Here's a downloadable PDF of the slideshow presented yesterday.
Francis Alys There's not much online about this Belgian born artist, but this brief
bio and
interview on postmedia.net are a fairly good introduction to this process-based artist's body of work and approach. Below the film recordings of his pieces I showed in class:
Harrell FletcherHarrell is an artist based in Portland, OR who creates socially engaged interdisciplinary works. His work is almost always about other people-the collective, collaborative, the community. On his site, he offers insight into his creative process through the display of both finished projects and possible (or impossible) ideas on his website. Below are links to the two motion peices I showed in class:
Babies (NYC)Sunglints (St. Paul MN)Learning to Love You More
Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists
Miranda July and
Harrell Fletcher.
Yuri Ono designs and manages the web site. Participants accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and see their work posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.
No doubt the online component of this project was influenced by LTLYM in structure and format, but the core idea of this stems from Austrian-American graphic designer
Stefan Sagmeister's personal project of the same name.
Excerpt from the project site: T
he idea for this site originally came out of my own list in my diary, under the very same title: Things I have learned in my life so far. Astonishingly, I have only learned twenty or so things so far. Over the last five years I did manage to publish these maxims all over the world, in spaces normally occupied by advertisements and promotions: as billboards, projections, light-boxes, magazine spreads, annual report covers, fashion brochures, and, recently, as giant inflatable monkeys. So here I extend this same question to you:
What have you learned in your life so far? What is it that you are fairly sure about? What is it that you believe in by now?
Please do write it down beautifully. Design it digitally, photograph it, draw it, scan it and upload it. Use any media that works for you, paint, sculpture, film…. The Art Guys101 of the World's Greatest Sculpture Proposals (ongoing)Described in the New York Times as “a cross between Dada and David Letterman, John Cage and the Smothers Brothers,” The Art Guys often use humor and everyday materials as a way to demystify art in an attempt to welcome a broad range of audiences into the discourse of contemporary art. In this way their work has been compared to medieval court jesters and fools as well as noted 20th century artists like Marcel Duchamp and Dada, Fluxus artists, Andy Warhol and William Wegman among others.
Using an open and offbeat “direct-to-the public” methodology, they have presented their work in grocery stores, movie theaters, airports, restaurants, sports arenas and many other non-traditional venues for experiencing art while also exploiting mass media and entertainment to explore contemporary society and issues. They are perhaps most well known for their numerous staged performances, public spectacles, and “behavioral” interventions in a wide array of situations that have blurred the divisions between art and life.Obsessive ConsumptionYou should be familiar with this work from last week's introduction (see previous blog entry), but it's still very pertinent to this stage of the project as well.
And here's a link to Kate's blog. And her Flickr page.Born in Madrid, Spain, now lives, works, and teaches in Chicago. Ovalle created a diverse body of work that comprises installation-based practices, photography, sculpture, and community-based projects. Filtering his subject matter through the lens of modernity, he explores a broad range of issues—such as representation and identity, new technologies, and structures of power. Seemingly neutral and clinical realms of science, such as climatology and genomic mapping, are problematized and engaged as form and content in his work. The assumptions of those fields and their implications in creating or reifying social hierarchies slowly and subtly emerge in his projects, He is engaged in a process of understanding how certain extraordinary forces and systems-man-made and natural-are always and already in the process of remaking the world.
Walid RaadThe Atlas Group1989-2004–15 year long project.
Making visable, the leftovers of war. Writing the history of contemporary Lebonon, thru the production of multi-media "documents" archived thru "The Atlas Group," It's a project composed of audio, visual, and literary elements dealing with the contemporary history of Lebanon, particularly the Lebanese wars from 1975 to 1991. In this project he grapples with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions and the ways that film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence.
Using tools, constructs, methodologies, formats, and research process of Historical Archiving, such as cataloguing, documentation, interviews, preparation of dossiés, etc. along with the "players" that use these constructs and processes to produce a body of artwork.
Here's the podcast of the artist talk he did at the Walker 2 years ago. Amazing!And a link to a few more films from the project.
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