Art 285: Post-Cold War Contemporary Art History

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Joseph Beuys, Fat Chair, 1963, wood chair with fat

Hint 1

-- fat is a key material, ideal because its chaotic (liquid) and cold (order)
-- placed in that most ordered form = right angled chair (Caroline Tisdale)
-- interest in politics: SOCIAL SCULPTURE. balance, reintegration and flexible flow between areas of thinking, feeling, and will, all of which are essential
-- sculpture is anything that changes ideas or teaches others -- -- refers to Duchamp and the readymade
-- thinks materials are symbolic while Duchamp does not
-- re-inscribing everyday objects w/aura = something special
-- regresses into primitive myth, art as means of personal and social healing
-- fat and felt becomes key materials for his sculpture = warmth and energy
-- extremes: formless when solid, theory of "SOCIAL SCULPTURE"
-- what can art tell us about society, infiltrates world, seeps out into world
-- fat has magical qualities
-- MYTH OF ORIGIN
-- negating art, the spiritual

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Joseph Beuys, Auschwitz-Demonstration Vitrine, 1956-64, mixed media installation

Hint 2

-- works b/t dept store/museum and a shrine
-- one of the first works since in 1940s in Germany to directly address Holocaust
-- atmosphere of bodily torture, decrepid
-- glass means we are distant but we can see, we will never fully understand or engage with the Holocaust but we can use metaphor
-- trying to heal = fat on hotplate represents melting flesch, you have the potential to heal, fat as regenerative
1. figuration
2. near-abstraction (Fautrier)
3. metaphor (Beuy's "social sculpture")
-- jews referred to as rats
-- decaying
-- organized how Nazis reduced humans down to objects
-- about trying to heal in Germany in trying to deal w/past
-- regenerative vs. cheap, historical theatrics

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Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965, performance

Hint 3

-- holding a dead hare and explain his works which are on walls
-- kind of silly, but deadly serious
-- tyring to explain abstraction is as ridiculous as explaining it to something dead
-- much more complex than fluxus (event scores)

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Gerhard Richter, Uncle Rudi, 1965, oil on canvas

Hint 4

-- German, "pop" artist
-- a painting based on a photo of his uncle, a Nazi soldier killed soon after Normady
**Hitler youth, socialist realism, ideal society, understands postwar Germany
-- then became a westerner in 1961
-- Germany (east) was very censored, you couldn't do abstraction, areas look like they've been painted over
-- addressing censorship as a way of marking dissatisfaction w/Communist regime (could not paint abstract or modernist pictures)
-- used socialist realism to be able to paint, but had deeper meaning
-- "BANALITY OF EVIL": Hannah Ardent, how could this clown be responsible for evil, can't reconcile horror of deeds and ludicrousness of man
-- looks harmless, smiling Nazi, snapshot, family album, blur (looks nostalgic), evil complex in postwar Germany
-- technology vs. pre-technology, historically specific, vs. vague metaphor (comparing to Auschwitz-Demonstration Vitrine)
-- tension between family (love) and Nazi (hate), history wants to portray him as being bad, but he is a family member

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Gerhard Richter, Tote, 1962, oil on canvas

Hint 5

-- painting from press photgraph
-- "tote" means death in German
-- out of context, we don't know what to think
-- laten: to plumb the depths in order to understand, you must look closely
-- refers to Fautrier
-- ice block in front of body
-- finds way t o communicate contradictions of Cold War: confusion between painting and photo, between abstraction and figuration
-- idea of the caption

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Gerhard Richter, The Folding Drying Rock, 1962, oil on canvas

Hint 6

-- painted commodities
-- Marshall Plan: W. Germany economic miracle (1960s)
-- when he saw the ad, he already owned the drying rack
-- spooky, depicts it as a cheap and awkward thing
-- Capitalism and Communism both promise utopia, both yield power through images
-- begins to call his work "CAPITALIST REALISM": his experience allows him to see parallels across Cold War

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Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome; Monogold; Monopink (triptych), 1960, mixed media on canvas

Hint 7

-- New Realist, NOUVEAU REALISME: Pierre Restany: critic who put together publicity or marketing ploy, new perception of the real, conscious of collective identity
-- NEO-AVANT-GARDE: reclaiming monochrome from political critique of Rodchenko, tried to patent IKB, using commercial culture for validation, return of avant-garde forms in new context, using forms of famous 20th century, Peter Berger: postwar practices merely empty gestures that lost politics of prewar avant-gardes
1. historical amnesia: WWII so traumatic, prewar art seems new
2. desire for transcendence in art but reliance upon spectacle
** says something about 1960s France: art does not exist in a vaccum, combining market w/transcendence shows irrationality of both
-- claims to have invented monochrome
-- ROSICRUCIANISM: mystical ideas, Judo, over interest in pure spirituality, metaphysical Christian
-- primal elements like fire
-- transcendence: forged photograph of himself defying gravity
-- interest in mediated culture
-- mysticism in triptych: use of gold leaf: religious painting and alchemy
-- pink-- favorite colors of ROSICRUCIANISM
-- IKB: infinite depths of oceans (international klein blue)

