Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance and video artist originating from the San Joaquin Valley of California. Her (often precarious) work encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation and video. Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. Her work has been exhibited, among other locales at, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. Most recently she was one of four winners of the Chase Legacy Film Challenge grant in partnership with HBO and Kodak, presented at the Sundance Film Festival 08.
Currently Bustamante is on sabbatical as a visiting scholar at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. She holds the position as Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
http://www.naobustamante.com/
14 responses so far ↓
1 matt // Apr 28, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Nao’s timing was perfect for me, helping me look at Georgia Wall’s senior show and giving me a framework for understanding feminist performance art.
I’ve really been dwelling on the artifacts of art for a while now. Thinking of Earth People 2057 in particular, I like to grapple with the different layers of how Nao has made this piece. Of course, there are the images themselves, the footage that Nao has compiled. However, there’s the added layer of the preservation, of the “time capsule” aspect, that gives us more to chew on in regards to the piece. What does making art for the future mean? This is art that is not meant for us, me and you reading this in 2008, at all. But we can still experience and take from the work when we are exposed to it, much like we can take from work that is already 500 years old. Because of our temporal proximity to the work’s creation, we are visually literate to the contents of the work. Added on to that is the revisiting process, the way Nao’s work will be continually updated to the latest mode of storage and its presence in Iron Mountain. Every act of updating adds to the piece’s personal timeline, on its journey to the future, which is really just the work’s intended present. This piece gets me excited because of these layers. It’s an artifact of our time, but the piece is its own artifact, and with every update in medium will become something completely new while keeping its single concept.
2 Lauren // Apr 28, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I was also especially intrigued by Nao’s Earth People 2057 (2507?) piece. As a photographer it is interesting for me to think about the nature of this piece. Fiber paper is arguably the most archival material for photography and even that lasts only around 100 years if you fix it really well. The changing nature of photography, from film to digital is only making things more disposable. In fact almost everything in our culture is becoming increasingly disposable. With people routinely getting new computers every two years when a better one comes out, new phones just because a promotion came along it is hard to think about anything lasting for 500 years. I cant imagine the audience that Earth People 2507 will reach in 2507. Considering how drastically technology has changed in the last thirty years, from shelves and shelves of vinyl records, to thousands of songs on an ipod in the palm of your hand, I haven’t the slightest clue how to think about where technology will go and how this piece will be viewed in 500 years. I think perhaps that is the crux of the piece, that the aim of the work, to be seen in 2507, is so incomprehensible. That no one of us will ever know how the piece will be seen, the piece forces us to face our mortality and try as we may to look forward we can only speculate and use the past as reference. It is perplexing indeed.
3 anna // Apr 29, 2008 at 7:33 am
I appreciated that Bustamante incorporated a performative aspect into her talk about performance art perpetuating and involving us in the work that she does. She “ruptured the space” which I liked since it brought her more close to us and perhaps in doing so, made her work more accessible.
My favorite video, although hard to watch, was the one where she cut her mouth as she licked/but the perimeter of a glass frame. A lot of her work deals with extreme parody, I thought. And as I watched that video I was totally grossed out by how extreme it would be if she actually had made herself bleed. But once she received the phone call and was talking to someone with a mouth full of blood it occurred to me that perhaps this was a parody and maybe blood letting wasn’t such an extreme idea especially when the letting is being done from the comfort of the privileged, “bratty” artist’s chair. I thought the video was very funny, but also subverting the idea of how we can give a lot of credit to artists that try to shock us in some of their actions (think Yale MFA miscarriage student). It is a funny juxtaposition (not funny HAHA, but funny in a disturbing way) to actual violence that occurs every day.
