20th Century Art part 2

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55

"-One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag," Johns has said of this work, "and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it." -Those materials included three canvases that he mounted on plywood, strips of newspaper, and encaustic paint—a mixture of pigment and molten wax that has formed a surface of lumps and smears. -An ancient technique -The newspaper scraps visible beneath the stripes and forty-eight stars lend this icon historical specificity. -He did not just make a simple idea of re-representing a flag but brought depth to it because it does have a complicated history. -The American flag is something "the mind already knows," Johns has said, but its execution complicates the representation and invites close inspection. -A critic of the time encapsulated this painting's ambivalence, asking, "Is this a flag or a painting? -This sense of "other levels" is critical to Jasper Johns' method of operation. If he does not create an images, but uses ready-made designs, images, and lettering, what does his work consist of? -There are two ideas here: first, the notion of an image which is seen and not seen, because of its familiarity. -And second, the idea of an image which can be precisely measured and put onto canvas - an object identified by its fixed proportions. -An accurately reproduced flag is familiar, and therefore "not looked at." But by painting the image in encaustic, with its heavily worked, encrusted surface, Johns' flag image becomes familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and therefore draws our notice. -It also provokes more abstract considerations. Once concerns the idea of painting a flag. -In the 1950s that act seemed to many observers an absurdity: an American flag might be many things, but it was certainly not art. -Yet Johns presented a carefully worked, elegantly executed painting. Such a painting was surely art - or was it? That became a problem for the viewer, alone. Johns is gone; he has already made the painting, he has already presented the problem. The viewer is left to resolve it as best he can. -raw surface, almost like a collage, paper mâché -Aware of this as a physically made object, not as a mass produced flag or a print and used the ancient technique to do that. -Johns is concerned with the narrow line between art and life. -Not represented a glass on a hill waving on a flag pole -He has given up a lot of authority because colors and composition are chosen, do we celebrate the originality or the ideas? He gave all that up. Not about making or is it because he makes the handy craft obvious? -Makes us look at it because it is a fresh look at something we do not think of as art, relates to Dada. -American flag is a symbol that is so potent especially at the height of the Cold War at this time. -People had very powerful actions to it depending on their political leanings -This is a mirror, such a potent symbol with a lot of personalized experiences that it means different things to different people, the content contained in the baggage that each viewer brings to it not in its representation -Very loaded but neutral, someone comes with all their emotions and this is what they see and there in lies the content -After WWII, that authority itself was subject and why should the artist have more authority, can't art function in a totally individualized manner? -Art before pop art exists so turning his art onto something that are already set, color, composition, and yet it is still not a flag but a representation, walking on narrow edge. -Neo-Dadaist and pop art. -Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965

