Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907, gelatin-silver print
American Art Before WWII
-The straight photographer exploits the intrinsic properties of the camera to make photographs that look like photographs instead of imitations of paintings or fine-art prints.
- interest among his fellow first-class passengers and wandered over to steerage, where the cheapest
accommodation was located
-he was struck by the combination of forms he witnessed among the crowds on deck
-"a round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railings made of circular chains, white suspenders crossing on the back of a man."
-Avoiding even the slightest Pictorialist sentiment or anecdote, Stieglitz provided a straight document of the scene, which he said was not
merely a crowd of immigrants but "a
study in mathematical lines ... in a pattern of light and shade.
Edward Steichen, Balzac, The Silhouette�4 a.m., 1908, gum bichromate print
American Art Before WWII
#NAME?
Georgia O'Keeffe, Cow's Skull with Calico Roses, 1931
American Art Before WWII
- very interested in skulls
- animals associated with southwest
- sun bleached skull --> next to beautiful roses
-Jagged edge of skulls vs. rose
-Study in white, textures and colors
-Alternatively, her abstractions have such tangible presence that they suggest forms in nature
George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's, 1909
The Ashcan School
-Stags boxing club
-Stags were name of boxers that couldn't get into clubs
-Elites of society and lower classes
-People crowded in front
-Technique of a room from an angle
-Two boxers coming together
-->merged
--> dance like movement
-Many figures look cartoonish
-Illustrated style
-Remind of James Ensor
-Figure to bottom left, baldness facial structure--> snapshot moment in time
Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936, gelatin-silver print
Documentary Photography
#NAME?
Walker Evans, Miner's Home, West Virginia, 1935, gelatin-silver print
Documentary Photography
-Furniture very cramped
-Child doesn't know what he's doing on the chair
-A women and child--> middle class
-Christmas--> happy
-Real clash of cultures
-tells volumes about the life of its inhabitants.
-The cheerful middle-class homemakers and the smiling Santa that cover the walls are sadly incongruent in this stark environment
Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Montana, first cover of Life magazine, Nov. 23, 1936
Documentary Photography
#NAME?
Weegee, Their First Murder, October 9, 1941, gelatin silver print
Documentary Photography
-Doesn't show dead body
-Focused on reaction
-Not concerned about dead body
-Sense of inhumanity
Charles Sheeler, Rolling Power, 1939, oil on canvas
Precisionism
#NAME?
Charles Demuth, The Figure 5 in Gold, 1928, oil on composition board
Precisionism
-Fire Truck 5
-Diagonal lines coming at you
-Influenced by cubism
-Adding onto Cubist idea
-->use of primary colors
-->Subject matter not as cubist/modern
-Abstracted notion of fire truck
-Eye doesn't rest anywhere
-Visual motion and sound
-Push/pull of space
-Receding depth
-Depth and flat picture plane
James van der Zee, Couple Wearing Raccoon Coats with a Cadillac, Taken on West 127th Street Harlem, New York, 1932, gelatin-silver print
The Harlem Renaissance
Thomas Hart Benton, City Building, from mural series America Today, 1930, originally in New School
for Social Research, New York, tempera on linen with oil glaze
Regionalism & Social Realism
-Industrial materials
-Monumental figure
-People of different skin colors
-African American, top of composition= equal rights
-Can't see face, not about individualism
-Their hands are building America
-Almost cartoony looking
-Really strong males
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930, oil on beaverboard
Regionalism & Social Realism
-He spent a lot of time in Europe
-->medieval styles, church art
-Bodies are often charged with emotion
-Not naturalistic
-Endured hard work
-Used to working all day
-P0sing for a portrait
-Directly in front of newer
-Gothic Architecture in house
-Element of pride
-Frowning with her face
-Overalls under suit coat
-Personalities
-Iconic-->american individualism
-He is standing in front of her --> shoulder
-Interesting gender dynamic
-Sense of territorialism
-Mouth pursued chin dimpling
-This shows pride--> humor in this
-Taking ownership
Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930
Regionalism & Social Realism
-Abandoned street in New York
-Very influenced by European Modernism
-Melancholy
-Playing with lines of architecture
-abstracted strip of light blue (sky)
-Very abstract
-Bright red contrasted with bright yellow
-depicts a row of buildings on a deserted Seventh Avenue in New York, where a sharp, raking light casts deep shadows and a strange stillness over the whole.
-The flat fa�ade and dramatic lighting have been linked to Hopper's interest in stage-set design.
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942
Regionalism & Social Realism
#NAME?
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration series, Panel No. 1: During World War I there was a great migration
north by Southern African Americans, 1940-41, tempera on hardboard
Regionalism & Social Realism
#NAME?
Diego Rivera, Flower Day, 1925
Mexican Artists
-Native holiday fit with religious
-Native culture
-Indian-->indigenous people
-Vendor in the center holding calalillies for sale
-Strong pyramidal composition
-The paint leads you
-Referencing christian themes
-cross form
-mathematical composition
-wants flowers to be center of piece
-flowers are bright
-striking color contrast
-A flower that is distinctive
-Earthy colors
-Large and solid figures--> monumentalized
-Figures and reddish brown
-same colors part of background
-All these echoes of the indigenous culture
-very lyrical, stylized
Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry, 1932-33, The Detroit Institute of Arts, North Wall, fresco
Mexican Artists
-Mural
-Depiction of ford factory assembly line production in Detroit
-Fordism/Taylorism
-Multivalent artwork
-Reflection on modern industrial production and technology in the contemporary world
-Cosmic vision (pulls from pre-colombia cosmology) origin muths (volcano/ 4 races/ points of world)
-Modern science and technology
-Man and machine
-many embedded meanings
-socialist themes
-assembly line/ figures pushing and pulling
-using whole body
-whole bodies
-whole bodies are engaged
-Metronome Rhythm
-Top panel--> 2 big figures
-African/Asian Figure
-Mountain/Volcano
-Looks like it travel down into modern way of making metal
-Old and New
-Complex and layered
-All workers, working together with harmony
-You can see people of different races
-Very important coming out of
-Toltech-->referencing
-Diego Rivera in painting
-looking squinting figure ( the man of the future)
-Greenish color
-men sewing as machine
-The Making of Poison Gas
--->gas masks
--->making a posion gas bomb
--->this what industry can get you
--->he shows cells in a body collapsing (what happens medically) in on themselves
-Opposition of Panels: Vaccination Panel
--->animals of which vaccine was made
--->Christian imagery
--->This scene upset people the most
---> Utterly inappropriate
---> Making fun of religion
---> Showing that things can continue
Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States, 1932, oil on sheet metal
Mexican Artists
-in a terrible accident
--->spine broken
--->dislocated foot and collarbone
---> pelvis was pierced
-Couldn't have children
-important feminist figure
-consciously styles herself as Mexican
-Paints herself with unibrow
-Symbolic depictions of Mexican culture on left
-Terechota figure
-Roots in soil
-America on right
---> factory
--->industrial objects
--->instead of roots in soil, wires are in it
Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace, 1940
Mexican Artists
-surrealists loved her
-dark red tinted skin
-faint mustache
-thorn necklace with hummingbird
---> pierces her neck
-monkey and a cat
-she's right up in our face
-utterly unapologetic
-divorced, documenting grief
Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52
Abstract Expressionism
-Depict "iconic" figure
-Typical artistic trope of posing female nude model
-Reference to the "eternal feminine" archetype
-idealized, immutable "women" existing outside of transcending any one place or time
-Highly charged emotion, discordant, acid colors, mixed with neutral tones
-references, amongst other figures to ancient
-body has been manipulated
-body seems to be very square
-looks more skeletal
-a lot of neutral tones
-acidic colors contrasting
-she appears to be grinning
-shoe or hoof?