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Yves Klein, IKB, 1959, dry pigment in syntetic resin on fabric on board

Hint 8

-- showed 11 IKBs all the same size, look identical but the prices vary
-- contradictory: more spirituality = more money
-- constructs artistic myth and exposes it at the same time
-- reinvesting avant-garde MONOCHROME with "aura" but acknowledging market
-- provides a myth of artistic genius but also acknowledges how it is impossible to escape market
-- differing contexts, this is not mere copying but says something particular about post war France
-- DeKooning: marking commodification of action painting but still retoric

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Yves Klein, Le Vide (The Void), 1958, photo of exhibition

Hint 9

-- exhibited an empty gallery space
-- declared to have impregnated space w/his "political sensibility" and "pictorial of feeling"
-- spectacle and myth in living brushes, "action painting" w/naked women, served blue martinis (blue in you)

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Arman, Accumulation of Water Pitchers, 1961, vitrine and water pitchers

Hint 10

-- best known for "ACCUMULATIONS", riffing on Duchamp's readymade
-- luster of consumer goods gone
-- memorializing "OBSOLESCENCE": dark side of capitalism is waste and excess of same
-- NOUVEAU REALISME
-- no emotional attachment
-- engaged w/present day France
-- compare with Auschwitz-Demonstration Vitrine, both old but differ, violence in present vs. healing from past, waste and excess vs. mythical redemption

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Arman, Large Bourgeois Trash, 1960, trash in vitrine

Hint 11

-- not based on one's inferiority
-- not what we consume, but what we throw away
-- inorganic matter
-- portraits based on what individuals throw away -- no way to escape consumption, trash is subject that captures violence of capitalism
-- gallery full of trash, contrast w/Klein's Le Vide
-- trash is subject that captures violence of capitalism
-- Americanization, France was worried about American consumption

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Cesar, Compression, 1960, compressed automobile

Hint 12

-- Roland Barthes (1957): not magical , symbol of American culture transformed into tombstone of rusted metal, "aura"
-- speed and transcendence
-- demythologizes automobile, simply metal
-- Marxist ideas of labor (fell out of the sky)
-- about big American cars as tombstones

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Jean Tinguely, Drawing Machine, c. 1961, kinetic sculpture

Hint 13

-- kinetic sculpture from scrap metal, gets trash and makes machines with no purpose
1. irrational machines, to make a machine is irrational
-- anyone can make abstract art
2. Pollock's machine-like gestures transformed into actual machine
3. art and science coming together

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Andy Warhol, Dr. Scholl's Corns, 1961, casein and crayon on canvas

Hint 14

-- NEW REALISM: realism of western capitalism, commodification of spirituality, death is lurking behind rationality and commodity, "realism" also refers to a return to figuration in art
-- paintings found advertisements on canvas becomes fine art
-- Richter: exposing sham of advertising
-- commenting on earlier work: painting is corrective to his shoe ads, showing dark side of fashionable shoes
-- paintings about advertising, ads cover up and allow to repress bodily trauma, consumerism allows us to repress trauma

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Andy Warhol, 32 Campbell Soup Cans, 1962, acrylic on canvas

Hint 15

-- Duchamp
-- debunks two founding myths of American painting
-- existential action now consumer action
-- we are what we consume
-- Pollock as a brand name
-- opticality
-- package design looks like American modern painting striking design necessary to attract eye in store
-- common object, can hide intention behind subject matter complicit or critical
-- capitalism and communism not that different, Cold War rhetoric of absolute difference
-- "COMMONISM": what Warhol called his work, through Capitalism, we are all becoming the same
-- act of choosing is like the art market, painting = soup cans
-- in dialogue w/Rosenberg (not action but consumer action, commodity culture, opticality, Noland and Rothko) and Greenberg (debunking both

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Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962, pencil, silkscreen ink, and acrylic on canvas

Hint 16

-- shift to SILKSCREEN, move ambiguous
-- made just after her death
-- mechanical process, using photography into painting
-- brand image on left, on the right is abstraction, where is the real
-- "the reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine"
-- compare with Richter's Tote

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Roy Lichtenstein, Golf Ball, 1962, oil on canvas

Hint 17

-- tension btwn modernist aesthetic and mass culture
-- Mondrian: turning into a golf ball, erases brand name from source
-- generic unlike Warhol
-- refinement: cleaning up images, losing much of the text
-- emphasizing eye and machine parts, monocular vision, makes it a painting about vision
-- macho aspects of action painting -- aggression, making fun of ab-ex artists

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Roy Lichtenstein, Torpedos...Los, 1963, oil and magna on canvas

