Gloria Sutton | Northeastern University (original) (raw)

Papers by Gloria Sutton

This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaki... more This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and video-maker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France. While the workshop videos are in colour and the camera was not required to remain static, Ehmann and Farocki’s students were tasked with honouring the original Lumière film’s basic parameters of theme and style. The fascinating result is a collection of more than 550 short videos that have appeared in international exhibitions and on an open-access website, offering the widest possible audience the opportunity to ponder contemporary labour in multiple contexts around the world.

Labour in a Single Shot, 2021

Mainframe Experimentalism

"AMAZEMENT PARK: Stan, Sara, and Johannes VanDerBeek was a yearlong project that combined th... more "AMAZEMENT PARK: Stan, Sara, and Johannes VanDerBeek was a yearlong project that combined the work of avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek with the work of his children, Sara (b. 1976) and Johannes (b. 1982). Taking inspiration from Stan VanDerBeek’s dream exhibition, Amazement Park was initially presented as an experimental, studio-like gallery at the Tang Teaching Museum. The evolving nature of the project mirrors the spirit of their work, which shares common interest in recombination and collage, and ephemeral materials and architectural forms.." -- Publisher's website.

Afterimage, Mar 1, 2002

A meta-theme Greene identifies is that conceived of as "systems of innovation," where n... more A meta-theme Greene identifies is that conceived of as "systems of innovation," where new media are often read as the compilation of discrete units reducible to finite forms. A parallel operation occurs in the race to historicize new media art as a specific aesthetic medium situated at the end of a sequence of designated art forms or "movements." In this version, net.art is the latest installment within a positivist history built on the seamless accretion of film and video technology, which conflates artistic movements with advances in image production. This linear reading traces the evolution of the camera and collapses, to take one example, Eadweard Muybridge's photographic motion studies into time-based forms such as avant-garde cinema and video art, and it inaccurately interprets net.art as a cohesive category of art that simply produces images with a computer rather than a camera. A problem with this materialist approach is that the computer and its screen falsely stand in as a mode of representation or depiction. Unlike the camera (still, film, video, digital or Web), image production is not the exclusive or even main operation of the computer. As Manovich so thoroughly relays, its the interface. This fact goes unrecognized by the plethora of chronological surveys of media art that do not differentiate between work that is edited, calculated, but in the end, out put by the computer and art work that exists in various forms within the network that is made accessible via the computer. The resulting narrative has nothing to do with art, Instead it becomes a history of the screen or a timeline of the pixel. Since the emphasis is always on the end product, not the process, the assumption is that art is located in the hardware, not the software. This line of reasoning also propagates the artist/engineer dichotomy inflating the myth of technomastery that Greene questions. My guess is that we will have to wait for the publication of Manovich's work on "Info Aesthetics" before the significance of projects like Mongrel's LINKER will be fully recognized. As contemporary art becomes interdependent on software expertise, artists are either adopting highly marketable skills (through any of the MFA programs that have recently added digital arts or net.art as a degree focus) or sub-contracting out the labor. Under the material conditions that define and often determine artistic production, new media art cannot be seen as separate or distinguishable from the cultural mechanisms in which the issues of labor and art production are negotiated. So the reliance on "systems of innovation," while defunct in application, are perpetuated because they provide a structure for art institutions. Art museums in particular have an investment in the clear differentiation between the fine artist and the commercial programmer even though within the field of new media art, they are often one and the same. …

