Beuys goes pop

 Just to prove that Joseph Beuys stayed current with the times…

http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/Beuys-Joseph_Sonne-Statt-Reagan_1982.mov

Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986)

Sonne Statt Reagan

4 mb (.mov), 1′ 57″
1982

MP3 of Sonne stat reagan from the Fluxus Anthology

Beuys tried his luck as a pop singer as part of his political commitment. His song ‘Sonne statt Reagan’ attacks Ronald Reagan’s arms policy. The song was issued as a record and Beuys appeared before big audiences with it during the peace movement’s demonstrations and also with the group Die Desserteure in the ARD television broadcast ‘Bananas’ on 3.7.1982.

‘Regen”, pronounced like ‘Reagan’, is the German for ‘rain’. 

Sasha Petrenko

“We House” at Southern Exposure Gallery, 2006

studies for “Pocket House”

Sasha Petrenko’s latest architecturally inspired project is titled Pocket-house. This portable one-person shelter is built with a modified boat building technique consisting of laminated strips of plywood. Conveniently, the structure is perfectly scaled to fit on top of Petrenko’s 1989 Acura Legend. The structure is then transported to various locations in Northern California where the artist temporarily resides and photographically documents her experience inside Pocket-house. The minimal yet comfortable structure features light and sound systems, plus sleeping and storage areas that are powered by either a 12 volt power generated by the Acura Legend or 120 volt supplied by her friendly host.  Inspired by her experiences as an artist attempting to afford a home of her own, Petrenko’s photographs of her project comment on the basic needs of daily living through alternative means, exploring ideas about place, shelter and affordable housing.

LINKS:

• artist website

Marjetica Potrc: “Urgent Architecture”

Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc discovers beauty in the unplanned urban landscapes of shantytowns, trailer parks, and barrios. In her installations in various art institutions across the globe, she sends instructions to the musum staff on how to build her installations–often inspired by a type of shelter found halfway across the world–out of local materials. Here she instructs/constructs a massive installation of housing units based on observations made of temporary shelters and gated communities in Caracas, the West Bank, and West Palm Beach.

LINK:

• artist’s website
• “Urgent Architecture” book

Artists addressing “the archive” and also casual display tactics

In light of Adam’s “archive” installation portraying his first home away from home I mentioned a few artists that seem to relate in different ways:

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Fred Wilson

Commenting on his unorthodox artistic practice, Wilson has said that, although he studied art, he no longer has a strong desire to make things with his hands. “I get everything that satisfies my soul,” he says, “from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.” Thus, Wilson creates new exhibition contexts for the display of art and artifacts found in museum collections, along with wall labels, sound, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects. His installations lead viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. While appropriating curatorial methods and strategies, Wilson maintains his subjective view of the museum environment and the works he presents. He questions—and forces the viewer to question—how curators shape interpretations of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display, and what kinds of biases our cultural institutions express.

• bio and images at PBS’ “Art21″ series

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Gail Wight

Zoo Kit

wooden box, felt, text
test tubes, DNA in solution
6″ x 12″ x 18″
1997

A small wooden box with racks of test tubes holds the DNA for land, air, and sea animals, the DNA for flora to sustain them, and the DNA for a zoo keeper. A tribute to Fluxus.

In attempts to understand thinking, I have:
made maps of various nervous systems, practiced art while under hypnosis, designed an artificial intelligence to read my tarot, read for hours to fish, conducted biochemical experiments on myself and others, executed medical illustrations in black velvet, worked on cognitive research projects, documented dissections of humans, dissected machines and failed to put most of them back together, freely made up vocabulary as needed, removed my teeth to model information systems, self-induced phobias concerning consciousness in the plant kingdom, donated my body to science and then requested it be returned, observed nerve development in vivo, choreographed synaptic responses, translated EEGs into music, conducted a cartesian exorcism on myself, and attempted to create cognitive models of my own confused state.
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Rirkrit Tiravanija

Since the early 1990s, Tiravanija has explored a new aesthetic paradigm of interactivity. He has cooked and served food to his audiences, set up a recording studio in a museum, reconstructed his apartment inside a gallery for visitors’ use, corresponded via the Internet while on an American road trip with Thai students, and provided opportunities for numerous other everyday activities to occur within art spaces. Tiravanija is a catalyst; he creates situations in which visitors are invited to participate or perform. In turn, their shared experiences activate the artwork, giving it meaning and altering its form.

• Guggenheim museum project
• interview with Ami Barak

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Mark Dion

In many of his works, Dion re-creates the categorization and exhibition practices of museums. In this piece, his concern is to explore how a subjective understanding of nature becomes established as history by a particular group of people at a particular time. The result is a fictive–or personal–view of history that reflects on the subjective and sometimes arbitrary nature of scientific methodology.

Mark Dion, Alexander Wilson-Studio, 1999, wooden structure, mixed media, 8 x 12 x 9ft. (installation view)

Mark Dion, Alexander Wilson-Studio, 1999, wooden structure, mixed media, 8 x 12 x 9ft. (installation view detail)

• Mark Dion: New England Digs
• Tate Museum project: Tate Thames Dig

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Exhibition: “Art of the Encyclopedic”
at the Carnegie Museum, 2003

Art of the Encyclopedic is guest curated by Paul Vanouse, Assistant Professor of Art, University at Buffalo and features the works of digiatal artists Natalie Bookchin, Brian Collier, Julia Dzwonkoski, Omar and Carlos Estrada, Caroline Koebel, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Walid Raad, and Igor Vamos.

