Exam 3

Question 1

Answer 1

Marina Abramovic, Imponderabilia (1977)

Performance Artist

Question 2

Answer 2

Alfredo Jaar, Lament of Images (2002)

Question 3

Answer 3

Alice Neel, Andy Warhol (1970)

Question 4

Answer 4

Allan McCollum, Drawings. (1988-1990)

Question 5

Answer 5

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Body Is A Battleground) (1989)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 6

Answer 6

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Twelve Water-towers (1978-85)

Post Modernist Artists

Question 7

Answer 7

Daniel Buren, Within and Beyond the Frame (1973)

Institutional Critique Artist

Question 8

Answer 8

Chris Burden, Shoot (1971)

Performance Artist

Question 9

Answer 9

Christo and Jean-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag (1979)

Site-Specific Art

Question 10

Answer 10

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #34 (1979)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 11

Answer 11

Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni Estate (1993-5)

Question 12

Answer 12

Dan Graham, Homes for America (pub. in Arts Magazine 1966-7)

Question 13

Answer 13

David Hammons, Injustice Case (1970)

Performance Artist

Question 14

Answer 14

David Hammons, Public Enemy (1991)

Performance Artist

Question 15

Answer 15

Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966)

Question 16

Answer 16

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (1991)

Question 17

Answer 17

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Portrait of Ross) (1991)

Question 18

Answer 18

Gabriel Orozco, Island Within an Island (Isla en la Isla) (1993)

Site-Specific Artist

Question 19

Answer 19

Gerhard Richter, Shot Down (1) (1998)

Question 20

Answer 20

Gordon Matta-Clark, Bronx Floors, Floor Above Ceiling Below (1973)

Site-Specific Artist

Question 21

Answer 21

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (1974)

Site-Specific Artist

Question 22

Answer 22

Gregory Crewdson, Ophelia (2001)

Question 23

Answer 23

Gursky, 99 Cent (1999)

Question 24

Answer 24

Hans Haacke, MoMa Poll (1970)

Institutional Critique Artist

Question 25

Answer 25

Jean Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans (1983)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 26

Answer 26

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Charles the First (1982)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 27

Answer 27

Jeff Koons, Rabbit (1986)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 28

Answer 28

Jeff Koons, Pink Panther (1988)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 29

Answer 29

Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk A Vision (1992)

Question 30

Answer 30

Jeff Wall, Outburst (1989)

Question 31

Answer 31

Jeff Wall, The Destroyed Room (1978)

Question 32

Answer 32

Jenny Holzer, Truisms (1982)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 33

Answer 33

Julian Schnabel, Exile (1980)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 34

Answer 34

Kara Walker, Exhibtion at the Whitney (2009)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 35

Answer 35

Keith Haring in NYC Subway (1980-3)

Post Modernist Artist

Question 36

Answer 36

Kiefer, Your Golden Hair Margarete (1981)

Question 37

Answer 37

Leon Golub, White Squad I (1982)

Question 38

Answer 38

Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Moden Art, Department of Eagles (1968)

Question 39

Answer 39

Mariko Mori. Play With Me. (1994)

Question 40

Answer 40

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 10 (1973)

Performance Artist

Question 41

Answer 41

Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home Vacation Getaway (1967-72)

Post Modernist Art

Question 42

Answer 42

Matthew Barney, Cremaster 4 (1994-5)

Post Modernist Artist, Film and Video

Question 43

Answer 43

Maurizio Cattelan. Novencento (Nineteenth Century) (1997)

Institutional Critique Artist

Question 44

Answer 44

Paul McCarthy, Hot Dog (1974)

Performance Artist

Question 45

Answer 45

Michael Heizer, Dissipate from Nine Nevada Depressions (1968)

Site Specific Artist

Question 46

Answer 46

Nam June Paik, Magnet TV (1965)

Fluxus Artist

Question 47

Answer 47

Richard Long, A Line in Scotland (1981)

Question 48

Answer 48

Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboys) (1993)

Question 49

Answer 49

Richard Serra, making Splashing (1969)

Question 50

Answer 50

Richard Serra, Splashing (1968)

Question 51

Answer 51

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc (1981)

Question 52

Answer 52

Rikrit Tiravanija, Untitled (Free) (1992)

Question 53

Answer 53

Robert Smithson, Gypsum Non-site, Benton, CA (1968)

