3.27.2010

'Art As Event' CAA session notes... discovered among other things lost

So I was going through all the pamphlets and invites that I gathered at all the tables and displays like some kind of frenzied squirrel at the CAA conference back in February, and I found a hidden treasure among all the institutional art propaganda... some notes scribbled on the back of a Vermont Studio Center pamphlet that I took at a panel session called "Art As Event", chaired by Nadja Rottner of the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Rather than take up too much time trying to piece this all together and write an elegantly flowing waterfall of regurgitated ideas and concepts, I'm transcribing my notes as I had written them. Scattered. Have fun making sense of it...

~Salina
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"Situational Aesthetics and the Art of Participation"
(Kirsi Peltomaki, Oregon State University)

- Victor Burgin: phenomenology, minimalism were his main influences
- material and even linguistic "framing"
- psychological processes taking place in the mind of the viewer (such as memory) is highlighted; not the object that's highlighted
- the work titled "0 Any moment previous to the present moment" : directs subject to consider past, present, future, object (to a relational experience and a process of perception that places demands upon the viewer... a difficult act of directing your attention/ performative acts that take place in the mind of the viewer)
- Burgin invited a sort of mental gymnastics for the viewer
- perception of viewer is the ultimate focus of his work, while other art is focused on perceptions of artist, not spectator... situationists break down barriers/rules/assumptions about the relationship between the viewer and the artist
- conditional situations limit the agency of the spectator
- new vulnerability in spectator about the environment and other spectators themselves

"Anti-art, Non-event: The Situationist Inverse of Relational Aesthetics"
(Jennifer Stob, Yale University)

- Nicolas Bourriard's Relational Aesthetics
- service is his prime theoretical center... relational art produces human relations (but what type of relations and why?)
- stop analyzing 'situationism'; use it... the rhetoric of updating and reconciling... Bourriard de-politicizes the situationists
- situationsists must prioritize activism instead of art-making... situations that organize resistance
- spectacle should be countered... Bourriard agreed with Debord on this, but Bourriard fought spectacle with spectacle
- 1980 revision on Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (Bourriard probably should have read this before updating situationism)
- detournement went completely undiscussed by Bourriard
- relational art is always an allegory of it's particular situation, but situationist art is activism (not formalism) and is what it is

notes on next speaker that i neither titled nor wrote down the speaker's name...

- gallery can be a source of collectivity and community... through the feedback loop of the viewers
- Tino Sehgal: artist, relational?
- Ron Sier's Emancipated Spectator ... critique of Bourriard

3.12.2010

Charles Sandison at DAM

The Denver Art museum's Embrace! show is going on until April 4th, and I highly recommend visiting if you are interested in Installation.

Embrace! looks at the unique architecture of the newish Hamilton Building through the lens of 17 Installation artists.

Tobias Rehberger's Bungee cord maze is really spectacular. I love that in the towering wide open space of the Denver Art Museum I can feel cramped and uncomfortable, weaving my way through tight spaces with no real goal other than the experience.

As a digital art enthusiast (and as a human being), I couldn't help but love Charles Sandison's Chamber, an immense video Installation.

A large room in the DAM is turned in to what looks like a milky way of words and patterns sprawled across the walls and ceiling, interrupted from time to time by your towering shadow. The words and colors change, like a living stream.

Just go check it out for your self to get the real experience, but Sandison compared it to getting lost watching fire. The most primitive form of entertainment, created with technology, and modern language.

If you're a Projectorphile like me, you will especially enjoy it.

-Ryan