StopWatchingMe

Stop Watching Me. Copyright Amber Walsh 2015.©

I continue to be in�uenced by the notion of power. This has been on my mind even before our class, especially present in ethical criticisms that I have previously written. However, our Visual Culture seminar has given me greater insights into this. Foucault’s writing about the Panopticon and panopticism (Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison, 1999) has impacted my thoughts regarding how pervasive surveillance is in our everyday lives. Thus, my artwork entitled Stop Watching Me.

– Amber Walsh

StopWatchingMe

Stop Watching Me. Copyright Amber Walsh 2015.©

I continue to be in�uenced by the notion of power. This has been on my mind even before our class, especially present in ethical criticisms that I have previously written. However, our Visual Culture seminar has given me greater insights into this. Foucault’s writing about the Panopticon and panopticism (Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison, 1999) has impacted my thoughts regarding how pervasive surveillance is in our everyday lives. Thus, my artwork entitled Stop Watching Me.

– Amber Walsh

I have expressed my mood by changing myself to be an icon and sent it to my list via Snapchat. This gave me the feeling about what if the social media alter us to be a thing, we use the emoji instead of talking. Likewise, we almost lose our voice or forget how we are.

the avatar and how this impact our reality behind the devices on digital world. So, I ask what if we became an icon?

-LA

Snap me!

I have expressed my mood by changing myself to be an icon and sent it to my list via Snapchat. This gave me the feeling about what if the social media alter us to be a thing, we use the emoji instead of talking. Likewise, we almost lose our voice or forget how we are.

the avatar and how this impact our reality behind the devices on digital world. So, I ask what if we became an icon?

-LA

Snap me!

Visual Culture and the Art Museum CuratorScott Peck

Our task for our final project is to consider how this class on Visual Culture and Visual Studies

has impacted us personally. As a museum curator, I have learned so much from this class that I can personally apply to my practice. My applications can make the exhibitions that I curate more effective on a pedagogical level.

My semester project involved creating an art exhibition that utilized Visual Culture and its theories into my curatorial process. It can be argued that Visual Culture is postmodernism. Visual Culture involves so much more than just traditional ‘fine art’. It includes almost anything visual such as film, television, advertising, internet sites, photographs, and social media.

In the exhibition of a single sculpture by artist Kiki Smith, I added other nontraditional elements of Visual Culture for the display to impact interpretation and contextualization. Included in the exhibit were internet web sites, jazz music performance, video testimonials, building architecture and various photographs. I used this approach to tell the story of the creation and display of the sculpture. This led to my interest in the role

of Affect and Affect Theory in museum curatorial and pedagogical practice. As a result of this class, I have reevaluated my own practice and I continue to strive to incorporate the principles of Visual Culture and Visual Studies into my work as postmodern art museum curator. I have discovered many ways in which to practically incorporate Visual Culture theory in my work. Here are five initial ideas to consider.

Five Ideas to Incorporate Visual Culture and Visual Culture Theory into Museum Curatorial and Pedagogical Practice

1. Use Storytelling Techniques in the Implementation of Art Exhibitions.

Based upon the theory of Walter Benjamin, create a context for the piece of art to tell a story. Use an entire exhibition to tell a story. Benjamin argues that the traditional art of storytelling had been lost. Make sure the storytelling is to the depth and quality that Benjamin theorizes.

2. Respect all Visual Media.Many art museums discount visual

media that are not the traditional fine art approaches like oil paintings, sculpture and fine prints. This respect involves the attitude of the museum and its staff. It may include rewriting the museum mission, the educational programming, the collection guidelines and other areas.

3. Add Visual Culture Media to Traditional Museum Art Exhibition Practice.

Use nontraditional Visual Culture media to art exhibitions for contextualization and interpretation. For example, when showing an Andy Warhol painting one could include a polaroid photograph of the artist, a song from the Velvet Underground, show an album cover, display a box of brillo pads and Campbell soup cans, etc.

4. Create Exhibitions of Nontraditional Media involved in Visual Culture.Develop and implement exhibitions using these nontraditional media. Examples could include:

Newspaper exhibition, comic book exhibit, YouTube video exhibition, an exhibit of television commercials, architectural plans, etc.

