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Does anyone know when this was done? -- 130.243.79.252 17:46, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
This article needs to decide on whether it is "I am Sitting in a Room", or "I am sitting in a room"... - furrykef ( Talk at me) 17:55, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
According to my copy of the Lovely Music release of the CD as well as various websites, including http://alucier.web.wesleyan.edu/works.html, the title has only the first word (I) capitalized. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.105.113.246 ( talk) 18:11, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
Well I think the capitalization is silly and should be shot. Pyxzer ( talk) 22:15, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: not moved. Clear consensus on this. Andrewa ( talk) 08:10, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
I Am Sitting in a Room → I am sitting in a room – Correct capitalization as per talk page consensus and article references. Psiĥedelisto ( talk) 06:36, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
@ JrFedit: Mary Lucier's piece is a separate work, stop editing this article to say that "I Am Sitting in a Room" includes both the visual and audio components and was created by both. See the following sources which all treat the two works as distinct.
I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) for voice and electromagnetic tape [15:32] (original short version), text-based score. First performed in the Guggenheim Museum, New York City in 1970 and originally accompanied by Mary Lucier's Polaroid Slide Series.
— Miller-Keller, Andrea (2011). "Alvin Lucier (and His Artist Friends) Exhibition Checklist". Alvin Lucier: A Celebration. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. p. 34. ISBN 978-0-8195-7279-0.
Like Reich, [Alvin Lucier] went directly to human speech for the tape piece that remains his best-known work, I am sitting in a room, composed in 1970. It was first performed on May 25th of that year at the Guggenheim Museum in tandem with Mary Lucier's (Alvin Lucier's wife) Polaroid Image Series. The aural and visual works both explored the process of decay of an image in serial reproduction.
— Struckland, Edward (2000) [1993]. "P". Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 199. ISBN 0-253-21388-6.
Before that, landscape was something [Mary Lucier] became involved with indirectly, in the process of making a group of works called the "Polaroid Image Series" (1969-1974). Begun in 1969 as a collaboration with the composer Alvin Lucier, and based on his composition for voice and tape, I am sitting in a room, each "Image Series" copied and recopied an original photograph over multiple generations. "Slight errors in alignment, dirt accumulation, minute reflections, and the simple interaction of light and optics," Lucier has written recently, "produced an ever-changing and often unpredictable landscape in which the original image was completely transformed many times over." [1]
References
- ^ Mary Lucier, artist's statement for "The Polaroid Image Series" (1969-1974), January 1977. Three of these image series, "Croquet", "Three Points" and "Anne Opie Wehrer," were exhibited in a show entitled "Mary Lucier: Early Video and Photo Works, 1969-1974," at the Lennon, Weinberg gallery in New York from January 7-February 8, 1997.
— Barlow, Melind (Sep–Oct 1997). "Mapping Space, Sculpting Time: Mary Lucier and the Double Landscape". Afterimage. 25: 7.
While the main emphasis of the exhibition was on projected film and mixed-media works, it did include four works by Mary Lucier made in slide projection. One of these works, Polaroid Image Series (1970–74) was her response to the voice and tape work I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) made by her husband, the experimental composer Alvin Lucier. The slide images used the same methods as the voice composition where images are copied, recopied and repeated; and in its presentation in this exhibition they play simultaneously (Iles 2001).
— White, Mo (2020). "'It's all just a bit of History repeating': Slide-Tape's Key Works in the UK since the 1970s". In Menotti, Gabriel; Crisp, Virginia (eds.). Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies. Oxford University Press. p. 131. ISBN 978-0-19-093412-5.
This example is all the more apropos here because, as it happens, the work already has a "visual analogue": that is, Mary Lucier's series of Polaroid snapshots that was directly inspired by her husband's music. Although these photographs in themselves make a rather poor analysis of I am sitting in a room (unsurprisingly, since they were never intended as such), they do help explain how easily the idea and realization of Alvin Lucier's piece can be conceived of in the visual domain. By taking a photo of the first photo (of the chair in the room in which her husband sat when he made his original recording), then taking a photo of the photo of the photo, and so on, Mary Lucier introduced a slight error of size at each copy, so that the image gradually enlarged and move off the picture: "There was a dark shadow behind the lamp which grew on each reproduction, until finally the fifty-second one is completely black; the shadow behind the lamp grew until it took up the whole image."