Hint 18

-- painted cartoons blown up to large scale, cheap object matter
-- changes from original, more colorful, more modern
-- painting about vision

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Roy Lichtenstein, Sinking Sun, 1964, magna on canvas

Hint 19

-- ben-day dot: paints sublime landscape w/mass production techniques
-- shows us a new way of seeing
-- NY Pop: connections btwn culture of everyday life and questions of modern art

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Ed Ruscha, E. Ruscha, 1959, oil on canvas

Hint 20

-- grew up in Oklahoma, ends up in LA taking both fine and commercial art classes, paints like DeKooning in 1950s
-- becomes more "cool" because of Rauschenberg
-- making fun of the autographic gesture
-- Greenberg: limits of the canvas are marked
-- flatness
-- Rosenberg: autographic gesture
-- using text like Johns, but funnier and more ironic
-- LA Pop: car culture, place of dreams and nightmares

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Ed Ruscha, Boss, 1961, oil on canvas

Hint 21

-- treats word like a still life
-- taking inspiration from public lettering
-- words could be visually interesting
-- word association = its about coolness or authority
-- very painterly -- referring to ab-ex in style
-- taking inspiration from public lettering
-- ambiguous: coolnes vs. authority
-- Warhol and Ruscha: familiar into something strange through painting
-- SEMANTIC SATURATION: words go dumb when word is isolated, it can lose its meaning and become an empty sound

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Edward Kienholz, The Illegal Operation, 1962, mixed media

Hint 22

-- related to Rauschenberg
-- creates "tableau" whose meaning is much more direct
-- ASSEMBLAGE, irrational
-- reference to an abortion gone wrong, soiled furniture: equating bodily trauma w/discarded objects
-- highly controversial
-- like Arman, but narrative

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Edward Kienholz, The Cement Store #1 (Under 5,000 Population), 1967, plaque and typed sheet

Hint 23

-- suggests impossibility of works of art
-- more conceptual practice
-- FLUXUS: action doesnt actually have to happen, turning something that usually helps us forget death into masoleum
-- event score

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Bridget Riley, Current, 1964, synthetic polymer paint on composition board

Hint 24

-- OP ART: optical painting
-- assaults the eye violently, the visceral effects are amazing, very bodily effect, feeling, we have to turn away, vision is part of the body, not isolated from it
-- not violent subject matter but they are not violent works
-- feminist reading: making painting that deflects the gaze, making viewers turn away, takes violence of action, painitng and turns it around
-- AVANT-GARDE and KITSCH: these patterns immediately put on clothes and other things, commercialization gave critics reason to dismiss her
-- also critiques abstraction
-- takes violence of action painting

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Robert Morris, Installation shot, Green Gallery, New Yor, December 1964

Hint 25

-- MINIMALISM: must go back to Greenberg: OBJECTHOOD and OPTICALITY: how can we discuss these terms? both continues and ends this story (FRIED)
-- Greenberg and OBJECTHOOD: should'nt be something its not, OPTICALITY: should play trick but not 3D, very much an object (illusion); painting should embrace contradiction
-- MICHAEL FRIED:
1. shape is how a painting asserts OBJECTHOOD
2. deductive structure
3. what is painted, however, negates the materiality
-- art is all about vision
-- hollow plywood forms
-- PHENOMENLOGICAL: approach to minimalsim, must walk around space, sight is not enough, encourages participation, bodily participation is the paint
-- THEATRICALITY: viewer as the actor, not art for Fried, too familiar, no transcendence, just objects
-- **from eyesight alone to active bodies
-- claims to break from Greenberg, still see his legacy through opticality in sculptures and transcending objects

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Donald Judd, untitled, 1965, steel and colored Plexiglas

Hint 26

-- art critic and artist, began by working with tradition of painting
-- like Stella, structure changes color
-- bridges into sculpture
-- argues that any painting creates 3D illusion, so notiong coulbe be more specific
-- MINIMALISM getting away from traditional ideas of individuality, too subjective
-- likes SPECIFIC OBJECTS (painting creates 3D illusion, so nothing could be more specific and honest than objects in real space), but his sculpture DID create illusions, claims to have broken from Greenberg, but we still see opticality in structures
-- works gravitate toward his non-art aspects (Duchamp)
-- MINIMALSIM follows this logic to the point where it break w/it, crux btwn high, modernist practices and more postmodern practices
-- 1960: move away from human composition, embracing a language of industry, study of opposites

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Donald Judd, untitled, 1963, painted wood, colored Plexiglas

Hint 27

-- painting that attacks viewer's space, painting that aspires to be sculpture, no composition
-- MINIMALISM getting away from traditional ideas of individuality and balance, its too subjective

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Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966, fire bricks