5. Consider Affect and the Affective Turn in Museum Exhibitions.Affect Theory explores the idea that we can ‘affect’ others and their emotional experiences and

sensations. The museum Curator can create art exhibitions that produce a community of feelings, emotions and sensibility. Exhibitions involving trauma or extreme emotions can be especially effective in creating ‘affect’.

www.biblicalarts.org

Always already anticipated,scripted and surveilled,the border walls are falseassurances of exception.

The eyes are among you,always and already,always ready.

Welcome to the Panopticon.KC Jenkins

Always already anticipated,scripted and surveilled,the border walls are falseassurances of exception.

The eyes are among you,always and already,always ready.

Welcome to the Panopticon.KC Jenkins

Innocence of the Media (original 18x18 inches, acrylic on paper)

Society is increasingly peppered with visual information. The media often plays innocent and claims to simply give the audience what they want, with no intention of influencing them. This attempt by the media to shape the narrative is experienced immediately with tragic events, such as war.

Have You Authored Your Opinion Yet? (original 9x11 inches, pen and ink on paper)

One of the best approaches to remember information is with visual cues. The intent of this image is to provoke thought. Image and title of this work references a topic from each week of the Visual Culture Education seminar class.

Innocence of the Media (original 18x18 inches, acrylic on paper)

Society is increasingly peppered with visual information. The media often plays innocent and claims to simply give the audience what they want, with no intention of influencing them. This attempt by the media to shape the narrative is experienced immediately with tragic events, such as war.

Have You Authored Your Opinion Yet? (original 9x11 inches, pen and ink on paper)

One of the best approaches to remember information is with visual cues. The intent of this image is to provoke thought. Image and title of this work references a topic from each week of the Visual Culture Education seminar class.

This content best viewed at http://samuelthomas79.wix.com/meaninginmondrian

Negotiated Boundaries On display in a small corner of the Dallas Museum of Art is a sequence of Mondrian paintings that illustrates the artist’s transition from representational work to his signature abstractions. This sequence of work has always intrigued me- initially as an explanation for Mondrian’s compositional investigation of the spiritual, then as evidence of his evolving approach to the construction of a painted surface. My specific interest in Mondrian’s technique resides in the edges between color planes and black borders. There is intentional and deliberate attention paid to the edges between colors in Mondrian’s work – edges that were granted new dimension upon reading Cooper and Spronk’s analysis of Mondrian’s Transatlantic paintings and Fred Moten’s interpretation of Mondrian’s final painting Victory Boogie Woogie in his essay The Case of Blackness. Responses to these texts are presented in the form of two pages within this site, briefly described below. Transatlantic Gifs is a collection of animated gifs created from superimposed images of Mondrian’s Transatlantic paintings. The Transatlantic work includes seventeen paintings began by Mondrian in Paris, then revised after his move to New York in 1940. These paintings were the subject of intense scrutiny by art historian Harry Cooper and imaging expert Ron Spronk, who employed an arsenal of imaging technologies in an attempt to assess the revisions in Mondrian’s work and investigate the influences of New York City on his neo-plastic compositional construction. The gifs propose a new perspective on Mondrian’s Transatlantic paintings, his revisionist process in particular, and the surgical processes by which Cooper and Spronk have attempted to access the truth of these works. Victory Boogie Woogie brings together images of Mondrian’s final painting along with relevant excerpts from Fred Moten’s essay The Case of Blackness and an embedded audio copy of Albert Ammons’ Boogie Woogie Stomp. Experiencing the images, text, and music simultaneously may lend itself to new understandings of these diverse yet interconnected propositions of improvisation.

Transatlantic Gifs

Place de la Concorde No. 7 No. 8

Victory Boogie Woogie

Excerpts from The Case of Blackness, Fred Moten

"I'll argue that Mondrian is deregulated by the urban underground he'd been dreaming of; that his great, final picture, Victory Boogie Woogie, is all black, is all of what had been absorbed in black, is the explanation of a dissonant, chromatic saturation, the inhabitation of a break or border, the disruption embedded in the grid's boundaries." (p. 474)

"... there is a syntactic, compositional "equivalence" - a social life of forms within the painting - that animates Mondrian's work. It is not merely an accident that this social life - of which Mondrian writes a great deal in his extended meditation on neo-plastic art production's relation to the city, to the bar, to jazz - is spoken of in theatrical terms as "the scene of forms" by [Clement] Greenberg, who recognizes (or at least reveals) more clearly than [Ad] Reinhardt or [Michael] Fried an irreducible theatricality." (p. 481)

