Final Exam v2

Question 1

Suprematism

Answer 1

Art Movement
Early 20th century
focused on the fundamentals of geometry, painted in a limited range of colors.
Understood as a form of “painterly realism”. New visual language for a new society.
Example: Black square, painting by Malevich in 1915.

Question 2

Faktura

Answer 2

Style used in Constructivism
Began in 1910s
Meaning texture. Refers to the ways in which a work of art is made, its materiality. Form follows materials.
Example: Vladimir Tatlin, Selection of Materials: Iron, Stucco, Glass, Asphalt, 1915.

Question 3

Tectonics

Answer 3

Style used in Constructivism
Began in 1910s
The integration of structure and construction, the application of technical aspects, and the attention to detail in a systematic way. Use of industrial materials.
Monument to the 3rd international by Vladimir Tatlin.

Question 3

Surrealism

Answer 3

Cultural Movement
post WW1
artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself.
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas, 24 x 33 cm.

Question 3

Constructivism

Answer 3

Early 20th century art movement
constructivist art aimed to reflect modern industrial society and urban space. The movement rejected decorative stylization in favour of the industrial assemblage of materials.
The Constructivist Group (1921) aimed to join the principles of Faktura and Tectonics: realigning the avant-garde (and its autonomous tendencies) with the productive demands of socialism (communist ideology).
Example: Vladimir Tatlin, Selection of Materials: Iron, Stucco, Glass, Asphalt, 1915

Question 3

Dream-work (displacement + condensation)

Answer 3

Concept imagined by Freud
Post WW1
Freud suggested that dreams contained ‘messages’ from the unconscious. These are ‘coded’ through displacement and condensation (elements put together in unlikely scenarios)
Salvador Dali utilized this concept when developing his surrealist art practice.

Question 4

Psychic Automatism

Answer 4

Concept
post WW1
Dictated by thought, with no control using reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Automatic drawing and other automatic procedures used the concept of ‘chance’ to reveal the unconscious.
André Masson, Furious Suns, 1925. Ink on paper, 42.2 x 31.8 cm

Question 5

Dreamscape

Answer 5

Style of surrealist art
Post WW1
aimed to represent elements, narratives and signs from dreams, mimicking the logic of dream-work as theorized by Freud. a dreamlike usually surrealistic scene.
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas, 24 x 33 cm.

Question 6

Paranoic Critical Method (Dali)

Answer 6

surrealist technique
1930s
Strategic use of juxtaposition to generate a sense of delirium. Use of the logic of dream-work: displacement, Methods of psychoanalysis: free association, Mimicking a state of paranoia, and Aesthetically.
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas, 24 x 33 cm.

Question 7

Surrealist Object

Answer 7

Medium
1930s
The surrealist object is an everyday object made strange. It is usually modified to enhance its mysterious qualities and generate a charged narrative.
Meret Oppenheim, Object (Luncheon in Fur), 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon.

Question 8

Objective Chance

Answer 8

Concept
1930s
the intersection or crossing -point between subjective desire (originating in the psyche) and an objective manifestation (from the real of the real world and its events).
Man Ray, Slipper Spoon (for André Breton’s L’Amour Fou), 1934. An imagined idea that was found in the real world.

Question 9

Doubling

Answer 9

surrealist technique
1930s
doubling is used to generate meaning through repetition.
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939. Oil on canvas, 68 x 68 cm.
The ‘double’ is used to suggest a crisis of identity and the struggle to reconcile Western societal norms and Mexican indigenous heritage.

Question 10

Harlem Renaissance

Answer 10

Art movement
Post WW2
Writers and thinkers of the ‘New Negro Movement’ challenged the racist narratives and stereotypes that had dominated the representation of African-Americans. These authors sought to create a new Black identity. They celebrated African roots/heritage.
Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers, 1934. Oil on canvas, 9 x 9’.

Question 11

The Great Migration

Answer 11

Movement
WW1-WW2
Over 2 million Black Americans migrated to cities in the Northeast and Midwest (New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland…) + subsequent waves of migration from 1910 to 1970.
Mass African-American urbanization and formation of new urban Black communities and neighborhoods (Harlem) + Emergence of an African-American middle-class
Photograph of African American family from the rural South arriving in
Chicago, 1920. The New York Public Library

Question 12

Negritude

Answer 12

Anti-colonial cultural and political movement
created by a group of African and Caribbeans students in Paris in the 1930s.
It was influenced by a range of styles and art movements including surrealism and the Harlem Renaissance.
Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, 1943. Oil on canvas, 239 x 229 cm. He went to Europe to escape his homeland but instead discovered his own appropriated culture. He made this work with both his own and the West influences.

