Exam 1 SLIDE IDs-Contemporary Flashcards
Kazuo Shiraga
“Challenge to the Mud”
October, 1955
Medium:
Japanese
a. Famous for his paintings made with his feet.
b. At first Gutai show
c. Taking the “action painting” to the extreme.
d. Underscores the aspect of activity in painting…
e. Wrestling, challenging it, reference to sumo in Japanese tradition.
f. Emphasizes the primitive nature thing…
g. Pollock is still painting on canvas, but these Gutai artists have gone even beyond that.
Yves Klein
“Blue Monochrome (IKB 48)
1956
Oil on Wood
French
a. Was a Judo instructor.
b. Blue as not attached to anything material, freedom.
c. The shade he names after himself—becomes his signature pigment.
i. It also has historical context. Think Giotto. Historically produced with lapis lazuli.
ii. Most expensive historically, denotes the idea of a gift of the artist when included.
d. Each canvas is the same size, each has a different price tag, all the same painted.
e. He’s interested in the art market.
f. “blue period”—picasso also had a blue period
g. Limitlessness, immersion
h. Also made some gold paintings. Powdered gold on the surface of the painting. Prices these as exactly determined by the amount of gold in the picture. Unusual to have this material based way of pricing.
Piero Manzoni
“Merde D’ Artista”
1961
Medium:
Italian
a. Contemporary of Klein and Mathieu
b. Similar in some ways to Duchamp and his ready-mades.
c. Neo avant garde.
d. Literally Artist’s Shit. Numbered editions of these throughout galleries.
e. Critiquing the acts of enunciating how we decide works of art. How far can we go with the criticism of what art is and how it operates.
Allan Kaprow
Yard
1961
Found Objects?
American
a. also anti-commercial work of art
b. New york city,
c. Consisted of hundreds of used tires, covering the ground in no particular order. Poking up from the tires were tar paper mounds—covered sculptures. The audience was encouraged to navigate through the tires. No path, difficult to consume. About the experience, not about the material value, about the experience. Making you think about your environment in a different way.
d. He has re-staged this multiple times since. Changes a little each time of course.
e. Died in 2006.
f. In 2009 artists were invited to recreate yard in different ways.
i. William Pope L. does it inside, another critique on interior gallery space.
ii. Josiah Mcelheny-projected photos
Robert Rauschenberg
“Erased de Kooning Drawing”
1953
Traces of Ink and Crayon on Paper with Mat and hand lettered Label
American
a. His goal here was to discover if an artwork could be made purely through erasure. He originally tried it through erasing his own works, but decided for the experience to be true, he had to use someone else’s work.
b. He goes to De Kooning and asks for a work that was hard to erase, and that mattered to him-pencil and graphite. Takes him several weeks to erase the drawing—trying to completely obliterate all traces of the drawing.
c. Not everything could be erased, of course.
d. About how do we relate to personal creation? How do we detach if from ourselves.
Robert Rauschenberg
“White Painting”
1951
Paint on Canvas
American
a. A series of White Paintings.
b. Shown in 1953 at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery
c. White house emulsion paint on canvas—not hung up on the type of paint he’s using.
d. Because they are white, as they are transported to the gallery they get a bit scuffed, says why don’t you have an gallery assistant touch it up! –detached or unattached from his work, not a
e. “A landing pad for shadows” affected by the ambient environment in the galleries.
f. His paintings are not about painting at all, they are about what is happening all around the painting once complete. Almost as if the painting doesn’t even exist until someone is in front of it and the viewer’s shadow falls on it.
g. Trying to direct the attention away from thinking about the painter, and back out to the world.
RECORDING C 02
The Independent Group
“The Parallel of art and Life”
1953
Multimedia
American
a. Many different types of images—reproductions of all sorts of visual sources. Famous paintings, drawings like of Pollock, non western culture art, machines, photos of athletes….
b. No labels, no explanations. Inention is immersion in the images. Curated by Rheyna Banham.
c. Public didn’t know what to make of it.
d. Also had educational purpose—
e. Students at the architectural institute complained it was too rough, didn’t know what to do with it.
Richard Hamilton
“Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?”
1956
Collage on Paper
British
a. Hamilton had worked in advertising in the past. He delighted in the idea that advertising could be so persuasive—to persuade them to buy and consume.
b. This one responded to Paolozzi’s collages. Uses images from popular media.
c. What appears to be advertised is modern life itself.
d. Journalism, cinema, advertising, TV, styling, sex symbolism, randomization, photo image, mechanical conversion of imaging…
e. The “Jazz Singer” was one of the first movies to include sound in the film.
f. Nods and references to consumer world and processed…modern but not necessarily tasteful.
g. Portrait on the wall is the critic tthat took whistler to court back in the day.
h. Hamilton later said that these types of images that they made in the 50s were made for a mass audience, transient short term solution. Expendable, easily forgotten, sexy, glamorous, big business, low cost, mass produced,…
Roy Lichtenstein
“In the Car”
1963
Oil on Canvas
American
a. Male and female stereotypes
b. In the artwork, without context, have to bring in own context and impressions.
