Yves One and Yves Two
Yve ONE, Yve TWO
May all that emerges from me be beautiful,” Yves Klein prayed.
This is a rather non dada, dada unsurprising remark coming from Yves Klein, and yet he was a complex neo-dada, non dada artist. Yves Klein, (1928-1962) was the child of two French painters and lived a life as what would imagine an artist to live. He married an artist and had a son who became an artist. Klein has been considered the last French artist on the global arena, and has been credited to have revitalized the French avant-garde. After he died at the age of 34 years old (heart attack plus amphetamines), his son Yves Amu Klein was born soon after. When reading about Yves he appears to be a brilliant kind of megalomaniac who declared himself a genius even before he started painting. He has been labeled a neo-dadist or a nouveaux réalistes (he preferred the expression "today's realism") (réalisme d'aujourd'hui). He is full of contradictions as he was deeply religious and felt a calling to change the world.
Klein is best known for his monochrome paintings which became his signature work. He used appropriation, a dada method in his art strategy, but unlike dada he felt that the art product was essential. Klein's major appropriations were from nature, not necessarily from the urban environment which the nouveaux realistes preferred. It was the appropriation of the blue of the sky (1947) at the age of 20 that gave Klein a bold and innovative direction to his work. In the following excerpt he made his declaration, almost as similar to the Spanish Conquistadors who embarked on America and declared everything that they saw was theirs to keep. This appropriation is absurd as it is rational as it is complex as it is simple.
He dated his aesthetic from a day at the beach in Nice, in 1947, when he “signed the sky.” (He hated birds, he said, “because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.”) His self-mythologizing temerity, an airy parallel to the earthy mystique of his contemporary Joseph Beuys, made him a prophetic figure for the Conceptualism that took hold in art in the late nineteen-sixties. But he would—and could—have no proper successors. He and the critic Pierre Restany, his friend and collaborator, were leaders of Nouveau Réalisme, the last coherent French avant-garde, which specialized in appropriations and formal presentations of urban detritus.
Klein labored over his colors for his monochrome paintings. The colors were calculated and it seemed he used raw pigment, texture and brush work to indicate content. One of the first blues he used was a deep blue described as a Paris night sky with the headlights of traffic still reflecting the energy of life. At one point he exhibited 11 blue paintings and asked to be compared to be Picasso. He even patented his common blue color:
His monochrome paintings in a color he patented as International Klein Blue (it is ordinary ultramarine pigment, with a polymer binder to preserve its chromatic intensity and powdery texture).
Several articles have hailed Klein as a forerunner, if not a founder of installation art, conceptual art and institutional critique. He orchestrated photographs, set-up events for paintings and musical non-events as in the following excerpt:
Klein heavily promoted a Paris gallery show (1958) and invited 3,500 people that consisted of exactly nothing but the gallery walls, (“The Void,” 1958). There was also the rigged photograph of himself apparently leaping from the second story of a building, with an expression of rapt confidence in continued flight (“Leap Into the Void,” 1960); a chamber-orchestra “symphony” that held a single note for twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes of silence; paintings made with the aid of torches, or by exposing canvases to wind and rain; fountains combining water and fire; and assorted architectural ideas, including one for a city under a weather-deflecting roof of blowing air. Then, there were the Immaterials. For these works, a collector paid Klein a set price and was given a receipt for the sum. Klein then spent the money on gold leaf, which he strewed over water—most often, the Seine. At that point, the collector burned the receipt, consigning the work to mere memory.
These seem to be very funny events, I wonder is anyone laughed. Again it was making the audience work. And in the true tradition of dadaism his dada antics or gestures got the attention of the avant-garde and he seemed to have become their darling. Other theatrical antics included:
Resource:http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/yves-klein/
In 1960 he published a fake newspaper. In 1962, he sold certificates for non-existent works of art. In 1960, he staged a public performance of his new “Anthropometries,” instructing his nude female assistants to daub themselves with blue paint and press their bodies against a large canvas, while a small orchestra played a “Monotone Symphony” of Klein’s own composition. The next year, he launched a series of fire sculptures and paintings made with Bunsen burners and flamethrowers.
Klein is also associated with the nouveaux réalistes who wanted to bring life and art closer together by direct appropriation of reality, highlighting a urban, industrial reality. They used real objects into their work similar to the Duchamp's readymades. In 1960 Klein disassociated his relationship with the nouveaux realistes, contradicting himself and how was perceived.
I find his paintings and his gestures have a certain elegance and style. He had a sense of design that translated into his installations and events. He played with his audience with dada whimsy and he became their darling by his bold arrogance. There are some accounts where he seemed mad or was it that he was just pushing how far he could go. In the work of his son who he never met, one can see the same elegance and sense of spare design. Yves Amu Klein is concrete in his methodology an his approach to art. This Klein comes from a robotic background steeped in technology. His work exhibits a bold new step on a balance of art and science. His work is very innovative exploration on emotional behavior of robots and their relationship to the world and humans.
