1960 - Conceptual Art Flashcards
Artist: Joseph Kosuth
Artwork description & Analysis: A physical chair sits between a scale photograph of a chair and a printed definition of the word “chair.” Emblematic of Conceptual art, One and Three Chairs makes people question what constitutes the “chair” - the physical object, the idea, the photograph, or a combination of all three. Joseph Kosuth once wrote, “The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art. Thus, it is…a thinking out of all the implications, of all aspects of the concept ‘art.’” One and Three Chairsdenies the hierarchical distinction between an object and a representation, just as it implies a conceptual work of art can be object or representation in its various forms. This work harks back to and also extends the kind of inquiry into the presumed priority of object over representation that had been earlier proposed by the Surrealist Rene Magritte in his Treachery of Images (1928-9), with its image of a pipe over the inscription “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe).
Wood folding chair, mounted photograph of a chair, and photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of “chair” - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ewa Partum<br></br>Active Poetry 1971
Performance: Ewa Partum used performance as a means of creating her poetry. Her poetic works were made by taking individual letters of the alphabet cut from paper, and scattering them in city and countryside locations. By deconstructing language, the artist aimed to explore its structures.
Sol LeWitt<br></br>A Wall Divided Vertically into Fifteen Equal Parts, Each with a Different Line Direction and Colour, and All Combinations 1970
Instructions: Rather than actually making wall-drawings himself, Sol LeWitt produced instructions, consisting of text and diagrams, outlining how his wall drawings could be made.
Joseph Beuys
I like America and America likes me
Action: Beuys referred to his performance works as actions. His most famous action, I Like America and America Likes Me took place in May 1974. Beuys wrapped himself in felt and spent three days in a room with a coyote. The work was an expression of his anti-Vietnam War stance, and also reflected his beliefs about the damage done to the American continent and its native cultures by European settlers.
Richard Long<br></br>A Line Made by Walking 1967
Land art: To make this work Richard Long walked backwards and forwards in a field until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed the work, as a means of recording this physical intervention within the landscape.
Bruce McLean<br></br>Pose Work for Plinths I 1971
Body art: Originally conceived as a performance, McLean’s poses are an ironic and humorous commentary on what he considered to be the pompous monumentality of traditional large plinth-based sculptures. The artist later had himself photographed, repeating the poses.
Jannis Kounellis<br></br>Untitled 1969
Found objects: Some conceptual artists use found objects to express their ideas. For example artists in the Italian arte povera group used all kinds of found objects and low-value materials such as twigs, cloth and fat, with the aim of challenging and disrupting the values of the commercialised contemporary gallery system. (Arte povera means ‘poor art’).
Mary Kelly<br></br>Post-Partum Document. Analysed Markings And Diary Perspective Schema (Experimentum Mentis III: Weaning from the Dyad) 1975
Documentation: In Post-Partum Document 1975, Mary Kelly documented the relationship between herself and her son over a period of six years. Drawing on contemporary feminist thought, and in particular on psychoanalysis, it explores the contradictions for a woman artist between her creative and procreative roles.
Gilbert & George<br></br>A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men 1970
Film and video: Film and video is often used by conceptual artists to record their actions or performances. Gilbert & George’s art is a form of self-portraiture, since they almost always feature in their own work. They see no separation between their activities as artists and their everyday existence, and since 1969 have presented themselves as living sculptures.
Sophie Calle
The Hotel, Room 47 1981
This is a two-part framed work comprising photographs and text. In the upper part, the title Room 47 is printed below a colour photograph of elegantly carved wooden twin head-boards behind a bed covered in rich brown satin. Below it, three columns of italic text are diary entries describing findings in the hotel room between Sunday 22 February 1981 and Tuesday 24. In the lower frame a grid of nine black and white photographs show things listed in the text above.
La Monte Young, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, 1961
Thought of as a score, an instruction, and a sort of poem.
Artist: Robert Morris
Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961
Wood, internal speaker, 7” cassette of ¼” tape.
As its title indicates, Morris’s “Box with the Sound of Its Own Making” consists of an unadorned wooden cube, accompanied by a recording of the sounds produced during its construction. Lasting for three-and-a-half hours, the audio component of the piece denies the air of romantic mystery surrounding the creation of the art object, presenting it as a time-consuming and perhaps even tedious endeavor. In so doing, the piece also combines the resulting artwork with the process of artmaking, transferring the focus from one to the other. Fittingly, the first person in New York Morris invited to see the piece was John Cage-whose silent 1952 composition 4’33” is famously composed of the sounds heard in the background while it is being performed. Cage was reportedly transfixed by Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, as Morris later recalled: “When Cage came, I turned it on… and he wouldn’t listen to me. He sat and listened to it for three hours and that was really impressive to me. He just sat there.”
