Ana Mendieta

PERFORMATIVITY OF IDENTITY

This article really helped me understand the idea of performativity more than in the past discussions we've had in class. I could see the practical applications of the use of the term in the artist's life and works. I was amazed at how many people were willing to label Ana's works and dismiss them just because she is a minority female. Even when a critic tried to give her some worth as an artist, he still ended up labeling her works as self-portraits and personal. In this I don't think he was entirely wrong, but he didn't look deeper into her works at all. The fact that the author of this article decided to analyze Ana's works with performativity of identity instead of simply her permance in general stemming from her personal identifications to the world, made his analysis much stronger and much more open to possibility than an any other critic listed. It makes me wonder if her works were really that much ignored because of prejudice or if regular people watching the performances and were not critics, saw the works for what they were. Critics seem often to be the standard for what people will accept good works of art from, and it makes me wonder how much bigger in the art scene Ana would have been if a critic had acclaimed her more.

I think perhaps my favorite works described in the article were her eath works. I am not sure why, because I am not into the whole "new age" and "mother nature" spiritualisms, but I really do like these.
They do have a spiritual connection somehow between man and the earth, but they are also more than the simplistic new age movement. They are statements of her culture and herself as a person, and they are as transient as she is. Because they are made outside, they can be manipulated by the earth itself and may be there in time or may not. I like the natural feel of them, how art is part of the earth itself, that indeed the world itself is art and should be shown as such.

SURREALISM

There is a quote I found contradictory to the rest of the article when I read this assignment. The author states that "In offering the self as subject, we assume that the artist has chosen to reveal intimate aspects of his or her physical and psychological being to us." And later, it states that this is more "complex and conflicted issue." Yet, further in the article, as we are invited to explore each artist's works, we find that the artists, while having meaningful concepts behind their art, are all three psychologically messed up in one way or another. They may not have been consciously using their art to tell others about their problems, but in the end the art does seem to be a cry for help, perhaps a search for release of their mind from the tortures they are dealing with. The most disturbing of these of course, is Woodman's art, since she commits suicide by 22 years of age. Her works all seem to proclaim her sense of loss and confusion of her identity, and if anyone had bothered to see her cry for help through her art, they may have tried to help her deal with this instead of killing herself. Art is a strong display of a person's inner passion, no matter which type of art is being talked about. Any art that displays confusion of identity, loss, and hopelessness should be viewed as a danger to the artist. Anyone with thoughts like these coming out on paper should be talked to and helped immediately. Why is it that the "best" art always stems from the emotionally unstable? Hardly any of the artists we've covered this semester have been stable people. Can one be a stable person and still be an effective artist? Or are those the artists we claim to despise as those that are only in it for the commercial aspects, the money?

Below I have shown an example of this....the first photo is of an artist that drew this picture of suicide, and later died from falling down the stairs while drinking too much:A deeply disillusioned man, he saw humanity as essentially bestial and the city of Berlin as a sink of depravity and deprivation, its streets crowded with unprincipled profiteers, prostitutes, war-crippled dregs and a variety of perverts. A communist, his feeling of social outrage stimulated him to produce the most biting drawings and paintings. -Trewin Copplestone

And here we have an almost laughable picture of a man supposedly commiting suicide but you can feel the difference because this is a stock photo and the artist behind it was not creating because he actually felt suicidal or anything of the kind:

Picturing Whiteness

Yuppie Project

This article brings up a topic which I have been thinking about for awhile...the topic of whiteness and how to critique it in art. When we were given our assignment to come up with a stereotype against us and then find a way through art to falsify that myth, I had an extremely hard time thinking of a stereotype against me. There are things I could find, but they were limited and not powerful stereotypes. First, I am a woman, and there are ways to stereotype women still, but as a culture we have become far less prejudiced against women in general, especially in white society. Whereas a black or Asian, etc woman might have problems fitting in to society, the white woman has become an image of equality with man, and even at times, the stronger of the two. There are those that still hold stereotypes of women, but they are fewer and further between. Women can be in the army, they can study, they can hold jobs, preach in churches, and own companies as leader above men. They are not the woman of the early age, and they are not known as the raiser of children exclusively any longer. So how do you give a white woman such as myself a stereotype? I believe the only way to stereotype a white woman is to be of another descent and to criticize the whiteness I possess. As Nikki Lee points out in her Yuppie Project, the whites stand alone. They are possessors of their color without having to think about it. We have always been the high society in America, and therefore it is hard to stereotype us. I think the Yuppie Project does a great job of pointing out the white's exclusivity in society, and also says plainly that we are a close-minded group, unwilling or perhaps unable to blend with other society. Critiquing them in this project works because Nikki is Asian, but how does one critique their own whiteness? If I were to do Nikki's pieces, would I fit in to all the societies she fit into with ease? Would I fit in to the high society Wall Street stock brokers in the Yuppie Project? I think I would fit in better to the Yuppie Project than I would with the other societies she blended into during her series. The Wall Street business club seems to be the stereotype of white society; the money winners, the exclusives, the high societies. Lee could not fit in because she is foreign, and I could because I am white, but I could not fit in so well to alternative societies because I am white. Because the whites are viewed as this picture of high money maker society, and not as the poor, old, and essentially "low" society, we can never fit in to low society groups because we will stick out. Perhaps not always and not for every group, but overall white people stick out. How did we get this way? I think artists should focus more on critiquing whiteness to open people's eyes in our society.

