AH Final

Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine are two of the photographers closely identified with what Douglas Crimp called the "photographic activity of postmodernism." The basis of their activity as artists was:

appropriation

Among the key characteristics of Conceptual art are:

visual indifference and the prominence of text

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #6, 1977(Hopkins, fig. 101)

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills is a suite of seventy black-and-white photographs in which the artist posed in the guises of various generic female film characters, among them, ingénue, working girl, vamp, and lonely housewife. Staged to resemble scenes from 1950s and '60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films, the printed images mimic in format, scale, and quality the often-staged "stills" used to promote films. By photographing herself in such roles, Sherman inserts herself into a dialogue about stereotypical portrayals of women. Whether she was the one to release the camera's shutter or not, she is considered the author of the photographs. However, the works in Untitled Film Stills are not considered self-portraits.

Andreas Gursky, Grand Hyatt Hotel, 2000chromogenic color print (C-print), 9' 2" x 6' 7"

Critical opinion of Andreas Gursky's photographs is that they are some of the best representations of global capitalism. They are large format images focusing on signs and emblematic spaces of contemporaneity: huge industrial plants, apartment buildings, luxury hotels, the offices of international banks and stock exchanges or warehouses filled with goods. His urban and architectural landscapes testify to a modern world transformed by industry and high-tech, international trade, the globalisation of information and population displacement.

Daniel Buren, Affichages Sauvages [Wild Signboards] (Photo-souvenir: Hommes/Sandwichs - Affichages Sauvages [Wild Signboards]), Paris, April 1968

Daniel Buren's Affichages Sauvages (savage/wild posterings) is a series of temporary works created by the artist in Paris 1968 and 1969. Buren produced printed sheets of paper bearing his signature 8.7cm-wide stripes. He then posted them in public places, often over existing billboards or other fly-posted advertisements, or on public buildings.Here Buren acted without the permission of the authorities, challenging the limits of creative freedom and freedom of expression. His techniques reformulated the city as an endless canvas and exhibition space, indicating his detachment from the traditional art system and market, and challenging the institutional conventions for the 'proper' viewing and appreciating of abstract art. Buren's minimalist vandalism of advertisements (pasting stripes over entire billboards) demonstrated a particular desire to shift the way that people engage with the city environment; making people aware of the bombardment of images in public in the service of consumerism, and literally disabling this capitalist relation. Buren himself was involved in the 1968 student protests at the time of making these 'wild posters' and the piece shares tactics of détournement commonly used by protestors -turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself.The image used to represent this work is what Buren called a "photo-souvenir", something that documented his work in situ, which is the only place in which he believes it has an existence. He insists that the photograph is not the work of art, but only a "souvenir" of the original work, now lost. Taking abstract and conceptual work into the public realm using the DIY technologies of fly posters and advertisements remains an important, original, and highly influential practice, which can be seen in artists such as Jenny Holzer's posters a decade later.

El Anatsui, Fresh and Fading Memories I-IV, 2007 Aluminum and copper wire, 354 x 236 in. Venice Biennial, Palazzo Fortuny

Found materials, aluminium bottle-tops, are transformed into sumptuous surfaces, fabrics with color form and texture. The banal and everyday materials of consumerism and consumption, so readily discarded and forgotten, are re-imagined as extraordinarily beautiful and sensate objects. He was born in Ghana in 1944, and re-located to Nigeria in 1975. In 2011 he retired and now lives and works between Ghana and Nigeria. Whatever the genre, or mix of genres, in which they work, each [artist] is alert to the complexities of life in changing times not just locally but globally'. [6] He continues: 'It is this that decides the "authenticity" of the work, not an external judgement as to whether it appears to embody an essentially "African" spirit or to be made from distinctively African materials'. [7]. Anatsui comments: 'The world is beginning to realize that artists are just artists; not "European artists", not "African", nor "American". Art is not the preserve of any one particular people; it's something that happens around the whole world. Standing in close proximity to the wall hangings, the artist's source of the aluminium branded bottle tops are visible, meticulously flattened out, and organised into different colors, shapes, widths and lengths which come together to form the richly textured and colored surfaces we observe from a distance.

