Ambivalence 

Contradictory emotions, thoughts, or goals relating to the same person or situation.



Any two different organisms have different needs. At times they may function in harmony to get both of their needs met; at times they can't or won't.

The human body is made up of billions of cells. It is possible to think of each cell as an individual organism, and the body as a group of billions of individual, though connected, organisms.

Continuing, the cells of a human body, though they may usually function more or less together, in harmony, this isn't always true. There are times when the needs of one cell (or group of cells or organ or organ systems) conflict with the needs of other cells (or groups of cells or organs or organ systems).

In these cases the body is at odds with itself. One part of the body is in conflict with another part. Probably this is true at all times to some degree or other.

From the inner or psychological side, the experiential side, a person can also be understood as consisting of different parts. The passions a man experiences within himself can push him towards doing something he thinks is stupid and that he feels is wrong. This conflict in the man's psyche probably parallels the physical conflicts in his body (in his sexual organs, his heart, and in his brain), but this is a conjecture.

There can be conflicts between psychological systems (in our example, between the system of sexual needs, the system of rational planning, and the system of evaluating what is and isn't appropriate and right). And there can be conflicts within a single system. A simple example of a conflict within a system would be a person ordering at an Italian restaurant who has a desire for spaghetti and a desire for a pizza and who can't decide. A deeper and more serious problem can arise when a person has strong feelings of warmth, say for a father, and, at the exact same time, strong angry feelings.

I use the word ambivalence for all sorts of psychological conflicts that involve conflicting factors (or opposites). This word, was introduced into psychology in 1911 by the Swiss psychiatrist, Paul Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939). Sigmund Freud reserved the word for conflicts involving love and hate. Carl Jung used the word to apply to images as well as to instincts, and his concept of ambivalence dovetails cleanly with his ideas of complexes and of compensation.

The psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) spoke of approach-avoidance situations in which a person (or animal) is attracted to something but is also frightened of approaching it or is repelled by it. An example that could be researched and quantified would be a mouse that, for the purposes of an experiment, we have starved and put in a maze at the end of which is both food and a cat. In our use of the word, Lewin is discussing one example or type of ambivalence.

In their practices, psychologists and other therapists see example after example of people who are tortured by ambivalence. This often comes out in an inability to decide. People often are torn between different options: They see both sides and weigh arguments for and against each side, and they still can't decide; finally they find themselves acting one way or the other or, perhaps, they flip a coin or consult a psychic or follow the advice of a friend or teacher. Or an ambivalent person can move in one direction and then hesitate and then move in another direction and then hesitate and so on to the point where he or she is caught in a kind of paralysis.

In these situations, people are aware of both sides of the conflict, and so they can weigh them. The process is painful, but it is out in the open within the person's consciousness. However there are many situations where the person himself (or herself) can't see one whole aspect of the conflict even though it is raging in himself. Example: A 35 year old man worships his father and does not know that it is anger he is feeling when his father yells at him in public and orders him around and calls him stupid. The son blames himself, and says to himself (and to us), "I'll never be able to be like dad! I'm so stupid! I wish I could be like him!" At the same time, the son, who has no knowledge of his own angry states, lectures in public on anger. He has developed a reputation for preaching (and writing) that anger is a bad thing, that people who are angry are causing the problems of the world, and that the solution for these people is to think happy thoughts and be outwardly kind and to improve themselves.

(via: www.psychological-observation.com/key-concept/ambivalence)

Cognitive Dissonance 

https://web.mst.edu/~psyworld/general/dissonance/dissonance.pdf

Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance, etc.

For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition).

Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance). This is known as the principle of cognitive consistency.

Cognitive dissonance was first investigated by Leon Festinger, arising out of a participant observation study of a cult which believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood, and what happened to its members — particularly the really committed ones who had given up their homes and jobs to work for the cult — when the flood did not happen.

While fringe members were more inclined to recognize that they had made fools of themselves and to "put it down to experience," committed members were more likely to re-interpret the evidence to show that they were right all along (the earth was not destroyed because of the faithfulness of the cult members).

Searching for Silence - John Cage's art of noise

On August 29, 1952, David Tudor walked onto the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, New York, sat down at the piano, and, for four and a half minutes, made no sound. He was performing “4'33",’’ a conceptual work by John Cage. It has been called the “silent piece,” but its purpose is to make people listen. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage said, recalling the première. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” Indeed, some listeners didn’t care for the experiment, although they saved their loudest protests for the question-and-answer session afterward. Someone reportedly hollered, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town!” Even Cage’s mother had her doubts. At a subsequent performance, she asked the composer Earle Brown, “Now, Earle, don’t you think that John has gone too far this time?”