A whole new level was added when Bustamanted discussed how the video was actually received and perceived by curators. It was taken as a serious piece. Or, not serious, but at least taken as real thus revealing video (and new media) as a medium of deceit or at least parody. How do you know what is real? (Part of defining new media is the willingness to analyze the medium with the critique it deserves….realizing the nature of the medium and its potential for creating, subverting, questioning, etc.) Of course the fact that her actions in the video were taken seriously (even the phone call which to me revealed the parody) kind of embarrasses the art world. And totally legitimizes her work and the comment she made in that video.
4 Sara K // May 3, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I am hesitant to write anything analytical or critical of Nao. I was not moved by her presence or work. Earthpeople 2507 made me think that now is the only time to pursue, rather then past or future. It feels a little silly to make something that will have some meaning in 500 years. I guess its significant for humans as a whole but it doesn’t really strike any chord in my heart. Maybe that was the point, just to think about now past and future.
The path from artist to world and back into viewer that Nao has built and follows feels gaudy or something, sporadic. Uses words and narcissism as tool for communication. Part of Noa’s talk/performance made me think about the over saturation of everything, images performances things food etc. and most of all that there are too many words not enough other forms of communication. Nao was saturated as well.
5 noah // May 3, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I found Earthpeople 2507 to be an interesting idea because it called into question some fundamental aspects of the intent of art. Frequently artists are forced to make decisions between their art as it pertains to the future (i.e. their legacy) and their present circumstances (i.e. their life). Throughout history, many great artists, writers, musicians, etc. have led miserable lives, essentially trading their own quality of life for a kind of immortality attained through their work (Van Gogh, Mozart, etc.). However, a lot of contemporary work seems much more focused on the present than on its place in the canon and its perception in the future. What was interesting about Earthpeople 2507 was that it was specifically designed with the distant future in mind. None of the artists I mentioned necessarily made the trade-off between short-term gain and long-term fame consciously, but Nao’s piece is targeted at that long-term vision. My only gripe with its execution is that she is showing it in pieces now. It seems to me that showing it to an audience that is not its target audience, in an incomplete form, is doing an injustice to the premise of the work.
6 john // May 3, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Nao’s earth2507 project sounds like it has so many possibilities. It really makes me wonder what it will look like to be in 2507 and to see 2008. They get to see so many more things than we can into 1508. But the problem of addressing the future is problematic too because we’re never really addressing them. We’re addressing what we think they might be. How do we make that link more intimate and real? In 500 years, things might be so much more different than anything we can imagine. How can we make our language less arcane? Our concerns more relevant to the future-people?
7 Max Kotelchuck // May 4, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I’d like to address Earth People 2507, simply because so many people have made reference to it. I liked the idea of critically examining the notion of archive, and the production of archival artwork. But it is problematic that this is a work that is being shown now, that’s being talked about now. Is she simply making fun of the idea of permanence? Is she pointing out the absurdity of thinking so far into the future? Or was she genuinely trying to establish some sort of dialogue with earth people 2507? Was the video a fun project for her and her dog? Or was she critiquing art, the conservation of art? Maybe she was making commentary about the environment, our nation’s history, or buffalo. I don’t really know. She didn’t have enough time really, to explain herself. I felt detached from many of her projects because i just never quite got to the point where I could explain her motivations. I wanted to know what she thought. I wanted her to stop performing momentarily, I guess.
THE FOOD! I’d also like to say that the pot-luck was fun and relaxing. Really glad we got a chance to relax with each other. The food was delicious!! Especially…. that “new food,” made by myself, peter, and sara. Also, that mutli layer Norwegian cake was a hit!
8 ben // May 5, 2008 at 11:55 am
Sadly, Nao Bustamante’s presentation of her work reinforced the stereotype of video art being ineffectual, narcissistic and self-indulgent.
Nao began her presentation unconventionally by hypnotizing the audience. She told us to shed our skin, and to step into her skin, and voila we were suddenly her. In retrospect, I think hypnotizing us may have been her only hope of eliciting a positive reaction to her video art, but at the time I found the hypnotism to be kitschy, commercialized, and generally a waste of time.
