Guggenheim Visit response

Because I could not go on the class trip to the Dia Beacon, I went to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.  I loved the museum—I had never been before, and it was such an interesting space.  I went to the museum by myself, which is also something I have never done before, and I was able to take my time and appreciate the work more because I was alone.  The exhibits were really interesting and a lot of them were relevant to Digital Imaging.  The Third Mind, American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, the show that was taking place when I went in March, featured over one hundred different artists, and contemplated how philosophies from the East have influenced art in America.  I thought it was interesting how Asian ideals, especially religious and aesthetic ones, such as minimalism, have influenced American artists for well over a hundred years.

My favorite piece was Teching Hsieh’s “One Year Performance 1980-81”.  I think the reason I was able to appreciate this piece was because I had seen another of his one year performances at the MoMA earlier this semester—not only was I able to compare the two, but I feel like I have a more solid understanding of Hsieh’s work after seeing more than one of them.  Like the piece at the MoMA, this work was about unfolding time, a concept that definitely relates to the Digital Arts.  In this work Hsieh punched a time clock in his studio once every hour of the day for a year, and took a photo after each punch.  Because he was doing this action every hour, he couldn’t leave the studio or sleep for more that 50 minutes at a time, or he would miss the punch for that hour.  For documentation of the project, the museum displayed the photographs from each punch, as well as the time cards from the punching.  These were hung around the walls of the gallery in chronological order, and like his work in the MoMA, the pictures not only demonstrated the passage of time, but they show the repetitiveness of this project in their own repetition.  In addition to the photos was a six-minute long video that showed the artist, with each hour of his time during the year he spent on the project seen in less than one second of video time.  I find Hsieh’s fascination with time and this display of time passing extremely interesting; the documentation of the work through photography and video is how I can most relate the piece to the work we have studied this semester, and were very effective.

Nam June Paik’s “Zen for Film”, another video work I saw, was part of the “New Media Movement”.  On display was an empty film projector as well as a film canister.  The projector is playing, leaving a white square of light on wall.  The idea of this pure white light contrasts with the truth of what the viewer sees—the noisy projector and the dust on the film contrast with this supposedly pure, empty light.

Although there were not a lot of digital works using techniques we have used in class, such as Illustrator or Photoshop, I was still able to relate much of the work to other concepts we have used on our projects, such as composition and mixed medium pieces, and many of the artists used older forms of digital technology, such as video, in their work.