Benjamin’s Work

Week 11

Food Piece

Food Piece Notes:

• Use the food left in my old studio mini fridge 
  • Mouldy Potato Soup
  • 1 can of Bubly carbonated water
  • 1 can of Christmas Canada Dry gingerale
  • 2 containers of ranch veggie dip 
• Approach it materially and sculpturally
• Want to freeze all the food and take them out of their containers and set them out 
  • thinking about Rachel Whiteread and her casts of objects, specifically her series of resin chairs 
    • noticed how the chair casts which show the negative space beneath a chair between the legs are functionally still chair looking, like small stools 
    • the food in my piece is still food, but they are more casts of the inside of their container since all conventional functionality of consuming them is gone 
  • the foods become their container removing any functionality or way of eating or drinking 
  • this removal of function speaks to the fact that they are abandoned food, food waste 
    • they are really now just physical space takers in the fridge with no intention by anyone to consume them 
    • this displays them as exactly that, stripped of the veil of their containers which suggest some sort of intention to store keep or preserve

Week 8 : Zoom Video Piece

Week 7

Pipolotti Rist 

Be Nice To Me (Flatten 4)

• This piece communicates the medium so effectively, as Diane said in class if this was played in a gallery space on a CRT television it would look like she is somehow inside the box of the television pressing against the glass of the screen
• It could also communicate the opposite, that she is witnessing us on a screen and we are looking out towards her
• After watching the full Be Nice To Me piece the moments of her against the glass with makeup were by far the most captivating
  • you can follow the trace of the colour and intended shape on her face to be pressed onto the glass and warped and then picked up again and printed back on the skin 
  • the patterns the colours made that were indicative of her movement and which stayed on her face and the glass
  • and then when the video plays in reverse being able to almost predict where she goes through the smears of makeup and spit 
    • such a cool way to engage the viewer
• I think possible prompts for this piece would be to engage the viewer in as visceral as possible through the medium of a screen, using the divide to create intimacy with the viewer
  • im assuming the performer is Pipilotti herself

Week 6

Week 6 Notes

The Case for Video Art

What sets apart video art from other video media?

Early cinema was inherently experimental because there was no standard for creation yet. 

Sony porta-pak- changed everything for video art 

• portable 

Nam June Paik 

Zen for Film 1964

Minimal, focus on the process and mechanism of video 

Shigego Kubota

expanded cinema

when films exited theatres 

sculptural videos 

playing with projection and light and the viewers’ involvement

Had Video- Art Prepared us Enough for Zoom Meeting 

Vivian Castro 

• iconologically the face occupying the whole frame of an image was rare in painting
  • “video is the first medium that is used to being so focused on the face, differently from film” 
    • interesting distinction, also what about still images
  • artists using the “potency” of the smaller camera
    • referring to the intimacy ascribed to it
    • physical closeness = intimate experience my be simplifying it a bit or maybe I have too narrow a definition of intimate experience 
      • intimately unnerving? 
      • intimately unattractive?
    • the narcissism of the medium, the longing for absolute video feedback to become like a recorded mirror

On Boomerang (1974)

• anxious energy so much of it 
• drawing lines between Holts experienced distance between thoughts and the slowing down of connecting thoughts and words. “Do we have trouble making connections between thoughts? Are we expressing everything we want to?”
• frustrations more to do with the medium than the content.

• but is it also then the context, I don’t feel frustrated or tired when I’m on calls with friends, but school it can be mind-numbingly annoying 
• Why is that?
• “impulse for participants to talk all the time” 
• this this this this
• it is either silence or a monologue, so difficult to keep a social rhythm 
• being “surrounded by ourselves” on the screen 
• “online meetings are the ultimate modern life’s immobility.” 
  • to Castro, this social isolation of the self on the screen through video art was precursory to what technology like this would do to us in real life, outside of an art context 

Candice Breitz 

Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley) 2005 

Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) 2005

• Loved the moments between tracks the waiting, or when people are feeling it and start talking to the recording 
• I viewed the videos before reading and it’s funny I didn’t pick up on a geographic specificity in the sample of people shown, I don’t know if I imagined it as just indicative of the fanbase demography or what. 
• It does feel like a study of a group of people, almost like interviews of a specific demographic like you would see for a documentary around a single person or a community of people or experience. 
• their artist is their shared experience, their community, so it makes sense that the manner of the interview would be their music
• I don’t know if I ever picked up on the critical aspects of mainstream entertainment itself but rather the culture it inadvertently creates
•  something so streamlined in its production to be shown from the other side, in an infinitely diverse way, is an interesting point of tension 

