Posts Tagged ‘lecture’

Lecture: Fluxus

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

Adrian only briefly touched on Fluxus in the lecture today, but I wanted to talk a little more about it so I have given it its own post.

Fluxus is a really interesting art movement. The reason it came up in the lecture is because it relates to the ideas explored in this course. Adrian described Fluxus as art that is like Barthes’ idea of ‘text’ because it is made up of instructions and recipes, ways of doing. It is an art movement that asks for the consumer to engage. There is no monument to view, to simply consume, but rather it tells you how to create art separately. It is a game.

Quite a few years ago I had the privilege to visit the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary art in Gateshead, England. It is my favourite contemporary art museum in the world. (I’ve also been to MoMA, Museum Brandhorst, Pinakothek der Moderne, the Tate, Sydney MCA, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, but the BALTIC is undeniably the best in my humble opinion. However, I am dying to visit Mona in Tasmania.) The first time I went there it had two exhibitions showing. One was Yoko Ono’s Between the Sky and My Head, which was only shown in two galleries in the whole world, and a retrospective of Fluxus, which Yoko Ono was a part of in the 1960s. It included a lot of Fluxus works, instruction booklets, videos and so on, by a wide range of artists. What I realised in today’s lecture, though, is that the BALTIC turned the ‘text’ into ‘work’ inadvertently. The point of Fluxus is to be ‘text’ and for the consumer to engage in the work. That is the whole message of the medium, it’s very much rooted in DIY. Fluxus artists made do with what was available to them and they were, in a way, anti-art (which could be taken as anti-’work’).

Yet, the curators at the BALTIC placed all of the booklets in glass cases. The paintings were mounted on the walls to be viewed. The videos were in small rooms to watch — videos of interactive art, like Ono’s brilliant Cut Piece. The curators had taken a movement that was all ‘text’ and removed the agency that was given to the consumer by the artists. I didn’t realise this at the time at all. I didn’t even question it.

In hindsight, this surprises me about the BALTIC because the thing that I like the most about it is that it utilises its space so well. It used to be a flour mill until it was converted into a five-storey art space. Artists are invited in to create exhibitions however they see fit. The Fluxus exhibition was ineffective because it was not its own art form. It was just a collection of stuff. The other exhibitions I have seen there were extremely effective and could be seen as ‘text’ completely. The best was Yoko Ono’s Between the Sky and My Head. It featured two floors of Ono’s art that she arranged to her liking. The first floor was her older stuff and was simply arranged to be consumed, but the second floor was designed to engage with. It involved installations and interactive works. The two most relevant to this course — to the theory of ‘text’ — are Wish Tree and My Mommy is Beautiful which invited guests to the museum to write their wishes on paper and tie them to the wish trees and to write or draw something about their mothers on the wall provided. Ono herself had been through the room and written messages on the walls in various places. It was the most spectacular art exhibition I’d ever been to.

I’ve been to the BALTIC since then and I saw Robert Breer’s retrospective exhibition. He died during its showing at the museum, but he did have a large hand in putting it together and, again, utilising the space provided. He uses a lot of mediums, but the most interesting for me were the moving sculptures. Breer had built sculptures on very small motors that moved around the room, but you wouldn’t have noticed just by looking at them. The sculptures moved so slowly that most people noticed they were moving because they looked away. You might go into a room to view an animation for a little while and then when you come out again, suddenly the dividing wall is on the other side of the room. It was very entertaining to watch all of this go on and I think it’s another fun example of ‘text.’

The lecture today was really interesting and got me thinking about movements like Fluxus and their modern equivalents, like Korsakow. I have been in a jarring state of anxiety over the last few months and struggling with my creative identity and finding a purpose or direction for my life and my creation and art. Lately I’ve been starting to think about a desire to utilise new media forms, interactivity and available medium. This lecture kind of helped me to cement — or maybe not cement, but start sticky-taping together — ideas about the kinds of things I want to make. One of Barthes’ points in his From Work to Text is about pleasure in consumption. Adrian explained that pleasure is where the gap between the consumer and the art dissolves which puts the consumer’s identity at risk. This struck a chord with me a bit because this has always been the sort of art I’ve wanted to create. I am moved by the things that change me, that introduce me to new ideas or phrase for me things I already knew but couldn’t articulate. The art that I love is the art that reshapes my identity. This is the sort of stuff I want to be doing. I want to use a variety of mediums to say things that are important to me while allowing the consumer to reshape what I say into meanings that are important to them. Like Korsakow, like Fluxus, I want to make things that are multi-directional and multi-purposeful, things that strive to have a plurality of meaning because art only ever should have that. I want to wilfully and joyfully embrace mediums in my art. All I’ve got to work out now is where to start.

