Richard Prince

A maker of photographs, drawings, paintings and sculptures, as well as a writer, Richard Prince's habit of re-photographing existing photographs (initiated in the late 1970's) helped spawn the appropriation craze of the 80's. The artist himself is best known for his deadpan recycling of magazine and newspaper images that range through the highs and lows of popular culture. References to sex, drugs, rock-and- roll, alcoholism and the movies frequently give his efforts a dark and familiar undercurrent. But his relentless replication of found images also has its esoteric side and continually questions definitions of art, originality and artistic technique.

During the early 1980s, Prince developed a process that resulted in grids of juxtaposed images, which he referred to as "gangs." In works such as Entertainers (1982–83), he joined together multiple 35 mm slides of images from advertisements and magazines to form one larger negative, from which the final print was made. Each "gang" focused on a particular pop-culture motif of desire, including car hoods, bikers, pornography, cowboys, and sunsets.

http://www.rogallery.com/Prince_Richard/Prince_Richard-Biography.html

 

Cowboys (1980)

Joe McKay
Sunset Solitaire


Sunset Solitaire

“In this performance/video I've written a program on my computer that lets me mix the sunset live. I have three gradient fields that I can constantly change with specially devised hardware. I then project from my computer onto a garage in a field behind my studio. I did this a few times - each time I went back to the studio and messed with the software, and each time I got a little better at the game.” – Joe McKay

Over the course of five evenings last fall, in a field behind Joe McKay’s studio at the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay, small groups gathered to watch him paint the sunset. During the first night only a few people were present, but word got out and the crowds grew for successive presentations of Sunset Solitaire. Facing west, McKay manipulated a small controller box with three sliding switches, one each for red, green, and blue. Connected to a laptop and running the Director program, the box enabled him to mix horizontal bands of color. The resulting image was projected onto a free-standing building in the field, all under a darkening sky.

The audience watched as McKay attempted to match his digitally painted sunset, mixed live, to the real sunset as it slowly and quietly transitioned from blue to orange to fiery pink before finally fading to indigo. Appearing side-by-side, the actual and projected sunsets sometimes merged and sometimes remained jarringly distinct. An exhilarating meeting of pastoral and technological was found in the wonder and pleasure of watching a gorgeous sunset in the company of others, and the fugitive illusionism achieved when McKay’s simulated sky momentarily matched the real one to produce a seamless vista was awe-inspiring. Even documented as a 30-minute DVD, the work contains startling moments when the blend of elements from the natural and digital worlds is hypnotic and truly sublime.

– Chris Ashley (http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=452&fid=6&sid=17)

Olafur Elliasson


The Weather Project (2003)

In The Weather Project (Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, 2003) representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of the Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space. A glance overhead, to see where the mist might escape, reveals that the ceiling of the Turbine Hall has disappeared, replaced by a reflection of the space below. At the far end of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The arc repeated in the mirror overhead produces a sphere of dazzling radiance linking the real space with the reflection. Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape.

– http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/eliasson/about.htm


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Ed Ruscha

Ruscha’s output is nothing if not consistent. He’s the self-styled doyen of deadpan, endlessly sampling American language and iconography to duplicate the country’s visual systems of representation, identification, and communication—logos, landscapes, language.

http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=424&fid=6&sid=17

The sunset skies hold the crisp words in deadpan perspective. His characteristic attention to vernacular is surgically applied.

http://www.nplusonemag.com/ruscha3.html

"'Hollywood' is like a verb to me," Ruscha has stated, "It's something you can do to any subject or any thing. You can take something in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Hollywoodize it....'Hollywood dreams' -- I mean think about it. Close your eyes and what does it mean, visually? It means a ray of light, actually, to me rather than a success story. And so I play around with the ray of light rather than with the success story...I'm not so much interested in words as I am in the evocative power of them, rather than their poetic power"
(E. Ruscha, quoted in E. Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, Cambridge, 2002, p. 221.)

 


Hollywood is a verb. (1970s)



Ed Ruscha, I Think I'll... 1983


Blue Collar Tech-Chem I (1992) and The Old Tech-Chem Building (2005)



 

Terminology

Narrative = story and discourse
what you sayand how you say it (content + form) inextricably bound.

Story:
A set of events / actions
i.e. The sun is setting.

Discourse:
Style, order, time, form or genre
i.e. turner, westerns, magazine ads, science fiction
i.e. baroque, minimal, slow, fast, kodachrome, bitmapped

In interactive works, add idea of experience:
How is audience interacting with the work?
How do particpants become part of the work?
How is the narrative extended when it's not confined?

 

 

 

Discourse is everything?

 

Francis Alÿs, SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC (2005)


"In June 2005 Mr. Alÿs walked from one end of Jerusalem to the other carrying a can filled with green paint. The bottom of the can was perforated with a small hole, so the paint dripped out as a continuous squiggly line on the ground as he walked.
The route he followed was one drawn in green on a map as part of the armistice after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, indicating land under the control of the new state of Israel. The original Green Line has since been considerably altered on the ground, with cataclysmic consequences for people on both sides.
Mr. Alÿs restricted his walking to a 15-mile stretch through a divided Jerusalem, a hike that took him down streets, through yards and parks, and over rocky abandoned terrain. In a film of the walk made with Julien Devaux, he seems to attract little notice. People just go about their lives. Even Israeli soldiers at checkpoints barely acknowledge the lanky guy in jeans with a leaky can.
In part this is because — as is always true with Mr. Alÿs’s oblique work, which bows to artists like Joseph Beuys and Gordon Matta-Clark — what he’s really doing isn’t immediately obvious: creating a metaphor about history with his body. As he moves along, dribbling paint, he recreates a barrier that exists in physical form, as a series of concrete partitions separating Israelis and Palestinians, and as a separatist symbol, both triumphant and oppressive. "

– NY Times, Holland Cotter 2007


Paul Vester, In the Woods (2008)