-human with other animals
-very striking figure
-violence of such intense aesthetic scrutiny, his slashing strokes simultaneously evoking the work of a dispassionate anatomist as well as a frenzied attacker.
-The banal and the shocking coexist in Woman I, creating a striking aesthetic tension.
-A monumental image of a seated woman in a sundress is his repellent and arresting evocation of woman as sex symbol and fertility goddess.
-the strip of silver metallic paint along the right edge of the canvas insists on a decidedly quotidian setting�the aluminum edge of a screen door, perhaps, or other structure redolent of middle-class
comfort�and anchors the sitter in the everyday world.
-Although the vigorous paint application appears entirely improvisatory, the artist labored over the painting
for eighteen months, scraping the canvas down, revising it, and, along the way, making countless drawings�he was a consummate draftsman�of the subject.
Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943
Abstract Expressionism
-not quite clear
-mysterious
-strange hieroglyphic signs
-absolutely taken by Piscasso
-took tons of sketches of picasso paintings
-references to southwest and pacific northwest
-Native American art (shaman masks, hieroglyphs)but this inspiration forms the basis of a highly personal artistic code or language
-influence of picasso
-invented hieroglyphic signs, pictographs sticks figures
-mysterious title, symbols and shapes
-plays w/vision
Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948
Abstract Expressionism
-notion of "becoming", individual consciousness
-notion of process going forward
-notion of individual emotion
-really strong gestural rhythms
-is an early realization of his distinctive approach to drip painting. Its intricate web of oil colors mixed with black enamel and aluminum paint asserts and then subverts the viewer's attempt to interpret the image
-a sequence of overlapping webs or as a sort of veil obscuring an underlying subject.
-Thin lines of dripped pigment commingle with broader strokes and even handprints in the upper right quadrant, while smudges of red-pink punctuate the lower left portion of the composition, asserting the possibility of a distinct foreground before dissolving into the play of colors across the plane of the canvas.
-The presence of bits of studio detritus�cigarette butts, ashes, pastry wrapping, even insects whose struggle left frantic marks�embedded in his paintings (deliberately or by accident is impossible to know) suggests that Pollock was giving form to the unconscious, with its capacity for sublime longing as well as abject fear.
-His lines are divorced from any descriptive function and range from string-like thinness to coagulated puddles, all merging into a hazy, luminous whole that seems to hover above the picture plane rather than illusionistically behind it.
Lee Krasner, Untitled, 1949
Abstract Expressionism
#NAME?
Lee Krasner, Milkweed, 1955
Abstract Expressionism
-cut up completed canvases turned into a collage
-collage in large scale
-title added after creation
-Milkweed: associated with rural life, monarch butterflies (they lay their eggs on milkweed plants, and the caterpillar eat only that plant until they turn into butterflies
-cycles of life, season
Franz Kline, Nijinsky, 1950
Abstract Expressionism
-inspired by a photography of nijinksy
-bold, energetic lines translate the essence of dynamic movement, human locomotion
-inspired by photograph of avant-garde Russian ballets russes performer and choreographer nikinkis, posing as the character petrouchka from a ballet by stravinksi
-distillation of form/movement into slashing and jerky lines
-is an abstract meditation on his own figurative representations of the subject, based on a photograph of the great Russian dancer as Petrushka in Stravinsky's ballet
of the same name.
- Despite the almost academic approach that Kline employed in working up paintings after numerous studies, the final works exhibit the gestural freedom and immediacy so valued by critics like Harold Rosenberg.
Mark Rothko, No. 1 (No. 18, 1948), 1948-49
Abstract Expressionism
-rough imperfect layering
-Rothko first made compositions based on classical myths and then, by the mid-1940s, painted biomorphic, Surrealist inspired, hybrid creatures floating in primordial waters.
-These forms began to coalesce at the end of the decade into floating color shapes with loose, undefined edges within larger expanses of color
Mark Rothko, Rothko Chapel, Wall paintings, Houston, TX, 1965-66 (opened 1971)
Abstract Expressionism
-nondenominational space
-take up walls
-big bloc
-This last series consists of fourteen large panels, almost uniform in their deep black and red-brown, almost filling the entire available space.
-The canvases are designed to be homogeneous with the octagonal building (designed by Philip Johnson) and the changing light of the chapel interior
-Thus, the forms have a less amorphous, harder edge appearance than Rothko's earlier abstractions.
-They represent a total architectural-pictorial experience in a sense analogous to that attempted by the religious muralists of the Baroque seventeenth century.
-Rothko, who even adopted the triptych format long associated with religious subjects, never intended his abstractions as mere formal experiments, but rather wanted to provoke emotional and even transcendental experiences in the viewer
Barnett Newman, Onement, I, 1948
Abstract Expressionism
#NAME?
Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 34, 1953-54
Abstract Expressionism
-very aware of spanish civil war
-a mourning and reflection taken to its essential component
- inspired by his profound reaction to its defeat by fascist forces in early 1939.
-Until his death in 1991, he painted more than 150 variants of the Elegy theme.
-These works stand in contrast to his brilliantly coloristic collages and paintings created during the same period, for they were executed predominantly in stark black and white.
-"Black is death; white is life," the artist said.
-The Elegies consisted for the most part of a few large, simple forms, vertical rectangles holding ovoid shapes in suspension.
-The scale increased as the series progressed, with some works on a mural scale.
-While the loosely brushed, organic shapes have been read literally by some, who have suggested that they might represent male genitalia with reference to Spanish bullfights
David Smith, Cubi (XVIII, XVII, XIX), 1963-64, stainless steel
Abstract Expressionism
-paying with solidity
-looks like they are in movement
-cubes balancing sides
-brushed steel
-all the patterns on the steel
-he exercised particular care in polishing to create effects of brilliant, allover calligraphy out of the highly reflecting, light-saturated surfaces.
-The work communicates an intimate sense of the artist's touch.
-Smith only rarely employed assistants and even the works of the Cubi series, with their machine-like precision, were constructed and finished by the artist.
Isamu Noguchi, Kouros, 1944-45, pink Georgia marble on slate base
Abstract Expressionism
-After WW II but he volunteered to live at the detention center in Poston, Arizona, in order to conduct research that might help the campaign against detention.
-research on internment camp
-taken kouros idea
-looking at ancient models
-interested in automatism
-strange shapes balanced together
-biomorphic in sense
- he evoked the human form, not only by the Greek title, but also by the Mir�esque biomorphism of the eyeholed and crossed, bone-like forms, all interlocked and arranged in the vertical orientation of a standing figure.
-The idea for sculptures of this type had originated with Noguchi's 1944 set design for Herodiade, a ballet by the leading American choreographer Martha Graham.
