Week 3 /// general plans

Tuesday:
1. THE ABOLITION OF WORK in-class reading

2. Bruce Nauman Art 21
3. final cut demo (sound, transitions, layering, double screen, keying, filters)
4. work or play with your videos

Thursday:
1. review shot topics and editing methods
2. group interpretations:

Francis Alys - El Gringo

Cory Archangel - Mario Movie or Video Ravings

Dara Birnbaum - Technology/Transformation

Gary Hill - Bathing

Paul McCarthy - WGG

Pipilotti Rist - Not the Girl Who Misses Much

extra credit:

5050 - oliver laric

Low Epic - jaakko pallasvuo

Inside Wildchatster's Apartment Pt 1 (with my voice) - Guthrie Lonergan

Short Music Videos - Guthrie Lonergan

Art Tape: Live With/ Think About - Michael Bell-Smith

3. work or play with your videos

Homework:
Work on your community footage videos.
Blog entry (no topic, but you could write about labor/work/play, Bruce Nauman, ideas spawned from your work on the project, a video that you enjoyed, an investigation of an artist on ubu.com (or elsewhere for that matter), etc.)

Grab Bag - Community Video Project Guidelines

Attention all fellow artist-citizens,

As you all know we are starting a new project today. I also wanted to give you guys a general idea of what's happening this week, and what you'll be responsible for (as our syllabus course calendar is now slightly less accurate).

Grab Bag - Community Video

You have each shot about five minutes of footage based a shot technique (close-ups, ambient sound, panning shot, etc.). You will all have access to each other's raw footage to use to create your own 3-5 minute videos. Please feel free to use as many video clips as you like, but you may not use your own footage.

This project is to allow you a moment to freely focus on learning Final Cut without the worry of planning for shooting. Explore the program. Experiment. On the other hand, this project becomes a challenge: to manipulate content/footage that you had no say in videoing to create poetry. How do you overcome these limitations to create art?

Barrage of questions: You have been given 11 visions of the world, how do you create your own? Do you see video in terms of the entirety of an action or a sequence of stills? How much editing should you do to your footage; does this in turn influence how you view your footage? Is your editing based primarily on cuts, layers, effects, play with speed; how does this conceptually change the perception of the work? Does your edit seem organized, seeking a type of rationality (aka the angel's view)? Does your edit rely on disorientation or lack of order (aka the devil's view)? Are you constructing a world anew or reaching to the one in which we already live? Is your video exposing a myth (a critical approach, see Rosler)? Are you asking us to notice something overlooked? Are you editing with a chainsaw or scalpel? Shotgun or tongue?

I want you artist-citizens to experiment, but not blindly. Notice what your experiments create. Remember the measurement brainstorming; what at first seems arbitrary can be shaped into conceptually sound art.

Barrage of phrases: sensation of time passing /// cause and effect /// compulsion and anxiety /// screen fatigue /// storytelling and narrative /// sea of perspectives /// the perfection of plastic parts snapping together /// underestimate overly sentimental /// passive viewing /// low-budget explosions /// guided meditation /// etc etc etc

Video gives you so many privileges. Feel the lack of limitations. If you don't believe me, then perform this experiment: video the sunset, import footage into final cut, turn the sunset upside-down. You have so much control; nothing would make me prouder than watching you all turn the world and it's celestial brethren on their heads.

Your 3-5 minute video needs to be an .mov file (no need for burning DVDs yet).

It will be due on Thursday Sept. 15th (that's a week and a half from today). It should be finished at the start of class, last minute exporting or tweaking means it is late.

This project is worth 10% of your final grade and will be broken down as follows:

3 points for experimentation and involvement with program - how much did you learn about how to use this technology as an art tool? did you adequately explore your options to accomplish the goals of your video?

3 points for formal and presentation issues - was your video well put together? did you make wise visual/sonic decisions? was the quality of the footage improved because of your involvement with it? is the video nicely finished or abrupt?

4 points for concept - in using this program and formal concerns, did you convey a message to your audience? even if you approached your edit intuitively, were you cognizant of the effects your choices had on the entirety of the video (and therefore the reception of your video)? did you consider the outcome of your edits? did you consider the access you gave to your audience?

Rosler's Reading Rainbow

Just like some of you, I found the Rosler reading to be pretty bizarre and dense. Those 20-odd pages were like navigating the Congo; it was slow, foreign, and ultimately aggressive with its ideals. What I've come to understand is that she has at least some passion for the potential of video art, and I've come to agree with the need of an easily accessible medium since everyone has the potential to make art --- to make a social comment.

Like Obi, I felt that Rosler unnecessarily made the reading complex by adding her critiques in a forced, aggressive manner. This in turn made the reading awkward and dense, like a hedge maze created by someone having a stroke. I felt that if Rosler had made her comments and criticism more of a poetic metaphor or parallel, the reading would've been lighter and I wouldn't feel as if I'm having her perspective and principles shoved down my throat.

