art 315 Issues in Contemporary Art

Hey everybody. I'm assuming you can hear me. Yep. Thank you, Jack. So last week's lecture is not up yet. Sorry, I haven't had a chance to do that, but I will get that up. Last week's topic was relational aesthetics. And I am going to touch on that tonight as a way to get into the other topics were looking at. But as you saw in the e-mails, I wanted to talk about the modernism postmodernism stuff with you a little bit. First for your papers. So if you wanted to take more time, that will be good. Now, I guess nobody has any questions. I must be doing my job then. But I'm still concerned that I wasn't doing my job. So I just wanted to actually just cover some main points. Then I'm hoping you understand, especially going into this paper. So I want to okay. I went and got my chat. Okay. So nobody emailed me questions, but feel free. You can type them in chat or just speak up and we'll talk about stuff. So this was a table that I gave you describing differences between modernism, modernism and post-modernism. And sort of looking at, looking at the two ideas in terms of dualities or dichotomy, however you want to think about it. This is from a literary, literary theory scholar named you have Hasan. So the thing with these kinds of tables is that on the one hand, they're really nice because they simplify everything. But on the other hand, there are problem because they simplify everything. Right? I don't want I don't want you to sort of look at this as the explanation for what is modernism and postmodernism, because it's one person's interpretation. And while I find it helpful, I think we need to be open to how we're looking at these ideas relative to some of the other. Readings that we looked at and also thinking about the art that we looked at. Okay. I don't want to talk about these items one by one, but a couple of the things that I wanted to point out for sure was one, to look at the time periods. Okay, so if we think of Modernism as sort of going through the 50s as sort of the heyday of modernism in art. And then we think of postmodernism is sort of starting around the time of pop art, Andy Warhol and stuff. You know, think about what changes. Like why, why? Why is there a kind of disruption that happens at this point in time? And away? We go. And so I wanted to revisit this because I'm not sure that we talked about it enough. But essentially, I would describe at least my interpretation of the shift really comes from the idea of Jean-Francois nucleotide that we looked at here, which is what he calls The Postmodern Condition. Write a report on knowledge, is, how do we gain knowledge? How is knowledge shared? And again, my sort of overarching theme of storytelling. Write stories are a way of perpetuating knowledge. And prior to kind of Andy Warhol, prior to the sixties, knowledge was very hierarchical, right? I mean, we, we had the powers that be sort of determining what it was that we needed to learn and, and how we learned it. And then come to 960 these feel recall. And actually I did not do this justice. But if you wanted to look into or on your own, the student, student strikes and protests in Europe in the late 1960s really indicate or demonstrate no pun intended. That people, all kinds of people. I really contesting how knowledge is sort of defined and how it is perpetuate it. Okay. So and that's essentially what Lee attire is talking about. He's psych. Postmodernism is about how we attain knowledge. And so if we think of it that way, going to the idea of the artist as a model of modernism and post-modernism. You know, thinking of Greenberg and Greenberg's model of the artist, I think a Patterson. The artist and that model is a solitary figure who by virtue of whatever the universe has given them this ability to see things or know things and then, and then the artist than kind of shares that right with everybody else. But it's a special, it's a special role. It's a special responsibility in society that the modernist artist has, right? And the thing is that not everybody, not everybody can, can be that right now. We can be that kind of artist. That's where our ideas of like artistic genius and originality in, and all of that come from those kinds of values are very modernist because they're based in this idea of the artist being special, being different than everyone else. Okay, now, 960 these. And I'm leaving this up here because we have new ways of sharing knowledge, right? And that's essentially what happens in postmodernism, is that now we sort of can all lay claim to both perpetuating knowledge. Sort of producing knowledge, right? And the like. So actually one of the readings for today, the article on Foucault and the social, I think, I think the writers as social panopticon. But this idea that remember the panopticon, right? The guards and the prisoners. And then foucault talks about this virtual panopticon where there's no guards and prisoners because we're all both guards and prisoners. Okay. We'll, we'll get to that. So that, that's where a big difference lies, right? Is who controls knowledge? How is knowledge disseminated? How is knowledge produced? Okay, modernism and postmodernism look at those two things very differently. Alright? And that's one way to sort of look at the role of the artist in each, in each one. The other thing I wanted to point out. And I hope this doesn't screw up your papers. But I think you need to think about this. Is that modernism doesn't end, right? I mean, like the way I'm talking about it is if there's this rupture and then modernism and postmodernism begins. But as we looked at, at the very beginning, our entire society, our culture, is founded in ideals of modernism, right? All people are created equal, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? These are all modernist ideals. There is no way, no way. Those are going anywhere, right? I mean, as long as we as a nation and as a people are who we are. Those are very strongly embedded ideals. So you cannot say that something may be strictly modernist or strictly post-modernist. Postmodernism relies a lot on the conditions of society. And given where we are right now, both with yeah. Kind of technology I guess is the easiest way to say it. Given the ability that we have to, to share information, then we have postmodern conditions as Lee attire talks about it. And yes, Michela, that's the point I want to make is we're all little bit of both, right? So we can talk about our society is having real modernist ideals. But