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Kath Blair

The Gap: Documentary Truth between Reality and Perception. - 0 views

www.horschamp.qc.ca/...documentary_truth.html

authorship documentary film truth

shared by Kath Blair on 06 Mar 08 - Cached
  • Increasingly the theoretical understanding of documentary film is moving away from the notion of an inherent reality found within a film text and more towards an understanding of how texts are read.
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 19 Mar 08
       
      I thought that this essay was interesting positioned in terms of nihilism and separation fro the real world, because documentary has had to renegotiate its presentation of reality as the understanding of reality changes.

Kath Blair

Six Artists Who Use Maps in Their Work - 0 views

www.artjunction.org/...mapartists.html

bukatman telematics tomorrowland

shared by Kath Blair on 05 Mar 08 - Cached
  • metaphors for human relationships
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 05 Mar 08
       
      I was thinking about the ideas about mapping and how it's discussed in there's always tomorrowland, and I decided that I find the tension inherent in mapping -- imposing a unifying structure on some information that, of course, doesn't make sense on its own so that you can understand and use it -- is interesting in how we use it, even now (especially now, maybe) that 'reality' seems less and less tangible, less and less supportive of any structure we use to understand it. I liked that the project worked as a recentering device, whether intentionally or not, for us, as students, when we read the information in the essays -- whether or not, of course, the ideas in the essays can be structured.
Kath Blair

telematic connections:: overview - 0 views

telematic.walkerart.org/...index.html

baudrillard bukatman communication tomorrowland

shared by Kath Blair on 03 Mar 08 - Cached
  • The eight installations that comprise the "Telereal" component of this exhibition use the Internet and computing to explore this mediated embrace between parties, whether human to human, human to machine, machine to machine, or even human to nature. Here, as well as in the ten online projects in the "Datasphere" component of the exhibition, what the visitor-participant does in the galleries affects (and is affected by) someone or something somewhere else in physical space. "The Virtual Embrace" signals this shift from the viewer as an observer to embracing us as a participant, integral to the work-process of art.
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 03 Mar 08
       
      This is a pretty interesting exhibition that deals with the technological aspects of communication between each other and the poblem / issue of real vs tele space, as Bukatman and Baudrillard discussed in their essays. I also like that the discussion in the exhibition seems to be along the same lines as the Bukatman discussion: finding a possibility for re-assertion of self in "the telematic  embrace".
Kath Blair

Green Disaster -- Andy Warhol - 0 views

www.artdaily.com/indexv5.asp

banality morris warhol

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      Warhol's Green Disaster has the same dual relationship with the banal that Morris does. Though there is a sense (for me) of the overwhelming, Baudrillardian fatal banality of the repetition of the images (and banal fatalities, as well, to an extent), the works can still command interest, and end up being open to a more human reading, as in The Return of Hank Herron, by Thomas Crow (24). The tension that Morris registers between hopeful readings of banality and overwhelmed ones (such as that of Baudrillard), makes the tensions inherent within nihilism, between having to still be human and communicate, and the knowledge of the impossibility of doing so.
Kath Blair

YouTube - 2001 Space Odyssey - Orbital Halcyon - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

2001 nishitani satre telematics tomorrowland

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
  • 2001 Space Odyssey - Orbital Halcyon
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      I love this section of 2001 -- well, I like watching it when I can control how fast it goes. There are two pertinent things which I think it does an interesting job of visualizing. And anyway, the monolith in that movie is so kind of nihilistic and threatening to yourself  just being there.

      One thing that it potentially (though not explicitly) visualizes is a possible 'telematic space' which is so kind of computerized and outside of Dave's control. Dave / the viewer are just watching, while the monolith processes away. This reminds me of the cyberpunk visualizations of computer-space, and it also (tellingly?) reminds me of the 'terror of perspective' that Bryson discusses in The Gaze in the Expanded Field (this is mostly the case in the sections where you do get a sense of perspective), because the visuals are dizzying depths into which the viewer is endlessly plummeting; the complete opposite of yourself taking all focus away from you like a black hole.
Kath Blair

Index 01 -- Art & Language - 0 views

nihilism.890m.com/artlanguage.html

baudrillard communication

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      Index 01 by Art and Language is an installation that, I think, has to do with the Ecstasy of Communication as theorized by Baudrillard (128), because it revels in its own informative communication, in which all of the articles are, so to speak, 'hyperlinked' -- the chart behind the cabinets of the essays of Art and Langage practicioners 'maps' the similarities, differences, disagreements, and agreements of the articles -- all 87 of them. I think this would be way too much to read in a gallery, and as if you even tried you would be separated from the space of the gallery by the reading you are doing, I think it creates a sort of telematic, out-of-body space, like the internet -- especially if you are a participant.  It's a database, and all it can or wants to do is communicate -- with the potential of absorbing you in the nihilistic 'ecstacy' that Baudrillard describes.
Kath Blair