Hint 28

-- refers to Duchamp more directly
-- 8 sculptures each made of 120 bricks
-- bringing sculpture back to its basics, wouldn't beare at a construction site
-- his works made viewers begin to see the exhibition space
-- refuse a "fine art" look
-- selling bricks, not paintings
-- Marxist
-- political
-- humble and neutral materials make viewers beings to see the exhibition space around them
-- SERIAL REPETITION vs. COMPOSITION: getting away from individuality of balance (Judd vs. Caro)
-- 1960s: embracing language of industry

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Carl Andre, Copper-Aluminum Plain, 1969, copper and aluminum

Hint 29

-- not an optical experience, but bodily, you hear your footsteps
-- emphasis on the gallery space and presence of the viewer
-- PHENOMENOLOGICAL
-- FRIED: art should be about eyes, not bodies
-- "action painting" to "action being": shift from AUTONOMOUS artist to AUTONOMOUS viewer
-- HERBERT MARCUSE: one-dimensional man, calls for subject to step away from object, consider own bodies on an Andre

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Diane Arbus, A Husband and Wife in the Woods at a Nudist Camp, N.J., 1963, photo

Hint 30

-- 1960s largely about violence, disconnect btwn art and politics and art doesn't really reference violence, "HUMAN BE-IN": hippies and counter culture (place where one coulde just "be") makes one aware of the body, bodily liberation
-- assassination in 1968 made bodies seem vulnerable, we are fragile
-- MINIMALISM provided moment of social amnesia, a way to cultivate an image of wholeness, allows us to see complexity in late 1960s
-- refers to tradition and the margins (fractures of society)
-- clearly referring to Adam and Eve
-- not the everyday America, those who are not usually portrayed
-- not pure nature
-- radical to join nudist colony
-- she has on flipflops, he has on smokes (modern)
-- Arbus comes from a rich and artsy family and became very controversial, killed herself

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Diane Arbus, Patriotic Young Man with a Flag, 1967, photograph

Hint 31

-- flags intentional
-- not idealized
-- maybe mentally challenged, off-putting about this image
-- very composed unlike Frank
-- "You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw"
-- conflicting views:
1. champion of the neglected, forcing viewers to make eye contact w/those you would otherwise avoid
2. exploitive, privileged, slumming narcissist who lacks compassion
-- posed photograph

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Diane Arbus, Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City, 1962, photo

Hint 32

-- unsettling image, confronting the viewer
-- claustrophobic space
-- kid is alone, wide open space, posed picture, picks one picture when kid facade breaks, looking for flaw (doesn't portray facade of innocence)
-- FREUDIAN SLIP: photograph perfect medium for this, accidental moment when truth is revealed
-- idea of doubling
-- war image w/a child who doesn't know better
-- danger, unsettling body language
-- clothes falling off, skinny-knob knees wouldn't be strong soldier, decrepit hands

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Bernd and Hilla Becher, Cooling Towers, 973 (project begun in 1960s), photograph

Hint 33

-- husband/wife team
-- erase notions of subjective style: emphasizing medium, not an individual point of view
-- removal of hand
-- SERIALITY
-- lack of composition
-- mechanical language
-- TYPOLOGIES: different manifestations of the same form, anonymous sculpture taken in an anonymous way
-- LE CORBUSIER: late 1960s, taking stock mourning loss of utopian promise
-- Thierry de Duve, fluctuate btwn architecture and sculpture, industrial forms remind viewers of the promises of modernity and its failures

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Life, "The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam

Hint 34

--"UNCENSORED WAR": Vietnam War
-- 1969: Life magazine dropped it American optimism and published images of one week's dead in Vietnam
-- Warhol: reminds me of a yearbook (not about optimism), you can connect with them, brings in a human element
-- "neutral aesthetic" becomes accepted way to register grief
-- MINIMALSIM and neutrality become accepted as aesthetic for memorials as these forms allow viewers to have their own experience

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Robert Smithson, Sand-Box Monument (alternative view), Monuments of Passaic project, 1967, photograph

Hint 35

-- MINIMAL ART important to Smithson, does sort of industrial, minimal art
-- ideas of minimalist SERIALITY in everyday, industrial life
-- escaping galleries of NY and using photography
-- "monuments" of sorts
-- ENTROPY: increasing disorder that occurs in the universe, drive from order to disorder
-- critique of refined, modernist painting, Noland's order is unnatural
-- questioning notions of progress

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Robert Smithson, Nonsite (The Palisades, Edgewater, New Jersey), 1968 (with detail)

Hint 36

-- brings parts of the world back to the gallery
-- all about absence, what is not there
-- what is the landscape? the rock, the map, both?
-- refers to something OUTSIDE the gallery
-- text refers to human industry (Trolly) equates grand geological process with human interventions
-- modern society is also subject to ruin and decay
-- PSYCHOLOGICAL ENTROPY: cant locate site, lost, art is about the failure of representation
1. gallery no longer a site of monetary worth (rocks and xerox)
2. gallery not the site of singular meaning, work is outside the space

