Europe and America, After 1945

Modernism – a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Abstraction – A trend in painting and sculpture in the twentieth century. Abstract art seeks to break away from traditional representation of physical objects. It explores the relationships of forms and colors, whereas more traditional art represents the world in recognizable images.

Abstract-Expressionism – a development of abstract art that originated in New York in the 1940s and 1950s and aimed at subjective emotional expression with particular emphasis on the creative spontaneous act (e.g., action painting). Leading figures were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

formalism – In art history, formalism is the study of art by analyzing and comparing form and style. Its discussion also includes the way objects are made and their purely visual aspects. … At its extreme, formalism in art history posits that everything necessary to comprehending a work of art is contained within the work of art.

gestural abstraction – Action painting, sometimes called “gestural abstraction”, is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied.

chromatic abstraction – Also known as color field painters/ chromatic abstraction. Style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s; characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas; creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane.

“hard edge” painting – painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.

Minimalism – In visual arts, music, and other mediums, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Expressive Sculpture – Abstract Expressionism is often thought of as a revolution in painting, but the movement also included several sculptors whose work challenged traditional conventions of the medium. David Smith made open structures that defied the heavy mass and volume usually associated with sculpture. Louise Nevelson placed her sculptural assemblages against the wall, sharing the grand scale of her painter contemporaries. Like their peers, sculptors also turned to unconventional and often scavenged materials, as well as less-common processes, such as welding.

Pop Art – a distinctive genre of art that first “popped” up in post-war Britain and America. Primarily characterized by an interest in popular culture and imaginative interpretations of commercial products, the movement ushered in a new and accessible approach to art.

Ben-Day dots – The Ben-Day dots printing process, named after illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr., is a technique dating from 1879. Depending on the effect, colour and optical illusion needed, small colored dotsare closely spaced, widely spaced or overlapping.

consumerism – a social and economic order and ideology that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts.

capitalism – an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

encaustic – Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. The liquid or paste is then applied to a surface—usually prepared wood, though canvas and other materials are often used.

combines – A combine painting is an artwork that incorporates various objects into a painted canvas surface, creating a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture. Items attached to paintings might include photographic images, clothing, newspaper clippings, ephemera or any number of three-dimensional objects.

silk-screen printing – a printmaking technique in which a mesh cloth is stretched over a heavy wooden frame and the design, painted on the screen by tusche or affixed by stencil, is printed by having a squeegee force color through the pores of the material in areas not blocked out by a glue sizing.

Photorealism – Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium.

Neo-Expressionism – Neo-expressionism developed as a reaction against conceptual art and minimal art of the 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in an abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way, often using vivid colors.

Feminist Art – The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to produce art that reflects women’s lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and reception of contemporary art.

male gaze – The male gaze is the way in which the visual arts and literature depict the world and women from a masculine point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure. The phrase male gaze was coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975.

Guerilla Girls – an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. … To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks and use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists.

femmage – Any artwork created by women by assembling objects, as by collage, photomontage, etc.

Happenings – A happening is a performance, event, or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related event or multiple events.

Black Mountain College – Black Mountain College was an experimental college founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others and located in North Carolina.

Fluxus – Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product.

performance art – Performance art is a performance presented to an audience within a fine art context, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation.

banality – so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.

Post-Modernism – Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath.

Conceptual Art – In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.

World War II

• Global devastation
• psychological, political, physical, and economic
• set the stage for the second half of the 20th century.

in 1945

• United States drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• signaled a turning point in how war would be conducted
• No longer rely on just trench warfare

For the rest of the century

• Nuclear war became a very real threat.
• Two nuclear superpowers
• United States and the Soviet Union.
• Would become the Cold War (1945 – 1991)
• Widespread disruption and dislocation.

In 1947

• the British left India
• Becomes India and Pakistan.

in 1949

• After a catastrophic war, Communism takes over in China.

in 1950 (Korean War)

• North Korea invade South Korea
• United States and its allies helped to end it in 1953.

The Soviet Union

• Suppressed political uprisings in its subject nations—East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

The United States

• intervenes in disputes in Central and South America.

Africa

• Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, the Sudan, Rwanda, and the Congo
• Win their independence from Britain, civil wars devastated them.

In Indonesia

• Civil wars left more than 100,000 dead.

in 1962

• Algeria kicks France out after the French wage a long, vicious war with Algeria’s Muslim population.

From 1955-1975

• The United States fights for almost 20 years Vietnam.

From 1979 to 1989

• the Soviets unsuccessfully tried to occupy Afghanistan.

Arab nations fought wars with Israel in 1967, 1973, and the early 1980s.

The Palestinian conflict remains the subject of almost daily newspaper headlines.

A revitalized Islam

• Inspired a fundamentalist religious revolution in Iran, has encouraged “holy war” with the West
• using a new weapon, international terrorism
• the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001.

In response, the United States and allied Western nations launched invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

War still continues today.

Various groups start to forcefully question the status quo.During the 1960s and 1970s

• Struggle for civil rights for African Americans
• Free speech on university campuses
• Pullout from the Vietnam War
• Led to a rebellion of the young
• Took to the streets demonstrations, sometimes with violent and deadly endings. (Kent State massacre, killed 4students)

Youth

• Rejected national policies
• Made fun of their parents and grandparents’ lifestyles
• Adopted unconventional dress, manners, habits, and morals deliberately subversive of mainstream social standards.
• Sexual revolution
• Widespread use and abuse of drugs
• Development of rock music.
• “dropped out” of regulated society
• embraced alternative belief systems
• Rejected Western university academics as irrelevant.

Civil rights movement of the 1960s

• Women’s liberation movement of the 1970s
• Spirit of rebellion
• Rejection of racism and sexism.

Women began to challenge the male-dominated culture

• They thought it limited their political power and economic opportunities.
• Institutions of Western society, particularly the nuclear family headed by the patriarch, perpetuated male power and subordination of women.

There was a need to uncover the dynamics of power, but then to change the balance of power

• Various ethnic groups and gays and lesbians challenged discriminatory policies and attitudes.
• Fought for recognition, respect, and legal protection and battled discrimination with political action.

People begin to discuss both individual and group identity

European and American art and architecture since 1945 have examined culture.

Because of World War II, Holocaust and the atomic bobs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

• The attitude was one of despair, disillusionment, and skepticism.

The Futurists in Italy thought WWI had some good qualities

• Impossible to find any good with World War II

World War I was mostly a European war that left 10 million people dead

• World War II was a global conflict that took 35 million lives.

This cynicism led to existentialism

• Philosophy that said humanity was absurd
• Impossibility of knowing anything
• Moral nor scientific thinking is actually needed
• Became very popular
• Many people started to promote atheism and questioned the possibility of God using philosophy.
• Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
• French author Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).

According to Sartre

“if God does not exist, then individuals must constantly struggle in isolation with the anguish of making decisions in a world without absolutes or traditional values”

Time of incredible pessimism.

• If God does exist, why do bad things happen?

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901–1966) Swiss artist

• Expresses the spirit of existentialism.

Giacometti never claimed he pursued existentialist ideas in his art

• His works seem to embody those ideas.

Sartre and Giacometti were friends

• Sartre saw the artist’s figural sculptures as the epitome of existentialist thought—alienated, solitary, and lost in the world.

Man Pointing

• Thin, featureless figures with rough surfaces.
• Are swallowed up by the space around them
• Make them feel isolated and fragile.
• Despair after the world war.

FRANCIS BACON (1910–1992) Painting

• Created the year after World War II ended
• British artist
• Reflection of how war was like butchery.
• Revolting image of a powerful, stocky man with a gaping mouth and a red stain on his upper lip
• Carnivore devouring the raw meat sitting on the railing around him.
• May have based his painting of the central figure on photos of European and American officials.

The umbrella

• Looks similar to images of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who appeared in photographs with an umbrella.

Carcass behind him is laid out like a crucifix.

Said it was “an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself,”

• Often referred to “the brutality of fact.”

JEAN DUBUFFET (1901–1985) Used materials to express his vision of the world Vie Inquiète (Uneasy Life)

• Thick painted surfaces
• Pushed and scraped the paint around the canvas
• He first built up an impasto (a layer of thickly applied pigment) of plaster, glue, sand, asphalt, and other materials.
• Over that he painted or incised crude images that look like they were made by children or the insane
• Could also look like graffiti.
• Resemble cave paintings used by many different people over a long time

Believed the art of children, the mentally unstable, prisoners, and outcasts was more direct and genuine

• Were not confined by the conventional rules of art

Promoted “art brut” – untaught and rough art.

In the 1940s

• Art world shifted from Paris to New York mainly because of World War II.
• Artists were forced to leave and immigrated to the US
• Continued movements such as Cubism and Dada
• Modernism focused more on a strict formalism—the emphasis the visual elements rather than its subject.

