After Modernism: Recap

                                           Jackson Pollock, Cathedral, 1947

1.  Abstract Expressionism & Clement Greenberg:

• Self-definition and self-critique (this is what prevents modernist art from becoming mere entertainment).
• 3 unique features of painting;

1. Two-dimensionality,
2. The rectangular shape of the support,
3. The properties of pigment.

• But many artists come to feel trapped by a reductive prescription of painting.

2. Pop Art

• Interested in the relation between art and commercial culture.
• Interested in obvious and banal imagery.
• Interested in the clash between high and low culture.
• Debate about whether Pop art was a celebration of consumer culture, or a critique of it.

                                          Claes Oldenburg, 7-Up Sign, 1961

3. Fluxus 

• Fluxus aimed at overcoming the distinction between art and life, sense and nonsense, object and event.
• Music, rather than painting, was taken as the model for artist creation.
• Many Fluxus works depended on the activity of the audience to exist. This is quite unlike Greenberg’s notion that each art from should become autonomous.
• In the Fluxus Manifesto flux is 3 meanings:

1.  Purging ( it is anit-art)
2.  Flooding (promoting new forms)
3. Fusing (art and life)

                                         George Maciunas, Fluxkit, 1964-5

Minimalism 

1.  To examine Judd’s and Morris’s ideas
2.  To look at gestalt psychology and phenomenology as interpretative strategies
3.  To identify the main features of minimalism
4.  To discuss gender in relation to minimalism
5.  To investigate has post-minimalist arists developed minimalist ideas
6.  To consider the significance of minimalism in contemporary art

Who were the minimalists?

• Everyone agrees on 5 names:

1.  Donald Judd
2.  Carl Andre
3.  Sol LeWitt
4.  Robert Morris
5.  Dan Flavin

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There are also a number of artists who are sometimes describes as minimalists:

• Frank Stella
• Anne Truitt
• Tony Smith

What is wrong with painting (according to Judd):

                         Barnett Newman, Vir Heroivus Sublimis, 1950-1

• Rectangularity
• Oil paint & canvas
• Pictorial space

                                     Frank Stella, Six Mile Bottom, 1960

• ‘My painting is based on the fact that only what can be see there is there. All I want anyone to get out of my paintings and all I can get put them is the fact that you see the whole idea without any confusion (..) What you see is what you see.’ Frank Stella, ArtNews 65, September 1966.
• ‘The shapes, the unity, order projection and color are specific, aggressive and powerful.’ Donald Judd, Specific Objects, 1965.
• ‘A painting isn’t an image.’ Donald Judd, Specific Objects, 1965.

 

Working Title/Artist: BeccaDepartment: Modern and Contemporary ArtCulture/Period/Location: HB/TOA Date Code: Working Date: 1965 Digital Photo File Name: DT2645.TIF Online Publications Edited By Steven Paneccasio for TOAH 3/10/14

(Left) David Smith, Becca, 1965. (Right) Louise Nevelson, The Tropical Gardens, 1957.

What is wrong with sculpture (according to Judd):

Conventional modernist sculpture:

• is made bit by bit
• is made only wood and metal
• lacks colour

                                             Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965

What is a ‘specific object’?

• one thing rather than a relation between parts
• fabricated not crafted
• commercial/industrial materials, not ‘art’ materials
• integral, not applied colour
• the junction between planes and between materials become the primary focus of attention. (Judd doesn’t actually say this, but it is implied in his practice.)

                                     Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966

“In the three-dimensional work the whole thing is made according to complex purposes, and these are not scattered but asserted by one form.” Donald Judd, Specific Objects, 1965

• Does Andre’s work suggest ‘complex purposes’?
• Does the work suggest an idea? if so, what is it?