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Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1969-70

Hint 37

-- most famous EARTHWORK: outside the gallery, critique of art as commodity
-- constructed in great salt lake
-- sculpture not place in landscape, but part of landscape, subject to elements of change
-- site not haphazard: he studied geology and history and incorporated this into his work
-- SITE-SPECIFICITY: these things are living and changing, dislocation
1. mimics the spiral of nature
2. MODERNIST: self reflective
3. POST-MODERN: dislocated, marginal, time-based
-- 17 miles away was where the TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAY met, American structure, ironic place
-- critiques this TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAY because you have to travel a lot to see the piece, trains alter the landscape
-- work is always changing, life cycles
-- linear vs. spiral
-- definite notion of history vs. deep
-- progress vs. ENTROPY
-- history (human progress, constant state of becoming, never complete) vs. continental stat
-- state of completion vs. state of change
-- ENTROPY: drive towards disorder, constantly changes
-- PRE-MODERN (deep geological time, commentary on spiral shape), MODERN (crystals themselves are spirals on the microscopic level, deductive structure), POSTMODERN (questions linearity and fixed narratives)

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Giovanni Anelmo, Untitled (Structure that Eats Salad), 1968

Hint 38

-- POP and MINIMAL art seen as "American" to Europeans, especially after Rauschenberg won Venice prize in 1964
-- MINIMALISM seemed cold, rational, hollow, a product of US industry like Vietnam, materials, POP seen as processing images
-- ARTE POVERA: away from networks of industrial production and distribution, away from advanced consumer culture, artist should be "producer of magic and marvelous deeds", not using industrial or media materials, art is counter to American production
-- ENTROPY: piece could collapse at any moment
-- stone, lettuce (fragile material holding together sculpture), sawdust
-- biological: life cycle, giving life to minimal art
-- information (data) vs. in-formation (becoming) = PROCESS ART and CONCEPTUAL ART

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Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1967

Hint 39

-- organic material (pre-industrial) vs. industrial
-- taking forms of minimal forms and incorporating life (organic material), showing its emptiness

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Robert Morris, Threadwaste, 1968, mixed media

Hint 40

-- uses industrial waste (leftover from textile manufacturers) called THREADWASTE
-- industrial progress as wasteful
-- ENTROPY and control: slippery material, trying to control, pieces and remnants of everyday life, material that can communicate chaos
-- PROCESS ART: antiform, materials at different levels of formation
-- anti-form
-- about material more than the viewer
-- constantly moving and shifting
-- unable to replicate
-- fractured body (mirrors)
-- visual ENTROPY: from solid forms that validate viewer to nes that formerly deny viewer as a whole, harder for us to differentiate figure from ground: "POST-MINIMALISM"
-- worked in warehouse/public gallery for 3 weeks but sold nothing
-- UNCANNY: industrial, something that is both foreign and familiar

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Richard Serra, Splashing, 1968

Hint 41

-- references Pollock
-- reclaiming Pollock as a PROCESS ARTIST
-- claiming Pollock as a materialist artist
-- "macho" painting = dangerous
-- heavy metal
-- addresses Pollock's vertical/horizontal duality
-- trying to outdo Pollock

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Richard Serra, One-Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969, lead plates

Hint 42

-- gravity holds pieces together
-- always in process of formation
-- PROCESS ART
-- PROCESS ART vs. ARTE POVERA: Italians more interested in organic matter and magical ideas vs. American industrial matter
-- COR-TEN STEEL: will withstand time, out lasts his legacy and human life

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Eva Hesse, Untitled (Rope Piece), 1970, wire and rope soaked in latex

Hint 43

-- carefully crafted works w/odd industrial materials: nylon, latex, fiberglass
-- bodily and modernist, referring to Pollock, locating body in new industrial forms
-- ARTE POVERA sensibility
-- CONCEPTUAL ART
-- like Pollock drips
-- violent, disembodied
-- bodily and MODERNIST, locating the body in new industrial way
-- INDUSTRIAL UNCANNY: something alive and uncanny
-- what does it mean to be human in an industrial world?

