Christian Marclay - book

Footsteps © Christian Marclay 1989 

3,500 single sided 12 inch vinyl records 

Installation, Shedhalle, Zurich

Installation art can be described as a 4 dimensional world where height,width, depth and time become the main components within which the art piece exists. Each viewer experiences the work in different ways and thus come to lots of different ways and creates new pieces of art within the initial work. The idea of moving art away from the gallery walls can be attributed in part the work of pop artists in the 60's who raised the question of art as product and thus paved the way for artists such as christian Marclay who fused the idea of sound and vision to create a new interactive form of art.
one such work is 'footsteps'(1989) in which he recorded the sound of his footsteps and overlayed it with the sound of tap dancing onto vinyl records - 3,500 in total. These vinyls were laid onto the gallery floor and effectively walked on by the visitors, they themselves becoming part of the resulting work in which the now scratched and damaged vinyls were packaged up and sold creating a new sound. The question remains however, had these vinyls remained unsold would the piece have become solely about the 'idea' of sound

Magnetic Recording Tape © Christian Marclay 1991

Installation, DAAD Galerie Berlin

Another piece of work created on a much more subtle scale is the work 'Magnetic recording Tape' (1991) displayed much like a hammock and with a recording of the sound of rain, the construction - carries very little density so the idea of the views presence, their breath, can move through and disrupt the shape of the structure and create a sense of a whisp like subtle after effect of a body being there. Their presence effectively create a DNA which has been transferred onto the delicate tape and further adds to the feeling of participation even in it's more subtle form.

Authors: Jennifer Gonzalez, Kim Gordon, Matthew Higgs
Title: Christian Marclay
Published: Phaidon Press LTD 2005
Publisher: Phaidon Press Inc.
ISBN 0714843741

Nam June Paik (1932-2006)- e resources

What is Installation Art?
My interpretation of installation art as a whole is art which is site specific, which is designed to provoke an expression or interpretation specific to it's place or sorroundings. Often involving a variety of senses i.e. site, vision, touch.

Nam June Paik is considered to be one of the first video artists. He is a qualified composer and studied history of music. Leading him to the exploration and experimentation of tv, musical compositions and avant-garde art as a combination.
Some of his most famous pieces of work, 'TV Buddah', 'TV Plant' and 'TV Cello' involve science and technology with natural beauty, whether it be nature its self, music or spirituality. Personifying the nature of the human form through different types of media/instalments and sculptures.
"he insisted that the video camera was not so much a technological device as a brush for creating images, which could freely be used by anyone in any country. He believed that when technology could be used like an artist's brush, this would humanize technology so it could be applied for the true benefit of mankind. "

Lee Yongwoo,
	Technotogy as Art: The Legacy of Video Artist Paik Nam June
SOURCE:	Koreana 20 no2 36-9 Summ 2006
COPYRIGHT:	(C) Korea Foundation. Web address: http://www.kofo.or.kr/kdata.htm.

Video Fish (1975). Three channel video installation with aquariums, water, live fish, and variable number of monitors.

Paik humanises technology my removing the interior of the tv and replacing it with something else. He provokes his audience by allowing them to question technology and it's possibilities and limitations. With a world around us becoming increasing dependant on the use of technology in all aspects of everyday life, he endeavours to dig deeper into the mind and sole of technology. By extracting ones original connatation of a tv or a fish tank and replacing it with something else, Paik has given the piece of technology a new form. One that is open to interpretation, therefore being installation art.

Nam June Piak also plays with the notion of time passing and repetition, often giving something a different meaning or perception after some time has passed. The monotony of watching fish is like that of watching the TV or playing a repetitive computer game. The idea of placing a fish tank with live fish in front of video screens of fish swimming, planes flying and other moving images creates a literal crossing of mediums, giving the live fish a tv like feel and the tv's themselves a  three dimensional sculpture form. 

           NAM JUNE PAIK, TV Fish (detail), 1975–88, three-channel video, 24 monitors and aquariums, live fish, 1158 × 147 × 99 cm. Courtesy Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin.

This iconic piece























http://www.paikstudios.com/gallery/18.html





References:

AUTHOR:	Carla Hanzal
TITLE:	Traversing the Worlds of NAM JUNE PAIK
SOURCE:	Sculpture (Washington, D.C.) 20 no5 18-23 Je 2001

• Source Citation

Dillon, Brian. "Outside the box: turning television sets into art is a compelling conceit, says Brian Dillon." New Statesman[1996] 10 Jan. 2011: 53. Gale Power Search. Web. 6 Feb. 2012.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA247975819&v=2.1&u=stock&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w

Gale Document Number: GALE|A247975819

Installation Art by James Turrell.