The only possible redeeming factor of the reading was the facts --- the concrete content elaborating more on the history of video art, and the art world throughout the period. Still, Rosler's commentary was like having a radical feminist group gain control of Reading Rainbow to attack viewers with their own beliefs.

Ridiculous Rosler

That's exactly what the Rosler reading was. Ridiculous. I found myself steadily digressing throughout the gruesome 20 pages of reading. I did get through all of it though but it took me a while. WAY too long. Before actually delving into the reading, I told myself that I was going to read it twice to fully grasp what she was saying. That ended up not happening at all and I barely read it once. Through hours of struggling and sounding out weird names, I finally achieved my goal.

The biggest thing I question Rosler about was her choice of vocabulary and its complexity, which many people in class wondered too. C'mon now woman. You don't need to say all that just to mean this. It's like she over-analyzes and over-critiques things that frankly don't need to. Probably, I would say, about 90% of what she wrote is dense for no reason. A lot of her sentences are run-on and should be broken up because they contain too many dense ideas that create this super duper long sentence that the reader has to break down on their own. I shouldn't have to be stopping and breaking up paragraphs and sentences for my understanding. Your writing should be clear and concise enough from the start so I could easily grasp it.

What she actually talks about, on the other hand, is quite contradicting. She talks bad and down towards the elitist but sounds just like one of them in the reading. I do fully believe that she is against galleries. LOL she hates them and that is one of the few things that is actually clearly apparent in the reading. Her point basically was how video art was not considered a real art at first. It was then "museumized" and lost a lot of its respect and appeal.

Rosler reading: D-

Rosler.

Rosler, especially the reading, is a difficult subject to tackle. Yet, before I attempt to analyze 20 pages of verbose, unnecessary ranting against media, I would like to praise her. I really liked the reading regarding landlords. She gave an interesting perspective of a woman who was under the impression that the grass was greener on the other side. She explained the complexity of relations between landlords and tenants and how some can indeed be friends. I also enjoyed the two videos that were shown. Especially the Julia-esque videos involving Rosler stabbing kitchen knives directly into the audience while staring them dead in the eye. I also liked the complete and utter disgust she has for the measurements and social norms that were shown in the video where she was analyzed by the medical team. The parents speaking about their daughter's death due to eating disorders was touching as well.

Now, onto the reading. I did not like it. Dense is an understatement. Her views are quite radical and she seems to contradict herself from what I can grasp from this reading. I think she is anti-gallery and believes that video art should interrupt tv and provide alternatives. She doesn't want video to be the main form of art and thinks the art world is only for elitist but allows the population to critique the mass world. As a classmate stated, it's ironic because she seems like an elitist with this ridiculous writing.

Essentially, Rosler dislikes artist like McLuhan, Nam June Pike, and Pollack for a variety of reasons. Her jab at Pollack is due to his macho attitude, expressive paintings, and his lack of being available to everyone. Her beef with Pike was halfhearted- she liked that he interrupted tv with the magnet but didn't like how he was assimilated into the gallery world.

-Marla

Rosler's Reading Fun

Before I discuss this reading, I think it is important to mention the supreme irony of the essay that was also discussed in class: although Rosler denounces elitism in both the art and society, the highly academic and inaccessible langauge she uses (in a paper directed at art world elitists) is nothing that an ordinary person would ever want, or be able to, read.

Now that is out of the way, so let's take a look... well, sloughing through Roslers history of video was painful at best, but that's not the point of the whole thing. Rosler's point was how she felt video art managed to avoid being lost to art as a mere commodity, but that the way it was brought into art (museumization) made it lose a lot of it's "rebel" appeal. In other words, once video art had an established status quo in the art world, it was somehow "less" of a true "art."

Also... art, ART, and art art... COME ON. If your going to use different terms for "art," you need to create them. It needs to be some TYPE of art, not just a r t or art or freakin art- I prefer if if you call it "museum" art vs "fringe" art, or "kitsch" art vs "non" art.

Also, the conflict between "science and myth" or "traditional values and industrialization" is interesting, and it's worth noting how Rosler sees this as the main conflict in art up until modern times. Her pessimism about the industrial side is a bit grueling, and her feminist viewpoint seeps conspicuously into every sentence, but she is entitled to her opinion.

And I also hate Jackson Pollock and the male domination over the "high art" world, so she has my support there. Art seems like something like is much better suited to sensitive, feminine attitudes- why should harsh, masculine attitudes have such a hold over art? Both approaches deserve to be seen. I can see where Rosler's anger comes from (you can see it in her videos too- you toss that spoon girl!).

Also- even though Rosler dislikes this dominate approach- she ultimately concedes that "the issue at hand as always is who controls the means of communication and what are the forms counternanced and created." So ultimately, control is necessary in this world in order to gain recognition. It's the same concept as "the victors write the history books." Rosler is bitter about this, but also acknowledges the reality that the right artists need to fight for control, or forever be lost in obscurity.

Yet, good art that is obscure is always more "art" than good art that has become famous and garnered a high price tag.

... It's so easy to get fed up with this nonsense. Thanks for the confusing, mind bending read, Rosler.

Woahhhh...