TROUBADOURS OF ART
by WENDY JANE BANTAM
When I first saw Pixar Animation’s Luxo Jr. I was sixteen. It was 1986. At the time, my biggest dream was to be a painter, but when I saw the five minute movie Pixar had entered in the Festival of Animation I began to think of paint and storytelling differently. Until then I had thought of my work as a one frame image. Much in the way a political cartoonist might draw a single frame for the editorial column of the newspaper. However, from this point on I began thinking in multiple frames. I started looking at artists who were working in different medium, and telling narrative stories. I studied ceramics, photography, and fiction writing throughout high school and my first years of college. At this time, creative departments were segregated from each other. Administrative departments were reluctant to meld disciplines. Fine art was not design and design was not fine art. Screenwriting was in the English department and video and performance art were considered fringe courses in the school of art.
Computer technology was completely void in the Art Department. "Relevant," an administrator said, "for architects and computer science majors only."I was told to pick one discipline and stick to it, or I would never master anything. And so I picked painting. Through this discipline I would at least be able to learn the manipulation of color and movement through brushwork, texture, and create the illusion of light.
3.
In the meantime I watched with my face pressed against the glass as artists outside of the university moved into multi media. Sculptors moved into performance and video, musicians moved into film, and painters went towards animation and installation art. Artists like Bill Viola and Laurie Anderson were breaking barriers as they taught themselves the technology they needed to express the narratives they used.
Multi media allowed for freedoms previously limited to artists for lack of equipment. Foundries, kilns, printmaking presses and work space often limited to artists, made construction and transport cumbersome. Multi media began to allow for more diversity, accessible equipment, and a wider audience.In 1991, I crashed a party my performance art professor, Roger Shimomura, was throwing for Laurie Anderson. Laurie Anderson was visiting the University of Kansas to present her video work. As an important side note, she was also visiting Lawrence to meet with her biggest influence, William Burroughs.
William Burroughs had settled in Lawrence, Kansas long before and had been given reverence for his fragmentary narrative. In 1959 he was considered a pioneer. The book by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality states that for Burroughs,
4.
"…narrative operated as a vast, multi-threaded network that reflected the associative tendencies of the mind, collapsing the boundaries of time and space, drawing attention to previously undetected connections, drawing attention to the links between disparate ideas and elements."Burroughs stated himself,"Certainly if writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for sometime past in painting, music and film."
In his last years, William Burroughs was stretching the boundaries further in his collaborations with students at the University of Kansas, and his work with musicians and performance artists like Laurie Anderson. None of the students were meant to be at the party that evening, and my interaction with Laurie Anderson was awkward at best. In Roger’s crowded home, she stepped on my foot. At this juncture I was able to tell her how much her work affected and influenced my own vision of how stories could be told.
A handful of us had been studying performance art with Roger Shimomura and Tony Allard. We were doing live performances in bars and alleyways around town and we weren’t really sure why. We were experimenting awkwardly with the equipment available to us and finding our voice through narrative. We couldn’t wait to see her live performance at the K. U. Theatre. At this time, she was performing with so much technical equipment we could barely see her on the stage.
5.
In 1979, the National Endowment of Arts awarded Laurie Anderson a grant with which she wrote and recorded "O Superman". The lyrics were ominous and suggested a foreboding of war. Warner Bros. Records released the song in England where it shot to No. 2 on the charts. They then released the song on an album of songs called "Big Science". At the time, it was an exciting statement of American culture. The big record label and the reclusive culture of the high art world embraced to propel the pioneering efforts of a performance artist.
In 2002, eleven years after the performances she gave at the University of Kansas, I saw her perform at the Scottsdale Center for Contemporary Art in Arizona. One year after the World Trade Center tragedy she called her performance, "Happiness". Composed using a flexible headband microphone, she used her head as a percussive instrument and had only an I-Pod on the stage with her. Compared to the earlier performances it was exciting to hear the same powerful sounds and images come from such a minimal arrangement. Her interest in technology had freed her form the cumbersome piles of sound and light equipment. Last year she was named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Artist in Residence. Through NASA, she will be developing an installation on the cosmos, mapping out the moon and stars.
6.