This past July, the pianist Pedja Muzijevic included “4'33" ” in a recital at Maverick, which is in a patch of woods a couple of miles outside Woodstock. I went up for the day, wanting to experience the piece in its native habitat. The hall, made primarily of oak and pine, is rough-hewn and barnlike. On pleasant summer evenings, the doors are left open, so that patrons can listen from benches outside. Muzijevic, mindful of the natural setting, chose not to use a mechanical timepiece; instead, he counted off the seconds in his head. Technology intruded all the same, in the form of a car stereo from somewhere nearby. A solitary bird in the trees struggled to compete with the thumping bass. After a couple of minutes, the stereo receded. There was no wind and no rain. The audience stayed perfectly still. For about a minute, we sat in deep, full silence. Muzijevic broke the spell savagely, with a blast of Wagner: Liszt’s transcription of the Liebestod from “Tristan und Isolde.” Someone might as well have started up a chain saw. I might not have been the only listener who wished that the music of the forest had gone on a little longer.

Cage’s mute manifesto has inspired reams of commentary. The composer and scholar Kyle Gann recently published “No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s ‘4' 33" ’ ” (Yale; $24), which doubles as an incisive, stylish primer on Cage’s career. Gann defines “4'33" ” as “an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music.” That last thought ruled Cage’s life: he wanted to discard inherited structures, open doors to the exterior world, “let sounds be just sounds.” Gann writes, “It begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.”

On a simpler level, Cage had an itch to try new things. What would happen if you sat at a piano and did nothing? If you chose among an array of musical possibilities by flipping a coin and consulting the I Ching? If you made music from junk-yard percussion, squads of radios, the scratching of pens, an amplified cactus? If you wrote music for dance—Merce Cunningham was Cage’s longtime partner—in which dance and music went their separate ways? If you took at face value Erik Satie’s conceit that his piano piece “Vexations” could be played eight hundred and forty times in succession? Cage had an innocent, almost Boy Scout-like spirit of adventure. As he put it, “Art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living.”

Many people, of course, won’t hear of it. Nearly six decades after the work came into the world, “4'33" ” is still dismissed as “absolutely ridiculous,” “stupid,” “a gimmick,” and the “emperor’s new clothes”—to quote some sample putdowns that Gann extracted from an online comment board. Such judgments are especially common within classical music, where Cage, who died in 1992, remains an object of widespread scorn. In the visual arts, though, he long ago achieved monumental stature. He is considered a co-inventor of “happenings” and performance art; the Fluxus movement essentially arose from classes that Cage taught at the New School, in the late nineteen-fifties. (One exercise consisted of listening to a pin drop.) Cage emulated visual artists in turn, his chief idol being the master conceptualist Marcel Duchamp. The difference is that scorn for avant-garde art has almost entirely vanished. A Times editorial writer made an “emperor’s new clothes” jab at Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” when it showed at the Armory, in 1913. Jackson Pollock, too, was once widely mocked. Now the art market bows before them.

The simplest explanation for the resistance to avant-garde music is that human ears have a catlike vulnerability to unfamiliar sounds, and that when people feel trapped, as in a concert hall, they panic. In museums and galleries, we are free to move around, and turn away from what bewilders us. It’s no surprise, then, that Cage has always gone over better in non-traditional spaces. Last year, MACBA, in Barcelona, mounted a remarkable exhibition entitled “The Anarchy of Silence,” which traced Cage’s career and his myriad connections to other arts. (The show is now playing at SCHUNCK, in the Netherlands.) The day I was there, the crowd was notably youthful: high schoolers and college students dashed through galleries devoted to Cage’s concepts and contraptions, their faces wavering between disbelief and delight. Like it or not, Cage will be with us a long time.

Morton Feldman, another avant-garde musician with an eye for the wider artistic landscape, once said, “John Cage was the first composer in the history of music who raised the question by implication that maybe music could be an art form rather than a music form.” Feldman meant that, since the Middle Ages, even the most adventurous composers had labored within a craftsmanlike tradition. Cage held that an artist can work as freely with sound as with paint: he changed what it meant to be a composer, and every kid manipulating music on a laptop is in his debt. Not everything he did was laudable, or even tolerable. Even his strongest admirers may admit to sometimes feeling as Jeanne Reynal did when, in 1950, Cage recited his “Lecture on Nothing” at the Artists’ Club: “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.” Yet the work remains inescapable, mesmerizing, and—as I’ve found over months of listening, mainly to Mode Records’ comprehensive Cage edition—often unexpectedly touching. It encompasses some of the most violent sounds of the twentieth century, as well as some of the most gently beguiling. It confronts us with the elemental question of what music is, and confounds all easy answers.

