FPA 260 Fall 2002 Instructor: Judy Radul

Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
Project 4
Research Tips
Gallery Report
Grading Information

Build a "structure" out of plywood (each student has 4'x 4' ) and any other materials you choose.
 
You are creating an 'organizing principal' and manifesting it with materials. What you 'organize' is up to you.
 
Research method: Make a list/sketches of systems and structures which organize. Some systems may organize objects according to their similarity, for instance: the slide library ; a book shelf; pill bottles. On a larger scale a classroom could be seen as organizing students and teacher. Examples of systems which bring together objects which are not explicitly alike might be the basement or attic (as places of storage) the garbage can, a zoo. Yet even in these examples we can see categories emerging. For instance, detritus around your house and kitchen becomes a kind of collection once you put it in the garbage. When you designate the objects as garbage they share in being in the category of the 'unwanted.'
 
Your method of (dis)organization and display should be created in relation to the specifics of your collection, consider provoking unlikely or unusual connections between elements. Can you change the "identity" of an object by your association of it with other things? (For instance a Barbie doll in a collection of toys may be understood as one amongst several examples of childhood memorabilia, if that same doll is in a collection of pictures and representations of women, then it's most obvious meaning will be as a female image.)

Are the objects organized with display, safety/preservation, or storage in mind? If they are not organized for display how will your audience come upon them? If, for instance, you have made a set of "drawers", can the viewer open it? If so, think about the handle or pull as an essential element in your design.
 
Production method: sketch ideas, draw a plan to scale, calculate cuts etc. don't forget to include the width of the wood in your calculations. Decide how will you brace corners, and make the object structurally sound, before you start
 
You are expected to use:
Table Saw
Chop saw
Band saw
Nail gun
And to fill and sand your joins
 
Note: Avoid anything that replicates furniture or games in any easy manner unless you are critically addressing them. Avoid "the grid" (it's too obvious.)
The expectation is that you will use the shop to realize this project and that your methods of construction will demonstrate skill, care and finish.
 
Artworks:
On line:
Marcel Broodthaers (meuble de salon noir, 1966)
http://www.cgac.org/gal/expo/broodth.html
 
"MusÈe d'Art Moderne, DÈpartement des Aigles, Section PublicitÈ" 1968-72.
 
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag97/belgium/sm-belgm.htm
 
Geoffry Farmer (The Hunchback Kit, Puppet Kit) http://www3.bc.sympatico.ca/cat_jef/geo_far.html
 
Damien Hirst (Pharmacy, this site includes 360 panorama)
 
http://www.tate.org.uk/pharmacy/default.htm
 
Ben Vautier, Flux Holes...1963-64
 
http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/classes/ah111/vautier1.jpg

Mark Dion, The Corridor of Extinction, 1997
 
http://www.muhka.be/verzamelt_depot_detail.php?work_id=658&person_id=220&letter=D&la=nl
 
Mark Dion, Great Chain (drawing)

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1999/muse/artist_pages/dion_greatestchaim.html
 
Lorna Simpson Wigs (portfolio)  1994
 
http://www.walkerart.org/education/activities/simpson/
 
 
Texts which relate to the project:
#1
Swiss Linguist Ferdinand De Saussure (1857-1913) used a linguistic approach to reconceive linguistics by developing ideas about how meaning is attached to words. This 'science of signs' which has been greatly developed since Saussure is known as Semiotics. One idea of Saussure's which relates to our assignment is that words (or in our case things) are not inherently meaningful, but that at least some of their meaning results from their relationship to other words and things.
 
"Even though one English speaker's notion of a sister may differ dramatically from another's , there will always be more points in common between the two notions of sister than there are between either's notion of a sister and that of a brother, father or mother. In short the identity of a given signifier or a given signified is established through the ways in which it differs from all other signifiers or signifieds within the same system." (Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, p. 7)
 
"liminal" cases may help illustrate this point further. For instance colour can be described (visually) in a number of waysú--linear charts, or colour wheels for instance. Is the transition of colour best demonstrated as a linear progression or grid or a circle. How does one decide where one colour starts and another one stops? Is this just "perception". If so, how would we explain cultures where colours are conceived completely differently than our own? This may seem like a fine point but through our creation of categories we decide what in fact exists. For instance there has been much political debate around the instances of hermaphroditism and whether there is a "need" for a third gender.
 
