Topic 6
Interdisciplinary Art
What is interdisciplinary art? Interdisciplinary art is the combination of at least two different artforms, for example, painting and sculpture. It is the combination of these artforms that contributes to create something new with a new meaning. Consider: is all art interdisciplinary?
Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003 Monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminium, and scaffolding
Joseph Beuys “An inspiring teacher and one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, Joseph Beuys first came to prominence in the 1960s as a performance artist and major contributor to Fluxus, a group dedicated to organising anarchic events and happenings. While many of his early actions were witnessed by only very small audiences, they have become well known through the photographs of fellow artist Ute Klophaus. The action ‘Explaining pictures to a dead hare’, for instance, took place on the opening night of Beuys’ exhibition of drawings at Galerie Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf. The invited public arrived at the gallery to find the doors locked. Through the glass front of the gallery they saw Beuys sitting in a chair with his face covered in honey and gold leaf, cradling a dead hare in his arms. Slowly he got up and wandered around the exhibition, as if explaining each work to the hare.
Joseph Beuys The photographs of this action, along with others such as ‘Mainstream’, have been extensively reproduced and have taken on a significance of their own independent of the original event to become iconic images of the post World War II era. ‘Mainstream’ for example was a cathartic event in which Beuys rolled about convulsively slapping fat into his armpit and behind his knees.
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965
Joseph Beuys A survivor of no less than five near fatal crashes as a Luftwaffe pilot during World War II, Beuys saw his art both as a means of working through his guilt-by-implication in the Holocaust and of finding a language of healing. On one occasion Beuys was shot down over the frozen wasteland of the Crimea, where he was discovered unconscious by a nomadic Tartar tribe who saved his life by covering his body in fat and felt to regenerate heat. In his later actions and installations, the elements of fat and fur, combined with other non-art materials such as minerals, turf and honey, became important symbols of healing and regeneration. Beuys’ performances left behind material traces such as pieces of bitten fat and objects used during the action and these have been assembled as relics of the actions. Beuys had developed a very personal symbolic language drawn from alchemy, shamanism and his own personal experiences to represent his predominant themes of healing, regeneration and enlightenment as a result of personal trauma – in particular the shaman belief in heightened perception following a near death experience.”1 1
Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006
Joseph Beuys, Fat Corner, 1968
Joseph Beuys Beuys strongly believed that art had the power to shape a better society and once stated that ‘It was simply impossible for human beings to bring their creative intention into the world any other way than through action.” This strength of conviction led Beuys to push the boundaries of established artforms to include human action and large-scale sculptural environments exploring universal social concerns. Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments focuses on three areas of Beuys’ work which became increasingly central to his artistic output during the second half of his career. Through his performances or ‘Actions’, Beuys encouraged audiences to incorporate his political and social messages into their everyday lives Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974
7000 Oak Trees “In 1982, for documenta 7, Beuys proposed a plan to plant 7000 oaks throughout the city of Kassel, each paired with a basalt stone. The 7000 stones were piled up on the lawn in front of the Museum Fridericianum with the idea that the pile would shrink every time a tree was planted. The project, seen locally as a gesture towards green urban renewal, took five years to complete and has spread to other cities around the world.” - Tate Gallery label, November 2015 The concept of social sculpture continues today with artists like Pedro Reyes who collected 1,527 weapons from residents of Cuiliacán in Western Mexico, which were exchanged for electronics. The artist then melted the weapons down into shovels, which were used to plant 1,527 trees. Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oak Trees, 1982
Expanded Art By the 1970s Beuys’s understanding of form-making had expanded so far that he began to include pedagogy and political organizing in the category of sculpture. His objects and performances, he claimed, were not important in themselves. Rather, their function lay in getting their viewers to think, ask questions, and, above all, to recognize their own inherent creative potential. “Every human being is an artist,” became one of Beuys’s best known mottoes; and his theory of social sculpture — which held that politics, law, economics, and science must be rethought on the basis of an expanded concept of art — became his most important artwork. Just as many of Beuys’s works from the 1960s had been props from his various actions (chewed fat, for example, or a spade with two handles), in the 1970s, blackboards covered with writing and illustrations from his various lectures were removed from their classroom contexts and housed in museums or incorporated into larger works of art. In addition, Beuys attempted to transform the academic system.
