Sunday, March 23, 2008
Pinkard gallery solo show
Fifteen minutes is on view at the Pinkark Gallery at 1401 Mount Royal March 10- April 11.
INTERACTIVE WEB-BASED STUDENT PERFORMANCE AT MICA
GIVES WEB VIEWERS AN ALTERNATIVE USE OF POWER
BALTIMORE – In a new student exhibition at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), fifteen minutes gives Web surfers a unique position of power. Fifteen minutes, an interactive web-based performance created by MICA senior Rebecca Nagle, allows viewers an opportunity to choose an activity for the artist to perform within 15 minutes on video. In a comfortable living room setting, complete with a sofa and other furnishings, viewers can enjoy and experience the video installation as well as surf the project’s Web site at www.fifteenminutesvideo.com. The video performance is on display from Monday, March 10 through Friday, April 11 in Bunting Center, Pinkard Student Space Gallery at 1401 Mount Royal Avenue. A reception occurs on Wednesday, March 12 from 5–7 p.m.
In fifteen minutes, viewers can submit an activity via the Web site, as well as specify the date and location of the act, that will be performed by Rebecca Nagle. All videos are uploaded to the Web site for the public to view. The requests have varied from radical to demeaning to misogynistic. She has fulfilled a number of requests including gluing M&Ms to rubber duckies while hula hooping; public bathing; playing with a noose; and dancing to Michael Jackson. According to Nagle, “The purpose of fifteen minutes is not to fulfill the desires of participants, but rather to establish a relationship by which those desires are negotiated. This negotiation complicates the typical rendering of power relationships as absolute, and puts forth an alternative view of power as malleable.”
All exhibitions and receptions at MICA are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday from noon–5 p.m. For more information about fifteen minutes, visit www.fifteenminutesvideo.com. For more information about MICA, visit www.mica.edu or call 410-225-2300.
INTERACTIVE WEB-BASED STUDENT PERFORMANCE AT MICA
GIVES WEB VIEWERS AN ALTERNATIVE USE OF POWER
BALTIMORE – In a new student exhibition at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), fifteen minutes gives Web surfers a unique position of power. Fifteen minutes, an interactive web-based performance created by MICA senior Rebecca Nagle, allows viewers an opportunity to choose an activity for the artist to perform within 15 minutes on video. In a comfortable living room setting, complete with a sofa and other furnishings, viewers can enjoy and experience the video installation as well as surf the project’s Web site at www.fifteenminutesvideo.com. The video performance is on display from Monday, March 10 through Friday, April 11 in Bunting Center, Pinkard Student Space Gallery at 1401 Mount Royal Avenue. A reception occurs on Wednesday, March 12 from 5–7 p.m.
In fifteen minutes, viewers can submit an activity via the Web site, as well as specify the date and location of the act, that will be performed by Rebecca Nagle. All videos are uploaded to the Web site for the public to view. The requests have varied from radical to demeaning to misogynistic. She has fulfilled a number of requests including gluing M&Ms to rubber duckies while hula hooping; public bathing; playing with a noose; and dancing to Michael Jackson. According to Nagle, “The purpose of fifteen minutes is not to fulfill the desires of participants, but rather to establish a relationship by which those desires are negotiated. This negotiation complicates the typical rendering of power relationships as absolute, and puts forth an alternative view of power as malleable.”
All exhibitions and receptions at MICA are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday from noon–5 p.m. For more information about fifteen minutes, visit www.fifteenminutesvideo.com. For more information about MICA, visit www.mica.edu or call 410-225-2300.
fifteen minutes on NPR
Fifteen minutes was also recently on the Signal on WYPR, Baltimore's NPR station. You can listen to the interview at signalradio.org
Baltimore Sun Article
Fifteen minutes was recently feature in the Baltimore Sun.
ART ON DEMAND
For 15 minutes, performance artist Rebecca Nagle will do whatever you ask - within limits - on her Web site
By Glenn McNatt
Sun Art Critic
March 3, 2008
Imagine letting perfect strangers order you around, mess with your head and demand that you do stupid, demeaning things just so they can laugh at you. After a while, even the most compliant souls would likely rebel.