DIRTY FOUND - 0 views

dirtyfound.typepad.com

baudrillard communication obscenity

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
  • We collect DIRTY FOUND stuff: pervy Polaroids, sleazy birthday cards, raunchy to-do lists, nasty poetry on napkins, illustrations--anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's sex life. It's just like our sister, > FOUND Magazine > , only sleazier. >
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      I think found magazine creates a really awesome tension between the 'new obscenity' of having your life splayed out before everybody's eyes, and the 'old obscenity' of sex (130), because it's got both -- and I think, like the dirtier secrets on postsecret, what's more embarassing or obscene is indeed that these are real (so far as we know) scraps from people's real lives.

      There's also the realm of reality TV, where, far beyond simply watching a family, we've even got highly sexually charged reality tv shows (like Paradise Hotel), and we'll even watch you lose weight. However, Baurillard asserts that this is, and the ecstasy of communication on the whole, isn't alienating (130), which I don't think is necessarily true. Now our crowd is maybe farther away, and sometimes (as I feel when I read found magazine or postsecret) they become imaginary people in your head, there are so many people that it feels like you can never know any of them.
Kath Blair

At Sundance, a Second Life Sweatshop Is Art - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - 0 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...a-second-life-sweatshop-is-art

bukatman life second tomorrowland

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
  • virtual sweat shop that exists only on Second Life
  • Invisible Threads is intended as art, but they see it as a window into so-called telemetric manufacturing methods of the future.
  • The jeans are being shown and sold for the first time at Sundance, in a beta version.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “What I think is fascinating about her work is that it is a step towards what our future is going to be,” said Jeffrey Winter, a panel programmer for the Sundance Festival who focuses on media, art and technology. “It’s called art now, but in the future it’s going to be how you get your jeans. It will be daily life. So often what you call art is just people who see the future before the rest of us do.”
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      This art project, which pushes the bounds of telematic space and our relationship to it, as well as the possibilities for our future (echoing tomorrowland. Some day the Invisible Threads factory will be a Second Life relic, maybe?). In the essay, telematic space is represented as initially impenetrable, but then eventually it is penetrated and represented, which takes away a lot of the completely nihilistic possibility that it had when it was unfathomable. Second life is a step away frm complete virtual reality -- and, with the internet, we've become more used to the idea of splitting ourselves from our bodies, one of the ways we lose ourselves for Baudrillard (129).

      Still, when you really think about it, the idea that you are existing in a computer, which isn't real, but which could be and, in some ways, is effectively real (and presumably which will become more and more effectively real with the progression of virtual reality), can, in some ways, heighten the nihilistic effect of the experience of 'existing' in 'telematic space' -- it is because the virtual world is so real and so penetrable that it really threatens the real world you physically exist in. You can see a future where they may as well be one and the same, and you can imagine not being 'real' in a physical sense -- and if you can imagine that, there's no reason to think you're any more real now.

      In There's Always Tomorrowland, Bukatman presents the experience of moving through telematic space, given by almost-virtual-reality-rides with simulated motion, and by the cyber-cowboys of nihilistic cyberpunk scifi fiction, the subjec re-asserts and re-centres itself. However, because these expereinces of telematic space are mediated and controlled, whether by the Company that is Disney, or by the cyberpunk author (78), the re-centering doesn't actually relate to an experience in telematic space where the only authority you have is your own -- I think, in this case (not, however, without
Kath Blair

Jasper Johns -- Target with Plaster Casts - 0 views

www.artchive.com/...targcast.jpg.html

identity johns pee-wee penley performance queer

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      The Cabinet of Dr Pee-Wee is discusses the ways in which the show is camp and the ways in which it promotes sexual investigation, which is a 'fraught' topic for children, but that this is essential for children to be able to accept differences, because it challenges the children's (and the adults watching) understanding of identity and open them to acceptance of difference (145).

