modernity
- designates a historical period - the modern era
- ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in post-medieval Europe and have developed since
- focused on increased productivity, wealth accumulation and spread of rig
industry/industrialization
- The process in which a society or country (or world) transforms itself from a primarily agricultural society into one based on the manufacturing of goods and services.
- early modern period is 1500s - 1800s, the industrial revolution
- industry = econom
modernism
- advanced art, most experimental or innovative art of the moment, has a critical function and is judgmental
- in the 1970s it becomes attached to movements with radical politics or social aspirations (Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism)
- mixing of high an
Futurism 1906 - 1916
- captures energy, dynamism and simultaneity
- aligned politically with fascism (origins in Italy) - desire to purge the world from everything old, start from scratch, enthusiastic about WWI
- movement dies
- emphasized and glorified themes associated wit
Dada 1916 - 1922
- Zurich, Paris, Kohn, New York; European avant-garde
- linguistic component - assault on language being meaningful; against WWI (merger of the linguistic and the visual, many interpretations; can make it anything you want)
- rejected reason and logic, pr
Constructivism 1919
- comes out of Russian futurism; starts in imperial Russia ends in Soviet
- accused of formalism, preoccupied with form; this was an insult and implied that they were only creating art for art's sake; not interested in what art does in a larger context
Surrealism 1924 - 1942
- Dali
- important for abstract expressionism
- movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind
- nazis do not like their ideas and most go into exile before WWII
- intended to express the true function
WWII and The Holocaust
- 1939-45
- a genocide in which approximately six million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime, under the command of Adolf Hitler, and its collaborators. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories
Neo-avant gardes/(Peter Buerger)
- post WWII
- The German literary critic Peter B�rger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the politic
Semiotics
- general science of signs; study of meaning-making, the philosophical theory of signs and symbols
- science of forms, since it studies significations apart from their content
- closely related to linguistics
Psychoanalysis; the unconscious
- related to surrealism and Freud
- a system of psychological theory and therapy that aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the con
the uncanny
- strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way
- connection in art between the organic and the inorganic; did we actually see something moving?
- term coined by Freud
- example: White Points by Vasarely
Marxism / historical materialism
- worldview and method of societal analysis that focuses on class relations and societal conflict, that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, and a dialectical view of social transformation
- Historical materialism is a methodologic
Sign, Signifier and the Signified (de Saussure)
- a 'signifier' - the form which the sign takes; and
- the 'signified' - the concept it represents
- The sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified
- The relationship between the signifier and the signified is
Indexicality (Icon vs. Symbol vs. Index - Charles Saunders Pierce)
- Icon: a sign that is linked to its represented object by some shared quality (which may vary from physical appearances, common actions, distinct sounds, etc.). An example of this would be the stick-figure pictorial representations of men and women on th
high culture and low culture
- high culture - the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture; independent films, traditional visual arts, things that are not mass marketed
- low culture - derogatory term for some forms of popular culture tha
Marcel Duchamp
- French-American, Dada and conceptualist art, 1887 - 1968
- readymades - found objects which Duchamp chose and presented as art
- Fountain, one of the most famous Dada works; submits a urinal to an open exhibition and it is rejected; crucial point - he C
the readymade
- found objects which Duchamp chose and presented as art
- ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art"
- By simply choosing the object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, titli
mass culture/mass media
- culture that is widely disseminated via the mass media
- media culture refers to the current western capitalist society that emerged and developed from the 20th century, under the influence of mass media
- mass media - diversified media technologies tha
kitsch
- art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way; seen in bad taste
- low-brow style of mass-produced art or design using popular or cultural
social realism
- international art movement, refers to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these co
WPA (Works Projects Administration)
- largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects
- American social documentary photography
- Go all over the country and photo rural America, hired by
Regionalism
- American realist modern art movement that was popular during the 1930s. The artistic focus was from artists who shunned city life, and rapidly developing technological advances, to create scenes of rural life
- widely appreciated for its reassuring imag
Mexican muralism
- promotion of mural painting starting in the 1920s, generally with social and political messages as part of efforts to reunify the country under the post Mexican Revolution government. It was headed by "the big three" painters, Diego Rivera, Jos� Clement
socialist realism
- style of realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other socialist countries
- teleologically-oriented style having as its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism
- glorifies the roles of
Mimesis / Naturalism / Illusionism / Academicism
- all parts of realism - 19th century painting; high degree of semblance of what is being painted
- mimesis - imitation, in particular, representation or imitation of the real world in art and literature, the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one gr
Cold War
- state of political and military tension after World War II between powers in the Western Bloc and powers in the Eastern Bloc
- In 1974, an exhibition of independent artists (The bulldozer exhibition, About the Cold War, In the news because American repo
McCarthyism
- a vociferous campaign against alleged communists in the US government and other institutions carried out under Senator Joseph McCarthy in the period 1950-54. Many of the accused were blacklisted or lost their jobs, although most did not in fact belong t
abstract expressionism
- Post-World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s.