The first video Nao played featured her pet miniature poodle, cut to look like a miniature buffalo, complete with horns. The video quality was almost unacceptably grainy, like a youtube video displayed in full screen. Nao explained to us that the low-resolution found-footage would somehow be better preserved for posterity in comparison to something like HD video. I understand her fears about the preservation of video art, but personally, in 500 years I think the chances of being able to play back low resolution movies and HD movies are equally low. I think this video was ultimately about the plight of wild buffalo in North America, but the presence of a cute dog wearing buffalo horns constantly prancing in the foreground was at best a distraction.
The second video was of Nao watching a scene in a movie that made her cry, over and over again. It was supposed to be an exploration of the cheap and disposable aspects of mass-media film, but I personally felt like it was a poor excuse for Nao to turn the camera on herself, while she sobbed, for about 10 minutes straight. When someone asked her why she blew her nose with a Mexican flag, Nao became defensive, stating that she blew her nose with a dish rag that was coincidentally had three solid stripes of red, white and green, and that she intended no nationalist undertones. The fact that Nao refused to take responsibility for her artistic choices surprised me a great deal. If she thought that her choice to film herself blowing her nose with a red, white and green towel while watching a Spanish-language film was irrelevant, then she might has well have chosen to blow her nose with a miniature poodle wearing buffalo horns.
9 Hannah Noelle Celeste Vaughan // May 5, 2008 at 10:24 pm
I must agree with Ben, Sarah and Max in the fact that i found it difficult to really understand where Nao Bustemante was coming from and what her intention was. I think my confusion came, first from the hypnotism, which was, i believe, not well recieved by most of the people in the audience, and Secondly from a somewhat scattered presentation and selection of works.
I am intriguided with the fact that most of her works (excluding 2507) deal with pain in an humorous way. The glass cutting the lips performance, the crying while watching the ending of the sappy movie over and over again, and for all i can tell- America the beautiful. (By the way, i have heard so much about that piece, i can’t find it anywhere online and i really want to see it!) The humor was kind of disturbing in a good way, but i can’t say i fully understood it. I understand that she is critiquing the standpoint of artists who cause themselves pain from their high horse, or safe studios, But i also feel, in a small way that she is doing the very same thing. Take for example the piece in which she put her head in the bag full of water and taped the bag closed around her neck. There was very little humor. It was actually pretty serious and disturbing.
I am still also struggling with whether i can really get past my frustration that she was in every piece. I understand that alot of people including myself initially felt like she was being very narcissistic in centering herself, or her favorite pooch in each piece of work. But she is a performance artist! Can you really escape the appearance of narcissism in performance art? the artist is the performer. They personify and act out the art!
I am still confused. I don’t really know what to do with Nao. But the dinner party was fabulous, and I am supa excited that I got to build a fire.
10 arden // May 6, 2008 at 6:07 pm
I really enjoyed finally having a female artist visit, particularly since I have been finding myself associating new media to a male perspective. While I didn’t assume that I would have more of a connection to the work because it was from a female viewpoint, I did believe that it would afford me an alternative perspective (which it did); however, not one I could relate to. I was hoping for Nao to reflect on her work as a whole, which in some cases she did, but as a performance artist I felt that she was consistently performing throughout the entire lecture and was overly concerned with the audience’s reaction. This became especially true when students were exiting and entering the Cat, and it appeared that Nao was uncomfortable with the overall informality of the talk. While I would, as a speaker, probably find this distracting as well, it is a fact that students have other priorities, most likely class. This surprised me since I was worried that such accomplished artists like Paul Demarinis would be especially bothered by this, but I never assumed that it would concern Nao. I felt by eliciting such a reaction, it illustrated how Nao considered her talk a performance in itself, and by leaving we were not only interrupting the work, but also insulting it. Consequently, if we view the talk as a performance I felt beginning with “hypnotizing” the audience truly weakened her presentation. It demonstrated that when we listen to her we should have the privilege of becoming her, which can solely we achieved through her. In this way, I have to agree with Ben when he remarks that Nao’s piece seemed fairly self-centered and alienating. While I do believe that work can be simultaneously interesting and self-reflective, taking this to such an intense point seemed to deter the audience. Nevertheless, I really liked the fabulous dinner with Nao, because it finally felt as if we could get to know her. Not only was the food great, but the dinner also enabled everyone to interact and connect on a much more intimate scale. In retrospect, I would definitely agree that the lack of performance during the dinner was much more of a success than the heightened sense of performance during the talk.