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Lecture: Barthes, pt. 2

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

Today’s lecture was very useful in regards to the essay prompt my group has chosen for the major assessment — “A K-Film is not very good at making stories with clear direction, what Barthes would describe as ‘work,’ but is ideal for making videos that make visible Barthes’ idea of ‘text.’” I took a lot of notes and I think what I write here I’ll probably revisit later when writing my portion of the essay.

So, the first point that I took down was that work, or art or whatever it is that you create, doesn’t come out of nowhere. As Adrian said, there are always relationships to other things. His example was in new media, in the sense that new websites aren’t just completely new, they always go back to other things and the rise of trends and so on. In a way, everything is kind of open source. Adrian’s argument was that this makes things ‘text’ as Barthes describes. Traditionally, the author is seen as the father or owner of the work, and his (or her, sigh) declared intention is what is considered important. Adrian described this as a romanticised idea of creativity and that it’s the whole point of Barthes’ essay; ‘text’ is not like ‘work.’

However, ‘text’ is not better than ‘work’ nor vice-versa. Rather, they both matter and they are both important today. It is just important to understand the differences and perhaps also that ‘text’ is maybe what we really need right now. Because ‘work’ is about consumption. You do not ‘play’ with ‘work,’ you just consume it straight up. In contrast, ‘text’ is always changing and unfolding and you engage with it directly.

This is where Barthes best connects with Korsakow. Korsakow films have, as Adrian explained, no beginning or end. They are just middle. For a Korsakow film to just be you must engage with it. Otherwise it is not even art at all, it is not giving you anything. You cannot be a passive consumer with a medium like Korsakow. This is almost exactly what Barthes is talking about. Korsakow is ‘text’ at its core. There is never a clear direction with Korsakow and so therefore it can’t be a ‘work.’ Even if the creator has a declared intention, because the media itself is always different, how can that intention always be the same? The consumer decides what the film means because the consumer decides what the film even is.

The best quote form Barthes’ essay to sum up this idea is, “The theory of Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.” ‘Text’ is all about practice, it’s about doing. A Korsakow film requires interactivity. It is, as Korsakow proclaims itself, dynamic storytelling. Adrian said that text links everything wilfully and joyfully, that it embraces its medium. A Korsakow film is a perfect example of that. It makes connections that appear unclear and perhaps sometimes erratic, but it gives the consumer a unique experience of their own design. The consumer and the creator are collaborating without even realising it.

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Lecture: Barthes

Monday, April 16th, 2012

Again, no lightbulb moments this week. I did the reading two weeks ago but I haven’t blogged about it so far, as I was busy doing the first assessment. I’m also busy freaking out about the next assessment which is pretty darn full on and other personal things that are happening next week and I’ve been planning for all summer. So anyway, excuses aside, here are the notes I took.

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Lecture: Making for Yourself

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

I’m not really feeling it this week. I often go into lectures kind of grumpy and defensive. I don’t really know why. There were no lightbulb moments today so I’ll just put up a few notes. I appreciated the mini feminism spiel, though. It’s always nice to see some radical feminism discussed like it’s so obvious because it really should be.

Anyway, Adrian first talked about tacit vs explicit knowledge, which was a big topic in the very first lab with Seth. Summed up, tacit knowledge is the ‘how’ while explicit knowledge is the ‘what.’ I was a little peeved when Adrian generalised that everyone in the room has had a mostly explicit education. Once again I was reminded how my way of doing stuff is not the right way because I left explicit education for tacit education a long time ago and am only coming back to explicit now I’ve started Proper University.

Adrian melded tacit vs explicit with qualitative vs quantitative and I don’t think he should have because they’re not the same thing. Whether he thinks they’re the same thing or not, I don’t know, but they ran right into each other in the lecture. While I don’t agree that I have more explicit knowledge than tacit knowledge, I concede that I have more quantitative knowledge than qualitative knowledge. Just because I know how a program works doesn’t mean I can make good stuff with that program. This is most certainly the case, but isn’t tacit knowledge the bit that means you can use the program at all?

It was mildly amusing that when Adrian said, ‘Make the stuff that matters to you for you,’ there was an absolute flurry of typing. His wisdom was eagerly taken down as he basically gave us a 101 on how to be good at stuff. This nicely segued into the idea of semiotics and that meaning is not in things individually but the relations between things. Adrian’s spot-on example was cinema. The art of cinema is using the sequence of shots. Not the shots themselves but their connection to the rest of the film. To make good stuff we need to connect the things that matter to us and there we have the message. Korsakow is like the abstract version of that. It’s all about the connections, SNUs and POCs. Our shots will be arranged into a sequence depending on how we choose to connect them to convey our message.

