ch 33 art history

Ann Hamilton

-The site-specific installations of Ann Hamilton (b. 1956) demonstrate the intersection of craft tradition, conceptual practice, and immersive experience in contemporary art. Hamilton uses sensual materials like horsehair, fabric, and audiovisual elements, as well as live animals and performers, to evoke a range of emotional and physical responses in viewers. -Trained in textile design, she often uses sewing and weaving as metaphors for social interactions that she feels are rooted in the body. For example, her 2012 installation at New York's Park Avenue Armory, In the Event of a Thread, relied on visitors to raise and lower a billowing white curtain, set in motion by giant swings that controlled a web of strings and pulleys on the ceiling.

Fig. 33-51 Zaha Hadid VITRA FIRE STATION, WEIL-AM-RHEIN

-A good example of Deconstructivist architecture is the vitra fire station in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany (fig. 33-51), designed by Baghdad-born architect Zaha Hadid (b. 1950), who studied in London and established her practice there in 1979. -Formally influenced by the paintings of Kazimir Malevich (see fig. 32-25), the Vitra Fire Station features reinforced concrete walls that lean into one another, meet at unexpected angles, and jut out dramatically into space, denying a sense of visual unity or structural coherence but creating a feeling of immediacy, speed, and dynamism appropriate to the building's function.

Fig. 33-66 David Hammons, UNTITLED (AFRICAN-AMERICAN FLAG)

-A socially minded artist committed to working in the public realm, David Hammons (b. 1943) is an outspoken critic of the gallery system, arguing that art must intervene in society in order to resist commercialization and encourage action. In untitled (fig. 33-66), he makes a provocative statement asserting the place of African Americans within American culture. -Traditionally sewn by hand, flags are deeply meaningful objects that publically proclaim national identity, political alliance, and ideological values through abstract forms and colors. Originally created in 1990 for the Studio Museum in Harlem, Hammon's flag responded to a controversy about the flying of the Confederate flag on public buildings in some states. -By replacing the colors of the flag of the United States with those of the Pan-African Flag, adopted by the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League in 1920 as a symbol of liberation for all people of African descent, Hammons counters the racist implications of the Confederate emblem and suggests that African Americans are integrated into the very fabric of American society.

silkscreen printing

-A technique of printing in which paint or ink is pressed through a stencil and specially prepared cloth to reproduce a design in multiple copies

ig. 33-9 Yoko Ono CUT PIECE

-After settling in New York, Yoko Ono (b. 1933) became involved with Fluxus in the early 1960s, and her loft at 112 Chambers Street became an important site for many avant-garde activities. In cut piece (fig. 33-9), performed first in Japan in 1964 and the following year at New York's Carnegie Hall, Ono knelt passively on stage while members of the audience were invited to use sewing shears, which were provided next to her, to cut away bits of her clothing to take with them. -This powerful work demonstrated key characteristics of Fluxus: its reliance on the audience to realize the event and the ritualistic nature of the performance, which suggest both self-sacrifice and desecration. -The performance was charged with implicit violence and eroticism as the body of the young Japanese woman was slowly exposed by the deliberate action of each audience member who walked up and chose to make the next cut. -Although Cut Piece was not recognized as a feminist work of art at the time, Ono has since described it as "against ageism, against racism, against sexism, and against violence."

Fig. 33-59 Damien Hirst MOTHER AND CHILD (DIVIDED), EXHIBITION COPY 2007 (ORIGINAL 1993)

-Along with Ofili, Damien Hirst (b. 1965) is one of the so-called "YBAs," or Young British Artists. Hirst first gained notoriety in the 1990s for his outrageous behavior and shocking artwork that he continues to produce. An example is For the Love of God (2007), a diamond-encrusted human skull with an asking price of $100 million. -Despite its sensationalism, the object speaks to Hirst's persistent interest in death and philosophical questions involving mortality and spiritual existence. Many of his works feature dead and preserved animals. In mother and child (divided) (fig. 33-59), Hirst bisected vertically and longitudinally the bodies of a cow and her calf and displayed them in glass cases filled with formaldehyde solution. -This sculpture resembles a display in a natural history museum, but here viewers can walk around and between the cases. From the outside, the animals look amazingly lifelike (even their eyelashes and individual hairs are visible), preserved inside the brilliant blue formaldehyde solution, but once we see the cleavages in their bones, muscles, organs, and flesh on the "inside" sides of the cases, the reality of the dead carcasses is overwhelming. -Hirst also plays on the art historical theme of the mother and child, iconic in Christian tradition, to symbolize the union of earthly and spiritual realms. Mother and Child (Divided) suggests that we are caught between the separation of life and death, between mother and child, and between scientific reality and our own fears and emotions.

Fig. 33-61 Gerhard Richter MAN SHOT DOWN (1) ERSCHOSSENER (1) FROM OCTOBER 18, 1977

-Although Richter consistently identifies as a painter, his work's underlying conceptualism characterizes much painting of the contemporary period. Rejecting the expectation that artists demonstrate only one "signature" style, Richter has worked throughout his career simultaneously in abstract and representational styles, often using photographic sources as the basis for his work. - man shot down (1) erschossener (1) from october 18, 1977 (fig. 33-61) is from Richter's 1988 series based on newspaper reports in 1977 about three members of the Red Army Faction, an anti-capitalist terrorist group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who were found dead in their prison cells. Although the deaths were ruled as suicides, suspicions arose about whether the German government had been responsible. -In life-size paintings, Richter reproduces in blurry detail the grainy black-and-white photographs that appeared in the press. His direct reproduction questions the powerful role of the mass media to shape historical events, the ability of photography to create cultural and personal memories of the past, and the value of the hand of the artist, even when, as in this case, it is almost invisible.

Fig. 33-65 Martin Puryear PLENTY'S BOAST

-Although the clarity and scale of Martin Puryear's abstract sculptures suggest a Minimalist influence, his emphasis on technique reflects ideas of Process art. But unlike these earlier movements, Puryear's art draws on vernacular craft traditions that value the handmade object and highly skilled workmanship. -In plenty's boast (fig. 33-65), Puryear highlights the sculpture's visible joints and natural materials. But Puryear's work diverges from traditional craft by lacking the practical function of furniture or a well-built cabinet. And while he wants viewers to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of his work, his forms create many allusions.

Fig. 33-32 Eero Saarinen TRANS WORLD AIRLINES (TWA) TERMINAL, JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, NEW YORK

-Although the pared-down, rectilinear forms of the International Style dominated the urban skyline, other architects departed from its impersonal principles so that even in commercial architecture, expressive designs using new structural techniques and more materials also appeared. -For instance, the trans world airlines (twa) terminal (fig. 33-32) at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, by the Finnish-born American architect Eero Saarinen (1910-1961), dramatically breaks out of the box. Saarinen sought to evoke the thrill and glamour of air travel by giving the TWA Terminal's roof two broad, winglike canopies of reinforced concrete that suggest a huge bird about to take flight. -The interior consists of large, open, dramatically flowing spaces. Saarinen designed each detail of the interior—from ticket counters to telephone booths—to complement his gull-winged shell.

Fig. 33-23 Eva Hesse NO TITLE

-American artist Eva Hesse (1936-1970) adapted the formal vocabulary of abstraction in sculptures that highlight both process and tactility. Born in Hamburg and narrowly escaping the Holocaust as a child, she made evocative works full of personal history and meaning. -For feminist critics such as Lucy Lippard, this type of "eccentric" abstraction suggested an alternative to the confrontational style of male-dominated Minimalism. no title (fig. 33-23) exemplifies the organic quality of Hesse's sculpture. -Like her Minimalist colleagues, Hesse often used industrial materials, but instead of steel and Plexiglas, she used latex, polyester resin, and fiberglass, giving her work a translucency and texture very different than the slick, machinelike surfaces of Minimalism. -In No Title Hesse put knots in a long piece of rope before dipping it in liquid latex and hanging it from the ceiling to dry. The resulting sculpture is a chaotic mass of looping, open webs and dense tangles, showing the pull of gravity on the heavy rope suspended from above. -Hesse intended the sculpture to morph, shrink, expand, and look different each time it was exhibited, and this openness contributes to the work's impression of being alive: The unusual forms suggest internal organs or other bodily tissue; we can also imagine them as a literal representation of the expressive drips and lines of a Pollock painting. Hesse embraced the instability, irrationality, and emotive power of art, reflecting her own life and feelings in the work.

