Barnes Stair Case - An Installation and Photography Project

Late at night when I walk past the Barnes stair case (always lit up after dark), I have often thought about the potential to decorate this fluorescent walkway with nude bodies and photograph it from the outside. A few nights ago, Ella and I recruited some people to participate in the project and the idea finally came to fruition. Although the bodies were a little more abstracted than I imagined them being, the project was a success. The process was a lot of fun and the product, I think, will turn out well. Baiza, Neil, Neva, Ursula, Ella, Max and Julia all agreed to be the models, while Jackson Solway acted as photographer and I was the director.

The project started with an unsure group -- would they get in trouble for nudity and need to register as sex offenders? Luckily, we ran into a security guard who told us, among other things (like the fact that sherm-- weed coated with formaldehyde--is the most common drug in the Springs and has effects similar to PCP), that as long as the nudity was for an art project and not for "ooo oo look at me" while shimmying her body (streaking), we were fine. Everyone then finished off their beers and headed inside.

I ran around outside the staircase scouting for a good angle to take the photos from and ranting into Ursula's phone telling people where to stand, how to stand etc. Jackson found the best angle, and Ursula and I quickly found it was going to be too difficult to organize completely by talking on the phone. So Jackson basically continuously snapped shots with his extra long lens, balanced with a tripod. It took a little while to get the shots in focus but once he figured it out, the photos turned out great. We took a few with one person on each "platform", or landing between the sets of stairs. Some of these platforms are behind a silhouetted tree which offers a really effect with the bodies and the fluorescent lights. 

From the outside it was really fun to watch the project unfold. My friends appeared in the staircase and immediately began experimenting with positions (I later found out they could see themselves in the reflections of the windows). I watched as they peeled off layers of clothing until only the silhouettes of bare bodies were visible. It was so exciting to see that they really did look beautiful in this staircase and that my "vision" was a good one. 

The project functioned as an installation piece as well. Many by-passers stopped to watch the silent forms inside as they leaned against each other, turned their backs away, or balanced on the railings. Some people took pictures with their cell phones and some asked what was going on. I think that the people who saw it were generally excited to have come across something outside of their everyday experiences. 

The models enjoyed themselves as well (as far as I know). Nudity among friends is only a good thing. Ursula proposed the idea of taking a similar series of photos on the staircase behind Olin. And it may be pretty to take some in the Fishbowl as well. Hopefully, this project may be the start of a few others similar to it.

Below are a few of the photos:

Abstract Outdoor Art

This was a project called Sited in which we took an object into the environment to make Andy Goldsworthy-esque art. I used a thick black rope, about 20 feet long. I thought of it as a long bold line I could drape across the landscape. The first day we went to Red Rock Canyon (on Highway 24, just before Manitou. The first thing I tried was using my line to accentuate the natural lines in the landscape.

The second day we went to The Paintmines. You can get there if you take Platte until it turns into 24 going East. It's about a half-hour outside of town on the right--I forget the name of the town (Calhoun?). Anyway, its where Native Americans used to find pigment to make paint. There, as well as continuing my accentuation technique, I also went the other way and tried to draw contradictory lines.

Macrology

During my senior year in high school, I did a photography project using macro lenses to capture the miniscule details in objects like leaves, sparkly things, etc. It was a lot of fun and what I most liked about it was that it offered a way to abstract common objects using the photographic medium. While photography seems to be criticized often as too straight-forward of a medium in the fine arts, I think this challenges that idea. Though of course, there are other ways to do this. 

The project altered my perspective on the ways I view everyday objects- if you look at something the right way, it can be beautiful. Steel pipes for example, have really interesting patterns from rust, etc. The texture is often very interesting. In the past year I have done a few projects in the same vein. I did one project of Max's body which I submitted to the all campus art show last year, and I did another project with molded beets. Below is a project I just did with a termite that I found on my rug a few weeks ago. I like the way a close up shot brings your attention to depth of field, what is in focus vs what is not, and especially, texture.

Here is one of the beet project:

And one of the body project:

Anselm Kiefer: Subjectivity in and Out

Musings on a sr. philosophy thesis

Rachael DeWitt

As senior year draws to a close and my thesis sits on my bookshelf, bound in its purple cover, I remain excited by the ideas that prompted that yearlong academic endeavor. Presenting a version of the project—first at Colorado College and then at the Colorado Springs Undergraduate Research Forum—has forced me to reshape the 37 pages into 15 minutes of interest-sustaining theory. It is through that process of consolidation and reiteration that will keep this work form becoming stale and irrelevant. The entire project began with a longstanding interest of mine, characterized by the question, “what can philosophy tell us about art?” I have not succeeded in answering this question entirely, for it is one I hope I will never tire of. In attempts to continue to explore that question, here goes another version of “THE CONTINUOUS PLAY OF REPRESENTATION: DERRIDA AND KIEFER.”

