Saint Mary's College Of California

Talking Walls Dialogue: Ingrid and Plato, Interactive Still Lives, Knit One, Swim Two

Interactive art

In conjunction with the January 2000 course:

"On Line, On Fire, Art at the Beginning/End of the Millennium"

Professor Joan U. Halprin

1. Ingrid Bachmann, exhibition at Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary's College, Moraga, California: Fluid Exchanges and Twitching Automata: Three Interactive Installations, 12 January - 5 March 2000. Brief biography and bibliography
2. Symposium: Hard Talk on Soft Porn: Revisiting the Masters. Tuesday, January 25, 3-5 P.M. with artist Barbara Ravizza, in the Br. Kyran Multi-Media Room (adjacent to Hearst Art Gallery). Brief biography.

I. Ingrid Bachmann, Fluid Exchanges and Twitching Automata: Three Interactive Installations.

Hearst Art Gallery opens the year 2000 with three interactive installations by new media artist Ingrid Bachmann, whose work relates to multiple aspects of Saint Mary's curriculum, from Plato's dialogues to computer science, physics and studio art. Students in the January Term class, "On Line, On Fire, Art at the Beginning/End of the Millennium," will have the opportunity to help install the exhibition. The Montréal-based artist will also be available to other students wishing to discuss their work with her.

On Tuesday, January 11, Bachmann will give a public lecture, "Fluid Exchanges and Twitching Automata: Three Interactive Installations," at 7:30 PM in the Soda Center, a preview of the exhibition.

Ingrid Bachmann combines new media with traditional art practices and explores shifting relationships between artist, audience, and artifact. "Interactive art implies a certain trust between the artist and the participant," she remarks.

In the installation, Talking Walls: Dialogue, Ingrid and Plato, she turns a gallery room into a giant 3-D blackboard where she responds with drawings and texts to certain utterances in Plato's dialogues, then leaves erasers, chalk, a bicycle and ladders so that the public can continue the dialogue.

Playing with the Socratic method while transgressing boundaries of time, gender, and social divisions, Bachmann's Dialogue sheds new light on old questions:

• If "Life is short but Art is long," how does the ephemeral nature of this work challenge the notion of the art object as a fixed and immutable commodity?
• How does the medium (schoolroom tools) limit or liberate ways of knowing?
• Do the images in the darkened room suggest, like Plato's Cave, that human insights are but faint reflections of a transcendent Reality? Or do Bachmann's interactive dialogues point to something quite different?

Talking Walls: Dialogue, Ingrid and Plato
	The New Gallery, Calgary, Canada, 1992

• In the installation, Knit One, Swim Two, two 14-foot steel knitting needles can be manipulated by the viewer:

  

  Photo credit James Prinz
• On the other side of a gallery wall, viewers see clear cylinders of water moving up and down; these are weights activated by the motion of the knitting needles:
  Gallery 2, Chicago, 1996
• The weights' movements are tracked by a sensor system, fed into a computer and transformed into an image on a monitor in front of the knitting needles:

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The "knitted image" raises questions, as does a third installation, where Bachmann has exquisitely copied and modified seventeenth-century Dutch floral paintings:

• What senses other than vision tell us what we think we know?
• How do new technologies alter our perceptions and our behavior?
• To what extent is a participant "disembodied" while investigating Virtual Reality or traveling on the Information Highway?

Bachmann explains the origin of her Interactive Still Lifes:

I am simultaneously repelled and seduced by 17th century Dutch still life painting, in particular the flower paintings. It is as if by capturing every detail through a precise realism, one could possess and consume the thing represented This desire to possess through mimesis is deeply rooted in the Western philosophical tradition. It is also present in the mimetic impetus behind new digital technologies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In copying fragments of the still lifes, I worked as the Dutch artists did, segment by segment. This reminded me of the way I create images on the computer, pixel by pixel. I think there is a link between the aims and intents of Dutch 17th century painting and the rhetoric around digital technologies, particularly in discussions around Virtual Reality. For example, the primacy of the visual and the Dutch artists' use of new devices, such as the microscope and Drebbel's Camera Obscura are similar to the technological drive behind new media art.

Though informed by the Dutch genre of still life, these Interactive Still Lives engage all the viewer's senses, as she or he approaches and manipulates elements of the work Not only sight but sound, smell, and touch are stimulated In combining what has been called "high art" with hand technologies, these works invest the digital and electronic with the sensory and intellectual richness of painting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Students in the class, "On Line, On Fire, Art at the Beginning/End of the Millennium" will operate a virtual chatroom during the last part of January, discussing viewers' comments and reactions to Bachmann's work and making a visual record of changes in the installation, Talking Walls.

Brief biography: Ingrid Bachmann is an Ontario-born new media artist working on the front-lines of experimental art and emerging technologies. She has received critical acclaim for interactive installations that have been featured in group and solo shows throughout the United States and Canada.

As a curator and writer, Bachman continues to interrogate the interface between what she calls "hand and high technologies," combining her training in the fiber arts with her interest in digital and virtual innovations.

A gifted instructor, Bachman has taught at several institutions, including Vermont College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received the Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is currently on the faculty of Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.