#2
German writer Walter Benjamin was very interested in new relations to the material world which emerged in the 19th century as everyday objects became mass produced commodities. There is a section about "the collector" in his collection of written fragments and quotes published as The Arcades Project.
 
"What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any unity, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this "completeness"? it is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object's mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection. And for the true collector, every single thing in this system becomes an encyclopedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry and the owner from which it comes. It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired) it turns to stone. Everything remembered, everything thought, everything conscious becomes socle, frame pedestal, seal of his possession. It must not be assumed that the collector, in particular would find anything strange in the topos hyperouranios-that place beyond the heavens which, for Plato, shelters the unchangeable archetypes of things. He loses himself, assuredly. But he has the strength to pull himself up again by nothing more than a straw; and from out of the sea of fog that envelops his senses rises the newly acquired piece, like an island-collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of "nearness' it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense the smallest act of political reflection makes for an epoch I n the antiques business. We construct here an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to "assembly." (The Arcades, p. 204,205)
 
"...With individuals as with societies, the need to accumulate is one of the signs of approaching death..." ( 208)
 
"Passages by Marx..."Private property has made us so stupid and inert that an object is ours only when we have it." "All the physical and intellectual senses...have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses, the sense of having." (p. 210)
 
 

Project 2: The external and the internal

How do we account for our conception of "self". At different historical moments and in different cultures, certain aspects may be more valued than others.
 
Consider the issues discussed below and make a project in which you address "a sense of the self in the world in a particular moment." The work can be about "your" self, "the" self, or an invented identity. The "particular" moment can be in the past, present or future. We sometimes feel that we become different versions of ourselves depending on the situation that we're in and/or the people we're interacting with. How other people see us can affect our sense of who we are, which in turn can affect how we relate to the outside world. Think of your self as someone who has a number of identities, all incomplete, all lived at once, and, subject to change in each situation.
 
Keep in mind that there can be many possible formal strategies that can be used to address these questions.  You don't have to be limited to working in a literal or symbolic way; try to explore other ways of creating meaning.
 
Production Method/questions: What materials are appropriate? Is there a form which is appropriate to your exploration of identity? For instance if you are thinking about "internal" vs. "external" factors, perhaps a form which uses both positive and negative (ie. A cast and its contents) may be appropriate. This work may be executed in any media, including the use of found or original texts, drawings, photography, painting, sculpture, installation, audio, video, performance or any appropriate combinations of these.
 
Note: no images of yourself may be used, the image of self is too easy a convention for referencing this complex of relations. Also, this territory has been very thoroughly mined, as you see in our examples, and anyway, you can make works with your own self image in every other art project, just not this one!
 
Related Discussion points and Quotes
 
Post structuralist philosophy, political theory, theories of spectatorship (which examine the cultural and psychological conditions/effects of looking) and performance have tried to account for the fact that the Cartesian idea of a self-determining subject or person is no longer tenable. As in the previous project we realize that the very idea of being "someone" is a cultural phenomenon. Yet it also seems that we are not just culturally and linguistically produced. That is, although "I" am only "I" by the very fact of a place in language/culture from which I speak, I am not only that.
 
Michel Foucault from Remarks on Marx (Semiotext 1991)
"...in the course of their history, men had never ceased constructing themselves, that is, to shift continuously the level of their subjectivity, to constitute themselves in an infinite and multiple series of different subjectivities that would never reach an end and would never place us in the presence of something that would be "man." Man is an animal of experience, he is involved ad infinitum within a process that, by defining a field of objects, at the same time changes him, deforms him, transforms him and transfigures him as a subject...."(p. 123, 124)
 
Paricular ideas concerning the subject are advanced in discourses which frame a notion of the "self" such as the following. Come to class prepared to consider these and other determining concepts of self:
 
Citizen: a conception of self which is 'political' in a broad sense. The citizen has rights and responsibilities in a public body. A certain relationship to the state may be implied.
 