-In the ballet, Salome dances before her mirror, in which she sees, according to Noguchi, "her bones, the potential skeleton of her body.
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, oil and charcoal on canvas
Abstract Expressionism
-Frankenthaler poured thinned oil-based paint onto her canvas, allowing it to soak into the support.
-This produced effects of irresistible movement and flow as the pigment and oil leeched into the support.
-Frankenthaler's "staining" technique also allowed the weave of the canvas to reveal itself through the pigment, alerting the viewer to her process and the unique properties of her materials.
- her first stained painting, marked a turning point in her career.
-Having just returned from a vacation in Nova Scotia, the artist found herself experimenting with composition and consistency of paint.
Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, 1961, dry pigment in synthetic polymer on cotton over plywood
Nouveau R�alisme (New Realism)
-saturated powdery blue
-For Klein, this blue embodied unity, serenity, and, as he said, the supreme "representation of the immaterial, the sovereign liberation of the spirit."
-These flat, uninflected paintings carried no indication of the artist's hand on their surface and were a radical alternative to gestural abstraction, though Klein cheekily differentiated the works by pricing each one differently.
Yves Klein, Fire Painting, 1961-62, flame burned into asbestos with pigment
Nouveau R�alisme (New Realism)
#NAME?
Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York, 1960, mixed media, self-destructing installation in the garden of The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Nouveau R�alisme (New Realism)
- created in the garden of New York's Museum of Modern Art out of refuse and motors gathered from around the city, was a machine designed to destroy itself.
-An invited audience watched for about half an hour as the machine smoked and sputtered, finally self-destructing with the aid of the New York Fire Department.
-A remnant is in the museum's collection.
Niki de Saint-Phalle, Shooting Picture, 1961, plaster, paint, string, polythene, wire on wood
Nouveau R�alisme (New Realism)
-In the early 1960s she began to make "Shot-reliefs," firing a pistol at bags of paint placed on top of assemblage reliefs.
- As the punctured bags leaked their contents, "drip" paintings were created by chance methods
-These works were both a parodic comment on Action Painting and a ritualistic kind of Performance art.
Christo, Package 1961, 1961, fabric and rope
Nouveau R�alisme (New Realism)
#NAME?
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Kunsthalle, 1968, Bern, Switzerland
Nouveau R�alisme (New Realism)
#NAME?
George Maciunas and Billie Hutching, Fluxwedding, February 25, 1978, New York City
Fluxus
-Fluxus resisted transformations of life into art, believing that the two were already inseparable
-Performance pieces served best to demonstrate the commingling of life and art, and Fluxus members staged various events ranging from Fluxus festivals, where many participants would convene for concerts and Performances executed over several days, to intimate happenings such as Fluxus divorces (in one case involving a group of participants who literally cut all of the couple's possessions in half), to Maciunas's 1978 "Fluxus Wedding" to artist Billie Hutching, in which the couple arrived in traditional
wedding attire before ritually exchanging costumes
-Wedding guests then presented various impromptu actions and pre-orchestrated Performances.
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, performance at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York City, March 21, 1965
Fluxus
-highlighting inequality in gender roles
-how far would you go?
-While these pieces resonate with the antiart or Neo-Dada spirit of the Fluxus movement, another Performance reveals the political stakes that often rests hidden behind the Fluxus sensibility.
-In Ono's 1964 Cut Piece (fig. 18.19), the artist sat impassively on the floor of a stage wearing a black dress and black nylon stockings.
-Next to her on the floor was a pair of silver shears. -Audience members were invited to cut her dress. Taking turns, individuals came up to the stage and, reluctantly at first, took turns making slits into the dress or cutting pieces out of the fabric while Ono neither moved nor spoke.
-Eventually, once the upper portion of the garment had been cut away, a male member of the audience�egged on by now-emboldened viewers�clipped away the straps of her bra, leaving Ono to hold the undergarment up
-This work, with its subtle but chilling evocation of society's casual exploitation of women, confirms that the apparent whimsy of much Fluxus work masks politically astute commentaries on everyday life.
Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, 1956, collage on
paper
The Era of Pop Art
-Hamilton was a disciple of and respected authority on Marcel Duchamp, whose influence on
Pop art cannot be overestimated
-Hamilton's collage shows a "modern" apartment inhabited by a pin-up girl and her muscle-man mate, whose Tootsie Pop barbell prophesies the Pop movement on its label.
-Like Adam and Eve in a consumers' paradise, the couple have furnished their apartment with products of mass culture: television, tape recorder, an enlarged cover from a comic book, a Ford emblem, and an advertisement for a vacuum cleaner.
-Through the window can be seen a movie marquee featuring Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.
The images, all culled from contemporary magazines, provide a kind of inventory of visual culture.
David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967, acrylic on canvas
The Era of Pop Art
-paints over and over, LA setting
-water splash
-very graphic image
-pleasant space
-combines his signature equilibrium of elegant Matissean flat-pattern design and luxurious mood with a painterly virtuosity for the splash itself.
- One critic described this sense of suspended animation as the "epitome of expectant stillness," which is due partly to the artist's habit of working from photographs.
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955, combine painting
The Era of Pop Art
-In 1955 he made one of his most notorious "combine" paintings, as he called these works, Bed
-This one included a pillow and quilt over which paint was splashed in an Abstract Expressionist manner, a style Rauschenberg never completely abandoned.
Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1959, combine painting (oil and collage with objects)
The Era of Pop Art
-stuffed angora goat
-tire over him
-tennis ball in back
-monogram--> one locks into another
-tire and goat
-we have to create connection
-layers of paint
-grew up cross streets from the tire company
-with a stuffed Angora goat encompassed in an automobile tire, includes a painted and collage-covered base�or rather a painting extended horizontally on the floor�in which free brush painting acts as a unifying element
-Monogram is composed of disparate elements that do not, as is true of Rauschenberg's work as a whole, coalesce into any single, unified meaning or narrative.
-The combine paintings clearly had their origin in the collages and constructions of Schwitters and other Dadaists
-Rauschenberg's work, however, is different not only in its great spatial expansion, but in its desire to take not so much a Dada, antiart stance as one that expands our very definitions of art.
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55, encaustic oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood
The Era of Pop Art
-made paintstankenly
-3 panels been combined
-newspaper and collage
-ancient form of painting
-rough textures
-drip
-newspaper peaking out
-relationship between ideas and images
-with the paint built up in sensuous, translucent layers
Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955, encaustic and collage on canvas with wood construction and plaster casts
The Era of Pop Art
#NAME?
Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze, 1960, painted bronze
The Era of Pop Art
-not attached to base, can pick up can
-ones opened/hallow
-one closed, solid bronze
-explores the limit of art
-points to the ways art is given in cultural value
-painted cast-bronze cans on base
-cans unattached to base
-one "open" can and one "closed" can (full vs/ empty) solid vs. light
-bronze: reference to traditional sculptural medium, but represents a "low" subject matter (2 ale cans) that has been monumentalized
George Segal, The Diner, 1964-66, plaster, wood, chrome, laminated plastic, Masonite, fluorescent
lamp, glass, and paper
The Era of Pop Art
-real built environment
-generally life like
-are pretty disturbing looking
-mood-->lonely
-Segal was casting figures from live models, both nude and fully clothed.
