Who is the other? Part One:

• ‘The Mythic Being- Adrian Piper, transvestite, loudmouth black man- her alter-ego.
• This being is pointed at the middle class art going public, everything that they hate and fear, the notion of otherness, opens onto question of identity, what is the self and the idea of difference, and how we negotiate with ourselves and others.
• It contains a threat, and its crucial how individuals and society understand, recognise, and deal with this threat.
• She has this alter-ego, ‘the mythic being’, she also thought what is the opposite of all of her qualities.
• She created artworks and performances, she staged a fight with a white man, its supposed to be an edgy performance but no one was around to see it.
• Cruising White Woman- she sat on the set as the mythic being and shouted out to white woman as they passed by, sexual innuendo, and more edgy performance, the chances of someone knowing that this isn’t a performance is slim, they wouldn’t know shes not a loud-mouth, black, aggressive male. There could be genuine confrontation that arises from this performance. The clothes that shes wears might be excepted as being real, but she is a small, petite woman, and so she doesn’t become a threatening presence. And it could stop people from taking her seriously.
• She also would go through her diary and pull out phrases and put them as performance and in images, and what happened to words when they were spoken by the mythic being? They are the same words but they are being changed by the person speaking them. She is also reflecting on her own identity, what did she mean?

The Mythic Being is directed at society’s perceptions of race, gender, and class. Otherness is Sociological. 

It is also directed at the construction of self. Otherness is Philosophical.

It is also directed at internal desires and fears. Otherness is Psychological.

Mike Kelley, Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991-9

1. Sociology 

• Within any given society, the dominant group(s) set the norms. People who through biology or choice do not fit those norms are excluded from full membership of that society. (Exclusion is not either/or: there are many degrees of exclusion, so many that most people experience it at some level.)
• Kelley- In this work Mike Kelly has stitched together soft toys, they are second hand soft toys from hospitals, hospitals get through a lot of these toys because they can hang around for long as they become germ factory’s, and they are items that have a life and have reached the end of it. He has put them together by the basis of colour, and likeness, theirs another work with these balls and there is a part of this were sitting on the floor there is a yellowish toy, called Almost White and it makes the idea of exclusion and what puts them together.
• It alerts us to the idea of this art work not us being about soft toys but also about the general workings of society. The formation of a group included some from of exclusion, who’s in and who’s out. You can’t have everyone in a group, there needs to be someone outside to make a boundary.

• When we come across otherness in art it may be presented in the form of exclusion, these figures are not life-size but they are not small, they are around 4ft high. Scale is important. We can’t look upon this this as equals as they are not the same size as us, they are not miniatures, its an awkward size that’s smaller than us but not so small that we can regard them as models.
• When you come into the room they are all facing away from you, their backs are facing you, and you can walk around to the front.

• When you come around to the front they are all laughing, you stand at the place where they are laughing at, you are excluded when you are behind but when you see the faces you are then excluded because you become the butt of someones else’s joke.
• There is another thing about this is that the faces are repeated, there’s a duplication, they are not fully individualised, the group identity is stronger than the individual.

What does the world look like?

What counts as a realistic representation in the 21st century?

• In a photograph there are areas when you can capture just half a car, that doesn’t match up with the visual impression, we move around in the world, we dont always stand still for a long period of time. The sense of the world is different to that of what you capture in a photograph. Our eyes are constantly moving, and land in more than one position at one time.
• When we capture the moon in a photograph it is always disappointing, you see the low moon and it looks really big but its does not correlate in a photograph. One reason is that the moon isn’t as big as we think, and because we pay attention to it it occupies more of our visual receptors, so it appears larger than it it. With a moon near the horizon you can cover the moon with you thumb and it will be the same at the horizon and at the middle of the sky. But it appears bigger at the horizon because we have trees and houses that we can compare the size to. If we just look straight up it appears smaller as we have nothing to compare the size to.
• With photography its difficult to know what is a realistic representation, should we go with that the camera records everything impersonally, and even if we think that’s not what the moon look like the truth is that is what look like- our perception is wrong and the camera is right.
• Well that is wrong- the camera is a machine and the human view is that it is larger and bigger at the horizon.

What do we mean by realism?

Would a ‘realistic’ image look the same to everyone regardless of their culture?