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Eva Hesse, Accession II, 1967-68, vinyl tubing and steel box

Hint 44

-- adding strange, unsettling life to blank forms of MINIMALISM
-- what does it mean to be human in an industrial world?
-- CONCEPTUAL ART

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Mel Bocher, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, 1969, 4 binders

Hint 45

-- POST-INDUSTRIALIST ART
-- still reliant upon capitalism, but now white-collar, corporate jobs
-- not language of industry, but of culture and the office
-- archival
-- reference to Duchamp and commodity, nothing precious
-- shows process w/o end gain
-- only way of seeing Judd's hand, no singular work of art
-- using radical machines, questions ownership
-- art is not original, endlessly reproducible, xerox machine
-- art literally as information, no precious object
-- art de-materialized or re-materialized in language, information as data
-- collected artists sketches, receipts, scientific graphs, xeroxed 4 copies of each sheet and displayed in gallery

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Hans Haacke, MoMa Poll, 1968

Hint 46

-- what does it say about the museum experience? (poll inside a museum space)
-- politics within the arts, you think you have a choice, but you don't (Warhol)
**aesthetic choices and perception have political consequences: governor Rockefeller was a trustee of MoMA, connecting the museum straight to Vietnam

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Joseph Kosuth, Titled (Art as Idea as Idea): 'Theory,' 1966, Manifestation: photostet on board

Hint 47

-- art should be the things that make us see the limits of art
-- art as LINGUISTIC
-- you don't even need the art object itself, but he himself makes these written objects a series of dictionary definitions
-- very legalistic view of exhibition
-- language depends on context, language is fuzzy: words and photos can be ambiguous

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Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, Documentation II: Analysed Utterances and Related Speech Events, 1975

Hint 48

-- child as process, its physical and social formation, 135 total units
-- important feminist work, not romanticized view of mother hood
-- Mom as process, very clinical, no expression
-- "MIRROR STAGE":
1. child recognizes self in mirror, see yourself as self separate from mom
2. we are socially-constructed, identities not pregiven but in flux
-- overall, we see an archaeology of everyday life here
-- Kelly excavates the origins of her son's subjectivity
-- nature vs. culture, she falls towards culture

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Chris Burden, Shoot, 1974, photograph of performance

Hint 49

-- guns can kill you or hurt you = limits of the body, limits of psychological trauma
-- gallery is a place to test limits
-- do we need extreme conditions to feel alive

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Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1974, video stills

Hint 50

-- learning the alphabet
-- not your typical domestic goddess
-- very violent
-- we think of these tools as simple women's objects, but she gives them power
changes the way we think about the kitchen
-- new definition, the woman is the tool in the kitchen
-- social frame that can control the individual, in her case, the female in America
-- how to break away from this confined space (domestic realm)
-- VIDEO ART: away from precious materials, all that's needed is a camera and a screen, gallery space can be anywhere (like EARTHWORKS), closely related to broadcast television
-- Warhol and Lichtenstein based on print culture, VIDEO ART based on broadcast TV and media
-- video as a "utopian" critic
-- broadcast seen as a one-way producer, but as viewers, we can make our content (social change) through VIDEO ART
-- broadcast art largely dependent upon advertisements

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Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972, 144 photographs

Hint 51

-- went on a diet for 36 days and photographed
-- prison mug shots -- visual contrl of the body
-- uses the language of art: "carving" a "sculpture"
-- aesthetics of the female form
-- cultural ideas of beauty dominate ideas of art and popular culture
-- she is under surveillance, not by any single authority but by social codes of feminine beauty, making a work of art referring to classical sculpture

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David Hammons, Spade, 1974

Hint 52

-- racism
--key strategy for artists to re-frame stereotyped African-American artists trying to gain control over the public system
-- showing the ambiguity of language
-- direct imprint
-- reference to African masks
-- terrible stereotype in tension with harmless playing cards
-- slur is arbitrary
-- IDENTITY POLITICS

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Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970 photograph of performance

Hint 53

-- dealing with feminism, race and using performance strategies
-- increase the rate of a chemical reaction by the introduction of a CATALYST
-- speeding up what people want to do with her
-- social world as chemical solution, social change as process that he presence as "art" is trying to speed along
-- we are socially-constructed beings, no existence outside of social formations (POST-MODERNIST subject)
-- IDENTITY POLITICS: struggles in 1970s
-- her presence calls attention to oppressive framework

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Vito Acconci, Trademarks, 1970

Hint 54

-- PERFORMANCE WORK: 1970s, limits of the body
-- biting self on as many parts of his naked flesh that he could reach
-- Rosenberg: violent and expressive, autographic mark
-- Greenberg: medium specific w/the body limits of the human body
-- title: making sure property isn't stolen, your teeth are unique and his body is like a commodity
-- body as commodity to consume, his bites are unique to him, body as subject and object of work

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Chris Burden, Five Day Locker Piece, 1971, photograph of performance and lock

Hint 55

-- actual limits of the body
-- lock and photos are all that's left, like relics
** something spiritual about the experience, body as processs
** paradox: about the concrete body, but also about transcending body -- going beyond what seems possible

