Wishing everyone a wonderful Canada Day long weekend and a happy upcoming Fourth of July to our neighbours in south of the border. I am getting ready to teach a shortened summer session of ARTH 341: 20th Century Art & Culture, The Postmodern beginning tomorrow up at UBC over the next six weeks, so I am taking this time out to relax and enjoy the sunshine and long weekend offerings. You can follow this link to check out the latest additions to my blog's online magazine of collected links, videos, and images or see a few of the standout articles linked directly below:
Driving down Las Vegas Boulevard in 1968-- the seeds of modern day Vegas were already planted.
Image from Learning From Las Vegas (1972)
In the autumn of 1968, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown decided to take a group of Yale students on an infamous field trip-- one that would lead them to Las Vegas. Equipped with cameras, both in hand and strapped to the hood of a rented Ford, the group studied and photographed every hotel, motel, sign, and gas station along the infamous Las Vegas strip. Their findings, assembled, archived, and analyzed in the landmark text four years later Learning From Las Vegas (1972) not only helped launch the Postmodern Architecture movement, but also brought a level of serious critical inquiry into the popular, spectactular and strange spatial landscape of Sin City.
It was Venturi and Scott Brown I was thinking of on my recent visit to Vegas. I have always had a fascination with the place, going back to family trips as a kid when we would roll through Vegas in my Dad's Volkswagen van en route to visiting relatives in Arizona. Playing carnival games at the Circus Circus hotel while my parents played slot machines, I fondly recall escaping for a short time into a fantasy world of windowless rooms, bright neon lit streets, 24 hour access, and all you can eat buffets. But while Vegas remains a place of play, it is rarely taken seriously as a cultural destination. It wasn't until I studied Learning From Las Vegas in an architecture seminar in grad school that I began to see the Vegas of my childhood memories in a completely new way. How incredible, I thought, it would be to create a field school in one of the most dynamic architectural environments of the planet. Indeed, what we see in Vegas is undoubtedly the synthesis of the "both/and" hallmark of contemporary postmodernism, a place to study where popular and high culture intersect and transform.
Below, I am sharing a fascinating 1984 interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown where they encourage audiences to see architecture as a kind of cultural symbolism and to aknowledge the complexity, contradiction, and ambiguity of the urban spaces they inhabit. Next time you find yourself in Las Vegas, remember to look and experience with new eyes.
The semiotics of postmodern architecture can be traced back to the early study of Las Vegas.
Image from Learning From Las Vegas (1972)
Las Vegas 2013-- a cacophony of visual and spatial stimuli
Image from my recent visit to Vegas.
Vegas remains a place of temporal fantasy, a new spectacle around every corner,
such as this pop-up wedding chapel.
Instagram image from my recent visit to Vegas.
Hotelier Steve Wynn paid $34 million at auction for Jeff Koons Tulips (2004),
It is now on public display in the lobby of the Wynn Hotel, a fitting and symbolic
tribute to convergence of popular and high culture in Las Vegas.
Instagram image from my recent visit to Vegas.
Are motion picture Instagrams better than still ones? I highly doubt it.
Media specificity lies at the core of my research focus.
I have long been interested in thinking about how audiences and publics, both
past and present, make meaning of the same represented persons/objects/things
from diverse representational modes. Bringing critical awareness to these means of representation is deeply embedded within traditions of
modern and contemporary art. Artists, ranging from Manet and the
Impressionists, to Magritte and the Surrealists, through to conceptual artists
such as Joseph Kosuth, have made it part of their practice to bring insight to both the illusion and multiple media modes of our visual landscape.
Manet, Magritte, and Kosuth push audiences to think about the means of representation
and media forms as sets of shifting signs. Modern and contemporary art teaches us for example that a painting
is not a mimetic copy of reality, any more than a photograph or a convinving line of text.
