Assignment 1: The interaction of media

For this first assignment, we are asked to consider the influence of technological developments on visual arts practice, specifically:

•  to find three examples of visual artists whose practice and/or imagery are, or have been, influenced by new media (photography, film, television, radio, electronic or digital media, etc) since the beginning of the twentieth century;
• Choose one or more works by each of these artists to analyse in more depth. Try to found out why these artists work in their chosen medium rather than traditional painting, sculpture etc

As a newcomer to the art world, this project has proved something of a challenge and required a significant amount of research, albeit some of the work already completed, for example on Jeff Koons and on constructivist photography, provided some clues. After reviewing a few possibilities, I chose the following:

1. Nam June Paik
2. Lynn Hershman Leeson
3. Hannah Höch

The choices are not random - I sought some loose links with those I selected, commencing with the very recent use of new media by a well known male artist; thence to the same from a prominent female artist who in turn shares a feminist approach with the last, whose most important work dates from earlier last century, thus acknowledging that the expression "new media" is not restricted to the last few decades.

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik is viewed as the founder of video art. He is generally considered to be the source of the phrase “information super highway”, albeit he originally referred to the “electronic superhighway” in 1974.

Born in Korea, his parents moved to USA when he was young, fleeing the Korean War in 1950s. He led a peripatetic life until settling in New York in 1964.

Nam June Paik graduated in music (and later worked with rock stars such as David Bowie) but soon became interested in visual media arts. Therein may lie the basis for his very new approach; he had no preconceptions of fine art or indeed visual art at all. He carried no baggage. He was an inspiration for artists in media culture, “not simply accept what it [media culture] can do, but make it something it wasn’t intended to do.” (Hanhardt, 2012). His foresight was to see television in particular as a medium not only to show art but also to be art, that the new media could perform both functions simultaneously, as in this celebrated work:

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995

 TV Garden is a perfect exemplar of Paik’s use of the medium as an art object (note 1):

Nam June Paik, TV Garden (detail), 1974/2000

Paik produced the first international satellite art installation on 1 January 1984. Entitled “Good Morning, Mr Orwell”, it was evidently designed to snub the implied negativity of Orwell’s 1984, albeit the showing suffered from technological problems.

Nam June Paik ploughed his own furrow. He had little time for the theory and niceties around traditional fine art. In one interview (Zurbrugg, 1990) he was dismissive of criticism of video art by Frederic Jameson, a theorist who claimed that video is a mobile medium suitable only for generating superficial, ever-changing effects with no special meaning (quoted in Zurbrugg, ibid). Paik's riposte is waspish: semiotics (implicitly assuming that semiotics is the root of the criticism) is highly regarded in English speaking countries "because it is difficult to understand. Academic people know they have to deal with complications." He admits to having read only one book from Foucault and one from Barthes before deciding his time was better spent producing video and computer tapes. 

If a scornful attitude towards art theory provides one motive for working in video art, another interview (Kac, 1988) provides a more positive response. Paik points out that there has always been a close relationship between art and new technology and quotes the Egyptian pyramids as an early example of the combination between high art and high tech. He argues further that art progresses by artists trying new things; for example, Monet created Impressionism as he was tired of Academicism. In turn, Picasso was tired of Impressionism so he created Cubism. Paik continues:

"Since today we have satellites, we want to use them, discover what we, artists, can do with them. We want to try something new, in the tradition of Monet and Picasso."

In short, I believe Nam June Paik was an experimenter, he was excited by the newness of the technology around him and sought to embrace it in ways that evidently did not win universal approval but brought about some very original art.

Lynn Hershman Leeson

In a career spanning 40 years, Lynn Hershman Leeson has utilized virtually all types of visual in her quest to discuss contemporary issues, not least the position of women in society generally, and in the art world in particular. She demonstrates a high degree of versatility, using new media in ways that seem perfectly natural but were often cutting edge.

She says she could never dream of doing anything else - she was born as an artist and was experimenting as a young child. In a very short piece such as this, it is impossible to give full justice to the range of Hershman Leeson's work but the following are among the most well known.

Her early work used wax sculptures to provide some graphic insight into her view of how women were trapped in contemporary society, as these two examples show:

Lynn Hershman Leeson Caged Woman 1965

Lynn Hershman Leeson Self Portrait as Another Person 1965

Note from these images two recurring themes of Hershman Leeson's early work: the inclusion of technology in the piece, and a fetish with alter ego. (She wrote her master's thesis under three pseudonyms and later developed Roberta Breitmore, a persona developed by the artist during the 1970s with different wigs, make up and clothing - Gagnon, 2006).

These and similar sculptures were exhibited at the Museum of Berkeley in 1972 with the inclusion of audio breathing and voices. Having successfully overcome any gender prejudice, she was less successful in the use of the new media: the exhibition was cancelled as audio was not considered de rigeur  in an art museum (Gagnon, ibid).

