Flavorwire: We’ve known Kara Walker’s video follow-up to her installation piece A Subtlety, which showed at Williamsburg’s Domino Sugar Factory site this summer, was coming for a while. In a conversation with the LA Times last month, Walker revealed she’d filmed audience reactions to her monumental piece — the same audience reactions that provoked outrage in some attendees.
4 comments:
Calling it "performance art" is an interesting way to look at Kara Walker's piece when it was the audience being observed all along -- although it is true that some people's actions are more performance than not. I'm glad that Walker was unsurprised by the actions that she ultimately observed, and that she's not trying to use her footage as proof that there is no such thing as human decency, because you really couldn't have expected anything else. In that sense "A Subtlety" was really only re-confirming something we already new: some people will be very disrespectful if given the chance, often because they think they are being cool or they're trying to impress their friends. The rest will be as polite as they deem is necessary.
Is she allowed to use the footage without the audience member's permission? Were they aware they were being recorded? I imagine they weren't, as that would defeat the point Kara Walker is trying to make. I'm also not entirely sure I would call it performance art. Not sure what I would call it, but I'm not sure it wold be performance art. I'm also glad that she's focusing more on the whole experience and what happens when a bunch of humans get together to look at the same thing rather than looking at people being disrespectful.
This is really interesting. I would love to film people viewing my designs; to be able to get a real reaction from them without them knowing that I would know how they were reacting and what they were saying. It also sounds kind of immoral, but hey that's art. I think this article is relevant to the question of whether or not art is created for the people or the artist. Personally I think there should be a balance between public and artist appeal, that creating something for purely personal joy is kind of selfish. Maybe at my next crib I'll put up a camera to see how people really react to my work. That would be fun.
Over the summer, my parents and I got the chance to visit the sugar sphynx and while, it was an amazing experience, I knew exactly what I was going to witness in this video and I imagine on a grander scale in the longer version. For the most part while I was there, people were very respectful of the art work and the history behind it, but there was no small number of people treating the art disrespectfully and carelessly or having loud inappropriate conversations about the nature of the sphinx's exposed body or how black people should feel about the piece of art. I think that this was a great idea for a performance art piece because it highlighted both the awed and pensive reactions to the art as well as the blatantly disrespectful and thoughtless nature in which some people often approach controversial artwork or historical landmarks.
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