(no subject)
my glasses broke and i'm gluing them back together (hot, I know) so I've set the text size ridiculous huge so that I can see it. It's trippy.
I wanted to get input from all of you on some of the art projects that I have to finish in the next two weeks (argh).
The Gaze
So for my studio theory class, I've got a 'summary' due on Friday. We're 'summarizing' three articles: Michel Foucault's The Eye of Power (from Power/Knowledge, summarizes a lot of the stuff about the panopticon from Discipline and Punish, Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and Coco Fusco's The Other History of Intercultural Performance. All of these works are about gaze -- Foucault is about how Victorian prisons created a system of control based on gaze where watched can do the watching and create control of bodies by the gaze, and thus control of minds. Laura Mulvey talks about the gaze in cinema with respect to women and fetishization and Lacan's mirror stage and basically control through gaze in film. Coco Fusco's article is about her performance piece, The Couple in the Cage, in which she and Guillermo Gómez -Peña were exhibited in a cage in various locations on the 500th anniversary of Columbus, who apparently started human exhibition.
Anyway clearly the gaze is really important in all of these articles. We can either write an essay (which is probably the less impressive thing we can do, but it's only worth 12 percent, but I don't know what I got on my last one ... ) or do some sort of art project. I have two ideas for the art project: one is to do something with a circle of mirrors and then maybe a lightbulb in the middle (so it would have the format of the panopticon ... not sure if that's too simple) and then paint faces of many different people -- maybe eight -- on the mirrors. so they would all refelct back and forth on eachother and change or imprint on the other faces. Or I could do body parts because it's so much about how the reflections change bodies. It would be cool to use video instead of paint, because then each could really move and change, but I'm not sure how on earth I would do that. Or in I could get bent glass and then film and use the light to throw the images on the film around. But I don't have that stuff. But I'm worried about how kitschy painting on mirrors might be, except that it makes a lot of sense for the concept ... I want, I guess, to create a model or realization of the combined functioning of all of the gazes discussed in the three articles.
Another idea I kind of had with this was to do something about how sound controls or sound's place in the system of control, because sound is, I think, kind of hilariously neglected in our systems of control -- especially because I think often when we're thinking about control of society, we think about all the signs we can use to do so with sight and how sight can do that, but of course you get as much information through sound and it's not just talking that controls you -- it's not, of course, completely neglected, but I don't know if we think about how much we're controlled and how much we control each other through visual cues and control than by sound; so I thought it would be cool to create an installation about that. Maybe I would do something where I would darken a room (a small room, I think) and then create a track of sounds that are part of our control systems as well as sounds that are not, to make us more aware of the space between sound and sight in how the society that Foucault describes is structured.
Anyway let me know what you think about those two ideas. I'm not really sure what I would write about, unfortunately -- or maybe fortunately -- because all of the ideas are fairly similar and, though ubiquitous and important and so on, there's not a lot of tension between them that I could talk about. Maybe I could talk about the things each one forgets. But I think the art project would be more impressive ....
Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility
In the same class we've got a final art project too. This one I've been thinking and talking about for quite a while. We're supposed to make an artwork that responds to some of the issues we've been talking about, and I wanted to deal with aura / authenticity and charlatanism (we read Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and about Yves Klein's zones of 'immaterial pictorial sensibility'), and I wanted to bring it to the internet because art on the internet and issues about its autheticity, saleability, etc, are important. Also I was entertained by the idea that some conceptual artists would, in total seriousness, sell certificates of authenticity with their conceptual works, as one of the cool things (for me and, I thought, for a lot of them) about conceptual art was that it was a bit more resistant to the artwork and that it was beyond or outside of authenticity.
What I want to do is make a website from which I would "sell" a .jpeg file. This is kind of hard to explain so ... I'll give it a shot. I want to present it like you're buying super special fancy art. There would be a preview of the .jpeg so you "know what you're getting". That preview would be a small (maybe 100x100px), flat colour jpeg. Then when you "buy" the file (through paypal and maybe wp ecommerce) and you could download a 'hi res', possibly psd or tiff file that would would just be a gigantic flat colour. You wouldn't get any sort of certificate, though -- although I'm slightly worried that the larger file itself may count as a certificate of authenticity .... I want it to be like when you buy the art, what you get is just basically the knowledge that you own "it". Make the certificate as much a state of mind as the belief that the jpeg or the colour is art.
On the site I'd try to market it, as I said, as a great art project -- talk about its reproducibility and its immaterial nature as making it adaptable to any use the purchaser can print out the big file and make it into posters or get paint in that colour, etc etc etc. I want to buy a can of paint that colour and paint a bunch of panels and then hang them up in a room as a "show". I'd also use various articles about immaterial / conceptual art and frankenstein them together so that they seem to apply to the work I'm selling. I was also thinking that I would take money by donation, so that ownership would be 'open' to anyone -- rather than fixing a price -- or maybe fix a stupidly high price so that no one would actually do it because I don't expect anyone to but I'd have to give their money back.
I also want to make sure that it's just over the top enough that you'd at least get an inkling that it's silly. I don't want to be a real or successful charlatan, I want to make people consider the marketability of immaterial things and think about other online products and services you can buy that are kind of, to me, suspect in terms of their legitimacy as products -- for instance, money on second life or web space -- but then of course that's how capitalism works and to keep these things going, real resources are required -- but the real resources and what you pay for are hugely abstracted from one anther.
So I want to talk about artistic authenticity in a digital age; whether or not it exists and what the limits of ownership are. I also wanted to hopefulyl bring to mind other things you buy online and the trust and potential charlatanism implicated there, as well as buying things like music, where you can easily aquire them, so the only benefit you, yourself, really get out of actually buying music online is that you bought it, not that you can listen to it.
When I originally had this idea it seemed a lot simpler. A lot of this thinking would be under the surface ... I'm going to start doing the work on it today / tomorrow so I will post updates as I go. Thoughts appreciated -- especially as to whether this actually or clearly brings in any issues after Klein, because I think the digital-immateriality and not just artistic immateriality -- or rather the similarities between the two -- is something I want to address in the piece and if it doesn't come through I need to fix that.
Also suugestions for the colour are much appreciated -- would be hilarious if I didn't even choose the colour myself.
I also need a title for it. I am thinking of basing it on the colour. But I need to get the domain for it really quickly -- if I can't thinking of a good one I'll just use my name and repurpose it to a real site in a few months. I was going to get the domain through one of the 'free domain name' sites (which are a pain) just to make it as ... fake? as I can. Then if I want to keep the domain I'll move it to a real registrar in a year.
Here are some possibilities:
Video
I'm in a video class this semester and we've got a final project coming up in that class too. My last project was about stress and about working at 800 miles a minute, so I was thinking about possibly continuing that theme by doing something where I film myself sleeping for several hours and then compress it into a few minutes. I would also record the sounds around me for the same amount of time (during a busy and noisy day) and then compress it to the same amount of time. Or I could stretch the sleeping images out the same amount that I compress the sound ... I think the intent is pretty clear ... tell me what you all think ... blech sleepy.
Also some art!
That full version is really big, btw.