Destruction

This project is very literally the destruction of a moving image. Essentially, I've taken two videos playing repeatedly, and crossfaded one into the other over the period of half an hour. So at its most basic level, the project can be said to merely be the slow destruction of a video. This, of course, is not all there is to it, but I am loathe to say much more than that for fear of contaminating your interpretation of the project. However, I understand that I must divulge my thought process, and so I give fair warning that if you would rather let the project affect you without outside influence, don't read further. 

This project is as much a juxtaposition project as it is a destruction project. I couldn't get my head around the fact that our generation is so used to random juxtaposition, that we are hardly affected by it anymore. So this is as much as anything else an attempt to truly shock and offend people by juxtaposing two videos that I myself find shocking and offensive. To me, this project symbolizes the destruction of innocence, the pure, unadulterated joy of this child slowly fading into the most horrific form of self-mutilation imaginable. And the kicker is that the man in the second video was once that child, as we all were at one point in our lives. He isn't some anomaly. And while our forms of self-mutilation are hopefully much less extreme and physically manifested, we still find ourselves later in life committing acts against ourselves that one could never imagine the innocence of that child allowing itself to commit. I want to be clear that I don't mean any of this as a moral or subjective argument for a return to innocence later in life. Only just as an acknowledgement of where we are in relation to where we were, and all the things that must have been  destroyed along the way. 

SI

Gus Halper

Debord’s theory that art is in constant danger of being “co-opted” is unfortunately very easily supportable. Forget for a minute about the assimilation of last year’s “avant-garde” art movement into this year’s popular culture. Forget for a minute that heavy, filthy dubstep has somehow snuck itself onto Applebees’ daily play list, and that “random humor” is now being choked to death by corporations like Geico who use it unashamedly to promote their products. While annoying, these things hardly seem dangerous or life changing. However, when it comes to confirmed suspicions that the CIA helped fund America’s Modern Art movement in the 1950’s, things get a little more confusing and the

“danger” of cooption becomes increasingly more clear. The CIA supported Abstract Expressionism through the works of Pollock, Kooning, Rothko, and Motherwell, in order to foster feelings of freedom and artistic liberation amongst Americans during the Cold War in the face of our communist enemies.

            While in this particular case the result of such art in people’s lives seems generally beneficial, it cannot help but speak volumes about the power of art in our society and the risk we take of being manipulated by it. Art has the enormous potential to change the way we think and function the way that Modern Art so clearly did. One of Debord’s main concerns was the ease with which art can be turned into propaganda, even for the most trivial causes (such as Geico commercials). And while the commercial aspects of co-option are less a worry of mine than the more harrowing political aspects of co-option, they both pose the same concern. Art is very powerful because it affects people very strongly, and as long as one puts it out into the world, people will always want to take advantage of that fact.

Having said all of that, I must now admit that I completely disagree with Debord’s theories on art. I understand on an intellectual level the argument he is trying to make, however, I think that his ideas about what art is capable of are narrow at best. He is idealizing art as something stagnant, something which serves the same purpose at the end of its life as it did at the beginning. This is a wild misconception. In my opinion, art and life are very much and should remain one intertwined, interfused mass, inseparable from one another, and both subject to the inevitable changes that time brings.

On top of my somewhat over blown philosophical argument, I think that even if art is co-opted and its original essence is lost, the simple creation of it is worth all the effort. The argument is made all too often, just because something bad will inevitably happen doesn’t mean we shouldn’t venture out and try things. If it did, what would be the point of living? We will all die in the end. What would be the point of getting a dog? It’s just going to leave you grieving in ten years. What would be the point of starting any sort of romantic relationship? Chances are it won’t work out and you’ll wind up depressed, or best case scenario you meet the love of your life, and then eventually they die and leave you alone on this earth for the remainder of your short miserable life before you too croak. I think the point that I am too brashly trying to make is just because art may spend the majority of its life in the grips of cooption doesn’t mean that the first few moments of its innovation can’t change the world completely.

Sound Machine

The idea for my sound machine came out of necessity rather than artistry. I live a somewhat minimalistic lifestyle, and so have very few "things" lying around my room. Because of this, I was limited in the complexity of the machine that I could really build. So I started to think about something else that once I started I couldn't control. Immediately the fluxus projects came to mind, and so I decided to do a little addendum to my last project. Like I said in class, the result was significantly different from what I thought it would be, possibly because I overestimated the class's level of enthusiasm. I had given some people instructions to make harmonies and some people instructions to make dissonance, so what I had envisioned happening was for those two groups to sort of chase each other around for the full minute. Instead, everybody seemed quite fed up with the whole thing after about thirty seconds or so, and ready to stop singing/speaking/drumming, and so when miles finally shouted "HEY" after what seemed like forever, there was a truly beautiful and much welcomed silence that was far more pleasing and interesting than any other sound I could have imagined making.