Case in Point:
What do you think automatically when you see this picture? That she is a member of the society? Or that she's in a foreign country to help this society? I automatically think the latter. What if the roles were reversed?

ALTHEA THAUBERGER

ALTHEA THAUBERGER

I find the pieces described in this article very interesting because this is the issue I've had with the internet ever since the arrival of YouTube. Anyone, because of the ready access to equipment, can become an artist. Althea used this to her advantage and brought the concept out of the internet and into real space, which I like. She shows explicitly how the average person can be an artist if given the correct equipment and opportunity. The reaction to these pieces is interesting, also because it seems that the regular people (non-artists, as she says) get more meaning out of the pieces than the artists do. I think this is a shift in culture, because most people would never attempt some kind of art without training and very few non-artists would understand or even be interested in traditional art pieces, such as "Nude on a Staircase." Yet, with the arrival of the internet, any average person can download, edit, and upload to YouTube any video they want. Is this the new "modern" art? I think it is. We are entering an age where people want to be connected to others around the world, they want to be seen and heard and cared about. This YouTube phenomenon has facilitated this idea. It's a new kind of art, created by our facebook/myspace influenced culture; an art that is not traditional art at all, but rather interactive, connective, and as Emily Duke says, empathetic. Even blogs can be considered a new art in this vein. The issue I have is whether or not this is truly to be considered art in and of itself, or if art needs more thought and consideration before being considered "art." Art can be a loose term at times. I think Althea's works are definitely art because they are commenting on the new cultural shift facilitated by the internet, but are the actual videos on YouTube art? In one sense I think they are, but on the other hand, they aren't. Maybe it's just hard to let go of traditional thoughts of art that I've been learning about, and it's hard to accept something so easily constructed as being the same level of art that I've become used to. Perhaps it can be considered art, but a new strain of art that cannot be considered as "high art" but perhaps "social art." I think the term "modern" is not good enough to describe this new wave. Modern to me evokes a sense of experimentalism, unique, using found objects to make something new and interesting...but many videos on YouTube are certainly not interesting, and neither are they all a comment on any other art created. Some of them are just daily video blogs. I think in order to consider this art more carefully, it should be given a name of its own and taken seriously as a new wave of art.

Internet Identities

IDENTITY, SOCIAL NETWORKS, AND ONLINE COMMUNICATION

In this article the point is made that it is possible that online communication has made us into a "new kind of person." Guy Merchant makes it clear that he does not support the argument that this is true and definite, but he does mention it as a point to consider. I find this a fascinating argument, because I have heard this theory before, especially when dealing with new technologies like the internet, cell phones, and the possibilities of the internet becoming a virtual reality that we can live and walk in as if it were the real life we live in now, much like the Matrix. If we were to live in a virtual computer-based reality, it seems we would be radically different, but is the change really that obvious? I think it isn't. I think it would be more accurate to say that the technology is indeed changing us right now, even though it is still essentially in the early phases. When was the last time any of us went a day without using some sort of technology? The more I think about it, the more I realize how dependent I am on it. I forgot my cellphone at home a few days back and I nearly panicked. I only left it at home for one class, but I went out of my way to go home and grab it before I went out again, even though it was far out of my way. I cannot afford internet on my phone, but when I use my friends' phones as a internet connection, I love the feeling of connectedness, of feeling like there is always someone out there that wants to talk to me. I get this feeling every time I am online, and I thrive on that contact with the virtual world. Yet, I don't really go out of my way to meet new people in real life...instead, I rely on Facebook and Myspace and like-minded chat rooms and forums online to meet people. I look for people with like opinions and interests. I don't even bother talking to strangers unless they are friends of friends or are classmates that I have to work with. This is a change in societal thinking, because I know I am not the only one that does this. Who I am as a person is esconced on a webpage, and I make most of my friends through it. If I were to lose my Facebook, I would lose contact with a good half of my friends, and all of the memories we'd shared together. Many of those friends are surface friends, and people that I don't even talk to outside of the website. I never call them or hang out with them. A lot of them I do, of course, but a majority of them are simply online friends. Some of them I met online and never met in person.