Art of the Encyclopedic is a meta-commentary on both exhibition curation as well as the historic function of the Carnegie Art Center (formerly the Carnegie Library). The exhibition is about classification, organization, categorization, archiving and public display. Furthermore, the exhibition is interested in displaying, in actual gallery space, qualities of contemporary information technologies, i.e. the world wide web, that tend toward exhaustive re-cataloging of existing information. For instance, many museum web-sites have hyperlinks to other museum collections, often creating recursive loops of references to one another so that our primary experience is of navigating linkages and information hierarchies and secondarily of the discreet information that they organize.

Art of the Encyclopedic is intended to highlight artworks that embody these systematic, hyper-rationalized processes and, of course, to further organize these works in the exhibition space. The works planned incorporate a variety of media including, photography, video, found-objects, text, and digital media. Read more…

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Rebecca Bollinger

“Last Year by Color and Composition” 2002

A digital movie made from every picture stored on my computer during one years time – eBay photos, personal snapshots, search result pictures, work documentation, photos of drawings, travel pictures (mostly anonymous,) pie charts and graphs, quotes, maps and logos – organized by color and composition.

How to use this site

Welcome to the class website! I will be posting updates weekly, and adding new topics and examples of interesting things for you to consider. This site is a resource to get your juices flowing and come to terms with the myriad ways in which materials and concepts can be pulled together to create meaning and metaphor. I welcome comments, suggestions, and feedback on the content and hope everyone can contribute their own info to this archive during the semester (more on this later). This is an archive-in-progress and is by no means complete, but a start at creating conversation points and spurring your own investigation. Currently, there are fifty entries to browse, with lots of images.

How to navigate: This site is built as a blog, so those of you familiar with standard blogs will pick it up easily. You can browse the content in several ways:

1. Scroll directly down the page to read entries. Recent ones are at the top, and older ones are at the end
2. Choose a “category” at the right-hand column to get specific information
3. Get class information, syllabus, and contact information at the top navigation bar
4. Check out the art-related “links” also at the right-hand column to view other sites of interest, but aren’t necessarily related to the class content

NOTE: Each entry has a “more” link, that if clicked, will take you to a more extensive write-up complete with further images and informative links. Don’t forget to access these! Also, if scrolling down a page, click on the “previous entries” link to see older posts.

I’ll be showing my own work sometime during the semester, but if you are interested now you can view it at my website: http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com

Looking forward to working with all of you this semester!

Anna Maltz

“Maggie, Daniell, Finley & Kaizen, San Francisco”, 2003, c-print, 13.5”x20”, ed. of 5.

Joseph Beuys

Capri Battery, 1985.

Informed by diverse sources, including German history, Shamanism, and Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, Beuys’s unique outlook evolved throughout his career. Beuys later expanded his artistic definition to include “social sculpture” which resulted from public interaction and discussion. His work methods can best be seen in his showcases or glass cases containing objects found or created by him. Another essential feature of the exhibition are the artist’s own drawings, which he described as the “energy source” inspiring his work in other media.

Fred Sandback

“Untitled (Fourth of Ten Corner Constructions),” 1983
maroon and black acrylic yarn

The quilts of Gee’s Bend

Gee’s Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850. After the Civil War, the freed slaves took the name Pettway, became tenant farmers for the Pettway family, and founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world…The town’s women developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. The women of Gee’s Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present…

braiding

instructions and more at Dreamweaver Braiding

hand-knit leprosy bandages

Very weird but metaphorically interesting…a church website showing people how to make crocheted or handknit bandages to be donated to lepers in tropical countries.

Erwin Wurm

“Outdoor Sculpture, Taipei” 2000

“The artist is perhaps best known for his ongoing “Do It Yourself” and “One Minute Sculpture” series (begun in 1996 and ‘98, respectively). These consist of written instructions and diagrams and any props needed to carry them out, such as “show your tongue,” “lie on the balls–no part of the body should touch the ground,” and “put the felt markers on top of your shoes, hold this for one minute and think of Rene Descartes….” (read article)

lacemaking

Weaving and knotting tiny threads (sometimes numbering in the hundreds) into a decorative fiber. The ultimate in connecting…

handmade lace in progress–note the many individual threads and bobbins.

types of glue

Impressive list of types of adhesives from wikipedia.com:

Historically, glue only refers to protein colloids prepared from animal tissues. The meaning has been extended to any type of glue-like substances that are used to attach one material to another.

treehouses

More complex than you probably know, treehouses are built around the world by different cultures and are an amazing hybrid of human shelter and organic, living material. Finding ways to build on top of and within a tree poses specific problems of cohabiting without damaging as well as human comforts. The organic, almost build-as-you-go aesthetic of some of these dwellings can be a direct reflection of the individuality and idiosyncracies of each tree they inhabit.

The Treehouse Book, by Peter Nelson, David Larkin