John Baldessari, Terms Most Useful for Describing Works of Art, 1966-68. Acrylic on canvas
This piece is so straightforward in fact that we can use the terms in the painting to describe the painting itself. It’s tough to say whether John Baldessari was serious when he made this work or just messing with art critics - what with the lifelong battle between artists and critics and everything. In all likelihood it’s the latter, but we think it’s OK for critics to get a taste of their own medicine every once in a while. Baldessari certainly thought so and didn’t hold back.
Baldessari’s Terms Most Useful In Describing Creative Works Of Art “gives vision” and “flavor” to art criticism criticism. Does he do this by ridiculing critics? Maybe. Is it still “enlighten[ing]”? Yes. This painting is “out of the ordinary” and “challenges” the entire profession and livelihood of people like Jerry Saltz, Peter Schjeldahl and Holland Cotter (all critics, obviously). Baldessari implies that it is hard to “take seriously” anything that certain writers say about him, especially Jerry Saltz who said, “Baldessari’s art was never as unnerving or revealing of secret psychic structures as Nauman’s. Nor was he as intelligent or as visually original as Ruscha, as darkly poetic as Acconci, or as relentless as Serra.” If anything these comments give Baldessari a “motivation” to “communicate” how stupid he thinks critics are in hopes that his ideas will “transfer” to art lovers everywhere. All in all, this work is just a tongue-in-cheek way of flipping art criticism on its head in an attempt to make people lol.
Artist: Agnes Denes
Dialectic Triangulation: A Visual Philosophy, 1967-69
Mapping the loss that occurs in communication, i.e. between viewer and artist, between giver and receiver, between specific meaning and symbol, between nations, epochs, systems and universes. • Mapping human parameters within the changing aspects of reality, within the transformations and interactions of phenomena. • Working with the paradox, the contradictions of human existence such as our illusions of freedom and the inescapability of the system; our alienation in togetherness; the individual human dilemma, struggle and pride versus the whole human predicament; our importance or insignificance in the universe. • Trying to give form to invisible processes such as evolution, changing human values, thought processes and time aspects (pinpointing the moment growth becomes decay in an organism; penetrating the “folds of time” to record its “instants”). • Finding contradictions and balances, pitting art against existence, illusions versus reality, imagination versus fact, chaos versus order, the moment versus eternity, universals versus the self.
Dan Graham, Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, 1973<br></br>Two mirrors, two cameras, two monitors, time delay
Live video cameras film and transmits footage to the opposite TV, with a few seconds delay. The mirror then reflects the present moment and multiple times of the past.
Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone, 1973
Line Describing a Cone is composed by a beam of white light emitted from a film projector positioned at one end of a darkened room. Passing through the projector is an animated film of a thin, arcing line that, frame by frame, gradually joins up to become a complete circle. Over the course of thirty minutes this line of light traces the circumference of the circle as a projection on the far wall while the beam takes the form of a three-dimensional hollow cone. Mist from smoke machines gives the beam of light a greater density, making it appear almost tangible.
Roman Ondák<br></br>Measuring the Universe 2007<br></br>Presented at Tate St Ives, 2011
In the summer of 2011, Roman Ondák’s Measuring the Universe was installed at Tate St Ives. Upon entering an initially empty, white gallery, visitors were invited to mark their height on the walls, along with their name and the date. Over the duration of the installation, the room was gradually filled with individual markings and names, overlapping and obscuring one another, to create a constellation of measurements. After the installation closed, the walls were repainted white, obscuring the moments of engagement with the performance, emphasising the ephemerality of the artwork as a whole, and of those brief moments of participation.
Ondák’s work functions on the level of the personal and of the public. The act of measuring the body – in the way, as Ondák points out, one measures a child as they grow1 – allowed participants to create an empirical measurement of themselves which was entirely unique. On the other hand, when viewed as the repeated act of measurement, and displayed as the physical, visual embodiment of that – both in the marks on the wall, and on the visitors’ ability to observe one another participating – the work took on an acutely public aspect. Anyone visiting Tate St Ives during the three-month span of the installation, could impact on the work, depending on their height and where they chose to place their signature. Those visiting the installation could also choose to focus on individual measurements, picked out and studied, or to observe the gradual creation of a collective pattern around the room. The private and the public became intertwined as the creators, the material and the observers of the evolving work.
