Readings for Week 6

Here is what you need to do before class on Monday:

Read pages 133-173 in the Fusco book; read "Presence" in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation by Amelia Jones (follow the link to JSTOR); make at least two thoughtful comments on the upcoming "assignment post" regarding the readings; post four links to your del.icio.us page; prepare your Social Intervention projects for presentation and critique (with revised proposal). Responses to your proposals are on their way via email.

(Assignment Post) Readings Week 5

Please post at least two thoughtful comments on the readings for this week: pages 225-265 in the Coco Fusco book and pages 13-22 in the Interventionists book.

Here are some considerations:

-How is a figure like Alejandro Jodorowsky especially pertinent to current students of art, and more particularly to students like you in programs like VaPA?

-Respond to Bustamante's contention that the group movement in Mexico ended with the 1983 MAM exhibition. What other "institutionalizations" are you aware of and what effect do you think such recognition or inclusion has on artists and art forms/trends that were previously uncannonized?

-Link or trace the use of the term "tactics," especially in the Thompson essay and the Chavoya essay. How does this term function and how is this useful in your efforts to construct an intervention proposal?

-Respond to the direct dealing with situation, concept, space, community, and issue in Asco's work. Does this account of some of their projects help you in concieving your own piece? (What direct issues are you involved in/aware of and do they seem like subjects for art work to you?)

Readings for Week 5

Here is what you need to do before class on Monday:

Read pages 225-265 in the Fusco book; read pages 13-22 in the Interventionists book (follow this link (3.8 MB)); make at least two thoughtful comments on the upcoming "assignment post" regarding the readings; post four links to your del.icio.us page; write a working proposal for your Social Intervention project (at least one page but not more than two pages).

Here are also some links to intervention projects from inSite 05:
Paul Ramírez-Jonas
Måns Wrange and here
Judi Werthein
João Louro

Because of copyright issues, the link to the Interventionists reading will only be active for about a week, so get it while it's good!

Recommended and Required Events Listing

Here is a listing of some recommended and required events for you to put on your calendar:

•Marina Zurkow: "Nicking the Never"
Gaylord Hall, Colorado College, 902 N. Cascade Ave.
Public Lecture, Feb. 20, 7:00pm
RECOMMENDED

•Marina Zurkow: "Nicking the Never"
Coburn Gallery, Colorado College, 902 N. Cascade Ave.
Gallery Reception, Feb. 22, 4:30pm
RECOMMENDED

•Theory Lecture: Notes on Postmodernism
Feb. 22, 6 pm
The Lab at Belmar, 404 S. Upham St. Lakewood, CO 80226
RECOMMENDED
For other great (recommended) Belmar events, see their website.

•Gallery Talk: "The Way We Live Now" with Mark Addison
Feb. 23, 6:00pm
Gallery of Contemporary Art, UCCS
RECOMMENDED

•Jospehine Lobato: Miracles and Memories
Opening Reception and Artist Talk
March 1, 5:00 - 8:00pm
UCCS University Center, Lower Level
RECOMMENDED

•Grandpa's Still in the Tuff Shed
Film Night and Lecture with Suzanne Macaulay (in preparation for Frozen Dead Guy Days)
Friday, March 2, 7:00pm
REQUIRED

•CU Boulder Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Tania Bruguera
Tuesday, March 6
Location and time still to be determined: see website for updates
REQUIRED or Hip Hop to Hardcore

•Rock Your Mind Lecture and Performance Series
Hip Hop to Hardcore: Miles White and the Flobots
March 10, 6:30 - 9pm
The Lab at Belmar, 404 S. Upham St. Lakewood, CO 80226
REQUIRED or Tania Bruguera

•Denver Art Musuem Logan Lectures 2007: Artists on Art: From Any Angle
100 W. 14th Ave. Pkwy, Denver, CO 80204
Betty Woodman, March 15, 6:30 pm
RECOMMENDED

•Julia M. Becker: Savoring the Sacred in a Secular World
Gaylord Hall, Colorado College, 902 N. Cascade Ave.
Artist Lecture, March 29, 4:30pm
RECOMMENDED

•Rock Your Mind Lecture and Performance Series
The Evolution of Glam Rock: King of the Highway, Queen of the Hop: Philip Auslander and the Swayback
April 14, 6:30 - 9pm
The Lab at Belmar, 404 S. Upham St. Lakewood, CO 80226
RECOMMENDED and EXTRA CREDIT AVAILABLE

•Lian Amaris Sifuentes, Corpus Projecti: An Interactive Performance Installation for an Audience of One
Coburn Gallery, Colorado College, 902 N. Cascade Ave.
Monday, April 16 and Tuesday, April 17, 6:00 - 10:00pm
REQUIRED

