HA 261 – Minimalism & Earthworks & Installation Art

Art Workers Coalition

Judd’s Specific Objects (1964)

specific objects

Process Art

site-specific art

skyspace

Minimalism

• Interested in art being a multitude of things
• Rejecting viewer. Lack of reference to natural world
• Extremely political
• Non-figurative sculptures
• Sculpture about being sculptural

Judd

Untitled, 1969

(St. Louis Art Museum)

• Didn’t like to use the word sculpture to describe his work
• Linear, hard edged.
• Lack of title rejects outside work.
• Not exactly perfect cubes but appear so
• Blue plexy glass. Industrial materials. Anodised aluminium. Industrially fabricated
• Wants installations to be called specific objects instead of sculptures
• Interconnected through light and reflections. Specific to location.
• Sculpture usually on plinth not on floor
• Hard edge interrupted by soft shadow as light changes

Untitled, 1969

• Brass, pink florescent flexy glass
• Hung by bracket and spaced at regular intervals
• Position in relation to your eye allows the boxes to change
• Calling attention to ceiling and floor

Serra

One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969

• 4 plates. 1 = 500lbs. Lead.
• 40 X 48 X 1”
• Worked at steel mill in college
• Held up by themselves. Physics
• Level of tension wrapped up in object. Threat.

Process Art

Hesse

Hang Up, 1966

• Hesse escapes Nazis during the war. Sent to an orphanage in Amsterdam but family collect her and her sister.
• 7ft x 6ft. 10ft projection.
• Stretcher wrapped in bedsheets and dyed.
• Process of healing. Hospital?
• “Idea pieces”. Conceptual idea that she is working out.

Untitled (Rope Piece), 1970

• Directions like LeWitt.
• Needed help installing it.
• No set shape. Loose hanging. Sense of movement.
• Fluidity. Chaos.
• Rope knotted and dipped in latex. Hung from ceiling and left to dry.

Earthworks

• Incorporating land
• Using land as a medium

Smithson

Spiral Jett, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1969 – 70

• Black rock, crystal, earth.
• Platform. Earth pushed into lake which people can walk on.
• Man vs Nature
• Can construct all things with machines but nature can destroy them

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Running Fence (California) 1972 – 76

• Federal and private land. Countryside.
• Result of negotiations.
• Free for public to see.
• Pair funded by selling sketches of works.
• $3.2 mil in 70s.
• 24.5 miles long. 18ft high. Cut across 2 counties. Ended in Pacific Ocean.
• Passed through middle of a town.
• Not lasting effects on environment
• Follows contours of land and wind.

The Gates (Project for Central Park, New York City), 1979 – 2005

• Lined paths with gates. 600 workers to install.
• Installation took 16 days. No environmental impact.

Installation Art

Turrell

The Meeting, 1986

• Skyspace
• Hole cut out of ceiling
• Alter perception of blue sky above
• Tones are matched to created certain experience
• Complimentary colours
• Closed when weather is bad

Gard Blue, 1968

Eliasson

The Weather Projection, 2003

• Perception of space.
• Illuminates with soft, hyper-articifcial sunlight
• Mirage
• Mirrored ceiling. Light bounces around the space.
• 200 sodium lamps
• How society perceives the weather.

FMS 321 – Social Realism II

Reaction against modernist movements form before the revolution

All means of production belong to the whole community

Represented Common worker’s life as admirable

Meant to educate the masses about the Communist Party’s goals

Severely enforced in all the arts

Major Genres

• Socialist Musicals
  • Deemed important for and about the “everyday lives” of workers
  • Not realist in sense of documentary reality
• Civil War Films
  • Important for narrating the story of Revolution
  • We are From Kronstadt (1936)
• Biographical Films
  • Featured “progressive” historical figures that prefigured Communist ideals (Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great)
  • Anti-Feudal themes
• Everyday Heroes
  • Maxim Gorky Trilogy – idea of the common man as hero

Films as “Bullets”

• 1939: Nazi-Soviet Non Aggression Pact
  • Meant to protect the USSR from Nazi invasion
  • Nazi’s attacked the USSR in June 1941
• During the pacts films such as Alexander Nevsky (1937) were withdrawn.
• But films were depicting Germans as (historic and contemporary) villains were produced almost immediately after the German invasion of Finland
• Captured German “Agfacolour” stock enabled Eisenstein to shoot Ivan the Terrible II in colour

Soviet Cinema 1945 – 50

• Soviet film industry suffered due to material and human losses of the war
• Stalin tightened control and censorship to limit the effects of Western films
• The postwar period brought even more government control with the rise of the Cold War
• Production plummeted (by 1951 only 9 films were produced, 23 in 1952)
• Acceptable genres
  • Filmed versions of staged performances
  • Short films for children
  • Experimental stereoscopic films