by the same token, we are living in kind of postmodern times. And so if we go back, whoops, why didn't it go back? Map? Yeah. So we're not saying like, you know, post post 1960s was all of this on the modern aside. And I mean pre 1960s, what was everything on the modernists? Idh1 and post 1960s is everything on the postmodernists side, right? I mean, the, the real assessment has to be what aspects are modernist and was what aspects are post-modern. Okay. There is no sort of clear demarcation. When I sort of explain it that way. That's one reason why I wanted to talk about this tonight was I didn't want to get the sense that this is all cut and dried in terms of, you know, one is this thing and the others that thing. Everything interact. And it's not like, you know, something like a work of art can only be cerebral and reflective or visual insensate, right? It can be all of that. And in fact, you know, how, how are we sort of truly postmodern without also being monitored? A modernist in some respect. Okay, so when you're thinking about Patterson and you're thinking about Christine Jetson, you have to think about them. Not as sort of static examples of one thing or another. But how sort of modernist ideals and postmodern conditions and ideas are at play with both artists. Okay, I mean, certainly Patterson tends toward modernism, which makes sense since it's based on William, William Carlos Williams. And Christine is definitely postmodern and sort of all that she does. But fundamentally, I mean, you might still see that she's kind of aspiring to be an artist in a kind of modernist fashion. Okay, so I hope that doesn't screw you up too much, but I think that should actually help you. Okay. Now, are there any questions on that stuff? You have to digest that. What just popped the question. If it if it should come up. I want to make sure that I covered everything. Yeah. So I mean, we can I meet her. One of the values I think, of thinking about modernism and postmodernism is not. Well, it's definitely an academic thing to know the terminology and sort of, you know, who, who fits in what camp and what did they think and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, understanding modernism and post-modernism, I think is giving, giving ourselves tools, right to think about sort of the world around us. And even maybe more specifically, art that we might make. And how, and how we're seeing that. Did I talk about freshmen aren't students signing signing their drawings in freshmen drawing class. Okay, think about that and what that question I just asked me address atoms. Adam's question here. I think again, that we don't need to apply the labels of modernism and postmodernism. If we don't want to, I mean, you know, in this class I'm asking you to do that. But like I said, I think they're giving us a framework for thinking about things. And that's probably the more important aspect of it. I don't know that artists, at least in this, in this day and age would say the series would. I mean, they might joke about something being modernist or something being postmodern. But I think kind of what we're going to talk about today is how we have these two ideas. And then how do we use them? Both? How do we use them and how do we move past them? So, you know what? You, I guess, kind of need to think about. If you were going to apply the terms modernism or modernist and post-modern to something is to actually think about the characteristics relative to the context, right? I could have a painting that looks very abstract. And actually, I can give you a good example of that. Where did this come up? If somebody was it in this class and somebody brought up white paintings, or is that my other class? Anyway? So an artist named Robert Ryman did these white paintings, right? I mean, and that's it. They were literally just like white. And you might look at something like that and think that it looks okay, Mikkel, Thanks. So the, that's right. I remember now so that the white paintings, if you look at it, it looks sort of very formal. It looks very austere. Very seriously, you might think it's modernist, right? I mean, so visually sort of ticks the boxes for modernism. But then when you understand the artist's intention and the idea behind the paintings, It's really a critique of painting, right? So one of the things that we see in postmodernism a lot is irony. And these white paintings, in a way, a very ironic playing on this idea of painting is dead. So that's why I'm saying you can think about characteristics of work relative to context. And then say something is modernist or postmodern. But I think like what I'm saying, And Adam, I think this is what you're saying as well, is that, you know, we're probably mostly A blend of both, right? And in fact, you might say that we can't help it because we come from modernist heritage. But we live in a post-modern or so people would say post, postmodern society. Okay. Does that make sense? I think maybe the other helpful aspect to the ideas of modernism and postmodernism is to also look at the kind of not community, but look at the people is what I want is a look at the people behind them. Modernism, right, is very hierarchical. And so I find my, my perception is that modernists tend to be more conservative and more desirous of a kind of hierarchical structure. Someone who has a more of a postmodern sensibility would be more populous than sort of believe everyone is an artist and, and that sort of thing. And so I think maybe understanding where people are coming from and what their work is like helps us to understand what the artist's intentions might be and where, where the work may fit contextually. Okay. So those are actually ways that you could think about Patterson and Christine. If you were writing sort of like, you know, socially, even politically, if you wanted to, to say that. Where do they, where do they fit? Right. I'm in Paterson. He he's out in society every day and he has these connections. But as an artist, he's very much his own person. And very solitary. Christine, on the other hand, her work is all about making these connections and expressing social bonds in different ways. Right? And so those, those aspects of their work really characterize the modernist side and the postmodern. Okay? So yeah, you can, you can think about that. So what I was going to say was that, you know, one of the, I think great values of looking at modernism and postmodernism as a kind of economy is to think about those intersections. To think