Postmodern criticism and art
Appropriation
Irony
Parody
Deconstruction
Identitity
Gender
All these
characteristics of the
postmodern in art
can be found in the
work of Marcel
Duchamp and his
Dadaist
contemporaries
Man Ray
Marcel Duchamp as Rrose
Selavy 1921-22
Marcel Duchamp
L.H.O.O.Q. 1919-40
Marcel Duchamp The
Bride Stripped Bare by her
Bachelors, Even (The
Large Glass)
In this work Duchamp portrays human
sexual functions in the form of an
improbable machine. The “Bride” section
is at the top and must be fertilised by the
male section below.
Duchamp’s ironic machine is painted on
glass, with
appropriated images such as the chocolate
grinder and the occulist’s rings, recycled
images from earlier works by the artist,
and
Random and accidental elements such as
the “shots” and the cracks in the glass.
Appropriation, Mechanical Reproduction
Andy Warhol Dick Tracy 1960
Andy Warhol Auto portrait 1966
Appropriation
Yasumasa Morimura Futago, cibachrome photographic print 1990
print, 1990
Appropriation,
Identity and
Gender
source Actress Ursula Andress
Julie Rrap Camouflage # 1 (Ursula)
photograph mounted on lexcen
2000
Appropriation
and Gender
Julie Rrap
Overstepping
digital print 2001
source
René Magritte,
Le Modèle Rouge III,
1937
Appropriation
Julie Rrap Untitled (after Manet’s ‘Olympia’)
2002
source
Edouard Manet ‘Olympia’ 1863
Identity
Tracy Emin Everyone I’ve ever slept with 1997
Identity
Tracy Emin
Theres a lot of money in chairs
Identity
Tracy Emin
Helter F…ing Skelter
2001
Tracy Emin
• “…Emin's art is one of disclosure, using her
life events in works ranging from story telling,
drawing, filmmaking, installation, painting,
neon, photography, appliquéd blankets and
sculpture. Emin exposes herself, her hopes,
humiliations, failures and successes in an
incredibly direct manner. Often tragic and
frequently humorous, it is as if by telling her
story and weaving it into the fiction of her art
she somehow transforms it….”
From the White Cube Gallery, London
Identity and new
media
Marc Quinn Self 1991
Frozen Blood (re-cast 1996)
Marc Quinn
Alison Lapper Pregnant
White marble
• Blood sculpture 'melted'
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Self was bought for a rumoured £13,000
One of the Brit Art movement's most remarkable works, a
sculpture made entirely of human blood, may accidentally have
been destroyed.
According to a report in The Guardian, there has been speculation
in the art world that Self, by Marc Quinn, had melted after the
refrigerator it was stored in was disconnected by builders.
The work, which is a life size cast of the artist's head, is made out
of in nine pints of his own frozen, congealed blood.
It has to be kept refrigerated or it will melt.
The work is owned by Charles Saatchi, the key patron of Brit Art,
and the owner of the Saatchi Gallery along with one of the biggest
private collections of contemporary British art.
It has been reported that builders who arrived to extend Mr
Saatchi's London kitchen at the request of his partner, TV chef
Nigella Lawson, unplugged the kitchen freezer where the head was
kept.
They discovered the mistake when red liquid was found oozing
across the floor.
Identity, race and
culture
Chris Ofili
The Holy Virgin Mary
(1996)
Ofili's work is made up of
paper collage, oil paint, glitter,
polyester resin and elephant
dung on linen.
Identity, race
and culture
Lin Onus Fruit
Bats, 1991
New media
Damien Hirst
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone
Living (1991)
Shark suspended in a formaldehyde bath
A comment by the artist
'[After] the first piece of art I ever sold, I
paid someone else to make the next
one, so I could actually keep going out
drinking.' (Damien Hirst).
Appropriation
source
GoyaThe Disasters of War Plate 39
Great Deeds - Against the Dead
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Great Deeds Against The Dead (1994)
Appropriation and irony
“The exhibition, Works from the Chapman
Family Collection 2002, paid ironic
homage to the fast food giant
McDonald’s through a fictional collection
of rare ethnographic objects. The objects
were carved from aged wood and
presented in a parody of traditional
museum displays. They appeared
genuinely authentic until a closer
inspection revealed the corporate
symbolism of the hamburger chain.