“I don’t start with an idea or concept or a drawing or anything like that, I have to start with a set of physical realities that I order in a way which I find satisfying to me. So I have to go and, as I said, the open end of my work is scavenging; just walking through the streets of the city and coming upon construction sites and finding groups of material and taking them. And often I have these groups sitting on the floor and I try to figure out what is the sort of the just combination of these pieces.” Carl Andre, 1972.

Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture’, Art Forum, February, 1966.

What does Morris say is the difference between painting and sculpture?

• Painting is illusionistic; sculpture is literal
• Painting is optical, sculpture is tactile

What are the unique features of sculpture?

• shape
• simplicity
• wholeness
• openness
• extendibility
• accessibility
• publicness
• repeatability
• equanimity
• directness
• immediacy

What is intimacy in sculpture, and why is Morris so against it?

• An intimate sculpture carries all its space within itself
• In an intimate sculpture the details of texture and construction become significant
• In an intimate sculpture the quality the finish matters
• An intimate sculpture is private, not public- it ‘tends to eliminate the viewer’
• ‘In (…) these sculptures, an eye-level examination of the work alters the scale of miniaturization first perceived by the viewer. The vastness of the empty piazza and the anonymity of the figures are revealed by such close-up scrutiny.’ Elizabeth Childs, Guggenheim website.

                                      Alberto Giacometti, Piazza, 1947-9

What is ‘gestalt’ and Why is Morris interested in it?

• Literally, ‘gestalt’ means ‘form’ or ‘shape’.
• Gestalt psychology is a theory that attempts to explain how we perceive the world.
• In Morris’s essay gestalts are presented as the basic forms of perception. Because they are the most basic, Morris implies (but does not quite say) that gestalts are the purest forms of perception.
• Critics and viewers worried that there was not enough to look at in minimalist work. Morris used the idea of gestalt to claim that minimalist work offers a vision of wholeness.

Robert Morris, Untitled (Slab), 1964

Features of gestalt psychology or perception:

• reification
• multi-stability
• grouping: similarity
• grouping: proximity
• grouping: closure
• emergence

Minimalism and Phenomenology:

• ‘The object is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic. It is in some way ore reflexive because one’s awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work is stronger than in previous work.’  Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture, 1966.

  Geometrical diagram showing point of observation (form Wikipedia)

Vision is often conceived as disembodied. Phenomenology stresses the role of the entire sensing body. It argues that we understand out environment in relation to our bodies rather than in terms of abstract qualities. The experience that art offers is more important than its meaning.

‘The awareness of scale in a function of the comparison made between (…) one’s body size, and the object.’ Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture, 1966.

                                    Richard Serra, Backdoor Pipeline, 2010

6 Features of Minimalism:

1. Simplicity (gestalt)

                                             Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969

• ‘minimalist work complicates the purity of conception with the contingency of perception’ Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, 1996.
• ‘the known constant and the perceived variable’ Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture, 1966.

2. Scale 

Q: Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?

A: I was not making a monument.

Q: Then why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?

A: I was not making an object.

Tony Smith in Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture, 1966

                                                        Tony Smith, Die, 1962

3. Repetition 

• ‘The order is not rationalistic and underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after anther.’ Donald Judd, Specific Objects, 1965.

                                     Carl Andre, Zinc Steel Plain, 1969

• Although it looks like a recognisable object, Uccello’s drawing is not really about observed reality (look at the vertical line that runs from top to bottom).
• Each unit on the circumference of the chalice is identical. Uccello is fascinated by the way repetition produces differences.

                                    Paolo Uccello, Chalice, c.1450

4. Gravity 

                                          Robert Morris, L-Beams, 1967

5. Systems 

                                  Sol LeWitt, 1 2 3 2 1 (Cross), 1980

6. Colour 

• Do colour and pattern reinforce one another?
• How many colours are there?

                                    Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp, 1962

Minimalism and Gender:

• On the surface, minimalism wouldn’t seem to have any interest in gender as the objects it makes are so bare of any kind of figurative reference. However, this piece by Robert Morris suggests otherwise. The ‘I’ that forms the lid of the box reefers to the notion of self, but it is also like a steel I-beam, suggesting a link between masculinity, minimalism, and industrialisation.

