Video Vortex V – Day 1

Institute of Network Cultures Blog: "
System Flaws and Tactics

After the opening speech by Bram Crevits (Cimatics) and Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures), the 5th edition of Video Vortex kicked off at the amazing Atomium in Brussels.

The first session addressed System Flaws and Tactics. This session was inspired by the inherent errors, disabilities and restrictions of online video technology that often conduct our behaviour but can also provide inspiring new insights. Liesbeth Huybrechts and Rudy Knoops gave the first presentation of the day, titled ‘Playing that video’. They work at the School of Communication and Multimedia Design (C-MD) in Genk, Belgium, where they lead the research group Social Spaces, on the topic of social, societal and spatial issues, using the internet as a tool and interface.

After pointing at the rules of play and playground, and building on theory of tactics and strategy as defined by De Certeau, the presenters explored the diffuse difference between work and play in the age of new media. Knoops pointed out that Google employees get to spend 20% of their time ‘playing’, i.e. working on their own projects. In his recent work, Julian Kuecklich refers to this conflation of play and labour as ‘Playbour’. Knoops and Huybrechts showed impressive work by the C-MD students in Genk, and called for play as a critical tool, and encouraged a practice of tactical play.

Next up was Brian Willems, who lectures in media culture as well as British and Irish Literature at the University of Split, Croatia. In his talk, titled ‘Blindness: the inability of YouTube to read itself’, he argued that online video often demonstrates blindness,as theorized by Paul de Man, Agamben, and Proust, and rather than being readable. He presented two cases of online video: The Rodney King Story, and Natalie Bookchin’s installation ‘Mass Ornament’, which was presented by the artist herself at the Video Vortex conference in Split (2009).

According to Willems, the Rodney King story demonstrates how difficult it is to read video. In the video, King, lying on the ground, tried to get up when the police attacked him again. The police later stated that they considered his standing up as aggressive behaviour. The video does not clarify whether this was indeed the case. Therefore, Willems argues the video demonstrates its blindness. In this respect, the work by Natalie Bookchin is equally hard to read. Inspired by the chorus lines of the Tiller Girls, she selected and sorted YouTube dance videos so they form a chorus line, through montage, soundtrack and composition. Willems pointed out that the amount of screens, layers and motifs makes this video hard to read, and therefore confronts you with its illegibility or blindness.

Rosa Menkman, artist, VJ and PhD candidate at KHM presented her Glitch Studies Manifesto, in which she called for a more drain approach of technology studies, which includes the study of its flaws and failures:

1. The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.
2. Dispute the operating templates of creative practice by fighting genres and expectations!
3. Get away from the established action scripts and join the avant-garde of the unknown. Become a nomad of noise artifacts!
4. Use the glitch as an exoskeleton of progress.
5. The gospel of glitch art sings about new models implemented by corruption.
6. The ambiguous contingency of the glitch depends on its constantly mutating materiality.
7. Glitch artifacts are critical trans-media aesthetics.
8. Translate acousmatic noise and soundscapes into acousmatic video and videoscapes to create conceptual synesthesia.
9. Speak the totalitarian language of disintegration.
10. Study what is outside of knowledge, start with Glitch studies. Theory is just what you can get away with!

The session ended with a presentation by the artist Johan Grimonprez, who guided the audience through his You-tube-o-teque. And while the sphere of the Atomium was shaking because of an autumn storm, grimonprez created his own whirlwind, going from the history of the remote control and the invention of zap-proof commercials, to hitchcock pastiches and the swine flu vaccine scandal from 1976. (www.zapomatik.com)

Go to the Institute of Network Cultures blog for reports on day 2:

Video Vortex V – Day 2 – Online cinema

Video Vortex V – Day 2- Politics of Online cinema

Video Vortex V – Day 1

Exhibition by Influential Designer Verner Panton

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Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery Shows Exhibition by Influential Designer Verner Panton

A visitor sits on Verner Panton's 'Phantasy Landscape' which is made of fabric, wood and foam rubber, at the Tokyo Opera city art gallery in Tokyo. Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon.

TOKYO.- Who is Verner Panton? If you are enquired about this name, you might think of Panton Chair that is the streamlined form with the first single-unit cantilevered chair made of molded plastic. Verner Panton, who was born in Denmark, immediately established himself at the forefront of avant-garde design in Europe in 1960's in consequence of producing famous design collaborating with industrial producers. His works were not limited to single objects, but extend to the design of entire space like the product design, architecture – few of which were actually built – and the exhibition. At a glance, extravagant forms and the use of strong, intense colours might typify his work, but what he retained throughout his work was a systematic approach to design. For this reason, his interest didn't only reach to the furniture but entire space. Unfortunately, his singular design has not ever been reflected as the subject of the research in the design history, because of just the singularity. This exhibition is the retrospective to present Panton's extensive and diverse work that the Vitra Design Museum planed and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery originally organized. This exhibition focuses nearly 150 works of furniture, lightings, textiles, models, sketches and videos, etc., from the Vitra Design Museum collection, between the mid-fifties and the mid-seventies during which time he had a substantial influence upon the direction and development on international design. This exhibition, which presents his total space design, would provide the opportunity to look back on the past and look to the future in the modern design. Starting with Panton Chair, the exhibition presents Panton's passion and history for his experiment and challenge. First furniture collection The exhibition shows Panton's first furniture collection – Tivoli Chair (1955) produced for the restaurant in Tivoli Park, Denmark; S-Chair, wooden single-unit cantilevered chair; Chair Cone (1958) which has the unique structure consisted of the conical metal shell and the pivot on a cross shaped metal base; the chair shaped like trumpet, Chair Trumpet, made of steel wire – that impressed his experimental passion and artistic stamp over the world. Modular Furniture Pantonova, which is consisted of a chromium-plated steel wire, could be assembled in various ways. This exhibition presents them that were very influential in the 1960's. Panton Chair Panton Chair is the icon in the design history in 20th for the first single-unit cantilevered chair made of molded plastic. The exhibition shows the changes of plastics to enable beautiful streamlined chair and the development process of it. Experiential space: Phantasy Landscape and space consisted of design items by Panton Phantasy Landscape For this international tour, Vitra Design Museum reconstructed Phantasy Landscape room, which was the legendary interior represented at 'Visiona 2' exhibition in Cologne Furniture Fair in 1970. The Bayer chemical company commissioned 'Visiona 2' exhibition, the concept of which was the futuristic interior. In 'Visiona 2' that was hold at the ship on the river Rhein, 24,000 visitors came in 4 days. In this exhibition, you could experience to be surrounded by 360°Panton's design in the cave-like colourful space around 8m x 6m x 2.4m. Space by Panton The extraordinary furniture of Verner Panton suggests the unique usage of space for example 'Flying Chair' (1963) floating in space like the hammock; 'Living Tower' (1968) which is a reclining chair with different sitting positions. In addition, 'Ring Lamp' (1969), which was produced for 'Visiona 2,' fills the wall and the ceiling with colours, light and geometrical form so that creates the optical space.

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Exhibition by Influential Designer Verner Panton

Peter Roehr

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"Stadel Museum Examines Works by Frankfurt Artist Who Died at Age 23



Peter Roehr, 'Untitled' (FO-116), 1965 (Detail). Collection Dr. J. Lindenberger, Frankfurt. Photo: Günter Maniewski-Atelier. ©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009.

