Neal Stuckenschneider
2/25/09
ART 308
Research for Project 2: Interactivity
What marks the movement of “interactivity” artists is that they seek to reveal the interrelatedness in the elements of the world around them. They consider relationships such as that between the artist and the audience, the artwork and the audience, and even the artwork with itself. Artwork is not didactic, but rather inquisition. The artists are reluctant to trust themselves with the governance of the work. They surrender the work to do its own expression, or to the audience, or to natural elements. Even after the artwork has been constructed, it has not yet finished maturing into an entity that may surprise the artist and audience alike. Work such as this has been developing since the sixties, with artist reacting against the minimalist movement, such as Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell.
Many interactive art pieces began to emerge in the 60’s, lashing out against minimalistic art that was so popular at the time. Allan Kaprow was initially trained as a painter of landscapes, and through the influence of such artists as Pollock, his interests grew from the painting to the environment it created. With this concern of place and environment, Kaprow began working in the environment itself, calling his works Happenings. His happenings are described as “a non verbal, theatrical production that abandons the stage-audience structure as well as the usual plot or narrative line of traditional theatre. (1)” The Happening was something ever-changing with the action or involvement of the audience, making it an ever unable to be reproduced. I like to imagine it as an extemporaneous play, a sort of tangent to the day-to-day life that the participants followed. Kaprow established the venue and elements for the individuals to react to. Richard Schechner writes in one article that Kaprow was producing “a new theatre [that] combines associative variations on visual-aural themes, chance permutations, games and journeys.(1)” Kaprow chose New York city as a primary venue for these Happenings to take place because it as such a receptive environment, carrying these artworks into both intimately personal and public spaces. His Happening “Yard” was simply “a backyard filled with rubber auto tires heaped randomly for viewers to climb in and around.(1)”
Another aspect of Kaprow as an artist that fascinates me is his interest with words. This interest is evident in, but goes past the Happening he created in 1962, titled Words, wherein viewers entered into various rooms with words covering objects and walls, and had free reign to rearrange them in any way they pleased. In an interview, Kaprow stops to clarify the distinctions he makes in the words he uses to describe his art: performance and assemblage. Kaprow states: “What's called an installation today is the child of what used to be called, before the happenings, an environment. Now, I think that if you look at the words there, the shifts indicate something like a real change toward the installation compared to that of the environment, and the performance to that of the happening.(2)” Kaprow sees his artwork as an itself being in direct interaction with past and future movements, and continues to react to art as defined as art itself. He interacts with the concept of art as a fluid movement; the Happenings as he first saw them were extensions of the action seen in painting – the effort to connect with life. In the same interview mentioned above, Kaprow mentions seeing the consolidation of art and life studying the work and theories of Mondrian. Mondrian sought that after extended scrutiny of his work, the lines and distinctions would disappear. Of his work Kaprow states, “I was convinced that when he was talking about the mutual destruction of all parts of the work, which would produce some sort of transcendent unity at the end, he was dealing with the elimination of painting through itself.(2)” These sorts of concerns show that Kaprows work seems to be less about the objects, but how the react to conventions through the unique dynamic created by letting them guide themselves. Kaprow states he felt he was “following a scent” as he pursued his work.
An artist exhibiting similar tendencies to interactivity is Wolf Vostell. Vostell is a German artist born in 1932 who picked up on Kaprow’s Happenings and eventually created a few of his own. Unlike Kaprow, he was a member of the Fluxus group, the ranks of which many artists committed themselves to (3). Vostell employed concepts of Happenings very differently than Kaprow, in that he responded much more strongly to issues of popular and consumer culture than to art culture itself. As such, his material demanded much less of the audience, and used the products of the culture itself. Vostell was the first artist ever to use televisions in his art. He also coined the term Dé-collage, important in that it “stresses the aggressive, destructive aspect of found structures and visuals. (4)” His “Elektronischer De-coll/age Happening Raum (E.D.H.R.)” exhibits both these unique qualities well. In it six variously ornamented and equipped televisions set themselves to various motorized tasks: one with a scythe swinging in front, one with a shroud dipping in and soaking up red lipstick, one with a roller pushing the air right before a stack of dilapidated shoes, all to the sound of churning industrial engines (. Watching the machines altogether in action imbues them with a sort of anthropomorphism, mocking pithy human habits and tasks. This wouldn’t be true without the movement. Another piece that Vostell completed was a video collage titled “Sun in Your Head.” This piece shows broken up footage of people interacting, solitary faces, loves embracing, and a U.S. Air Force plane and pilot sailing through the sky. The way all these disparate elements interact in the spliced up footage is fascinating, as they all seem to be trapped within the same strange, disjointed narrative. The film was originally shown in conjunction with several other pieces for an audience moving from location to location. Of the process, one article writes: “The film transfers to the moving image Vostell’s principle of ‘Décollage’. While up to then Vostell had altered TV pictures as they were being broadcast, he was now able to compose the temporal sequence. Since no video equipment was available in 1963, Vostell instructed camera-man Edo Jansen to film distorted TV images off the TV screen. The film was re-edited and copied to video in 1967. (5)” Collage gains its impact predominately through the interaction of the objects chosen, and with television, a medium rarely questioned, this becomes even more jarring.
1) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5422/kaprow.html
2) http://www.mailartist.com/johnheldjr/InterviewWithAlanKaprow.html
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Vostell
Research Assignment
ReplyDeleteKate Brown
Tim Hawkinson engages interactivity of sculpture in a pretty big way. Some pieces of his use interactivity more than others. He doesn’t use normal mediums to sculpt with or normal means to make his creations. Some of the substances he uses to sculpt come from his own body such as his fingernails and hair. He actually programs and uses a bunch of engineering in his most interactive pieces. One piece that I think of as being the most interactive is his Uberorgan. It is an installation that takes over multiple rooms echoing melody’s throughout the building. He uses large amounts of plastic and netting to make the structures. It is interactive to me because people can walk around listening to the odd sounds and even touching it. He used a scale of 12 tones and programmed it to play songs that are composed onto a large plastic piece. Another interactive piece of Hawkinson’s is called emoter. It is his face that gets randomly moved around my small motor machines. People stand their and watch while trying to understand what emotion the random movements would portray. Both of Tim Hawkinson’s sculptures that I have talked about are interactive that they need an audience to watch and think. The Uberorgan had people running around looking at different parts and listening to different sounds. The emoter sculpture involves people watching the movements and trying to find emotion in the random changes.
Krzysztof Wodiczko I consider to be a very interactive artist. He does projects that not only consist of people telling their toughest stories but also involve the people watching. The emotional level of his projects is very high. He does this thing where he projects people’s images onto monuments in different places. He uses different filmed parts of the body. In one project called the Hiroshima project he films people’s hands as they talk about the horrors they witnessed. The hands are then projected onto a building and people listen to the audio of the story while watching the hands. Wodiczko made this and other projects because he believes it helps towards creating peace. Another project was called the Tijuana projection where women’s faces are projected on a round monument telling stories of pain and rape. I feel like Wodiczko’s projects are less art and more of a production. He definitely plans the whole event out making sure the projections are in the correct place to look good and even draws sketches of how he wants the picture to look but most of the show is done by the story tellers, and the set up. He does put in a lot of work to make these projections happen and gets lots of people to interact with them.
Sources
Krzysztof Wodiczko
http://interrogative.org/
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/wodiczko/index.html
http://artandcommitment.umn.edu/wodiczko.html
Tim Hawkinson
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/hawkinson/index.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4802237
http://www.laweekly.com/news/features/hurricane-of-the-eye/480/