Oliver Herring

Last updated
Oliver Herring
Born1964
NationalityGerman-American
Education The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art
Hunter College

Oliver Herring (born 1964 in Heidelberg, Germany) is an experimental artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His works include knitting Mylar, participatory performances, styrofoam photo sculptures and video. [1]

Contents

Biography

Herring as born in Heidelberg Germany in 1964. He earned his BFA at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford. [2] He went on to Hunter College in New York where he got his MFA.

Work

Oliver Herring started his art career as a painter with very colorful and expressive works. When Ethyl Eichelberger committed suicide in 1991, Herring started knitting Mylar to pay respect to him. Herring knit the transparent tape into colorless human figures, clothing and furniture. When they were on display, he chose the Mylar clothing to be hung or placed in a way that it looks like the shape they would be if worn. [3]

Performance video art

Herring moved from knitting Mylar to video and participatory performances in 1998. His videos were primarily stop motion. When he was sitting in his knitting chair for hours on end, knitting, his mind would wonder and his stop motion videos expressed his thoughts. In his video Exit, he starts out in his knitting chair, than through stop motion he bounds out of it in a flight of fancy. He flies from his chair into the air in a jerky movement. The next scene he has long white hair, still flying through the air.

In the participatory performances he replaces himself with his friends and strangers to star in the videos. He incorporates stop motion video in these as well. Herring cared more about the process then he did about the medium which is why his video was not high quality and his stop motion was jerky.

Herring does not like the term act or actor because he believes the people end up contributing to his art and it becomes a collaboration. Herring said “I don’t think of the people I work with as models or actors. They are people who are willing to sacrifice their time for me.” [PBS]

One of his most famous experiments is Spitting Food Dye, similar to Spit Reverse. These experiments consists of strangers he found who would dress in a white shirt, black pants and spit food dye out of their mouths into the air and back on their faces. After hours of this, they were tired with dye all over their faces, he would photograph them. He would repeat this with different people. The photographs would be placed on display, where people are able to compare them next to each other.

Photo sculpture

For the Styrofoam Photo sculpture, Herring starts with a polystyrene base and pastes thousands of cut up photographs to the base. “Gloria”, one of his most famous sculptures, is of a girl leaning against a wall in a colorful flower dress holding her necklace. Herring took pictures from every angle of her and he cut and pasted them on the base to form the sculpture.

TASK parties

Beginning in 2002 Herring organized a series of participatory improvisational art events known as TASK parties. To find an interview with Herring discussing his personal thoughts on TASK.

Related Research Articles

Knitting Method of forming fabric from yarn

Knitting is a method by which yarn is manipulated to create a textile, or fabric. It is used to create many types of garments. Knitting may be done by hand or by machine.

Stop motion Animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own

Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints or plasticine figures are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation. Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation. Stop motion of flat materials such as paper, fabrics or photographs is usually called cutout animation.

Found object Non-standard material used in work of art

A found object, or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function. Pablo Picasso first publicly utilized the idea when he pasted a printed image of chair caning onto his painting titled Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Marcel Duchamp is thought to have perfected the concept several years later when he made a series of ready-mades, consisting of completely unaltered everyday objects selected by Duchamp and designated as art. The most famous example is Fountain (1917), a standard urinal purchased from a hardware store and displayed on a pedestal, resting on its side. In its strictest sense the term "ready-made" is applied exclusively to works produced by Marcel Duchamp, who borrowed the term from the clothing industry while living in New York, and especially to works dating from 1913 to 1921.

Andy Goldsworthy British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist

Andy Goldsworthy is an English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings.

Clay animation Stop-motion animation made using malleable clay models

Clay animation or claymation, sometimes plasticine animation, is one of many forms of stop-motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine clay.

Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings — some 200 of them — evolved over the years. Eventually Kaprow shifted his practice into what he called "Activities", intimately scaled pieces for one or several players, devoted to the study of normal human activity in a way congruent to ordinary life. Fluxus, performance art, and installation art were, in turn, influenced by his work.