Alternatively, if realism is dependent on culture, is it actually realistic at all?

• The first idea is that there is a universal objective idea of realism, a realistic image, whatever it is, would appear realistic to every single person no matter upbringing, or time and place where you live. Because it was realistic wit would look like the world, and they would recognize the look of the world in that image.
• The second alternative is that one culture realisms is not the same as another realism and just because something looks real in Chile, it does not mean it will look the same in Africa. and just because something look realistic in 2016 doesn’t mean it will look like this in 1320. Realism is a culturally relative term and there is no realism.

• How images, perception, and psychology.
• Jakobson is a linguistic theorist,  he traveled from Russia, to Prague, and ended up in New York.
• We can’t see or represent anything without referring to something else. consciously or unconsciously. In order to understand with as a table I need to have an understanding of a table in my head, if i have nothing like that, of a table, I might use the idea of a chair, and think of a table as a large stool. Id have something to make sense of what I am seeing.
• If I don’t have that, would I be able to see the table properly or represent it properly?
• In science fiction and horror stories if the writer wants to give you an idea of something from another dimension, they run out of words to describe the thing, trying to describe something in humans terms that is indescribable. The fact there is no schema is part of the horror.
• none of us have ever seen a unicorn, but we have a schema for it, I have seen a horse with a long horn, we have an idea of a horse, but if we have no schema we can’t even put it into words.

• Durer’s image became a schema, it even carried on when people could see them.
• There is the sharpness from the horn which related in both the drawing and the painting that are direct schema From one to another.
• We know better now that what a rhino looks like, replaced one schema for another.

• We defer to photography as a truth.
• We can see things that are bt quite right, and we remove things that dont belong, it still works as an image of a rhino but we’ve replaced the schema, and makes it appear as an exception.
• When we think we know what it is we have to change the schema.

• Over time artists test the schema against their work “making and matching”
• Giotto- The schema for the mountains is a tower, rough, and rocky.
• Another artist’s might come along and understand this schema but might make the trees smaller which will make the mountain bigger, and further away.
• You can modify and modify.
• Poussin- His schema for the mountis is not the same but it is rocks, he could have used some rocks and painted them in his studio to represent the mountains, he uses pale blues when we accept the distance and what he is telling us.
• Monet- He was in the snow and it is a direct perception, we tend to see this as more realistic, over time makler and matching is a feature of art the schema will become more realistic.
• What ever schema you start with, if you make and match enough over time the image will become objectively more realistic.

• No one agrees on an absolute definition of realism, it changes over time, society and society.
• Incompatible meanings for realism.
• There is no agreed meaning for realism, if you look at how things change, like a painting, and people think that is realistic other people will then use this picture and mimic it themselves.
• An individual image becomes mainstream and then becomes stale, it is perceived as being unreal.
• The realism of yesterday becomes the realism of today, The effect of realism is created by breaking conventions. There is no objective truth, there will never be an image that will be realistic for all time. There is a short shelf life and it is constantly being renewed and changed.

• Vernet- He painted these seascapes and they were accepted as being realistic, but at the end of the nineteenth century these images had become stale.
• Turner- Had to find a different way to paint the sea and in finding a different way of painting the sea he creates something that is realistic again and then again this image becomes stale.
• Monet and Nolde find ways of representing it and the process of renewal means eac painting no matter how different and perceived as being realistic at the time of completion.
•  As it slips into history it becomes normalised and conventionalized and then it becomes dull. Art has to overturn to create realism again.

• The mere look of 3D films becomes boring and cinema sand film makers have to come up with new ways to create them, IMAX does this well, now the seats shake etc. We have to restore that effect of realism.

• We have a notion of perspective and photography, and the two are deeply connected and embedded in our perceptive psychological apparatus, and when we look at an image like this we understand the space that is being described, and we accept that as being more realistic.
• We are not certain of the conventions are when we first look at it. Is he a small man?
• The visual culture that we find ourselves in.

• People look at this top image for the obvious critique of it, the process of drawing her objectifies her she becomes an object of vision for the man, her body is available for art. And perspective forms that turning another human being into a drawing.  The man is in the position of power and the woman is passive.
• He may have more power but the apparatus that objectifies her controls him. There is this window between them with a grid of string and a piece of paper with correlating lines, and there is an obiblis. If he moves his head the view  is changed and he won’t produce the picture.
• As soon as perspective is create artists start to play around with it.

