Friday 30 September 2016
Thoughts on Chris Burdens Art,.
Burden's art does is not concerned with the creation of an object designed to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer, the art resides in the actual response of the viewer or even the non response of the viewer, if there can indeed there is any such thing as a non-response, for it can be argued that not to respond to a situation being experienced is a response.Burden in the act of causing injury to himself forces the viewer either to intervene or remain passive during the act of viewing , but we will assume in either case the viewer is mentaly or emotionally moved, either to a state of concern, horror ,helplessness or possibly even disgust.Burden art does not produce as already stated a physical object that can be traded as a commodity in the art market, like a painting or piece of sculpture. Burdens art is dealing with the creation of ideas, through actions which are born of a concept, or maybe a question he wishes us to ask ourselves. Burdens art as stated is not a commodity, but it does posse questions about the commodification of modern mass culture. If we see violence on a television screen similar to that which Burden enacts in a gallery space, but we fail to respond in a similar way. Burden's art posses the question ,has mass media and the commodification of contemporary culture anethetised our emotional response through a form of anethetised repetition.
Chris Burden , Artist, viewer, response no-response
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ARTISTS CHRIS BURDEN
Chris Burden
American Sculptor and Performance Artist
Movements: Performance Art, Conceptual Art
Born: April 11, 1946 - Boston, Massachusetts
Died: May 10, 2015 - Topanga, California
QUOTES
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"It's about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, 'Here's the beauty in this. I'm going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.' That's what artists do. It's really a pointing activity."
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"I had an intuitive sense that being shot is as American as apple pie. We see people being shot on TV, we read about it in the newspaper. Everybody has wondered what it's like. So I did it."
Synopsis
Chris Burden has produced some of the most shocking works in the history of twentieth century American art, including spending five days and nights in the fetal position inside a locker, having a spectator push pins into his body, being "crucified" to a Volkswagen Beetle, being kicked down two flights of stairs, and even having himself shot. The challenge for viewers is to try to understand such troubling and seemingly "inartistic" gestures. Such an understanding is made possible by seeing these works within the context of Conceptual artduring the 1970s, where artists concerned themselves with art based on ideas and action rather than objects created for an elite art market. Additionally, the violent images of the war in Vietnam and the television media in general provided a background setting for Burden. His work further challenges viewers to take stock of their own moral compasses and widen their understanding of the ways in which it is possible for art to serve humanity.
Key Ideas
Chris Burden's seemingly outrageous performances were in fact authentically intentioned. His art explores the nature of suffering by setting up extreme situations that he, himself, has to endure. Theoretically, a viewer can interrupt the work at any point, but usually they do not; thus, his work challenges viewers themselves to act - both within the sphere of his art and within the larger context of humanity in general.
The artist wanted to portray the reality of pain to the audience at a time when people had become desensitized to the plethora of television images of injured and dead American soldiers in Vietnam and the general dominance of violence in media imagery.
Burden also questioned the role of art itself. Can art be more than something precious, elite, and distant? To what extent can the artist be the work of art and how far can the artist go in leading viewers to think and respond?
Most Important Art
 | Shoot (1971) Shoot is the piece for which Burden is infamously known. He asked a friend to shoot him with a .22 rifle from a distance of 15 feet. The bullet was originally supposed to nick the side of Burden's arm, but the shooter was slightly off target and the bullet went through the arm instead. This piece presented exactly what happens when a person is shot so that the audience could experience it in person, and not just in a detached setting such as watching the television while sitting comfortably on the couch. The viewer can only recoil in shock at realizing that an actual person was just shot in front of them. In describing the piece, Burden stated that "it was really disgusting, and there was a smoking hole in my arm." This work also poses questions about the nature of power and following orders, a theme especially indicated by the imperative of the title Shoot, itself. To what extent are we required to follow orders? What are the boundaries between rules and responsibility to fellow human beings? Burden's work was also a way of re-sensitizing people to the violence that had become less and less shocking due to its prevalence in the news. Finally, in addition to challenging the art world's traditional preference for the "fine art" of painting, for example, what Burden really seemed to be challenging was himself and his own dedication to his art. One cannot argue that someone who so consistently put himself in physical and mortal danger for his work was not completely dedicated to his art: in fact, Burden said that one of the reasons he performed Shootwas so that he would be taken seriously as an artist. .22 rifle and bullet - N/A |
Biography
Childhood
Burden, the son of an engineer and a biologist, was born in Boston in 1946 and grew up in France and Italy. When he was 12, Burden was involved in a motorcycle accident in Italy that required his foot to be operated on without anesthesia. This traumatic event seemed to be the catalyst for his future works that focused on self-inflicted physical pain. Burden moved back to the states and finished high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Influences and Connections
Influences on artist
Artists, Friends, Movements
Influenced by artist
Artists, Friends, Movements
Interactive chart with Chris Burden's main influences, and the people and ideas that the artist influenced in turn.