— Bernard, Jonathan W. (1995). "Theory, Analysis, and the "Problem" of Minimal Music". In Marvin, Elizabeth West; Hermann, Richard (eds.). Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. pp. 268–269. ISBN 1-878822-42-X.
Even Mary Lucier's own website treats the two works as distinct with separate creators:
Polaroid Image Series, digital installation version, 2008
A four-channel synchronous video/sound installation accompanied by Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room.
Black and white. Sound. 23:00, continuous.
And Alvin Lucier's book you cite (Chambers p. 30) clearly says "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969) is for voice and electromagnetic tape
, i.e., it is a piece of sound art, not multi-media.
The "History and performances" section currently has the line The first performance of the full, collaborative work was in 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.[6] With Mary Lucier, the performance featured projections of Polaroid images that had been degraded like the voice.[7]
If you would like to further discuss Mary Lucier's related work, here would be the section, but it would be incorrect to say she was a co-creator of the sound art (not multi-media) work "I Am Sitting in a Room" which was Alvin Lucier's alone. Please stop edit warring and going against published, secondary (non-interview) sources. CC
TheFetishMachine and
Jerome Kohl who have also had to revert your edits.
Umimmak (
talk)
12:21, 28 June 2020 (UTC) [Update 12:59, 28 June 2020 (UTC)]
Medium: Sound installation, and
© 2020 Alvin Lucier, so I'm not sure what the purpose of that was. Umimmak ( talk) 13:10, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
′′′comment′′′ there is a wide ranging discussion around this situation elsewhere now. I should add at this point that I am a sound artist myself with over 4 decades of experience including as a curator, lecturer and artist. There are several key issues including one pivotal one; after the 1970 premiere a patriarchal art world gave Alvin the opportunity to perform and become known for the solo version of the piece. Had there not been problems of sexism (and of course the separation and later divorce of Alvin and Mary) in the arts the piece would have remained known as being a collaborative piece when first exhibited in the wider knowledge of it. Both artists might have chosen to exhibit / perform the individual elements separately but 'I am sitting in a room' would, as it should still, be known as a mixed media piece on its first public outing (by the way, the mention of Mary in the 1970 performance was placed there by me & is one of the few edits that has remained intact). The argument that because Alvin performed the solo version more often after 1970 does not and should not alter the factually correct and inclusive history of the piece. The 'for voice and tape' 'score' was written out well after the 1970 performance and, is was common for a large number of similar mixed media works the visual element was not notated in such scores. If one compares that 'score' to the notes from the premiere performance it states 'I Am Sitting In A Room' Alvin Lucier, Mary Lucier and details the use of voice, magnetic tape and projections. Further Whilst Alvin was experimenting with the sound aspect he was also working with Mary on the piece, as it became titled, as stated by them both, as a collaboration stemming for those experiments. The comment about the chair image proving anything is problematic as it assumes the images used were the first ones taken. Mary Lucier was / is an artist in her own right and the story of her work on the piece shows a process not, as the said comment implies, some sort of 'tag on' role. In summing up the entire point of trying to correct this page (for what its worth wiki does have a massive problem with significant patriarchal bias across the arts, and indeed other subjects, even to the point of female artists being removed from the pages of art forms they originated) is to fully represent the history & like it or not the art work 'I am sitting in a room' was presented by Alvin and Mary Lucier as a single work, not as two separate works, at its premiere in 1970. Arguing that subsequent performances by Alvin alone define the work is literally allowing the history to be rewritten. For some it might be important to allow Alvin or certain academics to decide if the work was entirely his before, during and after the 1970 performance but that isn't how art history should ever been represented and there are concerted efforts across the arts now to correct such distortions that don't do anything to damage the reputations of the male artists but simply seek to detail the full facts. The prime source on the work is its 1970 premiere (and its 2019 re-staging) and after that there should be, at least, equity in allowing the artists themselves to define the piece and as mentioned both have stated, clearly, that the piece was a collaboration. There is however a bigger issue here; having Mary's involvement allowed its correct place in the piece acts as a powerful sign of how art history should reflect the facts, not the selective facts based on any advantages afforded to one artist over another due to systemic prejudices. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