                                             Robert Morris, I-Box, 1962

                Sol Lewitt, Schematic Drawing for Muybridge II, 1964/1970

• Even Sol Lewitt, whose work is normally austere and cerebral, made works about sex and gender. Muybridge II was a long rectangular box with 10 peepholes. Inside the peepholes the figure of a naked woman can be seen in increasing close-up. Vision is here associated with a kind of sexual power or domination. (Muybridge was a 19th Century photographer whose works analyse movement, but also power over their subjects.)

               Eadweard Muybridge, A Woman Getting into Bed, 1887

• David Batchelor talks about this work (Eva Hesse) as a metaphor for the human body. It has an inside and an outside (in contrast to many minimalist works which are all exterior). The inside and outside are integrated (by the little rubber tubes pushed though the holes in the steel mesh) but each offers a quite different experience.

                                            Eva Hesse, Accession II, 1969

• Greenberg supported Truitt’s work, which annoyed the minimalist. He suggested that she had ‘invented’ minimalism before them, and that their work was derivative.
• The surface of her objects are always hand painted (not industrially fabricated). This enabled Greenberg to defend her work as a form of extended painting, rather than strictly sculpture.
• He also stoked the gender debate by claiming that her work was ‘truly’ feminine whereas theirs was exaggeratedly and artificially masculine.

                                       Anne Truitt, Primrose, 1962

What reasons might there be for thinking of Truitt’s work as minimalist?

And what reasons for thinking of it as non-minimalist?

Features of Post-minimalism:

1. Gestalt?

                                    Robert Smithson Non-Site (Essen) 1969

Do you see a pile of rubble (as a gestalt)?

• Gestalt means ‘form’ or ‘shape’ and there is a simple form to this arrangement even if it is dirt placed with mirrors.

2. Chance 

Why go to the bother of arranging stuff, if its just as interesting to chuck it on the floor?

                                   Carl Andre, Spill (Scatter Piece), 1966

3. Formlessness 

• This is made of cut felt, Morris is interested in the way that the form of the piece is beyond control.
• This is something a number of artists become interested in.

                                      Robert Morris, Untitled, 1968 (2008)

• The work is formed of strings of latex. Hesse follows a process without knowing exactly what the end result will be. The sensuous qualities of the material are allowed to dominate the visual form.
• You could also look at this work as a response to Pollock’s drip paintings.

                                           Eva Hesse, Right After, 1969

• This work is made from polyurethane paints. Once it dries it can be lifted from the floor like a mat. It is a form of painting that is free of the constraints that Judd identifies.

                                           Lynda Benglis, Contraband, 1969

4. Softness

• This is like a standard repetitive minimalist work, with identical cylinders. However, because the cylinders are made of latex each one becomes individual. Once again, the material is used to over-ride the system.

                                Eva Hesse, Repetition Nineteen III, 1968

5. Drama 

• These objects are very heavy and are kept n place by gravity alone- no welding or fixing.

(Left) Richard Serra, Prop, 1968. (Right) Richard Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969

6. Monumentality 

                                         Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981-9

Contemporary art & minimalism:

• These are not minimalist works, but each in its own way is related to some of the concerns of minimalist artists.

(Left) Rachel Whiteread, Ghost, 1990, (Right) Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991.

 

Fluxus: The Roots of Fluxus

 

                                           Wolf Vostell, Sun in your Head, 1963

The Roots of Fluxus:

1. Dada:

• Irrationality,
• Performance,
• Chance,
• Iconoclasm.

 

                  Hugo Ball reciting phonetic poetry at Cabaret Voltaire, 1916

 

(Left) Jean Arp, collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17. (Right) Hannah Hoch, Equilibrium, 1925.