      As I mentioned in my disucssion of the White Paitings by Rauschenberg in terms of Cindy Sherman and New Figuration, in Chapter 10: How New York Queered the Idea of Modern Art (Gavin Butt) in Varieties of Modernism, these can be read as a non-statement of queer identity. This chapter also undertakes a discussion of Jasper Johns's Plaster Casts with Target as another expression of queer identity, whether it can be 'decoded' as queer, or is also a significant performance of not saying anything about being queer (327-328). This contrasts with the Pee-Wee method which appears to be more optimistic (and therefore less nihilist). However, the wish, if not completely articulated by Johns, of both texts is an eventual acceptance of difference, which, according to Nishitani, is essentially accepting the break up of a monadic self on the field of Sunyata (because you accept that your existance is defined by your difference from others, rather than by some sort of intrinsic selfhod).

      The sexual terror and the uncanny images in Pee-Wee's playhouse (see Faces in Places) are also associated with the nihilist overtones in the show.
Kath Blair

MoMA.org | Exhibitions | 1997 | Cindy Sherman - 0 views

www.moma.org/...index.html

authorship graham identity martin sherman

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
  • In December 1995, The Museum of Modern Art acquired all sixty-nine black-and-white photographs in Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills series.
  • For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made.
  • The sixty-nine solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America—the period of Sherman's youth, and the ground-zero of our contemporary mythology.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them.
  • Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      Make sure you look at the selected works too -- www.moma.org/exhibitions/1997/sherman/selectedworks.html

      I think Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills are a really interesting specifically 'art' interpretation of the issues of performed identity that Dan Graham discusses in Dean Martin / Entertainment as Theatre. In her stills, Sherman is performing just like Martin -- the endless performance with no glimpse of the 'real person' is very much in line with nihilist thought -- it's a constructed and clear non-reality.

      I love that the Exhibition Statement from MOMA talks about the "grammar" that Sherman creates with her works -- it's very Sauserre-ian, the construction of signs that signify "feminity". In my notes for the page on the Buchloh article, I talked about Rauschenberg's white paintings as the conspicuous non-performance of his identity, and I think that Sherman's untitled film stills are another permutation of this: you get nothing of Sherman because you get too much of other systems of meanin which you know are adopted (just as you get of Dean Martin). I think the pairing of Sherman and Martin make clear the possible applicability of Sherman's Stills to all kinds of performed identity, not just feminine identity. As taken up by Graham in the Martin article (and by Rauschenberg), male identity -- all identity -- is also performed, and as with the other articles I'm discussing, so is identity and a centered subject.

Kath Blair

Image and Narrative - 0 views

www.imageandnarrative.be/...hackenschmidt01.htm

broodthaurs buchloh figuration myths

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
  • Fig. 1. Marcel Broodthaers: “Fémur d'homme belge“ and “Fémur de la femme francaise“ (1964/65), © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2005
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      These bones, paitned by Marcel Broodhauer, are a great contrast to the work of the new figurative painters in the 80's, both a response to nihilist ideas about the de-centering of the self. The flags (of Belgium and France) are meant to suggest (ironically) that our nationalism is an essential part of who we are. By breaking down nationalism, and therefore a part of how we centre ourselves in our world, as so many Historical Avant-Gardes have done or wanted to do (for example, Zurich Dada and Hugo Ball).

      This is the opposite of the project, whether intentionally or though market salesmanship, of the new figurative painters, who recreated styles that could be associated with a nationality, according to Buchloh (124).
       
      Broodthaers' work is an acknowledgement of nihilist ideas, and the work of the new figurative painters is in resistance to them -- recreating a reality to believe in around national identity.

Kath Blair

Nihilism -- the Project - 8 views

This project, which maps ideas about nihilism and (postmodern) art on the internet, is a project that I'm working on for VISA 381, my studio theory course at the University of British Columbia. The...

Introduction

started by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 no follow-up yet
Kath Blair

¤ c i r c l e m a k e r s ¤ - 0 views

www.circlemakers.org/crop7.html

authorship crow myths

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
  • Stonehenge, Wiltshire, 1996
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      I found an article about Rod Dickinson's crop circles:

      Roberts, John. "Trickster". Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1. (1999), pp. 3-101. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0142-6540(1999)22:12.0.CO;2-O

      Which references "The Return of Hank Herron", making the connection between the invented Hank Herron and the tension of authorship that is associated with crop circles -- because anyone treating them as art or seriously knows who makes the crop ciricles, most of the global audience doesn't and debates their authorhsip. The article then says that this 'trickster' practice of playing with authorship allows the penetration of modern mythmaking.