This reliance on technology, this connectedness, I think is a new way of relating to the world that my parents never dealt with. Your lives were connected to a few people in your area, most likely your neighborhood, and you had little choice who you were connected to. There was no possibility of going online and finding friends in other states. You were exposed to opinions and views of the world that were not your own and you learned to live with them because they were all you had. Now, this is no longer true. You can ignore those people you don't see eye to eye with, and go online and find meaningful friends somewhere far away that you can still easily keep in contact with. Does this make us a new kind of person? I think so. Not only are we relating differently, but we are also living a majority of our lives on a computer, becoming dependent on a device to survive socially. We are also more narrow minded and probably less accomodating of new ideas. We are becoming a dependent and weak people who no longer rely on each other but on technology to survive. I think we are not too far from virtual friends and robots...a time when we will no longer need people at all. I would be interested to see what kind of world that would be, and I don't think it's too far off. Maybe I'll see it before I die...though I doubt it will be something I will want to see. Then again, we are growing up in this new world, and by then I may like it, even thrive on it like I now thrive on Facebook. By then Second Life may become that virtual world outside the computer, and all the "friends" you see are digital.

CONNECTIVE IDENTITIES

"More than any other medium, even more than television, the Internet nourishes and fabricates the fantasy of having a double of oneself. The person with whom we phantasmagoically identify in a film is always someone completely different, someone fictional."

I am not sure how much I agree with this particular statement, because though it is true that on the internet one can be anyone they want to be because no one will ever know, as is said later in the article one cannot ever truly separate online identity from your real life identity, because identity is constantly being constructed. I love this word "construction" when dealing with identity, because it seems to say that even though we have personalities and gestures particular to us, we can always change. This change seems to be what the internet is about, more than trying out new identities in general, but about trying out new versions of ourselves. Things you wouldn't be brave enough to say online, suddenly, you can say in an online conversation. Where your emotions mught give you away in real life, online you can be bold and brave in word and the other person will think you are cool, instead of scared or nervous. The "you" that you project online is the "you" you wish to be, the brave you, the flirty you, and the cool you. The thing about being online that helps is that you are writing, not acting out those new yous. Or, as is the case in Second Life, your avatar is playing the "you" you want to be. Everyone has social fears of some type, and being online helps you overcome them. The problem is, we end up thinking we are that you we project online, and are constantly disappointed when we are not that you in real life. You could say that being online helps you rediscover who you want to be, but you could also say that you are leaning on a crutch. So is it more truthful to talk online in Second Life, or is it more truthful to talk in person? Like the first article's author wrote, only time will tell, when more facts can be gathered. Digital worlds are still new, so it's very hard to say. I do, however, think it is safe to say that the digital worlds are changing everything.

Gender/Sexuality Differences

This idea that the femininity or masculinity of a person is learned behavior instead of inherent in your natural being as a boy or girl in sex has bothered me from the moment we discussed it. After reading the article I am convinced that the idea of women having femininity only as learned behavior is actually just women still trying to fight society's view of women. They are trying to say that women can be whatever they want to be, that we can compete with males, we can be just as masculine and men can be just as feminine...and while this may be true in the learned behavior discussed in the article, we are essentially by sex, naturally more feminine or masculine by hormone secretions in our bodies. We are feminine because we are by sex girl, whether these feminists featured in the article like it or not. We have created this media rendered image of the perfect woman (like below)
to sell things to people because sex sells, especially if you are using a female to attract a male, because men are visually stimulated. Once this media image was born, it was too late to try to change society's view of women. No longer are women respected in society, and always will we be seen as an object. Always will we fall short as real women when compared to the images rendered in magazines, and as such we will always be trying to compensate and trying to bring back respect for ourselves. This quote by Martha Wilson supports this argument: "art-making is an identity-making process...I could generate a new self out of the absence that was left when my boyfriends' ideas, my teachers' and my parents' ideas were subtracted." Wilson is only just now discovering that she is not the object of others' ideals; she is just herself. What she calls her "new self" is actually the true self she is under the culturally painted surface. She and all these other mentioned feminist artists are trying to say that women deserve to be free of culture's views of them, but their comments through art are only serving to make women more the enemy of men instead of earning their respect. They are trying to be as powerful as men, and they aren't and never will be. Men are supposed to be the leaders, and women are supposed to respect the man. This is how a man feels love, and he returns that love to the woman, who needs the comfort and safety of that love. As more feminists create art like this, less respect for men is shown and fewer men love women because of it. In this pattern, women feel lost and unloved and try to compensate even more. In the end they are causing more problems than they think they are solving.

