J'ai rêvé New York

New York is booked for beginning of December. MoMA has some goodies: Abstract Expressionist New York (I'm excited for this, but Pollock's always at MoMa no?); On to Pop (ditto, and right on the heels of the big Lichtenstein sale!), and two photo shows- one all female. That show, aptly titled Pictures By Women: A History of Modern Photography, is one I'm particularly excited about since, for one, I've been working more and more with photography and two, my research background has a lot to do with my interests in feminist theory. (Image above is from the exhibited slide installation by Lisa Oppenheim).

What I'm really excited to see though from this exhibition is the inimitable Yoko Ono and George Maciunas' Fluxus bum wallpaper known as Bottoms (1973). The repeated still making up the wallpaper was taken from Yoko Ono's film (from '67), featuring close up bums including that of Carolee Schneeman's, of the same name. It's only about 6 min if you feel like watching.


Yoko Ono has been recorded as saying it was really just some sort of collective mooning at the absurd, but the film corresponds to a period in which technology and art were increasingly employed by Fluxartists as a means of exploring the perceptual experience. In her theoretical text on American fluxarts, Hannah Higgins identified the movement’s characteristic explorations of vision through an analysis of three Fluxartworks: John Cavanaugh’s film Flicker (1966), Yoko Ono’s film Eyeblink (1966), and Daniel Spoerri and Francois Dufrene’s retina-piercing spectacles Optique Moderne (1963). Each- as the titles indicate- is concerned with seeing, perception and/or the visual apparatus; however, the films in particular link how we see with how we move and thereby create a multi-sensory experience. Higgins describes how both Cavanaugh’s Flicker and Yoko Ono’s Eyeblink induce the viewer into a blinking frenzy and expose the limitations of both the “visible (what is seen in the world) and the optical (how humans see these things.)” Bottoms, like Eyeblink and from the same period, really focuses on the tension between the role of the camera and the ways in which we see. While it doesn't produce that same bananas-blinking, the way in which the subjects walk/move away from the camera's viewpoint challenges its typical function to frame the subject and structure space- things that became typical of structural film (I don't think Yoko's part of Sitney's thing, but I think there are a few similarities that can be teased out). Below is an image of a version of Optique Moderne, not quite as good, but by Daniel Spoerri from the same period...