VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono Lennon, born in Tokyo on Feb 18, 1933, is a Japanese artist and musician. She is known for her work as an avant-garde artist and musician, and her marriage and works with musician John Lennon.

Ono was an explorer of conceptual art and performance art. An example of her performance art is “Cut Piece”, performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. Cut Piece had one destructive verb as its instruction: “Cut.” Ono executed the performance in Tokyo by walking on stage and casually kneeling on the floor in a draped garment. Audience members were requested to come on stage and begin cutting until she was naked. Cut Piece was one of Ono’s many opportunities to outwardly communicate her internal suffering through her art. Ono had originally been exposed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of existentialism in college, and in order to appease her own human suffering, Ono enlisted her viewers to complete her works of art in order to complete her identity as well. Besides a commentary on identity, Cut Piece was a commentary on the need for social unity and love. It was also a piece that touched on issues of gender and sexism as well as the greater, universal affliction of human suffering and loneliness. Ono performed this piece again in London and other venues, garnering drastically different attention depending on the audience. In Japan, the audience was shy and cautious. In London, the audience participators became zealous to get a piece of her clothing and became violent to the point where she had to be protected by security. An example of her conceptual art includes her book of instructions called Grapefruit. This book, first produced in 1964, includes surreal, Zen-like instructions that are to be completed in the mind of the reader, for example: “Hide and seek Piece: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies.” The book, an example of Heuristic art, was published several times, most widely distributed by Simon and Schuster in 1971, and reprinted by them again in 2000. Many of the scenarios in the book would be enacted as performance pieces throughout Ono’s career and have formed the basis for her art exhibitions, including one highly publicized show at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York that was nearly closed by a fan riot.

( Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, performance, Japan/England, 1964-1966 ) http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=529

John Lennon once described her as “the world’s most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono)

A paragraph on my piece

I chose to work off of the third video of from last time, which played with the notion of time. I wanted to further explore how the visual (without any sound) and certain images provoke the thought of time moving in a certain direction. As in Yoko Ono’s “cut piece,” I use myself as a central subject(placing myself in the middle).   On crucial difference between My video and Ono’s, however, is that unlike Ono’s Cut Piece which focuses more on the interaction with the audience, my piece focuses more on my personal space and time.

(image source: http://www.ovationtv.com/files/large_image_videos/0000/0026/alfred_hitchcock_372x495.jpg)

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock(13 August 1899 ? 29 April 1980) was a British filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades. He remains one of the best-known and most popular filmmakers of all time.

One of the most powerful elements of Hitchcock’s films is his brilliant mastery of cinematic cut scenes, which might be best illustrated in his well-known film ‘Psycho’. The film’s pivotal scene, and one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, is the murder of Marion, Janet Leigh’s character, in the shower, which in particular draws our attention to the fact of the cinematic cut.

(image source: google image search “hitchcock psycho”)

The entire sequence runs only 3 minutes and is composed of 50 cuts, most of which are very short and extreme close-ups. When the stabbing begins, especially, there is a cinematic cut with almost every thrust of knife, as if the camera itself too murders and dissects.

(image source: google image search “hitchcock psycho”)

We have no choice but to identify with Marion in the shower, to insert ourselves into the position of the wayward subject who has strayed from the highway of cultural acceptability, but who now wants to make amends. The vulnerability of her naked and surprisingly small body leaves us without anything to deflect that transaction. The combination of the close shots with the short duration between cuts makes the sequence feel longer, more subjective, more uncontrolled, more powerful, and more violent than would a seamless narrative would be.

In my video, I tried to incorporate Hitchcock’s cinematic cuts and use short shots from various angles.

Chantal Ackerman was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1950, but now lives in Paris.  Ackerman’s first film, “Saute Ma Ville” (1968), pictured a domestic scene and was her debut as a feminist film maker.  Ackerman is aware of the viewpoint of the spectator and the passage of time.  She uses time to create a sense of monotony and routine.  She uses the camera angle to manipulate the way in which a viewer sees a scene.