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994)

• The most important influencer of New York formalist painting
• American art critic
• Tremendous influence from the 1940s through the 1970s.
• Rejected illusionism
• Encouraged the exploration of the properties of each artistic medium.
• Was so powerful, art historians refer to this period as “Greenbergian formalism”.
• Promoted the idea of purity in art.
• “Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.”
• Greenberg you should focus on the properties of the medium— the flatness in painting, the three-dimensionality of sculpture.

A modernist work of art should not express ideas outside of the context of the media being used.

• Renounce illusion and subject matter.
• The arts are to achieve concreteness, “purity,”
• Should be abstract.

Abstract Expressionism

• The first major American avant-garde movement
• Emerged in New York in the 1940s.
• Made paintings that are abstract
• Also wanted to express the artist’s state of mind
• Turned inward to create.
• Wanted the viewer to grasp the ideas in their art intuitively, free from structured thinking.

The artist Mark Rothko wrote:

“We assert man’s absolute emotions. We don’t need props or legends. We create images whose realities are self evident. Free ourselves from memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or life, we make it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is understood by anyone who looks at it without nostalgic glasses of history.”

The Abstract Expressionist movement developed along two thoughts

• gestural abstraction – relied on the expressiveness of energetically applied paint.
• chromatic abstraction – focused on color’s emotional qualities

 JACKSON POLLOCK (1912–1956)

• Best exemplifies gestural abstraction
• Developed his signature style in the mid-1940s.

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

• By 1950, Pollock had refined his technique and was producing large-scale abstract paintings.
• Drips, splatters, and dribbles of paint.
• The scale of the paintings surrounds the viewers.
• Used sticks or brushes
• Flung, poured, and dripped paint
• Used traditional oil paints as well as aluminum paints and household enamels
• Unrolled canvas on his studio floor.
• Earned him the nickname “Jack the Dripper.”

Responding to the image as he worked

Created art that was both spontaneous and choreographed.

Emphasized the creative process.

• Pollock immersed himself in the painting during its creation.

Was interested in Carl Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious.

• Improvisational nature of his work
• Reliance on the subconscious
• Have parallels in the “psychic automatism” of Surrealism and the work of Vassily Kandinsky
• Critics described him as an “abstract expressionist” as early as 1919.

No real focal points in his paintings, afocal.

Was picking up his girlfriend and her friend from the train station.

• Died in a car accident at age 44, while he was drunk.

Two statements made in 1947

• One as part of his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship
• One in a published essay
• Explained the motivations behind this new kind of “action painting”
• Described how he applied pigment to canvas.

“I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function be- tween the easel and mural. . . . I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural.”

“My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West. I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added. When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. . . . The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. . . . The source of my painting is the unconscious.”

Pollock’s studio

“ My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. ”

“ I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added. When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U19VOF4qfs

Lee Krasner (October 27, 1908 – June 19, 1984)

• Influential abstract expressionist painter
• Born in Brooklyn, New York to Russian Jewish immigrant parents.
• Studied at The Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design and worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943.

In 1937

• Took classes with Hans Hofmann, who taught the principles of cubism
• When commenting on her work, Hofmann stated, “This is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman.”

In 1940

• Started showing with the American Abstract Artists.

Often cut apart her own drawings and paintings to create collages

• Sometimes threw out whole series of work.
• Not a lot of her work has survived.
• Only 599 known pieces.
• Very self-critical.

Krasner struggled with the public’s reception to her identity as both a woman and the wife of Pollock.

She often signed her works with the initials “L.K.” so people would not know she was a woman.

In 1945

• Married artist Jackson Pollock.

Krasner was portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Marcia Gay Harden in the 2000 film Pollock, a drama about the life of her husband Jackson Pollock, directed by Ed Harris

She died at age 75 in 1984.

After her death, her East Hampton property became the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, and is open to the public for tours.

A separate organization, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, was established under the terms of her will to make monetary grants to artists who demonstrate financial need and artistic merit.

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904–1997)Dutch-born

• Developed a gestural abstractionist style.

Woman I

• Rooted in figuration
• Still gestural abstraction.
• Slashing lines
• Patches of color
• Staring eyes and large breasts.
• Toothy smile, modeled on an ad for Camel cigarettes, looks like a grimace.

Female models on advertising billboards partly inspired Woman I

• Also look like fertility figures.

Process was important to de Kooning,

• Worked on Woman I for almost two years
• Would often paint an image and then scrape it away the next day and start over.

Elaine

• His wife
• Also a painter

Estimated that he painted approximately 200 scraped-away images of women on this canvas before finishing it.

His dealer, Sidney Janis (1896–1989)

• Said that de Kooning sometimes brought him paintings with holes in them, the result of over painting them.

Critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)

• Described the work of the New York School as action painting. 
• Influential 1952 article “The American Action Painters,” Rosenberg described the attempts of Pollock, de Kooning, and others to get “inside the canvas.”

Painting was a place to act, to engage with ideas, not just reproduce what you could see.

Created an event on the canvas, not a picture

• No longer approach the easel with an image in your mind
• Use the material in your hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of you.
• The image would be the result of this encounter.

Chromatic abstractionists paintings seem quieter.

• Emotional overtones come from their use of color.

BARNETT NEWMAN (1905–1970)In his early paintings

• Inspired by his study of biology
• Fascination with Native American art.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis – Latin, “sublime heroic man”

• Later he would simplify his compositions
• Each canvas consists of a single color field split by narrow bands the artist called “zips”

Newman explained it:

“The streak was always going through an atmosphere; I kept trying to create a world around it.”

Did not intend for the viewer to see the zips as specific things, separate from the background, but as accents energizing the field of color and making it appear larger than it is.

Illustrate the expanse of life against the simplicity of it

Claimed that

“the artist’s problem . . . is the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery—of life, of men, of nature, of the hard black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy.”

The scale changes how we view the work.

MARK ROTHKO (1903–1970) Also deals with universal themes.Born in Russia

• Moved with his family to the United States when he was 10.

His early paintings were figural

• Soon believed that if he painted anything specific in the physical world that it conflicted with the idea of the universal spiritual (not christian spiritual)
• Saw the supernatural as the core of art.

Rothko expressed his beliefs about art:

“We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. . . . We assert that . . . only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

Rothko’s paintings became very simple

• Focused on color as the primary conveyor of meaning.

No. 14

• Made of two or three large rectangles of pure color with hazy, brushy edges
• Seem to float on the canvas surface
• Hovering in front of a colored background.

Much more than decorative.

• Saw color as a doorway to another reality

Insisted that color could express

“basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom. . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v1mBepDlOw

Post-Painterly Abstraction

• American art movement
• Developed out of Abstract Expressionism.
• Many of the artists associated with Post-Painterly Abstraction first made Abstract Expressionist works
• Description Clement Greenberg came up with
• Very different from Abstract Expressionism.

Abstract Expressionism

• Conveys a feeling of passion and intensity

Post-Painterly Abstraction

• Cool and detached
• Emphasizes tighter control

Greenberg

• saw this art as contrasting with “painterly” art which was loose, visible paint application.

In Post-Painterly Abstraction

• You do not see the hand of the artist

Greenberg idea of purity in art

ELLSWORTH KELLY (b. 1923)Post-Painterly Abstractionists

• Distilled painting down to its essential elements
• Made spare, elemental paintings.

Red Blue Green

• Variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction called hard-edge painting
• Ssharp edges and clear shapes
• Work is completely abstract and extremely simple compositionally.
• No suggestion of the illusion of depth
• The color shapes appear absolutely flat.

FRANK STELLA (b. 1936)Associated with the hard-edge paintersMas o Menos (More or Less)

• Eliminated many of the variables associated with painting.
• Simplified images of thin, evenly spaced pinstripes on colored grounds have no central focus
• No painterly or expressive elements
• No surface texture, completely smooth.

The artist’s famous comment on his work

• “What you see is what you see,”
• Reinforces the idea that painters interested in producing advanced art must reduce their work to its essential elements
• The viewer must acknowledge that a painting is simply color on a flat surface.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (b. 1928)Color-field painting

• Another variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction
• Emphasized painting’s basic properties.
• Poured diluted paint onto unprimed canvas, allowing the pigments to soak in.
• Literal flatness.

The Bay

• Appears spontaneous and almost accidental.

In 1965

Frankenthaler describes her approach to placing color on canvas.

“I will sometimes start a picture feeling “What will happen if I work with three blues and another color, and maybe more or less of the other color than the combined blues?” And very often midway through the picture I have to change the basis of the experience. . . .When you first saw a Cubist or Impressionist picture there was a whole way of instructing the eye or the subconscious. Dabs of color had to stand for real things; it was an abstraction of a guitar or a hillside. The opposite is going on now. If you have bands of blue, green, and pink, the mind doesn’t think sky, grass and flesh. These are colors and the question is what are they doing with themselves and with each other. Sentiment and nuance are being squeezed out.”

