Week Three: Performance and Video art (November 4-6)

I'm glad that we are covering the beginnings of video art in class this week because aside from painting, this is the medium that excites me the most. Video art has a lot of potential for me, I think, because it a) it's familiar to most of us who grew up watching television, and b) because it includes the visual languages of painting and performance, but also includes sound.
Video art deals with a language that most of us in the western world are intimately familiar with; television. It uses moving images on a screen but unlike film, the images can be broadcast in real time so there is an immediacy to it. In this way, it also has voyeuristic connotations (which Acconci explores in a work like Theme Song). There is an interesting tension created between the viewer and screen, and the artist and camera lens. The artist knows we will watch them at some point, but they have to perform the work with no audience creating an element of self-consciousness. As viewers, we become very aware of the camera as foreground to the work. This heightens the sense that perhaps we shouldn't be watching this or are watching this by accident because the artist forgot to hit pause on the recorder.
Video art uses sound. This makes it a more attractive medium than photography because it involves more of the senses (in a general sense). You can see the influence of Cage in using the ambient sounds present during the recording instead of overlaying a traditional musical score.
Video art also uses time. Moving images require space/time to move through and thus engages the viewer in a prescribed duration of time. Unlike a photograph which you can potentially scan in a few seconds, video art asks the viewer to spend some time with the work. These early pieces also do not use any editing so the duration of the piece is the same for the artist as it is for the viewer; a shared experience.
What I like about learning about the beginnings of Video art is to see how the artists were searching out the language of the medium: experimenting and seeing what would stick. Nauman moving through space, Baldassari lifting his arms, Serra grabbing pieces of lead that are dropping from above are all very minimal actions and may be boring for some viewers. I think it is because these actions are boring is what makes them significant. Using these simple actions enabled the artists to be free of resorting to a traditional narrative as in television or film. The viewer is left with the questions what are they doing?, what is going on here? In the tradition of minimalism, what you see is what you see, enabling the video art piece to become art.
The fact that these pieces are not edited makes them seem more real because there is no polishing done to them. I think this is an interesting point; a medium that relies on a pre-recorded sequence of images mediated through a screen seems more like our lives. Perhaps this is how we perceive the world?
My only criticism with Video art is that it relies too much on technology and gear. Photography shares this same problem. It will be interesting to learn more about how artists have tried to deal with this issue. I'm aware of the work of Mark Lewis, Bill Viola, and Douglas Gordon so it will be fascinating for me to see how this develops.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (in situ), Douglas Gordon

Week Two: Process, Performance, Installation, and lead in to Video (October 28-30)

I wanted to write about the question of where the art is? Whenever there is a new and radical art, one of the main criticisms of it tend to be that critics can't seem to identify where the art is in the piece. This had a precedence as far back as Duchamp and possibly even as early as Goya, but especially now that we are talking about Concept and Land Art, it seems like particularly relevant point to think about.
Traditionally, the art object is where the art resides. A work of art, made skilfully and adhering to accepted traditions, was easy to define as art. It was an object that you could seperate from the world as distinctly Art. It wasn't until the Avant-Garde (and especially Duchamp) began to question the idea of what made an object Art; everyday objects were used to blur the line between Art and the world.
I think Conceptual Art and Land Art have taken and expanded on this idea. In fact, it propels the work. Partly due to the commodification of art objects and the rise of the art market, these artists wanted to make art that defied those institutions. They were reacting to the seemingly decorative and elitist Formalist art that Greenberg had championed and which seemed to be a dead-end for art.
Conceptual art makes the idea more important than the form it takes. The form then is secondary to the idea making the object almost redundant. This practice made art that was ephemeral like LeWitt's wall drawings that would be painted over once the exhibition was over. This idea breaks down the art as owned object in a radical way because if the object isn't important, then the idea is the art: is it possible to own an idea?
Process art pushed this idea further. An artist would create an art-making strategy by using the language of their given media and to accept the results, no matter what the form took shape as. The making of the thing became more important than the thing. A work like Long's Walking in a Line is shaped by the process of his walking in a field to create a line on the landscape (leading to Land Art, below), but the form it takes is secondary to act of its making. It is also ephemeral and goes beyond being an object that someone can own.
Land Art develops this idea another step farther and takes the art beyond the confines of the gallery and into the landscape. The art is defiantly beyond object so there cannot be ownership of it. Smithson created a large spiral in a salt lake, drawing/sculpting into the earth itself; making the world a canvas or frame of reference in which the art exists. To make the matter more difficult, the viewer must seek the art out, which is often in an isolated site.
This begs the question again, where does the art reside? I'd say that the art resides in the idea of opening up art to the larger canvas of the world (and cosmos like in the work of Holt or Turrell) and there is something poetic about that. We live in the canvas on which art is made. There are no limits to the canvas. The world is ever-changing and alive, therefore so is art. The Avant-Garde tried to bring the world into art, but Land artists have made art out of the world.