Fig. 33-73 Patricia Cronin SHRINE FOR GIRLS

-American artist Patricia Cronin (b. 1963) employs many artistic formats for her politically charged subjects. Addressing themes of homosexuality, feminism, and art history, Cronin's work supports her goal of raising public awareness of these issues. shrine for girls (fig. 33-73) presented in conjunction with the 2015 Venice Biennale, appeared at the sixteenth-century Church of San Gallo. On the chapel's three marble altars, Cronin placed photographs of young girls next to mounds of clothing to suggest relics of religious martyrs. -The monuments referred to incidents of violence against women around the world. Brilliantly colored saris on the central altar related to two Indian teenagers who were gang-raped, murdered, and found strung from trees in 2014. -Muslim hijabs (head coverings) were on the altar to the left, representing 276 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped in 2014 by Boko Haram militants in Nigeria; the altar on the right displayed uniforms like those worn by women imprisoned and forced to work in Magdalene asylums across Europe and the United States throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

Fig. 33-29 Ana Mendieta UNTITLED, FROM THE TREE OF LIFE SERIES

-Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was born in Cuba but sent to Iowa in 1961 as part of "Operation Peter Pan," which relocated 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children after the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro and communism to power in Cuba. Mendieta never fully recovered from the trauma of her removal. A sense of personal dislocation haunted her, and much of her work reveals a need to find deeper connection with her physical surroundings. -Influenced by the work of Beuys and the African-Cuban religion of Santería, Mendieta produced ritualistic actions that invoked both spiritual redemption through communion with nature and the power of the feminine rooted in the earth. For the creation of her "Silhouettes," Mendieta enacted 200 private performances on location in Mexico and Iowa, which she documented in photographs and on film. -Each involved the artist using materials such as mud, flowers, gunpowder, and fire to act upon the landscape, leaving a trace form or impression of her body. An image from her tree of life series (fig. 33-29) shows Mendieta with arms upraised, pressed against a tree and covered in mud, as if to invite the tree to absorb her and connect her to the earth as a maternal source of life.

Fig. 33-47 Chris Ofili THE HOLY VIRGIN MARY

-Another controversy erupted in 1999 when the Brooklyn Museum exhibited "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Catholic leaders took particular offense to the holy virgin mary (fig. 33-47) by Nigerian-British artist Chris Ofili (b. 1968). -The large, glittering canvas features a stylized African Madonna augmented with mixed-media elements of elephant dung and found pornographic photographs of women's buttocks. Ofili, who spent a year studying in Zimbabwe, explained that many African nations have a tradition of using found objects and materials in both popular and high art. -He intended the painting as a contemporary, bicultural reinvention of the Western Madonna tradition, using elephant dung to reinforce this black Madonna's connection to the art and religion of Zimbabwe and to represent her fertility. -When the Brooklyn Museum refused Mayor Giuliani's demands to cancel the show, the mayor withheld the city's monthly maintenance payment to the museum of $497,554 and filed a suit in the state court to revoke its lease. In response, the museum filed for an injunction against Giuliani's actions on the grounds that they violated the First Amendment. -A federal district court eventually barred Giuliani from punishing or retaliating against the museum in any way for mounting the exhibition. Guiliani had argued that Ofili's art fostered religious intolerance, but the court ruled that the government has "no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them," adding that taxpayers "subsidize all manner of views with which they do not agree" and even those "they abhor."

Fig. 33-72 Rachel Whiteread HOUSE

-Another of the YBAs, sculptor Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963) made her reputation by casting the inside of ordinary objects like mattresses or book shelves, thus transforming overlooked negative spaces into poignant memorials alluding to absence and loss. Made with materials like rubber, resin, and plaster, Whiteread's work has the spare appearance of Minimalist sculpture, but visible details offer hints to its functional origins. Whiteread addressed the invisibility of the British working classes in house (fig. 33-72). -She sprayed liquid concrete on the inner walls of a three-story Victorian row house before it was carefully dismantled, leaving a ghostlike replica in its place. The project took place in the Grove Road area of London's East End, where the last row of the Victorian houses that had originally filled the area was slated to be demolished by developers. -Over the years, similar projects had effectively erased all vestiges of the community by replacing the row houses with high-rise apartments and other structures. Like much of Whiteread's work, House is about the memories contained in places and times and how easily they can be lost. Whiteread intended House as a political statement about development practices in England and "the ludicrous policy of knocking down homes like this and building badly designed tower blocks which themselves have to be knocked down after 20 years." The publicity surrounding Whiteread's project, which occurred at the same time she won the prestigious Turrner Prize, succeeded in bringing these critical issues to the public's eye.

Fig. 33-49 Maya Lin VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL, WASHINGTON, DC

-Around the same time of Serra's commission, a jury of architects, landscape architects, and sculptors awarded Maya Lin (b. 1959) the commission for the vietnam veterans memorial (fig. 33-49), to be built near the National Mall in Washington, DC. A student at Yale University, Lin proposed a simple and dramatic memorial cut into the ground in a V shape like a scar, as a symbol of national healing over the divisive war. The sculpture is made of two highly polished black granite slabs that reach out from deep in the earth at the center. -Each slab is 247 feet long, and they meet at a 130-degree angle where they are 10 feet tall. The names of 58,272 American soldiers killed or declared missing in action during the Vietnam War are listed chronologically in the order they died or were lost, beginning in 1956 at the shallowest point to the left and climaxing in 1968 at the tallest part of the sculpture, representing the year of highest casualties. -The memorial serves both to commemorate the dead and missing and to provide a place where survivors can confront their own loss. It is one of the best-known works of public art in the United States and has transformed the way the nation mourns its war dead.

Fig. 33-40 Barbara Kruger UNTITLED (YOUR GAZE HITS THE SIDE OF MY FACE)

-Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) appropriates advertising and marketing techniques to subvert the messages in mainstream mass media. Her early career, working as a designer and art director at Mademoiselle, House and Garden, and other popular magazines, informs the signature look of her work. -She relies on her provocative juxtapositions of words and image to challenge expected meanings that come from our experience of popular advertising. untitled (your gaze hits the side of my face) (fig. 33-40) is typical in the slightly nostalgic quality of the female mannequin's appearance and the graphic contrast that recalls the three-color printing once common in newspapers. -By addressing the viewer directly, Kruger forces us to acknowledge the relationship usually kept hidden between the viewer and the viewed. Framed within an advertising context, the viewer is likened to the consumer who looks at an object of desire for purchase. -Although Kruger's pronouns are ambiguous in terms of gender, they seem an implicit reference to the "male gaze" in art described by critics like Laura Mulvey and John Berger and much discussed in the 1970s and 1980s. Kruger's work, however, raises broad Postmodernist issues of power and the need to expose underlying social structures that oppress and subjugate others.

Fig. 33-64 Julie Mehretu STADIA II

-Born in Ethiopia, Julie Mehretu (b. 1970) builds on the abstraction pioneered by Kandinsky and other early Modern artists to give visual form to complex systems and global networks. Her highly finished paintings, made from thinly applied layers of translucent paint built up and polished, have a smooth, waxy-looking surface. -Working on a monumental scale, Mehretu employs a rich vocabulary from sources that include architectural drawings, maps, graffiti, and aerial photographs. One of a triptych of paintings created for the 2004-2005 Carnegie International, stadia ii (fig. 33-64) captures the excitement and energy of major athletic events by layering fragmented architectural drawings of sports arenas from around the world. -Mehretu uses the subject to address themes of national identity, commerce, entertainment, and conflict. Colorful geometric shapes suggest flags and banners denoting cultural and team alliances, and superimposed graphic elements unify the composition while also contributing dynamism and a sense of chaos.

Fig. 33-53 Shirin Neshat REBELLIOUS SILENCE

-Born in Iran in 1957, Neshat moved to the United States in 1974. She returned to Iran for the first time in 1993 to see the country transformed by the fundamentalist regime that came to power with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. -Soon afterward, Neshat began to create beautifully poetic photographs and films that explore complicated realities of gender, religion, and cultural difference. In her 1994 "Women of Allah" series, she exposes Western stereotypes of Muslim women, claiming their identities are more varied and complex than usually assumed. -Typical of the series, rebellious silence (fig. 33-53) is a black-and-white photograph of a woman clad in a traditional chador. The woman's face is exposed, and Neshat has inscribed on the photograph, in Farsi, text from a twentieth-century Iranian female writer. A rifle barrel runs vertically through the composition, bisecting the woman's figure. -Like the veil covering her body, the calligraphy and gun seem to protect the woman and show how little we understand her. She looks out to meet our gaze, challenging beliefs about submissive Muslim women and reinforcing fears of fundamentalist Islamic militarism. Produced for Western audiences, the image's meaning remains unclear as Neshat confronts our national prejudices and raises questions about the role of women in post-revolutionary Iran.