MORRIS LOUIS (1912–1962)Pursued color-field painting.Clement Greenberg

• Admirer of Frankenthaler’s paintings
• Took Louis to her studio
• She introduced him to the possibilities with using the staining technique.

Poured diluted paint onto the surface of unprimed canvas in several series of paintings.

Saraband 

• Part of the Veils series.
• Held up the canvas edges and poured on diluted acrylic resin
• Created flowing, fluid, transparent shapes that run down the length of the canvas.

Painters were not the only artists interested in Greenberg’s formalist ideas.American sculptors

• Also tried to make sculpture “pure”

Painters worked to emphasize flatness

Sculptors focused on three-dimensionality.

Minimalism.

• Predominantly sculptural movement
• emerged in the 1960s among artists seeking Greenbergian purity of form

DAVID SMITH (1906–1965) American sculptor

• Made metal sculptures that have similarities with Abstract Expressionist painters

Learned to weld in an automobile plant in 1925

• Applied these techniques to the sculptures he would produce later on
• Worked in large scale at the factories
• Helped him visualize the possibilities for monumental metal sculpture.

Cubi

• Experimented with a variety of sculptural styles and materials
• Created this series in the early 1960s.
• Consist of simple geometric forms—cubes, cylinders, and rectangular bars.
• Made of stainless steel sections piled atop one another and then welded together
• Did add some gestural elements
• Burnished the metal with steel wool
• Made swirling random-looking patterns
• Draw attention to the surface
• Makes the surface seem to move

Meant to be seen outdoors, don’t look the same in museum lighting

Understood that light could affect how the piece was viewed

David Smith said.

“I like outdoor sculpture and the most practical thing for outdoor sculpture is stainless steel, and I make them and I polish them in such a way that on a dull day, they take on the dull blue, or the color of the sky in the late afternoon sun, the glow, golden like the rays, the colors of nature. And in a particular sense, I have used atmosphere in a reflective way on the surfaces. They are colored by the sky and the surroundings, the green or blue of water. Some are down by the water and some are by the mountains. They reflect the colors. They are designed for the outdoors.”

TONY SMITH (1912–1980) Leading Minimalist

• Created simple volumetric sculptures such as Die. 

Difficult to describe other than as three-dimensional objects

Minimalist artworks often lack identifiable subjects, colors, surface textures, and narrative stories.

Rejected illusionism

• Reduced sculpture to basic geometric forms

Minimalists stress their art’s “objecthood”.

• It is only an object
• Reduce experience to its most fundamental level
• Preventing viewers from making assumptions.

DONALD JUDD (1928–1994) Minimalist sculptor

• embraced a spare, universal aesthetic.

Avoided deception or ambiguity

• Went away from representation
• Toward precise and simple sculpture.

Untitled 

• Presents basic geometric boxes made of brass and red Plexiglas.
• Not meant to look like something else, nor hide it’s materials
• Plexiglas allows the viewer to see the inside
• Sculpture is both open and enclosed.
• No mystery in the sculpture.

Greenberg did not embrace this direction in art.

• Thought that Minimal Art played with ideas too much and not enough of anything else.

No aesthetic surprises in Minimal Art. . . . Aesthetic surprise hangs on forever—it is there in Raphael as it is in Pollock—and ideas alone cannot achieve it.

In a 1965 essay entitled “Specific Objects,” the Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd described his thoughts.

“Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism . . . one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface. . . . The use of three dimensions makes it possible to see all sorts of materials and colors. Most of [my] work involves new mate- rials, either recent inventions or things not used before in art. Little was done until lately with the wide range of industrial products. . . . Materials vary greatly and are simply materials—formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material. . . . The form of a work of art and its materials are closely related. In earlier work the structure and the imagery were executed in some neutral and homogeneous material.”

Although Minimalism was dominant in the 1960s

• Many sculptors pursued other styles.

LOUISE NEVELSON (1899–1988) Russian-born

• Created sculpture that combines architectural fragments
• Used found objects to express her personal sense of life’s significance.
• Similar to Dada and Surrealism (found objects)
• Multiple meanings was important to Nevelson

She sought “the in-between place. . . . The dawns and the dusks”—the transitional realm between one state of being and another.

Beginning in the late 1950s

• Assembled sculptures of found wooden objects and forms
• Made small sculptural compositions in boxes of different sizes
• Joined the boxes to one another to form “walls,”
• Then painted in a single color—usually black, white, or gold.

Tropical Garden II

• The color helps pull all the different shapes together to form a whole.
• Rough geometric shapes that the eye glances over

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (b. 1911 )French-American Cumul I 

• Collection of rounded objects grouped together
• Peak through gabric
• Different sizes
• Each seems tobe a little different and have its own personality
• Refer strongly to human bodies.

Bourgeois uses a wide variety of materials in her works

• Wood, plaster, latex, and plastics, in addition to alabaster, marble, and bronze.

Cumul I

• Used a high gloss and matte finish
• Made from marble
• Appears sensuous.

Discusses the bodies relationship to landscape:

“My pieces are anthropomorphic and they are landscape also, since our body could be considered from a topographical point of view, as a land with mounds and valleys and caves and holes.”

Openly sexual.

“There has always been sexual suggestiveness in my work. Sometimes I am totally concerned with female shapes—characters of breasts like clouds—but often I merge the activity—phallic breasts, male and female, active and passive.”

EVA HESSE (1936–1970) Started out as a minimalist but would later change her styleCreated sculptures that are bare and simple

• Have a presence about them

Using nontraditional sculptural materials

• Fiberglass, cord, and latex
• Sculptures appear to crumble, sag, and warp.

Born Jewish in Hitler’s Germany

• As a young girl, Hesse hid with a Christian family
• Her parents and older sister had to flee the Nazis.
• Did not reunite with them until the early 1940s, just before her parents divorced.

Made her see modern life as strange and absurd.

Hang-Up

• Created informal sculptural arrangements
• Parts often hung from the ceiling, propped against the walls, or spilled out along the floor.
• Has a quiet but unsettling presence
• Looks like a carefully made empty frame sprouting a strange feeler that extends into the room and doubles back to the frame.

Hesse wrote that in this work, for the first time, her

“idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came through. . . . [Hang-Up] has a kind of depth I don’t always achieve and that is the kind of depth or soul or absurdity of life or meaning or feeling or intellect that I want to get.”

She said she wanted her pieces to be

“non art, non connotative, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort.”

Hesse was herself a touching and fragile presence in the art world. She died of a brain tumor at age 34. (Because of the use of fiberglass and resin)

Abstract Expressionists, Post-Painterly Abstractionists, and Minimalists

• All were abstract

Other artists thought this abstract work wasn’t reaching a wide enough audience

• Did not want to create academic work
• Their focus was not on modern formalism

Pop Art

• Brought back everything the abstract artists got rid of
• Revived signs, symbols, metaphors, allusions, illusions, and figural imagery
• Embraced representation
• Art was rooted in consumer culture and mass media
• Much more accessible and understandable to the average person

“Pop Art” is short for “popular art”

• (credited to the British art critic Lawrence Alloway)
• Popular mass culture

The roots of Pop Art

• Group of young British artists, architects, and writers
• Formed the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in the early 1950s
• Wanted fresh thinking in art
• Interested in popular culture such as advertising, comic books, and movies

RICHARD HAMILTON Independent Group member

• Trained as an engineering draftsman, exhibition designer, and painter
• Studied the way advertising affects people
• Intrigued by Duchamp’s ideas
• Combined elements of popular art and fine art

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

• Created for the poster and catalogue for an exhibition titled This Is Tomorrow
• Images from
• Hollywood movies
• science fiction
• mass media
• reproduction of a van Gogh painting (to represent popular fine artworks).

Reflects the values of modern consumer culture

• Objects cut from glossy magazines

References to

• mass media (the television, the theater marquee outside the window, the newspaper)
• advertising (Hoover vacuums, Ford cars, Armour hams, Tootsie Pops)
• popular culture (girlie magazine, body-builder Charles Atlas, romance comic books)

Pop Art originated in England

• Greatest success in the United States
• American popular culture provided the material needed for Pop Art
• English Independent Group members said their inspiration came from Hollywood, Detroit, and New York’s Madison Avenue

JASPER JOHNS

• Wanted to draw attention to everyday objects
• Things that were “seen but not looked at”
• Created several paintings of targets, flags, numbers, and alphabets

Flag 

• See often, but never question
• Used encaustic to paint the flag
• – painting with liquid wax and dissolved pigment

Placed a collage of newspaper scraps and photographs in wax

• Painted over them with encaustic.