Andy Warhol
“White Burning Car III”
1963
Silkscreen on linen
American
a. Produced a series of prints called the disaster series. Most chilling in this was his images of car wrecks.
b. In incidents such as those he used would be tragic and devastating for those involved but just common and detached for the rest of those who saw the image or event….
c. What makes his commentary is the fat that he reproduces the images.
d. Lose a part of our humanity in our ability to look at the image with a numbed or detached sense, looking at it as an aesthetic question rather than connection with what is happening.
e. Man thrown up on post, killed, man walking past in the background.
f. Ability to look past
g. Imagine looking at a stack of the same newspaper—repeated front page.
h. Warhol is interested in the saturation of the media—overexposure to tragedy.
i. 100”x72”
Andy Warhol
“13 Most Wanted Men”
1964
Silkscreen
American
a. Formally, the images look like mug shots—cropping, background, expression, facing views.
b. Pop art was seen to non critically reflect culture and why he was invited to decoate the building. They weren’t expecting the solution he came up with. Pop art not seen as edgy or dangerous at the time—with it’s emphasis on consumer culture seemed…
c. Offered to replace this with the directors photo.
d. Look to essay for more info.
Claes Oldenberg
“The Store, 107 E. 2nd St NYC”
Dec 1961
Multimedia
. Swedish born
b. Comes out of the same ideas as Kaprow.
c. Set up at that location downtown, in the Bowery—lots of flea markets, down and outs. Very cheap to rent a storefront.
d. Sets up stuff he has made like a store—all of the stuff for sale is his sculpture made out of cheap, throw-away materials.
e. By offering his works for sale in a downtown store he is getting rid of the boundary between art and life. Democratizing the art world.
f. Funky store.
g. Monumentalizing things of everyday life.
h. Made fun soft sculptures…Soft Toilet from in 1966,
Bruce Conner
“THE CHILD”
1959
American
Wax, nylon, cloth, metal, twine, and high chair
a. Uses stockings stretched across the figure—look like flesh colored spider webs, age and decay.
b. Sitting in the old fashioned high chair.
c. Different than we think of when we think of child…violence, corruption, not fresh and rosy. Looks like a mummy, preserved relic of earlier time.
d. This was a period in history when Motherhood and childhood is fetishized. Very wholesome ideas of childhood. This instead shows the dark underside, the hidden and repressed underside of the American psyche.
e. He produced this one in response to the trial of a serial killer. he often looked to news stories.
f.
Edward Ruscha
“Every Building on the Sunset Strip”
1966
American
Artist’s Book
a. A book. Opens up constantina fashion.
b. Focus is architecture, treatment is pretty much unremarkable. He photographs every building on the sunset strip, not just the cool or interesting. Prescribed seriality.
c. Labels the photos with street numbers.
d. Documentary photography without commentary. Not typical or documentary photos.
e. No moral, no social judgment,,,that itself could be a commentary on the times.
Ad Reinhardt
“Abstract Painting No. 5”
1962
Oil on Canvas
American
a. Same generation as the abstract expressionists…
b. art should not be about anything but painting.
c. Some All black but variety on the canvas.
d. 5’ by 5’ square.
e. All of the series of Abstract paintings are black, and composed around a modernist grid that divides the canvas into 9 squares, black painting nwith black squares.
f. He achieves the differences in the black through tints—mixed with a little yellow or blue etc.
g. Interested in art for arts sake.
h. Polychrome because of different hues of paint.
i. Because he uses the polychrome, in contrast with Kelley who uses just one color, our attention is still captured by the painting because of trying to discern the pattern/ hue.
j. His square paintings have not “direction” reference to any objective.
k. Grid:
Frank Stella
“Die Fahne Hoch!”
1959
Black Enamel on Canvas
American
a. “Up with the Flag!”
b. emerges with a show in 1959. There same time as Micheal Freid.
c. Has a show where he documents the process of making his pictures.
d. Uses anti-compositional techniques, specifically deductive stricture: makes a stretcher on which to put his canvas. If thickness of the wood is 2 ½ inches, and then chooses his brush the same width, and then he paints a stripe determined by the width of the brush. So the deductive structure determines the work. A
e. Uses industrial and non art paints,
f. Like Reinhardt, he is teaching us how to see. Approaching it in a prosaic way at beginning,
Carle Andre
“Equivalant VIII”
1966
Fire Bricks
American-Minimalist
Carl Morris
“Untitled (“L-Beams”)”
1965-6
Painted Plywood
American
Louise Bourgeois
“Destruction of the Father”
1974
Plaster, Latex, Wood, Fabric, Red Light
French-American
Lydia Benglis
“Untitled (detail)”
1974
Color Photograph
American
Eva Hesse
“Hang Up”
1966
Acrylic Paint on Cloth over Wood; Acrylic Paint on cord over Steel Tube
German-American?
Richard Serra
“One Ton Prop (House of Cards)”
1969
Lead Antimony, Four plates
American