Fig. 33-37 Jean-Michel Basquiat HORN PLAYERS

-Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) grew up in middle-class comfort before leaving home as a teenager for New York's Lower East Side. As a street artist, he covered walls with short and witty philosophical texts signed with the tag "SAMO©." He gained critical attention in 1980 in the highly publicized "Times Square Show," which showcased many of the city's subway and graffiti artists. -Basquiat's active brushwork, autobiographical elements, and personal iconography link him to Neo-Expressionism. horn players (fig. 33-37) of 1983 references the triptych format to pay homage to musicians Charlie Parker (upper left) and Dizzy Gillespie (center right). -A fan of jazz, Basquiat echoes the improvisational bebop style Parker made popular in the 1950s in his painting technique, and his expressive images and text offer a range of interpretative meanings. The painting underscores Basquiat's passionate determination to focus on African-American subjects in an unsentimental way. As he said, "Black people are never portrayed realistically, not even portrayed, in Modern art, and I'm glad to do that.

Fig. 33-19 Bruce Nauman SELF-PORTRAIT AS A FOUNTAIN

-Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) uses performance, video, and other nontraditional media to explore the effects of physical, psychological, and intellectual experiences. Like Kosuth, Nauman considers the role of language and visual representation in demonstrating our individual identities. -From 1966 to 1967, Nauman made a series of 11 color photographs based on his reenactment of common words and phrases. self-portrait as a fountain (fig. 33-19) shows the bare-chested artist tipping his head back and spurting water into the air. Cleverly pulling together artistic identity, bodily experience, and visual communication, Nauman's photograph serves many functions. -It documents his physical transformation into "a fountain," resembling the nude statues that often work to fill a traditional public fountain's basin. It acts as a self-portrait that represents the artist as his own work of art. -And Nauman's title also recalls Duchamp's Fountain (see fig. 32-29), suggesting the young artist's authority to recreate the famous readymade using his own body. Characteristically, Nauman uses humor and wit to engage the viewer and investigate challenging conceptual issues

Fig. 33-42 Cindy Sherman UNTITLED FILM STILL #21

-Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) also turned to photography as a way to engage in Postmodern critique. In her series "Untitled Film Stills," Sherman creates fictional narratives with herself in the starring role. -Each of the black-and-white photographs resembles a publicity still from popular cinema of the early 1960s, in which Sherman appears, costumed and made-up, in settings that seem to quote from the plots of old movies. Although each untitled image stands alone, we recognize these women's stories. -In untitled film still #21 (fig. 33-42), for instance, Sherman assumes the part of "small-town girl" recently arrived in the big city. Others show her as "the hardworking housewife," "the femme-fatale," "the teenage runaway," and other stereotypical personae. Part performance and part Conceptual Art, these works play on the documentary status we give the photograph and our familiarity with the cinematic narratives Sherman recreates. -By forcing us to acknowledge the illusion of her own image, Sherman underscores the power of visual representation to construct female identity and alludes to the performances we enact every day in roles like "the best friend" or "the good student."

Fig. 33-18 Joseph Kosuth ONE AND THREE CHAIRS

-Conceptual Art found inspiration in both Fluxus and Minimalism, especially in art's relationship to systems of communication. Artists like Joseph Kosuth rejected traditional aesthetics and employed language itself as a medium for art. Drawing on the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the study of semiotics, Kosuth explored the role of visual signs to communicate meaning in one and three chairs (fig. 33-18). -He illustrated this idea by juxtaposing a wooden chair, a photograph of a chair, and a printed definition of the word "chair" in the dictionary. The installation showed the visual equivalence of three distinct forms to represent a singular abstract concept. -The title highlights the inherent ambiguity in systems of communication: We can read this work as one chair represented three different ways or as three different chairs. Kosuth's work may seem a philosophical exercise, but his questions about words and what they represent encourage more critical inquiry into the systems that endow art with value and meaning.

Fig. 33-46 Andres Serrano PISS CHRIST

-Created in 1987, two years before the NEA controversy, piss christ (fig. 33-46) is one of many photographs Serrano (b. 1950) made that involve bodily fluids like blood, semen, and human milk. These function to highlight the tension between his images' aesthetic appeal and the abject undertones Serrano makes clear in the title. -Piss Christ is an almost 2-foot-high, brilliantly colored Cibachrome photograph that shows a Christian crucifix bathed in a hazy, ethereal light. Serrano made the haunting image by submerging a small plastic crucifix in a Plexiglas container filled with his own urine. Serrano, who was raised a strict Catholic, has argued that the work addresses the physical death of Christ's body and critiques the commercialization of Christ's image.

Fig. 33-56 David Wojnarowicz UNTITLED (SOMETIMES I COME TO HATE PEOPLE)

-David Wojnarowicz (1955-1992), another artist lost to AIDS, found inspiration for his photographs, films, and books in the stories of people he met while living on the streets after leaving an abusive home. His frequent combination of imagery with lengthy passages of texts suggests a need to give voice to those marginalized by society. -Around 1987, when faced with the death of his lover, photographer Peter Hujar, and his own diagnosis as HIV-positive, Wojnarowicz began to focus his art on the feelings involved in watching a loved one die while facing one's own mortality. untitled (sometimes i come to hate people) (fig. 33-56) shows a black-and-white photograph of two outstretched hands, bound by white bandages that suggest human pain, suffering, and the need for compassion. -Superimposed is an angry text in red type taken from Wojnarowicz's book Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, in which he describes himself hollowing out from the inside and becoming invisible as he dies. Wojnarowicz's work can often be disturbing in its graphic imagery and allusion to religious symbolism. A frequent target of critics during the Culture Wars of the 1990s, it remains controversial even today.

Fig. 33-60 Matthew Barney CREMASTER 3: MAHABYN

-Each film has its own complex narrative and catalog of multilayered symbols. Cremaster 3 from 2002 describes the construction of the Chrysler Building in New York and features the artist Richard Serra as the architect. In one segment, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is the setting where Barney, playing Serra's apprentice, dressed in a peach-colored kilt and gagged, must accomplish a series of tasks to assert his supremacy over the master. -Barney scales the walls of the rotunda to complete a task on each level before gaining enlightenment. Along the way he encounters a series of challenges—a line of Rockettes dressed as Masonic lambs; warring punk-rock bands; a leopard woman played by the double-amputee athlete, model, and speaker Aimee Mullins; and finally Serra, throwing molten wax down the museum's spiraling ramp in a nod to the sculptor's famous casting of process-based works out of lead in the 1960s. -The settings and costumes are lavish, and the epic plot is complex and enigmatic. In mahabyn (fig. 33-60), from Cremaster 3, Barney and the leopard woman transform by donning modified Masonic costumes. While the meaning remains ambiguous, the extravagant work seems to refer to a crisis among white, middle-class, heterosexual male artists in an era exploring difference and identity.

Fig. 33-55 Felix Gonzalez-Torres "UNTITLED" (LOVERBOY)

-Felix Gonzales-Torres (1957-1996) infused Minimalism's preference for spare geometries, repetition, and mass-produced materials with deeply personal meaning in works that offer profound statements on human mortality. He created "untitled" (loverboy) (fig. 33-55) in 1990 when his longtime partner, Ross Laycock, was dying from AIDS. The piece was deceptively simple: A stack of pale blue paper sat on the gallery floor with instructions for visitors to take a sheet with them. -As the sheets were removed, the vertical stack gradually diminished in height, an allegory of the slowly disappearing body of Gonzalez-Torres's partner. Similarly, in "Untitled" of 1991 the artist created a mound of individually wrapped candies totalling 175 pounds—his partner's ideal weight—which viewers were invited to take away with them, thus realizing the meaning in the work and carrying with them a small reminder of its purpose. -By involving the viewer as a participant, Gonzalez-Torres transformed a story of individual loss into a political act that called attention to the social impact of the AIDS epidemic, as well as a lasting memorial to those who had died. Gonzalez-Torres himself died of AIDS in 1996.

