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.

SCUL 349 – Working the Dumb End.

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.

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