Responses to videos

GARY HILL DOCUMENTARY-

I liked the way Hill spoke of video as not being about image but about the connectors in a circuit. It got me thinking more about the way that we see image with our eyes, not an apparatus. When we see it through technology, it becomes something else, further from image. I also liked his interest with symmetry and how he compared/contrasted it with his hands and feet in some of the pieces. His affinity for using the body is apparent, from the work where he strapped cameras to himself, to the one that observed bodies in panorama, to the one of himself lying naked on the floor. I also like his involvement of speech in most of his work as well, from speaking written language aloud to create a phonetic rhythm to having words spoken backwards. I found the Mediations piece to be especially interesting because it somewhat combined the body, language, and symmetry together. Body because he was using his hands to fill the speaker, language because of the words coming out of the speaker, and symmetry because the wordplay created a strange symmetry of words spoken and events happening in the piece.

THE KNIFE-

I found this to be excruciatingly boring. Which makes me wonder if that was the point of it? The whole time I was watching it, I couldn't help but think "is this all that's going to happen in this video?". It was kind of like watching a movie and waiting for a twist in the plot, and it never happening. When I saw the colors on the knife, instead of thinking of the connotations of each color (red-hot, blue-cold), I thought about the primary colors. And I began to think about contrast among them. I thought to myself, "well he is using the two most bold primary colors, but why? Because they are so different from one another? Is he using their oppositeness to bring different personas to the knife?" And then he made the knife turn yellow at the end, which furthered my thinking about primary colors, but didn't really answer my questions about why. I am sure this piece has a deep, meaningful thought process behind it, but I can't seem to delve deeper than the colors to find it.

THE CHAIR-

After watching this, I am now fairly certain that Goldstein has a thing for doing boring videos. Or maybe I should say simple videos that require patience. Either way, I wanted to fast forward through this one to see what happens too, without watching each feather fall slowly to the ground. I think the fact that he uses feathers further slows the piece, since feathers have such a slow falling rate compared to other, dense objects. I liked the imagery of the colorful feathers creating a confetti-like appeal, but part of me wanted it to be fast, or all of them at once. I am starting to interpret his videos as work that plays with color and tests the viewers patience.

Jack Goldstein: The Knife and The Chair

The Knife

Quite honestly, I felt that this video was extremely boring, uninteresting, and very predictable. Although, it was intriguing that the colors went from a bit duller in the beginning to more vibrant and bright towards the middle. I didn't recieve any emotional content from this piece. I felt that it lacked context. A knife is obviously associated with pain, blood, cutting, and red. It seemed too litteral that the knife would turn red. The warm and cool color switch was ok but I felt that this video just lacked context and was too surface oriented and not deep enough.

The Chair

I enjoyed this piece much better than "The Knife". The what seem to be feathers, although it is hard to make out due to the quality of the video, change the sace completely throughout the video. The piece starts off very solemn and almost foreboading in a sense, an empty chair in a room without an occupant. Then the very colorful feathers gently fall from nowhere eventually fill the space with color almost like confetti in a celebretory manner. This piece gave me a sense of completeness when finished which was much different that my first feeling upon starting the video I felt much of a void. I enjoyed the relaxed nature of the piece and the use of bright playful colors used in a contrasting subdued manner.

Gary Hill Video

This artist was very interesting in his use of video to portray the body and physical properties of the human being. The way Gary uses video in order to explore the body in some ways reminds me of the Aesthetics of Narcisism article. It reminds of of this because like in the video that is viewing the limbs of the body in some ways this could be seen as narcissistic, as well as the video that was shot behind the head. Most of his work seems to analyze the human in such a way that the beings almost become mechanical and not human at all but a mere exploration of science. I enjoyed the works of Gary Hill and felt that he had interesting viewpoints. His pieces seemed to really make me think and reanalyze myself as a human being. I enjoyed his use of camera angles and the difficulties that he conquered while strapping cameras to a moving human being. I also admire the fact that he is the subject in most of his videos, especially the one where he is nude. It must take much courage in order to be the subject of your own work.

The Aesthetics of Narcissism

It seems as if Krauss is implying that video can be nothing more than narcissistic. Typically people are often seen recording themselves to express the idea with video art, such as the man pointing at the center of the television for twenty minutes. It seems as if video is being used to show only the artist and not much else. Krauss makes the argument that video is focused solely on the people being filmed. It is understandable to see this reasoning, but video is also used to record memories and actions, not just the people involved.

The Aesthetics of Narcissism

I really appreciated how Krauss pointed out the fact that video works have to be processed and viewed through a machine. It is a point that is so obvious but something i overlooked. Initially when she pointed this out I felt like it cheapened the art form. With painting and sculpture you see the original with your eyes, with video, the machine limits you. You can't go into the television and look around.

The part of this article I enjoyed the most was when she was talking about the piece called boomerang. I really sympathized with Nancy Holt because I've had a similar experience on phone calls with bad reception. At work I answer phones so it's not like i can just hang up on them. There are times when i hear an echo of myself and i agree that my voice doesn't sound as sure when i hear the echo of it, and then it makes me question what I'm saying and then its this circular disintegration of my confidence and thoughts. I'm not sure that if Krauss's assumption of narcissism is correct. Narcissism seems negative and self obsessed, i would argue that it's self exploration or an awareness of self.

The Aesthetics of Narcissism

Although the article was long and drawn out, it provided many examples of video art in support of its main point that this type of art is "narcissistic". Outside of the art realm, the majority of a video camera's use is definitely to record people, but I'm not sure if I would call this tendency narcissistic. Sometimes people record themselves for blogs, tutorials, etc., but usually people record other people rather than themselves, and it's usually for documentation purposes. In the art world, video art does not always focus on human figures as its subjects, but a fair share of it does. And those that do always convey some type of human emotion that could not be as explicitly expressed through any other subject other than a person. When an artist creates a work relevant to humans and human emotions, what better way to present it than through another human? Any kind of complex psychological state of mind is almost only relatable to humans because no other animal, as far as we know, can think as in depth as we can. So aside from taking an abstract or metaphorical path in creating a video artwork, how else would one directly show emotion?
That might have been a bit of a tangent, but I just can't get the idea through my head that video works featuring humans are narcissistic. I can definitely see where the idea is coming from, but I do not entirely agree with it.

The Aesthetics of Narcissism

I thought that the intent behind the article was interesting, but the way that Krauss presented it didn't work for me. I didn't think it was over my head, however, it was too much information. I get that Krauss believes that video art's medium is narcissism, and she makes a good point, but it could have been stated more simply. I feel that she went on and on, giving too many examples to make her point. It was hard for me to stay connected to the article whenever she would describe pieces of video art that I had never seen; even though she described each work in detail, there was a disconnect because I couldn't relate the points she was making to anything I had physically seen, just the images she had constructed for me. With that said, I really do believe she makes some good points about video art, especially when she relates it to psychology. "Narcissism" was a little further than I would have taken it, and I think that if she had just left her main message as "psychology is the medium for video art" I would have found it much more believable. She makes some really interesting points about "medium" itself, using it to refer to a person's body and the way it reacts as being a type of medium. I feel that if she had kept things more simple and to the point she could have made her ideas come across more valid, because she has some really great argumentation in the article about how video and psychology relate, but it is lost in the jumble of her relating pieces to one another and describing them so in-depth.