Chapter 7.4: Alternative Media

Alternative media processes may include the use of unusual materials or mixed media in the production of art or may draw our attention to ideas and actions rather than to a physical product. They include conceptual art (kinetic or ready-made), performance art, and installations.

Lick and Lather comprises fourteen self-portrait busts that Janine Antoni cast in two materials, with seven in chocolate, and seven in soap. Each cast was identical until the artist undertook the task of licking the chocolate busts and bathing with the soap busts, hence the playful title, Lick and Lather. The number seven is significant for it represents the average number of heads measuring a full female figure, a metric used in drawing classes. It also riffs on the idealizing representations in classical sculpture, which over time have become worn.

Antoni’s performative work regularly transforms the processes of daily rituals (eating, washing, sleeping, and walking) into art. She insists that the process becomes the end and the material the means for her work. Antoni references the test of ones’ body to process socially coded consumption: desire, symbolized by chocolate on the one hand, and beauty, symbolized by soap, on the other. Antoni has said, “All of my objects sort of walk the line between sculpture, performance, and relic.

Vik Muniz drew portraits of the children of sugar cane workers he met on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts using sugar crystals on black paper, which he then photographed for the series he called “The Sugar Children.” As he wipes the paper clean after creating each image and begins again, his actions and his subjects’ lives take on symbolic value, suggesting that generations of cane workers have been consumed by the sugar industry.

The artist here skillfully undermines the tradition of the “happy locals” vacation photo through pictures laced with a bittersweet irony: the sugar Muniz pours connotes both the elixir of childhood and the hard labor of the local trade.

Installation/Performance Art and Videos

Performance art is a performance presented to an audience within a fine art context. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated, spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or via media; the performer can be present or absent. It can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer’s body or presence in a medium, and a relationship between the performer and audience. Performance art can happen anywhere, in any type of venue or setting, and for any length of time. The actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and at a particular time constitute the work.

Performance artworks are generally documented by photography, but the artwork is in the act itself. Cut Piece is a performance work Yoko Ono (b. 1933, Japan, lives USA) originally created in 1964 in which audience members were given scissors to cut off pieces of her clothing while the artist sat on a stage. (Cut Piece, Yoko Ono). As the artist passively allowed her garments to fall away, the participants and viewers were in control of her transformation from whole to segmented.

Videos

To understand performance art better, we look at The Case for Performance Art, the Tate Modern Museum, and Bringing Performance Art to Life with Frank Skinner. Last but not least, in the words of the artist Marina Abramovic, a TED Talk that discusses her Performance Art.

Conceptual Art and Video

Conceptual art, also known as installations, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Read more about installations by revisiting the Chapter 6.3: Sculpture reading (near the end of the reading).

To understand conceptual art further, watch The Case for Conceptual Art.

Mixed Media and New Media Art

Mixed media is a term used to describe artworks composed from a combination of different media or materials. This interesting article by Linda Yablonosky will help us understand the influence of mixed media in contemporary art.
What Makes a Painting a Painting.

New media art usually refers to interactive works such as digital art, computer animation, video games, robotics, and 3D printing, where artists explore the expressive potential of these new creative technologies. The international connectivity of the Internet has ushered in a globalization of information exchange which includes the arts. One example of the use of new media in art would be 10,000 Moving Cities by Marc Lee (b. 1969, Switzerland). In this work, a viewer wears a video projection headset in which images from a chosen city are projected onto a digital urban architecture. The viewer can move within the new space through head motion. Real-time social-media images and text from the chosen city are also captured and projected.