Bird Folklore

OWL
A bird with a poor reputation despite being known for being extremely wise hence the expression being a 'wise old owl'. Perhaps this stems from the fact that the owl leads a nocturnal and solitary existence and that the night has long been associated with the time when darker forces and negative energies are present. To see one by day is unlucky and to experience one flying around the house at night signals that death is present, which is thought to stem back to Roman times when the historian 'Pliny' in AD 77 was quoted as saying the bird was 'most execrable and accursed' and always brought bad news. Should an owl brush its wings against a window pain or be seen perching for a considerable length of time on a roof then it is traditionally believed that illness and even death is present within. To look into an owl's nest is reputed to leave the observer with a sad and morose soul. According to an old Welsh tradition if you hear an owl hooting amongst a densely built up area then a female in the locality is said to have just lost her virginity! To hear the hoot of the owl when pregnant, it is traditionally believed in France, means that the baby will be a girl. In Germany if one is heard as a child is being born then the life will be an unhappy one. In the Southern states of America an old traditional rhyme tells of the cry of the owl:

'When you hear the screech owl, honey, in the sweet gum tree,
It's a sign as sure as you're born a death is bound to be;
Unless you put the shovel in the fire mighty quick,
For to conjure that old screech owl, take care the one that's sick.'

A dead owl has served many purposes including mixing some of the flesh with boar's grease as an ointment to ease the pain of gout. Owl broth was once used to feed children to avoid whooping cough according to British tradition, perhaps because the owl itself never suffered in pain when making a similar sound. The eggs were also once thought to help prevent epilepsy, bad sight (for obvious reasons) and more amusingly to bring drunks back to their senses.

ROBIN
Legend has it that the robin received its red breast from trying to remove the bloody thorns from Christ's head at the Crucifixion, with a small drop of His blood falling on the bird and injuring itself in the process:

'A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.'
Extract taken from 'Auguries of Innocence' : William Blake

It is also believed traditionally that the robin received its red feathers as it was taking water into Hell for the burning sinners.

Said to be extremely unlucky to kill this bird. The hand that does so will continue to shake thereafter. Traditionally the Irish believe that a large lump will appear on the right hand if you kill one, and in Yorkshire if the person owns cows then the milk will become blood colored. It is a reputed fact that whatever you do to a robin you will suffer the same tragedy. Breaking the eggs will result in something valuable of your own being broken. Flying in through an open window or tapping on the window is a sign of death being present. To see a robin sheltering in the branches of a tree indicates that rain is on the way & to see one chirping on an open branch indicates that fine weather is imminent. Some believe that the robin will not be chased by a cat. You should make a wish when seeing the first robin of the season, making sure that you are quick as if the bird flies away then no good luck will be present for the next twelve months.

Ready for Cat and Parrot Shoot on Sunday and New Prints

I Just Noticed Saltines are Button-Tufted

Bu Hua

WebSites

http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?cat=7

www.artshow.com

Electronics Resource, http://www.rrrf.org/

Harry Smith

"You start out with old child ballads and you start out with all kinds of mystical situations and supernatural being, and very frightening situations that are often done for comic effect. And then you keep going and you begin to get in to real historical events" From The Old Weird America, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.

Why Video?

Quotes below are from David Dunn and Woody Vesulka's "Digital Space: A Summary" Unquoted text is my own.

Video is about immediacy. It is a time based medium where you receive real-time feedback of the end result. You can experiment quickly, see the results, keep the footage, or try again. You can manipulate the signal as is it recorded-through a Time Based Corrector, Video Buffer, or other equipment while the image is being created.

Woody Vesulka states "The experience of cinema informs us that the compositional decisions of editing are constrained by a syntatic set which results in a concept of narrative negotiable with an audience on the terms of the author...the abandonment of a traditional syntactic set is essential within digital space since its organization is no longer the exclusive domain of the author....There has been a general tendency to use the computer as a tool to emulate traditional art genre or extend formal principles of emulation and organization and structure."

Why use video instead of cinema? Vesulka asks the video artist/ computer artist to consider the tools they are using, and what they offer to the experience of the piece. Many apply content to the medium, instead of using the medium to inform content.

"...the characteristics of digital space which imply new structural possibilities for art are those of random access, interaction between sensory modes within the numerical code, and a re-definition of the author's role towards the specification of a world for potential exploration."

