Translating the forms…

 The interesting point, after Sebastian workshop today, was that ALL of the selected works were narrative works. Why we are more interested in?

In art and design area, we usually translate the Ideas and meanings to Forms. On the other hand, when we try to understand other works translate (or let me call it retranslate) it again to original form. This matter happens when we want to explaining an idea for others also.

Our mind looks after some rules in a work to be able to experience and understand it.Changing the visual mediom to literacture usually is happend by people, the audience want to memorize the events in the clip or poster, or he wants explain it to other ones so tries to find a third language.

If The main idea of designers was shaped in narrative from,this third language is near to first thinker imagines. And it happens often because we owed our anecdotes in way of thinking. Most of the ancient pictures are narrative. They depict some story beyond the forms.

I think in this area of design,after that someone tried to explain the clip to other one,by retranslating, the reproduced  form is very clos to original one. And it is one characteristics of narrative design.

In this kind of narration(non-narration), designer uses the forms and relaion between the forms. Now, translating the narration to literacy is impossibl or very hard. 

although, in my point of view, translatin the informaion by using non-narative medioms is faster than other one, but, we are influenced by our ancients mind. the narration is very important part of their ways of thinking.

for me the exiting matter is: as long as non-narrative works do not need retranslating to other mediums, why we still are looking for narrative advertising or works?

Empire

 

 One early example is Hurlements en

faveur de Sade (1952) from Guy-Ernest Debord, where a black and a white screen

are shown alternately over a period of 80 minutes. During the white scenes texts

of laws, newspaper notices etc. are recited.3 However, Debord cannot be considered

a Minimalist artist. He was closely connected with the Situationist International,

a radical group of artists who stuck to a strongly political programme

between 1957 and 1972. In Minimal Art, however, all forms of political commitment

were substituted by concentrating on aesthetics.

About 10 years later Andy Warhol’s film Empire (1963) shows the filming of the

Empire State Building in New York from the 44th floor of the Time Life Buildingfor a period of eight hours. He maintains the same camera position and angle

throughout the whole film. As the object itself does not change and there is no

sound track the lighting conditions are the only changing element in the film

but are also reduced to a minimum by the use of black and white as well as by

the fact that the image changes only slightly.

Similar to Debord, Warhol’s film stands out from the rest of his works as an

extraordinary piece of art which laid the basis for Pop Art. Although his artistic

movement evolved at the same time as Minimalism, it clearly distances itself

from the latter by elevating mass phenomena to works of art.

with nevillloe brody and rick poynorclickhere

click here

two minimal film

Film About A Woman Who… (1974)

By :Yvonne Rainer (b. 1935)

Rainer’s work of this period also problematized the conception of the relationship between viewer and artwork that was at the core of the minimalist aesthetic.

Once again, this arose from the fact that the material of dance was the person. A minimalist painting or sculpture was thought to frankly address the viewer and the space of the gallery, to rely upon the viewer for its completion. To seek such a relationship between a live performer and an audience, however, was to risk opening up the dance to all of those things that Rainer had rallied against in her “NO manifesto,” since in dance, the performer/spectator relationship is a human one, in which emotion, empathy, and relations of power are present. Again, one of the basic tenets of minimalism posed a unique problem for live performance. In a way, Rainer can be said to have inverted a key principle of minimalist art by attempting to cut off any kind of human connection between her performers and the audience. For instance, Rainer often instructed her dancers to refuse eye contact with the audience, either by keeping their heads cocked away from the spectators or by looking over and beyond their heads. Ironically, then, Rainer’s performances seem to have initially aspired to the condition Michael Fried called “absorption,” a condition characterized by the work’s refusal to address the viewer, an almost metaphysical detachment of the work from the viewer’s time and space. Fried criticized the minimalist sculptors for their refusal to do this – for the ways their work acknowledged the viewer and depended on him or her for their completion. (Fried, 125-27) Rainer, concerned about the “seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer,” and troubled by the ramifications of the display of the dancers’ bodies for crowds of onlookers, resisted this dimension of minimalist art. In her analysis of her dance Trio A.

(From Erin Brannigan):

 

The Awful Backlash (1967)

Made by Robert Nelson and William Allan 

“In their starkly minimal film, The Awful Backlash, directors Robert Nelson and William Allan, focus solely on a pair of hands as they begin to unravel what appears to be a tangled fishing line. Any further evidence of the title’s confusing ‘awfulness’  other than the literal disentanglement of the line remains, however, tentative, left as it were, literally, at a loose end. The viewer knows nothing of the incident that led to this backlash or entanglement; nor of the directors’ initial motive for the title indeed not of any other attempt at blending an additional storyline beyond what is seen. There is, perhaps, one link with a reverse reaction  a sense of gradual recovery taking place, as the thread unfolds from a position of multiplicity back to a singular line.” (Pamela Kember, Rethinking Refunctioning, ‘Awful Backlash’ catalogue, May 2000)

Erik Satie, a minimal composer

Alfred Éric Leslie Satie (Honfleur, 17 May 1866 – Paris, 1 July 1925) was a French composer and pianist. Starting with his first composition in 1884, he signed his name as Erik Satie. Satie was introduced as a “gymnopedist” in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a “phonometrograph” or “phonometrician” (meaning “someone who measures (and writes down) sounds”) preferring this designation to that of “musician,” after having been called “a clumsy but subtle technician” in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911. In addition to his body of music, Satie also left a remarkable set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications, from the dadaist 391 to the American Vanity Fair. Although in later life he prided himself on always publishing his work under his own name, in the late nineteenth century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde. He was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music and the Theatre of the Absurd.