Cage’s high-school yearbook said of him, “Noted for: being radical.” His radicalism was lifelong and unrelenting: he took the path of most resistance. As much as any artist, he enjoyed receiving applause and recognition, but he had no need for wider public or institutional approval. The one time that I saw him up close, he was delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, at Harvard. Eminences of the faculty had gathered in Memorial Hall, possibly laboring under the illusion that in such august company Cage would finally drop his games and explain himself. Unease rippled through the room as Cage began reciting a string of mesostics—acrostics in which the organizing word runs down the middle instead of the side:

Much of our

of borEdom

Toward talks in

it misled Him

diplOmatic skill to

place to place but Does it look

at present Most

fivE Iranian fishermen

cuTbacks would not

It went on like that, for six lectures, the verbal material generated randomly from Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and the Times, among other sources. Later, when Cage was asked what he thought of being a Harvard professor, he commented that it was “not much different from not being a Harvard professor.”

Carolyn Brown, a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, offers a winning portrait of Cage in “Chance and Circumstance,” her 2007 memoir. “He was open, frank, ready to reveal all his most optimistic utopian schemes and dreams, willing to be a friend to any who sought him out,” Brown writes. In the early days of the Cunningham company, Cage served, variously, as tour manager, publicist, fund-raiser, and bus driver; Brown recalls him behind the wheel, chattering away on innumerable subjects while taking detours in search of odd sights and out-of-the-way restaurants. He had a sunny disposition and a stubborn soul, and was prone to flashes of anger. When he learned, in 1953, that he had to give up a beloved home—his tenement on Monroe Street, on the Lower East Side—he was crestfallen, and Brown made matters worse by reminding him of the Zen Buddhist principle of non-attachment. “Don’t you ever parrot my words back at me!” Cage roared. His indefatigable optimism carried him through periods of frustration. Gann writes, “He was a handbook on how to be a non-bitter composer in a democracy.” The dance critic Jill Johnston called him a “cheerful existentialist.”

The life of Cage is meticulously told in a new biography by Kenneth Silverman, “Begin Again” (Knopf; $40). Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. His father, a brilliant, intermittently successful inventor, devised one of the earliest functioning submarines; his mother covered the women’s-club circuit for the Los Angeles Times. The art of publicity was hardly unknown in the Cage household, and the son inherited the ability to get his name in the papers, even when he was delivering an unpopular message. In 1928, he won the Southern California Oratorical Contest with a speech titled “Other People Think,” which he delivered at the Hollywood Bowl:

One of the greatest blessings that the United States could receive in the near future would be to have her industries halted, her business discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created. . . . We should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think.

Cage’s passion for silence, it seems, had political roots. He was a lonely, precocious child, mocked by classmates as a sissy. “People would lie and wait for me and beat me up,” he said, in a rare comment on his personal life, shortly before his death. In 1935, when he was twenty-two, he married a young artist named Xenia Kashevaroff, but it soon became clear that he was more strongly attracted to men. His most sonically assaultive works might be understood, at least in part, as a sissy’s revenge.

Cage dabbled in art and architecture before settling on music. He studied with Henry Cowell, the godfather of American experimental music, and then took lessons with none other than Arnold Schoenberg, the supreme modernist, first at U.S.C. and then at U.C.L.A. Although Cage was not a disciple, rejecting most of the Germanic canon that Schoenberg held dear (Mozart and Grieg were the only classics he admitted to loving), he fulfilled Schoenberg’s tenet that music should exercise a critical function, disturbing rather than comforting the listener. Cage was to the second half of the century what Schoenberg was to the first half: the angel of destruction, the agent of change. Some commentators later tried to dissociate Schoenberg from his most notorious student, claiming that the two had had little contact. But scraps of evidence suggest otherwise. When, in 1937, Schoenberg invited friends to his home for a run-through of his Fourth Quartet—the guest list included Otto Klemperer and the pianist Edward Steuermann—Cage seems to have been the only American pupil in attendance.

Schoenberg told Cage to immerse himself in harmony. Cage proceeded to ignore harmony for the next fifty years. He first made his name as a composer for percussion, following the example of Cowell and Edgard Varèse. He transformed the piano into a percussion instrument—the “prepared piano”—by inserting objects into its strings. He brought phonographs and radios into the concert hall. He famously declared, “I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.” Yet most of his early music—from the mid-thirties to the end of the forties—speaks in a surprisingly subdued voice. “Music for Marcel Duchamp,” a prepared-piano work from 1947, never rises above mezzo-piano, offering exotic tendrils of melody, stop-and-start ostinatos, and, at the end, eighth-note patterns that drift upward into some vaguely Asian ether. “When the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds,” Cage later said. “There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love, or friendship.”