Yves Amu Klein is the son of Yves Klein and lives in Arizona. The second Yves works in a very different material and method than the father he has never known. Yves Amu Klein has a background in robotics, and he seems to be merging his science and art into his living sculptures. The second Yves is trying to make the connections between animate and non-animate objects. He wants to bring emotional intelligence to inanimate objects. The Yves Amu is trying to get people to reexamine their lives in the world. Thus lies the connection with Yves One. Yves Two creates objects that has been called Living sculptures or Organic sculpture which manifest in unique large scale creature type robotic sculpture. Yves Amu is trying to blur the line between robots and art, culture and inanimate and animate. Very much like his father's work he is incorporating the randomness of life as part of the object and sees it as an inclusive element. Unlike his father there is no appropriation or found objects in his work, he creates from scratch his unique sculptures/creatures and they seem to be sleek and futuristic actually much like the Monochrome paintings.
In the following: Living Sculpture the art and science of creating robotic life: http://www.jstor.org/pss/1576604 He describes his attempt to integrate unusual technologies with his aesthetic sensibilities to create evolving sculptures that manifest learned behaviors dependent on their interactions with their environment and their viewers. He describes past projects and recent works such as "Octofungi" and the Gene Genie software, as well as his goals for the future of what he calls "Living Sculpture.
Notes on Yves Amu Klein
http://www.deweyhagborg.com/reports/YvesAmuKlein.htm
-demonstrates idea of embodiment; regarding the "dirty" world and all its randomness and noise as essential to a systems growth rather than as a nuisance
-questions the line between object and being; what it means to be alive
-aims unambiguously for living autonomy
-coined term "Living Sculpture" attempting to bring emotional intelligence to sculpture
-Idea of symbiotic sculpture, taking two species that would ordinarily kill each other and turning them into cooperative sculpture systems
-Idea of eating, digesting and self-reproducing sculpture; artificial robotic cells; true artificial life.
Resource:http://particle-space.com/events/2011/yves-amu-klein-2/
Octofungi, a sculpture by artist Yves Amu Klein of Arizona, has eight arms activated by a shape-memory alloy. They can extend and rock from side to side like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Eight electronic eyes, hooked to a neural network computer, set the arms in motion when they sense changes in the environment.
In the following website called Particle (there is a contingency of artists working in this method)
Octofungi Spine:
Octofungi shoulder
Resource:http://particle-space.com/events/2011/yves-amu-klein-2/
Yves Amu seems to talk about these creatures as if they will live to be alive- living autonomy?
Is there a divide between an object and being? It seems he hopes to bridge this gap in the following excerpt:
Notes on Yves Amu Klein
-demonstrates idea of embodiment; regarding the "dirty" world and all its randomness and noise as essential to a systems growth rather than as a nuisance
-questions the line between object and being; what it means to be alive
-aims unambiguously for living autonomy
-coined term "Living Sculpture" attempting to bring emotional intelligence to sculpture
-Idea of symbiotic sculpture, taking two species that would ordinarily kill each other and turning them into cooperative sculpture systems
-Idea of eating, digesting and self-reproducing sculpture; artificial robotic cells; true artificial life
Octofungi eyes, top view
Octofungi
-8 legs, 30cm tall, molded polyurethane
-uses shape memory alloy (muscle wire) to actuate legs
-8 light sensors connect as eyes to a dual PIC processor neural network
-2 other PIC processors handle physical actuation
-neural net learns to be still when nothing is happening in the environment, to approach or recoil from other changes
-next version will have more complex recognition, able to recognize sequences of movements in the environment and respond with sequences
-Strong emphasis on the design of the art object, no use of found objects, strives for elegance
Gene Genie
-Used for making Octofungi's brain
-software for breeding neural network brains for "interesting behavior"
-incorporates the computer equivalent of time-dependent hormonal flows, hyper-dimensional neural geometry, electrical neural 'noise,' and both DNA and reproductive structuring based on biological models
-combination of neural networks and time-dependent hormonal flow can potentially create brains that are much more flexible and 'fuzzy' than conventional neural networks, simulating emotional changes
I see the Yve One paintings and Yve Two sculptures are similar in their sleek spare design. There is an attention to small details and materials that are integral to their process. Unlike the dadas the product is essential to the end gain. I wonder if it would have been different if Yves One had lived to have influenced his son Yve Two. They were both exploring interesting behavior and human emotions.