FRANKFURT.- When the Frankfurt artist Peter Roehr died in 1968 at the young age of 23, he left behind several hundreds of works in which he pursued exclusively the idea of serial repetition. From found commonplace materials he created ever new montages of photographs, text, typography, objects, sound, and film probing the concept of redundancy. Roehr abstained from both making a statement and sticking to an individual style. His formal repertory is deliberately reduced to the selection of an object, the definition of the number of its repetitions, and their arrangement. The element used is still recognizable, although it becomes absorbed in the series, so that the original form and color scheme are subjected to a potentiating effect. Last year, the Städelsche Museums-Verein was able to acquire the artist’s ten Schwarze Tafeln (Black Panels) for the museum, a central work in which the method of a non-narrative serial arrangement of identical objects culminates.

Now that four decades have lapsed, the commonplace nature of Roehr’s works pushes to the fore even more vehemently. They become amazingly enhanced and turn into narrative formulations oscillating between ready-made and seriality, pop and minimal art, everyday life and abstraction. The exhibition Peter Roehr illustrates that Roehr’s strict formalism is much more complex and eloquent than it seems to be at first glance.

Peter Roehr

New Work by Dave Lewis

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Dave Lewis, 'New Forest' (image from Field Work), 2009.

HAMPSHIRE.- ArtSway announced an exhibition of new work by Dave Lewis bringing together photographs and video. Dave Lewis is a photographer and filmmaker interested in identity and how people belong to a place. In making his work, Lewis attempts to act as both an ethnographer (the study of the characteristics of different people) and an artist. Field Work is a new body of artwork inspired by the idea of the artist as a ‘stranger’ who visits a place or site to gather first-hand evidence as research. Lewis has explored the New Forest in Hampshire and Newtown in mid-Wales for Field Work. Both of theses places are linked by their rural locations and also by their cultural differences to Lewis’ hometown of London. By analyzing and contrasting these areas, interviewing residents and documenting events such as local festivals and carnivals, Lewis examines the role of the individual within society and how that individual identifies themselves with a place. For his exhibition at ArtSway Lewis will present a series of large-scale landscape photographs taken on the outskirts of Newtown, and Sway. These photographs are taken from the viewpoint of the ‘stranger’ as he surveys a place that is new to him. Alongside these photographs are two filmed ‘journeys’ showing the ‘stranger’ as he conducts his research into Newtown and Sway, including interviews with local people. Other images in the exhibition will include photographs Lewis took at carnivals in Wales and the New Forest that further explore ideas of identity and belonging to a place. Dave Lewis gained a BA Hons in Film and Photographic Arts from the Polytechnic of Central London in 1985. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: Photo-ID Norwich Forum, 2009; Hybridity, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts 2008; Anywhere but Here, Southwark Gallery, 2008; AfterShock, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2007. Dave Lewis lives and works in London and is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London.

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New Work by Dave Lewis

Nineteen New Paintings by Damien Hirst on View at White Cube

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Damien Hirst, The Crow, 2009. Oil on canvas. Triptych. Each: 98 13/16 x 69 1/8 x 4 5/16 in. (251 x 175.5 x 11 cm) (incl. frame) © the artist. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Courtesy White Cube.

LONDON.- White Cube presents nineteen new paintings by Damien Hirst. The exhibition will be staged at White Cube Mason’s Yard and White Cube Hoxton Square. At White Cube Hoxton Square, Hirst will present a group of paintings, which include three triptychs from 2007-09, each depicting crows shot in mid-flight against blue skies, with outspread wings and violent splatters of red paint across their bodies. In the four triptychs on show in the lower ground floor at White Cube Mason's Yard, these crows reappear, as omens of bad news. They often share the space with ghost-like figures, skeletal forms and objects, including chairs, lemons, knives, animal skulls, wine glasses or a scorpion. Rudi Fuchs begins his essay with the following reading of these paintings: 'When I try to pinpoint what the visual mood is in Hirst’s new images, I am constantly reminded of Beckett – not of any one story in particular, though subject matter is important, but of the austere dryness of the language. Sentences are interrupted, lines are broken, observations are fragmented in order to direct us slowly towards a clearer perception of the real.' Damien Hirst, Insomnia, 2008. Oil on canvas. Triptych.  Each: 98 13/16 x 69 1/8 x 4 5/16 in. (251 x 175.5 x 11 cm) (incl. frame) © the artist. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates  Ltd. Courtesy White Cube. Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, UK. He lives and works in London and Devon. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including ‘Into Me / Out of Me’, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006), ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, Tate Britain (2004), the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and ‘Century City’, Tate Modern (2001). Solo exhibitions include ‘No Love Lost’, The Wallace Collection, London (2009), ‘Requiem’, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2009), ‘For the Love of God’, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2008), Astrup Fearnley Museet fur Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2005), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2005) and Archaeological Museum, Naples (2004). He received the DAAD fellowship in Berlin in 1994 and the Turner Prize in 1995. An exhibition of the artist’s private collection, ‘Murderme’, was held at Serpentine Gallery, London in 2006.

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Nineteen New Paintings by Damien Hirst on View at White Cube

Interpreting urban screens

Interpreting urban screens « NAIT5: "

Noviembre 24, 2009

Posted by christian saucedo 

Interpreting urban screens
Anthony Auerbach

Abstract

Large-scale video screens in urban settings suggest new possibilities and challenges for city authorities and regulators, architects, advertisers and broadcasters as well as for cultural curators and producers. While this potential remains largely untested, it is clear that urban screens establish new sites for the negotiation between commercial, public and cultural interests. This paper takes a critical approach to the question of defining the role of culture in urban media, highlighting the shifts in the relations of representation mediated by video and the complexity of the urban media environment.

Location

The conference ‘Urban Screens’[1] aimed to explore the potential of large-scale video screens in public places as venues for artistic and cultural programming. My contribution sketched a critical approach which did not start out with simplistic notions such as ‘electronic billboard’, ‘outdoor TV’ or ‘public art’. I aimed to locate large-scale video installations in the spectrum of television and video networks which populate and, increasingly, construct the urban fabric. The photographic documentation which accompanied my talk (and which accompanies this article) is an inventory of the urban phenomena of video familiar to everyone. It demonstrates how a small set of technologies supports a large set of applications at different scales: from the infrastructure of terrestrial, satellite, cable and mobile networks, through the equipment of the home, the workplace, commercial and public spaces, to systems of surveillance and control. Each photograph offers a document which would repay analysis, tracing the web of interactions between of media and architecture, subject and commodity, identity and desire, the city and its phantasmagoria.

My starting point, ‘Video as Urban Condition’[2] is the working title of an exhibition and archive project which begins as an inquiry into how video shapes urban experience.

Fascination

The fascination of urban screens — like that of television when it appeared in the twentieth century — is the allure of a medium in search of a message, with the potential to create audiences. The large-scale LED video screens which are becoming an increasingly common sight on the urban landscape have been put there principally for advertising, information or entertainment. In practice, the installations have usually combined all three purposes in various proportions and sometimes admitted other content such as artists’ videos or interactions with members of the public. Urban screens are made possible when the interests of those who control the exhibition space, the technology, the potential content streams and the potential revenue streams converge. Urban screens today are experimental enterprises. Emerging in complex environments, urban screens will challenge the assumptions of artists, curators, urban- and media theorists as well as the expectations of city authorities, advertisers and broadcasters.

