Video Art

My video is not uploading again, but it did on YouTube.  Here is the link :) I based my video around the notion that Technology is taking over our lives.  Please enjoy :)

Pipilotti Rist

        Wow this girl is crazy.  She certainly proves that you can never go above and beyond in a movie.  Her video installations introduce so much color, image, music and of course, technology.  After watching her video art piece, I was eager to figure out her deal.  Her 11 minutes video piece, is combined with these flickering colors and completely random images.  Many of the images feature a woman falling.  The distortion of the images and colors are amazing.  The images become more random as the clip goes on, such as stop lights, dancing and a woman carrying a flower.  Throughout the art piece it looks as if it is all being projected from the TV which I thought was very cool.  Towards the end, there are clips of a woman stuggling and drowning.  
       I could even feel such a strong sense of her, while I was interacting on her website.  Another video of her we watched in class was called, "I'm not the girl that misses much." The girls voice speaking is extremely distorted into a very high pitched voice.  She is dancing with her breasts exposed, the pitch changes along with the screen color and the song by the Beatles, "Happiness is a Warm Gun," is incorporated with the video which I found fascinating.  And yes, I do love The Beatles.  The effects and transitions she uses are truly incredible.  

I'm not the Girl who Misses Much (1986)

          She believes in encouraging the mind and energy.  Rist uses art to try to destroy certain clichés.  Pippilotti Rist wants her audience members to forget about prejudices and free their minds.  Her happy images can also prove quite sexual.  More recently, (last year) in the Modern Museum of Art she had an exhibit with a 7354 Cubic Meters video projection, called Put Your Body Out.  

Pierre Schaeffer

          Pierre Schaeffer invented an electronic, stereophonic sound, called concrete music.  His interest in music, evolved with his occupation as a broadcaster with the ability to practice with sound. He spent much of his time at Radiodiffusion Francaise experimenting with mulitple different sounds, one normally would not label as music.  He played with the speed of sounds and integrated them together.  The sounds were also mixed with natural recordings, he had done himself.

             In 1948, radio stations equipment was limited to shellac record players, mixing desks, mechanical reverberation and microphones.  With the combination of these appliances musicians such as Schaeffer, could loop, extract, and filter songs.  Three years later he created a Researching Group for Concrete Music that attracted many composers, who would later become famous for their work.  His creation of the phonogene was on of the first machines to transform sound.  Concrete music is still being practiced. Here is a link I found online of a super strange one.  Today he serves as one of the most influential musicians of our time.

Jim Campbell & Engineering Interactive Art

       In 1956, a new type of interactive, video installation artist was born.  Jim Campbell, was going to introduce a new type of art that integrated his scientific background to create amazing electronic installations.  One of his pieces I found extraordinary was called, Hallucination.  It allowed viewers of his video art to experiment with their bodies.  When someone looked at the screen, his or her body could go on fire.  He also introduces a sneaky other person in the screen so the audience member is under the illusion someone else is in the room.
           Another work he created was called, Library he combined photos with different resolutions and edited each of them, removing certain aspects of a picture.  The photos moved with time, so the image was constantly changing.  
Campbell pushed interactive act to a new level, he did not want people to just push a button but he wanted his viewers to explore his work more intuitively.  A lot of his work focuses on layering images, like in his more recent piece Simultaneous Perspective, he captures the live environment of a bathroom,  and other various locations combined with previous architectonic images.  He uses time and mixes the past and present.  Currently, Campbell resides in California and is working with HDTV products.  

Leigh Bowery

       Leigh Bowery has made a tremendous impact for performing artists today.  He was born in a conservative home with a mother who loved fashion.  He left his native Australian town and moved to London to pursue his fashion designing career.  When all failed, he did start to earn a reputation for his outrageous outfits.  In 1982 he started to promote for a club while dressed up in his intricate designs.  His work was featured in numerous collections during London's fashion week too.  
          He was extremely self absorbed like Andy Wardhol and he looked up to him as a role model.  Bowery, later started the club Taboo, where not only did he run but he also performed at. His club was an escape for homosexuals who wanted to have fun without being judged.  He was widely flamboyant and often dressed up in clothes that emphasized his larger size. His fashion career sky rocketed in 1988 during a show in Dering Street Gallery that lasted a week.  Artists were extremely interested in his unique techniques.  He really captivated the street and it served as a major influence during the show.  He even played self recordings of traffic noises.  

            Leigh Bowery did not have the best financial means, and this hurt him in the end because he sold himself as a product and not enough of what he created.  He was casted in the group Minty, one of their performances called "Childbirth" had Bowery stage a naked woman to come out of his "vagina."  He was an extremely passionate performer and rehearsed religiously. 