Yves One continued to open the door to what art can be and his ego justified its validity. The dadas blew open interpretations and possibilities and I am sure there were many doubters along the way.
urinals and art interventionists and stuckism equals duchamp
urinals and art interventionists and stuckism equals duchamp
Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi are two Chinese performance artists in England who work as an art intervention team. They produce work that is oppositional and humorous. Duchamp would be proud. They question art and art values and above all they question China. As a team they perform radical gestures reminiscent of the Dadas, Fluxus and Futurists. Their art practice intentionally intervenes in political, social narrative and cultural belief systems.
Let me digress for a second and address the question of art intervention? Art intervention can be an oppositional or just a gestural interaction with existing art, audience or space. Antecedents for art intervention acts are conceptualism, Dadaism and Neo-Dadaism, and I would add the Futurists. It can be political or social in its intent when purposefully intervening in a political, economic or social condition. Intentional actions can be authorized or subversive, and sometimes the lines blur between vandalism and what is art intervention. Art interventionists seem to perform in the spirit of the Dadas, and Duchamp's name is proclaimed in the justification of the art interventionists.
Chai and JJ got famous for two distinct unauthorized art interventions. The first one was an unofficial intervention in 1999 at the Venice Biennale with the famous Turner Prize. At this event, Cai and JJ jumped onto Tracey Emin's art piece called My Bed. It was a performance object of an unmade bed with artifacts- it was the Turner Prize. Cai and JJ called their performance Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey's Bed, even though they wore their underpants. They jumped and fooled around, people clapped, security was confused. They were led away, but not charged.
Resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Chai_and_Jian_Jun_Xi
Chai considered that, although Emin's work was strong, it was nevertheless institutionalized and said, "We want to push the idea further. Our action will make the public think about what is good art or bad art. We didn't have time to do a proper performance. I thought I should touch the bed and smell the bed." He had various words written in Chinese and English on his body, such as "Internationalism", "Freedom" and "Idealism". Xi said that the work was not interesting enough and also that he wanted to push it further, increasing its significance and sensationalism. Words written on his body included "Anarchism", "Idealism" and "Optimism".
It is interesting to note that they had the word anti-stuckism painted on their torsos- again making an anti-political art statement about the Stuckism movement and lots of other isms. By jumping on the Turner Prize bed, their performance became art, and it got them famous. This is a recurring intervention pattern of media manipulation that all systems use for publicity. The Futurists were the forerunners of manipulating media for gain. The art movements/groups continue to usurp a particular event with another event, thereby the secondary event becomes that much more famous. It seems so easy now that in order to create famous work, one can seriously art intervene on another famous art and then famous is spread around equally.
The added complexity of the bed jumping is in the anti-stuckism protest word printed on their torsos. The Stuckists are an international group of artists who annually perform a protest against the Turner Prize at the TateBritain. The Stuckists protest all that is conceptual and/or performance art. They believe in the return of figurative art, and the reemergence of painting in a place of honor again. It really irks them that the Turner Prize is named after a famous painter, yet the prize continues to honor conceptual artists. The Stuckists were founded in 1999 by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish. The name Stuckists supposedly emerged from an insult Tracey Emin said to her to ex-boyfriend, Billy Childish, stating that he was stuck. The art interventionists, Cai and JJ seemed to have picked Tracy Emin's bed on purpose for all the crossroads it represents in this web of relationships.
The first protest by the Stuckists was in 2000, whereby they dressed as clowns snubbing the carnival of the Turner prize. The Tate authorized the 2000 protest, for they adhered to the old adage there is no bad publicity. Since then, at subsequent TateBritain events, the Stuckists have used flashlights to light up a dark, conceptual installation, displayed sex dolls, sported tall hats, handed out their manifestos and leaflets. Its funny how they condemn performance art, yet do the performance art quite well in order to get their message across.
Resource:http://www.stuckism.com/Tate/Tate00.html
Stuckist Clown Non-Demo, 28 November 2000, at Tate Britain, the day of the Turner Prize announcement. We were simply exercising our democratic right to visit a gallery we had paid for through our taxes in the attire of our choice - as confirmed by the Tate.
The Tate is pleased with these thematic events. Critics are warmed by the debates and the additional text to their columns. Its the recycled media drone that keeps these things alive. And everyone got famous.
The second famous art intervention act for Cai and JJ was with the famous Duchamp's urinal Fountain. This art work had several gestural Duchampian interventions before and after the Cai and JJ intervention. The Fountain created in 1917 was attacked January 6, 2006 at the Pompidou Center in Paris by a 76 year old artist with a hammer. Apparently this artist also urinated in the urinal prior to the attack.
Resource: http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-01-06-duchampfountain_x.htm
According to police, the man claimed his hammer attack on Wednesday was a work of performance art that might have pleased Dada artists. The suspect, a Provence resident whose identity was not released, already vandalized the work in 1993 — urinating into the piece when it was on display in Nimes, in southern France, police said.