ADRIAN PIPER

I found this article interesting because I also keep a journal of my life throughout the years. I like to occasionally go back and read what happened during my life, read what lessons I learned, how my character grew, and how my experiences have ended up shaping who I am now. It always strikes me that the experiences that happen to me although technically unique, end up being the same story that everyone else also deals with. Everyone has the occasional fight with their parents, every person deals with the stress of friendships and romances going sour, and everyone has to learn how to balance their time among all the things they want or need to do. When I write this stuff in my journal, it feels like it is happening only to myself, but when I look back later, I compare my writings to the stories I've heard from friends, and suddenly the story isn't so unique any longer. We are all part of the same puzzle. Adrian Piper took this a step further of course, and rereads her experiences until they are so commonplace that she starts to wonder if they are from her life or someone else's. As she does this, she creates an alter ego that is so far from herself that she fears this alter ego will start having experiences of its own...it will become its own person. This is where I differ in opinion from the artist. While I think it is a good thing to look at yourself objectively as just another human and see that we are all similar in the end, there is no excuse for making yourself into a completely different person. This to me is the extreme, and can cause problems just like Roberta Breitmore did for Sherman. Sherman was so obsessed with Breitmore that some people thought she was schizophrenic. And who is to say she isn't? Artists often take things too far to the extreme and I think this is yet another instance of this. Is Piper an artist creating art or is Piper using art to find in herself that she is actually a cross dresser? That she actually wants or perhaps is deep down emotionally, a male? Is art helping her find that she is gay? Or did art make her gay?

The Woman As Object/Masquerade

A PIECE OF THE ACTION: IMAGES OF "WOMAN" INTHE PHOTOGRAPHY OF CINDY SHERMAN

After reading this article I can't help asking myself what femininity really is. Judith Williamson recognizes femininity as an identity, and something that has many faces, but she also mentions that Sherman's settings in her photos are part of what makes a character "feminine". So if it's the setting that makes the picture itself feminine, is the person behind the mask of the photo feminine? Or is femininity nothing more than a culture created manipulation of the female form? Is it now simply something to put on, like the author discusses putting on clothing in the morning? Is it nothing more than a face, a facade, an act? If we had never started using propaganda, television, or movies, would femininity as we know it still exist? Scientifically, we know that men are attracted by looks, and women are attracted by relationship and connection. Somewhere along the line I think someone decided to capitalize on this to make money through media, and once this happened women were made more and more into an object, until art pieces like Shermans were created to critique it. She is putting herself into these feminine settings, and acting the part of the woman as object, but showing through her series that there are many ways to act out the role of the woman in society. I like how she brings in the boyish poses as well as the sexy ones, because it seems to be a critique of the propaganda's manipulation of societal thinking, recreating the woman as a person acting out roles, not simply a sexual object for people to look at. She is saying there is more to the woman than the media represents. One quote I'd like to discuss from Williamson says that "what we construct from the surface of each picture is an interior, a mixture of emotions. Each setting, pose, and facial expression seems literally to express an almost immeasurable interior which is at once mysteriously deep, and totally impenetrable: a feminine identity. Obviously this is what acting is about, but the still images are like frozen moments of performance and so the sense of personality seems more trapped in the image itself."
"Obviously this is what acting is all about." How can Williamson toss this comment aside so flippantly? I wish she had gone into more detail, because I think this is key to discussing Sherman's work. In all of these roles, a part is being acted out, and that role is the role mapped out for us by the media. In addition, the photos are carefully constructed as the media would do, to make the woman seem feminine, when really she is just a person like any other person, acting a cultural role. When Williamson says "personality seems...trapped in the image" she is touching on how the idea of femininity as we have been shown is a facade found only in media, and only in art. I think what she was trying to follow was the idea that femininity is complex and unreachable, but what she was getting at was deeper than even she knew when she wrote the quote.