Kara Walker, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994 paper and adhesive, 13 x 50 ft

From the left, the narrative begins with two members of the white upper class, as the woman wears an ornate dress and the man courting her carries a sheathed sword, placing the power in the man's hands. This theme of sexuality Behind them, a young (likely African American) boy with devil horns crouches next to the banks of a river, holding a dead duck. The devil horns brings about the 19th century stereotype of young black boys being mischievous and devil-like. Next to him, a black woman sits in a boat, reprimanding the 'untamable' boy. On an overlooking hill, a rich young white boy is having oral sex performed on him by a young black girl. This continues the theme of sexuality used as a means of displaying power. Above them, a starving young black boy is taken away by Death. This is another commentary on the faults of Civil War-era society. Below them, a black woman drops babies from under her skirt to fall onto the ground and die, commenting on the stereotype of African Americans not being able to raise their children in an oppressive white society. Finally, on the right, a white slave owner throws a slave onto the ground, illustrating the way different races were mistreated

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (Free), 1992

I was in a gallery he decided to convert that gallery into a lounge area where he cooked and served rice and curry a simple gesture but something is very unknown in an in an argument situation so what free did was literally free people to interact with contemporary Art more sociable way you're not participating in a performance that will be documented sometime in the future as art are you are the art and you were making the art in real time as you eat the curry and talk to you in reference to work as a platform for people to interact with the work itself each other a lot of it is also about the kind of experiential relationship so you between the artist and the art and the audience gets a bit blurred we are sitting in a scale model of the gallery where a free first was prepared visitors come to the space and they're served a bowl of curry with rice conceptual artist is interested in a kind of art it's not necessarily just made but something that can be apprehended as art because of the context he takes him as a rule Marcel Deschamps notion that I got a work of art is a work of art of the artist as it is is the museum it becomes a work of art because the artist by putting it here has asked us the viewers and the participants to apprehend and to participate in it as art

Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975 (Hopkins, fig. 98)

In 1975 she performed Interior Scroll, another much-cited work which saw her stand naked on a table as she slowly extracted a paper scroll from her vagina, reading from it as she went. Speaking about Interior Scroll in 2016, she explained: "The vagina had always been suppressed, detested, denied religiously... I've always been very concerned with the vitality of the vagina and that denial culturally." In front of an audience comprising mainly women artists, Schneemann approached a long table under two dimmed spotlights dressed and carrying two sheets. She undressed, wrapped herself in a sheet and climbed on the table. After telling the audience she would read from her book, Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter (published 1976), she dropped the sheet, retaining an apron, and applied strokes of dark paint on her face and body. Holding the book in one hand, she then read from it while adopting a series of 'life model "action poses"' (Schneemann in More Than Meat Joy, p.235). She then removed the apron and slowly drew a narrow scroll of paper from her vagina, reading aloud from it

Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 4, 1981 Gelatin silver print, 5 x 4 in.

In 1981, Levine photographed reproductions of Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans, such as this famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the wife of an Alabama sharecropper. The series, entitled After Walker Evans, became a landmark of postmodernism, both praised and attacked as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority, a critique of the commodification of art, and an elegy on the death of modernism. Far from a high-concept cheap shot, Levine's works from this series tell the story of our perpetually dashed hopes to create meaning, the inability to recapture the past, and our own lost illusions. Levine refers to a federal installation of the Roosevelt era for improving the living conditions of impoverished tenant farmers in the American South. Levine's gesture of reproduction lets itself be interpreted in a variety of ways: it represents a gesture of appropriation and at the same time dismisses every creative act. Unlike with Richard Prince, whose rephotographs of advertising imagery divert one's gaze towards everyday ‹visual culture› and reevaluates it, Levine reflects the mechanism of the art system, built around expressions such as authorship and originality, and questions this.

Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1991-92 Chromogenic print, 49 x 70.5 in.

In the mid-1970s Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society's desires. The idea for the project that would challenge everything sacred about ownership in photography came to Richard Prince when he was working in the tear-sheet department at Time Inc. While he deconstructed the pages of magazines for the archives, Prince's attention was drawn to the ads that appeared alongside articles. One ad in particular caught his eye: the macho image of the Marlboro Man riding a horse under blue skies. And so, in a process he came to call rephotography, Prince took pictures of the ads and cropped out the type, leaving only the iconic cowboy and his surroundings. That Prince didn't take the original picture meant little to collectors. In 2005 Untitled (Cowboy) sold for $1.2 million at auction, then the highest publicly recorded price for the sale of a contemporary photograph. Others were less enthusiastic. Prince was sued by a photographer for using copyrighted images, but the courts ruled largely in Prince's favor. That wasn't his only victory. Prince's rephotography helped to create a new art form—photography of photography—that foreshadowed the era of digital sharing and upended our understanding of a photo's authenticity and ownership.

