8 posts tagged “artmaking”
I take pictures on the fly and post them online as I go. I'm playing with the dynamics of text and image. Some of the image/text things are little jokes, some are simple moments of beauty, some are intersections between me and the world, my noting the beauty that sustains me.
Already there are picture series that are more than just snapshots or singular moments, but actually making text-and-image poems as a means of negotiating the complexities of daily life.
You can follow - visit --- on the fly
The video documenting our performance at the Brixen Ivey Theatre in Wrigleyville (that's in or around the area of Wrigley Field for those of you not in the know) is far too large for me to load to Vox. It's living at my website, www.drawclose.com, which I happened to have redesigned this week.
Its been a busy year for me so far. I've finally sorted my work by content, instead of media, which is important to me: while most audience members latch on to art by its physicality (Do you make paintings? What thing do you produce?) and the market needs classifiable objects in order to function as a marketplace (What kind of paintings do you make?) the reality of what I'm doing is something totally separate from the resulting object that viewers take in.
I'm examining the stories humans tell themselves and others, the stories that we think make life easier but sometimes create more complications. The nature of evil, how we contribute to our own suffering, our natural blindness to our spiritual anatomy. That sort of thing.
But, people miss the latent content most of the time. So they'll have to be satisfied - and probably will be satisfied - knowing that I write poems and make videos ...
Flip the Script, by the way, is a multimedia project that presents the transformation from argument to reconciliation. Choreographer Stephanie Thiel conceived the piece after seeing the documentary Invisible Children, about child-soldiers in the Sudan. When she got in touch with me, she had the audio produced (by Herman Pearl, a.k.a. DJ Soy Sauce) and half of the dance choreographed. It was my job to discover images that echoed and amplified the gestures written into the dance and create a projection that defined the dancer's floor space and set the mood for the piece.
Have a look! drawclose.com/manual5.html
A war continues on the periphery, embedded in the wallpaper of our lives. The war built by a republican president because that's what republican presidents do, they make wars and recessions. Its bloody and death and our taxes pay for it. Our brothers sisters sons daughters mothers fathers go overseas, move stuff around in a desert, explode things, try not to get blown up. They kill on demand and they come home. Some of them come home fine, some of them come home dead, and some of them come home pretending as hard as they can that they are fine but they pronouncedly aren't.
It goes on and on and on.
This violent bloody war it is somewhere in the room. It sits down to dinner with us but we can't eat with it. We need the media to make an argument about it because it is easier to argue than to be in the same room with this complex painful explosive mess.
I think we need to be in the room with this mess we've made, for a while. Just be with it. Tame our reactions to it so we can understand that it is what it is.
A bunch of people are trying to survive a situation the terms of their service has placed them in. People are trying to survive the only opportunity available. People are hoping to come home not wound up waiting to explode all over the neighbors.
I'm working on InService again. It was a 3-screen video projection plus live presentations by veterans and members of the media. It needs to be condensed into a single screen projection. I'm doing the editing for that. We hope that the finished product can be sent out and shown elsewhere. We want the film to stand on its own.
I am working with soldier-made documentary footage, images, video. I've discovered how the soldiers actively speak and participate in the hollywood-authored mythos of soldier. They make images of themselves and name them, "Me as Eastwood" or "Me as Cowboy". They are posed, legs spread, assault rifle between them. Stanley Kubrick whispers in my ear.
Images of the Iraqi people get me the most. Here are these people who have this relationship with The Soldier. They are subject to our 19-year-old highly trained weapon of a human being. I am introduced to these children and I wonder how old they are, I wonder if they've always had an American Soldier to deal with.
We make war now in a way that is about minimizing the damage to our soldiers while maximizing the damage to the other. It is in the action of making war - the relentless attention the soldiers have to keep, the preparedness for random explosions - the process of war creates a situation of attrition for the soldier.
How can I edit this to keep an audience's attention? How can I make this film so that they cannot look away?
My answer, so far, is to maximize a strange mix of beauty and emotional pull. Selecting the most stunning images made by the soldiers and making them better (contrast, cropping). Formalizing the available content and working in terms of a fine art approach to formal composition, tension, color, form, contrast, line.
I think of John Singer Sargent's WWI paintings of men blinded with mustard-gas, his unforgettable mural Gassed (1919) rich in browns golds and cream. Here it is tiny - in person it dwarfs and humbles the viewer, an oil painting on canvas stretched on thick reinforced stretcher bars taking the long wall of a museum room, the figures each taller than the viewer.
(The trenches in Iraq are highways carrying columns of vehicles which must remain in motion to stay safe)
Yes, this is survival, and this is what we do to survive our war technology, it says to me.