Johns had to work quick because the wax hardened so quickly

• Wax is translucent, can see through the layers

JASPER JOHNS, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 2’ 6 7/8″ X 3’ 9 1/2”. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (50th Anniversary Gift of the Gilman Foundation, the Lauder Foundation, and A. Alfred Taubman).


ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG Began using mass-media images in his work in the 1950sBegan by making combines

• Paintings combined with sculpture
• Similar to assemblages – artworks made from already existing objects

Sometimes they are painted sculptures, sometimes they are paintings with sculptures/objects added to the surface.

In the 1950s

• Assemblages usually used magazine and newspaper clippings

In the early 1960s

• Rauschenberg started using silk-screen printing
• First in black and white and then in color

Canyon

• Printed paper and photographs cover parts of the canvas
• Applied paint very roughly
• Stuffed bald eagle attached to the lower part of the combine
• A pillow hangs from a string attached to a wood stick below the eagle
• Tilted or turned some of the images sideways
• All the images overlap

Seems almost Dada

• Cannot be deciphered easily
• Chose all the elements with specific meanings in mind.

Based Canyon on a Rembrandt painting of Jupiter in the form of an eagle carrying the boy Ganymede heavenward

Photo in the combine is a reference to the Greek boy

• The hanging pillow is a visual pun on his buttocks

ROY LICHTENSTEIN  

American artist Interested commercial art – especially the comic book

Hopeless

• Took an image from a comic book
• Comics were meant to be read and then thrown away
• Elevated something that was low art to high art
• Besides making the image larger for the canvas, it’s almost identical to the original
• This one of the most popular romance comic books of the time
• Used black outlines
• Flat areas of color
• Square format

Used Benday dots

• were used in mass-produced images
• Named after its inventor, newspaper printer Benjamin Day
• Change color by placing dots close together or changing their size (similar to Seurat)
• Printers could not print fine colors…similar to printers today

In 1963

Roy Lichtenstein was one of eight painters interviewed for a profile on Pop Art in Art News.

Part of Lichtenstein on Pop Art:

“Pop Art is the use of commercial art as a subject matter in painting . . . . Pop artists portray what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also so powerful in their impingement on us. . . . I paint directly . . . without perspective or shading. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself. Instead of looking like a painting of a billboard . . . Pop Art seems to be the actual thing. It is an intensification, a stylistic intensification of the excitement which the subject matter has for me; but the style is . . . cool. One of the things a cartoon does is to express violent emotion and passion in a completely mechanized and removed style. To express this thing in a painterly style would dilute it. . . . Everybody has called Pop Art “American” painting, but it’s actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner . . . I think the meaning of my work is that it’s industrial, it’s what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it won’t be American; it will be universal.”

ANDY WARHOL 

Quintessential Pop artist

• Started out as a commercial artist and illustrator
• Gave him an understanding of advertising and mass media

Green Coca-Cola Bottles

• Nothing more iconic
• Mass-produced, consumer culture

Warhol about the Coke bottle:

“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.  A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke.”

The repetition and redundancy of the Coke bottle

• reflect the how dominant this product is in America

Silk-screening meant you could print as many images as you want

• Warhol slightly changed each print

Produced numerous canvases of the same image

• Named his studio “the Factory”

Often used images of Hollywood celebrities

• Marilyn Monroe
• These celebrities were looked at as objects

Marilyn Diptych 

• Created right after she committed suicide in August 1962
• Used a Hollywood publicity photo
• No insight into the real Norma Jean Baker
• Illustrated like consumer product the same as the Coke bottles
• The right half of this work looks like film stills
• Reference to to films that gave Monroe her fame

Famous for saying that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes

His most famous work – Campbell Soup Cans

Superrealism

• Wanted to communicate more directly with the viewer
• Thought that the  Abstract Expressionists, Post-Painterly Abstractionists, and Minimalists were inaccessible to the viewer
• Used some of the same images os Pop art
• Many used photographs to help them paint

Art historians also refer to this movement as Photorealism

AUDREY FLACK American artist

• known for her superrealist paintings
• Not just technical copies of what she saw
• Asked questions about how photography influences our understanding of reality

Flack observed that:

“Photography is my whole life, I studied art history, it was always photographs, I never saw the paintings, they were in Europe. . . .

Look at TV and at magazines and reproductions, they’re all influenced by photo-vision.”

Projected an image using a slide onto the canvas

• Used an airbrush to get smooth changes in color

Most of her paintings are still lifes

• Incredibly detailed and realistic

Marilyn

Paintings of photographs of Marilyn

• Commentary on Monroe’s tragic death

Alludes to Dutch vanitas paintings

• Includes multiple references to death
• Black-and-white photographs
• Fresh fruit
• hourglass
• burning candle
• watch
• calendar

CHUCK CLOSE Considered a Superrealist

• American artist
• Best known for his large portraits

For him, painting was very technical

• Based his paintings of the 60‘s and 70‘s on photographs
• Wanted to translate photographic information into painted information

Just wanted to paint what he saw

• Avoided creative compositions
• No flattering light
• No made up facial expression

Not interested in the personality of the person

• Painted anonymous and generic people, mostly friends

Felt the realistic image could be broken down into abstract shapes

• Canvas size is usually 9 by 7 feet
• If you look close, the face becomes abstract shapes

In a 1970 interview, Chuck Close discusses the scale of his huge portrait

He answered in part:

“The large scale allows me to deal with information that is overlooked in an eight-by-ten inch photograph . . . My large scale forces the viewer to focus on one area at a time. In that way he is made aware of the blurred areas that are seen with peripheral vision. Normally we never take those peripheral areas into account. When we focus on an area it is sharp. As we turn our attention to adjacent areas they sharpen up too. In my work, the blurred areas don’t come into focus, but they are too large to be ignored….In order to…make [my painted] information stack up with photographic information, I tried to purge my work of as much of the baggage of traditional portrait painting as I could. To avoid a painterly brush stroke and surface, I use some pretty devious means, such as razor blades, electric drills and airbrushes. I also work as thinly as possible and I don’t use white paint as it tends to build up and become chalky and opaque. In fact, in a nine-by-seven foot picture, I only use a couple of tablespoons of black paint to cover the entire canvas.”

This painting is on display at the MoMA in NYC and every time I see it I am still amazed at how well it is painted.  Its close to 4 foot by 6 foot in size.  You cannot see a single brushstroke.

DUANE HANSON Made plaster molds from live models

• Filled the molds with polyester resin
• After the resin hardened, the artist removed the outer molds
• Cleaned, painted the cast with an airbrush
• Decorated the sculptures with wigs, clothes, and other accessories

Supermarket Shopper

• Depict stereotypical average Americans
• We identify with the sculptures because they are reflections of us

Hanson explained his choice of imagery:

“The subject matter that I like best deals with the familiar lower and middle-class American types of today. To me, the resignation, emptiness and loneliness of their existence captures the true reality of life for these people. . . . I want to achieve a certain tough realism which speaks of the fascinating idiosyncrasies of our time.”

The first time I saw this guy I asked him where the restroom was. He’s not real. True story.

By the 1970s

• Art made with both traditional and new media
• Art ideas, styles media so diverse, one word is used to describe the time period, not the style: postmodernism
• No agreement about the definition of postmodern art

“New type of social life and a new economic order—what is often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism.”

Postmodernism

• Examine the process by which meaning is generated
• Dialogue that happens between viewers and artworks

Critical theory

• Views art and architecture, literature and the other humanities, as a culture’s intellectual products
• Many critical theorists use an analytical strategy called deconstruction
• After a method developed in the 1960s and 1970s by French intellectuals

For those employing deconstruction, all cultural constructs are “texts”

• Acknowledging the lack of fixed or uniform meanings in these texts, critical theorists accept a variety of interpretations as valid
• Further, as cultural products, how texts signify and what they signify are entirely conventional
• They can refer to nothing outside of themselves, only to other texts

Neo-Expressionism

• Reexamines earlier art styles
• Connects this art to the works of the German Expressionists and the Abstract Expressionists

SUSAN ROTHENBERG in the 1970s

• Series of large paintings with a horse as the central image

The horse theme has been used throughout history—

• Parthenon frieze
• Roman and Renaissance equestrian portraits
• Paintings of German Expressionist Franz Marc

Rothenberg saw horses as metaphors for humanity:

“The horse was a way of not doing people, yet it was a symbol of people, a self-portrait, really.”

