Dick Higgins - Audio Files

	Dick Higgins - DANGER MUSIC #2 (1961) .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

	Dick Higgins - Storm Riders .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Fluxus Artistic Philosophy

The Fluxus artistic philosophy can be expressed as a synthesis of four key factors that define the majority of Fluxus work:

1. Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
3. Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
4. Fluxus is fun. Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.

Source: Wikipedia

Laura Cottingham

(American, 1959-) is a critic, curator and visual artist. She lives in the Est Vllage. Her most recent book is "Fear Eats the Soul" (London: British Film Institute, 2005). her best known videos are "Not For Sale", 1998 and "The Anita Pallenberg Story," 2000. Her work has been exhibited i gallerie and museums throughout Europe and in New York City. In 2006 sh co-curated Sweden's annual national exhibition for the Lilevalchs Konsthalle, Stockholm. She served as a guest curator at the Louisiana Museum, Denmark and for Le Magasin, Grenoble, France. She has taught at the graduate visual arts programs at Rutgers University, The School of Visual Arts, THe Pratt Institute and Columbia University, New York.

"From Fish to Infinity" - the power of abstraction

"From Fish to Infinity"

In this debut New York Times column, mathematician Steven Strogatz

hopes to demystify math... and explain the beauty and power of numbers. He asks questions like, "Where exactly do numbers come from? Did humanity invent them? Or discover them?"

I thought the article might be of interest in light of our discussions about language and art.

Naum June (Pike) Paike

"Paik Nam-june (July 20, 1932 - January 29, 2006) was a South Korean-born American artist, particularly noted for his video art.
Paik studied music history, art history, and philosophy at the University of Tokyo, where he graduated with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg. He went to Germany in 1956 to continue the study of music history at the University of Munich. In Germany he met composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, who inspired Paik to go into electronic art. Paik worked with Stockhausen in a studio for Electronic Music. He also became involved with the post neo-Dada art movement Fluxus, founded by George Maciunas. He was a frequent collaborator with cellist Charlotte Moorman.
He began working with modified television sets in 1963 and bought his first video camera in 1965, returning to Japan to conduct experiments with electromagnets and color television alongside electronic engineer Shuya Abe. With Abe he constructed his first video synthesizer while artist-in-residence at WGBH, the Boston public broadcaster. He was known for using rapid cuts and fast motion in his videos. He also claimed to have coined the term "information superhighway" in a paper written in 1974.
He will be remembered as a founding father of video art and will continue to influence the younger generation of artists. A space rock unit known as Paik is named in his honour.
"Art is just fraud. You just have to do something nobody else has done before", he famously declared during an interview with a Korean newspaper, and this has now become a popular quote.
He was left partially paralyzed after a stroke in 1996. He died on January 29, 2006, at his apartment in Miami, Florida, of natural causes. Paik is survived by his wife, video artist Shigeko Kubota."

-MetroArtWork

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Project 2: Hybrids: Appropriation & Recontextualization (Readymades...)

In all of your projects, it is valuable to try to “identify your model.” What are those ideas and aspects that you always seem to return to—what informs and guides your thinking—what is important for you to say. Why are you making this art?

“Readymade” is the term that Marcel Duchamp coined to describe a series of art pieces that he made out of manufactured objects. Sometimes Duchamp altered these objects (the “assisted readymades”) and sometimes Duchamp presented them completely unchanged. His assertion was that the art value of an object does not reside in its aesthetic value. He claimed that the objects he chose for his readymades were chosen precisely because they were aesthetically neutral, for their “visual indifference” in his own words. (It is always important, however, to question Duchamp’s claims—he was fond of verbal jests that typically take on multiple levels of meaning. For example, is it possible for anything to be aesthetically neutral? Through culture, and by simply paying attention to something, does the neutrality fade?) If you take away the aesthetic consideration of an object, the basis of most art up until this period in history, what makes it an object of art? With his readymades, Duchamp asserted:

§ The artist defines an object by choosing it; the choice of the object is itself the creative act.

§ The crux of an artwork’s meaning does not reside in its formal qualities (retinal art), but in its idea (conceptual art).

§ This idea, or meaning, is not an immutable property of the artwork which is somehow imbued intot he object by the artist, but rather, in equal measure, the viewer’s interpretation creates the meaning.

§ Re-contextualizing an object (such as, putting a urinal in an art museum), re-titling it (calling it “Fountain”), re-presenting it (turning the urinal on its side and having Alfred Steiglitz photograph it) are all techniques that can create new thoughts, dialogues, and discourse about an object in the mind of the viewer, hence creating new meaning.

Whether you agree or disagree with his assertions, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and the ideas and questions they raise about the nature of art, have hugely influenced most of the artwork produced since then. Duchamp’s readymades precipitated radical changes in how we now view art.

For this project, you should create an artwork from a readymade object (or image). It can be an assisted readymade or an unassisted readymade, but in each case, your project should gain its meaning by fundamentally changing how we view the object (create a new line of thinking, a new discourse). Use the strategies of re-contextualization, re-titling, and re-presentation to achieve this.

Post at least two images of your Readymade/Hybrid to the Intermedia Class Blog... and bring your object (if you can) to class on presentation day (be sure to email me your short artist statement too... approximately 200-250 words).



Text credit: Mark Neucollins