Monday 6 August 2007

A moment

The moment where all comes together it's the moment, the reason why it all started and came into existence. The performance is parallel to the object as art(not in conflict with it), it's the momentary existent art work. The work can't be repeated because spaces have differences: spatial, visual, acoustic, cultural, emotional. Audiences make also each performance a unique moment, by the way they collectively engage with the work and how the performer(s) engage(s) with the audience.
Does the work exist before this moment: is the pre-existent material to the performance (the videos, objects or author based software) by itself art (objectified in most cases) or is it when used in a per formative moment that objects are used to create art (moment, ephemeral)?
This takes me to another question to which, as the above, intrigues me: How about the recorded material of a performance, is it art work?

5 comments:

Unknown said...

These are interesting questions, but I have a feelinn the answers really depend on how specificaly they are framed. The "performance" is a very broad topic, and the right answers for VJ may not be the same for music or for theater due to the different nature of the performance. I suspect that asking if the performance is art or not may be asking the wrong question entirely--in the contemporary art world most everything/anything can be or is art.

Theoretically at least it is potentially possible for a VJ performance to repeat a previous one exactly, esp. when it is driven by pre-programmed sequences and synchronized sound-image "events". (In actual practice the likelihood of repeat may be very small, but it does exist.) I imagine the only way to actually prevent such a repeat would be to build a system that incorporates each performance into itself as part of the database (just as a living actor does) so the material being performed changes during the performace.

vjam theory said...

wikipedia:
--Art is a (product of) human activity, made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind; thus art is an action, an object, or a collection of actions and objects created with the intention of transmitting emotions and/or ideas. Beyond this description, there is no general agreed-upon definition of art, since defining the boundaries of "art" is subjective, but the impetus for art is often called human creativity.--


so if we start by asking what part of performance is art, i agree that the intention of the creator is what mostly counts here. Each part of the performance can be art if the creator sees it that way..

Its totally possible to make an "artistic" recording of a performance if that is the creators intention... if not, then all shows we see on TV are art, excellent camera work in real time...

anyway, the question of what is art and what is not art is very time-based as we know from the history...andy warhol would have had difficulties of being recognized as an artists in the late 16th century..

lets not forget that "art" is basically a system that is kept running by institutions, critics, collectors, magazines, fairs, etc.. so there are many mouths to feed ..

nevertheless, ive been always pushing the notion that live cinema has artistic intentions basically because it cant be considered only as entertainment and art institutions are better places to show this kind of work than cinemas or even clubs (depends if its a special event or just a night club)

Joe Biturski said...

I was at cal art for a panel talk with Allen Sekula, John Baldesarri and some other on the power of image and semiotics of moment when a visiting professor popped up with a statement totally out of turn. His name was Jalal Tufic and he made a point that at first was puzzling then was clearly fascinating. He said to stop filming this moment. Stop it now. The documentation in time becomes the entity was his point. And that our moment was thus in a way surrogate to the video in the cameras whirring in the corner of the room and so much plastic. The live performance or a moment to him was to be like a happening where this is all and all is the fibers of this moment, its collusions, its breaks and collisions as any other pin point in space or time.

Unknown said...

To be picky :) I would say that "live cinema" doesn't have intentions at all--these are the exclusive domain of the artists and the audience of the live cinema work!

But I'm not really talking about intentions (claimed or otherwise) about the work, but about the structure of the work in relation to the boarder and more complex history that precedes it and which the informed audience shares with the artist making work. This is what makes a performance interesting or not, meaningful or not. It is this contextuality that exists as a result of the audiences "past experiences" with a class of works and that allows them to become meaningful and art.

Joe Biturski said...

I really like the concept of the past contextualizing and ultimately agitating ( or non agitating) a moment into full focus, cargo and totality. Very interesting. I used to make false poetry machines for experimentation with this in regards to specific words and sentence constructions.

Words like "sea" "Soul" "humanity" are open ended as opposed to words like "pacific ocean" or "population" (although, of course those words are also open to personal interpretation and filling to their skin by each person's past experiences and associations in a constellation of points and points of entry.

These words also arguably carry past usage, knowledge of their age, the cargo of their years, and thus when inserted into a rudimentary sentence 9 times out of 10 proved to seem meaningful, clever, even profound while the person had actually unknowingly picked them randomly earlier and they were simply dropped into the undercarriage of a basic sentence.

Perhaps some words seem more "poetic" because of the span of time, and it too is is in their bellies like so much ballast.

It is also interesting to see how a n individual moment of improvisation if one thinks of game theory could at times be exactly as another, a "copy" or " second form of what occurred before" as erroneously interpreted by someone who had some sense of this.

It would be erroneous in the face of game theory as there are mathematical probabilities, variabilities, recombinant potentialities within a set of tools no matter how vast. This would simply be that odd phenomenon where people with no biological lineage in other parts of the world have been found to be nearly identical in photos.

"Sampling" is a large umbrella and only getting wider and more complex to define and distill with creative commons and the increasing ubiquity of certain tools of performance, replication and creation as high en d technology becomes more affordable in waves.