But not Rebecca Nagle, a sweet-faced, 21-year-old senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art, who's given new meaning to the phrase video on demand.
Make a request on her Web site and she'll do just about anything you ask - within reason - in a 15-minute video made just for you.
That includes singing, dancing, taking a bath (fully clothed) and handing out sandwiches to passers-by at the Inner Harbor. But don't ask her to do anything dangerous or indecent: She's not your puppet.
Nagle is a performance artist, a relatively new form of creative expression in which the performer's own body and its relationship to the audience in time and space take the place of tangible art objects like paintings or sculpture.
On her Web site, fifteenminutesvideo.com, Nagle lets people ask her to perform silly, mostly innocuous activities such as smearing her face with pie, meditating under a tree or swirling a hula hoop around her hips. Then she makes a video of herself doing those things and posts it on the Internet for all to see.
A video installation documenting about a dozen of the nearly 60 on-demand performances Nagle created will be exhibited in MICA's Bunting Center next week.
"It looks like the familiar set-up of YouTube.com or other video-viewing Web sites," Nagle says. "But it implicates the viewer in a different way because the viewer has the power to generate the content.
"Of course, there are always people who are just going to say, 'take off your clothes' or something," the artist concedes. "A lot of the requests were really tests about what kinds of things I actually would do."
But because Nagle reserved the right to refuse or modify any request, her performances were as much about the negotiation of power relationships as they were about the contortions she put her body through.
"I'm interested in how power works, and that's one of the main components of this piece," Nagle says.
"Most people imagine power as fixed from the top down. I sort of have a more postmodern concept, so in this work I try to make the structures of power more transparent," she adds. "I decide how each activity will be performed, so it becomes about negotiation rather than just me fulfilling other people's desires. But the work is also about what other people will do if you give them power over you."
Nagle says she negotiated each request in terms of four broad guidelines she established when the project began. The guidelines stated the activity should last 15 minutes, cost less than $10, not harm any nonconsenting party and not damage property owned by nonconsenting parties.
"I've only had to reject one that fell outside the guidelines," Nagle said. "But I don't think I was naive about the project; I always knew that it could be open to people asking gross things." (She complied with one viewer's request to "do a sexy striptease," for example, but she performed it behind a curtain so all you see is her shadow.)
So how does a precocious student in MICA's fiber arts department go from making quilts, embroidered dresses and fabric sculptures to acting out the wishes of strangers on the Internet?
"In art school, there are disciplines and then there are people doing their art," says Susie Brandt, one of Nagle's instructors at MICA.
"There are a lot of organizing structures in fiber, so there are also larger metaphors to deal with, particularly around issues such as labor and power," Brandt says. "We expect students to extrapolate their ideas wherever they need to take them as artists. Rebecca's simply taken all this in and extrapolated it in her own way."
Brandt says she talked to Nagle about the possible pitfalls of exhibiting herself on the Internet and was satisfied with the precautions she had taken.
"I asked the motherly questions, like what are the limits of this thing and how far are you willing to take it," Brandt recalls. "But she's not meeting people face to face, she's not going out and having coffee with everybody that gets in touch with her. She's not going to put herself in danger from people asking her to hold her head underwater too long or go out and assassinate someone. She's smart enough to know what she's doing."
Smart and creative are qualities Nagle has exhibited since her childhood in Joplin, Mo. Her father, a physician, and her mother, a dean at the nursing school of the University of Nebraska, divorced when Nagle was 3. Nagle and her older sister, Mary, later moved to Kansas with their mother and stepfather, who still live in the Midwest.
Mary Nagle, now a third-year law student at Tulane University who also writes and produces plays, says she can't remember a time when her younger sister wasn't engaged is some creative activity.
"She played the saxophone and flute quite well," Mary Nagle recalls. "In elementary school, we shared a bathroom, and in the morning when I'd walk in as we were getting ready for school, she'd be performing some character she'd made up in the mirror."
By age 16, Nagle had become involved with theater as well as music. But a summer at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan persuaded her to become a visual artist.
When Interlochen's summer camp ended that season, Nagle applied to its performing arts boarding school and was accepted. After graduation, she attended Washington University in St. Louis for a year before transferring to MICA.
