Art History II
Instructor Dustin M Price
Quiz 14:
Please answer the following 3 questions.
1) Who was your favorite artist discussed in class?
2) Who was your least favorite artist discussed in class?
3) Do you feel that you have gained a better understanding of
art history and its involvement in humanity since 1500?
What did we cover last time?
-Had Quiz 13
-1960s in America
-Feminism and the Feminist Art Movement
- The 3 waves of Feminism
- Judy Chicago
- Her, The Dinner Party
- Guerrilla Girls
- Cindy Sherman
- Jenny Saville
- Her Matrix and Gustave Courbet's Origin
of the World, ca. 1866
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Postmodernism, scholars disagree about
the exact definition and timeline of
Postmodernism
- It is difficult to pinpoint as a movement or
era because many feel we are still
operating within it, remember it is often
easier to categorize movements in hindsight
Damien Hirst The Kingdom
- Some scholars feel we are still involved in
Postmodernism, some feel we have moved
past it and are in a new era, I have even
heard the term Post-Postmodernism thrown
around in scholarly discourse
- So please keep in mind that this is another
one of those definitions that is up for
scholarly debate!
'Michael Jackson and Bubbles,' by Jeff Koons (porcelain/ceramic blend,
1988).
- In fact I am going to disagree with your
text on its definition!
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-I would like to define “Postmodern Art” as:
A term (in the context of visual art) used
to describe artwork produced roughly
after the 1970’ s that has been derived
from Modern Art but at the same time
rejects or reacts to Modern Art
Zhang Xiaogang A Big Family 1995
-Rather than a style or school,
Postmodernism is better thought of as a
strategy for making art
- It manifests itself in countless ways.
Postmodern artists reject the seriousness of
Modern art and create visually interesting,
messy, provocative, contradictory, and often
political images
- Postmodern artists appropriate from both
“high art” and popular sources,
repositioning and re contextualizing them,
making them partially their own
Michael Ray Charles Forever Free, Beware, 1994.
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Twisting the imagery and changing its
meanings questioning authenticity and
ownership
- Modern art responded to an industrial,
technological society. Postmodernism
ushers a post-industrial, advanced capitalist
society based on communication and
information.
Gerhard Richter Drei Kerzen Three Candles 1982
- Postmodernism art reflects the pluralism
of our globalized society
- Pluralism refers to social and cultural
diversity
- Postmodernism reflects the ideology that
the only constant in contemporary times is
change and the only thing we have in
common is difference
Fred Wilson Speak of Me as I Am (Chandelier Mori) 2003
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Postmodernism also reflects the influence
of the vast visual culture of the 1980’s, the
PC, video cameras, cable TV, Internet
culture, and the newfound ease of
communication technologies
Kara Walker "Cut“ 1998
- Postmodern artists reject the Modern
artists ideology of art as absolute, ideal,
pure, or perfect, and the artist as a serious,
single minded tortured lone genius, who
was ostracized by society and lived on the
fringe, above and apart from society
- They felt this ideology was rather
introspective, separatist, and arrogant,
many Postmodern artists look at
themselves of representations of society
and look to improve it (society) in one way
or another
Jeff Wall After “Invisible Man” By
Ralph Ellison, the Preface
- Lets discuss a number of Postmodern
artists
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-The passage from the 1980’s to the 1990’s
was marked by what is commonly referred
to as the “culture Wars”
- This included a confrontation between
artists and public officials (an even to some
degree the general public) in America over
the freedom of speech and public funding
for the arts
- We see a number of lesser known artists
becoming better known in the 1990’s by
producing images that were intended to
disrupt, provoke, and offend viewers
- Artists such as Serrano, Hirst,
Mapplethorpe, and Currin all utilized this
technique to garner attention and fame
- Lets discuss a few of these individuals
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Andres Serrano, created Piss Christ in
1987 (left). It is one of a number of
photographs exploring similar themes
- The image is a 2 foot tall photograph of a
plastic crucifix encased in a plexiglass box
filled with the artists own urine
- He was raised in a rather pious strict
Catholic household, he argues that this
image is about confronting the physicality of
the death of the body of Christ, which he
feels is easily forgotten
- He also critiques the commercialization of
Christ’s image
- Are religious objects inherently holey or do
we imbue them with sacredness?
- Can an object that is sacred for one group
of people invoke that “sacredness” to
another group?
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Damien Hirst
-For the Love of God is an 18th century
human skull, encrusted with 8,601
diamonds.
-the piece is on display at the White Cube
gallery in London’s west end and sold at an
alleged £50 million, almost five times the
cost it took to make.
-Hirst has recently sold a complete show of
his artwork at a record-breaking auction,
making over £111 million.
-.Hirst hired technicians (jewelers Bentley &
Skinner) to actually create the piece, which
took 18 months to make.
-Hirst has long stood by his philosophy that
the important part is creating the concept of
the art, rather than the physical work itself.