• A funny shape in the foreground, there is a notch in the painting, you can then see a skull, you cant see them both at the same time, the idea of death intruding on the scene. Cannot occupy the same space, can’t see death unless you more right to the side.

• Constable- He had a piece of glass in a frame which he fix to his easel, there were four pieces of string he nailed into the corners of the frame and he would hold them tight in his mouth, closing one eye, he would trace in using printers ink what he could see. He would then press a piece of paper onto the glass and get the mirror image, flip it over and trace it again to produce the image that he saw around him.
• Hes trying to find his homemade way of producing a photograph, it is really accurate, it should produce a convincing painting.

• When you line up the drawing with the painting not everything lines up, in this image the trees line up but then the boats dont match. The houses don’t match.

• Again when you line up the boats then the trees dont match.
• The whole picture doesn’t match, it goes through the process of marking and excluding his own subjectivity in the picture making process, and then he decided its not as realistic as he would like, he modifies the glass drawing.
• He expands the central area, the things that we are focused on occupy more space.

• The photograph records things that we couldn’t see, someone partially present.

• The idea of being there and not there “spiti photography” or “ghost photography”.
• We have two images that are showing us things that we cant see, one is one scientific and one is a lie. It still relies on a belief we can’t verify what we are seeing, we have to believe that the photograph is accurately showing the world.
• The truth of both of the images is rested on the belief of the authority of what photography is showing, as a visual means of reputation.

• He has someone perform an action, and it is recorded with very fast photos, from several different positions, each row if you were standing there, that is what there is to be seen. You couldnt occupy all the angles at the same time, photography opens the idea of totally visualization of a phenomenon, and true view, but impossible to see.
• We can produce a knowledge of the world that is impossible to the unaided human perception, beyond what we can see. Means of recording what you can see but human vision is limited and machine vision can bypass human vision and show us things we could never see.

• He has marked up using white dots and lines so we can see the relative positions, we can follow the line and see what happens to the head etc. This is not what someone look like when they jump over the fence but we are not used to seeing it in this way.
• A new way of depicting motion in space.

Contemporaneity

What makes a work of art contemporary?

1. Does it depend on when it was made?

• Yesterday?
• 2000?
• 1990?
• 1980?

2. Is contemporary art a kid of style?

Which, if any, of these art works would you describe as contemporary? Why?

Idea: 

• In order to be contemporary an artwork must be relatively new, and it must also be about contemporaneity, that is, it must express, analyse, or embody something about the contemporary condition.

 

Does Mark Bradford’s work fulfil both conditions?

“They’re all based on AIDS cells under a microscope. I don’t want to say the show is about AIDS, but it’s about the body, and about my relationship to the nineteen-eighties, when all that stuff hit. It’s my using a particular moment and abstracting it.” 

Mark Bradford interviewed by Calvin Tomkins, “What else can art do?” The New Yorker, June, 2015.

 

 

Whats the difference between a Brillo box and an Andy Warhol Brillo box?

Arthur Danto’s idea that contemporary art is not self-sufficient; it relies on a text, or on a theory that it is not part of the artwork itself, and may not be visible in it.

Andy Warhol, Brillo Box, 1964

 

 

The anxiety about being in the moment.

Is today’s social and political situation so different from that of 30years ago. that we need a totally new form of art (a new ‘ism’) to deal with it?

Is today’s social and political situation so complex and fragmented that no single ‘ism’ can respond to it?

How do we define ‘now’?

How have theorists given an account for contemporaneity in art?

Nicholas Bourriaud’s theory of altermodernism, as explained through a comic strip on Tate Britian’s website for Altermodern the Tate Triennial, created by Bourriaud, 2009.

 

Mark Godfrey: New Time Paradigm 

Contemporary  art is determined by its relation to time:

• the present
• the past
• nostalgia for modernism
• nostalgia for yesterday’s future

Fernando Bryce, Die Welt (detail) 2008

 

 

= ultra-modern

= anti-modern

talgia for yesterda

 

= situation where modern, traditional and chaotic art brought into temporary relation.