"... the texture and landscape of black social life, of black social music, are given in Victory Boogie Woogie, making visible and audible a difference that exists not so much between Reinhardt's and Mondrian's paintings but between the way they deal with what might be understood as the social chromaticism of the color black and of blackness-in-color in their paintings." (p. 482)

"[quoting Yve-Alain Bois] 'When ... asked ... why he kept repainting Victory Boogie Woogie instead of making several paintings of the different solutions that had been superimposed on this canvas, Mondrian answered, 'I don't want pictures. I just want to find things out.''" (p. 482)

"[Harry] Cooper ... takes note of Mondrian's increasing obsession with revision, which we might think of not only as repetition but also as a kind of pianistic repercussion. ... that repercussive revision and a certain inventive discovery are fundamental protocols of black socio-aesthetic activity." (p. 482)

"Cooper moves us more firmly in the direction of a mediated, more than visual perception and interpretation of Mondrian’s work not only by attending carefully to the structural trace of boogie-woogie piano in Mondrian’s improvisatory, revisionary compositional practice but also by offering a brief history of the color black’s career in Mondrian’s late phase. He notes, along with Bois, that the black lines that instantiated dualistic equilibrium by 'bounding color planes' proliferate and are made glossier, more reflective before Mondrian, in exile and at the unfinished end of a twenty-year project, under the influence of boogie-woogie, 'burst[s] the pod of painting and disseminated its elements across a broken border'” (p. 482)

"This is a matter of touch—of painterly and pianistic feel. Color pouring from as well as across the border records and reverses the sound, the social music, which had been poured into the painting. The rhythmic story of left hand, right hand, explodes into every note that can and can’t be played, in every possible shade and shading of that note." (p. 482)

"Mondrian all but discovers certain ochres and blues in his strange, estranged homecoming, in appositional placements of the primary that allow for the secondary, for the minor that had been repressed, to emerge. He could be said to interpret, from the standpoint of a radical political-aesthetic, the rhythmic images of his country. He joins Ammons in joining what we will see [Frantz] Fanon come to recognize as 'that fluctuating movement which [the] people are just giving shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question.'” (p. 483)

Art reflects the image of societies that includes their thoughts, culture, and religion. Art can challenge societies to think in different ways about themselves. In the Western culture, women have traditionally been presented in a passive way, as John Berger (1972) mentioned in his book, "Ways of Seeing". However, through the Visual Culture seminar, I want to highlight more on the Theoretical Feminist in both the Western or Eastern cultures. I think the Eastern culture has presented women in passive way too. I want to get rid of the concept that relies on active/male and passive/female. As I am an artist and art educator, I want to give the right for my students to express themselves and their identities freely.

M.B.

Art reflects the image of societies that includes their thoughts, culture, and religion. Art can challenge societies to think in different ways about themselves. In the Western culture, women have traditionally been presented in a passive way, as John Berger (1972) mentioned in his book, "Ways of Seeing". However, through the Visual Culture seminar, I want to highlight more on the Theoretical Feminist in both the Western or Eastern cultures. I think the Eastern culture has presented women in passive way too. I want to get rid of the concept that relies on active/male and passive/female. As I am an artist and art educator, I want to give the right for my students to express themselves and their identities freely.

M.B.

POWER HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=URX0Z5_HCRK&FEATURE=YOUTU.BE

WHAT I LEARNED FROM THIS COURSE IS

THAT POWER DOMINATES EVERYTHING. IN

O R D E R F O R M E , A S A N A R T I S T O R

TEACHER, TO LIVE WELL IN THE CONTEXT

OF HIERARCHICAL POWER, I HAVE TO

EMPOWER MYSELF BY AVOIDING BLIND

AC C E P TA N C E O F P OW E R A N D A LW AYS

IMPROVING MY OWN EDUCATION. I WILL

TEACH MY STUDENTS TO DO SO AS WELL.

The Avatar;

The glue that brings the virtual and the biological worlds into harmony.