Subjectivity

Whereas the discussion of ‘urban screens’ has been dominated by screen technology and what could or should be done with it, mainly from the point of view of professional producers, I would like to emphasise the multiplicity of subjectivities implicated by video in urban environments. ‘Video as Urban Condition’ aims to explore how our knowledge, perception and fantasy of urban environments are mediated by video. That means understanding not only the influence of the flickering screens which surround us, but also the image-world of the city transmitted, for example, by TV drama or by the urban playgrounds of video games such asSimCity or Grand Theft Auto. The games, moreover, assert the position of the viewer as the first person subject acting on or in the virtual city. Similarly, with the spread of consumer-level camcorders and video-equipped mobile phones, it is important to acknowledge how the subject of ‘video’ (‘to see’) is the one who holds the camera as much as the one who watches the screen (even — especially — if in the act of recording, the two cannot be separated). Video has become a medium of mass-production — that is, mass-participation — as well as mass-consumption.

Figure 1: Rome, 2005: This act of video recording dislodges the traditional custom and saves a coin.

Video is no longer the exclusive domain of professionals. Video offers the tourist, for example, a means of both mediating consumption (of technology and of travel) and authenticating experience (even when the preoccupation with filming would seem to compromise the experience promised by the idea of travel). One could also argue that, despite the aura which clings to the profession ‘artist’, the way artists use video has more in common with the amateur than with the professional broadcaster or film-maker.

Origins

Which brings me to the origin of ‘Video as Urban Condition’ as a project: against the background of the myriad uses of video in daily life, the effort to assimilate and contain video within the norms and institutions of art (and thereby to defend the status of the artist as such) begins to seem absurd. We are accustomed to the idea that video images assert a multitude of different claims, that the same LCD, LED or plasma screens, cathode ray tubes or projectors convey a multitude of different messages and will ambush us in almost any location. To be sure, the video screen captures eyeballs, but does not by itself dictate a particular mode of viewing in the way the traditional media, framings and settings of art works instruct the viewer to adopt an appropriate mode of reverent attention. With video, we are capable, indeed trained, to adjust our subjectivity, perception and receptivity instantaneously — almost continuously — as quickly as we flip the channels with a remote control, or, for that matter, as we walk down a commercial street.

This condition seemed to me to present a more exciting set of possibilities for producing and showing videos than the battle for artistic credibility. What strategies would emerge if we could create the chance for artists to make use of the existing video infrastructure? In other words, not to offer a TV set on a plinth in a white cube or a projection in a black box, but instead to remove the protection of such institutions, expose the work in urban space and accept this less reliable frame; to accept that video will not support an artist’s claim to exceptional status or of itself command respect.

That seemed like a good idea and I began to investigate the practical possibilities. It will be no surprise to you, that in probing the structures which regulate public space and artistic production, I soon discovered the naivety of my proposition. Hence the need to interpret the site-specific nature of urban video installations and to understand what I have called the relations of representation.

Dialectics

To interpret ‘urban screens’ and assess their potential, it seems to me vital to acknowledge the dialectics of screens, that is, their double and contradictory functions. Broadly understood, a screen is there to display something, but also to conceal something. A screen acts only as ifit were a passive receiver of an image — as some would have it, merely the reflection of the society in which it is found. In the urban context especially, it is also a transmitter. As one agency claims, outdoor advertising is the ‘last remaining truly broadcast medium.’ (ClearChannel, 2005)[3]

Considering the relations of representation, we could ask: What is the ideological function of the screen? In other words: What and whose assumptions are concealed by the screen? Many speakers at the ‘Urban Screens’ conference invoked the notion of ‘public art’, but without suggesting that there is any agreement about how artists and public identify themselves or one another, by whom, and by means of what technology and what institutions this relationship is mediated. Instead of assuming, as the original call for papers seemed to suggest, that urban screens are culturally deprived spaces which need to be served by self-styled cultural producers and curators, we could ask: Who says what is culture?

In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman discuss the notion of culture which is propagated by broadcast media in the United States. They write:

There are exceptional cases of companies willing to sponsor serious programmes, sometimes the result of recent embarrassments that call for a public-relations offset. But even in these cases the companies will usually not want to sponsor close examination of sensitive or divisive issues — they prefer programmes on Greek antiquities, the ballet, and items of cultural and national history and nostalgia. Barnouw points out an interesting contrast: commercial-television drama [i.e., soap operas] ‘deals almost wholly with the here and now, as processed via advertising budgets,’ but on public television, culture ‘has come to mean “other cultures.” … American civilisation, here and now, is excluded from consideration.’ [Barnouw, 1978, p. 150]

Television stations and networks are also concerned to maintain audience ‘flow’ levels, i.e., to keep people watching from program to program, in order to sustain advertising ratings and revenue. Airing program interludes of documentary-cultural matter that cause station switching is costly, and over time a ‘free’ (i.e., ad-based) commercial system will tend to excise it. Such documentary-cultural-critical materials will be driven out of secondary media vehicles as well, as these companies strive to qualify for advertising interest, although there will always be some cultural political programming trying to come into being or surviving on the periphery of the mainstream media. (Chomsky and Herman, 1988, p. 18)

Many of the ‘cultural’ initiatives we heard about during the conference appeared to reassert this model, that is, the tendency towards displaying ‘culture’ as if it were separate from the conditions of its reproduction, and the acceptance of a marginal position. At least, this appeared to be the basis for the alliances between cultural workers and corporate sponsors, technology providers and media- or advertising agencies in developing cultural programmes for urban screens.[4] At most, culture provides a utopian affirmation of the power relations which govern public- and media space. Indeed, one could argue that such affirmation helps to define, secure and defend the realm of culture as such.

From this perspective, it is not really these power relations which are hidden by the screen. When you look, for example, at the ‘Big Screen’ in Manchester’s Exchange Square (which, incidentally, carries no advertising in its programme) you see that the logos of the local authority, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the BBC and Philips are permanently branded on the installation. What is concealed by large-scale video screens in public places, one could argue, are precisely the shifts in the relations of representation which have occurred since Chomsky analysed network television.

There is not enough space to develop the argument fully here, but I would like to make two comments which suggest how the analysis could go: one about the role of video in conditioning urban space and urban subjects; the other about communications technology and the privatisation of public space.

Producing and seducing a public

The multiplication of channels in the home which seemed to threaten the cohesion of television’s audience and its status as a mass-medium prompted advertisers and broadcasters to target their audiences in public. However, in taking TV from point-of-sale installations and the captive audiences of station platforms, airports, queues and waiting rooms into ‘public space’ means entering more complex urban environments. It means facing the decline of urban community spaces which, since the 1950s, has often been blamed on television. ‘Public space broadcasting’[5] is a meaningful proposition only if it can produce a public. This requires not just programming a screen, but all the forces of urban planning, architecture, policing and so on.

The role video surveillance in this process hardly needs to be underlined. CCTV is perceived to be the ideal means of making cities safe, in other words: of excluding ‘undesirables’ from specific places and helping to moderate the behaviour of individuals. What I would like to point out is how video display and surveillance installations can work together in the so-called regeneration of public space.