about. How things fall and why they fall, where they do. But then also what happens after the fact, right? So if we, if we think about the 990 three Whitney Biennial as this kind of watershed moment, right? Sort of, let's just call it just to simplify matters, let's call it postmodernism coming to a kind of coming to a head. Right? And then everything hits the fan because people hate the, I hate the exhibition and they think the work is not art and all this other stuff. Then also, we have this kind of censorship in this chilling effect in the arts and people feeling like they can express themselves in particular ways. So what happened? I mean, does, does art revert? There's our revolt. I mean, what, what does r do? And I think what's interesting is that, yes, we do. Start thinking about art in ways that we hadn't thought about them previously. And largely that has to do with what happened sort of the sixties through the eighties in art as a way of expanding what art could be, right? But then at the same time, the idea of expanding what art can be also allows for debates about is that art. And I think that I think that's a valuable, it's a valuable debate to have. So I would say one of the things that we look at that we see after so I was like, Hey, I wanted to make sure that I was recording. Can you guys see is do you have do you have I know it's recording. Yeah. Thank you. Owe me. Go back. Okay. So one of the things that we saw in modernism was that modernists very much believed in the art object, right? And then postmodernism now expanded that. Expanded this def, definition apart to include sort of non-objective work, conceptual art, performance art, right? Of different other kinds of forms that weren't necessarily things. And actually, I should have looked up the year. A curator, French curator named Nicolas Bourriaud wrote a book around an exhibition that he curated called relational aesthetics. And that was the topic for last week. And I have a quote here that I think summarizes that pretty well. So Liam Gillick is one of the artists that falls into this relational aesthetics group. And he says, this is, in a way, it's kind of a definition and relational aesthetics. If we want to understand tendencies in art, we have to look at the structures that underscore the sharing of ideas. This is especially true when we consider discursive processes to be the base of self-conscious art practice. It is necessary to find a way to describe, map, and analogize the processes that have actually been taking place under the surface of recent models of curating and artistic practice. Okay, What does that mean? Basically, what he's saying is that art is a vehicle or should be a vehicle for sharing ideas and initiating conversation. So what he's saying, what he's calling discursive processes, I'm just going to say that that's conversational, courageous people talking about sharing ideas. And what relational aesthetics essentially talks about is that all art, whether it's an object or not, is in one way or another about this facilitation of sharing and specifically sharing ideas. Okay, So that could be from an object that could not. I mean, one way to think about it is that sort of any kind of debate that arises around the discussion of a work. We might even consider that part of the work, right? And that would be a relational practice. Okay, Let me jump there yet. Alright Then why? Because I'm out-of-order. This, okay, This slide is out of order, will come back. So this is actually from the relational aesthetics writing done by Nicolas Bourriaud. Set of artistic practices which takes us their theoretical and practical point of departure. The whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space. So. Those of you who know Lance when he likes to joke that relational aesthetics has always been with us because it's basically architecture, right? I mean, so if you want to think of it that way, that is kind of what boys talking about. He's talking about spaces for social interaction, right? It's not very, it's actually not very profound if you, if you give it more thought. I think what's more interesting? I don't know of interesting is the right word. Maybe it's kind of funny. Is that yeah, It is funny is that for some reason in recent, I would say like in the last decade or so, people started Revisiting Relational Aesthetics as a way to rationalize art. Rash, or specifically, I think, rationalize their own art. And one of the things in the relational aesthetics lecture is a YouTube video. That's very funny, that talks about relational aesthetics. So anyway, I will get that up for you and you can look at it. Oh, here are just some images. This is Liam Gillick work. Now he actually talks about architecture very specifically, very theoretical. I, I don't personally connect the ideas he writes about and talks about with the work itself. I feel like his work is more about the writing and the ideas. And then the work that he, that he presents is kind of, I don't know, more for show. Anyway, he talks a lot about utopian architecture. And so if we use this idea of architecture as spaces for interpersonal or human interaction. Utopian architecture talks just, just what that says. A utopian, a utopian, a Utopian kind of space. This is another liam Gillick piece. I just thought I would throw this in because it's fun. It's called I think it's called something like the kitchen Pat speaks. And if you can see here, I know it's yeah, that's a kitchen the kitchen cat is here sitting on top of a cabinets. So this is a kitchen, right? And there's a cat. And then these are viewers, and you walk through the space and the kitchen cat doesn't actually talk to you, but they do look at you. And there is, if you Google it, it's kind of long. The kitchen cat isn't. Talking to you directly, but the kitchen cat is talking and I can't remember what the cat talks about. But again, it's kind of long. But if you Google it, you can find like a whole soundtrack of this piece where the kitchen kept speaks. And the, the idea behind this comes from Derrida. And we're going to talk about this in a couple of weeks. I think Derrida has this writing, this essay, where he talks about stepping out of the shower and seeing his cat. They're in the bathroom looking at him and he's naked. And all of a sudden he feels the cat kind of gaze. Okay. So it says cat nearly, I guess he gave much thought to the cat before, but all of a sudden, he now feels like the cat is actually looking at him, right? Seeing him. And it