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Museum in North Adams, Massachusetts and in a US historic place

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the United States.

Theo Jansen Dutch artist

Theodorus Gerardus Jozef Jansen is a Dutch artist. In 1990, he began building large mechanisms out of PVC that are able to move on their own and, collectively, are entitled, Strandbeest. The kinetic sculptures appear to walk. His animated works are intended to be a fusion of art and engineering. He has said that "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds." He strives to equip his creations with their own artificial intelligence so they may avoid obstacles such as the sea, by changing course when detected.

Martin Kippenberger was a German artist and sculptor known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.

Ann Hamilton (artist) Visual artist

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s known for her large-scale multimedia installations. After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.

Rudolf Stingel is an artist based in New York City.

Michael Ashkin is an American artist who makes sculptures, videos, photographs and installations depicting marginalized, desolate landscapes. He is a professor at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Ashkin was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.

Stephen DiRado is an American photographer. His work is mostly black-and-white, and he makes frequent use of large-format cameras. He is most noted for his portraiture, night-astronomical photography, and semi-composed group photography, and for the extensive length of his projects.

<i>Unconditional Surrender</i> (sculpture) Statue by Seward Johnson

Unconditional Surrender is a series of computer-generated statues by Seward Johnson that resemble an iconic 1945 photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, V–J day in Times Square, but was said by Johnson to be based on a similar, less well-known, photograph by Victor Jorgensen that is in the public domain. The first in the series was installed temporarily in Sarasota, Florida, then was moved to San Diego, California and New York City. Other copies have been installed in Hamilton, New Jersey; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; and Normandy, France. Johnson later identified the statue at exhibitions as "Embracing Peace" for the risqué double entendre when spoken.

JR (artist) Pseudonymous French artist

JR is the pseudonym of a French photographer and street artist whose identity is unconfirmed. Describing himself as a photograffeur, he flyposts large black-and-white photographic images in public locations. He states that the street is "the largest art gallery in the world." He started out on the streets of Paris. JR's work "often challenges widely held preconceptions and the reductive images propagated by advertising and the media."

<i>Race Riot</i> (Warhol)

Race Riot is an acrylic and silkscreen painting by the American artist Andy Warhol that he executed in 1964. It fetched $62,885,000 at Christie's in New York on 13 May 2014.

<i>Flight Stop</i> Art installation in Toronto

Flight Stop, also titled Flightstop, is a 1979 site-specific art work by Canadian artist Michael Snow. Located in the Toronto Eaton Centre in Downtown Toronto, the work hangs from the ceiling and appears to depict sixty Canada geese in flight. Each individual goose is made of Styrofoam covered in fibreglass and covered in a sheath made from photographs taken from a single goose. The flock is frozen in mid-flight, "flight stop" being a pun on the nature of still photography. When conceived in 1977, the work was titled Flight Stop but has frequently also been titled Flightstop. The work remains an iconic public art piece in Toronto and in many ways stands as a visual identity for the mall.

Ivan Monforte is a Mexican performance artist based in New York. His work aspires to start a dialogue for disenfranchised members of the LGBT community about sexuality, love, sex, and loss.

Donald Roger Snyder was an American photographer and multimedia artist. Immersed in the social upheaval of the 1960s, he is best known for his iconic photographs of the counterculture, collected in his 1979 book Aquarian Odyssey: A Photographic Trip into the Sixties.

References

  1. Smith, Roberta (2004-11-05). "Art in Review; Oliver Herring". New York Times.
  2. "Their Creative Instincts Decidedly Similar". Worcester Telegram & Gazette. 1989-05-14. As the only two foreign students in the art department of Oxford University, Peter Krashes and Oliver Herring discovered they had more than a few things in common. Now, after four years of working together . . . ["Related Wall Works"] includes 11 paintings by Herring and 15 drawings and etchings by Krashes.
  3. Cotter, Holland (1994-01-28). "Art in Review". New York Times.