11 cubby // May 7, 2008 at 1:36 pm
people walking in and out of the Cat was highly problematic to the talk and to nao’s execution of the talk. i think she was entitled to have a seated audience, but there is repeated and legitimate sentiment on this blog that her talk being a highly-conceived performance made itself inflexible. it was inflexible because it made demands such as a seated audience. but annoyance/confusion at performative elements of the talk (such as the hypnosis, frequently cited here) can be attributed to issues besides inflexibility–such as Nao’s performance as a medium. Her performative elements mediated her message to the audience. Are we reacting against the drama and flair of this mediation? are we comfortable with art being new mediated but personal contact not so much? am i uncomfortable with an artist being an actor? that analysis assumes that Nao’s performance thought critically of itself as a mediator between her concepts and her audience, which does not seem evident. i guess i am asking if i am uncomfortable with more outward and less critical forms of mediation, which much performance art might fall under. i don’t want to call this ‘old media,’ but am i receiving it that way? i mean all i wanted to know about during the foofoo/buffalo video was how barry’s of hollywood got that dog to look so much like a tiny tiny buffalo. i feel pretty stupid asking for such an engagement with the literal. but as anna pointed out, much of nao’s work deals with parody. it’s possible that sometimes nao doesn’t recognize the melodrma, humor and parody in all of her work and so ignores the literal detail that composes all those things. (that video was saying something. i think it is the farthest example of representational art i can now cite. also, i think it is very much the privilege of nao”bratty artist in their studio’ to morph poodle into a buffalo and still believe be perceived to be making a video about buffalo) the music in the foofoo video, for instance, was so silly, untamed and in fact, in opposition to her suggestion that the video was about such lofty concepts as the search for home and extinction. conceptual art runs a risk of feigning independence from the mundane and practical. new media as described up to nao in the lecture series, sometimes as a subset of conceptual art but also beyond that realm, resists pretending the material isn’t important. thus, i’m not sure a new media presentation would be upset by the practical matter of its audience moving about. i don’t know that nao is a new media artist by my definition. i really enjoyed all of the questions her work and her personana has raised among the class. i value her work and her talk as radically different flavors to the series. i am not trying to diminish any of my negative comments here; nao’s visit is my favorite for all the complications it has brought with it.
12 Louie // May 8, 2008 at 9:39 pm
I think it is definitely worthy to think about viscerality and personal contact as a mode of performance that we sometimes find repelling.
I gather from what other people have said that the performative aspects of Nao’s presentation were distracting and or overbearing for some people. I think it is just as important to think about this knee-jerk reaction a lot of us had to the hypnosis and general performative nature of her presentation as much as it is to examine the content of her other work that she showed us. I think it is ironic that she showed the earth people 2057 video because of the themes of layering (time, storage medium, content, image etc….) because her presentation, was in some ways, a layering of parody.
Nao’s schtick, which seems to be about examining the extreme narcissim of performance art, is done so in a way that is so over the top as to make fun of herself. In this way, Nao’s performance, ontop of all of the highly self-indulgent work which she showed us, served to oversaturate me with the feeling that she was being narcissistic. While this garners a really uncomfortable feeling for me, I think this might be exactly what she is going for. Not only were Nao’s selected works dealing with highly personal and possibly selfish themes, but she introduced the lecture by asking people to temporarily embody her. I enjoyed Nao’s nonchalance about this request, as if doing such a thing was run of the mill. I believe she is simply trying to garner these kinds of reactions in us in order for to think more critically about the role the artist plays as performer and mediator. In some ways, it seems like Nao is some kind martyr for the cause of critical transcendental thinking.
