Teoretikere

Question 1

The readymade and the tube of paint

Answer 1

Thiery De Duve (1996)

readymades become sculptures when recognized as art, black square becomes art when recognized as painting. Duchamp focuses on pure art. making is choosing.

Question 2

The Unhappy Consciousness

Answer 2

T.J. Clark (1999)

reception is intrinsic to Pollock. the bourgeois want an alternative to the mundane, exotic subconscious art. the technique is more elaborate than it looks, Pollock has control, he is a craftsman. he uses his technique to dissolve form. the vogue-shoot is a capitalistic nightmare, the bad dream modernism.

Question 3

Jackson Pollock`s Agency

Answer 3

Rosalind Krauss (1992)

Clark assumes Pollock wants to defy convention and cliche. these assumptions seem reception based. the formalist reading too simple. Pollock was obsessed with Picasso and won using subconscious.

Question 4

The Pollockian Performative

Answer 4

Amelia Jones (1998)

Namuths film shows performance. creation is performance, art is an act of discourse not product. the static pollock is modernist, the dynamic one postmodernist. Pollocks performance is subjective, the artist no prophet. Pollock is the origin of fluxus happenings.

Question 5

The Crux of Minimalism

Answer 5

Hal Foster (1996)

Minimalism opened a new field in art. it was no dead end, but a paradigm shift. Robert Morris cube mirrors reflect the room, the world and are not anthropomorphic like expressionist painting or site-less like modernist sculpture. observing it removes the viewer from the site of art, into the here and now. it is not a-priori like a cube is stable, but a posteriori discovery of unstable walls like Richard serras house of cards. minimalism is the death of the author and the birth of the viewer.

Question 6

No exit: Video and the Readymade

Answer 6

David Joselit (2007)

Nam June Paik identifies three ways to create oscillation.

duchamps readymade as object.
jasper johns readymade as action.
paiks readymade as network, scrambled data codes.
the coding rearranges meaning without changing the object.

Question 7

Post Cagean Aesthetics and the Event score

Answer 7

Liz Kotz (2007)

events were invented in 1960 from an expanded sense of music after John cages influential 4.33 (1953)
Brecht`s mailed texts were music, poetry, performance instructions. they are often seen as tools for action, but the readers attention shifts between the note and the proposed action. the notes are object language and performance. music is a phenomenon of time, and the work is composed by the audience.

Question 8

George Brech`s Events and the conceptual turn in the art of the 1960s.

Answer 8

Julia Robinson (2009)

pollock harnessed chance. duchamp demystified the artist subjective investment. Rauschenberg’s white paintings and John Cages 4.33. combined the two. the score is the liminal space of expectation between intention and realization. George Brech`s Three chair event combines readymade and score. the designation of the chairs is performance, perception is event.

Question 9

Andy Warhols one-dimensional art

Answer 9

Benjamin Buchloh (2001)

Warhol always embodied high and low culture. he was aware of the changing structures. the real triumph of mass culture over art is the fetishization of art in the late 20th century. Warhol personified the shift from dirt poor visionary artist to conformist business-artist. “business art is the step after art” Warhol realized originality was outdated. his commercial success relied on his ability to reduce any sign of the handmade. the sacredness of the artistic ritual still remained after the abstract expressionists. Warhol ruined the last of it with his do it yourselves. Warhols bright monochromes do almost the opposite as rauschenbergs. he leaves no room for reflection, his bright canvases impose themselves and include vulgar commercial details. he tantalized his buyers. he was a man of great cultural and artistic insight.

Question 10

saturday disasters: Trace and reference in early Warhol

Answer 10

Thomas Crow (1996)

Warhols Marilyn shows deep feeling. they were made right after her death. her face has a gold icon background. the other one shows her fading. there is distance between public mourning and that for those involved. even commodity can have a dark side, like in the tunafish disaster. Warhol pokes a hole in the fetish. the repetition is that of commodity but also of grim sameness within the illusion of individuality. Early Warhol was no mere conduit, he was attracted to open sores in American life.

Question 11

Getting the Warhol we deserve

Answer 11

Douglas Crimp (1999)

cultural studies is the best way to study Warhol.

Question 12

Joseph Beuys or the last of the Proletarians

Answer 12

Thiery de Duve (1988)

Beuys in Naples is Oedipus Rex and oedipus at colonnus. his duality is essential to his work. He is the bohemian proletarian. a constructed man of the future. the artist sells his individuality and humanity to the capitalist machinery. Creativity is to the cultural field what labor is to capitalism. human potential. all productive activity is art. beuys proposed economic model is naive, and he knows. Beuys empty oil drums are allegorical, they only gain value in the art market. the artist, human, creates and his creativity becomes fetishized. Beuys hopes for this to end one day. Beuys is hero, Warhol is star. beuys has hope, Warhol acceptance. for beuys art is production, for Warhol commodity. buys believed in creativity, warhol did not.

