ON SANTIAGO SIERRA

SANTIAGO SIERRA IS FRESH AND MARINA ABRAMOVIC IS TIRED: A BRIEF EXPLANATION
There is a similarity in the sort of performance constraints used by contemporary artists Sierra and Abramovic: a specifed duration in which a body will be in a certain space and perform a certain action -- often longer than is considered comfortable, usually without much talking, often sitting, or standing, or doing fairly simple things. Abramovic performs her own work, sometimes with collaborators. Or sometimes her work is re-performed by dancers. Usually thin people in art galleries. The conditions of these relations are rarely made explicit – how much the performers are paid, the conditions of the contract, and so forth. Her whole apparatus is cloaked in a sort of phenomenologo-mysticism - presence, reduction to experience, epoqué, the body, its boundaries, its potentiality.
Sierra, on the other hand, rarely performs his own pieces. He hires poor people to be in his work, often immigrants, people who are desperate for money. He makes the economic relation between himself and his performers explicit by including the term 'remunerated person' in the titles of his pieces and usually noting how much he has paid the person in the description of a work.
Abramovic gallivants her subjectivity around like it is something special, like something transcendent is happening in her pieces. When you sit across a table from her, it will be categorically unlike any other time you have sat across from someone, because she is an Artist. What goes unstated is the reliance of her work and her special artistic subjectivity upon a range of other unannounced performers, namely cops. In her performance of The Artist is Present at the MOMA, security guards protected the space that had been taped off as part of the 'art.' If anyone stepped into this space, they would be tackled by the 'security' mercenaries, which happened on numerous occasions. The presence of the security guards, their performance in the protection of the commodity form of art, was framed as outside the piece, an externality to the constraints of the performance. This allowed viewers to have mystical connections, to feel Abramovic's energy, to bracket the social world and be present with 'Art.'
Sierra deliberately undermines the performance of some kind of special artistic subjectivity and the fantasy of being able to bracket broader social relations from the aesthetic experience. He offers whatever subjectivities – the man on the street, the worker, the immigrant, the impoverished, the mass of faces, the mass of fesh – instead of the Artist. Rather than feeling an unadulterated 'presence,' Sierra's viewers are more likely to be profoundly ashamed, to be disgusted with themselves and art galleries which enable situations of humiliatingly useless toil. Sierra's work reminds its audience that that they are in culture, that they are in capitalism traversed by its racialized logics. Don't think that an art gallery is any different a sweatshop, a brothel, a marketing frm. Here as elsewhere, we are faced with the logic of capital and its demands on our bodies, our time, our lives.
We don't get anywhere by leaving, by trying to go to somewhere else, to some special or alternative space. This is a trap. To think that we have left, that we are in an autonomous domain is a fantasy. The logics (of capital, of race, of gender) will surface. These forces are not invincible, and our lives are full of moments of communization, of being together, of singularity. But let us be wary. Let us be vigilant. Rather than leaving, let us try to be here, be present – with security guards, pointless jobs, commodities, war. Let us watch bodies face the humiliatingly useless conditions of work. Anti-utopia. Presence sans mysticism. Presence avec disgust. May the new world emerge from the collective retching of our nausea.

by K Olive McKeon

Niki's Music Visualizer Code:

Hey, for those interested in Processing code, below is the code from my music visualizer:


//Libraries (OPENGL better than P3D)
import processing.opengl.*;
import ddf.minim.analysis.*;
import ddf.minim.*;
//Global Variables
Minim minim;          //Minim object
AudioPlayer jingle;   //AudioPlayer object that holds sound
FFT fft;              //FFT (Ferrier Form Transformation) Object that hold band data
int numS = 40;        //Const that dictates how many bands will get read
System s;             //An arraylist object that holds all of the WaveForm's and parses through them
float zoom = 20;     //A variable that controls the starting zoom
float sf = 0;         //a variable used in garbage control

//Setup
void setup() {
  size(1000, 800, OPENGL);
  minim = new Minim(this);                        //instantiate the Minim master object



 
  jingle = minim.loadFile("08 Broken Drum.mp3", 1024); //song file, you can put any song you in //here as long as it's an mp3 file, if it's m4a it can be converted to mp3 through iTunes. 
 

