Category Archives: Humor

Yoko Ono, Film No. 4 (Bottoms), 1966

“The film combines men and women almost equally, capturing their exposed buttocks in a tight frame that results in quadrants of flesh, hence the “No. 4″ of the title. Since the telltale part of the human anatomy is facing away from the camera, the viewer is left to parse out identity based on subtle signs of difference, including hair, fat, and shape. Motion comes into play because the subjects are shot while walking, a fact that can be guessed by carefully watching the film and that is proved in a production still, which illustrates the simple rotating contraption on which they moved in place.”

Credit: Waxman, Lori. Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus. Sternberg Press, 2017. Page 261.

John Cage, Water Walk (1959)

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“Composed in 1959. Premiered on “Lascia o Raddoppia,” a TV program televised in Milan, Feb 5, 1959. Subsequently performed on “I’ve Got a Secret,” the popular American game show, Feb 24, 1960.

For solo television performance involving a large number of properties and a special single-track tape, 7.5 i.p.s. In one of his manuscripts, Cage indicated a subtitle for Water Walk as Water Music No. 2″. Like his Sounds of Venice, it was composed for the Italian TV quiz “Lascia O Raddoppia”, using Fontana Mix as the composing means. In it, Cage used 34 materials, as well as a single-track tape, 7 1/2″, 3 minutes.

The materials required are mostly related to water, i.e. bath tub, toy fish, pressure cooker, ice cubes (and an electric mixer to crush them), rubber duck, etc., but Cage also calls for a grand piano and 5 radios. The score consists of a list of properties, a floor plan showing the placements of instruments and objects, three pages with a timeline (one minute each) with descriptions and pictographic notations of occurrence of events, and a list of notes “regarding some of the actions to be made in the order of occurrence.” Timings are not accurate: “Start watch and then time actions as closely as possible to their appearance in the score” (from score). Water Walk led Cage to compose his Theatre Piece.”

 

Francis Alys, Guards (2004-5)

Marching British Guards

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” “A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.” Francis Alys, 2005

Francis Alys walks a lot. The city is his open-air studio. ‘Guards’ (2004) is one component of ‘Seven Walks’, the body of works commissioned by Artangel and developed over the course of five years spent walking through the streets of London, which includes paintings, drawings, and works in moving image. ‘Guards’ draws upon many of Alys’s long-term concerns: how street-scapes structure behavior, the unspoken rhythms of the city; and the use of daily walking to encounter new phenomena and ideas. The artist provided a series of instructions which form the basis of the film: 64 Coldstream guards enter separately in the City of London, unaware of one another’s route; the guards wander through the City looking for one another; upon meeting, they fall into step and march together; when a square measuring 8 by 8 Guards is built, the complete formation marches towards the closest bridge; as they step on to the bridge, the guards break step and disperse.”

a marching british guard

Francis Alys, Guards (2004-5)

 

Bas Jan Ader, “In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles)” (1973)

Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975)

“In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles) (1973) is a series of fourteen photographs [on paper with text in ink] documenting artist Bas Jan Ader’s walk into the LA night. It was the first part of a proposed three part project, which culminated in Ader being lost at sea attempting to undertake a solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1975. Both works engage with romantic notions of the sublime and reference German Romantic painting…”

“The often indistinct, occasionally banal images that constitute In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles) have a spectral, mysterious quality heightened by the shadow cast by later events; a man walks alone into the night, and eventually the sea. However, the pathos of the images is disturbed by the inclusion of pop lyrics and there is a tragic humor in much of Ader’s work that alludes to the silent cinema of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.” [credit]

 

Benjamin Patterson, “Stand Erect” (1961)