That is one urination act and one violent hammer attack. It seems that the elderly French artist's intent is to follow in the footsteps of Duchamp. It does not seem malicious. I must admit that the urinal Fountain made by the Dadaist Duchamp screams 'pee in me'. For this French artist is not the only one with this idea.
In the year 2000, the second famous unauthorized art intervention act by performance artists Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xia was a constructed urination act in the Fountain - in the spirit of Duchamp, modern art and artistic debate. They filmed the act and now it is on film as an important art film. These guys intentional wanted to question the idea of art and what constitutes modern art.
Resource:http://www.madforreal.org/artists.html
Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi, Two Artists Piss on Duchamp’s Urinal, 2000, Tate Modern, London. Their website notes: ‘This intervention took place on Duchamp’s iconic work Fountain in Tate Modern, the urinal which revolutionized the concept of modern art in the twentieth century. The artists employed the concept of Qigong, channelling the internal energy after storing it for a few hours before releasing their Qi (spirit). They intended to broaden the context of the urinal, with the suggestive act of pissing on it to celebrate the spirit of contemporary art. Subsequently the performance was made into a film commissioned by Dazed & Confused/FilmFour.’ In fact, the artists could only piss on the vitrine in which the Fountain was fetishistically contained and protected in its vaulted status of high art.
A subsequent statement revealed the motivation behind their actions: "to make people re-evaluate what constitutes art itself and how an act can be art" and "to broaden the context of the iconic urinal, celebrating the spirit of modern art."
And guess what, the sculpture is now enclosed in a plastic box. If Dada is the act of protest in the guise of humor or sarcasm, then Duchamp would have approved. It is ironic that both artifacts, Duchamp's urinal and Emin's bed questioned cultural aesthetics and the value of aesthetics. Cai and JJ question the value judgements of the Turner prize, modern art and the Stuckists.
Cai and JJ intervened with these artifacts by interacting with them in their original purpose. Cai and JJ take Duchamp's original intention, question the boundaries of the aesthetic and literal use of an object. Duchamp thumbed his nose at the value judgement of the established art establishment, and in a twist of irony the artifacts became what he despised. So Cai and JJ once again tried to recreate this gesture of defiance with similar objects and similar results, yet their acts are now immortalized or was that the original purpose?
Duchamp chose to make an industrial object an object of art, Cai & JJ chose to use performance to bring it back to its original intention as a functional urinal not a high art artifact. The Duchamp urinal is revered, and yet people want to continue to interact with the artifact – now they cannot, it is encased in plastic.
Resource :http://www.madforreal.org/artists.html
When interviewed about the Duchamp intervention, Cai noted, ‘the urinal is there - it's an invitation…. As Duchamp said himself, it's the artist's choice. He chooses what is art. We just added to it.’ Far from ‘just adding to it’, actually Cai and JJ profoundly (if subtly) shift the terms of its place in history. This is a ‘re-enactment’ of a still work of art that opens out the performative dimension through which it originally challenged in the most radical way beliefs about art. To return even a vestige of the radical to such a now canonized work in 2000 is no small thing.
That was the second urination attack.
The third urination attack on the Duchamp's urinal the Fountain was by the musician, Brian Eno who urinated in the urinal sometime around 1995. It was quite intentional, for he had to prepare the attack carefully since it was displayed in the Museum of Modern Art at the time.
Resource: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3597350/Art-attacks.htm
Eno therefore took great pains - some would say quasi-psychotic pains - to prepare for his prank. Bottling his urine in a vessel which he could readily secrete about his person and attaching to it a tap and a length of plastic tubing which would fit through the casing protecting the urinal, he was able to approach the piece and apply the ambient urine surreptitiously.
It will probably not be the last urination attack. Others will continue and why not. Why not turn it back to its original purpose? Intervention acts become art and the anti-intervention acts become art. So is art what the second interventionists said to the first interventionist? Is art intervention necessary to balance the weight of high vs low brow art? Art intervention and Stuckism is good for the art soul. It provides fodder for cold winter days. I think art events help question the sacredness of our cultural icons and reflect on our cultural definitions of art. Urinals, urination attacks in art urinals and plastic to protect urinals will cycle through again at another point in history, at least I hope.
ODD Guerilla Girls
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Odd Guerilla Girls Manifesto
Art Manifestos are emboldened with hope and passion. Art Manifestos declare and expect. Art Manifestos depend on the egos that write them. Since the manifesto for the Futurists called to arms against the art status quo, each of the subsequent art manifestos rebelled against and declared a prespective on art, how it should or could relate to the world. Do manifestos have an impact? By looking at several past manifestos, I certainly think that it gives direction and voice for a particular art cause or perceived injustice. Most manifestos are directed from a single person or single group's perspective. When I started to look at the Wikipedia list of 29 manifestos since 1909, I started to wonder about two manifestos I remember personally, that were not on the list, one from an individual artist and the other from an fledging group. Both these manifestos came out of the 1980s, both of these manifestos used media techniques to manipulate the media to their cause. Both of these manifestos had an impact on the art world that could be described as significant.
