Week 6 Assignment Post

Here is what you need to do before class on Monday:

Read pages 133-173 in the Fusco book, have your Social Intervention projects ready to perform/present, add four links to your del.icio.us site, and make at least two considered comments on the reading. Here are some considerations:

• Respond to and critique one specific work by Mendieta, Clark, or Oiticica. Given that your experience of this work is solely description in an essay and possibly documentary photographs, what elements of your response do you think are owed to this written perspective?
• Consider the end notes–what information contained here is provacative to you? Why was this not contained in the body of the main article in your opinion? How does it elucidate the information primarily presented?

Week 5 Assignment Post

Here is what you need to do before class on Monday:

Read pages 225-265 in the Fusco book; read these selections from the Interventionists book (follow this link (3.8 MB)) and inSite 05 (links below); listen to the Bad at Sports interview with the Center for Tactical Magic; make at least two thoughtful comments here regarding the readings; post four links to your del.icio.us page; write a working proposal for your Social Intervention project (please email this to me if possible).

Here are the links to intervention projects from inSite 05:

Paul Ramírez-Jonas

Måns Wrange and here

Judi Werthein

João Louro

Here are some considerations:

• How is a figure like Alejandro Jodorowsky especially pertinent to current students of art, and more particularly to students like you in programs like VaPA?

• Respond to Bustamante’s contention that the group movement in Mexico ended with the 1983 MAM exhibition. What other “institutionalizations” are you aware of and what effect do you think such recognition or inclusion has on artists and art forms/trends that were previously uncannonized?

• Link or trace the use of the term “tactics,” especially in the Thompson essay and the Chavoya essay. How does this term function and how is this useful in your efforts to construct an intervention proposal?

• Respond to the direct dealing with situation, concept, space, community, and issue in Asco’s work. Does this account of some of their projects help you in concieving your own piece? (What direct issues are you involved in/aware of and do they seem like subjects for art work to you?)

Week 4 Assignment Post

Please post at least two thoughtful comments on the readings for this week: pages 152-226 in the Goldberg book; Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century by Martha Wilson (JSTOR); and section one in the library reserve binder, chapter 5 in Performance: A Critical Introduction by Marvin Carlson.

Here are some considerations:

• After the descriptions of performance art as a genre in these two readings (and almost one month in class), locate/delineate your understanding of the nature of performance art.
• How do the discussions in these readings of some of the artists you are already familiar with clarify, expand, or change your understanding of these artists’ works?
• For those of you with a background in theatre, respond to references to theatre as the antecedent and discussions of theatre’s relationship to performance art.
• Select an artist from the Goldberg section and do some independent research on them. Post what you discover.

Remember your del.icio.us posts as well for this week. In class we will first complete the two performances from this past week, and then we will hopefully jaunt over to the dance studio for some exercises.

Week 3 Assignment Post

Please post at least two thoughtful comments on the readings for this week: pages 97-151 in the Goldberg book. You will also need to have your Performing the Self project ready to perform in class and have posted 4 links to your del.icio.us site.

Here are some considerations:

• Suggest a theoretical happening based on the tenants of the Bauhaus (descriptions of Bauhaus festivities and Schlemmer’s conceptual assertions might be a starting point.)

• What concerns of the period influenced the aesthetic investigations of the Bauhaus (re: interest in technology, etc.) and what parallel concerns of contemporary life might likewise influence your aesthetics?

• How do accounts of and artists statements regarding some of the early happenings in the 1950s-early 1960s fit in to class discussion regarding the need or lack of need for artist intent and responsibility? (ex., Alan Kaprow’s statement regarding 18 Happenings in 6 Parts: “the actions will mean nothing clearly formulable so far as the artist is concerned.”)

• Discuss and react to the social implications of the work of Klein, Manzoni, and Beuys; or defend the assertion that Joseph Beuys is the best artist ever.

Critique Guidelines

Here are the guidelines for critiques that we will be using in this class starting on Monday. We will discuss the method at the beginning of class before we start your performances, but you can read over them now to get a preview:

There are a few key steps in critiquing artwork. These steps can apply to other specialties and fields, but we will only discuss them in terms of visual art.