In her most recent work, "The End of The Moon", she explores the themes of consumerism, spirituality and war. Themes which have been threaded throughout her work since she was doing performance art on street corners. In an interview which appears on her website she states,"The End of the Moon I guess is a phrase that has some of the melancholy I feel at the moment. Not just melancholy really. More like loss. Like I lost something and I can’t put my finger on what it is. Actually I think what I lost was a country. The last three years have been pretty tough. Pretty alienating for a lot of people."
She exhibits this alienation through her work using binaural sounds, creating the sensation you are on a journey somewhere, but without a destination. Even more she creates the sensation we are floating on our journey, lost. Presently she is working with Japanese designers on an infrared system which allows her to access sounds using small wireless cards. She is now able to travel to performances with two small briefcases.
Bill Viola, an artist renowned for his projections of light and sound was once a musician and an audio/video engineer. Ever since the first portable video camera was available, he has been using video to film ordinary images to explore states of consciousness.
7.
He avoids special effects and graphics and builds video installations in museums and galleries, transforming the environment from rooms of complete darkness to a space in which the audience is completely immersed by projections and sounds.
His projection installation work can perfectly be described by an entry he wrote in his diary in 1976 by the Sufi poet, Jallaludin Rumi, who lived in the 12th Century."With every moment a world is born and dies, and know that for you, with every moment come death and renewal."Viola studied Buddhism extensively and this has greatly affected his work. In Buddhism there are three universal truths; nothing is lost in the universe, everything changes, and the law of cause and effect.In the Buddha’s teachings there are also four noble truths. In the search to find the end of suffering he saw that life was suffering. This is the first of the noble truths. Then there is the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to the end of suffering.In the book, "Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality" Bill Viola’s distinction in bringing these teachings forth is described in his concept of Dataspace, a piece he composed in 1983.
8.
"Viola arrives at the notion of dataspace by considering the spaces that have been constructed over the ages to record cultural history in architectural form…from Greek temples to Gothic cathedrals. He compares "memory places" to the personal computer, with its capacity for storage, instant access and information retrieval. The computer has introduced the "next evolutionary step" in which ancient models of memory and artistic expressions are reborn through the fluid processes of information technologies."
The same themes are visible in some of his most recent work. He has said," If I hadn’t been studying texts and poems of the mystics and the spiritual masters at the time I started with video, I don’t think I could have made as much progress. These individuals gave me the language to understand what I was really seeing. One of the common threads in all these traditions… is the idea everything in front of us right now is merely a world of appearances…the task is to understand and master sensory experience because you need the language of the senses to help decipher this surface and penetrate to the deeper connections underneath."
In his 2001 piece, "Five Angels for the Millennium", Viola penetrates the deeper connections just below the surface especially well. By using five channels of video projection and five channels of stereo sound in the velvet darkness of an empty room, the sound is crisp and clear and reveals the projection of a body falling into water.
9.
Each air bubble exploding underwater is heard, and likewise, each air bubble seen in the eerie blue light surrounding the body.In a room where the projection is 7 foot by 10 ½ inches high and 10 foot by 6 inches wide, the audience is "with" the body in the water and the sensation is at once both of helplessness and peacefulness and the audience is blanketed in a transcended empathy. It seems as the body is first plunged down into the water surrounded by a mass of bubbles, and then rises slowly, surrounded by the clearing water, the audience is viewing a simple metaphor of both the divine and the mundane.
By showing the human condition in a transcended light, Bill Viola has instilled in his work the belief there is a transformative power in art, a path from suffering.Surely the animation of Pixar Studios in the early 80’s may seem a far stretch from the works of Laurie Anderson and Bill Viola. However, the leaps artists made with the use of technology and multi media during this time were spectacular. They showed multi media is interdisciplinary. Surely the observations made at this time show an interconnectedness with science, technology, spirituality and art. We have also learned narrative communication means more than words and pictures. It has become a sensory experience. This is what multi media artists are striving for. Painters became musicians and filmmakers. Audio technicians became installation artists and new frontiers were set in using the computer for animation. Strong forces created and discovered then, seem to be coming to a place of perfection and continued growth.
10.
Artists like Laurie Anderson continue to ride the wave of what is cutting edge. And, while Bill Viola remains one of the leading visual and sound narrators of the transcended experience, they both continue to open doors with their pioneering efforts for those of us who are finding our own voice with the mediums available to us.
