Japanese

An interesting correlation arises between Japanese sensibilities of art, and the theory of Literalist art explored and destested by Michael Fried in his text "Objecthood and Reductivity".  In his work, he describes certain ideas on which the work of minimalist artist Donald Judd  concentrates his work, explaining that Judd is concerned with the "whole" of the work, in a sense, the purity of a work, disconnected from references, and interrelationships that manifest within the work, perhaps out of the artists' control.  Fried later establishes in his text, that Literalist art sensibilities attempt to bring the work back to the realm of life, that its own trajectory is only whole and complete when it blends back into some kind of "normative" level.  For example, minimalist sculpture is not simply about the body of the artwork, it is interactive with the space in which it is presented, giving itself a stage and therefore drawing in themes of theater and performance instead of being a purified form lost in any time and place.  

The gravity between a work of art and its place in life or in human reality is where I believe the Japanese condition explored by Kusahara's text begins.  

In the beginning of her work, Kusahara  explains aesthetic value in Japan as being well incorporated into the living realm, meaning functionality, spacial, and not excluding adoration, which is conditioned by the person in the state of adoration.  This means that aesthetic value in Japanese culture is not independant of the viewer.  It is influenced by the viewer, and "aesthetic truth" has more variability, it changes as its viewing environment changes, as language changes, as its function changes.  The development of Japanese aesthetic value is "indirect", and this is confirmed in the text when Kusahara writes:

It is obvious that drinking a cup of green tea is not the final goal of the ceremony.

Tools that are fully functional and yet aesthetically beautiful are appreciated, while

they represent the taste or even personality of the owner.  Naturally, a playfulness

of elements is regarded favorably.  For example, tea bowls with an unexpected

design or choice of material are highly appreciated, if they function well (286)

Within this indirection of aesthetic value, this certain Japanese condition explores all of the interrelations of a work of art, or a body of artistic value, for what is it itself, and what it is in a condition of change.  Japanese art and Literalist art come together as they explore a view and complete it, and this inherently brings it back to life. 

So how does this interaction between artwork and wholeness contribute to Japan's interest in technology, and contemporary art-making? What does "kawaii" (superflat, non-depth in post-modern age) have to do with it?

THINGS FROM THE OTHERSIDE BROUGHT INTO THEIRS

The scientific, constructive condition imported from the west has been successfully adopted into the Japanese way (not to mention that certain aspects of the "whole" are already evident in systems of Western thinking, like Tautology).  

What is popularly conceived as "Japanese" is much more than "charming" or "repulsive".  I am simply going to state that the over-exaggeration of imagery in Japanese pop culture is an observation and is then demonstrated as an extension from Japanese culture to Western culture.  Anime characters are not simply Japanese imagery, they are more or less exaggerated forms of the interpretation of Westerners with a Japanese flair, similar and more playful to exaggerated images of race in the US, such as "Black face" or the flock of little yellow "Chinamen".   Of course, japanese animation has also been turned into an obsession, like many pop culture epics, such as Star Wars.  (more coming)

A Sample of Japan's Complex Visual and Electronic Culture

[this place is real, by the way]

check out www.aec.at, www.internationaldanceparty.com, www.beatbots

I want to be a sound intercepter/sound collector

Still interested in the changes of personal spaces and the focus on the self brought on by technology and consumerism (cell phones, i pods, lap tops), I am interested in the idea of WIRELESS, and mobility.  These technological conditions of the current world have brought people together in a different way, as much as it has dispersed, and I believe that the sense of "sociality" has changed. Although, it may not be noticeable because these changes are concur with our own lives; we view these changes as we live them, which is much different than coming to the present day from the 1800's.

