Sandy Skoglund
- photographer, set designer, sculptor
- intent: "to show what it's like to live in America at this time"
- animal/human forms sculpted and posed - idea of still life tradition
- food shown in context of pattern painting and "food photography"
(for sunday grocery store inserts)
- paradox - commercial/uncommercial
- work is about art and objects
- tableaux as "film in a frame"
- It's about how eye experiences it; she doesn't think that the installation
enhances the viewers' experiences
- Identifies work as "theme park" almost non-art because it's so
many things: painting, photography, installation, theater, film, pop sculpture
- "deliberately meant to have lots of different means of access"
- sees photography itself as a medium within culture that's mainly about control
- no photo is neutral -- she expands this
Christian Boltanski
- objects and images including photos
- creates nuanced environment that conveys political message (Holocaust)
- believes beyond scope of "direct documentation" and "single
image"
- grainy b&w photos
- takes from holocaust sources (for instance group photos of Jewish children
celebrating narrow escape of jews from mass execution)
- innocent childrens' faces seem like corpses -- empty sockets for eyes
- installs in semi-darkness
- small incandescent bulbs cast soft haloes of light
- coffin-like metal drawers/boxes
- poignant archive *indirectly* memorializaes the dead
- "Photographic sculptures"
- evoke hauning memory, loss and death
- archive with obituaries/newsclippings
- garments - allusion to mountain of clothing left beyind by Holocaust victims
of Nazi death camps.
Mariko Mori
- multimedia (photo, video, performance, 3d video technology - pioneer in
the latter)
- born in Tokyo; now works in New York studio with international team of assistants
- deals with issues of being an "outsider" both in American society
and mainstream Japanese culture
- daughter of art historian and inventor (wants to merge in art)
- worked as fashion designer and model in the 1980s
- art school at Chelsea School of Art (London) and Whitney in New York
- work explores complex and hybrid nature of individual identity in the globalized
world
- Japanese tradition, Eastern & Western art forms & motifs, fashion,
pop culture, science fiction & technology
- compare to 2001 A Space Odyssey
- highly stylized interface of humans, technology and ethereal "other"
- spiritual dimension of Buddhist enlightenment -- shown as a possible way
for humankiind to progress into era of peace and understanding
- appears in her own work cf. Yasumasa Morimura, Cindy Sherman
- postmodern role of medium through which various social and cultural ideas
can be evoked.
- "someone who needs to be created" - techno dream-woman of tomorrow
- Cyborg woman, casts others as extras in cinematically staged photographic
events
- *not* a conceptual art exercise
Tea Ceremony
- from 15c, feminine pursuit, stressing constraint, discipline and tradition
- serious and frivolous at once
- unlike Warhol, she actually has become the machine
- a cyborg not just through fantasy costume and photo narrative but through
notion of infinite replication by computer.
Birth of a Star
- cyber lolita
- pop/punk trends of yesteryear
- "when you wear clothes, you become a personality, you become the clothes"
Miko no Inori (video)
- shaman-girl's prayer (rough translation)
- at Osaka airport
- futuristic kaleidoscope-eyed vision
- gently caresses crystal ball to haunting Japanese song
- again "medium" -- bodhisattva & cyborg
- "our machines are disturbingly lively and we ourselves are frighteningly
inert"
- (but her work is not about technology per se)
Nirvana (video)
- merges past/present/future
- floats as goddess figure (cyborgs, spirits, multiple selves)
- into spiritual nature of Buddhist art
- digital landscape animated by new technologies
- 3d & interactive virtual reality video (melts into viewers space)
- fiber optic sunlight collection and transmission device (Himiwari)
- seeks total revolution in thinking about reality through visceral and visual
experience of her art
- optical illusion beyond hologram