Fig. 33-33 Frank Lloyd Wright SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK

-Frank Lloyd Wright (see figs. 32-41, 32-42, 32-43) transformed museum architecture with the guggenheim museum (fig. 33-33) in New York, designed as a sculptural work of art in its own right. The Guggenheim was created to house Solomon Guggenheim's personal collection of Modern art and, like the TWA Terminal, took on an organic shape, in this case a spiral. -The museum's galleries spiral downward from a glass ceiling, wrapping themselves around a spectacular five-story atrium. Wright intended visitors to begin by taking the elevator to the top floor and then walk down the sloping and increasingly widening ramp, enjoying paintings along the way. -Today, the interior maintains the intended intimacy of a "living room," despite alterations by the museum's first directors. Wright wanted the building to contrast with skyscrapers like the Seagram Building and become a Manhattan landmark—and it remains one of the twentieth century's most distinctive museum spaces.

Fig. 33-24 Gilberto Zorio PINK-BLUE-PINK

-Gilberto Zorio (b. 1944) created sculpture and performances using salt, acids, and other reactive compounds that altered the work's aesthetic and structural form. Inspired by the medieval practice of alchemy, Zorio saw the scientific process of metamorphosis as a visual metaphor for the power of art to effect social change. -In pink-blue-pink (fig. 33-24), he sliced an industrial pipe in half and filled it with a thick paste made from cobalt chloride. Highly sensitive to humidity, the chemical alternates between blue and pink depending on its surrounding environmental conditions. Measuring over 9 feet, the sculpture was long enough that the humidity (and thus the color) might vary along different segments of the pipe. -Like other conceptual artists of the period, Arte Povera artists intended the impermanence of their sculpture and performances as a way to prevent institutions from reducing art to symbols of wealth and status. Their work was evidence of a politically charged desire among many artists to see nature as an arcane source of power and beauty, well suited to countering the social ills brought on by industrial expansion.

Fig. 33-68 Ann Hamilton MYEIN

-Hamilton's installations respond to the architectural conditions and social histories of their particular sites. myein (fig. 33-68), created for the 1999 Venice Biennale, was inspired by the Neoclassical building that housed the United States Pavilion and by Hamilton's interest in the darker parts of American history that are invisible or unspoken, although we know they exist. -This is reflected in her title, an ancient Greek word meaning "to close the eyes or mouth," which also refers to the practice of medieval cults keeping their initiation rites secret. For the installation, Hamilton surrounded the pavilion with a 90 by 16 foot glass wall that blurred the building's façade, suggesting movement and alluding to the perceptual distortions caused by the passage of time. -Inside, words by the poet Charles Reznikoff describing human suffering and injustice in the United States were written in Braille on the white walls. Fine fuchsia powder fell from the perimeter of the ceiling, collecting on the raised Braille surfaces and pooling in bright areas on the floor. -The installation also included a soundtrack in which Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural Address was whispered in phonetic code to make the words indecipherable. The effect was haunting yet beautiful and reflected Hamilton's goal to call attention to unspoken histories that remain mysterious and cryptic.

ig. 33-3 Robert Rauschenberg CANYON

-In 1955, Rauschenberg began a series of assemblages that he called combines because they blended features of both painting and sculpture. canyon (fig. 33-3) incorporates old family photos, a picture of the Statue of Liberty, newsprint, and political posters alongside ordinary objects like a flattened steel drum adhered to the work's surface. -Other elements, including a stuffed eagle and a dirty pillow suspended by a piece of wood, project into the real space of the viewer. Rauschenberg added dripping splashes of paint to his composition as well, an ironic reference to Abstract Expressionist Action painting. -Similar to Johns's more conceptual approach, Rauschenberg combined imagery from popular culture and avant-garde painting to undermine the idea of an autonomous art.

Fig. 33-13 Andy Warhol MARILYN DIPTYCH

-In 1962, movie star Marilyn Monroe was found dead in an apparent suicide. Warhol's marilyn diptych (fig. 33-13) is one of a series of silkscreens that he made immediately after the actress's death. -Warhol memorializes the screen image of Monroe, using a famous publicity photograph transferred directly onto silkscreen, thus rendering it flat and bland so that Monroe's signature features—her bleach-blond hair, her ruby lips, and her sultry, blue-eye-shadowed eyes—stand out as a caricature of the actress. -The face portrayed is not that of Norma Jeane (Monroe's real name) but of Marilyn, the celluloid sex symbol as made over by the movie industry. Warhol made multiple prints from this screen, aided—as he was in many of his works—by a host of assistants working with assembly-line efficiency. In 1965, Warhol ironically named his studio "The Factory," further highlighting the commercial aspect of his art.

Fig. 33-14 Andy Warhol BRILLO SOAP PADS BOX

-In 1964, in his first sculptural project, brillo soap pads boxes (fig. 33-14), Warhol hired carpenters to create plywood boxes identical in size and shape to the cardboard cartons used to ship boxes of Brillo soap pads to supermarkets. -By silkscreening onto these boxes the logos and texts that appeared on the actual cartons, the artist created what were essentially useless replicas of commercial packaging. -Stacking the fabricated boxes in piles, Warhol transformed the interior space of the Stable Gallery in New York into what looked like a grocery stockroom, simultaneously pointing to the commercial foundation of the art gallery system and critiquing the nature of art.

Fig. 33-48 Richard Serra TILTED ARC

-In 1981, Richard Serra (b. 1939) won a commission from the United States General Services Administration, which approved plans for tilted arc (fig. 33-48), a curved and slightly angled Cor-Ten steel wall, 120 feet long, 12 feet tall, and 2½ inches thick that would bisect the plaza in front of the Javits Federal Building in New York. -After its installation, the sculpture began to draw criticism for its impact on the public space, because it forced people to detour as they crossed the plaza and made it impossible to hold concerts or performances. Over time, the steel weathered to a rusty brown and became covered with pigeon droppings and graffiti. -Public outrage grew so intense that in 1986 Serra's sculpture was removed to a Brooklyn parking lot, an action that incited further furor, this time among artists and critics. Serra argued that moving Tilted Arc effectively destroyed the site-specific sculpture; he filed a lawsuit claiming censorship, but the federal district court found no legal merit in his case and denied his plea.

Fig. 33-5 Shozo Shimamoto HURLING COLORS

-In Japan, Yoshihara Jirō founded the Gutai collective of artists in 1954 "to pursue the possibilities of pure and creative activity with great energy," as he explained in a manifesto of 1956. The Gutai (meaning "concrete" or "embodiment") organized outdoor installations, theatrical events, and dramatic performances intended to reveal art's relationship to viewers and the natural surroundings. -These works highlighted the physical act of creating art through sometimes violent interactions with paint, mud, paper, electric lights, and industrial materials. At the second Gutai Exhibition in 1956, Shozo Shimamoto (1928-2013) performed hurling colors (fig. 33-5) by smashing bottles of paint against a canvas on the floor. -Informed by Japanese philosophy, Shimamoto recognized his act of destruction to be one of creation as well, writing that "in this age, the boundary between the two no longer exists." The Gutai moved past Pollock's gestural influence to the point where the painting's production appeared as important as the object produced, if not more so.

Fig. 33-7 Carolee Schneemann MEAT JOY

-In contrast to Environments, which invited the viewers to interact with static installations, were works that Kaprow called Happenings: immersive, chance-based performances like Cage's Theatre Piece No. 1. These overwhelmed the audience with a barrage of unrelated activities that invoked a range of sensual and emotional responses. -One example was meat joy (fig. 33-7) by Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939), enacted first at the Festival de la Libre Expression in Paris and then in New York, where it was filmed and photographed. Eight men and women first undressed one another, then danced, rolled on the floor ecstatically, and played with a mixture of raw fish, raw sausages, partially plucked raw and bloody chickens, wet paint, and scraps of paper. Schneemann wanted both performers and audience to experience the smell, taste, and feel of the body and its fluids. -Critics described the piece variously as an erotic rite and a visceral celebration of flesh and blood. It countered the expectation that a work of art was something to be examined in the cool, detached space of an art gallery where the viewer remains passively in control and the artist remains invisible. Meat Joy forced the viewer to become complicit in the live event. -Many feminist artists like Schneemann embraced Happenings and other forms of what was beginning to be called performance art, a term that distinguished such events from traditional theatrical presentation. These practices offered a powerful tool to challenge the objectification of women's bodies that had existed in art for centuries. -Performance art enabled women to assert their own artistic agency by determining how their bodies were viewed and even confronting their audience who, in turn, had to acknowledge the woman's active presence.

Fig. 33-22 Nam June Paik ELECTRONIC SUPERHIGHWAY: CONTINENTAL U.S.

