabled new speakers at an alarming rate. On the other hand, no new technologies have emerged that allow us to listen to all of these new public speakers. Each video consists of a single lone individual speaking candidly to a (potentially massive) imagined audience from a private space such as a bedroom, kitchen, or dorm room. The multi-channel sound composition glides between individuals and the group, allowing viewers to listen in on unique speakers or become immersed in the cacophony. Viewers are encouraged to dwell in the space.
see video on culture.tv
Filed under: Brown Gallery
Richmond Center for Visual Arts
Summer Exhibition to Focus on Frostic School of Art Alumni
Western Michigan University’s Richmond Center for Visual Arts will host two exhibitions by alumni in the Albertine Monroe-Brown Gallery. The exhibitions, Through a Crack in the Lake: Collaborative Paintings by Patricia Opel and Tim Norris, and Paul Marquardt: Word Play open on Thursday, April 23rd, and run through June 26, 2009.
From tribal shamanism to twentieth-century Surrealism, floating or swimming in water has been used as a symbol of sleep, hallucination, sex, birth, death, and passage to other spiritual realms. Submergence underwater as a metaphor for the subconscious or the dream-state is a common feature found in many artists’ works. For Patricia Opel and Tim Norris, this universal symbolism connects to local history in their collaborative paintings on the subject of Great Lakes shipwrecks and ecology. The show’s title is borrowed from sailor’s lingo describing the sudden and complete disappearance of a ship in a storm. But the title can also suggest a mythic descent into the subconscious.
Paul Marquardt’s works are a cross section of digitally altered images he has been working with over the past few years. But while technology has been used in their creation, Marquardt’s art is filled with content about who we are as humans and how we live on this earth. They are juxtapositions of our actions and our goals, politics and social norms, and the varied signals that stream between us as we live together in small communities, larger urban populations, or in our personal dream states. Word Play will expose layers of meaning, while giving us the means of seeing within ourselves – as well as others.
Filed under: Exhibitions | Screenings
© Susan Dobson, Smart Centre #3, 2008
CONTACT is an annual month long festival of photography that takes place at over 200 venues across the Greater Toronto Area from May 1 – 31. As the largest photography festival in the world, CONTACT has become a premiere cultural event in Toronto with a broad range of international programming. This includes exhibitions, public installations, films, lectures, seminars and workshops. CONTACT participants, whether acclaimed international artists or local emerging photographers, exhibit in a variety of venues, from major public museums to private galleries and many alternative spaces including subway stations, billboards, the airport and city streets.
CONTACT 2009 – Still Revolution examines how each significant innovation in photography’s evolution has radically altered the creation and consumption of images, irrevocably changing the history of visual representation.
MAY 1 – 20
RETAIL
SUSAN DOBSON
The DepARTment >>
Susan Dobson’s recent body of work, Retail (2008) continues her exploration of architecture and land use in the suburban landscape. In this work, she examines the makeshift nature of retail architecture and consumer culture’s dependence on the automobile. The series of large, colour inkjet prints depict franchise retail outlets set against optimistic blue skies and vast, deserted parking lots. The structures are digitally masked with an asphalt colour. The resulting large gray boxes highlight the unimaginative and provisional designs of big retail stores, while the empty lots, stripped of cars (and hence of purpose), are transformed into urban wastelands. Dobson’s images foreshadow the future of temporary architecture and of rampant consumerism during a time of economic uncertainty and growing environmental awareness. Seen within this context, writes Robin Metcalfe, “Dobson’s ghostly big-box stores glisten like a digital mirage, prescient images of a doomed landscape.” The photographs describe the future perfect – that which will have been – an ominous future, cast back in time.
exhibitions listing on CONTACT website
** if you travel into Canada, make sure that you have the proper ID.
Featuring photos taken by paparazzi and others who happened on the scene, this documentary examines the tragic 1997 car accident in which Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed died, and tells the story of the photographers who were arrested. Produced by the U.K.’s Channel 4, the program reveals a never-before-scene photographic record of the events that transpired in the hour following the crash in Paris’s Pont de l’Alma tunnel. Director: Janice Sutherland, Stuart Tanner (Netflix Description)
Filed under: Student Exhibitions
Eight WMU Frostic School of Art Students competitively selected for international Ukrainian juried photography exhibit.
Morgana Skelton, Photo BFA Major, was chosen to contribute her artwork for the creation of the exhibition poster. Ukrainian Curator and Photo Art Union member, Eduardo Stranadko, helped to facilitate the show with Frostic School of Art Photo faculty member, Bill Davis. The exhibit, which included undergraduate photography majors from Ohio’s Wright State University and Florida’s Jacksonville University, may also travel to a second gallery destination in Ukraine.