Used a ghostly outline or hazy painting

• More like a suggestion than a realistic painting
• Area between representation and abstraction

Tattoo

• Loose brushwork and rough surface make the painting expressive
• The title, Tattoo, refers to the horse’s head drawn within the outline of its leg—“a tattoo or memory image” according to the artist

ANSELM KIEFER Neo-Expressionism was by not just an2 American movement

• German artist

Nigredo 

• Monumental in scale
• Similar to Abstract Expressionism
• The texture of the painting is whats most interesting
• Added materials such as straw and lead

Paintings are mythological and metaphorical

Kiefer’s works of the 1970s and 1980s

• Reexamined German history
• Particularly the Nazi era of 1933–1945
• Gives a feeling of despair
• Believed that Germany’s participation in World War II and the Holocaust
• Left permanent scars on the souls of both Germans and the rest of the world

Nigredo  (“blackening”)

• Pulled into the landscape
• Not a pretty green landscape, but blackened with death
• No specific reference to the Holocaust

The black landscape may refer to alchemical change or transformation

• Black is one of the four symbolic colors of the alchemist—
• Refers to death and to chaotic state of things melted down by fire
• Death is not absolute, but just a change
• Can also be read as part of a process of renewal and redemption

Deep symbolic meaning

Environmental and Site-Specific Art

Sometimes called earthworks

• Environmental Art movement
• Emerged in the 1960s
• Wide range of artworks, most site-specific (created for only one location) and existing outdoors
• Used natural or organic materials, including the land itself
• People were becoming more concerned with the environment
• U.S. National Environmental Policy Act in 1969
• Creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency

Environmental artists used their art to call attention to the landscape

• Most encouraged spectator interaction with their works
• Ironically, the remote locations of many earthworks have limited public access

ROBERT SMITHSON 

A leading American Environmental artistUsed bulldozers to make the work

Spiral Jetty

• 1,500-foot-long coil
• Black basalt, lime-stone rocks, and earth
• Great Salt Lake in Utah
• Driving by the lake one day, Smithson came across some abandoned mining equipment
• Left there by a company that had tried and failed to extract oil from the site

Created an artwork in the lake

• Monumental spiral curving out from the shoreline
• Runs 1,500 feet into the water
• Insisted on designing his work in response to the location itself

While researching the Great Salt Lake

Smithson discovered that the molecular structure of the salt crystals coating the rocks at the water’s edge was spiral in form

“As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake.

A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. The site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness.

From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty.”

Recorded Spiral Jetty in photographs and in film

Now underwater.

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE 

Seek to intensify the viewer’s awareness of the space and features of rural and urban sitesRather than physically alter the land itself

• Christo and Jeanne-Claude prompt this awareness by temporarily modifying the landscape with cloth

Christo studied art in his native Bulgaria and in Vienna

After a move to Paris, he began to encase objects in clumsy wrappings

• Thereby appropriating bits of the real world into the mysterious world of the unopened package
• Whose contents can be dimly seen in silhouette under the wrap

Starting in 1961, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, husband and wife

• Began to collaborate on large-scale projects that normally deal with the environment itself
• 1969: The couple wrapped a million square feet of Australian coast
• 1972: Hung a vast curtain across a valley at Rifle Gap, Colorado

Their works of art require years of preparation and research

• Scores of meetings with local authorities and interested groups of local citizens

These temporary works are usually on view for only a few weeks

Surrounded Islands 1980–83 

Created in Biscayne Bay in Miami, Florida

• For two weeks in May 1983

Typifies Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work

For this project, they surrounded 11 small human-made islands in the bay

• With 6.5 million square feet of specially fabricated pink polypropylene floating fabric

This Environmental artwork required three years of preparation

• To obtain the necessary permits
• To assemble the labor force
• To obtain the $3.2 million needed to complete the project

The artists raised the money by selling preparatory drawings, collages, models, and works they created in the 1950s and 1960s

Huge crowds watched as crews removed accumulated trash from the 11 islands

• (to assure maximum contrast between their dark colors, the pink of the cloth, and the blue of the bay)
• Then unfurled the fabric “cocoons” to form magical floating “skirts” around each tiny bit of land

Despite the brevity of its existence, Surrounded Islands 1980–83 lives on in the host of photographs, films, and books documenting the project

The Gates in Central Park NY. 25 years to organize and raise money.  Only up for 2 weeks.

Running fence, 24.5 miles of fabric.  Only up for 2 weeks.

RICHARD SERRA 

Other artists have created site-specific works that are not set in nature but in the built environment

• Their purpose is to focus attention on art’s role in public spaces

One work that sparked national discussion about public art was Tilted Arc 

The General Services Administration (GSA)

• The federal agency responsible for overseeing the selection and installation of artworks for government buildings
• Commissioned Tilted Arc

Enormous 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high curved wall of Cor-Ten steel

• Bisected the plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan

Serra situated the sculpture in a way that significantly altered the space of the open plaza and the traffic flow across the square

He intended Tilted Arc to

“dislocate or alter the decorative function of the plaza and actively bring people into the sculpture’s context.”

By creating such a monumental presence in this large public space

• Serra succeeded in forcing viewers to reconsider the plaza’s physical space as a sculptural form—
• Only temporarily, because the public forced the sculpture to be removed

When Serra installed Tilted Arc in the plaza in front of the Javits Federal Building in New York City in 1981

• Much of the public immediately responded with hostile criticism

Prompting the chorus of complaints was the uncompromising presence of a Minimalist sculpture bisecting the plaza

Many argued that Tilted Arc was ugly

• That it attracted graffiti
• That it interfered with the view across the plaza
• That it prevented using the plaza for performances or concerts

Due to the sustained barrage of protests and petitions demanding the removal of Tilted Arc

• The GSA held a series of public hearings.
• Decided to remove the sculpture despite its prior approval of Serra’s maquette

This, understandably, infuriated Serra, who had a legally binding contract acknowledging the site-specific nature of Tilted Arc

• “To remove the work is to destroy the work,” the artist stated

This episode raised intriguing issues about the nature of public art

• Including the public reception of experimental art
• The artist’s responsibilities and rights when executing public commissions
• Censorship in the arts
• The purpose of public art

If an artwork is on display in a public space outside the relatively private confines of a museum or gallery, do different guidelines apply?

As one participant in the Tilted Arc saga asked

“Should an artist have the right to impose his values and taste on a public that now rejects his taste and values?”

One of the express functions of the historical avant-garde was to challenge convention by rejecting tradition and disrupting the complacency of the viewer

Will placing experimental art in a public place always cause controversy?

From Serra’s statements, it is clear he intended the sculpture to challenge the public

Another issue Tilted Arc presented involved the rights of the artist, who in this case accused the GSA of censorship

• Serra filed a lawsuit against the government for infringement of his First Amendment rights
• Insisted that “the artist’s work must be uncensored, respected, and tolerated,
• although deemed abhorrent, or perceived as challenging, or experienced as threatening.”

Did removal of the work constitute censorship?

• A federal district court held that it did not
• Ultimately, who should decide what artworks are appropriate for the public arena?

One artist argued, “we cannot have public art by plebiscite [popular vote].”

To avoid recurrences of the Tilted Arc controversy

• The GSA changed its procedures
• Now solicits input from a wide range of civic and neighborhood groups before commissioning public artworks

Despite the removal of Tilted Arc, the sculpture maintains a powerful presence in all discussions of the aesthetics, politics, and dynamics of public art

Realized that art could communicate numerous ideas

• Artists investigated the dynamics of power and privilege
• Dealt with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality

In the 1970s

• Feminist movement focused public attention on the history of women and their place in society

Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro

• Largely responsible the American feminist art movement

Judy Chicago and a group of students at California State University in Fresno

• Founded the Feminist Art Program
• Chicago and Schapiro coordinated it at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia

In 1972

• As part of this program, teachers and students joined together to create projects such as Womanhouse
• An abandoned house in Los Angeles they completely converted into a suite of “environments”
• Each based on a different aspect of women’s lives and fantasies

JUDY CHICAGO 

Wanted to educate viewers about women’s role in history and the fine artsWanted to

• Establish a respect for women and their art
• Create a new kind of art expressing women’s experiences
• Find a way to make that art accessible to a large audience

Inspired by Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Louise Nevelson

• Developed a painting style that included abstract vaginal images

In the early 1970s,

• Chicago began planning The Dinner Party
• Using craft techniques (such as china painting and needlework) traditionally practiced by women

Originally thought of the work as a feminist Last Supper for 13 “honored guests”

• Same as in the New Testament, but all women
• There also are 13 women in a witches’ coven
• Dinner Party refers to witchcraft
• Witchcraft was a pagan religion that placed emphasis on the feminine and nature
• Was seen as a threat to the male dominated Christianity
• Worship of the Mother Goddess

Chicago knew she needed more than 13 place settings

• Expanded the number of guests to 39
• Placed them around a triangular table 48 feet long on each side
• The triangle form is the ancient symbol for both woman and the Goddess