Artist: Chris Burden
Samson, 1985
“a museum installation consisting of a 100-ton jack connected to a gear box and a turnstile. The 100-ton jack pushes two large timbers against the bearing walls of the museum. Each visitor to the museum must pass through the turnstile in order to see the exhibition. Each input on the turnstile ever so slightly expands the jack, and ultimately if enough people visit the exhibition, SAMSON could theoretically destroy the building. Like a glacier its powerful movement is imperceptible to the naked eye. This sculptural installation subverts the notion of the sanctity of the museum (the shed that houses art).”
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987-1990)
Artwork description & Analysis: “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) is an installation of two identical, battery-operated clocks, synchronized and hanging side-by-side. As ordinary objects elevated to the level of fine art, the clocks undoubtedly reference the Duchampian readymade, and, with their austere forms and serial repetition, Minimalist sculpture. Like all of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, however, mundane materials are springboards for subtle personal and political meanings that vary with their context. The viewer’s response to the clocks shifts dramatically knowing that the artist created the installation while his partner Ross Laycock was dying from AIDS. Gonzalez-Torres acknowledged that clocks would fall out of synch, one eventually stopping first. “Time is something that scares me . . . or used to. This piece I made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.”<br></br><br></br>On the other hand, the clocks exemplify his desire to create works with multiple possible meanings. Although it obviously reflects his own homosexual relationship, the abstract nature of the clocks’ substitution for bodies allows it to be read generally, as a metaphor for love. Gonzalez-Torres explained how he resisted the label of “gay art” during a period of increased censorship and furor over the NEA funding for Robert Mapplethorpe: “Two clocks side by side are much more threatening to the powers that be than an image of two guys sucking each other’s dicks, because they cannot use me as a rallying point in their battle to erase meaning. It is going to be very difficult for members of Congress to tell their constituents that money is being expended for the promotion of homosexual art when all they have to show are two plugs side by side, or two mirrors side by side…“<br></br><br></br>Gonzalez-Torres often produced multiple versions of his installations, and his detailed instructions for their display became an important element of the piece itself. For Perfect Lovers, the instructions require the commercial clocks to be of exact dimensions and design and that they touch; before the exhibition opens the hands are set to the same time; if one or both of the clocks stop before the end of the exhibition, batteries may be replaced and reset. With such directions, Gonzalez-Torres created the basic boundaries of the work, while still allowing for certain flexibility in any given exhibition or installation.
- Dallas Museum of Art
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964)<br></br><br></br>If you ever had any doubt that Yoko Ono was a groundbreaking artist in her own right before she had even met John Lennon, this piece should allay all doubts. The piece originally began as a textual “event score” similar to La Monte Young’s Composition #2.<br></br>The work is quite minimalist as a text-only piece, but the work took on much more provocative protofeminist overtones when Ono performed it in 1964. At first, Cut Piece might seem naughty or erotically charged as members of the audience engage in the taboo thrill of cutting off tiny pieces of the female artist’s clothes. Then, the work gradually becomes more disturbing, as more and more of the woman’s clothing is cut away, leaving her even more naked and vulnerable. The effect was amplified even more when Ono performed the piece, because she would stay silent during the piece, embodying an almost stereotypical Asian stoicism. At one performance of the piece in Japan, a man even made a motion to stab Ono with the scissors. It is one of the first major feminist artworks about the objectification of women, at a time when the word “objectification” was barely in anybody’s conceptual toolkit.
Elaine Sturtevant, Relâche (1967)
Pop Art was built on appropriations from mass culture, such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book panels. Sturtevant stood Pop Art on its head by appropriating the appropriators, creating slightly altered reproductions of works by the major Pop Artists. When Andy Warhol made multicolored silkscreens of flowers, Sturtevant made her own versions of Warhol’s flowers, at one point exhibiting a show that consisted of nothing but slightly altered remakes of Warhol’s flowers. When Jasper Johns appropriated the American flag for his paintings, Sturtevant appropriated the original appropriation of the American flag. The titans of Pop Art, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein, and Rauschenburg, all got wealthy mining the rich vein of mass culture, but when Sturtevant started use the Pop Artists as the raw material for her own work (much like the Pop Artists did to mass commercial culture), the tenor of the reaction was often, “Who does she think she is?”<br></br><br></br>Perhaps the most brilliant of Elaine Sturtevant’s appropriations is her 1967 restaging of the ballet Relâche, a 1924 work choreographed by Francis Picabia with a score by Erik Satie. The title Relâche is a bit of a joke, because the word “relâche” is used in French to indicate that a performance has been cancelled. Ironically, the first performance of Relâche in 1924 actually was cancelled, because the principal dancer Jean Börlin wasn’t feeling well. When it came time for Sturtevant to stage Relâche, she cancelled the performance, not because any of the performers were sick, but because the cancellation was the performance. Sturtevant had gone “meta” even one level beyond old Dadaists like Picabia and Satie. Sturtevant was evidently convincing enough in her restaging/cancellation of Relâche that the pioneering Dadaist Marcel Duchamp went out of his way to attend the performance.