To remark the current "sociality", I have decided to recruit the senses of mobility and the wirelessness of pico to fabric a hybrid between an interactive costume and a sculptural object to push the relationship between people in a space and what is happening to it in this digital age.  My intention is not negatively criticizing technology, or the current sociality between people, I am simply asserting the SENSE OF HEARING and the SENSE OF SIGHT to pave a way in the invisible realm of wireless technology and reflect or collect (which I will explain) the sounds of people to send off my own affect on a space.  For instance, if a group of people are talking, how would they respond if a human being wearing or holding a disc collecting their noises  reflected them off to by-passing individuals?  Does collecting sound create positive spaces or negative spaces? How will my own presense affect the space, as a trespasser and a reflector? Do I have to get close to people or can the nature of sound and sight affect people from a distance?  Would I be stealing information, in a sense?

My vision is to be able to wear MATERIAL with the most sound reflective capabilities.

I originally wanted to create sound discs, but I felt that it might be too much of a visual quality.  The Pico blocks will function to give motion to the reflectors and collectors to move them at random or towards people, I have yet to decide.  If the choice is to have the attention of the collectors towards groups of sounds or people, I would then be interested in using Infra Red Tracking.  

My struggle with interactive work is this awareness of the otherside of the work, which is the hardware.  Engineering will be the struggle.  Aesthetically, I don't want my hardware to exist entirely in the secret realm "back stage", nor, is it going to be dangling around my face. 

COUNTER PROJECT: make sound stop

or use it in a way that it cannot be

identified as a sound

(on the thoughts of EMP...)

Camille Utterback v.s. David Rozin v.s. Olivia Robinson

view Olivia Robinson's Negotiations at www.olivarobinson.com/web/content/negotiations

Digital Art-Is it unresolved? Is it an opening for a cultural voice?

Clark, Oiticica, Pham.

The following vocabulary from the text is what I found to be highly thematic not only in the text, but also in my introductory level interpretation of the Interactive Arts: participation, body-based, action-based, telecommunication space, optical-formal, immaterial.  From other digital art classes of the same spirit, I gathered: generative, kinetic, behavioral, performative.

I am interested in the non-distinct state of the work and the complex aesthetic values found within the work's openness seemingly "inherent" by the themes addressed.  I want to pose the question, "How is interactivity resolved as an art form? Or, how does its disclosure contribute or comprimise its aesthetic values?"

Interactive arts is not a new form, nor is it an old form.  I consider it young.  I also consider it a form of sculptural practice, taking flight.  As interactive media is contributing and changing aesthetic sensibilities and artistic realities, it is easy to be skeptical of its growing merit.  For instance, looking back upon the works previously studied in this course, Matthew Barney, Rebecca Horn, Joseph Beuys, I understand this work as having existed before my experience with sculptural practice.  These artists have already established their sensibilities.  The way their works fulfill their theories has already become a vision embraced by other artists and institutions, and when I myself create work, it is made within their shadows.  Themes of time and space, metaphysical exploration, language, culture, science, society and reality are probed by post-modern art, the work of this era still enthusiastic on the search for purity.  

I accept the search for purity in art because it is emotionally and artistically valueable, however it creates a skepticism for interactive arts.  The problems I have found with digital arts is within a reality shared between the physicality of the artwork and my own tastes.  Throughout the article, "immateriality" is the word used to characterize this growing digital aesthetic.  While immateriality is completely interesting to me, my focus in sculptural sensibilities find interactive arts to be unresolved.  How is walking into a behavior-aware environment controlled by machines as potent as a meditative duration of an icky fat performance by Joseph Beuys?  Does art lose merit as it moves away from direct contact or command of reality?  Do you find piano more artistic than techno? Sometimes, I find that participation and interfacing have not gone far in the art experience, again, my skepticism exists because this form is still young.

The closure of many interactive works I have seen are so current, I myself am included in this aesthetic dimension, I am responsible for contributing to these developing values, and I can only dinstinguish aesthetic value that I have grown from.  

In the youth of interactive media, there is an oppurtunity for a cultural voice, as this field explores bodies, language, space, and metaphysical experiences in a way that welcomes world cultures.  The text itself confirms the fertility of body-based digital arts for the cultural experience, describing western aesthetics to privilege visual and metaphyiscal knowledge, while in Afro-Indigineous oral traditions in which knowledge and history are encoded in the body and ritual is profoundly concrete (280).  Encoded.  

