Yoko Ono: early video works in the 1960s

https://youtu.be/lYJ3dPwa2tI

During the first 11 years of her career, Ono moved among New York, Tokyo, and London, serving a pioneering role in the international development of Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art. Her earliest works were often based on instructions that Ono communicated to viewers in verbal or written form. Though easily overlooked, the work radically questioned the division between art and the everyday by asking viewers to participate in its completion.

In the above video Cut Piece, Ono confronted issues of gender, class, and cultural identity by asking viewers to cut away pieces of her clothing as she sat quietly on stage.

Yoko Ono and John Lennon collaborated on a number of works, often in response to global politics and conflict. At the end of the decade, Ono’s collaborations with John Lennon, including Bed-In (1969) and the WAR IS OVER! if you want it (1969–) campaign, boldly communicated her commitment to promoting world peace.

“I think that conceptual art – it works in many ways. What I think it does the most is when it opens up things within people’s mind. And they will follow it and do something that is conceptual – but it would create reality in their life.”

Bruce Naumann: early video works

https://youtu.be/D6LppuVHlus

Bruce Nauman was one of the most prominent, influential, and versatile American artists to emerge in the 1960s.   For more than 50 years Naumann has worked in every conceivable artistic medium, dissolving established genres and inventing new ones in the process. “I’ve always had overlapping ways of going about my work,” Bruce Nauman once remarked. “I’ve never been able to stick to one thing.”His expanded notion of sculpture admits wax casts and neon signs, bodily contortions and immersive video environments. Using his body to explore the limits of everday situations, Nauman explored video as a theatrical stage and a surveillance device within an installation context, blending ideas from conceptualism, minimalism, performance art, and video art.

Some of Nauman’s earliest work was shaped by ideas that arose in the wake of Minimalism in the late 1960s. In particular, the way he treated the body – often his own, shown on video completing repetitive tasks – and the way he related the body to surrounding objects show the impact of Minimalism’s new ideas about the relationship between the viewer and the sculptural object. Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s ideas about language have been an important influence on his work, shaping his interest in the way words succeed or fail in referring to objects in the world.

Much of Nauman’s work reflects the disappearance of the old modernist belief in the ability of the artist to express his ideas clearly and powerfully. Art, for him, is a haphazard system of codes and signs, just like any other form of communication. Aside from informing his use of words, it has also encouraged him to use “readymade” objects – objects that, unlike paintings or traditional sculptures, already carry meanings and associations from their use in the world – and to make casts of objects ranging from the space underneath chairs to human body parts.

Andy Warhol

In 1963 he acquired his first motion picture camera, a hand held 16mm Bolex, and shortly after he claimed an ‘abandoning’ of painting. Disingenuous this claim might have been but his expansion into filmmaking was no passing jaunt. Between 1964 and 1968 the artist was particularly prolific, producing literally hundreds of films of varying length and style. Nearly 650 films were produced, including hundreds of silent Screen Tests, or portrait films, and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation.”

Warhol’s films have been highly regarded for their radical explorations beyond the frontiers of conventional cinema. One such film, Empire 1964, his eight-hour, static-shot of New York’s most recognisable skyscraper, is included in the exhibition at Tate Liverpool.

Warhol began to take an interest in the avant-garde film in 1963 when it was at the height of the mythic stage. He quickly made himself familiar with the latest works of Brakhage, Markopoulos, Anger, and especially Jack Smith, who had a direct influence on him. On one level at least Warhol turned his genius for parody and reduction against the American avant-garde film itself.

The first film that he seriously engaged himself in was a monumental inversion of the dream tradition within the avant-garde film. His Sleep (1962) was no trance film or mythic dream but six hours of a man sleeping.

Planning Response

I plan on taking inspiration from these videos by producing my own video recordings of the same task everyday. I will then edit these recoding together so the video dress the theme repetition. I think by doing this I will develop more ideas for my project and will inspire me to produce more video responses. By recoding a task I do everyday will produce the same shot in different variations i.e. different lighting, compositions.