Factum Trembley, 2009

• so so so impactful on me
• the narrative form of their answers is almost too perfect, speaking too their twinhood 
  • Albeit Breitz makes many cuts to communicate her perspective through her subjects (repeating a phrase of one of them later in the video, almost responding as a third connecting member of the “conversation”(?))
  • she draws attention to contradictions between the two separate accounts or differing opinions on single events, its fascinating to see the spectrum of experience so clearly on such a minute scale

Video Piece Notes

• obstructing the webcam 
  • with wax paper or plastic wrap
  • created a fuzzy or crystalline effect 
• I kind of want to formally and visually play with two obstructed (abstracted) laptop cameras back to back, walking around them  
• thinking about Bruce Nauman’s walking pieces
• maybe play with the audio freaking out when the two microphones pick up the same audio and reproduce it  
  • audio of me talking? 

Week 4

Notes:

Adad Hannah

• Mainly photographic practice 
  • Interested in tableaux vivant, the french practice historically to get live actors and performers to pose in recreations of famous paintings 
  • Focus on the bodies movement while being still, 
  • Moment of the pose, when the subject freezes
    • tableaux vivant spreads that moment out 
    • watching a video of someone standing still while they themselves stand still prompts the viewer to examine their bodies more carefully
    • almost like a Foucault mirroring 
  • Movement in stillness
  • Even in his still photographic work like The Screen, there is a focus on one’s own bodily awareness, the skin beneath the exterior skin 
    • I wish that one model wasn’t looking at the camera, breaks from the shape trying to be created 

Vancouver Sun Article

• Hannah goes deeper into his process of capturing these covid portraits 
• Used long lens and went to public spaces and asked people if they wanted their photo taken 
  • Having a blown-out background associating with “deep conversation” feels like a stretch. I think there is no emotional intimacy given in these portraits but rather bodily vulnerability
  • He are being given access to these people in a way even they themselves are not aware of 
    • How the body moves in this moment of posed tension
  • The videos expose how people think one ought to look while being photographed, especially in the ones of people playing a sport it is revealing how much sports media effects the posing of “what people playing sports” looks like 
• Hannah asks questions about the pandemic to each of his models and their words are quoted beneath each portrait 
  • I don’t know how I feel about the necessity of these quotes in the work, while yes they do feel heartfelt and play into exclusively present sentiments surrounding the fear, stress and adaptive nature of our current lives, I think the videos could stand alone, or just names could be given. The quotes are too similar to “Humans of New York” for my liking.

Self Portrait a la Adad Hanna: Party

The thing I miss most at this moment in time, self-indulgent as it may be, are my friends. On the screen behind me is one of the many recordings I made at a friend’s birthday party two summers ago. This documentation of that night was more impactful to me viewing it now than I probably ever had imagined it to be when I made it. This work feels like documentation in response to that video; responding to a record of an experience that feels so far away at this moment.

Formally, I wish to experiment with tableaux vivant-ish things more, especially with this camera (a very old digital Pentax) which gives away quite quickly that the viewer is watching a video, through the pulsating of the camera refocusing and shivering of the horizontal grain. I like how the edges of my figure are fuzzy, I look even more still than if the video quality was better and my movement instead seems now to be caused by the grain itself.

I didn’t want the image on the screen to be clear to the viewer, as that would be obviously distracting but also personalizes the video to me, which is not my intention. I want the viewer to see that it is a video of some sort of party playing in contrast to the dark monotone stillness of the scene. A video of such abundant joy and energy within one that has seemingly none. Perhaps a metaphor for our current situation. 😉

Week 3

Notes:

Hiba Abdallah Artist Interview: McMaster Museum of Art

• projects embedded in social practice, text exploring locality and civic agency 

 We remain profoundly and infinitely connected

• human connectivity as an interconnected feedback loop 
• visual art and human biochemistry

Practice – Communities 

• social engagement 
• most works are collaborative projects
  • projects are led by the people Abdallah works with 
  • back and forth, a feedback loop 
  • results often  in a text work (book, billboard) 
• interested in the intersections of art and civic responsibility 
• drew connections between Windsor and hamilton as post-industrial cities 
  • “Two tales of City” (2012) revealed hamiltons often looked over the historical textile industry 

COVID’s effect on work:

• how languages intersect and how words change from day to day 
• how language shifts over time 
• covid changed the context of of her work as other present contexts will change it in the future

Banner Candidates: 

I wanted to take an ironic approach to the placement of my banner, at first picturing putting it around the car metal scrap yards that are near my studio. But then I found this spot on my search for scrap and thought it would be perfect. The covered-up graffiti, the bland colour pallet, the lack of seemingly any of the “cultural material” as the article probably intended to mean.

