Installation Nasties

• Sam Taylor Wood
• Tony Oursler
• Bill Viola 

The people above are all multimedia and installation artists. Video Installation is a temporary art form that combines video technology with installation art, making use of all aspects of the surrounding environment to affect the audience. One of the main strategies used by video installation artists is the incorporation of the space as a key element in a narrative structure.

Sam Taylor wood is an English filmmaker, photographer and visual artist. Sam began exhibiting fine art photography in the early 1990's. She is perhaps best known for her work entitled 'Crying Men' which features many of Hollywood's glitterati crying, including Robin Williams, Sean Pean, Laurence Fishburne and Paul Newman. Tony Oursler was born in New York in 1957. He completed a BA in fine arts at the California institute for the Arts, Valencia California in 1979. His art covers a range of mediums working with video, sculpture, installation, performance and painting. Oursler's work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions including the Walker Art Center and many others.

Bill Viola is internationally recognized as one of today's leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For 40 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola's video installations, total environments that envelop state of the art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity.

Tony Oursler was born in New York in 1957 he is a multimedia and installation artist, He completed a BA in fine arts at the California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, California in 1979. His art covers a range of mediums working with video, sculpture, installation, performance and painting. A lot of Oursler's work has been exhibited at prestigious institutions including the Walker Art Center, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney museum of American Art and many more. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYka4ouQXqk The First art piece that I viewed was Sam's "A little death", with a narrative of decomposition she showcases to us the gruesome reality of whats it like for something to rot away in front of our own eyes. What puzzled me as part of the audience was the peach which has no movement in the video but just sits there?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJQYSPFo7hk Another video she created "Still Life" which is very similar to "A Little Death" we see the hideous view of fruits rotting away, the music used builds up to the decomposition and slowly starts to fade away we can see that she has used and eerie and scary type of soundtrack to give the audience a scared feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTPf6mHKYD0 Here we see a piece of Bill's installation. What we can learn from watching this video is as it clearly says in the title itself "Emergence". We see a male figure emerge from the water like well and is seen being grabbed as he falls. The character on the left seems frustrated/ upset like as he appears from the water the music goes well with narrative and builds up to him coming out. In comparison to Sam Taylor Wood's installation work we can clearly see that Bill mainly likes to focus on ideas of fundamental human experiences whereas Sam likes to use objects, animals and pieces of fruit to bring her installation to life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StwsM_riSf0 This piece of Oursler's ties in with Sam's work the whole theme of having disfigured and disproportional. In particular Oursler uses human faces. He has reconstructed it to make it look strange in a way specifically this piece of his where a continuous blinking of one eye and the eyes moving in two different directions making it look weird. Facial features have been painted in blue to make it seem as if its a alien like character, the model seems to be having muttered speech and speaking a load of non sense making it hard for us as the audience to understand.

Sam has put together something that we don't usually witness, the outcome of death, the process of decomposition and how the peach just sits there with no power over itself. I personally believe that all three of these artists wanted us to have some emotion towards their work with Sam's use of decomposition, this as a viewer would most probably want us to feel sorry for the main subject in the frame such as the frame. Whereas with Bill's installation makes us feel more sad as the figure appears from the water and the two characters in frustration gives us a sense that they are waiting. The disfigured faces that Tony uses gets us confused as to why he has done this. 

As a viewer I'm quite shocked into why Sam would want us to view a hare decay in front of our eyes? The whole idea of decomposition is quite horrible really and makes me feel disgusted to watch it. In comparison to Bill's and Tony's work they differentiate on a whole new level. All in all I think sam wanted us as a viewer to know what its like and face the reality that we don't usually encounter. Her aim is to keep us puzzled and disgusted once we've watched the video. All three artists managed to capture my attention because never in my lifetime have I viewed such work.