Question 13

Creolisation

Answer 13

Concept originated in the Caribbean
1930s
Refers to the hybrid culture produced by the mixing of peoples with different heritages. The term comes from “créole”, a term used in French to describe people born in the Americas as opposed to those who were African-born.
Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, 1943. Oil on canvas, 239 x 229 cm Visual hybridity

Question 14

Muralismo

Answer 14

State sponsored, ideologically driven modern art movement.
Post Mexican revolution.
Government figure conceived a collaboration between the government and artists: muralismo. This became a movement that interrogated the postrevolutionary condition
Diego Rivera, From the Conquest to 1930, History of Mexico murals

Question 15

Indigenismo

Answer 15

Movement in Mexico
1930s
Refusal of easel painting (elitist) and bourgeois individualism. Mural painting as monumental public art for the masses. Celebration of Indigenous identity as a fundamental aspect of Mexican identity. Called for an alliances between indigenous peoples and proletariat/rural workers: Marxist ideology
David Alfaro Siqueiros, The Revolution, Mural

Question 16

Anthropophagy (Manifesto)

Answer 16

Manifesto/Movement
Written in 1928
argued that Brazil’s history of cannibalizing other cultures was its greatest strength and had been the nation’s way of asserting independence over European colonial culture
Oswald de Andrade

Question 17

L’informe/Formless (Bataille

Answer 17

Concept
1930s
Removing meaning (classist) from art. L’informe “declassified” things, by bringing the “high” and the “low” into contact and dissolving their boundaries.
Examples of formless elements: trash, fluff, foam, mud, dirt, a heap of something, fat…
Jean Fautrier, Hostage Head

Question 18

Potlatch Ban

Answer 18

Section 149 of the Indian Act
1885-1951
Any Indian or other person who encourages, either directly or indirectly an Indian or Indians to get up such a festival or dance, or to celebrate the same, or who shall assist in the celebration of the same is guilty of a like offense, and shall be liable to the same punishment.”
A collection of dance masks, Alert Bay, BC. Seized by Indian Agent William Halliday

Question 19

Art Informel + Tachisme

Answer 19

Style of Abstract painting in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.
characterized by highly gestural and textural techniques: including dripping, pouring and splattering.
Jean Fautrier, Hostage Head
Tachisme: From the French word “Tache” or stain/blot. A branch of Art Informel. Emphasis on splatter techniques and abstraction.

Question 20

Medium Specificity

Answer 20

Concept by Greenberg
1930s
The unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. Thus would each art be rendered ‘pure,’ and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.
Jackson Pollock, No. 1A, 1948

Question 21

Opticality (Greenberg)

Answer 21

Concept
1930s
The first mark made on a canvas destroys its literal and utter flatness. Only now it is a strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension. The illusion can only be seen into by the modernist painter with the eye.
Jackson Pollock 1A

Question 22

Action Painting (Rosenberg)

Answer 22

Style
1950s
style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied.
Canvas acts as an arena in which to act— rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
Jackson Pollock 1A

Question 23

Indigenous Resistance/Resurgence

Answer 23

Movement
1950s-1960s
Renaissance or resurgence of Northwest Coast Indigenous art refers to a moment of widespread recognition of indigenous art, as art.
Expressed through a shift in terminology, the organization of exhibitions in art galleries and museums, and the rise in market value of Indigenous art. Artists adopted new mediums and art forms. Used traditional elements such as formline.
Bill Reid, Dog Fish, 1972. Silkscreen print, 65 x 50 cm

Question 24

Formline

Answer 24

Style
the unique visual language found in Northwest indigenous art (northern region).
Describes the characteristic use of a main line to outline the body or contours of the figure. Different parts of the subject such as the head, joints and other body parts are defined by the formline. The primary formline is usually black in color, with secondary formline elements in red.
Bill Reid, Dog Fish, 1972. Silkscreen print, 65 x 50 cm.