Joseph Beuys, The End of the Twentieth Centurys, 1983-1985
Social Sculpture In the late 1960s, artist Joseph Beuys came up with the concept of “social sculpture”, which essentially gave art the power to change society. ”Those unwilling to think are dismissed,” he proclaimed, producing performances, actions and happenings that were actively shared between himself and the audience. This was also the time when Fluxus and Body art became pivotal art movements testifying to this development, engaging the viewers themselves into the process of making artworks.
Joseph Beuys, Fat Chair, 1964-1985
George Macinuas “It was the year 1961 when George Maciunas, an extravagant art historian from Lithuania, proclaimed the birth of Fluxus. It was a new group of aspiring artists gathered around John Cage, a composer who taught a series of classes in Experimental Composition at the end of the 1950s at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Following the idea of embarking on an artistic journey without having a conception of an eventual end, the group explored the indeterminacy in art and the notions of chance and infinity. Avid fans of Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism, the idea of blurring the line between everyday life and arts with a sense of humour and the urge to get away from clear definitions of what an artwork should be, imposed by museums and other cultural institutions, these artists gave their own interpretation of experimental and performance pieces. All of this made nothing less of a strong impression on said George Maciunas, who decided such actions and events should “flow” and “effluent” the entire world – and they did, for some twenty years that followed.”
Allan Kaprow Kaprow wrote in a 1966 essay that “the line between the Happening and daily life should be kept as fluid and perhaps indistinct as possible�—a revolution in the conception of artmaking, enticing artists to consider and reimagine audiences as part of their work. Although they remain an ephemeral moment in art history, the Happenings made a lasting impact on generations of artists.
Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (1932–2006) brought the television to fine art, treating it as a tactile and multi sensory medium and object. Trained as a classical pianist, he came into contact with protagonists of the counterculture and avant-garde movements of the 1960s through his early interests in composition and performance, and this engagement profoundly shaped his outlook at a time when electronic images were becoming increasingly present in everyday life. His groundbreaking work is considered seminal to the development of video art.
Nam June Paik Over the decades his work met with immediate acceptance from fellow artists and art historians alike. Although we know that the artists who come up with something new, who devise new methods and media, may not necessarily later turn out to have been decisive artistic personalities, Paik was to be both innovative and influential, because in his art he always also incorporated the polar opposite to technological progress – namely reduction, minimalisation and resistance. His output is notable for the fact that works with too much coexist with others that have too little.
Nam June Paik “Paik would open up a whole range of possibilities in the new medium of video art: in March 1963, in Exposition of Music – Electronic Television (a wonderful, programmatic title for an exhibition), he first used television sets, responding to input from the viewer, to create electronic paintings (Participation TV). He was the first to demonstrate publicly and verifiably all sorts of different artistic uses for the medium of television, and this marked the beginning of a career during which he, more than any other visual artist, foresaw and actively influenced the technological, philosophical and social development of the new media – television, video, computers and lasers. In 1965, in New York, he made his first video tapes. In 1969–70, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, he constructed his first video synthesizer, for the television station WGBH in Boston. From 1974 onwards he started making large-scale multi-monitor installations, such as TV Garden 1974, initially seen in Philadelphia and re-created for Documenta 6 in 1977. For the opening of Documenta 6 he created the first live satellite broadcast with artistic works (by Joseph Beuys and Douglas Davis). By 1985 he was making figurative video sculptures (including Family of Robots); in 1987 he made his first compact multi-screen wall (Beuys Voice, for Documenta 8); and in the mid-1990s he started to combine lasers and video technology (on the grand scale for the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in February 2000).” Nam June Paik, Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, 1963
Nam June Paik The proud list of artistic technological premieres outlined above illuminates only one side of Paik’s art – the other was determined by his refusal to deploy new technologies. In 1963 he placed a TV set face-down on the floor, exposing the brand name, Rembrandt Automatic. In 1974 he created a piece where an antique statue of Buddha is seen watching itself on closed circuit television; in another a burning candle replaces the inner, electronic life of a monitor; and in One Candle the subject of the title fills an entire room by virtue of a technologically complex six-fold projection. These works raise issues that are a far cry from high-tech art: the poetry of artistic vision plays ironically with the rich possibilities of technology.