Short Bibliography:
--Bachmann, Ingrid and R. Scheuling, eds., Material Matters. Toronto: YYZ Books, 1999. Essay by Bachmann, "Material and the Promise of the Immaterial."
--Bachmann, Ingrid, So, To Speak, J.-P. Gilbert, S. Gilbert, L. Johnstone, eds., Montreal Artextes Editions, 1999.
--Bachmann, Ingrid, "Peacocks and Paradise," essay in Bioapparatus, Banff. The Walter Phillips Gallery, 1992.

Reviews (selected):
--Plant, Sadie, "The Good, the Bad, and the Productive," Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics, Ine Gever & J. van Heswijk, eds., Nijmejen, Holland: SUN, 1997.
--Oades, Lorraine, "Ingrid Bachmann: A Portrait in Three Parts," FUSE magazine, vol. 20,no.3,1997.
--Anderson, Elizabeth, "The Presence of Touch," Parachute magazine, Spring 1997.
--Ferris, Alison, "The Presence of Touch," Interrobang, vol. 2, no. 2, 1996.
--Sawchuk, Kim, "Barbara Layne and Ingrid Bachman," Parachute magazine, Summer 1996.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

II. Symposium: Hard Talk on Soft Porn: Revisiting the Masters

Tuesday, January 25, 3-5 P.M. Br. Kyran Multi-Media Room (adjacent to Hearst Art Gallery), Saint Mary's College, Moraga, CA.

Bay Area artist Barbara Ravizza will join students from the class, "On Line, On Fire: Art at the Beginning/End of the Millennium," in a critical and historical discussion of her mixed-media work, Conversation Piece, Picnic on the Grass, based on Manet's well-known Luncheon on the Grass.

Ravizza's pastel-collage, which is part of the Hearst Art Gallery's permanent collection, will be exhibited during January-March 2000 in the college's library, Saint Albert Hall.

With fierce wit and technical grace, Ravizza appropriates well-known icons such as Manet's Luncheon on the Grass or Grant Wood's American Gothic, rendered in luminous pastel on a black background.

Conversation Piece # 8 "American Gothic" after Grant Wood 40" x 32" collage, 1998

We recognize the source of the image instantly, but Ravizza's icons are different in that they refuse to remain silent. Framing each piece with the flotsam of our lives -- discount coupons, off-hand remarks, unpaid bills -- she asks that we intuit associations between the objects and the texts in her Conversation Pieces, teaching us to find meaning in the chaos of our evolving culture. Her sense of humor guides us through the bleakest scenes, such Masaccio's fifteenth-century Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.

Conversation Piece # 13 "Expulsion from the Garden" after Masaccio 40" x 32" collage, 1998

"Win a Week in Paradise!" her text beckons. "Order your fruit of the month now, and automatically be eligible! A tempting stay in one of the world's most delightful gardens... Call 1-800 SERPENT."

It is not immediately clear whether Ravizza found or created the text of this "come-on." Mocking the line between fact and fiction, she points out that all images, from fifteenth century painting to current advertising, are easily mistaken for reality itself.

Other "Conversation Pieces" have a lot to say about female identity and the social forces that both construct and constrict. Such is the case in Picnic on the Grass, after a painting by Edouard Manet that caused a scandal when Manet exhibited it in Paris in 1862.

Manet, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, oil painting, 1862 Orsay Museum, Paris

To enlarge, click on nude

Manet's painting was inspired in part by an Italian Renaissance painting believed to be by Giorgione (though often attributed to Titien), which hangs in the Louvre:

To enlarge, click on nude

Giorgione, Concert champêtre oil painting, 41.4" x 53.5" sixteenth-century Louvre

The Symposium will explore this and other sources of Ravizza. The Conversation Pieces "were so named," Ravizza explains, "because in creating these works, I held imaginary conversations with the artists of the classical pieces and with their subjects. The woman in Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe proclaimed to me that since she had been sitting in the nude for 133 years, it was time the two men had their turn."

Barbara Ravizza Conversation Piece # 5 "Picnic on the Grass" 41" x 57", collage, 1997 Hearst Art Gallery collection

To enlarge, click on nude

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Close observation of this collage leads to other inquiries into contemporary culture and the history of art, to be discussed during Hard Talk on Soft Porn. Barbara Ravizza will join with Saint Mary's students on January 25 to engage the audience in the surprising and often challenging dialogues staged in her work.

Brief biography: Barbara Ravizza is a West Coast artist who escapes easy classification. Her charcoal drawings on velum, exhibited at the Cecile Moochnek Gallery in 1996, are architectonic, subtle, ethereal. Since spring of 1997, her Conversation Pieces, shown at the Jernigan-Wicker Gallery in San Francisco, have combined astonishingly adroit renditions of classic artworks with personal comments and objects--fragments of our consumer culture that jolt the viewer into a new awareness of the role of art in contemporary life.

Having studied classical drawing and painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Ravizza earned her degree in Graphics and Photography from San Jose Sate University in 1964. She subsequently took courses in art history from Stanford University, as well as courses in pre-medical anatomy, painting and drawing from Cañada College.

Visit www.nextmonet.com to see more of her work.

The Hearst Art Gallery is accredited by the American Association of Museums. The Gallery is open to the public on Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. A $1 admission donation is requested. For membership information, or to schedule a group tour, please call 925/631-3479.