Although Odd Nerdrum and the Gorilla Girls have two very different manifestos, there are similarities to Marinetti's Futurist's manifesto and every other manifesto thereafter. The basic manifesto structures and formats used the culture and systems in society to foment their declarations and to carry out their ideas.
Odd's manifesto is called On Kitsch. The odd thing abouts Odd's manifesto is that it seems to follow a singular logic and dignified rant until you get to the title and the word kitsch. Odd seems to have taken the term kitsch and rebelled against the cultural meaning of kitsch, and then for me his whole manifesto seems out of whack and too illogical- just based on the word kitsch. To explain this a bit, one of the many historical cultural meanings of the word kitsch means 'bad taste' or a tacky mass-produced comodity. In the early 1980s the writer Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) wrote that kitsch presented a sanitized version of the world, and he defines it as the "denial of shit". In this single word, properties of sameness and simpleness became associated with kitsch, and with this term totaliarism had been tossed about. When kitsch became the ugly, garish objects that define the commercialization of our culture, the pop artists appropriated kitsch aligned it with camp and edged it with humor. Perhaps camp/kitsch is a fun aspect, a relief from the serious arrogant art headed to the galleries or art palaces called museums.
In 1998, Odd Nerdrum took out several full-page ads in a 1998 Artnews edition to post his manifesto On Kitsch. I remember reading this when it first came out, and my first thought was ego and what the .... Odd was very serious, very strident in his version on what is kitsch, contrary to what the culture had implied. Kitsch was the opposite, kitsch was a spiritual endeavor. Again I admired the rant, it was the word that undermined his theory without context. This manifesto is not camp, not the 'denial of shit', but a view of kitsch as a spiritual renewal. A rant against contemporary art and the values it imposes on artists. He completely takes Kundera's definition and says the opposite, indicating that kitsch is an eternal and sensual expression, kitsch is the essence of life and beauty, not the camp ironic tome of the pop artists. It is truly odd that Odd takes this defense. His version of kitsch in his manifesto is for a positive structure for figurative painters, not ironic and in a narrative format. Odd declares in his manifesto that art is not art but kitsch. In his manifesto he stated, " that he is no longer an artist, but a maker of kitsch, or anti-art, free to take his liberties where he may, outside of the critical eye." Source:http://portraitsocietygallery.wordpress.com/essays-about-portraiture/
For me the redefined word is still wrapped in the strapping of years of cultural notation and it still doesn't make sense, and I think he does want to make serious sense. Despite my problem with this contradiction, Odd has many figurative artist followers. The Kitsch artists have a biennale on kitsch painters and strive to show romantic themes of eternal beings. This is so odd, why rebel against the word kitsch when in reality he is rebelling against the art and the art culture. Yet, it is not any more strange than the Futurists who made up words and rebelled against cultural icons and everything that wasn't nailed down.
The following is an excerpt from Nerdrum's manifesto:
Source: http://www.jahsonic.com/OddNerdrum.html
The kitsch painter occupies himself with the eternal things in life- like love, death and the sunrise.
Renewal or to locally belong to your own time is uninteresting; as is personal expression. Absorption is the goal, for in nature itself lies the personal.
As modernism and the state together have taken over the art world, kitsch is the savior of talent and heartiness.
So Odd Nerdrum got his say, his picture on Artnews and a printed manifesto in a major magazine. He used the print media in a straight and direct format initially, and now has branched out to other social networks. He has group followings and the Kitsch Biennale is an established event., proving today that a singular artist can still publish their own manifesto and develop a group around his/her theories. Odd's singular vision in his art, drove him to take his cause to the greater world. Like Marinetti he has a large-size ego and convictions that propelled action and his manifestos that led to media events. Perhaps art needs these outbursts to keep it balanced.
The Guerilla Girl's manifesto can be viewed on many media formats. These girls are media savvy and that is probably why their twenty year Guerrilla Girl gigs are still thriving. The following You Tube :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHVBZh5HBgc
is an example of their manifesto stating in visual imagery and humor their cause and the discrimination within the art world. Like the Futurists, the girls manipulate and mix-up their art mediums to give a voice to their causes. Sly wit, rhetorical format, direct observations juxtaposed with facts keep their message alive. Although the Girls have the advantage of internet self-publishing systems, the distribution and marketing are similar challenges to the Futurists. The Girl's use humor as their weapon as the Futurists used violence. Below is an extract of their manifesto:
Source: PDF: Guerrilla Girls reinventing the F Word-Feminism
SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS MAY 22 2010
The following is extracts from their manifesto:
The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Behaving Badly (Which You Have to Do Most of the Time in the World as We Know It)
Be a loser. The world of art and design doesn’t have to be an Olympics where a few win and everyone else is forgotten. Even though the art market and celebrity culture is set up to support the idea of hyper-competition and to make everyone but the stars feel like failures, there’s also a world out there of artistic cooperation and collaboration that’s not about raging egos. That’s the one we joined, and the one you can join, too. Get beyond the outdated assumption that only a handful of you will "make it." Don’t all waste your time running after the same few carrots.