Flux

Over the break, I went to see a fluxus art exhibit at the MoMA, where one artist asked others to send him instructions which he would then execute uniquely. Some of them got really weird. Some of them were incredible indicators of human behavior. For example, in one video that played on repeat, the audience was lined up on all four walls of a room, and the artist, without speaking would slowly choose a member of the audience, wait a long while, and then kiss them. The ways in which people would react when they were chosen were so illuminating, especially for an actor. The instruction on the side of the video was "Kiss someone. Back away. Repeat."

For my project, I wanted to play with the idea of "audience" and "artist". I tried, instead of making the cards for the audience to experience, to make them so that the artist him/herself would see the class or objects around the room as the exhibition. I'm not really sure how successful I was in doing that, but it was a really interesting mind game, and gave me a great outlet to philosophize a little bit about the structure of art. Like Dean always says about the structure of the classroom, the teacher stands here and the students sit there, and that sets up this almost formulaic stagnancy between the two parties.

Surrealist Object

My piece is below. The process that lead me to this piece was similar to the first one. I was wrestling with the absurdity of trying to truly shock people by putting two things together that clearly didn't belong. But I came to the conclusion that in the modern world, the generation that has been living with "lobster-telephones" for years is no longer shocked by the bizarre juxtaposition of two things under the category of "art". Therefore the only true way to shock someone is simply not to tell them that it is "art". The splicing of Dr. Suess with Nietzche, while fun, was a satire of the oblivious pretension of those who comment on the pretension of other thinkers.

Gus Halper

For this surrealist piece I interfused a paragraph from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good And Evil” with a tongue twister by Dr. Suess. I had the idea before I knew what I wanted the outcome to be, and I felt it ended up being rather comical, highlighting the absurdity and pretension that comes hand in hand with philosophical thought. But I guess that’s for you to decide? Anyway, since I’m usually very organized with my art, I wanted to take this opportunity to do something messy, something that I don’t even fully understand. So that’s what I tried to do.  After all, what’s the point of making art that has the potential to be fully realized? (And my apologies about the backside of the piece. I accidentally stapled it to my homework for my acting class and didn't want to tear the sheets apart in case it would rip them both.)

LIGHT ME ON FIRE

After examining philosophers between the lines with a sharp eye for a sufficient length of time, I tell myself the following: if your daddy’s name is Jim
and if Jim swims and if Jim’s slim,
the perfect Christmas gift for him
is a set of slim Jim swim fins. Even in the case of philosophical thinking we must re-learn here, in the same way we re-learned about heredity and what is “innate.” Just as if your daddy’s name is Dwight
and he likes to look at birds at night,
the gift for Dwight that might be right
is a bright Dwight bird-flight
night-sight light, so there’s little point in setting up “consciousness” in any significant sense as something opposite to what is instinctual—the most conscious thinking of a philosopher is led on secretly and forced into particular paths by his instincts. Even behind all logic and its apparent dynamic authority stand evaluations of worth or, putting the matter more clearly, a walrus with whiskers
is not a good pet. And a walrus which whispers
is worse even yet—for example, that what is certain is more valuable than what is uncertain, that appearance is of less value than the “truth.” Evaluations like these could, for all their regulatory importance for us, still be only foreground evaluations, a particular kind of niaiserie necessary for the preservation of beings precisely like us. That’s assuming, of course, that when a walrus lisps whispers
through tough rough wet whiskers,
your poor daddy’s ear
will get blispers and bliskers.

Time

60 seconds. That’s not a lot. 48 hours. That’s even less. 19½ years. Nothing; might as well have never been born. But 3. 3 is infinitely more than I have any idea what the fuck to do with. So I fill it with nothing. I fill it with meaningless, random bullshit, and I try to convince myself and those around me that it has some intrinsic significance. One moves quickly, one moves slowly, one stands still. Time. (Thanks guys. You can sit down now.) So the last 19½ years has lead up to the last 48 hours, has lead up to this 60 seconds that I’m almost through sharing with you now. And what have we come up with? 3 empty spaces. Kind of disappointing. Like waiting for a song to drop and then remembering you’re listening to fucking Chopin.