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Blithe Riley Lecture

My favorite part of Blithe Riley's lecture was the interview she showed with Lee Krasner. For one thing, it was cool to connect a face and a voice with a name and images that I've studied in art history classes. It was almost like being able to ask Lee Krasner those questions myself, with her so big and so direct up on that screen. It seems like the interview project that Blithe has been working on with the Video Data Bank is a really valuable resource for artists and art historians.

Then, the link between that work and the Belief Objects project where an interview is the central element of the "art" as it's been going thus far, makes sense. I wondered whether the two women who started the Video Data Bank had any training in how to interview, and what exactly Blithe has learned from remastering and editing all those videos. I also found Blithe's brief discussion of her collaborator's patented interview technique for advertising execs fascinating. I wodner whether the fact that the collaborator is doing an interview project separately form her company is.. legal.

I think it's interesting how both Blithe and Siobahn are using the interview format as a way of producing art... it's very much like the Critical Art Ensemble's absorption of scientific ways of knowing in their artworks. And other contempoary art folks, too, I guess.. it's a melding of the disciplines and a collapse of disicplinary boundaries. I was having a ocnversation the other day with a friend about somehting that Jason Watson said in his contemporary printmaking lecture about some artists being jacks of all trades and masters of none. While, on the one hand, I do want to learn a lot of new skills (as wide a variety of skills as possible) I do think that the expansion of the definition of art promotes that kind of broadness wihtout depth. But really, developing a broad range of skills are what art school (esp. liberal arts school) is about. I guess if we want to expand the definition of art to include advertising, sociology, and the natural sciences, then we have to develop a new strategy for obtaining knowledge and information.. we can't just expect ourselves to know everything about a certain topic.. hence: Blithe's collaboration with another artist on the Belief Objects project.

Rev Billy Response

So.. I'm obviously biased about this performance.. I was one of the organizers and have been following the Rev for a few years.. it was a thrill to see all those people in Monty 25, and a thrill to hear back from the performers afterwards that they felt fantastic about the show, that they got so much energy from the audience, and that they felt like something had happened in the room, somethign had clicked or twisted or.. that they had gotten through.

But, for me, here are some highlights of the performance:

-the Benedictions: Blessed are you.. the way that the choir responded in their voices to the plac that Billy was in his phrase, the way that their back up singing was a total complement to his preaching, to his praising

-the Sermon: wow. So that was a 20+ minute improvisation! He said afterwards that he thought the sermon went really well, and that he would probably do it two or three more times in the next few performances. He said he came into it with a vague structure of where he woud start and end and a few points in between, but he said he didn't know he was going to relate the post-midterm election situation to post-9/11 til he started actually saying it.

I think the most moving part for me was his discussion of the 714 stories each of us has inside, and the way that these 714 stories have something in them that is true about America, that is completely unmediated and real, and that these are stories of ourselves, our families, our country. It was thinking about racism, the way we all hold that story inside us, that really got to me.. the way that we all have that kind of story, and the way that a story that powerful can actually be let out.. someday.

I also really enjoyed, in the lecture Friday morning, the discussion of breaking through the commodity wall (is that the right term?) which I felt really embodied the art work that I want to do. It's an interesting balance that they described, between the way that doing these performances helps build a community of performers, thereby breaking down the commodity wall, and how the performances themselves are an example of performing that breakdown (both literally, and because, as savitri said, the actions are a performance of community). I would like to wrok through this idea of commodity wall (maybe in my final project for my drawing class?) but I would really like to think or read a lot about it first... I thought it was interesting hwo they answered Fereshteh's question about digital self promotion.. savitri insisting so firmly that now is the time for honest face to face interaction as a method for radical change, and that digital interaction just mediates a real (messy, emotional, necessary) experience that we have been avoiding for too long.

So how can real experience fit into a digital art class? How can I do some sort of final project that uses the idea of real live experience in a.. digital way?

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