Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Portrait of Ross in LA
In the first week of the class, we re-examined the definition of new media art and looked at some of the important artists and works that represent the radical shifts in how we evaluate and appreciate art and its form, one of which was Marcel Duchamp, leader of DADA movement in the early 20th century. His use of found objects in pieces, like Fountain and Bicycle Wheel, instead of creating something on his own opened up the conversations around what is art, how is art made and perceived. And soon after that the difference between how art should be made and that everyone can make art started to collapse. Followed along Duchamp were artists who kept challenging conventional art-making practice: Robert Rauschenberg, Martha Rosler, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin.
The interactive piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Portrait of Ross in LA, especially stood out to me as it makes me think about the relationships among viewers and artwork on immediate experience. The work is a metaphor of Ross weighing away as viewers take away candies from the pile. Viewers’ experience is also part of this piece, which helped complete the meaning of the work, which is public ignorance. On the other hand, there is minimalism, where meaning resides in the interactive nature between the viewer and the object in any way. Minimalism provides more experiential experiences calling viewers to make up what they want out of the object. Therefore thinking about the relationships with the work as we experience the piece might provide some interesting perspectives for understanding the art itself and its relationships with the artist.
James Turrell - Meeting
In the second week, our discussion continued on radicality of new media. There was the emergence of body as medium in the works of Ana Mendieta, Kara Walker and Zhang Huan as well as the use of natural environment as medium in works the of Richard Long and James Turrell. James Turrell’s fascination with light and sky in Meeting makes me question the objectivity of everything that I experience through all my senses. His idea of subjective vision, seeing yourself seeing, is how senses can create difference response among different individuals, like Plato’s Cave. Our reality is so subjective and we rarely realize the limits of our perceptions. I love how Turrell was comparing the experience of Roden Crater project with book-reading. When “you enter that universe, it expands to any size you'd like to think of”. Through portals like these, with patience as price of admission, we enter some space that is beyond our present space, which may tell us something beyond what we already know from obtaining information from our subjective vision.
I also highly admire the Sol Lewitt, Anthony McCall, Jeongmoon Choi, and Tatsuo Miyajima who use conceptual forms of art. I’m fascinated by the accuracy, precision, attention to details and amount of careful planning they put into their work even it’s just made of simple lines and geometric shapes. They adapt to new medium, transferred from conventional canvas to space and environment. Instead of viewers being outside looking at a work, they place them inside the work, creating an immersive space for viewers to contemplate and explore within.
The relationship between art and technology is just as old as we are. All art was once new media art until the next expressive media was discovered, something that are used to draw, paint brushes, oil, are merely the most common form of media and thus perceived as the norm. Examining work of these artists who played with the media to reconfigure the way we view art challenged my preconception of what is new media art.