13 Gavin // May 10, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Much time has passed since my introduction to the work of Nao Bustamante which left me slightly confused and admittedly uninterested, most likely stemming from my desires to hear someone other than the artist discuss her work (about herself and dog, henceforth referred to as NaoFu). Thankfully, the people over at Rhizome posted on her last a few weeks ago in which they discussed the piece Earth People 2507. By the way, for those of you who want a fantastic still, follow the link:
http://bp0.blogger.com/_YCDDKGBEo_8/SAoVaYvnIWI/AAAAAAAAAIw/Dn-dqZxuV4E/s1600-h/Bustamante_untitled%231_filmstill.jpg
Anyway, NaoFu “positions herself as ‘a cosmovideographer shot into space and time,’ to create something ‘that is part Public Service Announcement and part time capsule’”. NaoFu posits “performances function as vital acts of transfer; transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated behavior.”
The performance, or record of performance, this vital mediation and transmissions seems self-important or indulgent, maybe that is why everyone is going on and on about narcissism. Anyway, the pieces all seem highly personal and don’t translate/resonate for/with me. I don’t know if I believe artists can transmit social knowledge, at least not over this spatio-temporal distance of 500 years. Maybe that’s the joke…is this just kitsch? Are we okay with that? I would like to think that neither are true. During the Modern era I suppose that Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world, but, today I think it just models a number of possibilities. With the multiplicity/interconnectedness of everything (incorrect/highly-problematic statement… whatever) it seems difficult to get your finger on the pulse of society/culture/etc. As such, I see this piece as an artist taking a thoroughly fragmented form of “social knowledge, memory and identity”, perhaps recognizing the futility of predicting society/resonating with any(one)thing beyond the (near)present, resulting in an amusing form. I have no idea what I am saying.
Separately, these highly personal works that revel in narcissism and self-importance seem to require the hypnotized state of being the artist to have much resonance. With all of the identities, memories, fragmented bits of the myth that is ‘social-knowledge’…should we worry about the medium being preserved when the message is empty?
Where did all the absolutes go, I miss modernism. On a semi-related note, here is a link to this piece by Noguchi, made for future/other civilizations to know that humans had existed at one point, even though they were bent on destroying each other at the time.
http://www.noguchi.org/mars269.htm
14 sarah // May 14, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I was only at Nao’s talk breifly because I was sick but from what I saw I was not really pleased. I guess I was not truely sure what Nao’s deal was. When I saw her I did not know that what she was doing might be a satire until after we talked about it and I was pretty taken-aback by her talk and some of her work.
Maybe I just dont understand performance art but I just didnt really like her work or performance. I think it is great that she out in the world doing what she thinks is important and some people really enjoy it but its not really for me.
in regards to her coming, like Arden I was excited for us to have a female artist. I feel sometimes that new media and a lot of technologicly involved art is dominated by men which is sort of discouraging and confusing-why are there not more women in this art form/industry?
I wish her talk had been more of a talk then a performance. I wanted to know more about why she was doing this and what it meant to her and less of seeing her do more of what I could watch online or read about. I was hoping she would come out of her character and talk to us. I felt that her character kept me from getting close to her as an audience member.
I do think that the leaving and coming of people was distruptive but I do not think they were leaving because of the talk but more because they had to class and they were not trying to be disrepectful.
Going back to an earlier point I made about performance art and not really understanding it, It just seems weird that everything she does would be to make fun of to a degree the form she is doing–is there nothing else to talk about? she seems to be creative and tallentented, why dosen’t she reach out to some other topics?
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