- an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation
- Hans Hoffman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett
the Irascibles
- Name given to a group of American abstract artists who put name to an open letter, written in 1950, to the president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, rejecting the museum's exhibition American Painting Today - 1950 and boycotting the accompanying comp
Clement Greenberg
- American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century
- popularized the term "medium specificity
medium specificity
- Allan Kaprow - Happenings - Suppressions of medium specificity; Touches on all realms of perception and dissolves boundaries between existing media
- medium specificity holds that "the unique and proper area of competence" for a form of art corresponds
anti-illusionism
- movement in art which opposes the idea of illusionism.
- pays ultra close attention to how a piece of art is presented to the point where the art object itself is barely a concern
- try to give the feeling to the viewers that they are looking at a work
Harold Rosenberg
- Harold Rosenberg was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. Rosenberg is best known for his art criticism
- Beginning in the early 19
Hans Namuth
- Hans Namuth was a German-born photographer
- Namuth specialized in portraiture, photographing many artists, including abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock
- His photos of Pollock at work in his studio increased Pollock's fame and recognition and led t
automatism
- the avoidance of conscious intention in producing works of art, especially by using mechanical techniques or subconscious associations
- Surrealists practice this
- Give up control and access a pure state of the unconscious by letting go of control as y
Carol Jung: collective unconscious, archetypes
- Collective unconscious - A level of the psyche shaped by the cumulative experience of the human race
- Archetypes: There is a level to our psyches where there are just a few patterns as to how humans will respond under the demands makes for us; These ar
Totem
- Ordering parts from a catalogue of boiler tanks and repurposing them into tank totems
- David Smith: totem pole collages, work is a vertical agglomeration of mementos to the sculptor's rigid upbringing in the American midwest
the totem half signals the
the primitive/primitivism
- a belief in the value of what is simple and unsophisticated, expressed as a philosophy of life or through art or literature
- Upholds the value of and valorizes the simple, the undeveloped, the uncivilized - timeless, more pure
- Borrows from ancient, n
zip
- Barnett Newman uses zips to create his abract expressionism works
- uses masking tape for places he doesn't want to paint over
- Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Barnett Newman, 1950-51
color field
- painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s
- inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstra
The sublime
- the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic
- Sublime is the opposite of beautiful
- Art can also explore the sublime; Experience of facing something so much larger than you that it re
documenta
- In 1955, exhibition Documenta was conducted in Kassel, West Germany
- All about pre-war avant-gardes
- Redeeming Germany after the disgrace of the 1937 degenerate art collection that put on display pieces that were confiscated from German art museums an
second generation abstract expressionism
- The artists of the 1950s suffer the fate of coming in between two stand-out movements: abstract expressionism and pop art. Sometimes called the "second" generation of abstract expressionism, this term refers to the relationship of these artists to abstr
art informel / Michel Tapie
- unformed art
- Tapie - internationally active French critic, curator, and collector of art. He was an early and influential theorist and practitioner of "tachisme" (art informel), which is generally regarded as the European equivalent of abstract expres
art brut
- French artist Jean Dubuffet was particularly struck by Bildnerei der Geisteskranken and began his own collection of such art, which he called art brut or raw art. In 1948 he formed the Compagnie de l'Art Brut along with other artists, including Andr� Br
existentialism / Jean-Paul Sartre
- a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will
- French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political acti
Gutai
- Art as event
- Concrete - philosophy
- Tried to find inventive ways to use paint on canvas
- Start to have outdoor exhibitions and leave painting; Takes canvas with footprints and spreads it out
- Murakami Saburo, Work Painted by Throwing a Ball, 1954
-
combines
- ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG - Bed, 1955
- A combine painting is an artwork that incorporates various objects into a painted canvas surface, creating a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture
- Items attached to paintings might include photographic images,
collage
- a piece of art made by sticking various different materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric onto a backing
- Hans Arp, Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, threw paper squares in the air to see where they woul
assemblage
- a collection or gathering of things or people
- consists of making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects
- In literature, assemblage refers to a text "built primarily and explicitly from existing te
bricolage
- construction or creation from a diverse range of available things
- technique where works are constructed from various materials available or on hand, and is seen as a characteristic of many postmodern works
- These materials may be mass-produced or "ju
Happening - Allan Kaprow
- Availability of the world at large
- Event unfolding in time; Does not take place in a gallery
- Dissolution of hierarchies and value systems; Undermine the distinction between the pristine space of a museum and the outside world
- Suppressions of mediu
Nouveua Realism / Pierre Restany