Issues of colonialism, capitalism, racism
and globalisation are inherent in the
work yet no critique or political
statement is offered by the artists.
Rather, the Chapmans’ aim is to unearth
the contradictions and hypocrisies
present in contemporary culture, posing
questions but providing no answers.”
Saatchi paid £1m for their widely praised
Works from the Chapman Family
Collection, a group of totemistic wooden
figures with a mysterious yen for fast
food.
Appropriation, Irony, Parody
source
Gerrit Rietveld
Red-Blue Chair 1917
Glen Baxter Trouble At The Design Museum
Irony
a late Mondrian
Glen Baxter “I’m still not entirely
convinced it is a late Mondrian”
drawled Buchanan
STELARC Third Hand
Photographer: F.Parr
Image courtesy of Sherman
Galleries
Mike Parr’s performance “Malevich (A Political Arm) performance for
as long as possible”
“For thirty hours between the third and fourth of May 2002, a man
sat in a gallery with his only arm nailed to the wall.”
From:
Mike Parr: internet performance
Adam Geczy
• The origin of performance art can be located
in 1917 in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire,
where Hugo Ball, his partner Emmy Hennings
and several other notable Dadaists, spouted
nonsense verse to accompany nonsense acts
to protest the Great War and the preciousness
of art in general: no more cute art in frames,
no more static art that only makes the
philistines richer. From its beginnings, then, a
critical part of the content of performance art
has been its ephemerality. Once performed, or
in fact at any given moment during the
performance, it can never be the same again.
Site specific
installation
Richard Long
A Circle in Alaska – Bering
Straight Driftwood 1977
Gallery
installation
-unconventional
media
Richard Long
Untitled 2003
River Avon mud
with acrylic
medium on wood
Site specific
installation
Andy Goldsworthy
Red Pool, Scaur
River,
Dumfriesshire,
1994/95
Site specific
installation
Andy Goldsworthy
Snow Spires, Ellesmere
Island 1994/95
Artist’s statement -Andy Goldsworthy
• "At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into
the heart of nature; most days I don't even
get close. These things are all part of a
transient process that I cannot understand
unless my touch is also transient-only in this
way can the cycle remain unbroken and the
process be complete." -Andy Goldsworthy
• Andy Goldsworthy hit the headlines in June
2000 when he placed 13, one-ton snowballs
around London for a Brit Art exhibition.
Andy Goldsworthy
Installations
Grise fjord, Ellesmere
Island March/April1989
Jean Tinguely Homage to New York.
A self-constructing and self-destroying work of art. Demonstration in sculpture garden of
Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 17, 1960
New Materials and Technology, “Playfulness”
Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, 1997.
Appropriation
Robert Venturi Vanna Venturi House,
Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1962
source :Leon Battista Alberti
The Church of San Francesco, Rimini, Italy 1446-68
The Architecture of
Deconstruction
Bernard Tschumi
Parc de la Villette,
Paris 1983-91
Appropriation
Two Follies:
Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette,
and
Pirro Ligorio Villa Bomarzo 16th Century
The Architecture of Deconstruction
- the architectural realisation of Derrida’s
theories
Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette
…One aspect of the Parc de la Villette's
deconstructive nature is its inversion of the
traditional hierarchy of structure over
ornamentation. The insides of structures are, in
places, exposed on exteriors and used as decoration.
The site also demonstrates how formal construction
principles can be co-opted by purely ornamental
considerations. The result is wonderfully disorienting
to say the least. From the standpoint of
poststructuralism, the Parc de la Villette participates
in deconstruction's elevation of the signifier to a
more active relationship with the signified.
postmodern – new technologies, “escalation of shock”
"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was
wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was
devised visually." Damien Hirst
postmodern – appropriation, recontextualisation (see next
frame for possible source)
New York 9/11 “Tribute in Light” memorial
3/11/02 to 4/13/02
possible source
Albert Speer
The Cathedral of
Light
German Nazi Party
Rally at Nuremburg
1934
Feminism, Parody,
Irony and Political
Dissent
The Guerilla Girls
The Women’s
Homeland Terror Alert
System