Be impatient. Don't wait for a stamp of approval from the system. Don’t wait around to be asked to dance. Claim your place...Be anonymous. You’d be surprised what comes out of your mouth when you’re wearing a gorilla mask. We started wearing them to protect our careers, but soon realized it was one of the secrets of our success. Anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. So join that long line of anonymous masked avengers, like Robin Hood, Batman, and of course, Wonder Woman.
Be an outsider
Lead a double life. Be a split personality.
Just do one thing.
Don't make only FINE art. Make some cheap art that can be owned by everyone, like books and movies can.
Sell out
Complain, complain, complain. But be creative about it. Sure we've done 45 feet high banners and billboards all over the world. But here's some simpler things we've done: Put anti-film industry stickers in movie theatre bathrooms, insert fliers with facts about art world discrimination into books in museum stores, send anonymous postcards to museum directors. Want more ideas? How about attaching political hangtags to items in clothing stores, putting up street art or billboards across from your office, slapping stickers on fashion magazine covers. You can probably think up a million better ideas than we can.
Use the F wordAnd last, but not least, be a great ape.
Guerrilla Girls use rhetoric to entice not to hammer down their point. Not to rant or to admonish. Masters at turning a phrase or a question, for an example, the most famous question a Guerrilla Girl billboard asked, “Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?” The question implies that there is a problem. The Girls followed up on this question by counting all the female nudes and male nudes in the the Met museum and published their finding, by asking another question. As Marinetti and the Futurists thrived on controversy so do the Guerrilla Girls. There is no bad press, and its more fun, the worse the event. The Guerrilla Girls use of the visual argument has the same appeal of a really good commercial. I think that for the Guerrilla Girls the textures of their visual collages of words and images seem rebellious at the same time stating facts, which drives home the contradictions, creating a bigger punch.
Like Marinetti, the Guerrilla Girls use events and theatrics to continue to clarify their agenda, and address issues of discrimination or current events. Their posters have a distinctive and unique quality similar to the distinctive quality of Marinetti's designs and type on media. There is a sensational feeling regarding the Futurists and the Guerilla Girls, bad boys and girls for a good cause kind of thing. Both groups enjoy the insults and derision, and they use it to their advantage. The staging of events are strategic, although it looks random, no event is random initially. Both groups are able to orchestrate their events so they are filmed and photographed to be used again in another context. There is a multi-tiered approach to their image events. The Guerrilla Girl's technique starts with the creation of the first media event, and then it is rolled over to a new event, and continues to cycle through one event leading into another. Below is an example of the Guerrilla Girls creating a media event out of a current event. They filmed the event and it was looped onto TV, presented on posters and went viral on You Tube. Marinetti would be so envious. I could see him embracing this technology to create chaos.
Source: Enculturation 6.2 (2009): http://enculturation.gmu.edu/6.2/tulley
The Guerilla Girls invented the“anti-grope” shields in response to the media report of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alleged fondling of female co-workers, We think all women in California should protect themselves by carrying our new, specially designed, “Schwarzenegger Shield.” This anti-Arnold armor can be used to block any unwanted advances, and insure that the new governor won't be able to grope, grab or sexually harass any of us, in any way. Don't go to the governor's office or mansion without it!
Today we are geared into visuals. We are conditioned to respond to visual nuances and take delight when it is thrown back at us. The Girls know how to market and balance this road. The best part of the Guerrilla Girls is you don't have to formally belong or take an oath of allegiance to participate in Guerrilla Girl activities. Anyone can create an image event, create bumper stickers or posters and put them up in art establishments. This system allows the iconic message and method to spread across the planet. It seems in other manifestos there is a more formality to its groupings. The Guerrilla Girls seemed to have embraced the contemporary wiki spirit of a loose organization that trusts that humans will take the spirit of a manifesto and do right by it.
Cage, Van den Broek, Monk and Cunningham
Although Merce Cunningham, Ann Van den Broek and Meredith Monk seem to have similar avant garde multi-media and/or intermedia work, each artist is unique and independent of each other, and remain true to the spirit of avant-garde intentions. Cage had an impact on all three artists, primarily Cunningham, since they worked together professionally and personally for fifty years. Cage's theories on music and creativity seemed to have slowly seeped into these artists looking to explore outside the boundaries of their disciplines. It takes a boldness to continue to explore the Fluxus and experimental ideas. Although the Avant-Garde seemed confined to the cities and academic institutions, this group's impact is still prevalent in contemporary artist's work as Monks and Van de Broek.
