alissapajer

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NOTE: This reel has no audio.

I shot all of the video footage in this reel and edited it using Final Cut Pro.
I did not create the CNN graphics; that footage aired on CNN on June 21, 2006.

In art museums all of the visitors are on the same level; the museum owns the art, and the visitors are there to look at it. But in galleries and art fairs, everyone is not on the same level: some people are lookers and others are buyers. Lookers are there to appreciate the art. They visit galleries for the same reasons they visit museums. But buyers are there with one intention: to buy. Galleries and fairs exist for the sole purpose of selling art, and thus cater to the buyer. The buyers keep the galleries alive while the lookers contribute nothing to the galleries.

This past Thursday I visited the Frieze Art Fair. The fair exhibits work from over 150 of the world’s top contemporary art galleries and was teeming with wealthy buyers. I could see their wealth in their clothes, hairstyles, and facial expressions. They wanted me and everyone else to know that they are wealthy to ensure no one would mistake them for a looker. As a looker myself, I did not feel welcome at the fair. The gallery owners did not want to talk to me because they could tell I had no intentions of buying, and the buyers acted as if I was invading their fair. Since I felt unwelcome at the fair, I also felt uncomfortable looking at the artwork. In a museum I do not hesitate to go right up to a work or to spend twenty minutes standing in front of it, but at Frieze sometimes I didn’t even want to go into a gallery. The art was not there for me to appreciate, and the gallery owners and the buyers did not hesitate to remind me of this.

Now about the artwork itself. The majority of the artwork I saw at Frieze was all idea and lacked any sort of physical creation that could speak for itself. The art at Frieze needed written or verbal explanation; the art did not stand on its own and say, “This is what I am.” Instead, it sat there with a plaque or gallery owner somewhere close by ready to give a lengthy explanation of its metaphorical and philosophical significance. The art would be nothing if it came uncoupled with its verbal or written description. To create contemporary art that could be shown at Frieze an artist only needs good ideas. Artistic talent is no longer a requirement to become a well-known artist. Contemporary art, as exhibited at Frieze, was all talk and no show.

The visual arts are separate from the literary arts and other non-visual arts because they do not require words to explain themselves. An artist can successfully incorporate words into their visual artwork, but then the words become a piece of the artwork, not a written ad-on in the form of a plaque on a wall. Thus today’s contemporary art is about the idea behind the artwork, not about the physical artwork itself. The artwork itself has become an incomplete physical manifestation of the ideas behind it; the artwork does not fully contain its own meaning or purpose. If it did, no verbal descriptions would be necessary. So the artwork is only an approximation of the ideas it represents. It stops short of representing the entire idea as if the idea it represents is too profound to ever be totally encompassed by something physical.

I believe that physical artwork can render a complete portrait of an idea, and is the artist’s job to figure out how to do this. One piece of artwork can have many interpretations, and interpretations that differ from the artist’s original intentions can be correct. But if one cannot interpret the art without a verbal or written description, then that artwork is not art. It is merely a physical something that silently sits in room with white walls, waiting for someone to read its plaque.

Art should not be silent. Art should scream. Art should deafen me when I walk into the room. It should make me cover my ears and close my eyes because it screams so loudly. But it should not push me away; it should entice me with its screams. It should seduce me with its visual glory. Perhaps I long for art that artists no longer create; yet I don’t want artists to recreate art of the past. I don’t want another The Starry Night or another Mona Lisa. But this is what I do want: I want art to represent the turmoil, pain, and beauty that the artist sees when he or she looks at the world. I want art to have emotion and feeling. I want art to take on the responsibility of communicating the ideas behind it and not to leave it up to words to explain what it is and why it is here.

I have a new project idea for my off-campus study program. A couple of weeks ago I decided that I would create a series of videos featuring a bouncy ball that I bought at MoMA. Here in London I tried to take some footage of the bouncy ball, but this proved difficult because the bouncy ball kept bouncing away.

I still plan to use video in my project, but I am not using a bouncy ball any more. Instead I am making a series of short films with shots that solely consist of reflections. There are lots of shiny things in cities, so I won’t have any problem finding reflective objects. Here is an example of a video I made in New York using the reflections on the skyscrapers.

The point (as if there has to be one): looking at things without looking at them and then seeing what you see.

There is a second city that lives in reflections, and I want to capture this city on video.

They see me when I walk down the street, when I walk into a store, when I enter a tube station, when I stroll in the park… In London, CCTV surveillance cameras are everywhere. They transmit live video feeds from around the city to a few major surveillance centers where police officers and government officials watch the feeds 24/7. Yesterday I visited the surveillance center in East Ham.