leads to a lot of thoughts on his part as to who is the cat. What does the cat about? Essentially, a recognition of the cat as an individual. And not just this kind of pet that hangs around the house. So it is, it is very interesting. It's the idea is one of animal sentience, right? Sentience, meaning this ability to be self-aware and to think, get to feel, and to understand one. Understand being part of a larger context. Understanding your relationship to a larger context. But anyway, so that's kind of where this particular piece goes. Kitchen. I'm young preachers called the Kitchen cat speak. We looked at this before. I believe I showed you artists get to Irvine it on the right there with the glasses, creating spaces where he essentially holds dinner parties. Okay. So he's originally from Thailand and he would create spaces where he then cooked Thai food for gallery goers and other guests. So that's what that looks like. This is one of the spaces he creates. And again, this is part of that whole relational aesthetics idea. We're get to your vine it, along with Liam Gillick was one of the artists that Nicolas Bourriaud talks about in his relational aesthetics. Because what we're kid is doing is, right, he, he has designed and built the space specifically for these interactions that are happening there. Interactions that are then being kind of facilitated by, by the food, right? Because we all understand sharing food together. I believe I'm pretty sure this is another piece. So it wasn't just about food, but and it's not quite as Gate Park, but it is a space for skating. I mean, and you do understand that it's a space for interpersonal interaction, right? And then, hey, So if I'm meeting presenter view, what do you guys see? The ECE? Dc, what I see in my presenter notes or do you still just see the UDC? Udc, my notes. Okay. Well, that's not very interesting, is it? Plus I also don't see my notes. All right. So how do I get out of this now? I guess I'm supposed to see the notes over here, but they don't show up anyway. Okay. So there you go back to this. You may or may not recognize the man or the place, but this is art critic Jerry salts. Who those of you who follow contemporary art world recognize his name is kind of a premier art critic. He was also a judge on the, on the reality TV show art start. That's just the kind of status he has. Anyway. The building actually well, I'll just tell you it's the Guggenheim. It's a Guggenheim Museum. And an artist named see, this is where I needed my notes. An artist name, Carsten Heller's, I believe. Did this space or did this, whoops. He did this project where he was making, creating hotel rooms. And then he brought the project to the Guggenheim. And he made the Guggenheim a hotel. So this is jerry salts coming to the Guggenheim hotel with his carryon bag. And then here he is in bed, in his room. There are more pictures of this. If you're interested, you can Google it. So if you're familiar with the Guggenheim, right? It's just it's like a circular ramp that goes all the way around. So it's not really individual rooms per se. And so what, what the artist did was just created individual spaces that look like little hotel rooms. But really we're not, not very private. And so that's what, that's what Jerry salt is doing here. So this piece was part of an exhibition. Have to look it up. In my notes. The was something any space, something, something like any space. Any space, any time, something like that. But it was a more contemporary exhibition about relational aesthetics. But really there wasn't that much that was new in terms of ideas. It was just exploring. Exploring that again. Okay. Let me go back to my slide that was out-of-order. Yeah. So this is one of the readings for today was regarding Debord, who wrote a book called Society of the Spectacle, again into the French guy. So it's linked on your syllabus. It was a reading for today. The Society of the Spectacle pretty much says what it means. But I think the reason and the readings for today bear this out. You know, relational aesthetics. I think the important thing that we can glean from relational aesthetics and its views of artistic practice is that the viewers part of, part of the work. Okay? This idea of text, right? The viewer or the reader completes the text. The sense that the artists can make the work. But the viewer will take what the viewer will take from the piece. And when we start talking about art as sort of interactive in this way. And then we look at our contemporary context. We can't help. But think about the impact that technology has on art. I was talking to a graduate student, I think it was today, who said that they. They get lost looking at art on Instagram, right? I mean, it's kind of a crazy thing is you might not even be looking for anything and then you just go down this rabbit hole when you start looking at stuff, right? I mean, I think we've all had that experience where we're on online looking for something or looking at something. And then we get join into something on the side and then that leads us write down the rabbit hole. And then all of a sudden we've lost hours on the internet reading violent racist comments on something. And then when we finish, we're like, Why did I do that? But okay. So DDA board, this is really echoes stuff that we've talked about before. And this is, this is a quote directly from the article, not from the board. To sum up the book substance in a couple of sentences, this is a nonsense, but here goes essentially. Du Bois argues that having recast the idea of being into having what he calls the present phase of federal occupation of social life. But the accumulated resulted economy has led to a generalized sliding from having into appearing from which all Asheville having must draw its immediate prestige and ultimate function. Okay, So what that saying essentially is, right? If we go back to my example of this kind of ***** and span home, right? The idea of having a home as superseded by having this ***** and span home. And then whether or not we have that ***** and span home. What's more important is that we appear to have the ***** and span home. Okay. So anyway, the other readings about Foucault and Twitter and social media and stuff. I really interesting and they bear this out and I'm sure that you all have experiences that you can relate to with regard to social media in particular, as This way that we appear, right? We decide how we want to appear. And what did the board is saying is that we've