Surveillance and display both have a share in the fascination of television, that is, its ability both to connect the viewer to a distant place and to distance the viewer in the present location. As part of the apparatus of controlling urban spaces, video surveillance facilitates the ways in which a video display can assemble, interpellate and commodify a public. In turn, the fascination projected by display facilitates the acceptance of video surveillance by seducing the individuals under surveillance with their own images on screen — permitting individuals the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing themselves where they stand — at a distance. The ‘narcissism’ of the Exchange Square audience was mentioned as a key factor in successful programming for that public screen. This narcissism is echoed whenever we walk under the monitor placed at the entrance to a shop or station to reassure those it welcomes and warn those it excludes with the announcement: You are being watched. TV still flatters, even without the promise of fame.

The private in public

Large-scale video screens tend to adopt modes of address which are familiar from television, outdoor advertising or the cinema. Each has its history and retains some of its rhetorical force, but all are increasingly undermined by the integration of entertainment, information and mobile communications technology. ‘Public space’ as the natural environment for one-to-many communications and the shared spectacle is now intersected by private and personal channels: connecting you to your choice of media streams , to other individuals in other places, or simply immersing you in the interior urban movie produced with the soundtrack of a portable music player.

Figure 2: New York City, 2005: A momentary story-within-a-story on a public urban screen

Big screen initiatives have emerged which invite you to use your mobile phone to display poems, photographs or messages, to vote or bet on what you see. The efforts of commercial and cultural producers alike to incorporate mobile communications technologies into the big screen appear to be motivated by the anxiety to bind the potentially autonomous user to its regime. For a while, the screen becomes the audience. It receives your message or image and projects a flattering notion of public address. The ‘interactive’ message, like the radio dedication, still goes out only to ‘friends and family’, whom you could contact directly whenever you want.

At the same time, electronic ‘interactivity’ divides the audience into those who have, and those who do not have access to the technology. It flatters the haves (while, if possible, harvesting data) and advertises the product to the have-nots. For increasingly integrated media and communications corporations there is no conflict in using the public screen to promote the private consumption of video in public places, just as broadcasters frequently use the screens in public places to advertise what they have to offer the home viewer.

Potential

At the end of her book Ambient Television: visual culture and public space, Anna McCarthy reflects:

The TV screen embodies all the political contradictions that come with art in public spaces, as well as those more particularly associated with television. As a public medium governed by private logics, as a private medium that comes to stand in for the public it addresses, as a private, domesticated possession that regularly appears in, and alters, public places, television spans utopia and critique as it brings modes of spectatorship into the illegible terrain of the everyday. These video installations … involving TV’s commercial logics in a dialogue with radical alternatives to consumerism[6] [provide] us with provocative and instructive inkblots not for thinking about how to begin making rapprochements between utopian and critical ideas about TV, social change, and public space but for recognizing and exploiting how much these rapprochements are already available in the spaces of everyday life. This means taking seriously the site-specific power relations which become visible in ambient television installations. Only then can we devise policies, programs, and practices that develop these ideas about sociality and collectivity that TV’s presence in such places raises. (McCarthy, 2001, p. 251)

In my view, discovering the potential of urban screens also means taking seriously the inattentive viewer, the perpetually distracted subject which video and the city have created.

Consumer culture is often blamed for the homogenisation of urban experience, through domination of global brands and the insidious effects of the entertainment industry and media corporations. Video is at the heart of this process and is perhaps the pre-eminent means of propagating norms. Video has also produced the subjective hybrids which we know as infotainment, docudrama and reality-TV as well as the many unnamed alterations of perception and behaviour mediated by the video screen. Such alterations certainly influence, but do not necessarily bind the ever-growing number of people who are video-makers. The distribution of video technology suggests the possibility engendering as many approaches as there are users. Among them, perhaps, ways of contesting the conventions and habits which video persuades us are second nature, and means of making the specificities of urban experience perceptible.

About the author

Anthony Auerbach’s work revolves around the critique of knowledge and representation. Like drawing, which is at the heart of Auerbach’s artistic practice, video is a medium which cannot be claimed exclusively by art and therefore calls for an interdisciplinary approach. As initiator and director of the project ‘Video as Urban Condition’ (2004–), Auerbach brings together a range of interests and concerns: interpreting relationship between video, architecture and urban geographies (following his MA studies and his involvement in teaching architectural design); critical models for the understanding the relationships between technology and representation (following his PhD study ‘Structural Constellations’); practical and collaborative models for work in public (following his involvement in devising and curating exhibitions and events).

E-mail: contact [at] video-as [dot] org

www.vargas.org.uk/artists/

www.vargas.org.uk/aa/research

http://www.video-as.org

Notes

1. Urban Screens: discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society’, Amsterdam 23–24 September 2005. An international conference organised by Mirjam Struppek in co-operation with the Institute of Network Cultures (Department of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam) welcomed a wide range of speakers to discuss the uses of large-scale LED screens ‘that increasingly influence the visual sphere of our public spaces in urban settings’. In the words of the organisers, the conference would ‘investigate how the currently dominating commercial use of these screens can be broadened and culturally curated. Can these screens become a tool to contribute to a lively urban society, involving its audience interactively?’ Contributions from academics, curators and artists were complemented by talks by architects, technology providers, advertising agencies and broadcasters.

2. See http://www.video-as.org

3. Clearly, that also applies to billboard-sized LED screens, although it will be interesting to see what influence the increasing segmentation of air time on such screens will have in the future.

4. Chomsky and Herman do not point out that when advertising itself becomes the chief cause of ‘switching’, then cultural matter can present itself again as a means of binding the audience to the flow. On a commercial channel, cultural matter has the ambivalent status of advertising the fact that there remains unsold air time.

5. This is what the BBC calls its project, and in so doing expresses a ambition shared by commercial operators.

6. McCarthy has just discussed two video works in public places: a self-organised intervention by TWCDC (Together We Can Defeat Capitalism) in which the activist group paid $800 to insert a message in the San Francisco public transport information system, and an elaborately conceived interactive video art installation by Dara Birnbaum, commissioned by the developer for a new shopping mall. In the latter case, the interactive element depended on the movement of shoppers, who, apparently not attracted either by the video installation or the shops, failed to show up. The supposedly critical rhetoric of the installation thus was bound to share the success or failure of the commercial enterprise.

References

ClearChannel, 2005. ‘Glossary’ at

http://www.clearchannel.co.uk/dsp_glossary.cfm?fuseaction=ViewGlossary&letter=B accessed 21 September 2005.

 

Erik Barnouw, 1978. The Sponsor. New York: Oxford University Press

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, 1988. Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon Books

Anna McCarthy, 2001. Ambient Television: visual culture and public space. Durham: Duke University Press

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Copyright ©2006, First Monday
Copyright ©2006, Anthony Auerbach
Interpreting urban screens by Anthony Auerbach

First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1546/1461
cómo citar: AUERBACH, Anthony, Interpreting urban screens, First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006), URL: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1546/1461

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Interpreting urban screens

'Radicalizing Refamiliarization,' Journal of Visual Culture (8:2)

joygarnett: 'Radicalizing Refamiliarization' in Journal of Visual Culture (8:2): "

Stones, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive). (2003) 60 x 78 inches. Oil on canvas.