Ben Patterson, “From Methods & Processes: Stand Erect” (1962); performed by Ben Patterson and others

people standing together and slowly walking

Stand erect

Place body weight on right foot

lift left leg and foot with bent knee several inches above ground while balancing on right foot

extend left leg forward and place foot on ground, heel first, several inches ahead and to left of right foot

shift body weight to left foot

lift right leg and foot with bent knee several inches above ground while balancing on left foot

extend right leg forward and place foot on ground, heel first, several inches ahead and to the right of left foot

shift body weight to right foot

continue sequentially left, right, left, right until process becomes automatic

Tracy Hanna “Hill Walker” 2009

video projection, 58 seconds, 25kg plaster

a hill of plaster with a walker projected on it

Tracy Hanna “Hill Walker” 2009

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“Tracy Hanna works with video projection and three-dimensional media to explore perception and our physical relationship to sculpture. ‘Hill­ walker’ is perhaps uncharacteristic of her work in that it otters both overt comedy and bathos. We encounter a lone, heroic figure, seen at a miniature scale. Footage of a walker, climber or mountaineer struggling up a snow-covered hillside is projected onto a bag of plaster that has been formed into a cone shape that looks like the ur-form of a mountain. The form is not unrealistic enough to be cartoon-like or alarming. But nor is it realistic enough to be any mountain in particular. It merely evokes the category of ‘mountain’ with the minimum means required. The hill-walker’s progress from bottom to top takes only a minute, after which it is repeated – again and again. The brevity of the process renders the arduous efforts expended on the task seem ludicrous. It is as though men’s motivation to walk, climb, explore and conquer was merely a pathology, or an adjunct to a will­ to-power. ThewalkerseemsmorelikeSisyphus than the single-minded hero that a mountaineer must be to stay alive.

Lee Walton and Jon Rubin, “Playing Apart” (2011)

“On Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011, over one square mile area of downtown Denver, artists Jon Rubin and Lee Walton worked with the Bear Creek High School Marching Band to present “Playing Apart,” a one-of-a-kind musical event that dismantled an entire 90-piece marching band into single performers who collectively use the whole city as a playing field. Each band member started on a different corner and walked a specific route, collectively covering one-square mile of downtown Denver. Mimicking the experience of city life, band members intersected randomly in an unpredictable mash-up of instruments and sounds. Viewers throughout the city— sitting in cafes, walking the sidewalks and working in the offices, saw one band member after another passing by, like solitary pieces of a larger puzzle. The performance was both subtle and obvious, small and large. Disrupting and re-imagining the normal flow of the city, this project invited viewers to contemplate social and auditory patterns within the chaos of the city.

Jon Rubin is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores the social dynamics of public places and the idiosyncrasies of individual and group behavior. His projects include starting a radio station that only plays the sound of an extinct bird, training a hypnotized human robot army, operating a restaurant that produces a live talk show with its customers, and running an ongoing take-out joint that only sells food from countries the United States is in conflict with. Rubin’s project Thinking About Flying is currently at the MCA Denver, and consists of a group of young homing pigeons that are trained by museum’s visitors continually taking home the birds and releasing them to fly back to the loft on the museum’s roof.

Lee Walton is an artist who playfully questions the world we live in. His work takes many forms and often involves collaboration with numerous participants from artists and non-artists alike. Walton once played an entire round of golf by taking only one shot a day, competed in a season-long free throw competition with Shaquille O’Neal and started a competitive residency program inside an international supermarket.

Rubin and Walton have each created commissioned projects for museums and cities both nationally and internationally. Their work can be viewed at jonrubin.net and leewalton.com

The Bear Creek HS Instrumental Music program boasts one of the strongest music programs in the Jefferson County School District and in the state of Colorado. The Bear Creek HS Band as an all-inclusive program which is home to the Bear Creek HS Marching Band, a 2010 state finalist and a nine-time state semi-finalist. Bear Creek has one of the strongest percussion programs in the state. They are a four time World Class Percussion State Champions (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) and the two-time WGI World Concert Class Percussion National Finalist. The Winter Guard program has been a national finalist and is the 2010 RMCGA state Color Guard 3rd place champion and a 2011 state finalist. The Bear Creek Band has performed throughout the state, most recently with the Denver Brass and the Metropolitan Jazz Orchestra.” (credit)

Dada Connections

Tristan Tzara reads to the crowd at a “Dada excursion” at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church (1921) Paris

Tristan Tzara reads to the crowd at a “Dada excursion” at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church (1921) Paris

Shortly before the Dada group broke up, they advertised a series of excursions to “places that have no reason to exist.” (see poster below)  These were banal places; they didn’t count the picturesque, historical interest, or sentimental value.

These trips were a way of rejecting art’s assigned urban spaces. They saw these trips as anti-art or a negation; a type of urban readymade that values spaces, actions, and experiences over objects. The dadaists wanted the total secularization of art to achieve a union between art and life, and the sublime and the quotidian. They took flânerie and raised it to the level of an aesthetic operation.