Duchamp, who of course knew of the original Relâche, decided to attend Sturtevant’s performance but arrived to discover that the show had been called off. He returned to his taxi, which was idling outside (his wife Teeny had been waiting for him).<br></br><br></br>Shortly after, Duchamp invited Sturtevant to dinner, and asked her how the performance had gone. “Fine, thank you,” she responded. He wondered, had everything gone as planned? “Yes.”<br></br><br></br>“That’s quite beautiful,” he said.
Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll (1970)<br></br><br></br>Martin Fox has already pointed out the amazing work Hans Haacke, but I wanted to point out MoMA Poll, the first of what are called Haacke’s “system works.” In 1970, Haacke proposed to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that he would make an installation that asked visitors of the gallery to vote on a sociopolitical issue, but Haacke would not reveal the issue until it was time to unveil the exhibit. When the exhibit was finally put on display, it proved to be extremely controversial, because the poll incorporated into the installation specifically singled out Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller for failing to denounce Nixon’s Vietnam War policies. The fact that Rockefeller was on the Museum of Modern Art’s board only made things more uncomfortable for MoMA, which for Haacke was precisely the point. Haacke’s purpose was to underscore the transactional nature of much contemporary art, in which “what we have here is a real exchange of capital: financial capital on the part of the sponsors and symbolic capital on the part of the sponsored.”
Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being (1973)<br></br><br></br>A pioneer in both philosophy and conceptual art, Adrian Piper is a light-skinned woman of biracial heritage who created an alter ego in 1973 that she called “the mythic being.” Piper would put on an Afro wig, a fake mustache, and adopt masculine mannerisms. Then, she would go out in public and record how people reacted to her. As a “black male” with exaggerated masculine mannerisms, she discovered that white people would sometimes react to her in fear, but on the other hand, Adrian Piper herself was such a petite woman in real life that her on-the-street performances had a tendency to make white people look more ridiculous than her own alter ego. The artworks that Piper derived from this conceptual piece proved to make a powerful statement about how black men are treated as the Other in American society.
Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, It’s Still Privileged Art (1975)<br></br><br></br>When Condé and Beveridge started to grow concerned that their art was becoming apolitical, they hit upon the idea of repurposing Maoist posters of artists, but including themselves in the posters. Eventually, this led to the duo creating a larger series about how their politics began to influence their art, using a simple black, white, and red color scheme borrowed from Maoist comic books used in China during the period. The text is simultaneously didactic yet filled with ironic detachment about the collaborators’ realization about how art cuts them off from politics.
Komar & Melamid, Most Wanted and Least Wanted Painting Series (1994)<br></br><br></br>Komar & Melamid used polling and marketing research techniques to create paintings that would be the respective “most wanted” and “least wanted” paintings in different countries. Instead of taking the elitist route and avoiding “pandering,” Komar & Melamid took pandering to mass popular taste to almost ridiculous levels, thereby creating completely bizarre artworks in the process, as if to say, “The public wants what it wants, but not too much of what it wants.”
Marina Abramovic, The Artist Is Present (2010)<br></br><br></br>To commemorate a recent retrospective of Marina Abramovic’s performance art work at the Museum of Modern Art, Abramovic did another performance piece “The Artist Is Present,” which consisted of nothing but Abramovic sitting silently immobile on a chair, while members of the public were encouraged to queue up for the chance to sit across from her. In total, Abramovic sat in for 736 hours, never speaking the whole time, sometimes returning the gaze of the person sitting across from her, sometimes not. Although the basic concept might appear to have “no there there,” gallery-goers who participated in the work found the experience to be so intense that a “Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry” support group developed on Facebook.
John Cage
Theater Piece No. 1 (1952)
Artwork description & Analysis: Theater Piece No. 1 was one of Cage’s first large scale collaborative, multimedia performances, created and performed while Cage was teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Referred to by many as simply “The Event,” the piece involved several simultaneous performance components - all orchestrated by Cage, where chance played a determining role in the course of the performance. Some of the components included in “The Event” were: poetry readings, music, dance, photographic slide projections, film, and the four panels of Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) suspended from the ceiling in the shape of a cross. Cage sat on a step ladder and lectured about Buddhism, or said nothing, and M.C. Richards and Charles Olson read different poems from ladders, while Rauschenberg played Edith Piaf records, Merce Cunningham danced amidst the audience (chased by a barking dog), coffee was served by four boys dressed in white, and David Tudor played improvised notes on a prepared piano, fitted with pieces of felt and wood between the strings. Cage composed the piece such that each participant did whatever they chose during assigned intervals of time and within certain parameters, but the overarching principle of chance guided the course of events. The highly involved multimedia characteristics of No. 1are a wonderful example of the Neo-Dada movement and its incorporation of the everyday into modern art. This early proto-happening prefigured later developments in modern art, particularly the increasing focus on the outside world, as evidenced in later movements like Fluxus, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, as well as performance art in general.