I am pleased to announce the publication of my recent article,
'Radical Refamiliarization,' co-authoredwith John Armitage
(University of Northumbria) for The Journal ofVisual Culture
(Volume 8, number 2, August 2009). The issue is out at last.
It is a Special Issue in which a number of scholars,educators,
curators, activists and artists respond to a questionnaire on
Barack Obama and visual mediation. Several of the article
(including ours) engage the interesting developments surrounding
Shepard Fairey's Obama posters.

Click the link to download our article; see also the full
Table of Contents on SAGE:

Radicalizing Refamiliarization, [PDF] Journal of Visual Culture 8:2 (Fall 2009).



contributors:
Editorial, Marquard Smith; W.J.T. Mitchell; ShaunMichelle Smith; Dora Apel; Raimi Gbadamosi; Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan;Toby Miller; Jacqueline Bobo; Julian Myers, Dominic Willsdon and MaryElizabeth Yarbrough; Lauren Berlant; Marita Sturken; Lisa Cartwrightand Stephen Mandiberg; John Armitage and Joy Garnett; Victor Margolin;Joanna Zylinska; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Anna Everett; JulianStallabrass; Ellis Cashmore; John Carlos Rowe; Robert Harvey; CurtisMarez; Cynthia A. Young; Nicholas Mirzoeff.

"

'Radicalizing Refamiliarization,' Journal of Visual Culture (8:2)

Sunrise Outside City Dumpsite - Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

ZORIAH - A PHOTOJOURNALIST AND WAR PHOTOGRAPHER'S BLOG:

The sun rises through the haze of pollution and smoke from burning landfills outside of a city dumpsite in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Sunrise Outside City Dumpsite - Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Deborah Willis and Carrie Mae Weems talk about beauty

from Cnylink Local News:

Nov 24

Nancy Keefe Rhodes 11/24/09

Deborah Willis’ new book, ‘Posing Beauty,’ uses Ken Ramsay’s 1970s-era portrait of Susan Taylor for the cover.


“Where are you going next?” I asked Deborah Willis, who sat at the end of a table piled with copies of half a dozen of her 27 books in the hallway at Light Work Gallery.


“Well tomorrow I’m going to Paris for a signing and then after that to Zurich for another book event,” she smiled. All the copies of Willis’ two new books – “Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present” and a slender volume centering on Michelle Obama, which she later said she’d had to agree to do as part of a package deal to get the beauty book a publisher – had sold out.


In the hallway before the talk, under Willis’ hands on the table’s edge sat a single copy of her book with Carla Williams, “The Black Female Body: A Photographic History” (2002). It’s out of print now and the few hard-to-come-by copies on-line are collector-grade pricey. The SU Bookstore was managing the book table sales and had pulled out what other Willis volumes they had on hand for this signing event, which was how this single stray copy of “The Black Female Body” had surfaced. Willis herself quickly bought it and then called Williams on her cell to report she’d found a copy: even Williams hadn’t had one, which made me feel not so bad I’d gotten there too late.


Willis – premier photohistorian, writer, curator, Chair of Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, MacArthur “genius” fellow, and art photographer (she has a joint photo exhibition with her son, Hank Willis Thomas, “Progeny,” touring nationally through 2010) – travels a lot. The artist and photographer Carrie Mae Weems says she has never encountered anyone with a matching work ethic. The two are very old friends and last Thursday night they sat together before a packed audience in the auditorium off Light Work Gallery and talked at length about Black beauty and how that is represented in photography, something both have wrestled with and written about and made images of for years now, and ranged as well into how work really starts in the classroom with students’ questions and how Michelle Obama – once cast as fist-bumping terrorist – has changed things. The Willis-Weems talk was the final event in the Central New York Mellon Humanities Corridor’s “Key Words in Visual Culture,” a semester-long project carried on jointly among Syracuse University, the University of Rochester and Cornell.


Carrie Mae Weems was recently featured on PBS’ Artists in the 21st Century series and herself has work in the Getty Museum, the International Center of Photography and MoMA. She said Thursday that she had known Willis over 30 years.


“When I was starting out, I put out a call to find women who were working around the country – Black women in photography – Deb was one of the first who replied,” she said.


Willis was in town last year right after the presidential election at the invitation of the Southside Initiative, consulting about creating community history projects. She gave an afternoon talk at the Dunbar Center, showing slides and commenting on some of the early black-and-white photos of local photographer Marjory Wilkins. Later that day she spoke on campus, introduced by Weems, and showed slides from the beauty project, which she’d just then sent off to the publisher. She said she wished she’d seen Wilkins’ images before she’d finished the book, fastening particularly on one of a young man arm-in-arm with two well-dressed ladies and another of five young women posing before a plate-glass window after church. She again showed slides Thursday night, beginning with a 1850 poster for a runaway slave named Dolly, whom her owner so wanted back that he acknowledged publically that she was “rather good looking.”


Willis has been researching her new book actively for over a decade, seeking out images from the 1890s to the present that document how both photographers and their subjects have defined, challenged and reinvented concepts of beauty for women and men in African-American communities, how a “pose” is constructed (as well as how images actively “pose” – as in, to offer or assert – certain visual traits as beautiful) and the ways that beauty is essentially empowering. But her engagement with these questions dates from her childhood when she “watched the transformation women experienced in my mother’s beauty shop in our home in North Philadelphia,” and from her years as an undergraduate student who’d just started working at the Schomberg Center in Harlem and noticed there seemed to be very little material on Black beauty. Criss-crossing the country since then, getting a second masters in art history, she found there turned out to be a lot more material than she’d thought. She is looking always for stories, she says.


At 234 pages, “Posing Beauty” has a compact introduction that asks about both sides of the photographic interaction – what the photographer and what the subject each sought; how the Black community went about making its own store of images to counter the sea of mainstream hostile, stereotypical images in the U.S.; and references Elaine Scarry’s astute and thoughtful “On Beauty and being Just” (2001), the best working-out that I know about how we recognize the beautiful and the sources of our urge to reproduce that – to make images. The book also has a detailed index, a bibliography, end-notes – but mostly it has pages and pages of images, both men and women, and to sit with it for even a little while is to see why Publisher’s Weekly calls it “ground-breaking.”


These are divided into four sections, each of which contains wonderful surprises. Early in “Constructing a Pose,” there’s a snapshot of the musician Valaida Snow, a musician caught in a Nazi dragnet in World War II Europe who died in a concentration camp; here, she’s conducting a small orchestra during a show in London in 1934, dressed in a shimmering, slinky white gown, baton raised. There is the image of Zora Neale Hurston by Carl Van Vechten that she liked because it made her “look mean and impressive.” There’s also Cartier-Bresson’s “Easter Sunday Morning, Harlem, 1947” and Theodore Fonville Winans’ “Dixie Belles, Central Louisiana, 1938” – two girls in straw hats placed just so – and Eve Arnold’s “Malcolm X, Chicago, 1961” (also on the book’s back cover) and Bruce Davidson’s “Bodybuilder on Venice Beach, 1964,” one of the slides Willis showed last Thursday with a droll comment about the woman in the picture taking the bodybuilder’s picture while her husband looked on, helpless, hands jammed in his pockets. Some of the images in “Posing Beauty” have appeared already in “The Black Body” and it’s a pleasure to see they will have a new lease of life in this new book.