Dinner party also alludes to women’s traditional role as homemakers

The Dinner Party 

• Rests on a white tile floor
• Inscribed with the names of 999 additional women of achievement
• To signify that the accomplishments of the 39 honored guests rest on a foundation that other women laid

Among those with place settings at the table are:

• O’Keeffe
• Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut
• British writer Virginia Woolf
• Native American guide Sacagawea
• American Susan B. Anthony

Each woman’s place has identical utensils and a goblet

• Unique large porcelain plate and a long place mat
• Covered with imagery that reflects significant facts about that woman’s life and culture

The plates range from simple concave shapes with china painted imagery

• To dishes with sculpted three-dimensional designs

The designs on each plate incorporate both butterfly and vaginal patterns

• The butterfly is the ancient symbol of liberation
• The vagina as the symbol of female sexuality

Each table runner uses traditional needlework

• Needlepoint, embroidery, crochet, beading, patchwork, and appliqué

Needed a team of nearly 400 to create and assemble

In 1979, Chicago published a book explaining the origins and symbolism of the work –

“[By 1974] I had discarded [my original] idea of painting a hundred abstract portraits on plates, each paying tribute to a different historic female figure. . . . In my research I realized over and over again that women’s achievements had been left out of history . . . . My new idea was to try to symbolize this. . . . [I thought] about putting the plates on a table with silver, glasses, napkins, and tablecloths, and over the next year and a half the concept of The Dinner Party slowly evolved. I began to think about the piece as a reinterpretation of the Last Supper from the point of view of women, who, throughout history, had prepared the meals and set the table. In my “Last Supper,” however, the women would be the honored guests. Their representation in the form of plates set on the table would express the way women had been confined, and the piece would thus reflect both women’s achievements and their oppression. . . . My goal with The Dinner Party was . . . to forge a new kind of art expressing women’s experience . . . . [It] seemed appropriate to relate our history through art, particularly through techniques traditionally associated with women—china-painting and needlework.”

MIRIAM SCHAPIRO 

Started as a hard-edge painter in California in the late 1960s

• Became fascinated with the metaphors for womanhood

Interested in the materials she had used to create a doll’s house for her part in Womanhouse

• Began to make huge sewn collages
• Assembled from fabrics, quilts, buttons, sequins, lace, and rickrack collected at antique shows
• Called these works femmages

Anatomy of a Kimono 

• One of a series of monumental femmages
• Based on the patterns of Japanese kimonos, fans, and robes

CINDY SHERMAN – American artist

Emphasized differences—biological or based on experiences—between women and menSex is male or female (biological), gender is masculine or feminine (physiological)

• Is gender something we are born with, or accumulate over time, from our parents and our surroundings? Can identity can change?

Looks at how Western art portrays female beauty

• For the “male gaze,”
• Primary focus of contemporary feminist theory

Since 1977

• Produced a series of more than 80 black-and-white photographs called Untitled Film Stills
• Got the idea after looking at soft-core pornography magazines
• Noticed the stereotypical ways they depicted women
• Decided to produce her own series of photographs
• Designed, acted in, directed, and photographed the works
• Took control of her own image
• Constructed her own identity

Untitled Film Still #35 

• Sherman appears in costume and wig in a photograph that seems to be a film still
• Most of her images recreate the look of popular films

Sherman often shows the viewer how the image was made

• Shutter release cable runs across the floor

BARBARA KRUGER 

Also examined the male gaze and the notion of gender in her artLooks at the strategies and techniques of contemporary mass media

• Started out as a graphic designer
• Contributed to Mademoiselle magazine

Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face)

• Used the techniques mass media used to sell goods
• Liked the look of advertising, but also wanted to subvert it
• Wanted to expose it’s deceptiveness
• Wanted to undermine the myths about women that the media constantly reinforced

Your Gaze

• Overlaid a photograph of a classically beautiful sculpted head of a woman
• With a vertical row of text
• Words cannot be taken in with a single glance
• Reading them takes time and intensifies the meaning

HANNAH WILKE 

Used her own nude body as her artistic materialIn her 1974–1982 series S.O.S.—Starification Object Series 

• Metaphorical and real meanings
• Stereotypical and unique
• Erotic and disconcerting
• Pleasure and pain

10 black-and-white photographs documenting a performance

• Appears topless in a variety of poses
• Some seductive and others more confrontational
• Pieces of chewed gum shaped into small vaginas decorate her body
• Allude to female pleasure but also appear as scars, suggesting pain

Ultimately, Wilke hoped that women would:

“take control of and have pride in the sensuality of their own bodies and create a sexuality in their own terms, with- out deferring to concepts degenerated by culture”

GUERRILLA GIRLSNew York–based Guerrilla Girls

• Formed in 1984
• See themselves as the “conscience of the art world”
• Calls attention to injustice in the art world
• Especially the sexist and racist orientation of the major art institutions

The women who are members of the Guerrilla Girls are anonymous

• They wear gorilla masks in public
• Demonstrate in public
• Put on performances
• Place posters and flyers in public locations

“The advantages of being a woman artist”

What is the scope and impact of protest art? As Adorno famously wrote, ‘all art is an uncommitted crime’, meaning that art challenges the status quo by its very nature. Thus it can be argued that all art is political in the sense that it takes place in a public space and engages with an already existing ideology and dominant discourse. Yet, art can often become dangerously and explicitly political and serve as a powerful weapon. Throughout the history of social movements and social revolt, art has always reacted against oppression, violence, injustice and inequalities. Addressing socio-political issues and challenging the traditional boundaries and hierarchies imposed by those in power, art can open up the space for the marginalized to be seen and heard and contribute to the social change by producing knowledge and solidarity or simply raising awareness. In this way, the personal life and work of the artist transcends the individual and speak meaningfully to a larger audience bringing together the political and human functions of art.

Since many variations of protest art can be found throughout the history, it is difficult to establish the beginning of this politically engaging artistic expression. Activist conceptual and performance art was majorly influenced by Dada, an anti-war movement which used satire, non-rational and anti-idealistic discourse to critique the First World War and its capitalist agenda. Some of the other early examples of protest art include the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros who has been very active in left-wing politics in the beginning of the 20th century and wanted to reach hard-working Mexicans through art. When it comes to fine art, Picasso’s Guernica (1937) based on the Spanish Civil War and capturing its atrocities and inhumanity, served as an inspiration for the modern human rights movement.

War was often a motivating factor for artists, also providing the metaphor for the more general exercise of power. Many artists during the 1960s and 1970s visibly opposed the Vietnam War including Ronald Haeberle, Peter Saul, Carl Andre, Norman Carlberg and Nancy Spero and produced artworks that raised awareness and called for the responsibility. Chris Burden’s performances with intentional wound inflicting called upon the audience to engage with political messages and consider their responsibilities. Art became a potent language to speak against various forms of oppression and persisting inequalities regarding gender, race or class. As one of the founding members of the Feminist Art Movement,  Judy Chicago explored the women’s position in culture and history through large collaborative installations. Art has also shaped the cultural and political response to the AIDS pandemics during the 1980s, with artists like Keith Haring, Niki de Saint Phalle or Robert Mapplethorpe raising their voice.

LORNA SIMPSON 

Spent much of her career producing photographs

• Explore feminist and African American ways to subvert stereotypes

Deals with the issue of “the gaze”

• Trying to counteract objectification of women and African Americans

Stereo Styles

• Series of Polaroid photographs and engravings
• Focuses on African American hairstyles, often used to symbolize the entire race
• Hair is tied to social status and position

Kobena Mercer, who has studied the cultural importance of hair, observed that:

“Hair is never a straightforward biological ‘fact’ because it is almost always groomed, . . . cut, . . . and generally ‘worked upon’ by human hands. Such practices socialize hair, making it the medium of significant ‘statements’ about self and society.”

On the issue of race, Mercer argued:

“where race structures social relations of power, hair—as visible as skin color, but also the most tangible sign of racial difference—takes on another forcefully symbolic dimension.”

CHRIS OFILI 

Explored his ethnic and racial heritageReligion

• Interpreted through the eyes of a British-born Catholic of Nigerian ancestry.

The Holy Virgin Mary 

• Presents the Virgin in simplified form
• Appears to float
• Brightly colored pigments
• applied to the canvas in multiple layers of dots (inspired by images from ancient caves in Zimbabwe).
• Tiny images of genitalia and buttocks cut from pornographic magazines
• Look like the small angels in Renaissance paintings
• Clumps of elephant dung – part of Africa

People reacted strongly to the work

Included in Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999

• People demanded the show be cancelled
• Others said it should not be censored

Since the early 1980s, a number of heated controversies about art have surfaced in the United States.

In 1999, Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York

• Protested the inclusion of several artworks in the exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum.

The Holy Virgin Mary was the focus of the outrage.

