On Fri, 19 Nov 2010 11:34:15 -0800, William Scott wrote:
>Which begs the question, "Who will be watching the video feed 
>from our professor's occiput in Qatar, ... and why"?

Well, the exhibition of images will be at "Mathaf: Arab Museum
of Modern Art" in Qatar, so I assume it will be Qatari locals
and tourists.  Why?  Consider the following description from
the "Gulf Times":

|For one year, Bilal’s camera will take still pictures at one-minute 
|intervals, with the images being streamed to a computer database 
|and then appearing in different sequences, some in real time, on 
|monitors at Mathaf in an exhibition space between December and 
|May, according to the New York Times.
|
|The artwork, titled The 3rd I, is intended as “a comment on the 
|inaccessibility of time, and the inability to capture memory and 
|experience, the WSJ explains, quoting press materials from the 
|museum, which is to feature Bilal’s work among its inaugural exhibits.

So, the simple answer to your question "why?" might be that people
who find this kind of modern art interesting will go and see/experience
this kind of thing.  Otherwise I have no idea why anyone would
watch/experience/attend this exhibition.

True Story #1:  On the ground floor of the building that houses the
Tisch School of the Arts (TSOA), on Waverley Place and a few
feet west of Broadway, there is a window with a big screen LCD
TV that is playing a image of people walking past it in real time.
The fact that few people actually stop to watch the images, I think,
says a lot about what people think about this kind of art.  The first
time I saw it, I was reminded of electronics stores selling videocameras
when they first came out and had a window display with a video 
camera feeding street images to a connected TV.  At least in this case 
one understood the point was to sell video cameras.

True Stroy #2:  "Modern Art" especially performance art like that
Bilal engages in may require one to think about what is being exhibited
but I get the feeling that it confuses more than clarifies.  A couple of
friends of mine took me to a performance "piece" a few years ago
where I could not figure out what was going on.  There was an overweight
guy in what looked like old-fashioned longjohns performing "movements"
on a stage with music.  It reminded me of a scene in the movie "The Big
Lebowski" where the Dude and friends are discussing their plans in a
theatre while on stage an overweight guy performed "movements" to
music.  At the end of the piece, my friends asked me what I thought of
the piece and I said "It took a lot of guts for that guy to do that in public."
They didn't ask me along on any other artistic excursions after that.

-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu


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