Sol Lewitt, Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974 White painted wood or metal, photography, photolithography, dimensions vary

Incomplete Open Cubes demonstrates an artistic technique integral to the art of the 1960s: seriality. Generally speaking, serial art is generated through the application of premeditated rules or plans. In this case, LeWitt systematically explored the 122 ways of "not making a cube, all the ways of the cube not being complete," per the artist. LeWitt might have taken all the necessary steps to realize each of the 122 solutions to his query, as seen here, but the work can hardly be understood as finished in the conventional sense. It would be more precise to say, according to LeWitt, that Incomplete Open Cubes "[runs] its course," ending abruptly. Moreover, to the extent that the cubes frame and, by extension, incorporate elements from the surrounding space, they muddy the boundary between art and world.

The form of Conceptual art that explicitly takes the social function and cultural authority of museums and galleries as its subject matter, and that is exemplified by the work of Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke, is called:

Institutional Critique

Jeff Koons, New Hoover Quadraflex, New Hoover Convertible, New Hoover Dimension 1000, 1981-86

Jeff Koons began his artistic career in the 1980s by emphasizing the conspicuous consumption that defined the era. He made his mark in the art world with a 1980 exhibition in the window of the New Museum in New York, titled The New, in which New Hoover Convertibles was included. With an irony reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 exhibited a urinal as a work of art, Koons placed brand-new, store-bought vacuum cleaners in a sterile, fluorescent-lit vitrine that protects them from the dirt and grime they are designed to remove. By thoroughly transforming the expected context and use of the vacuum cleaners, and by raising domestic appliances to the realm of fine art, Koons makes us question not only our assumptions of what constitutes art, but society's obsession with cleanliness, efficiency, and newness. "I don't seek to make consumer icons," Koons explained, "but to decode why and how consumer objects are glorified." According to him, the vacuum cleaner is one of the most ubiquitous household equipment in American households and displays both "male and female sexuality tendencies." From 1981 to 1987, Koons continued to create several different configurations using banal or ready-made elements, and the resulting artworks were quite a sight. This body of work, collectively known as "The New," played a huge role in the rise of Jeff Koons to fame. They all explored the way our desires and fantasies are manifested in everyday objects.

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1959

Keita's portraits first gained international art-world attention in the 1990s, though he has been photographing the local people of Mali since the 1940s. He uses postures and props to construct a narrative of his sitter. The art world became interested in Keita's for two reasons: to draw attention to an abscure artist, and to create an archive of social and cultural imagery. From then on people queued up to have their pictures taken. The sole desire of people posing in front if Keïta's lens was to look their best. To accomplish this, Keïta gave them costumes, accessories and furniture to further enhance their appearance. Men, women and children, all look perfectly elegant. If we look beyond the aesthetics of the black-and-white pictures, Keita shows us a portrait of Malian society in full transition.

Anselm Kiefer, Shulamith, 1983 Oil, acrylic, woodcut, emulsion and straw on canvas, 9'6" x 12'2" San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Kiefer's hall is not a memorial to great men with patriotic flags waving boldly, but a gateway to damnation, a dark and foreboding road to hell, enclosed by low arches and paved with massive stones —the whole mise-en-scène (a stage set that tells a story) suggestive of an oven (immediately bringing to mind the hyperactivity of the crematoria at the Nazi death camps). Sulamith, is inscribed in the upper left hand corner, a graffiti-like testament in white paint upon the stone, to Celan's brave young Jewish girl consumed by this living hell, who came to her death in a chamber such as this because she had not the golden hair of Aryan Margarete but the dark "ashen hair" of Shulamite. Kiefer transformed architecture meant to honor Nazi heros into a memorial for their victims. Germans want to forget [the past] and start a new thing all the time, but only by going into the past can you go into the future," he says. Revealing the influence of his tutelage under Joseph Beuys, Kiefer's epic-scaled, dense sculptures and paintings are often exposed to elements like acid and fire, and incorporate materials such as lead, burned books, concrete, thorny branches, ashes, and clothing; famed critic and historian Simon Schama has described his work as "heavy-load maximalism."