Filed under: Announcement
Gary Cialdella will speak at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts on the topic of his upcoming book, The Calumet Region: An American Place. Co-published by the University of Illinois Press and the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University
Anticipated new date of publication, June 2009.
Noon Art Break
April 7, 2009
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
314 South Park Street
Kalamazoo, MI 49007
T 269 349 7775
Virgin, April 4, 1979. Chalk on blackboard, chalk and soap bar on wood table, wood chair, electrical cable, socket, and light bulb, Dimensions Variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 94.4265. Joseph Beuys © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Beuys’s public discussions—lectures on politics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and social relations that often served as catalysts for other work—exemplify his role as artist, teacher, and activist. One such discussion was held in Vienna on April 4, 1979, at the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, where Beuys had been invited to speak in the context of a debate surrounding the use of Vienna’s Palais Lichtenstein as a museum for modern art. Earlier that same year, the gallery had given Beuys the opportunity to create an installation entitled Basic Room–Wet Laundry, a manifestation of his provocative contention that the baroque palace was as useful for hanging wet laundry as it was for displaying art. The April 4 discussion grew directly from that project. During the discussion, Beuys referred to a chalk drawing on a blackboard that showed the chemical formula for making soap. Using the soap-making process as a metaphor for social relations and its colloidal character as an analogy for the stages of fetal development, he then spoke of the cyclical nature of feminine cleansing, associating virginity and motherhood with cleanliness and impurity respectively. The lecture also related back to the notion of washing as “the traditional domain of women” presented in Basic Room–Wet Laundry. These themes were further brought to bear upon the machinations and politics of the art world, which the artist viewed with contempt. The installation Virgin, April 4, 1979, is a kind of “representation” of that lecture, and utilized the essential elements that comprised this cycle of works—soap, blackboard, a table and chair, and the single light bulb,
In the summer of that same year, Beuys made Virgin Basic–Wet Room Laundry for a major exhibition at the Vienna Secession. A further iteration of the previous two installations and lectures, this was to have been the grandest presentation of the subject of the Virgin. However, Beuys decided to isolate some (though not all) of the elements of the piece as independent objects after a vandal had damaged the work; Virgin, April 4, 1979/June 23, 1979, consists solely of the blackboard from the Vienna installation. Beuys reworked the imagery to evoke more painterly results, which he achieved by rubbing soap directly onto the surface in broad circular movements. The dual date refers to both that of the original idea—in this case, back to the April 4 discussion—and the date the piece was constituted as a self-contained object, rather than referring to the date of its actual creation, a practice occasionally used by Beuys to underscore his belief that “thinking=art.”
Matthew Drutt
Guggenheim.com
Filed under: Exhibitions | Screenings
http://www.kalamazooarts.com
Filed under: Announcement
Annual Frostic School of Art Student Award Ceremony
Western Michigan University
Thursday, April 2, 2009
4 pm Dalton Recital Hall
5 pm Student Exhibition Opening
6-8p m Frostic School of Art Open House
Schedule of Open House Events in South Korhman Hall
Sculpture – Bronze Pour at 6:45 & 7:35 – rm 1104
Metals/Jewelry Brooch Making Workshop - rm 1150
Ceramics – Clay Construction Demo - rm 1115
Foundations – Annual Exhibit – rms 1117, 1206
Woodshop – Frame Making Demo – rm 1140
Art Education – Collaborative Art Experience – rm 1304
Printmaking – Student Designed tee shirt & Student Print Portfolio sale – rm 2504
Printmaking – Print an Intaglio – rm 2170
Photography – Free Digital Portraits – rm 2111
Photography – Darkroom Demo – rms 2102, 2116
Photography – Video Art Screenings – rms 2206, 2309
Painting – Painting in Progress – rms 2101, 2117, 2130, 2150,
Art History – Art History ID Game – win an iPod! – rm 2123
ART:21: Your work has often been described as ‘installation art.’ Could you talk about what an installation is and what it means to you, personally, to work in this way?
HAMILTON: I think the form, for me, of working in installation is one that always implicates you actively within it. So that unlike an object, which we are very comfortable standing outside of and looking at, to work in installation is to work in relation to a particular place and all of the confluences and complexities of whatever it is that creates that (space). And so, as a viewer, to come in, it’s the experience the minute you cross the threshold: it’s the smells, it’s the sounds, it’s the temperature, it’s how all of those things have everything to do with the felt quality of ultimately what the thing becomes. I started in weaving, in textiles. I think that my first hand is still a textile hand in some ways, but I was very dissatisfied with the flatness that things actually had when they were done. It seemed like they were dead in some ways. And working, for me, in the form of installation in the way that I have, it’s that you’re coming in and you’re in some instances animating the space, and the process is often very social; for me, that part of it is very satisfying. There’s a way that it (the installation) has an ongoing life as it meets the public. Every moment that it’s up it’s different. It’s different from moment to moment, and somehow it’s that live time that’s just a factor of the form really, or something that is characteristic or inherent in the form is something that makes it continually interesting for me. It’s like there’s no real repetition in that time. Every day you’ll come in and every day it may be the same, seemingly, but within that there’s a difference and it’s only…I don’t know, I guess it allows that to be experienced and to be felt and registered.