-A chair sits alongside a photograph of a chair and a dictionary definition of the word chair. -Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one: a visual code, a verbal code, and a code in the language of objects, that is, a chair of wood. But isn't this last chair simply . . . a chair? -Or, as Marcel Duchamp asked in his Bicycle Wheel of 1913, does the inclusion of an object in an artwork somehow change it? -If both photograph and words describe a chair, how is their functioning different from that of the real chair, and what is Kosuth's artwork doing by adding these functions together? -Prodded to ask such questions, the viewer embarks on the basic processes demanded by Conceptual art. -"The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art," Kosuth has written. - "Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept 'art,' . . . Fundamental to this idea of art is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction." -In Art after Philosophy: "What is the function of art, or the nature of art?" -Chasing a chair through three different registers, Kosuth asks us to try to decipher the subliminal sentences in which we phrase our experience of art. -This work is the first and most famous example of Kosuth's series of One and Three installations, in which he assembled an object, a photograph of that object, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the object. -It questions what actually constitutes a chair in our thinking: is it the solid object we see and use or is it the word "chair" that we use to identify it and communicate it to others? -Furthermore, it confronts us with how we use words to explain and define visible, tangible, ordinary things, how words represent, describe, or signify things, and how this often becomes more complex when the thing is simple, fundamental, or intangible. -Thus, it explores how language plays an integral role in conveying meaning and identity. It makes us more aware of why and how words become the verbal and written equivalents for commonplace tangible, solid things and objects. -This is one of the first Conceptual works of art that was intended to eliminate any sense of authorship or individual expression and creativity. -Ironically, One and Three Chairs can be looked upon as simple but rather complex model, of the science of signs. -A viewer may ask "what's real here?" and answer that "the definition is real"; Without a definition, one would never know what an actual chair is. -Kosuth is drawing attention to a three-way code of approach to reality: an objectual code, a visual code and a verbal code (reference, representation and language) -Plato's Theory of Forms asserts that non-material abstract forms (or ideas), and not the physical world, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. -The actual work exists as a piece of paper with instructions how to install it and a copy of the dictionary definition 'chair' signed by J. Kosuth. -It's up to the curator or gallery owner to set up the work. -In Kosuth's own words:"It meant you could have an art work which was that idea of an art work, and its formal components weren't important." -Together with Marcel Duchamp, Kosuth is one of the godfathers of conceptual art, nay, of art as we know it today. -The reason being their profound questioning of the relation between presentation, concept, idea, meaning. - Accompanying these photographic images are certificates of documentation and ownership (not for display) indicating that the works can be made and remade for exhibition purposes. -This strategy of presentation represents Kosuth's attempt to undermine the preciousness of the unique art object and its privileged place in the museum. -He sought to demonstrate that the "art" component is not located in the object itself but rather in the idea or concept of the work. -Duchamp brought about the idea of concept rather than materiality that interrupted the relationship between the artist and the audience. -The purpose of art was shifted to the perception of the artist to the perception of the viewer. -What modern and conceptual art have in common is the shift away from traditional art such as painting and sculpture. -Both following formalism, they share the concern with the power of the idea. -There is less importance involved with content, or aesthetic value. -Properties such as the medium and material were of less interest, and there was much more emphasis upon reduction of material all together. -Conceptual artists were influenced by the brutal simplicity of Minimalism, but they rejected Minimalism's embrace of the conventions of sculpture and painting as mainstays of artistic production. -For Conceptual artists, art need not look like a traditional work of art, or even take any physical form at all.

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

-Abstract Expressionism -Newman saw Onement I as a breakthrough in his work. -It features the first full incarnation of what he later called a 'zip', a vertical band of color. -This motif would play a central role in many of his subsequent paintings. The painting's title is an archaic derivation of the word 'atonement', meaning, "the state of being made into one." -For Newman, this unevenly painted zip on a flat field of color does not divide the canvas, rather it merges both sides, drawing in the audience to intensely experience the work both physically and emotionally. - -Some have compared the zips to Giacometti's slender figures, reinforcing Newman's own connections between his paintings and the viewer's body. -Gotten rid of landscape, but rather it is illusionistic relationship between forms in space. -Vertical lines, relate to each other as vertical forms, as soon as a mark is made on canvas one thing is in front of another. -Never removed the masking tape, he just decided to paint on the masking tape, unprecedented turn and impulsiveness -Creative energy, have idea and go somewhere else, what he valued -This is a purified expression of creative energy and natural impulsiveness -Vertical line, standing directly in front of it, align yourself with the zip like a human figure -That zip is an abstract mirror of the human in space related to Giacometti's very thin figures -Panting the tape is a declaration of human presence, i am here, existentialism, which was powerful at this time -Concentration camps, people pushed together, this is an assertion of the american individual and personal freedom.

