Kyle Kopta DTC

   This section in the book focuses on the emergence of video art as it relates to Conceptualism and the increasing popularity of television in the American home. As television was becoming an integral part of everyday life, artists understood the effectiveness of communicating with their audience in a televisual way. To add on to this, through advertising, a new consumer society was forming that only worked to perpetuate this television culture. Although television was helpful to early video artists in many ways, the critique of this new television culture was the subject of many early video works.    What I found interesting about this section was the inception of alternative coverage of different events. Today, we are accustomed to seeing coverage of significant events from a multitude of sources (especially the thousands of smaller sources that can be found online). However, a time existed when a few large groups had the ability to create an uncontested narrati...

   This section touches upon media performance as it related to different schools of thought in the latter half of the 20th Century. One such example is that of the disruption of the 1968 Miss America beauty pageant. Through this street theater, feminist ideology of the time was able to manifest in performance. This was only one of the many liberation movements that would go on to utilize media performance and street theater as a way to draw from a theory and promote it in some way.    What really interested me in this section was the theory of the Situationist International, who where an organization of avant-garde artists and intellectuals. They subscribed to the idea that theory should be the main idea with which artists draw from for their aesthetic actions. Furthermore, they were critics of work that saw itself as detached from politics and the social climate. This theory concerning self-governing art makes me think about the value of art in relation to its su...

   This section is an examination of the symbiotic relationship between media as an art form and performance. As art as a performance evolved, the action of making the art became just as, if not more, important as the final painted subject. This idea of art evolving from a marketable object to a process in and of itself and distancing itself from other commercial and traditional art is very interesting to me. How much of art is actually just one's ability to convince others of a work's artistic worth?    When one typically thinks of art, they think of the final product. However, the idea of the process being the source of the actual art is interesting in that it requires an artist to examine their rhetoric carefully. Rather than having to sell the final product itself, one must be able to sell others on the process as well as convince the audience that it is performative art, rather than just an unorthodox way to make a painting or video. This makes me think of w...

   Chapter 3, 'Video Installation Art', is an examination of video installation as an art medium and the emergence of the context of a work becoming an integral part of its content. This idea of completely controlling the context of a piece of art was very interesting to me. Before reading this chapter, I believed that I had exercised a large amount of control over how others have seen my art. Whether it be through the size of an image, the color of an art mat, or the frame for a photograph, I believed I was making a great effort in how others viewed my art. However, this does not even hold a candle to the extent to which these installation artists control the environment in which their art lives. Through a manipulation and consideration of the time and space surrounding their work, video installation artists were able to push the idea of sculpture and poetry into a new art form.    What also interested me in this chapter is the collapse of boundaries that can be a...

   This self-portrait assignment was a difficult one to approach. In these past couple years of art and photography, little to none of my work has included myself (in a literal sense) in any capacity. Not only was actually becoming the subject of a piece of work intimidating, but the self-reflection that would come with it as well.    My online footprint is very minimal, largely due to my aversion to social media since middle school. If you had searched my name before I began attending Washington State this term, you would find an old Instagram account with no pictures and my name mentioned in an article about an art show that I was in. However, since becoming a student here, I have created another blog for my Digital Imaging course. Here, I have been posting my work fairly frequently. This blog is not only the sole way of finding my work online, but it is also the only information that an outsider observer could use to try to make sense of who Kyle Kopta is. ...