Beneath the plinking of junk-yard percussion and the chiming of the prepared piano was an unsettling new idea about the relation of music to time. Cage wanted sounds to follow one another in a free, artless sequence, without harmonic glue. Works would be structured simply in terms of durations between events. Later in the forties, he laid out “gamuts”—gridlike arrays of preset sounds—trying to go from one to the next without consciously shaping the outcome. He read widely in South Asian and East Asian thought, his readings guided by the young Indian musician Gita Sarabhai and, later, by the Zen scholar Daisetz Suzuki. Sarabhai supplied him with a pivotal formulation of music’s purpose: “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” Cage also looked to Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, finding another motto in Aquinas’s declaration that “art imitates nature in its manner of operation.”

Audiences were initially unaware that a musical upheaval was taking place. More often than not, they found Cage’s early work inoffensive, even charming. When he gave an all-percussion concert at MOMA in 1943, a year after he moved to New York, he received a wave of positive, if bemused, publicity. By the late forties, he had acquired a reputation as a serious new musical voice. After the première of his prepared-piano cycle “Sonatas and Interludes,” in 1949, the Times declared the work “haunting and lovely,” and its composer “one of this country’s finest.” Cage might easily have found a calling as a purveyor of delicate exoticism. Instead, he radicalized himself further. On a trip to Paris in 1949, Cage encountered Pierre Boulez, whose handsomely brutal music made him feel quaint. In 1951, writing the closing movement of his Concerto for Prepared Piano, he finally let nature run its course, flipping coins and consulting the I Ching to determine which elements in his charts should come next. “Music of Changes,” a forty-three-minute piece for solo piano, was written entirely in this manner, the labor-intensive process consuming most of a year.

As randomness took over, so did noise. “Imaginary Landscape No. 4” employs twelve radios, whose tuning, volume, and tone are governed by chance operations. “Imaginary Landscape No. 5” does much the same with forty-two phonograph records. “Williams Mix” is a collage of thousands of prerecorded tape fragments. “Water Music” asks a pianist not only to play his instrument but also to turn a radio on and off, shuffle cards, blow a duck whistle into a bowl of water, pour water from one receptacle into another, and slam the keyboard lid shut. “Black Mountain Piece,” which is considered the first true sixties-style “happening,” involves piano playing, poetry recitation, record-players, movie projectors, dancing, and, possibly, a barking dog. All this occurred in the eighteen or so months leading up to “4'33",” the still point in the sonic storm.

Did Cage love noise? Or did he merely make peace with it? Like many creative spirits, he was sensitive to intrusions of sound; years later, when he was living in the West Village, next door to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he asked Lennon to stop using wall-mounted speakers. But he trained himself to find noise interesting rather than distracting. Once, in a radio discussion with Cage, Feldman complained about being subjected to the buzzing of radios at the beach. Never one to miss a good setup, Cage responded that in such a situation he’d say, “Well, they’re just playing my piece.” He also disliked Muzak, and in 1948 spoke of trying to sell a silent work to the Muzak company. Gann points out that in May, 1952, three months before “4'33",” the Supreme Court took up a Muzak-related case, ruling against complainants who hoped to have piped-in music banned from public transport. There was no escaping the prosperous racket of postwar America. In a way, “4'33" ” is a tombstone for silence. Silverman, in “Begin Again,” rightly emphasizes Cage’s later obsession with Thoreau, who said, “Silence is the universal refuge.”

Zen attitudes notwithstanding, Cage had a conservative, controlling side. It is a mistake to think of him as the guru of Anything Goes. He sometimes lost patience with performers who took his chance and conceptual pieces as invitations to do whatever they pleased. Even his most earnest devotees sometimes disappointed him. Carolyn Brown recounts how puzzled she was when, after she had laboriously followed Cage’s instructions for one work, he reprimanded her for executing it “improperly.” If the idea is to free oneself from conscious will, Brown wondered, how can the composer issue decrees of right and wrong?