At the center there are around 40 screens that cycle through video from 360 local cameras. At any given time about six people monitor the video and control the cameras. One staff member demonstrated how she could control a camera: she zoomed in for a close-up of a man sitting on a bench.

Living in a surveillance society is just another way to live. In the United States there are very few surveillance cameras; in the UK there are a lot. I could argue that CCTV is great because it makes the streets safer; or I could argue that it is dangerous because it invades the privacy of individuals. But I am not going to argue either point. I have only been in London for eight days, and thus I am too ignorant of British culture to form any opinions.

Double-decker buses are amazing. I rode on one for the first time today; I sat on the top in the very front row. From now on I am going to ride buses around the city instead of the tube.

I also went to Regent’s Park today and lay on the grass in the sun. It was wonderful. I am happy.

I have noticed that the sunlight in London is slightly more blue than the sunlight in Minnesota. It is not a cold blue nor a distant blue, though. It is just more blue, or perhaps less orange, depending on how you think about it.

Minimalist art has been approaching zero for too long. It is getting closer and closer to actually being nothing. If this trend continues, minimalist art soon will cease to exist.

We have made solid black paintings such as Bob Law’s Bordeaux Black Blue Black (1977). We have even written about the idea of art as nothingness as Keith Arnatt did in Is it Possible for me to do Nothing as my Contribution to this Exhibition? (1970) And currently London’s Institute for Contemporary Art displays Cerith Wyn Evans’ take my eyes and through them see you… (2006) which consists of two continuously looped four-minute 35mm films. One film is solid black, and the other is solid white. I see very little difference between Law’s work of 1977 and Evans’ work of 2006. I think that art should change over time because there is little artistic value in reproducing what has already been created.

If art continues to become increasingly minimalistic, this is what I predict will happen: Artists themselves will become their artwork; they will stand naked in museums behind panes of glass, and we will study them. Then the human body will become too substantial; the artists will leave the museums and will replace themselves with nothing but air. Then the air itself will become too substantial, so we will suck the air out of the exhibits in an attempt to create matterless art. We will try to create absolute vacuums, which theoretically are spaces void of all matter. But quantum theory suggests that it is impossible to create an absolute vacuum, so we will have partial vacuums instead. Every museum will have one. Other art will still exist, but it will seem ridiculously substantive when viewed next to a partial vacuum. This is as close as we could get to nothing.

This is too close, so let’s revolt against nothing! Let’s fight against the zero! Let’s create art with substance and with form. Let’s not forget minimalism; let’s incorporate nothingness into our new style of art. But only part of the art will be nothing; the rest of the art will be something.

This is substantialism. Substantialist art consciously tries to be something, not nothing. Substantialist art focuses on what it is, not on what it is not.

I love the rhythm of iambic pentameter. I also like alliteration, rhymes, and how words sound when sung melodically. When I listen to music, the words become part of the song’s melody and the singer’s voice becomes another instrument.

Yesterday I saw A Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare’s Globe. I tried to listen to the meanings of the words, but I wasn’t able to; I could hear only the sounds of the words as they resonated in the theater. Although undoubtably I missed many spoken jokes, I still found the play hilarious. I could understand the nature of each scene not through the meanings of the words but through the actors’ tones of voice and through their movements on stage.

In summary: Often my mind perceives only the aesthetics of spoken words and fails to comprehend their meanings.

I arrived in London this morning. On the airplane I saw the most beautiful sunrise that I ever seen. The sky was a perfect gradient from black to deep blue to deep orange. My favorite part of sunrises and sunsets is the line near the horizon where the blue turns into orange. I also like how, if you do not know what time of day it is or which direction is north, you cannot tell the difference between a sunrise and a sunset. Of course, if you stood there long enough you could tell, but just for a couple minutes it would be impossible to know if the sun was rising or setting.

The plane approached England a couple hours after sunrise. As soon as I was close enough to the ground to see, I made sure that the cars were travelling on the opposite sides of the roads. They were. After I got off the plane I took The Underground to my place of stay. The trains here have cushy seats with colorful fabric. The bright colors gave me a false sense of security; I felt like nothing could possibly hurt me while I sat in a bright purple train. And nothing did hurt me.

For the rest of the day, I focused on staying awake to minimize my jetlag. I was quite excited to be here, but it turns out that the body’s need for sleep overpowers adrenaline. After drifting in and out of sleep all day, I feel asleep instantly once I lay down and turned out the light.