VIII Simposio de Historia del Arte: Arte y medio(s) en la historia contemporánea del arte

El video, la fotografía y el cine han tenido un papel clave tanto en la definición de nuevos desafíos metodológicos, analíticos o teóricos para la historia del arte, como en la reformulación crítica de nociones y modelos modernistas de la especificidad de los medios, y en la inevitable expansión de las nociones de historia y arte para dar cuenta de nuevas relaciones prácticas y teóricas en arte y medios. El VIII Simposio de Historia del Arte ha invitado a la reflexión y discusión sobre dichos desafíos, reformulaciones y expansiones, teniendo como referentes tres problemáticas que definen un espacio metodológico y conceptual en el cual se ubican las conferencias y las ponencias participantes.

 

1. Rosalind Krauss publicó en el año 2000 un controversial ensayo para el cual adoptó el título de la película Un viaje en el mar del norte, dirigida y producida por Marcel Broodthaers en 1973. Allí reformuló la discusión modernista sobre el medio en respuesta al surgimiento del video en los años sesenta. Ella propuso una noción post-medial entendida en términos de estructuras de soporte compuestas por elementos “diferenciales” y autodiferenciadores (vg. el celuloide, la cámara, el proyector y la pantalla de cine), y en términos de las diversas posibilidades de interacciones entre dichos componentes. Por su parte, Carol Armstrong ha propuesto una interpretación feminista de la “marca puntillista” de Georges Seurat y en términos de lo que su actual proyecto de publicación recoje bajo la idea de una “compleja matriz de materiales y materialidades interrelacionadas”, así como de elementos corporales, táctiles, y generativos. En esta línea, el Simposio propone la discusión y reflexión sobre obras de arte y las prácticas artísticas desde perspectivas que enfatizan la materialidad y la creación dentro de condiciones y dinámicas de interrelación entre diferentes medios artísticos o de interacción entre los aparentes “elementos de autodiferenciación” de un medio artístico.

 

2. En su libro Between Film, Video and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age (2016), Ji Hoon Kim ha mostrado que la especificidad del medio y la propuesta de Krauss difícilmente ayudan a estudiar obras de arte que utilizan otros dispositivos de exposición y plataformas para “escudriñar la complejidad material y técnica del cine”. Por su parte, en su libro Between the Black Box and the White Cube (2014), Andrew Uroskie evidencia cómo los artistas de los años cincuenta y sesenta usaron la escultura y otros medios para “abordar aspectos fundamentales de la experiencia cinematográfica”. Él propone que los artistas y el público asumieron el cine menos en términos de “una ontología de la forma material” y más en términos de “la historicidad contingente de la elaboración cultural de esa forma” y los regímenes en los que el cine tenía lugar. En esta dirección, la segunda problemática versa sobre el modo como la producción y la recepción de obras de arte tiene lugar en términos de regímenes de percepción y comunicación, y su relación con la hibridación de los medios.

 

3. En 1990, Raymond Bellour publicó su referencial obra L’Entre-Images: Photo Cinéma Vidéo. Él argumentó allí que los artefactos de video, electrónicos y digitales no disolvieron el cine ni sus estructuras, sino que habilitaron su desarrollo al tiempo que impulsaron la tarea de reexaminar la relación entre los nuevos medios y los antiguos. Esta tarea ha sido asumida y reformulada por la “arqueología de los medios”, bien sea en la línea histórica desarrollada por Siegfried Zielinsky, o en la línea ontológica impulsada por Friedrich Kittler, quien propuso que los medios son tecnologías activas y mecanismos de inscripción de su propia arqueología. Por su parte, Ina Blom ha combinado la historia del arte y la arqueo-ontología Kittleriana a fin de proponer una “autobiografía” del videoarte que dé cuenta de “la vida y los tiempos de una tecnología de la memoria”. Atendiendo a estas posibilidades ‘entre’ imágenes y medios, el Simposio propone pensar e interpretar las obras de arte y las prácticas artísticas en términos de conjunciones de la historia del arte y de la tecnología, y en diálogo con una arqueología que evalúe y reexamine críticamente los retos históricos y ontológicos de los nuevos medios y las intricadas dinámicas entre nuevos y viejos medios.

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Keynote speakers:

Programación

 

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Resúmenes

MIÉRCOLES 24 DE OCTUBRE

 

Conferencia Inaugural

9:00 a.m. – 10:20 a.m. – Auditorio Lleras

 

Medium Matrix materiality: A feminist perspective

Carol Armstrong, Yale University

 

I will begin by laying out some propositions for a new consideration of the old concept of “medium-specificity.” Taking issue with the essentialist view of the question famously espoused by Clement Greenberg in the 1940s and fifties–namely, that the “arts,” principally that of painting, should be “hunted back to their mediums, and there … isolated, concentrated and defined,” each as “unique and strictly itself,” thereby achieving            “purity and a radical delimitation,” the “willing acceptance of the limitations of the medium of the specific art”–my aim is to conceptualize both “medium” and “specificity” differently. Far from giving up the importance that Greenberg ascribed to the “medium” and its “opacity,” however, I wish to argue for a pluralist, border-crossing, open-ended conception of “medium-specificity” that is better suited to our post-modernist moment.

The propositions that I wish to lay out for such a conception of “medium” are as follows. The first proposition is that any such conception should be practice-specific, and understood from the ground up rather than from the top down: which is to say that it should be derived from the practice of artists rather than from abstract principles laid down by philosophers and philosophically-minded critics and historians. The second proposition is that the concept of “medium” should be oriented towards specific potentialities rather than limitations, and therefore generative rather than reductive, as well as emergent and provisional rather than fixed and teleological in its outlines. The third proposition is that this notion of “medium” should be directed towards intermedial dialogue rather than closed off from it. The fourth is that the history of the discourse of medium-specificity be taken into account in this understanding of it.       The fifth and final proposition is that the “medium” is mother to the meaning of the work of art, its body and its soul.

The feminist underpinnings and consequences of this understanding of “medium” are both practical and theoretical. The choice of artists through which to explore the problem, also provisional at this point, speaks to the practical side of the feminism of this proposal about “medium-specificity”: Helen Frankenthaler for painting; Eva Hesse for sculpture; Anni Albers and Sonia Delaunay for textile art; Ellen Gallagher and Hannah Höch for collage and mixed-media work; Mary Cassatt for printmaking; Anna Atkins for drawing; Zoe Leonard for photography; Jane Campion and Sally Potter for film; Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf for the novel; Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop for poetry; Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and Diamanda Galas for song; Loïe Fuller, Martha Graham and Pina Bausch for dance. All drawn from the 19th century up to the present moment, they are also all women, chosen not only for their sex/gender, but also for richness and power of their work.         As for the theoretical side of the feminism of this project, it is derived from the maternal etymologies of the twin concepts of “matrix” and “matter,” which shall be linked to “medium,” but is also to be distinguished from the theory of the “matrixial” outlined by Bracha Ettinger.