Walter de Maria
The Lightning Field (1977)
Artwork description & Analysis: This may be De Maria’s most famous work. It is an expansive installation of 400 stainless steel poles placed in a one-mile by one-kilometer grid. The rods are each two inches in diameter but extend upwards at varying heights ranging from 15 feet to 26 feet nine inches, in order to create a perfectly horizontal plane where their pointed tips stop.<br></br><br></br>This work is a significant piece of the Land art movement of the late 1960’s, which began in the Southwestern United States. This piece lives in an obscure desert plain near Quemado, New Mexico, specially selected for its frequent lightning storms and isolation. The work incorporates the natural environment into art in a meaningful way, seeing the land as a critical aspect of the work, not merely a site for it. The locale was scouted precisely for its distance from other signs of human development and its ability to reflect the enormity of the landscape. The work communicates a variety of experiences of being in the landscape, and simultaneously asks individual visitors to meditate on the moment, while contemplating shifts in light and perceptions of time and space in their changing vastness.<br></br><br></br>The poles were placed outside, rather than in a museum or gallery so the work reveals the significance of the setting, beyond the built, sculptural aspect. The title calls attention to the tantalizing possibility of highly ephemeral illumination from irregularly occurring natural lighting strikes, potentially drawn down from the sky into the field by the rods. It also calls for awareness of the surrounding landscape, and the relationship between art and nature. The earth is an integral part of the artwork and acts as a canvas while also drawing attention to the sky as part of the larger environment, and our relationship to it. Visitors must travel to this remote location in order to view the work, therefore incorporating the journey away from the everyday as part of the experience of the piece, which initiates a total immersion of the senses while creating an unusual degree of intimate encounter with a liberating spirit.
Damien Hirst
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)
Artwork description & Analysis: This is the work that established Hirst as a major presence in the art world. A little like the art world version of Jaws, this installation featuring a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde that capitalizes on the viewer’s visceral response, a spine-tingling thrill one experiences in the presence of a good horror movie, knowing one is safely removed from the danger. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Livingwas among the works showcased in the Sensation exhibition of the early 1990s, the great “succes de scandale” of the late twentieth century and a game-changer in the art world. Charles Saatchi funded both the work and the exhibition, which were roundly condemned by art world conservatives from London to New York, and embraced by audiences eager for something new. On the meaning of the work, Hirst commented that the vitrines “first came from a fear of everything in life being so fragile” and explained that he wanted “to make a sculpture where the fragility was encased… [and] exists in its own space.” Jeff Koons’s Total Equilibrium Tanks (1985), a basketball suspended in a glass case, is an obvious precedent for Hirst’s work. Dismissed by some critics as a “pickled shark,” this has nevertheless come to be considered an icon of British art in the 1990s. Due to deterioration of the original specimen, the shark was replaced in 2006.
Tiger shark, formaldehyde solution, glass, steel - Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jenny Holzer
UNEX Sign #1 (Selections from the Survival Series) (1983)
Artwork description & Analysis: LED technology was relatively new in the early 1980s. Signboards were capable of displaying blocky letters in varying fonts, colors, and simple graphics. At first glance, this piece could easily be mistaken for an electronic signboard transmitting public announcements, instructions, or advertisements. Its fifty-four statements and messages spin through a single LED sign, ranging from humorous to disturbing, and communicating private thoughts many of which are inappropriate in polite conversation. One includes a computerized Spectacolor graphic of a woman’s face alongside the words, “What urge will save us now that sex won’t?” Other statements draw attention to social injustices such as sexism and homelessness. Some issue direct commands to viewers. The point of the work and its value as art forces us to question our relationship with the technology we often take for granted.
LED Sign in Powder Coated Aluminum Housing - The Whitney Museum of American Art
Ai Weiwei
Ton of Tea (2008)
Artwork description & Analysis: This work compresses a ton of traditional pu’er tea leaves into the space of one cubic meter. Aesthetically, it recalls the glass and steel cubes of Minimalism. Donald Judd and Robert Morris were among the artists Ai admired. At the same time, it is made out of tea (one smells its pungent odor from afar) setting it apart from anything a Minimalist would make. Much tea in China is still produced in compressed cubes, so this is also an enlarged form of an everyday domestic item. While in the West, drinking tea (especially from Chinese porcelain) has historically been a status symbol, tea is the everyday drink in China. The brand here is one of the most common. In a much less dramatic way than Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, Ai’s act of making tea into Minimalist sculpture calls attention to divisions between past and present. Ai’s awareness of Western trends and Eastern ideas locates the work at the center of a global matrix crisscrossing the world, a persistent feature of his approach as an artist.