CINDY SHERMAN:UNTITLED

This article went much deeper into the exact reasons why women are objects, going into Freudian concepts and pschycological explanations, but ultimately, it all comes down to the same idea as what I already mentioned above. One quote that Rosalind Krauss included from Arthur Danto goes along with what I was saying in the other response: "Another form of myth consumption is to buy into the finished signified of the role, the 'character' but to see the multiplicity of these various forms of what [he] likes to call The Girl.....The Girl is an allegory for something deeper and darker, in the mythic unconscious of everyone, regardless of sex...Each of the stills is about the Girl In Trouble, but in the aggragate they touch the myth we carry out of childhood, of danger, love, and the security that defines the human condition."
Essentially, Danto is saying that the piece is using the idea, or rather, the cultural object of women as object, to facilitate a message that actually applies to all humans, not just women. The "woman as object" is, in fact, nothing more than a cultural facade.
Later in the article, this idea once again comes up, this time mentioned by Krauss herself: "Rather stereotype-itself rebaptized as "masquerade," and here understood as a psychoanalytic term-is thought of as the phenomenon to which all women are submitted both inside and outside the representation, so that as far as femininity goes, there is nothing but costume. Representation itself-films, advertisements, novels, and so forth-would thus be part of a far more absolute set of mechanisms by which characters are constructed: constructed equally in life as in film, or rather, equally in film as in life. And in this logic woman is nothing but masquerade, nothing but image."
Here Krauss is recognizing a shift in culture; a shift that shows how women have become the object they were made in media. No longer are woman free to be people, because they have been made into a cultural object of femininity, which has been twisted into woman as the sexual object, or even, as is mentioned later in the article, the woman as lacking, or rather, the Freudian concept of the castrated, or unwhole unless seen as a fetish, which makes them whole again. Culture has so manipulated the idea of the woman, that we are continually put into roles every day, stuck acting out who we are instead of being who we are. We are either helpless and lost, or flaunting our bodies for attention. No longer are we seen as people with normal human thoughts and emotions. It is this cultural shift, I feel, that has so stripped women of confidence, making them desperate to be liked, and to be the perfect shape that they see in magazines, and makes men want women to be what they see in magazines and television, no longer accepting women as they are unless they become the fetish to them that they have come to accept as real.

Below is a picture I found illustrating the woman as nothing more than a cultural creation to sell in advertising:

"Who Will Stand for Freedom?"

So I did my first performance art project in downtown Milwaukee, and here are the pictures of it:

Self-Portraiture/Self-Other Dynamics

WHAT IS PERFORMANCE?

I like how Carlson uses so many different definitions of "performance" in general to show how complex and fluctuating the term "performance art" really is. One thing I had been a little confused about going into the reading was how daily life figured in to performance art, because to me, essentially everyone plays a part of someone else. We all act differently for different people, to the point where it almost seems that we lose our true selves. For instance, this project we are doing soon...several of the people I talked to wanted to make their performance piece a showing of their true personality. They seemed to think that they needed a project to hide behind to actually do what they felt was true to their personality. Carlson says that there is a difference between "doing and performing" which comes down to attitude, but I disagree. After reading her opinion, I feel more solid on my own. Carlson's point that some things are done without thought and therefore not considered performance, does not make sense to me personally. In our society, people put on faces so much that it becomes part of us. Any learned behavior we project without thought is just another sad indication that we are afraid to just be ourselves. The more we hide who we are in public, the more we forget who we are at home. The performance is always intentional, it just is used so much that it becomes second nature. Essentially, we are always acting for an audience, even if that audience is ourselves when we look in the mirror.

BENEATH THIS MASK ANOTHER MASK

I am interested in this idea of the photo as "death" that is represented by Jones in this chapter, especially in relation to self-portraiture. One thing I am interested in exploring is the difference between film and digital photography in relation to this topic. One quote Jones used really caught my eye: "the photograph is a screen, the site where subject and object, self and other, intertwine to produce intersubjective meaning." In a regular photo this might be true because it is an actual tangible piece of paper that is kind of like a physical remnant of a person, caught with light on photo paper and preserved. But digital photography seems different. You are not preserving anything but pixels, and the pixels are part of the compter, alive essentially, in the computer and on the web. Therefore, your picture in pixels is a more live representation than a photo in general is, and the issue of death is compromised. Also, regular photographs are expensive and painstaking, and each produced photo is a rememberance of a person that can be kept after their death, but digital is much easier to take and so many photos may exist that after the person dies you could practically animate them into a video, living and moving and active, keeping the person alive in pixels and in motion. Below I have uploaded a series of photos I took when I got my new camera and then posted the pics on facebook:

I have dozens of photo albums like this. My facebook is much like a daily photo diary. I am still frozen in time in the pictures, and the person watching is, though now viewing through a computer screen rather than a photo surface, still reanimating me as they view me, but since the photos are not a phyiscal remnant in which to be trapped, I feel these pictures are an alive and functioning version of me, almost near to live video of my life through the computer.