      I think that this investigation of myths of authorship is particularly interesting becuase it acknowledges the 'mythicism' in narratives of authorship on a huge scale -- this is the whole world that thinks about these myths of authorship, and rather than exposing the myth of one author only to create the myth of another author that exposed the myth (as I think sometimes it is easy to do in art criticism -- we still talk about Sherrie Levine as the author of her approrpiated images, even though she does undermine her own and the other photographer's authorship). Because the myth around the creation of crop circles is so huge, and because it takes the myth from cosmic to human levels when it is exposed, I think it gives another interesting perspective that doesn't care as much about people as aliens -- the myth of the people behind the crop circles has, for many spectators, less power than the myth of an alien -- unlike myths of Levine or Hank Herron, where the fact that they are imaginary or an artist in themselves only adds to the myth that we inevitably create around them.

      Rather than this comment being an attempt to discrdit Levine's work or the interesting questions posed by Herron, I think it's interesting to think about crop circles as another system of author-myth-m
Kath Blair

Cornelius Tittel: And then it went boom - signandsight - 0 views

www.signandsight.com/...773.html

broodthaurs buchloh figuration myths new

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
  • Heiner Bastian should know. He has worked with the greatest classics, as private secretary to Beuys, later as the curator of the loveliest Warhol retrospective (shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and The Tate, London). He also gave advice to those who disappeared, to Fetting and Salomé, as well as he could. It was he who purchased Fetting's "Big Shower" for the Marx Collection. "A powerful picture," he says, "even today." But it is not on show; since the opening of the Hamburger Bahnhof it has been in storage.Does Bastian know why they disappeared, the former Neuen Wilden? "Their painting was probably just the expression of a feeling, a zeitgeist," he says: "And when that feeling disappeared, the art went with it." Bastian briefly raises his eyebrows, totally unsentimental, as if he were talking about asymmetrical haircuts, leggings or shoulder pads.
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      This article is about the German Neo-Expressionists, whom Buchloh is so absolutely against. What I find most interesting about it is its almost total denial of the issues Buchloh was talking about -- which makes sense; while upholding the status quo was the result of the art of the new figurative painting in the 80's, I think it's probably like Jackson Pollock -- he became a symbol of American Capitalism without intending it.

      But the essay also doesn't talk about the main thread of nihilism which I found in the Buchloh essay -- they barely touch on why artists turned to painting ("they're weary of minimalism") -- instead, I think, it was against the tide towards nihilism and a continued attempt (rather than a new one) to re-centre themselves in the world.

      What's also interesting is that there's only a tacit, unspoken acknowledgement that a lack of criticality might have been what threw them out of the art world -- the 'change in zeitgeist'; which is why Beuys is still big.
  • At this time, Fetting's pictures had titles like "Van Gogh at the Berlin Wall" or "The Big Shower." They showed scenes from the gay subculture and looked like they had been painted after an amphetamine-fuelled sleepless night by some revenant version of Max Beckmann.
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      What I found interesting about this quote was that it exposes a possible more subversive content that could have been found in this art as it was in Rauschenberg (White paintings, whose identity is performed in that the shadows of the room determine the content of the painting, is read in Chapter 10: How New York Queered the idea of Modern Art in Varieties of Modernism, as about the silence around sexuality in America at the time), that doesn't seem to be discussed, allowed, or taken as redeeming, or isn't considered because of the other associations of the work.
Kath Blair

Faces in Places - 0 views

www.facesinplaces.blogspot.com

banality baudrillard bryson lacan morris nihilism uncanny

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached
  • A photographic collection of faces found in everyday places.
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      These photos give a really interesting perspective on Lacan's version of the Gaze -- illustrating it in a literal but striking way. I think it makes Lacan's myth about the challenge to the other far more imaginable if you haven't had the experience (Bryson, 91) These are also interestingly both funny and uncanny -- obviously some of the photos slip to one or the other. They are all 'real'. They also call up the animated objects that are so uncanny in the Pee-Wee Herman Show. (Pneley, 139). Finally they are also a bombardment of images -- their uncanniness and funniness is somehow both lessened and increased by their number, and are, when taken with their 'potential' to provoke the decentering of the subject and their banality, a sort of 'fatal banality', I think. (Baudrillard, 132. Morris, 17-18 ) Overall I think they're one of the interesting art?projects on the internet that combine a lot of collection ideas and a sort of playful engagement with issues like nihilism and the uncanny.
Kath Blair

U B U W E B - Film & Video: Samuel Beckett - 0 views

www.ubu.com/beckett.html

bryson existentialism gaze sartre

shared by Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08 - Cached






  • Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989)



    Film (1965)
    • Kath Blair
      Kath Blair on 29 Feb 08
       
      This is a film by Beckett that explores existentialism and nihility visually -- I think it's a really great illustration of The Gaze (and quite funny).
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