moved from this state of kinda like being who we are, to being told what we want to have or what we should have. And then beyond that, not even having it, but having the appearance of having it. Right? Just, I guess like knock-offs would be kind of simplistic example of that. It's not it's not a it's a it's a knockoff. I, I I bought on I bought in China town. But it's a symbol of all of these things that, you know, good boy would say is Society of the Spectacle. And then your reading for today on social media bears this out a lot. Anyway. Okay, so this is an extension of what I'm saying about contemporary art, right? So this idea of relational aesthetics and are being, are being a vehicle for discursive practice. Discursive process. I0 conversation. It's about sharing ideas. And even though social media, I think it's very messy. And you really have to be critical about what you consume. It does allow all of us to be both consumers and producers, right? And that's kind of what the article on Foucault, the online piece about Foucault talks about, okay, we're going to shift gears a little bit. So another thing, right? We were talking about, you know, what? The broader topic is. What happens to our kind of post, postmodernism. Okay, so it's like if modernism taught us the specific lessons, postmodernism was our response to those lessons. So what are the lessons of postmodernism? And if we're in this post, postmodernism time period, you know, what is it that we've learned and, and what, what does art, what does r do? And so this is from an exhibition catalog which has some very interesting writing in it. From 2006 was the exhibition. And it was called sensorium. And it was at the MIT List Center. And this is one of your readings, which I know nobody did because nobody told me that the link didn't work. I will I will correct it. I will fix it. Don't worry. Carolyn Jones wrote the piece on the exhibition and makes a kind of summary statement here. A set of artistic practices which takes as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and its social context rather than an independent private space. Oh, I'm sorry. That's not carolyn jones. Yeah. No, not that Nicholas. Carolyn Carolyn Jones. This I'm sorry. This is still yet because we were out of water, right? That was boreal. There we go. This is Caroline Jones. This is about, this is from sensorium in developing the methods subsequently known as formalism, right? And just to remind you, so formulism refers to the formal elements of art, which is elements that relate to form. So it's not formal versus informal, but it's formalism as it relates to form. Fetishized site, right? The sense of sight, which had traditionally been the sense of Kp, which had been the sense capable of producing the most distance from the body. Formalism offered the user a set of positivist protocols that could produce isolated sensations abstracted from the bourgeois body rather than participate in their reproduction, always ordinate it by site. Okay. What does that mean? Essentially, in kind of modernist views. No pun intended. The prioritized sense was site, right? Every, everything that was valued in modernist art was based on what people could see with their eyes. And the interesting point that Carolyn Jones is making is that site is the one sense that really allows the viewer of the work to have some distance from it. I mean, I guess we can hear things from afar. We can smell things from afar. But site from afar maybe gives us still the, the greatest potential for recognition at a distance, right? In other words, I don't have to be right up on the work. Okay. I don't even actually have to interact with it. I can I can look at it from a distance. It's just like in the museum and they have all those barriers and stuff that you can do okay. Cause of the work don't test the work. You know, all of that, right? Very modernist. This work is special. We can't ruin it by touching it or anything like that. But as we, as we were just talking about relational aesthetics. What if the work is about interaction? What if the work is about promoting this personal interaction? Okay? And so what this exhibition is, sensorium did, was as the name kind of implies, it looked at work that addressed the other senses, right? I guess. I think taste was the one that was not really, was not really included. But they definitely wanted to look at work that involved interaction. So most of it was interactive and also engaging of senses other than strictly site. So this is an artist named Matthew, real French guy, remarried since 2006. So back in the day, this was a little more unique, but look at that design. So essentially he created virtual reality interactive piece. I don't remember like how this works. I think you and your person, your other person. I mean, you interact through this virtual reality. So I think you select a context and then you're able to sort of communicate within that context. So today that's kind of not, not so fascinating nor different. But back then it was this is an artist named real g keda. And this is a piece called spectra. And I really wish I had seen this in person, I could describe it to you better. But what real GE Keita did? Keita is IK e da. He uses white light as sculptural material. Okay. So he did a lot of I shouldn't say lights, so he did these pieces. So. So I believe the floor is actually white and then but the rest of the space is white light. So he's just using the idea which I think is fascinating is using white light as a sculptural material. Okay. If you Google him and let's go to his website, you'll see more, more of that work. And then I thought I would show you this as an extension of that. So he caters work actually precedes this. I think. I'm not sure if these were architects. There was a group that put this together. Right when they were looking at a memorial for the towers and 9, 11. Right? So they created beams of light, which is what the Keita was doing. So this is sort of related to educators work. Okay. I mean, again, yes, it's, it's visual but it's not tactile material. I think is what the curators would argue. So, okay. Now obviously sound art is not, not anything new. But there was a lot of attention paid to sound art in this particular, in this particular exhibition. This is a piece by an artist team named Carter for Miller was called Opera for a small space. And I'd be created like this little cabin in a black room. So the room itself is very dark. And then in the center, lit from inside is