Intermedia

The article "Intermedia" by Dick Higgins examines the advent of intermedia art primarily throughout the 20th century. Higgins explains that intermedia art exists somewhere between media rather that identifying with any one particular art form, such as painting. It is the blending of not only media, but forms of communication as well. Higgins suggests that we are approaching a classless society and that the art world should run parallel to said societal advances. According to Higgins, the only way to escape the perpetual rigidity of academicism is to break down the barriers between media, emblematic of the breaking down the barriers of class identification. 

When has our society ever been classless? While I understand the parallels between class and the tiers of the art world, I don't agree that the two movements are at all synonymous. I wonder how much of this article is political propaganda for a socialist society. In a classless society, individuals seem to cease to exist. Personal self worth and motivation are channeled into energy toward a common goal. I find myself wondering how artists would retain their individual identity in an entirely intermedia art world? The idea of being a printmaker,or a painter, or a sculptor are very much a part of the artist's identity and sense of place in an ever increasingly convoluted world and market.  One also takes pride in producing work within a particular media and advancing their relationship to that media. I find that this article fails to take into account the idea of the individual and its relationship to productivity and longevity. 

Project Proposals

These are the four projects I included on my syllabus:

"Balance"

For this film I would like to manipulate time. "Balance" will concern primarily the everyday balance and juggling act I find myself and other women participating in and often time the absence of grace in the process. Women supposedly possess better balance than men though I am not sure whether this trait is inherent. I hope to film this piece in a gymnastics studio. The focus of the film will be on the gymnast's two feet as they curl and bend around the balance beam to hang on during a routine. The piece will be in black and white and will be slowed down to capture every possible nuance of motion and every curl of a toe. I would like the film to be completely silent and grainy in appearance. The final product should be slow, silent and visually beautiful. 

I was influenced by Steve McQueen's piece, "Bear" here. 

Mcqueen's work is minimalist and visually quite poetic. I think this piece will touch on the aspect of repulsion and seduction I am trying to achieve with the Playboy series I am presently working on in the studio. 

"Reaching"

This film will manipulate reality (the audience may have difficulty discerning whether the actions taking place were staged). The film will be conceptually quite simple. A solitary female figure will sit blindfolded in a chair with her hands tied behind her back. There will be dramatic lighting overhead. This film will also be rendered in black and white to heighten the dramatic effect. The room will be fairly dark save for an overhead light.The woman will stretch her neck to receive the empty offerings of a spoon that is placed near her face. The figure feeding her will never be seen in his entirety. The spoon will grace her face but she will never get the satisfaction of grasping it with her mouth. 

I think this may speak to the sadistic undertones of human nature and the yearning for the "ideal" 

Project 3

This film will manipulate sound and the idea of storytelling.T he film will be in color. I loved the technique of blacking out the background that was used in "Mother's and Fathers." I would like to have a woman (removed from any background) telling a very private and even painful story to the camera. The woman will get visibly upset throughout the short film, crying and shouting about something very painful that happened to her. However, the audience will hear no sound coming from her mouth. Instead, there will be either a song playing or an alternate dialogue that can either serve as a substitution or a metaphor for what the woman is trying very desperately to tell the audience. 

Project 4

This piece will again employ the use of a solitary woman and will also be shot in color. A young woman will sit in a chair and comfortably talk about a childhood story or pleasant memory she holds very dear. The camera will never grace her face. Instead it will pan over her figure slowly, stopping in places for the audience to observe. She will appear as a specimen. The audience should feel uncomfortable at times at the length of the pauses the camera takes. This piece will attempt to employ the viewer as voyeur and will provide commentary on the materialization and compartmentalizing young women are often subject to in the media. 

This project coheres nicely with the ideas I am working with in regard to our culture's materialization of the female form (Playboy and the media).

How to make the bridge?

For the past year my work has concerned the female form and feminist theory. The American feminist philosopher, Judith Butler, whose writings on gender performativity, monogamy, and the construct of heterosexuality have greatly influenced the development of my work. (Her book, Gender Trouble, analyzes these issues in depth). I began to examine what roles I perform in my everyday life and what aspects of myself, as a woman, may in fact be inherent. During the same time I was researching Judith Butler, I was exposed to the work of the artist Mary Coble. Coble's work combines performance and video documentation. Her performance piece, "Binding Ritual" inspired me to make "Squeeze," which was part of a portrait series I was working on at the time.