Mary Kelly was a British feminist artist. Her Post-Partum Document was an elaborate project, completed between 1973 and 1979, that sought to visualize and materialize the construction of gender difference in the relationship of a mother and son. The theoretical foundation of the work was:

Lacanian psychoanalysis

With their references to the visual culture of film and in some cases to tropes from the history of art, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills can be understood in terms of the postmodern manipulation of signs and codes, the critique of originality and authorship. However, her focus on the construction of femininity in visual representation was clearly informed by feminist thinking. Which of these writers wrote an important critical essay on Hollywood narrative cinema and gender difference that may have informed Sherman's work of the late 1970s?

Laura Mulvey

Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moquor, Afghanistan, Winter, 1986), 1992 Transparency on light box, 229 x 417 cm The Broad Collection

One of the most influential photographers to emerge in the last thirty years, Jeff Wall creates elaborately staged transparencies that are displayed in light boxes. Wall's photographs conjure moments of strange resonance, mixing art historical references with subtle conceptual strategies and juxtapositions to offer a critique of modern living. In Dead Troops Talk, Wall captures an intricate fictional scene that resembles at once a painting of war and a still from a zombie horror film. Staged in several parts, the photograph depicts a battlefield with soldiers coming back to life. The men show a range of emotional responses to their newfound transcendence, from humor to confusion. In a strange paradox, the troops appear more concerned with interpersonal relationships than with the historical meaning of their own actions. The three soldiers clowning with their own wounds provide a note of macabre levity. Wall has suggested that their black humour is as plausible a reaction to their circumstances as the more serious or distressed responses of their comrades. As carefully constructed as a film or epic painting, the work was shot in a large temporary studio, involving performers and costume, special effects and make-up professionals. The figures were photographed separately or in small groups and the final image was assembled as a digital montage.

Sigmar Polke, This Is How You Sit Correctly (after Goya), 1982 Acrylic on fabric 79 in. x 71 in.

Polke developed a radical new style of painting based on what he had learned in his decade of traveling. Rather than painting on canvas he turned to synthetic fabrics that were already printed with colors and patterns he felt were in conversation with his process. For his pigments, he turned to a range of exotic sources such as meteorite dust, red lead, flower pigment, ground up stone tools, silver leaf, silver oxide, damar resin and various other exotic, and often poisonous substances. For his image sources, he turned to his vast collection of books featuring references to culture, mythology and art history. His reasons for not explaining his work likely had to do with the fact that he was just not interested in telling us what to think. He was interested in creating situations in which it was possible for us to think for ourselves. His diverse mediums, materials, processes and source images were merely prompts, as he said, "connecting everything to everything, establishing an endless rush of association until they turn against one another." Rather than claiming knowledge, he directly engaged us, the spectators, in the process of seeking to know, inviting us toward the various meanings, understandings and inspirations that we may be able to discover for ourselves.

Bill Viola, Stations, 1994video installation Museum of Modern Art, New York

Stations comprises five video projections, each displaying a nude figure suspended in water, accompanied by a lulling soundtrack of underwater gurgles and murmurs. Floating heads-down, the figures drift slowly out of the image frames. Their reflections in the polished slabs of granite placed at the foot of each screen give the impression of figures swimming in pools of black liquid. The thirteenth-century Persian poet Jahal al-Din Rumi, a favorite author of the artist, proclaimed: "With every moment a world is born and dies. And know that for you, with every moment comes death and renewal." Likewise, in Stations there is no ending or beginning—every instant is a meditation on the continual cycles of life, death, and rebirth.

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-1979Ceramic, embroidery, painting, 48 x 42 x 3 ft. Brooklyn Art Museum, New York

The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago. Widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork, it functions as a symbolic history of women in civilization. There are 39 elaborate place settings on a triangular table for 39 mythical and historical famous women. Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Virginia Woolf, Susan B. Anthony, and Georgia O'Keeffe are among the symbolic guests. place setting features a table runner embroidered with the woman's name and images or symbols relating to her accomplishments, with a napkin, utensils, a glass or goblet, and a plate. Many of the plates feature a butterfly- or flower-like sculpture representing a vulva. A cooperative effort of female and male artisans, The Dinner Party celebrates traditional female accomplishments such as textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing) and china painting, which have been framed as craft or domestic art, as opposed to the more culturally valued, male-dominated fine arts.[2] While the piece is composed of typical craftwork such as needlepoint and china painting and normally considered low art, "Chicago made it clear that she wants The Dinner Party to be viewed as high art, that she still subscribes to this structure of value: 'I'm not willing to say a painting and a pot are the same thing,' she has stated. 'It has to do with intent. I want to make art.'"[3]