Eva Hesse, Accession II, 1967

-Accession II seems a logical, structural outcome of the compartmental images characterizing Hesse's early paintings. - -Once again, the metal cube seems to have dropped straight out of a two-dimensional, Minimalist work of art, all the while the interior rows of tubing complicate its clean, exterior sensibility. -Bristling along the inner walls of the cube like the quills of a porcupine, the protrusions give the cube an ominous aura that belies their soft plasticity. -Is this a cloister of cushioning, or a torture chamber? -The dual qualities of the box aptly characterize Hesse's own "life of extremes", the unknowing girl of a forced and tragic diaspora, and the accomplished university design student. -Alluding to unexpected dangers and the need for a safe, protective space, Accession II embodies the artist's own fears and desires just as effectively, perhaps, as any more representational self-portrait. -Eva Hesse is known as post-Minimalist, although she didn't think of her work as a critique -The meticulous labor of piercing the metal screen and tying the tubing contrasts both the industrial outer appearance of this work and the industrial mode of production in Minimalist art. -appeals to our sense of touch -inside feels animated almost as if it were an organism -connotation of femininity -the womb, its penetrability (hollowness) -but also the labor (i.e stringing, weaving, tying) that is historically gendered as female. -since her death in 1970, at the age of 34, from a brain tumor. Her works are full of the pain she suffered, both mental and physical, and of the absurdity and wit she wielded to combat her suffering. -The trick is to acknowledge the tragic dimensions of her life without succumbing to sentimentality or cliche, or romanticizing her death as some sort of martyrdom. -Hesse's achievement can be measured in many ways. She became expert at incorporating light into her work. Like other sculptors of her generation, she used industrial materials, but instead of inflexible ones like iron she favored the pliancy of wire, rubber tubing, fiberglass and latex. -From these she constructed objects whose soft, idiosyncratic, often erotic forms brought something of the soul-searching aspirations of Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. -In many other hands, Minimalism was a chilling, impersonal, calculating art. -Hesse made the style fit her own purposes, borrowing the Minimalist idea of mechanical repetition to suggest a distinctly personal obsessiveness, and using Minimalist order as a container for surging emotions. -She embraced contradictions. The idea of combining a substance as ephemeral as latex with one as permanent as fiberglass, which she often did, illustrates her sensibility. -She once said: "I was always aware that I would take order versus chaos, stringy versus mass, huge versus small, and I would try to find the most absurd opposites or extreme opposites. And I was always aware of their absurdity, and also their contradiction formally. And it was always more interesting than making something average, normal, right size, right proportion." -This attitude is apparent in a work like "Accession II" (1968). -Hesse began with a galvanized steel cube and wove tens of thousands of rubber tubes through its sides so that the interior of the cube became a plush carpet of rubber tendrils. -The tendrils evoke natural forms that contrast with the sculpture's industrial exterior, just as Hesse's technique of weaving brings to mind a stereotype of female domesticity that clashes with the hard-edged masculinity of the mass-produced steel. -As a reaction against the emotional and gestural excesses of Abstract Expressionism--the dominant American movement of the 1940s and 50s, in which the painterly or expressive processes of the artists are left in evidence--Minimalist artists of the early and mid-1960s employed hard edged, geometric forms to create unified, reductive sculptures. -Post-Minimalism, in constrast to Minimalism, emphasized tactile sensual surfaces, and its inception has been associated with Hesse's art. -The movement reacted against the sterility of Minimalism, celebrating instead curved, gestural lines and forms. Its art is evocative rather than literal; it evades the viewer's experience, communicating the artist's inner sensibilities through tactility, sensuality, and content. -Mirroring the political and social rebellions of the mid and late 1960s, Post-Minimalist art, including Hesse's, foregrounded unpredictability, inter determinacy, infinity, mutability, chaos, heterogeneity, subjectivity, diversity, and pluralism. Promoted radical spacial metaphors for the body and self. -The work of Eva Hesse is also postminimalist: it uses "grids" and "seriality", themes often found in minimalism, but is also usually hand-made, introducing a human element into her art, in contrast to the machine or custom-made works of minimalism. -Hesse's work is typical of those among her peers who borrowed the anonymous language of Minimalism, but rejected its austere formalism, reintroducing emotionally expressive qualities.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #7, 1978

-Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills have been canonized as a hallmark of postmodernist art, which frequently utilized mass-media codes and techniques of representation in order to comment on contemporary society. -In this series of 69 black-and-white photographs, Sherman posed herself in various melodramatic guises that recall the stereotypical feminine characters presented in 8 x 10 publicity stills for B-grade movies from the 1950s and 1960s. -The personae she created range from ingenue lost in the big city to martini-wielding party girl to jilted lover to hausfrau. -Contrary to the media images they appropriate, which may require a transparent sense of realism to sell an illusion, -Sherman's stills have an artifice that is heightened by the often visible camera cord, slightly eccentric props, unusual camera angles, and by the fact that each image includes the artist, rather than a recognizable actress or model. -consist of black-and-white photographs of the artist posing in different stereotypical female roles. -Although she poses for her photographs, Sherman's pictures are not self-portraits in a traditional sense. -Sherman focuses on the consequences of society's stereotyped roles for women — in this case as a victim of fashion — rather than upon the roles themselves. -Modeling in several roles, she reveals gender as an unstable and constructed position, which suggests that there is no innate biological female identity. -On the contrary, women adopt several roles and identities depending on their circumstances. -Importantly, her work encourages self-reflection in the spectator. As Sherman argues, "I'm trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me." -She would often pose her heroines as alone, expressionless, and in private. -An overarching characteristic of her heroines were those that did not follow conventional ideas of marriage and family. -They were rebellious women who either died as that or who were later tamed by society. -Sherman sought to call into question the seductive and often oppressive influence of mass-media over our individual and collective identities. -Turning the camera on herself in a game of extended role playing of fantasy Hollywood, fashion, mass advertising, and "girl-next-door" roles and poses, Sherman ultimately called her audience's attention to the powerful machinery and make-up that lay behind the countless images circulating in an incessantly public, "plugged in" culture. -Sexual desire and domination, the fashioning of self identity as mass deception, these are among the unsettling subjects lying behind Sherman's extensive series of self-portraiture in various guises. -Sherman's work is central in the era of intense consumerism and image proliferation at the close of the 20th century. -This "readymade" quality of the critically applied photograph, whereby a preexisting image or convention is appropriated intact by the artist and subtly turned into something more conceptually problematic -These black-and-white photographs feature the artist herself as a model in various costumes and poses, and are her portrayals of female stereotypes found in film, television, and advertising. -Sherman examines and distorts femininity as a social construct."I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realize what you're looking at is something totally opposite," -Recalling a long tradition of self-portraiture and theatrical role-playing in art, Sherman utilizes the camera and the various tools of the everyday cinema, such as makeup, costumes, and stage scenery, to recreate common illusions, or iconic "snapshots," that signify various concepts of public celebrity, self confidence, sexual adventure, entertainment, and other socially sanctioned, existential conditions.

Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971

-Conceptual art -A landmark work of institutional critique, it chronicles the fraudulent activities of one of New York City's largest slumlords over the course of two decades. -The work comprises 146 photographs of Manhattan apartment buildings, mostly tenements; maps of Harlem and the Lower East Side; -photographs and charts documenting real estate transactions; and texts with information about the location, ownership structure, and financial histories of the buildings. -Haacke culled all of his data from the public record, adapting a neutral presentational style that resembles various contemporaneous projects in Conceptual art. -Shapolsky et al. was to be part of the artist's solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in the spring of 1971, but the show was cancelled six weeks before its scheduled opening for fear that this work, and one other to be included in the show, might result in legal action. -Documents the ownership and control of urban space. The work exposes the properties and transactions of Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, which in 1971 represented the biggest concentration of real estate in New York under one group, and it is still an active corporation today. -The properties of the group were found primarily in the Lower East Side and Harlem, two neighbourhoods characterised by their ethnic and racial minorities. -The information was culled from New York City public records and covered approximately twenty years prior to 1971. -About seventy companies proved to be the owners of these properties, often interchanging among each other mortgages or properties, which obscured ownership and granted fiscal advantages. -Composed of various elements, the work includes 142 photographs of buildings, accompanied by typewritten sheets with different data on the property such as its address, the type of building, the size of the lot, date of acquisition, owner, or its assessed land value. -Haacke then synthesised this material into diagrams revealing how the system was made up of an obscure network of family ties and dummy corporations. -Two maps of the Lower East Side and Harlem highlighting the lots owned by the Shapolsky network complete the work. -Haacke's piece exceeds its investigation of the Shapolsky family and expands into a critique of relations of property. -It frames the fundamental contradiction of the real estate system in which the Shapolsky operation occurred: the opposition between market requirements and the social needs of city residents. -Haacke's photographs, taken from street level, neglected compositional considerations and testify to the type of investments these properties represented - housing in impoverished neighbourhoods lucratively run at a low level of maintenance - and reinforce the impression of the city as a mere economic product. -The work was part of the Haacke's individual exhibition programmed for 1971 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. -Thomas Messer, director of the museum, called Shapolsky et al. 'inadequate' and refused it along with two other works, judging them incompatible with the functions of an artistic institution. -The exhibition was cancelled a month and a half before its scheduled date, when the artist refused to remove these three works. -Edward F. Fry, curator of the exhibition, defended the works and was subsequently fired. -Many commentators on the controversy have speculated that the Board of Trustees of the Guggenheim Museum were connected to the real estate group, but this has never been proven. -demystifying the relationship between museums and businesses and their individual practices. -corporate sponsorship of art enhances their public reputation, which is of material use to them. -Haacke believes, moreover, that both parties are aware of this exchange, financial and symbolic capital, and as an artist, Haacke is intent on making this relationship clear to viewers.