James Turrell, Crater's Eye from Roden Crater Project

Week One: Minimalism leading into Post-Minimalism (October 21-23)

For the journal entry for this first week, I wanted to respond to the idea of beauty in contemporary art. Beauty is a difficult idea to talk about. What makes something beautiful? What is beautiful when it comes to appreciating contemporary art? Why is beauty important especially since there are so many other criteria in which to evaluate a work of art?
In class we talked a little bit about Kant and the difference between something being beautiful and personal preference. The difference is beauty is in the thing and it is something you can agree on or describe that is outside of self. Personal preference is about how you like something, subjective, and relies on criteria you have set out yourself. We talked about beauty in art being supplanted by various things like talent, expression, etc. There are other ways to evaluate a work of art aside from whether it is beautiful or not and it seems that generally, beauty is out of the equation in contemporary art. I think, though, that even though beauty is no longer how we judge an artwork, that's not to say it's not a part of the work. Beauty, according to Kant, seems to go beyond a mere appreciation of the formal or visual qualities of a work of art. It stimulates an intuitive response, a felt response that you cannot explain rationally. It also goes beyond our own personal experience, towards a universal appreciation.
Beauty in art has been closely related to Academic painting and is synonymous with good taste. The criteria for something to be beautiful was dictated by the authoritative nature of Salon painting (the Academy telling you what you should consider to be beautiful). Beauty then has associations with the notion of bourgeois taste and this is something that any Avant-Garde art would have tried to distance itself from if it wanted to be truly progressive. You can see this as evident in Duchamp's Fountain as you can in Andre's Lever: art that challenges the current bourgeois idea of what art is.
I think the reason why beauty isn't discussed often in art anymore is because it seems outdated, kind of like saying art is magical. I mean, it certainly could be seen as magical (ie. illusionistic space on a flat surface), but most viewers may back away slowly and smile nervously if the artist presents the work in that way. I, personally, think this is a product of modern life, we don't seek beauty anymore. We are cynical about it, don't trust it.  Instead we rush to and fro, doing errands, being good consumers, a tamed mass, acting like productive members of society. But then we wonder why it all seems so empty, and that's because it is. That's where the role of beauty in art kicks in, it feeds our hungry souls when the meaninglessness of our lives begins to show at the seams. And we either search for beauty or continue to numb ourselves with consumer goods, the vicious cycle continues. I think it is our job as artists to connect to other people and shake them out of this cycle, or at least show them some glimmer of meaning beyond everyday consumer goods and experiences.
When it comes to beauty as it relates to Minimalist work, you could describe Judd's pure cube shapes as beautiful because they deal with elements of craft and precision (terms which are often packaged with beauty). In Andre's stacks of bricks, you get the sense of the beauty in the way that he is actually carving into lived space, the bricks are just a convenience and also very neatly stacked. Minimalist work may be obdurate (to use one of Judd's words) but you can get a sense that there is some meaning beyond the object even though the art is art about the art.
I doubt that the Minimalists would ever say "I wanted to make something beautiful," but they made beautiful things anyway. Perhaps it was through avoidance that beauty crept back into the work. I think beauty is essential to art because that seems to be where the soul of any work resides. As Duke Ellington said, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."

Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre

Beneath the Beard

Beneath the Beard, 40" by 48", oil on canvas, 2014

Souvenir

Souvenir, 40" by 48", oil on canvas, 2014

yah!

Picture for Women, by Jeff Wall 1979

I was energized by the discussion we had in class today about this image. Yes, there's the reference to Manet's painting "La Folie Bergere," but try to decipher where the figures are looking. What are they looking at? What are we looking at here? Try to imagine the space.
(hint: mirror)

Eye Contact

Eye Contact, 48" by 60", oil on canvas, 2014

More sleepy time paintings

A couple of more paintings about sleep.

How Can I Forget You, 30" by 40", oil on canvas, 2014

Medicine For Regret, 32" by 40", oil on canvas, 2014

Artist statement 2014

Weirdly distorted and morphing figures in confusing spaces. Patterned marks, raw colours and contrasts, shifting perspective, layers and history of making. Paintings that represent people and spaces but also reference the flatness of surface.
The subject of human interaction is fascinating. For an introverted person, meeting other people is often fraught with anxiety. The anxiety is processed into these paintings.
Scenes from everyday life act as an armature onto which energetic brushwork infuse these scenes with activity and evoke a sense of fleeting memories.

Artist statement: in progress

Artist Statement Pete Kohut: ugh. it feels like i don't have much that's holding together for a series :(
WHAT AM I DOING?
I'm making images that represent our daily life while evoking the fragmented nature in which we preceive and understand the world around us. 1.The coffee shop in North America is very much like the cafe in European countries, except that it can also function as a place to work, read, study, and be "alone".  It's a peculiar space especially for that last reason. I'm interested in the crossover of behaviours between the two types of spaces, private and public. 2. Media culture has affects how we think and feel about the world. 3. I'm using retrograde media to show the limits of current media.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
I'm driven to create images that seduce the viewer to inspect it closer, spend more time with it, and be rewarded by being able to read deeper into an image. 1. I find that digital media does not have the ability to hold our attention for long, mostly because we are so saturated by images so I wanted to create images that do hold our attention for longer than the brief glance that we normally attribute to images. 2. I believe that it is important as human beings to digest our images so that we may sort out what we think and feel. I want to create a situation where a viewer is rewarded from spending time in front of an image with a protected chunk of time in which they can contemplate, to create an alternative space for the viewer's mind to exercise it's thinking. 3. I want the viewer to be reminded to spend their lives in the present. All we have is now. You exist now. I feel the the media saturated culture we live in promotes us to be on the move, ever quickening the pace until we are exhausted, leaving us empty and hungry for more from life than glossy advertisements and consumer goods.
Scenes from the coffee shop, daydreaming, couples ignoring each other, people enacting their private lives in a public space.

? Do I need to go back and make a few more of these?

yep