 
 
  jingle.loop();                                  //loop song file
  fft = new FFT(jingle.bufferSize(), jingle.sampleRate()); // create an FFT object that has a time-domain buffer the same size as jingle's sample buffer
                                                           // note that this needs to be a power of two and that it means the size of the spectrum
                                                           // will be 512.
  s = new System();                              //make a new system
}

void draw()
{
  WaveForm w = new WaveForm(numS);              //make a new WaveForm object every time you draw. This object is then passed to the system which draws it and all of the existing waveforms
  background(0); 
  pointLight(11, 202, 255, 25, 175, 200);       
  pointLight(200, 40, 60, -65, -60, -150); 
  ambientLight(65, 35, 120);                  
 
  translate(width/2.8,height/4,-zoom);            //Translation and rotation stuff. A lot of this is just experimenting and tweaking
  rotateY((0.0-((float)mouseX/(float)width)+0.5)*PI);
  rotateX(PI/2.3);
  rotateX((((float)mouseY/(float)width)-.5)*(PI/2));
 
  fft.forward(jingle.mix);                      //get the data
  for(int i = 0; i < numS; i++)  {
    w.importBand(fft.getBand(i), i);            //pass the data to the WaveForm
  }
  s.addWave(w);                 
  //fill(200,0,0);
  noStroke();                                  
  s.render();
  //Garbage collection
  sf += .01;
  if (sf > .75) {
    s.remWave(s.waves.size() - 1);
    sf = 1.01;
  }
  //end of Draw 
}

void stop()
{
  // always close Minim audio classes when you finish with them
  jingle.close();
  minim.stop(); 
  super.stop();
}

//Zooming control. o = zoomout   i = zoomin
void keyPressed() {
  if (key == 'o') {
    zoom += 25;
  }
  if (key == 'i') {
    zoom -= 25;
  }
}

//WaveForm class
class WaveForm {
  float[] bandMap; //holds all of the getBand() numbers from FFT
  int sz;          //size of the array

  WaveForm(int _sz) {
    sz = _sz;
    bandMap = new float[sz];
  }
  void importBand(float i, int place) {
    bandMap[place] = i;
  }
}


//System Class
class System {
  ArrayList waves;
  float xyScale = 11.0f; //Contracts or expands the whole flowing shape

  System() {  
    waves = new ArrayList();
  }
 


 //Render waves
  void render() {
    pushMatrix();
    //colorMode(HSB, 255);
    translate(-xyScale * 8, 0, -100);
    //Basically, this takes two waves (going through the whole array of course and creates and bunch of
    //rectangles between them to synthesize a flowing shape.
    for (int y = 3; y < waves.size(); y++) {
      WaveForm w1 = (WaveForm) waves.get(y-1); //The two waves
      WaveForm w2 = (WaveForm) waves.get(y);
   
      beginShape(QUADS);                     
      for(int x=1; x < w1.sz; x++) {
        //fill(w1.bandMap[x]  * 6, 255, 0);
        vertex(x*xyScale,y*xyScale, w1.bandMap[x-1]);
        vertex(x*xyScale,(y+1)*xyScale,w2.bandMap[x-1]);
        vertex((x+1)*xyScale,(y+1)*xyScale,w2.bandMap[x]);
        vertex((x+1)*xyScale,y*xyScale,w1.bandMap[x]);
      }
   
   
   
   
   
   
      endShape();
    }
    popMatrix();
   
  }






  //adds a WaveForm object to the front of the list
  void addWave(WaveForm w) {
    waves.add(0,w);
  }
 
  //removes a WaveForm object from the index i (this is used only in the Garbage collection area in draw)
  void remWave(int i) {
    waves.remove(i);
  }
}

SPRING BREAK SHOW

Come see my band, Day Pussy, perform in Boston or New York over break!

Mon 19 - Port D'Or 841 Sterling Place, Brooklyn
Sat 24 - Whitehaus 10 Seaverns Ave, Jamaica Plain
Western Mass shows still in the works...

<3 B

Thank You

I really want to thank you guys for the crit today. It really got me thinking about things.

M Abramovic

A blog post about The Artist is Present:
http://teresapizza.tumblr.com/post/589781631/reperformance-art

B

Bad Brains playing Boston

Check it out!

That's My Girl

Tina Turner -Come Together LIVE 1971.
Tina has always been a huge inspiration of mine. And she just simply never fails at giving an incredible performance. Thought I would share her cover of Come Together.
Enjoy!

Cheers,
Avery

Bye Bye Bird- Sonny Boy Williamson

I decided to check out Sonny Boy Williamson after Seth referred to him in class. Wish I had more to say but this post is purely for sharing purposes. Check it out! Incredible!

I met Alice Bag today at Lady Fest.  She just recently published her memoir Violence Girl about rock in LA.  Check it out.

Jimi the man!

One of my favorite Jimi Hendrix interviews! Had this one on my bookmarks bar for over a year! Love his mentality and how his stance on some matters of society are still relevant and relatable decades later. The presenter is an interesting guy too! Speaks to how American society feared and were disgusted by rocknrollers when rock n roll was a new thing.

- Lydia