Wisconsin Death Trip Hommage

"Family Outside House" circa 1910 by Charles J. Van Schaick
Wisconsin Historical Society Visual Archive

Wisconsin Darkness & Picturesque:

A Multimedia Response to

Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip

Saturday, March 9, 2013 @ 8:00 PM

Esch Hurvis Studio @ Warch Campus Center

Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin

This 1-hour program features videos by LU ART 240 Digital Processes students

accompanied by improvisational performances by LU faculty: Jesse Dochnahl '06 (sax),

John T. Gates (voice), Brian Pertl '86 (Tibetan horn & didgeridoo), John Shimon (guitar).

The artists are responding to the seminal book, Wisconsin Death Trip (1973) by

Michael Lesy (American, b. 1945). WDT juxtaposes archival photographs by

Charles Van Schaik (made 1890-1910 in Black River Falls, WI) with 19th-century stories

published in the Badger State Banner newspaper. Lesy wrote in his introduction:

“It is as much an exercise of history as it is an experiment of alchemy.”

PROGRAM 1 – EAST SCREEN

Yoga Exorcism by Rose “Brosie” Broll ’14

Manipulated/Insanity by Shea Love ’14

Reversal of Fortune by Amber Latimer ’15

Kid Play by Amalie Ludwig ‘15

Foxes are Common by Renee Kargleder ’13

A Stroll in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, by Xian Qu ’14

Insanity by Frank “Frankie” Lieberman ’14

Adam’s Death Rib: Eve’s Trip to Genesisby Alfredo Duque ’14

Shoemakers by Sarah Jane Rennick ’15

Shitfaced Voyeurism by Emma Moss ’14

BFF by Htee Moo ’15

PROGRAM 2 – WEST SCREEN

Shitfaced Voyeurism by Emma Moss ’14

Insanity by Frank “Frankie” Lieberman ’14

Yoga Exorcism by Rose “Brosie” Broll ’14

Shoemakers by Sarah Jane Rennick ’15

Adam’s Death Rib: Eve’s Trip to Genesis by Alfredo Duque ’14

BFF by Htee Moo ’15

Reversal of Fortune by Amber Latimer ’15

Foxes are Common by Renee Kargleder ’13

Kid Play by Amalie Ludwig ‘15

Manipulated/Insanity by Shea Love ’14

A Stroll in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, by Xian Qu ’14

Sponsored by the Lawrence University

Department of Art & Art History and the Conservatory of Music

 

 Alfredo Duque Vocalizes to His Video:
"Adam's Death Rib:
Eve's Trip to Genesis" © March 2013

 

 Renee Kargleder Dances to Her Video:
 "Foxes are Common" © March 2013

Evan Baden & the Digital Natives

Evan Baden with his photographs, circa 2011

Milwaukee Art Museum curator Lisa Hostetler showed us Evan Baden's Illuminati series on a visit to the MAM Print Room. He'd made the work while an undergraduate at the College for Visual Studies in St. Paul (to close in June 30, 2013). We emailed Evan to arrange a visit to his studio in Minneapolis/St. Paul in June of 2011 where he showed us his provocative Technically Intimate series that we'd seen excerpts of in various glossy magazines. The walls of his small studio were covered with blow ups of his best images and he pulled out a few work prints of experiments. The Lawrence University Photography Club, lead by the dynamic Will Melnick, invited Evan to speak on his work and visit with students March 5-6, 2013. In his lecture, Evan pointed to the painstaking detail to convey his understanding of his extensive Internet research of online phenomena. His photographs ultimately critique how online experience is shaping real world relationships. He covered his resourceful technical practices too. Most memorable was adding supplemental light with three iPods to most convincingly simulate the illumination provided by the handheld electronic devices shown in Illuminati. His latest series, Under the Influence, examines how teens perform themselves and their sexuality for the camera (see below image). His 4x5 format view camera and use of color negative film heightens the intensity of such coreographed performances embellished by props and supervised by parents. The prints are titled with captions taken directly from mainstream magazines. Museums and galleries in the US and Europe have included his work in exhibitions interrogating technology and its impact. Baden ships rolled-up prints or uploads files to servers for output on location. The venue mounts the print on aluminum, exhibits then destroys it. Some prints make their way into museum collections rather than face destruction or the expense of crating and return shipping. Evan is working on an MFA at Columbia College in Chicago and lives in Oak Park while he juggles the demands of an international speaking/exhibition schedule, making work, and teaching.

"It's All About Me. I Mean You. I Mean Me." © 2012 Evan Baden, panoramic inkjet print

We simply are not equipped with earlids

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), the most important and
controversial electronic composer of the 20th and 21st centuries

"Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships," writes Marshall McLuhan in The Medium is the Massage (1967). The "ear world" influence of German electronic composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, trickled down to the pop level via The Beatles and others bands of the 1960s creating many "simultaneous relationships". His electronic, spatial, and chance compositions (e.g. "variable form") influenced other 1960s pop musicians as well, including Frank Zappa and Pete Townsend. The Beatles included his face on the cover montage image of their album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Inspired by Stockhausen and the Fluxus sound experiments of Yoko Ono (now 80 years old and a huge Twitter and Instagram user), Beatle John Lennon wanted to make his own experimental sound piece. Lasting more than 8 minutes, Revolution 9, contained random everyday sounds and tape loops (some from the archives of EMI ) of cheering crowds, cooing babies, random conversation, orchestral music, and laughter. The Stockhausen-influence as heard in Hymnen (1967), made up of electronically manipulated national anthems, is obvious. After some controversy, Revolution 9 (1968) was included on THE BEATLES (a/k/a "The White Album"). The most accessible Stockhausen sound continuum may very well be the Beatles' A Day in the Life. The culminating track on their Sgt. Pepper's album, it includes sounds of an alarm clock, panting, and piano strings aggressively banged and left to decay. "The ringing of the piano went on and on and on...with an 18 kHz track for dogs to listen to," said producer George Martin in a video interview (below). Marshall McLuhan writes of the Beatles influence on "musical effects":

Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one's environment.
The Beatles do this. They are a group of people who suddenly
were able to put on their audience and the English language
with musical effects--putting on a vesture, a whole time, a Zeit. (p. 114)

George Martin talks about "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles

It Is What It Is: Image + Book

TV Room from Suburbia © Bill Owens, 1973, revised 1999

The generally affable Bill Owens (American 1938- ) had just returned from a stint in the Peace Corps. He observed the normalcy yet strangeness of the burgeoning American suburbs. While working for the Livermore Independent as a photojournalist, he became intrigued by suburban Livermore. He photographed on assignment and made pictures of people in their homes doing what they do for work and leisure. After he had enough material and was laid off, he collected quotes as text to make something substantial, a book titled Suburbia published in 1973. Though his photographs were collected and exhibited by prestigious museums from the MOMA to the Getty, it wasn't a living. He had a family to support. Always entrepreneurial and a believer in self-publishing, he wrote a book about making books (extremely rare) after his own experiences. He later quit pursuing the "art world" to put his energy into more economically viable projects like a brew pub (1983) and later distilling (2004). As Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan wrote in his 1967 book, The Medium is the Massage: "The poet, the artist, the sleuth--whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are." (p. 88). Owens did exactly that in his books and ongoing projects. Entering suburban space in earnest to photograph, he left us with a critique of a lifestyle that today may strike us as comic yet coaxes feelings of pity. McLuhan continued, "Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment--of what's really going on--affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal with theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions." (p. 92). Perusing the Suburbia work today becomes an act of discovery, a probe of a mental space and a place that once was. Decades later, suburbia has mutated throughout America into a boundless sprawl of fast food restaurants, faux artisinal boutique stores, big box stores, parking lots, seemingly infinite beige, gray, and white cookie cutter houses, and vacant McMansions. 

Tupperware Party from Suburbia © Bill Owens, 1973, revised 1999

Lynda Barry's Digits

Lynda Barry, author and cartoonist

Cartoonist and author Lynda Barry presented an evocative convocation at Lawrence University on Thursday, January 24, 2013 wearing smart velvet hat and long braids. She has been a keen observer of digital culture noting that parents spend more time looking at their smart phones than looking at their children's faces. Holding her arms up in the air and wiggling her fingers, she pointed out that fingers are the original digital media. Telling a naughty joke about snoring and balls that her farmer neighbors told her, she amused the audience but made the college president squirm. Barry let her freak flag fly and the audience loved it on a cold January day.

"Time" has ceased, "space" has vanished

Chris Burden, Shoot, November 19, 1971,
F Space, Santa Ana, CA

"We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the

entire human environment as a work of art, as a teacing machine

designed to maximize perceptoin and to make

everyday learning a process of discovery." 

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967

Pondering Chris Burden's performance piece, Shoot, mounted at F-Space in Santa Ana on November 19, 1971, we see that Burden (who studied for his B.A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine from 1969 to 1971) played off what a camera does (shoot) while making a statement about the gravity of the gunfire in Vietnam, which has resonated through the decades. Electronic media allowed the below seven second film and audio documentation of a private event witnessed by 12 people to become iconic. Until we entered this era only material objects could attain the status of Art. Shoot made Burden a "living myth". When a UCLA student tried to do a piece with a gun in a graduate seminar, in 2005, Burden retired his position. McLuhan presaged Burden's performance piece "arranging of the entire human environment as a work of art" by 4 years.

To Understand and be Understood

Ai Weiwei and Zuoxian Zuzhou with two police officers in
Chengdu's Anyi Hotel elevator, at 5 a.m. August 12, 2009.
(when taken in custody by the police)
Sichuan, China, C-print, 4x5 inches

Considered by the editors of Art Review as "the world's most powerful artist,"Ai Weiwei uses social media to "exchange information and express ideas." He writes "art in all its forms is about the effort to understand and be understood" (Art Forum, September 2012, p. 511). He kept a blog from 2006-2009 making more than 2,700 posts using the new Sina blog platform. At first, he didn't even know how to type and thought of blogging as an opportunity "to exercise his literary side influenced by Ai Qing, his dissident poet father's legacy. Today, his art encompasses photography, installation, sculpture, architecture, and increasingly social media. His blog posts have been published in Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 by MIT Press, 2011, and his views have been recorded in a recent documentary, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.  He continues to uses Twitter daily to comment on politics, media, and life.