Double Artist Talk Think Posts

In the past few weeks, I had the privilege to see an artist and art historian give talks at Lawrence. The artist was Colleen Woolpert who works with stereography. The art historian was Joan Rothfuss who discussed Nam June Paik in a lecture entitled "Striptease, Robots, and Videotapes."

Colleen Woolpert

The most interesting concept to me that Woolpert brought up in her talk was about the artist's role as an inventor. With her stereographic work, she had to invent a new way to view stereographs due to them not being completely accessible in a museum or art gallery setting. While working on her goggles for this, she came to a realization that as an artist, she invents. While creating the goggles, she was inventing in the more traditional sense, but even before, she was inventing. Ideas. Ideas have to be invented in many cases. People seem to bring up the artistry in scientists and inventors a lot, but rarely the inverse. There's a sense of a discovery in art, and sometimes it can be clinical and more "inventor-esque" than "arty." That's fine.

Joan Rothfuss

A ways into the lecture, Rothfuss brought up Paik's view of music simply being anything bound by a sequence of time—meaning dance, moving images, sonic work, and more. Freeing. Too often we limit ourselves by thinking in only one medium. Or how one medium interacts with another. Or thinking what makes mediums different. Try thinking about music in the way Paik does. What can you create, bound only by time?