"She's an extremely passionate person and also dedicated to her work in an unusual way," says Marisa Miller, a New York-based performance artist and sculptor who met Nagle when they were both students at Washington University.
"She's a very complicated person, a self-analytical, complex individual who has gone through a lot of difficulties in her life and who's also got this side of her that loves to take off and live in the woods for extended periods, like a survivalist," Miller says. "She's spent summers on trails in Alaska, and she's really motivated by hiking and being part of nature."
Nagle's 15-minute videos aren't the first time she's used her art to explore relationships of power and control. Last year, she created a performance called Actions to Relate at Load of Fun Galerie on North Avenue.
In that performance, members of the audience were invited to hand the artist cards with a range of commands written on them - from "shake my hand" and "kiss me on the cheek" to "hit me" or "slap me." Nagle then performed the action on the person's body. (You can see that performance, as well as others, on Nagle's portfolio Web site, rebec canagle.com.)
MICA's Brandt says Nagle's work springs from a tradition pioneered in the 1970s by Marina Abramovic and others, who explored the possibilities and limits of the body in social space.
Abramovic was known for performances in which she protested communist rule in her native Serbia by allowing viewers to scourge her body with knives, ropes and other implements. Nagle says she was inspired, in part, by Abramovic's example.
Nagle, for her part, says she doesn't spend a lot of time trying to define what art is, but rather what it does.
"My goal for this artwork is to change the way people think about media culture and how they relate to the media they consume," Nagle says. "We're all familiar with consuming videos online, but viewers don't feel implicated in most situations because they don't generate the content. They're passive. Yet viewers are always implicated in what they consume; they're never neutral. So this work just sort of makes that relationship more transparent, makes it clearer."
You can read the article at this link:
www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bal-to.video03mar03,0,1870800.storyART ON DEMAND
For 15 minutes, performance artist Rebecca Nagle will do whatever you ask - within limits - on her Web site
By Glenn McNatt
Sun Art Critic
March 3, 2008
Imagine letting perfect strangers order you around, mess with your head and demand that you do stupid, demeaning things just so they can laugh at you. After a while, even the most compliant souls would likely rebel.
But not Rebecca Nagle, a sweet-faced, 21-year-old senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art, who's given new meaning to the phrase video on demand.
Make a request on her Web site and she'll do just about anything you ask - within reason - in a 15-minute video made just for you.
That includes singing, dancing, taking a bath (fully clothed) and handing out sandwiches to passers-by at the Inner Harbor. But don't ask her to do anything dangerous or indecent: She's not your puppet.
Nagle is a performance artist, a relatively new form of creative expression in which the performer's own body and its relationship to the audience in time and space take the place of tangible art objects like paintings or sculpture.
On her Web site, fifteenminutesvideo.com, Nagle lets people ask her to perform silly, mostly innocuous activities such as smearing her face with pie, meditating under a tree or swirling a hula hoop around her hips. Then she makes a video of herself doing those things and posts it on the Internet for all to see.
A video installation documenting about a dozen of the nearly 60 on-demand performances Nagle created will be exhibited in MICA's Bunting Center next week.
"It looks like the familiar set-up of YouTube.com or other video-viewing Web sites," Nagle says. "But it implicates the viewer in a different way because the viewer has the power to generate the content.
"Of course, there are always people who are just going to say, 'take off your clothes' or something," the artist concedes. "A lot of the requests were really tests about what kinds of things I actually would do."
But because Nagle reserved the right to refuse or modify any request, her performances were as much about the negotiation of power relationships as they were about the contortions she put her body through.
"I'm interested in how power works, and that's one of the main components of this piece," Nagle says.
"Most people imagine power as fixed from the top down. I sort of have a more postmodern concept, so in this work I try to make the structures of power more transparent," she adds. "I decide how each activity will be performed, so it becomes about negotiation rather than just me fulfilling other people's desires. But the work is also about what other people will do if you give them power over you."
Nagle says she negotiated each request in terms of four broad guidelines she established when the project began. The guidelines stated the activity should last 15 minutes, cost less than $10, not harm any nonconsenting party and not damage property owned by nonconsenting parties.