 

Kelly Baum: 

The form of art is linked to the form of subjectivity in any given society. Contemporary art is heterogeneous; not just in form: heterogeneity is its chief subject. Contemporary art reverses Greenberg’s project of disciplinary purity; it wants to see itself as non-art; it is involved in a process of self-othering (auto-defamiliarization).

Suzanne Hudson: The paradigm of no paradogm

Contemporary art is an idea, it has no real existence.

Whose interests are served by the belief in the existence of contemporary art?

The Market

The museum

The university ect

The biggest problem with contemporary art as it is currently understood it its fatherlessness.

Eric Fischl, Art Fair Booth #1: Oldenburg’s Sneakers, 2013

Isabelle Graw: The service sector artist 

The artistic value of contemporary art is underpinned (and undermined) by its market value.

The figure of the contemporary artist is mythical, made up of those qualities that are thought valuable in the labour market at the moment.

‘Art’ has a value that is trans-individual and timeless; ‘contemporary’ has a vale that is based on the relevance and urgency: The two terms push in opposite directions.

 

 

PDP

Throughout the year, and the first two terms, Constellation was the main academic source of my learning. My two Constellation study groups, Smells Like Teen Spirit and After Modernism both opened my mind too different ways of looking at art and culture. And the weekly keynotes left me thinking about ideas and society long after the session was over.

In Smells Like Teen Spirit: Subcultures and Street Style, I was taught to not only read between the lines, but to take face values as fact. Within these weekly study groups I was also taught how to read academic texts, pull apart the most relevant opinions and fact, and then work them into my own essays. Before this study group I had no idea how to quote or reference, so being able to do this weekly made all the difference to my learning. This study group touched on something that interested me, I love learning about fashion, style, and subcultures. In the first few weeks we looked deeper into the meanings surrounding Goth. I had looked into Goth fashion before but I had never taken the time to really think about why these elements make up a style, and why people are drawn into it.

Having weekly reading has really helped my understanding of texts, lectures, and theorists. I struggle to read and write and it takes a little longer for information to process on the first reading, so being able to spend a week rereading, annotating, and paraphrasing really helped with my preparation for the formative assessment. What I also really enjoyed about this study group was the time Cath took during to go over the texts during the study group and if we had any questions or quires she was right there to help out with understanding. It also takes me a little longer to process whats being said but during the lessons she would take time to go over everything properly and was happy to take questions, even if she had to go over something more than once.

For my formative assessment Cath spent a whole study group going over how to reference, quote, and what was expected for the final essay. She also ran a Keynote lecture which helped the information sink in fully. When it came to making the essay and giving feedback she gave me great advice and tips for extending this essay into summative.

For my second study group I picked After Modernism, which is a very fine art based group. Throughout the eight weeks we looked into contemporary art, consumerism, and expressionism, to mention a few. My favourite study group week was the Fluxus group, I had never looked into this from of artist expression and it was amazing to see how anti art shaped and bent the art work. I enjoyed every study group because I love being able to share my personal opinion about art. The great thing about this study group was that there was no right or wrong answer when talking about art, its all personal and there is no right and wrong with personal experiences.

I really enjoyed going to this study group because each week was different, with different theories to go through, and different art works to talk about. What I really liked about this study group was that even if you didn’t have prior understanding about any of the art movements that were covered, Jon went over them in a way that made it easy to catch up. This study group was very different to my first one, as it was all about other peoples work but how you saw and understood what they were trying to say.

One of the main things that I did struggle with was towards the end of the eight weeks the amount of reading went up and I found it hard to understand and absorb what was being said, I also found it hard to keep up in these start sections as we didn’t go through the text, and he would reference something vague and ask us to expand and that would through me off as it would take me a long time to even find the right part of the text, even after a week of studying it.

For my formative assessment I decided to write it on two of the art works from this study group, when I saw them in the study group for the first time I couldn’t stop thinking about them. And thanks to the study group before I knew how to analysis, back up with theory, and write the essay. I did struggle with how to go from the factual essay to a opinion based essay but after talking with Jon and he was happy with the subject matter of my work I was able to sit down and write an essay I was proud off.