Over the summer I began thinking more about ideals, cultural approproation, and the transformation of human flesh over time. Ancient Greek scupltures served as the physical embodiement for cultural ideals. "Perfect" human beings were carved out of marble and placed on fluted columns. They were gods among the masses. However, these imposed figures were highly deformed, anatomically unrealistic and disproportionate. I began to wonder, are these arhetypes any different than than the modern day superhumans we aspire to be like today? Has anything changed and will we ever escape the self depricating cyle? How do we as a culture take and borrow to suit our own sadistic needs? Playboy entered the picture and I began researching the anothology that covered fifty years of publications and the gross metamorphosis of the female form over time.

It was apparent that as the decades passed, the image of "woman" and what construes the Playboy Bunny, became more plastic, more cold, and more sexually explicit. As the appearce of flesh diminished along with tan lines, cellulite and freckles, the women became more like hollow statues, not so different than those created by the Greeks centuries ago. So where have we arrived at as a culture? How have we transformed aesthetic ideals into products? The materialization of flesh and the commericalization of the female form ignited my interest in cultural appropriation and how we as a culture find ourselves attracted to and manipulating cultures and ideologies we know nothing about. I have just recently begun comining images of appropriated cultures (embodied by landscapes) and images of women from Playboy publications.

I'm not exactly sure how I will marry my ideas and source material for my work in the studio with the work I am doing in multimedia. I hope to create a correlation between the two, or at least work that supports each other.

A Season in Hell

The multimedia installation "A Season in Hell" created by Randall Packer, John Anderson, and Charles Lane blurs the line between reality and fantasy. The piece criticizes the political regime of President George W. Bush, referring to his reign in office as a "Season in Hell." Elements of myth, political speeches and televised news reports are combined to weave an alternate reality, or a "hyper-reality." The character "Orph" takes us (the audience) and ultimately Packer through the depths of hell on a mythic journey. Interestingly, "factual" events are interwoven with the fantastical to create a sense of disorientation. One does not know what is fact and what is fantasy, thus illustrating how illusive and disconnected our government is with its citizens. News reports, which are supposed to offer unbiased information, are really just another way of confusing and ultimately controlling the public. Times of true crisis become sensationalized plot lines for the next blockbuster film. The piece left me questioning what it is I really know about the topic at hand, and whether truths and facts can actually exist once circulated through the circus that is the media. 

"The Art of Noises"

Luigi Russolo, a futurist painter (1885-1947) suggests that we (the public) abandon our preconceptions of sound, and investigate the musical/lyrical quality of Noise. He distinguishes between sounds and noises. I had thought that sounds and noises were of the same "stuff" though one does have a feeling or reaction to the word "sound" versus the word "noise." For example, someone might say that there is too much noise and thus they cannot concentrate. It is rare that someone would say that there is too much "sound." A musical hierarchy definitely exists. Noises are strange, irritating, annoying, and bothersome. Sounds are pleasant, appealing and evocative of emotion and feeling. "The sounds of nature," not the noises of nature. Russolo argues that we abandon our archaic preconceptions of sound. Perhaps it is not the noise of cars on a city street, but the sound of their engines roaring in rhythmic undulations.  I think that Russolo makes an excellent case for sound or more specifically, noise, as material for an art piece. 

Noises build pictures where visual literacy fails. Our eyes serve as tools for taking in information and our brains are trained to process the images - often in learned patterns that result in judgements. Our ears work with our eyes and all too often serve the visual. Walking through the metro station blindfolded would result in an entirely different experience than walking through it with your eyes wide open. One would hear things they had most likely never heard and thus make entirely new associations- even visual associations. Perhaps we can call them sound images. It is incredibly important for people to re-interpret their environment in order to avoid creative stagnation. 

My question regarding Russolo regards his motive. Russolo was after all a Futurist and Futurism was a historically very political art movement. He champions the noise of machines and even suggests that before their existence, nature was silent. Perhaps silent of noise, but not silent of sound. How can one truly distinguish between sound and noise without giving into cultural prejudice? If Russolo was really making a case for sound as noise or noise as sound, he would make no distinction whatsoever. Russolo is obviously championing the futurist movement and the need for the mechanical in all aspects of life. I wonder how much of this article is really about the art of noises, and how much of it is about the movement of Futurism. Is is all propaganda?