Quick Summary: The topic of my thesis is Anselm Kiefer, the living German “neo-expressionist,” whose paintings I examine through the lens of Derrida’s aesthetics. But before I get to Derrida, I introduce Arthur Danto’s criticism of Kiefer. Danto finds the ambiguity of Kiefer’s work evasive and pretentious. Danto’s complaint, and later on Schapiro’s demand for accuracy when understanding a work of art, presupposes the possibility of a specific, determinate meaning behind a work of art. I wonder to what extent this degree of certainty is ever possible in art, and in Kiefer’s art. At this point, my thesis turns into a discussion of representation, and I look to Antonin Artaud and Jacques Derrrida’s philosophical commentary on the nature of representation as guides for navigating the simultaneously abstract and representational nature of Kiefer’s work. In the end I decide that representation is impossible to escape, even in abstract art, for the mind makes associations, be they unconscious, that tie a work of art to things and thoughts that are not themselves part of the work. I call this mental activity provoked by art, and sustained by the impossibility of a final or true “meaning,” the “play of representation.” I find that in Kiefer’s landscapes, when he creates a painting of the earth that is also composed of the earth, he exemplifies the constant coming and going of representation.

Above from left to right: Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem, close-up of same work, and Black Flakes 

Thesis Excerpted . . . 

Section 7: (un)Stitching Kiefer’s representations

Just as Schapiro restitutes the painting to historical accuracy, Danto believes that good art may be restituted to an order, an order that Kiefer’s work resists. Kiefer himself does not seem worried about the restitution of order. Rather his works seem to reinforce this Derridian view of the endless play of restitution. At his Aperiatur Terra exhibit at White Cube in London in March 2007, Kiefer spoke to a small audience while standing in front of his various works. While stopped in front of the Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem painting, Kiefer spoke about the role titles play in his work. “Aperiatur Terra means a lot. I always have titles that have not only one sense. Nothing in the world has one sense only. Americans think there is good and bad. That’s not true; even the truth is turned around. Sometimes the truth’s there; sometimes its there. It’s all in a flux.”

Kiefer’s Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem (Latin for let the earth open and the/a savior grow) is a painted landscape, to which, as he explains to his audience, he applied red dirt and then exposed to the sun. The red earth in the center of the painting looks like fire spreading across the land. Up close, the crackles in the dirt fixed to the canvas serve as an allusion to the title’s mention of the opening earth. But the reference to savior and the appearance of fire is a provocative juxtaposition.

Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem provides a stunning example not only of Kiefer’s simultaneous play between word and image, but also his career-long exploration of mixed media. In the Milky Way the juxtaposition between the transcendent and the earthly is created with paint and metal on the canvas. But in many of Kiefer’s other works, that coincidence is carried even farther when one of the subjects at hand, earth, is applied to the canvas, to represent itself. Black Flakes is another winter grassy scene, like Milky Way, but is composed of a wider variety of media: oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, burnt sticks, and lead book. In Black Flakes the rows of sticks and text meet at the horizon where a lead book protrudes from the 130 by 570 inch canvas. The sticks pop out against the white background and direct eyes to the book that is in the center of the canvas. As Lauterwein points out, “The materials actualize the signs of destruction by giving them a sensual dimension. Their destruction corresponds to the facts. Starting out from this mnemotechnical aspect of his materials, Kiefer creates private allegories: straw is transformed into ash, lead is purified, and sand does not burn.”[4]

In “On the Balinese Theater,” Artaud praises the gesture in Balinese theater for its direct rather than symbolic expression of human experiences. “—the Balinese offer us a stupefying realization, suppressing all possibility of recourse to words for the elucidation of the most abstract themes—inventing a language of gesture to be developed in space, a language without meaning except in the circumstances of the stage.”[5] Similarly, Kiefer seems to bypass the indirect nature of the symbol when he “creates private allegories” by bringing his subject matter to the surface of the canvas.

Black Flakes is quiet or perhaps somber. The black sticks conjure images of ash against snow, of plants sticking out above the snow, pointing to the text, literature or poetry, the Bible and its peoples, or text of order or law. The juxtaposition of light and dark, the component of natural media, and the centering effect of the book gives the work a calm and quiet presence, despite the possible Holocaust narrative told through the black ash in the snow and its proximity to the lead book.

 

Conclusion: Danto’s Search for Solid Ground

Throughout his career, Anselm Kiefer has ignored taboo and convention, and operated on his own terms of what it means to genuinely communicate. Kiefer’s attention to ambiguity and double meaning can be found throughout his work. Since Kiefer’s works don’t point to order, one is left only with the painting. From there one may engage in cycles of detachment. Ultimately, there is little opportunity to restitute the truth in Kiefer’s painting.