           Bowery can be seen as an influence on Lady Gaga, because of her remarkable fashion and numerous outfit changes during her music videos.  In her music video "Paparazzi" she changed 10 times.  Some of her leather jumpsuits and high shoes also resemble what Leigh Bowery wore.  Leigh Bowery died from AIDS in 1994, while only telling a couple of people of his disease.  
        

Laurie Anderson

          After watching a performance by Laurie Anderson in class called "O Superman," (which reached number 2 on UKs billboard charts) I could tell she was not the typical MTV performer.  She completely questioned the traditional performance.  She has even invented objects for her productions, including a tape bow violin talking stick.  I recently watched a video called "Lost Art of Conversation" on her website, it was extremely interesting  because conversation is not what it used to be, especially with the rise of technology people cannot even communicate without their cell phones or computers!

        
           She grew up in a small town in Illinois called Glen Ellyn, and graduated from Columbia University with a MFA in sculpture.  In the 1970s while she was illustrating children's books, she also started to perform in New York. One of her earlier, more notorious performances involved her playing the violin ice skating on a frozen block of ice.  She has recorded 7 albums and this year released her new album Homeland.  

                  In the early 1990s she also created multiple different public service announcements,  that ranged from national debt to lunch menus   In her lunch menu public service announcement she says in the beginning she does not watch television and then talks about how lunch menus came on t.v. for high schools at 6am.  She talks about the music that went along with the menu, and then ends it by saying it "this is television at its best."  I interpreted it as totally poking fun at television and loved it.  I really like her personality in all of the clips I watched from her.
         Her most recent album was produced by her and husband Lou Reed, rock musician from Velvet Underground.  She used her voice filter invention in her new songs.  The songs touch up on issues such as foreign policy, torture, the economy, religion and more controversial topics.  The musically talented couple will be curating a month of programming at "The Stone" in February.  The Stone is a non-profit space dedicated to performance and experimental music.

Weekly Roundup

Hey, I found this really cool link where people are playing the piano while being in their piano.  I know it sounds crazy but check it out on Weekly Roundup.  Laurie Anderson is helping to promote this in Chicago sometime soon!

Joseph Beuys

         Joseph Beuys was not always an artist.  In 1921 he was born in a small northwestern, German city called Krefleld.  He was interested in medicine, but ended up volunteering for the military where he worked with piloting and aircrafts.  Beuys was seriously wounded many times and even survived a major crash.  At the end of the war, he was held as a prisoner in a British interment camp.


     When he returned he pursued his interest in medicine, and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. When he graduated in 1952, he spent most of his time drawing and reading.  He was offered to become a professor at Düsseldorf.  While he was teaching, he grew intrigued by the work of Nam June Paik and the fluxus movement.  His work was also heavily influenced from the images he collected from war time.  

         His first exhibit was in 1965 called, "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare."  It featured a man with his face covered in honey and gold coloring.  He explained his drawings on the walls to the dead hare he held.  Beuys also experimented with sculpting and installations. 
        He believed art to be a healthy way.  Joseph Beuys took risks and wanted his art to provoke people.  He did not want to create something beautiful, he wanted his audience members to question his work. As an art theorist Beuys also believed in conserving the environment.  He planted 7,000 trees in Kassel, Germany.  Unfortunately, he died in 1986 but his risks have transformed what we consider art today.  

Performance Art

                    My video does not want to upload at all!  Check out this link from my facebook, to see the video since it wants to only upload on there?  I passed out in front of starbucks, and within the first 10 seconds someone wanted to call the cops and thought I was in a drunken stupor from the night before.  I tried so hard not to laugh!! No one really helped me though, everyone just kind of stared and laughed or seemed very confused.  I tried to look prego too, as I stuffed a balloon up my dress.  I also put a wine bottle and a pack of cigarettes next to me.

Is Fluxus the new Dada?

    Marcel Duchamp's notion of readymade influenced the fluxus movement immensely.  Artists started to use themselves as art and interact with resources that were already available.  The Fluxus movement emerged right after the Dada movement in the 1960s.   It was an international avant garde style, which artists wanted to connect everyday life items to art.  They achieved this through film, music, collages and writing.  The earliest Fluxus movements occurred in New York at the AG Gallery in 1961 by George Maciunas.   Important performers that erupted out of this movement are also street performer Yoko Ono.  Fun Fact-she was married to John Lennon!
 
         I watched a video of her on youtube which was called her "cut piece" performance art.  It seems like many of her performances were very interactive with her audience.  In her piece she had each viewer cut a piece of her clothing off.

            Street art started to become more and more familiar, and live art was the latest trend.  Artists started to question what exactly art is.   Flux musicians such as John Cage, believed connect theater to media.  "Happenings" was a new term that evolved out of this period,  they were long performances that were meant to make the audience interact with the artist performing.  Artists started to eliminate the screen between them and their audience.