Week 3: 041908

For outside work (homework for this week), I asked everyone to consider how they could record their experience walking through the Lab 2 building (we met briefly in the building to look around). Rubbings, writing, photographs, moving, feeling.

To begin class, we'll discuss the books that you made, working off of this prompt:

please design a book (the size, materials, and content) that records your experiences in the building (and you may certainly return to the building frequently, the book does not have to record just the time we spent in class). The materials you choose and the scale of the book would ideally reflect the experience. Are there multiple types of books in the book? Are some pages folded (like a map perhaps) while others are bound to show the development of a narrative? What is the story (if any) being told? Are they collected in some type of structure?

The book you make is to be in an edition of 2 (design two works that are nearly identical). One of the books will be traded to another person in class following (or as part of) our discussion.

then

Break, with coffee

Then we'll continue exploring art made with everyday materials, and created through everyday acts. We'll discuss cutting as a procedure and make numerous works that use cutting as their primary operation. Please bring the following to class with you:
scissors (for cutting)
paper and fabric (to be cut)
tape and pins and thread (to put the cut pieces back together)
an article of clothing that you don't mind getting cut. Ideally this would be a garment that you've worn and may already (for you) have some sort of history attached to it. We'll be using these articles of clothing as sculptural objects; taking them apart, performing with them, discussing their history, and documenting their changes.

As frame for this discussion on cutting, I'll be exhibiting some of Lygia Clark's Propositions (specifically focusing on her Caminhando), as well as works by Yoko Ono, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana (his Concetto Spaziale seem especially relevant as early examples), and maybe some other people who cut things apart (Barry Le Va, Robert Morris, Valie Export), depending on how far we get.

The last half of the class will be spent in small groups with each group designing a collaborative sculpture or event integrating the articles of clothing, themselves, and a physical record of the object/experience (through writing or drawing, most likely, although I'm open to other suggestions).

For Week 4, or, work done outside of class:

Return to the set of instructions you made for Week 2 and expand them in some way. Consider the instructions as a visual document of an experience. How do the works you made (text-based, in many cases) function as compositions? How do they look and how does that look effect how they act?

WEEK 4 WE WILL MEET IN SEM II E2124

Image credits:

Gordon Matta Clark
Splitting (still), 1974
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA
© 2007 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York


Gordon Matta-Clark (American, 1943–1978)
Splitting, 1974
Chromogenic prints mounted on board; 40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2 cm)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1992 (1992.5067)
Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art

from their website:

In the decade between receiving his B.A. in architecture from Cornell University and his death in 1978, Matta-Clark was a key member of the New York avant-garde. His work, like that of Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson, was formed outside the parameters of gallery presentation, and as with many artists who matured in the 1960s, his subversive activities were rooted in a critique of bourgeois American culture.

Compelled to focus attention on the dehumanization of the modern world, Matta-Clark developed a personal idiom that combined Minimalism and Surrealism with urban architecture. Using abandoned buildings for his medium and wielding a chainsaw as his instrument, he cut into the structures, creating unexpected apertures and incisions.

In 1974, Matta-Clark operated on a two-story home in New Jersey slated for demolition, effectively splitting it down the middle. The light from the incision invaded the interior and united the rooms with a swath of brilliance. The artist photographed his work and created a collage of prints, the unconventional disposition of which re-creates the disorienting experience of the unprecedented destruction.