In response to Kiefer’s retrospective, which he dislikes, Danto describes good art as “immediately understood.”[6] Similarly, Heidegger’s essay drives Schapiro to make lofty historical assumptions for the sake of defending the idea of meaning in art as pointing to an idea outside of it. Derrida explores the outcomes and consequences of the ambiguity of art that both Kiefer and Heidegger uncover and Danto and Schapiro deny.

All these shoes remain there, in a sale, so you can compare them, pair them up, unpair them, bet or not bet on the pair. the trap is the inevitability of betting. The logic of the disparate. You can also try to buy the trap and take it home, as a tribute or the way you think you’re taking something away on the soles of painted shoes. All these shoes remain there—for he painted many, and despite the pas d’idiome one would like to pin down the very singular cause of this relentless effort: what was he doing, exactly?—as a tribute that cannot be appropriated . . . You can only give them back [rendre] if you think you have them, and you can only think you’re giving them if you haven’t got them. When Artaud protests against the ghosts [7]

At the end of “Restitutions,” Derrida revisits Artaud and his attempt to expel all representation from art. Derrida agrees with Artaud in that restitutions superimpose external subjects into a work of art that form a barrier between the viewer and the work. But he diverges from Artaud’s call for the incorporation of the sensory in performance to rid it of representation. While Artaud believes “there can be theater only for the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry which occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols,”[8] Derrida maintains that such restitutions are inevitable in encounters with art. In this sense, even Balinese theater where gestures are “realized symbols,” they are symbols nonetheless.

The closeness of the shoes Heidegger describes to the earth, Derrida’s description of the movement of the laces in and out of the frame, and the dirt and sticks piled on and in Kiefer’s canvases, all serve to expose the distinction and bridge the gap thus created between surface and content, between the reference and its referent, between representation and reality. Derrida ends on an optimistic note when he embraces the cyclical movement of representation, and continues the play between world and earth, between original and copy. “It’s just gone. It’s coming round again. It’s just gone again,” read the last lines of “Restitutions.” In the Derridian sense, there is no solid ground to rest the work of art upon, it supports itself through the play of representation.

[4] Lauterwein, 228. [5] Artaud, 61. [6] Danto, 241. [7] Derrida 1987, 381. [8] Artaud, 27-8.

Attention:

Just thought I should add, that Rachael just ended our debate about whether our mission statement "felt complete" with "This is so post modern!" Her thesis presentation on Derrida will be held tomorrow at 3:15 in the Max Kade theater.

From Matt: I might puke if we continue to talk.

John's 'stache and more

Production Weekend

It's production weekend for The Cipher and shockingly early to have our copy editors plugged into their ipods in the next room. Maybe it was the freak (but not so freak for Colorado ) April snow storm that kept our heads in the game, or the mid afternoon wine. Even better, a long-due intervention kept Jenny away from 7-11, which, in turn, kept us all from eating a lunch and dinner of Doritos.
Maybe our relegation of snack duty to Matt the Foodie (where are my prociuto wrapped portabellos!) made for better brain food after all.
So, we're taking some time to work on our shaky-at-best mission statement. The main problem with our old mission statement was that it read like a Victorian treatise (complete with creative word choice like "reportage" in lieu of "reporting".)

While John wanted to add in a few more metaphors and start it with the phrase ("since the beginning of time, magazines have existed to investigate, explore and delve into"...just kidding, John), my move to begin it with "The Cipher strives not to bore the reader" was also summarily rejected. We now have a few drafts and we could use all the input we can get.

"The Cipher is a nonfiction magazine that emphasizes journalistic writing. It features profiles, opinions, and investigations of social politics, arts, culture, and current events. The Cipher comes forth from and through Colorado College, but it does not cover Colorado College exclusively. The magazine investigates matters affecting the college, Colorado Springs, this nation, and the world, and strives to be a venue for creative, critical perspectives. The Cipher embraces pluralities within its pages and endeavors to meet the reader’s expectations for engaging and meaningful discourse."


"The Cipher is a nonfiction magazine that emphasizes journalistic writing. It endeavors to engage the reader in meaningful discourse. The Cipher comes out of Colorado College, but it does not cover Colorado College exclusively. The magazine investigates matters affecting the college, Colorado Springs, this nation, and the world, and strives to be a venue for creative, critical perspectives. The Cipher embraces pluralities within its pages."

Among other issues we would like you, our new-but-already-totally-addicted readers', advice on:

What do you think of our vote on the theme of "Firsts" over "Tradition" for next issue's theme? I'm having second thoughts!
Possible themes for next years issues?
Do you think John is sporting a mustache ironically?
Or, alternatively, is there such a thing as unconscious irony?