This lecture began in the last half of class of February 11, and ended on February 20.
On February 11, and then again on February 13, we began with Manfred Mohr’s Cubic Limit from 1975:
On February 18, we irreverently yet topically began with The Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Star, 1979, which “relates to concerns about mixed attitudes towards 20th-century inventions and machines for the media arts.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ
On February 20, as a prelude to our conversation about performance art as a tendency within conceptual art, we began with two Yvonne Rainer clips simultaneously: Hand Movie and Trio A, both from 1966.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuArqL7r1WQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aggv4jybdaY
The slide material was distributed across all three days.
Click here to view the slides from Conceptual Art-and-Technology.
For each artist/technologist discussed, we viewed several videos. Most of this video content is provided below. In some cases the video content is not available online and has been replaced by another appropriate link.
Sol Lewitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes
John Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt
Sol Lewitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1969.
Joseph Kosuth, Art after Philosophy, 1969.
http://vimeo.com/23123591
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970
Marina Abramovic: What is Performance Art?
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present
Marina Abramovic meets Ulay during The Artist is Present.
The lecture concluded with synthetic conversations about two important contemporary artists, Ann Hamilton (soon to be a faculty member at UCI) and James Turrell (who currently has a retrospective exhibition at LACMA).
Marina Abramovic “The Artist is Present” video greatly reminded me of another performing artist I learned last year in my FIP class. His name is James Luna (Native American descent), and the video link below is one of his short performances called “Take a Picture With a Real Indian”. The purpose was to see how the audience reacted and responded to the performance. Each photograph at the end of the video shows space between James Luna as the performer and the audience, indicating that the audience see him only as an object such as taking a picture with a sculpture at a museum. Even though James Luna is portraying common stereotypes of Native Americans in most of his work, he is using his body as the medium to perform a authentic or real performance that requires the audience to be part of it. He is trying to build a relationship with the audience in order to show exactly how people interact with Indians.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAa69BVwPYg
Not to sound so cliche, but it really does seem like there’s an app for everything. In regards to giving secrets and getting one back, there is now an app along the lines of that, aptly named Secret as well. Secrets are posted by friends/contacts on your phone or friends of friends with the app, but you’ll never know which friend, thus giving an air of anonymity to the varying secrets.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/17/5419814/open-secret-how-two-google-refugees-built-the-next-big-thing-in
Hey Jesse! Unfortunately I can’t remember if it was this lecture that discussed about Ai Weiwei, but I thought I’d share this article about a Miami artist recently destroying one of Ai Weiwei’s work since we discussed about him briefly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/arts/design/ai-weiwei-vase-destroyed-by-protester-at-miami-museum.html?_r=0
Thanks Tina! Great story. This is why I love this class — I can’t keep track of everything.
In lecture, we discussed Marina Abromovic’s works and it reminded me of her collaboration with Lady Gaga to promote the Abromovic Method (http://vimeo.com/71919803). The Abromovic Method helps heighten the awareness of the participant’s mental and physical awareness. The video raised controversy due to Lady Gaga’s nudity in the video, which also relates to what we discussed in lecture about how nudity in art is still not widely accepted. However, I find it very inspiring that Lady Gaga is a strong ambassador of contemporary art, constantly working with different artists, such as Jeff Koons.
I thought it was interesting how we saw the typewriter being connected to a computer so I looked to see if this is something people can buy. I found this site http://www.usbtypewriter.com/ and they offer typewriters for ipads. I think its cool to see new technology mixed together and functioning with old technology. I don’t think I would personally use a typewriter as my keyboard for an ipad but it adds old charm to a high tech device.
I really enjoyed this lecture. I too don’t understand why we have to categorize everything and draw such a clear distinction between conceptual art and art-and-technology. Manfred Mohr and Sol Lewitt have very similar works the only difference being their idea or intent behind it, but I don’t see why their works have to be categorized differently from each other. Sometimes I feel like the art world with their gallery openings can be pretentious, and having these separate categories and placing more meaning and value on conceptual art makes it even more pretentious for me. I know as a society we categorize pretty much everything in our lives, but I don’t know, maybe I expected more from the art world.
Hi Alix,
I think we can and we should expect more from the art world! But being an artist is hard. Difficulty leads to conservativism: protect what little you have.
-J