this is this cabin. And I have a let me see on this work. Are you seeing them over to our gallery? Is pleased to present opera. Are you seeing the video? Yes. No, we're not. Okay. Got that. Okay. Okay. Now, using the video. Thank you. For a small room by Janet Cardiff and George Burns. I can't come back. Southern Alberta Art Gallery is pleased to present opera for a small room by Janet Cardiff and George Burns Miller. Janet and George's practice often blur the lines between art theater and cinema. And while it touches on some of the traditions of theater, it pushes the transient good qualities of book, cinema and theater in a way that almost stimulates a sense. It's more because of its lack of human actors. Like many of the other installations by Janet and George, opera for a small room, Walters time perception in the atmosphere, allowing fictional narrative to blend in. Your own experiences and memories. Opera for a small room is a beautifully melancholic lover built from a mythological narrative about the man are dead. And when he will enter into the exhibition space, see that the installation is, in certain respects, a selected key of a small room. Presumably the roof or cabin identically occupy for listening. Once inside the main exhibition space, the memory of Denning he wants with no apologies. Danny, he's memory occupies the gallery space. And if I stay for the duration, There's an aspect, then a nice memories stay with the viewer, almost intruding on your personal experience. As a full you're appearing into the room, you'll see all of these objects within the artist carefully chosen show please, as being of importance to our demi, which depending on how you choose to read this piece, is very important. Once captivated by the story, can become very aware that it's tragedy. It's about love, loss. And that there's a certain burden that imposes itself on to viewers. The records were acquired all in one purchase from a thrift store. And the massive collection of opera music was enough to make the hardest question, why or what would cause personally to a mass such a huge collection? What did they mean to the former owner? What role that they play in this man's life would drive or desire was at play behind collecting so many records. He was spurred on by an emotional situation. Was he a musician himself? Large extent. All of these questions are left open to the viewers to ponder and enjoy. Janet and George invite you to indulge your voyeuristic desires. Caught between the distinction between outside and inside. The viewer floats through the exhibition like a ghost between walls. It's important to pay attention to the non-human actors in the exhibitions as well. These objects to have agency that the music, the record players, and the lights all become an actress that convey a dramatic narrative portrait of debbie. Although Denning, he isn't actually present. What is present is shadow, which moves around the space because if you were there, there's an interesting relationship and play bringing the absence to the forefront rather than the presence. Ultimately, it's your imagination that create STEMI. He threw the interaction with the objects in the exhibition. Listen to the music and the insufficient and ask yourself how they build the narrative. Look at the way that the mood and the emotion is created by the interplay of light and sound. Neither one of the individuals who were the focus of this to be ill are present in the exhibition. So how is there tension created between the lady and the NAD and the lady? Like many of the duos major works, this meticulously orchestrated audio visual installation of offers an uncanny world rife with narrative and opportunities to 0 and siding with the six 40th anniversary, artists and Miller are artists who have left their mark through many decades of the galleries institutional history. You need to influence and inspire artists and audiences all around the world. Well, good evening. My name is moistened. Must have found the dean here, and I just wanted to welcome The admitted and this MD candidates here to the GSD. It's really wonderful that you're here. I had hoped that we would actually meet earlier today and we will have some time together. But somehow our calendars didn't quite work out at exactly the right time. That was good for you. All right. Okay. Let me go back to who we're not looking at this. Yeah. Okay. That's a really bad image. Okay, so that was sound. To me, the most fascinating part of this exhibition was, I know I smell art. I had never encountered smell art before. Or I think she calls it shouldn't call it smelt like it's not odor. I mean, she has color smell. Uh-huh. Her name is so tall less. I'm going to show you a video of her in a minute. But she creates she created for this exhibition for all intents purposes, a scratch and sniff wall. Okay, That's what this person is doing, is they're smelling the wall. And on the left there are like spray bottles with different odors that the artist has collected. And so I'm not going to get to that. The video yet. So it's the smell of fear. Okay. The the pieces of the smell of fear and you can look on the bottles, I believe is where this information is available. And then you can go to the wall and sort of scratch and sniff. And so you could see fear, 0, sweat of a body. Who fears nobody. Fear one's weight of a body who fears more, more one body. I don't know what that means. Anyway, you can see the there is the smell of fear from different sources given different circumstances. And it's really quite interesting. She is a fascinating person. And so actually, let me, okay, I'm going to stop this share. How companies didn't go anywhere. See here we go again. I am assuming you can hear me, but I can I can see ash now. Okay. Wait. Where did my Zoom go? Here. Okay. Hi there. My name is seasickness. Canvas is linguist. Looking into how the world come across on behalf of its invisibility mind. Firstly, sessile means the energy of the woods as an old Norwegian. And secondly, code as it is, we're used to describe demo, where to kind tree grows. I was very early interested in invisible realities. The year that surround us, is it just abstract nothing. So it does it potentially contain information we don't see APK when your discovery, discovery what it means to be. We are born with a set off. Our senses smell a quick as processor memory and the brain will be up to 24000. Principally, the air we breathe contain smell molecules, and those molecules end up self-consciousness