 

Sesión Pintura, Cine y Televisión

Miércoles 24

10:40 a.m. – 11:59 a.m. – Auditorio ML-C

 

You Ought to be in Pictures

Katherine E. Manthorne (Graduate Center CUNY, NY)

 

In 1934 writer and art collector Gertrude Stein claimed that she recognized, retrospectively, that her writing had been “doing what the cinema was doing,” and she acknowledged film as seminal to this moment: I cannot repeat this too often any one is of one’s period and this our period was undoubtedly the period of cinema and series production. And each of us in our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing.

These connections were symptomatic of this era. The leading film journal entitled Close Up featured her work beginning in its first year (it ran from 1927 to 1933), when it published her portrait “Mrs. Emerson” in the same issue with an essay by artist Man Ray about his experimental film Emak Bakia. The proximity of their work in print underscores the interrelationship between modern art, poetry and cinema, and prompts us to seek further links among them.

From the time that moving images appeared in the mid-1890s they occupied a common historical ground with modern art. While Joseph Cornell captured not only Greta Garbo, but also Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr and other female stars in his shallow relief works, painter Charles Sheeler collaborated with photographer Paul Strand on the art film Manhattan (1920) and painter Edward Hopper went on what he called “movie binges” that culminated in canvases like New York Movie (1939). This, however, is only the tip of the art historical iceberg.

Artists of this generation– those born in the 1870s and 1880s – grew up in tandem with early cinema; they viewed movies, and created art that in diverse ways responded to the pictures flickering on the screen. Art and film historians, however, have yet to account fully for this dynamic. It is necessary to cut across media boundaries to analyze fine art against the emergence of film and to establish this engagement as seminal for the artists who witnessed film’s evolution from sideshow curiosity to major art form. These cross-overs occurred at key junctures when movies changed radically and in parallel with concomitant shifts in thinking about art making, including not only what a picture means but also how it means.

The silent era is an especially dynamic moment to explore this art-film dialogue, when the moving picture medium was still finding its way, borrowing from other fields and experimenting with multiple forms and technologies. Before D.W. Griffith decamped to California and established a nascent Hollywood, New York City and Chicago were major sites of movie making. Given that these cities were also meccas for visual artists, it is not surprising that cross-media professional and personal relationships soon blossomed. Painters and sculptors worked as film extras, designed sets, and frequently socialized with the movie cameramen they encountered on the urban streets. Still photographers tried their hands at movie production and moviemakers took instruction in fine art. Artists unveiled the secrets of their profession on film, making movies that showed them drawing or sculpting. Early bio-pics featured artists such as Rembrandt. As movies became increasingly lucrative, those in the industry used their newfound wealth to commission artworks and cultivate collections. These inter-media interactions enriched both sides, only to be curtailed as the studio system and industry professionalization became increasingly dominant after World War II.

My paper You Ought to be in Pictures excavates artists who from the very “invention” of cinema in the 1890s engaged seriously with the medium and produced images that addressed that dialogue in a variety of ways, and provides the foundation for understanding post-1945 aesthetic developments.

 

Late-Modernist Painting and the Televisual: A Lesson in Mid-Century Embodiment

Christa Noel Robins ( University of Virginia, Charlottesville)

 

In this conference I reconsider the question of embodiment in the late-modernist paintings of Morris Louis, Sam Gilliam and Kenneth Noland. While such paintings have most often been described as exemplifying a disembodied theory of modernist opticality, I demonstrate that paintings such as Noland’s Turnsole (1961), Louis’s Alpha Tau (1961) and Gilliam’s Red April (1970) should instead be seen to engage real, historically situated bodies in a manner that is indicative of important technological shifts in mid-twentiethcentury representational practices. In order to understand these optical paintings as enacting what Joan Copjec termed an “embodied vision,” I argue that it is necessary to view them in the context of the “televisual.” Situating these paintings within such a context further allows me to demonstrate that late-modernist painting may have more in common with the early video-installations of artists such as Dan Graham, Lynda Benglis and Joan Jonas, who used the televisual to return us to our bodies, than they have with Clement Greenberg’s and Michael Fried’s theory of opticality.

The televisual is legible in late-modernist painting in relation to two formal innovations specific to 1960s modernist painting: first, in its emphasis on what I term the phenomenology of viewership and, second, in the wide-spread use of serial structure in late-modernist abstraction. The phenomenology of viewership is signaled in these paintings’ emphatic concern with the processes, not just of looking, but of being looked at—an experience that Noland claimed he hoped his paintings would evoke by hailing the viewer with their “pulsing colors” and expansive compositions. This emphasis on the dynamics of looking recalls not only the body- centered environments constructed by Jonas’s and Graham’s video installations, but also Marshal McLuhan’s description of the televisual as demanding a “sensuous participation” of its viewers.

These paintings are further embedded in the televisual, I explain, in their almost uniform embrace of serial structure. While in 1971 Rosalind Krauss related the rise of seriality in modernist painting to the mechanical reproduction of documentary photography, I argue that these paintings are better related to the televisual in their distension of the viewing experience across multiple sites. As such, serial structure should not be seen to diminish the impact of abstract painting—as, for example, the image is diminished through mechanical reproduction. Rather the distanciation enacted through seriality is capable of demonstrating to the viewer her own “deep involvement” (to quote McLuhan once again) in the completion of the pictorial whole. I explain this deep involvement by looking at specific media events, such as the Kennedy assassination, which help to illustrate the imbrication of bodies and screens in sixties televisual experience. If we can no longer detect the televisual in the “post Pollock,” “post painterly” abstractions of the mid-sixties, I conclude, it as much due to the failed promises of the televisual—promises that I explain are made apparent in the video installations of the sixties and seventies—as it is to our failed reading of late-modernist paintings and the concept of medium specificity, with which it is most meaningfully accessed. Indeed, our almost universal transition from analog to digital television only confirms that we have made of the televisual little more than an image, just as our increasingly digital interactions with post-painterly abstraction risks reducing it to that all-too- familiar optical painting that is produced within the late-modernist narrative—which is to say, it is returned to being no more than a mere picture.

 

Sesión Pintura expandida y fotografía

Miércoles 24

2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. – Auditorio ML-C

 

Temporalities: what happened with Duchamp and Fotodinamismo?

Filippo De Tomasi (Universidad NOVA de Lisboa, Lisboa)

 

The conference reflects on the temporal aspect of photography in the artistic production at the beginning of the twentieth century. The main purpose is to propose a reformulation of the concept of temporality through a hybrid and multimedia dimension. In this sense, the analysis starts form two recent considerations. On the one hand, Philippe Dubois recognizes that it is impossible to distinguish the different types of time between photography and cinema, since they are subject to an “elasticization” process (Dubois 2016). On the other hand, Terry Smith analyses contemporary artworks with the perspective of “co-temporality”, evidencing how many artists reached a “highly elaborated engagement with temporal multiplicity” (Cohen and Streitberger 2016, 28). Hence, he states that several types of temporalities exist in one work. These two theoretical perspectives allow us to reconsider photographic temporality in its values of multiplicity and co-presence: if in an artwork there is more than one temporality, it is not possible to find differences between the photographic and the cinematographic times. Following this dimension in an archaeological perspective, the text aims to analyse different aspect of Duchamp’s early paintings and the futurist artworks. The academic literature is sceptical about approaching the two together – as Marcel Duchamp declared, his interest was closer to cubism than the “futurism interest of suggesting the movement” (Duchamp apud A. Schwarz 2000, 20). However, in both approaches it is possible to find a leitmotiv not in the movement, but in the research on Time. Bearing in mind this common ground, the interest of the French artist is outlined by a dimension linked to the space and related to the concept of Time (Grazioli 2017, 14). Likewise, the futurist production appears mainly structured on the concept of dynamism. However, there is a small group named Fotodinamismo futurista, that develops a new perspective of research. This group, formed by two of the Bragaglia brothers – Antonio Giulio and Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia – reconsiders the idea of dynamism associated to the photographic production, but their attention is focused also on the temporal aspect of the artwork. Though Bergson’s approach on time and memory, Fotodinamismo creates images in which the idea of temporality is “elasticized”, introducing a dimension multi- and co-temporal.

However, how these multi-temporalities in a single work could be perceived? Should they be understood as merely related to the movement? Or is co-temporality one of the aspects that characterizes photography? It tries to answer to these questions developing a research on the idea of temporality, co-temporality and medial “elasticization” in the work of Duchamp and Fotodinamismo.

 

El concepto de  Pintura no albergada y su práctica en la Escuela de Arquitectura de Valparaíso durante la década de 1970

Magdalena Dardel Coronado (Universidad de los Andes, Santiago de Chile)

 

La Escuela de Arquitectura de Valparaíso, fundada y liderada en 1952 por el arquitecto Alberto Cruz y el poeta Godofredo Iommi junto a un grupo de otros seis artistas y arquitectos, fue conocida durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX por sus radicales ejercicios pedagógicos que proponían una comprensión de la arquitectura a partir de un criterio poético de apropiación del espacio. En ese contexto, los profesores promovieron la interdisciplinareidad con las artes visuales en ejercicios entonces novedosos como los actos poéticos, los talleres de experimentación artística con los estudiantes y los viajes por el continente americano, realizando obras pictóricas y escultóricas que hacían dialogar con el paisaje.

El pintor y arquitecto Francisco Méndez, miembro del grupo fundador, realizó en 1979 el curso “Pintura no albergada”, donde buscó cuestionar los medios tradicionales de la pintura a través de un abandono paulatino de la superficie pictórica. Estos ejercicios se insertan dentro de una trayectoria mayor en donde el artista, de tendencia no figurativa, realizó murales, experiencias al aire libre, trabajo con cometas y figuras móviles y otras acciones en donde la pintura estuviera definida por el desprendimiento del soporte y, a la vez, estableciera una relación con el entorno. De este modo, Méndez cuestionaba la especificidad del medio y se orientaba a una obra que fuera pensada para el lugar donde había sido concebida. Si bien el concepto “Pintura no albergada” fue formulado por el artista en 1979, cuando realizó Taller con ese nombre, las experiencias en torno al cuestionamiento del medio comenzaron con una serie de murales abstractos que había llevado a cabo con sus estudiantes entre 1969 y 1973 en Valparaíso, continuaron con los ejercicios de Pintura no albergada realizados en Ciudad Abierta y en travesías hechas en Chile y Sudamérica y tuvieron un último momento cuando el pintor lideró el proyecto Museo a Cielo Abierto de Valparaíso entre 1991 y 1992. Pese a su diversidad, estas propuestas estuvieron caracterizadas por la supresión de los límites y la cuestionamiento del medio, guardando un estrecho vínculo con la noción de campo expandido definida por Rosalind Krauss en 1979, mismo año del Taller de objetos móviles realizado en Ciudad Abierta.

En esta ponencia se buscará poner en relación estas experiencias pictóricas con la teoría de Krauss, texto que el escultor argentino Claudio Girola, también miembro del grupo fundador, difundió en la Escuela y vinculó a su trabajo. Proponemos que Méndez logró adaptar el planteo de la historiadora norteamericana a su obra, sugiriendo un análisis de la pintura que superara la especificidad medial para relacionar con el entorno gracias a un soporte ya no bidimensional y rígido, sino abierto y ambiguo.

 

Sesión Fotografía, otras materializaciones

Miércoles 24

3:40 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. – Auditorio ML-C

 

Petrifying Photography, Animating Sculpture: From François Willème’s Photosculpture to Bruce Nauman’s Contrapposto Series

Joanna Fiduccia (Reed College, Portland)

Histories of the relationship between photography and sculpture generally reside in one of two camps: technical accounts that discuss photography as sculpture’s handmaiden, documenting and disseminating it, and analogical models concerned with conceptual similarities between the mediums. This paper merges these two discourses by turning to an early encounter of photography and sculpture: the invention of “photosculpture” in the 1860s by the French chronophotographer François Willème. Willème sought to automate the production of sculpture by enlisting photography to generate small portrait busts and statuettes. Willème constructed a circular room whose circumference was equipped with a battalion of cameras that could be triggered simultaneously.

The client positioned herself on a short pedestal at the center of this room, whereupon a whistle was blown and all the camera shutters opened at once; the resulting exposures were then transposed with the aid of a pantograph onto a block of clay or wood, whose resulting saccades —not unlike the striations in early 3-D printing experiments— were then smoothed over by the sculptor’s hand. Willème’s ultimately unsuccessful bid to popularize the technique stressed the modernity of photosculpture as a sculptural practice, yet it was far more radical, and ultimately far more prescient, as a modeling procedure: neither sculpture nor photography, nor the sculpting of photography, it was suspended between the petrifying and animating impulses of these two mediums.

Willème’s schismatic chronophotography, unlike the far more familiar chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey or Albert Londe, did not seek to stitch together moments of time, but rather to suture together views in space. Alexander Galloway has observed that photosculpture suggests a precursor of 3-D animation based on an informatics modality rather than a cinematic modality: the profiles captured by photography become a data set, which can then be “modeled” in a different medium. Yet if this technology and its corresponding modality were available and commercialized in the 1860s, it remains a question why they were so quickly abandoned in favor of a cinematic model of chronophotography, only to reemerge in recent decades in computer modeling and cinematic special effects. I argue that the procedure of photosculpture, instead of sinking into oblivion, in fact migrated into the logic of modern sculpture. Drawing out the confluence of information and modeling in Willème’s invention, this paper then turns to Bruce Nauman’s early video work Walk with Contrapposto (1961), and immersive revisitation of the project, Contrapposto Studies (2015–16) to reveal the conjoined states of petrification and animation at one endpoint of recent sculpture.

 

Relay and Delay: A Photographic Paradigm

Heather Diack (University of Miami, Coral Gables)

 

Photography was the challenge of Conceptual art. Though largely untheorised as a medium in the early years of conceptualism, the built-in “impossibility” of the photographic document, as art historian John Roberts has remarked, effectively “destabilized conventional expectations about making and talking about art which remain the shared cognitive ground of advanced art today.” Building on this scholarship, my aim is to expose the theoretical implications of Conceptual art through the rubric of photography, in order to demonstrate how the threat photography poses to ontological security was crucial to Conceptual art’s challenge to any sense of certainty, be it modernist or otherwise.

Numerous art historians in the last decade have noted the widespread turn towards the scientific dimension and the bureaucratic potential of images and language in the 1960s. The integral relationship between this orientation and the photographic process deserve additional attention however. In fact, as a model, photography’s deep ambivalence has proved to be as influential as its suggested ‘evidence.’ My paper will discuss Mel Bochner’s early use of photography and how his clever disclosure of what he has called the “groundlessness” of photography refutes one of the most iconic and persistent claims of late Modernist art, namely that “what you see is what you see.” Through close analysis of his Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) (1967-1970) and his Measurements series (1968-1969), I draw connections to contemporaneous images circulating in the mass media and in popular culture, including the Zapruder film stills (1963) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), while tracing a trajectory towards the status of images in the post-internet era.

Evoking Hito Steyerl’s provocative concept of the “poor image” (2009), I address how photography is a medium that inevitably both shapes and degrades the image, ultimately opening the work of art onto new possibilities, including infinite and ambiguous iterations in other mediums including film, video, and performance. Moreover, acknowledging the paradoxically dependent and yet dismissive view of photography within early Conceptual art practices, I challenge the persistent historicization of Conceptual art as “dematerialization,” instead offering a more complex understanding of materiality and, by extension, medium.

 

JUEVES 25 DE OCTUBRE

 

Sesión Cine “puro” y Experimental

9:00 a.m. – 10:20 a.m. – Auditorio ML-C

 

From purity to Intermedia:  mobile color and absolute film in America

Pierre J. Pernuit (Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne)

 

The many color-light devices created by American artists —such as Stanton McDonald-Wright’s Color-Light-Machine, Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux, or even Charles Dockum’s Mobilux—form a trend in American art in which media-related stakes are central. What was called “Mobile Color” in the 1920s and 1930s corresponds to a series of plastic experiments by several artists who all shared a common claim: they had created a new medium of expression. Conceived both as the technological evolution of abstract art and as the purest form of cinema, Mobile Color –or what Thomas Wilfred called Lumia, the “Eighth art of light”1- acted as a parasite in the media ecology of modern America.

As Gene Youngblood accurately noted in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema2, Wilfred and the other experimenters in electric-light were forerunners of intermedia post-war environments. In pre-war America, the art of electric light was conceived by its creators as a solution to the technical limitations of new media such as photography and film, and as a technological improvement over traditional media such as painting or theatre. Implementing purity within the mechanisms of their machines, these artists saw light as an ephemeral and dematerialized medium, the right vehicle to continue the work of early abstract painters; abstraction required an abstract medium.

This conference discusses early intermedia practices in their relation to the mid-1920s debate on thespecificity of cinema. Rather than an archeology of the impurity of the medium, my aim is to discuss the interdependence of the rhetoric of medium specificity and intermedia practices.

Indeed, on both sides of the Atlantic, many critics and film-makers wrote that the essence of cinema was light in movement. This refusal to locate cinema’s specificity within the materiality of its dispositif —the use of celluloid— prompted many to see Mobile Color as the purest form of cinema. I will discuss the relation between the modernist quest for medium specificity and intermedia practices using Thomas Wilfred’s light recital at the 1925 Salon des Arts Décoratif in Paris, an event which took place right in the heart of the French debate on cinéma pur.

The idea that Mobile Color could be the technical solution for a Pure Cinema reveals an absurdity in the modernist quest for purity: reduced to its core, the medium becomes so pure that it ends up being another medium: Mobile Color, Lumia,or the hypothetical field of experiments Higgins called Intermedia. This paper is based on one chapter of my doctoral dissertation entitled In Media Res: Light as intermedia in American Art 1911-1952.

 

Películas experimentales de Andy Warhol y Hélio Oiticica

Tatiane de Oliveira Elías (Universidad Federal de Sta. María)

 

This conference aims to expound upon the different approaches to cinema taken by Andy Warhol and Hélio Oiticica. Andy Warhol and Hélio Oiticica were two very important artists who worked using two different media: art and film. Oiticica’s films were an artistic extension of his work, which began with his “Instalation Tropicalia”, and culminated in the installation “Quase Cinema”. Oiticica first started to work with film in the 1970s, while he lived in New York. Oiticica was inspired by the Warhol film aesthetic to make his own films. Warhol and Oiticica however, both produced a very different film aesthetic from their paintings – their films relate to the underground, experimental, queer, and expanded cinema categories. At the same time, Warhol had a variety of phases as a filmmaker which differed from Oiticica’s.  Warhol’s films are parodies of Hollywood, portraits, minimalistic films, and have a strong interest in sexual liberation, drugs, and transvestism. Some of Warhol’s themes, such as drugs and sexual liberation, are also found in Oiticica’s films. Warhol and Oiticica departed significantly from conventional film.

 

Sesión Cine Experimental

Jueves 25

10:40 a.m. – 11:59 a.m. – Auditorio ML-C

 

Ericka Beckman: Gaming and Dreamwork

Piper Marshall (Columbia University, NY)

 

In 1983, Ericka Beckman screened her first feature length film, You the Better, at the New York non-profit performance space The Kitchen as part of The New York Film Festival. Not half way through the thirty minute film the audience erupted in hisses, whistles, and hooting, which culminated with the viewers hurling their evening programs at the artist herself. In its initial reception, the film didn’t fare well. It fared no better with film critics. Instead of an arc delivered through dialogue, critics such as Armond White encountered characters who played and replayed a game that amounted simply to “repetition without effect.” “You the Better,” he wrote, “weakens and exhausts its own ideas and considerable technical élan.” Recurrence, for White, emptied the film, which mobilized “a centrifugal, live-action pinball game (and a soundtrack of SoHo cheerleaders)” to convey “a Tron-like metaphor for—no surprise— dehumanization and industrialization.”3 While the formal qualities of Beckman’s filmic work were observed, well-noted even, the innovative narrative drive remained relatively misunderstood. This is important, for the inability to appreciate the arc of Beckman’s project has impeded its broader critical and art historical reception.

However anecdotal, the reception of Beckman’s work in 1983 points to how a frustrated search for the properties of traditional filmic narrative occludes the contribution of the artist. As an artist only recently associated with “Pictures” and historically affiliated with CalArts “poststudio” at the outset of her career, Beckman is uniquely positioned to help us make sense of and mend these categories, thereby reconfiguring our understanding of the artistic codification in the 1970s and 80s.

In contrast to peers such as Cindy Sherman who received critical success for reference to mainstream Hollywood tropes without using film, Beckman and colleagues who deployed film, with the exception of the work of Jack Goldstein, would largely remain outside of the canon of artists associated with the group. Beckman permits us to stake out an alternative and extensive genealogy of Pictures, and its intersection with gaming, which encouraged Beckman to explore this while in dialogue with issues of techno-scientific determinism and cultural identity which would be concerns explored in the beginning of the next decade. Beckman’s work takes up the terms associated with Pictures (fixed subject position, suspended narrative, and return of representation) developed by Douglas Crimp and modifies their application to an unsung group of artists.

This paper addresses the first of Beckman’s Super-8 films, We Imitate; We Break Up, made between 1976 and 1978, when Beckman turned away from the readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein to focus on the writing of Jean Piaget. This paper argues that Beckman’s study allowed her to distill the filmic storyboard to a set of instructions similar to a scientific model where the film served as the proof. The Super-8 camera offered Beckman the capacity to layer into the film itself. With this feature Beckman assimilated and coordinated actions such as jumping, boxing, and chasing. Such synchronicity opens up questions as to how causality is conveyed to and internalized by viewers. This marked the beginning of Beckman utilizing the camera to develop a filmic language that opened onto the techniques of video gaming, prioritizing its modes over narrative.

Beckman’s search to deconstruct the teleological drive of cinematic narrative work and to expand the cultural possibilities of art offers a case study for us to re-examine the relationship between traditional cinema and gaming, the new imaging and entertainment of the 70’s. Such consideration analyzes how the reception of gaming intersects with cinema to alter and discipline the perception of its public.

 

Hunger and Shame: Physicality in Steve McQueen’s Film Form

Jamie Di Sarno (University of Buffalo)

 

The films, Hunger and Shame, directed by Steve McQueen exemplify the possibilities of adapting strategies of expanded cinema to fit the dominant cinema form of the movie theater. McQueen, who began his career as a video artist, frequently used phenomenological techniques to engage the viewer in a haptic and embodied manner. What has been little analyzed is the way in which McQueen has hybridized strategies of haptic viewing from the gallery format with film form. McQueen’s turn towards more popular reception of the cinema posed new challenges and thus required new methods in order to similarly effect the body of the viewer. When utilizing the standard cinematic apparatus, McQueen transferred strategies of expanded cinema to film form by emphasizing the actor as embodied performer and vacillating between real and fictive temporalities. It is critical, however, that this coalescing of strategies between various media served the purpose of posing highly political questions by directly implicating the viewer in the representations on screen. McQueen employed techniques of film form to heighten the viewer’s relationship to voyeurism and spectacle while alternatively, performative and real time action on screen offered a connection to the viewer’s own physicality. This vacillation disrupts passive spectatorship and serves to pitch the viewer into the self-consciousness of seeing and being seen. The films ultimately present an undermining of the fantasy in film by directly acknowledging and thus implicating the viewer’s role in the violence and representation on screen.

 

Sesión  Video: Poesía y cine por otros medios

Jueves 25

2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. – Auditorio ML-C

 

Poesía, video, y cibernética en In-pulso (1976-78) de Sandra Llano- Mejía

Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández (Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá)

 

Sandra Llano-Mejía  es considerada una de las pioneras del videoarte en Colombia, y mi intuición, como espero mostrar en la ponencia, es que con su obra In-pulso ha de ser reconocida como una de las pioneras de la videopoesía a nivel mundial. Y lo es en un sentido muy original toda vez que se desmarca de la autoridad del grafema y del signo lingüístico tan caros y omnipresentes en la práctica del poema literarios así como de las llamadas “video poesía”, el “poema video”, y la “poesía en video”. Parafraseando la idea que Pavle Levi propuso para reformular otros orígenes y desarrollos del cine vanguardista, identifico en la obra de Llano una apuesta neo-vanguardista en la que el poema no radica en las palabras y grafemas y por ello mismo no es una “máquina de palabras” como propusiera William Carlos Williams.

Despojándose del especificidad medial de la poesía, Llano-Mejía retoma elementos de la tradición poética antigua del yambo que Paul Claudel discutió en su Réflexions et Proposions sur le vers français (1928) y presentó bajo la idea de un “verso esencial y primordial” que es “anterior a las palabras mismas” y al que le es propio “cierta intensidad, cualidad y proporción de tensión”. Llano-Mejía retoma esa tradición y ofrece una obra que en diálogo con la nueva poesía beat persigue esa ruptura que por su parte Charles Olson propuso en1950 bajo la idea del verso proyectivo o abierto. Empleando el electrocardiograma y el sensor de respiración, y estableciendo una reformulación del feedback identificado y motivado por el uso del video desde finales de los años sesenta, encuentro en Llano-Mejía una poética cibernética según la cual, parafraseando a Olson, el poema es una circulación de energía.

En esta dirección, en la medida que su obra enfatiza en el cuerpo danzante, en el corazón y la respiración en vez del cerebro, Llano entronca en la tradición energética presente en el Elan vital de Henri Bergson, para quien “no es la razón la que es creativa, la que capta lo nuevo, las posibilidades, sino que el impulso vital es lo que nos permite crear”. Llano se desmarca de la tradición que Katherine Hayles identificara bajo la tendencia de la descorporización de la información; línea que se inaugura en la propuesta e interpretación matemática que Norbert Wiener hiciera de la Cibernética. Más bien se mueve en línea con la idea que Ina Blom recupera de la practica de video de los setentas y ochentas, y según la cual el video es también asociado a la vida biológica y ofrece una alternativa a las ansiedad por la plausible pérdida de la memoria que marcó la era computacional. Es significativo que si bien su trabajo recuerda la ‘poesía electrónica’ y performática de Paulo Bruscky (por ejemplo en su obras O Meu Cérebro Desenha Assim de 1976, y Registros de 1979), Llano no asume la máquina como instrumento, sino más bien como otro cuerpos con el que el suyo, como medios energético, dialoga y se encuentran en un mismo plano de inmanencia energético.

 

Cinema by Other(ed) Means: Harry Gamboa Jr.’s Early Video Work, Los Angeles, 1980s

George F. Flaherty (CLAVIS-Texas University, Houston)

 

In Cinema by Other Means (2012), Pavle Levi argues that “the [avant-garde] idea of cinema is not a function of the materials of film, but the other way around–the materials of film are a function of the idea of cinema.” The Chicano conceptual art collective ASCO based in Los Angeles infamously exercised this dematerialization of cinema with their “No Movies” series in the 1970s: spectacular film stills for non-existent films that they circulated through international mail art networks, and simultaneously embraced (racist) Hollywood and censured it. This presentation looks at the early video work of Harry Gamboa Jr., a leading member of ASCO, which he referred to as his “conceptual dramas,” and sought to operate on both the reality and the idea of mass media in dominant U.S. culture. The videos were quickly written, shot, and edited on a small budget for public access cable television in L.A., combining performance and installation techniques learned from his ASCO days.

In Imperfecto (1982), we meet an apparently schizophrenic street preacher held in an asylum. He is released by one incompetent institution—his care no longer profitable—only to encounter many more: family, friends, and the public. He seeks some version of social truth but no one engages him. The character appears to find expression (if not communion) as he paces and then dances on the streets downtown Los Angeles, ultimately succumbing to exhaustion—or intellectual impasse. Economic constraints and struggles with new technology contribute to the fuzzy, improvised look and feel of the video. Moreover, Gamboa echoes the “imperfect cinema” advocated by Cuban Julio García Espinosa in 1969, which put aside technical perfection and narrative resolution to show audiences that they live in a world that requires their active intervention. Irony and satire, which destabilize narrative and even representation, are central to Gamboa’s project.

This instability operates on the Anglo-liberal sympathies of documentary photography, the exclusion or stereotypes of mainstream mass media and, just as powerfully, the ethnic essentialism of the early Chicano Civil Rights Movement, with its attachments to the nuclear family, traditional gender roles, and heterosexuality. Gamboa’ “imperfect” videos trace his and his audiences’ process of making sense of illogic and absurdity of capitalist social reality that is presented as logic and moral certitude under the “(North) American Way of Life.”

 

Sesión Infiltraciones e Interacciones políticas

Jueves 25

3:40 – 5:00 p.m. – Auditorio ML-C

 

Video arte, publicidad y política: Ejercicios en infiltración audiovisual en los inicios de la transición chilena

Sebastían Vidal ( Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago de Chile)

 

Mi propuesta para el VIII Simposio de Historia del Arte consiste en analizar la contribución que se produjo desde el video arte a la Franja del NO, campaña política televisiva desarrollada para acabar por la vía electoral con la dictadura de Augusto Pinochet en 1988. Mi estudio sostiene que esta interacción operó como un ejercicio de infiltración cultural inédito no abordado con propiedad ni por la historia del arte ni la de los medios en Chile. Así, considero que con la Franja del NO –uno de los elementos visuales más representativos de la transición democrática– comenzó a dibujarse un patrón dinámico existente que combinaba intereses de orden político y social con motivos y recursos artísticos de avanzada, algunos de ellos desarrollados previamente en uno de los hitos más relevantes de video arte latinoamericano: el Festival franco-chileno de video arte (1981-1992). Esta imbricación, basada en elementos de la publicidad política y el video arte, trazó un camino original e híbrido no sólo para los publicistas –que lograron un impacto mediático inesperado en la campaña– sino que también para un grupo importante de video artistas que modelaron, a través de innovaciones audiovisuales, un ejercicio de transposición formal y simbólico al poder. Para ejemplificar lo anterior, me referiré en la presentación a dos casos. El primero de ellos es el del reconocido videoartista Juan Downey (1940-1993), quien desarrolla una pieza (NO, 1988) de forma exclusiva para la Franja del NO y que pese a su simple estructura integra de manera aguda una serie de cruces culturales y políticas de memoria derivados del sonido, la protesta social y la cultura Mapuche. El segundo caso corresponde al artista Juan Forch (1948- ) del cual presentaré tres piezas de su videografía.

La primera (Torre Eiffel, 1985) consistió en un video producido para el Festival francochileno y que alternaba una serie de sofisticaciones audiovisuales como el uso de compresores de video, ralentizaciones e incrustaciones con la lectura de un poema de Vicente Huidobro. La segunda (El palo y el paco, 1988) fue un video hecho para la Franja del NO compuesto por material de cámara recuperado por Forch de una protesta en el centro de Santiago y donde se combinan los mismos efectos mediante la denuncia a los aparatos represivos del Estado. El último caso corresponde a otra pieza de video arte hecha para el Festival franco- chileno llamado El video es redondo, 1990 y que criticaba las políticas de censura audiovisual heredadas por la dictadura en los primeros años de la transición democrática.

Esta presentación considera la profundización no sólo del análisis formal de estas integraciones, sino que también la apertura a la reflexión cultural sobre la cual el video arte ha operado disruptiva y silenciosamente dentro de la cultura de medios en Chile. Considero que al reconfigurar un posible proceso de filiaciones y redes históricas entre poéticas artísticas y formatos televisivos podemos acercarnos de manera más acabada a las complejidades iniciales que dieron cuenta de la consolidación de las políticas neoliberales heredadas de la dictadura en la transición chilena.

 

Investigating the Interplay of moving image and still photography in Faces Places (2017) by Agnès Varda and JR

Eleni Varmazi (Bahçesehir Üniversitesi, Estambul)

 

Taking the film under detailed examination and analysis the paper will look at the multilayered structure in which the director Agnès Varda, at age 88, expands the genre of documentary through her collaboration with the much younger then herself visual artist JR. JR, who is the initiator of the Inside Out project, is known for his large format black and white portraits which he then pastes in exterior spaces believing that the streets are “the largest gallery in the world”. In the film Agnès Varda and JR both guide and follow each other while travelling in JR’s Photobooth truck in rural France, meeting ordinary people, taking photographs of them and plastering them on their surroundings in gigantic dimensions. In that sense they are both working on their own medium, video and still photography. However, the result is a collaborative work documented in Faces Places. In the film both Varda and JR are shooting video themselves but they are also documented in their travels by multiple image and sound recordists. Out of what often seems to be a spontaneous work, Varda and her editor Maxime Pozzi-Garcia create a work that is vivid, lyrical, and inspiring.

The idiosyncratic documentary incorporates self-reflexivity, memories from Agnès Varda’s previous work, huge blow-ups of still photographs of ordinary people, sociopolitical issues, friendship, nostalgia for a fast disappearing France and of course art. All the above mingle in a most humanistic way at what is supposed to be the last film by Agnès Varda. Faces Places is both a very personal film but at the same time also a popular celebration of artisanal production, a reflection on human mortality, a support for workers’ solidarity and a study of the photographic arts.

However, beyond its humanistic character, the film also is an artwork that incorporates other artwork (that of the street photographer JR) investigating therefore the relationship between the two mediums (moving image and still photography), while at the same time it addresses the subject of culturally expanding the possibilities of these two mediums in order to communicate with a wider audience. Therefore, the film stands as an exceptional case study for artwork that emphasizes materiality and examines the interrelatedness between two art mediums.

 

VIERNES 26 DE OCTUBRE

 

Sesión Performance, medialidad y materialidad

9:00 a.m. – 10:20 a.m. – Auditorio ML-C

 

Performance entre medios: inmediatez, mediación y contemporaneidad

Juan Albarrán Diego (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid)

 

La performance es, sin duda, una de las tradiciones y modos de hacer que de una manera más consciente contribuyó a impugnar los relatos modernos acerca de la pureza de los medios artísticos. Su intermedialidad la situó en los margenes de los relatos de la historia del arte moderno hasta que, a finales de los años setenta, la historiadora británica RoseLee Goldberg publicó un influyente trabajo (Performance Art, 1979) que demostraba la centralidad de la performance en el desarrollo de las prácticas artísticas del siglo XX. Paradójicamente, esa recuperación historiográfica supuso también cierta institucionalización de una tradición que, al delimitar un conjunto heterogéneo de propuestas, comenzaba a nombrar un medio. No sin problemas, la performance se convertía en un medio artístico más que parecía definirse por su inmediatez, es decir, por su carácter no-mediado.

Esta propuesta de comunicación pretende explorar las contradicciones y ambivalencias que laten tras la institucionalización de la performance como medio desde los años setenta. Hoy la performance ocupa un lugar importante en el sistema internacional del arte. Museos, bienales e instituciones culturales necesitan proveer de nuevas experiencias a los espectadores: participar y sentir en directo más que contemplar obras del pasado.

El carácter supuestamente no-mediado (el liveness) de la performance parece responder a esa demanda experiencial. Sin embargo, resulta evidente que esa inmediatez —la naturaleza efímera que Goldberg reivindicaba para la performance— ha sido construida a través de diversos dispositivos de mediación. Por ejemplo, la documentalidad del vídeo y la fotografía —medios que se expandían con fuerza durante los sesenta y setenta—, en lugar de traicionar el ser efímero de la performance, ha contribuido a potenciar su inmediatez. Algo similar sucede con los discursos y prácticas curatoriales que, en los últimos años, han tratado de trasladar la fuerza fenomenológica de la performance a la sala de exposiciones.

Así pues, nuestra hipótesis de trabajo podría formularse como sigue: la inmediatez (el carácter no-mediado) de la performance (como medio) ha sido construida y reforzada en diálogo con otros dispositivos de mediación (fotografía, vídeo, publicaciones, displays expositivos, etc.). Explorar el modo en que los medios generan la inmediatez de la performance puede ayudarnos a comprender algunas de las dinámicas dominantes en la cultura contemporánea, especialmente si tenemos en cuenta que su temporalidad e hibridez se han convertido en elementos constitutivos de nuestra contemporaneidad.

 

Material Matters: Artists’ Mediums as Signifiers of Meaning

Melanie Herzog (Edgewood College) y Susan Messer (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

 

This presentation focuses on the work of women artists from the mid-twentieth century to the present who deliberately choose to utilize materials that resonate with personal, social, and cultural significance. These materials, charged with semiotic potential, are thus central to the interpretation and meaning of the work. In particular, we explore artists’ use of culturally laden substances and processes that materially embody individual and collective history, bodily experience and memory, and the raced and gendered histories of art mediums and practices. Quite a few feminist scholars have attended to the historically gendered signification of materials such as fiber and its use by contemporary feminist artists to give voice to women’s experiences. We acknowledge this work and extend it to investigate artists’ use of mediums that are saturated with culturally specific references and historical reverberations, imbricating into an analysis of gender and materials an investigation of ways in which artists variously lay claim to, subvert, disrupt, or transform significations of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and other social locations through their chosen materials.

We consider, for example, sculptor Ruth Asawa’s crocheted abstract wire forms as an interrogation of mid-century modernist abstraction and utilization of industrial materials through a decidedly gendered process of fiber-based making. Mixed-media artist Flo Oy Wong describes her bodily realization of the possibilities of material to signify meaning when, in the early 1980s, she encountered these sculptures at Asawa’s home, writing, “Something had awakened in me and was coming through my fingers.” Wong’s chosen mediums speak to her gendered location as a woman of Chinese ancestry in the United States: embroidered and beaded rice sacks, brocade, U.S. flags, suitcases, and found objects invoke Chinese and Chinese American history, culture, and experiences, and themes of memory, voice, tradition, and loss.

Relatedly, Faith Ringgold’s painted story quilts reference African and AfriAmerican textile aesthetics; Joyce Scott’s beaded figures evoke Yoruba beadwork. Contemporary Sicangu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk overlays abstract paintings with beads, porcupine quills, and other historically resonant materials that represent, she writes, “a Lakota aesthetic.”

We also consider artists whose mediums are central to their interrogation of culturally constructed and gendered notions of the corporeal body. Examples include Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, Laura Splan’s contemporary use of substances such as cosmetic facial peel that bears traces of her own skin and hair, and Sonya Clark’s current explorations of meanings of materials associated with raced and gendered bodies. For her year-long Hair Craft Project Clark collaborated with hairdressers who utilized Clark’s own hair-as-fiber as their medium. Of her Comb Series Clark writes, “The black plastic combs evoke a legacy of hair culture, race politics, and antiquated notions of good hair and bad hair. What type of hair would easily pass through these fine-toothed combs? What does it mean that the combs themselves are arranged into tangles like felted dreadlocks, neat curls, and wavy strands?” In these artists’ chosen mediums and artistic practices, though distinguished here as separate threads of meaning, culturally resonant revelations of embodied experience and material histories of making are inextricably and richly entangled.

 

Sesión Invisibilidad e indexicalidad digital

Viernes 26

10:45 a.m. – 11:59 a.m. – Auditorio ML-C

 

La Construcción de lo Invisible – Gráficos por Computador y el  Fin de los Medios Ópticos

Ricardo Cedeño Montaña (Universidad de Antioquia)

 

Esta conferencia aborda la problemática relación entre lo imaginario y los medios técnicos. Presenta una arqueología mediática de los procedimientos algorítmicos detrás de los gráficos 3D por computador durante la década de 1970 y la enmarca dentro de una discusión general sobre el fin de los medios ópticos. El argumento central es que si bien los gráficos por computador no representan el fin de los medios ópticos sí hacen parte de parte la escalada en la producción de la invisibilidad en el medio digital. Los gráficos 3D por computador simulan el hardware óptico y por esta razón no pueden ser considerados medios ópticos. En su genealogía sobre los medios ópticos (Optische Medien, 2002)

Friedrich Kittler argumenta que con la aparición de técnicas gráficas tales como raytracing y radiosity los medios ópticos enfrentaron su fin y pasaron a ser meras simulaciones en el procesador universal y discreto de datos, es decir en el computador. Este es un fin que Kittler introduce tempranamente en Optische Medien, pero que luego no desarrolla en las pocas páginas que dedicada a los computadores en este libro. En el siguiente texto sobre los gráficos 3D por computador, por un lado, proporcionare un análisis desde la arqueología de medios sobre este supuesto fin con la esperanza de reconstruirlo, y por otro lado ofreceré una discusión desde la teoría de medios técnicos sobre el problema de la tecnoimaginación.

Primero introduciré del concepto de subficie que define las imágenes digitales como entidades con una existencia dual y luego lo usare como herramienta metodológica para realizar un análisis mediático de los gráficos 3D por computador a partir de los algoritmos y los principios matemáticos que los gobiernan. Mi intención no es argumentar por el final de los medios ópticos a manos de simulaciones algorítmicas de mundos ópticos. Lo que busco es algo diferente. En la primera sección caracterizaré las imágenes digitales como objetos con una doble existencia: como superficie y subficie. La segunda sección presenta una breve arqueología mediática de lo invisible descrita a través de dos problemas centrales de las gráficas en 3D durante la década de 1970: primero la no presentación de los vértices ocultos de un objeto 3D y luego el suavizado de los bordes de la estructura poligonal de un modelo 3D.

El objetivo de esta mirada arqueológica es entender las condiciones de existencia de este tipo de imágenes. En la última sección regresaré al problema de lo imaginario cuando este es mediado por medios técnicos. Al dirigir la atención hacia los algoritmos y programas que impulsan estas simulaciones quiero fomentar una reflexión mediática primero sobre la construcción de lo invisible y segundo sobre la situación actual en la que las imágenes, ordenadas por códigos técnicos, delinean y estructuran el código de comunicación dominante con el que imaginamos.

 

Digital Indexicality. On the work of Julien Previeux

Jasmin Kathöfer (Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig) y Jens Schröter ( Universität Bonn, Bonn)

 

Rosalind Krauss argued convincingly that the art of the 1970s was structured by‚ the photographic‘ and that even non-photographic artforms of that time, like paintings and installations, were only conceivable with photography as a kind of master medium. Especially it was the index, as a causal type of sign in the sense of Peirce, that structured these works. Interestingly enough – as Krauss made these claims, there were new types of media technologies emerging, of course computers and the ‘New Media’, that seemed to challenge the whole paradigm of indexicality. In the 1990s there was a quite nervous and widespread discussion that the era of indexicality as such was over, since all images ‘looking like’ photographs could now digitally be manipulated without a trace or even constructed and fabricated completely.

But as always, this ‘digital revolution’ did not take place, at least not in the extreme imagined ways. People use digital photographs still indexically as in family photography and there have been discussions that insist that digital photographs are indexical too, since the constitutive trait of indexicality in analogue photography, namely the link between object and image via light, is still relevant, although the link might be weaker due to the electronic (and not irreversibly chemical) inscription. So it might make more sense not to speak of the disappearance of the index, but of its transformation towards a ‘digital index’. This is also supported by the presence of the index in other digital media that work with sensors. If this can be argued, the question of Krauss can be asked again. Is there a structuring role not of the ‘classical’ photographic, but now of the ‘digital index’ in contemporary art?

We think that this is the case and can be shown, exemplarily, by analyzing chosen works of French Artist Julien Prévieux (http://www.previeux.net/). Previeux often works with digital media that are sensor-based and thus capable of detecting the movements and behaviour of individuals and groups. He is interested in dealing with the digital-medial environment that surrounds us every day. In doing so, he relies on the long technological history of body surveillance media and those that were developed to optimize human movement, including photography.

With his works like ‘Patterns of Life’ or ‘The Elements of Influence’ we want to show how digital media, such as eyetracking, make the digital index the subject of art – and, moreover, reflects critically the status of these media in society. We think that his work is the most detailed and complex meditation on the condition of the digital index, not only structuring art but society as a whole in the early 21st century.

 

Conferencia de cierre

Viernes 26

2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. – Auditorio ML-B

 

From objects to situations: Selma Last Year (1966) the Documentary Impulse and the emergence of Institutional Critique

Andrew Uroskie (Universidad de Stony Brook)

 

This talk will revisit the debates around medium and theatricality that characterized the late 1960s which would set the stage for the post-formalist conceptual installation, performance, and video art of the decades to come. It does so not through a consideration of Minimalism, which has long served as the art historical reference point, but rather through the power of the documentary image, which had recently been introduced to art institutions within practices of photography, film and video recording.

As its central case-study, it will revisit the 1966 multimedia installation “Selma Last Year” produced by Happenings artist Ken Dewey in collaboration with photojournalist Bruce Davidson and avant-garde composer Terry Riley. Juxtaposing large scale projected images, an immersive audio collage, documentary photography and film, along with the first use of delayed video feedback in a major venue, this work sought to create and rejuvenate the political aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht for a new era of media communication.

In contrast with the beleagued cries for “medium-specificity” with which Annette Michelson would disparage the work, Dewey’s prescient concern for what would come to be known as “site-specificity” and “institutional critique” would prove the enduring model for critical media aesthetics in the decades to come.