The philosopher Lydia Goehr, in her book “The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works,” notes that Cage is still playing by traditional rules: “It is because of his specifications that people gather together, usually in a concert hall, to listen to the sounds of the hall for the allotted time period.” If “4'33" ” is supposed to explode the idea of a fixed repertory of formally constrained works, it has failed, by virtue of having become a modernist classic. You could argue that this was Cage’s plan all along—his circuitous path to greatness. Richard Taruskin, in a cold-eyed 1993 essay reprinted in his collection “The Danger of Music,” proposes that Cage, no less than Schoenberg, participated in the Germanic cult of musical genius. Indeed, Taruskin writes, Cage brought the aesthetic of Western art “to its purest, scariest peak.” Perhaps Cage’s entire career was a colossal annexation of unclaimed territory. If, as he said, there is nothing that is not music, there is nothing that is not Cage.

"Green Imposes Its Discomfiting Mood": The History of Green and the Work of Bruce Nauman, Brice Marden, and Olafur Eliasson

Textbooks tend to organize art history chronologically. But what if we re-told art history through color instead? Artspace is publishing a series of articles excerpted from Phaidon's Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art, each one offering a close look into the history of a single color in its relation to art. Last week we examined red, and in this iteration, we look at art history against the grain of green, and the color's conceptual, psychological and cultural significance in the works of Bruce Nauman, Brice Marden, and Olafur Eliasson.

 ...

Green seems to exert charismatic power as metaphor, yet the symbols can be contradictory, depending on cultural and personal context. Green gems depicted in mosaics from Santa Maria Maggiore, for example, could be understood through various lenses: ritual or ethics, optics or magic. Other contexts for thinking about green include the realm of commerce and industry, as explored by Boetti, or the colors of gender bias, which Dumas uncovers in the annals of medical history. Nauman's green not only imposes its discomfiting mood on participants but also engages viewers in a sensory experience that demonstrates how eye and brain produce uncanny perceptual effects.

Several artists use green to depict subjects in a blatantly non-mimetic mode. The greens in the flesh of Matisse's subject, in Derain's river, and in Kirchner's street scenes send disparate signals that are nevertheless clear thanks to color. Eliassonuses green in an anti-naturalistic manner to make viewers see the everyday world differently. Kelly's green shapes are tenaciously abstract yet moored in a reference to reality. Marden's olive/grey/bluish monochrome in a nuanced investigation into art and nature based on a specific place.

Green's links to nature and the pastoral make it integral to the genre of landscape painting. Rubens and Poussin treated verdant vistas in different ways, using color to convey ideas and bringing us back to a recurring theme: artistic disagreements about the use of color. The Renaissance polarity between design and color, planning and process, discussed in reference to blue, is here updated, shifting in a new context in the seventeenth century. These disagreements continued into the nineteenth century, as seen in works by Ingres, Delacroix, and Monet. The use of color, furthermore, sheds light on fundamental artistic goals, as seen in Cézanne's use of signature hues, including viridian green, to construct form and space on a flat surface.

Green provides many insights into artists' practice. The color plays a surprising and important role in the creation of naturalistic flesh tone, as with Duccio's behind-the-scenes backdrop for the Virgin's face. Techniques such as underpainting and glazing and their effects on color and meaning are also explored in Uccello's frescoes and van Eyck's oils. The crucial role of binding medium, first made explicit in the chapter on red, is further investigated in Frankenthaler's and Louis's stained color field paintings, and the history of pigments is carried forward in works by Veronese and by Millais and Hunt.

Bruce Nauman, Green Light Corridor, 1941. Courtesy, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

This work is an assault on the senses, brought on through management of space and color. Viewers are engulfed in a ghastly green light as they engage with this deliberately discomfiting narrow corridor. It is meant to be walked through, not just looked at, but it is barely 1 foot (30 cm) wide, so the spectator has to shimmy, usually sideways, through an alienating space that feels and looks unnatural and hostile.

Nauman's color plays a calculated role, with a stunning finish even after the experience is over. The pervasive green glow comes from overhead fluorescent tubes, and the light is claustrophoic rather than radiant or transcendent. It is an acid green that harangues the spectator. But the work plays out over time. While inside the corridor, the eye and brain accomodate the color and it almost starts to feel neutral, although in reality, the brain's visual system is becoming fatigued by the stimulus. When you exit the corridor, you experience an optical phenomenon called "after-image," the illusory sensation of a complementary color. Having been over-exposed to such an abundance of green, now the eye "sees" a rosy, pinkish glow. The time immersed in Nauman's unnerving green results in an alteration of the viewer's perceptions.

Artists have exploited such surprising effects of color vision for centuries, and theorists have developed theses to explain the interaction of colors with eye and brain. Goethe described in detail the phenomenon of after-images in 1810: "Every decided color does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition."

Nauman's green corridor is a space for individual sensory exploration, which viewers don't fully "see" until they exit it and experience the results of Goethe's "violence to the eye."