-In electronic superhighway: continental u.s. (fig. 33-22), Nam June Paik (1931-2006) builds on his early experiments with video and new media to comment on communication technology in the United States. -A tribute to Paik's adopted country, the monumental sculpture refers to the intricate system of interstate highways across the United States, which were still new in 1964 when the Korean artist first arrived. -Outlined in colorful neon lights, each of the 50 states is filled with television monitors—336 in the entire work—that flicker out moving images from popular entertainment, news broadcasts, and Paik's own video footage.

In just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (fig. 33-12)

-In just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (fig. 33-12) from 1956, Hamilton critiques marketing strategies by imitating them. The title parodies an advertising slogan, while the collage itself shows two figures named Adam and Eve in a domestic setting. Like the biblical figures, these are almost naked, but the temptations to which they have given in are those of consumer culture. -Adam is a bodybuilder and Eve a pin-up girl. In an attempt to recreate their lost Garden of Eden, the first couple has filled their home with all the best new products: a television, a tape recorder, a vacuum cleaner, and fashionable new furniture. Displayed on the wall is not high art but a poster advertising a romance novel, hung next to a traditional portrait of a stern-looking man. -Adam holds a huge, suggestively placed Tootsie Pop, which the English critic Lawrence Alloway cited when he described this work as "Pop art," one possible source of the movement's name. Like assemblages in the United States, Hamilton's collage comments on the visual overload of popular culture and on society's inability to differentiate between the advertising world and the real one.

Fig. 33-35 Philip Johnson and John Burgee AT&T CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK

-In the 1970s, Postmodern ideas were also applied to commercial architecture. One of the first examples was the at&t corporate headquarters (now the Sony Building) in New York City (fig. 33-35) by Philip Johnson (1906-2005) and John Burgee (b. 1933). This elegant, granite-clad skyscraper has 36 oversized stories, making it as tall as the average 60-story building. -It mimics its International Style neighbors with its smooth, uncluttered skin, while its Classical window groupings set between vertical piers also echo nearby skyscrapers from much earlier in the century. -But the overall profile of the building bears a whimsical resemblance to the shape of a Chippendale highboy, an eighteenth-century chest of drawers with a long-legged base and angled top—this seems to be an intended pun on the terms "highboy" and "high-rise." -The round notch at the top of the building as well as the rounded entryway at its base suggest the coin slot and coin return of an old pay telephone in a clever reference to the building's client, the AT&T telephone company.

Fig. 33-6 Allan Kaprow YARD

-In the late 1950s, Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), who studied with Cage in New York, began to create Environments. These built on assemblage practices to extend the work of art into space surrounding the viewer. Trained as a painter, Kaprow found inspiration in Pollock, whose drip technique and large-scale compositions suggested to him new forms of art that rejected painting entirely. -In his 1958 essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," Kaprow concluded that artists "must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life ... objects of every sort are materials for the new art." -In yard (fig. 33-6) Kaprow filled the courtyard behind the Martha Jackson Gallery in Manhattan with used tires, tar paper, and barrels, and asked viewers to walk through it, thus positioning them as a part of the artwork itself. -Different from a painting on the gallery wall, Yard called attention to the viewer's physical experience, stumbling amid detritus and smelling the dirty rubber and tar—features of the urban environment that might go unnoticed outside of the art gallery context.

Fig. 33-71 Krzysztof Wodiczko HOMELESS VEHICLE

-In the late 1980s, Polish-born Canadian artist Krzysztof Wodiczko (b. 1943) designed the homeless vehicle (fig. 33-71) in collaboration with homeless people in New York. The vehicle, shown in art exhibitions and prototyped on the streets, was intended to draw attention to the problem of homelessness in New York. -Recalling Constructivist product design, the Homeless Vehicle includes an extendable metal pod for sleeping, washing, or toilet needs, baskets underneath to store belongings and cans that could be sold, and a brightly colored flag to signal approach. Wodiczko explains its use as "both communication and the transport; a vehicle that could articulate the real conditions of work and life and the resistance of this group" instead of the stolen grocery carts often linked to the homeless. Critics of his work say that the project undermines efforts to help homelessness because it does not address the systemic roots of the problem.

Fig. 33-1 Jasper Johns TARGET WITH PLASTER CASTS

-Inspired by the example of Marcel Duchamp (see Chapter 32), Jasper Johns combined assemblage with painting techniques in works like Target with Plaster Casts (see fig. 33-1) to address formal and conceptual issues in art. Johns also raised psychological questions about perceptions of the self in the modern era. -The fragmented body casts above the target lack any sense of the organic whole. Closing the lids on the boxes that contain the casts further depersonalizes the individual by obliterating all or a selective part of the human presence. -The combination of fragmented and partially hidden body parts with the target takes on richer meaning when we consider that Johns was a gay artist in the restrictive climate of Cold War America.

Fig. 33-43 James Luna THE ARTIFACT PIECE

-James Luna (1950-2018) asks us to confront Native American stereotypes in the artifact piece (fig. 33-43), first staged in 1987 in a hall dedicated to a traditional ethnographic exhibition at the Museum of Man in San Diego. Luna lay almost naked in a glass display case filled with sand embedded with artifacts from his life, including his favorite music and books and personal legal papers. -Museum-style labels pointed to marks and scars on his body that he had acquired while drinking or fighting or in accidents. In this way, Luna turned his living body and his life into an ethnographic object for people to ogle and judge. By objectifying himself, he challenges our prejudices and assumptions about Native Americans and highlights the cultural role of institutions to perpetuate or counter such myths.

Fig. 33-69 Kara Walker DARKYTOWN REBELLION

-Kara Walker (b. 1969) uses installation as a strategy to involve, and perhaps implicate, her viewers. She has said, "It's interesting that as soon as you start telling the story of racism you start reliving it." In darkytown rebellion (fig. 33-69) she depicts a story about slave revolt and massacre. -Based on eighteenth-century craft tradition, Walker's large-scale silhouettes are cut out of black construction paper, then applied to gallery walls to tell an unfolding tale of horror. Like the nightlight in a child's room, beautiful yellow, pink, and blue lights swirl through the gallery, but they reveal nightmarish shadows dancing across the walls. -As we walk around the space, we step in front of the light source, casting our own shadows that insert us into the narrative. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's stories draw variously from slave narratives, minstrel shows, advertising memorabilia, and even Harlequin romance novels, blending fiction and fact to evoke a history of oppression and terrible violence. -Her grotesque rendering of plantation life can be an uncomfortable experience, forcing us to confront racial stereotypes and fears, as well as our culpability in maintaining them.

Fig. 33-58 Kiki Smith UNTITLED

-Kiki Smith (b. 1954) focuses on the body's materiality and loss of physical control in untitled (fig. 33-58), in which two life-size, naked figures, female and male, hang limply side by side about a foot above the ground. Milk appears to drip from the woman's breasts and semen down the man's leg, as if both figures have lost control of bodily functions that were once a source of vitality and pleasure. -Reflecting the influence of process-based artists like Hesse, the flesh-colored beeswax contributes a tactility that underscores Smith's visceral content. She points out that the societal demand that we conceal and control bodily functions makes our inability to maintain them humiliating and frightening. -Acceptance of our body's reality generates a profound sense of loss, but also of release and liberation. Like essentialist feminists who gave voice to female experience by representing taboo subjects like menstruation, Smith calls attention to the body that cannot be controlled and asks us to consider the impact of this repression.

Fig. 33-20 Laurie Anderson DUETS ON ICE

-Known for her pioneering use of technology in art, Laurie Anderson (b. 1947) crosses boundaries between experimental music, performance art, traditional storytelling, and popular entertainment. One of her earliest performances, duets on ice (fig. 33-20), was presented in 1974 at five different locations throughout New York. -For each, Anderson alternated telling personal stories and playing the violin while wearing ice skates frozen in blocks of ice until the ice melted to release the blades. Anderson's piece dealt with issues of identity, physical experience, and artistic expression, similar to Nauman's work, but it did so through the mediating factors of technology and public performance. -Describing her violin as a ventriloquist dummy or alter ego, Anderson modified her instrument with technology in ways that allowed her to pre-record audio, distort sounds, or accompany her own live playing. -By manipulating her "voice," she challenges the expressive authenticity of the artist's performance, an effect further highlighted by any changes in her playing brought about by the physical discomfort of standing in ice for an extended time.