Artists are also exploring virtual worlds as a medium in and through which to create art. In doing so,

artists not only engage with the rich creative and imaginative potential of the virtual worlds, but they

also interrogate the issues inherent in virtual environments, questioning the limitations and conventions

in ways that have both integrity and impact.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufd9UEchc6A The Many Faces of Aqua th Oracl3 in her

virtual world. This machinima is meant to open the door to the variety of ways avatars can be

visually creative and different in visual arts cultural education. The vast variety of creative

endeavors in virtual worlds opens door ways for our students and the avatar is the guide/glue.

An avatar can take as many shapes as the imagination of the student or artist. This allows VR

artists from around the globe can promote and collaborate on real-time projects that are

relevant to the cultural issues (Sweeny, 2010) says.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOyrVx8QSto Robert Sweeny discussing his 2010 book.

Below is a link to an example of a real-time collaborative effort by 45 virtual world artists from around

the globe. The machinima (virtual world video) was made the month after the Charlie Hebdo murders.

We all worked together on a sim furnished by a grant I received from the Linden Endowment for the

Arts for an art sim. I was the organizer, producer of the machinima, group coordinator, as well as one of

the participating artists. Each artists was given so many prims (virtual world art supplies) and given free-

reign on how they wanted to express their emotions with their art.

Artists are also exploring virtual worlds as a medium in and through which to create art. In doing so, artists not only engage with the rich creative and imaginative potential of the virtual worlds, but they also interrogate the issues inherent in virtual environments, questioning the limitations and conventions in ways that have both integrity and impact (183).

2. http://www.slartist.com/aquaglo-lea8-starfall-full-sim-art-to-charlie-hebdos-

staff_e5c5cf2a5.html When 45 artists joined together to make this machinima, representing

over 10 countries, is an example of how virtual world art can be pivotal in both worlds. It also

shows how using a form of research methodology called A/R/tography is successful in a multi-

cultural open-ended arts-based project. It is a form of Arts-Based-Research or ABR, that allows

the artist/researcher to discover as they create. A/R/tography evolves into a partnership

between the artist, the research and a subject. It begins as a process and uses art making as the

actual research methodology. Of the main types of arts-based-research it allows the artist to

create visually what they feel and have learned about their subject and let it take form as the art

is in process. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo video the subject was terrorism. It is subject

driven to an extent. Yet, it is open to the creativity and life-learned experiences of the

artists/students. It does intend to help education but education is not the main priority. By

studying the machinima on the art about Charlie Hebdo incident much can be gleaned.

Overviews of the varying artists’ works can be studied then the researcher can gather narrative

and objective data to analyze, and form questions for later use. The artist is able to grow in their

art, the researcher has multi-layers of research, and the teacher can use the work as a spring-

board for further explorations (Wyatt, 2014).

biological Artist

Virtual / Visual art

Avatar

Virtual & biological cultures

The best definition of an avatar for the 21st century I found is from PCmag.com

A graphic identity that users select to represent themselves in a chat, instant messaging (IM)

or multiplayer gaming session. The avatar is generally a caricature, rather than a realistic

photo,and can be anything from a simple cartoon to a bizarre fantasy figure. However, images of

real objects are also used. The term is a Sanskrit word that means the incarnation of a god on

earth, and this usage of the term came from the gaming and 3D chat worlds,. It had its

beginnings as the incarnation of a Hindu deity.

Below are more examples of how A/R/tography and the use of avatars and machinima can be used.

3. http://www.slartist.com/the-bear-hunt-doc-b-hunts-the-big-c-bear-alp-99_9a90b0439.html The

Bear Hunt - A public service video example of how virtual world visual arts can have an impact in

the biological world.

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJmiFVGtWqo Presentation at a virtual world conference

with my professor last October.

A trilogy of short visual only videos using A/R/tography as a methodology to show what I was learning

about myself, research, and how I learned during a semester a year ago.

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWZXXxmiQDM Avatar Photo-voice trilogy 1 of 3

6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKjlbV_EorM Avatar Photo-voice trilogy 2 of 3

7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUjYM83AK8 Avatar Photo-voice trilogy 3 of 3.

I learn by observing, by creating, through experiences, and through research. The visual culture we live

in is the way I begin. The avatar is the beginning of exploration of visual cultures within virtual worlds.

Through the faces and eyes of the avatar we are transformed and view the global world through a much

broader field of vision.

Sweeny, R. (2010). Inter/Actions/Inter/Sections: Art education in a digital visual culture. National Art

Education Association, Reston, Va.

Wyatt, G. (2014). Arts-Based-Research Review.