Okie dokey...I'm a technologically challenged dinosaur so posted this blog somewhere totally wrong. It can be found in the Art and Architecture blog. It's hanging out by its lonesome as the only blog entry of that site- as if that wasn't enough to inform my failed blogging attempts!
The address is http://artandtoday2011-alexia.blogspot.com/
Couldn't copy and paste, not going to rewrite it. Sorry guys!
Showing posts with label Alexia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alexia. Show all posts
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Some Relations between Conceptual and Performance Art
- I do not believe conceptual art is anti-elitist. Duchamp's intention to democratise the aesthetic language was not successful. The contemporary dialectic is an exclusive brand of knowledge that has failed to receive acceptance from the nonart (public) audience. It is art for artists. In which case, is it successful? Can it be legitimated considering the wider context of a rigorous and often collapsing global system? Is conceptual art necessary considering it exists as such a parochialised cultural activity? I hope so, but often doubt the fact.
- Definition is not description. Kosuth stated conceptual art is self-referential...is that not circular reasoning and hence a logical fallacy?
- Art practice: priority is given to the conceptual scheme found generally in linguistic formulation which is followed by the perceptual experience the artwork provides. This is not conceptual art for the concept does not refer here to intention of the manifest work. Intention deliberates a controlled outcome and the focus is on objecthood. Conceptual art is often undeterminable (chance-based) and planted in the procedure of art making itself.
- All art is manifestly physical. Performance art is distinguishable from conceptual art as being uninformed by the notion of relic. It exists in a splinter of time and place. The auratic experience of a performance is lost in the documentation procedure whereas other aesthetic mediums bless their physical outputs with substantial life force.
- Bochner: "There is no art that does not bear some burden of physicality. To deny it is to descend to irony." AGREED!
- Please comment! I've left questions open-ended for discussion. I haven't got any answers but since this is what we have involved ourselves in it's worth debating.
VANTAGE POINTS AND IMAGE WORLDS
Time and space compressions, caused by the ubiquity and eternal presence of media and image mediations, have propelled information into a geographically non-specific matrix. Information gathered from the sources of ever-perfected technologies is not a fictive rendering of reality or a formative mimesis but an effective strategy for humans to visualise and conceive of themselves. The medium of television in particular extends human interactive abilities much like a technical prosthesis giving us access to the greater human experience unlike ever before; the gift of broad self-reflexivity.
By no means does this cultural transformation impede on social functioning but has defined the modern procedure for survival. The shift exists as a pan-cultural phenomenon. It multiplies the individual identity of places, objects and people so that the global collectivity is bound to a network of analogous experiences of information. The shift to digital technologies sees the hybridisation of human identity. Notably the collective and inherited memory is carried in verbal fragments as opposed to written histories. This is the birth of an oral culture.
The action of viewing becomes less self-conscious with emerging desires for total immersion in image-worlds. This is evidenced in the popularised use of video games and HD screens. Personally, this is a precarious situation. We are on the precipice of forfeiting responsibilities as viewers to make image-world distinct from immediate and physical experiences. We cannot naively allow images to be used duplicitously for wide circulation of misinformation and unjust attempts at social control. The creation of images is an innate facet of human activity. It is imperative to maintain a schismatical relationship between the viewing and the living of images.
By no means does this cultural transformation impede on social functioning but has defined the modern procedure for survival. The shift exists as a pan-cultural phenomenon. It multiplies the individual identity of places, objects and people so that the global collectivity is bound to a network of analogous experiences of information. The shift to digital technologies sees the hybridisation of human identity. Notably the collective and inherited memory is carried in verbal fragments as opposed to written histories. This is the birth of an oral culture.
The action of viewing becomes less self-conscious with emerging desires for total immersion in image-worlds. This is evidenced in the popularised use of video games and HD screens. Personally, this is a precarious situation. We are on the precipice of forfeiting responsibilities as viewers to make image-world distinct from immediate and physical experiences. We cannot naively allow images to be used duplicitously for wide circulation of misinformation and unjust attempts at social control. The creation of images is an innate facet of human activity. It is imperative to maintain a schismatical relationship between the viewing and the living of images.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Annotated Bibliography: Art & Spirituality
Heartney, E. 2008. Art & Today.
London: Phaidon
Art & Today provides a somewhat parochial overview of notions concerning spirituality and aesthetics. The focus tends to dwell on matters of religiosity (or denial thereof) commencing with pre-modernism, wherein visual imagery was immediately quoted from organised religious material, to the pan-European secularisation of culture at the birth of modernism that propagated the denial of orthodox representations. This cultural shift emancipated the artist from having to satisfy strict ritualistic function, hence licencing oblique experimentation with formal properties. I personally wished to investigate questions of sublimity dissociated from the religious motif and mere object-observation. The text does briefly mention Olafur Eliasson, who I have chosen to exemplify features of my thesis, but refrains from a discussion on less overt aspects of sublimity such as liminality or altering states of consciousness. Art & Today delivers a fair account of art and spirituality, however is insufficient for the supplementation of my own theoretical inquiry.
Ed. by Morley, S. 2010. The Sublime.
