I’m still trying to figure out my whole blog strategy, now that I have one personal one, and one academic. According to Shannon Mattern, we needn’t separate these two completely, nor should we, as each informs the other. However until I find a way to merge them in a way so that my academic work isn’t infected by stories of debauchery and drunkenness (and vice versa) – I will maintain the two as discrete entities. I’m also going to use this one to document all my academic writing, and will be posting work from all my classes, using tags to differentiate them (MLS = “Media Language & Society,” etc.) The following is a recent response to a YouTube video documenting Dialogue, a work at the New Museum by Kumi Yamashita.
My reaction to the video documentation of Kumi Yamashita’s piece may not be the expected one. On the surface, I suspect we were to relate the “talking” heads aspect of the piece to the idea of dialogue explored in the previous assignment, but I’d like to approach it from another angle. This video was clearly a *documentation* of a piece of art that was meant to live in a live space. While I’m not entirely sure how it worked, it appeared as though there was one piece (the white one) living in 3-D space on a pedestal, and casting a shadow on the wall behind it, so that the shadow appeared to be “talking” to the live art. This is an intriguing concept, and I would have loved to have seen it when it was installed at the New Museum, but the video documentation left me cold. With any live art, or art that is meant to be experienced communally, there is an “energy” that defies translation from the real world to another medium. Walter Benjamin called the energy of an original work of art its “aura” – it’s something that exists not only for visual art work, but dance, theatre, performance art, and even film. Live art is meant to activate a space and the people around it, creating a unique relationship between the art and its viewers and the viewers with each other. This relationship is the kind of ‘dialogue’ that I find valuable in art, and that almost inevitably disappears in its documentation. I come from a background in performance (actor, director, producer) and the day after a particularly electric performance, I’d always be excited to watch the video – and was almost always disappointed at how the video failed to capture the electricity. In the last minute of the Yamashita video (which was inexplicably 9-minutes long,) the camera tries to simulate the experience of the viewer walking around the piece, viewing it from different angles. However, doesn’t this take much of the agency away from the viewer, and leave it up to the camera to tell her/him *how* to see it? If art is a dialogue, then by definition it takes both parties (art/artist and viewer) to contribute to the conversation. By allowing a camera to do my seeing, I feel as though I am being deprived the right to express myself as a viewer.
This complaint is one that I have not only of this type of video documentation, but the way in which much of the new art – being created by new artists using new technology – is experienced. Whereas experimental filmmakers in the 50s and 60s had cafes and venues (like
Cinema 16) in which to present their work before a live audience, today’s artists often have no place but YouTube – which takes the live social aspect of art out of the equation altogether. I think it’s a mistake to assume that because something is “video art,” that all we need to experience it is a screen. Like all art, we need others as well.
Tagged as:
Art,
MLS,
Video