Fig. 33-39 Sherrie Levine AFTER WALKER EVANS: 4

-Like Neo-Expressionist painting, the work of Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) and others of the Pictures generation signaled the return of image-making after a decade dominated by dematerialized art forms. after walker evans: 4 (fig. 33-39) is from a provocative series of photographs—actually reproductions of Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans—in which Levine questions the nature of artistic originality and authority. -While working with the Farm Securities Administration in the 1930s, Evans produced images that were widely shown as evidence of poverty in the South. Levine's direct appropriation of Evans's work claims the legacy of a well-known male artist for herself, while seeming to indict his own appropriation of his destitute subjects for personal artistic and commercial gain. -Furthermore, as exact copies of Evan's images, Levine's work highlights photography's resistance to how Modernism tends to value most highly the original work of art and forces us to consider the influence of mass media on cultural knowledge

Fig. 33-2 Louise Nevelson SKY CATHEDRAL

-Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) collected discarded packing boxes in which she would carefully arrange chair legs, broom handles, cabinet doors, spindles, and other wooden refuse. Reflecting a Cubist approach to assemblage, Nevelson unified the fragmented forms by painting her compositions matte black, white, or gold. -These monochromatic schemes obscured the identity of the individual elements and evoked some sense of mood. She heightened this poetic element in her monumental assemblage sky cathedral (fig. 33-2) by displaying it bathed in soft blue light, recalling moonlight. -While artists like Nevelson used assemblage for formal and expressive effect, others, influenced by Dada, saw that by integrating everyday objects into their art, they could challenge the artistic autonomy and high-minded intellectualism of Abstract Expressionism.

Fig. 33-31 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson SEAGRAM BUILDING, NEW YORK

-Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) created the most extreme examples of postwar International Style buildings (see Chapter 32). A former Bauhaus teacher and a refugee from Nazi Germany, Mies designed the rectilinear glass towers that came to personify postwar capitalism. -The crisp, clean lines of the seagram building in New York City (fig. 33-31), designed with Philip Johnson, epitomize the standardization and impersonality that became synonymous with corporations in the postwar period. -Such buildings, with their efficient construction methods and use of materials, allowed architects to pack an immense amount of office space into a building on a very small lot; they were also economical to construct. Although criticized for building relatively unadorned glass boxes, Mies advocated "Less is more." -He did, however, use nonfunctional, decorative bronze beams on the outside of the Seagram Building to echo the functional beams inside and give the façade a sleek, rich, and dignified appearance.

Fig. 33-8 George Brecht THREE AQUEOUS EVENTS

-Many Fluxus events were presented as written "scores," reflecting the importance of Cage and the broad reach of the movement to include musicians, writers, dancers, and visual artists. -George Brecht's three aqueous events (fig. 33-8) is one of 69 cards with written instructions for activities that could be performed by the reader; the cards were collected, boxed, and published in editions. -The ambiguous nature of Brecht's printed prompts reflects the tendency of Fluxus artists to blur the boundaries between life, art, action, and object. Brecht's other scores included Exit Event, where the instructions were simply the word "Exit," and Duration Event, with only "Red" and "Green" appearing on the card. -In each case, the reader is left to choose whether or not to follow the cue, how it might be realized, and even if they will acknowledge their action as a work of art.

Fig. 33-8 George Brecht THREE AQUEOUS EVENTS

-Many Fluxus events were presented as written "scores," reflecting the importance of Cage and the broad reach of the movement to include musicians, writers, dancers, and visual artists. -George Brecht's three aqueous events (fig. 33-8) is one of 69 cards with written instructions for activities that could be performed by the reader; the cards were collected, boxed, and published in editions. -The ambiguous nature of Brecht's printed prompts reflects the tendency of Fluxus artists to blur the boundaries between life, art, action, and object. Brecht's other scores included Exit Event, where the instructions were simply the word "Exit," and Duration Event, with only "Red" and "Green" appearing on the card. In each case, the reader is left to choose whether or not to follow the cue, how it might be realized, and even if they will acknowledge their action as a work of art.

tv bra for living sculpture (fig. 33-10)

-Often described as the father of video art, Korean artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) came from a classical music background and was deeply influenced by Cage. Paik's interest in mass-media technology led to his early experiments altering broadcast images with magnets he attached to the top of television consoles. In the 1960s, Paik produced a number of intermedia works in collaboration with musician Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) that were included as part of Fluxus festivals. -tv bra for living sculpture (fig. 33-10) combined Paik's interest in sculpture, technology, music, and performance and demonstrated the humor and sexual content often seen in Fluxus works. Designed to be worn by Moorman while playing the cello, the device was wired so she could manipulate images broadcast on the screens with foot pedals and her musical technique. Paik described the work as an effort to humanize technology, but it also highlighted the fetish-like status afforded both women's breasts and television in a society dominated by mass media. Moorman's role as a "living sculpture" further suggested the human body as an object akin to sculpture, thus reflecting the Fluxus idea that life itself is art that we enact every day.

Fig. 33-62 Jeff Wall AFTER "INVISIBLE MAN" BY RALPH ELLISON, THE PREFACE

-One of the Pictures generation of artists, Jeff Wall (b. 1946) uses multiple photographs and elaborate stage sets to create large-scale visual narratives that he compares to nineteenth-century history paintings. Wall exhibits these as brilliantly colored transparencies mounted in lightboxes—a format used in advertising that also recalls the cinema. -He works like a movie director, carefully designing sets and posing actors to photograph, then digitally combining multiple images to create the final transparency. after "invisible man" by ralph ellison, the preface (fig. 33-62), is an elaborate composition; it took 18 months to design and construct the sets and 3 weeks to take the photographs. -Basing the work on Ralph Ellison's 1951 novel about a young African-American man struggling to find recognition in a racially divided society, Wall depicts a scene from the book's prologue where the narrator explains that he's retreated to an underground cellar, lit by 1,369 lightbulbs, to write his story.

Fig. 33-41 Guerrilla Girls THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST

-One of the most famous features Ingres's Large Odalisque wearing a gorilla mask with the headline "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" The poster, made in 1989, notes that while women represented less than 5 percent of the artists in the famous museum, they were 85 percent of the nudes on display. -(The Guerrilla Girls repeated the survey in 2005 and found the number of women artists had decreased to only 3 percent—but pointed out with characteristic humor that at least there were more naked men.) the advantages of being a woman artist (fig. 33-41) delivers a clever, ironic, and sadly still accurate list of the treatment afforded women artists.

Fig. 33-30 Mary Kelly POST-PARTUM DOCUMENT

-Produced over a six-year period by Mary Kelly (b. 1941), post-partum document (fig. 33-30) is a monumental artwork that tracks the artist's changing relationship with her son after his birth. Kelly's pseudo-scientific approach draws on Marxism, feminist philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to explore her experience as a woman, a professional, and a mother in a patriarchal (male-dominated) society. -Although she based Post-Partum Document on her own life, she describes it as "an interplay of voices—the mother's experience, feminist analysis, academic discussion, political debate." The work, which includes 135 objects, photographs, diagrams, charts, printed transcripts, handwritten notes, scribbles, and drawings, acts as both a personal record of her child's development and evidence of Kelly's rigorous art-making process. -Each of its six parts focuses on key moments related to the child's acquisition of language and Kelly's feelings of loss and change as her son grows up. Although Post-Partum Document has only been exhibited once in its entirety, Kelly has also published the project as a book, underscoring how conceptual artists often rely on multiple formats to communicate their ideas.

Fig. 33-25 Robert Smithson SPIRAL JETTY

-Robert Smithson (1938-1973) sought to illustrate what he called the "ongoing dialectic" in nature between the constructive forces that build and shape form and the destructive forces that destroy it. spiral jetty (fig. 33-25) of 1970, a 1,500-foot stone and earth platform spiraling into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, reflects these ideas. -To Smithson, the salty water and algae of the lake suggested both the primordial ocean where life began and a dead sea that killed it; the abandoned oil rigs dotting the lake's shore reminded him of dinosaur skeletons and the remains of vanished civilizations. Smithson used the spiral because it is an archetypal shape—found throughout nature in galaxies, DNA molecules, seashells, as well as used for millennia in the art of different cultures. -Although it recalls the geometry favored by Modernist artists, the spiral is a "dialectical" shape that endlessly curls and uncurls, suggesting growth and decay, creation and destruction, or, in Smithson's words, the perpetual "coming and going of things." He ordered that no maintenance be done on Spiral Jetty so that the work would be governed by the natural elements over time. -Since its completion, the work has been changed by the varying environmental conditions of the lake, including years when it was completely submerged. Now covered with crystallized salt, it is visible to visitors at the site and as well as on Google Earth.

