Art Theory

Question 1

Fountain (dada)

Answer 1

-urinal placed on a flat Side
-Practical joke
-1917- Society for Independent Art Founded, had to pay to enter. Duchamp enters under pseudonym ‘R. Mutt’ to comment on art world attributes and how value of art goes according to name.
-Urinals purpose: urinate. Taking the ‘piss’ out of art + contemplates idea of ‘pissing’ on traditional art and values
-BOTH: challenge the idea that artists must have skill and be unique. Displays the belief that anything in the right context can be considered an artwork.

Question 2

Sleep (surrealism)

Answer 2

-polymorph structure on stilts with a boat and small city in the background
-Sense of foreground and background
-Soft face = ID phase. Sleep grips people and is shown by crutches (break imagined). Face is
supported away from the ground and away from reality.
-Cloth covered ears = distance from noise of outside world
-Boat in background = destruction, no normal environment
-Empty space = detachment from earth when sleeping (disembodiment of conscious state)

Question 3

Number 1 (abstract expressionim)

Answer 3

-Drip pouring techniques. He moved around the canvas to fling + pour paint
-Paint lines = speed and force
-Dense and lush yet detail of delicate and lace
-Inspired by Native Americans sand paintings

Question 4

Marilyn Monroe’s Lips

Answer 4

-repeated image of Marilyn Monroe’s lips on a silk screen
-Consumer culture, no individual presence. She has become a brand that isn’t unique anymore.
-Colour scheme doesn’t match and ink varies
-Repetition shows how fascinated the public was with celebrities. They are just commodities society has lost all individual identify.

Question 5

Double silver disaster

Answer 5

-2 different coloured silk screens next to each other showing an image of an electric chair on one side
-Background: 1963- two executions took place at Singh correctional facticity by electric chair (form of capitol punishment). Image used from a press picture.
-From the series ‘Death and Disaster’
-Same image in 1 no colour.
-Reptation = how desensitised the masses are to death. The void on the right speaks to
silence. The silence that death creates.
-Shows public’s fascination with death and how tragedies are portrayed in the media

Question 6

Bicycle wheel

Answer 6

-Questioned values of art
-Making a statement, technology has not moved humankind forward
-Wheel placed above a very ordinary common stool
-His ideas and meaning is what separates the work apart and makes it art