- "The New Realists have become conscious of their collective identity; New Realism = new perceptions of the real." - Manifesto of Nouveau Realisme, 1960
- artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein durin
situationist international (1957-1972) / Guy Debord
- Commodity/commodity fetishism/reification
- Consumption/consumer society
- Alienated labor/instrumentalism
- Spectacle/culture industry/commodification of experience
- Detournement (diversion; misapplication; subversion rom within); To divert found imag
decollage
- Jaswues de la Villefle, 122 rue du temple, 1968; Name is address where he found the posters to rip off of the walls
- You don't make a new image - the world is already so flooded with these images so all you do is rip posters off of walls
- the opposite
derive (drifting)
- A technique of transient passage through varied ambiances
- Subversive relation to everyday life in a capitalist city
- Psychogeography: A study of the specific effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behaviors of individuals
detournement (diversion; misapplication; subversion from within)
- To divert found images, texts, and events toward subversive viewing, readings and situations
- Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, page from Memories, 1959
Paris, May 1968
- The May 1968 events in France were a volatile period of civil unrest punctuated by demonstrations and massive general strikes as well as the occupation of universities and factories across France
commodity / commodity fetishism
- goods and services obtained through market trade; capitalism makes an unprecedented amount of these available; An object becomes a commodity the moment it enters the market
- commodity fetishism - coined by Marx; mystifies human relations; multivalent m
Reification
- "objectification" - a mental process, a way of thinking about social life; celebrity culture; thingification of relations between people so that social relationships are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified between things
- exampl
consumerism
- Consumers consume commodities
- In a consumerist society, social life is focused on the acquisition of commodities - the constant acquisition of new things becomes a goal in itself
- Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the system
spectacle / culture industry
- Spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world...At this point in the "second industrial revolution,
The Independent Group
- The Independent Group (IG) met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, England, from 1952-55. The IG consisted of painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who wanted to challenge prevailing modernist approaches to culture. The
Pop Art
- taking materials from the outside world and using them in art
- presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc
- employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books
The Factory
- the name of Andy Warhol's New York City studio, which had three different locations between 1962 and 1984
- The Factory was the hip hangout for artistic types, amphetamine (speed) users, and the Warhol superstars. It was famed for its groundbreaking par
straight photography
- Focus: entire photo in sharp focus
- No manipulation
- Tone: deep contrast and full range of tones
- Subject: composition and form
- Surface: printed on glossy, waxed paper
- Overall goal: to make photos look like photos
social documentary photography / FSA
- operate in public places documenting people and their behavior in public places for recording people's history and other purposes
- Farm Security Administration (FSA) was an effort during the Depression to combat American rural poverty
- photographers w
photographic modernism
- not always recognized as art form, espeically in the beginning
- Stieglitz did not understand this
- In 1902, Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession group, which had the objective of raising the standard and increasing the awareness of art photography
-
photojournalism / illustrated magazines
- In the wake of WWII
- Generation and direction of many American photographers
- Robert Capa/MAGNUM; most prestigious photojournalism group, magazines did now own MAGNUM; magazines chose from the photos from all of the photographers, retained freedom and
The Family of Man (1955) curated by Edward Steichen at MoMA
- 503 photos from 68 countries from 273 photographers
- Open call, anyone could submit from all over the world
- Takes logic of picture magazine and expands it into 3 dimensions to tell a positive, universalist story of the family of man; We are more alik
street photography
- photography that features the human condition within public places and does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment
- Garry Winogrand - quintessential street photographer; completely disinterested in editing; shoots contin
Civil Rights movement / segregation / desegregation
Norman Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With, 1964
- Now working for Look
- One of the visual icons for the Civil Rights Movement
- Ruby Bridges being escorted to a newly desegregated school in New Orleans
- Racial slur on wall
- Tomato being thrown
suburbanization
- growth of areas on the fringes of cities. It is one of the many causes of the increase in urban sprawl
- Diane Arbus, Christmas Tree in a Living Room; Essence of suburbia, Livittown, PA, 1959, Entirely white communities
fluxus
- Elimination of distinction between art and life
- "Anything can be art and everyone can do it"
- Life as a permanent artistic/aesthetic event - the Fluxus Attitude
- Internationalism
- Ephemerality: publication, mail art
- Works that need to be performe
John Cage
- experimental avant-garde composer
- American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant
chance and indeterminacy
- chance is another avatar of the index and, uninterfered with by its witness, is another way to avoid composition
- combination of chance with Elsworth Kelly's found objects was fully available in the cityscape around him; his own most masterful use of c
zen
school of buddhism (?)
berlin wall 1961-1989
barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off (by land) West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin
social sculpture
- specific example of the extended concept of art, that was advocated by the conceptual artist and politician Joseph Beuys. Beuys created the term Social Sculpture to illustrate his idea of art's potential to transform society; I Like America and America
Shaman
a person regarded as having access to, and influence in, the world of good and evil spirits, especially among some peoples of northern Asia and North America. Typically such people enter a trance state during a ritual, and practice divination and healing
artist as a persona
joseph beuys
performance art
- performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participa
abjection
- explore themes that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety particularly referencing the body and bodily functions
- drawn to blood
- example: New York photographers, Joel Peter Witkin, whose book Love and Redemption is made up en
minimalism
- style that uses pared-down design elements
- Yves Klein, Monochrome painting
- began in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s
- Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Jud
seriality
- social construct which differs from a mere group of individuals
- Serial art is an art movement in which uniform elements or objects were assembled in accordance with strict modular principles. The composition of serial art is a systematic process
- One
phenomenology / Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness
- French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote o
Gestalt
- an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts
- theory of mind in the Berlin School
- gestalt effect is the capability of our brain to generate whole forms, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of global figures i
Ganzfield
- phenomenon of perception caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field
- The effect is the result of the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual signals
- The noise is interpreted in the higher visual cor
post-minimalism / The Expanded Field
- work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism
- postminimalist art uses minimalism either as an aesthetic or conceptual reference point
- usually everyday objects, use simple materials, and sometimes take
post-medium condition
- protocols of medium specificity seemed to be voided
- two aspects relevant to process art; tradtional mediums odder practical rules for making and meaning: art may seem free without such constraint, but it may also become arbitrary , is also continued a
Process Art
- an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment where the end product of art and craft, the objet d'art, is not the principal focus
- The 'process' in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, ass
Arte Povera
- poor art
- during 1967-1972 and took place in cities throughout Italy
- term was coined by Italian art critic Germano Celant and introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance; Artist
earthworks / land art
- coined by Robert Smithson
- art movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. It is also an art form that is created in nature, using natural materials such as soil, rock (bed rock, boulders, stones), organic media (logs, bran
entropy
- concept that governs Smithson's entire artistic production
- formulated in the 19th century in the field of thermodynamics, the law predicts the inevitable extinction of energy in any given system, the dissolution of any organization into a state of dis
anti - monuments
- philosophy in art that denies the presence of any imposing, authoritative social force in public spaces. It developed as an opposition to monumentalism whereby authorities (usually the state or dictator) establish monuments in public spaces to symbolize
anarchitecture
- Gordon Matta-Clark
- his medium: a building that has been marked out for imminent destruction, and which he would pierce here and there, hollowing out negative spaces in its mass conceived as inert matter, without much consideration for its constructive
deindustrialization
- process of social and economic change caused by the removal or reduction of industrial capacity or activity in a country or region, especially heavy industry or manufacturing industry
typology / taxonomy
- a classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences
- the branch of science concerned with classification, especially of organisms; systematic
- Lawrence Weiner's works take on the form of typographi
Conceptualism
- art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many works of conceptual art, sometimes called installations, may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written
dematerialization
In "Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object" Lucy Lippard characterizes the period of 1966 to 1972 as one in which the art object was dematerialised through the new artistic practices of conceptual art
the linguistic turn
- Social and power
- Discourse: Ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivist and power relations which inhere in such knowledge and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producin
discourse
Ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivist and power relations which inhere in such knowledge and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the '
ludwig wittgenstein
- Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language
- read by many Conceptual artists of the time
- anti-idealist
- labored to purge our conceptions of languag