[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. I'd like to welcome you to this episode of Exploring Art History with Ian. My name is Ian McConnell, and today's lesson is about post studio artistic practices and recent trends. As you're watching the video, feel free to pause, move forward, or rewind as often as you feel is necessary. And as soon as you're ready, we can begin.
Today's objectives are listed below. By the end of the lesson today, you'll be able to identify and define today's key terms, identify forms and examples of post studio art.
Key terms, as always, are listed in yellow through the lesson. First key term is intervention, a technique where existing artwork is used to elevate social awareness through subversive action. Hacktivism, a form of activism or computers are illegally broken into and manipulated.
Graffiti art, a controversial art movement or style creating artwork that may include illegally spray painting or drawing outsides of buildings, walls, trains, boats, or cars, and in locations outside traditional gallery spaces. And post studio practice, the method of making artwork in the street. The big idea for today is that graffiti art, hacktivism, and intervention or art intervention are newer, unconventional forms of art outside the traditional studio.
The art that we're talking about today dates from between 2000 and 2010. Now graffiti as an art is a form of post studio artistic practice given that it takes place out of studio and on the street. Now as an art form, it's an example of the recent trends for some artists recent within the last decade or so of moving away from the isolation of the studio in order to integrate their work within the greater social sphere.
Banksy is a moniker for a graffiti artist that originated in Bristol, England. And despite the controversy regarding graffiti as art or vandalism, Banksy has been able to secure his reputation as one of the most important artists in this genre. Although graffiti can take on the form of vandalism, particularly with the prevalence of gang tagging as it's called in larger urban settings, Banksy's work carries a certain political tone with it, addressing a particular issue and bringing it to the public's attention.
And although he began as a freestyle graffiti artist, around 2000 he changed to premade stencils, allowing him to more quickly put up his work and move on. It's this subversive nature combined with the concept of raising social awareness that makes his work a form of interventionist and graffiti art.
Intervention as art can take on other forms. Hacktivism is a form of intervention as artwork computers are hacked into in order to bring awareness to a particular issue. The Electronic Disturbance Theater is a hacktivist group known for conducting virtual sit ins and Anonymous is another group associated with hacktivism.
But intervention as art can also be in the form of performances with the ubiquity and availability of the internet, sociopolitical messages can potentially reach millions or even billions of people. Critical Art Ensemble and the Yes Men are two groups who create social awareness of particular issues through a process called tactical media, a form of media activism where short interventionist messages are directed at a particular issue to create social awareness.
Now as opposed to a broader media outlet that covers a broad range of stories, tactical media specialists, like Critical Art Ensemble, could be considered more surgical. Their targets are very specific and they are looking to elicit a response and/or action from their audience. In their performance of Radiation Burn-- you can see a still of that here-- Critical Art Ensemble was addressing what they considered media and government scare tactics about the dangers posed by dirty bombs and their inevitable detonation. Now believing it was an unnecessary and intentionally alarming proclamation by those groups, Critical Art Ensemble created a satirical video about how to detonate a dirty bomb.
Gabriel Orozco's Mobile Matrix is a really fascinating piece that explores the relationship between different parts of a biological machine. In this case, a humpback whale. He was able to secure a complete skeleton from the Mexican government with a team of artists drew concentric circles from joints and other specific locations that overlapped and crossed each other, like ripples on the water.
Now in this simple, yet time-consuming processes, he's visualized the unseen harmony that exists between parts of a biological machine, casting light on the inherent and culvert beauty that exists within nature. And perhaps, even rallying support for conservation all without saying a word.
So that brings us to the end of this lesson. Let's take a look at our objectives to see if we met them. Now that you've seen the lesson, are you able to identify and define today's key terms? Can you identify forms and examples of post studio art? And the big idea today, once again, is that graffiti art, hacktivism, and intervention or art intervention are newer, unconventional forms of art outside the traditional studio.
And that is it. Thank you very much for joining me. I'll see you next time.