Wegman

From "Wegman's Video: Funny Instead of Formal", Kim Levin, 1982, Wegman's World, catalogue for Walker Art Center Exhibition, Minneapolis, Dec 5, 1982 to Jan 16 1983, article reprinted in the DVD book from "William Wegman Video Works, 1970-1999"

"Wegman anthropomorphizes his dog, his torso, his work lamps, They all acquire human characteristics and do human things--the sort of things a child might imagine. As if Wegman, starting with nothing but his bare room and his blank screen, has decided to play let's pretend, aimlessly amusing himself out of pure boredom... Boredom was the given of video art in those years; it wasn't supposed to be enjoyable. That was what distinguished it from real TV. "

"Wegman's humor has a large quotient of frustration in it. His wonderfully puzzling nonsense conveys and hides a great deal of psychological sense."

"The implications of an art that is funny instead of formal are more complex than simply a switch of emphasis toward psychological content (and viewer response) and away from structural form. "Formal" --whether in the sense of formality or formalism--and "funny" have something in common: both require detachment, both take the long view. Both can be means of distancing, disengaging mind, hand, or eye from the immediate involvements of reality, subjectivity and the world of appearances. Slipping on a banana peel isn't funny when you're involved. In Wegman's very informal work, humor may well be a substitute for formalism, shifting our attention from subject to object. For as he humanized his dog and animates inanimate objects, he also reverses the process, depersonalizing himself, impersonating defective patterns of behavior--using himself as a comic object. "

"During the 1970's this aesthetic of the amateur sprang up in the real world as well as in art. Saturated with specialists of all sorts, with slick technology as well as sleek art, and disillusioned by the return of worldly events, people--and artists-- began wanting to expose flaws, foibles, weaknesses and failings: they wanted to see human imperfections. They began to cherish the defects in homemade things... The 70s can be seen as a criticism of the optimistic 60s: it presented antidotes. It was a reformation as well as a rebellion: the do-it-yourself decade.... Contrast Nam Jun Paik's video art of the e60s with Wegman's of the 70s. It's state-of-the-art versus seat-of-the-pants."

"[Wegman's] video works are like his doodled pencil drawings--quick easy notes with instant results, casually testing what lies along the path of least resistance. By using video unabashedly as do-it-yourself TV, he anticipated the advent of cable TV coming into the home with an aw shucks low budget mentality. "

"Wegman's idiosyncratic humor... is off-center, vaudevillian, droll rather than witty, based on incompetence rather than skill in repartee. It's a reverse of the Duschampian wit, for as William Hazlitt once said, wit is the product of fancy while humor is the growth of accident... Wegman's humor works in the realm of discrepancy--with substitutions, reversals, accidents, and shifts."

"Against the cerebral humor of Bruce Nauman's body-as-sculpture puns or John Baldessari's artist-as-wise-man parables, Wegman acted the buffoon. Into a milieu of narcissistic performance video, Wegman brought his dog."

Making the Costumes

I want to display these costumes in conjunction with the video. I'm almost through the silver jumpsuit. The boy clown will be wearing this gold and red polka-dot fabric. Now I need to make a bird-arm cozy and the PUMA socks have to come in from Amazon and I'm ready to shoot.

We watched Global Groove tonight in Junior Video. Paik's musical training is obvious in the way that he live-mixes this piece. The use of dancers in unitards dancing to pop music, mixed with global cultures is coming from a man who experienced global culture and predicted its future (some form of the Internet/Information Super Highway) long before anyone else saw it coming. He talking about a concept of television where the TV guide is as thick as the Manhattan phonebook and every artist has his own channel--this was when there were only 4 channels on the TV and no one could access their own portable video-making equipment. Incredible foresight. The timing of the composition of Global Grooves is nuanced. I have to confess, my favorite moment is when he says "this is interactive TV", and there is a topless lady barely visible dancing on the screen. Brilliant.

I'm trying to pull together threads of content about American folklore and folkcraft (including but not limited to mechanics, animatrons, and computer media), American folksong, remembered histories, phantasmagoria and machines, possibly touching on the occult. I'm honing in on Harry Smith as someone who researched the occult and American folksong in parallel (and made his own time-based work). I've ordered through interlibrary loan 2 books-- Think of the Self Speaking and American Magus Harry Smith. I'm also delving back in to Zoe Beloff's writings to see the research from which her work is coming. Is it true that American artists are reluctant to address history and particularly American History?

Rep Rap Research Foundation

http://www.rrrf.org/

Great Electronics Resource

#354

Workin on Stuff and Thinking about Neptune Beach

Showing