Front 56

Back 56

Richard Serra, Television Delivers People, 1973

Hint 56

-- we are controlled by TV, it brainwashes us
-- corporate tool, how corporations control people
-- form of TV: ironic, upbeat music, credits
-- TV meant to lull us, control
-- critique of mass media
-- propaganda for profit, you think you have a choice, but you don't
-- corporate control, using the credits, show us that entertainment controls us
-- think of Greenberg and KITSCH: distracting us from our political consciousness
-- programming us to make certain material and political choices
-- appropriated from a TV conference
-- TV colonizing the mind, penetration and influence
-- soap operas originally meant to sell soap, show meant to make you watch advertisements
-- one media, constructs and shapes the viewer
-- expose
-- SONY PORTAPAK: used by Martha Rossler to film Semiotics of the kitchen, first handheld video camera, making audience and producer interchangable
-- FEEDBACK: receiving and transferring a response

Front 57

Back 57

Nam June Paik, Electronic Opera #1, video still

Hint 57

-- 2 types of feedback:
1. electronic noise, interferences as image
2. two-way relationship btwn audience and producer
-- being flushed down toilet, questioning the image
-- ELECTRONIC FEEDBACK (idea of electronic noise) w/magnet also the signal can be changed by the viewer
-- abstraction
-- took a magnet to image of Nixon the TV, changing televisual communication, abstracting image, looks like he's being flushed down the toilet
-- like Warhol, questioning the photographic/televisual image, imperfect visions
-- broadcasted on Boston Public Television
-- turning a receiver into a broadcaster

Front 58

Back 58

Chris Burden, TV Ad, 1973 (with still), www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6CMzcfBL2U

Hint 58

-- testing the limits of the human body (5 days in a locker)
-- crawling through broken glass, testing the limits of extreme pain
-- tried to intervene into broadcast TV: a short advertisement or actual commercial TV
-- showing the dark side of commodity culture, using video art to wake viewership to the violence that TV is repressing
-- he wanted to buy a tv commercial slot
-- content wasn't important, just that he was on TV
-- stuck out, strange moment of a guy in his underwear
-- ads that it was between changed every night
-- what is advertising hiding/protecting us from
-- Warhol, Dr. Scholl's Corns
-- his own body in pain reminds us of worldly traumas that remain hidden through TV or how TV distracts us from trauma
-- gender stereotypes, "macho"
-- how difficult it is to become a producer, incredibilty expensive, hard to enter into discourse of broadcast TV

Front 59

Back 59

Vito Acconci, Pryings, 1971 (with Kathy Dillon), video still

Hint 59

-- just the idea of the camera is violent, violent to film someone
-- individuals -- > objects
-- she refuses to validate the camera
-- different kind of violence, in some ways, this depiction of violence is even more disturbing
-- idea of the TV camera as violent, the camera coming into our lives turning individuals into objects
-- violence broadcast on TV
-- end comes into reality
**you don't really know anything about the people on TV
-- negating the idea of the closeup (Kathy with her eyes closed)

Front 60

Back 60

Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, 1972 (with still)

Hint 60

-- Greenberg: good painting should critic the medium (medium-specificity)
-- idea of the vertical roll to critic TV as a medium (violent medium)
female identity by deconstructing the body of Joan Jonas
-- hard to understand what she is doing
-- feminine stereotype, end comes into reality
-- you can reclaim yourself...maybe

Front 61

Back 61

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #2, 1977

Hint 61

-- creating new images, but still in dialogue with appropriation
-- dresses up and imitates movie stills from 1940s and 1960s
1. images seem familiar to us, shows the power of filmic tropes, she appropriates stereotypes, copies w/no original -- the SIMULACRUM
2. very condition of subjectivity conditioned through media and photography
-- all "self portraits" are filtered through media representations
-- society like a hall of mirrors
-- everything is based on a pre-existing model, we can't escape culture
-- industry
-- feminist critique of the male gaze
-- Psycho!
-- questions social stereotypes

Front 62

Back 62

Sherrie Levine, Untitled, After Edward Weston I, 1980, photograph

Hint 62

-- production: reproduction
-- so interested in bypassing notions of heroic (male) artists, does not offer her bio
-- classical torso has long been copied
-- Roland Barthes' "DEATH OF AN AUTHOR"
-- so, who is the "author" of this image? we can't locate one, highlights circulation of images, makes us look outside the frame
-- gender critique: this is an assault on largely male notions of originality
-- CRITICAL POSTMODERNISM: under mind notions of originality, "death of the author", birth of a reader, Weston's intention is of no importance to Levine, instead the long history of this kind of image, "SIMULaCRUM" -- Baudrillard's notion of a copy w/out an original, we can't find moment of origin, no more originality, questions how we know anything about anything
-- **both ideas criticize the idea of originality, is it possible to or questioning notions of authority, how images come to signify
-- vs. COMPLICIT POSTMODERNISM: anything can be art, breakdown of high and low, seems to embrace market and image culture
-- both critique the idea of originality -- is originality even possible?
-- APPROPRIATION: important art form of taking found images of stereotypes (Warhol w/MM), subject making an object
-- important art form of the late 1970s and early 1980s exploring the very act of appropriation and what it can
-- questions authorship, where did the original begin?