The second section is titled “Body and Image” and features a range of images that actively assert “beauty” and the power it confers – a 1930s image entitled “Brown Madonna and Child,” Prentice Polk’s portrait of Lena Horne posing with the Tuskegee Airmen in the 1940s before a statue of George Washington Carver, Eve Arnold’s “Integration Crisis” – two schoolgirls side by side in a restroom, one Black, at a party to introduce students in Virginia in 1958.


Part III, “Modeling Beauty and Beauty Contests,” brings together a number of Willis projects, including photo-documentation of Black beauty parlors and barber shops, some from the 1920s, and her question to find visual records of Black beauty contests, the earliest of which occurred over a century ago. This section also contains images of men posing with jazzy new cars and women engaging in cultured pursuits such as the image of a Black woman giving piano lessons to a young girl that W.E.B. DuBois took the Paris Exposition in 1899 as part of his project to present African Americans in radically new visual settings. And here is Jurgen Schadberg’s 1955 shot of the singer Miriam Makeba in a Johannesburg nightclub with her natural hair, which Willis has spoken of as having an electrifying effecting in those years. Part IV comprises a number of color plates, from portraits of public figures to the increasing use of self-portraiture such as Renée Cox perched in the Statue of Liberty’s crown.


Light Work videotaped the talk that Willis and Weems had so that may be available at some point. Meanwhile, there’s “Posing Beauty,” worth the wait.



Nancy covers the arts. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

"

Deborah Willis and Carrie Mae Weems talk about beauty

What’s it Worth? Works on Paper at Arcadia–the talk

What’s it Worth? Works on Paper at Arcadia–the talk: "
The prestigious Works on Paper show at Arcadia, which opened Wednesday, raises worthy questions about the value of art objects in the year 2009.

A woman stood guard over Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link's Health Care Bill, 2009, at the opening. printed paper 11 x 8.5 x 3 inches

Exhibit juror Joao Ribas, who is curator of MIT’s List Visual Arts Center (and former curator of the Drawing Center), selected 22 works by 22 artists from 1,256 entries submitted by 567. (The press release said 22 works, but I count 23).

In Ribas’ introductory talk just before the opening event, he immediately distanced himself from the talk’s ponderous title–4 Points Towards a Present History: Knowledge, Representation, Freedom and the Subject. “The real title is, Things I Have a Problem With.” That got a laugh.

Michael Davis Carter, gator 2009, detail, tissue paper, custom frame, 13.25 x 37.25 inches

Ribas spoke like a man with too many ideas–he started and restarted sentences, redirected them and then trailed off to begin again.Yet he still delivered a coherent talk, exploring aesthetics, the suspect reality of images, and the evolution of art objects as things that reflect symbolic value and freedom (of the artist) to make choices that don’t necessarily further society or its commercial ambitions.

Pernot Hudson, Samburg's Finest, 2008, silkscreen/graphite on paper, 19 x 25 3/4 inches

The aesthetics part of his talk was charming–including his projection of David Attenborough’s BBC bower bird video. And the bit about suspect reality in art and images became especially interesting when he brought up Islamist beheadings on video as indisputably real and as the “most iconic images in contemporary culture.” (The shakiness of Truth in art was another important theme underlying his selections for the show).

Kistina Martino, Subtitled Film Still: "And the Day After that..." 2009, black colored pencil on paper, 16 3/4 x 17 x 20 inches

But it was Ribas’ synopsis of the history of the value of art that interested me most. Here’s my synopsis of his synopsis (this is sort of like crunching down an image on the computer so it’s still recognizable but barely–and of course this too is highly suspect).

The story goes that society, hellbent on creating utile things that it values and needs, has no intrinsic commitment to art. So art is outside the needs of society. And art objects reflect freedom of the artist to operate outside the needs of society. Art represents “radical individual will–the antithesis of what was associated with capital [i.e. money].” So in the 15th century, a division grows between utile valuables provided by the craftsmen of the guilds and non-utile products of artists.

Fay Stanford, Indigenous Princess, 2007, ink on yupo, 21.25 x 15.25 inches

The freedom required in making art, the freedom to make choices and refuse others’ wishes, “creates a class of object that can’t fit into society in the normal way.” It cannot be priced in the same way ordinary goods are priced, and it is not based on consumer needs.

This history leads artists to later “commodify themselves as bohemians,” Ribas said.

As a symbolic marker of wealth rather than a manufactured product for consumers, art takes on a utopian identity, Ribas suggested, precisely because it is made outside the assembly line.

Matt Neff's two Wu Tang Clan-inspired works, GZA 2009 letterpress, 28.5 x 20.5 inches (left); Protect Ya Neck, 2009, etching, 28.5 x 20.5 inches (right)

Technology, however, has messed with this evolution of art as a symbol of value and freedom and mystical power. “Everyone can express himself through technology. …Technology changes how freedom is expressed. The consumer is also the producer.” At this point, Ribas brought in an aside (or maybe not at aside, it being very much to the point) that the World Bank defines wealth as natural capital and creative capital.

With technology, the concomitant sharing/reproducibility and loss of copyright control give every ordinary Joe freedom to choose. How do you preserve the model of authorship when all around us that model no longer applies? Ribas asked. “The artist no longer has a place of privilege With sharing, now everyone has choice.”

Post on the show next!
"

What’s it Worth? Works on Paper at Arcadia–the talk

Thomas Hirschhorn's The Subjecters

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Thomas Hirschhorn's The Subjecters on View at La Casa Encendida

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Tool Vitrine”, 2009, 300 x 85 x 220 cm. Mannequin, tools, foam, photos. Photo: Courtesy Arndt & Partner Gallery, Berlin.