1. Description: The description of the object(s) is a matter-of-fact listing of what you are actually looking at. What is it? If you are looking at the Mona Lisa, you may say that it is an oil painting on wood, approximately 30″ x 20″, hung at such-and-such a height, the paint is applied in a delicate manner to depict a seated woman before a pastoral landscape. Other details may come out about the painted background and the way her hands are situated, but there is to be no interpretation or evaluation during the description process. Only hard facts about the physicality of the object are to be discussed – not history, context, or intent. It may seem redundant to describe work that everyone is standing before, but different people notice different things and it is helpful to point out those details. Describing the object(s) also sets the groundwork for the rest of the discussion as the following steps depend upon what is pointed out in the description phase.
2. Interpretation: Now you may take what was discussed in the description phase and talk about how those factors come together and what it means. Do not discuss artist’s intention during interpretation, however you may bring in historical and environmental context.
3. Evaluation: At this point you should be able to articulately evaluate the work based upon how well the work operates between what it is and what it is doing/trying to do. This should be the culmination and combination of the description and interpretation to result in well-stated judgments and opinion. If a work seems to be attempting humor, but the materials take themselves to seriously, you may raise that point. A work may succeed because what it is and how it operates are in accord. The artist’s intentions should still be left out of this phase. As a matter of fact, the artist’s intentions should almost always be left out of critiques. Artists rarely know what they are talking about in relation to their work.

Week 2 Assignment Post

For class this coming week, you will need to have read the Goldberg chapters on Dada and Surrealism, made at least two comments on this post, added 4 links to your del.icio.us site, posted images of your Beuys project to Flickr, and have your proposal for the performing the process project ready (I prefer it if you email this to me).

 Here are some things to consider regarding the readings:

• What might the perceived use of writing and publishing manifestos have been for the artist groups you have read about? What do you think the actual results were at the time? How is this different from the results over time, i.e., how have the manifestos affected the transition of these movements from practice to history?
• Respond to the insight into artists’ practice that their involvement to whatever degree in these movements has  provided to your understanding of their work and their place in cultural history (ex.: Picasso’s costumes for Parade, Satie’s infamy, etc.).
• Given your personal area of  focus (visual art, music, theater, etc.), does this history of artistic cross-pollination lend insight into your understanding of the current state of your specialty area? How does it inform your participation in an interdisciplinary degree?

Guillermo Gómez-Peña to visit CSU Fort Collins

This is an event that I strongly recommend. Perhaps some of your peers might be interested in carpooling to Fort Collins. Feel free to post here in the comments section if you are interested in carpooling to Fort Collins.

The Colorado State University Student Organization for the Visual Arts (SOVA) is honored to announce Guillermo Gómez-Peña as a visiting artist for the 2008 academic season. The artist will appear at CSU’s Lory Student Center Theater on Wednesday, February 27, and Thursday, February 28, at 6 p.m. The events are free and open to the public.

Wednesday evening Gómez-Peña will offer a solo performance, The Mexorcist, in which he explores aspects of immigration, globalization, technology, censorship, and interracial relations. Thursday evening’s audio-visual performance, Ethno Techno: In Search of a New Aesthetic, will focus on Gómez-Peña’s projects over the past five years. In addition to themes addressed in The Mexorcist, Gómez-Peña here explores the “mainstream bizarre” and “multi-culturalism” as it relates to the Chicano/Latino community, and notions of the body in performance.

Born in Mexico, resident of San Francisco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whether working in performance, installation, writing, video, or the web, illuminates the cultural side effects of globalization and the commodification of identity. The world-renowned artist may also be familiar to the public as a contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” In 1993, he formalized the artist-collective and non-profit organization La Pocha Nostra, based in San Francisco. The group’s artwork primarily concerns the interface between Mexican and United States culture. Interdisciplinary projects and books explore borders in various realms–physical, cultural, and otherwise, between the two countries and between mainstream U.S. and Latino cultures in general: the U.S.-Mexican border itself, immigration, cross-cultural identity, and the confrontation and misunderstandings between cultures and races. Gómez-Peña’s collaborative performance art often involves elaborate costuming which ultimately engages the audience to become a part of the performance itself. He has worked in multiple media, and has published eight books in both English and Spanish. Among his many prestigious awards, he is the first Mexican-born artist to receive a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (1991). He has been producing work around the world consistently since 1988. In the words of La Pocha Nostra:

“Our common denominator is our desire to cross and erase dangerous borders between art and politics, practice and theory, artist and spectator. We strive to eradicate myths of purity and dissolve borders surrounding culture, ethnicity, gender, language, and métier. La Pocha collaborates across national borders, race, gender and generations. Our collaborations are founded on an ideal: If we learn to cross borders on stage, we may learn how to do so in larger social spheres. We hope others will be challenged to do the same. La Pocha Nostra is a virtual “maquiladora,” a conceptual assembly plant that produces brand-new metaphors, symbols, images, and words to explain the complexities of our times.”

Project Proposal: Good Example

The following is an example of a good project proposal. Some of the strengths include: well-organized paragraphs, conceptually creative and supported choices,  logistical foresight, clarity in communicating project purpose, awareness of its situation in contemporary performance, and ambition. Micro/Macro-Performance

Performance art is often created according to a human scale since it is based upon the body/bodies of the performer.  The performer moves his body around a space; she engages with the audience’s bodies; the performance is documented by another person using a manageable hand-held camera; etc.  I am interested in exploring avenues of performance art that are habitually passed over because of issues of scale.  I propose to create two performances: one that explores performance on a small scale and another that creates a mega-scale performance.