(click on image to see a larger version)
ART:21: And there’s also the way in which installations are impermanent, being specific to a particular place and time.
HAMILTON: Well, certainly. It’s almost like the attitude about this space is not necessarily to alter it or deny it or erase it in any way, but to make present something that’s always here, make it more experienceable, perhaps. And part of that is its live time, and so the duration of that time means that it’s ephemeral in this form here. I don’t think it means that it can’t be reinstalled or have another iteration, but that will always be different. The experience of it will be different because of all the factors that actually give this the atmosphere that it has; it won’t be there in another situation or context. I suppose it is that live quality that is the thing that keeps it animate for me. You know, it’s that it’s never quite fixed, and so I don’t really think that it’s ultimately ephemeral. I mean, I feel like the video could be installed in a lot of different ways, and could take on different layers of meaning depending on whatever context it goes into. But it will only be like this once.
Artist Website here: www.annhamiltonstudios.com
The American flea market is the star of this quirky documentary from filmmaker Rick Sebak, who journeys across the country to various noteworthy markets and interviews fellow bargain hunters along the way. The stops include Seattle’s Fremont Market, vintage clothing shops in New York City, Texas’s First Monday Trade Days and the staggering Highway 127 Sale, which stretches across four states for a record-breaking 450 miles. (Netflix Description)
Image Credit: © Wenda Gu, ink alchemy
sherman galleries, sydney, australia, 2001
a site-specific installation
9 boxes of liquid hair ink, 9 boxes of hair ink sticks, 18 six inches flat tv monitors, hair braid and electronic cables, video document: making ink alchemy.
1999 – 2001, shanghai cao su gong ink factory, shanghai, china.
powdered chinese hair made into the biological liquid ink and ink stick format are the new materials for chinese ink painting. the hair-made genetic ink itself is an art object, and at the same time, it is a component of my new installation. this special invention has been possible by the collaborative effort and generous support of the bio-lab of shanghai university, the shanghai test tubing factory, the shanghai qunzhong furniture factory, the shanghai medical factory and the shanghai ink factory. through difficult process of experimentation, we have achieved a significant result in the historical development of chinese traditional ink-making methods.
the definition of “black silk” represents chinese hair itself, “rain” refers to the ink drop. traditionally, the shanghai medical factory produces hair powder for medicinal purposes. powdered human hair is used as a medical treatment for anxiety. in traditional ink fabrication, charcoal powder is used as the black pigment material. the medical factory has invented a hair powder especially formulated to be the fundamental pigment for my liquid ink and ink stick following the original chinese prescription of powdered human hair, ironically and symbolically, the human hair-made ink is now given a conceptual function to cure cultural anxiety.
#1, black silk rain (liquid ink)
because of it is biological properties, and link to the concept of our biological century, this new chinese ink is bottled in a standard biological laboratory container made of clear glass, resting in a gracefully designed jichi wood box. the ink glass bottle and jichi wood box are engraved with the words “black silk rain” both in chinese and english. the package traditionally displays the ink as a revered, chinese national treasure.
#2, black silk rain (ink sticks)
the human biological ink sticks are traditionally formulated and each made by hand. the ink stick shape is made to my custom specifications and includes the name carved into the surface and highlighted in gold. they are beautifully displayed in a jichi wood box with the three word title engraved on the lid: “black silk rain” .
Lecture: Thursday, March 26
RCVA #2008, 5:30 PM
Don Harvey
This year’s juror is the artist Don Harvey. Harvey has lived and worked in Cleveland Ohio for the last 25 years, where he has produced gallery works in various media, from industrial materials to digital images. He is also well known for his public art commissions and work with Cleveland’s Committee for Public Art agency, an organization he co-founded in the early 1980’s.
Harvey has had numerous one person and group exhibitions, including a recent exhibition at William Busta Gallery in Cleveland, and Don Harvey, Invented Landscapes at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. Group shows include Artists and the Art of the Book and One of a Kind Artists Books, both shows that traveled throughout the United States and South America. Harvey taught at the Meyers School of Art, the University of Akron from 1973-2000, and is now a Visiting Professor of Art at Oberlin College, in Ohio.