•Fang Lijun: Heads
Opening Reception
April 18, 6 pm
The Lab at Belmar, 404 S. Upham St. Lakewood, CO 80226
RECOMMENDED

•Denver Art Musuem Logan Lectures 2007: Artists on Art: From Any Angle
100 W. 14th Ave. Pkwy, Denver, CO 80204
Fang Lijun, April 19, 6:30 pm
RECOMMENDED

Gilbert and George and "The Laws of Sculptors"

“Art for all” is the belief that underpins Gilbert & George’s art. Their trademark format is the large grid, a square or rectangular picture broken into sections that becomes a unified field of signs and images. Gilbert & George began working together in 1967 when they met at St Martins School of Art, and from the beginning, in their films and ‘living sculpture’ they appeared as figures in their own work. Gilbert & George believe that everything is potential subject matter for their work, and they have always addressed social issues, taboos and artistic conventions. Implicit in their work is the idea that an artist’s sacrifice and personal investment is a necessary condition of art. They have depicted themselves as naked figures in their own work, recasting the male nude as something vulnerable and fragile rather than as a potent figure of strength. Of their most recent show at White Cube, ‘SONOFAGOD PICTURES’ (2006), Michael Bracewell wrote, “lustrous, ornate, pictorially complex, vividly coloured, yet suffused with tenebrous solemnity, they have all of the dramatic visual impact which one might expect to find in neo-Gothic medievalism – in Victorian reclamations of Celtic or Moorish symbolism, for example, regally bejewelled and portentous with romantic mysticism. At the same time, however, the SONOFAGOD PICTURES possess a darkly graven strangeness, at once archaic and ultra-modern, in which their temper no less than their signage appears deeply contemporary, ritualistic and disturbed.”Gilbert was born in the Dolomites, Italy in 1943; George was born in Devon in 1942 and both live and work in London. Together they have participated in many important group and solo exhibitions including The Venice Biennale (2005), Turner Prize (1984) and Carnegie International (1985). They have had extensive solo exhibitions, including, Whitechapel Art Gallery (1971-1972), National Gallery, Beijing (1993), Shanghai Art Museum (1993), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995-1996), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998), Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2002) and Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2004-2005).

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic, from Yogoslavia, performed a series of works based on ideas of ritual, bodily pain, and the state of conciousness of the performer. In a work titled "Rhythm 10" she used knives to ritually stab her fingers, in "Rhythm 5" she ultimately passed out from lack of oxygen beneath a flaming star, in "Rhythm 2" she ingested various drugs that altered her body mechanics and mental states, and in "Rhythm 0" she had audience members inflict pain, with various instruments, upon her for six hours. She felt that during the high energy of a performance her body could withstand things it normally could not. In "Rhythm 0", Abramovic explored the relationship between an audience member and the performer, a strongly reoccuring theme in performance art, by giving the audience a choice to inflict harm against her without consequence. From all the performances we have studied with the theme of audience/performer boundries, I think this piece is the most powerful. Since Abramovic, considered the "performer", is completely passive to any act by the "audience", the roles of each are reversed. And when the action is that of real violence, the performance by the "audience" is heighted, made more real, in the present.

Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci came to performance art through poetry. This interesting transition was made because of a need he felt to trancend the written word on the page. Acconci felt that it was simply not enough to read his work, because his audience would be unable to know him. His most notable works, then, became both poetic, and liberating through performance. His work empowered him, as in his "Seedbed" peice, where he masturbated beneith the ramp of a museum in New York as guests walkd over head. He relincuished all power and made himself voulnerable when he performed his "Telling Secrets" Peice, in shich he met with a small audience between 1 and 2 am on a winter morning in a small dark shed and whispered his most intamate secrets to them.
To me, his most compelling peice whas his "Following Piece" in which he followed compleate strangers through public places, and mimiced their actions. His followings could last for minutes or hours depending on where his target went. Acconci would follow his target untill he or she entered what he considered to be a private space such as a home or automobile. The people he followed retained their ananemity, often only apearing to him from the back and never having a distingushable face. I can only imagine the sort of introspective details this would reveal to a person throguth conflicting manerisms.
Acconci did several of these private peices that were documented by a photographer. The subjects eing followed were never aware of Acconci's presence, so their interaction was genuine, though the target was oblivious.