Family:
 
Celebrity: Sometimes it seems that celebrities act as THE model for the individual. Yet Guy Debord writes in The Society of The Spectacle (1967)
61

"The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a model for identification. the agent renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the course of things. The consumption celebrity superficially represents different types of personality and shows each of these types having equal access to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness there. The decision celebrity must possess a complete stock of accepted human qualities. Official differences between stars are wiped out by the official similarity which is the presupposition of their excellence in everything. Khrushchev became a general so as to make decisions on the battle of Kursk, not on the spot, but at the twentieth anniversary, when he was master of the State. Kennedy remained an orator even to the point of proclaiming the eulogy over his own tomb, since Theodore Sorenson continued to edit speeches for the successor in the style which had characterized the personality of the deceased. The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it. ≥
 
Gender:
 
Race:
 
Age:
 
Class:
 
Social construct:
 
Philosophical Construct:
 
Psychic Construct: Freud's (1856-1939) elaboration of the concept of ≥the unconscious≤ as a part of a psychic process which comes between perception and conciousness had a huge effect on the concept of self. No longer "whole" the self (as mind) was understood to be divided between conscious and unconscious functions. Direct and unmediated access to "reality" could not be assumed as the conscious mind was theorized as only one part of the mental process. Further, expression, or signification was not transparently translating conscious intention but perhaps revealing the unconscious which Freud insists speaks in the obscure code of dreams and slips of the tongue, etc.
 
Linguistic Construct:
"Benveniste insists that the individual finds his or her cultural identity only within discourse, by means of the pronouns "I" and "you." He or she identifies with the first of these, and is defined in oppositions to the second...Subjectivity is here grasped in the relational terms...used by Saussure to explain the operations of language. Like the linguistic sign, the subject relies upon another term within the same paradigm-here the personal pronoun "you"-for its meaning and value. And that paradigm can only be activated through discourse. In the space between two discursive events, subjectivity, like the pronouns which sustain it, falls into abeyance. Benveniste emphasizes the radical discontinuity which characterizes the condition of subjectivity, its constant stops and starts."
—Kaja Silverman. The Subject of Semiotics. P. 45
 
Machine or Cyborg self:
From the seventeenth century till now, machines could be animated--given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanized--reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. We donπt need organic holism to give impermeable wholeness, the total woman and her feminist variants (mutants?).

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centered polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases—all crucial to establishing modern identity—Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits from thos proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.
 
äA cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for grantedä.We can be responsible for machines "we are they."
Donna Haraway, Simians Cyborgs and Women, p. 180.
 
Medical or Legal Discourses:
 
 After discussing the above "external" discourses, we might wonder if is there another sense of "self" which the subject determines on their own or which "escapes" these categories. If so, how to describe it?
 
 
Artworks:
James Luna

http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/ArtifactPiece.html

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/01/10.18.01/Luna.html
Pierre Molinier, Hanel et Pierre, "Les Ambigus," 1970
http://www.lattuadastudio.it/Artisti/Molinier/copia di enchaine.htm
Ana Mendieta
Lorna Simpson
Hannah Wilke

 

Project 4: Artist research and studio project
 
Art training was at one time primarily concerned with copying great works. Copying can be very instructive. As the ideology of originality has come to dominate art, the practice of copying has died off. The idea of learning by rote has been critiqued in favour of a more individualistic approach.
 
The premise of this project is, that while the practice of copying may have outlived its usefulness, the idea of originality is also subject to question in a culture in which sampling has become one of the key practices.
 
Furthermore, it is important to recognize that as a producer of objects, ideas, events etc. you don't exist in a vacuum. So what is your relationship to other works and cultural production then? Imagine a discussion, or a dialogue. In a discussion, you will address what has been said by other speakers, you may pick up on their ideas, but there is no point in repeating what they said. To contribute to the discussion, all participants want to hear your take on things.
 