JrFedit (
talk •
contribs)
22:36, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
a multi media pieceand that it was
created [...] by Mary and Alvin Lucier. I think it's important to mention Mary Lucier's work Polaroid Slide Series in relation to the 1970 (and 2019 if there are reliable, secondary sources) performance of I am sitting in a room, and if you have source to back up
Both considered the performance in 2019 as only the 2nd time the 'full piece' has been performed / exhibited, that's certainly worth noting in the article. But other than Mary Lucier using the word "collaboration" and Alvin Lucier using the phrase "the visual part", your sources don't demonstrate that there is a consensus in the literature for I am sitting in a room to refer to anything other than Alvin Lucier's sound art or for Mary Lucier's Polaroid Slide Series to not be viewed as a separate work. Umimmak ( talk) 04:22, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
JrFedit ( talk) 07:17, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
I am arguing that the 1970 exhibition is, in art history terms, a key point in the time line of the collaborative piece and that recognition of that should be front & centre so that future students when searching for references for 'I am sitting in a room' don't get steered to only to AL's work and not to a more rounded history.and if you want to do that, that's fine. I said before it makes sense to have talk about the 1970 exhibition in the history and performance section. The issue was more things like changing infoboxes and the lead paragraph to say the piece is primarily a single multi-media piece created by both Mary and Alvin, but I think we're on the same page now. Umimmak ( talk) 00:50, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||
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Does anyone know when this was done? -- 130.243.79.252 17:46, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
This article needs to decide on whether it is "I am Sitting in a Room", or "I am sitting in a room"... - furrykef ( Talk at me) 17:55, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
According to my copy of the Lovely Music release of the CD as well as various websites, including http://alucier.web.wesleyan.edu/works.html, the title has only the first word (I) capitalized. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.105.113.246 ( talk) 18:11, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
Well I think the capitalization is silly and should be shot. Pyxzer ( talk) 22:15, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: not moved. Clear consensus on this. Andrewa ( talk) 08:10, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
I Am Sitting in a Room → I am sitting in a room – Correct capitalization as per talk page consensus and article references. Psiĥedelisto ( talk) 06:36, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
@ JrFedit: Mary Lucier's piece is a separate work, stop editing this article to say that "I Am Sitting in a Room" includes both the visual and audio components and was created by both. See the following sources which all treat the two works as distinct.
I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) for voice and electromagnetic tape [15:32] (original short version), text-based score. First performed in the Guggenheim Museum, New York City in 1970 and originally accompanied by Mary Lucier's Polaroid Slide Series.
— Miller-Keller, Andrea (2011). "Alvin Lucier (and His Artist Friends) Exhibition Checklist". Alvin Lucier: A Celebration. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. p. 34. ISBN 978-0-8195-7279-0.
Like Reich, [Alvin Lucier] went directly to human speech for the tape piece that remains his best-known work, I am sitting in a room, composed in 1970. It was first performed on May 25th of that year at the Guggenheim Museum in tandem with Mary Lucier's (Alvin Lucier's wife) Polaroid Image Series. The aural and visual works both explored the process of decay of an image in serial reproduction.
— Struckland, Edward (2000) [1993]. "P". Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 199. ISBN 0-253-21388-6.
