Two Screams from 1994

Something to think about: "what was the first thing you saw on the internet?" The year was 1994, and a friend tried to describe to me what the world wide web thing was, and that you can put a music video on your computer and someone on the other side of the country could watch it over a phone line in the computer. My favorite band at the time was of course Nine Inch Nails. This video was the first thing I ever saw on the internet.



What else happened in 1994?


The genocide in Rwaanda.
Kurt Cobain kills himself.
NAFTA goes into effect.
Nelson Mandela elected president of South Africa.
OJ Simpson helps sell some Ford Broncos.
And in the world of high-profile art theft, Edvard Munch's painting, 'the scream' is stolen.

Holidays and Grades

You young witches and wizards,
You did well on your final. The grades are not going to be online for you until after January 2nd, because we took the final so late in the semester, but if you need to know your grades before then, I can email them to you individually this week some time, just let me know. And the graded finals will be in your folders at school soon. I also saved the flash slide presentation on this blog as a draft so that we don't have to sign in everytime we view the blog. We can reactivate them at anytime, and I will let you know if the password changes for the slides website. Enjoy the cold you enchanted Jersey folk.


Warmly, Yuley, and Scatologically Yours,
Nathan Shafier,
Professor of Defense Against the Dark Visual Arts,
Mason Gross School of the Farts

THANKS SOOO MUCH

HEY .. WHO EVER PUT THE SLIDES UP...
THANK YOUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!
GREAT IDEA!

???????

why is the slides list on sldies.rutgers.edu the ones from the first test? theyre the slides from fall only i dont get it! and the username is slides, password user right? HELPPPPP

Seminar Exam Review Notes

I was unable to attend the exam review due to the weather and a long risky commute. Nathan suggested that I obtain notes from someone in class. Would anyone be able to provide me with the notes as soon as possible? My e-mail address is susannap@eden.rutgers.edu. Thank you very much. Mayissa Susanna

The Final Exam

To all my wizards and witches,

The final; exam will be on Thursday, get there by 7:00 pm, bring a pen and pencil, there will be paper provided. Sleep well the night before, know the artists you want to talk about, and you will do well. Good luck to you all and have a festive Yule, Christmas, Eid, Hanukka, Kwanzaa, or however you folks celebrate good times and cold weather.

Nathan Shafier,

Servant to the Jingle Bells of the Black Lectroids

what is website for the slides again? and is the username and password still the same?

Questions for the Final and Study Guide

Okay, so it is crazy outside, but we gotta study for the final.

I am going to give you four questions on the final, you are going to pick two and answer them. You guys gotta give at least three examples for the questions, so get ready to talk about the artist, and example of their work, and issues they are working woth which are relevant to their work. An example of a right answer is "Smithon was dealing with issues of entropy, which he developed in his spiral jetty on the great salt lake." and then you would explain all of those things in detail. A wrong answer is just shoving things together, "the Vienna Actionists were dealing with color and form, they wanted to make murals in LA like the Vietnam War Memorial." That is not right, think about what you write abd don't just sling info together, build up an essay that makes sense, and thats something you know.

The questions:

1)
Discuss, compare and contrast issues of site-specificity in the postminimalist practice of at least three artists, gives names and examples of their work.

2)
What are the issues important to artists working with performance art? Give the names of at least three artists and examples of their work, then relate the issues to their art.

3)
Discuss the issues of appropriation, the aura, documentation, simulacra, advertising and technology in relation to photography and video, give three examples (name, example, etc.)

4)
Discuss Duchamp's importance in the development of conceptual art, what topics, issues and forms did he pioneer that became important for conceptual artists and their practices (give three examples).

Now we will study like the friggin winds of change.

Hazah!
Le Prof Shafier of the Obliqueness and Teen Poems about Dead Birds

im posting!

What draws the line between video art and day to day television?
Can an episode of seinfeld really go up in a gallery?

What elements constitute a photograph worth being called art?
are other photographs just not as important or is there something else?

1973

Ok....here goes...I'm finally posting my second question...

In what ways has television contributed to the progression of visual art?
(I thought I'd ask a question that pertains to my major :] )

What truely is the definiton of "video art" ?

Short and sweet :]

Shoutouts to Bri Bri, Mich Mich, and Angelrey...

WORD.

Minimalist Photography

Ok.

So after reading all the material, I realize that all the work is repetitive and mundane. The work is non-representational, anonymous and boring. Also, if you watch any of Nam june paik's video installations, you may have an epilleptic seizure even if you dont have epillepsy. Does anyone understand the point in the photographs and video installations? Can anyone justify it?

