Guggenheim Museum YouTubePlay: Shortlist Announced

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The Guggenheim and YouTube, in collaboration with HP and Intel, announced the shortlist for YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video this week. Selected from more than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries, the 125 shortlisted videos can now be seen on the YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play and also at creative kiosks in the Guggenheim museums of New York City, Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice. The selected videos can be sorted by animation, documentary, experimental, music videos, narrative, and non-narrative.

Guggenheim YouTube kiosk
Open to the global online community, the competition was announced this past June and accepted submissions through July 31st. The 125 shortlisted videos were chosen by the Guggenheim curatorial team and have been presented to the YouTube Play jury for consideration. The jury of eleven includes: musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson; musical artists Animal Collective; visual artists Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter, and Takashi Murakami; artists and filmmakers Darren Aronofsky, Shirin Neshat, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, with the Guggenheim’s Nancy Spector serving as jury chairperson.

Of the shortlist, Spector says that it “presents a rich sampling of the best creative video found on YouTube and is representative of the various stylistic and conceptual genres specific to this broad, ever-expanding platform. The selection is diverse in technique, subject matter, geography, and professional status, which reflects the increasing accessibility of new media technologies around the world. We believe the shortlist reveals the abundance of creative energy this project evoked.”

Takashi Murakami, who has recently opened the controversial exhibition at Versailles that I have already blogged about explains, “In both the global art world and beyond, the speed at which information technology is developing is accelerating at an astounding rate. These innovations have brought with them drastic changes in both the form and dissemination of artistic expression. In the past several years, not a day passes without me watching something on YouTube. YouTube is a medium to communicate with the world at large and we artists can no longer call ourselves artists merely by discovering something special and presenting it to the public alone. In that way, YouTube has incited a revolution.”

The jury will now select up to 20 of their top choices to be revealed and presented at a special YouTube Play event at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21. The final videos selected by the jury will be on view to the public from October 22 through 24 in the Tower 2 gallery of the museum, and available to a worldwide audience on the YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play.

Six Canadians (two Vancouverites!) have been chosen for the shortlist, including:
  • Jerry Levitan's Oscar-nominated I Met the Walrus, an animated film based on a 1969 interview with John Lennon, has been selected by the Guggenheim Museum in its YouTubePlay art project.
  • Jason Ryan of Toronto with Acornucopia, an animated film about a generous squirrel and a space-age robotic blue jay.
  • Jeff Kopas of Toronto with Dogasaur, in which a four-year-old girl tries to help her blind grandfather by reintroducing him to the world of imagination.
  • Nicole Duquette of Vancouver with Dreamscape, an anime-inspired video about a girl's watery dream.
  • Andrew Nicolas McCann Smith of Toronto and New York with Home, a live drama set an old folks home.
  • Sterling Pache of Vancouver with Mars to Jupiter, a short film about the struggles of a Rwandan genocide survivor as she integrates into North American society.
In honour of Peace Day, I have chosen to feature Levitan’s I Met the Walrus for your viewing pleasure. This work also won the 2009 Emmy for "New Approaches" making it, as the YouTubePlay site remarks "the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the Internet"

Snapshot Photography and Awkwardness

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Family vacation snapshot from the highly addictive Awkward Family Photos website
As summer draws to a close, many of us will no doubt be getting to the task of downloading, arranging, and circulating all of the digital photographs from the various family events, weddings, vacations and BBQs that have made up the leisure moments of the past several months. Some of us will spend the now expected time editing and trashing any of the images that are unflattering, out of focus, or just plain bad, while some of us will take the extra time to “enhance” via Photoshop those pictures that merit the mark of the professional. What will inevitably be lost in this process, or relegated to neglected trash bins on computer desktops forever, will be the many snapshots that didn’t make the cut—those awkward photographs—that still litter many of our family photo albums of the analog variety.

The snapshot photograph is usually understood as an informally composed and quickly taken picture without any artistic or journalistic intent, often “flawed” and possessing the mark of the amateur. Snapshots are what many of us think of today when we look back at family photo albums from a decade or more ago—those material relics that house the personal memories and traces of our imperfect past—and find the less than flattering and often revealing photos which were not as easy to “delete” back then. Before the advent of digital photography, the task of editing and enhancement was of course very different. The time lag between taking and developing a photograph was measured in days and not seconds, and the final pictures had a physical, not digital, trace. Photographs were also far less ubiquitous, more difficult to circulate, and so each individual image seemed to be more valuable, and families were far less likely to trash the “bad ones” (preferring to jam them into old shoe boxes for later sorting).