Lynn Hershman Leeson

LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON

This article on Leeson's work I think brings to light an old idea that inventors invent new things because they see a need and try to find a way to fill that need. Leeson spent the better part of her life manipulating images because she obviously found it more meaningful than basic photography, and at the time there existed no way to manipulate images on a computer. Her early works had a sense of realness to them, in that the original images were physically touched and rendered by her own hands. There is a quality of inventiveness to her work in the beginning, especially with her use of paint. Each mixed media work started very basically with a photograph but the rest was made completely by her own hands as if she were a painter instead of a photographer. One example is the picture of Roberta below:

This can hardly be called photography, even though it does start off with a photo in the beginning. This is very similar to what we do in the digital age today...we start with a photo and then manipulate it into a piece of artwork that can hardly be called photography any longer. This prompts Glenn Kurtz to say, "Soon no one will be a photographer." Kurtz seems to feel a loss when he describes Leeson's work, because she moves into the digital works and loses her individuality as a mixed media artist. But I think that Kurtz is too married to Leeson's earlier works and I find this irritating as an artist. He may have liked her earlier works, but every artist has the right to change styles without saying they are less of an artist for doing so. Leeson at heart was always a mixed media artist, and now that the technology exists, her true self as a creator can be realized. I would think that this would be a freeing thing for Leeson and should make Kurtz excited at what she will come up with next. Granted, her cyborg photos were a little lacking in comparison to her original works:


but I find them interesting in that she is experimenting with computer art in ways that are completely new to her, and still managing to work within the new ideas and contexts. As for her strict photographic manipulations in the "Phantom Limb" series, I actually really liked her photography, even more than her original creations. Her originals seem chaotic and almost abstract, while these photos are straight to the point. I think the loss that Kurtz sees is their commercial value because they are all print and the themes are so obvious:
which is a dominant theme in commerical photography. But instead of criticizing her like Kurtz, I see her growing as an artist and I find her new avenues adventuresome and brave for someone so new to the technology. In her recent works, she is planning on doing a piece on Second Life:

In all, I think Kurtz is seeing a loss in Leeson's work because she has new technology available. When things are harder, one finds a way of doing what you need to do, even if the outcome is not what you see in your mind. It is only after the technology comes available that you are finally able to do what you've always wanted to do. This I believe is the case with Leeson, and her works will continue to evolve as she learns new technologies and factors them into her work. I find her adaptable and changing and this to me means artistic freedom and should not be criticized. Eventually I think we will find that Leeson will go back to a more physical relationship with her works, only because she will get bored of the new technology and will want to change it herself again.

WORKS CITED
http://www.lynnhershman.com/


ROBERTA BREITMORE

"ROBERTA represented part of me as surely as we all have within us an underside; a dark, shadowy anaemous cadaever that is the gnawing decay of our bodies, the sustaining growth of death that we try with pathetic illusion to camouflage. To me, she was my own flipped effigy; my physical reverse, my psychological fears."

I found this article disturbing, because it shows once again that "art" has a fine line inherently whithin it which many refuse to acknowledge. The term "art" has become so broad that just about anything one does can be seen as "art", especially when we are speaking of performance. In many pieces I've seen in the past, especially in video, filmmakers will reveal a side of themselves that is dark and sadistic or raunchy, and display this openly for the camera. In a sense, the term "art" gives them an avenue, an excuse if you will, to act out on desires and to test boundaries that no normal person should or would do. As long as there is a concept behind the work, the grotesque is allowed to happen. It's gotten so ridiculous that I wouldn't be surprised if some day somebody decided killing was art, and they openly display murder in a gallery or on film. Technically this is against the law, but what if we were to go a little more grey area and I were to say, as an artist, that I thought abortion was a type of art? What if I were to take a small camera, since the technology exists, and insert the camera into the womb to record the death of an innocent child? Now what if I were to display this in a gallery as an installation piece that reacts to movement of the gellery goers (since that technology also exists now) and each time a person walks by, the baby gets killed? Am I an artist, or a sadist? Am I both? Am I to be considered an artist at all?

"For years my daughter denied she was related to me. People assumed I was schizophenic."

This is a very disturbing quote by the artist, because it shows manipulation of the mind. The mind is very inflencial on the spirit, and we must guard what we do with it or it can affect us forever. People assumed she was schizophrenic? I'd say she was! Or if she wasn't, she was adjusting her mind into the state which eventually she might be clinically considered to be schizophrenic! She was taking her "art" into the realm of mind manipulation, like her brain was the canvas, and suddenly "art" has crossed the line and become destructive. Her ealier quote:

"ROBERTA represented part of me as surely as we all have within us an underside; a dark, shadowy anaemous cadaever that is the gnawing decay of our bodies, the sustaining growth of death that we try with pathetic illusion to camouflage. To me, she was my own flipped effigy; my physical reverse, my psychological fears."

is not talking about an "alter ego"; she's talking about the flesh, the Satanic influence that all of us have inside of ourselves when we are not saved by Jesus Christ. By allowing herself to embrace this flesh side of her soul, she is injuring herself more and more and leading herself further and further into that flesh, or as she puts it, her "alter ego." The more she encourages this behavior, the more schizo she'll become and the more fearful and depressed she will be.