Jean Dubuffet, Volonté de Puissance (Will to Power), 1946

-Dubuffet influenced by the Artistry of the Mentally Ill by Hans Pinzhorn. -Dubuffet's championing of the art brut - of the insane and others at the margins of society - is yet another example of avant-garde art challenging established cultural values. -Dubuffet's painting style, which he called Art Brut (raw art instead of refined), was contrary to everything expected of a painter in the French tradition and dealt a serious blow to the usual aesthetic assumptions. -Inspired by graffiti and art made by the mentally ill, Dubuffet insisted that his protest was against specious notions of beauty "inherited from the Greeks and cultivated by magazine covers." - -Grotesque male nude dominates Will to Power, his gritty roughness, burly proportions, inlaid stone teeth, and glass fragments for eyes giving him a fierce and threatening air. -But the figure's aggressive machismo is itself threatened by the very stance he assumes: hands held behind the back, his gesture is either one of unexpected receptivity or of helpless captivity. -But in a single deft stroke, Dubuffet's caricature mocks Fascism's claims to authority as it emasculates romanticized male aggression. -Dubuffet was launched to success with a series of exhibitions that opposed the prevailing mood of post-war Paris and consequently sparked enormous scandal. -While the public looked for a redemptive art and a restoration of old values, Dubuffet confronted them with childlike images that satirized the conventional genres of high art. -And while the public looked for beauty, he gave them pictures with coarse textures and drab colors, which critics likened to dirt and excrement. -The emphasis on texture and materiality in Dubuffet's paintings might be read as an insistence on the real. -In the aftermath of the war, it represented an appeal to acknowledge humanity's failings and begin again from the ground - literally the soil - up. -The extraordinary range of techniques that Dubuffet employed in this work includes creating successive layers of paint by shaking a brush over the painting and covering it with a spray of tiny droplets, scattering sand over the surface, and scratching it with the tines of a fork. - In his attempt to rehabilitate values and materials dismissed by Western aesthetics, what mattered to Dubuffet was unbridled energy, spontaneity, and truth to self—and with them, a spirit of insubordination and impertinence. -"I believe very much in values of savagery... instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness."