This project has three components and is based around the work and practice or one particular work of a contemporary artist. Your artist will be selected in discussion with your instructor. You are expected to research three possible contemporary artists/works you would like to engage with (as a general rule the work should have been produced since 1960, for exceptions talk with your instructor.) It is extremely important for your enjoyment and the success of this project that you choose your work/artist carefully. Really "interrogate" the work. Make notes about what qualities of this work you admire and want to emulate. Note both formal, material and conceptual elements. Ask yourself what it is that attracts you to the work and try not to judge this visceral attraction (maybe it is the work's physical size and impact when you think you should be looking for intellectual meaning) forget about "shoulds" and explore your attraction in depth.
 
The first component of this project consists of researching your artist's practice/work. Challenge yourself to find an artist/artwork that you don't already know about. Broaden your horizons by going to galleries and reading contemporary art periodicals and books (see research suggestions below.) To make research possible and profitable your artist must be reasonably well known and documented. This assignment requires that you let yourself be completely drawn to a work, and critically investigate your "attraction" without (it is hoped) letting go of your enthusiasm. Come to the "midterm meeting" with the instructor prepared to briefly put forward your three options. On October 29, you will be required to hand in a one page summary of the artist's work and process as well as a specific bibliography listing your research to date and your intended research.
 
The second component of the project requires you to create a work that responds to, but is not a copy of, work by the artist you have been assigned. What is a response? A response is a way of creating a realtionship with what you are responding to. You may be critical, or selective, you may amplify one part of the original and downplay another, you may change "it's" scale, or gender or authorial intentions. Impovisation is part of a theatrical (and musical) vocabulary. Here are some notes from a more performative source.

You and your fellow students will install your works as an exhibition and photographically document the work. In lieu of the traditional individual critiques students will give feedback notes on each work. Make three copies of your notes, give one to the artist, one to the instructor, and keep one for yourself.
 
In the third component you will present the slides of your work and give a brief presentation as to its relationship to the aritst/work it was based on.
 
Related Artworks:
* Tania Bruguera (Cuban) has made many works relating to the artist Ana Mendieta
* Jeff Wall "Picture for Women" refers to Manet's A Bar at the Follies Berger, 1882
* Jeff Wall's "A Sudden Gust of Wind" 1993 refers to a print by Hokusai from the "Thirty-six views of the Fuji" 1831-33
* Sheri Levine's remaking of "masterworks"
 
Related Quotes:
From Richard Shiff, "Originality" in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert Nelson Richard Schiff. (This book is a collection of essays on important topics for contemporary art, it is very useful.)
 
..."Originality implies some sense of coming first or doing first, a priority or lack of precedent; it therefore cannot be divorced from considerations of chronology and historical sequence. It is also linked to issues of class, a kind of social priority or lineage(one inherits class status and property, just as one does an artistic tradition). If artists must use what has already been shaped how can they and their artworks attain originality? Perhaps originality is transmissible (the artist as in heritor and bearer of original first principles, a set of universal truths). And perhaps originality is manifested when one alters existing directions or forces (the artist as counter cultural deviator of a tradition or as social deviant).
...So we can ask not only what might be the historical origin of a particular practice or tradition, but also what might be the origin of or motivation for a particular sense of originality...
...
Poststructuralists argue that belief in originality as conceived in the Western tradition entails isolating a central origin; this is to privilege one term above all others from within what must be a continuously reconfigured matrix of language and representation, a system without a center. When the center is not evident, both classicists and modernists assume it nevertheless exists, but is hidden or has been "lost." It therefore becomes the object of an artistic search. For classicists, the center, origin, or privileged representational term might be God, nature, community, or truth; for modernists, it might be true feeling, unmediated experience, individuality, or the essential self.
...[on a "classically minded" understanding of "originality" in the work of "the Renaissance master Raphael" who took "so many models, that he became himself a model for all succeeding painters, always imitating, and always original"(Sir Joshua Reynolds)...Raphael's choice of features worthy of the effort of his imitation make him original in two senses. First, he creates particularly effective combinations, actually enriching the standard imagery with new, albeit hybrid forms derived from his multiple sources; classicists had a special term for this , calling it "invention." Second, Raphael imitates only the very best of all discernible qualities. If we presume that Raphael's antecedents did the same...then we understand that at least some element of the earliest artistic form necessarily passes into Raphael's art through a timeless process of genius recognizing, emulating, and re-creating genius. What results is an expression of Western culture as a set of collective anonymous values. There is further implication: the principle of classical anonymity entails that predecessors resemble followers as much as followers resemble predecessors; thus, classical originality has little to do with one's position in a sequence of "geniuses" but depends instead on whether one participates in transmitting a culture's primordial values. Priority becomes a matter of rediscovering and disseminating first principles which (it must be concluded have not independent alternatives. Classical artists work not to innovate but to preserve established priorities. Their originality entails a certain sameness.
That at least, is the classical position in the eyes of "modernist" artists. They assume the role of revolutionaries either by introducing change, returning to values long lost from the classical hierarchy, or representing truths in personalized, perhaps deviant, expressive form...Nineteenth-century romantics...adopted this position...as if it were their exclusive property. Modernists have a certain hubris. Often arguing that they lack true precedent, they conceive of themselves (not their principles) as original and seek originality by realizing their inner feelings, thoughts, and character. Manet once represented his aesthetic by stating that he "sought simply to be himself, and not another"...
 