Stone Flower (1946)

• Based on folktale by Bazhov
• 1950: Adapted to the ballet The Tale of the Stone Flower by Prokofiew
• Acceptable genre and serves need of state
• Technically important

Fall of Berlin (1949)

• Praising Stalin for keeping promises.
• Colour = larger than life memorisation of history

Sergei Eisenstein

• Lived: 1898 -1948
• Believed cinema could unite diverse fields of knowledge and develop revolutionary consciousness

• Applied concept of dialectical materialism to film
• Theorised different types of montage with could elicit physical, emotional, and intellectual responses in the spectator

Political Problems

• Battleship Potemkin: International fame but October criticised for inaccessibility and formalism
• Traveled Europe and America. Attempts to complete films in US and Mexico failed
• Alexander Nevsky (1938) featured famous actors, a simplified plot, and an allegorical appeal to anti-German sentiment

HA 261 – Conceptual Art

Performance Art

Happenings

Chance operations

David Tudor

Tacet (tah-ket)

Fluxus

Conceptual Art

• Extreme manner
• Interested in ideas of Duchamp
• Direct people away from valuing art objects

Cage

4’ 3”, 1952

• Thought and musical composition
• Comparison: Kandinsky, Benton, Picasso, Ball
• Silence should be given same status as sound
• 4’ 33” of silence. Negative space.
• Arranged for any combination of instruments.
• David Tudor first performed this on Aug 29th 1952.
• Audience expectations shattered, music not being made. Shuffling, coughing, laughing, etc.
• Ambient sound becomes subject.

Rauschenberg

Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953

• Erases Woman I, 1950 – 52
• Focused on removal of another’s hand
• Asks de Kooning for a drawing, agrees but chooses one he thought would be difficult to erase.
• Is it a critique, a sabotage? Who is the artist? Readymade altered.
• Nothingness becomes the subject. Absence = presence.
• Comparison: Duchamp.

Kosuth

One and Three Chairs, 1965

• Questioning representation. A photograph, sculpture, and written word.
• Comparison: Magritte.
• Institutional critique. Having them consider these pieces in similar regard to the grand paintings on display.
• Is the chair 3 separate things or is it 1 thing?
• Systems of signs. What can be representative of a thing?

On Kawara

TODAY Series, 1966

• Japanese artist settled in America,
• Date on which the painting was made.
• Block white letters and numbers on black background
• Variation on sizes. Centre of panel
• Crafted techniques. Rulers, set squares.
• If painting was not finished by midnight he would destroy it
• Formal journal documenting each piece
• Newspaper from the day on back

Sol LeWitt

Plan for Wall Drawing, 1969

• The idea itself is as much a work of art as any finished product
• Begins with idea and then someone else produces it.
• Sample drawing of final drawing and description of how to make it.

FMS 321 – Socialist Realism

Chicago writing style

• footnotes: citations, sources you haven’t cited
• writing.ku.edu/writing-guides

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Socialist Realism

Coming of Sound

• The USSR’s first sound experiments were released in 1930
  • Entuziam (Dziga Vertov) was a nonfiction film with an experimental, dialogue-less soundtrack.
  • The Plan of the Great Works (Abram Room) a documentary with music and spoken voiceover narration
  • Both used Russian sound-on-film systems
  • 1931: The Road to Life (Nikolai Ekk) a drama was the Soviet Union’s first all-talking picture

Social Realism

• 1932: became state policy when Stalin announced “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organisations”
• … Socialist Realism is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands if the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with that task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.
• 1935: Leningrad Union of Artists held the first exhibition of Sociealist Realist art in Moscow.
• Reaction against modernist movements (i.e. impressionism, cubism, etc) from before the revolution and this rejected as “decadent bourgeois art”
• All material goods and means of production belonged to the community as a whole; including art, which were seen as powerful propaganda tools
• Elevated the common worker (factory of farm) by representing his life, work and recreation as admirable.
• Goal was to educate audiences about the goals of Communism and to create “an entirely new type of human being’ or a New Soviet Man
• SR was ruthlessly enforced in all the arts.

Boris Shumyatsky

• In 1930, Stalin appointed him head of Soyuzkino Studios
• Even after Soyuzkino was dissolved in 1933, he remained in charge of production, import/ export, distribution ands exhibition.
• Championed a ‘cinema for the millions’ which would use
  • clear, linear narration
  • positive heroes as role models
  • lessons in good citizenship
  • support for Stalinist/ Communist Party policy
• Cracked down on filmmakers practicing formalism (Eisentein)

Decline of the Soviet Film Industry

• Shumyatsky failed to complete Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, a devastating failure for both men.
• Failed to build Kinograd, a film community to equal Hollywood, NeuBabelsberg, and Cinecitta.
• Poor production
  • 1930: 94
  • 1935: 45 (130 planned)
  • 1936: 46 (165)
  • 1937: 24 (62)
• Arrested in 1938 for spying. Exiled.

