ART/FIST 245 Interarts/Installation...Some Installation Artists...

 The idea of installation art is usually considered something that arose from what was referred to as 'Happenings' and 'Environments' and the scene that somewhat centered around the artist/provocateur Allan Kaprow in the US in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

In 1960 Jim Dine created Car Crash, a happening that played out in an elaborate construction that both performers and the audience where immersed in.

Another prototypical installation is Claes Oldenburg's The Store, seen here re-created in a museum setting.

Again the border between 'Environment' and 'Performance' are blurred. This was also the case with Judy Chicago's Womanhouse, but her later work The Dinner Party existed purely as an environment where the viewer moved through the piece.

Gordon Matta-Clark's work physically deconstructing architecture is known mostly through documentation, although he did create 'souvenir' cuttings of his buildings to circulate as product.

Sometimes the artifacts of a performance become an installation, as seen in Carolee Schneemann's Up to and Including Her Limits,

Many of installation art's pioneers kept re-inventing the form, as we see in Yayoi Kusama's interactive Obliteration Room.

Some artists wanted to make their installations more accessible over time, like Dan Graham.

And also Ann Hamilton, whose The Event of a Thread becomes an amusement-park-like spectacle.

This can be taken to the monumental level, as with James Turrell's work in process, Roden Crater.

Video can be placed in a site in a way which perfectly integrates with it, as seen in Bill Viola's Tiny Deaths.

Or it can totally dominate the architecture, as seen in the retrospectives of Pipilotti Rist. Although primarily working in video, abstraction informs much of their work.

Judy Pfaff's installations reference nature but also embrace abstraction.

Rachel Whiteread's work uses the literalness of the imprint, creating a negative reproduction of her subject matter.

Sarah Sze uses everyday objects in a way that defies their former functions and transforms them into formal constructions.

Danish artists' group Superflex constructs a fake McDonalds here, which they flood, with the final work consisting as a semi-documentary video. Often work falling into the installation realm defies categorization.

Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled (Free/Still) serves free curry in a very intentionally constructed, though makeshift looking, environment.

Although solidly viewed in an art context, teamLab is actually a for-profit company, pushing the boundaries between fine art and entertainment.

Missing from 'The Medium is the Massage'

 Who's face is missing from 'The Medium is the Massage'? Well many, but given that this book was put together right after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we need to seriously contemplate the exclusion of Dr. Martin Luther King. The March on Washington of August 28, 1963 was instrumental in getting this legislation passed, and was also a feat of new technologies. About 260,000 people were transported to Washington, mostly on buses traveling on the new interstate highway system. An adequate sound system was considered essential in maintaining order. Equipment was rented at a cost of $19,000. The elaborate set up was sabotaged on the day before the march, and then was successfully rebuilt overnight by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Television had contributed greatly to the success of the event. President Kennedy had watched Dr. King's speech on TV and was "very impressed", and agreed to meet with the march's organizers.

Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on TV. Washington D.C., USA. 1968. © René Burri Magnum Photos

“The civil-rights revolution in the South began when a man and the eye of the television film camera came together, giving the camera a focal point for events breaking from state to state, and the man, Martin Luther King Jr., high exposure on television sets from coast to coast,” wrote the journalists Robert Donovan and Ray Scherer in their history of television news, Unsilent Revolution. 

Many people spoke and performed that day, including Bob Dylan...

The choice of mostly white singers was criticized at the time, and Dylan himself questioned the validity of his own participation, but this is certainly one of his most moving performances ever.

James Blue's monumental film, The March, 1963, restored in 2008.

Inkjet printer link

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDncxuIUyHw

Here's the link to the printer video, there's several important steps here. The printer is in the Wriston digital lab, on the lower level west 2D wing, across from the photo area. For the prints due on the 16th use the default letter (8.5x11) size, and either use 'scale to fit media' or pick an attractive margin size. It's unlikely that you'll need to change ink carts but if you do, they are now on a shelf above the printer.