Tea leaves - Ai Wei Wei studio
Marcel Broodthaers
Pense-Bête (Memory Aid) (1964)
Artwork description & Analysis: In 1964, Broodthaers tried his hand at visual art by taking unsold copies of his latest volume of poetry, titled Pense-Bête, and encasing them sloppily in a mix of plaster and other materials. As his first “official” piece, Pense-Bête set the tone for the rest of Broodthaers’ artistic output, including his pursuit of preserving ideas of experience. Here, he takes his “failed” poetry - which didn’t sell - and converts it into something new that actually was considered to be successful, worthy of preservation.<br></br><br></br>Broodthaers’ attempt with this work was to transform the refined poetry to which he had dedicated himself into an aesthetically “ugly” object. The conversion accomplishes two ends: it reveals the absence of a link between either hard work or beauty and eventual success, and it recontextualizes his past experience as a writer into something else entirely - into a form whereby his words would be preserved, rather than forgotten. Ironically, therefore, his polished verses had to be degraded into a “mess” in order to be positively received.<br></br><br></br>In a way, Pense-Bête showed Broodthaers mocking both his own history and his fellow contemporary artists. There is a certain humor in the fact that the title refers to the means by which his apparently forgettable poetry would become memorable. The rather haphazard way in which the plaster and ordinary materials are applied to the volumes of text pokes fun at the usually careful nature of the construction of artworks as a product of great technical skill. The title also contains a bit of humor in its translation as “Memory Aid,” yet the conglomeration of materials grouped around the books do not immediately remind the viewer of anything specific and remain ambiguous as a referent. The transformation of the original poetry, meanwhile, does not make the text of the poetry itself any more memorable - it only achieves lasting fame as a piece of a larger work.
Books, paper, plaster, plastic balls on wood base 11 4/5 x 33 3/10 x 16 9/10 in - Collection Flemish Community, long-term loan S.M.A.K.
Marcel Duchamp
L.H.O.O.Q (1919)
Artwork description & Analysis: Marcel Duchamp’s scandalous L.H.O.O.Q is an altered postcard reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. For this “assisted” (which implied a degree of manipulation as opposed to the “unassisted”) readymade, Duchamp penciled a moustache and a goatee over Mona Lisa’s upper lip and chin, and re-titled the artwork. The title riffs on the French pronunciation of the letters, “Elle a chaud au cul,” which roughly translates as “She has a hot ass.” Rather than transmuting an ordinary, manufactured object into a work of art, as in the bulk of his readymades, in L.H.O.O.Q Duchamp starts with the representation of an iconic masterpiece that he takes down from its pedestal by playfully debunking it. In endowing the Mona Lisa with masculine attributes, he alludes to Leonardo’s purported homosexuality and gestures at the androgynous nature of creativity. Duchamp is clearly concerned here with gender role-reversals, which later come to the fore in Man Ray’s portraits of the artist dressed as his female alter ego, Rrose Selavy.
Collotype - Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Fluids (1967)
Artwork description & Analysis: Fluids is one of Kaprow’s most ambitious works. In it, he recruited groups of local residents to build huge ice structures in various locations in Pasadena, CA during a mid career retrospective. The original “score” for the piece was displayed on billboards around the city. The idea of collective action resulting in the inevitable melting of the ice was a comment on the obsolete nature of human labor - a “dystopian allegory of capitalist production and consumption,” refuting the permanence of the art object. Documentation of the event includes photographs, film, the billboard score, the artist’s notes and drawings, letters and press clippings. This seminal work was reinvented in 2005 and as Overflow by the LA Art Girls in 2008 as part of Allan Kaprow - Art as Life posthumous retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary’s space in LA MOCA.