Monk, Van de Broek and Cunningham used multi-media, intermedia and then multimedia again which for me represents the transformation of these states in many of their work. I have watched videos of each of these artist's work and can see Cage and the Fluxus influence in their intent and products. Its extraordinary how well known these artists are in the US major cities, academia, global arena. Cage and Cunningham made an impact on artists since the 60s, but outside of these pockets, these artists are still a foreign entity.
Merce Cunningham was quoted in one of my recent articles on Fluxus artists as one of the most consistent artists to adhere to the Fluxus criteria of chance and intermedia. His work was considered 'baffling and beautiful' at the same time. His dance work embraced just the movement as stated in the following excerpt:
His work questioned the essence of dance,“What interests me is movement,” Cunningham said in a 2005 interview with Bloomberg News. “Not movement that necessarily refers to something else, but is just what it is. Like when you see somebody or an animal move, you don’t have to know what it’s doing.”
Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1913764,00.html#ixzz1kBk42k4d
I like that I am off the hook to find meaning. I can relax and just watch for the movement alone. I found the lack of meaning comforting. We are always thinking there is a right answer for everything and when there is no answer, its even better. The next excerpt indicates how the audience was tested by his work.
Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1913764,00.html#ixzz1kBk42k4d
Cunningham never made things easy for his audience. His dances shunned narrative and character. They were simply about dynamic human bodies moving in space. Occasionally the work assaulted the spectator. The 1964 “Winterbranch,” with its Sisyphean movement, its darkened stage from which lights shone full blast into the viewers’ eyes and its abrasive La Monte Young score had people exiting the theater in droves.
I am not sure I would be able to make the grade after being assaulted by lights. Audiences had to endure and be patient, and I think that in our fast-paced society this would be an additional challenge.
Cage collaborated with artists, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Stella, mixing up the media and dancers. The following excerpt provides a glimpse into these forays:
Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1913764,00.html#ixzz1kBk42k4d
“Summerspace” (1958), with its dancers streaming past Rauschenberg’s pointillist backdrop in leotards that match it; the exuberantly athletic “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run” (1965); “RainForest” (1968), where the dancers move like jungle creatures among Warhol’s silvery helium-lofted pillows; “Sounddance” (1975), which seems to launch its performers into a violent intergalactic world; “Points in Space” (1986-1987), which takes its title from Einstein's declaration that there are no fixed points in space; and “Ocean” (1994), a magisterial piece that has its dancers framed by concentric rings -- the spectators and, behind them, the musicians.
He described “Ocean” this way in a November 2008 interview with Bloomberg’s Muse TV: “It’s like being in a bath of sound, because it comes from every source around you. In doing it, you find out something else about dance, something that you never thought of before. I always look forward to seeing what that will be.”
I love the last line in this quote. Chance is a major element in his work and even he has no idea what it will become in each production.
Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1913764,00.html#ixzz1kBk42k4d
In creating a dance, Cunningham sometimes turned to the “I Ching,” the Chinese system based on rolling dice. Injecting an element of chance into his work, he said, expanded his choreographic choices that might otherwise be limited by habit. Zen philosophy, with its emphasis on the present moment, and a keen sensitivity to nature also informed his work.
I like that he also did his dances in site specific locations. Change and chance were the cornerstones of both Cage and Cunningham's work, and the I Ching was used as a template. Cage has conjectured that the purpose of his work was not to bring order out of chaos but to embrace the chaos and live it.
The following two internet sites show the Merce Cunningham dance troupe on You Tube.
The first piece is called Mercat de la Flors, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGU2QQpQlD8
This is a site specific dance in a public building. The dancers are in red leotards and the music is like clanging barges on a port. The dancer's light movements clash with the harsh sounds. Although the dancers are all dancing isolated movements, there is symmetry in the entire piece- which is probably why it is successful.
The next Cunningham dance, Nearly Ninety, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpV5ZY9N-bg&feature=related is a dynamic production on a stage with enormous screens overpowering the dancers. The images on the screen are huge industrial platforms or machines The music plays to the images- discordant sounds and the movements reacting to the sounds. Cunningham would have had all the players in a performance work in isolation until the rehearsal. So improv, adaptability and flexibility of thought was an essential element leaving a lot to chance.