Hershman Leeson has been responsible for a number of technological innovations, including the first interactive computer-based artwork. Lorna (1979-82) tells the story of an agoraphobic woman who is fearful of what she sees in commercials and news on TV. There is resonance here with the point made above on Nam June Paik's work: the new media not only demonstrates the art but is itself an integral part of the artistic work. Hershman Leeson says of Lorna:

"Here we are in the communications revolution and yet people have never been more alienated or more lonely." (Lorna on Youtube, 2011) 

In a more recent work, !WAR:Women Art Revolution, Hershman Leeson makes a narrative film covering forty years of the feminist art movement including interviews with artists and critics. Even the title is innovative, Hershman Leeson candidly admitting in interview that  the exclamation mark was an (unsuccessful) attempt to get the film first on alphabetic listings (Egenhoefer, 2012). The entire recording including outtakes is over 12,000 minutes long and is being added to all the time with an open invitation to submit artwork on the RAWWAR website.

In all three of these works, Hershman Leeson demonstrates her vision, not overtly polemically but presented cogently. She explains the use of the varying media by claiming that "the idea dictates the form" (Curiel,2013) and that film in particular reaches to a broader audience, particularly if it can be downloaded. This is an artist who believes she has a message and adopts the media most appropriate to delivering that message to as wide an audience as possible. New media dominates in much of Hershman Leeson's work, but (arguably in contrast to Nam June Paik) it is not the critical point. She explains:

"I think that what is critically important is that people have a driving vision. The media will follow. Every medium has one [a driving vision] that speaks to its community, whether it be social sculpture or wax casting. So concentrate on what and why change is necessary and the most effective way to achieve that. All else will follow." (quoted in Simmons, 2013)
  
Hershman Leeson is not disparaging of traditional visual art forms. In an online interview with Wolf Lieser she says that it is valid for someone to be a painter or a sculptor if that is what their vision is. The technology, she adds, is a reflection (my emphasis) of the issues the artist seeks to address.

Hannah Höch

Born into a middle class family in 1899, Hannah Höch became a (arguably the) key female artist in the 1920s Dada anti art movement. She suffered sex discrimination from the outset of her artistic life, being diverted to graphic arts and glass design rather than painting and sculpture, which were viewed as 'serious men's business' (Hudson, 2014). Höch claims that WW1 changed her world view (Maloney, 2013) and became involved with Dada shortly after the war, introduced to the movement by Raoul Hausmann with whom she had an affair lasting several years.

Probably Höch's most famous work is the snappily entitled  Cut With The Kitchen Knife Through The Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, included in the First International Dada Fair in 1920. Perhaps the title is a clue: this is a busy photomontage that includes many facets and messages. The work was nearly not included in the fair; two leading figures of the Dada movement, George Grosz and Thomas Heartfield, sought to exclude Höch, whose work was included only by virtue of Hausmann threatening to withdraw if Höch's work was not shown (Dillon, 2014). The motives of Grosz and Heartfield are unclear; it may have been prejudice against the medium; that Höch was an applied artist; or that she was a woman. Like Hershman Leeson, Höch was aware of sexism within the arts, specifically amongst her fellow Dadaists, and comments on the duplicity of her male peers thus:

 “None of these men were satisfied with just an ordinary woman. But neither were they included [sic] to abandon the (conventional) male/masculine morality toward the woman... . they all desired this ‘New Woman’ and her groundbreaking will to freedom. But—they more or less brutally rejected the notion that they, too, had to adopt new attitudes. (from Höch's possessions, quoted in Maloney, 2013).

Insofar as there was the concept of new media in 1920s, photomantage may claim to be included, being a key medium for the likes of Rodchenko, who used the medium as an instrument for State propaganda (BBC, 2007), and other Dadaists. In 1918, Höch and Hausmann reportedly noticed a photograph from a guest house owner who had superimposed the face of his son over a stock shot of men in uniform (Hudson, 2014). The couple evidently realised the power of cut and paste to "alienate" images  An alternative explanation is simpler: that Höch had come across the technique when working for publisher Ullstein (Dillon, 2014). 

Hannah Höch Cut With The Kitchen Knife Through The Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919-20

Cut With a Kitchen Knife is a seemingly chaotic montage of images and text cut from magazines, periodicals, and advertising material. (note 2) The use of "kitchen knife" in the title is both a wry sideways comment on the place of women in society and an indication of the artist's desire to cut through a swathe of media messages and reassemble them in a way that made sense to her. The central point is the head of Käthe Kollwitz, another female artist who found training in a male dominated world difficult, and whose work focussed on the proletariat, atop the body of a dancer. There are other female images - dancers, athletes and gymnasts - and, in the bottom right hand corner (where typically the artist would sign), a self portrait superimposed on a map of European countries that enfranchised women.