and that trigger your emotion and your memory. I've been working with the topic of smell for more than 20 years, using myself as a Guinea pig for exploring smell to field work, I build up a substantial archive consisting of up to 7 thousand smell sources across the globe. As experienced, the value of a being than anything. The sense of smell, understand Noble. Wherever I want it to remember something, instead of taking a photo, I collected this month with my device, that's Botkyrka ear. This technology enable me to detect enough. Confocal structure of a smell. And then I just need the replication and reproduction dismantles. The topics of concern of my work is everything that has to do with life and being alive. What makes, what that means is that if how a whole gender ways that are born with technology explore, in this book. I want to take young people aren't going to cope with them. That's my big intensive because that I think it's not just the smells and the tsunamis includes own. Yes, ma'am. This is the air you breathe and this makes you understand where you are, who you are. Yay. Okay. Thank you. And thank you, especially for spending the next half an hour with could you hear that? We're not going to spend the next half an hour with sessile total less. But if you, if you want to Google IU, there's there's plenty of stuff on her up there. Hey, now I need to go back to my screen. Share that. Okay, so that's what we just looked at. Actually. Smell is really fascinating. I guess. Because I work with dogs. I'm particularly fascinated by smell. If you think about it. Right? And me, because we all know dogs have this incredible sense of smell. But imagine how we see the world. Literally we are primary sense for understanding what's around us is site, right? Imagine being able to do that with smell, right? How crazy is that? Like? I know that I can't even imagine what that's like. I mean, I guess this is kind of an aside, but there's a woman who does research with dogs. Her name is Alexandra Horowitz, and she has a book about I forget the title of it, but it's something about it. What's Doug's how dogs smell or something like that? How dogs know the world or something like that. Anyway, fascinating things about smell. That odor moves rather consistently over the course of a day. So dogs are able to keep track of hours, you know, kind of what we would call hours based on smell. So for example, eight AM has a particular smell. As does noon, as does for PMB, right? But we're not, we humans are not able to discern that, but dogs are. So the way that we look out and we see space. However, we see what we see. Dogs smell that. So it's really fascinating. Anyway, this whole idea of modernism as being as prioritizing site, right? As kind of the main or the important sense is also really interesting because in Freud, freud says, I'm going to extrapolate from Freud that I will not say massage any, but right, I mean, for Freud everything is kind of like ***** related. And so one of the things that he talks about is that, you know, what site allows us to do or identifies for males. Is that when they see a female, they see the lack of a *****, right? Okay. I mean, you know, take that with a grain of salt. This is Freud. But it's, it is a very interesting point. That site is the sense by which most of us humans determine difference, right? Race, for example, gender. And when we prioritize site. As that sense, like this, like I don't believe you show me show me the proof, right? I want to see it with my own eyes. When we prioritize site that way. That relegates this idea of truth to things that we see. Right? Does that makes sense? And what f, There are things that we can't see that are integral to our understanding. I mean, that's kind of the point of this exhibition that looks at other, at other senses is that why are we, are ways are only looking at what we can see. Right? And so we've been talking about kind of post, postmodern explorations and art. And one of them is like, how do we get away from this prioritising of of sight or vision? I mean, because think of it this way. I mean, let's just say for argument's sake that Freud is right. And that men see women as lacking, right? I don't think that's a stretch. And let's say that these men are then responsible for writing, I don't know, laws, books, you know, just generally these men are responsible for producing knowledge and then disseminating knowledge. And inherent in all of that knowledge is a fear of women, right? I mean, that's pretty that's pretty serious. And so fear quickly turns to kind of anger that I didn't need to say anger. Fear turns to well, the desire to get away from or to differentiate from Amy. I hope you see where I'm going with that. Anyway. Yeah, lots of interesting, lots of interesting ideas come from this concept of the primacy of, of sight. Anyway. So another artist too soon that was included in this exhibition and was actually older work that was shown was Bruce Nauman. I should probably just do a whole section on Nauman. He, he's an artist whose work I enjoy. I find them very interesting. I would say intellectually interesting, and not necessarily look at his work and enjoy it for how it looks, right? Anyway. So he, he has this quote which I think is fascinating and it'll partially, it's a little tongue in cheek, but I think it still makes a point that, that is important. If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point, I became more of an activity and less of a product. Right? So what we're, what we're seeing now. And I'm just thinking about this as I'm saying it. You know, this idea of art more as more of an activity and less of a product. I mean, we saw that happening in the 1960s with feminists artists, right? That is not a new idea. But by the late 1970s, when an artist of the stature of Bruce Nauman, who happens to be. A straight white man says something like, you know, art is more an activity and less of a product. You know, that that statement has a kind of veracity that it didn't used to have. Right? You get my point. So that's one way of saying I think that aspects of what might be called protest art or identity or whatever that happened through, through the eighties. While it came to a head in that 93 Whitney and was pandas and step a, people took ideas from that, you know, like from what was going on then and said, you know, that's that's cool, that's reasonable, that that sounds like art to me. And I think in a way we were allowing for much more variety in