EXAM 2 Slide IDs Flashcards
Robert Smithson
“Spiral Jetty”
April 1970
Rock, Salt Crystals, Earth, Water
American
Michael Heizer
“Double Negative”
1969/70
Earth, Rock?
American
Heizer–trained as a sculptor.
Likes to work in remote places-deliberate, places for meditation, beauty.
ponder the smallness of human nature in contrast with the enormity of nature,
Sponsored by Robert Scull
Literally makes his art out of the western landscape, going further than Pollock or others who are said to have made allegorical works to reference the west. Doesn’t allude to big things, it IS a big thing.
A sculpture made from absence, rather than adding to something. Separated by a naturally occuring canyon.
the documents and photographs are important for understanding this work since most wont make it there.
Heizer wants it to weather naturally, for it to be reconsumed by nature. Wants no action taken for conservation. Like Smithson, interested in natural processes.
Land art critiques gallery spaces in some ways, but also has complex relationships with them. Dependent upon them for communicating the very existence of the pieces.
Richard Long
“A Line in Ireland”
1974
Rocks? Sculpture?
English
Land art in Britain is in contrast with that of US at the time. Lack the massive areas like the American west…UK land art tended to be on a more intimate, human scale.
Embraces the ephemoral, of the same lines of Andy Goldsworthy. primarily shown through photographs.
Think of the relationship between the documentation of an artwork that is ephemoral, vs the artwork itself.
direct opposite of Heizer
related to the human exertion, element of work as opposed to machinery.
THink of his work as a reinterpretation of the long history of British landscape artwork-usually painting.
displaces sedimentary rock that was lying on top…a reference to practice by hikers and ramblers–put a rock on top of others to signify made it to top of hill-cairn.
always uses natural materials.
some critiques that say it is about privilege
Gordon Matta Clark
“Splitting” Engelwood
1974
House (Photograph)
American
a. Fusion of site specific art and conceptual art.
b. Created sculptures that referenced architecture and made a name for himself.
c. He would find an abandoned building and intervene.
d. used industrial cutting machinery and cut it from top to bottom in the house.
e. His own word for this type of art making is: Anarchictecture
f. he had the permission to make this work, owned by his art builders.
Clark didn’t always have permission to do his works though, as in “Day’s End” 1975—abandoned building and he cuts a semicircular wedge. Creates new meaning through destruction at the end of the life of a functional thing. The cut is oriented at the west end of the building so that it is lit up at day’s end—namesake.
Hans Haacke
“The Schapolski Project”
1971
Photos with Data Sheets
German-American Artist
a. More conceptual in that it isn’t tied to a physical entity…photo tho.
b. Part of a series of documentary images he made to illuminate the practices of a corrupt slum owner—Schapolsky
c. Were scheduled to go up at the Guggenheim were supposed to go up with the photos and the addresses of the slum buildings. Also with the public records of sale and transaction showing his corruption.
i. Shapolsky was on the board or something at Guggenhiem though, so didn’t make it up, director said it wasn’t appropriate or something.
d. One of the buildings he photographed was that of the late Jacob Riis.
Hacke “Metromobilitan” 1985—complicated image—showing the conflict of elevating a culture while exploiting them for capital gain…
Students of John Baldessari
“I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”
1971
Conceptual–Performance/photograph
American
a. “King” of west coast conceptual art.
b. Art teacher as well as artist. Finds it kind of ridiculous—that you can teach someone how to be an artist.
c. Invited to go do a residency at Nova Scotia college of art and Design. He lives in CA tho, so he said he could do it remotely. He asks the students to write out the statement “I will not make any more boring art” and asks them to write it so that it covers the walls of the gallery at the college.
d. Parody of grade school punishment.
e. Also a commentary on teaching in art school.
f. Proposing as a way through conceptual art that it is more about the idea than the facture.
Baldessari “Wrong” 1967/1968—showing an idea of how not to do photography thorugh a photograph instead of teaching in class or smeothing. Using the medium to critique the medium.
