Sunday, November 2, 2008
an update on visiting artists at SAIC
Well, here are a few thoughts on some of the visiting artists I've seen while I've been in Chicago. The first major artist who came through was Martha Rosler. She teaches at Rutgers now. A large number of her photo-montages are up at the Art Institute so it was great to see her work up close and then listen to her lecture. She's an unusual artist in many respects, including the fact that she writes extensively and a lot of her work is assigned in my classes. You don't see that many artists who make seminal art who are also important writers on the arts.
Her work is in the art history books and usually it's the Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems or her photo-montages of images of the Vietnam war paired with images from glossy fashion magazines ("Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful"). She has also done a bunch of great video work. I didn't get to meet her, but she was the mentor at Rutgers for Clifford Owens, the visiting artist who is teaching the Photography Seminar, so we've talked quite a lot about her work and her writing.
Here are some of Rosler's works:
Omer Fast was in the Whitney Biennial with video work and he visited SAIC as well. Another artist I didn't actually meet, but I did met three SAIC students who worked on his newest video installation ("Looking Pretty for God (After GW)"). He also did an artist's talk. Not a great talk, but really amazing work. You cannot appreciate the work in a static environment but really need to see it as a video to understand the intelligence and amazing craft of the work. Here's a link to part of the video from the Whitney: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=omer%20fast&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLF&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv#q=omer%20fast&emb=0
The installation is much better. The entire video is about 40 minutes long and it is shown on 2 screns, with the front showing actors portraying a story that looks seamless. You walk behind the panels and you see the speakers in a traditional interview pose, talking, but you can tell from the visual how heavily edited the story is. In this video, the protagonist (an American soldier) describes shooting an Iraqi civilian and a completely different story of a very bad date he went on while stationed in Germany. Fast edits the two stories together so that they appear seamless from the front. He creates fiction from the "facts" of the video in pretty amazing ways.
As good as this video is, I prefer a piece he showed which was made right after he got his MFA. He was watching CNN all the time and edited the clips (almost never more than a single second in length) into a new narrative that he wrote. It is an amazing piece of editing and of writing. I wish I could find the text of it. Here's a short excerpt of that video: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=omer%20fast&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLF&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv#q=omer%20fast%20cnn&emb=0
There is a constant stream of visiting artists and I can't summarize all of them here, but it is one of the cool things about this place.
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