Astrid van Nimwegen Trimester1-Draft

(this is a draft of a draft of a draft….?)

How the process becomes the work

‘The shifting of content within the medium’ : film versus video – Astrid van Nimwegen 21/11/2011

Since my medium became film instead of video I created more awareness of the medium itself.

My concept was about existentialism and mostly I used to register a movement through a certain timeline. This involves body/physical on the one hand and mind/psychological on the other hand, an equal synthesis of those two exposes a certain essence/soul/meaning or at least it questions the meaning of our existence and by this the viewers existence is mirrored and he is pushed to remember things he already know but wasn’t aware of anymore.

I only used video as ‘a tool to register’, by using 16mm film and expanding my knowledge of the history of the medium it is clearer to me how film in essence is made. I’m getting more grip on the process and I am more conscious about the medium. Because film has a physical and concrete ‘body’ it seems that the content is shifting now. Time is now literally, physical on the filmstrip itself, instead of present in the action in front of the videocamera.

The meaning of life is not in life itself but in living (experience) life: The meaning of my work is not in the work itself but in the process of making.

The things themselves have no consciousness; humans give things consciousness. By perception and interpretation.

‘Through our way of living and by experiencing reality, every one of us is constantly creating. The only quality of the artist is that he is aware of this and exemplifies it in the context of art, with respect for the artistic conventions he confirms to.’ (Pierre Bismuth 1963)

University of California Press, 1996 - 258 pagina's As the creator of "Happenings" and "Environments," Allan Kaprow is the prince and prophet of all we call performance art today. He is also known for having written some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential essays of his generation. From "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" in 1958 to "The Meaning of Life" in 1990, Kaprow has conducted a sustained philosophical inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life, and thus into the nature of meaning itself. With the publication of this book, twenty-three of Kaprow's most significant essays are brought together in one volume for the first time. Kaprow charts his own evolution as an artist and also comments on contemporaneous developments in the arts. From the modernist avant-garde of the fifties to the current postmodernfin de siegrave;cle, Kaprow has written about--and from within--the shifting, blurring boundaries of genre, media, culture, and experience. Edited and introduced by critic Jeff Kelley, these essays bring into crisp focus the thinking of one of the most influential figures in the varied landscape of American art since the late 1950s.