Fig. 33-15 Roy Lichtenstein OH, JEFF...I LOVE YOU, TOO...BUT...

-Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) also investigated the ways that popular imagery resonated with high art, imitating the format of comic books in his critique of mass-produced visual culture. In 1961, while teaching at Rutgers University with Allan Kaprow, Lichtenstein began to make paintings based on panels from war and romance comic books. -He cropped and simplified the source images to focus on dramatic emotions or actions, simultaneously representing and parodying the flat, superficial ways in which comic books of the time graphically communicated with their readers. -His use of heavy black outlines, flat primary colors, and hand-painted Benday dots like those used in commercial printing ironically replicate the mechanical character of cartoons. oh, jeff... i love you too... but... (fig. 33-15) compresses into a single frame a romantic storyline involving a crisis threatening a love relationship. Lichtenstein plays a witty game: We know that comic books are often unrealistically melodramatic, yet he presents this overblown episode vividly, almost reverently, enshrined in a work of high art.

Fig. 33-27 Miriam Schapiro PERSONAL APPEARANCE #3

-Schapiro, and 21 of their female students created Womanhouse, a collaborative art environment in a run-down Hollywood mansion that the artists renovated and filled with feminist installations. In collaboration with Sherry Brody, Schapiro's contribution to the project was Dollhouse, a mixed-media construction of several miniature rooms adorned with richly patterned fabrics. -Schapiro subsequently began to incorporate pieces of fabric into her acrylic paintings, developing a type of work she called femmage (from "female" and "collage"). Characteristic of femmage, personal appearance #3 (fig. 33-27) celebrates traditional women's crafts with a formal and emotional richness that was meant to counter the male-dominated Minimalist aesthetic of the 1960s. -Schapiro later returned to New York to lead the Pattern and Decoration movement, a group of female and male artists who merged the aesthetics of abstraction with ornamental motifs derived from women's craft, folk art, and art beyond the Western tradition in a nonhierarchical manner.

Earthworks

-Some earthworks are vast sculptures that altered the landscape permanently, and others are ambitious temporary works that called attention to their environmental surroundings and the social conditions of their production. Like other ephemeral art practices, earthworks are often documented through photographs and film, which provide collectable objects other than the work itself. -Many of these projects are in remote, difficult-to-access locations, making it a real effort for most viewers to visit. Part of these works, then, is the idea of pilgrimage, which likens the viewer's physical encounter with a unique work of art in its natural surroundings to a spiritual experience.

Fig. 33-67 William Kentridge HISTORY OF THE MAIN COMPLAINT

-South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955) explores difficult themes like violence, pain, and social justice in animated films made more affecting by his expressive drawing style and narrative structure. Kentridge creates each scene by filming a large charcoal drawing, which he erases and redraws to advance the narrative. -This physical process is visible in the final film as trace markings appear and disappear throughout each scene. Created from 20 individual drawings, history of the main complaint (fig. 33-67) was made in 1996, soon after South Africa established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to conduct public hearings of civil rights abuses that had taken place under apartheid. -In the film, the medical examination of Soho Eckstein—a greedy white businessman character in several of Kentridge's films—symbolizes white South Africans recognizing their responsibility for the suffering under apartheid. Kentridge describes drawing as an act of compassion and redemption. -He explains that he finds sympathy for others through the extended contemplation and time spent studying his subjects, and that this process redeems his appropriation of their pain as the raw material for his art.

Fig. 33-36 Anselm Kiefer HEATH OF THE BRANDENBURG MARCH

-The German artist Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), born in the final weeks of World War II, builds on the style and political undertones of German Expressionism from the early twentieth century (see Chapter 32). Heavily worked with thick layers of paint and shellac, heath of the brandenburg march (fig. 33-36) evokes the historical tradition of German landscape painting to confront his country's Nazi past. -The linear perspective of the central road pulls the viewer into a scorched and barren countryside, alluding to centuries of past warfare in this region around Berlin. Scrawled on top of the desolate scene, the words of the Nazi marching song "Märkische Heide, märkische Sand" appear in the foreground. Kiefer's work resists being interpreted in only one way, but instead has layers of meaning when looked at through the varied lenses of artistic style, cultural heritage, and political association. -Combining the influences of Postmodernism and Kiefer's teacher Beuys, Kiefer's art confronts Germany's rich—and at times horrific—historical past, perhaps suggesting an opportunity for national healing.

Fig. 33-16 Donald Judd UNTITLED

-The Minimalist creation of three-dimensional objects was a logical extension of the desire to eliminate illusionism in art, effectively moving it into the real space of the gallery. In "Specific Objects" Judd wrote, "The new work obviously resembles sculpture more than it does painting, but it is nearer to painting." -He further rejected the gesture and emotion invested in the handcrafted object by hiring industrial fabricators to create his sculpture in materials such as Plexiglas and steel. Judd explained that this approach synthesized art's various component parts into a unified whole that could be valued for its formal and material qualities. -This idea is evident in untitled (fig. 33-16) of 1969, consisting of ten rectangular units made of galvanized iron and tinted Plexiglas that are hung in a vertical row on the gallery wall. Although each unit remains discrete, the regular repetition of identical forms creates the impression of a single, large-scale structure. -Judd's industrial production technique eliminates the expressionistic implications of brushwork to leave a smooth, even surface infused with subtle color. The arrangement avoids references to any imagined subject, allowing the objects to be seen only as themselves.

Fig. 33-52 Frank O. Gehry GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO

-The Toronto-born, California-based Frank O. Gehry (b. 1929) also creates dynamic Deconstructivist forms with curved, winglike shapes that extend far beyond the solid masses of his buildings. One of his most spectacular designs is the guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain (fig. 33-52). -In the 1990s, the designing of art museums became more and more spectacular as they increasingly came to define the visual landscape of cities. Gehry developed his asymmetrical design using a CATIA CAD program that enabled him to create a powerfully organic, sculptural structure. -The complex steel skeleton is covered by a thin skin of silvery titanium that shimmers gold or silver depending on the time of day and the weather conditions. -From the north the building resembles a living organism, while from other angles it looks like a giant ship, a reference to the industry on which Bilbao has traditionally depended, thereby identifying the museum with the city. -Despite the sculptural beauty of the museum, however, the interior is a notoriously difficult space in which to display art, a characteristic this building shares with Wright's spiraling design of the New York Guggenheim (see fig. 33-33), a notable forebear of Gehry's explorations of the sculptural potential of architecture.

Fig. 33-57 THE AIDS MEMORIAL QUILT

-The aids memorial quilt (fig. 33-57) is an ongoing effort to address personal loss and political issues brought about by the AIDS epidemic. Quilts have historically served a community purpose, often made collectively to mark life events like marriages and births and to preserve cultural history and beliefs. -Growing out of the gay community in San Francisco, the AIDS Memorial Quilt builds on this tradition to educate the public and create a lasting tribute to thousands of individuals who have lost their lives to AIDS. Gay-rights activist Clive Jones began the Quilt in the mid-1980s. Each 3 by 6 foot panel is sewn by friends, families, and lovers to commemorate an individual lost to AIDS. -The panels are then organized in 8-panel, 12-foot-square blocks that can be exhibited separately. An assembly of 1,920 panels was displayed on the National Mall in Washington, DC in 1987 as a visual demonstration of the scale of the epidemic and to incite a call for government action toward research and education preventing its spread. -In 1989, the project was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Today, the Quilt includes 48,000 panels in remembrance of over 94,000 individuals, and it is still growing. The NAMES Project Foundation, an international nonprofit organization, continues this work by inviting participants to create new memorial panels, organizing exhibitions of the quilt around the world, and maintaining an archive of each person's name in a searchable online database.

Fig. 33-70 Olafur Eliasson THE WEATHER PROJECT

-The growing popularity—and scale—of contemporary art propelled a wave of expansive projects in museums around the world. When London's Tate Gallery decided to relocate its Modern and contemporary art collections into a refurbished power plant, they transformed the Turbine Hall, an enormous area where the building's electric generators once stood, into an impressive entry for the new museum. Measuring 115 by 375 feet, it provides an ideal site for monumental installations, and the Tate launched the Unilever Series, which commissions artists to create temporary works specifically for this vast open space. Projects have included a large crack that ran the length of the concrete floor (Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth, 2007) and choreographed encounters that encouraged conversations among strangers who crowd the hall (Tito Seghal, These Associations, 2012). In the weather project (fig. 33-70), Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) covered the entire ceiling with foil mirrors to visually double the massive hall, which he filled with an artificially generated foglike mist. At one end of the hall, he placed a semicircular screen backlit by 200 mono-frequency lights that, when reflected in the mirrors, created the illusion of a giant yellow sun shining brilliantly in a darkened sky.