30 walls of ice - Photos and archives: Allan Kaprow Archives, the Getty Research Institute
On Kawara
Today Series (1965-2014)
Artwork description & Analysis: December 17, 1979 is one of nearly 3,000 works produced over a span of almost fifty years as part of Kawara’s Today series. The Date Paintings which make up the series consist of the date of composition, hand-painted in sans-serif font, against a monochrome background. These backgrounds are mostly dark grey, though paintings were also produced in shades of red and blue, and the tonal variation between different paintings is surprisingly wide. They ranged in size from 8 x 10 inches to 61 x 89 inches, although Kawara generally used the same eight increments of scale.<br></br><br></br>The Date Paintings are partly documents of a repetitive, meditative composition process which took on something of the quality of a ritual or liturgy, marking the passage of time, and of the artist’s life. Kawara set two main formal parameters when producing the paintings: first, each date was formatted using the writing customs of the country in which it was composed, and written in the relevant language; second, each painting had to be completed on the day in question. If Kawara did not finish a painting by midnight, it was destroyed. A later work, the 100 Years Calendar (1984), used a color coding system to mark each day of Kawara’s life when a painting was successfully produced. The craftsmanship involved in producing the Date Paintings was remarkable: each ground-wash was created using four separate coats of paint. The outlines of the letters and numbers were then hand-written, carefully spaced out to make sure the date sat perfectly in the center of the canvas, and filled in with several coats of white paint, using tapered brushes, a ruler, and a set square. The Today series is thus partly a monument to an investment of time, care, and labor which is almost invisible in the finished works, whose appeal to the viewer is immediate, not to say ephemeral.<br></br><br></br>Once the hidden craftsmanship of the pieces becomes evident, the Date Paintings suggest a series of engaging analogies between the present moment and the past which informs it. Because the date of each painting has necessarily passed by the time of its viewing, the pieces also suggest the ephemerality of the present moment: its instant passage into the past. In these ways, the Today series is classic Conceptual art, its idea-content, often informed by philosophy, more significant than its aesthetic content. At the same time, there remains visual variation and interest in the Date Paintings; the regularity of the paintings partly provides a backdrop against which elementary changes in color, size, wording, and so on, assume an exaggerated significance to the viewer.<br></br><br></br>Today is one of the longest-lasting series of works to be produced by an individual artist, and quite possibly one of the most methodically continuous activities ever undertaken by a human being. It is also broadly agreed to be one of the most important works of Conceptual art. As regards the development of Kawara’s career, Today marked a definitive shift from figurative art to the conceptual, process-based projects, concerned with temporal and spatial location, which would characterize his most valuable contributions to modern art.
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York
Barbara Kruger
Installation view of self-titled solo exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery, NYC (1991)
Artwork description & Analysis: For her third solo show at Mary Boone Gallery, Kruger transformed the gallery space into pure experience, with wall to wall and floor to ceiling displays in black, white, and red. Upon entering the gallery, visitors were greeted with the following text, printed in white letters on a vermillion background: “All that seemed beneath you is speaking to you now. All that seemed deaf hears you. All that seemed dumb knows what’s on your mind. All that seemed blind sees through you.” This confrontational epithet set the tone for the entire installation, which implicates the viewers in Kruger’s critique of the dynamics of power in the early 1990s. Kruger used bold white text within a virtual sea of red, pitting a flood of language against billboard-sized images that collide on the walls. Two images of a child’s screaming face confront the viewer with the phrase “All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype,” while a sensational image, tucked in the back room of the gallery, portrays a naked woman on a cross wearing a gas mask, emblazoned with the words, “It’s our pleasure to disgust you,” a brazen challenge aimed at the conservative elements of American society. The hostile tone of Kruger’s language, as well as the nature of the entire installation, is intended to activate viewers’ emotions in order to consider the circumstances that led Kruger to make such incisive statements. Her first foray into site-specific installation, this exhibition represented a major departure from her earlier two-dimensional work.
Photographic collage - Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Piero Manzoni
Artist’s Shit 1961
In May 1961 Manzoni created 90 small cans, sealed with the text Artist’s Shit (Merda d’Artista). Each 30-gram can was priced by weight based on the current value of gold (around $1.12 a gram in 1960). The contents of the cans remain a much-disputed enigma, since opening them would destroy the value of the artwork. Various theories about the contents have been proposed, including speculation that it is plaster. In the following years, the cans have spread to various art collections all over the world and netted large prices, far outstripping inflation. A tin was sold for € 124,000 at Sotheby’s on May 23, 2007; in October 2008 tin 83 was offered for sale at Sotheby’s with an estimate of £ 50–70,000. It sold for £97,250. It was described as:
“It is a joke, a parody of the art market, and a critique of consumerism and the waste it generates.”
— Stephen Bury
On October 16, 2015, tin 54 was sold at Christies for the astonishing sum of £182,500. The tins were originally to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold – $37 each in 1961 – with the price fluctuating according to the market.