...

Bruce Nauman (B. 1941), Eat War, neon tubing with clear glass tubing in suspension frame, 5 3/8 x 31 1/4 x 2 in. (13.7 x 79.4 x 5.1 cm.), Executed in 1986.

Acclaimed international artist Bruce Nauman’s Natural Light, Blue Light Room is on display at Blain Southern, London, for the first time since its original presentation in 1971. A landmark piece and significant architectural installation, Natural Light, Blue Light Room is one of the earliest instances of the artist producing built environments to discomfort and disorientate the audience.

Comprised of skylights accompanied by blue fluorescent lights, the artwork alters the viewer’s ability to perceive the space clearly. Whilst representative of the familiar minimalist aesthetic of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Natural Light, Blue Light Room also acts as a reminder of the alternative concepts that concerned Nauman at the time. Alongside the idea of pairing a piece or object down to the bare minimum, the artist also focused on subtle atmospheric changes that could be employed to create a particular physical or psychological experience for the viewer.

By utilising the natural phenomena of light, temperature or space in a sculpture or image, inside of simply representing it, the artist plays with the audiences’s senses and their perceptive abilities. Upon entering the gallery space, viewers undergo a physical response to the empty space and unfamiliar light put before them. With time, they are able to differentiate between the two light sources: the natural daylight and blue fluorescent lights. This cognitive experience continues to develop as the audience member witnesses the shifting daylight outside and its effects on their own interaction and understanding of the space that they inhabit.

Bruce Nauman, Natural Light, Blue Light Room, until 12 November, Blain Southern, London.

For more, visit www.blainsouthern.com.

Credits
1. Bruce Nauman, Natural Light, Blue Light Room, 1971, Installation View, 2016, © Bruce Nauman 2016, Photo: Peter Mallet.

Fruit

'The tension of words and images'

Ed began his career as a layout artist at a Los Angeles advertising agency in the late 1950s.

Ed Ruscha continued to draw on his advertising background, producing works that demonstrate an ongoing interest in typography, signage and the West Coast of the United States.

He creates paintings in which text is superimposed over landscapes and traditional American vistas, where the bold lettering is in complete opposition to the idyllic, idealised and somewhat kitsch representations of the images.

Through this playful and characteristically enigmatic conflation of image and text, Ruscha explores the viewer's interpretation of language and transforms the words into subjects in themselves.

________

Los Angeles had a lot to do with my feeling about art in the world and everything. I came from a sort of almost backward place in Oklahoma. When I came to California it was very sparkly, glamorous, so it was like a new world to me, an accelerated culture that I responded to. The real vitality for me is to be in my own studio in my own environment. I'm constantly moving wherever I work. I might work here for a while and then I'll move this to somewhere else. Sometimes I’ll work on four or five things at the same time, to the point where I don’t know what direction I'm going in, but that’s also exhilarating at the same time.

I think I centred on words because, first of all, they had no size so if I painted the word 'boss' I could paint it that big or I could paint it that big. I liked that, that you could be realistic and at the same time not be bound by any kind of size reference. I also liked the left to right kind of thing. You know, our eyes are like this and we read like this and landscapes are like this. I had a studio in Western Avenue in Hollywood and I would walk outside, I'd look up in the hills, and there was the Hollywood sign. Looking at that every day I just thought, well, I should make a comment on it. It's also got these things left to right, it's got those words, it's got those letters, and it also had that sort of corny magic to it. Just the idea of Hollywood, it's always been a potent symbol.

Backgrounds to me are simply just that - backgrounds. They're more like stage settings. It can almost be like elevator music where you're just accenting or you're setting a stage or setting a tone for a given subject.

I use stencils too. See, this is a stencil here. That’s not even a finished work but it begins to make a kind of lively picture. It's hard to read that but it says, 'car parts'. I like the tension of having a combination of words or word in front of something that is also lively in itself, like a mountaintop. A lot of these mountaintops, they suggest glory or beauty, things like that. They almost have their own orchestration, you can almost hear trumpets playing, and I like that reference. It's sort of a non-verbal way of referencing something that is really not making any noise at all.

But then, putting combination with words, that tension is where I live, I guess.