Runa Islam: "Tuin"

Runa Islam's film titled "Tuin" (1998) recreates an intimate moment between two strangers from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1973 film, "Martha." Islam's recreation is captivating and an incredibly effective piece from Realisms at the Hirshhorn Museum. It's easy to stand in the middle of the dark room, hypnotized, watching the footage of the camera dance around the two actors. The strangers approach each other while crossing what appears to be a college campus. As they near their eyes meet and lock while the camera swoops in, spinning around the two actors who exchange a silent intimate moment. It is unclear what the two individuals are thinking as they look intensely at one another. The "movie" footage appears on the screen in color while the actual documenting of the scene appears in black and white, as if to make it appear more factual - like a headline in a newspaper. 

A screen is suspended in the middle of the room, inviting viewers to walk around it thus mimicking the circular motion of the cameras that are operated on a dolly. Islam places the viewer right in the middle of the action and ultimately in the very intimate moment between the two strangers. It is as if the audience is invited on set to observe the film crew intently watching their monitors to ensure that the scene is "just right." My reaction to "Tuin"was somewhat muddled. Islam's exposure of how the camera crew filmed the scene from the movie could take away from the intimacy of the experience, or heighten it. The grainy film footage of the camera crew and the silence that hangs in the room as the camera spans round and round spins a sort of poetic tapestry that the audience can engage with. The piece can also be viewed as a sort of deconstruction of the seemingly contrived romanticism present in so many pop culture films. The source for "Tuin" is after all a film that touches on the sadomasochistic tendencies of monogamous relationships. I ask, does the documenting of the filming of the re-enactment add or take away from this very private, intense scene? If so, then what could be the secondary read?

Candice Breitz' "Mothers and Fathers"

The piece "Mothers and Fathers," included in the Hirshhorn Museum show, The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, confronts the pervasive stereotypes that help shape the American "family portrait" you can purchase at Sears for $29.95. What is the identity of "Mother" in modern day culture anyway? Isn't it just a compilation of stimuli you've been choking down since the day you were born and received your first baby doll? The "Mothers" room resonated with me far more than the "Fathers", but perhaps this is because "mother" is a role society eventually expects me to fulfill. The "mothers" of the piece seemed desperate and lonely, whereas the "fathers" seemed insecure and selfish. One "father" repeatedly shouts "what about me?" while another longs for the affirmation that he is indeed a good father to his children. Both rooms buckle at the seems with absurdity, hilarity and frightening discourse. 

The effect if achieved via de-contextualizing the dialogue of well known American films such as "Postcards from the Edge," "Mommy Dearest," and "Father of the Bride." Most of the films borrowed from I have seen several times or even own. Breitz extracts various segments, gestures, and exacerbations from the films and removes any background from the scenes to further distance the dialogue from its original context.  The actors seem to engage in a disconnected conversation with each other. Some of the most heartfelt and emotional scenes are transformed into a circus of ticks, huffs, and crying spells. What remains are not genuine people we can empathize with, but hollow wooden puppets dangling on a string. Who however, holds the metaphorical string? Who is the grand puppeteer? Is it the artist or the media? Who illuminates whom? The piece obviously exaggerates the stereotypes the media enforces on the public by compiling them all together in an all over assault. However, the artist could be construed as another pawn on the game board, simply re-enforcing what the media has already achieved, albeit much more insidiously. 

It is clear that the piece "Mothers and Fathers" renders the actor's emotions and words disingenuous, thus removing any validity to the stereotypes. I walked away from the piece feeling quite negatively about both motherhood and fatherhood. Then again, I feel the same after I watch yet another mind numbing commercial featuring a stressed out parent and their need for stronger paper towels in an increasingly chaotic life (because children are obviously the root of insanity).  I suppose my question is, is this piece just as, if not more absurd than the stereotypes perpetuated by the media that we, the American public, encounter on a regular basis? Is it at all enlightening in regard to the role of the media? Or is it simply about deconstructing the modern day myth of "Mother" and "Father?"