When I first saw Pixar Animation’s Luxo Jr. I was sixteen. It was 1986. At the time, my biggest dream was to be a painter, but when I saw the five minute movie Pixar had entered in the Festival of Animation I began to think of paint and storytelling differently. Until then I had thought of my work as a one frame image. Much in the way a political cartoonist might draw a single frame for the editorial column of the newspaper. However, from this point on I began thinking in multiple frames. I started looking at artists who were working in different medium, and telling narrative stories. I studied ceramics, photography, and fiction writing throughout high school and my first years of college. At this time, creative departments were segregated from each other. Administrative departments were reluctant to meld disciplines. Fine art was not design and design was not fine art. Screenwriting was in the English department and video and performance art were considered fringe courses in the school of art.
Computer technology was completely void in the Art Department. "Relevant," an administrator said, "for architects and computer science majors only."I was told to pick one discipline and stick to it, or I would never master anything. And so I picked painting. Through this discipline I would at least be able to learn the manipulation of color and movement through brushwork, texture, and create the illusion of light.
3.
In the meantime I watched with my face pressed against the glass as artists outside of the university moved into multi media. Sculptors moved into performance and video, musicians moved into film, and painters went towards animation and installation art. Artists like Bill Viola and Laurie Anderson were breaking barriers as they taught themselves the technology they needed to express the narratives they used.
Multi media allowed for freedoms previously limited to artists for lack of equipment. Foundries, kilns, printmaking presses and work space often limited to artists, made construction and transport cumbersome. Multi media began to allow for more diversity, accessible equipment, and a wider audience.In 1991, I crashed a party my performance art professor, Roger Shimomura, was throwing for Laurie Anderson. Laurie Anderson was visiting the University of Kansas to present her video work. As an important side note, she was also visiting Lawrence to meet with her biggest influence, William Burroughs.
William Burroughs had settled in Lawrence, Kansas long before and had been given reverence for his fragmentary narrative. In 1959 he was considered a pioneer. The book by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality states that for Burroughs,
4.
"…narrative operated as a vast, multi-threaded network that reflected the associative tendencies of the mind, collapsing the boundaries of time and space, drawing attention to previously undetected connections, drawing attention to the links between disparate ideas and elements."Burroughs stated himself,"Certainly if writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for sometime past in painting, music and film."
In his last years, William Burroughs was stretching the boundaries further in his collaborations with students at the University of Kansas, and his work with musicians and performance artists like Laurie Anderson. None of the students were meant to be at the party that evening, and my interaction with Laurie Anderson was awkward at best. In Roger’s crowded home, she stepped on my foot. At this juncture I was able to tell her how much her work affected and influenced my own vision of how stories could be told.
A handful of us had been studying performance art with Roger Shimomura and Tony Allard. We were doing live performances in bars and alleyways around town and we weren’t really sure why. We were experimenting awkwardly with the equipment available to us and finding our voice through narrative. We couldn’t wait to see her live performance at the K. U. Theatre. At this time, she was performing with so much technical equipment we could barely see her on the stage.
5.
In 1979, the National Endowment of Arts awarded Laurie Anderson a grant with which she wrote and recorded "O Superman". The lyrics were ominous and suggested a foreboding of war. Warner Bros. Records released the song in England where it shot to No. 2 on the charts. They then released the song on an album of songs called "Big Science". At the time, it was an exciting statement of American culture. The big record label and the reclusive culture of the high art world embraced to propel the pioneering efforts of a performance artist.
In 2002, eleven years after the performances she gave at the University of Kansas, I saw her perform at the Scottsdale Center for Contemporary Art in Arizona. One year after the World Trade Center tragedy she called her performance, "Happiness". Composed using a flexible headband microphone, she used her head as a percussive instrument and had only an I-Pod on the stage with her. Compared to the earlier performances it was exciting to hear the same powerful sounds and images come from such a minimal arrangement. Her interest in technology had freed her form the cumbersome piles of sound and light equipment. Last year she was named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Artist in Residence. Through NASA, she will be developing an installation on the cosmos, mapping out the moon and stars.
6.