MADRID.- Thomas Hirschhorn, a Swiss artist resident in Paris, presents an exhibition entitled 'The Subjecters', which features a series of vitrines containing mannequins and two installations. According to the artist, every work is a 'commentary' on the 'complex, chaotic, cruel, beautiful and wonderful' world we live in. The work of Thomas Hirschhorn (Bern, 1957) is a politically committed reflection about contemporary reality. Employing a variety of disciplines such as sculpture, video and installation, Hirschhorn produces works charged with social and political criticism. Three of the works featured have never before been exhibited: 'Tools Vitrine', 'Subjecter', from which the exhibition takes its name, and the vitrine 'Ingrowth', originally created to be shown in a public space in Paris. 'The Subjecters', which will be on display at La Casa Encendida of Obra Social Caja Madrid through 5 January, comprises a series of vitrines with mannequins and two installations. According to the artist, every work is a 'commentary' on the 'complex, chaotic, cruel, beautiful and wonderful' world we live in. Using everyday materials such as adhesive tape, cardboard, sheets of plastic, photocopies or, as in this case, mannequins, he represents universal situations in a transgressive, direct way. Through the mannequins, which are intended to represent human beings, the artist talks to us of a 'universal wound', which personifies his assertion, 'Each wound is my wound.' The exhibition begins with a newly produced piece, 'INGROWTH', which unlike the other works was originally planned to be exhibited in a public space in Paris. However, as it never went on display, it will receive its first showing here at La Casa Encendida. For Hirschhorn, a vitrine is a public space because it is an enclosed place which exhibits an object for a hypothetical audience. In addition to this piece, the artist has produced two new works for the project: 'Tool Vitrine' and 'Subjecter', which lends its name to the title of the exhibition. In 'Tool Vitrine', a mannequin appears to threaten us with a hammer, although he might just be going about his daily work, surrounded by all kinds of tools. The implements are typical of those used by the inhabitants of industrial areas such as Aubervilliers, where the artist has his studio. In the midst of the tools, as if it were an instruction manual, sits a copy of Spinoza's 'Ethics', one of Thomas Hirschhorn's favourite books. Meanwhile, in 'Subjecter', a single mannequin riddled with nails appears outside the vitrines, like a fetishistic representation of a human figure. The mannequins in the works are all "connected" in some way with society, be it through the tattoos on the surface of "4 Women", the magazines that highlight body care in "Mono Vitrine (Interview)", the art books on Goya that remind us of the horrors of war in "Mono-Vitrine (Goya)", the tools in the piece "Tool Vitrine", or the Manga figurines in "INGROWTH". Completing the exhibition are two installations situated in the middle of the room, "Black&White Hemisphere" and "The One World". The Subjecters 'The Subjecters' is the title of the exhibition but also the global term for the pieces the artist has made with mannequins or parts of them. As the artist himself says, 'The mannequin (or the parts of mannequins) is not the Subject – it's a Subjecter. The Subjecter is an invention of mine – it stands for what I cannot give a name but for what I can give form (and must give form, as the artist), and I worked it out with the form of mannequins, which is not new in the history of art, but which is a form to express the 'closest-far-away of myself.'' Thomas Hirschhorn has been using mannequins for several years now, regarding them as a material that is 'inclusive and non-intimidating, unpretentious and democratic, non-hierarchical and simple', like the adhesive tapes, tinfoil and magazine clippings that he usually employs in his installations.

"

Thomas Hirschhorn's The Subjecters

Provocative and Colorful Artistic Dialogue by Takashi Murakami Opens in Valencia

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net
Prvocative and Colorful Artistic Dialogue by Takashi Murakami Opens in Valencia
n

A man walks by the lithographs by Japanese artist Takeshi Murakami on display during the 'Superflat. New Pop Culture' exhibition at La Llotgeta gallery in Valencia, Spain. Photo: EFE/Manuel Bruque.

VALENCIA.- The particular, provocative and colorful artistic dialogue between his ancestral Japan and Pop symbols from Occident which have taken him to become ambassador of modernity is the main theme in the new Takashi Murakami exhibition which opened this week at La Llotgeta. Organized by the Aula de Cultura de Caja Mediterráneo (CAM), 'Superflat. New Pop Culture' gathers 21 lithographs and several small sized sculptures made by Murakami, considered to be one of the most recognized international Japanese artists. Murakami's style, called Superflat, is characterized by flat planes of color and graphic images involving a character style derived from anime and manga. Superflat is an artistic style that comments on otaku lifestyle and subculture, as well as consumerism and sexual fetishism. Like Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami takes low culture and repackages it, and sells it to the highest bidder in the 'high-art' market. Unlike Warhol, Murakami also makes his repacked low culture available to all other markets in the form of paintings, sculptures, videos, T-shirts, key chains, mouse pads, plush dolls, cell phone caddies, and $5,000 limited-edition Louis Vuitton handbags. This is comparable to Claes Oldenburg, who sold his own low art, high art pieces in his own store front in the 1960s. What makes Murakami different is his methods of production, and his work is not in one store front but many, ranging from toy stores, candy aisles, comic book stores, and the French design house of Louis Vuitton. Murakami's style is an amalgam of his Western predecessors, Warhol, Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as Japanese predecessors and contemporaries of anime and manga. He has successfully marketed himself to Western culture and to Japan in the form of Kaikai Kiki and GEISAI. Interviewer Magdalene Perez asked him about straddling the line between art and commercial products, and mixing art with branding and merchandizing. Murakami said, 'I don’t think of it as straddling. I think of it as changing the line. What I’ve been talking about for years is how in Japan, that line is less defined. Both by the culture and by the post-War economic situation. Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of ‘high art.’ In the West, it certainly is dangerous to blend the two because people will throw all sorts of stones. But that's okay—I’m ready with my hard hat.'

Provocative and Colorful Artistic Dialogue by Takashi Murakami Opens in Valencia

Japan Society Gallery to Show Forerunner to Today's Manga Artists

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Japan Society Gallery to Show Forerunner to Today's Manga Artists

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Fishermen at Teppozu, early 1830s, Colour woodblock, oban, 24.6 x 36.4 cm, American Friends of the British Museum (The Arthur R. Miller Collection) 03604.

NEW YORK, NY.- Thrashing sea creatures, samurai warriors, and a giant, looming skeleton are among the distinguishing subjects of the brashest of Japan's Ukiyo-e masters, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, whose populist oeuvre is to be presented by Japan Society Gallery from March 12 to June 13, 2010. Fresh from its spring 2009 showing at London's Royal Academy of Arts, where it was the surprise smash hit of the season, Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller Collection marks the first major exhibition of Kuniyoshi's work in the United States in nearly 30 years. The exhibition has been organized by the Royal Academy in collaboration with Arthur R. Miller and The British Museum. The vast majority of the 150 color woodblock prints on display are from the Arthur R. Miller Collection, New York, generously loaned to Japan Society by the American Friends of the British Museum. Like Hokusai, Hiroshige, and other masters of the school of Ukiyo-e printmaking ('Pictures of the Floating World'), Utagawa Kuniyoshi pursued the themes of landscape, kabuki theater, and beautiful women. He was unique, however, in his mastery of lesser known subjects: action-packed tales drawn from the history, religion, folklore, and myths of Japan, China, and other Asian countries; comic 'crazy pictures' often featuring animals impersonating humans; and exotic experiments with foreign subject-matter and European techniques of visual representation. 'Kuniyoshi's work can be seen as foreshadowing the visual storytelling of contemporary manga, anime, and computer and video games,' says Joe Earle, Director of Japan Society Gallery and organizer of the exhibition. 'Like a number of the top creators in these genres of today, he was an eccentric who specialized in comic figures and action scenes sold in vast numbers at low prices to an insatiable and visually sophisticated audience.' Kuniyoshi practiced as a woodblock printmaker during the Tokugawa shogunate, which routinely censored popular printed materials. 'There is a sense in which censorship spurred Kuniyoshi's imagination, as he sought to circumvent the government bans,' says Earle. Certainly, the artist became adept at applying his graphic inventiveness to the coding of political meaning into seemingly innocuous scenes. While his narratives may have toed the official line, their veiled subtexts were only too clear to his fellow townspeople. One of the prints on view, created in 1843 during a particularly stringent period of repression, became a cause célèbre for its version of a tale about the evil Earth Spider, who conjured up a battle between rival armies of demons to torment the ailing warrior hero Yorimitsu. Viewers identified Yorimitsu with Japan's ineffectual shogun, Tokugawa Ieyoshi, and the print was widely interpreted-and pirated-as a hanji-mono ('riddle picture') slyly satirizing current-day reforms. At this point, government censorship even extended to the portrayal of beautiful courtesans and geisha entertainers, hitherto among the most lucrative genres for print publishers. Kuniyoshi responded to this challenge with graceful prints of beauties designed for round summer fans (uchiwa), hanging scroll paintings, and a number of original series. The exhibition features selections from ten such series, which ostensibly offer virtuous models of feminine behavior while satisfying the popular appetite for pictures of attractive women in a variety of situations. The bravura of Kuniyoshi's picture-making is particularly evident in his prints of battles and other manly struggles. Muscular tattooed warriors are shown in dramatic combat in the series 108 Heroes of the Popular Water Margin; the warrior Morozumi Masakiyo is shown at just the moment he kills himself in battle in an extraordinary fractured design (1848); a crowd of figures is depicted in the battle on the roof of Horyu tower from one of the best-loved scenes of a popular novel (1840); and a giant skeleton thrillingly occupies three quarters of a triptych in Mitsukuni Defies the Skeleton Specter Conjured up by Princess Takiyashi (1845/46). One of Kuniyoshi's greatest innovations, in fact, was to spread a large motif across all three sheets of a three-sheet format, unifying the composition and heightening the visual drama. In one print in the exhibition, created in 1851/52, he also brilliantly exploited the extremely unusual format of a vertical triptych to show the monk Mongaku doing penance for murder under the great Nachi Waterfall: daringly, the middle panel of this triptych shows only water and rock. The huge public appetite for Kuniyoshi's prints may be gauged by the print run of one series represented in the exhibition. Issued in 1847 and 1848, Biographies of Loyal and Righteous Hearts comprised 51 prints packed with gruesome detail and bold action: 8,000 impressions of each print were sold, for a whopping total of 408,000 sheets. Arthur R. Miller Collection Professor Arthur R. Miller, one of America's leading lawyers and legal scholars, was an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York before his move into teaching at Columbia University School of Law, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Michigan. In 1971 he joined Harvard Law School, where he became Bruce Bromley Professor of Law. Since 2007 Professor Miller has been University Professor in the School of Law at New York University and last year he became Special Counsel to Milberg LLP. A renowned commentator on law and society, he appeared on "Good Morning America" for two decades as its legal editor and on PBS in several celebrated seminars. He received two Emmy awards for his work as host of several TV series and has published more than forty books. An avid art-lover, Professor Miller has been collecting prints by Kuniyoshi for nearly thirty years. In 2008 he began to donate his collection of nearly two thousand prints to the American Friends of the British Museum. The collection is presently on loan to the British Museum.