Question 54

Answer 54

Robert Smithson, Sprial Jetty (1970)

Question 55

Answer 55

Stelarc, The Third Hand (1981)

Question 56

Answer 56

Struth, Art Institute of Chicago, 2 (1990)

Question 57

Answer 57

Tony Oursler, Getaway #2 (1994)

Question 58

Answer 58

Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1969)

Question 59

Answer 59

Vito Acconci, Trademarks (1970)

Question 60

Answer 60

Yasumasa Morimura, Portrait (Twins) (1988)

Question 61

Relational Aesthetics

Answer 61

The French curator Nicholas Bourriaud published Relational Aesthetics in 1998 (published in English in 2002). He defines the term as meaning “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” He saw artists as facilitators rather than makers and regarded art as an open-ended exchange of information between the artist and the viewers. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world. Relational art, for example works by Rikrit Tiravanija or Felix Gonzalez-Torres, is based on interactivity; it seeks to establish intersubjective (shared, collective), encounters. In short, relational art in Bourriaud’s eyes, is a means to creating a community, even a provisional one. He frames this type of work in terms of creating a potentially improved ethical and political model of society.

Question 62

Institutional Critique

Answer 62

The act of critiquing an institution as artistic practice, the institution usually being a museum or an art gallery. Institutional criticism began in the late 1960s when artists began to create art in response to the institutions that bought and exhibited their work. In the 1960s the art institution was often perceived as a place of “cultural confinement” and thus something to attack aesthetically, politically and theoretically. In his essay “Conceptual Art 1962 -1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” Benjamin Buchloh focuses on conceptual art as a direct attack on the power that museums, galleries, critics, and curators have in the creation and reception of a work of art. Early conceptualism’s dematerialization of the art object, Buchloh argued, relied on the institutions of art to render it legible as art, while the emerging strategies of institutional critique revealed and called this reliance–symptomatic of the compromised nature of the art object in advanced capitalism–into question.

Question 63

Entropy

Answer 63

A term borrowed from physics that describes the irreversible dissolution of any closed system wherein the system loses energy and becomes increasingly disordered. As a concept meaning the general process of material disintegration, entropy has since been used in other fields, drawing on the interests of writers such as Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi-Strauss (anthropology). Fascinated by the strength and inevitability of entropy and decay in any process, Robert Smithson inverted this view into a positive force that performed in itself a kind of critique of humankind and its pretenses as the only universal condition of all things and beings. He was drawn to sites, industrial areas and urban sprawl, which he often referred to as “ruins in reverse.” In 1966 he published an essay entitled “Entropy and the New Monuments.”

Question 64

Kitsch

Answer 64

A term used to describe object and images that became ubiquitous with the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. Kitsch appeals to a common (often referred to disparagingly as “low”) cultural sensibility in that mass-produced objects and images repackage and resell culture by emptying it of any critical dimension. So there is a symbiotic relation between kitsch and art. In his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), Clement Greenberg named kitsch the natural enemy of the avant-garde art. Kitsch is thus the witless embrace of cliché as a defense against the weight of human estrangement in late capitalist, consumerist society.

Question 65

Phenomenology

Answer 65

Philosophical movement founded in the early 20th Century by Edmund Husserl, then expounded upon by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Translations of this work were made available in the 1960s, and produced a collective mediation on the relation between perception and knowledge. Close attention is paid to how we, as embodied viewers, use vision determine the meaning of objects. Within Minimalism, phenomenology becomes a defining concept in which the work is a pretext for a bodily or performative encounter, and the object foregrounds the bodily and psychological mechanisms of perception.

Question 66

Simulacra/Simulacrum

Answer 66

: A term from ancient philosophy, particularly Plato, that defines a representation that is not necessarily tied to an object in the world. As a copy without an original, a simulacrum is often used in cultural criticism to describe the status of the image in our society of spectacle: mass-media, consumerism, commodity consumption, leisure and images. In the history of art, this concept can be seen in the work of Magritte and Andy Warhol where we see images that, even as they appear to be representations, dissolve the truth-claims of representation. Much postmodern art (Richard Price, Cindy Sherman, etc.) plays with and on the concept of the simulacrum. Key texts: Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle (1967) and Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981).