2. Art v. Life.

• Many modernist artists believed that art should be a part of life and not some specialised activity separate from the process of living.  There were two approaches to achieving this goal:
• i) Abandon thr traditional forms of art (painting, sculpture, ect) and fuse art with design, and in this way revolutionise and enrich the experience of living.
• Constructivism, Bauhaus.
• ii) Revolutionise the basis of everyday life (through technology, psychoanalysis) and allow new forms of art to spring up to reflect these changes.
• Futurism, Surrealism.

 

(Left) Marcel Breuer, Wassily chair, 1927. (Right) Dorothe Tanning, Raing Day Canape, 1970.

3. John Cage

• Chance,
• Scores,
• Experimentalism.

 

(Left) John Cage performing on a toy piano, 1960, (Top Right) Benjamin Patterson, score for String Music, 1960, (Bottom Right) John Cage, score for Fontana Mix, 1958.

The evolution of modern art, according to Dick Higgins:

1. Collage – Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1911-12

2. Combine – Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-9

3. Environment – Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson, Peter & Alison Smithson, This is Tomorrow, 1956

4. Happening – Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1967

5. Event – Philip Corner, Piano Activities, 1962

6. Concentration – George Brecht, Two Vehicle Events, 1961

 

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• How does Higgin’s account compare with Greenberg’s?

Shigeko Kubota, Vagina Painting, 1965

How is Kubota’s work related to Abstract Expressionism?

George Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963

How do you read this manifesto?

What kind of object is it?

Why are some parts printed and other parts handwritten?

What is fluxus according to Maciunas?

How does it compare with Cleas Oldenburg’s I am for an art..?

9 Features of Fluxus, according to Dick Higgins:

1. Internationalism

• Fluxus was international from the start and included artists from USA, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and France.

 

                              Ray Johnson & others, Mail art, various dates.

2. Anti-art and iconoclasm 

                       Henry Flynt demonstrating outside MoMA New York, 1963.

3. Intermedia 

• ‘Imagine, perhaps, an art form that is comprised of 10% music, 25% architecture, 12% drawing, 18% shoemaking, 30% panting and 5% smell. what would it be like? how would it work? how would some of the specific art works appear? How would they function? How would the elements interact?’ (Friedman, 1998: 247-8)

                                          George Brecht, Water Yam, 1963-5

4. Concentration/ simplicity

                                              Nam June Paik, Zen for Head, 1962

5. Art & Life

6. Activation of the audience

 

                                                     Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1965

7. Games, Jokes, Playing 

• Established games were subjected to the Fluxus treatment. Preventing the game from working makes the absurdity of the rules visible. But there is also an idea that once released from their absurd conventional rules, games become available to life again: Fluxus table tennis does not formalise social relationships, but instead opens a space where genuine social interaction might take place.

 

                        George Maciunas, Fluxus Table Tennis and Rackets, 1960s

8. Ephemeralitly and invisibility 

• Filliou’s project was ‘to become integrated into the crowd’. In what sense is that a project? What needs to be done to enable it to happen? Does this photo show him integrated into the crowd, or does the fact that we can see him mean that he is still unintegrated?
• Once again, a very simple idea opens onto all sorts of impossibilities and absurdities.

9. Specificity 

                                     Ben Vautire, Fluxus Suicide Kit, 1963

What Dick Higgins doesn’t mention…

A) Mysticism

• Paik was one of many Fluxus artists who was interested in mysticism.
• What would a TV look like if it could meditate on its own existence?

                                              Nam June Paik, Zen for TV, 1976

• Joseph Beuys created a whole personal mythology. He had served in the Luftwaffe during WWII and was shot down. His story is that the plane crashed on a remote mountainside, but all the crew (apart from himself) died. He was rescued by some nomadic tribesmen who covered him in fat and wrapped him in felt and so saved his life. So far as we are aware, the story isn’t true. But it sheds light on his use of materials: felt and fat are protective and nurturing in Beuys’ universe, so the slab of fat on the chair is not repulsive (although, of course, it is) but protecting the chair as a symbol of human civilisation.