John Cage's music portrayed the inner sounds of the mind or everyday sounds of life. Sort of playing with the duality in life and sound perception. Cage's ruminations with perception and sound is similar to Meredith Monk's work on music. Monk's piece, Dolmen Music for 6 voices and percussion (1979) www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNacNzhcNZI is haunting and far beyond any a cappella I have heard. The performers seemed to be listening to each other then answering each other back in pure voices. I did not think I would like it, but I really did. It was relaxing and hypnotic, taking me to a medieval environment. The performers just performed noises, clear clear notes. I am not sure if it was intermedia or multi-media, yet since it was a performance, based on criteria and several elements, I am leaning towards intermedia. Monk's vocal innovations have been coined as her extended techniques, which extends to Cage and his forays into random sounds and methods.
The next Monk piece is called the Book of Days, (1988) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMFLct2laqw
It starts off literally with a blast in a colored brick wall and moving to a black and white performance from the Middle Ages. Its a combination performance, song, dance, opera and mythic drama. The performance seems like a morality play of deep, dark cultural secrets against the rhythm of a children's song. There are contrasting emotions working to form this strange past and future piece somewhere in an isolated world where the two realities converge.
The last artist I would like to highlight is Ann Van de Broek. Van de Broek is a Flemish/Dutch artist who has truly been a cutting edge dance choreographer and performance artist. In the following art piece entitled Co(te)lette,(2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJWYYa7nu6o&feature=endscreen&NR=1 she teams up with the American director, Mike Figgs who filmed this performance. The interesting thing is how he creates an audience and how the audience is forced or not to participate in this performance. This work is very edgy, physically and emotionally demanding for the dancers and the audience. The official synopsis states:
Source: http://www.dancecamerawest.org/pr/2011/Cotelette-presskit.pdf
THE CO(TE)LETTE FILM is Mike Figgis' cinematographic adaptation of the dance performance by Ann Van den Broek.
Women and flesh, beauty and perishableness, raw and fragile. A delirious desire overwhelms the dancers. A desire for physical and mental satisfaction. The dancers go from appeal to sensuality, over lust, fleshness, fame, success, reflection and control, to silence. They are slaves of their own desires while trying to get in control of them. Female bodies in a frenzy.
In THE CO(TE)LETTE FILM, three female dancers are shown in a rather intimate atmosphere, in a chicken-and-egg situation between desire and satisfaction. There is no confrontation, nor rivalry. No story-telling, no solution and no ending. Co(te)lette's story is restless and... empty.
The dance and the way it is filmed feels voyeuristic and personal at the same time. A dualism of toughness and glamour. The women are naked and bruised, and as the Los Angeles Times wrote it was “55 minutes of an unrelenting portrait of nakedness and erotica”. Ann Van de Broek stated that:
Source: http://www.wardward.be/e-avdb-visie.html
I am also inspired by contemporary society: a sign of the times, a recent phenomenon or a universal motif. In that sense, my work is also a critical reaction or rebelling against things that go unquestioned, are ignored or are generally assumed to be the norm. I feel the need to fight against conformity. However, this does not mean that there is a clear political, social or ideological message in my work.... "Co(te)lette," — literally "a piece of meat" — was also inspired by French feminist writer Colette.I have never intended to make a loud statement. It is only a subtle undertone in my work. These behavior patterns, impressions, signs of the times and phenomena from my surroundings are the basis of the core concept of every new production and each time they are linked to the general underlying themes that are characteristic of my work: restlessness, struggle, resistance, compulsion/control, fanaticism, nihilism and activity/passivity.
Music and sound play an integral part in the creative process of the choreography.
Through my work and characteristic dance idiom, I want to touch people, to make them think. I allow room for doubt and interpretation for the spectator, as well as for me. Everyday activities are placed in a new context: movement and dance. the selected core concept to movement is done through an in-depth and broad analysis. You could call this process a clinical analysis.
This piece by Van de Broek seems initially like a multi-media work until Figgis adds another element of film and the work takes on another dimension. The oblique angles. The birds-eye view and intimate views juxtaposing the audience's emotions. The film is startling in capturing the raw energy of the dancers against the stillness of the audience. The work is transformed into an intermedia performance that fuses all the elements into 55 minutes of three women dancers. Although Van de Broek's work is not a clear extension of Cage, Cunningham and Monk, the intention is worthy of the Fluxus. The elements and everyday activities that propel the themes and stories. Although this work seems to have definite themes, it is very abstracted so not one message is directed. Each audience participant extracts the meaning of this dance in the context of their persona.
When I think of Cage I see how he provided the fodder for Cunningham, Monk and Van de Broek. They found the elements in his work to transform into their own work. The work of all these artists encompass a certain boldness of spirit and a challenge to the viewer. I was surprised how accessible the work was for a lay person like me. I somehow got the sense I would have to study more stuff to understand the intentions and final products. I thought it would be difficult to discern the good, bad and the ugly of avant-garde work if one was a novice audience participant. I think you just have to take it as it comes and intuit each piece- that was probably the intent.