-He wrapped his subjects in bandages, which he covered in plaster, allowed to dry, and then cut open and resealed, a process that records quite literally the details of anatomy and expression, but retains the rough textures of the original bandages.
Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!, 1963, oil and Magna on two canvas panels
The Era of Pop Art
-When drawing from comic strips, Lichtenstein preferred those representing violent action and sentimental romance and even incorporated the Benday dots used in photomechanical reproduction.
-Whaam! (fig. 19.35) belongs to a group of paintings that he made in the early 1960s.
-By virtue of its monumental scale (nearly fourteen feet, or 4 m, across) and dramatic subject (one based on heroic images in the comics of World War II battles), Whaam! became a kind of history painting for the Pop generation.
Roy Lichtenstein, Big Painting No. 6, 1965, oil and Magna on canvas
The Era of Pop Art
-The artist's depictions of giant, dripping brushstrokes, meticulously constructed and far from spontaneous, are a comedic Pop riposte to the heroic individual gestures of the Abstract Expressionists
-As cheeky as Lichtenstein's "drip paintings" might be, the artist's attraction to the Pop idiom was by no means a retreat from his engagement with the history of modernist art.
-In fact, he would describe his adoption of Pop themes and techniques as a last-ditch effort at finding a distinct place for himself in the wake of Abstract Expressionism
Andy Warhol, 210 Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962, silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas
The Era of Pop Art
-everyone trained to want the same thing
-level playing field
-a little bit overlapping
-seriality-row upon row of bottles, shown from 3 different angles
-repetition within a grid�endless rows of Coca-Cola bottles, literally presented, and arranged as they might be on supermarket shelves or an assembly line
Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962, silkscreen on canvas
The Era of Pop Art
-one for each flavor
-surreal and bizarre conformity
-When he exhibited thirty-two paintings of soup cans in 1962 at the Los Angeles Ferus Gallery, the number was determined by the variety of flavors then offered by Campbell's, and the canvases were monotonously lined up around the gallery on a white shelf like so many grocery goods
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1962, silkscreen ink, silkscreen enamel, and acrylic on canvas
The Era of Pop Art
#NAME?
Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964-65, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
The Era of Pop Art
#NAME?
Edward Kienholz, The Beanery, 1965, mixed-media tableau
The Era of Pop Art
-controversial
-fag-stay out-> artists reproduced
-famous for giving artists money
-the doors famously hung out there
-life sized, walk in artwork
-"the entire work symbolizes the switch from real time (symbolized by a newspaper) to the surrealist
-bar owner barney only figure with face
-customers have clocks for faces all set at 10:10
-Mannequins covered in cheap clothing
-figures and space in layer
-vending machine newspaper
-headline "children kill children in Vietnam
Edward Kienholz, The State Hospital, 1966, mixed-media tableau
The Era of Pop Art
-interior view:
-dirty grimy loooking
-fish bowls for face
-strapped to bed
-nude
-genitalia
-used bed pan
-terrible space
-people at mental hospital
-tableu: group of figures in a created environment
-assemblage sculpture
-immersive; highly psychological
-theatrical; box like setting
Edward Ruscha, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963
The Era of Pop Art
-interested in vernacular culture
-He based his large painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas on one of those images, though he transformed the mundane motif into a dramatic composition, slicing the canvas diagonally, turning the sky black, and transforming the station into a sleek, gleaming structure that recalls Precisionist paintings of the 1930s.
Edward Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, artist's book, offset lithograph, 1966
The Era of Pop Art
-Another of Ruscha's books, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (fig. 19.54), documents exactly what its title indicates in a series of deadpan photographs. -"I want absolutely neutral material," he told one interviewer. "My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter.
-They are simply a collection of 'facts'; my book is more like a collection of readymades."
-Ruscha's citation of Duchamp is a reminder that the latter's first major retrospective was held in 1963 at the Pasadena Art Museum
Robert Frank, Political Rally
The Era of Pop Art
#NAME?
Robert Frank, Parade�Hoboken, New Jersey
The Era of Pop Art
Awarded two grants, he struck out across the country in a style similar to that of the Beat Generation writers of the time: spontaneously and without a set plan. The resulting photographs, published in the United States as The Americans in 1959, are a raw and insightful consideration of a country in transition, revealing the uncertainty of post-World War II American culture. The sense of disquiet that overwhelms his subjects suggests cracks in the veneer of hope and optimism that allegedly defined the postwar era.
Robert Frank, Trolley�New Orleans
The Era of Pop Art
#NAME?
Robert Frank, Restaurant, U.S. 1 Leaving Columbia, South Carolina
The Era of Pop Art
#NAME?
Ellsworth Kelly, Orange and Green, 1966, Liquitex (mat varnish) on canvas
Hard-Edge Painting
-His paintings of the early 1960s frequently juxtaposed fields of equally vibrant color, squeezing expansive forms within the confines of a rectangular canvas
- But just as the tension in these canvases suggests, these forms frequently exploded from the rectangular frame, giving rise to works of various shapes
-These shaped canvases undermined the distinction between painting and sculpture.
-observation of natural forms around him
-organic form
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965, galvanized iron, seven boxes
Minimalism
#NAME?
Richard Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969, lead antimony, four plates
Minimalism
-One Ton Prop (House of Cards) balances four 500-lb. lead sheets against one another.
-The seemingly casual arrangement of these slabs paradoxically accentuates their weight and communicates a sense of dangerous but exciting precariousness�heightened by the title's reference to the ephemeral, practically weightless house of cards that it emulates.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers, 1980, black-and-white photographs
Minimalism
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Walter de Maria, Lightning Field, 1970-77, permanent Earth sculpture, 400 stainless-steel poles
Earthworks and Land Art
-In Lightning Field (fig. 23.20) De Maria combined the pictorialness and ephemeral character of European Land art with the sublimity of scale and conception typical of American Earthworks.
-Here the natural force incited by the work is lightning, drawn by 400 stainless-steel rods standing over twenty feet (6 m) tall and arranged as a one-mile-byone-kilometer grid set in a flat, New Mexican basin ringed by distant mountains.
- Chosen not only for its magnificent, almost limitless vistas and exceptionally sparse human population, but also for its frequent incidence of atmospheric electricity,
-the site offered the artist a prime opportunity to create a work that would involve both earth and sky, yet intrude upon neither, by articulating their trackless expanse with deliberately induced discharges of lightning.
- Few have ever been eyewitnesses to Lightning Field in full performance, but the photographic documentation leaves little doubt about the sublime, albeit unpredictable, unrepeatable, and fugitive effects produced by a work designed to celebrate the power and visual splendor of an awesome natural phenomenon.
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1969-70, black rock, salt crystal, and earth, Great Salt Lake, Utah
Earthworks and Land Art
- the artist was a gifted and even prolific writer, whose essays about his Great Salt Lake creation have made Spiral Jetty the most famous and romantic of all the Earthworks
-He deposited 6,000 tons (6,096 tonnes) of
earth into the lake, forming an enormous raised spiral.
-With its graceful curl and extraordinary coloration�pink, blue, and brown-black�the piece rewards the viewer with endless aesthetic delight, but the form, for all its purity, arose from Smithson's deep pondering of the site, combined with his fascination with entropy and the possibilities of reclamation.
Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981, hand-rolled steel
Public Art
- a 120-foot-long (36.6 m), twelve-foot-tall (3.7 m), seventytwo-ton (73-tonne) slab of unadorned curved and tilted steel for the federal building complex (Federal Plaza) in New York's Foley Square.
-Installed in 1981, the work was removed in 1989 in response to the demand of local civil servants, who objected to its imposing size and industrial seeming character.
- It was called a "hideous hulk of rusty
scrap metal" and an "iron curtain" barrier not only to passage across the plaza but also to other activities that once took place there, such as jazz concerts, rallies, and simple lunchtime socializing.
Maya Ying Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, black granite
Public Art
-Lin daringly proposed two simple walls of polished black granite that would meet at an angle, an idea that at first seemed too abstract for some of the interested parties.
-Several veterans' groups wanted to add a realistic sculpture of soldiers at the apex of the structure, which would have drastically compromised the original concept; the figure sculpture was
eventually added, but at a sufficient distance to allow both artworks to retain their individual integrity.
-In its finished state, the memorial's reflective black surface shows visitors their own faces as they search among the names of the casualties inscribed on the wall, an emotionally compelling effect that many have compared to an encounter between the living and the dead. In addition, visitors have the option of making pencil rubbings of the names of their loved ones.
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965, wooden folding chair, photographic copy of a chair, and
photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of a chair; chair
Conceptual Art
-An artist as well as a writer and theorist, Kosuth was cocurator of the Information exhibition.
-His 1965 piece One and Three Chairs presents one of the earliest Conceptual explorations of language as a means of representation.
-The piece consists of an actual chair accompanied by a full-scale photograph of it and a dictionary definition of "chair."
-These three representations of "chairness" evoke Plato's Theory of Forms, which holds that the true form of something exists only in the idea of that thing�all representations of the idea are degraded versions.
- To illustrate his point, Plato described a couch in three forms: the ideal "couch" that one can only imagine; the actual couch one can rest upon; and a picture of a couch.
-For Plato, the pictorial representation of the couch is the most degraded version, possessing neither the use value of the real couch nor the perfection of the ideal "couch."
-In a deliberate evocation of Plato, Kosuth uses a piece of furniture to show that each representation of the chair conveys a slightly different idea: all sign systems (including language) are inherently imprecise, inevitably producing as much misapprehension as understanding
John Baldessari, "Art History" from book Ingres and Other Parables, 1971, photograph and typed text
Conceptual Art
John Baldessari composed brief but trenchant
tales about art itself, usually accompanied by a reproduction
of some key monument from the art-historical canon
Louise Lawler, Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut, 1984,
silver dye bleach print
Conceptual Art
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Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992, installation detail, "Metalwork."
Conceptual Art
-Fred Wilson likewise developed a practice of intervention in the "sacred" cultural spaces such as museums
-His installations, such as Mining the Museum, pointedly examine how the circulation and accumulation of objects document�sometimes quite subtly�the exercise of cultural power, in
this case the American involvement in the slave trade.
-Wilson's interventions reveal the ability of objects to perpetuate racist ideologies, even when such beliefs have been publicly disavowed.
Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975, performance with scroll text
Feminist Art
-By the 1970s, Schneemann's performances were focusing on the relationship between culture, meaning, and the female body.
-Interior Scroll was one of the most visceral performances of the decade.
- It included readings, the painting of a large figure, and concluded with Schneemann slowly unrolling a small scroll, which she had inserted in her vagina prior to the performance.
-As she unfurled the text she read it, telling the audience about a confrontation with a male filmmaker.
-The man told her that good art must avoid the graphic and personally revealing subject matter that interested her: "You are unable to appreciate the system of the grid," he exclaims.
- It is this ability to confound the aesthetic rules guiding the reception of contemporary art that continues to make work such as Schneemann's so challenging.
-With a sensitivity that avoids lapsing into simplistic opposition to masculinity, Schneemann gave serious thought to finding meaning in the experience of being a woman that was independent from male symbols.
-She explained, "I thought of the vagina in many ways�physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the source of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation." -From within her body, Schneemann described her life and challenged the codes of the art world.
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79, white tile floor inscribed in gold with 999 women's names;
triangular table with painted porcelain, sculpted porcelain plates, and needlework
Feminist Art
-Womanhouse encouraged a generation of female artists to explore content and media marginalized in the art world but central to many women's experiences. The most visible work to come out of this moment was Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, 1979
- This elaborate celebration of women's history was executed, with intentional exaggeration, in such stereotypically feminine and decorative artistic media as needlework and china painting.
-The entire ensemble is organized as a triangle, a primordial symbol of womanhood as well as equality.
-Within its enclosed floor area are inscribed the names of 999 women in history and legend
- Each side of the triangular table has thirteen place settings; in part this makes a wry comment on the Last Supper�an exclusively male dinner party of thirteen�and in part it acknowledges the number of witches in a coven.
-The thirty-nine settings pay tribute to thirty-nine notable women, and each name is placed on a runner embroidered in a style appropriate to its figure's historical era.
-In The Dinner Party's most provocative gesture, the plates on the table display painted and sculpted motifs based on female genitalia.
-The dynamic designs of the plates transform the vagina into an energetic counterpart to the ubiquitous phallic symbol.
-Such a reversal attracted criticism, first for essentializing and defining each woman by her anatomy, and secondly for visualizing female power as phallic energy in drag.
-The essentializing and binary nature of the work has made it as controversial as its politics and craft have made it central to the history of gender and the arts.
Sylvia Sleigh, Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano, 1977, oil on canvas
Feminist Art
-Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano serves up all the standard tropes of the reclining nude as it has been painted since the Renaissance, yet Sleigh's painting defangs even Manet's Olympia, making it by comparison a tame homage to Titian as opposed to a radical gesture
-It is Sleigh's work that finally enables a thoroughgoing critique of the tradition of the nude while also insisting on the feminist position that the full experience of erotic pleasure does not require suppressing the sexual agency of either men or women.
Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation I Analysed fecal stains and feeding charts, 1974,
Perspex units, white card, diaper lining, plastic sheeting, paper, ink
Feminist Art
One of the most remarkable works of the period is Mary Kelly's (b. 1941) Post-Partum Document (fig. 22.34).
-American-born but at that time based in London, Kelly charted the early childhood development of her son in comparison to the psychological changes of herself as a new mother.
-Basing her work on the linguistic interpretation of Freud by the French psychoanalyst and writer Jacques Lacan, Kelly emphasized the role of language in identity translation of the son's acquisition of language and education into a sensible event for the mother.
-This is a moment when the relationship between mother and child begins to change.
-Significance for the child starts to be located out in the world, to be translated by him through language rather than given to him by the mother.
-Likewise, the role of the child as the primary bearer of meaning for the mother begins to fade in a confusing, often distressing manner.
- Kelly's striking foray into motherhood and psychology proposed content and form that combined Conceptual art, feminist politics, and psychoanalytic theory to examine aspects of female experience that were still taboo in the art world of the 1970s.
Mary Kelly, Guerrilla Girls, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988, poster
Feminist Art
-The group, calling themselves the Guerrilla Girls (a pun on "gorilla" as well as a reference to their unorthodox tactics for consciousness-raising), took on the mantle of the "conscience of the art world" and had grown frustrated at the small number of women represented in galleries, museums, and positions of power in that world.