“What this Painting Aims to Do” 1967
pretty much gives up on painting—says he will paint if it is necessary to do the job.
“Cremation Project” 1970—all his unsold painting from May 1953-1966 cremated.
Nam June Paik in performance at
“Zen for Head”
1962
Fluxus performance–ink and tomato on paper
??
b. based on the instructions: Draw a line and follow it.
George Maciunas: one of the founders of fluxus. SoHo, not a pleasant palce att. “Fluxus Manifesto” speaks in an anti-establishment tone. Calls for a revolutionary flood tide in art. Wanted to direct attention to life itself. Fluxkit. Strong, DIY element. Don’t need education to do flux performances. Anything can be a fluxus performance if you declare it to be.
Shigeko Kubota
“Vagina Painting”
1965
Performance
Japanese Artist
a. 4th july in NY city at the fluxus Festival.
b. Attached paintbrush to the back of her skirt and squatted to make painting with it.
c. Challenges some of the assumptions of abstract expressionism such as the masculine associations of the abstract artistic abilities.
Alison Knowles
“Shoes of Your Choice”
1963
Performance
American
b.Based on prompt—recruit a person from the audience and get them to talk about their shoes. And talk about shoes.
Carolee Schneemann
“Eye Body”
1963
Photography?
American
a. Also interested in this
b. Not trying to de-sexualize the body but reclaim it.
c. Turns her apartment into a studio where she makes this body of work.
d. Photographs, video.
e. “Fuses” the experience from a female viewpoint.
Schneeman—“Meat Joy” 1964 directed by her– men and women rolling around in meat and sticky substances
“Naked Action Lecture” 1968 Delivered an academic lecture on the works of Cezanne and hers while dressing and undressing.
Yoko Ono
“Cut Piece”
1965
Performance
Japanese artist
(Performed in Carnegie Hall, NY)
a. One of a group of Japanese independent artists in NY. Influenced by Gutai.
b. 1st performed in Tokyo in 1964, then in 1965 in Carnegie Hall.
c. Kneeled on stage in the traditional Japanese woman fashion and invited audience to come up and cut her clothing off one piece at a time.
d. Some have see it as part of a feminist movement of art that highlights and addresses violence against women.
Vito Acconci
“Trademarks”
1970
Photographic activity
American
a. Interested in male gender performance. Makes the male nude body the material and object of the work, which is unusual for the time.
b. Typicallyb triadic relationship: object, artist, canvas.
i. Then peple like Pollock, from triadic to Diadic relationship—cuts out the object.
c. Now Acconci—compresses the relationship further by using his own body. Monadic relationship
d. Marina Abramovic performs his Seedbed later on as a part of Seven Easy Pieces.
Chris Burden
“Transfixed”
1974
Performance
American
a. Nailed to a volkswagon bug.
b. Aggression to his works, masochistic but also disruptive and disturbing to the audience as well.
c. Acconci and Burden both doing their works at a time during the Vietnam war or in the wake of it, a time of vulnerability and anxiety.
Judy Chicago
“The Dinner Party”
1974-9
Mixed Media installation
American
An invitation for women to join history.One of the things that this work does is elevate the status of theses overlooked “crafts”Worked openly with lots of artist collaborators.
Mary Kelly
from “Post-Partum Document”
1978
Multi-Media piece
American
In the 70s, Kelly explored on of the least examined parts—the woman as mother and artist.Her work acknowledges the seriousness of birthing and raising children and the parallel seriousness of an occupation outside of the home.In Antepartum she uses her own body, heavily pregnant. Super 8 3 minute long video. Shown together with a close up of a woman’s hands working at an industrial lathe.Post Partum Document was an installation based on the record of her relationship with her young son over the course of 6 years…in the document she was having a discussion about how… 6 separate parts–She is looking at the more visible direct experience of women involved in labor…Through the objects that she displays, she documents her experiences during the raising of her child by using objects from the time. Transcripts of his first speech, some of his firstdrawings, the impression of his foot.Each part of the installation refers to key points in her son’s development of language abilities—speech and writing. Not documenting only the changes in him, but also the changes in her as a result.Conceptual.Shows a different portrayal of motherhood than we see in art usually—typically very sentimentalized. Kelly instead records the experiences through a language of science…language of analysis. Maternity is shown as a complex and difficult relationship.