Postmodermist "Picture"

Douglass Crimp said "We are not in search of souces of images...but of structures of signification: underneath each picutre there is always nother picture" how does this relate to the legal authorship problem where Sherrie Levine took a couple of Weston's Untitled, AFter Edward Weston series of his nude son and cropped as to include no more than his torso? Does it Make her the legal author of these series of pictures?

It is kind of confussing but quite true to some of male statues from the High Classical period, as the book says: itself (the original statue) the model for endless Roman copies.

Hey Nathan I just saw you!!! lol What did you think of Joanna's video final?

question

in 1964b, warhol talks of his appreciation for "boring things" when talking about his repetitive images he goes on to say "I dont want it to be essentially the same, i want it to be exactly the same. because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel." warho claims to want a life of repetition with no meaning, empty of emotion or feeling. is this related to another famous warhol quote "i want to be a machine"? perhaps, like machines, warhol thinks that feelings and emotion are destractions to his productivity. does repetition or daily routine, like warhols claim of eating the same lunch everyday for 20 years, create a lack of emotion and meaning, like a machine, or frustration and discontent?

Photography and Video

Okay,
So this is our last lecture class before the final. We are going to meet again in the slide library next week for the review. And someone has got to remind me to get you guys to fill out the course evaluation forms. I forgot to do it last week!

But here we go into the world of the lens. Go back to some of our first post and think about 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', the idea of the 'aura', it will be on the test.

To study:

1) the aura
2) simulacra/simlucarum
3) appropriation
4) originality (think of the modernist holy trinity of origin, original, and originality)
5) the idea of photos or videotape as reality, or as documentation, remember that video is inadmisable in court, think of Rodney King, OJ Simpson, the show COPS, all that stuff, legally video tape is not REAL!
6) the role of technology in art making and our ability to make art
7) the connections between advertising, magazines, newspapers, photos, pop art, journalism, documentary
8) how can art exist without the lens of a camera?

We have gone over everything you need to understand this text, just grab it all and make a friggin' salad!

Professor Shafier goes into the night like a recumbent moon over Miami...

Judy Chicago " Dinner Party"

In Judy's "Dinner Party" she states " I firmly believe that if art speaks clearly about something relevant to people's live, it can change the way they perceive reality.."

How do you feel about this notion and how might this be true?

Performance Art, Body Art, and Living la Vida Loca

Welcome back to school, and I apologize for the later post here, but time is scarce.

This week our readings covered a little too much territory, so we are going to have to spend a bit of our discussion sorting through when's and where's and who's, and did you notice that a bit of the stuff that was happening and being talked about was happening right here?

So what was important to remember from all this stuff? What is valid about it?

Hopefully our class so far has set stages for the development of most of these ideas to work through.

Remember our discussions of phenomenology, ontology...the idea of the viewer as a body in front of a work of art...what if the body itself was the work of art, and another body viewing it makes it a work of art. I know it sounds a little dark arts, and let's not kid ourselves, it probably is.

What I want you to know:

1) feminism (think about this word a whole lot, there isn't a 'feminist' style like there is a minimalist style...feminist art is an embodiment of theories and politics, not a way art is made, the variety is huge and feminist body art/performance can be hard to distinguish from the rather sexist performance work of the Vienna Actionists.)

2) internationalism and the 'global village': internationalism in the sense of the Fluxus artists, relate them to more nationally themed art movements (futurism, ab ex, minimalism) and look back to Marshall McLuhan, who we have talked about, and get to know his idea of the 'global village'.

3) theoretical work: start looking at how art will start incorporating theories and ideas into its 'process', compare this with the ideas of making 'conceptual' art. My best example here would be Freud, compare the way the Vienna Actionists used the thinking and theories of Freud to the way in which Mary Kelly uses Freud in here 'Post-Partum Document'

4) positivism, and the utopian gesture

5) collectives versus movements in art: the minimalists hung out together, but Fluxus and Gutai artists made work together

6) identity politics (think of its relationship to institutional critique as well) the body as object/ subject

Hopefully you are noticing the way these writers want to categorize everything. One, because it helps us talk about it better and two because it validates arguments and helps one 'prove things wrong'.

Ex.: is a work of art the object or the subject?

Take great notice at how the Fluxus artists are 'proven wrong' based on contradictions in their artistic practices or in their lives, in these texts. We have to be careful on this desire to 'prove people wrong'. Take it to heart that there is no right or wrong answer in art: whether it be an action, a task or a ritual.

Yours in magic,
Prof Nathan Shafier
WZMB New Jersey's Radio Zombie

Midnight Spank

Hiiii. I'm posting.