Question 67

Performance Art

Answer 67

: Beginning in the mid-1960s there was a turn to performance art. This was a consequence of the idea of action painting (Pollock as performing on and around the canvas), but it was also used as an antidote to the intellectual propositions of early Conceptual Art. Performance art in the late 1960s and 1970s dealt with experience and perception in real time and space, often using autobiographical material and the artist’s body. The artist’s body is both the subject and the object of the work. Key: the artist’s identity and persona is central here. Three models help us organize much of the performance work in the mid-1960s through 1970s:

performance as action, performance as task, and performance as ritual. Note the three models of performance work in the 1960s and 1970s we identified.

Robert Morris, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Judy Chicago, Adrian Piper
David Hammons

Question 68

Body Art

Answer 68

Term used to describe art in which the body, often that of the artist is the principal medium and focus. It covers a wide range of art from about 1960 on, encompassing a variety of different approaches. It includes much of Performance art, where the artist is directly concerned with the body in the form of improvised or choreographed actions, happenings, and staged events. However, the term body art is also used for explorations of the body in a variety of other media including painting, photography, and film. Body art has frequently been concerned with issues of gender and identity. A major theme has been the relationship of body and mind, explored in work consisting of feats of physical endurance designed to test the limits of the body and the ability of the mind to suffer pain. Body art has often highlighted the abject, focusing on bodily substances or the theme of nourishment. It has also highlighted contrasts such as those between clothed and nude, internal and external, parts of the body and the whole. In some work, the body is seen as the vehicle for language. In 1998 the art historian Amelia Jones published a survey titled Body Art. Consider Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974-5), Vito Acconci’s Trademarks (1970), or even Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista.

Question 69

Site-Specificity

Answer 69

One outcome of both Minimalism and Conceptual Art: art that defines itself in its precise interaction with a particular site. Refers to works of art designed specifically for a particular location and that have an interrelationship with the location; if removed from the location it would lose all or a substantial part of its meaning. How the site is conceived, however, is variable. It could be a gallery space, the corner of a room, a city square, a desert, an idea, etc. In the end, it is art that challenges the traditional frame of the gallery/museum. Consider Richard Serra’s Splashing (1968) to see how site-specific work stems from Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Earth Art in the 1970s (Smithson, Heizer, Turrell) takes on certain characteristics in the American context that we do not see in the work of Richard Long or other European artists dealing with nature and experience as the site. Another key element in postmodernism.

Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Andy Goldsworthy
Gabriel Orozco

Question 70

Post Modernism

Answer 70

An attempt to address the relation between postwar society and representation (e.g., art) that produces our visual culture. It arises after the conceits and failures of Modernism, including a certain conception of history and identity, had been exposed. Much postmodern thought argues that ideas and concepts (including one’s own identity) are not given (defined completely and in advance), but are social and cultural constructs, that is, contingent on other ideas, people, contexts, etc. This thought is inherently political because if things are not simply given (there is not simply a way things are), then change is possible. Representation and understanding have a relation to power and ideology; representation and power are mutually dependent. Key text in defining postmodernism is Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1984)

• He argues that postmodernity is the next, critical phase of Modernism; it critiques the claims of Modernism. Postmodernism challenges Modernist ideals of originality, progress, essence, and rationality.
• Disintegration of “metanarratives” (grand, rationales about the human condition improving, even perfecting itself, through progress, science, technology, history (destiny), etc.). These “metanarratives,” which defined Modernism, he argues, are replaced not by unifying ideas, but rather by a complex of “little stories” or minor points of view that never add up to the whole.
• In art, postmodernism is a rejection of the themes, subjects, and methodologies of Modern art (abstraction, universality, etc.).

In contemporary art, postmodernism is also referred to as anti-aesthetics, that is, the substitution of originality, uniqueness, and universal expressivity for the possibility of a socio-cultural political critique. Postmodern art that poses a political critique does so by rejecting the ideals of beauty, uniqueness, etc. Walter Benjamin’s work plays a key role in the conception of anti-aesthetics by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, and others.

General characteristics of postmodernism include an attention/commitment to multiculturalism; attention to the particular (not universalism); copies without an original (simulacra); how identity is constituted through language; meaning is not fixed, but indeterminate, in flux.

Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman
Matthew Barney

Question 71

Abjection

Answer 71

A concept developed from psychoanalysis (desublimation) and in part from Georges Bataille idea of the informe (formless) by the philosopher Julia Kristeva in her text Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980). It is the psychic process of abjection that Kristeva believes safeguards the self from a descent into psychosis. To begin, the abject consists of those elements, particularly of the body, that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety. Kristeva herself commented that “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.” Abjection is an aspect of the semiotic (signs, the production of meaning) that functions close to the psychological drives (sex, death, desires). In practice the abject covers all the bodily functions, or aspects of the body, that are deemed impure or inappropriate for public display or discussion. This concept has been central to contemporary art discourse, especially in the 1990s in relation to art practice (sculpture, installation, and photography) and feminist critical readings. In 1993 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York staged an exhibition titled Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. It also enters the discourse on performance art. See the work of Paul McCarthy, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, Carolee Schneemann, Louise Bourgeois, and others.

• The self abjects that which threatens its sense of secure boundaries. Blood, shit, death.
• That which is abject refuses to be positioned; it is always “in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Powers of Horror 4).

Question 72

Spectacle

Answer 72

A concept best defined by Guy Debord in his text The Society of Spectacle (1967). He used it to address a new stage of advanced capitalism in the postwar period in which consumption, leisure, and the image (simulacrum) become indissolubly linked and determinative of society and culture. Spectacle exposes new forms of power (media, etc.), but also new possibilities for artistic strategies of subversion.

Question 73

Appropriation Art

Answer 73

A term referring to the more or less taking and representing of a real object or a preexisting work of art into another artwork. This practice has precedents in synthetic cubism, Duchamp’s readymade strategy, and Surrealist found objects. In the late 1950s appropriated images and objects appear extensively in the work of Johns and Rauschenberg, Pop art as well as in Assemblage art practices. However, with the advent of postmodernism, appropriation practices became a primary means to challenge the ideas and myths of Modernism. Consider the work of Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, and others. The aim of this form of practice being to create a new situation, and therefore a new meaning or set of meanings, for a familiar image. Appropriation art raises questions of originality, authenticity and authorship. Appropriation artists were influenced by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” A key art historical text is Rosalind Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985).

Question 74

Düsseldorf School of Photography

Answer 74

Refers to contemporary photographers who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Bernd and Hilla Becher. Bernd Becher was appointed to a professorship at the Kunstakademie in 1976. It was then that he began his legendary photography program. Between 1976 and 1987 their students included what were to become some of the most prominent and important contemporary photographers today, including Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, and others.

Question 75

Tableaux Photographs

Answer 75

The “tableau form” refers to contemporary photographic projects that share a large scale, use of color, made through a “directorial mode” (photographer as director of near-cinematographic scenes), and a relation to the viewer (an immersive experience often heightened by backlighting these Cibachrome prints. This term is used to characterize work by Jeff Wall, Luc Delahaye, Andreas Gursky, Jean-Marc Bustamente, Gregory Crewdson, and others. Photographers shifted to the tableau form in the 1970s. It was first identified and addressed in Jean-François Chevrier’s “The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography” (1989). As Bustamante has said, “I wanted not to make photographs that would be art, but art that would be photography. I refused the small format and the craft aspect of black and white. I wanted to move into color, in a format for the wall, in order to give photography the dimensions of a tableau, to transform it into a object.” For many, the tableau form reasserts aesthetics into the discourse of contemporary photography.

Question 76

Jeff Wall

Answer 76

(b. 1961): One of the most acclaimed and influential artists of his generation. The Vancouver-based photographer initially studied art history, grounding much of his photographic practice in the discipline. Wall frequently refers to Charles Baudelaire’s phrase “the painting of modern life” in discussions of his own. His first major work was The Destroyed Room (1978), a work that exhibits many of the characteristics that have become synonymous with Wall: a staged hyperrealism, tableau format (photographic transparencies mounted in an aluminum light box), print size (on average his prints are 6 ft. x 8 ft.), and the use of analogue and digital processes (Wall scans his film and then creates a digital montage of it). He called The Destroyed Room “cinematographic,” and it certainly has the qualities of the directorial mode. The hyperrealism in Wall’s work steps beyond the limitations of the snapshot aesthetic that dominated art photography in the 1950s-1970s. As such Wall’s practice, which includes his own scholarship on Conceptual art and photography, instigated a return to aesthetics in the discourse of photography. See, for example, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993). In 2007, Wall was given a solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.