Ackerman’s film “Hotel Monterey” (1972) particularly intrigues me. “Hôtel Monterey – is the idea that something is about to happen, or is happening just out of sight…Back and forth the camera goes, a silent walker, a leading character in a movie without a plot.”  Ackerman uses the camera to create the motion of the viewer.  She moves one through the space of her film — through doorways, hallways, and into rooms to observe. The film is silent.  There is no plot, but rather a focus on observation of both people and the architecture and arrangement of objects in a space.  Also, an acknowledgement of what cannot be observed–that which is behind the closed doors.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jul/15/art.film)

Ackerman Photo: http://www.deutsches-filminstitut.de/f_films/fotos/fp3602_06.jpg

Hotel Monterey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2F9T7IdfiM

Ackerman’s filming techniques are relevant to my own work.  Her use of the camera as the main character is reminiscent of my use of the camera.  Motion is key in both of our films.  I also admire her composition and hope to emulate it more in future films. “Wake Up Swing” is an expansion of my film “Swing”.  In this film, my concept is similar to that of Ackerman’s Hotel Monterey: I want to lead the spectator through the park as if the camera is their person, physically moving through the scene.   However, my film has more plot than Ackerman’s.  I seek to show the life given to inanimate objects by motion–the life of motion.  My film also uses many short cuts in opposition to Ackerman’s use of a fewer, longer cuts.

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David Lynch-

(born January 20, 1946)

David Lynch is an American mixed media and performance artist.  He has a wide range of work that falls between short art films to a prime time television show.  Lynch has received mixed critical acclaim for many of his films.  He is recognized usually for films such as Mulholland Drive(2001) or many other films that he has received Academy Award nominations for.  His work is characterized by chilling plots usually interrupted by surreal and horrifying experimental sequences.  His work, though much of which remains within dominant narrative practice, foregrounds some of the apparatus itself and also a tendency to move from the narrative.  He is one of few directors to also make large budget films that remains so heavily involved in the sound editing and even credits himself.  His most recent film Inland Empire also marked a shift away from film into a full length experimental feature completely done with digital video.
Many of his early works along with other shorts from throughout his career can be found on a DVD, called “The Short Films of David Lynch.”  I was able to see many of these (you can too, if you have netflix) including some of his earlier work-Six Men Getting Sick (’66) and Grandmother(’70).  He originally began his work from an art background and moved in the mid sixties to practice in film animation and experimental film.  Grandmother  is a little more characteristic of some of his later narrative cinema, and is the story of a little boy attempting to grow a new grandparent.  The animation in this film is astounding, and the mixed dark narrative really complicates a tale of child abuse.  His style and interest in man in relation (post)modernity are large influences on my work.  One of the most interesting pieces he’s done is also an extremely short film done with one of the original Lumiere cameras that can also be found on that collection DVD.  If you can get a chance check out some of the links.  Also watch Twin Peaks.
Grandmother (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VaI1v0CIlA&feature=related)
Six Men Getting Sick  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFo_05hUUcw&feature=related)
Lumiere (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjQ99gMIEM8&feature=related)

Image courtesy of archive.senseofcinema.com “Great Directors”.

Christian Jankowski

Christian Jankowski and his work, Angels of Revenge. Photo / Kenny Rodger

Christian Jankowski is a contemporary multimedia artist who was born in Göttingen, Germany, in 1968. His work is largely focussed on photography, video, literature, performance, and instillation. He is very interested in mixing and meshing private and public, fiction and reality, which is epitomised in his piece ‘My Life as a Dove’, in which a professional magician transformed him into a dove, where he had no private life until his re-transformation. In his work ‘Let’s Get Physical/Digital’ in the boundaries between public and private are blurred and confused as the piece culminates in an intimate dialogue between Jankowski and his girl-friend that is transformed into actors playing parts.

One of his more famous creations is his work ‘Telemistica’. This is a video installation in which Jankowski questions several TV fortune-tellers live about the success of his upcoming artwork, which is, in fact, this very piece. It was included in the 1999 Venice Biennale.  I was particularly interested by this piece:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=32246520673

which is set on various rooftops and particularly appealed to me because of it’s sense of humour and also because of its relevance to our current assignments.  The open subtitles state that this is about “letting loose, relaxing, and contemplating on nature”, something akin to the slow passage of time.

He now lives and works in New York

The Holy Artwork, 2001. Video. 15 minutes, 52 seconds. Courtesy of Klosterfelde and maccarone, inc.

 In this 15-minute video, Jankowski approaches and collapses at the feet of a televangelist and remains there while the man completes a sermon about art and God.