Adrian ended on an ‘Open your mind’ tangent. Inside vs Outside, which can really be translated down to Us vs Them and how that is so very limiting. He said that, ‘We all think we’re in charge of what we think, but we’re not.’ He made his point by using a language trick that is designed to override people’s logical thinking by utilising patterns. It’s kind of like ‘Say toast ten times. Now, what do you put in the toaster?’ It all runs so seamlessly your first impulse is to say toast, which is wrong. Our brains just really like patterns and they’d prefer to keep them going at the expense of being correct.

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Lecture: Strategy vs Tactic

Monday, March 26th, 2012

In today’s lecture, Adrian talked about the reading, a chapter from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. His main focus was strategy and tactic or, how I’ve worded it here, strategy vs tactic. The way Adrian described it, the analogies he chose, seemed to frame it in this way. He talked about consumers having agency, their role is not to just ‘consume’ but to ‘create’ or ‘produce.’ This is directly opposed to the model that consumers are mindless and take in what they’re told to. But they never have. People don’t do that. People practice la perruque, people use tactics.

Adrian’s definitions: strategy is an attempt to frame power for its institutions. Tactics do not formally or deliberately engage in the strategy’s plan. Tactics circumvent it. Tactics aren’t about space, they’re about time. They are, as de Certeau says, about the utilisation of time.

This sort of gave me a lightbulb moment. For a few reasons. The biggest one was when Adrian was talking about students. Students at uni refusing to pick up marked work because it was unnecessary, and students at high school wearing their uniforms incorrectly. This made so much sense to me. School uniforms are horrible when you’re in them. When I was in high school I had a love/hate relationship with my uniform. I liked that I didn’t have to think about what I was wearing everyday nor was I judged for what I was wearing by my peers, but I did hate how structured and formal it had to be. I had so little freedom in my school’s strategy — I was weak. So I used tactics. I rolled the sleeves on my blouse. I wore sport socks instead of regular socks. They were such small things, but they were tactics. I was interested in getting around the rules for my own comfort.

Students are almost always young people. And young people suffer the perils of ageism in our society. The biggest targets of ageism are teenagers. Teenagers are the most reviled group, by age, in our society. After them comes children, then the elderly, then young adults, and so on. But back to teenagers — teenagers are considered, more often than not, lazy. And it’s because they use tactics! Because teenagers are so structured into strategy’s plans and told that everything must be aligned to either work or leisure, because teenagers are so powerless in all of this, they have no choice but to develop tactics. Their lives are essentially la perruque. If only I had this vocabulary when I was in high school.

This line of thinking led me to the idea that tactics are actually revolutionary. Adrian said that blogging and social media is tactical, but I’m thinking on bigger terms. Movements are tactical. Protests and rallies are tactical. They have to work around what strategy is already in place. They have to circumvent it. They must be able to change, quickly, suddenly. They respond to the circumstance.

But they can be on the smaller scale too, like Adrian says. He gave the example of a supermarket as strategic. It is designed for consumer flow, for product placement, for a methodical approach to consuming. And yet I approach supermarkets tactically. I don’t follow the rules. I don’t go down the aisles, one by one. I look for things as I remember them. I go down the same aisles more than once. And that’s even if I’m following a shopping list written strategically, which most people don’t do.

Strategy is not like this and strategy does not like this. Strategy is often surprised to find that it isn’t prepared to deal with tactical movements. Strategy wants to be in control of things and doesn’t think to cope with change if the change falls outside its predetermined possibilities.

This idea of framing and reframing was also kind of uncanny. I am currently reading Clarisse Thorn’s ebook Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men that deals with theory of pickup artistry (or as they refer to themselves, the ’seduction community’). Pickup artists are all about control of social situations. Their terminology for this is ‘framing’ or ‘reframing.’ In Clarisse’s glossary, she says:

A frame is a paradigm, or a way of thinking about the world. PUAs theorize that socially dominant people set the terms of social interactions by controlling the frame. A person can take control of a social interaction by reframing it to their advantage.

This is very interesting. Are pickup artists strategic or tactical? They seem to fall under both. But I think they’re tactical. They use the strategy of societal norms and structured social interaction to their benefit by taking shortcuts. They don’t mould the environment to their need, they travel through it and take advantage of it. PUAs are often described as ‘cheating’ in social interaction.

And so I became a little confused. On the one hand, tactics are revolutionary, they create change! But they also can be kinda evil. On the other hand, strategy is totally used for evil, but it can also be kinda beneficial. I mean, when you’re trying to walk down the stairs, it’s much easier if everyone stays on the left side of the direction they are travelling. But there are always those tactical people who don’t follow that rule. And it’s not necessarily because they want to bring down the system, they were probably just impatient. But we can’t all be impatient, can we?

Oh dear, now I’m thinking about Nothing to Envy and The Hunger Games and Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser and The Practice of Everyday Life, all the books I’ve been reading at the moment, and how they all seem to be running along the same lines. Power, control, strategy, tactics, revolution, change, power, power, power.

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