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Useful Resources on Chris Burden
ARTIST FEATURES
| Extreme Acts of Chris Burden Entry on Art Story Blog |
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Monday 30 May 2016
Op Art
The Neuroscience of Op Art
Artists, like neuroscientists, are masters of visual systems. Through experimentation and observation, artists have developed innovative methods for fooling the eye, enabling flat canvases to appear three-dimensional, for instance. Neuroscience—and more recently the subfield of neuroaesthetics—can help to explain the biology behind these visual tricks, many of which were first discovered by artists. “I often go to art to figure out questions to ask about science,” says Margaret Livingstone, Takeda Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. “Artists may not study the neuroscience per se, but they’re experimentalists.”
During the 1960s, Op Art—short for “Optical art”—combined the two disciplines by challenging the role of illusion in art. While earlier painters had created the illusion of depth where there was none, Op artists developed visual effects that called attention to the distortions at play. Abstract and geometric, their works relied upon the mechanics of the spectator’s eye to warp their compositions into shimmering and shifting displays of line and color. The Museum of Modern Art announced this international artistic trend in 1965 in a seminal exhibition titled “The Responsive Eye.” Since then, neuroscientists have continued to probe the mechanisms by which the human eye responds to these mind-bending works.
The notion that eyes are drawn to areas of contrast is foundational to visual neuroscience. Hard-edged boundaries between light and dark attract attention and become exaggerated through visual perception. A black circle on a white background, for example, will appear darker than the same black circle on a gray background—to scientists, this phenomenon is known as “center/surround antagonism.” A similar effect occurs in Hermann’s Grid, first discovered by the physiologist Ludimar Hermann in 1870, in which “ghostlike” gray squares flicker at the intersections of black-and-white matrices.
A comparative effect results from color contrasts. Stare at a blue-and-white-striped square for a few seconds, and chances are a yellow halo will appear in your visual field. “Yet there is no yellow in this work, none at all,” the Venezuelan Op artist Carlos Cruz-Diez once explained. “You see yellow because, when the blue hits the black, that is the effect on the retina. It’s an optical effect known as simultaneous contrast.”
Simultaneous contrast—the visual phenomenon behind the viral striped dress that appeared black and blue or white and gold depending on the viewer—is the principle that the perception of a color is dependent on what other colors surround it. Bright colors cast a shadow of their complementary (or opposite) color—blue contrasts yellow, red contrasts green—which is why the area surrounding the blue square takes on a golden hue.
While illusions such as these are hard-wired in the human visual system, others emerge through lived experiences. By observing the natural world, the eye learns to interpret areas of low contrast (like clouds) as a transparent overlay atop areas of higher contrast (like the sky). American painter Edwin Mieczkowski takes advantage of this phenomenon, creating images that are simultaneously hard-edged and blurry. Mieczkowski’s Monobloc No. 1 (1966) tricks the eye into viewing areas of the painting that are low-contrast as misty layers in front of a uniform black-and-white background. The longer one looks at the painting, the more these areas seem to float towards the viewer and into the three-dimensional world.
The appearance of motion in Op Art continues to drive research in neuroscience today. In 1957, Donald M. MacKay discovered that radiating lines (now called MacKay rays) create a glimmer of movement, though artists have used this mind-bending technique for centuries. One explanation for this effect lies in small, involuntary rapid-eye movements, called “microsaccades.” When presented with heavily patterned, high-contrast images, the eye (which is drawn to contrast) can’t focus its attention.
“My paintings are multifocal,” the British Op artist Bridget Riley once explained. “Not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.” Without a clear point to fix on, the eye involuntarily moves around an image, bringing elements of the picture in and out of focus.
Op artists Marina Apollonio and Victor Vasarely applied centuries-old lessons of linear perspective to their abstract compositions in order to create illusory effects. Linear perspective is “a phenomenon of optics that light travels in a straight line,” says Livingstone, though she notes that artists discovered it before scientists were able to explain its effect. Around 1415, the Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi is thought to have invented linear perspective, the first mathematical method for tricking the human eye. It involved arranging a composition around a vantage point that appeared to recede into the distance. The Op artists proved this method could be applied outside of representational painting. Vasarely used linear perspective to manipulate the colors and shapes of abstract forms, creating images that appear to balloon out into space.
While Op artists studied the science of perception, scientists have in turn looked to Op Art to ask questions about visual processes. Though their experimental techniques differ radically, their conclusions are often the same: The human visual system is not a mirror for the outside world. Rather, it is capable of seeing far beyond what is actually there.
—Sarah Gottesman
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