                                         Joseph Beuys, Chair with Fat, 1963

• Similarly, the felt protects against the aggression of the spear. Other materials have other qualities. Metal (which tips the spear) is a conductor: it transmits energy and heat – it is communication, whilst felt is insulate and isolates. In the way these simple abstract and apparently irrational sculptures are used by Beuys to symbolise complex ideas about human society and nature.

                                               Joseph Beuys, Untitled, 1985

B) Music 

                                   Charlotte Moorman & Nam Jume Paik

C) Meaning and meaningless 

• This is the first poem ‘composed’ by computer. Knowles fed in a variety of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th lines and then instructed the computer to select at random.

                                 Alison Knowles, A House of Dust, 1967

D) Boredom 

• Boredom was pretty important to Fluxus. In the world of the avant-garde, artists could be as outrageous as they liked as long as they weren’t boring. To many of these artists boredom felt like the last taboo.
•  What was good about boredom for them was that the artwork disappeared from view and life came to occupy the space previously reserved for art.

E) Politics 

               Joseph Beuys, Overcome Party Dictatorship Now, poster, 1970-72

• This poster shows Beuys and a group of students involved in direct action/artwork: protesting the compulsory felling of trees and cleaning up the woods.

Beuys was a political activist throughout his life;

• In 1967 he founded the German Student Party.
• In 1971 he began the Organisation for Direct Democracy through Referendum.
• In 1974 he was one of the founder members for the Free International University.
• And in 1980 he was one the founder members of the German Green Party.

 

‘Artist, anti-artists, non-artists, anartists, the politically committed and the apolitical, poets and non-poetry, non-dancers dancing, doers, undoers and non-doers, Fluxus encompasses opposites. Consider opposing it, supporting it, changing your mind’. 

George Brecht (1963)

(In Jacqueline Baas, Fluxus and the Essential Questions Of Life, University of Chicago Press, 2011, p.8)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pop Art & Consumerism

Is there a real difference between what an artist does and what a manufacturer does, or are they both engaged in the same activity: selling stuff?

How do these artworks alter the ordinary associations of shopping trolleys?

(Christo, Pousette (Packed Supermarket Cart 1963)) (Sylvie Fleury, ELA 75/K Easy, Breezy Beautiful No. 6, 2000) 

• The shopping trolley on the left is a very simple design but when it is compared with the one on the right you can see the design has not changed as it is perfect for the job it has to perform.
•  When you look at the design on the left there is a mystery as to what the trolley is containing, there is the impressions of items but no clear definition

The taste pyramid:

Does the idea of taste as a pyramid still exist today? 

How does it function?

Where would you position artworks on this pyramid?

What does Alloway think are the problems associated with it?

How does he think these could be resolved?

Do you agree with him?

What does Alloway mean by ‘pop art’? 

Cyclops 1957 Sir Eduardo Paolozzi 1924-2005 Purchased 1958 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00225

(John Bratby, Jean with Dog, 1954.   Eduardo Paolozzi, Cyclops, 1957)

How much is a work of art worth? $192?

Andy Warhol, 192 One Dollar Bills, 1962.

This picture was sold at Christie’s New York in 2009 for $43,800,000.

How much is a fake Brillo Box worth?

In 1994: $6000

In 2006: one was sold at Christies, London for $208,695

In 2007: one was pulled from auction when it became known it belonged to this group.

Some of the 105 Brillo boxes made in 1990 (3 years after Warhol’s death) at Moderna Musset, Sweden.