Question 13

The twilight of the idol

Answer 13

Benjamin Buhloh (1980)

beuys is populist. he is utopian. his followers blind. his story is fake, and an attempt to wash his hands of germanys war crimes. his anal fat chair is infantile. he misunderstands the readymade.

Question 14

Between showman and shaman

Answer 14

Donald Kuspit (1995)

critics see the devil of subjectivism in Beuys. Buchloh fails to see the necessity in buys story. it represents hope and vulnerability. Beuys engages the audience in mediated trauma as a healing exercise. he removes taboo, creating a lifeline. this enables empathy. he embodies the postmodern critique of the objective. symbolism is his tool. he is both showman and shaman.

Question 15

Earthwords

Answer 15

Craig Owens (1979)

smithsons essay a museum of language describes what happens when language occupies the center. evoking center is describing its loss. center can only occur within language. he describes decentering, the moment all became discourse. the jetty is always recentered. language is three-dimentional. allegory breaks up language, allows it to acquire new meaning. allegory is accumulation. writing is part of smithsons work, not supplement. allegory is the dissolution of boundaries between disciplines.

Question 16

Sculpture in the expanded field

Answer 16

Rosalind Krauss (1985)

sculpture was site specific. not-landscape not-architecture. expanding this creates more opportunities. site construction, sculpture, marked sites, axiomatic structures. postmodernism relates to cultural terms ans their limits. architecture and landscape in sculpture, uniqueness and reproducibility in painting.

Question 17

Entropy and the new monuments

Answer 17

Robert Smithson (1996)

achitecture in science fiction suggests new monumentality. time as decay is eliminated. commercial interiors brought to art a new consciousness of the vapid and dull. the real is impossible in a world of readymades. frank stellas paintings are crystal beams of a synthetic math. trange like Durhamps meters.

Question 18

painting negation, Gerhard richters negatives

Answer 18

Peter Osborne (1992)

the readymade rendered painting undecidable. Richter uses painting as a means to study photography as cultural representation. He mediates photography`s proximity and distance, past and presence. the paintings affirm photography. using paint to describe the victory of photography shows that painting is still possible to use as a means of representation, a way to show it isn’t completely dead. they are left at a stalemate. he does not manage to create a new ground for painting, just a strand of hope. negation need not be the end.

Question 19

The Richter scale of blur

Answer 19

Gertrud Koch (1992)

you do not see less by looking at a field out of focus through a magnifying glass. the extension of the object remains the same under changing conditions of perception. indifferent empirical evidence can produce different notions. changing mountains makes fun of the notion of the omnipotent artist. photography is equally subjective as painting. photography can ruin aura through cheap seriality. in 48 portraits the faces loose meaning. in atlas porn and concentration camps diminish echoers connotations. history decomposes meaning, and our reading of images is dependent on understanding context.

Question 20

Pictures

Answer 20

Douglas Crimp 1979

pictures was the name of an exhibit breaking boundaries of media. temporality cannot be unseen. in Jump temporality is expressed through expectation. in the film stills there is an expectation of a fake before and after. we fetishize the image, we desire its nonexistent story. good postmodernism has layers like strata.

Question 21

Cindy Sherman

Answer 21

Rosalind Krauss (1993)

Sherman produces myth. myth is signs drained of history, creating seeming universality. under the hood are the signifiers. tiny alterations create different associations. we want to believe the created femininities. Shermans voyerist images are very different from each other and produce different meanings through angle, light blur. the centerfolds are horizontal. modernism prefers verticality, horizontality is desublimating. in freud fetish develops from genitals to whole figures, to art. her history portraits are framed comfortably using fabric and surroundings. the body parts are removable, to be looked behind to find “truth behind the painting” yet we see them as fake. constructions. behind them is a body. Sherman takes us back to verticality to discredit the sublime in art.

Question 22

a phantasmagoria of the female body

Answer 22

Laura Mulvey (1991)

Shermans work from the 70s-late 80s seems to follow a narrative of the feminine. She dissects the phantasmagoria of the female body. the first images are dressed up in heels and makeup. the photographs reveal the masquerade. knowing the images are Sherman impresses the viewer but also takes away some of the believability. the horisontal soft core pastiche are intimate and private the glossy, erect light effect contrasts with the limpness of the bodies. in the final stage they are dissolved., the truth behind the female form is revealed. castration anxiety makes men construct an image of a whole woman. yet the anxiety of castration lies beyond. woman is always dual. the oscillation is important to postmodernism. the last images are the collapse of the fetish.