Hello Class,

I am canceling today's class. 

I left comments on your blog where you posted choice of artists for your presentation. 

I asked you to post 2-3 artists.

You need to check each other's blog because I see some redundancy. (For example, there are 2-3 people who want to do Gregory Crewdson and Robert Parke Harrison). You have to contact the students who selected same artists as you did, and then negotiate, concede and circumvent which works best for everyone.  

Although we won't have a class, I will be in the class from 5:30-5:55.

Please come to see me if you have any question about the presentation.

See you next week.

Please watch short movies and/or interviews about artists who use the style of tableaux vivants. 

1. Anthony Goicolea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1uDl8cBuWM

2. Sam Taylor Wood: Check her work titled, Soliloquy. http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/2926

Also watch her video:

Little Death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H21ypJb7KJk

Still Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXPP8eUlEtk

Sam Taylor Wood uses the style of paintings or copies of painting in a modern environment to make tableaux vivants that emulate a baroque and bohemian style. The image “Soliloquy I” is an emulation of a Henry Wallis (1830-1916) painting. A man lays on a sofa lifeless; the sofa is a modern worn sofa with a dirty looking throw. The man’s arm hangs to the floor with the light coming from behind him. The tableau photograph lets the viewer make their own narrative picking up on clues within the image. Underneath the man in a smaller sequence of images a story of a man’s suicide is being told. The way that the images are represented have both the feel of an old painting but also a cinematic quality that moves the narrative.

Interview:http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hpj/stwinterview.htm

3. Jeff Wall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg8bB0zs3HQ

Wall uses a variety of techniques in his photography, but the main crux of his art is, he states; “mid-way between the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ and the‘Society of the Spectacle’.” He is interested in they way that the photograph works and uses the ideas of John Berger (“Ways of Seeing”) to expose the image through the image itself. Wall uses tableaux vivants to construct his images, creating narratives that Roberts defines as conceptualized realism. This means that the images that Wall creates appear to be snapshots of natural scens, but are in fact constructed using actors, friends and extras to precisely stage the narrative that Wall wants to produce.

In addition, Jeff Wall also uses digital manipulation techniques to construct the image and achieve the effects in his pictures. Everything in Wall’s image has been set up to tell a story through a series of clues. Representation of life as is created through realistic scenes that transcend traditional narratives and point to the camera’s presence. Wall’s post-conceptual scenes mimic the everyday and at the same time question its existence.