VISA 2061 WINTER 2011 Week 8
Performance, using the self and photography! 3. “Optics”! The camera is an apparatus equipped with a lens. Light enters the lens to be become registered into pictorial information. The camera lens is the tool that negotiates relationships between your apparatus and the world. The camera lens is the crucial piece of glass that defines how light enters the camera. A wide-angle lens translates a wide perspective. A normal lens matches normal vision. A telephoto lens is equivalent to looking through binoculars. Using a wide, normal and long lens setting- interpret what the camera sees by photographing through one or more glass containers filled with water. If you don’t have zoom capacity on your lens, create 3 photographs that use cropping to create a wide, normal and longs lens effect. !
Landscape must be part of the final image!
3 5x7 photographs! 4. “Experiments, inventions and sequences in time.”! Photographs talk about time. A photograph can document an event occurring over time through multiple frames or by simply depicting change. Document an experiment where something changes. Create either a before and after pair of photographs or capture the experience of change or the experiment itself.!
3 5x7” photographs or 2 8x10 photographs! Bruce Nauman (b1941-) Self Portrait as a Fountain, 1966- rephotographed 1970! The Way Things Go !
Peter Fischli, David Weiss Swiss artist duo collaborating since 1979. ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrRC3pfLnE! Why use the word experiment!
-to identify a sense of not knowing! -to encourage process- to begin and allow something to happen!
It could be a structured planned experiment ! Or a fairly loose one!
Photographs talk about time! Why is this idea important?!
Imagine a photograph that references time- describe it!
What is your relationship as a photographer to time, process?!
What is your relationship as a photographer using yourself as subject? What appeals about using the self?! Katherine Knight, from series aerostat, 2000! What is my relationship as a photographer to time, process?!
Katherine Knight, from series bubble, 1998-2002! Duane Michals, American 1932-!
“The keyword is having something to express,” says Duane Michals. “When you look at my photographs you are looking into my mind.”!
Self taught using photo experimentation with double exposure, sandwiching negatives, blurring, using long exposures and whatever manipulation he needs to enhance his ideas.! Duane Michals, The Illuminated Man!
“I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, doing some work and went to visit my old house in McKeesport,” he says. “The house was abandoned for 10 years and the garden was overgrown. I went into the room where I was born 70 years ago. It was moving and upsetting. !
‘The House I Once Called Home’ became my latest project and since most of the principles in my family are dead I wrote things about my mother and father and our relationship.!
Photographers love these old beat-up houses but rarely do they know who lived there. I did. I photographed the rooms and the overgrown yard and then double exposed pictures I had taken in these same rooms 30 years ago with my family there.” ! ‘The House I Once Called Home’ ! http://www.photoeye.com/BookteaseLight/bookteaselight.cfm?catalog=FL044&image=1! Duane Michals Self Portrait! Duane Michals, The Spirit leaves the body! Duane Michals!
Things are queer, 1973! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zFI_j3E2nk! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ3SbheUuwk&feature=fvwrel! There is also a specialized form of fine art in which the artist performs his or her work live to an audience. This is called Performance Art.!
Wikipedia - "Performance art is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body and a relationship between performer and audience. It is opposed to painting or sculpture, for example, where an object constitutes the work.”! Chris Burden 1974 ! Trans-fixed where he was nailed to the back of a Volkswagen! Marina Abramovi": Live at MoMA ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GD5PBK_Bto&feature=related!
Marina Abramovic. How we kill rats in the Balkans! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE5H8k8VE2M&feature=related! Perform! Performance!
By saying something we do something! What is performative mean! Performative utterances are those speech acts which perform the action the sentence describes. They are not true or false. They perform the action. ! Examples:!
"I now pronounce you man and wife."! "I sentence you to death."! "I promise to be there."! "I apologize."! “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth”! “I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee”! “I do”! Zhang Huan ! b 1965 Chinese artist based in Shanghai and New York.!
Huan first became known in the early 90s for his endurance performance works—like sitting in a latrine covered in honey and fish oil to attract flies and insects —he soon branched out into coordinating thoughtful yet uncanny group performances like 1997’s To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond.! Zhang Huan To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond 1997 Performance still!
See:! http://www.canadianart.ca/online/see-it/2008/07/10/zhang-huan/!
Following a late-90s move to New York City, Huan’s practice melded into performing for the camera in works like Family Tree, which involves Huan’s face being coated with increasing amounts of calligraphy until it is completely black with ink. !
At that time, the artist also started to explore in art the collisions of culture and place that he was experiencing in life; performances like My Rome, My New York and My Boston showed Huan bringing Buddhist sensibilities to Western capitals.!
Now, resituated back in Beijing, Huan focuses more on sculptures made from antique wooden doors and from burnt incense ash from local temples.! Zhang Huan Family Tree 2000 ! Performance still ! Collection of Larry Warsh / photo courtesy of the artist!
Using the self in photography!
Available! Ethical- you can speak from a position of expertise!
Tripod, time release! Triggering light! Or using time through long exposure! 1840 Hippolte Bayrad portrayed himself as a Drowned Man. !
The photograph was his personal response to not being accorded the respect given to Daguerre by the art establishment. Seen as one of the first self portraits and an example of obsessive self dramatization. ! Hippolte Bayrad!
Self Portrait as a Drowned Man!
1840!
Francesca Woodman, Swan Song, 1978 ! Francesca Woodman, 1978 !
Zhang Huan, Homeland, 2001!
Performance in his native Shandong province, where farmers have abandoned the land to go to the cities in search of work. ! Hew Locke, Tyger, 2007 (1959-) ! Guyanese/British!
Webcast interview:! http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/ 22448950001! Anas Al-shaikh, ! Memory Of Memories 1, 2001!
Memory and exile are the themes of Anas Al-Shaikh’s self-portraits. His childhood in Saudi Arabia is a constant motif, remembered in family portraits that are then overlaid with other symbols, both real and imagined. ! Anas Al-shaikh, Memory Of Memories 6, 2001! Tracey Rose, Ciao Bella, Ms Cast, Venus Baartman, 2001! Tracey Rose (south african) adopts the role of Saartjie Baartman, the famous Hottentot Venus, who was exhibited – and ridiculed – in Paris and London as a scientific curiosity in the early 19th century. !
Rose uses herself as her main subject, her work comments on colonialism and racism in western art.! Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison! http://www.parkeharrison.com/slides-counterpoint/index.html! Florian Maier-Aichen! http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/florian-maier-aichen/!