Documenting Performance Art

PERFORMATIVITY OF DOCUMENTING

I have a hard time agreeing with Philip Auslander's opinon that theatrical performance is as much a performance as the traditional documented performance. It doesn't make any sense to me that someone could create a false photo and call it performance art. A great example of this is Yves Klein's work, in which he staged jumping out of a window. Sure, he created the art-this doctored photo of him jumping from a window-but he did not actually DO it, so how is it performance art? How is this not simply photography? Many people create photos like this and it is always considered photography. I do not like his comparison to the Beatles, either. How is this argument relevant? Recording music is so very different from live performance that I have to shake my head at his obvious loss of arguement. Sure, the Beatles sang the song, but it was recorded separately; this is what recording is, recording each voice separately. But did they "perform" it? No, they sang their parts. They only "perform" it when they are live on stage, singing together and interacting with the audience. Performance is all about working with the audience! Another work I have a problem with is Vitto Acconci's "Photo-Piece". (below) The author himself says, "Acconci was making art out of nothing, an art without content." Honestly, I've never heard of such a dumb art concept. Basically all he is doing is thinking about how often he blinks. He is essentially becoming self-aware. This would be great for a science project or a personal interest piece, but how is this a performance piece? How is it art at all? If I decided to do this also, perhaps some kind of spin off of his piece, would I also be considered a performance artist? Because perhaps being an artist is easier than I thought...according to this reading I could basically think of something blane and boring, do it with a photographer watching and taking pictures, and then send it to artists and say I just did a performance piece. I understand that "art is in the concept" but some things people call art is ridiculous. Most especially when it comes to performance art, I think lines are being crossed the more people do it. Performance to me should always involve an audience. If it meant for the ending photo, then it is a photography piece, not a performance.

CONNOTATIONS

I like this article because it shows how performance art is reliant on the documentary image to "prove" that it happened, and how that image can be easily faked. Anyone can say they performed a performance art piece, when all they really did was stage a fancy photograph that makes it look like a performance was done. I like how "Smoke smoke smoke" as a live performance ended up with a low resolutioned poorly taken photo as a document, and the staged photo was well taken and in higher resolution; yet, the staged photograph "masked the party atmosphere". If it's a staged art work, it is going to feel that way. The live version of "Smoke smoke smoke" was apparently performed after the staged photo was taken for Connotations. If I had to pick one for myself, I'd say I like the staged photo myself, simply because it sounds like it has a commercial feel to it, with the higher resolutions and well placed and lit smoke. But once again, this is not performance art, but photography. If I went to a performance of "Smoke smoke smoke" I'd probably prefer to see the grainy and realistic photo because it would remind me of being there. I think the photo as a document has become too much of a focus in performance art and it is drawing us away from what performance art started out as.

Vito Acconci

I've decided to do my project on Vito Acconci because in past video classes I've seen his video work, and found him creepy and disturbing. When I saw him on the list I thought I'd see what kind of performance works he's done.

VITO ACCONCI

Vito Acconci, born in in 1940, started his art career as a poet. He is quoted in the book American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980, saying: "I think that when I started doing pieces, the initial attempts were very much oriented towards defining my body in a space, finding a ground for myself, an alternative ground for the page ground I had as a poet." Even though he had started as a fiction writer, Acconci crossed over to poetry after seeing a painting by Jasper Johns, which was a piece that started with something normal and forgettable and then was manipulated, and the art critic Kenneth Burke, who mentioned the importance of the viewer in any art piece and how they influence the outcome (Jackson). After this, Acconci chose to persue poetry, and in so doing, learned the value of space on a page. He become more interested in the space than the words, creating finally a piece called "DROP (ON THE SIDE/OVER THE SIDE)" which is a page of a thesarus, but with the words removed from the center, focusing the viewer onto the space within it instead of the words on the page. (pictured below)

