FW: art students...

From: Alan Tollefson
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2011 9:48 PM
To: leaf@baymoon.com
Subject: RE: art students...

Glad you liked the show I'm going to post this exchange on the blog for the record.
Yeah Skype is easy. Give me a call tomorrow when you get an acct. and I'll plug in my camera and we can vid/chat.

AT
Alan Tollefson

Technical Director
University of La Verne Theater Arts

1950 Third St.
La Verne, Ca 91750
909.593.3511 ext.4552

atollefson@laverne.edu
________________________________________
From: leaf@baymoon.com [leaf@baymoon.com]
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2011 9:35 PM
To: Alan Tollefson
Subject: Re: art students...

i'd love to. i don't have a skype acct yet. easy?
i watched the vids. i am so proud of them, and you! this shit is wack,
in the best way!!! ahhh, the red chairs :)

possible additions (if appropriate):

it might be seriously disturbing and powerful if, for instance, the
tied/taped/desecrated people were already that way when folks entered the
space, and never came out of character. (the written-on gal had some
SERIOUS stage presence. she was practically a hero-martyr).

along the same lines, if aome of the artists were written
on/objectified/used in some non-standard way by the AUDIENCE rather than
the performers, similar to yoko ono's clothes being removed by the
audience... (any way to implicate, test, dirty, and offer redemption to
the audience) it would, i think, exponentially heighten the experience.

> They totally miss you and I told them to email. The are stoked for No.e on
> Wed. And their performance was awesome! They totally fucked that shit up!
> The viedo is up on youtube my channel is @ findtollefson check'em out and
> if
> you want to skype into class tomorrow (also findtollefson) you could give
> a
> mini crit. What do you think?
> Peace!
>
> AT
>
>
> On 1/24/11 6:34 PM, "leaf@baymoon.com" <leaf@baymoon.com> wrote:
>
>> hi al,
>> some of your (?) students contacted me via fb today. i wondered if it
>> was
>> part of some shenanigan. moheb said they did a fantastic piece where
>> they
>> fucked shit up. i'm intrigued! what's going on over there?!?
>> ~leaf
>>
>
>

New Originals Part 6

new Originals Part 5

New Originals Part 4

New Originals Part 3

New Originals Part 2

The New Originals at the Harris Gallery

world in a nutshell

helplessness

mini woodstock

body image piece (film &blood)

life punch recession stories

insults

birthcontrol

life fork

follower or leader with cloths pins

linked (hiv+)

liger in the room

media web

unexpected robbery

cammo coverup

what do you really think

choices and consequences

adam and steve

peer pressure

1. writing on the body

hung

hungry

oppression with handcuffs

if you really knew..

suicide

1. text added (reasoning)

bad die/t

it can be real violent

sheeeit

club impact

Photography and Perfromance Art Panel with RoseLee Goldberg, Marina Abromovic, and Vanessa Beecroft

Dawn Kasper

*

Dawn Kasper
Dawn Kasper @ Circus Gallery

Published in Beautiful/Decay magazine

Dawn Kasper, “Life and Death” at Circus Gallery

Dawn Kasper’s visceral, uncanny self-portraits assuming the guises of various characters and re-enacting their fabricated death scenes are at once incredibly seductive and subtly humorous—perhaps precisely for their occlusion of verisimilitude. Invoking a kind of bizarre schadenfreude, the viewer can’t help but feel sickly bemused by Kasper’s cast of character’s untimely and unglamorous demises (choking on a sandwich in “Peanut Butter Shop,” or discarded, as in “Woman That Had Been Thrown out with the Garbage.”) Her visual language within these fictionalized horror mis-en-scenes owes more to the fantastic camp and vaudeville affects of tawdry wax torture museums and b-rate horror films than the gritty, stark reality of snuff films or forensic photography. Certain aesthetic clues tip the viewer off that the images are not operating under the pretense of literal-minded documents, they are, in fact, Kasper’s personal, stylized riffs on death: the overabundance of slick, glossy Karo syrup blood spilling across the floor, theatrically dark, zombie-like circles or the completely unnatural, mask-like white pallor of her face make-up. In many ways, these aesthetic details are precisely what make the images so compelling. Cutting through the constant droning hum of our current media saturated environment is no easy task, where we are constantly exposed to “authentic” images of tragedy, violence, death, crime scandals, car crashes and the like- yet Kasper’s accessible and appealing images somehow hit an underlying nerve.

Perhaps because the impetus behind Kasper’s images is not to devise sensationalist spectacles—though they are visually alluring. Rather, Kasper’s modus operandi is fundamentally rooted in the sincere existentialist task of questioning the nature and meaning of life-and, accordingly cathartically wrestling with, methodically and unnervingly, gazing upon her own demise. In an interview, Kasper relayed that in simulating these deaths, she wanted to believe that she would never have to die in such a fashion. Thus imagining, organizing, researching, acting out and actively creating indexical, self-imposed projections of her own corpse in some ways allows Kasper to reconcile and exert control over a phenomena in which she in fact has little agency.

I was instantly reminded of Hippolyte Batard’s Autoportrait en nove (Self Portrait as a Drowned Man), in which he presented a photograph of himself slumped over, described as a body that was sadly “unclaimed” in the morgue, to express his despair that the French government chose to credit Daguerre (rather than him) as the inventor of photography. In many ways, both Kasper and Batard’s images are compelling representations of an honest attempt to re-insert their “being” into the collective consciousness- and ironically, forestalling death or disappearance. As Walter Benjamin has philosophized within his theories on photography, these images reference the desire to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly- to get hold of an object at a close range by way of its likeness and reproduction.

