Research Task

Research task: ‘Slow TV’

Search for and document some examples of Slow TV and record your thoughts on the genre in your log, what are some of the arguments for and against this kind of real-time viewing?

Slow TV is an unusual form of entertainment which seeks not to inform, convey a particular message, or advertise but rather take the viewer along for a ride. Engagement with slow TV is fundamentally different in the way it engages the viewer because it is essentially passive. Slow TV is a program for the background, like white noise or elevator music. The programs come in different forms: some are more hectic, depicting the passage of time on a busy street or showing a train journey form one city to another, but others are almost entirely static, like literally watching paint dry, cheddar cheese age, or a lawn grow. The most well-known program to have Slow TV is the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) (Sakte-tv), though arguably the place with most viewership is the internet. The video of a campfire above is a perfect example of popular slow television, and the tags as well as the title give us the key words we need to understand why such a strange form of entertainment would be so popular (at no less than 7.4M views as of my writing this). The key words are #Relaxation and #Sleep. The Korean part of the title translates to “firewood burning sound, 8 hours continuous playback”. The hastags really say it all, I think.

Some might disagree. In an article by the Toronto Star, the author quotes John Eastwood on the popularity of Slow TV in Norway. He attributes the popularity of Slow TV to nationalism. He says that watching made people feel like they were participating to something greater happening in real time, especially when the videos also featured other people waving flags or wearing costumes and playing or dancing.

I think it’s simpler than that. I think watching something peaceful and mostly repetitive is relaxing. Otherwise two million people wouldn’t click on a video of a train journey to the Arctic Circle.

Research Task: ‘Fast’ and ‘Slow’ Art

Search for and record your thoughts on the production of both ‘Fast’ and ‘Slow’ artworks in your learning log. What are some of the arguments for and against this kind of real-time viewing? Research these artworks and artists for different approaches in different creative contexts: ● ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, a film directed by Godfrey Reggio (1982). ● Artists Jem Finer’s project ‘Longplayer’ (2000). ● Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptural practice. ● Marina Abramović’s performance ‘The Artist is Present’ (2010). ● Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese artist most known for his five ‘One Year Performances’ each lasting a year and completed between 1978 and 1986.

‘Koyaanisqatsi’, by Godfrey Reggio (1982)

Koyaanisqatsi is a experimental film, a visual tone poem without words. The title is a word from the Hopi language meaning “life out of balance”. The film consists of time lapses and slow motion footage of various landscapes from around the United States with the focus on industrialization and the takeover of technology, resulting in imbalance for the modern man. Much of the “storytelling” of the film is accomplished by the orchestral and choral music composed by Philip Glass.

Though not my personal cup of tea, I did find the grand poetry of the film captivating. How much of that is the film itself and how much it’s being able to look into a world twenty years and an ocean away from my own birth is debatable.

The pacing of the film would over all be considered slow, because of the absence of goal, but on a more individual level the scenes, parts, or phrases would differ. I would attribute the speed of an individual scene entirely to the pacing of the music. The speed of the images do very little to influence the mood of the film. A slow piece of music over a time-lapsed scene feels slow and a fast-paced piece of music over a slow motion scene feels fast-paced. The music trumps the images in feeling.

‘Longplayer’ by Jem Finer (2000)

‘Longplayer’ is an atonal musical composition written with the aid of computer algorithm which can continue infinitely without repetition. The piece debuted in 1999 with the goal of ending it in 2999. The time stamp can be seen on their website. It can be heard at multiple locations around the world and in a continuous audio stream, though its permanent location is at Buoy Wharf in London. Tibetan singing bowls are the instruments of choice for this monumental piece, in part because of the practicality of an instrument which can be played for long periods of time without needing tuning and in part because of their timelessness.

The experience of listening to ‘Longplayer’ can range between peaceful and sinister. I found that there is a difference between the studio recordings and the recorded public performances. The studio-recorded version available on YouTube leans a little to the sinister for me, where the live ones seem much more peaceful. I don’t think the music itself is all that different, just the context and the ambient sounds which tip the scales.

Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptural practice (born July 1956)

Andy Goldsworthy is a land artist who creates artwork by ‘sculpting’ with elements of nature itself and incorporating erosion and time into the pieces. He documents the process using photography and videos because by their very nature, many of his pieces are now lost to time. He prefers to use found materials and his own hands to sculpt, but if the installations are meant to be permanent, he will employ a team and use power tools to make sure the piece will withstand the test of time. But whether the works themselves are ephemeral or not, they still convey the feeling of changing nature and how humans can connect to it.

Marina Abramović’s performance ‘The Artist is Present’ (2010)

Marina Abramović is one of the best known performance artists of all time. Her 2010 project “The Artist is Present” was simply her sitting at a table, with an open invitation for the audience members to sit across from her in a minute of silence. She was specifically interested in the way extending the time of the performances can influence the emotions of the audience, allowing for a more profound experience. Many described the work as very moving and even transformative. Abramović herself reflected on how this demonstrated our deep need for connection as human beings. A beautiful way to explore human contact in a world that makes it more and more difficult to build new relationships or feel basic connection with one’s fellow man, unknown though he may be.

‘One Year Performances’ by Tehching Hsieh (1978 and 1986)

Tehching Hsieh is also a performance artist, and his ‘One Year Performances’ are year-long challenges to be documented and presented as art. The first year, he locked himself in a 11.5-by-9-by-8-foot wooden cage. He was not allowed to talk, read, write, or listen to radio or TV. He had a lawyer notarize and monitor the entire process, making sure Hsieh never left the cage. The second year, he punched a time clock every single hour, and then took a picture of himself. The third, he spent the entire year outside in New York City with only his backpack and sleeping bag. He was not allowed to enter any buildings or shelters at all. The only exception was a 15 hour period when he got arrested and had to spend the night at the station. The fourth year, Hsieh and Linda Montano tied themselves together with a two and a half meter long rope. They were not allowed to take it off or touch each other. This piece was also notarized. For the last year, he was not allowed to interact or discuss art at all, let alone make it.

Overall, a very interesting study of struggle and self-denial. I commend his dedication, though I do find this way of exploring ideas more than a little baffling on a personal level.

https://artincontext.org/andy-goldsworthy/

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/marina-abramovic-marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present-2010/

https://www.tehchinghsieh.net/oneyearperformance1978-1979

(38) Andy Goldsworthy – ‘We Share a Connection with Stone’ | TateShots – YouTube

Research Task: Large Scale Image-Making

Search for and record your thoughts on some of the following artists who make large-scale images in your log: ● Emma Stibbon ● Adam Dant ● John Vertue ● The Boyle Family ● Andreas Gursky Choose one artist and ask yourself the following questions about their artwork: ● How do they choose their subjects? ● How do their creative and material approaches differ? ● Why do they make their work at a large scale? ● What hurdles have they encountered or initiatives have they had to develop in order to produce their work?

Emma Stibbon

Emma Stibbon, Isfjorden, Svalbard, 2020

Emma Stibbon‘s (born 1962) work is mainly of landscapes. She travels to remote and often dangerous locations and captures the changing nature of her surroundings in photographs and in watercolors and ink. She is especially interested in erosion and the effect time and the elements have on the landscape.

Her finalized works are accomplished in the studio via printing. She uses a combination of techniques to achieve an ideal result and layers printing methods in the same work for the right depth. For example, in the work above she freehanded a positive plate, exposed it, and then used the photogravure printing technique to create the main black and white portion of the image. To add color, she carved into a wood block and used to print a bit of rose to the sky.

Emma Stibbon – Territories of Print 1994 – 2019

Exhibition at Rabley Drawing Centre, Marlborough, England, United Kingdom

Adam Dant

Adam Dant (born 1967) is a lover of satire, eighteenth century graphic style and the City of London. His artwork is very large, generally done in sepia ink and is best described and Hogarthian (a. i. the style of William Hogarth), it is detailed, architectural and expressive. Similar to Hogarth, Dant uses exaggeration and humor to comment on modern society, marrying a historical artistic style with modern ideas. He believes that there are things in the works of the masters which people have not yet explored and which a modern artist might pull from. Dant is also known for the Donald Parsnips Daily Journal pamphlet, which he printed daily for a period of five years and which cemented his practice in printing. However, his large works are mainly done by drawing, not printing. His process combines his love of history and his love of research into the past with field work and drawing from real life. The final images are conglomerations of small stories rooted in both past and present.