1. Our culture has taught us that the power of women has slowly evolved and progressed. The woman today, or even 1979, supposedly has much more power than those of the past. Our society has recognized the wrongs that have been done unto women, and has, to the best of its ability, reformed that. Think of sufferage, divorce rights, property ownership.HOWEVER, Judy Chicago seemingly is telling us just the opposite. She says that the power of women, our spirit, our knowledge of what trials and tribulations we have and still face is limited. She paints the picture that society, more specifically that male population, is somehow doing us wrong by not giving us enough credit for all of our accomplishments. Is her way of thinking unfair? Overly feminist? Or have we had it backwards all this time? Is she right and it's just pretty hard to admit that we have been fooled into thinking us gals have been getting the pat on the back we deserve these past hundred years?

2. Which brings me to my next question; Is this complication, or, even better, traumatic realization that I stated in the latter paragraph a form of what Adrian Piper is talking about in his "Ideology, Confrontation...."? Am I justifying my belief (that the feminine population has not been taken advantage of and that we have gained more power and respect over the past century) by writing off Chicago as an overly-feminist antagonist?

3. I hope we can discuss Nancy Spero's idea that "the body is a symbol or a hieroglyph...an extension of language..." and how that pertains to the performance artists' reasonings. Furthermore, she says she wants to change the "idea of a woman's body to transcend that which is a male ideal of a woman in a man-controlled world." She's trying to bring woman onto an equal, if not higher, plane than man. She's serious about her subject matter, yet in this discussion she seems to have a more playful approach to it (i.e. the goddess with the dildo). She's not really attacking men so much as celebrating women and our control. Does her technique seem more validating and approachable than Chicago's to anyone else?

Well, that's it. I think I'll go listen to my Bikini Kill CD now.
GOOD NIGHT

Conceptual Art

This weeks readings are around conceptual art and the relationship art has with philosophy. Now the book gave us a very unique look at who the artists involved with conceptual art are. Authoritatively concept art is actually a rather debated subject. It is clear that it emerged from Duchamp and Minimalism, post-war politics and positivist philosophy (as opposed to the existential dread). Several artists claim to be the originators of concept art: Kosuth, Buren, and Anastasi (the last of whom was not mentioned in the text). We talked about how minimalism was the beginnings of postmodernism, but concept art is now squarely in what Lyotard calls 'the postmodern condition'.

Think of Lawrence Wiener for this:
"you can make art, you can have art fabricated, you don't even have to make the work," type thinking. Or of artists who say things like, "I don't want to put more objects into the world, so my work will be documentation in the form of drawings, photographs and essays"....

Terms to think about in more depth:

1) deskilling (which is a slur, and negative connotations in the beginning)
2) institutional critique
3) epistemes (Foucault's term for the way societies organize their facts)
4) aesthetics vs. art (in terms of Kosuth's essay 'Art After Philosophy')
5) the house of muses (the museum)
6) and this statement by Clement Greenberg that, from my point of view, will end up being his one great legacy, that the world of high art has been attached to the ruling class (and the bourgeiosie) by an umbilical cord of gold.

I have added an image of some of Hans Haacke's recent work, when he was the Dean of Students, or whatever at Cooper Union in the city. (Hows that for institutional critique!) But Haacke is totally rad, I highly advise getting to know his work very well...

So tonight we go conceptual style,
Shafier of the Night Flowers of Utter Doom

1.) In Carl Andre's response to Anonymous Sculptures he read the Becher's work as though it were primarily defined by its compulsive attention to serial repetition relating them to Minimalism and Post Minimalism aesthetics. Do you agree with Andre's on how he read the Becher's work or is there something that sets their work apart from the Minimalist/Post Minimalist ideas.

2.) When looking at Broodthaer's work, Especially the piece Pense Bete, where he takes his last fifty copies of a recent volume of poetry and plasters them together to transform them into a visual object. The text says: "Bloodthaer's action implicitly askes the spectator why he or she refused to be a reader and wished to become a viewer instead. Therefore his work would take as one of its key questions the status of the work of art as commodity." Do you agree that he work would fall under that catagory of a commodity, of something obsolete?

Conceptual Art

Hey everybody. Time to post questions:

1. Collectivity, anonymity, and functionalism are all seen as key artistic values to Bernd and Hilla Becher. Why are these values important, and how does the work of the Bechers relate to minimalism (think of the grids!)? Also, how did the Bechers photographs effect the field of archaeological preservation?

2. Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Joseph Kosuth, and Richard Long all opposed the installation of Daniel Buren's huge bannerlike work in the Guggenheim International Exhibition, stating Buren's banner "obscured the view of their works". Despite the flaws in their case, Buren's work was removed. Explain why the minimalists (Judd, Flavin, etc.) clashed with conceptual artists such as Buren. How does Buren's conceptual work activate space differently than the minimalists' sculptures?