Notes on art by Nathaniel Katz
Film and Video Installation
Response to Alex Field Installation #3
Nathaniel Katz
May 5, 2008
Alex’s latest installation is a culmination of his investigation into the mediation of information. It is an impressive room size installation that consists of two primary sites: an open space of information and a tunnel of information.
Continue reading ‘Respondent notes #3′
Film and Video Installation
Response to Alex Field Installation #2
Nathaniel Katz
April 14, 2008
Alex’s second installation is a successful and positive move from the conclusions of the first installation towards the defined site of the mediated space. The first installation required Alex to abstract the content in order to literalize the form. His interest is in the space of cinema as mediated experience. First content was removed to allow for an investigation of how we travel through mediated space and how that informs our experience of that space. The second installation brings content directly into conversation with experienced space, the space of the cinema and the cinematic space. Continue reading ‘Respondent notes #2′
Film and Video Installation
Response to Alex Field Installation #1
Nathaniel Katz
March 16, 2008
Alex’s site is the collapse of space through the mediation of information. We enter a long narrow alleyway making it’s way up and up to a hole in the wall. On one side is a building lit and inhabited by art students making art, on the other side is an old brick wall. The space we are in is a non-space, extra space, left over space. However, the actual physical site is more of a site of convenience, a way of illustrating a conceptual idea in the most direct way possible in order to grasp it in the physical. Continue reading ‘Respondent notes #1′
I’m taking a Film and Video Installation class this semester with Daniel Peltz. One of the really innovative formats that he incorporated in the class is the “respondent notes.” For the duration of the semester each student has a respondent assigned to them. The respondent visits the installation prior to critique and spends some time with the work and ideas, they then “frame” the critique. It is a really wonderful opportunity to have a colleague think deeply about your work and your progress and to do the same for another person. The following are my three write ups about Alex’s work, a super talented undergraduate student in the Printmaking department. I will ask my respondent whether I can post his write-ups on my work as well.
Tomorrow is the deadline for the third draft of my thesis. I looked over my prospectus from the fall semester to see how much has changed. Thought I would post it here, it’s a very different document now… Continue reading ‘Thesis Prospectus’
Rhode Island School of Design
The End of the End of Art
A commentary and analysis of Hal Foster’s
This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse
Critical Issues in Contemporary Art
May 21, 2007
Nathaniel J. Katz
In the article This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse, American art critic Hal Foster lays out a categorical redefinition of contemporary art as one of “living on†as opposed to a more conventional historicist or pluralistic analysis brought to contemporary art. Under the heading of “living on†Foster defines four, largely formalist, categories, those are: trauma, spectral, nonsynchronous and incongruent.
Foster begins by taking up the issue of the “end of art†making sure to place this statement in its due place. The “end of art†is not suggestive, according to Foster, of an end to all making and art practices. Rather, the end in this phrase suggests an end to the phases of formal innovation begun in the Renaissance and carried through the modernist era. In that sense art functioned as a marker for history, as it dealt with the historical context through formal innovation. Foster quotes Henrich Wölfflin that “not all things are possible at all times,†a suggestion that the formal manifestation of art making exists at particular times in history due to the particular moment. And so with the end of innovation (within traditional given art making fields) also comes to an end art history. Continue reading ‘The End of the End of Art’
Rhode Island School of Design
Understanding “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism†by Frederic Jameson
Digital+Media Theory. DM 7538
April 12, 2007
Nathaniel J. Katz
In approaching Frederic Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism†there are a couple of things to keep in mind that allow for a clearer reading of the essay. The first is that Jameson’s essay was first published in 1983, well before many of the concepts that he lays out as distinguishing of postmodernism came to be so prevalent. A lot of the ideas he writes about seem obvious to us now, but for Jameson they came out of his specific methodology,
Continue reading ‘frederic jameson and the cultural logic of late capitalism’