The boxes were made by Pontus Hulten who provided a certificate of authentication for each of them, saying that they had been made in 1968. The forgeries were made at the centre of the art world rather than the margins.

what are the main differences between Vostells and Warhols depictions of coco-cola  what do these differences mean 

When looking at these images the main differences are very obvious, the Vostell, is a story, with the layers that have been ripped apart you can see the outline of faces, it is places on a billboard style, meaning it is to be see, its messy like life that happens around cola, but it also looks like the cola ad is underneath the top layers that have been ripped, this is interesting because there is the idea that even tho you might forget about cola and it may be covered there is still the image and idea that is left behind, we all know the red of coke, and the idea remains that there is a strong capitalist movement though subliminal text.

When you look at the Warhol you can make out every shape, clean line, the print look like an advert, there is no artists liberty like with the Vostell, there is no personality to the image there is just the pure image in its original form, this is a very plain and boring description of what cola is as Warhole could of added colour into the print, or texture, but the main idea is that no matter how plain or messy the image of cola will always shine though for advertising and for symbolism.

What is Oldenburg’s attitude to American culture in I am for an art…?

What is the form of his text?

Does it contain a theory of art?

How does Oldenburg’s text, I am for n art… relate to his practice?

Gerhard Richter and Konrad Leug, Living with pop, a demonstrtion of Capitalsit realism 

This was an art show in a dept, store, downstairs painting were displayed as part of the simulated interiors you find in dept. stores. Upstairs the artists put the furniture on plinths and sat around ‘performing’ (doing nothing).

Rosalyn Drexler, Love and Violence 1963 

Her work looks into the idea of what is love and what is considered violence, she takes well know movie posters, two lovers in an embrace, but when you take away the rest of the scene you see a man grabbing a woman, forcing her to him, possessing her, this then makes us question everything we see and know and how is love and what is violence, these images are show to us from movies posters, adverts, everywhere we look there is the idea of a man controlling a woman, where he is holding her or passionately kissing her. The shocking thing when looking at her work is that when these images have text, names, information for a romantic film that what we take it as romance, and its only when you remove everything else is it that we begin to see the major problems with what is happening, and the possessiveness we have to expect for males who love us.

Pauline Boty, Its a Man’s World II, 1965-66

In this work I think she is exploring the idea of what is the female form and how do men perceive it, the main things that you see in this image are the naked women who are challenging you to look at them, they dare you too look at the pornographic nature of the positions. you have women with their arms over their head in a relaxed but forced position making there breasts look larger, you have a woman draped with a sheer curtain the optimum of nude photography, the whole lay out of the women is to grab a males attention, its all positions meant for men’s eyes only, what I find interesting about this image is the background, the way the sky is one tone, how there isn’t any real definition to the landscape just light hints of texture, what I also find interesting is that on the left side on the landscape you have a sloping, rising landscape that is a direct echo to the women, its almost as if she is saying that it may be a mans world but a women’s form and influence is in everything you see and admire.

James Rosenquist, I Love You with My Ford, 1961

I really like this image by Rosenquist because it is such a subjective image, there is no right or wrong about this you can take it for face value, its a selection of three images that might have major importance to the artist, his car, his partner, and spaghetti, or you can look further into the ideas behind the image, what is painter trying to tell us about the American dream and the American male mentality. You can pull apart the individual elements of the image, the big, heavy mussel car, the element of the American Dream, the material goal, the next panel is of a woman, we cant see her all of her identity its just the idea of having a beautiful woman that yours, shes in a very sensual pose, shes laying on her back with her eyes closed. This could be her laying in the back of the car, these two things link together in a cohesive way. The final panel is of some spaghetti, its interesting that this panel is in colour, with the use of colour you can image the smell and taste of the spaghetti, you can also hear the wet sound of the food, this then links into the other two panels and the middle of more because you can group together the ideas of a woman laying n the backseat of a car and the wet sound of moving spaghetti.

Other notable pop art works:

• Claes Oldenburg, Soft Engine for Airflow No.5, 1966
• Andy Warhol, Ambulance Disaster, 1963/1982
• Andy Warhol, Green Car, 1963
• Richard Hamilton, Hommage a Chrysler Carp., 1957,

How important is the car?