Detail of Dant’s work, contrast between classical style and modern subject is evident

John Vertue

John Virtue at work

Virtue (born 1947) is known for his expressive black and white mark making and his use of negative space and abstraction to depict landscapes. His work is heavily location-based whether he was living in Lancashire, Devon, Exeter, London, Italy or Norfolk. The canvas painting stem straight from his diary of images made during his walks. Early in his career, Virtue decided he would capture the very essence of the landscape around him and his response to it. This meant eliminating any sort of extraneous material, resulting in the black and white works of art he is known for. Movement is central to his body of work, and the exploration of movement starts with the quick sketches meant to capture the world around him. His walk sketches are effectively a sequential story about his journey from his home to the sea. Some show stillness and others the tumult of the sea. When in the studio, he expands on the material he captured in nature via charcoal or pencil into something much larger, using a paint made of ink and shellac and canvas. With dynamic movements, Virtue seeks to capture the motion in a still image. He considers the sea to be the ultimate embodiment of exploring the passage of time, stillness and motion. In the studio, he uses the library of images captured on his walks to inform his large canvas works depicting the place between stillness and change.

Landscape No 567 , 1998–1999

The Boyle Family

The Boyle Family are a family of artists who explore the world and record their findings and their process through art. Whether they display found objects like pieces of rubble or they recreate natural surfaces from all over the globe using resin, the objective is to display the world from a perspective as purely objective as can be, and to challenge the limits of what art is. They are scientific in their exploration. The Boyles do not employ methods such as drawing or painting, but rather take much more sculptural approaches, creating works that are large and imposing, but still artistic in the painstaking way they were recreated from nature. To capture things that are too small to se with the naked eye, they used electron-micro-photography or micro projectors for capturing things like the texture of human skin, studies of small insects, plankton or bodily fluids. In studies of the population they used density photography to show the movements of crowds.

 Andreas Gursky

Gursky’s work, Man as reference for scale

Andreas Gursky (born 1955) is a contemporary artist/photographer. His landscape photography is large scale and often urban, as he is interested in exploring how humans interact and function as a collective. His photographs are enormous in both scale and concept. Their execution gives the otherwise completely realistic images a pictorial quality. Some are almost abstract from far enough away. His images are subtly edited to enhance the composition or the mood of the image, but never in a way that detracts from the reality captured by the lens, which is often stranger than one might have imagined on one’s own.

Cristea Roberts Gallery (May 26, 2021) Emma Stibbon in Isfjorden, Svalbard, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co79mpHO1v8&ab_channel=CristeaRobertsGallery

Gentle Author/Spitalfields Life (May 29, 2010) Adam Dant, Artist, Available At:  https://spitalfieldslife.com/2010/05/29/adam-dant-artist/

Moorhouse, P., Patrick Davies Contemporary art, Available at: https://www.patrickdaviesca.com/artists/46-john-virtue/

Southbank Centre (Feb. 7, 2018) Redefining Photography | Andreas Gursky, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdOxpTARGx4&ab_channel=SouthbankCentre

TEDx Talks, (Apr. 18 2018) The glance and the gaze | John Virtue | TEDxCourtauldInstitute, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO615-F2uoc&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

The Big Draw (April 21, 2020) Environmental Sketching with Emma Stibbon RA, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SMcXRc-Tfs&ab_channel=TheBigDraw

treehousedaddy (Jun 7, 2012) Adam Dant Subverts and Intuits, Available At: https://www.youtube.com/watch v=z846BBUB1qI&ab_channel=treehousedaddy

Two Step Films Ltd. (Sep.8 2015) ‘Boyle Family’ documentary, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwFaGh_QpDM&ab_channel=TwoStepFilmsLtd

UK Parliment (Sep 17, 2015) Adam Dant, 2015 General Election Artist for the House of Commons – Part One, Available At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlZoFasAPvo&ab_channel=UKParliament