I will reserve a classroom in Columbine specifically for my performance.  The room will be darkened for visitors as they enter.  Inside the room I will have constructed a small box that will house me and an opaque projector.  There will be a small hole through which the opaque projector will throw its image and a few small slots for ventilation.  Since opaque projectors enlarge whatever is in their viewfinder, whatever I perform within the viewfinder will be enlarged for the audience.  I will use a small needle to implant corn silk into a strip of apricot fruit leather.  When enlarged, this will appear similar to the act of adding hair to a hide, but just different enough to make the viewer question what is actually being performed.  The use of unusual materials and their shift in scale will create an unsettling image for the audience.

I have chosen not to use video for this project because of the complications it can create.  If video is used, the audience may wonder if the image is simply a recording or if it has been altered with special effects.  Using the opaque projector will allow the audience to understand that it is a live performance being carried out in the box.

My choice of materials and their apparent similarity to skin and hair will hint at the body – a constant in traditional performance art – without using the actual image of a body, thereby playing with the history of performance and reexamining its uses.

My macro-performance will consist of one iceberg in the Antarctic located at latitude: 72.087432 and longitude: 94.394531.  For the next two weeks, I will drive everywhere I go, even from class to class.  I will leave my car running as much as possible.  The bumper of my car will bear a sticker reading, “Al Gore Loves Global Warming.  It Makes Him Rich.  I Work for Al Gore.” If I have to walk anywhere, I will dispense an aerosol can full of CFCs into the air during the duration of my walk.  My actions should melt and move the iceberg an infinitesimally small amount.  The performance is not my driving or walking, but the reaction of the iceberg.

This performance requires no formal audience and my only documentation will be scientific data accumulated by scientists in the region that I will never see, my gas receipts, and the empty aerosol cans.  My performance is large in scale because of the amount of people involved – the scientists, those holding me up in traffic, the landscape architects who require me to walk around a corner rather than through it, the manufacturers of the aerosol, and the Subaru corporation – as well as the scope of the geography and land involved.

This project examines the effects of an individual and where an artwork begins and ends.  My actions will be felt far into the future as well as here in the present and they involve many more people than those within my immediate “audience.”
The proposal is a hypothetical one for an assignment that we will not have this semester: Micro- and Macro-Performance.

Project Proposal: Bad Example

The following is an example of a bad project proposal. Some of the problems include: typos, grammar and spelling issues, lack of choice justification, illogical reasoning, verb tense shifts, apparently trying to make one project count for two classes. . . just to name a few. The proposal is a hypothetical one for an assignment that we will not have this semester: Micro- and Macro-Performance.

Micro/Macro Performance

I was thinking that I might do a performance of painting two small paintings. Like 2 inches sqwared. I’ll probably paint these in front of the class, but I might also just video myself doing this at home and show the video in class. I like to paint and if UCCS offered a painting major, that’s what I would do. I’ll paint one still life of a plant or something like that. The other would be of myself using a mirror. My face just small. Can you get a video projector or TV for me in case I video myself? And a video cassette player. For my big performance maybe I would see if I could rent one of those big fat sumo suits from a party supply store or something. I could challenge my girlfriend to a fight in front of the class but she couldn’t really hurt me since I was wearing a big fat sumo suit. My girlfriend and I sometimes fight, but we never hit each toher. We’re just be acting. I think that since performing is all about the actors, I would just make one of the actors bigger than normal. Since one actor would be small (my girlfriend is super skinny) then the other actor (me) would look really huge. I would just be reading a book or something and my girlfriend would walk in and start yelling at me about something like I left the toilet seat up. The book I am reading is one I made in my other class about my grandma who died a few years ago. It is shaped like a person and has different color paper in it. The person is my grandma and I wrote about a time that she showed me the asparagus in her garden and then we ate it. So, my girlfriend is all yelling at me and I start yelling at her and then she’ll try to punch me, but I won’t feel it. Then I can roll over her or something and we can just fight. I saw someone using the sumo suits at a student activity a couple years ago and it was pretty funny. I think I might know who to ask where they got them. After a while my girlfriend will start yelling at me about how her mom used to abuse her (not really, just pretend). I’ll stop bumping her and rolling around and say I’m sorry. We’ll make up. So I’m really big and the fight will be really big and then we’ll make up showing that everyone has things that they carry around and that we can get along.

Course Schedule

I’ve got the course schedule finished to a suitable degree (I will add more readings later in the semester). You may now download it and marvel at all you will learn and do this semester. Ain’t education great?

Link: VaPA 390 Course Schedule (56KB PDF)