artintelligence

Michal Rovner’s, Against Order? Against Disorder?, 2003, filled the Israeli pavilion in the Venice Biennale of 2003 providing a highly effective, multi-faceted and thought provoking immersive installation.

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Regina José Galindo’s performance Who Can Erase the Traces?, 2003, was shown in video form at the Venice Biennale in 2005, where she won a Golden Lion award in the category “artists under 30″ for the works she exhibited which also included Himenoplastia: a video of an operation she underwent to reconstruct her hymen. Regarding her use of her body as an art form Galindo has stated: “My body not like an individual body, but a social body, a collective body, a global body. To be, or to reflect, through me, her, his, their experience; because all of us, we are at the same time ourselves and others.” (Aucklandtriennial). (more…)

Rebecca Belmore represented Canada in the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005. She presented an installation which was of interest because of its faithfulness to Claire Bishop’s description of installation art as differing from “traditional media (sculpture, painting, photography, video)” because it “addresses the viewer directly as a literal presence in the space’ (Bishop 2005: 6). (more…)

I saw Gary Hill’s Viewer, 1996, exhibited at the Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 29 September 2006 - 25 February 2007. The work is a silent five-channel video loop that shows a line of seventeen homeless Mexican day labourers recruited by Hill from the environs of his studio in California (Israel), in what appears to be an elongated police lineup. What seems most significant for the viewer is that the line of men are in fact video projections. The viewer is able to see the bodies of these people moving slightly providing a sense of presence that is palpable: the viewer has the sense of being viewed. Hill has not given these people a voice but he has given them an extraordinary presence that can be compared to the portraiture of Rembrandt for example. The scale, the silence and the potency of the darkened room provides the subject matter (exploited Third World labour) with considerable dignity, SEE VIDEO.

This is a lecture I gave to my students; as it touches on some basic problems regarding the role of language, narrative and metaphor in contemporary fine art I thought I would share it with you. You will need to click the image to the left twice to get it full size.

Since the 1960s the dominant discourse in fine art is what I will refer to as “deconstructive art”. I am using my own terminology here (Coulter-Smith 2006) mainly because the dominant discourse of which I am speaking doesn’t have an institutionally agreed upon name yet, in the manner of ‘abstraction’ or ‘expressionism’. (more…)

Daniel von Sturmer’s, The Object of Things, 2007, is a video-sculptural installation filling the Australian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. Obviously there have been quite a number of sculptural installations since the 1990s (Coulter-Smith 2006), but this one is particularly interesting not only because of its intersection of sculpture and video but also because of its intersection of narrative and abstraction. (more…)