However, the scene is simultaneously superficially absent yet internally filled with cultural material regardless. All of these small elements on the periphery of our considered world are reflective of our culture. The North American romanticization of the highway. What motivates the censoring of graffiti on a highway underpass? The fence to obstruct people or animals (?) from crossing the highway. Im doing a poor job articulating it but basically, I liked that the placement of this statement (almost an exclamation) here in a place where the definition of cultural material is shifted to encourage a closer examination of the everyday and banal.

Week 2

Notes:

“The Optics of the Language: How Joi T. Arcand Looks with Words” Canadian Art 

• Native misery apparent in everyday aesthetics 
  • the Optic of the murderer of an Indigenous woman 
    • “optic” is the lens or filter by which one looks and from this looking ropes what is seen into an encounter humming with all sorts of potential”
    • Bushby’s optic is a part of “settler horror” 
    • This optic ropes indigenous people “the ante-Canada… into a representational field where all things… can be put to violent use.” 
    • “I got one” phrase when Bushby murdered Barbara Kentner
• The second paragraph is wildly confusing, super flowery 
  • “modes of enfleshment” 
  • in summary, words encapsulate simultaneous danger and pride by creating worlds around them
    • like how “one” in terms of Bushby’s “optic” creates “death worlds” for indigenous people, violence in everything 
    • the “double-bind of enunciation” ??? 
  • “savage call to being with a more spacious one (word world?)”
    • is Arcand answering this call? 
• Arcand’s using words as “emotional architectures” which “change the visual landscape” 
  • Arcand titles her new word world “Future Earth”
• References Maggie Nelson (American Writer) speaking of words being able to “incite “the outline of a becoming””
  • Is Arcand inciting “a becoming” through her commandeering of Cree syllabics into everyday aesthetics? 
  • In an aside reminder to self to read “Something Bright Then Holes” 
• Bushby’s use of “one” as a “refusal of a name and the humanity that comes with it” shows the “terrible mechanics of language” 
  • Arcand is subverting these mechanics through presenting language in a native futuristic way 
• Arcand is “mourning language loss” of the Cree syllabics but through a method that signifies a “world-to-come”

Onto the Work

Here on Future Earth

• “where Arcands photo-based practice and interest in textuality synched”
• These images are to thought about as an “alternative present” 
• digitally manipulated signs and replaced original text with Cree syllabics
  • shows us a present parallel to our own allows us to “loop into a new mode of perception”
  • shows us “the rogue possibilities bubbling up in the thick ordinariness of everyday life” where they weren’t before. 
    • the power in the mundane language around us once changed becomes clear 
  • Using signifiers of nostalgia Arcand orients the viewer to “think back on a future past” not “a Utopian Elsewhere” 
  • “The mise-en-scene of settlement”: interesting
    • Her new world portrays deep meanings separate from “terra nullius” and “myths of Indian savagery and degeneracy” 
      • the bucolic untamed wilderness, the stillness (stagnancy) in that false landscape
    • instead, “a future (built) atop the decayed remains of coloniality”

Week 2 Assignment: 

Both of these artists are repurposing textual media to fit their own created purposes, however the scale of both the mediums and the message could not be more different.

In Germaine Koh’s Dear Mercer (2006) she utilizes a practically obsolete and banal media; the telegram, as a way of conveying her disinterest in participating in fundraising events. The telegram is simple, always stating “I AM SORRY TO SAY I CANNOT PARTICIPATE, GERMAINE KOH”. The repeated use of this text along with the unorthodox medium turns what could be an banal emailed message into an artist’s multiple which the gallery oftentimes frames and auctions off at the fundraiser event. This piece utilizes double meanings and methods in every aspect of its appearance and function. It is simultaneously a rejection of the acquisition while still providing a “work”. It is also simultaneously a piece of ephemera and a printed work that is now privy to formal examination (ie. the placing of the text, the way the telegram is cut, the texture of the paper.). These double meanings confront the viewer, at first belying its complexity and depth through its seemingly banal, almost bureaucratic appearance. 

Joi T. Arcand’s Sweetgrass Store (2009) along with all her images from the “Here on Future Earth” series utilize different text in much different ways. She digitally replaces texts from storefronts and other building signage with Cree syllabics in a way to stake out a parallel present future that asserts indigenous presence and prosperity taking over the remnants of a colonial prairie landscape. Instead of repurposing the text of communication, she commandeers the text of place, ownership and power within the landscape. The scale of this textual shift is much larger than Kohs’ it is far more charged than the wit and cynicism of Kohs’ telegraphs.

Week 1