Tom Wesselmann, Bathtub Collage, No.2, 1963

How does this image relate to gender?

• The male and female relating colour scheme, pink and purple= feminine, blues and yellow= masculine,
• A woman in a relaxing bath, on the phone, with a big fluffy towel,
• A cold, lid up toilet, is a very masculine image, there are male products on the shelf, there is a clear division in the image,
• The orange shower curtain is a perfect division line because its neither a male or female in this context, the colour works in harmony with the two gender messages.

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How did Pop Art challenge Greenberg’s theory of modernism?

1. By incorporating mediated imagery- the more mediate the better, rather than trying to discover an immediate image through the process of painting
2. By attempting to overturn the division between high and low art.

Robert Rauschenberg, Estate, 1963

Pop art treats the representation of particular objects as convention signs. The artists are less interested in producing an illusionistic picture of the world than in making a telling arrangement of objects. The theorist Roland Barthes gives a semiotic analysis of this advert in ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’

 

Roland Barthes, ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ in Image, Music, Text, New York, 1977.

What is a sign?

• A sign is something that stands to somebody for something else.
• A sign always points to something that is absent.
• All communication is dependent on signs.
• Anything that has meaning is a sign.

His analysis depends on the working of 3 pairs of terms

1. Signifier and signified:

• From: Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, (1913)
• A sign consists of a signifier (the thing you see or hear ect.)
• And a signified (what the signifier refers to.)
• The relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary.
• The theory was developed to explain how language works, the word ‘dog’ does not look like or sound like a real dog. The bond between signifier and signified is clearly arbitrary. The system does not work quite as smoothly with pictures: a picture of a dog, even if it is just a stick figure, has to look like a dog, so the bond between signifier and signified is not completely arbitrary, even though it may be highly conventional.

2. Connotation and denotation:

• Barthes uses these two terms to overlay signifier and signified.
• Denotation: Tomato- At a certain basic level, a photo of an object (not a drawing or a painting) is a sign, but it is simply a sign of that object.
• Connotations: freshness, goodness, tastiness, Italian-ness, ‘one of your five-a-day’, ect.
• Once we have recognised the object, it becomes associated with all kinds of qualities that are not directly visible, which derive from the cultural status of the object.
• This is not an exhaustive list; he argues that images contain an indefinite number of connotations. It is always possible to find one more. What is important in an advert is that viewers should be able to pick up enough to understand the message.
• Barthes’ reading of the connotations of the advert- still life painting, the return for market, freshness ect, everything you need for a complete meal, paradigm: the tin of tomato puree is as good as a fresh tomato, the colours of the Italian flag (=Italian-ness)

3. Paradigm and syntagm.

• The terms describe the ways in which signs relate to one another:
• Paradigms are signs that can be exchanged for one another
• Syntagms are signs liked together to form a sequence.

 

Abstract expressionism and Greenberg

Art & Language, Portrait of V.I.Lenin in cap, in the style of Jackson Pillock III, 1980

• The roots of abstract expressionism, 
• 4 features of abstract expressionism,
• Clement Greenberg and Formalism.

Contributory causes to the rise of Abstract expressionism:

• Desire to claim cultural leadership,
• Official sponsorship (art as a weapon of the Cold War)
• Desire to synthesise the main trends of European art

Cubism: what did cubism mean to painters in New York in the 1940s?

1. Fragmentation of form
2. Politics (engagement with the outside world)
3. Line and plane
4. Flatness Vs. Volume

(Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937)

Surrealism: What did surrealism mean to painters in New York in the 1940s?

1. Automatism
2. Hidden imagery
3. Desire (engagement with the internal world)

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(Andre Masson, The KIll, 1944. Andre Masson, Pasiphae, 1937. Hans Hofmann, The Wind, 1942. Jackson Pollock, Pasiphae, 1943.)