Kreinik (quoted in Archino, 2012) identified four corners to the image: 

• top left "Dada propaganda" including an image of Albert Einstein framed by two German newspaper clippings that translate to “invest your money in dada!” and “he he, young man…dada is not an art trend”. (Archino, 2012). The latter shows that Höch was more interested in "a clear aesthetically resolved statement" as she put it herself, rather than expounding an anti-art agenda (Naves, 1997);
• lower left - "Dada persuasion" includes several images of crowds and of Karl Liebknecht, the Communist leader executed in 1919 for his part in the Spartacist uprising;
• In the lower right - "Dada world" - Höch pasted images of many male Dadaist colleagues, including the heads of Heartfield (aka Herzfeld) and Grosz together atop the body of a ballerina -  a possible reason they sought to exclude her work from the exhibition. Marx and Lenin are also included.
• "Anti Dadaists" in the upper right is where Höch is at her most sardonic. She pastes a large head of Keiser Wilhelm II, who many blamed for leading Germany into the disaster of WW1, replacing his moustache with a pair of wrestling legs. A photograph of General Hindenberg is attached to the body of a belly dancer.

By 1922, Höch had ceased the relationship with Hausmann. She had a long term relationship with a Dutch female academic. She continued her work with photomantage in a more abstract way as this example shows. 

Hannah Höch Made for a Party Hannah  , 1938 

During WW2, Hannah Höch kept a low profile, and indeed her work is better known since her death in 1978. 

Like Hershman Leeson, I think Hannah Höch used her chosen medium as the best way of expressing her vision. Both artists understandably promoted female issues, but had more to say besides, particularly on the conditions of people around them

Conclusion

I have presented three artists using different new media in very  different ways. Hannah Höch and Lynn Hershman Leeson both concentrate on the messages they wish to convey - in their eyes the medium is the best way to convey those messages. Leeson perhaps makes a more conscious decision about the media, Höch having in a way stumbled across photomantage. In this respect, one can see a similarity to Nam June Paik, also who seems to have adopted new media because it is there, almost to have some fun with it, even if it excites disapproval from the more traditional art world.

The project has taken more than the recommended 1,000 words. I write more about the learning outcomes of it and all the work in this section of the course in my Learning Log, suffice to say here that I have learnt a great deal during this project about the artists, the approaches, and performing research and the length of the project reflects that.

Note:

1. Interestingly, TV Garden  is similar to an image I took in 2011 with a strong hint of irony, and has been adopted since as a book cover - Green Spaces, published by Poetry Space

References:

Archino (2012) Cut with the Kitchen Knife Available from http://utopiadystopiawwi.wordpress.com/dada/hannah-hoch/cut-with-the-kitchen-knife/ [Accessed 7 February 2014]

BBC (2007)  The Genius of Photography. DVD.

Curiel (2013) Artist’s Statement: The Radical Art of Lynn Hershman Leeson Available from  http://www.lynnhershman.com/sfweekly-interview/ [Accessed 5 February 2014]

Dillon (2014) Hannah Höch: art's original punk Available from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10545071/Hannah-Hoch-The-woman-that-art-history-forgot.html

Egenhoefer (2012) Woman, Art & Technology: Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson
Available from http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/woman-art-technology-interview-lynn-hershman-leeson [Accessed 4 February 2014]


 Gagnon (2006) Lynn Hershman Available from http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=168 [Accessed 4 February 2014]

Hanhardt (2012) BBC online news 18 December 2012 Available from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20649028 [Accessed 2 February 2014]

Hudson (2014) Hannah Höch: The woman that art history forgot Available from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10545071/Hannah-Hoch-The-woman-that-art-history-forgot.html [Accessed 7 February 2014]

Kac (1988) Satellite Art: An Interview with Nam June Paik Available from http://ekac.org/paik.interview.html [Accessed 2 February 2014]

Lorna on Youtube Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erSDdku0edI
[Accessed 2 February 2014]

Maloney (2013) Hannah Höch and the Dada Montage - Before Digital Available from http://www.inthein-between.com/hannah-hoch/ [Accessed 7 February 2014]

Naves (1997) Hannah Höch at The Museum of Modern Art Available from http://mnaves.wordpress.com/hannah-hoch-at-the-museum-of-modern-art/ [Accessed 7 February 2014]

Simmons (2013) Dreaming is Risky Business: An Interview With Renowned New Media Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson Available from http://www.policymic.com/articles/26600/dreaming-is-risky-business-an-interview-with-renowned-new-media-artist-lynn-hershman-leeson
[Accessed 5 February 2014]

Zurbrugg (1990) Nam June Paik interview: Australian International Video Festival Available from http://www.vasulka.org/archive/4-25/Australia%286017%29.pdf [Accessed 2 February 2014]