Nam June Paik, Kaldor Candle, 1996
Nam June Paik Cologne supported a hub of progressive musical activity, managed by Mary Bauermeister and her partner Karlheinz Stockhausen, a leading composer at the electronic studios of the WDR broadcasting station. The artists and intellectuals that gathered at the studio around 1960 were united with the determination to create a new artwork that combines music, artistic action and literature. Time and motion, sound and action, structure and shock all featured in the innovative output of these artists, who included various diverse figures. Their vision of a new artwork also embraced film and electronic developments in the field of acoustics – so it seemed only logical for Paik to make the transition to visual electronic art, where he set about introducing into the realms of visual art his experience of a new electronic audio world where sounds could be endlessly manipulated.
Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental USA, Alaska, Hawaii , 1995
Anti-technological technologies In one of Paik’s most revealing, complicated comments, in an interview with Russell Connor in 1975, he remarked that he loved ‘anti-technological technology’. And when he presents us with tiny real fish swimming in aquariums inside TV casings (Video Fish 1975), or a solitary goldfish in a converted TV set (Sonatine for Goldfish 1975, once part of the Sammlung Hahn, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna), he is toying with the illusion created by the broadcasters that they are transmitting a wealth of endlessly changing programmes. Fifteen years later a German TV station, ORB, adopted this same image to fill the gaps in its schedule. And nowadays there is even a company selling DVDs of soothing little fishes in a TV aquarium. A highpoint of Paik’s anti-technological technology has to be his 160cm Robot K-456 of 1964 (just a little shorter than the artist himself ). It was constructed with the help of the engineer Shuya Abe, a friend of Paik’s with whom he also later collaborated on the development of the video synthesizer. Although the remote-controlled robot perhaps looked a little helpless, somewhat fragile and cobbled together, it could fulfil various functions, such as walking, which is in fact the trickiest activity for a two-legged robot. It could also transmit music and excrete white beans. The robot made its first appearance in Wuppertal in 1965 at the 24-hour happening 24 Stunden.
Jenny Holzer Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick Falls, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces. Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects. Her contemporaries include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler.
Jenny Holzer, Blue Purple Tilt, 2007
Jenny Holzer The public dimension is integral to Holzer’s work. Her large-scale installations have included advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, and illuminated electronic displays. LED signs have become her most visible medium, although her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including street posters, painted signs, stone benches, paintings, photographs, sound, video, projections, the Internet, and a race car for BMW. Text-based light projections have been central to Holzer’s practice since 1996. As of 2010, her LED signs have become more sculptural. Holzer is no longer the author of her texts, and in the ensuing years, she returned to her roots by painting.
Jenny Holzer, Blue Purple Tilt, 2007
Holzer’s interdisciplinary approach Printing or displaying her Truisms across a variety of media gives her access to diverse audiences, but also gives her flexibility in determining how each message should be displayed, based on their intended meaning and context. See the below quote from the reading: The Truisms are shameless; they’ll go happily everywhere, pretty much. But other things are meant to be read only in projection, only at night, only fleetingly, only with a group of people you don’t know, maybe only once, encountered by surprise. Other times, especially if I find a text notably moving or dire - in a pertinent way, not in a gratuitous way - I’ll think, “This should be in stone, somebody should find this again, even if it’s a Martian.”’
Jenny Holzer, Inflamatory Essays, 1980s
Artists for consideration • Stelarc
• Yoko Ono
• Joan Jonas
• Meredith Monk
• Laurie Anderson
• Matthew Barney
• Christian Boltanski
• James Turrell
• Bill Viola
• Mierle Laderman Ukeles
• Brian Ransom
• Gary Hill
• Marina Abramovic
• Superflex (collective
• Theo Jansen
• STOMP (Performance group)
• Bruce Nauman
Topic 6
Workshop
Essay plan (30 mins) We’re going to go through how to best set up your essay plan for assessment 2. You will also have some time to be able to work on the assessment plan during this class.
The Case for: (30 mins) We’ll be watching two videos in our tutorial and having a discussion about them. The Case for Performance Art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmMTKdUAokM The Case for Video Art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcXpAHVAxwY What do you find unique about each of these interdisciplinary artforms?