This afternoon I went to the Act/React Exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum to utilize the resident discount on Wednesdays. I did not have the best mentality coming into the Act/React exhibition, but I was converted after I had finally entered the exhibition.
The first one I noticed myself investigating was Brian Knep's floor installation Healing #1. I started just walking around on it, it was much larger than it appeared on the preview screening that John MacKinnon showed in our class. I was going to just breeze through this one and move on to the rest of the exhibit, but I found I was trying to alter it for nearly 10 minutes. It really isn't all this that dense, like the ones done by Camille Utterback further into the exhibit, but for me I enjoy the simplicity of understanding the cause-effect relationship that I have when I am altering the piece.
My favorite one was the Snow Mirror by Daniel Rozin. You have to walk into this completely blacked out room and when I got in there I found that the tranquility of this room was the most comfortable piece for me to function with. I enjoyed trying to see close-ups and farther away and i even messed around with what my cell phone looked like.
What I found interesting was observing these little kids running around the exhibition when I got out of the Snow Mirror. I saw that they were interested in the same one, they were loving running all over Brian Knep's piece. They also tried Camille Utterback's work while I was roaming around, and I saw that the 4 kids along with their mother were able to make a much more dynamic piece from Untitled 6 than I was able to do alone. I feel that so much of the work that I saw today would be better experienced with others because when there are more people working within the pieces collaboratively the results are much more dynamic than what you can achieve doing these alone. But it seems the ones that I was most interested in were the ones that you could get the similar results from if you were alone or with a group, or maybe they were even better alone than they would be in a group.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Journal Reading
After trying out Senses of Cinema, Vectors, and Afterall I have chosen to follow Afterall because it seems like I would be branching outside of what I would commonly be looking into, but am interested in learning more about. It seems to be about international contemporary works of art. The most current articles on the main page are about artists from London, Lebanon, Berlin, and Spain. Many of the articles on Afterall seem to be based around, but not limited to, contemporary video installations.
The first article I wanted to discuss is Tony Conrad: On the Threshold by George Clark. I feel this embodies this websites dynamics because Tony Conrad is recognized as a filmmaker, musician, and an artist; where he is not isolated to one particular artistic medium. What I learned was he was a central figure in New York's avant garde community in the 1960's, and he was at Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London where he was presenting his latest work Unprojectable: Projection and Perspective where he combines music, performance, and film into a highly dynamic installation. I felt that this way of formatting his work embodies every aspect of his individual works over the past 40 years can be uniquely combined to create an installation that I bet everyone enjoyed being able to experience.
The second article that I found to be representative of the artistic statement behind contemporary works was 'The Anxious: Five Artists Under the Pressure of War' at the Centre Pompidou by Sarah-Neel Smith. She examines five Lebanese artists work within the documentary The Anxious: Five Artists Under the Pressure of War. What I found appealing was the variances in the different artists opinions of videos medium and its subjectivity or objectivity. I think that this is one of the most intriguing arguements of the medium of video and filmmaking because each artist is going to have their own opinion on whether they feel that the medium serves as a way to embed a new way of thinking within the viewer ,or conversely, the medium only allows the viewer to be influenced as much as they don't settle for indifference, or feel too detached to care. I think that this arguement under certain circumstances could teeter back and forth depending on the variables at hand, but as 'The Anxious' artists ask at the end of Smith's article "if our comprehension and opinions of war are shaped by its increasingly fragmented mediation, have we lost the ability to take action?"
The first article I wanted to discuss is Tony Conrad: On the Threshold by George Clark. I feel this embodies this websites dynamics because Tony Conrad is recognized as a filmmaker, musician, and an artist; where he is not isolated to one particular artistic medium. What I learned was he was a central figure in New York's avant garde community in the 1960's, and he was at Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London where he was presenting his latest work Unprojectable: Projection and Perspective where he combines music, performance, and film into a highly dynamic installation. I felt that this way of formatting his work embodies every aspect of his individual works over the past 40 years can be uniquely combined to create an installation that I bet everyone enjoyed being able to experience.
The second article that I found to be representative of the artistic statement behind contemporary works was 'The Anxious: Five Artists Under the Pressure of War' at the Centre Pompidou by Sarah-Neel Smith. She examines five Lebanese artists work within the documentary The Anxious: Five Artists Under the Pressure of War. What I found appealing was the variances in the different artists opinions of videos medium and its subjectivity or objectivity. I think that this is one of the most intriguing arguements of the medium of video and filmmaking because each artist is going to have their own opinion on whether they feel that the medium serves as a way to embed a new way of thinking within the viewer ,or conversely, the medium only allows the viewer to be influenced as much as they don't settle for indifference, or feel too detached to care. I think that this arguement under certain circumstances could teeter back and forth depending on the variables at hand, but as 'The Anxious' artists ask at the end of Smith's article "if our comprehension and opinions of war are shaped by its increasingly fragmented mediation, have we lost the ability to take action?"
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