'SkySpace'

The extent to which Turrell goes in order to create such vast and captivating installation art is self evident when viewing his work. Collier Schorr describes the intense atmospheric nature of Turrell's work in a article he wrote for the world renowned magazine 'Frieze'. 'One must enter and exit through a pitch-black corridor; this juncture is where James Turrell’s installation begins. A maze of light turns must be carefully navigated, so that one avoids touching those passing in and out of the centre. In total darkness one may be hesitant to walk freely; small stumbling steps are taken instead. The entrance is a decompression chamber, an apparatus that momentarily rids the body of its own corporeality'. This beautifully articulate expression of Colliers first hand experience captures and portrays the magnitude and simultaneous subtlety of Turrells work. As we can see from the image above, the intentionality of Turrell's control of light and direction is elegantly achieved with the complexity of his work powering through the somewhat simplistic nature of the piece. The aesthetics of the piece shown through the image above reenforce, like that of various other examples of Turrell's work, these notions of geometry,  space, light and the manipulation of such things. There is a naturalistic element to the work perhaps evoking some primitive response from a dormant  part of our psyche in which we become excited when we see such  formations created by man, employing the elegance of nature.

Collier Article.
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/james_turrell/


'SkySpace' - Video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5YKXLfjMHw

James Turrell - Book Stock

Skyspaces

James Turrell is a contemporary artist, who works mainly with light, both natural and artificial. A Skyspace is based on the principle of cutting or modelling an opening through the ceiling of an enclosed structure. 

Skyspaces present an interesting juxtaposition between indoors and outdoors, in that they bring the sky down to “replace” the ceiling, creating a space that seems enclosed but is completely open to the sky and the elements. These elements have the ability to change the mood of the space and the experience of the viewer.

The Deer Shelter

During 1993, Turrell had been commissioned to do some work for Robert Hopper, in Halifax. During this period he spent much of his time in the grounds of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, exploring the many buildings and architectural features. It was here that he found a 19^th century deer shelter, a brick structure that was built on to the face of an old quarry. 

The shelter was in considerable disrepair, But Turrell set about not only restoring it, but also expanding upon it, so that it may become a refuge once again, albeit for humans rather than deer.  After 13 years of work, the Deer Shelter has gone through many changes. The side arches have been opened up and holes have been puched through the walls behind them to create a tunnel into a square chamber, excavated from within a hill, which contains heated concrete benches around the edges of the room, and a rectangular space missing from the ceiling so that the sky may be seen. It has become a place for people to relax and commune with nature – the nature in this case being the sky.

“Deer Shelter Skyspace is a work of art that acts as an invitation to look upwards. Turrell cannot control what is seen there, any more than he can control the elements.” – Gerrit Willems, The Sensuous Lushness of Light, 1996

Gaze Heuristic (With Drool)

Tony Oursler Web research

Tony Oursler was born in new york in 1957. He completed a BA in fine arts at the California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, California in 1979. His art covers a range of mediums working with video, sculpture, installation, performance and painting.
http://www.tonyoursler.com/

Eye in the sky (1997)

A recurrent theme in Oursler's work is the way in which visual technologies influence and even modify our social and psychological selves. His practice continuously engages with popular culture and questions how systems of mechanical reproduction, like photography, film and television, have come to dictate not only the way we see the world, but also the ways that images are constructed. Ourlser's formal vocabulary is deceptively simple, employing objects of everyday life, both high and low, that range from kitsch to folk art, and investing them with a new aesthetic meaning. A key feature of his work is the ways in which the human body comes into play. On one level the body is employed in a very literal sense through the projection of fragmented and alienating body parts onto fibreglass forms. On another level the body functions through the encounter with the work. Oursler's scenarios constantly invoke the very human wish to lose oneself in fantasy.
http://www.lissongallery.com/#/artists/tony-oursler/


Tony Oursler's mixed media installations, in which theatrical objects such as puppets and dolls are layered with video projections and spoken text, are prefigured in the wildly inventive body of videotapes that he has produced over the past twenty years. In his videotapes, Oursler's idiosyncratic fictions take the form of bizarre narrative odysseys, horror-comedies. Subjective visions of cultural and psychosexual delirium are pursued with outrageous black humor and a surreal theatricality.

Camera obscura (1998)

Fusing media-saturated artifice with primal obsessions, the iconography of his visual tableaux ranges from the biblical to the perverse; the language of his narrated texts is hilarious, irreverent and unexpectedly poetic. Utilizing low-tech gadgets to simulate and satirize video effects, his disjunctive fictions are haunted by themes of sexual alienation and hysteria, political and cultural violence, and the dichotomies of good and evil, life and death.

The Influence Machine

Early works, such as The Weak Bullet (1980) and Grand Mal (1981), have been described as "half Jackson Pollack, half David Cronenberg, and as funny as paranoid". The faux-naivete of his visual and spoken tales belies the textual sophistication of his meta-language of pop culture and subversion of narrative modes. Signature works have been his talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999). An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark and light in the history of the camera obscura.

He also mentions the influence of artists such as Jonathan Borofsky, John Baldessari, Judy Pfaff, and Laurie Anderson. Oursler has collaborated with a number of other artists, including Constance DeJong, Joe Gibbons, Tony Conrad, and Dan Graham and the band Sonic Youth.

