Looking for some performance art inspiration or instructions? Look no further! Marina Abramovic created Seven Easy Pieces, which she performed at the Guggenheim in 2005. Two of these pieces are written by Marina herself, and five of them are written by other artist but performed by Marina in 2005. Check out this website for some lovely images, performance instructions/directions/intentions etc. and maybe try performing one yourself!
www.seveneasypieces.com/home.html
www.catrionajeffries.com
Catriona Jefferies Gallery has a wonderful website / space filled with dynamic artists from the Vancouver area. The images are crisp and beautiful and the descriptions are short and sweet. Each artist has a bio or CV that easily accessible. Check this site out and pay special attention to the kinds of materials the artists use/reuse/recycle etc. Current.y there are two upcoming shows listed. Also, there is ample information under the contact if anyone is interested in visiting or perhaps even artist submissions.
Here is some text taken from their about page that best describes their gallery:
Established in 1994, the Catriona Jeffries Gallery focuses on the post conceptual art practices which have emerged from Vancouver and the critical relationships between these practices and particular international artists. The gallery is located in Vancouver’s east side False Creek area in a converted industrial warehouse building designed by architect Robert Kleyn.
Catriona Jeffries has played an important historical role in establishing the lineages of younger artistic practices emerging from Vancouver and in securing the vital dialogue among the gallery’s artists with international museums and private collections. Through its recognized exhibition program, curatorial collaborations, off-site projects and writing projects published under CJ Press, the gallery contributes to an international discussion and currency of contemporary art. Catriona Jeffries gallery has established a strong reputation amongst the international curatorial, critical and collecting community as being one of Canada’s pre-eminent sites of contemporary art.
Arthur Watson. Northing and Easting.
Watson was born and raised in Aberdeen. His work comes into being through emphasis on traditional processes such as those employed by Scotland’s artisans: shipwrights, carpenters, blacksmiths, engineers, toolmakers, printers and builders. The finished works have a dialogue not only with the history of art but with a social history and history of ideas.
He gathers information from oral and textual sources, and then categorises and stores it in extensive card indexes. Journals are then created from this resource, ‘part log, part laboratory – the platform on which seemingly endless rehearsals take place for the relatively few artworks that are eventually realised’.3 Watson finds inspiration from his local community and others like it, where communication is full of fabulous and erudite cross-references. He combines an innate joy of traditional language in Scotland with witty, private referencing, and combines sophisticated with superstitious belief.
Will Maclean and Arthur Watson. A History of Scottish Performance (work in progress). Part of the series Cairn Gorm: Reading a Landscape on Cairn Gorm Mountain, Speyside, 2004–2008
http://www.studio-international.co.uk/sculpture/watson.asp
http://www.cairngormmountain.co.uk/news/51-a-p-o-cg-m
http://fineart.dundee.ac.uk/research-staff/people/arthur-watson/research.jsp
A boy reads a copy of “The 99″ in Indonesia in October 2007. President Obama praised its publisher on Monday.
Naif al-Mutawa, shown here at a panel discussion in the United Arab Emirates in March, publishes “The 99.”Washington (CNN) — Kuwaiti publisher Naif al-Mutawa is having a week even his comic book superheroes might envy.
On Monday, President Obama singled him out for special praise for promoting international understanding with his “The 99″ comics.
“His comic books have captured the imagination of so many young people with superheroes who embody the teachings and tolerance of Islam,” Obama said.
And on Tuesday, Mutawa was treated like a rock star at the president’s Summit on Entrepreneurship, with people lining up to get his flashy, superhero-embossed business cards and polite words of encouragement.
The summit, a couple of blocks from the White House, is a follow-up to a speech in Egypt in June 2009 in which Obama sought to reach out to the Muslim world and offer specific help, mentoring and investment — and try to polish the U.S. image. Scores of business experts and wannabe entrepreneurs traveled to Washington from the Middle East, Indonesia and other Muslim-majority regions.
The September 11, 2001, terror attacks inspired Mutawa to find a way to change what he worried were dangerous exaggerations and misperceptions about mainstream Islam.
The comic’s title — “The 99″ (from 9 times 11 equals 99) — tells how 99 superheroes from across the globe team up to combat villains.
They succeed only if they work together.
There is no religion in the story line, Mutawa said, but he studied the Quran to find archetypes — what he calls basic human values like trust and generosity — that he weaves into the dramas.
“We’ve gone back to the same places that other people have pulled out negative messages and in their place put positive, multicultural, fun messages,” Mutawa said.
Mutawa, who has multiple advanced degrees from U.S. universities and worked as a clinical psychologist in New York, spends time in both the United States and Kuwait. He describes himself as “a part-time New Yorker” with lots of back and forth.
“I wanted to build something that made a difference,” he said about what inspired the comics. “I also have five boys, and I wanted to make a living.”
Mutawa said the comics explore shared values more than individual religious experiences and create what he calls “an alternative universe where kids feel glad where they are.”
The comics are printed in eight languages, including Arabic and English, and are for sale across the Middle East as well as China, India and the United States.
“The 99″ can be found online and already has spun off a theme park in Kuwait. Mutawa said he is about ready to announce the U.S. release of an animated version, with word expected soon from a well-known American distributor.
