Presentations May 5

Kate: If Rothko wanted the rich to suffer, why then would he take down his piece and move it to a museum? To make the less-rich suffer as well? And as far as Ms Hoy's reference to landscape/portrait goes, in what ways can Rothko's pieces be interpreted? Is this paradigm of orientation really just our means of grasping his art work by analyzing its relationship to traditional painting, since otherwise his art is so abstract that we supposedly don't have much to work with?

Yiwen: Thanks for making the class a physical experiment by having us watch a video and noting our attention span. It made me feel uncomfortable and I don't feel the results reflected the viewpoint you claim to take. The Time-Delay room really isn't as confusing as you say it is, unless of course the cameras have the monitors in view... because then the camera would delay an already delayed playback, which would then be rerecorded as it is played back in front of the cameras and delayed again. Now that's confusing. And how again was Vito Acconci video art? You seemed more to be focused on discomfort... art. Sounds more relevant to Chris Burden and violence art than to video art.

Anita: I don't know what city you were talking about, or if this was some generic scenario or something, since you weren't very specific. Regardless, you spoke of a city being rebuilt. You said that the graffiti was made to "take back the city" which is an act of possession, so this complicates the art's relationship to commodification in a different way; though the art itself isn't a sellable item, it is aiding in the possession of the city space. It seems like it might be more interesting to talk about the futility of permanently acquiring the city through graffiti art, since the "goal" is supposedly to take back the city, but since graffiti is easily painted over this is obviously an impossible task, and so maybe some of these tensions between time and materiality manifest themselves in the art itself? Also, just a thought, if the city wasn't owned by the graffiti artists to begin with, don't you think that rebuilding the city would be somebody else's way of taking the city back from the graffiti artists?