Dennis Oppenheim

Dennis Oppenheim originally began his artwork through exploration of body art as a sculpture. In 1970, Oppenheim did a peice called, "parallel stress" where he suspended his body by the fingertips and toes between two walls. These walls were two broken down concrete casts on a pier between the bridges (Brooklyn and Manhattan) in New York. He stayed there suspended for ten minutes. He did the same position on his stomach in between two gravel hills with an empty pit below him for one hour. His body's arc was parallel which he documented with photos. His main focus was his Landy and Body Art. He has a serries of performance art surrounding the same ideas projecting his rebellion against the resilliance to physical stress and potential harm to body for exhibition. What he was exhibiting in these performance art peices spoke to the changes in his body that would occur by manipulating his spatial relationship in a structured world.

The reading on Anderson, Heyward and Piper also made me feel that my performing the self piece wasn't as bad as I orginally thought. These artists were using what they knew to interpret their art. They used what they already knew and combined it with other things to create their performances. The audience was able to better understand their meaning for it. The reason I chose such a straightforward approach to my performing the self piece was because I didn't want the meaning to be completely lost.

My assignment post for the Goldberg reading were the artists: Laurie Anderson, Julia Heyward and Adrian Piper. Each of these performance artists used material from their own lives for their pieces and these types of pieces were called "autobiographical." Using their past as fuel for their performance allowed them to connect with the audience in a different way than other types of performance art. The fact that it's the artist using their own past as symbols in their performance makes the performance seem less removed than other forms of performance art or any kind of art.

Readings Week 4 (assignment post)

Please post at least two thoughtful comments on the readings for this week: Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century by Martha Wilson and section one in the library reserve binder, chapter 5 in Performance: A Critical Introduction by Marvin Carlson. (Pages 152-226 in the Goldberg book are addressed in your individual entry posts.)

Here are some considerations:
•After the descriptions of performance art as a genre in these two readings (and almost one month in class), locate/delineate your understanding of the nature of performance art.

•How do the discussions in these readings of some of the artists you are already familiar with from class videos, discussions, and prior readings clarify, expand, or change your understanding of these artists' works?

•For those of you with a background in theatre, respond to references to theatre as the antecedent and discussions of theatre's relationship to performance art.

Readings for this week

Here are the readings for this week:

•Pages 152-226 in Goldberg;
•Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century by Martha Wilson (follow this link);
•Section one in library reserve binder by Marvin Carlson.

Remember that you are required to post 4 links on your del.icio.us page, 2 comments per “assignment post (forthcoming),” and compose and post an entry on the blog (topics received via email). Thoughtful comments posted to peers’ entries may be eligible for extra credit.

Last Call

Anyone wanting to make up missed assignments from the first few weeks of class has until the start of class today (Monday) to do so for partial credit. This includes del.icio.us links posted to your site (4 per week--now you should have 12), comments on any blog "assignment posts" (2 per post), Flickr pictures uploaded to your site from the Beuys project, as well as 1 or 2 comments on the Carlos Basualdo post if you went to his lecture and are interested in the extra credit opportunity.

After today, anything not turned in or posted on the internet by class time on the due date will not be eligible for full credit but will be eligible for partial credit for one week following the due date. Please talk to me if you have extenuating circumstances; I am happy to work with you to help your grade if it is something that is important to you.

I am looking forward to all of the performances this afternoon!

Critique Guidelines

Here are the guidelines for critiques that we will be using in this class starting on Monday. We will discuss the method at the beginning of class before we start your performances, but you can read over them now to get a preview:

There are a few key steps in critiquing artwork. These steps can apply to other specialties and fields, but we will only discuss them in terms of visual art.

1. Description: The description of the object(s) is a matter-of-fact listing of what you are actually looking at. What is it? If you are looking at the Mona Lisa, you may say that it is an oil painting on wood, approximately 30” x 20”, hung at such-and-such a height, the paint is applied in a delicate manner to depict a seated woman before a pastoral landscape. Other details may come out about the painted background and the way her hands are situated, but there is to be no interpretation or evaluation during the description process. Only hard facts about the physicality of the object are to be discussed – not history, context, or intent. It may seem redundant to describe work that everyone is standing before, but different people notice different things and it is helpful to point out those details. Describing the object(s) also sets the groundwork for the rest of the discussion as the following steps depend upon what is pointed out in the description phase.
   
   
2. Interpretation: Now you may take what was discussed in the description phase and talk about how those factors come together and what it means. Do not discuss artist’s intention during interpretation, however you may bring in historical and environmental context.
   
   
3. Evaluation: At this point you should be able to articulately evaluate the work based upon how well the work operates between what it is and what it is doing/trying to do. This should be the culmination and combination of the description and interpretation to result in well-stated judgments and opinion. If a work seems to be attempting humor, but the materials take themselves to seriously, you may raise that point. A work may succeed because what it is and how it operates are in accord. The artist’s intentions should still be left out of this phase. As a matter of fact, the artist’s intentions should almost always be left out of critiques. Artists rarely know what they are talking about in relation to their work.