“Only one such field trip came to pass on April 14. At 3 p.m., a gaggle of Dada devotees met in the nondescript churchyard of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. André Breton read a manifesto and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes parodied an official tour guide, reading arbitrary definitions from a dictionary as keys to monuments in the church yard. A scheduled auction of abstractions was cancelled due to rain, and a porcelain-repairer and peanut-seller orchestra never performed because they never showed up.”

The Dadaists understood the entertainment system of the tourism industry, which turns the city into a simulation of itself. They wanted to draw attention to this cultural void and celebrate banality or the absence of meaning.

“A month after the performance, André Breton wrote off the event’s failure, charging the audience’s expectations of and saturation in Dada antics with rendering them innocuous.” (credit; Claire Bishop, “Artificial Hells”, 66-70)

André Breton and Tristan Tzara, Excursions & Visites Dada / Premiere Visite (1921) Paris

André Breton and Tristan Tzara, Excursions & Visites Dada / Premiere Visite (1921) Paris

“It was not a success, and remained the sole example. However they had an influence on getting people to look and look again, to notice and how to notice what you notice, daring to leap into the abyss and explore things in a different way.” (credit)

A dada poster and description

Guido van der Werve, Effugio c, you’re always only half a day away (2011)

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many photos of a person running around his house

Guido van der Werve, Effugio c, you’re always only half a day away

The artist ran around his house in Finland for 12 hours (65 miles).

From the Wanderlust catalog: “The artist notes in a statement about the work that, ‘Nowadays you can theoretically fly to almost everywhere in the world within twelve hours of less.’ Instead, he spends half a day going nowhere, his running is a futile act.”

—

“Public collections:
– De Hallen, Haarlem
– Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Running in circles 1. Lit. to run in a circular path. The horses ran in circles around the corral for their daily exercise. The children ran in circles around the tree.
2. and run around in circles. Fig. to waste one’s time in aimless activity.

Guido van der Werve: a Dutch artist who started long distance running in 2007. Soon after, he got addicted to running. Guido van der Werve ran his first marathon in Helsinki in 2009, and has been running two or three marathon a years ever since. Currently his personal best was achieved at the Berlin Marathon in September 2013, which he ran in 2.57.06.
In 2010, Guido van der Werve ran his first ultra marathon running from P.S.1 in Long Island City, New York, to Rachmaninoff’s grave in Valhalla, New York. On the 8th of June 2011, he ran approximately two and a half marathons around his house in Finland in exactly twelve hours. In the summer of 2011 he finished his first triathlon.

Emotional poverty: suggests a depletion of emotional resources, an absence of emotional health and well-being, a state of lack rather than abundance. Emotional poverty is a state in which a person finds him/herself when he/she lacks the ability to deal with specific emotional circumstances or life in general, without totally breaking down into severe depression. Everyone struggles to deal with difficulties in life, but some simply cannot emotionally cope with difficult circumstances. They turn to escapes, or they may just shut down altogether. When a person finds him/herself in a difficult time, but is not able to process the difficulties and live life, he/she may very well be dealing with emotional poverty. It is defined by a limited range or depth of feelings; interpersonal coldness in spite of signs of open gregariousness.

Half a day: equals twelve hours. The 12-hour clock can be traced back as far as the cultures of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt: both an Egyptian sundial for daytime use and an Egyptian water clock for night time use were found in the tomb of Pharaoh Amenhotep I. Dating back to approx. 1500 BC, these clocks divided their respective times of use into 12 hours each. Nowadays you can theoretically fly to almost everywhere in the world within 12 hours or less.
A day is a unit of time, commonly defined as an interval of 24 hours. It can also be used to describe that portion of the full day during which a location is illuminated by the light of the sun. The period of time measured from local noon to the following local noon is called a solar day.” [credit]

Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) [1997]

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“Paradox of Praxis 1 (1997) is the record of an action carried out under the rubric of “sometimes making something leads to nothing.” For more than nine hours, Alÿs pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melted. And so for hour after hour he struggled with the quintessentially Minimal rectangular block until finally it was reduced to no more than an ice cube suitable for a whisky on the rocks, so small that he could casually kick it along the street.”