"I've only had to reject one that fell outside the guidelines," Nagle said. "But I don't think I was naive about the project; I always knew that it could be open to people asking gross things." (She complied with one viewer's request to "do a sexy striptease," for example, but she performed it behind a curtain so all you see is her shadow.)
So how does a precocious student in MICA's fiber arts department go from making quilts, embroidered dresses and fabric sculptures to acting out the wishes of strangers on the Internet?
"In art school, there are disciplines and then there are people doing their art," says Susie Brandt, one of Nagle's instructors at MICA.
"There are a lot of organizing structures in fiber, so there are also larger metaphors to deal with, particularly around issues such as labor and power," Brandt says. "We expect students to extrapolate their ideas wherever they need to take them as artists. Rebecca's simply taken all this in and extrapolated it in her own way."
Brandt says she talked to Nagle about the possible pitfalls of exhibiting herself on the Internet and was satisfied with the precautions she had taken.
"I asked the motherly questions, like what are the limits of this thing and how far are you willing to take it," Brandt recalls. "But she's not meeting people face to face, she's not going out and having coffee with everybody that gets in touch with her. She's not going to put herself in danger from people asking her to hold her head underwater too long or go out and assassinate someone. She's smart enough to know what she's doing."
Smart and creative are qualities Nagle has exhibited since her childhood in Joplin, Mo. Her father, a physician, and her mother, a dean at the nursing school of the University of Nebraska, divorced when Nagle was 3. Nagle and her older sister, Mary, later moved to Kansas with their mother and stepfather, who still live in the Midwest.
Mary Nagle, now a third-year law student at Tulane University who also writes and produces plays, says she can't remember a time when her younger sister wasn't engaged is some creative activity.
"She played the saxophone and flute quite well," Mary Nagle recalls. "In elementary school, we shared a bathroom, and in the morning when I'd walk in as we were getting ready for school, she'd be performing some character she'd made up in the mirror."
By age 16, Nagle had become involved with theater as well as music. But a summer at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan persuaded her to become a visual artist.
When Interlochen's summer camp ended that season, Nagle applied to its performing arts boarding school and was accepted. After graduation, she attended Washington University in St. Louis for a year before transferring to MICA.
"She's an extremely passionate person and also dedicated to her work in an unusual way," says Marisa Miller, a New York-based performance artist and sculptor who met Nagle when they were both students at Washington University.
"She's a very complicated person, a self-analytical, complex individual who has gone through a lot of difficulties in her life and who's also got this side of her that loves to take off and live in the woods for extended periods, like a survivalist," Miller says. "She's spent summers on trails in Alaska, and she's really motivated by hiking and being part of nature."
Nagle's 15-minute videos aren't the first time she's used her art to explore relationships of power and control. Last year, she created a performance called Actions to Relate at Load of Fun Galerie on North Avenue.
In that performance, members of the audience were invited to hand the artist cards with a range of commands written on them - from "shake my hand" and "kiss me on the cheek" to "hit me" or "slap me." Nagle then performed the action on the person's body. (You can see that performance, as well as others, on Nagle's portfolio Web site, rebec canagle.com.)
MICA's Brandt says Nagle's work springs from a tradition pioneered in the 1970s by Marina Abramovic and others, who explored the possibilities and limits of the body in social space.
Abramovic was known for performances in which she protested communist rule in her native Serbia by allowing viewers to scourge her body with knives, ropes and other implements. Nagle says she was inspired, in part, by Abramovic's example.
Nagle, for her part, says she doesn't spend a lot of time trying to define what art is, but rather what it does.
"My goal for this artwork is to change the way people think about media culture and how they relate to the media they consume," Nagle says. "We're all familiar with consuming videos online, but viewers don't feel implicated in most situations because they don't generate the content. They're passive. Yet viewers are always implicated in what they consume; they're never neutral. So this work just sort of makes that relationship more transparent, makes it clearer."
Fifteen minutes
fifteen minutes is an interactive video website.
viewers choose an activity for the artist to perform for fifteen minutes.
the artist video tapes herself performing the chosen activities.
all videos are uploaded onto the project website.
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