Now with video we can make an emotional connection between audience and soldiers. This connection is a double-edged sword - it draws the audience closer to dangerous material. After all, we pay them to do what they do on foreign soil. We don't want to know, we want to know ... its all so bloody difficult and ambivalent, isn't it.
all the photographs were taken by american soldiers serving in iraq,
and available to me as part of the editing process for the Pittsburgh
Filmmakers/Bricolage Theater production InService, directed by Jeffrey
Carpenter. the painting, Gassed, is a mural-sized oil painting on canvas by john singer sargeant (1919).
last night was film kitchen at pittsburgh filmmakers. buzz miller organized it, had a bunch of us video people who collaborate with other artists screen documentation of our artwork(s).
buzz is so fantastic. his technical problem solving and inventiveness helps create some amazing theatrical experiences for audiences here in pittsburgh. he's developed a particular vocabulary of projecters and bodies on stage that creates visual symphonies of information for the audience to get overwhelmed in. and he's more than willing to share his love for problem-solving and theater-making with the audience.
anyway the thing i realised during the q&a for the rest of us at the end of the night is that i'm basically most interested in layering languages when i do collaborative work. working with images is less conscious than working with text/word but very close to text/word, as it is symbolic. then there's the language of images in musicians lyrics, then there is the un-conscious or less-conscious language of music (rhythm & pitch arranged over time) ... when dance is an element, there is the un-conscious language of gesture .. so my video needs to fit in with these other languages, and video is an easy read for the audience. recognition or reading images (think: television, internet) is something we are more adept at, culturally, than reading gestures (dance). the audience may be more comfortable reading the video. i have to always keep this in mind as i shape the video to nestle in with these other languages ...
time-based or performance-based artworks function like a language - there are complex sets of signs communicated to the audience over time; and the audience listens with eyes/ears/bodies, sometimes dances as an expression of resonance with the music performers ... still art (paintings, sculpture) to me end up being read like static words or iconic carriers of single meanings ... bound books live in a place between painting and performance, because the icons (words/sigils/referents) happen in a particular ordered series for the reader to digest, the reader sets their own tempo or pace for the consideration of symbols (where a music performer sets the tempo or pace & the audience is subject to the rhythm of icon/symbol/soundinstance presentation in sequence as determined by the performer ... )
i remain committed to moving images because of my fascination with (as i wrote for my master's thesis) the word standing outside of the sentence (the icon or single symbol) and its meaning, and then it is in the sentence, and the meaning shifts. figure and ground relationships with encoding and decoding meaning.
the individual has a relationship to that single iteration AND THEN we put that iteration in relationship with other things (in constellation - Duchamp's portfolios, Cornell's boxes) AND THEN we make them move over time (my symbol-series films, David Lynch/eraserhead, any plot-driven novel) AND THEN we juxtapose symbol-series (my symbol-series films/visual iteration + symbol series poetry performance/verbal iteration + soundtrack/sonic symbol iteration) (really well-made film, with controlled verbal language, color language, language of gesture of the actors all meshing together/or not) ... and the audience takes correlations and makes relationships between them, makes them causal or otherwise linked in a language-like way. we make related meaning out of parallel symbol systems, we create relationships between symbol-systems ... like we make meaning between words, like their relationships make meanings ... our perception of color shifts depending on the color it is next to. the same can be said for words. for many other things.
On Saturday, Dec 15 I staged a work called pattern recognition as part of a benefit for Common Ground, a women's shelter in New Orleans. A 20-minute spoken word performance with backing video and sound, the work presents a constellation of verbal & visual symbols spread out over time.
The video has alot of layers and I've struggled with size & compression issues for the web. Higher image quality will be coming soon.
Audio was produced by DJ earWIG in Texas. He uses found sound techniques, and applied that working method to audio recording of my violin performance.
I used found video and other animated found images to create the video.
Working with found material, to me, is like analyzing and manipulating sensory information. All sensory information is found or discovered. Art is the purposeful arrangement of any kind of material information for the viewer to sense.
Each viewer will read into that information what they will, each viewer working from their own perspective and projecting their own maps on the information they are receiving.
The found video I used comes to me from archive.org. This library of video functions as a memory bank for the West, as glitchy and subjective (and filled with sales pitches) as your average human's memory. So keep in mind that on some level as I manipulate this found video I am manipulating and re-presenting our communal memories.
This is also the website where I found DJ earWIG in the first place.
The spoken word element, which is hidden here, was a selection of my poetry. I wait until the last minute, almost, to select what I'm going to read when I do these performances. I can't perceive the finished work as it happens. Only the audience does. From the stage, I get to watch them make connections between symbols and images in the spoken word and the video, which I can't see while I read.
Feedback involves things like, "Did you plan that? How did you get that to synch up with the video like that?" etc. I am a highly intuitive person, and my performances with backing film happen with sychronicity as part of my tools. One audience member at this show referred to that as the 'man behind the curtain effect'.
...to the next performance of Flip the Script
a multi media performance piece I created with choreographer Stephanie Tiel. Three dancers take the audience on a transformative journey, from denial to battle to reconciliation. The stage is set and defined by gorgeous, oversized video projection. Next performance: Dec 9, 2007 at the Union Project in Pittsburgh, PA. Then February 25 in Chicago, IL.