Paper Toys

Paper toys are essentially what their name suggests; they are toys made of paper. Find some specific artists who design paper toys and document examples of their work in your log. What is the purpose of paper toys? Who is their target audience? What is the draw to making paper toys as opposed to buying pre-made toys? Some visual artists who make their own models as part of their practice are: ● Seth, Canadian cartoonist who constructs and paints models of the streets and buildings of a fictional North American town called Dominion for his ongoing comic book ‘Palookaville’. ● OCA tutor Steve Monger, who photographs his models of buildings which can be seen at http://www.stephenmonger.com/ ● Thomas Demand, a German artist who builds realistic life-sized models of spaces and buildings out of paper and cardboard, photographs them and then destroys the model so the photograph is the only record left. His work can be seen at http://www.thomasdemand.info/images/photographs/ ● Amy Bennett, who makes paintings from her models of American suburbia, which can be seen at http://www.amybennett.com

Amy Bennett

Amy Bennett (born 1977) creates detailed tiny sculptures and dioramas which she stages and lights, then uses as models for her paintings. She works with paper, Styrofoam, cardboard, wood, paint and glue to create her miniatures. Her work is theatrical, the models tell stories and the characters are actors. She is set designer, storyteller and lighting expert, and each element contributes to the overall image and mood that the final product will create.  Once her stage has been crafted and set, she paints from her model to produce unique paintings, which have both a sense of realism because they were technically painted from life whilst also straying into fantasy and unreality, because the reality she portrays was carefully crafted in the first place. On her about page she says: “While working with tiny pieces that often slip frustratingly from my fingers, I am reminded of the delicacy and vulnerability of the world I am creating, and this summons empathy for my subject. The clumsy inadequacies of miniatures help me to convey a sense of artifice and distance. I try to paint the scenes in a way that feels like a believable world, but an alternate, fabricated world.”

Her models and paintings are somewhat self-biographical, in the sense that she creates scenes from her experience as a middle-class American mother, though the images are also impersonal in the way she depicts that world. Her scenes feel like liminal spaces, both sparse and claustrophobic. The paintings show very human experiences, though the humanity is somewhat stripped because the viewer still feels like they observe a world of cardboard. Bennett does not seek to create warmth, but tension and isolation, and tries to explore the way the modern neighborhoods and communities are strange and lonely places to be.

Sunday Morning

Studson Studio

Howl’s Moving Castle model

Studson creates elaborate models out of a plethora of found materials and household objects including cereal boxes, plastic bottles, egg cartons, discarded toys, etc. He doesn’t always work from carefully collected piles of garbage, sometimes he uses materials from various building kits to create original designs. I personally like the work he does with found materials. He creatively deconstructs and cuts up household objects in order to create building blocks for his sculptures. He also finds clever ways to stamp and marks and textures using household materials (such as aluminum foil or toothbrushes). He builds the sculptures in sections, painstakingly cutting up and gluing together tiny bits of cardboard, paper and plastic then he will often paint them with a base coat in order to have a uniform painting surface. Each section is painted with careful detail, making sure to bring out the desired texture, color and level of weathering for each piece. Then, he assembles everything. After assembly, he will add some finishing touches such as moss, oil wash, additional weathering, etc.

Studson also creates engaging videos of his building process and posts them on YouTube, as can be seen below.

His work is playful, warm and are often based on films and games. Both the videos and the models themselves show a love for creation and a a passion for builidng.

Thomas Demand

Werkstatt / Workshop, 2017

Thomas Cyrill Demand (born 1964) creates artwork by building realistic models and then photographing them. The final photographs are the artwork rather than the models themselves, which he later destroys. Though Demand was initially a sculptor and does not consider himself a photographer. The photographs he creates are highly designed, like paintings rather than photographs which are meant to display the miniature models as objects in themselves. The images are naturalistic, though realism in itself is not the goal. Rather, the photographs convey a painterly more-than-reality, meaning that they portray essence rather than hyperrealism.  Each image has its own message and the compositions are designed to deliver said message.

His work is devoid of humans or any creature that can move, but this creates a greater sense of realism than the work of Amy Bennett because the inclusion of a stiff, lifeless doll as a model instantly “tips the viewer off”. Thus the images look more like spaces one might belong into rather than a peek into a strange alternate world. This familiarity gives the images a greater sense of warmth and belonging, even if the image itself depicts a rather droll office space or a low-lit basement. The way the photographs are shot also contributes to this feeling. Bennett’s images have something of a voyeuristic quality, like we are watching paper versions of our neighbors or perhaps actors on a stage. Demand’s images are shot like the viewer belongs in the paper environment, like we just walked into the Luthier’s workshop or like we just stepped in our own basement or kitchen.