Category Archives: Art

Intersection of Perfomance and Art and Performance Art

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Why pay more for a concert when you can enjoy crystal clear music in the comfort of your own home? Anyone who has ever been to a concert, mosh, or other appearance of a favorite artist will tell you the experience is everything. The concert is an entirely different product than the music recording; the musician truly becomes an artist since she works with visual as well as sound media. Such is the case with a brilliant piece by the brilliant Amanda Palmer. Watching this video, I hope you’ll notice it is not your average straight song variety. She uses Gaga’s Bad Romance in a satirical performance which comments on Gaga herself as well as performance art in general. The fact that the song is not hers only emphasizes the other elements of the show that she had to plan and create. The choreography, wardrobe, sequencing, and original spoken parts are all products of Palmer, and come together to create a unique experience which is entirely hers. In this way, live performances would operate just like books under a copyright.

a case study (more photography)

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well I seem to be on a photography binge today. Anyway here is a link to an interesting case of copyright violation in which one person photoshopped a previously existing photo submitted it to a contest and ended up winning.

the original picture carried a creative commons license but required attribution for distribution and the original photographer was never contacted or given proper credit. while the contest did require that “all submitted work be 100% original”  they ended up deciding that the original had been edited enough to qualify as a separate entity. while the manipulation was somewhat extensive (he changed the black circles to squares) since the real world consequences of this particular case have already been decided I’m curious to hear what everyone thinks about how this case would be settled legally.

Ethics of street photography (also copyright)

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street photography is exactly what it sounds like taking portraits of people on the street. here is an example.

Ethically there is some debate in the artistic community as to wether if some one asks you not to take their portrait you are obliged to delete it. common courtesy would dictate that you should delete the picture out of respect for your subjects wishes. However because art is protected under the law and if the work is culturally valuable many photographers feel they do not need to follow common courtesy. Recently I read this article. while this article argued the same points I just made it did make me think. one of the key points of the article is educating the public about what you are doing. several years ago I took a photo of two homeless men smoking something (i think it was crack) in a park in new york. they freaked out and left (I think they thought I was a cop or something) now I wish I had approached them and told them what I was doing instead of freaking them out.

As far as our class is concerned how does this factor legally into the ownership of the portrait. Lets assume that a photographer has taken your picture without your knowledge and you only find out about it several months after the fact when you see the picture online and the photographer has made  a  load of money. Technically the photographer owns the rights to the image and is completely in the clear legally. However does this not feel like a violation of copyright law? If you as a person can’t claim the right to your own image that seems to be a HUGE flaw in the copyright laws of the art world.

Copyright and the picture-less Art History Book

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In class when we were looking at the book Professor Phillips authored and all of the images that he had cleared I started to think about all of the image in my art history textbook. Do the publishers have to clear every image? In fact, I found this article about an art school that was forcing students to buy an image-less textbook for $180. The publishers of the textbook said that if they aquired all of the image rights the book would cost $800.An excerpt from the pictureless textbook:

Books and Art

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On Tuesday I was particularly interested in the version of Dracula the library had for us. The find of the original manuscript was interesting to say the least but what caught my attention were the images that accompanied the book. The Images were striking but they reminded me of Nosferatu, FW Mernau’s 1920 film based on Dracula. (its also by far one of the more accurate adaptations of Dracula)  Because the images were added to the text so far in time after the publication one has to wonder how much other work has influenced the artist and how has that changed a viewers perspective?

Present Shock

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In my sociology class we are reading a book called: PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now, wherein Rushkoff introduces the phenomenon of presentism. Rushkoff argues that we no longer have a sense of a future, of goals, of direction at all. We have a completely new relationship to time; we live in an always-on “now,” where the priorities of this moment seem to be everything. He talks about how in our current culture we have learn to distinguish between data flows (like Twitter) that can only be dipped into, and data storage (like books and emails) that can be fully consumed. The artist books seemed to be a step backward from this technological progression which was refreshing. Instead of perhaps blogging about their interpretations of a book or poem these artists were able to use their ideas to make a new book form.

The was something to say about the tactile quality of many of the books. I felt as though I really had to immerse myself in the books because I wanted to fully understand what they were all about. As opposed to my traditional scanning on a webpage or quick view of a momentary status or tweet.

Lab Assignment: Alphabet Introduction

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I was most impressed by the introduction to this video.  It begins by showing an average city and zooms in on all their signs and posters.  Then an old man appears in a park talking about how letters are used in daily life.  After being partially enticed by the thought of the numerous uses of letters, at 1:02 he states, “Our lives are ruled by words” and then his name appears.  That moment was more climactic and shocking than i thought a 1970s video about the alphabet could ever be.  he then states “words made up by those 26 symbols, which are the letters of our alphabet” to demonstrate how all of the uses of words in daily life he just stated are all symbolized through only 26 letters.

 

Lab Assignment

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For today’s lab assignment, I watched the documentary The Making of a Renaissance Book.  While the demonstration in the Experimental Printmaking Institute made me more appreciative of the hard work that goes into printing, this documentary enhanced that feeling of appreciation immensely.  The documentary shows many clips of artists creating the individual letters of the typecast for printing by hand.  From setting the mold to carving the letters, these jobs took an enormous amount of technical skill and artistry that I was previously unaware of.

The filmmaker did an excellent job of portraying these artists as real people.  Many of the shots focused on the artist’s hands as they were working, but the filmmaker also made sure to focus on the faces of the artists as well.  The documentary also included diagrams of the various objects used in printing that explained the parts of those objects.  This aspect of the film helped demonstrate how these objects worked and arouse even more appreciation for these artists and engineers of book history.

Lorenz, You Have Given Me a Mighty Burden

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To begin, I must first say that this is one adorable essay.

When I first heard the phrase “artists’ books,” I thought that they would be a portfolio or journal of an artist’s work, like a series. However, after our time with them on Tuesday, I came to a better definition which reflects the first one given by Lorenz in her article. Artists’ books are really just another artists’ work. It is a piece of art, a stand alone piece. Though I would love to call whatever new craze as art, I was skeptical for once in my life about these books. They are not, in my opinion, works derived entirely by the artist alone. They are parodies, plays, and mutilations of former books. While I would still grant them their status as parody, the uniqueness of their creation seems blurred. Then again, that is essentially what art does. It comments on everything, including the history of art.

 

Altered Books

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I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday’s presentation in the library.  Every work we looked at was interesting and unique in its own way.  I was especially intrigued by the altered book on the last tabled titled Le Corbusier and Me.  This was an altered book, where the author takes a preexisting book and physically changes the book in some way to create a new work.  The author of Le Corbusier and Me cut portions out of the pictures of Le Corbusier’s art and architecture to give readers a new perspective on Le Corbusier’s works.  I was reminded by the book Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (the author famous for Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).  I absolutely loved Tree of Codes .  I read the book that it was altered from as well and found the connections (and lack thereof) incredibly interesting.

This article contains images of more altered books. They’re really cool works of art as well as different and interesting interpretations of texts that we may not think of.