Do Everything

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Andy Warhol "painting" pop singer Debbie Harry
with his Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1985.

As the 20th-century began winding down, artist Andy Warhol's (1928-1987) art practice vociferously encompassed emerging media. His mantra: Do Everything. From 16 mm Bolexes (1960s) and Sony Portapaks (1970) to founding Interview magazine, shooting Polaroids with his Big Shot camera, tape recording every conversation, talking on the phone, shooting MTV videos, producing a cable TV interview show, staging multi-media light shows with Velvet Underground his practice eventually included the Commodore Amiga 1000 computer--just months before his death. Warhol exploited the speed, ease of use and newness with each successive technology. The social and collaborative quality of his art practice made his working methods miles away from the individual artist genius toiling alone in their artelier producing small easel paintings.  Bridget Berlin once said "He just wishes it was all easier" presaging Warhol's foray into digital technology by a couple decades. Warhol perceived his Amiga computers as a faster way to work and try out colors on his portraits. He stated in an interview with Amiga World magazine that the imagery the Amigas produced looked a lot like what he was doing with his silkscreens. He found using a mouse awkward and hoped for a pen tool for ease of use and a printer so he could make prints to send to the subjects of his portraits.

Fall Term 2010 Video Showcase

 Digital Processes and Independent Study students presented their projects in Lawrence University's Warch Campus Center Cinema, Tuesday, November 23, 3-5:30 pm:

Tom Coben (IS): Cave Bat Chronicle – A documentary video on the threats facing Phillippine cave bats. (5 mins).

Lawton Hall (IS): Song for Last Autumn – Reflection on the passing of time, the ending of things, the closing of a chapter, etc. using squares, leaves, sandpaper, cassette tape and primary colors (6 mins).

Emily Owens: Video Diary - Whispered inner thoughts and skin.

Maki Miura: GARBEAT - By combining the simple beats improvised on the spot using the found objects around them, the people in this video create a complex rhythm. 

Caitlyn Genovese: Mastication - An exploration of the disturbing and disgusting aspects of eating alluding to the intertwined  idea of love and eroticism 

Kanesha Walker: Back to Natural - A video addressing the issues African-American women encompass with their hair choices.
Evan Tracy: Untitled - A woman, played by Rachelle Krivichi, experiences a bleak anxiety-filled reality and a distanced sense of self.
Jinglei Xiao: A Schizophrenic Man - An experimental video explores what happens when a  schizophrenic man gets super powers and fights evil after taking PCP.

Kate Duncan-Welke: BP Oil Spill Deepwater Horizon Disaster - Video mashup creating a feeling of urgency as the impact of the April 20, 2010 spill continues despite minimal news coverage.

Byte Phichaphop: Mr. Dot - Interactions between objects in the 2nd and 3rd dimensions accessed through a strange hole that opens Mr. Dot's eyes to a new world.

Anam Shahid: Nature versus Technology - A video about society's reliance on technology and how it distracts from the tangible tranquility of nature. 

Kevin Mason: Technology and Identity - An examination of how technology alters our sense of self by enabling us to  create alternate identities or extensions of ourselves existing in a non physical plane.

Alaina Albaugh:Future of our Fears - Digital painting projection about a frightening world in which technology, not us, possesses the power.

Hillary Rogers: Portraiture and Propaganda - Ancient portraits recreated with contemporary people and symbolic props reduced to irrelevant substitutes.
Marvana Avery-Cash: Behind the Scenes - A photographic memoir of a play production.

Deliver us from Evel

Evel Knievel promotional photograph

Evel Knievel's (1938-2007) highly-publicized seven-second motorcycle stunts inspired a generation to embrace risk and value fearlessness as if self-inflicted danger would lead to redemption. "He puts his life on the line with every death defying jump," chant the carnies.  The visual culture of strength and bravery in the face of pain goes back to biblical portrayals of Jesus Christ's crucifixion. The stations of the cross document each step of JC's suffering until his death. The pop culture embrace of EK's televised stunts and press conferences galvanized the mass appetite for such spectacles. Like performance art works such as Marina Abramovic's Rhythm 10 (1973) and Chris Burden's Trans-Fixed (4.23.74) contemporary with EK's work, possible harm to the artist became integral to artistic practice. EK's legendary jump over the Caesar's Palace fountains in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve 1967--where he crashed crushing his pelvis and femur, fractures his hip, wrist and both ankles and sustained a concussion--as documented on film shows a slo-mo ballet of out of control skidding body and machine (see below clip). EK's official website lists his successes and his crashes along with a laundry list of broken bones and a notation that he was born again and baptized by a famous TV preacher. Knievel's "work" has been documented in myriad feature films including Evel Knievel (1971) with George Hamilton playing EK reflecting on his life in a series of reenactments interspersed with archival footage, Viva Knievel (1977) featuring Evel playing himself while delivering anti-drug speeches, The Last of the Gladiators (1988) produced by and narrated by Knievel himself, Evel Knievel The Rock Opera with a myspace page (2007) and most recently a Jackass tribute (2008) which aired after Knievel's death. With the duration of Knievel's works so brief and his hope for infamy and riches so vast, Knievel incorporated a statement of purpose and extensive documentation as part of his routine. "I am the last gladiator in the new Rome. I go into the arena and I compete against destruction and I win. And next week, I go out there and I do it again." He spoke such phrases perhaps mirroring a mass culture hunger for modern day martyrs. 