4 Features of Abstract Expressionism:

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“That these pictures were big is no cause for surprise; the abstract expressionists were being compelled to do huge canvases by the fact that they had increasingly renounced an illusion of depth within which they could develop pictorial incident without crowding; the flattening surfaces of their canvases compelled them to move along the picture plane literally and seek in its sheer physical size the space necessary for the telling of their kind of pictorial story.” (Clement Greenberg, American-Type painting, 1955)

Clement Greenberg & Formalism:

Why does Greenberg call Kant the first modernist?

• Traditionally philosophy had been used to investigate the world,
• Kant used philosophy to investigate philosophy, it became self-critical.
• Modernist art is self-critical.

Grennberg’s formalist definition of painting:

• two-dimensionality
• the rectangular shape of the support
• the properties of the pigment

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950

Is it possible to have an intense emotional experience while being conscious that you are only looking at marks on a surface?

But not all paintings are flat and rectangular…

Claude Monet, Nympheas, 1920-26

The painting is neither flat nor rectangular.

Monet wants the painting to envelop the viewer so that we even forget where the borders are. it is illusionist (bad, in Greenberg’s terms) but not in the way Old Master paintings are illusionist.

The evolution of Modernist painting, according to Greenberg:

‘Ever so many factors thought to be essential to the making and experience of art have been shown not to be so by the fact that Modernist art has been able to dispense with them and yet continue to provide the experience of art in all its essentials.’ Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting.

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1894

• You can remove Bouguereau’s under-painting and glazing; you can remove all Manet’s drawing and still leave something is unmistakably a painting.
• For Greenberg, every time an artist removes something for painting and still leaves a painting, the discipline becomes stronger and purer.

Is the monochrome  limit, beyond which you cannot go and still call what you make a painting?

Is this still a painting? (There isn’t any paint..)

Lucos Fontana, Sptical Concept, 1960

‘Modernism has found that these limiting conditions can be pushed back indefinitley before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object.’ Clament Greenberg, Modernist Painting, 1960.

The trouble with sculpture…

Greenberg’s theory works (up to a point) with painting, but sculpture is much more difficult to accommodate.

• If sculpture cannot define itself, it can never become fully self-critical, and so not fully modernist in Greenberg’s terms.
• The awkwardness of sculpture made it very attractive for artists who felt constrained by Greenberg’s reductive modernism.
• Greenberg was not blind to sculpture, he was a supporter of David Smith and Anthony Caro.

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(David Smith, Hudson River landscape, 1951, and Australia, 1951.)

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The trouble with Duchamp…

1. Humour

Greenberg wasn’t a humourless character, but the art he supported was earnest. You can never be sure if Duchamp is being serious: the initials below the picture make a mildly obscene pun when spoken out-loud. There is no place for work like this in Greenberg’s account.

2. Intellectualism (or pseudo intellectualism)

(Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass, The Bride Striped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23)

(Marcel Duchamp, The Green Box, 1934)

Duchamp published this to ‘explain’ The Large Glass. It looks like scraps of paper, but its actually carefully and expensively printed to look that way. Unlike a book, these notes and images have no fixed order.

3. Unclassifiability

(Marcel Duchamp, Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921)

Duchamp has tampered with the label of a perfume bottle, adding his own image and changing the name. ‘Belle Halenie’ means ‘beautiful breath’. ‘Eau de Voilette’  means something like ‘veil water’ (whatever that means). Is this a sculpture? A photograph? A text? A performance?

• Rrose Selavy was Duchamp’s transvestite alter-ego. When pronounced in French her name sounds like ‘eros c’est la viw’ (love is life).
• Duchamp’s work, just doesn’t fit into Greenberg’s scheme describe the developing and essence of modernism.
• As a later generation of artists looked for ways to challenge Greengerg’s account, or to find a way around it, Duchamp became an increasingly important artist.