Week 13 FINAL Flashcards
Untitled (Your body is a battleground)
Barbara Kruger
1989
photographic silkscreeen on vinyl
positive image one side, negative image other side, words super imposed atop.
Kruger created “Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)” to be used as a poster for the Women’s March on Washington, which supported a woman’s right to choose.
At first, this work seems to divide the reproductive health debate into two sides: those in support of a woman’s right to choose and those against it. The two halves of the image—the negative and the positive rendition—emphasize the twofold nature underlying this issue. However, the words “Your body is a battleground” represent how the fight for choice is different from other political battles. In the case of abortion, the campaign for a woman’s right to choose occurs outside of her body, yet directly affects her. The female body becomes a combat zone that women both struggle for and in.
Untitled film still #7
Cindy Sherman
1978
Sherman began making these pictures in 1977, when she was twenty-three. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blonde actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills—or perhaps like publicity pix—purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen (#3) and lounging in the bedroom (#6). On to something, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway (#7), the luscious librarian (#13, at left), the domesticated sex kitten (#14), the hot-blooded woman of the people (#35), the ice-cold sophisticate (#50), and others. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.
Untitled (Cowboy)
Richard Prince
1989
Ektacolor photograph
Richard Prince was part of the Pictures Generation of artists of the 1970s and 80s who ransacked the image banks of popular culture, redeploying mass-media imagery in politically subversive ways. Taking magazine advertising as his point of departure, Prince’s work both reflects and critiques American culture.
Prince’s use of advertising material was informed by a period of employment at the Time-Life Corporation, where he cut articles from popular magazines, leaving behind the advertisements. He began re-photographing these advertisements, cropping, refocusing and otherwise altering the images to suit his own purposes.
‘Untitled (cowboy)’, a politically charged image, is taken from a Marlboro advertisement. Stripped of its logo and branding paraphernalia, the image evokes a masculine ideal, harking back to a fantasy of pastoralist America life.
A line made by walking, England
Richard Long
1967
This formative piece was made on one of Long’s journeys to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Between hitchhiking lifts, he stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape.
Although this artwork underplays the artist’s corporeal presence, it anticipates a widespread interest in performative art practice. This piece demonstrates how Long had already found a visual language for his lifelong concerns with impermanence, motion and relativity.
Destroyed Room
Jeff Wall
1978
Relates more ot Crewdson. Transends the trap of photgrapher as days of Talbot and Dagueere as biulding represents itself and photography as reality. Photography as cinema. About workd but actually completely conceived conceptually
Archive
Thomas Demand
1995
Silver dye bleach print, face mounted to acrylic
All created by hand and then photographed. Elaborate sets. Photograph of archive, boxes, no scratches, seamless, compiling, storing, collecting, film archive, belonging to Nzi films documenting Nazi olympics, rallies, ect. Dealing with archival history.
Mimic
Jeff Wall 1982
Cibachrome transparency, fluorescent lights display case
Actors paid to reinact sceen that Jeff Wall had witnessed in Western canada whewer there was lots of Asian racism because of an influx of Asians to the area.
Bathroom
Thomas Demand
1997
c-print
Went to school of Bechers. Works like sculptor to create models tapletop, then photographs them and labels. Realize that placement and water do not loo that real from closeup but looks real from afar. Stern Magazine.
Chicago Board of Trade II
Andreas Gursky
1999
c print
Huge studio, many people working, huge format prints, some individuals added onto digitally. Landscapes that he chose incredibly colorful abstract, distant. comes from school of the Bechers, vission very differeent, about distance, conveys more context than Bechers. Always in color, wide immense landscape. Sublime being replaced with the sinister. Gurs,ky good interpreter of gloval architecture, landscape feeling out of place, we are little dots in that landscape, overwhelming. Subllime awe and terror before, more _____ in contemporary. Overwhelming beyond us.
99 Cent
Andreas Gursky
1999
c print
consumerism, seammlessness of 99 cent store, repetition, making you feel lost.
