Catching Up from Last Week

Catching up from last week: Christie Milliken, "The Pixel Visions of Sadie Benning"


1. Sadie Benning's work reflects the angry, confrontational, disaffected-youth sensibility which all help to shape the Riot Grrl subculture. Her work also mixes in-your-face "dyketactics," familiar to Riot Grrl culture, as well as vulnerable child-like self-imaging, which is not typical of this culture. The low-tech, go out and shoot, style of Benning's work is similar to the Punk scene. Yet, the fact that her work has been somewhat accepted by academic institutions means that her work is going against the punk subcultures and what they stand for.

2.Sadie Benning's work is considered "essay" because of the highly personal nature of her films, which take confessional, autobiographical tones much like a diary. However, she does not limit herself to only making autobiographical films and her incorporation of fictional aspects to her stories make them more universal.

Keller and Ward, "Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant-Garde Blockbuster"

3. In the 1960's the definition of "sculpture" broadened to incompass many seemingly unrelated disciplines such as media-based works, performance, and architecture. In Barney's case the fact that his work takes up a 3D space in a gallery and can be experienced from all angles is why he can define his work as sculpture.

4. Minimalist sculpture is post-modernist because it tries to eliminate the hand of the artist. The pieces seem like that could be recreated without that artist present. Minimalist sculpture does not have a coherent theme or meaning behind it and therefore does not leave emotional clues to imprint on the viewer. The viewer can not study the sculpture and infer anything about the artist or how the piece was made, they can only draw on how viewing this art makes them feel personally.

5. They would use their own bodies as sculpture, testing the functionality of the human body as an object or as a sculpture.

5 (again). Cremaster was different from other performance work of the time because it did not seem to have any purpose or message. It was considered a blockbuster because it followed a typical Hollywood blockbuster's model of a high budget, with aggressive press and marketing campaigns to ensure a large monetary gain and high success of the performance.

6. "Mode of film practice" refer to historical institutions which group styles of film from distribution, production, to exhibition. Defining modes as these institutions, practices, and concepts create a context for stylistic norms of certain types of films. Examples of this would be Hollywood narrative, and French New Wave.

7. Gallery films are sold, traded, and exhibited as unique, individual works by the artist and success is determined by fame and the rarity of the film. Gallery films are treated as rare commodities to be preserved, much like paintings. Experimental films on the other hand are more like other types of film made to be viewed in a theater, except that experimental films use very different methods of distribution and often have significantly smaller budgets.