what we're calling artistic practice. But anyway, so Bruce Nauman, I did this video. It's called Studio at night or something like that anyway is really kinda funny. He turns on the video camera and his studio and he just let it run through the night. So all you see this whole this whole time is this setup with the chairs and stuff in the studio. And then in one moment, this cat comes running across the screen, comes running across a frame and then out. And then that's it. You know, and that's and that's sort of the video. So appended to the question as well. Is that art, is it not? I mean, it goes back to that idea of art is an activity as opposed to a product. Again, I think Nauman, to me has like a very dry sense of humor, which I, I enjoy. So I think he's, I think he's funny. I think his work his work is funny. Am I missing? I know I'm out of. Okay. Okay. This is another artist that's included and and the sensorium exhibition. He's name is Christian Gentileschi. And he was one of the very early artists to use the internet as a medium. And what he did was he created these online chats with his Fiance and then televise them, not tell by Zheng. He's stream them. Well, yeah, he screamed them online. And so this is just an exchange there. So this I'm thinking now as I'm reading this, that this may have been like an actual like Chat, meaning texts exchange, not like a video chat. Buddy few. I should have done this. This would have been interesting to look at. If you Google Christian Jan Karski. I do believe he was the first artist to have his wedding or to get married online. So he and fauna una seem in their same and got married online and they invite all their friends and family to tune in online. Yes. He was using the internet kind of in that way. But again, this was back in the mid 2000s, early 2000s. So it was a very different context than than it is today. Back then, it was a lot more, I think, unusual and, and perhaps challenging for four people. This is another piece from Christian Jan Karski, where he's working with video directly here. But he's playing with the idea of tele evangelists. So he actually creates this whole scenario where it appears that we're watching tele evangelist giving light. Okay, Sorry, bad dog goes, bad dog goes anyway. Okay, so that's Christian Tchaikovsky. Okay, this is getting back to the essay, again regarding exhibition by Carolyn Jones. If there are sharing modalities among these cutting edge artists, they might be characterized by displacement, dislocation, distribution, and disorientation. But these are volitional states. It might be analogized to the kind of will transposition that occurs in the everyday cell phone conversation or the distributed effect engineered by serotonin Sequence Pharmaceuticals. And let me just go to this nine love will backup. Sensorium hopes to capture the aesthetic attitude of this hybrid moment where modernist segregation of the Census is giving way to dramatics and soil mixes, transmutations and opportunities for intensified and playful mediation. Well, what happened? I'm I'm okay. I'm still screen-sharing. I don't know what happened. I'm going to go back to this one. Okay, so a couple things about this quote. Obviously, this idea of displacement, dislocation, distribution and disorientation. Uh, she, I think is talking about those as characteristics of society. But also characteristics of the idea that our senses are sort of separated, right? That what we see is different from what we smell, which is different from what we hear. And that modernism. Because if we think back to again, Greenberg, just because he's the easiest example. When he says paintings, just be about painting. He's saying paint just be about site. Right. And then it'll work than that. Well, I mean, it's not like they're really was work that that would smell but that smell should just be about smell. Hearing it's just me but hearing, touch about touch, taste, taste, and so forth. And that by separating the census. We are, in a sense, living in this, in this space of displaced by dislocation distribution and this orientation. And then that's where we get to this conclusion. Sincerely hopes to capture the aesthetic attitude of the hybrid moment where modernist segregation of the senses is giving way to dramatics and soil mixes, transmutations, and opportunities for intensified playful mediation, right? So the idea is that we don't prioritize a single sense, but we allow for the census to work together. And we as viewers kind of soak in that moment, right? I think the use of the term mediation refers to this idea that an artist or artists can create work that encourages this kind of fully sand soil experience. We don't have to sort of given to. This idea of just, you know, just cite, just touch whatever. I think. I'm pretty sure that's my last on the sea. That's why we went dark. Okay. It's fine. Where we're at, the number where we started at. So we picked up people and then we lost people. And now we're back to where we started. Anyway. Okay. So that is all I have for you for tonight. So I guess you have time to go work on your papers. If questions come up about the modernism, post-modernism thing, please e-mail me. Feel free to ask. I think I'm feeling insecure because of this format that when we don't see each other, I'm not sure that I'm conveying all the things that I want to convey. Although I'm happy not to drive to school. Oh, there was something else I was going to say. So I'm going to do something a little different with your rough drafts this time, which is I will I will do them and get them back to you as I receive them. So what I did before was I returned everything when I had everything done. But instead what I will do is I will do them as they come in and then get them back to you as they, as they come in. Meaning the earlier you get it in, the earlier you'll get it back. And the more time you'll have to work on your final, on your final draft. Okay. But you'll want to do that. You'll want to do that anyway. I mean, you want to get it and see. Okay. Any, whoops. Sorry, I wasn't screen-sharing, right? You didn't. I lost you there for a minute. Any other questions? Anything? Last minute things, you know. Are we good? Okay. Yes. All right. Okay. So I will post actually, I can post the slides now. The lecture slides now. And then when the video's ready, whenever tomorrow, I'll post that as well. So otherwise, we're good. Everybody have a good night. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Goodnight.