Video Installation and the cinematic experience

Contemporary video art, whilst still including single channel or multi channel works (video works played on the one or multiple screens), has extended into another newish art form; installation. This is where the videos are shown, either projected or on a monitor, amongst an environment incorporating sculptural elements, objects, or intervened space. The video may be projected onto everyday objects, such as in Pipilotti Rist's Himalaya Sisters Living Room, or onto effigies, such as Tony Oursler's many contemporary works.

Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle is a pivotal contemporary work, in that it has the aura of a big budget Hollywood feature film/s, yet at it's centre it is conceptual and experimental.

2nd Wave Video Artists 1970s - 1980s

Australian video artist Peter Callas creates portraits of cultures from where he has lived, such as Australia, Papua New Guinea, Japan, Germany, Brazil, India, the US and Italy. He addresses multiculturalism and trans/cultural identity, as well as a retelling of history, or offering an alternative past.

VALIE EXPORT - performer, video artist, filmmaker, installation artist, photographer, sculptor and feminist - used video art (or as she termed it, 'expanded cinema') as a social mirror, reflecting back to society their own behaviours and reality.

Gary Hill, an American video artist, challenged the medium significantly, and incorporated text and spoken word with the moving image.

Bill Viola, perhaps one of the most recognised video artist, explores life, death, spirituality, and the unconscious, in his single channel and video installations.


We have started to see a shift away from video art being mainly a documentary tool for performance art, to becoming more of the experimental medium we see today.

More on early video art

Fluxus, an avant garde art group in the early to mid 1960s, included early video artists, performance artists and experimental film artists such as Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell.

The library has some fantastic resources including 'Video Art' (Michael Rush, 2003) and 'Video Art, a guided tour' (Catherine Elwes, 2005), as well as some actually video art recordings.

Early Video Art

I thought you guys might like to check out some early video artists who's work is YouTube...
Nam June Paik
Vito Acconci
Bruce Nauman
Dennis Oppenheim
VALIE EXPORT

A documentary on early experimentations in video art, titled The New Wave.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

And Video Art: A Retrospective
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

You might notice that early video art was used a lot for documenting performance art and body art and to comment critically on the media and television culture. Early video artists, such as Nam June Paik in Magnet TV 1965, and Peter Campus, also explored the technical boundaries of the medium.

Week 6 tips

Corel Painter X

Probably the most important thing is to have a conducive workspace setup.

[Command m] puts a grey mat around your canvas – so you don’t accidently click on your desktop while navigating, and it helps your eyes perceive colour.

Menu Bar > Windows. In here you will be able to hide/show all the palettes and windows you will need. The best ones to have open at this stage are Layers, Colours, Toolbox, Brush Properties and Brush Selector.

Be conscious of Layers, i.e. what layer you’re drawing on, needing a special layer for watercolours and liquid inks. It’s a good idea to utilise layers, it gives you more control over your work, i.e. you can ‘draw’ underneath an existing layer.

Also in your Layers palette, above the list is two scroll down menus > Composite Layer Methods: this changes how the layers interact with the layer underneath it.

You can mix colours on the Mixer palette by picking up colour with the brush (second button along the bottom), and mixing it with the palette knife (third button). To select the colour you have mixed use the eye dropper (4^th button) and click the area of colour. You can now paint with that colour you have created. If you want to save that colour, in the Colour Set palette, along the bottom is a button that looks like a coloured grid with a +; click on this and your colour has been added to the set.

Saving your work: Save as> RIFF (Raster Image File Format) – native format for Painter and can only be opened in Painter. The benefit of saving in RIFF means that you will be able to go back to your work at a later date and it will still be malleable, workable, i.e. the paint will still be wet and the layers will remain preserved. It’s a good idea to also save your work as a JPEG or TIFF, so that you can open them up in word or save for the net.

Your reading for this week is very, very helpful! You can borrow it or view it online from the library.

Stick it y'all!!!

Stick It! an exhibition of collage works by Australian artists currently showing at the NGV Ian Potter Centre (Fed Square)! And it's free!
While you're around the city you may also like to check out Mangamorphosis, but hurry because it closes Saturday.

Collage through the times

Pablo Picasso 'Glass and Bottle of Suze' 1912

Collage

Pronunciation: \kə-ˈläzh, kȯ-, kō-\

Function: noun

Etymology: French, literally, gluing, from coller to glue, from colle glue, from Vulgar Latin *colla,kolla from Greek

Date: 1919

1 a : an artistic composition made of various materials (as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a surface b : a creative work that resembles such a composition in incorporating various materials or elements
2 : the art of making collages
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collage)

Raoul Hausman 'The Art Critic' 1919-1920

A thoroughly modern medium, collage expressed the characteristics of the 20th Century - immediacy, the mass media and capitalism - through creative process and concept. Collage, coming from the French term coller, meaning glue, paste or stick, is the construction of pictures through the pasting of torn images.

John Heartfield 'Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Sprouts Junk' 1932

According to the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction, collage as an artform is much more than just simply making pictures. "It's a mode of perception, a multi-dimensional language with aesthetic implications that spans the histories of art, architecture, literature and music."

Kurt Schwitters 'The Proposal' 1942

Collage first emerged as a fine art medium in the form of papier colles, or pasted papers, from Cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Since, it has been an important medium throughout Modern art, showing up in Italian Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art and Fluxus. Artists who worked in the collage medium included Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell; who asserted that art could be made from anything. Abtract Expressionsist artists, such as Robert Motherwell, were attracted to the medium to expand their practice in abstract painting (IMCSC 2005).

David Hockney 'Pearblossom Hwy, 11th-18th April, 1986, #2' 1986

Contemporary artists use collage, and the closely related assemblage and mixed media, to construct a visual representation of their world and experiences, by using found objects and objects closely bound to the everyday; which viewers make an immediate identification to.

Peter Lewis 'The Birth of the Information Age' no date

Peter Lewis 'Tiki Touring' no date

As a medium, collage blurs the boundaries or bridges the dichotomy between high and low art or pop art; text and image; figuration and abstraction; past and present; and two and three dimensions (ibid). According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan. collage effectively breaks down perspectivalism, while at the same time emphasises the disparity of images or objects it juxtaposes.

Martin Smith 'Teevee #13' 1999

A collage is not just a bunch of random things pasted together. It is important to consider conventional design elements and principles such as composition, line, shape, colour, form, texture, etc; and what the images and objects in the collage represent and the meaning they add to the work. So before cutting and pasting, have a clear understanding of the message you want to send to your audience and the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the work.

Traditional collage and practice and digital collage practice share the same characteristics, both immediate and seemingly simple, yet potentially tedious and complex.

Natsuki Kimura 'Gone' 2000

Further Reading:

Greenberg, Clement. "Collage (The Pasted Paper Revolution)." Art News 57.5 (September 1958): 46-49, ff.

Rosenberg, Harold. "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers." Art on the Edge. New York: Macmillan, 1975.

Barthes, Roland. "The Rhetoric of the Image." Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Waldman, Diane. Collage, Assemblage and the Found Object. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.

Wescher, Herta. Collage. Trans Robert E. Wolf. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1968.

Online resources for digital collage artists:
Ear Studio
Jonathon Baker
Natsuki Kimura