Afterimage, May 1, 2002

GLORIA SUTTON is in the Ph.D. program of the Department of Art History at UCLA and has been on th... more GLORIA SUTTON is in the Ph.D. program of the Department of Art History at UCLA and has been on the Board of Directors of Rhizome.org since 1998. If the discourse on new media art was condensed into a single body and hooked up to a monitor to get a read of its vitals, two sharply different lines would zip across the screen. One would be a rapid succession of peaks and valleys reflecting the frenetic activity of artists and curators generating an exponentially growing number of exhibitions, festivals and catalogs devoted to new media art that has largely determined the parameters of this burgeoning field. If the second line recorded the amount of sustained critical analysis brought to bear on new media art by historians and critics, it would practically flat line across the screen setting off a shrill, incessant alarm. [pi] While these two lines rarely intersect, one point of convergence is the issue of digital preservation. Within museums, libraries, private collections and universities this has almost exclusively meant using scanning devices and database software to render existing artworks from a variety of distinct media (painting, sculpture, photography) into digital forms in order to extend the works' accessibility in terms of research, sales or instruction. The prevailing organization system for this activity is still ordered according to a typology of medium, with the intention that the digital database will merely mimic the analog system of classification. And while the efficacy of relying or insisting on a specific medium as a qualifier for art has been repeatedly contested, no other typology has come to replace this system. [pi] Alternative models are being discussed within a closed circuit of select museums and organizations that focus on new media and net art. Perhaps what is most productive about the recent institutionalization of these practices is that their inherently ephemeral qualities may destabilize the current system of classification. The complications that arise from commissioning, exhibiting or collecting media formats and software that are subject to obsolescence at a relatively rapid rate have demanded that institutions define artwork independently from medium. Two significant models are found in the Guggenheim's Variable Media Initiative (http://www.guggenheim.org/variablemedia/) and Rhizome.org's ArtBase (http://rhizome.org/artbase/). [pi] The Variable Media Initiative was developed by a consortium of Guggenheim staff and outside consultants and is built around case studies ranging from Robert Morris's performance "Site" (1964) to Mark Napier's web-based "Net Flag" (2001). Each artwork Is analyzed in terms of "behaviors," identified as "performed, interactive, networked or encoded," intrinsic to the piece. …

Afterimage, 1995

On December 4, 1994, the new Republican Congressional leadership via the House Republican Confere... more On December 4, 1994, the new Republican Congressional leadership via the House Republican Conference eliminated all Legislative Service OrganizatiOns (LSOs). Among the House services eliminated were all congressional caucuses including the minority and women's caucuses, and in particular, the Congressional Arts Caucus. Like all congressional caucuses, the Arts Caucus, established in 1981, served as a research pool and disseminated technical information on legislation. The Caucus did not engage in direct lobbying for certain legislation, but rather Arts Caucus staff monitored pending legislation that affects broadcasting, recording and film industries as well as government arts programs. The Arts Caucus, one of the largest caucuses with more than 260 bipartisan members, was the only clearing house in Congress for information on cultural issues spanning education, international trade, copyright, tax, and federal cultural agencies and institutions. Funding for the Congressional Arts Caucus came directly out of dues paid by members of both the House and Senate from their discretionary research and office supplies fund. In return, members received updates, reports and status checks on pending legislation. Congressional members received assistance from the Arts Caucus in preparing testimony for committees, formulating speeches, answering related correspondence from constituents, and responding to direct mail campaigns often targeted from citizen's groups. For the past 14 years, the Arts Caucus has also organized a successful Congressional High School Art Competition in conjunction with state art museums. The 1995 competition, which would have included works by tens of thousands of students from across the nation, has been eliminated with the Republican Conference's decision on caucuses. U.S. Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) and U.S. Senator James M. Jeffords (R-VT), Chair and Vice Chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, denounced the elimination of LSOs as an effort to limit the flow of information on important cultural issues in Congress. In a recent statement Jeffords said, "This doesn't have anything to do with shrinking the size of government. It has to do with options for getting information outside the committee system." Slaughter added, "The more you take away informational resources within the House, the more Congress will be dependent solely on the position promulgated by outside interests who often deliberately distort the facts for their own gain." She continued by stating, "At a time when the Caucus has demonstrated how the arts play a role in community revitalization, the education of our children as well as our balance of trade, this critical informational arm is being cut off." According to a press release from the House Republican Conference, part of the rationale behind eliminating caucuses is to reduce government spending. …

한국영상학회 논문집, 2002

원문정보. ...

