Katy Daiber
Sophomore Fine Arts Studio / Art History
Liz Trapp
November 7, 2016
1. Using Marina Abramovic’s works, The Artist is Present, and Rhythm 0, please explain how these two performances relate to one another within her larger body of work. How does the role of the audience shift between these two specific performances of Abramovic’s?
Marina Abramovic used her body as a medium and theme throughout her work. In Rhythm 0, the final of a series of 10 daring performances, Abramovic takes a passive role while the audience manipulated her body with objects of pain and pleasure. Whereas, several years later, Abramovic assertively stared into her audience’s eyes during her retrospective, The Artist Is Present. Marina Abramovic relies on her audience to complete her performances which often involve risk and pain endurance.
When Tate gallery reproduced the objects to exhibit Rhythm 0, they included, “Abramovic’s original intention for the piece is explained by her written instructions which accompanied the work:
“Instructions.
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance.
I am the object.
During this period I take full responsibility.”1
People became more aggressive and violent as the performance continued because each person continued to stretch the boundaries. “[T]he experience I drew from this work was that in your own performances you can go very far, but if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed” quoted from ‘Marina Abramovic: Approaching Zero.’
Thirty-five years later, Abramovich performed The Artist is Present during her retrospective at the the Museum of Modern Art.1 For 700 hours between March and May, she silently sat and stared into the eyes of each guest as they individually joined her at the table. The visitors chose the duration and their actions in the seat. The rules, quoted from an interview stated, “Anyone who was prepared to queue could sit opposite her just as long as they agreed to remain silent and motionless and to stare back into her eyes.”
Captured in Abramovich’s documentary, “The Artist is Present” some guests became emotional under her gaze, one proposed to her, and another was escorted out by security after an attempt to strip infront of the artist. However, Abramovich was struck with tears herself when her former lover and collaborator sat before her. For over a decade, Ulay and Abramovic explored the limits of their physical and psychological endurance and gender roles as well as the line of art and life.
The varying roles she plays and the amount of control she has over the performances could contribute to the overall concept of the pieces. In the Artist is Present, Abramovic was more assertive with the audience, compared to her behavior in Rhythm 0. Her direct gaze created a mutual respect with her viewers in her 2010 performance, whereas, her audience abused her in Rhythm 0 because she allowed them to treat her as an object, as inhuman.
2. Using Alfredo Jaar’s Untitled (Rwanda), Ori Gersht’s Will You Dance for Me?, and Walid Raad’s Atlas Project, please explain, in detail, how each artist pursues and presents varying lenses of history and memory. You’ll want to explain how each artist specifically deals with the themes of history and memory and how they differ (in some cases are in opposition) to one another.
Alfredo Jaar, Ori Gersht, and Walid Raad document history by juxtaposing news with personal memory. These works reveal that the media can distort history by picking and choosing what to portray and when it becomes tragic enough for the world to know.
Ori Gersht’s haunting video, Will You Dance with Me? displays an elderly Auschwitz survivor, who was liberated by American soldiers, in juxtaposition of her memory. Gersht’s film shows Yudica Norm’s portrait from her rocking chair, next to a barren winter landscape. This video mirrors this survivor’s memory of being asked to dance for the Nazi’s on a Christmas Eve in the concentration camp. Upon her refusal, the future professional dancer was forced to stand outside in the snow, barefoot. The dark lighting highlights her aging features and feeble movements during her “last dance.”
Gersht could be commenting on how long the holocaust continued before America realized what was happening and/or chose to help. But, in contrast, her escape to and success in the US could make our country appear as her hero because we stepped into to help unlike the situation in Rwanda.
A 2004 World News Article states, “President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents...” Alfredo Jaar’s piece, Untitled (Rwanda), includes a series of Newsweek covers and summaries of the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda. The covers often only show American pop-culture news topics, until Rwanda’s fatality reaches one million. Jaar records time by documenting the length of suffering of the Rwandan people juxtaposed with minut problems that were broadcast in the United States news.
Walid Raad’s project, The Atlas Group, documented Lebanon's history by displaying the countries photographs and writings. Although the work focused on the civil war, the violence was often absent. However some of these artifacts were invented by The Atlas Group, which is interesting that they would try to rewrite or add to Lebanon's history. Walid Raad’s work comments on the errors of historians and how history can be tampered with. Especially Fakhouri File, which exposed the persuasive powers of photographers who can even be bribed by the historians who write our knowledge of the past. Walid Raad, like the two other artists, composes work of time and place about what we choose to recognize and remember from history.
3. Please explain what Christian Marclay’s work The Clock is, what the audience experience is, and how this is inextricably linked to the theme of time. How do Marclay and On Kawara reference time in parallel ways?