Asking students to think critically about the means of
representation is also part of the art historian’s job. Here, the basics of
formal analysis kick into play. For example, what are the benefits and
drawbacks of producing a representation of the same thing as a painting, a drawing, a sculpture,
or a work of film or performance art? What is at stake in the conversations
they will generate? What meanings will be made with each media mode? What
is gained and what is lost? When Instagram announced its introduction to video captures
this past week, I immediately began to wonder what false assumptions were being
made about the move from still to moving pictures. Clearly, from watching the
promotional video, there is an idea in place that the moving image is the
natural evolution from the still Instagram picture. But is this really the case?
In the past several months, I have been thinking a great deal about these sorts of new media assumptions, and especially the move from silent to sound filmmaking and the many difficulties and limitations that were placed on experimental filmmakers of the late 1920’s who simply did not buy into the idea that sound was somehow “better” than silent film. To be sure, the entire history of film was transformed in a few short years when studio executives in Hollywood endorsed and promoted sound film (and narrative based movies) as the obvious evolution in filmmaking and then later colour filmmaking to replace black and white movies. What was lost with those transitions was how the means of filmic representation shifted and recast the way artists engaged with and/or abandoned film as a medium of choice. This is now part of a largely forgotten or misrepresented history we are just coming to grips with.
Claims for new media evolution and superiority have been made as far back as the early 20th century.
Here is an ad from 1918 in the trade journal Moving Picture World making the argument for a new film format.
Looking to the immediate and largely negative reaction to the Instagram announcement by both average users and critics alike, I am reminded of archival documents I have recently looked at from the early 1930’s where the public laments all of the important aspects of silent film that would be lost in its transition to sound. More importantly, the underlying charge of that time was how “artistic” decisions had been made at the expense of commercial interests. This sentiment echoes many of the reactions about Instagram’s move (recently acquired by Facebook) and the mini commercial spots that are surely coming to Instagram within short order. Interestingly, most critics unanimously agree that moving to video signals a backward move for Instagram and not a natural evolution for the new media form. As New York Times writer Jenna Wortham argues in her article on the topic, media specificity has all but been disregarded with the transition to moving images:
Instagram is a yearbook of our most memorable moments, not because they’re the moments worth remembering, but because they’re the moments worth projecting and sharing… Video, at least the amateurish footage I shot, is the antithesis of that fantasy. And as much as I think we’re getting more comfortable being ourselves online, there’s still a difference between the self you’re willing to share publicly and the self you’re willing to share when only a handful of people are watching.
So will video kill the Instagram star? Probably not, but I can't help but wonder as new media forms continue to shift and claim “evolution” how long it will take for critiques like these to recede into forgotten history.
This week's Flipboard cover is an Instagram pic I took while stopped in traffic on the 405 HIghway in Los Angeles (without GPS in my car and a map in the trunk!)
Has it already been a whole week? I have just returned home after several exhilarating days in Los Angeles on a research trip to both the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Margaret Herrick Library at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As part of my project I was looking at archival documents, posters, scripts, and yes films!, from the period of the late 1920's and early 1930's related to avant-garde filmmaker Paul Fejos. It was fantastic getting to look at materials from this era, and all of the librarians and archivists I encountered were incredibly helpful and very patient with my questions and queries. I even tried to get into the spirit of the visit by staying at a hotel that used to be an apartment house for silent cinema starts-- it is a great little hotel in Beverly Hills called The Crescent, I highly recommend it. While in Los Angeles, I was able to see some great art exhibitions and later this week I will blog about my visit to the Getty Museum and Research Institute, a must see for any art and architecture lover visiting the area.
Between visits, I was watching my social media feeds and saved several articles, links, and videos into this week's Flipbook. Follow this link to check out the complete magazine (see this link to learn how you can download the Flipboard app to your mobile device), or see a few of the standout articles linked directly below:
This week's Flipboard cover--Warhol meets Lennon-- an encounter captured in the late 1970's.
I am currently blogging from the road (on a short vacation to Las Vegas ahead of a research trip to Los Angeles) and experimenting with mobile Blogger-- wishing you all a wonderful weekend. You can find my weekly pick of social media links, articles, and videos on Avant-Guardian Musings Flipbook Magazine. I will be adding each week's curated selections and starting fresh each month, just like a real magazine subscription. Enjoy!