Atem / Breath

As part of their distinct, and manifestly influential bodies of work, artists Hans Haacke (b. 193... more As part of their distinct, and manifestly influential bodies of work, artists Hans Haacke (b. 1936) and Lygia Clark (1920-1988), produced indelible artworks that engendered a fragile balance between air, the inorganic materials used to suspend or generate it, and the human bodies that impacted it. These works modeled the precarious relationship humans have with their environments: natural, technological, biological and social. Haacke's and Clarke's early investment in aligning kinetic processes alongside organic/biological and human/social ones presents an integrated system of transference-what can be thought of as a reciprocity between bodies of knowledge production and bodies breathing in real time and in real space. Installed in their retrospective exhibitions in New York-Clark's The Abandonment of Art at the Museum of Modern Art (2014) and Haacke's All Connected at the New Museum (2019)-these air art works first produced in the 1960s were re-staged against a more contemporary socio-political backdrop marked by the continued struggle for social justice reform stemming from the civil rights movements that defined the period of their initial making. Examined together here, selected works by Haacke and Clark pivot on notions of reflexivity and complicity-reanimating our understanding of the interconnectedness of visual art and cultural life in a manner that draws our attention to the politics of breath within contemporary art.

The Art Bulletin, 2013

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California ... more eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

Author(s): Fischl, Eric; Assmann, Jan; Bull, Malcolm; English, Darby; Jordanova, Ludmilla; Miller... more Author(s): Fischl, Eric; Assmann, Jan; Bull, Malcolm; English, Darby; Jordanova, Ludmilla; Miller, Mary; Nelson, Steven; Sinha, Ajay; Sutton, Gloria; Walczak, Gerrit; Wellbery, David E

not retreat into established binaries of maker and receiver or subject and object. Doing so argua... more not retreat into established binaries of maker and receiver or subject and object. Doing so arguably reorients the very markers by which we define collective and singular identity. In this manner, Mauss's murals eschew the desultory conversation on the immersive that is routinely recirculated about architecturally scaled images within the field of contemporary art.

Labour in a Single Shot, 2021

Mainframe Experimentalism

Afterimage, Mar 1, 2002

Afterimage, May 1, 2002

Afterimage, 1995

한국영상학회 논문집, 2002

원문정보. ...

Atem / Breath

The Art Bulletin, 2013

Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirrors edited by Mika Yoshitake Hirshhorn Museum and Prestel Press, 2017

A key premise to this new scholarship on Yayoi Kusama is the argument that the full spectrum of t... more A key premise to this new scholarship on Yayoi Kusama is the argument that the full spectrum of the artist’s polymath thinking and output resides between the rhetorical space between enactment and depiction. This close reading of her techniques—advanced within the multiple iterations of her Infinity Mirror Rooms as well as her lesser-known media art projects from the mid-1960s (multisensory installations that often used sound and light projections in an experimental and performative manner to engage with audiences)—suggests that visual art’s adaption of the systems theories ushered in by cybernetics during this same period offers a new contextual backdrop against which Kusama’s diverse and prolific art practice can be read anew. Doing so helps affirm how Kusama’s singular career presciently signaled key shifts from information to social media.

Rosa Barba The Color Out of Space, 2015

Olafur Eliasson Reality Projector, 2018

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today edited by Eva Respini, 2018

The essay critiques the term Post-internet art as capacious reference to the ways that experienti... more The essay critiques the term Post-internet art as capacious reference to the ways that experiential, multisensory installations treat images as inherently variable and reproducible, and—in the most benign cases—as mutable works, equally at home in the space of the museum or on a webpage. In contrast, however, this essay argues that Barry, Birnbaum, Hershman Leeson, Scher’s and other post-internet art antecedents introduced in the 1990s suggest new affinities with what can be thought of as other perceptual systems and subjectivities. In doing so, their multimodal and multiplatform artworks offer a feminist methodology for contemporary art history that contests and re-inscribes existing modernist predecessors.