Sherrie Levine
“untitiled, After Edward Westin I”
1980
Photograph
American
Appropriation—most basically means taking something. Taking something for one’s own personal use. Also questions the privileging of original art.
Levine made a career out of appropriation.
In this series she re-photographs photographs. She takes pictures reproduced gallery catalogues and prints them frames them, and exhibits them as her own works of art.
Now these belong to both artists.Her re photographing of well established aritsts in the canon-male- she was questioning the most hallowed elements of art—originality, intention…
Some differences due to processing etc, but nearly indistinguishable from the “original”
Post-modernist thing that photographs are not images of the world.
Idea that all art, photogrphs, paintings etc, are sululacrums, not representations of reality but a view or opinion on it.
Westin’s photo of his son also refers to something else, art history and Michelangelo’s David…referring to culture and not to nature even though it is of his son.
39 woman getting ready to present herself to the world. The mirror acts as a sort of witness to her, and reflects back the way that society looks at women and what is expected of her. Her pictures of her, but not of her, remind us that picutres are all fabrications.
Cindy Sherman
“Untitled Film Still #39”
1979
Photograph
American
Its always Sherman in the untitled film stills, but she creates a simulacrum that stands in for herself, it is always her but never looks like her. Look like there is something else bigger than this picture going on…imagine that there is something that happened before that left her in this scene or after. Stages them with all sorts of cultural references and clues so that we think that other things are going on. In film, the women were not the protagonists, they were involved in the scenes etc but they were catalysts. This is why in so many of her photos the women look like they are waiting
The Gaze-places power in the looking in the presumed male spectator. The theory of the gaze gives power in looking to the men and places women in the position of being looked at. This gives men power over the women—Mulvey. Regardless of your actual gender etc. you are put in the position of the heterosexual male viewer.
Her title of film stills sets it up like a picture from a movie, but there is no movie…
Think Pamela Anderson, not modeled by surgery after nature, but instead after Barbie…so we have culture modeled after culture. Detachment of signs or signifiers from the signified…end up with a world of images that can be combined and recombined without context or meaning…
No longer necessary that there was a referenced thing in reality…the copy comes first, not referring to anything.
Barbara Kruger
“We Won’t Play Nature To Your Culture”
1983
Photograph
American
While we look at her, she cannot look at us—object ness.An assertion that the feminist person wont be the object in media etc. In a world where the woman is something to be looked at and the woman is the passive entity. That women can be beautiful things in art, that woman are not the creators. Men associated with creating culture, women being the objects in the art. Kruger refutes that in this image.Even though so much of her work originated in magazines for their image source, she did not approve of the way it was done.Challenges unrealistic self ideals that society has established and exposes them.Simulacrum—(Simulacra is plural)—a copy or a facsimile. A standing representation of the original thing. A copy of something that we experience in the real world.Signifier—representation via culture of the signified. E.G. cat, kitty, etc.Signified- thing that we know in the real world.
i. Relationship between signifier and signified have to be close or it makes no sense.
ii. In post modern art the relationship between the signifier and signified has only a loose relationship—the signified has a loose relationship with its signifier.
iii. Kruger, by using copies, shows that relationships have become strained. You can never actually be who you think you are supposed to be—the media has shaped who you think you should…
iv. Kruger is a conceptual artist like Holzer. Protests the medias appropriation of the female.
v. Her work is easily recognized by her appropriation of black and white photography from ads etc.
vi. Was a head designer for Mandel ? magazine. Very in touch with the whole advertising thing.
vii. Takes her photos from existing sources and matches them with pithy and provoking texts.
viii. Her trademark black and white often re paired with the harsh red.