Along with the two study groups throughout the year we also had weekly Keynotes which were to expand and inform our practice. One of the main Keynotes that stuck with me was the one of the theory of memesis, and how it was imitation of the real world and how it was copying or reproduction. During the keynote I didn’t really under stand what was being said and I didn’t really under stand the ideas surround memisis, but then days and weeks after the keynote i’m still thinking about memisis. I think this is the whole point of these weekly Keynotes, it what you take away from them and what makes you think. Unlike the study groups these are meant to expand on many different topics from Transforming form and fabric within Japanese Fashion Design to When is a nerd not a nerd? When hes a geek: Exploring the shift in representation of masculine identities. I really enjoyed the different topics that we could explore along with the continuity within the study groups, I’m really looking forward to next years topics not only in the study groups but within the keynotes.

Summative Assessment

How is gender and femininity explored within Pop Art?

 For the subject of my essay I have decided to look into the themes of femininity and gender and how they are expressed in Pop-art. In order to support my subject matter I will look into the work of Pauline Boty and James Rosenquist, what key meanings are explored and what I gain from their works. I also want to look into the ideas of gender and how art works can be directed to men by using the female form, how sex sells to both the male and female demographic, and how everything is ultimately at the mercy of the male gaze. I also want to look into the idea of the American Dream, and how it shapes and motivates lives, and how this echoed into the art world.

Pauline Boty: It’s A Mans World II, 1965, Style- Feminist art, Pop art, Nude painting,

 This painting is a collection of pornographic images that have been painted in a collage format, it’s the main focal point in the foreground. The background is a simple landscape, using block colours and shape. This image is made up of two panels, with the landscape as the background and the nude women as the foreground. The form of the painting is very interesting, the panels have very harsh, straight lines which then conflicts with the soft, curved lines of the naked women. There are very angular squares surrounding the painted women, giving them their own borders and importance. Each image is a snapshot from a different magazine, and is an expression of the female form and femininity. Every woman is nude, with only two of the women wearing bottoms, and one woman using a thin curtain to cover herself. The fact that every woman is naked aloud’s to the idea that this image is for male pleasure. The women are all grouped together in the middle panel, depicting either to the fact that all women sit in the same box or that they are all standing together as one.

 The background of the image is a simple landscape, with soft flowing trees and shrubbery, from the flat, simple sky, to the unnatural colour of the lake. The whole landscape is a simplified version because it is not the main focal point, it is just background noise. Time and motion are missing from this piece, there are no clouds in the sky to show physical movement and all the women are painted in a snapshot fashion that a moment was captured and that is how the image will stay forever. Unity and variety go hand in hand in this piece, the women are all partaking in the same soft porn poses, but there is the variety in the way that each women is different, no one has the same hair, makeup, or body. The artwork is balanced with perfect symmetry, the middle panel splits the background evenly this makes the whole piece balanced. Emphasis in this piece is solely on the naked women, they are in the main part of the piece, and they have the most variety. They are the titles muse, they are for men in a man’s world.

 Some of the key meanings that I have gained form this image is that her piece is both a celebration and critique surrounding the female form, it is a celebration with the liberation of the naked body but a critique because it is for the male gaze. When you first view the image you are assaulted by the female bodies, it is only after the initial assault is over that you start to pay attention to the rest of the image. The landscape is also a celebration and critique of the female form as the rising and falling of hills and the trees echo the naked bodies. This piece is hypocritical with expression because these women are embracing their bodies but they are only embracing themselves this way for men, there is no freedom of their expression. These images have been taken out of pornographic magazines which are purely made for the male demographic. And that links seamlessly to the title which is all about a man’s world.

 “Most depictions of the female in paintings throughout history have been commissioned and painted by men for the pleasure of other men thus leading to the ‘male gaze.'”  This is an interesting artistic note because It’s a Man’s World II was created by a woman with the subject material being women. This is showing Pauline’s self-awareness to the world around her, she knows what sells and what men want to see, and men want to see women in their most raw state. Women have always been a main subject in art for their beauty and grace, and later for the unknown. In this piece the identity of the women is unknown because they have been taken from pornographic magazines which have then been mass produced removing any intimacy and identity? With the faces being obscured in some way this removes all personal feelings for these women that the viewer may gain, with them being from pornographic magazines they are purely objects of lust.