-One early poster ironically listed the advantages to being a woman artist, beginning with "Working without the pressure of success.
Faith Ringgold, Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, 1983, printed and pieced fabric
Contemporary Art and Racial Politics
-In 1982, a year after her mother's death, Ringgold created her first story-quilt, Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (fig. 22.42), which told the story of Aunt Jemima, a matriarch restaurateur.
-The quilt and story weave together, describing the relations of the main character and her family as they compete with one another, meet and marry, and ultimately vie for the family business.
-Her characters are of different races and are compromised, sometimes morally upstanding,
sometimes weak, always human.
Robert Colescott, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History
Textbook, 1975, acrylic on canvas
Contemporary Art and Racial Politics
- is an ironic reversal of the race of heroes depicted in Emanuel Leutze's (1816-68) 1851 George Washington Crossing the Delaware and a serious commentary on the relationship between race and history in America.
-Above the fray of drunken debauchery, depicted in the iconography of racist imagery, the sole figure of Carver stands, a token black admitted to history books.
-Colescott incorporated the free use of stereotypes in a painterly language that combines the abstracting impulse of Picasso with the cathartic stylistics of Expressionism.
Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled, from the Kitchen Table series, 1999
Contemporary Art and Racial Politics
-Photographic investigation of a single domestic space in which the artist staged scenes of "the battle around the family" between women and men, friends and lovers, parents and children
� Photos in series follow the same format: Same point of view across from a kitchen table and under a brightly- lit lamp; figures often shown frontally; figures face towards the camera
� Positive images of the black family that defy certain racial stereotypes(e.g., the absence of a black male father and husband)
Kara Walker, Slavery!Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into
Picturesque South Slavery of "Life at 'Ol' Virginny's Hole'
Contemporary Art and Racial Politics
-Kara Walker creates shocking, often disturbing images refering to the history of slavery in America
� Explicit images of violence, sexuality, and exploitation
� Reference to taboo topics and historical imagery
� Reference to cultural stereotypes of the black body and the visual culture of the Antebellum South, specifically slavery
� For example,Walker references the Mammy figure; the minstrel figure; slaves practicing voodoo/arcane rituals; slaves in bloody revolt; the sexualized and exploited female house slave; the lecherous and wigged white male head of family and slave owner, the lavishly-dressed white Southern belle)
� Creates installations from cutpaper silhouettes (a traditional European and American form of art making, and a popular pastime in 19th-c. American homes)
� Surreal and mysterious scenes that are partially narrative, but mostly vignettes and collections of images
� Reference to Antebellum American culture and imagery, and the terrible deeds humans inflicted upon each other
� Reference to the realities of the slave trade, and the control of slave bodies in institutionalized slavery, and how "inhuman" humans can act
� Appropriation of stereotypical and racist imagery of black slaves, reconfigured in new contexts
� Use of irony, parody, black humor (note the long, descriptive full titles of many of her works, satirizing the long, descriptive, run-on chapter headings, a convention in 19th-c. American literature)
� Uncomfortable tension between whimsy and horror
Kara Walker, A Subtlety: Or... the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining
� Installation at Domino Sugar Refinery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which was closed adecade ago and is slated for demolition.
� The installation will be destroyed along with the factory. High-rise condos and apartments will bebuilt in the space (a coveted piece of real estate)
� The Domino refinery is an integral part of the history of sugar in the U.S. Built by the Havemeyer family in 1856, by 1870 it was producing more than half of the sugar in America, or approx. 1,200 tons of sugar per day.
� Installation in massive industrialspace: the refinery is five stories tall and as wide as a football field
� Installation required 4 tons of sugar
Figures:
� The "Sugar Baby":
� Massive 45-foot tall sphinx withthe features of a Mammy
� Made entirely of refined sugargranules
� The figure glows in the darkspace of the refinery
� Two embedded racialstereotypes: The mythical Mammy figure, a kerchief wearing nanny who takes care of white children
� The sexualized black female body: the figure has large prominent breasts, enormous buttocks, and protruding vulva
� The Attending "Subtleties":
� Life-sized statues made of melted sugar, and holding baskets filled with broken molasses pieces
� Based on "sugar subtleties," Medieval European sugar statues in the likeness of royalty and consumed by the elite)
� Entire installation a sensory experience: the viewer takes in the sights and smells of the burnt sugar that still coats the walls of the refinery, which for decades has processed cane into white sugar.
� Installation meant to bedisquieting, shocking, and overwhelming
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face), 1981, photograph
Postmodernism
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Sherrie Levine, AfterWalker Evans
Postmodernism
� Appropriation of imagery
� Artworks presented in new contexts (draws attention to relations between power, gender, and creativity, consumerism and commodity value, and the social sources and uses of art
� Disruption of modernist lineages
� What does it mean to see a female Dustbowl-era Alabama sharecropper outside of the context of a modernist photo archive and federal documentary project (Evans' & Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men project from the 1930's)?
Carrie Mae Weems, A Negroid Type / You Became a Scientific Profile / An Anthropological Debate / A
Photographic Subject, color photographs in four parts, from the photographic
installation of 30 images From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995-96
Po
-Weems: Appropriation of 19thc daguerreotype photographs of Southern slaves.
� Original daguerrotypes commissioned in 1850 by Harvardprofessor and scientist Louis Agassiz, and taken by J.T. Zealy.
� Photographs held in the historical archives of Harvard University.
� Agassiz was an advocate of the theory of polygenism (the idea that the human races come from different species.)
-He desired toprove through a comparison of human anatomical features (aided by the photographs of slaves) that whites were evolutionarily superior to blacks and other races.
� In the daguerrotype images' new context in Weems' work, and with visual disruptions, these daguerreotype images of slaves (as property, as dehumanized scientific specimens) are given identities as people.
� A voice given to the voiceless
� Visual disruptions inhibit our ability to read these photographs as documents of scientific specimens:
� blood red color superimposed on images
� text on images highlighting their original function, using "scientific"jargon
� presentation outside of the archive/ institutional context
� Institutional critique:
� Weems' images indict Harvard and other institutional structures for their unacknowledged role in dehumanizing programs such as Agassiz', and in the little-acknowledged historic role of such institutions in creating and maintaining problematic archival and anthropological programs
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #35, 1979, photograph
Postmodernism
-Beginning in 1978, Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) allied the arts of Performance and photography; she cast herself as the star of an inexhaustibly inventive series of still photographs called Untitled Film Stills sometimes characterized as "oneframe movie-making" (fig. 24.45).
-Complete with props, lighting, makeup, wigs, costume, and script, most of the pictures exploited, with the eventual goal of subverting, stereotypical female roles appropriated from films, television
shows, and commercials of the 1950s and 60s.
-Her characters ranged from a bored suburban housewife to a Playboy centerfold.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #175, 1987, color photograph
Postmodernism
-Some artists and writers embraced the abject as a vehicle for giving rein to the distinctly feminine unconscious with its unique desires and anxieties.
-Untitled #175 (1987) (fig. 24.46) presents the artist reflected in sunglasses dropped among the residue of incredible gluttony.