Seriously is equally elusive. A life-size, steel stick man sits in a chair with a bulky Antony Gormley monograph resting on his lap. An orange helium balloon on a long piece of string stands in for his head. The implication appears damning: Gormley’s work (or perhaps public sculpture at large?) is for airheads. But Strange’s statements are never so clear-cut. Seriously is also a not-so-subtle swipe at coffee-tabled art adulation, though, as with much of his work, implied critique hides behind a cloak of naivety.
Sparkling Sony HDR TG3, Sony DCR-TRV25E, Sony CCD-TRV228E was the most conceptually and formally considered of the pieces in the show. Three monitors sat on the floor, each showing a glass of fizzy water filmed using three different models of video camera, resulting in subtly different hues. Each video loops as the bubbles finally fade, a simple exercise that delights in recording slight variations of the banal and of time passing, recalling the dry concision of Martin Creed.
With this kind of light-touch conceptualism, emphasis and meaning are fugitive partners. ‘The Same As Usual’ opened with the equally sardonically titled Welcome To Stupid, a work that came to override and inform the rest of the show. The gallery’s small entrance hall was covered with a thin layer of soil so that, throughout the snowy Christmas period, visitors trudged mud across the floor, creating a grubby index of works considered. It was apparently added as an after-thought shortly before the opening, a last-minute act that literally dirtied the show and a conceptually deft sleight of hand. Content and interpretation were enmeshed with sullied footprints, a smoke-screen that Strange can stand behind. What’s more, if you view the work as awkward or scruffy, well that’s your fault, you shouldn’t have stepped inside.

(via: frieze) 

Chris Burden was a seminal American performance artist. His controversial works of art often involved putting himself in physical danger or extreme discomfort, most memorably in his iconic Shoot (1971) performance. After gathering bystanders in a gallery, he was shot in the left bicep by a 22 caliber rifle by a friend—daring his audience to intervene in a performance that has often been interpreted as a response to passivity in the face of the ongoing Vietnam War. “I had an intuitive sense that being shot is as American as apple pie,” Burden said. “We see people being shot on TV, we read about it in the newspaper. Everybody has wondered what it's like. So I did it.” Other notable projects included Trans-Fixed (1974), where the artist had his hands nailed into the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle in a shocking crucifixion. Though he continued performing for much of his career, his later works often consisted of kinetic sculptural elements and mechanized toys. Born on April 11, 1946 in Boston, MA, he went on to study at Pomona College and under the famed Conceptual artist Robert Irwin at the University of California Irvine. He went on to receive four separate National Endowment for the Arts grants, and today, Burden’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and he National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., among others. In 2013, the New Museum in New York held a major retrospective titled “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures.” He died on May 10, 2015 in Topanga Canyon, CA at the age of 69.

Chris Burden was the first artist represented by Larry Gagosian, from 1978 until the present day. An artist's artist, he was a radical and uncompromising figure with a fierce political consciousness.  He ceaselessly probed the physical and conceptual limits of art to reflect on the surreal and precarious realities of contemporary life, first in performance, then in large–scale sculptures that are ludic, awe–inspiring, and deeply engaging.

Burden’s early work was ephemeral, overturning preconceptions about the status of a work of art while addressing political, social, environmental and technological change. In shockingly simple, visceral performances, he shook the conventional art world and took the new art form to as–yet unparalleled extremes. Images of this young artist continue to resonate today: having himself shot (Shoot, 1971), locked up (Five Day Locker Piece, 1971), electrocuted (Doorway to Heaven, 1973), cut (Through the Night Softly, 1973), crucified (Trans–fixed, 1974), and advertised on television (4 TV Ads, 1937–77). In later years, Burden channeled the daring spirit of these early life–threatening performances into sculptures that embody technical feats on an imposing scale. Toys (figurines, train sets, Erector parts) became the building blocks for expansive scale models, cities, and battlefields, while actual vehicles (ships, trucks, and cars) were suspended or set in motion in surreal and improbable ways. Monumental sculptures and installations such as B–Car (1975), The Big Wheel (1979), A Tale of Two Cities (1981), Beam Drop (1984, 2008), Samson (1985), Medusa’s Head (1990), L.A.P.D. Uniforms(1993), and Metropolis II (2010), reflect on urban society and cultural institutions, as well as examining the limits of science and technology.

Chris Burden was born in 1946 in Boston, Massachusetts, and died in 2015 in Topanga, California. He received his B.F.A. in 1969 from Pomona College, California, and his M.F.A. in 1971 from the University of California, Irvine. Burden has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “A Tale of Two Cities,” Orange County Museum of Art, California (2000); “Tower of Power,” Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (2002); The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, England (2002); “What My Dad Gave Me,” Rockefeller Center, New York (2008); Middelheim Open Air Sculpture Museum, Antwerp (2009); “Three Ghost Ships,” Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2011); “Metropolis II,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012); “Small Skyscraper,” Armory Center for the Arts and One Colorado, California (2012); “Extreme Measures,” New Museum, New York (2013); “The Master Builder,” Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Massachusetts (2014); and “Ode to Santos Dumont,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015).