Other works from this period include limited edition thumbprints, and the Declarations of Authenticity, 1961-61, a printed multiple that could be bought, proving the owner’s status as either part or whole work of art, depending on the price paid. He also designated a number of people, including Umberto Eco, as authentic works of art gratis. Various other experimental pieces included trying to create a mechanical animal as a moving sculpture and using solar energy as a power source. In 1960 he created a sphere that was held aloft on a jet of air.
Judy Chicago
The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party as installed at the Brooklyn Museum.
Chicago decided to take Lerner’s lesson to heart and took action to teach women about their history. This action would become Chicago’s masterpiece, The Dinner Party, now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. It took her five years and cost about $250,000 to complete. First, Chicago conceived the project in her Santa Monica studio: a large triangle, which measures 48-feet by 43-feet by 36-feet, consisting of 39 place settings.[17] Each place setting commemorates a historical or mythical female figure, such as artists, goddesses, activists and martyrs. The project came into fruition with the assistance of over 400 people, mainly women, who volunteered to assist in needlework, creating sculptures and other aspects of the process. When The Dinner Partywas first constructed it was a traveling exhibition. Through the Flower, her non-profit organization, was originally created to cover the expense of the creation and travel of the artwork. Jane Gerhard dedicated a book to Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party, entitled “The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and The Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007”.
Martin Creed
Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, 2000
Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The lights going on and off consists of an empty room which is filled with light for five seconds and then plunged into darkness for five seconds. This pattern is repeated ad infinitum. In exploiting the existing light fittings of the gallery space, Creed creates a new and unexpected effect. An empty room with lighting that seems to be misbehaving itself confounds the viewer’s normal expectations. This work challenges the traditional conventions of museum or gallery display and, consequently, the visiting experience. Creed plays with the viewer’s sense of space and time and in so doing he implicates and empowers the viewer, forcing an awareness of, and interaction with, the physical actuality of the space. The work is simply titled ‘Work’ followed by a brief description and a number which forms part of the artist’s ongoing system for titling and cataloguing his work.
This work emerges from the artist’s ongoing series of investigations into commonplace phenomena. His subtle interventions reintroduce the viewer to elements of the everyday. Creed’s choice and use of materials – plain A4 sheets of paper, blu-tak, masking tape, party balloons, simple or ‘unpoetic’ language as text or as lyrics to songs – is a thoughtful celebration of the ordinary, a focused reading of the ambiguity of everyday stuff.
By identifying his works primarily through a numbering system, Creed accords them equal status, regardless of size or material. He has said ‘I find that it’s difficult to choose, to decide that one thing’s more important than the other … So what I try and do is to choose without having to make decisions.’ (Quoted in Buck 2000, p.111.) His idiosyncratic approach is born out of this refusal to make decisions and a playful concern with the conundrum of wanting both to make something and nothing: ‘the problem was to attempt to establish, amongst other things, what material something could be, what shape something could be, what size something could be, how something could be constructed, how something could be situated … how many of something there could be, or should be, if any, if at all.’ (Quoted in Virginia Button, The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, London 2003, p.172.) His interrogation of his own motives reveals an anxiety about ‘making something extra for the world’ (ibid.). The economy of means of Work No. 227 exemplifies Creed’s attempts to make work with minimal physical intervention.
Artist: Carsten Höller
Slides, 1998
For the seventh commission in The Unilever Series, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Höller created Test Site, an installment in his ongoing series of slide works which started in 1998. Höller’s interest in slides ranges from their use as a practical and alternative means of transportation and the effect of sliding itself, which involves a loss of control, vertigo and an emotional response from the sliders, often delight. He is also interested in the shape of slides as a counterpoint to rectangular architecture, as in the Turbine Hall.
Earlier slide works include Valerio I and Valerio II, which were installed at Kunst-Werke in Berlin in 1998 and 1999. Höller described their title, “The Valerio Phenomenon…supposedly originated at a rock concert in Italy. It’s an interesting example of mass hysteria. A sound technician at a concert disappeared, and someone in the audience, pretending to know his name, shouted ‘Valerio!’, and more and more people joined in. It was apparently infectious, and it spread from Brindisi to Rimini and other cities. There is something about the sound of this name that makes you want to shout it loud. You feel a little better after you’ve done it, just like after having traveled down a slide.”
In an essay about Test Site, Dorothea von Hantelmann compares Höller’s slides to Nietzsche’s ideas regarding art and science as two different powers that inform culture in distinct ways. “When Nietzsche speaks of art’s potential to create intensities and vital energies, for him these creations are extraordinary—but they need not be true. While the scientist deals with truth and its cognition, the artist, after Nietzche, creates and transforms reality.”
In his exhibition Experience at the New Museum in New York in 2011/2012, a slide was installed inside, spiraling straight through the third and fourth floors of the museum, ejecting the sliders on the second floor.