Critical interest in the work of painters such as Georg Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel surged around 1980, just as conservative governments took control in many Western democracies. Many dealers, critics, and collectors were relieved to see monumental figurative paintings again, rather than the austerity associated with the ephemeral, immaterial, remote, anti-aesthetic, uncommodifiable work that dominated critical discourse in the 1970s. An important exhibition in London that exemplified this development and framed it in terms of a return to painting, aesthetic pleasure, individual creativity, and traditional artistic values was:

The New Spirit in Painting

OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture), The Wall of Respect, 1967 (Chicago)

The Visual Art of the Black Arts Movement Organisation of Black American Culture (Obac), set up in South Side, Chicago, in 1967. Obac was a multi-disciplinary collective of artistic, community and intellectual practitioners active within the US civil rights movement. The photograph documents the Wall of Respect, a group mural conceived by one of Obac's founder members, William Walker, and completed in the summer of 1967 - its eclectically styled sections painted by artists trained in different media, including painters, printmakers and photographers. This community artwork combined multiple images to make a highly visible setting. It was created through a distinctly collaborative process. The artists and community debated and agreed a list of black heroes to feature in the mural, using Obac's definition - "any Black person who honestly reflects the beauty of black life and genius in his or her style" - and who demonstrated originality and social consciousness for other less fortunate black people. The physical existence of the mural was short-lived, however, emphasising the contested nature of this site within the politics of Chicago's urban renewal. For a time, fees were charged to visit it, and parts of the wall were vandalised. It was also a scene of violence, and the body of murdered community member, Brother Herbert, who had been prominent in the mural's production, was left propped against it. After damage by a suspicious fire in 1971, the City of Chicago declared the site unsafe, and razed the neighbourhood. Today, it is a vast open space, with a commemorative plaque.

A number of characteristics are typical of postmodernism in the visual arts. Which of these is NOT one of them?

The assertion of medium specificity

Faith Ringgold, Fight to Save Your Life (Slave Rape series #3), 1972Oil on canvas, 7'3" x 4' (reproduced in Powell)

The quilted borders locate these stories as part of a female tradition, the reinsertion of now-invisible histories of women fleeing slavers on the African continent. 'Faith Ringgold: A Family History' is a focused selection of work that examines America's racial history and politics by means of the artist's own story. Throughout her career, Ringgold has addressed the experience of African Americans, but only rarely through the lens of the self-portrait. The presentation includes unique depictions of the artist herself and her two daughters, weaving the intimacy of a personal narrative together with the wider politics of her practice. The presentation focuses on the three large 'Slave Rape' (1972) paintings, key works that mark a turning point in her career. Her first collaboration with her mother, they are also significant as her last oil paintings on canvas and her only 'tankas' or quilts using this medium; from here on she used acrylic.

Hélio Oiticica, Parangolé No. 11 (Embody Revolt), 1968

The same year that Oiticica developed the parangolé, the Brazilian military (with U.S. support) launched a coup d'etat, initiating a twenty-one year military dictatorship. It was against the backdrop of increasing political repression that Oiticica began engaging the spectator as a participant in his works, an approach known today as participatory art. This approach to art engages the audience in the creative process so that they become collaborators in the work. A common interpretation of the parangolés is that they were intended to liberate their wearers from the repressive military regime by enabling them to become aware of their capacity to rebel.

You Get to Be a Girl Like You? 1995 Installation of three costumes of wax-print cotton textiles tailored by Sian Lewis, approx. height 168 cm

These Western-style nineteenth-century costumes, worn by mannequins as if part of a historical display, are made from so-called African fabrics. "African fabric signifies African identity," explains the artist, "rather like American jeans (Levi's) are an indicator of trendy youth culture. In Brixton, African fabric is worn with pride amongst radical or cool youth [....] It becomes an aesthetics of defiance, an aesthetics of reassurance, a way of holding on to one's identity in a culture presumed foreign or different." Although typically African and worn as an expression of an idealized unified identity, these wax-print fabrics are actually Dutch and were made in factories in England, where Yinka Shonibare, who was brought up in Nigeria, now lives and works. Originally made in Holland with an Indonesian technique, and exported to Africa, such fabrics bespeak colonial trade. The title is taken from a line in Alfred Hitchock's 1959 film North by Northwest, and like the cultural conflation of the work, poses a question about identity and becoming.