Grigori Aleksandrov (1903 – 1983)

• Worked as Eisenstein’s Assistant Director. (Oct)
• Accompanied Eisenstein to Hollywood in the early 1930s
• Ordered home by Stalin in 1932 but deeply influenced by his journey and determined to find a lighthearted approach to Socialist Realism

TD 313 – Basket Weaving Basics

SCUL 349 – Wax Piece I

TD 313 – Basket Weaving I

HA 261 – Pop Art

• Popular culture
• Bright colours
• “Kitsch-y”

Hamilton

Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1955

• Photomontage. Collage of consumer culture. Popular culture invading homes after the war.
• Advertisement for “This is Tomorrow” exhibition, featured in exhibition
• Interested in shaped identity through mass culture and advertisement
• Explosion of growth in industry post WWII
• Wife and friends cut up magazines, takes clippings and creates image.
• Interior 1950s apartment. Slightly displaced objects. Magazine clipping framed and placed on wall.   Pollock-esque drip painting rug. Innovative vacuum.
• Repeated female nude figure in art history. Greco-Roman nude figure.
• Strategically placed Tootsie Pop
• Race: Advertisement on theatre outside for the film The Jazz Singer. Controversial movie involving white man putting on black face and performing as an African American.
• Gender: Different types of women of the era.
• Copyright? Not as large an issue as it was today. It was a parody.

Johns

Target with Four Faces, 1955

• Boundary between object from everyday life and work of art
• Painting relates to both art and life. Act in the gap between the two
• Four plaster casts of faces. Hinge door that could fold over and cover.
• 33 X 26”
• Assemblage
• Wax, paint, pigment on canvas. Plaster cast, wooden box.
• Encaustic. Melted wax incorporated with pigment then applied to surface.
• Strips of newspaper added.
• Picking overlooked objects in everyday life.
• Enigmatic. Puzzling. Conceptually rich.
• Can’t see eyes. Sense of tension with target. Venerability
• Psychological? Issue of perception?
• Link to Goya’s Execution. Overt. Tension.

Rauschenberg

Canyon, 1959

• Darker, not so much celebrating popular culture
• Combine Paintings. Combination of sculpture and painting.
• Dirty pillow suspended. Stuffed bird. Found objects from urbane environment
• Figure reaching up. Mimicking Statue of Liberty image.
• Chaotic experience of NYC conveyed through application of paint. Haphazard.

Warhol

32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962

200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962

• Commercial illustrator in NYC. Central figure.
• Takes the most boring things and makes them into art objects.
• Drank Campbell’s soup everyday for 20 years. Immerses self in culture.
• As if stacked upon one another. Mimicking of grocery shelf. Both grid and can is repeatable.
• Deliberateness as he is pulling from Pop Culture but also critiquing it.

HA 261 – The New York School: Abstract Expressionism

• Gesture, action, drip painting

• Colour Field painting

Greenberg

How does Greenberg define a cultural phenomena of “avant-garde” and “kitsch”? Provide specific examples.

• Avant-garde is evolving techniques of the masters, kitsch is more of a mockery
• A.g: Art for arts sake. Not representing the time but making it atheistically pleasing. Kitsch similar but for the lower class
• Kitsch: produced by the lower class for the lower class.
• A.G: Cezanne, Picasso
• Kitsch: Hitler’s using kitsch to control masses. Russian artwork. Primitive.

On page 15, Greenberg summarises…

• A.G: Person has to go through process to understand it. Kitsch: Artist has done all the work for the audience to understand.
• A.G: formal. Kitsch: Lower class.

According to Greenberg, how are the strategies of the…

• Fascism, Hitler, totalitarianism: used as a means to control masses. Couldn’t use avant-garde because he couldn’t control it as much as Kitsch
• Kitsch, easier to hide propaganda. A.G was too innocent. Education of masses linked more to Kitsch.
• Hitler used expressionist artists because they were popular in Germany.

Gesture, Action, Drip Painting

Pollock

Male and Female, 1942

• Inspired by Native American sand painting
• Rhythmic painting, gestural brushstrokes
• Colours of sand painting, shapes, movement
• Tapping into unconscious when making sand paintings, Pollock wanted to mimic
• Jungian: Collective unconscious.
• Random shapes that fell out of hand onto canvas
• Black field with scribing on top.
• Unstable, chaotic on top of blue background

Hans Namuth film about Jackson Pollock

• Outside the studio, large canvas on ground
• Direct painting
• Prefer stick to brush. Dripping fluid paint. sand, broken glass, pebbles.
• Control flow of paint. No accident.
• No fear of changing the image or destroying it. Life of its own.

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950

• Unprimed canvas. Paint soaks in more easily.
• Not stretched over structure before painted
• Balance of colour. Patterns and rhythms spaced out
• Heaviest at bottom.

Krasner

Untitled (from Little Images series), 1949

• Studio inside the house in comparison to Pollock working outside
• Paint squirted onto canvas
• No hierarchy of imagery

The Seasons, 1957

• Vegetable-like shapes. Organic curvilinear
• Structured
• Abstracted landscape

Colour Field Painting

• Interested in fields of colours and resonance
• Meditative state from size

Rothko

No. 61, Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue, 1953

• Not referencing anything in the real world
• Emotional resonance with the colours. Meditative experience in front of the painting
• Subject matter: colour and rectangles
• Rusty red juxtaposed against darker blue underneath

Newman

Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950 – 51

• Freeing from association, myth, memory.
• Simplified composition
• Red interrupted by zips. Slightly varying width.
• Zip has vibrating quality. Tricks of the eye.

Reinhardt

Abstract Painting, Blue 1953

• Grid-like squares emerge the more you look at it
• Arms of the cross. Religiosity.
• Unconscious experience

FMS 321 – Postwar Japanese Film

Timeline

• US Occupation of Japan (1945 – 52)
• US – Japan Security Treaty (1951, renewed 60, still active)
• The Korean Conflict (1950 – 53)
• The Vietnam War (1965 – 73)

S.C.A.P. – The U.S. Occupation of Japan

• Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers
• Unlike Germany or Italy, Japan’s occupation was primarily American
• Goal was to eradicate “feudalism in Japanese society
• Reconstruction was widespread and deep including education, law, philosophy, politics, cultures, society, art, religion, land reform, etc.

Japan’s Postwar Constitution

Article 9

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of setting international disputes. (2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised.

War Responsibility

• 2 main camps
• What/ who lead America to war?
• Any ‘borrowed’ ideology may not reflect the needs of Japan

Purges and War Guilt

• War criminals divided into A, B, and C levels of importance
• Who is innocent when almost no one resisted militarism?
  • Deception as excuse
  • Victimhood (on multiple levels)
• Not a matter of self-reflection so much as subjectivity
  • Stories presented the shutaiteki or subjective will of characters
  • Victim consciousness was necessary for both Japan and the US Occupation
    • Lack of representation of US Occupation
    • Blame for war laid wholly on the government/ military
• “Victor’s Justice”

Japanese Film Industry

Postwar Japanese film oligopoly ‘the Big Six”

• Nikkatsu 1912-42, 54-
• Shochiku 1895/1920-
• Toho 1934-
• Daiei 1942-71 74-2003
• Shin-Toho 1947-61
• Toei 1950-

Daiei Studios

• Created by the wartime govt. to consolidate resources
• Absorbed smaller studios and Nikkatsu
• Integrated modern film technology
• First successful exporter of Japanese films to West
• Rashomon

Shin-Toho Studios

• Created in response to labour strikes at Toho
• Became favoured studio for leading directors
• After Toho strikes, focused on popular genres
• An early collaborator with television production

Toei Studios

• Employed many repatriates from China
• Focused on jidai-geki and war films
• Would expand into animation (mid-50s)
• Effective expansion and diversification

The Toho Strikes

• “Everything came except the battleships”
• 4 separate strikes occurring between 1946-50
• U.S. military intervention
• Suppression of the left within the film industry
• Support of the conservative right-leaning major studios

Japan’s Film Industry and the “Red Purge”

• Officially announced by decree of SCAP, Sept 1950
• Unofficially requested by the major Japanese studios before
• Similar film industry purges were conducted in Hong Kong the same year

Censorship

• Japanese Film Industry repealed wartime restrictions, banned war-themed on 8/15
• SCAP officials from Civil Information and Education (CIE) Section met with studio heads 9/20
• CIE personnel initially consisted of liberal Roosevelt-era “New Dealers” who wanted to rebuild Japan in the image of the idealised America
• CIE’s 3-point plan to (re)educate the Japanese Film industry

Banned Films

• Film Industry identified and banned 227 – 236 films with militaristic themes
• Self-censorship was conducted so as not to aggravate SCAP
• Obedience was incomplete – some films were successfully hidden
• US military rounded up films, copies were deposited at LOC, surplus was unceremoniously burned in a riverbed
• Paternal attitude of reeducation