Denounced the show as “sick stuff,”

• The mayor threatened to cut off all city support to the museum.

Art that seeks to unsettle and challenge is critical to the cultural, political, and psychological life of a society.

• The regularity with which such art raises controversy suggests that it operates at the intersection of two competing principles: free speech and artistic expression on the one hand and a reluctance to impose images upon an audience that finds them repugnant or offensive on the other.
• What these controversies do demonstrate, beyond doubt, is the power of art.

There have been many calls to remove “offensive” works from public view. Should art received public funding? Two exhibits in 1989 caused trouble for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

• The NEA provides funding, through taxes, to artists.

Awards for the Visual Arts (AVA) exhibition

• Took place at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina.

Among the award winners was Andres Serrano

Piss Christ

• Photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine.

Reverend Donald Wildmon

• Evangelical minister from Mississippi
• Head of the American Family Association
• Expressed outrage that such work was in an exhibition funded by the NEA.
• Demanded that the work be removed

To Wildmon and other conservatives this exhibition served as evidence of cultural depravity and immorality

• They insisted it should not be funded by government agencies such as the NEA.

Sister Wendy Beckett, nun, came out in support of the work

• Said it is what we have done to Christ

Also objected to Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect MomentMapplethorpe was a photographer known for his spare photographs of flowers and vegetables

• As well as his erotic, homosexual images.

Media sensation over The Perfect Moment

• The director of the Corcoran Museum of Art canceled the exhibition of this traveling show.
• The director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati decided to mount the show.
• The government indicted him on charges of obscenity
• Jury acquitted him six months later

These controversies intensified public criticism of the NEA and its funding practices. 

The next year, the head of the NEA, John Frohnmayer

• Vetoed grants for four lesbian, gay, or feminist performance artists
• Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller
• Became known as the “NEA Four.”
• The artists filed suit, eventually settling the case and winning their grants.

Congress responded by dramatically reducing the NEA’s budget

• The agency no longer awards grants or fellowships to individual artists.

DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1955–1992) Gay activist

• Lost many friends to AIDS
• Created disturbing works about the tragedy of this disease.
• Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992

“When I put my hands on your body”

• • Overlaid a photograph of a pile of skeletal remains
  • Evenly spaced typed commentary that communicated his feelings about watching a loved one dying of AIDS.
  • Described the effects of AIDS on the human body and soul.
  • Juxtaposed text with imagery

Most significant development in the art world after World War II

• Almost anything could be considered art
• Invention of new media, computers and video cameras

Performance Art

• temporal works
• Replace traditional works of art
• Used movements, gestures, and sounds carried out before an audience
• Members may or may not participate in the performance
• Usually photographs were taken
• Only documentation of the works

Informal and spontaneous events

• Were rebellious like the 1960s
• Pushed art outside the confines of mainstream art institutions
• This type of art could not be sold
• In the later 1960s museums did start to commission performances

JOHN CAGE Many of the artists in the development of Performance Art

• Students/associates of the teacher and composer John Cage

Cage encouraged his students to link their art directly with life

• New School for Social Research in New York
• Black Mountain College in North Carolina

He brought to music composition some of the ideas of Duchamp and of Eastern philosophy

Cage used methods such as chance to avoid the closed structures marking traditional music

• In his view, separating it from the unpredictable and multilayered qualities of daily existence

For example, the score for one of Cage’s piano compositions instructs the performer to

• Appear, sit down at the piano
• Raise the keyboard cover to mark the beginning of the piece
• Remain motionless at the instrument for 4 minutes and 33 seconds
• Close the keyboard cover, rise, and bow to signal the end of the work

The “music” would be the unplanned sounds and noises (such as coughs and whispers) emanating from the audience during the “performance”

ALLAN KAPROW 

• One of Cage’s students in the 1950s
• Learned about art history as well as music composition
• Wanted to explore the intersection of art and life

He believed that Jackson Pollock’s actions when producing a painting were more important than the finished painting

This led Kaprow to develop a type of event known as a Happening

A Happening

• an assemblage of events performed in more than one time and place
• Used the materials around him or brought materials with him
• Different from theatre
• May occur anywhere
• Could happen once or over and over again

The Happening is performed according to plan but without rehearsal, audience, or repetition

“It is art but seems closer to life.”

One of Kaprow’s first Happenings, titled 18 Happenings in Six Parts

• Took place in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York City

For the event, he divided the gallery space into three sections with translucent plastic sheets

• Over the course of the 90-minute piece, performers, including Kaprow’s artist friends
• Bounced balls, read from placards, extended their arms like wings
• Played records as slides and lights flashed on and off in programmed sequences

FLUXUS 

Other Cage students interested in the composer’s search

• To find aesthetic potential in the nontraditional and commonplace
• Formed the Fluxus group

Eventually expanding to include European and Japanese artist

This group’s performances were more theatrical than Happening

To distinguish their performances from Happenings, the artists associated with Fluxus coined the term Events to describe their work

Fluxus events focused on single actions

• Such as turning a light on and off or watching falling snow

• Fluxus artist La Monte Young called “the theater of the single event.”

The Events usually took place on a stage separating the performers from the audience

• Without costumes or added decor

Events were not spontaneous

They followed a compositional “score,” which, given the restricted nature of these performances, was short

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN 

Integrated painting and performance in her artworksHer self-described “kinetic theater” radically transformed the nature of Performance Art

• Introducing a feminist dimension through the use of her body (often nude)
• To challenge “the psychic territorial power lines by which women were admitted to the Art Stud Club.”

In her 1964 performance Meat Joy 

• Schneemann reveled in the taste, smell, and feel of raw sausages, chickens, and fish

One of the pioneering Performance artists of the 1960s

Also produced works in other medi

In notes she wrote in 1962–1963

“Environments, happenings—concretions—are an extension of my painting-constructions which often have moving (motorized) sections. . . . [But, the] steady exploration and repeated viewing which the eye is required to make with my painting-constructions is reversed in the performance situation where the spectator is overwhelmed with changing recognitions, carried emotionally by a flux of evocative actions and led or held by the specified time sequence which marks the duration of a performance. In this way the audience is actually visually more passive than when confronting a . . . “still” work . . . . With paintings, constructions and sculptures the viewers are able to carry out repeated examinations of the work, to select and vary viewing positions (to walk with the eye), to touch surfaces and to freely indulge responses to areas of color and texture at their chosen speed.”

Readers of this book will also take special interest in Schneemann’s 1975 essay entitled “Woman in the Year 2000”

She envisioned what introductory art history courses would be like at the beginning of the 21st century:

“By the year 2000 [every] young woman will study Art Istory [sic] courses enriched by the inclusion, discovery, and re-evaluation of works by women artists: works (and lives) until recently buried away, willfully destroyed, [or] ignored.”

A comparison between this 13th edition of Art through the Ages and editions published in the 1960s and 1970s will immediately reveal the accuracy of Schneemann’s prediction

http://www.ubu.com/film/schneemann_meatjoy.html

JOSEPH BEUYS – German artist

The Leftist politics of the Fluxus group in the early 1960s strongly influenced Joseph Beuys

Drawing on Happenings and Fluxus

• Beuys created actions aimed at illuminating the condition of modern humanity.

He wanted to make a new kind of sculptural object that would include

“Thinking Forms: how we mould our thoughts or Spoken Forms: how we shape our thoughts into words or Social Sculpture: how we mould and shape the world in which we live.”

Beuys’s commitment to artworks stimulating thought about art and life

• Derived in part from his experiences as a pilot during World War II

After the enemy shot down his plane over the Crimea

• Nomadic Tatars nursed him back to health by swaddling his body in fat and felt to warm him

Fat and felt thus symbolized healing and regeneration to Beuys

• He incorporated these materials into many of his sculptures and actions
• Such as How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 

This one-person event consisted of stylized actions evoking a sense of mystery and sacred ritual

• Beuys appeared in a room hung with his drawings, cradling a dead hare to which he spoke softly
• Beuys coated his head with honey covered with gold leaf, creating a shimmering mask

In this manner, he took on the role of the shaman, an individual with special spiritual powers

• As a shaman, Beuys believed he was acting to help revolutionize human thought so that each human being could become a truly free and creative person

A widespread movement from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, Conceptual art emphasized the artist’s thinking, making any activity or thought a work of art without the necessity of translating it into physical form. The term gained currency after the publication in the summer 1967 issue of Artforum of the Minimal artist Sol Lewitt’s article ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.’  This dealt with the ‘primary structures’ of Robert Morris, simple polyhedrons which could be ‘visualized’ from any point of view.

In its broadest sense, Conceptual art can be traced back to the primitive artist who included the backbone in his drawing of a fish because he ‘knew’ it was there, even though it was outwardly invisible. The Renaissance, with its concern for accurate depiction, could be said to have firmly placed the emphasis on the perceptual rather than the conceptual.