Kehinde Wiley, Officer of the Hussars, 2007

Wiley is a Nigerian artist, based in New York, with studios in China and Senegal. He specializes in naturalistic, brightly colored portraits of young black men, often with dramatic flowery backgrounds. With black masculinity often framed as synonymous with fear and violence in the USA, his generous and vibrant portraits challenge viewers' preconceptions of their subjects. These often resemble West African style fabrics patterns or Arts and Crafts Movement designs. moreover the subjects of the paintings are usually ordinary men and women Wiley meets in the streets. He invites them into his studio and together they select the classical painting to form the basis of the portrait. The model then replicates the pose from the painting for a photograph. Through this fusion of classical references and Afro-American models, the artist comments on the position of black people in contemporary American society. https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/painting-of-the-week-kehinde-wiley-officer-of-the-hussars/

Richard Wilson, 20/50, 1987 Used sump oil, steel, dimensions variable (Here as installed in the Saatchi Gallery, London)

he filled a room with glossy recycled engine oil, reportedly conceived after spending weeks by a swimming pool on holiday. "The idea of a Tardis-like space, where the internal volume is greater than its physical boundaries, had always appealed to me." You might only spend a moment in Richard Wilson's 20:50 installation, but the experience seems to reverberate through your consciousness for aeons. The British sculptor's most famous design is a (literally) slick concept: extraordinary, exhilarating, mind-warping: you step alone onto an angular metal walkway in the centre of a room that has been flooded with recycled engine oil (20:50 takes its title from this substance). The glossy, viscous surface stretches out somewhere around waist-level; it mirrors its surrounding architecture, conjuring the illusion that you are suspended somewhere heady and precarious.

In lecture, I sketched three ways that postmodernism was defined or understood. One of these was the understanding voiced by critics associated with the journal October, such as Douglas Crimp. Theyse critics promoted the work of certain photographers, sometimes called the "Pictures generation," as a a postmodernism of:

indifference

Performance art was a central medium for feminist artists in the 1970s. Among the reasons that have been proposed for its importance is:

its ability to recover experience, to tell stories, and to make clear the politics of the personal

Lorna Simpson, Guarded Conditions, 1989 18 dye diffusion color Polaroid prints, 21 engraved plastic plaques, 17 plastic letters, 7' x 12'4"Musem of Contemporary Art, San Diego

speaks of the violence that black women face because of their gender and skin color. The photographs within the six panels line up imperfectly, breaking up the woman's body even as they appear to combine into a whole image of her. Simpson's subtle fragmentation of the photographs speaks to the mutilation of black women's bodies, from the wounds of beatings and sexual violence during slavery to the ongoing killings at the hands of police. The title and her fist suggests that the woman must protect herself from the threats named below the frames: "sex attacks" and "skin attacks.") In 1989 Lorna Simpson made Guarded Conditions. It depicts a black woman in a simple shift and sensible shoes with equally sensible neck-skimming braids, her body rendered in three subtly mismatched images whose serial iteration proposes an endlessly expansive repetition. Yet among the six versions presented of this antiportrait, differences obtain between one seemingly identical set of Polaroids and the next, as if to register the model's shifting relationship to herself. Feet are shuffled about; hair gets ever-so-slightly rearranged; and in that middle row of photographs, the right hand alternately embraces, then caresses the left arm, echoing the rhythm of the words "sex attacks skin attacks," which caption the prints.

From 1965 to 1975, commitment to the development of an aesthetic and art that would challenge the hegemony of dominant white culture and serve the needs of the African American community by fostering pride in Black history and culture and awakening Black consciousness was central to:

the Black Arts Movement

™ark (RTMark)/etoy, The Twelve Days of Christmas, 1999

®™ark (RTMArk), an activist group, was founded in 1991 with the goal of subverting corporate power and monopoly. All members remain anonymous to avoid legal ramifications for ®™ark projects but do give interviews under aliases. Through anonymous donations, ®™ark aids organizations, artists and individuals that intend to produce anti-corporate projects. Recently included in New York's Whitney Biennial (2000), the group has become extremely well known for its subversive tactics and active support of anti-corporate causes. Not only was ®™ark the silent supporter of the art group etoy.com's domain name war with the commercial site eToy.com in 1999, but it has also been associated with mirror sites of campaign Web sites for George W. Bush (1999) and the mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani