HA 261 – Global themes in Contemporary Art

Neshat

Turbulent, 1998

• Race, gender.
• Male/female identity. How they are viewed In Western and Iranian culture.
• Reverential exploration of Islamic traditions
• White and black binary. Highlighting differences.
• Man singing a love poem. Woman guttural sounds, etc.
• Male has audience, woman does not.
• Comparison: Karawane, 4’ 33’

Edward Burtynsky

Shipbreaking #49, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2001

• Metaphor for modern existence
• Ships pushed up on shore and broken apart to sell for scrap.
• Same as whale carcasses on beaches

Takashi Murakami

Eye Love Superflat, 2003

• Incorporates Japanese manga figure eyes
• Taken design to fine art level
• “The Warhol of Japan”
• Flatness of image refuses to engage viewer. Illusionistic depth. Society is flat

Ai Weiwei

Coloured Vases, 2003 – 10

• Speaks out against government and its policies. Calls attention to the working individual. Harm inflicted by the Chinese authority.
• Celebrated in West as artist shaking up China.
• Dips into industrial house paint and allows it to drip.
• Choices of how much to use, what colour.
• Questioning originality. Taking ancient object and changing it. Questioning cultural values. Graphic designs peak through the vases.

HA 261: The Body in Contemporary Art

identity politics

Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection

National Endowment for the Arts

absence/ presence

diaspora

Serrano

Piss Christ, 1987

• Bodily fluids used to create something arguably beautiful
• Referencing theory of abjection. Boundaries, rules, social morals, processes are disrupted. React in visceral way. Grotesque result.
• Cibachrome. 60” X 40”
• Heavenly glow. Vibrant. Vivid. Almost transcendent.
• Deemed degenerate

Gonzalez-Torres

Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991

• Interaction between object and viewer. Encouraged to take from the installation.
• Weight of candy was same as artist’s lover. Dying of aids. Viewer taking away. Cathartic interaction. Kind of memorial

Yasumasa Morimura

Portrait Futago (Twins), 1990

• Engages with issues of race. Olympia.
• Artist is both figures. Gender.
• Challenges high art.
• Identity is never fixed.
• Ceramic cat, totem of prosperity. Consumption in Japanese culture

Abramović

The Artist is Present, 2010

• Performance. Pushes own mind and body to physical limit.
• Sat across form a chair. 700 hours. Her and the audience sitting together in complete silence.
• Declaring her as being present
• Attracting audience who would not usually attend.

Walker

A Subtlety, 2014

• Short term installation art. Domino Sugar Factory
• Attendants are Kitsch-y blow up to life-size
• Comparison: Saar, appropriating from similar contemporary imagery.
• Great Sphinx of Giza. Created through slave labour. Protector of the pyramids. Body of a cat.

HA 261: Contemporary Commodity Art

Commodity art: commercialism, value of the object, myth of artist, love/hate relationship with the artist

• Warhol, Hamilton, Manet, Holzer, Kruger

Koons

New Shelton Wet/Dry Triple Decker, 1981

• Vacuums lit from bottom. Glows in cases.
• Appear to be floating. Drawn to the objects
• Provocative: Taking everyday objects into the museum context
• Married a pornstar and created shocking pieces
• How consumerism and capitalism drives society

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988

• Rendered in gold elevates showmanship
• Memorialised.
• High end materials
• Figure that was beyond life-size during his lifetime. Sculpture is larger than life.
• Kitsch?

Wilson

Mining the Museum, 1992

• Value of art objects in a museum. Pseudo-archaeological dig.
• Two types of objects juxtaposed. High crafted silver set. Slave shackles.
• Issues of labour. Who created them? Who served with them?
• Questioning American’s history and sanctity of museum space

Hirst

The Physicality Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991

• Tiger shark suspended and preserved in formaldehyde
• Links between death and immortality.
• Tank is minimalistic sculpture. Pseudo-habitat. Falls apart over time, leaks. Replaces tank.
• Controversial artist. Death made into a commodity.
• Information on death not always given to the viewer
• Intimidated. Fundamental fears.
• Memento mori.

For the Love of God, 2007

• Sold for over $100 mil.
• OTT. Ostentatious.
• Blood diamonds. Labour, life.
• Skull is a platinum cast which Hirst found in an antique shop. Inserts original teeth
• 8600 flawless diamonds. Costs between $16 – $20 mil to make
• Never seen a hearse with a trailer hitch

Postmodern Art & Architecture

Piano and Rogers

Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 1971 – 78

• Open space on interior. Flexibility for moving walls.
• See process. 20/21 Gallery, Sol LeWitt
• Transparency as metaphor.

I. M. Pei

Grand Louvre Pyramid, 1988 – 89

• Commissioned to modernise the Louvre.
• Underground entrance
• Comparison: The Pyramids of Giza. Greco-Roman inspired from Egyptian architecture. Pyramids hiding what is inside but the Louvre Pyramid is an entrance made of glass.

Sherman

Untitled Film Still #21, 1978

• B&W 8X10
• Author and actress. Portrait of Sherman adapting the character.

Untitled Film Still #81, 1980

• Looking to mirror. Not illusionistic. Image of self.
• Additional information limited. Conscious choices.
• Traditional male gaze onto female replaced with female gaze on female

Untitled, 2008

• Stereotyping of age
• Greenscreen photograph
• Elegance, then cracks in make-up, red-rimmed eyes.

Levine

Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp), 1991

• Appropriating then changing
• Curvilinear, feminine lines emphasised in bronze version

Holzer

Protect Me From What I Want, 1977

• Billboard Times Square
• Reach the masses
• Title seems simple. Didactic. Meant to teach.
• Trying to call attention to language that we digest on daily basis

Kruger

Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am), 1987

• Text and image in 2D
• Juxtaposition of phrases

Prince

Untitled (Cowboy), 1991 – 92

• Not his image. Source from elsewhere. Marlboro cigarettes.
• Pop culture image use elsewhere

Feminist Art

Yoko Ono

Cut Piece, 1965

• Performance.
• Non-productive art. Not to buy or sell. Ideas over commercial value.
• Audience reacts with cheering for those cutting. Females not cheered as much as males.
• Fabric sheers
• Element of bravery on both sides
• Comparison: Grande Odalisque, Olympia 

 

Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party, 1974 – 79

• Calling out how women have been represented throughout history
• 400 different people involved in making. Very collaborative.
• Three tables arranged in triangular shape. 39 place settings.
• Heritage floor. 999 names written on floor. Who didn’t earn a place at the table. Obscure women who have supported the 39.
• Plate design reduces down to their sex.
• Different times and ethnicities represented
• Typical of early feminist artwork. Throw the idea into the audiences’ face
• Social historical context backs up the work. Chicago criticises this. Who has been left out, why.
• High art, not utilitarian objects

Mary Wollstonecraft

• Wrote on the vindication of the rights of women. Women should be educated so they can educate their sons and husbands.
• Elaborate embroidery.

Georgia O’Keeffe

• Last chronologically
• Most sculptural

Ana Mendieta

Untitled, 1977

• Performance. Roll around in mud gathering earth onto body, place self against tree trunk.
• Sense of place inscribed on her body
• Morphing the earth. Intigrating.
• Comparison: The Spiral Jetty, Autumn Rhythm 30
• Layering of racial identity
• “Reactivation of a primary belief” 
• Cut Piece: Body posture. Distance between audience. Setting. Lack of control.

Betye Saar

The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

• Combines found object from every day culture.
• Congenial African American woman
• Caretaker of privileged white child
• White paper: Images of racial identity. Pencils: Broom and gun
• Background: Image of Aunt Jemima taken from syrup bottle
• Overruling the idea of servant for African Americans
• Polished sculptural piece.

Miriam Schapiro

Heartfelt, 1979

• Femmage. Combination of feminine and collage
• Paints on fabric. Adheres to a canvas.
• Maximalist
• House-like shape. Basic geometric form. Centre is a heart made of felt.
• Traditional female roles and materials. Celebrates them.

According to Broude, what is the nature….

Broude argues….

• Taking material and not trying to alter the context. Showing the originality.

In this essay…

• Bauhaus. Mundane mass produced objects and spiced them up.
• Oppenheim. Luncheon. Different context through adding different materials. Making it abstract and decorative.
• Duchamp. Fountain. Bicycle. First trying to challenge what is low and high art. Taking unappealing things and giving them different perspectives.
• Pollock. Autumn. Appears haphazard but is actually thought out. Meticulously thought out.

Guerrilla Girls

The Advantages of Being A Woman Artist, 1988

• Take women artists as their subjects. Role of women in the art world.
• Anonymous. Wearing gorilla masks in public.
• Distributing messages through guerrilla means.
• Calling out cultural biases of institutions

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.

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.

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

HA 261 – Modernism in Europe and Surrealism

Modernist Architecture in Europe

de Stijl

Gerrit Rietveld

Schröder House, 1925

• Areas of empty space, rectangles, but our minds close them together into a building
• Use of primary colours. White panels. Black posts and railings.
• Alternating panels and glass fit into one another

“Red-Blue” Chair, 1925

• Rudimentary. Basic Elements.
• Not for comfort.
• Pre-cut lumber shapes to create chair. Uniformity. Easy of building. Easily mass produced.

Bauhaus

Walter Gropius

Bauhaus Building, Dessau, Germany, 1925 – 26

• Closed by Hitler in mid 30s
• Combining craft with function-ability. High and low art.
• Art serving a social function. Institute of design.
• Worked and lived in the building.
• Lots of window. Looking out and in. Access.
• Objects that can be mass produced.
• Women accepted into the school

Marianne Brandt

Coffee and Tea Service, 1924

• Cast in cheap materials and mass produced for the public.
• Lines sleek and polished. Elegant forms.
• Utilitarian and streamline

Bedside Lamp, 1928

• Rounded shape to focus light. Pivot at the head of the lamp.

Marcel Breuer

Armchair, Model B3, “Wassily” Chair, c. 1927-28

• Intersecting planes of tubular steel
• Inspired to use materials as he was riding bicycle

Surrealism

• Represent real things and making them seem uncanny
• Sur: On/ Over
• Originates in 1924 survives WWII
• Cultivate imagery in a state beyond logical perception

Max Ernst

Forest and Sun, 1925

• Design to rubbing. Forms not of the artist’s conscious control.
• Circumvent the rational mind by engaging with approach

Two Children Are Threatened By A Nightingale, 1924

• Combined painting with non-sensical objects
• Small red gate breaks out of the frame.
• Title is unsettling.
• Nightingale hovering in sky above gate.
• Children painted in greyscale, pulling them out of the colourful landscape
• Panic and despair but not sure what is happening

Joan Miró

Shooting Start, 1938

• Automatic drawing
• Odd playful floating shapes. Free of conscious thought.
• Biomorphic. Seemingly organic.
• Unplanned but has a concrete title.
• Thick black lines. Nothing pinned down.

Salvador Dalí

The Persistence of Memory, 1931

• Desolate setting.
• Was asked by a doctor to see his tongue.
• Paranoiac critical method: Juxtapositions in dialogue with one another.
• Lit by an eerie sun. Light is not consistent.
• Bottom left pocket watch died and now bugs have come to take it away

René Magritte

The Treachery of Images 1928-29

• “This is not a pipe” 
• Calling out that is is a representation
• Question that text and images can represent and replace.

Time Transfixed, 1939

• Hides the hand of the artist. Could be real.
• Reflection of mirror. Opens up space because it reflects light but here it flattens.
• Train coming out of the fireplace? Shadow cast in illusionistic way.
• Time standing still. Room sucked of air.
• Candlestick would be used as time and light. The holders are not filled.

Meret Oppenheim

Object (Le Déjeuner en Fourrure) (Luncheon in fur), 1936

• Juxtapose and unite: fur, jewellery, utilitarian objects.
• Want to touch but not drink from.
• Representation of genitalia?

Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit, Munich, 1937

• Derogatory term.
• Exhibited works that were an “insult to German feeling”
• One of the most successful exhibitions of the 20th century.
• Salon des Refuse. Same idea.
• > 3 mil people went
• V&A put together a full list. Donated by a widow of a European art dealer.