In her most recent work, "The End of The Moon", she explores the themes of consumerism, spirituality and war. Themes which have been threaded throughout her work since she was doing performance art on street corners. In an interview which appears on her website she states,"The End of the Moon I guess is a phrase that has some of the melancholy I feel at the moment. Not just melancholy really. More like loss. Like I lost something and I can’t put my finger on what it is. Actually I think what I lost was a country. The last three years have been pretty tough. Pretty alienating for a lot of people."
She exhibits this alienation through her work using binaural sounds, creating the sensation you are on a journey somewhere, but without a destination. Even more she creates the sensation we are floating on our journey, lost. Presently she is working with Japanese designers on an infrared system which allows her to access sounds using small wireless cards. She is now able to travel to performances with two small briefcases.
Bill Viola, an artist renowned for his projections of light and sound was once a musician and an audio/video engineer. Ever since the first portable video camera was available, he has been using video to film ordinary images to explore states of consciousness.
7.
He avoids special effects and graphics and builds video installations in museums and galleries, transforming the environment from rooms of complete darkness to a space in which the audience is completely immersed by projections and sounds.
His projection installation work can perfectly be described by an entry he wrote in his diary in 1976 by the Sufi poet, Jallaludin Rumi, who lived in the 12th Century."With every moment a world is born and dies, and know that for you, with every moment come death and renewal."Viola studied Buddhism extensively and this has greatly affected his work. In Buddhism there are three universal truths; nothing is lost in the universe, everything changes, and the law of cause and effect.In the Buddha’s teachings there are also four noble truths. In the search to find the end of suffering he saw that life was suffering. This is the first of the noble truths. Then there is the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to the end of suffering.In the book, "Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality" Bill Viola’s distinction in bringing these teachings forth is described in his concept of Dataspace, a piece he composed in 1983.
8.
"Viola arrives at the notion of dataspace by considering the spaces that have been constructed over the ages to record cultural history in architectural form…from Greek temples to Gothic cathedrals. He compares "memory places" to the personal computer, with its capacity for storage, instant access and information retrieval. The computer has introduced the "next evolutionary step" in which ancient models of memory and artistic expressions are reborn through the fluid processes of information technologies."
The same themes are visible in some of his most recent work. He has said," If I hadn’t been studying texts and poems of the mystics and the spiritual masters at the time I started with video, I don’t think I could have made as much progress. These individuals gave me the language to understand what I was really seeing. One of the common threads in all these traditions… is the idea everything in front of us right now is merely a world of appearances…the task is to understand and master sensory experience because you need the language of the senses to help decipher this surface and penetrate to the deeper connections underneath."
In his 2001 piece, "Five Angels for the Millennium", Viola penetrates the deeper connections just below the surface especially well. By using five channels of video projection and five channels of stereo sound in the velvet darkness of an empty room, the sound is crisp and clear and reveals the projection of a body falling into water.
9.
Each air bubble exploding underwater is heard, and likewise, each air bubble seen in the eerie blue light surrounding the body.In a room where the projection is 7 foot by 10 ½ inches high and 10 foot by 6 inches wide, the audience is "with" the body in the water and the sensation is at once both of helplessness and peacefulness and the audience is blanketed in a transcended empathy. It seems as the body is first plunged down into the water surrounded by a mass of bubbles, and then rises slowly, surrounded by the clearing water, the audience is viewing a simple metaphor of both the divine and the mundane.
By showing the human condition in a transcended light, Bill Viola has instilled in his work the belief there is a transformative power in art, a path from suffering.Surely the animation of Pixar Studios in the early 80’s may seem a far stretch from the works of Laurie Anderson and Bill Viola. However, the leaps artists made with the use of technology and multi media during this time were spectacular. They showed multi media is interdisciplinary. Surely the observations made at this time show an interconnectedness with science, technology, spirituality and art. We have also learned narrative communication means more than words and pictures. It has become a sensory experience. This is what multi media artists are striving for. Painters became musicians and filmmakers. Audio technicians became installation artists and new frontiers were set in using the computer for animation. Strong forces created and discovered then, seem to be coming to a place of perfection and continued growth.
10.
Artists like Laurie Anderson continue to ride the wave of what is cutting edge. And, while Bill Viola remains one of the leading visual and sound narrators of the transcended experience, they both continue to open doors with their pioneering efforts for those of us who are finding our own voice with the mediums available to us.
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