  

Being radical without being sad

Fading Away by Henry Peach Robinson, Albumen Combination Print, 1858 

Lev Manovich set about defining the New Media Field in his introduction to the New Media Reader (MIT, 2003). Pointing to Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee among others as "the important artists of our time" (15), he challenges our sacrosanct definitions of art. Berners-Lee who submitted his proposal on November 12, 1990 for a "hypertext project" that would become the World Wide Web makes us consider the cultural implications of the Web and how it has changed the way humans live and think as the biggest art project ever attempted. Berners-Lee's proposal reads like an excerpt from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's writing on the Rhizome from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (UMMP, 1987) (e.g. "The texts are known as nodes. The process of proceeding from node to node is called navigation. Nodes do not need to be on the same machine: links may point across machine boundaries."). One thing leads to another and as Deleuze and Guattari write "the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots." Manovich's attentions have recently turned to founding a Software Studies Program and Twitter where he has been promoting his Mapping Time exhibition and its intent to visualizing cultural change through video pieces that surveying every cover of Time magazine or changes in Manga over time. In his ruminations on New Media he mentioned briefly the "combination prints" of Henry Peach Robinson. We recall the melancholy mood of Fading Away (1858) depicting the last moment of life of a dying girl made by combing five different negatives. Through the wonders of software and the Net, we can see the contemporary equivalent in video as JibJab's This Land (2004) and its spin off E-cards and wonder what mapping the changes in this montaged imagery would indicate.

Professor McLuhan's World

Professor Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)

To be fully aware of the media environment that saturates contemporary existence remains as important today as it was when Professor Marshall McLuhan wrote his infamous The Medium is the Massage nearly 50 years ago. He may have been thinking television, newspapers, radio and LP records but his ideas remain applicable to iPads, smart phones and Twitter. Students seem to feel powerless over how social networking sites like Facebook have come to replace face-to-face gatherings around the kitchen table and smart phones have become an extension of the nervous system. McLuhan famously wrote: "there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered." His collaborations with book designers such as Quentin Fiore, appearances in mainstream TV talk shows and films such as Woody Allen's Annie Hall and use of the Columbia Records LPs as an "outlet" demonstrates his willingness to use media rather than be used. This morning wondering what he would Tweet and what he would say about our 140 character attention spans, the expanding global village and the power of the constructed self via the Facebook News Feed.

That was Then, This is Now

With the dawn of the modern age and an increasing appetite for power and speed in the 20th century, photographers documented the worker while reflecting evolving philosophical and political points of view. According to Lawrence University's art historian and curator Frank Lewis (right), in his lecture in the Wriston Auditorium on Friday, October 28, 2010; early photographers' nostalgic portrayals of anonymous laborers rooted in the land and in tradition began fading away as the Modern age took hold. Instead, came pictures of workers blurring into a frenzy of production fueling an increasingly materially-addicted society. Noteworthy were Lewis Hine's photographs of child laborers. Children in mines sorting nuggets of coal virtually disappearing into a cloud of dust. Eventually Hine's photographs raised public awareness and new child labor laws were enacted to protect the health and safety of children.

Lewis Hine, Breakers, Pennsylvania Coal Co. (circa 1908-1912)

Cut to the 21st century. In American cities once known for making things in the 20th century, the factories have faded away or have been turned into monuments or condos. The biggest employers in many cities are hospitals perhaps treating the people who used to make things? The job of making things has moved elsewhere while America's appetite for electronic devices and fast food continues to grow. Where do all those broken cell phones and blown out hard drives and old TVs land? Other than a few obscure documentaries like Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground or Edward Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes, the final resting place of digital waste is not discussed often enough. Lewis ended his lecture with an Edward Burtynsky's photograph. A blur of faceless workers clad in pink jumpsuits working in a plant processing chicken in Jilin Province, China maybe to satisfy the ongoing appetite for McNuggets. Burtynsky's ouvre also includes the byproducts of these times. Staggering accumulations of mother boards and computer cables in China forming both landscapes and monuments reminding us of both labor and unchecked consumption.

Edward Burtynsky, Manufacturing #17, China, 2005

Edward Burtynsky, Recycling #9, China, 2004

YouTube as Venue

Paul Sharits Shutter Interface film (1975)

Last year the New York Times writer Virginia Heffernan proposed an avant-garde emerging from the mass of video material posted every minute on YouTube in an article titled Uploading the Avant-Garde. Even more recently New York magazine wrote of US soldiers posting videos in The Ke$ha-Loving, Coman-Defying Army Auteur: Generation YouTube at War describing the artistry of Cody Wilson. 21st century upstart artists Ryan Trecartin and Kalup Lindzy (who just started a web series "Melody Set Me free") continue to use YouTube as a venue for their work despite having achieved art world recognition. In our teaching, we find the vast trove of experimental film posted on YouTube from the Paul Sharits structural film Tails  (1976) or Nam June Paik's Fluxus work Zen for Film (circa 1962-4) and interviews with artists such as Marina Aramovic useful especially as we recall how nearly impossible it was to gain access to such material when sequestered in remote locations such as central Wisconsin.