Christian Marclay contradicted film by collaging clips into a twenty-four hour video, The Clock. These thousands of movie clips that record or reference time, ranging throughout cinema’s history, are placed in the exact rhythm of present time. This allowed the audience to watch as the screen matched their watches in an awareness of every second spent with the film. Marclay created this film out of moments in the past, but everyday, it is is recreated in the present moment because it is exists in real time.
Movies help us lose track of time, by compressing a narrative’s time-line and transporting us between time periods and locations, ceaselessly. In contrast, when watching The Clock, the audience is constantly reminded of how much time they’ve spent in the theater and what the present time is.9 The Clock is distressing and jarring to watch because of the continuous flipping between recycled scenes. Clocks are watched in times of stress, impatience, boredom, and anticipation, and these emotions are broadcasted by the hundreds of actors in film.
Similarly, Artist On Kawara, compulsively counted days in paintings while Marclay tracked minutes in film clips.Obsessed with time and place, On Kawara created a visual diary with his “date paintings”. These basic paintings inscribed the date on a monochromatic background and were juxtaposed with the daily news and events during exhibition. Both On Kawara and Marclay ask the viewer to create a relationship between our personal measurement of time and memory by reminding us that time is our only currency, it is the only thing we can not get back.
4. How does Cyprien Gaillard’s work intersect with memory, history, and place? Ultimately, what do you think the aim of Gaillard’s work is, and do you find it to be successful? Why or Why not?
Cyprien Gaillard highlights destruction and failure in dreamlike films. In an article from Interview Magazine, the artist explains, “I’m interested in things failing, in the beauty of failure, and the fall in general.” Gaillard documents how time erodes history and memory by focusing on the demolition of historic buildings.
In his film, Cities of Gold and Mirrors, music heavy with symphonies keep the audience in a trance while the screen flipped between frat boys chugging liquor to a dolphin gliding through a glistening ocean to a demolition. While watching this, I felt calm even though some of the clips were dramatic. I think his work is successful in creating an indifference to the varying acts of ruin and violence which could be reflective to the thought that some of these buildings were destroyed because not enough people cherished their history.
Galliard has stated that he feels romantic towards these buildings and disappointed and nostalgic towards the buildings demolitions that star in his work. In an interview with Mousse Magazine he said, “The urgency of this situation has driven my work further than simple fascination and has brought me closer to these unauthorized ruins as I might be one of the last to capture them.”
Katy Daiber
Sophomore Fine Arts Studio Art History
Liz Trapp
Paper one, Identity Artist Research
September 28, 2016
Robert Rauschenberg's shirt installations show how clothing highlights the act of constructing our identities, my work similarly contemplates how clothing reflects personal history. Robert Rauschenberg’s “The ¼ Mile or 2 Furlong Piece” (Detail) is a mixed media work in progress from 1981: two collages of his childhood shirts that his mother handmade. ( Kotz 50) They appear flat as if they are paintings which contrasts with Rauschenberg’s combines. This work in progress detail is described later in the book, Rauschenberg/ Art and Life as, “an arrangement of colorful long-sleeve shirts - laminated onto plywood and placed directly on the wall - appears ready to take flight.” (Kotz 259)
The first installation is two tan button-up shirts. They appear dirty and worn, which reflects Rauschenberg’s rural Texan upbringing through their rural tone and pattern. The left one is checkered and facing upside down. Whereas, the other shirt, a tan striped one with red rectangles, is horizontal collar is connected to the button seam of the checkered shirt. They appear haphazard, each with one arm dangling to the side. The left is pointed down in a nose dive while the other seems to be kissing or biting the other as if to personify the action of his homeland.
The second installation is of three shirts. The middle is primary red. It is facing down in the shape of an upside down skirt. The bright hue can be compared to blood or reminiscent of romance. Bleeding over to the left shirt, a little of the red seeps onto the beige button up. This one is facing the left and is masked with a range of grayed sea hues with smooth brush strokes that follow the pattern of seams and wrinkles. The fact that Rauschenberg created a neutral shirt to calm the bright red hue of the middle, speaks to the juxtaposition of chaos and order. For example, the right arm of the beige shirt is sticking straight up, like a warning flag.
The right shirt, which is white in color and facing the correct way although we view it from the back, tries to restore innocence in the installation. But the bottom left corner and left sleeve overlap with the red shirt. Only the white shirt’s corner appears transparent enough for the red to shine through just a few tints lighter. This light red appears again on the far right side of the piece as dripping paint on the white shirt, showing that an emotional trauma can bleed through an attempted cover up.
Clothes can represent figure because they are the absence of figure. Used clothing carries a history translating into questioning who wore these clothes, where have they been, and what happened in them. Clothing can also represent gender and sexual identity. Our fashion reflects how we choose to display ourselves, and our clothes change as we grow and age. Shelter for our bodies, but when clothes are displayed alone, it can highlight the nudity of the displaced person who is missing from the portrait.