More coming...

Objecthood Literalist sensibilities and interactive arts getting back to life

In the fourth paragraph of Art in Theory, the literalist idea is given an interesting description which I find, links its self-separating sensibilities to modern art.  The author writes, "In fact, being distanced by such objects is not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly-for example, in somewhat darkened rooms-can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting in a way"(826).  According to this description, the literalist intention wants to bring art works back to life, or reality.  It sets a perspective for the conditions of viewing a work, or, anything for that matter, and it is that the viewer himself is within the work; interaction between the viewers presence and the work and the space and rest of the audience are constant.  On such a level of, it theoretically becomes close to the non-art. In bringing the view back to the normalness of reality, literalist sensibility considers everything that frames a view of a work; therefore, what is termed, the everyday, is factor to strengthen or weaken the wholeness of an artwork (827).  I find the "nonrelational" and the "everyday" ironic in a way, since that seems to be the last achievement of literalist works if all audience members form their own separate relations with the work and their level of the ordinary.  

The literalist sensiblity finds its concept in seemingly formal aspects of work, such as shape and size, however, it is on these grounds that teeter back and forth between being interpreted as it wants to be, for example, a canvas, and what it is, a rectangle image in three dimensions that give literalist works their control.   

There is deconstructive character to the literalist achievement, in that brings they viewing of a work to the surface level, between what the object fundamentally is in reality instead of what it is in attempt, again for example, a painting.  This surface valuing then implies that there is no inherent value or relational meaning between things; nothing truely belongs together; anything can be put together.  

But I think this has been the goal of modern art for quite sometime.  Literalist ideas are just further extensions of this modern exploration.  The search to find new value, or, at the least, to break away from the old seems like an ancient characteristic, or a relation to, the literalist realm.  A difference between modern works and literalist works is that they are separated by ages of technological progress, which drastically changes the everyday, nonrelational experience.  Literalist ideas begin to separate from these modernist roots, but still retain the sensibility of sculpture, or painting; its former distinctions.

Since performance and interactive arts are growths of sculpture into a nonrelational sense, perhaps of art form, in some ways, interactive arts become relational as the work itself builds specific relations with viewers, based on their physical size, their shape, etc.

Ceiling, Florian Slotowa, Germany

Body Dialogue.

From Lippard's interpretation of the sculptural performances and art objects of Rebecca Horn, in the text, "Rebecca Horn: A Special Touch", the idea of "dialogue" between a body and a place is a very clear action throughout the works discussed. At the end of the text, Lippard writes about Horn's concern for balance throughout her work (71). The search for such between body and environment is strongly present, but attaining that balance is not always possible, which lends the work its sensibilities of torture and entrapment. In this case, the body in struggle exhibits a constant reinventing or relearning of the way it is balancing itself in a place (which can also be understood as functioning comfortably). In imagining Horn's sense of balancing opposites, I wondered whether the inanimate work itself-the costumes and extensions-was capable of "struggling", or if a struggle was visible "extension" of the performer. Does the bodily function grow onto the object?

Several motifs between Rebecca Horn and Matthew Barney become apparent through the lens of tension and growth. Both apply the concept. In addition to sculptural performing, the two artists attain sensibilities of ritualism in exploring the body in a place. Moreover, the body in certain conditions. Horn and Barney produce work that inherently triggers learning or transformation, such as Barney's Restraint Drawings or Horn's Finger Gloves. These works force a body and a consciousness to find systems or "ways" to identify themselves and what might be possible of them.

Not only do the artists's work bear dialogue between body and place, but there is also a recombinant quality to certain pieces, as Horn and Barney refer to their other works within a work. Horn's Dialogue of the Paradise Widow refers to her other works (Lippard 71); Barney showed his work in a place in video, which was shown as a video sculpture in the same place (Trottman 146). Although the products of the two artists are rather different, the reappearance or continued life of the work becomes symbolic, and gains ritual character as it gains meaning.