 The American Dream is not a modern concept, “…it was first publicly defined in 1931. Historian James Truslow Adams used the phrase in his book Epic of America… The American Dream is that dream of a land which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” But this is not only an American standing point, for Botys was from England where similar ideas where you could become and be anyone you wanted to be. After the devastation of World War II there was a need for people to not only make the best of a bad situation but to make it better for themselves. A Man’s world supports the western ideals, what would a man’s world look like? In Botys eyes a man’s world would be filled with naked women at his fingertips with even the landscape ready to present the female form to him.

James Rosenquist: I Love You with My Ford, 1961, oil on canvas, 6ft. ca. 10 in. x 7ft. 9 in. Moderna Musset, Stockholm.

 This artwork is a collection of advertisement style images that have been arranged in an anti-advertising format, these images have been used within the rules of re-signification. The main subject matter of this piece is the bumper of the car, the sensual woman laying down, and the coloured spaghetti. Rosenquist was originally a billboard painter, focusing on advertising which supports the graphic nature of the work, its bold and eye grabbing. This work was created in 1961, “when abstract expressionism drew to a close” and the start of a graphic, pop art age, this work reflects this as there appears to be no correlation between the images at first glance, it is only when you look deeper into the meanings that it becomes clearer.

 This work is a three panel oil painting which has further been quartered, they are all different images that are selling all different ideas. When I look at this image I get the idea that all these images are linked together for the male gaze, these are all images that would gain attention, from the big shiny and new car, to the colour of the food. Each element in this piece is dominant but some is more than other, this is a very thought provoking piece, there are any elements of thought and layers that can be pulled apart and analysed. Lines in this piece have been used to section and divide.

 Shapes in the top panel are repeated creating harmony and balance, which conflict with the rest of the piece, the bottom panel is chaotic and disorganised. Without the use of colour in the top panels the image is left very flat and cold, the use of shadow and tone conflicts with the brightness and colour of the food. This is a very clever use of tone as the eye is drawn to the intensity against a plain foreground. The top panels look as though they have been zoomed in to remove the context, which then forcing the images into an abstract field where the viewer has to make the context for themselves.

 When I first look at this image I am drawn into the sexual ideas and theories that surround this work, when looking at this image the eye is drawn to the colour at the bottom rather than scanning down the work like a book. The colour is the most interesting element until you start to pull apart the sexual themes that surround the work. I think this whole work is filled with western ideologies of gender and masculinity, the big muscle car supports the American dream. The American Dream is an idea that anyone, no matter where you come from can better oneself, and reach any goal, the main goals being own a house, car, have a wife and family, and be the best version of yourself.

 After the Second World War there was a huge boost in production of commodities as metal was no longer needed for the war effort, this saw the rise in car sales as they became more widely available. The car was seen as a masculine object because it was big, study, and associated with men as at the time before the 1960s before the women’s lib, it was mostly a male workforce, this then reflected in the consumer society. This then associated the car with power, wealth, and self-improvement, thus reinforcing the American Dream. Furthermore this idea links into the second panel, a woman who obscured from the viewer and laying down.

 One of the first things I noticed about this middle panel is that it is smallest and the least is focus, which bends to the idea that cars, and objects can be more important than people. One of the main things that captures my attention about the women being small and out of focus is the idea that people are background, and secondary to things that can be bought, reinforcing the capitalist ideology. It is a very sensual position, with her laying on her back with her mouth open, as though she is in the throes of passion, tapping into carnal desires. Although it is not directly sexual the position of the woman brings forth sexual innuendos to the uncultured mind. Furthermore, this links into the ideas surrounding the American Dream, because once a man has gained a car it’s only natural for him to pick up women who would later become his wife and give him children. This is supported by the artwork, because the eye flows down the piece from the car to the women, insinuating that you can’t have one without the other.

 “When I copied a 1940s spaghetti illustration, I had to ask myself, why am I doing this? I didn’t honestly know. It was just an instinct about images as pure form… in a sense the spaghetti is like an abstract expressionist painting. De Kooning loved it. He said it was sexy.”