(Jackson)
From his poetry, Acconci began moving more and more into performance works, feeling restrained as he did by the size of the page. As he says in The Believer, "I was starting to recognize a corner I was driving myself into: that all writing could do was refer to things that had already been written. I’m making the margin, but the margin of a book that already exists. I was having this exhilaration at, but at the same time horror of this recognition that I’d driven myself into the world of only books. This is a world of the previously written, and maybe I don’t have to add to it, maybe all I can do is measure it." Once he realized that writing was restrictive, he began branching out into performace, but still using his poetry. In one piece he read lines of the poem while following a person with a typewriter, who wrote what he said, and another time he did a poetry reading where he said one word at a time, crossing the room once per word read. More and more his art inched off the page and into the spaces of the world itself (Jackson).
One of Acconci's first performances that truly broke from poetry into real space was "Following Piece". In this work, Acconci followed passers-by in New York, without them knowing he was doing it. The idea was to show the relation between public and private space, since although he was on a busy street in New York, he was singling out one certain person, following their every whim and making it his own. He was in a sense, showing how each person, though part of the masses, has their own life, their own agenda, and their own separate thoughts and feelings which drive them. All these separate lives are usually lost in the bustle of crowds, but Acconci was pointing them all out again. He followed people every day for a month, recording the events through photographs and writings and then sending them to artists in his area (Zbikowski). (Pictured below)
(Jackon)
Acconci's work did not stop with "Following Piece." His many performances after it were all based around the tumultuous times, and many of his works were controversial. One piece, called "Pull" consisted of himself and a woman, and all he did was circle her while eyeing her, and she him. The idea was to reflect the rise of feminism during his era, and how the male figure is threatening to women even though he is just a man sexually drawn to a woman and it should be a normal thing to be expected (Larson). Works like "Seedbed" in which he masterbated under a bridge while speaking out loud his sexual desires about and to the audience, continued to observe the difference in public and private spaces (Larson).
Vito Acconci has proven himself to be an extremely versatile artist. Starting off as a fiction writer, branching into poetry, and finally deciding to observe different spaces, he has made himself into a well-known and respected artist. He now works with installation pieces and architectural spaces, making as he says, "alternate worlds." (Jackson)



WORKS CITED
1.Johnson, Ellen H. American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980. Westview Press, 1982. Pg. 232.
2. Jackson, Shelley. The Believer. "Shelley Jackson Talks with Vito Acconci." Dec 2006-Jan2007 ed. Sept 17 2008.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200612/?read=interview_acconci.
3. Zbikowski, Dorte. Ctrl[space]. "[text]Vito Acconci."
http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/d/texts/01?print-friendly=true.
4. Larson, Kay. The New York Times. "ART IN REVIEW; Vito Acconci -- 'Performance Documentation and Photoworks, 1969-1973'." 9 Feb 2001. 17 Sept 2008.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2D71531F93AA35751C0A9679C8B63

A Life More Photographic

Throughout this article, an argument is slowly built that the modern digital "snapshot" has lost the indexical quality of photography, because the physical photo to paper has been replaced by digital pixels. In this loss, the snapshot has lost identity as a piece of artwork, and has become instead forgettable and unoriginal, generating a new identity as a type of "stock photo" in which tags have led to each new snapshot becoming just like another before it, a way of communicating between the picture creators through tags and comments rather than a new piece of art.

Personally I am seeing this as a bias from a writer that has studied photography in London College of Printing (1) and though he has done research in new media, he is older and out of touch with the changes in media that someone more my age would see. Growing up in this new culture, I see digital art as a new type of photographic media, not forgettable at all, and certainly not, like a stock photo, just like all the other digital snapshots before it. Rubinstein is seeing this new wave of photography from his basis in fine art photography and assuming that new art photography should be tied back to old art photography in order to have worth. While it is true that digital photography has lost indexical quality in the sense that physical light no longer reacts with paper, the camera is still seeing light to create a picture, whether there is a physical chemical reaction or not.
My further reasoning leads me to believe that why should this be necessary at all? In this new digital age, why can't the idea of the photo in the old sense die, and this new digital identity become a new way of creating art? Just because it is easier to snap a photo does not mean it is no longer art to create it. Anyone can pick up a pencil, but not everyone can draw, and the same goes for digital art. So there are a few people that have digital cameras just for the immediacy of creating memories...so what? There are many more artists that have digital cameras and are using them to create real art. In a few years there may not be such a thing as a dark room any longer. Does that mean that phototgraphy as an art has died? No, I say it has been recreated, and indeed, improved. Photography has always been on the rise with technology. It was a huge discovery in the past age when it was first created, and it took a long time for a photographer to learn how to use the bulky cameras. Does this make him more of an artist than currnet digial artists, just because it took him longer to learn how to use a camera? Certainly not! Technology has improved, and photography as a medium has changed, and evolved into something new and fresh. I don't think we can look at photography in the same way as we did before. This new medium is much more exciting and has many more possibilities than it did before, because we are no longer restricted by bulky new technology. Now anyone can create a picture, anywhere at any time, and art can take on a new face because more people now have access to it. Who knows where photography will take us in a few more years? A whole new, interactive art has emerged, and I think we are yet to embrace it properly.







Works Cited
1)London South University. 14 March 2008. 12 Sept 2008.
https://phonebook.lsbu.ac.uk/php4/curriculumvitae.php?id=4556&template=ahs&divtemp=aam