Readings Week 3 (assignment post)

Please post at least two thoughtful comments on the readings for this week: pages 97-151 in the Goldberg book.

Here are some considerations:
-Suggest a theoretical happening based on the tenants of the Bauhaus (descriptions of Bauhaus festivities and Schlemmer's conceptual assertions might be a starting point.)

-What concerns of the period influenced the aesthetic investigations of the Bauhaus (re: interest in technology, etc.) and what parallel concerns of contemporary life might likewise influence your aesthetics?

-How do accounts of and artists statements regarding some of the early happenings in the 1950s-early 1960s fit in to class discussion regarding the need or lack of need for artist intent and responsibility? (ex., Alan Kaprow's statement regarding 18 Happenings in 6 Parts: "the actions will mean nothing clearly formulable so far as the artist is concerned.")

-Discuss and react to the social implications of the work of Klein, Manzoni, and Beuys; or defend the assertion that Joseph Beuys is the best artist ever.

Performer/Audience/Mirror (assignment post)

In class we watched Dan Graham's 1975 piece, "Performer/Audience/Mirror." Please post at least two thoughtful comments on the piece, continuing our class conversation, and/or responding to the following quotes concerning the piece:

"The performance is doubly reflected back to the audience by the artist's lecturing and the architectural device of a mirrored wall. Graham has written extensively on how video, which can deliver information in real time, functions semiotically as a mirror. Using the mirror at the back of the stage as a monitor, Graham voices his unrehearsed observations, activating the various feedback cycles taking place within himself as a performer, between the performer and the audience, and among audience members. Issues of duration and attention are critical for both performer and audience." (Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States, Chris Hill, ed.)

"Through the use of the mirror the audience is able to instantaneously percieve itself as a public mass (as a unity), offsetting its definition by the performer('s discourse). The audience sees itself reflected by the mirror instantly while the performer's comments are slightly delayed. First, a person in the audience sees himself "objectively" ("subjectively") perceived by himself, next he hears himself described "objectively" ("subjectively") in terms of the performer's perception." (Dan Graham qtd. in Hill)

Carlos Basualdo and Tropicalia (extra credit post)

For those of you who were able to attend the Carlos Basualdo lecture last night (Monday), make one or two thoughtful comments for extra credit.

Here are some considerations (although you are as always welcome to discuss other issues as long as you do so thoughtfully):
•Revisit Basualdo's distinction between a cultural "movement" and a cultural "moment."
•Basualdo spoke a lot about an artist we will read about later in the semester, Helio Oiticica. From what you learned about Oiticica, what can you infer about his performance work? What elements of his works that were discussed are relevant to performance work?
•Discuss the relevance of the major works in the Tropicalia exhibition (that are decades old) to current work.

Art Service (You Got Served)

•In what ways was this exercise useful to you?
•What are your reactions to the demonstrations of the other "team"?
•Did you consider yourself "audience" to the other team?
•Respond to your audience--the other team, passersby, etc. Did you find that you wanted their attention? Did you feed off of spectators?
•How did team membership influence your willingness or lack of willingness to perform? How did it affect what you chose to do?

Reminder: Carlos Basualdo Lecture Tonight

From the Lecture series “Curatorial Voices in Contemporary Art":
Carlos Basualdo
Monday, February 5th 6:00 pm
CS Fine Arts Center Music Room 30 W Dale St
Basualdo is the Curator of Contemporary Art the Philadelphia Museum. His presentation will introduce his most recent project, Troplicalia: Revolution in Brazilain Culture (1967-1972), an interdisciplinary exhibition that highlights the Brazilian avant-garde’s exploration of the politics of form.

Performance of Self Hint

If you are still looking for some examples, ideas or directions relative to performance of the self for your project proposal due on Monday, I have marked a few sites on the class del.icio.us page that you might want to check out (especially those tagged "self" or body").

Readings Week 2 (assignment post)

Please post at least two thoughtful comments on the readings for this week: pages 50-96 in the Goldberg book and the Performing Bodies conversation article found on JSTOR.

Here are some considerations:
•Construct a bridge between the motivating principles of the Dada/Surrealist artists and the contemporary Chinese artists.

•Explore the progressions, crossovers, and functional distinctions between the Futurists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists respecting their performances.

•What provoking differences can you identify between the works of Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming despite their parallel backgrounds? Consider the similarities evident in an intial survey of their work and what different conceptual groundings could have led them to seemingly related products.