Public Art class 8

Week 8 (March 12)

Portraiture

Portraiture in public art:

Why portraiture?

    Which is a representation of an individual
    To remember them, to honor them

Some public portraiture is imposed from above (statues of pharaohs, dictators) Statue of Ramses in Cairo (being moved)[[1]]

Some chosen by the community to be those people most worthy of remembering (wall of respect)

Some chosen by artists as people with compelling stories to tell, who represent the common man/person (Krystof Wodicko)

Crown Fountain chosen by community groups as worthy or representative

Some chosen at random by surveillance cameras

Portrait as an insight into the soul of the person portrayed Lincoln – quiescent, thoughtful [[2]]

traditionally, an example of a hero, an extraordinary individual whose example we should emulate Frequently in a moment of military victory – General Logan – what is remembered and what is left out

how much of the person is shown and does this make a difference (bust) Jane Adams – Helping Hands [[3]]

extraordinarily different - Alison Lapper [4]

Saddam Hussein [[5]]

Scale: Black hills, Stone Mountain

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial [[6]] is a sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore near Keystone, South Dakota, in the United States. Sculpted by Danish-American Gutzon Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, Mount Rushmore features 60-foot (18 m) sculptures of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln

who is represented, who is missing [[7]] [[8]]

The Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument complex that is under construction on privately held land in the Black Hills, in Custer County, South Dakota. It depicts Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota warrior, riding a horse and pointing into the distance. The memorial was commissioned by Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, to be sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski. It is operated by the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, a private non-profit organization. The memorial consists of the mountain carving (monument), the Indian Museum of North America, and the Native American Cultural Center. The monument is being carved out of Thunderhead Mountain on land considered sacred by some Oglala Lakota, between Custer and Hill City, roughly 17 miles from Mount Rushmore. The sculpture's final dimensions are planned to be 641 feet (195 m) wide and 563 feet (172 m) high. The head of Crazy Horse will be 87 feet (27 m) high; by comparison, the heads of the four U.S. Presidents at Mount Rushmore are each 60 feet (18 m) high.

Crazy Horse (c. 1840 – September 5, 1877) War leader of the Oglala Lakota. He took up arms against the U.S. Federal government to fight against encroachments on the territories and way of life of the Lakota people.  When the War Department ordered all Lakota bands onto reservations in 1876, Crazy Horse became a leader of the resistance. He gathered a force of 1,200 Oglala and Cheyenne at his village and turned back General George Crook on June 17, 1876, as Crook tried to advance up Rosebud Creek toward Sitting Bull’s encampment on the Little Bighorn. After this victory, Crazy Horse joined forces with Sitting Bull and on June 25 led his band in the counterattack that destroyed Custer’s Seventh Cavalry.  He was bayoneted in the back while taking his sick wife to her parents.) other end of scale – Einstein bobble heads – 8” [[9]]

Claes Oldenburg – the portraiture of absence [[10]] In the sphere of public art, disillusionment with traditional political monuments gave birth to what art historian Sergiusz Michalski has called ‘a new art form: monuments which tried to attain invisibility as a way of engendering reflection on the limitations of monumental imagery’. Curiously, Claes Oldenburg, better known for the wry giganticism of his homage’s to everyday objects, played a leading role in developing this low-profile territory. His Proposed Underground Memorial and Tomb for President John F. Kennedy (1965) called for a huge statue of the assassinated President to be buried head-first in the ground. The statue’s size would be identical to that of the Statue of Liberty, suggesting that Kennedy’s murder had turned the American Dream on its head. In 1967, Oldenburg actually carried out a proposal for a very different kind of invisible monument - one intended to protest not only against the Vietnam War but also the celebratory heroic memorials that the artist imagined (wrongly as it turned out) would eventually be erected to honour its veterans. For Placid Civil Monument (1967), Oldenburg hired a crew of municipal grave-diggers to excavate a hole in the lawn behind New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Besides suggesting a grave, the hole evoked an inverted plinth, cancelling out in advance the visibility of future monuments to the war. But Placid Civil Monument ultimately went beyond the negative iconography of the Kennedy memorial, as the artist, after documenting the grave-diggers’ work, had the hole filled in hole, leaving no trace of its brief existence.

Mediated portraiture:

hand held scanner; 3D printing [11]

Krzysztof Wodiczko [[12]]

National Portrait Gallery: doppelgänger is the second in a series of virtual exhibitions held by the National Portrait Gallery that explore contemporary notions of portraiture in the online realm.

Second Life as public space Virtual environments like SL Give the artist an opportunity to explore Not what you are, but what you aren't avatar/doppleganger [[13]]

Avatars as self portraits; [[14]] QR code portraiture: [[15]]

(SL) Gazira Babeli Hammering the Void [[16]]

abstraction/data as representation inigo manglano ovalle “Garden of Delights” [[17]] clip from interview (1:20) [[18]]

Luc Courchesne Family Portrait 1993 [[19]]

Bill Viola Reverse TV mid 1980's for WGBH [[20]]

To remember and honor: [[21]]

Artists who use surveillance cameras to call surveillance to our attention

Surveillance may be said to be an unwilling form of portraiture

a pre-electronic technology form of surveillance was the Panopticon designed by Jeremy Bentham, 1798 and written about by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, An analysis of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that occurred in western penal systems

The idea was to allow the prison guards to see but not be seen, and for the prisoner not to know when he was being observed its architectural incarnation in Cuba, 1928: [[22]] ; [[23]]

The history of CCTV in the United States One of its first appearances was in 1973 in Times Square in New York City.[9] The NYPD installed it in order to deter crime that was occurring in the area however crime rates did not appear to drop much due to the cameras.

Also used early on to monitor workers

New York Surveillance Camera Players [[24]] [[25]]

Institute for Applied Autonomy [[26]] iSee mapping system – to take the most surveillance free route

Google street view intervention: [[27]]

Links

Storefront projection: Karolina Sobecka [28]

chosen by community: Wall of Respect [[29]]

celebrating ordinary people with compelling stories: Krystof Wodiczko, Tijuana, Mexico: [[30]][[31]]

Shelley Eshkar, Pedestrian [[32]]

fall of statue of Saddam [[33]]

Bill Viola – reverse portraits [[34]]

Luc Courchesne - interactive portraits [[35]]

Tony Oursler - projection portraits [[36]]

Surveillance Camera Players [[37]][[38]]

Control/Space - Rhetoric of Surveillance [[39]]

Lincoln Schatz website [[40]]

Institute for Applied Autonomy [[41]]

Reading

Reading: Christiane Paul [[42]]