"To seek originality by stressing one's deviation from others has consequences in the social realm; it encourages a certain personal competition which in turn has economic implications. Artists sell their unique difference, but not always easily. Modernists saw the irony of struggling for market recognition in a world ruled by fashion, which itself follows a principle of uniqueness of a particular kind: fashion is novelty produced in multiple and multiauthored edition...
 
...If, among many contemporary artists, originality and other modernist values now seem discredited, it is because artists have radicalized old suspicions, adopting postructuralist theory to make their case.
         The most discussed case has been Sherrie Levine. During the early 1980's she violated modernist standards of originality and propriety, becoming known as "an appropriator of images"...she rephotographed photographs by the likes of Edward Weston and Walker Evans in order to expose her antecedent's own appropriation of imagery and the operation of their work as market commodity. Levine's practice denied the originality of authorship that nineteenth-century romantics had once struggled to assert; she did not fear but sought to confirm the fact that language or representation overrides claims to a unique self. Moreover, she created her photographic imitations in opposition to what such practice would mean to a classicist-homage to the work of another who was judged as manifesting original genius and emulation of that genius and its methods."

Research Tips:
Go to Vancouver galleries!
Look through catalogues from recent large group exhibitions such as The Venice Biennial, Documenta, Kwangju, The Mirror's Edge (touring), Border Crossings (National Gallery Canada), The Object Reconsidered (Conceptual touring exhibition) Out of Actions (touring exhibition of performance art documents.)
The publisher Phaidon has produced several excellent books on individual contemporary artists. Also see their recent collections "Cream".
If you want to look at new books the bookstore at Vancouver Art Gallery and at Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr can be inspiring.
Through the Library Home page you can find databases such as Art Index to research journal articles on your artist and the AMICO Library An online collection of high-quality, digital documentation of works of art from around the world. http://www.lib.sfu.ca/researchtools/databases/dbofdb.htm?DatabaseID=406
SFU Library Home > Research Tools > SFU Library Databases>Contemporary Arts

Grading
Marks are based on:
-a demonstration of your understanding of the project or assignment requirements
-your creative and imaginative response to each project or assignment
-your commitment to ideas (following through)
-completion of each project or assignment
-your relative growth throughout the course particularly in relations to challenging yourself and critically and materially engaging with the work
-preparation for and participation in group discussions
-studio practice and consideration of the classroom environment
-attendance
 
Grading:
projects 65 %
first project 15%
2nd 15%
3rd 15%
4th 20%
gallery report 10%
participation/studio practice 25%
        
                                                      total  100%
 
Attendance and punctuality are very important. Marks will be affected by arriving late for class or leaving early or missing class. If you must miss class please speak to me about your absence. If you do miss a class it is your responsibility to find out what you have missed.
 
It is your responsibility to be prepared to work in class time, students will not be excused from class to go out shooting etc.
 
Collaborations can be proposed for all assignments.