From: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, Michael Clarke, Deborah Clarke. © 2012 Oxford University Press (used with permission)

JOSEPH KOSUTH American artist and major proponent of Conceptual Art

“Like everyone else I inherited the idea of art as a set of formal problems. So when I began to re-think my ideas of art, I had to re-think that thinking process . . . . [T]he radical shift was in changing the idea of art itself. . . . It meant you could have an art work which was that idea of an art work, and its formal components weren’t impor-ant. I felt I had found a way to make art without formal components being confused for an expressionist composition. The expression was in the idea, not the form—the forms were only a device in the service of the idea.”

Kosuth’s work operates at the intersection of language and vision and deals with the relationship between the abstract and the concrete.

One and Three Chairs

Kosuth juxtaposed a real chair, a full-scale photograph of the chair and an enlarged reproduction of a dictionary definition of the word “chair”. By so doing, the Conceptual artist asked the viewer to ponder the notion of what constitutes “chairness”

BRUCE NAUMAN 

In the mid-1960s, Nauman made his artistic presence known when he abandoned painting and turned to object-making. Since then, his work has been amazingly varied. In addition to sculptural pieces constructed from different materials Including rubber, fiberglass, and cardboard. He has also produced photographs, films, videos, books, and large room installations, as well as Performance Art. 

Nauman’s work of the 1960s intersected with that of the Conceptual artist, especially in terms of the philosophical exploration that was the foundation of much of his art. His work illustrates his interest in language and wordplay

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths 

• First of Nauman’s many neon sculptures
• Selected neon because he wanted to find a medium that would be identified with a non-artistic function

Determined to discover a way to connect objects with words, he used the method outlined in Philosophical Investigations in which the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein encouraged contradictory and nonsensical arguments

But as Nauman explained

“It was kind of a test—like when you say some- thing out loud to see if you believe it. . . . [I]t was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it.”

Other Conceptual artists pursued the notion that the idea is a work of art itself by creating works involving invisible materials, such as inert gases, radioactive isotopes, or radio waves. 

In each case, viewers must base their understanding of the artwork on what they know about the properties of these materials rather than on any visible empirical data. Must depend on the artist’s written description of the work. 

Ultimately, the Conceptual artists challenged the very premises of artistic production by pushing art’s boundaries to a point where no concrete definition of “art” is possible.

New Media 

During the past half century many avant-garde artists have eagerly embraced new technologies

• In their attempt to find fresh avenues of artistic expression

Among the most popular new media are video recording and computer graphics

VIDEO 

Initially, only commercial television studios possessed video equipment

In the 1960s

• Development of relatively inexpensive portable video recorders and of electronic devices
• Allowing manipulation of recorded video material

Artists began to explore in earnest the expressive possibilities of this new technology

In its basic form, video recording involves a special motion-picture camera

• Captures visible images and translates them into electronic data
• Can be displayed on a video monitor or television screen

Video pictures resemble photographs in the amount of detail they contain

• But, like computer graphics, a video image consists of a series of points of light on a grid
• Giving the impression of soft focus

Viewers looking at television or video art are not aware of the monitor’s surface

Instead, fulfilling the Renaissance ideal, they concentrate on the image

• Look through the glass surface, as through a window, into the “space” beyond

Video images combine the optical realism of photography with the sense that the subjects move in real time in a deep space “inside” the monitor.

Video introduced the possibility of manipulating subjects in real time

• Artists were eager to work with the medium

NAM JUNE PAIK 

Inspired by the ideas of John Cage

Studied music performance, art history, and Eastern philosophy in Korea and Japan

Paik worked with electronic music in Germany in the late 1950s

In 1965, after relocating to New York City

• Paik acquired the first inexpensive video recorder sold in Manhattan (the Sony Porta-Pak)
• Immediately recorded everything he saw out the window of his taxi on the return trip to his studio downtown

Experience acquired as artist-in-residence at television stations WGBH in Boston and WNET in New York

• Allowed him to experiment with the most advanced broadcast video technology

A grant permitted Paik to collaborate with the gifted Japanese engineer-inventor Shuya Abe in developing a video synthesizer

This instrument allows artists to manipulate and change the electronic video information in various ways

• Causing images or parts of images to stretch, shrink, change color, or break up

With the synthesizer, artists can also layer images

• Inset one image into another
• Or merge images from various cameras with those from video recorders
• To make a single visual kaleidoscopic “time-collage”

This kind of compositional freedom

• Permitted Paik to combine his interests
• Painting, music, Eastern philosophy, global politics for survival, humanized technology, and cybernetics

Paik called his video works “physical music”

• Said that his musical background enabled him to understand time better than could video artists trained in painting or sculpture

Paik’s best-known video work, Global Groove 

• Combines in quick succession fragmented sequences of female tap dancers
• Beat-generation poet Allen Ginsberg reading his work
• A performance by Fluxus artist and cellist Charlotte Moorman  using a man’s back as her instrument
• Pepsi commercials from Japanese television
• Korean drummers
• Shot of the Living Theatre group performing a controversial piece called Paradise Now

Commissioned originally for broadcast over the United Nations satellite

• The cascade of imagery in Global Groove gives viewers a glimpse of the rich worldwide television menu Paik predicted would be available in the future

BILL VIOLA

For much of his artistic career, Bill Viola has also explored the capabilities of digitized imageryProducing many video installations and single-channel works

Often focused on sensory perception

• The pieces not only heighten viewer awareness of the senses
• Also suggest an exploration into the spiritual realm

Viola  spent years seriously studying Buddhist, Christian, Sufi, and Zen mysticism

Because he fervently believes in art’s transformative power and in a spiritual view of human nature

• Viola designs works encouraging spectator introspection

His recent video projects involve using techniques such as

• Extreme slow motion
• Contrasts in scale, shifts in focus
• Mirrored reflections, staccato editing
• Multiple or layered screens to achieve dramatic effects

The Crossing
An installation piece involving two color video channels projected on 16-foot-high screens

The artist either shows the two projections on the front and back of the same screen

• Or on two separate screens in the same installation

In these two companion videos, shown simultaneously on the two screens

• A man surrounded in darkness appears, moving closer until he fills the screen

On one screen, drops of water fall from above onto the man’s head

• While on the other screen, a small fire breaks out at the man’s feet

Over the next few minutes, the water and fire increase in intensity

• Until the man disappears in a torrent of water on one screen
• And flames consume the man on the other screen

The deafening roar of a raging fire and a torrential downpour accompany these visual images

• Eventually, everything subsides and fades into darkness

This installation’s elemental nature and its presentation in a dark space

• Immerse viewers in a pure sensory experience very much rooted in tangible reality

Bill Viola Video (above)

JENNY HOLZER Another contemporary artist who has harnessed new technology for artistic purposesCreated several series of artworks using electronic signs

• Most involving light-emitting diode (LED) technology

In 1989, Holzer did a major installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York

• Included elements from her previous series
• Consisted of a large continuous LED display spiraling around the museum’s interior ramp

Holzer’s installation focused specifically on text

• She invented sayings with an authoritative tone for her LED displays

Statements included

• “Protect me from what I want”
• “Abuse of power comes as no surprise”
• “Romantic love was invented to manipulate women”

The statements, which people could read from a distance, were intentionally vague and, in some cases, contradictor.

MATTHEW BARNEY

One of the major trends in the art world of the opening decade of the 21st century is the relaxation of the traditional boundaries between and among artistic media

Many artists today are creating vast and complex multimedia installations combining new and traditional media

The 2003 installation of his epic Cremaster cycle at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York

• Typifies the expansive scale of many contemporary works

A multimedia extravaganza involving drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos, films, and performances (presented in videos)

The Cremaster cycle is a lengthy narrative that takes place in a self-enclosed universe Barney created

The title of the work refers to the cremaster muscle, which controls testicular contractions in response to external stimuli

• Barney uses the development of this muscle in the embryonic process of sexual differentiation as the conceptual springboard for the entire Cremaster project
• In which he explores the notion of creation in expansive and complicated ways

The cycle’s narrative, revealed in the five 35-mm feature-length films and the artworks

• Makes reference to, among other things
• A musical revue in Boise, Idaho (Barney’s hometown)
• The life cycle of bees
• The execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore
• The construction of the Chrysler Building
• Celtic mythology
• Masonic rituals
• A motorcycle race
• A lyric opera set in late-19th-century Budapest

In the installation, Barney tied the artworks together conceptually by a five-channel video piece

• Projected on screens hanging in the Guggenheim’s rotunda

Immersion in Barney’s constructed world is disorienting and overwhelming

• Has a force that competes with the immense scale and often frenzied pace of contemporary life

The following video contains nudity.