Before that, landscape was something [Mary Lucier] became involved with indirectly, in the process of making a group of works called the "Polaroid Image Series" (1969-1974). Begun in 1969 as a collaboration with the composer Alvin Lucier, and based on his composition for voice and tape, I am sitting in a room, each "Image Series" copied and recopied an original photograph over multiple generations. "Slight errors in alignment, dirt accumulation, minute reflections, and the simple interaction of light and optics," Lucier has written recently, "produced an ever-changing and often unpredictable landscape in which the original image was completely transformed many times over." [1]
References
- ^ Mary Lucier, artist's statement for "The Polaroid Image Series" (1969-1974), January 1977. Three of these image series, "Croquet", "Three Points" and "Anne Opie Wehrer," were exhibited in a show entitled "Mary Lucier: Early Video and Photo Works, 1969-1974," at the Lennon, Weinberg gallery in New York from January 7-February 8, 1997.
— Barlow, Melind (Sep–Oct 1997). "Mapping Space, Sculpting Time: Mary Lucier and the Double Landscape". Afterimage. 25: 7.
While the main emphasis of the exhibition was on projected film and mixed-media works, it did include four works by Mary Lucier made in slide projection. One of these works, Polaroid Image Series (1970–74) was her response to the voice and tape work I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) made by her husband, the experimental composer Alvin Lucier. The slide images used the same methods as the voice composition where images are copied, recopied and repeated; and in its presentation in this exhibition they play simultaneously (Iles 2001).
— White, Mo (2020). "'It's all just a bit of History repeating': Slide-Tape's Key Works in the UK since the 1970s". In Menotti, Gabriel; Crisp, Virginia (eds.). Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies. Oxford University Press. p. 131. ISBN 978-0-19-093412-5.
This example is all the more apropos here because, as it happens, the work already has a "visual analogue": that is, Mary Lucier's series of Polaroid snapshots that was directly inspired by her husband's music. Although these photographs in themselves make a rather poor analysis of I am sitting in a room (unsurprisingly, since they were never intended as such), they do help explain how easily the idea and realization of Alvin Lucier's piece can be conceived of in the visual domain. By taking a photo of the first photo (of the chair in the room in which her husband sat when he made his original recording), then taking a photo of the photo of the photo, and so on, Mary Lucier introduced a slight error of size at each copy, so that the image gradually enlarged and move off the picture: "There was a dark shadow behind the lamp which grew on each reproduction, until finally the fifty-second one is completely black; the shadow behind the lamp grew until it took up the whole image."
— Bernard, Jonathan W. (1995). "Theory, Analysis, and the "Problem" of Minimal Music". In Marvin, Elizabeth West; Hermann, Richard (eds.). Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. pp. 268–269. ISBN 1-878822-42-X.
Even Mary Lucier's own website treats the two works as distinct with separate creators:
Polaroid Image Series, digital installation version, 2008
A four-channel synchronous video/sound installation accompanied by Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room.
Black and white. Sound. 23:00, continuous.
And Alvin Lucier's book you cite (Chambers p. 30) clearly says "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969) is for voice and electromagnetic tape
, i.e., it is a piece of sound art, not multi-media.
The "History and performances" section currently has the line The first performance of the full, collaborative work was in 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.[6] With Mary Lucier, the performance featured projections of Polaroid images that had been degraded like the voice.[7]
If you would like to further discuss Mary Lucier's related work, here would be the section, but it would be incorrect to say she was a co-creator of the sound art (not multi-media) work "I Am Sitting in a Room" which was Alvin Lucier's alone. Please stop edit warring and going against published, secondary (non-interview) sources. CC
TheFetishMachine and
Jerome Kohl who have also had to revert your edits.