Fig. 33-50 Norman Foster HONG KONG and SHANGHAI BANK, HONG KONG

-The hong kong & shanghai bank (fig. 33-50) by British architect Norman Foster (b. 1935) is among the most spectacular examples of High Tech architecture. Foster was invited to spare no expense in designing this futuristic 47-story skyscraper. Motorized "sunscoops" at the top of the structure track the sun's rays and channel them into the building, pouring additional daylight into a ten-story atrium space in the banking hall in the lower part of the building. -The sole concession Foster makes to tradition in this design is his placement of two bronze lions taken from the bank's previous headquarters flanking the public entrance. Touching the lions before entering the bank is believed to bring good luck.

Fig. 33-44 Lorna Simpson STEREO STYLES

-Using Postmodern strategies similar to Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) also addresses female stereotyping, but she expands the issue to include the question of race. In stereo styles (fig. 33-44), Simpson arranges ten Polaroid photographs in two rows. -Each depicts an African-American woman wearing a plain white shift and photographed from behind to reveal her head and shoulders. The only key to her identity is the distinctive hairstyle in each image, described by words such as "Daring," "Boyish," "Magnetic," "Country Fresh," and "Sweet" written in cursive on a plaque between the rows. -Simpson's gridlike display of black-and-white images uses Conceptual Art's straightforward presentation of information, encouraging us to look more closely at the relationship of visual appearance to our perceptions of individual identity.

Fig. 33-54 Wenda Gu CHINA MONUMENT: TEMPLE OF HEAVEN

-Wenda Gu (b. 1955) studied traditional ink painting at China's National Academy of Fine Arts before emigrating to the United States in 1987. In 1992, he began the ongoing project "United Nations Series" that now includes more than 20 "monuments," which highlight the histories and traditions of particular countries. -These large-scale installations are constructed with transparent walls and screens of human hair collected from the floors of hairdressers around the world and woven to create lacelike patterns and pseudo-characters based on Chinese, English, Arabic, and Hindi languages. -Although the text appears readable, closer scrutiny shows it to be Gu's own invented script. His point is that in a global society our understanding of one another may be fragmented, misunderstood, or incorrect. -Gu references an imperial altar from the Ming dynasty in china monument: temple of heaven (fig. 33-54), commissioned in 1998 by the Asia Society in New York. Draped curtains, made from hair collected in China, New York's Chinatown, and other American cities, enclose the space around a meditation area. -Video monitors in chairs project images of clouds and sky while music of ancient Chinese bells plays in the background. Gu's goal to bring all people together may seem utopian, but he feels his dream can be "fully realized in the art world."

Fig. 33-17 Robert Morris UNTITLED (MIRRORED CUBES)

-While characteristic of Minimalism's repeated geometric forms, industrial materials, and machine-made surfaces that lack the artist's touch, Morris's untitled (mirrored cubes) (fig. 33-17) is different because the mirrors deflect the viewer's attention away from the boxes. -Morris argued that Minimalist sculpture heightens psychological perceptions of an object in its spatial surroundings, forcing viewers to consider the art's relationship to their own bodily experience moving around the gallery and observing the work from many sides. -This idea derived in part from Morris's involvement in dance and experimental performance with artists involved in Happenings and Fluxus, and contributed to critic Michael Fried's characterization of Minimalism as "theatrical" because it relied on space, time, and physical interaction with the viewer.

Fig. 33-74 Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago FLOWER

-While games like Tetris and Minecraft encourage geometrical problem-solving, flower (fig. 33-74), created by Jenova Chen (b. 1981) and Kellee Santiago (b. 1979) of thatgamecompany, allows the viewer to assume the role of the wind and navigate through a lush and lyrical landscape, creating their own visual narrative as they are propelled along their path. Having grown up in the dense urban environment of Shanghai, Chen says his inspiration for the game was driving through rolling green hills and pastures on his first visit to California. -The goal for Flower was to recreate that sensation by allowing the player to fly up and see the scale of the surrounding landscape. He explains, "[Games have] the sense of endlessness, the sense of freedom. You can go anywhere you want." While still images capture the saturated color and pleasing contours that make Flower so visually appealing, the game requires the player's interaction to demonstrate its full effects. In Flower, we recognize ideas and themes that have emerged in art since 1950. The reliance on the viewer, the desire to blur the distinction between art and real life, and the synthesis of conceptual origins and aesthetic experience find new form in the intersection of computer animation and interactive design. As the world continues to evolve and develop in ways we cannot yet imagine, artists will certainly advance new theories and explore innovative formats that aim to communicate their interests and offer us alternative perspectives from which to consider the world and our place in it. Although art in the future will no doubt be different from contemporary art today, it will continue its historical tradition to reflect, critique, and document humanity's struggles and accomplishments and to inspire those who encounter it.

Fig. 33-34A Robert Venturi FAÇADE, VANNA VENTURI HOUSE, CHESTNUT HILL

-While writing his treatise on Postmodernism—Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)—Venturi designed a house for his mother (fig. 33-34) that put many of his new ideas into practice. The shape of the façade returns to the traditional Western "house" shape that Modernists (see figs. 32-39, 32-40, 32-51) had rejected because of its clichéd historical associations. -Venturi's vocabulary of triangles and squares is arranged in a playful asymmetry that skews the staid harmonies of Modernist design, while the curved moldings are a purely decorative flourish—forbidden in the strict International Style. But the most disruptive element of the façade is the deep cleavage over the door, which opens to reveal a mysterious upper wall and chimney top. -The interior is also complex and contradictory. The irregular floor plan, including an odd stairway leading up to the second floor, is further complicated by irregular ceiling levels that are partially covered by a barrel vault.

Matthew Barney

-created a series of films entitled "The Cremaster Cycle" in which he developed an arcane sexual mythology drawing on Celtic legend, Masonic ritual, Mormonism, and the life of Harry Houdini. The concept of biological mutability dominates the narrative, which questions gender assignation and roles throughout. -The cremaster muscle, for which the series is named, controls the ascent and descent of the testes, usually in response to changes in temperature but also in response to fear or sexual arousal. It also determines sexual differentiation in the human embryo. Barney uses a diagrammatic representation of the cremaster muscle as his visual emblem throughout the series.

Fig. 33-26 Christo and Jeanne-Claude THE GATES, CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK

-the gates, central park, new york, 1979-2005 (fig. 33-26) took Christo and Jeanne-Claude 26 years to realize. The artists battled their way through various New York bureaucracies, meeting many obstacles and making changes to the work along the way. -Working with an army of paid workers, they finally installed 7,503 saffron-colored nylon panels on "gates" along 23 miles of pathway in Central Park in February 2005. Lasting for only 16 days, the brightly colored flapping panels enlivened the frigid winter landscape and drew many visitors, becoming an enormous public success.

commodification

-treating goods, services, ideas, or art merely as things to be bought or sold

Fig. 33-28 Judy Chicago THE DINNER PARTY

Chicago's the dinner party (fig. 33-28) is a large, complex, mixed-media installation dedicated to hundreds of women and women artists rescued from anonymity by early feminist artists and historians. It took six years of collaborative effort to make and drew on the assistance of hundreds of female and several male volunteers.

Fig. 33-70 Olafur Eliasson THE WEATHER PROJECT (con)

Eliasson based the project on his notion that weather is one of the few authentic ways that city dwellers interact with nature. His goal was to bring nature into the museum and to encourage visitors to take the memory of their experience back outside. Visitors were overwhelmed by the immense scale and simple beauty of the installation. People gathered, wandered around, and even lay down on the floor to enjoy the soft, golden light that permeated the space. While such reactions may recall the Romantic landscape painters' pursuit of the sublime, Eliasson instead hoped to highlight the artifice of the encounter imposed by the museum context. By exposing the wires and mechanical devices used to create the illusion, he asked viewers to question their experience, perhaps contrasting it to real moments they spent in nature.

Benday dots

In modern printing and typesetting, the dots that make up lettering and images. Often machine- or computer-generated, the dots are very small and closely spaced to give the effect of density and richness of tone.