Albertine Monroe Brown Gallery
April 2-16, 2009
Image Credit: © Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1924-37
Schwitters is very well known for his monumental Merzbau, a structure which was his own house. And so Kurt Schwitters picked refuse up off the ground and attempted to build a place in which he could live. Is this not the very task that faces modern society the vitality of which depends upon urban infrastructure and city planning?
“[E]verything had broken down in any case and new things had to be made out of the fragments: and this is Merz. It was like an image of the revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.”
–Kurt Schwitters
Filed under: Announcement
Informational Meeting – March 25, 2009 @ 5 pm
Photography BFA Program
ENTRANCE INTERVIEWS
April 10, 2009
Deadlines: (no late applications will be accepted)
Do before one week before interview:
1. ***Submit to Art Advising, 2 BFA Application Support Letters from Western Faculty (1 must be photo area faculty) who would be willing to serve on your committee.
2. ***Submit to Art Advising, a BFA Application.
3. Sign up for your interview time (sign up sheet will be located in the photography facility, outside equipment check).
4. Submit two enveloped packets (to Bill Davis, Ginger Owen and Adriane Little) with a current resume’ (please list art exhibits that you have been involved in, if applicable), artist statement (description of work), and a personal statement of reasons why you would like to become a BFA student, goals you plan on accomplishing as a BFA student and your future goals after degree is awarded.
***Application forms can be found on WMU website under “Advising” page.
http://cfa.wmich.edu/art/advising/forms/index.php
Requirements for April 10 – Interview
1. Must have taken 1 Basic Photography course, college level at WMU or equivalent as a transfer student.
2. Present a portfolio of 10-15 works of art. Choose work that best represents your craft and personal vision.
3. Come to your interview 10 minutes early. Be prepared, your interview will last no longer than slotted time (20 minutes). A list of interview questions will be available.
Image Credit: © Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String, 1942, New York
In 1942, Andre Breton organised a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art in New York: First Papers of Surrealism. For the vernissage Marcel Duchamp created this installation – a gigantic web – called the Mile of String. He and Breton furthermore arranged for a number of children to ball in the room thereby making it very difficult for the guests to see the paintings.
Inspired by Chris Marker’s acclaimed short film La Jetée (which is included on the DVD Short 2: Dreams), 12 Monkeys combines intricate, intelligent storytelling with the uniquely imaginative vision of director Terry Gilliam. The story opens in the wintry wasteland of the year 2035, where a virulent plague has forced humans to live in a squalid, oppressively regimented underground. Bruce Willis plays a societal outcast who is given the opportunity to erase his criminal record by “volunteering” to time-travel into the past to obtain a pure sample of the deadly virus that will help future scientists to develop a cure. But in bouncing from 1918 to the early and mid-1990s, he undergoes an ordeal that forces him to question his own perceptions of reality. Caught between the dangers of the past and the devastation of the future, he encounters a psychiatrist (Madeleine Stowe) who is initially convinced he’s insane, and a wacky mental patient (Brad Pitt in a twitchy Oscar-nominated role) with links to a radical group that may have unleashed the deadly virus. Equal parts mystery, tragedy, psychological thriller, and apocalyptic drama, 12 Monkeys ranks as one of the best science fiction films of the ’90s, boosted by Gilliam’s visual ingenuity and one of the finest performances of Willis’s career. –Jeff Shannon (Amazon.com). Terry Gilliam directs.
Filed under: Visiting Lectures
Color as Perception: Space, Light and Intuition
Visiting Artist Christine Carr
Monday, March 23rd.
3:30-4:30 pm
RCVA Room #1004 (FIRST FLOOR)
Visiting Artist Christine Carr will be here to speak about Color and her photo work with it.
Hailing from Portsmouth, Virginia, Christine Carr received degrees from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and the Tyler School of Art. Her work has been included in the 4th edition of Exploring Color Photography and in the 3rd edition of Photographic Possibilities, both by Robert Hirsch. She is two-time recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and has recently lectured on contemporary landscape photography at the Taubman Museum of Art. She has exhibited in solo shows in Washington, DC, Richmond, VA and Roanoke, VA, and in numerous group shows. Carr is currently teaching photography at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.
Essential Chair
Atrium Gallery, Richmond Center
Frostic Video and Sound Art Series
more information and complete schedule: wmuvideo.wordpress.com
leave any comments on the video Blog, not here, please and thank you
Filed under: Announcement
Call for Entries
2009 WMU Annual Frostic School of Art Student Exhibition
April 2-16
Albertine Monroe-Brown Gallery
Richmond Center for Visual Arts
The submission dates for the annual student show are Tuesday, March 24 from 10 to 6 p.m. and Wednesday, March 25 from 10 to 6 p.m.
Submission guidelines can be pick up at the front desk of the Albertine Monroe-Brown Gallery during regular gallery hours: 10 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday.