 The final (and most interesting for me) panel is not only the largest of the three but the only one in colour. Rosenquist himself was unsure what attracted him to the image of spaghetti but that it was like an abstract painting, that idea that anything can be art, even brightly coloured, mass-produced food, or the bumpers of cars. Similar cases have arose in the art world before, ideas that if the artist did not make the objects expressed then is it really a work of art, but then all these theories get thrown out the window when it comes to painting. By nature painting is the be-all-end-all of classical art, artworks included but are not limited to the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. There is also the museum critique that just because something is on a canvas and hung up in a gallery does even the most obscure objects become works of high classical art. This links into the spaghetti because Rosenquist just liked the look of it, the form, and expression, but when placed with the other images he has created a dream chasing, erotic image.  The whole use of colour also makes the spaghetti all the more real, but also engages the ideas about sound and texture. When looking at the spaghetti it’s easy to images the wet sound of the food moving around on a plate, and the slimy wetness of a cold food that should be served hot.

 The whole piece is titled I Love You With My Ford, not only making the Ford a main focal point in the image but also a cold, material, manmade object to base human feelings and emotions off. This is also linking into the idea of masculinity and gender when expressing emotions, it’s though that you are unable to love without this material object. That without this object to fulfil the American Dream there is no base line for emotion, all emotions lead up to objects that can be compared to people. I Love You With My Ford is also a critique of this capitalist driven society that places the means for objects above people, in this work the woman is the smallest part, unfocused and distant, and the need to collect and own becomes the sole, shining purpose of the American working class man’s life.

 Throughout this essay I have been exploring the ideas of gender, how sex is sold to the population, and how the American Dream seeps into every corner of art. Boty and Rosenquist both use all three of these elements to gain the viewers’ attention, drag out all analytical ideas and themes that can be both personal and public. When looking at the Boty image I was first drawn into the complex ideas of the female from and how it is perceived by a male demographic, but as I started to look deeper into the image there were more subtle theories. For Its A Man’s World II, there was the idea that there are masculine expectations about the world they live in, and that women are a secondary factor. This idea is also supported by Rosenquist in I Love You With My Ford, the women in the image is smaller, not in focus, and just reduced to a carnal ideal. Woman have always been used in artworks and painting, their soft lines, and hidden mysteries, but in Botys work they are complete bare, and any mystery is lost. The woman are on display like a piece of meat, the images are hung together and placed in a patchwork of carnal fantasy and desire.

 The American Dream became a main focal point of analysis when looking at Rosenquists work because of the factors that surround the time in which it was created, the 1950’s and 1960’s saw a huge boost in capitalist and commodity consumption. After the war there was a lot to be desired that the American people went without, the car has always been seen as a wealthy man’s prize, so it was only natural that people wanting to better themselves and their lives would see the car as the ultimate status symbol. The title of the piece may be about the Ford but it’s not close to being the main focal point, the colour and texture of the spaghetti violently takes the viewers eyes and reluctantly lets go.

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.

Harajuku Street Style;

• “Hippy, hillbilly, and hip hop genres are enacted in a self-reliable masquerade without any regard for appearing natural or authentic.”
• “Take signs out of their original context and transform their meaning in a character bricolage where distinction between reproduction and authenticity is extraneous.”
•   “Do-it yourself… irreverent but seamless combining of traditional Japanese dress, and western retro fashion, avaunt-grade Japanese culture, futuristic cyber style… hand made and second hand fashion, found/cheap mass-produced objects… combining novelty and tradition, east and west, old world and the modern.”
• “The more radical the masquerade, the more attention it earns, standing out in a city of twenty million, conforming nature of Japanese culture, the intensity of the pleasure in the subversive, subcultural is heightened-  would be less radical and wouldn’t produce the same intensity.”
• “Public-private distinction, no public spaces, microcosmic society.”
• “Living rent free allowed ongoing fashion consumption, public street culture allows respite from the intimate space of the private family home, rejection of what they are expected to aspire to be.”

Characteristics of style:

• celebration of the non-natural, everything is exaggerated, beyond fashionable and style.
• combing novelty with tradition.
• no respect for fashion rules.
• supermarket of style.

Key Findings:

• historical context,
• cultural context, how everyone sees the world,
• supermarket of style,
• fashion traveller/tourist,
• anti-establishment values,
• subcultural capital.