overview
Lesson 1 | Summary
Activity Pages
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lesson 1 | systems &
styles
activity | the power of repetition
Bruce Nauman’s use of repetition is legendary from his early
looped videos of actions taken in his studio—bouncing in
a corner, playing the violin, walking the perimeter of a square—to
the looping video works such as “Good Boy, Bad Boy.” In
Nauman’s
work “Clown Torture” an actor recites the grade school rhyme “Pete
and Repeat were sitting on a fence, Pete fell off, who was left,
Repeat. Pete
and Repeat were sitting on a fence, Pete fell off, who was left,
Repeat…”
The artist Paul Pfeiffer uses repetition
as a stylistic tool in his videos that present sports figures and
scenes from popular movies. Pfeiffer's video loops draw attention
to the impact of mass media and how the constant presence of technology
shapes and defines our consciousness of the world around us. Presented
on small LCD screens these videos reveal a culture captivated by
celebrity and spectacle. Pfeiffer describes his working process:
"The editing process that I use is very slow and ultimately
very manual and requires going frame by frame, even though to a
degree the process is somewhat automated through software tools.
It’s like the computer can only think so much and then the
human hand and eye really have to do the rest of the refining work."
In works such as “Race
Riot,” Pfeiffer re-frames moments from film and television
through the simple editing tool of the loop, paring these references
down to a single, suggestive moment. Pfeiffer describes the viewers
interest in the loop like a"moth to the flame."
Ellen Gallagher uses repetition to structure
the accumulations of visual information and imagery that she includes
in her paintings and prints. Gallagher describes her working process
on the print series “DeLuxe”
saying, “what was exciting for me here was that what happens
as whimsy in the drawings or as a decision made with an improvisational
spirit (for example, when I would make a choice to blindfold characters
or obliterate names underneath characters) would have to be structured
so that it could be repeated twenty times. And it was exciting to
see, repeated as a language, something that was usually a one-to-one
experience." This series of prints, inspired by magazines such
as “Ebony,” “Our World,” and “Sepia,”
presents a variety of characters from advertisements who have been
altered and re-styled by various printmaking techniques including
etching and over-printing, as well as the application of plasticine,
white-out, ink, and other materials. In paintings such as “eXelento,”
Gallagher pasted magazine pages in grid formation on enormous canvases
and used plasticine to meticulously alter each head or face. These
retouched characters each have a unique look but are gathered as
a succession of faces, a collective whole. In the same way, Gallagher's
earlier paintings on ledger paper such as “Blubber”
and “Purgatorium”
include hundreds of hand painted googly eyes and exaggerated lips
that when viewed as a whole, take on an ominous or suggestive presence.
Use the links listed above to introduce students to the work of
Nauman, Pfeiffer, and Gallagher, paying specific attention to the
ways that each artist uses repetition in different ways and to different
ends. How does repetition contribute to the meaning and structure
of their work? Ask students to consider the significance of the
loop in art and writing and how a writer might employ repetition.
Look at Gertrude Stein’s “The
Making of Americans” or “Lifting
Belly” and Tim O’Brien’s
“The Things They Carried.”
Have students select a word, idea, sentence, or theme that will
become the repetitive element in a short story or poem. Have them
include visual elements in their writing that emphasize the repetition
and the subject of the story. |
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