-It is no longer the violence of the gaze that is featured but the desire to look upon violence that Sherman explores in all the baroque luxuriance allowed by photographic technology.
Yasumasa Morimura, Portrait (Futago), 1988, photographic chromogenic print with acrylic paint and
gel medium
Postmodernism
-For Portrait (Futago)), his commentary on Olympia,, Morimura constructed an elaborate set of Olympia's boudoir in which he posed both as the infamous courtesan and as her maid. In apparently gleeful modifications to the Manet painting, one can see serious intrusions into modern art history.
-As we know from recent scholarship on Olympia, Manet's painting was as much about class and race as gender and modernity.
-Morimura's addition of a bridal kimono casts Morimura/ Olympia as a Japanese bride, and his transformation of the mysterious black cat into a figurine displayed by Japanese merchants as a totem of commerce and prosperity reiterates the class issues while adding those of race.
-Casting himself in the role of Olympia fuses the sexualized role of the prostitute with the vision, both feminized and eroticized, of the East still evident in Western discussions of Asian cultures.
-Morimura/Olympia takes on the observer's gaze and directs it, controlling those things one is able to see.
-If artists of the 1970s and 80s examined the disturbing consequences of being the object of beauty, desire, and examination, in the 1990s Morimura and artists including Lisa Yuskavage explored the potential for agency and power from the same position.
Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai), 1993, fluorescent light, color transparency, and
display case
Contemporary Photography
� A Sudden Gust of Wind looks like a fleeting moment captured in time but is in fact is the product of months of work on a Vancouver soundstage, the use of special effects to create the effect of papers being scattered by the wind, and the final product came out of taking about100 photographs
� Wall's works characterized as"one-frame cinematic productions"
� Large-scale photographs displayed in "light boxes" that illuminate the work and extend it from the plain, white contemporary museum or gallery wall
� The work is a photograph and three-dimensional object
� Plays with and reinvents art history and literature
Jeff Wall, After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 2000, fluorescent light, color transparency, and display case
Contemporary Photography
Wall's photograph:
� Highly-staged photograph
� Highly-detailed; taken using telephoto lens
� Protagonist shown "in my hole in the basement [where] there are exactly 1,369 lights"
� Wall's method of using a light box to illuminate the photograph means that this scene from Ellison's novel, which features light as a physcial reality (the illumination of 1,369 light bulbs" powered by stolen electricity), and light as a metaphor for the search for spiritual and intellectual truth
� Certain details from the novel, but Wall "invented" this space
� Fantastical, surreal space
Sandy Skoglund, Fox Games
Contemporary Photography
� Fox Games Commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris for the exhibition 150 Years: The Invention of an Art, an exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary ofphotography
� Skogland creates elaborate tableaux, many of them made by the artist, that are then photographed
� Highly stylized tableaux, that can appear computer-generated,although they are made by hand and photographed.
� Confrontation between the human world and nature
� Whimsical and comic, but underlying tension and fear at the mysterious events, and nature gone wild
� Dream world where uncanny events occur; the dream may slip into a nightmare
� The two diners and waiter in the back seem unaware of what is occurring in the room, as marauding foxes bound around, explore, and play in the room
� Tableau rendered in unnatural, contrasting colors: the monochramatic grey of the room contrasts wildly with the flaming orange-red of the foxes
� Room is entirely closed off and blocked and by an ornate grill. It is as if there is no outside world, and the events are occurring in a hermetically sealed space
� Is the scene simply playful, or dangerous, where the regular rules no longer apply?
� Allusion to the world in a nuclear age, when nature can be altered and skewed, and nuclear energy as a invisible but powerful force
Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent, 1999, chromogenic print
Contemporary Photography
� Photographs rendered in extreme detail
� Formal focus on linear abstraction
� Depicts the experience of public spaces in contemporary life
� An image illustrating the realities of a globalized economy
� Play: 99 cent photograph taken in 1999
� Modern reality of a globalized economy: the cheap, brightly colored mass-produced goods we buy at discount or big box stores in huge quantities are part of a global system of production and distribution that we rarely acknowledge in everyday life
� Signals the complex global economic systems and inequalities of production and consumption
� The people visiting stores such as this are not the same people, from the same countries or continents or social class, as those creating the raw materials or final products displayed for purchase in the store Andreas Gursky, 99 cent, 1999, chromogenic print
� Close cropping, horror vacui (the entire composition is filled with objects)
� Elevated viewpoint looking over the shelves and shelves of never ending products
� Feeling that the store sprawls infinitely
� Overwhelming, bright, colorful, a land of unlimited conspicuous consumption
� Geometric composition filled with small colorful units
� Pleasure at roving over the colorful, visually interesting scene
� Tension between abstraction and the depiction of a "real" modern space of consumption
Andreas Gursky, Rhein II, 1999, chromogenic print
Contemporary Photography
�Photograph of Rhine River in Germany
�Second in a set of 6 photographs depicting the River Rhine
�Digitally manipulated to remove extraneous details (e.g. pedestrians walking along the river, a factory in the distance)
�Fictional image: The created image is a sight that cannot be seen today: a landscape image of the River Rhine wholly untouched by modern circumstances (Gursky edited out people walking along the river and a factory in the distance); this is a similar technique as the one used by the French Impressionists, who often painted "idealized" landscape views offamous sites and "edited out" modern industry or people
� Abstract image of horizontal planes of color (reminiscent of abstract painting)
� Deeply atmospheric, hyper-real image of the Rhine
� Sensual, saturated color and contrasting textures
� Fun fact: A print of Rhein II was sold at auction at Christie's in 2011 for $4.3 million, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold
Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993, chromogenic print
Contemporary Photography
� Unflinching, deeply personal self-portrait, even though we are denied seeing the artist's face
� Creates a series documenting the gay and lesbian S/M community. Opie's self-portrait places her within this community.
� Highly-personal image of her dreams and desires, literally etched as an image into her skin
� Image scratched onto her back is reminiscent of a child's drawing of a family
� Drawing depicts two women holding hands, signaling her desire to find a female partner and share a family and home, a "traditional" desire for domestic happiness
� Plays with the history of painted portraiture, using conventions of portraiture (such as the colorful curtained background)
� Rich and and colorful brocade curtain background reminiscent of Northern Renaissance portraitists like hans Holbein
� Unusual twist: frontal format of head and torso, but the artist's self-portrait is from the back
Catherine Opie, Oliver, 2002, chromogenic print
Contemporary Photography
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Ophelia), Twilight series, 2003, chromogenic print
Contemporary Photography
� Explores the uncanny of the dream of nightmare
- In Crewdson's dreamlike Ophelia, a woman in her nightgown floats in water in the middle of the living room of a house.
- Is the woman asleep, or dead like the heroine Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet, who drowned herself in the play?
- Crewdson depicts the woman as Ophelia is typically represented in art history, as a beautiful maiden floating in a pool of water who appears more sleeping than dead from violent suicide
� Influenced by the films of David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock, and specifically refers to their films
� Most notably, Wall refers to Lynch in his photos and titles for his series (e.g. Beneath the Roses)
� Characters (people, animals) acting strangely, as if sleepwalking, compelled by some force, or even possessed
� Possible suggestion that mysterious outside forces are controlling people and things
� Plays with the uncanny, abject, our unconscious or irrational fears (things that disturb us, but we may not rationally know why, like imagining putting our hand down a drain, or seeing robins arrange their eggs in a circle)
� The viewer is prompted to ask questions about the nature of the scenes in the photographs, but will not be given anyclear answers
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Robin with ring of eggs), Natural Wonder series, 1993, chromogenic print
Contemporary Photography
� Plays with the uncanny, abject, our unconscious or irrational fears (things that disturb us, but we may not rationally know why, like imagining putting our hand down a drain, or seeing robins arrange their eggs in a circle)
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Boy with hand in drain), 2002, chromogenic print
Contemporary Photography
� Characters (people, animals) acting strangely, as if sleepwalking, compelled by some force, or even possessed
� Possible suggestion that mysterious outside forces are controlling people and things
� Plays with the uncanny, abject, our unconscious or irrational fears (things that disturb us, but we may not rationally know why, like imagining putting our hand down a drain, or seeing robins arrange their eggs in a circle)
� The viewer is prompted to ask questions about the nature of the scenes in the photographs, but will not be given any clear answers
Felix Gonzalez Torres, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), 1991, Candies wrapped in multicolored cellophane, endless supply
Globalization and Contemporary Art
-F�lix Gonz�lez-Torres (1957-96) created a poetic oeuvre in which a pile of candy, or a string of lightbulbs, could interweave physicality, memory, biography, politics, and history.
-Deeply influenced by Minimalism and Conceptual art, he found that the clarity and luxury of Minimalist art could be fashioned to push his audience from 1960s aesthetics to 1990s politics.
-Unlike the autonomy of Minimalist work, Gonz�lezTorres's sculpture directed attention to its creator and its audience.
-Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) (fig. 27.23), for instance, appears to be a collection of elegant metallic units, a sculpture in the tradition of Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt
-Its form, however, is the result of amassing the weight of Gonz�lez-Torres's lover Ross in brightly wrapped pieces of candy.
-Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), executed as its subject was dying of AIDS, is a meditation on the physical and emotional changes that occurred as the artist lost his lover.
-Viewers are invited to follow instructions and take a wrapped candy from the heap, the dwindling physical mass of the sculpture echoing the wasting away of Ross's body.
-Like all of Gonz�lez-Torres's work, this sculpture is dependent on physical interaction with an audience. There are no viewers of the work, only participants, and taking part in Gonz�lez-Torres's art demands that we alter it
-Change is integral to both its form and its content. The artist's technique also suggests a shift in the political landscape as AIDS took its toll on American lives. Working, as he described it, "within the contradictions of the system," he examines both the public qualities of private experiences of love and death and the private consequences of such public events as viewing art or providing healthcare.
Shirin Neshat, Untitled (Rapture), 1998, Production Still
Globalization and Contemporary Art
-Untitled (Rapture) (fig. 27.2) explores the separation of men and women in fundamentalist Islamic culture.
-Presented on facing screens, men occupy a fortress while women move across a desert landscape to the sea. As the white-shirted men aggressively define the boundaries of
their space, the women, veiled, watch.
-They shout once and the men look. Later, as several of the women board a boat, the men wave in an ambiguous gesture of farewell and warning.
-Rapture presents cultural divisions in choreographed movements in clearly articulated spaces.
-As we watch, alternating between screens mediating between the two sexes, we find our understanding of the film guided by similarly defined movements and spaces.
-Though tradition, culture, gender, and language may all appear threatening in Neshat's work, they do not overcome her female protagonists.
-Her work, she explains, is not about submission but rather the complexity of Islamic femininity that, to the artist, contains strength that is greater than men's because of its repeated suppression.
Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa, 2003, fourteen life-size fiberglass mannequins, fourteen chairs,
table, Dutch wax-printed cotton
Globalization and Contemporary Art
-Scramble for Africa is a pivotal work for Shonibare in its exploration of late Victorian England and its territorial expansion into Africa during the 1880s.
-The "scramble" for Africa by leading European and world powers resulted in the carving up of the continent, an act that was formalized at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85. Shonibare's work depicts this historic gathering, showing various statesmen huddled around a table with a large map of Africa, eagerly staking their claims.
-In Shonibare's interpretation the heads of state are characteristically headless--and equally mindless in their hunger for what Belgian King Leopold II called "a slice of this magnificent cake."
-Scramble for Africa is presented upon a raised platform that is lit from underneath, giving it a heightened sense of visual drama.
-Like actors upon a stage, the headless leaders gesticulate to one another as they scramble for the riches of the continent.
- Shonibare says, "Theatricality is certainly a device in my work, it is a way of setting the stage; it is also a fiction--a hyper-real, theatrical device that enables you to re-imagine events from history. . . . Scramble for Africa examines how history repeats itself and when I was making it I was really thinking about American imperialism and the need in the West for resources such as oil and how this pre-empts the annexation of different parts of the world.
Zhou Tiehai, Palace Woman, 2004, oil on canvas
Globalization and Contemporary Art
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Allan Sekula, Fish Story, 1995, exhibition of photographs at Santa Monica Museum of Art
Globalization and Contemporary Art
An epic body of work by Los Angeles photographic artist Allan Sekula, Fish Story was created over a five-year period of research that included travel to industrial ports all over the world.
-This project explored the historical, sociopolitical, aesthetic, and literary connections among such far-flung port cities as New York, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Seoul.
-Consisting of a sequence of 105 large-scale, color photographs interspersed with narrative panels authored by Sekula, as well as two slide projections, Fish Story wove an intricate web of visual and verbal associations among panoramic views of the sea, detailed close-ups of nautical devices, cargo containers, warehouses, sailors, and shipyard workers, locating the individual elements in an ever-shifting cross-current of global exchange: of goods, money, knowledge, and power.
Yes Men, Dow Does the Right Thing, 2004, performance
Globalization and Contemporary Art
-In Dow Does The Right Thing, Andy Bichlbaum of the collective The Yes Men, presents himself as the spokesman for Dow Chemical Company and agrees to do a live interview broadcast at BBC World.
-Dow took over Union Carbide Corporation, the company that was responsible for the Bhopal gas leak in 1984, in which hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to toxic chemicals.
-Though neither Dow nor UCC ever took responsibility for the catastrophe, Bichlbaum mentions his company has finally decided to compensate the victims and to clean up the contaminated soil.
-Dow only noticed the news item two hours after the BBC World interview. By that time, it had become world news.
-Dow lost 2 billion dollars on the German market and had to show its true position to 'rectify' the false information.
Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007, platinum, diamonds, human teeth
Globalization and Contemporary Art
-cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead that is known as the Skull Star Diamond.
-The skull's teeth are original, and were purchased by Hirst in London.
-The artwork is a Memento mori, or reminder of the mortality of the viewer.
-In 2007, art historian Rudi Fuchs, observed: 'The skull is out of this world, celestial almost. It proclaims victory over decay.
-At the same time it represents death as something infinitely more relentless.
- Compared to the tearful sadness of a vanitas scene, the diamond skull is glory itself.
-Costing �14 million to produce, the work was placed on its inaugural display at the White Cube gallery in London in an exhibition B
-Beyond belief with an asking price of �50 million. -This would have been the highest price ever paid for a single work by a living artist.