Tony Oursler research. Book stock.


The installations of Tony Oursler, an American installation artist, create a synthesis of video works, sculptures and environment installations. Ourslers installation art is aimed to be perceived emotionally by the viewer. Many of his works involve the projection of moving images onto everyday inanimate objects. The use of sound heavily affects the atmosphere of his exhibitions and plays a large part in making them an emotional experience.

Much of Ourslers work includes an assemblage of facial features (eyes, mouths, noses etc) for example, the exhibition ‘eyes’ held in 1999. This installation turned a gallery into a planetarium of suspended eyeballs that created a vision of disembodied gazes, stares and blinks. “I have a theory which is that all people are most attracted to the face. It carries the most information about us for many reasons. The rest of the body is inconsequential in comparison. Thus, the evolution of the close-up and the talking head on television” Tony Oursler.

Bull's Balls, 1997

“The transmigration of the face and what it signs has always been of interest to me, even since my first tapes in the 70s. The personification of the bull’s testicles in this exhibition is a logical extension of that exploration" Tony Oursler.

I feel that Tony Ourslers work, to be fully appreciated and understood, would need to be experienced in person. His art is an experience that aims to provoke emotion and create atmosphere. The photographs and descriptions of his work that I have researched cannot effectively convey the full effect of Ourslers exhibitions.

Mirror Maze (Through Dead Eyes)

I found this weeks research to be fairly difficult. The books that I found on Tony Oursler, I thought to be quite 'full on' and I found myself struggling to digest the information within. I feel perhaps that I should read more books written in such a way so I can better understand the language that they are written in, so my research will flow a little easier in the future.

Nam June Paik - Web Research

Installation Art – Web Research

Installation Art was seen as collectively bringing all the different types of media together and creating one amazing piece of installation art. Installation art is a piece performance for the gallery space in which it is going to be placed/exhibited in, the piece of art work performs rather than the artist. It is a piece where the audience/visitors can interact with it and get involved, so that it gets the visitors included and active towards the piece of work.

All different types of media are used to create a piece of installation art such as light, sound, video, electronic images etc, this then means involvement from the visitors is vital and is more than just looking at a static image. How the installation art is seen and the reaction from the visitors all depends on the involvement of them and how they view a piece of art.

Nam June Paik

In 1958 John Cage had inspirational ideas about music and performance, this led Paik to think about how he could experiment with sounds and his compositions.  Throughout this stage, Paik got involved with the Neo-Dada Artists, this was known as Fluxus, this included artist like Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and Wolf Vostell.

The artists became known for their ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity. In 1961 the first Fluxus event was formed at the AG gallery in New York, followed by many festivals in Europe in 1962.  There were no specific rules or ideas of Fluxus but it was seen as an attitude rather than a movement, accident and chance played a large part in installation art and humour was also an important part of it.

This type of medium opened up many ideas and thoughts for Paik and his work, as it was a way of showing everyday objects in a different form using sound and lighting and wanted to get new/ out of the ordinary reactions from the viewers.

www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/.../nam-june-paik-education-pack.pdf

Fluxus

The movement known as ‘Fluxus’ started off in the early 1960’s in New York, artists grouped together centred around John Cage and created/ developed ‘Anti-Art’. Fluxus staged a sequence of festivals in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, New York and Paris, there were successful festivals which shown Avant Garde style of performance, which created excitement for the viewers and visitors of them. The artist which played a large part in the Fluxus movement festivals included Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik.

‘The movement, which still continues, played an important role in the opening up of definitions of what art can be.’

http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/namjunepaik/room2.shtm

When Paik is using his television work and household objects are involved, he tends to turn them upside down, opposite way and on their sides so that it changes the viewers’ relationship with them as household objects.

Above (Top): Family of Robot: Mother (left) and Family of Robot: Father (right) (1986), single channel video sculptures with vintage television and radio castings and monitors; color, silent; mother: 78x61.5x20.75 inches

Above (Bottom) Family of Robot: Hi tech baby (1986). Single channel video sculpture with television casing, thirteen monitors, and aluminium structure, color, silent, 52.5x37.8 inches.

Electronic Superhighway: Continental US (1995). Forty seven channel and closed circuit video installation with 313 monitors, neon, and steel structure; color, sound, approx. 15x32x4 feet

http://www.paikstudios.com/gallery/gallery_index.html  



Work in Focus: Zen for film 1964:-

Zen for film can be viewed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z1sOsIrshU

In this piece, Paik work in run on a continuous loop through a projector, all the viewers will see is a blank white screen, the light projected from the lamp illuminating specs of dust and impurities on the film every so often. This was Paiks answer/result to Robert Rauschenberg’s work, in which white canvases and only light and shadow from the environment there were in was seen on them. This type of work is revealing the materials natural qualities and nothing more.

 

‘Zen is also concerned with being aware of life around you. It is about experiencing each moment without letting memories or thoughts get in the way- seeing, feeling, touching, smelling and hearing.’

www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/.../nam-june-paik-education-pack.pdf