Blurb Link

 https://www.blurb.com/magazines

Here's a link to the magazine section of the blurb website. Scroll down a bit and they'll have a button to download the BookWright software. The product you should order is called 'premium magazine' and is $7 for 20 pages plus shipping. 

David Byrne on "The Avant Garde"

 

'Enhancing' Images

Before

After

 

This was something I put together for online learning. No longer great subject matter in this image but the enhancing tactics are still good!

You can view the official Photoshop tutorial in enhancement here. My approach is a little different in that it avoids controls with a lot of artificial intelligence (which gives you some artificial mistakes too) and adjustment layers, mostly because I tend to work with 50-100 megapixel files and have frequent crashing problems if I take that approach. Another reason is that it is just faster to work 'destructively' when you know what you want to do.
Here we have a 10 megapixel image made with an iPhone. The first thing I'm going to do here is open this up in Image>Adjustments>Curves

In the curves graph the mountain peaks represent where your tone is in this image (dark left, light right) and the line represents how you're going to pull/shift those around. The steeper you make the line the more contrast you're adding. Digital images seldom have a dead black, and from working in the darkroom we know we want some pure black to make the most of our tonal scale. By moving the very bottom of the line to the right we will make our darkest tones in the first peak dead black.

To shift tones around further we are going to split this image in two, as we need more highlight detail in sky area but we need to maintain bright whites in the poster. To do this we'll use the lasso tool, the third one down on the far left. With this tool you need to fill in a number in the feather box at the top to transition between these two sections. Here, it's a relatively small 15 pixels. Then we'll trace around the area we want to work on and then open curves again.

Here we want more happening in the highlights, so we'll pull our line down on the right side rather severely, and then add points to straighten it out in the midtones. The main reason to use curves rather than brightness/contrast here is that these sorts of radical manipulations often result in tonal stepping (looks like wood grain, but in the sky) when using slider controls.

Next we'll go to Select>Inverse to work on the rest of the picture, and open Curves again.

Here we want just a touch more contrast so we'll make an 'S' curve that steepens the slope through the mid-tones.
Next we'll address color saturation by going to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation. There's a new control called 'Vibrance' that combines saturation with warming, but this image already shows too much color shift in that direction as we will see below.

 

Adding +10 here is making the poster more vibrant, but the pink shift in the library reflection gets really distracting, so next we'll address Image>Adjustments>Color Balance.

We're most concerned with mid-tones here so leave that box checked. Start out playing with the Yellow/Blue to see if you need to warm or cool. Next go to Cyan/Red, you almost always need to go in the opposite direction with it. Next fool around with Magenta/Green, often this will be left at '0'. Okay, so the radical shift illustrated above neutralizes most of the pink cast, but also it makes the picture sort of 'blah', and I think some of the source of this pinkness is in the tinting of the Wriston glass. Maybe we'll just back way down on this.

Here the color shift is mildly toned down with +10 Blue and -10 Cyan. 

This is the basic stuff, there may be a couple more things to try here. Because this is an architectural image taken with a phone it may benefit from some sharpening. We'll go to Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen.

Here we choose Lens Blur as we are dealing with a somewhat primitive optic. If there is camera shake in your image from a long exposure the Motion Blur can be very effective. Because of the type in this image we can't get away with much sharpening at all here, but a little bit helps. This is the default setting -50%.

This next move may be a bit questionable. This image has a bit of a casual 'tip' to it that we would expect to find in a hand held camera image. The Perspective Crop tool, hidden under the Crop Tool, can make this image look like it was taken with a view camera.

What we're doing here is making sure the buildings' verticles are parallel to the sides of the picture and making sure that we maintain an even porportion of crop all around to reduce distortion.

Not sure about this final move. There is a charm to the casualness of the tilted perspective, yet as an illustration this is much easier to look at.

For a good explanation of camera settings look at this;

https://streetbounty.com/basic-camera-settings/

Robert Frank's The Americans; The Most Influencial Photo Book of all time

 The Classic Documentary on Robert Frank;

Sarah Greenough on The Americans;