London: Whitechapel Gallery: The MIT Press
The Sublime collects a body of writing concerned with the subject of sublimity as both philosophical/psychological inquiry and artistic pursuit. My principle focus is thematically inspired by an excerpt by George Quasha and Charles Stein (p214) which discusses liminality, or a marginal state existing centrally within a psychic transition. The peripheries of this induced transition include an original state of awareness and a binary state of heightened (disassociated) awareness. Quasha and Stein posit that liminality facilitates a critical study wherein reality can question itself; it suspends one in a timeless respite, in between psychic states wherein both are accessible for assessment. I believe this basic idea is supported by a plurality of incarnations of the binary opposition theorem, which has had religious manifestations for millennia. One concern that resurfaces on multiple occasions, throughout the volume, is the ontological significance of the calculable. It's seed is found in the pan-cultural admittance of vast technological domination. Truth, according to Quasha and Stein, is what this imperious regime threatens. Art of the threshold, or of the liminal, is offered as a cure to the modern predicament principally because it commands a state of radical enquiry. This text has been invaluable to my study of the topic area. The mobilisation of spirituality as a psychological function and a means to recalibrate notions of reality has enabled me to investigate the experience of art and avoid matters of mere objecthood, which I believe in itself lacks quality of the sublime.
"Olafur Eliasson." Artforum International 48.10 (2010): 308. Expanded Academic ASAP (online), 16th August 2011.
http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A230152288&source=gale&srcprod=EAIM&userGroupName=usyd&version=1.0
The article is written by artist, Olafur Elaisson, on the fundamental advantages of the museological context in the containment and production of reality. Eliasson functionally uses the museum interior as a vehicle for viewers to experience art; not merely as a prescriptive environment for the observation of art-object, but to amplify the experiential quality of his aesthetic experimentation. Eliasson provides examples of occasions when he has deliberately pushed the temporal boundaries of the exhibition context, including one event in Austria (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2001) where he publicly sent notice for the opening of his exhibition preceding the actual date. The purpose of such experimentation, Eliasson purports, is to 'deconsolidate' his artwork, thereby diminishing inhibited focus on objecthood. The museum space is pivotal for Eliasson, having aided him in generating concepts of polyphonic space, elevated temporal awareness and the function of human sense-perception. I believe these ideas constitute an aspect of sublimity in Eliasson's work which react simultaneously (even symbiotically) with/against feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty rife within the social construct. The fissure between interior (museum) and exterior (installations appropriated from nature); between creating an alternate perceptive state and projecting a current one, closely follows my critical investigation of liminality, hence proving the article a valuable source.
London: Phaidon
Art & Today provides a somewhat parochial overview of notions concerning spirituality and aesthetics. The focus tends to dwell on matters of religiosity (or denial thereof) commencing with pre-modernism, wherein visual imagery was immediately quoted from organised religious material, to the pan-European secularisation of culture at the birth of modernism that propagated the denial of orthodox representations. This cultural shift emancipated the artist from having to satisfy strict ritualistic function, hence licencing oblique experimentation with formal properties. I personally wished to investigate questions of sublimity dissociated from the religious motif and mere object-observation. The text does briefly mention Olafur Eliasson, who I have chosen to exemplify features of my thesis, but refrains from a discussion on less overt aspects of sublimity such as liminality or altering states of consciousness. Art & Today delivers a fair account of art and spirituality, however is insufficient for the supplementation of my own theoretical inquiry.
Ed. by Morley, S. 2010. The Sublime.
London: Whitechapel Gallery: The MIT Press
The Sublime collects a body of writing concerned with the subject of sublimity as both philosophical/psychological inquiry and artistic pursuit. My principle focus is thematically inspired by an excerpt by George Quasha and Charles Stein (p214) which discusses liminality, or a marginal state existing centrally within a psychic transition. The peripheries of this induced transition include an original state of awareness and a binary state of heightened (disassociated) awareness. Quasha and Stein posit that liminality facilitates a critical study wherein reality can question itself; it suspends one in a timeless respite, in between psychic states wherein both are accessible for assessment. I believe this basic idea is supported by a plurality of incarnations of the binary opposition theorem, which has had religious manifestations for millennia. One concern that resurfaces on multiple occasions, throughout the volume, is the ontological significance of the calculable. It's seed is found in the pan-cultural admittance of vast technological domination. Truth, according to Quasha and Stein, is what this imperious regime threatens. Art of the threshold, or of the liminal, is offered as a cure to the modern predicament principally because it commands a state of radical enquiry. This text has been invaluable to my study of the topic area. The mobilisation of spirituality as a psychological function and a means to recalibrate notions of reality has enabled me to investigate the experience of art and avoid matters of mere objecthood, which I believe in itself lacks quality of the sublime.
"Olafur Eliasson." Artforum International 48.10 (2010): 308. Expanded Academic ASAP (online), 16th August 2011.
http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A230152288&source=gale&srcprod=EAIM&userGroupName=usyd&version=1.0
The article is written by artist, Olafur Elaisson, on the fundamental advantages of the museological context in the containment and production of reality. Eliasson functionally uses the museum interior as a vehicle for viewers to experience art; not merely as a prescriptive environment for the observation of art-object, but to amplify the experiential quality of his aesthetic experimentation. Eliasson provides examples of occasions when he has deliberately pushed the temporal boundaries of the exhibition context, including one event in Austria (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2001) where he publicly sent notice for the opening of his exhibition preceding the actual date. The purpose of such experimentation, Eliasson purports, is to 'deconsolidate' his artwork, thereby diminishing inhibited focus on objecthood. The museum space is pivotal for Eliasson, having aided him in generating concepts of polyphonic space, elevated temporal awareness and the function of human sense-perception. I believe these ideas constitute an aspect of sublimity in Eliasson's work which react simultaneously (even symbiotically) with/against feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty rife within the social construct. The fissure between interior (museum) and exterior (installations appropriated from nature); between creating an alternate perceptive state and projecting a current one, closely follows my critical investigation of liminality, hence proving the article a valuable source.
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