Jenny Holzer
“Truisms”
1977-9
Poster
American
Her first public work. Little sound bytes that play on clichés and …
When she first put these up they were put out anonymously.
The truisms are arranged alphabetically…total of 400 but this is just a selection.
They are all supposed to be provocative and instigate debate.
From the first form of the text, she put them on different things—light projections, t shirt, marble bench, bronze plaque.
LED sign is something she uses a lot too…her work goes beyond the gallery. Some of her most successful pieces have been some of her “guerilla’ works that are posted in places you wouldn’t expect to see.
Richard Prince
“Four Women Looking in the Same Direction”
1977-9
Photgraphs
American
Achieved some notoriety for his appropriation of images…looking to culture and media to billboards and advertising.
Prince culls his imagery from the high dollar advertising world…Re-photographed from magazine images, presumably from product advertisements.
Grouped together because they are all looking the same way.
He uses codified visual language and seriality to decipher advertisings messages of
Audrey Flack
Marilyn (Vanitas)
1977
Oil on ?Canvas?
American
Super realist or hyperrealist artistLarge scale painting.
She, like Estes, takes a photograph of what she wants to paint and projects it.Possible that color saturation is a side effect of her projection method of painting.
The image is of a woman’s dressing table. Referential objects to do with makeup and making one up. Photograph, think of the artist and her brother.
Showing Marilyn in her transition to Marilyn…pots of paint placed on her hair as curlers would be placed. Sheet from a calendar. Fruit.
Vanitas like, Memento Mori—reminder that all will pass away, decay and corrupt.
Blue and white Delft ware in the foreground, reference to dutch tradition. Setting up a relationship between her painting and 17th century Dutch vanitas.
Warning is against indulgent pleasures…
Gerhard Richter
“October 18, 1977: Confrontation I”
1988
Oil on Canvas
German born artist
Paints ina variety of styles and mediums, often to criticism.
Speak to an event in recetn German history—a result of his fascination with a 1970s german terrorist group RAF that had been active in Germany since the early 1970s—they opposed capitalist society.
Tried to draw attention to their beliefs by a series of bomb and terrorist attacks—theiri actiosn pursuit by the police, and their later group suicide inspired a lot of attention.
The date of the paintings refer to the date when the individuals were found dead in prison.
These paintings refer to a series of photographs that were taken in 1972 at Essen prison when she was arrested.
Cropped to the upper torso, enlarged to nearly life size.Confrontation yet with ambiguity.
When unveiled in 1989, they caused a stir due to the subject matter of the paintings.
In addition to official photographs from this incident, he collected a lot of photographs related to the RAF and put them in an album. He took the real photographs and put them into a blurred quality…
He immortalized them through the paintings and makes sure the events will be remembered, yet by blurring htem and enlarging them he troubles it.
Anselm Kiefer
“Occupations (Montpellier)”
1969
Eight Photographs on Cardboard
German
Neo-Expressionist?
Uses art to confront the troubled German Past.
Nachegeboren—late born. dealing with a cultural amnesia…directly following the war Germans would not talk about the Nazi past…he is born into this culture of denial of responsibility.
His stuff in this period refers toKiefer’s project is to not let Germany have a new start—not done dealing with WWII. In his works from the late 1960s he performs a number of actions and documents them photographically.
Doing Heil Hitler pose…making the gesture to shock Germans out of their amnesiac fog after the war. Saying you cannot forget.
Does the Heil gesture in front of the statue of Louis XIV…mirror gestures.People get angry because he is referencing not only WWII, but also the appropriated myths that the Nazis did.
Germans didn’t like thisAmericans received this differently.
Vergangenheitsbiwaltigung—coming to terms with the past.
The thing that troubles a lot of critics because he does not come out an overtly say that this was bad (Nazi stuff).Bois (Sp) was Kiefer’s mentor and suggested to him that painting might be healing for him. Kiefer became known for his high impasto paintings.
Paul Solan—Fugue of Death—Kiefer’s Margarathe and Sulamith were painted in response to this poem.
