The Happening

..no, this Happening is not M Night Shyamalan's apocalyptic film about an infectious pandemic of a suicidal neurotoxin.

The Happenings I speak of is a type of performance art event that started sometime in the late 50's. What happens in a Happening (I enjoy being redundant. sort of) is that a crowd of people congregate at a specified location and perform either planned or improvised actions. The locations and actions always changes. Happenings were created to put an emphasis on action as art; According to the Museum of Contemporary Art website: "action is extracted from the environment, replacing the traditional art object with a performative gesture rooted in the movements of everyday life".

The really cool thing about a Happening is that many, many people participate so that at any given time, there is always an action taking place - even if someone needs to take a bathroom break. I really enjoy how interactive it is as the experience changes with each participant and their specified action and the viewer of the participant's action.

Just to give an example of how trendy a Happening was back in the 50's - Wikipedia stated that: "In the later sixties, perhaps due to the depiction in films of hippie culture, the term was used much less specifically to mean any gathering of interest, from a pool hall meetup or a jamming of a few young people to a beer blast or fancy formal party."



I'll think between the lines whenever I ask people, "What's Happening?".

Great Success

So a couple of weeks ago on a particular uninspiring night after having a late dinner at a noodle place with my friend Chris, we decided to check out a local tattoo shop. It was a small shop, glowing with neon purple "OPEN" and lights - this was a really obscure shop that was was tucked away behind a large food mall, pretty much exiled to the corner.

We walked in when the store was closed (yes, the neon "OPEN" signs were rather deceiving). There were other similar aged people and we somehow got engaged in their discussion. (Or rather, it was more like a lecture by this one tattooist named Andy.) He was medium built, medium height, medium age, etc. But this Andy didn't have as average thoughts about art. He had big ideas to share. He showed us a youtube video called Art Fusion Experiment.

The premise of Art Fusion is pretty simple:

"...to help each other, work together, get to know each other more." - taken from the video.

It started out as a tattooist experimenting with a group other tattooists. They wanted to break from the mean and try something completely unheard of - working collaboratively and freehandedly on a full body tattoo. They were met with great success, so great that Borat would approve. This group then decided to take the ideas to the gallery walls. They again were met with success and gained the approval of institutional art critics.

This method of working collaboratively to create art is innovative in many ways:

(1.) communication in the art process - typically unheard of because traditionally, an artist would work alone

(2.) new styles/forms of art - by combining two artists styles, you get a nice fusion style that the world has never seen. I guess a comparison would be like watching the chef Ming Tsai cook a fusion of Asian-European cuisine on "East meets West" on FoodTV.

(3.) collapse of the ego - I may have phrased that incorrectly because it sounds more negative than positive. But anyway, it basically breaks down the external pressures on an artist to create a magnificent piece of art that completely puts other artists work in the dust. In collaborative art, every artist contributing to the work is not pressured to compete with other artists - thus, makes for an enriching experience. According to Wikipedia, who can say this more eloquently:

"Any one artist could spend an hour detailing an element of a canvas and in the blink of an eye, another artist may step in and change it entirely. Though this presents the most frustrating element of the exercise, it is an integral part of the ego-cleansing process that is so inherent of ArtFusion Camp. As a result, a newfound unity develops between the artists. Through the chaos that is the ArtFusion Experiment, many harmonies reveal themselves."



This video really inspired me to think a lot about collaborative arts It is also why I created this blog. I wanted to both explore concepts behind working together and communicating for art and also to share whatever insights or fun facts I come across.

"Great Success!"

Introduction

A man walks down a pristine hallway of a museum in quiet contemplation. An ornately framed painting is hung at eye-level. The man then proceeds to step directly across the artwork, viewing the work at a distance and with such scrutiny.

This description is a rather popular conception of art. One typically imagines art to consist of:

(1). artist
(2.) artwork
(3.) viewer

I thought that way until I went to UC Irvine. I was surprised to learn during my lectures that art is not just limited to an aesthetically pleasing image. Rather, it consists of communicative experiences that initiates a process of dialogue between people.

As a student of the arts, I feel that I should share what I have learned and experienced about the other aspects of art and its forms - especially when it involves more than one person at a time. Collaborative arts stresses the importance of communication.

..In fact, blogging on the internet could be seen as an art piece as it involves many people communicating over cyberspace.

(o O:)3