By positing her own visage as both subject and object, living and dead, Kasper essentially accesses and taps into the nature of the “self,” via its visible, corporeal form. She enigmatically asserts and illustrates that the body as a vessel for meaning is never fixed nor simple, but a guile magician, constantly shape-shifting, re-assuming forms, its meaning both transitory and contingent. Or as Nietzsche so eloquently wrote: “To the despisers of the body will I speak my word. Soul is only a word for something about the body. The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.”

By Sasha M. Lee freelance writer

source: http://www.sashamlee.com/?page_id=186

Paul McCarthy: Piccadilly Circus

Joseph Beuys: I like America and America likes me

Joseph Beuys w/ Coyote
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

African-American Performance Artists

(above) Charles McGill: "Playing Through" performed during the Gallery M exhibit: Black Baggage, 2001

Notes on critical African-American Performance Artists

Peru's shamans send US election vibes

Manifesto

Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema
Werner Herzog
April 30, 1999

LESSONS OF DARKNESS

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law; the bad guys should go to jail.”

Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures of ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.”

9. The gauntlet is herby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Werner Herzog
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 30, 1999





source: http://filmvideo.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=3286&title=Articles

Oral History

Francis Alys

Nick Cave

What is Performance Art?

leaf's gift

Laughter Yoga

Performance Art - Art History 101 Basics

1960s-Present

By Shelley Esaak, About.com Guide

See More About

• performance art
• modern art movements
• contemporary art movements
• art history 101

The term "Performance Art" got its start in the 1960s in the United States. It was originally used to describe any live artistic event that included poets, musicians, film makers, etc. - in addition to visual artists. If you weren't around during the 1960s, you missed a vast array of "Happenings," "Events" and Fluxus "concerts," to name just a few of the descriptive words that were used.
It's worth noting that, even though we're referencing the 1960s here, there were earlier precedents for Performance Art. The live performances of the Dadaists, in particular, meshed poetry and the visual arts. The German Bauhaus, founded in 1919, included a theater workshop to explore relationships between space, sound and light. The Black Mountain College (founded [in the United States] by Bauhaus instructors exiled by the Nazi Party), continued incorporating theatrical studies with the visual arts - a good 20 years before the 1960s Happenings happened. You may also have heard of "Beatniks" - stereotypically: cigarette-smoking, sunglasses and black-beret-wearing, poetry-spouting coffeehouse frequenters of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Though the term hadn't yet been coined, all of these were forerunners of Performance Art.
By 1970, Performance Art was a global term, and its definition a bit more specific. "Performance Art" meant that it was live, and it was art, not theater. Performance Art also meant that it was art that could not be bought, sold or traded as a commodity. Actually, the latter sentence is of major importance. Performance artists saw (and see) the movement as a means of taking their art directly to a public forum, thus completely eliminating the need for galleries, agents, brokers, tax accountants and any other aspect of capitalism. It's a sort of social commentary on the purity of art, you see.
In addition to visual artists, poets, musicians and film makers, Performance Art in the 1970s now encompassed dance (song and dance, yes, but don't forget it's not "theater"). Sometimes all of the above will be included in a performance "piece" (you just never know). Since Performance Art is live, no two performances are ever exactly the same.
The 1970s also saw the heyday of "Body Art" (an offshoot of Performance Art), which began in the 1960s. In Body Art, the artist's own flesh (or the flesh of others) is the canvas. Body Art can range from covering volunteers with blue paint and then having them writhe on a canvas, to self-mutilation in front of an audience. (Body Art is often disturbing, as you may well imagine.)
Additionally, the 1970s saw the rise of the autobiography being incorporated into a performance piece. This kind of story-telling is much more entertaining to most people than, say, seeing someone shot with a gun. (This actually happened, in a Body Art piece, in Venice, California, in 1971.) The autobiographical pieces are also a great platform for presenting one's views on social causes or issues.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Performance Art has increasingly incorporated technological media into pieces - mainly because we have acquired exponential amounts of new technology. Recently, in fact, an 80's pop musician made the news for Performance Art pieces which use a Microsoft® PowerPoint presentation as the crux of the performance. Where Performance Art goes from here is only a matter of combining technology and imagination. In other words, there are no foreseeable boundaries for Performance Art.
What are the characteristics of Performance Art?

• Performance Art is live. • Performance Art has no rules or guidelines. It is art because the artist says it is art. It is experimental. • Performance Art is not for sale. It may, however, sell admission tickets and film rights. • Performance Art may be comprised of painting or sculpture (or both), dialogue, poetry, music, dance, opera, film footage, turned on television sets, laser lights, live animals and fire. Or all of the above. There are as many variables as there are artists. • Performance Art is a legitimate artistic movement. It has longevity (some performance artists, in fact, have rather large bodies of work) and is a degreed course of study in many post-secondary institutions. • Dada, Futurism, the Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College all inspired and helped pave the way for Performance Art. • Performance Art is closely related to Conceptual Art. Both Fluxus and Body Art are types of Performance Art. • Performance Art may be entertaining, amusing, shocking or horrifying. No matter which adjective applies, it is meant to be memorable.

_{Source: Rosalee Goldberg: 'Performance Art: Developments from the 1960s', The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, (Oxford University Press, Accessed 01/17/04) http://www.groveart.com}

Performance art in glass house

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2007-04/25/content_860008_3.htm#

Performance art in glass house

(newsphoto)
Updated: 2007-04-25 16:37

Hai Rong Tian Tian, a performance artist behind a glass wall, plays with a young visitor as she participates in a performance in Beijing, April 24, 2007. She and another artist will live in the glass house for a month, exposing their daily life to visitors. [newsphoto]