Umimmak (
talk)
12:21, 28 June 2020 (UTC) [Update 12:59, 28 June 2020 (UTC)]
Medium: Sound installation, and
© 2020 Alvin Lucier, so I'm not sure what the purpose of that was. Umimmak ( talk) 13:10, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
′′′comment′′′ there is a wide ranging discussion around this situation elsewhere now. I should add at this point that I am a sound artist myself with over 4 decades of experience including as a curator, lecturer and artist. There are several key issues including one pivotal one; after the 1970 premiere a patriarchal art world gave Alvin the opportunity to perform and become known for the solo version of the piece. Had there not been problems of sexism (and of course the separation and later divorce of Alvin and Mary) in the arts the piece would have remained known as being a collaborative piece when first exhibited in the wider knowledge of it. Both artists might have chosen to exhibit / perform the individual elements separately but 'I am sitting in a room' would, as it should still, be known as a mixed media piece on its first public outing (by the way, the mention of Mary in the 1970 performance was placed there by me & is one of the few edits that has remained intact). The argument that because Alvin performed the solo version more often after 1970 does not and should not alter the factually correct and inclusive history of the piece. The 'for voice and tape' 'score' was written out well after the 1970 performance and, is was common for a large number of similar mixed media works the visual element was not notated in such scores. If one compares that 'score' to the notes from the premiere performance it states 'I Am Sitting In A Room' Alvin Lucier, Mary Lucier and details the use of voice, magnetic tape and projections. Further Whilst Alvin was experimenting with the sound aspect he was also working with Mary on the piece, as it became titled, as stated by them both, as a collaboration stemming for those experiments. The comment about the chair image proving anything is problematic as it assumes the images used were the first ones taken. Mary Lucier was / is an artist in her own right and the story of her work on the piece shows a process not, as the said comment implies, some sort of 'tag on' role. In summing up the entire point of trying to correct this page (for what its worth wiki does have a massive problem with significant patriarchal bias across the arts, and indeed other subjects, even to the point of female artists being removed from the pages of art forms they originated) is to fully represent the history & like it or not the art work 'I am sitting in a room' was presented by Alvin and Mary Lucier as a single work, not as two separate works, at its premiere in 1970. Arguing that subsequent performances by Alvin alone define the work is literally allowing the history to be rewritten. For some it might be important to allow Alvin or certain academics to decide if the work was entirely his before, during and after the 1970 performance but that isn't how art history should ever been represented and there are concerted efforts across the arts now to correct such distortions that don't do anything to damage the reputations of the male artists but simply seek to detail the full facts. The prime source on the work is its 1970 premiere (and its 2019 re-staging) and after that there should be, at least, equity in allowing the artists themselves to define the piece and as mentioned both have stated, clearly, that the piece was a collaboration. There is however a bigger issue here; having Mary's involvement allowed its correct place in the piece acts as a powerful sign of how art history should reflect the facts, not the selective facts based on any advantages afforded to one artist over another due to systemic prejudices. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
JrFedit (
talk •
contribs)
22:36, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
a multi media pieceand that it was
created [...] by Mary and Alvin Lucier. I think it's important to mention Mary Lucier's work Polaroid Slide Series in relation to the 1970 (and 2019 if there are reliable, secondary sources) performance of I am sitting in a room, and if you have source to back up
Both considered the performance in 2019 as only the 2nd time the 'full piece' has been performed / exhibited, that's certainly worth noting in the article. But other than Mary Lucier using the word "collaboration" and Alvin Lucier using the phrase "the visual part", your sources don't demonstrate that there is a consensus in the literature for I am sitting in a room to refer to anything other than Alvin Lucier's sound art or for Mary Lucier's Polaroid Slide Series to not be viewed as a separate work. Umimmak ( talk) 04:22, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
JrFedit ( talk) 07:17, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
I am arguing that the 1970 exhibition is, in art history terms, a key point in the time line of the collaborative piece and that recognition of that should be front & centre so that future students when searching for references for 'I am sitting in a room' don't get steered to only to AL's work and not to a more rounded history.and if you want to do that, that's fine. I said before it makes sense to have talk about the 1970 exhibition in the history and performance section. The issue was more things like changing infoboxes and the lead paragraph to say the piece is primarily a single multi-media piece created by both Mary and Alvin, but I think we're on the same page now. Umimmak ( talk) 00:50, 8 July 2020 (UTC)