According to Art Historian, Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg scrapy upbringing influenced his art making. Milton Rauschenberg, later known as Robert Rauschenberg, grew up in Port Arthur, Texas during the Depression. (Kotz 49) Similar to the majority of the community at this period of time, the Rauschenberg's’ were a poor, working class family. His frugal mother made sure nothing was ever thrown away, but reused and refashioned. Growing up in hand-me-downs, Dora Rauschenberg learned to sew early on and continued to sew for her family and the neighbors. She handmade Milton’s clothes throughout his childhood; collage shirts, pieced together with scraps of fabric. (Kimmelman 2005) “...Rauschenberg remembers that she was famous in Port Arthur for arranging her paper patterns on the fabric so tightly that not an inch of cloth was wasted. “That’s where I learned to collage,” he said.” (Kotz 49)
As a child, Milton was embarrassed of his handmade clothes because they stood out from his classmate’s store-bought attire. (Kotz 49) “He asked for and received a store-bought shirt for his high school graduation present, the very first in his young life.” (“Robert”)But on the other hand, he was thankful and appreciative of the effort his mother made to clothe him. (Kotz 49)
His mother’s craft later influenced his work. In a work in progress detail of Rauschenberg’s “The ¼ Mile or 2 Furlong Piece” 1981, he collaged and painted the handmade shirts he once wore. (Kotz 50) Basically a one-painting retrospective, Rauschenberg incorporated images from his friends, travels, and past into his largest art piece. “He said. “I consider [the painting] my treat, my hobby, something I work on at my will, whenever I have time and feel like it.”” (Kotz 255)
In fact, Rauschenberg tirelessly worked on the “¼ Mile” for seventeen years, continuing to add and revise from 1981 to 1998. During the creation process, he commented that he may never finish the piece, and that he might continue to add to it until it reached several miles. (Kotz 263) But in the end, this 1000 foot piece included 190 parts collaged of his combines, paintings, “cardboards”, and personal photographs. This resulted in one of his most important works as well as a diary-like autobiography. (Jing)
Rauschenberg’s hard work and ability to create art that was personal and relatable lead to his rapid success. In 1987, over seven hundred feet of the “First Furlong” was exhibited at The Met for an entire year. (Kotz 255) To commemorate the honor, William Lieberman described Rauschenberg’s piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, “[As a] scaled-up scroll that examines the artist’s vision of his art and his world, extending the parameters of traditional painting.” (Kotz 258)
At the exhibition opening, Dora Rauschenberg came and supported her son as well as to see her own portrait hanging in the MET. “Standing in front of the wall of flying shirts, she said, “Just look at those shirts. I recognize some of them. Wish I had a nickel for every buttonhole I’ve sewn on...Isn’t it something how he can see the beauty in almost anything?” (Kotz 263)
Similarly, Kaarina Kaikkonen, a Finnish artist, also uses clothing - mostly men’s button up shirts - as sculptures and installations. She often hangs them from clotheslines in a location-based sculpture that transforms urban landscapes. Suspending these men’s shirts in high traffic areas calls attention to the fact that women are associated with the privacy of the domicile, while also referencing how easily these clothes can be disrupted or destroyed. The comparison of the fragility and impermanence of clothes to humans. Our basic need for shelter and clothing affects everyone in the past as well as the future. Clothes are familiar and relatable, but also intimate because our clothes reflect our conscious decisions to express our gender identity. ("Kaarina”)
When I was researching artists, I realized that I was drawn to female artists creating work about gender as identity. I also was reading a book about Robert Rauschenberg and when I saw the work in progress shot, it inspired my work immediately.
When I was younger, my parents made everything from the curtains in the living room to the dollhouse I played with. My mother sewed the dresses I wore everyday as well as costumes for play and halloween. At the time, I enjoyed the fact they handmade my things because I thought that my parents could make anything, and I liked them just as much as my friends and thier store-bought barbies. Like Rauschenberg, this inspired my artmaking and collaging.
Both Rauschenberg and my artwork include painted and collaged personal clothing. Similarly, the clothes we used symbolized a part of our past that was possibly embarrassing but impacted our art career. Whereas, Rauschenberg used handmade clothes from his childhood, I painted a pair of underwear to resemble those I was raped in.
Underclothes are intimate and vulnerable vehicles for work. I took a pair of underwear that I had actually worn the day before I started my piece, and I created performance art via livestream. For over two hours, I sewed the underwear into the a painted canvas with deliberate stitches. The struggle of piercing the fabric and stiff canvas repeatedly with the needle and pulling it through acted as a metaphor for sexual assault. The thick red embroidery thread I used also represented blood as well as the violence. Sewing has a history of a feminine task, but it also acts as an attempt to repair fabric that is torn or injured. This is why I use a lot of sewing in my work, which is often created in a cycle of destruction and rehabilitation.
After I was raped, I washed and sewed up the blue underwear with white umbrellas and continued to wear them because I wanted to pretend that nothing had happened but eventually everything unraveled.
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