The nostalgia for this quickly disappearing category of photography is partly responsible for the popularity of the highly entertaining Awkward Family Photos website—a growing repository of the imperfect snapshot (among other badly posed and “professional” portraits). Here, individuals can view and comment on each submission while debating the finer points of technique and intention. In a conceptual move, the website bestows each photograph with evocative and sometimes ironic titles that point audiences to the photo’s “flaw.” The image I featured above is catalogued under “Vacation” and titled “Sugar Magnolia” and subtitled “with just a touch of grey”—enough said. Interestingly, the comments have largely been concerned with whether or not the image was manipulated to achieve its final effect. The original photographer—an unnamed Mom from cyberspace—finally intervened to claim that it was in fact a snapshot taken with a cheap camera on a family trip to San Francisco. Perhaps the American art critic John A. Kouwenhoven summed it up best: “No painting can tell the truth of a single instant; no snapshot can do anything else”

**P.S. Congratulations to my brother and his beautiful bride who were married in a lovely beachside ceremony this past weekend—we hope you have a blast on your European honeymoon and bring back many great snapshots!

Further Reading:

Kotchemidova, C. “Why we say ‘cheese’: Producing the smile in snapshot photography.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22.1 (2005): 2-25.

Zuromskis, Catherine. “Ordinary Pictures and Accidental Masterpieces: Snapshot Photography in the Modern Art Museum.” Art Journal 67.2 (2008): 104-125.

Weekly Twitter Round-Up

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It has been a busy week of classes, meetings, and general settling in for the term. Grab a cup of coffee and check out a few of the tweets I added to my favourites over that time. If you like what you are reading, you can link directly to each item's Twitter account and follow the individual feeds. Enjoy!



Quick sit down with Douglas Coupland at InterviewMag


Lady Gaga Warhol's biggest fan at TheWarholMuseum


Internet access in China, still subject to strict controls at chronicle


Apps as tours in NYC museums at GettyMuseum
 Celebrity as the subject of contemporary art at Slate


Special events and films at Vancity Theatre leading up to VIFF at VIFFest


Marina Abramovic: The Movie

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Abramovic at MoMA, March 2010 (my photo)
This past spring, I had the pleasure of traveling to New York and visiting the much discussed Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Abramovic, often called the “grandmother of performance art” (she is thought to have coined the term herself) was then in the beginning phases of her longest ever solo performance, a seven week endurance piece called “The Artist is Present” where Abramovic sat silently at a table while museum visitors took the chair across from her and met her gaze for as long as they desired. The morning that I arrived at MoMA, I entertained the idea of standing in line and becoming part of the performance, but lost my patience when a young hipster presumably trained in marathon meditation took the seat across from Abramovic and did not get up for what seemed like over an hour. Later, I spotted him giving an interview to a reporter waiting outside the exhibition about his moment in the spotlight. If you look here, you can probably locate him among the portraits that were recorded of every museum goer who took part in the performance. Actress Sharon Stone (Day 18, portrait 10) and CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour (Day 34, portrait 7) even got into the act.

Abramovic performing at MoMA, March 2010
(a picture I took from one floor above the main action)
While weighing the option of getting back into line, I was able to climb the stairs to the top floor of the museum and take in the stunning retrospective which featured live “re-performances” of Abramovic’s most famous works by a group of young artists she had specially trained to participate in the show. These individuals, some completely naked, performed milestone Abramovic works such as Relation in Time (1977); Rest Energy (1980); Luminosity (1997); and The House with Ocean View (2002), bravely enduring the combination of probing eyes, difficult to hold poses, and mental tedium that is part and parcel of performance art. While I was there, a minor scandal erupted when one patron was ejected from the museum after inappropriately touching a male artist performing Imponderabilia (1977) --a performance where the public must navigate a very limited space between two naked performers to gain entry into another space.

All of the publicity surrounding Abramovic during and since the exhibition has once again raised important questions concerning the place of performance art in the public gallery and the role of performance art in the canon of art history. How are explorations into the limits and discipline of the body related to the current, and some argue limited, state of contemporary art? At what point does Abramovic’s work blur distinctions between spectacle and artistic performance? Does it matter that Abramovic herself is now seen as a kind of celebrity? It is notable that the Abramovic show stands as the largest and most substantial exhibition of performance art ever staged at MoMA, and it is clear that the large crowds surrounding her work are as much the result of human curiosity as they are the genuine interest in her artistic achievement since her early days working in communist Belgrade.

Perhaps some of these questions will finally be addressed in a new film that is currently in development and titled simply Marina. Unlike the highly conceptual and experimental fiction film Balkan Baroque produced by Pierre Coulibeuf in 1999, this film is far more documentary in its approach and includes fascinating interviews with Abramovic concerning her preparation exercises and training methods while planning and training artists for the MoMA exhibition (see film clip below). I for one have a great deal of respect for the discipline and the focus required to pull off the range of works Abramovic has accomplished over the four decade span of her career. I am just left wondering how much her message was lost during her much discussed and often misunderstood retrospective.

Marina Trailer from New York Times T Magazine



Further reading:

Kaplan, Janet A. "Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic." Art Journal 58.2 (1999): 6.

Phelan, Peggy. "Marina Abramovic: Witnessing Shadows." Theatre Journal 56.4 (2004): 569-577.