Front 63

Back 63

Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1980-84

Hint 63

-- rephotographs Marlboro cig. ad, removes text and put in gallery
-- still think about the brand
-- power of the ad industry
-- author of the image does not matter, images power over the social
** prince's work exposes the success of advertising

Front 64

Back 64

Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles, New Shelton Wet/Dry Doubledecker, c. 1982

Hint 64

-- appropriated objects, more about commodity culture
1. Duchamp, a liberated version of postmodernism that sees all objects and processes as "art", why should a vaccuum be seen any differently than a sculpture? no more hierarchy
2. has surrendered to commodity culture absolutely, what is the difference b/t store and gallery
3. somewhere b/t these two poles, are these somehow allegorical?
-- he is saying about commodity culture: makes them look like relics
-- vaccuum packed, gets old or duty, forever young
-- sterility of modernism -- no dirt, no mess, all refinement

Front 65

Back 65

Julian Schnabel, Exile, 1980, oil and antlers on wood

Hint 65

-- 1980s was when painting came back
-- reasserting authorship, reinstating
-- COMPLICIT POST-MODERNISM
-- return to romantic ideas of art making
-- painting doesn't have to be original to be good
-- direct reference to caravaggio
-- different styles, cobbled together
-- abstract, figurative collage
-- not really composing in line and color
-- trying to recover artistic individuality through media appropriation
-- constructed himself as a serious artist
-- those buying these works don't want to think too critically about history -- selling people the art they want
-- re-asserting originality and "aura" of art after its demise

Front 66

Back 66

Anselm Kiefer, Shulamith, 1983, oil, emulsion, woodcut, shellac, acrylic, straw on canvas

Hint 66

-- art w/transformative powers like Beuys
-- student of Beuys, picked up on his idea of alchemy and the healing process
-- appropriating design for "funeral hall of Nazi War Heros" and places menorah in back
-- positive: dealing w/repression a trying to move past it in productive way
-- shows us the power of fascist forms and then questions thems
-- negative: controlling how viewers feel, such overblown
-- CRITICAL Vs. COMPLICIT: should art serve as a negation -- expose power of affirmative to provoke emotion and comment on history
-- "LATE CAPITALIST POSTMODERNISM": not good or bad but historical model
-- through internet, we are expanding ourselves and environment, more alienated from ourselves
-- things are so rational that they become irrational, we can't map position to the global economy

Front 67

Back 67

Andreas Gursky, Salerno I, 1990, digital print

Hint 67

-- 10ft tall
-- its hard to tell what the whole space is
-- we don't know if you're falling or rising (capitalism)
-- confusing space, so rational that we begin to lose placement
-- digital manipulation
-- sublime: fear and awe of the expansive nature of late capitalism
-- shipping parts for cars
-- Salerno is one of the most ancient ports in Italy, sense of history gone, this could be anywhere
-- very large scale photos replace
-- loss of history and specificity, everything becomes the same, no resistance to capitalism
-- "THE END OF HISTORY"

Front 68

Back 68

Andreas Gursky, Shanghai, 2000, digital print

Front 69

Back 69

William Kentridge, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, 1989, film stills

Hint 69

-- capture the resistance of history
-- stop motion with charcoal, drawing retains their past -- we see traces of it, we see the very process of storytelling
-- this is the time of photo shop, he uses old school drawings to think about the evolution of technology, makes us think historically about what has past

Front 70

Back 70

Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990

Hint 70

-- big ideas of life and death

Front 71

Back 71

Matthew Barney, The Goodyear Waltz, production still from Cremaster 1, 1995

Hint 71

-- world before sexual differentiation before the male Y chromosome world of utter possibility
-- football and chorus line -- masculine and feminine brought together
-- either testicles or ovaries (blimps)
-- dealing w/limits of the body, but how trying to escape limits of chromosomes/body
-- BIOLOGICAL HYBRIDITY

Front 72

social sculpture

Back 72

political theory of Beuy's fat chair (very involved in politics), metaphor for social change, viewed his teaching as sculpting, anyone can be an artist, interest in Fluxus

Front 73

"myth of origin"

Back 73

1964, development as an artist, biography becomes linked to art, shot down during WWII, saved by tartars (tribal Crimea), story of metaphorical rebirth -- wrapped him in fat and felt, story unlikely, part of his art?, fat and felt signify context of story?, organic, warmth and energy, fat expands and felt absorbs

Front 74

vitrine

Back 74

Beuys, refers to shop display, museum, and memorial shrine assembling objects in glass case

Front 75

shaman

Back 75

high priestess, someone who uses magic to cure the sick, divine unknown, or control events, Beuys?

Front 76

Capitalist Realism

Back 76

used to describe commodity-based "pop art" in Germany

Front 77

"the banality of evil"

Back 77

Hannah Ardent, the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal, "...the horrible can be not only ludicrous, but outright funny"