“The animation series will be announced next week. We will be in your living room. We’ll be in your living room, and you’re going to want to watch it,” Mutawa said between interviews and congratulations. “Because it is fun, it is exciting, it is top animation quality. The characters are from 99 countries, including the U.S.
“They are all heroes, they work together to make the world a better place, and that’s the way it should be.”
Mutawa said he “melted into his seat and felt I couldn’t move” when Obama said his name. “I was very proud. I was also very humbled.”
A recent issue of “The 99″ is set in the Philippines, where an international relief agency is under attack by Death Merchant. With plenty of action — and blazing color and “THWOOM” and “KA-POW” — the superheroes fight the bad guys and also talk up contemplation, spiritual growth and even the importance of mathematics. In his “Naif’s Notes” at the end of the comic, Mutawa drives home his teamwork message.
“Working together is the ultimate key to success for each member of the 99,” Mutawa writes. “However, like us, the members of the 99 need to be constantly reminded of this lesson. … When people work with and help each other, the world is always a better place.”
The White House seems to be keeping up with “The 99.”
“After my speech in Cairo, he [Mutawa] had a similar idea,” Obama said Monday. “So in his comic books, Superman and Batman reached out to their Muslim counterparts. And I hear they are making progress.”
from http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/04/27/kuwait.comics/index.html?hpt=C1
Patrick Farley is one of a small group of web comics artists whose work is truly groundbreaking. The majority of creativity on the web shares the same problem: the web is seen just a means of distribution, not as a unique medium with new possibilities for creativity and communication. Farley thoroughly embraced the web, creating works that could never exist in any other form. His The Spiders, for example, takes the problems of doing things on the web, eg, the fact that you’ve got a fixed window size and have to scroll to get more story, and turns them into narrative possibilities. More of his work can be found here.
Unfortunately, Farley’s innovation was also a drawback. There was no way to package up his work and resell it in print, as many other web comics artists have done, and he didn’t allow advertising on his site. Ultimately, he had to get a day job to cover his bills, and that killed his creative output. We haven’t seen anything new from him for years, until now.
Farley is trying to quit his day job, to go back to creating comics full-time. Using Kickstarter, a service that lets individuals fund creative projects (with or without rewards) Farley is asking people to contribute $2. If he can raise $6,000, he’ll quit his day job.
I pledged! I think of it as “paying it forward” because someday I hope to quit my day job as well!
Electric Sheep Kickstarter Promo Video from Electric Sheep Video on Vimeo.
Over three decades Esther Shalev-Gerz has consistently performed a process of unravelling particularities in order to reflect on the ways in which the generalities of history and memory are constructed. Working with a specific place, a certain moment in history, an urgent question, or a shared experience that resonates through history, Shalev-Gerz mines the personal in order to address and interrogate the ways in which the present is understood.
above from: http://artnews.org/gallery.php?i=1315&exi=18435&ESTHER_SHALEV_GERZ_at_Jeu_de_Paume_9_Feb_6_June_2010
see also: http://www.jeudepaume.org/index.php?page=article&idArt=1119&lieu=1&PHPSESSID=1562e6147b423d7e31d91455b8148fb7
Kirstine Roepstorff belongs to a young generation of artists who are working in a novel way with the technique of collage. Using this medium she has developed an unusual visual language, which she transposes into space-consuming installations, objects and sculptures in order to investigate cultural contexts and trigger new narratives. In a manner that is simultaneously glamorous and playful, but also politically demanding, she employs collage as a tool with which to develop a system of reflection and reference. The collage technique makes it possible to tie everything together and even to include aspects that are not present; the negative, the empty space of what has been cut out always refers to things absent as well.
above from: http://artnews.org/gallery.php?i=803&exi=19948&KIRSTINE_ROEPSTORFF_at_Galerie_im_Taxispalais_7_Feb_4_Apr_2010_
see also: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/kirstine_roepstorff.htm
Overflow, 2006
Image and text copied from natashakidd.com
“Situated within an extended language of painting, my work has continually involved the production of painting machines. What I find most compelling in the process of painting is the action or event. The machines come out of an ambition to make this visible. Over time the roles and functions of the machines have developed.”
Links:
http://natashakidd.com
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/dream_machines
http://www.bathspa.ac.uk/about/profiles/profile.asp?user=academic\kidn1
Eyecode, 2007
Image and text copied from www.flong.com
Eyecode (Golan Levin, 2007) is an interactive installation whose display is wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed. By means of a hidden camera, the system records and replays brief video clips of its viewers’ eyes. Each clip is articulated by the duration between two of the viewer’s blinks. The unnerving result is a typographic tapestry of recursive observation.
In his own words, “Golan Levin develops artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, often created with a variety of collaborators, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity.”
Links:
http://www.flong.com/
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/
http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/dumpster.shtml
reWrite, 2007
A language based interactive installation, performance, and web based artwork
Image and text copied from www.littlepig.org.uk
“Simon Biggs was born in Australia, 1957, and moved to the UK in 1986. A visual and inter-disciplinary artist, he uses the computer and interactive systems within large-scale installation, web-based artworks and other contexts to explore issues around identity and reality as social constructs.”
Links:
http://www.littlepig.org.uk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/bookofbooks/hypertext.htm
http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2002/04-20-Biggs.htm