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Robert Mapplethorpe
- Mapplethorpe's earliest efforts were his
most controversial. He first achieved
notoriety for his work celebrating and
documenting New York's gay community in
the late 1970s. Often the photographs
explicitly depicted sexual organs and
bondage equipment. Yet Mapplethorpe's art
always revealed the humanity and emotions
of his subjects behind their leather, spikes,
and chains.
- in 1986, he was diagnosed with AIDS.
Despite his illness, he accelerated his
creative efforts, broadened the scope of his
photographic inquiry, and accepted
increasingly challenging commissions.
- His vast, provocative, and powerful body
of work has established him as one of the
most important artists of the twentieth
century
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-John Currin
- The story of Currin's rise to prominence
generally begins in the early '90s, when
political correctness held sway in the art
world and highly visible exhibitions like the
Whitney Biennial were filled with
photography, video, and installation art
dealing with politics and issues of identity
John Currin Skinny Woman, 1992
- As he tells it, he realized that the best way
to stand out from the crowd of aspiring
young artists was to do the thing nobody
else was doing. So, he started making
modest, easel-sized paintings, mostly
portraits of young women
- By the late '90s, critics were pointing to a
re-emergence of the figure in painting,
crediting Currin along with a few other
young artists like Lisa Yuskavage, Elizabeth
Peyton, and Jenny Saville.
John Currin Ms. Omni, 1993
John Currin Heartless, 1997
John Currin The Cripple, 1997
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Race and ethnicity
- Many artists have used Postmodern
strategies to draw attention to racial and
ethnic issues
- Michael Ray Charles
-His graphically styled paintings investigate
racial stereotypes drawn from a history of
American advertising, product packaging,
billboards, radio jingles, and television
commercials.
Michael Ray Charles"(Forever Free) Buy Black!"1996
- Charles draws comparisons between
Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an
earlier era and contemporary mass-media
portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and
athletes—images he sees as a constant in
the American subconscious.
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-“Stereotypes have evolved,” he notes. “I’m
trying to deal with present and past
stereotypes in the context of today’s
society.” Caricatures of African-American
experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are
represented in Charles’s work as ordinary
depictions of blackness, yet are stripped of
the benign aura that lends them an often
unquestioned appearance of truth.
Michael Ray Charles "(Forever Free) ‘Servin with a smile’“ 1994
Michael Ray Charles "(Forever Free) Hello I’m Your New Neighbor“ 1997
- “Aunt Jemima is just an image, but it
almost automatically becomes a real person
for many people, in their minds. But there’s
a difference between these images and real
humans.”
-In each of his paintings, notions of beauty,
ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge
and converge, reminding us that we cannot
divorce ourselves from a past that has led
us to where we are, who we have become,
and how we are portrayed.
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Tara Donovan’s sculptural installations are
based on the physical properties and
capabilities of a single accumulated
material.
-Donovan uses prosaic items including
electrical cable, adding machine paper,
straight pins, paper plates, and toothpicks.
These materials are arranged in a manner
that sometimes mimics the organization of
geological or biological forms.
- Part of the intrigue of Donovan’s practice
lies in the way she is able to present a
mass of unaltered, simple objects that do
not disguise what they are while
simultaneously suggesting a range of richly
poetic associations.
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Matthew Barney
- Between 1994 and 2002 Barney created a
now legendary film series entitled The
Cremaster Cycle
- In these films he developed an arcane
sexual mythology
- His singular vision foregrounds erotic
undercurrents and explores the limits of the
body and sexuality
- The cycle is premised on the concept of
gender mutability, gender assignation and
roles
- This epic cycle has as its conceptual
departure point the male cremaster muscle,
which controls testicular contractions in
response to external stimuli.
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-The project is rife with anatomical allusions
to the position of the reproductive organs
during the embryonic process of sexual
differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the
most “ascended” (or undifferentiated) state,
Cremaster 5 the most “descended” (or
differentiated).
- The cycle repeatedly returns to those
moments during sexual development in
which the outcome of the process is still
unknown—in Barney’s metaphoric universe,
these moments represent a condition of
pure potentiality.
- with each feature-length Cremaster film,
which Barney writes and directs, and in
which he often plays one or more roles, the
artist has created related sculptures,
drawings, and photographs.
Matthew Barney, Still taken from Cremaster 3
Postmodernism/Contemporary Art
-Ron Mueck
- Through his detailed works, which are
always either smaller than life-size or
monumental, Mueck explores the
ambiguous relationship of reality to artifice.
- His earlier pieces were sculpted with
fiberglass, but recently he has begun to
work with silicone, which is more flexible
and allows greater ease in shaping body
parts and implanting hair.
- Born in Australia in 1958, Ron Mueck
began his career making puppets for
children's television, including a stint with
Jim Henson and Sesame Street.
-Since 1996, he has devoted himself full
time to his art.
Sam Jinks
Exam III:
Vocab:
Postmodern
Pluralism
Culture War
Artists:
Damien Hirst
Robert Mapplethorpe
John Currin
Michael Ray Charles
Matthew Barney
Artwork:
Barney Cremaster 3: Mahabyn 32-62
Hirst For the Love of God Lect. 33 slide 10
Shonibare How to Blow Up Two heads at
Once (Ladies) 32-67