Fluxus was a loosely organized group of artists that spanned the globe, but had an especially strong presence in New York City. George Maciunas is historically considered the primary founder and organizer of the movement, who described Fluxus as, "a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, Vaudeville, Cage and Duchamp." Like the Futurists and Dadaists before them, Fluxus artists did not agree with the authority of museums to determine the value of art, nor did they believe that one must be educated to view and understand a piece of art. Fluxus not only wanted art to be available to the masses, they also wanted everyone to produce art all the time. It is often difficult to define Fluxus, as many Fluxus artists claim that the act of defining the movement is, in fact, too limiting and reductive.

Key Ideas

Hedwig Houben, Others and I 

Six Possibilities for a Sculpture

Dutch artist Hedwig Houben makes sculptural works and installations that are mediated by film, performance and language. For her first solo exhibition in the UK, Houben presents tableaus and accompanying filmed performances from the last five years. Each work comprises one or more art objects and a script that is activated by the artist or a guest performer. At Spike Island, Houben is working with four guests (a visitor, a collector, a staff member and a studio artist) who take on the role of the ‘performer’ and activator in four separate performances. Houben is interested in the shift that occurs when the works leave her orbit and exist in isolation from their maker, in an institutional context. Who is the most powerful player – the artist, the art work or the spectator?

The artist’s scripts are witty, meandering, and sometimes ridiculous. Like their sculpted counterparts, the scripts are malleable objects which lay their form open to the performer and the performance. They reflect on the work, and the decisions made in order for it to come into being from shifting points of view – sometimes from the artist, as if she were giving a conventional artist’s talk, but often from the perspective of the objects, which become characters that reappear in different works. Through their repeated use, Houben demonstrates the lack of any fixed or singular meaning and emphasises context as crucial to interpretation.

On the opening night of the exhibition, the artist performs Personal Matters and Public Affairs (2016), which examines the position and status of the individual when they are removed from their private space. A 1:1 scale plasticine model of a Volkswagen hatchback, ‘The Other’, is confronted by a plasticine portrait of the performer, ‘I’. During the exhibition a number of different people take on the role of performer, thus modifying ‘The Other’. 

___________

In the video documentation of Hedwig Houben’s performance lecture Five Possible Lectures on Six Possibilities for a Sculpture (2013), the artist speaks in two voices: her own and that of a character named ‘the Sculpture’. There is little change in the artist’s breathy, measured delivery to signal the shift between the two identities and, regardless of who is speaking, Houben’s fingers continue to dig into the grey plasticine-topped table in front of her, drawing unexpected colour to the surface. The relationship between thinking and making is played out by the two voices, which never enter into dialogue but nevertheless seem to make contact. The Sculpture is able to observe Houben’s activity at the plasticine table, at first somewhat sceptically (‘Hedwig just copied me’) but, eventually, with growing intimacy and pleasure. (‘This feels amazing. The longer and more she pushes, the warmer it gets.’)

A pristine version of the plasticine table stands in the space of Houben’s solo exhibition ‘Others and I’. It awaits an invited artist from one of the Spike Island studios, who will reprise the performance, voicing both Houben and the Sculpture. Also in the gallery, positioned as if it might be careering around a corner, an enormous 1:1-scale plasticine model of a Volkswagen Polo waits to be activated by a curator and a visitor in two stagings of Personal Matters and Public Affairs (2015), following Houben’s own performance during the show’s preview in September. Climbing like a motor-show model across the bonnet of the car, the artist narrated the relationship between the automobile and a plasticine ‘portrait’ of her head, which she cradled against her chest. The car and the head were introduced as ‘he’ and ‘she’ but, as the artist paced through the lecture, scratching the vehicle’s surface and crushing the model head into its roof, the identities (and, at points, genders) of both car and head, or, as Houben designates them, ‘the Other’ and ‘I’, merged.

The Hand The Eye and It

Between these large pieces, the remaining characters in Houben’s expanding cast are represented by plaster, plywood and plasticine objects arranged on a modular shelving system. Even the shelving system is a character, listed as ‘the Collector’, who has been introduced as part of Houben’s latest work, The Collector and Its Host (2015). This work requires the gallery invigilators to daily disassemble and re-install the plywood shelves in the space, making decisions in their role as another character, ‘the Host’. The personality of the Host depends on the nature of the institution’s staff (potentially ranging, Houben suggests, from ‘generous and committed’ to ‘lazy and negligent’).

Imitator Being Made. 2015. Plaster