"

Japan Society Gallery to Show Forerunner to Today's Manga Artists

Reading images

The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Opinion | Reading images: "

READING IMAGES

Venus and Adonis Word, Image, Text: Studies in literary and Visual culture: Edited by Shormishtha Panja, Shirshendu Chakrabarti and Christel R. Devadawson, Orient, Rs 445 There has always been a close relationship between literature and the visual arts — a relationship not well explored. The editors of Word, Image, Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture deserve praise for venturing into new areas, for extending the study of literature beyond the written word and to the image — that in painting and sculpture. The four sections in the book, “The Renaissance in Europe”, “Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, “The Indian subcontinent” and “Art and Philosophy” put together 13 articles that explore the close relationship between the written word and art at different points of time as well as in different locations. The book encompasses “…not only the literature and art of Europe from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries”, but also “…includes an examination of the art and literature of the Indian sub-continent”, to quote from the preface. The area covered by the book is vast, but within that area it takes up selective topics. The first section on Renaissance in Europe is this reviewer’s favourite, as it takes up a period marvellously rich in all the arts — a richness that the articles succeed in conveying. Shormishtha Panja sensitively compares Shakespeare’s word picture in “Venus and Adonis” to Titian’s paintings, Venus of Urbino and Venus and Adonis, as well as to Giorgione’s Dresden Venus. She also compares Shakespeare’s poem, The Rape of Lucrece, to Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, and to other contemporary representations of the poem. The comparison is enhanced by the photographs of some of the paintings taken up in the book. Without the illustrations, the representation would not have been satisfactory. The second section focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. The neo-classical age was marked by a response divided between nostalgia and hope, between idealism and realism. The juxtaposition of patrician and plebeian perspectives led to the coining of the phrase, “the world of coffee and the world of gin”, which indicated the literary, cultural and aesthetic divide of the age. One would have liked the introduction to this section and the last section, “Art and Philosophy”, to be a little more elaborate. The section on the Indian subcontinent is different from the first two sections. To quote from the introduction to this section, “South Asia is presented here as a continuing cultural space despite wild discontinuities of time.” John Lockwood Kipling’s illustrations of India are taken up by Christel Devadawson with a few accompanying visuals. It is a very interesting article in an age when Rudyard Kipling and his characters have regained popularity. This section also has an article titled “Representations of Nature and Time in south Asian Sculpture: Lord Gommateshwara and the Fasting Buddha”. The writer, Vincent Villafranca, is a sculptor, and one finds his perspective on Indian sculpture interesting. The interrelationship between literary and visual forms of autobiography is taken up by Loris Button, a practising artist, in the concluding section on art and philosophy. He finds that the written language is a more dominant discourse. He provides a visual response in a series of self portraits, titled Facing Time. He says, “Facing Time can be seen as a visual response to the issue of describing identity in contemporary culture by the means of using physiognomy…” One remembers the self portraits by Rabindranath Tagore.The book is very readable and thought provoking. It should be of interest to students of literature and to lay readers.

PURABI PANWAR

"

Reading images

How Charles Darwin changed the way we see

How Charles Darwin changed the way we see - absolutearts.com: "

The extraordinary story of how Charles Darwin changed the way we see

Darwin's Camera Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution Phillip Prodger
 
ISBN: 9780195150315
Oxford University Press
Hardcover, October 2009
320 pages 106 b/w illus.,7 color illus. 7 x 10
List Price:$39.95

Darwin's Camera tells the extraordinary story of how Charles Darwin changed the way pictures are seen and made. In his illustrated masterpiece, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1871), Darwin introduced the idea of using photographs to illustrate a scientific theory. Creating the first photographically illustrated science book ever published, Darwin managed to produce dramatic images at a time when photography was famously slow and awkward.

During his investigation into the nature of emotions, Darwin commissioned photographs of children and adults in order to study specific facial expressions. Because of the dramatic delay between his subjects’ expressions and the photograph’s capture of them, Darwin used photographs made with electric currents to manipulate facial muscles into the desired expression. Using these and other staged photos, Darwin developed one of his most radical theories: emotions evolved biologically. With this, he altered the field of psychology, including the thinking of his later admirer, Sigmund Freud.

Darwin also influenced the course of photography. He mingled with artists on the voyage of HMS Beagle, collaborated with famed photographer Oscar Rejlander to make his pictures, and corresponded with many painters and photographers, such as Joseph Wolf and Lewis Carroll. Darwin's Camera provides the first examination ever of these relationships and their effect on Darwin's work, and how Darwin, in turn, shaped the history of art.

About the Author:

Phillip Prodger is Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the author of E.O. Hoppé's Amerika: Modernist Photographs from the 1920s; Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (OUP 2003); and co-editor of Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888-1918. His writings on art and photography have been published in eight languages.

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How Charles Darwin changed the way we see