Claes Oldenburg, The Store, 1961

-Historically, pop art, appropriate the store as art. But he produces these things himself which complicates it. -Performative through audience participation. -In the winter of 1961, Oldenburg circumvented the practice of selling art through a gallery by opening a storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and selling his work there. -Among the unorthodox, eclectic offerings were sculptures of undergarments and slices of blueberry pie and other pastries made out of painted plaster. -To advertise this bold endeavor, Oldenburg created business cards and stationery as well as posters such as the one on view here. -Modeled after a poster the artist saw in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of New York, it retains a few Spanish words. -A milestone of Pop art, The Store heralded Oldenburg's interest in the slippery line between art and commodity and the role of the artist in self-promotion. -The Store features brightly painted sculptures and sculptural reliefs shaped to evoke commercial products and comestibles. -In The Store, cigarettes, lingerie, and hamburgers all become viable subjects for art. "I'd like to get away from the notion of a work of art as something outside of experience, something that is located in museums, something that is terribly precious," -Oldenburg declared. In 1961 he presented a new body of work whose subject matter he had culled from the clothing stores, delis, and bric-a-brac shops that crowded the Lower East Side. -The earliest Store sculptures, which debuted in spring 1961 at the Martha Jackson Gallery, at 32 East Sixty-Ninth Street, are wall-mounted reliefs depicting everyday items like shirts, dresses, cigarettes, sausages, and slices of pie. -Oldenburg made them from armatures of chicken wire overlaid with plaster-soaked canvas, using enamel paint straight from the can to give them a bright color finish. -At the gallery, the reliefs hung cheek by jowl, emulating displays in low-end markets. -In December 1961, Oldenburg opened The Store in the rented storefront at 107 East Second Street that served as his studio, which he called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company. -A fully elaborated manifestation of the project that he had begun months earlier, The Store conflated two disparate types of commerce: the sale of cheap merchandise and the sale of serious art. -Oldenburg packed more than one hundred objects into the modestly sized room, setting previously exhibited reliefs alongside new, primarily freestanding sculptures. -"The Store, or My Store, or the Ray Gun Mfg. Co., located at 107 East 2nd St., NYC, is eighty feet long and is about ten feet wide. In the front half, it is my intention to create the environment of a store by painting and placing (hanging, projecting, lying) objects after the spirit and in the form of popular objects of merchandise, such as may be seen in store windows of the city, especially in the area where The Store is"--site specific, reflects characteristics of the neighborhood. -Everything was available for purchase, with prices starting at $21.79 up to $499.99. -Oldenburg hawked commonplace objects out of his storefront: ice cream, oranges, cigarettes, hats, shoes, all things that could be found in surrounding stores, but here, they were specially crafted and singular, specific to the artist and his studio-cum-store.

Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 1959

-In his groundbreaking happening, presented at the Reuben Gallery in New York in the fall of 1959, Kaprow synthesized his training in action painting with his study of Cage's scored and performed events ----Working from a carefully conceived and tighlty scripted score, he created an interactive environment that manipulated the audience to a degree virtually unprecedented in 20th century art. -The audience were given programs and three stapled cards, which provided instructions for their participation -The performance is divided into six parts...Each part contains three happenings which occur at once. -The beginning and end of each will be signaled by a bell. -At the end of the performance two strokes of the bell will be heard...There will be no applause after each set, but you may applaud after the sixth set if you wish. -These instructions also stipulated when audience members were required to change seats and move to the next of the three rooms into which the gallery was divided. -These rooms were formed by semitransparent plastic sheets painted and collaged with references to Kaprow's earlier work; by panels on which words were roughly painted, and by rows of plastic fruit. -In contrast to Cage, whose encouragement of the participation of audience members were motivated by his desire to relinquish authorial control, audience members in many of Kaprow's Happenings became props through which the artist's vision was executed. - 'something spontaneous, something that just happens to happen'. -Rather than being passive observers, the audience were participants - invitations to the event said 'you will become part of the happenings; you will simultaneously experience them'. -Once people arrived at the second floor loft space of the Reuben Gallery they were given a programme of events, and instructions on how to behave, including when to take their seats or move between the three spaces, or when applause was appropriate (at the very end only). -Lasting for ninety minutes, the eighteen simultaneous performances included painters painting on canvases, a procession of performers, readings from placards, the playing of musical instruments, and ended with two performers saying single-syllable words like "but", "well" as four huge scrolls fell from a horizontal bar between them. -In many ways these events brought out the ideas of chance encounters -These participatory events blurred the line between what was life and what was art, what was an everyday movement and what was a performance. -Kaprow said, 'The line between art and life sould be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct as possible'. -The happening had its roots in Hugo Ball's Dada Cabaret Voltaire, Surrealist performances and the Italian Futurists in the early years of the twentieth century. -Above all, happenings emphasized the organic connection between art and its environment. -In 1958, Kaprow published the essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock". In it he demands a "concrete art" made of everyday materials such as "paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies." -In this particular text, he uses the term "happening" for the first time stating that craftsmanship and permanence should be forgotten and perishable materials should be used in art. -The "Happenings" first started as tightly scripted events, in which the audience and performers followed cues to experience the art. -To Kaprow, a Happening was "A game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing." -- -Furthermore, Kaprow says that the Happenings were "events that, put simply, happen." -There was no structured beginning, middle, or end, and there was no distinction or hierarchy between artist and viewer. -It was the viewer's reaction that decided the art piece, making each Happening a unique experience that cannot be replicated. -These "Happenings" represent what we now call New Media Art. -It is participatory and interactive, with the goal of tearing down the wall a.k.a. "the fourth wall" between artist and observers, so observers are not just "reading" the piece, but also interacting with it, becoming part of the art. -One such work, titled Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, involved an audience moving together to experience elements such as a band playing toy instruments, a woman squeezing an orange, and painters painting. -His work evolved, and became less scripted and incorporated more everyday activities. -A form of conceptual art, performance art takes a different approach to defining art through means of dematerialization of the art object. -Performances are considered conceptual art because of their ability to free art from the object, as well as commodification. -In addition, the interactive participation of the audience is a key function of performance art. -The ability of accessibility of art establishes a sense of connectivity through collaboration while allowing the audience to directly interact with not only the artist but other viewers. -The importance of the artist lies in their responsibility of all roles as well as control of the space. -Nonlinear narrative -Key elements of happenings are planned but artists sometimes retain room for improvisation. -This new media art aspect to happenings eliminates the boundary between the artwork and its viewer. - "Art" was no longer an object to be viewed hanging on a wall or set on a pedestal; rather, it could now be anything at all, including movement, sound, and even scent. -Kaprow rebelled against the prescriptions of Clement Greenberg, both in his art and in his writings: -formal aesthetics, Kaprow believed, were no longer relevant when the art left the canvas. -Kaprow's work was based on an "aesthetic of regular experience," a transient and momentary experience felt by the viewer being as significant as a painting on canvas. -Kaprow's pieces involved spaces he physically altered, with sights and sounds as deliberately composed as any canvas by Pollock or Rothko.

David Hammons, Injustice Case, 1970

-Injustice Case is perhaps the most well known of these "body prints." The image of the contorted and bound figure at the center of the picture appears not to be afforded the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice for all symbolized by the flag that frames the picture. -As in much contemporary art created in this time period, this piece specifically relates to a specific event: the trial of Bobby Seale, a co-founder of the Black Panthers who was on trial in the wake of the 1968 Democratic convention, charged with conspiracy. -Hammons is making a political act in recreating the image of Bobby Seale of the Chicago Seven bound and gagged in the courtroom (Chicago Seven). - nstead of removing Seale from the courtroom, his freedom and rights were stripped away. -Hammons binds his own body, and strips away his own freedom to create a flattened image of a real life event that expresses his own anger about the stereotypes and racism present in not only society, but in a court of law. -He backs the image up with an American flag, which contrasts an image a justice with an image of something very unjust.

Fluxkit, 1966

-Manifesto: "...purge the world of bourgeois sickness, 'intellectual', professional & commercialized culture ..." -goal of most Fluxus artists was to destroy any boundary between art and life -Fluxus movement expressed a countercultural sentiment to the value of art and the modes of its experience -distinctly achieved by its commitment to collectivism and to decommodifying and deaestheticizing art. -Fluxus's spirit of rebellion against the commercial art market, elitism, and the conventions of both art and society had its roots in Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, while its irreverence and youthful energy were in tune with the burgeoning counterculture of the 1960s. -With their work, the Fluxus artists pushed art well outside of mainstream venues like galleries and museums. Their informal, spontaneous, and often ephemeral pieces were not only difficult to collect and codify; they were also sometimes hard to recognize as art. -fluxus artists did not agree with the authority of museums to determine the value of art, nor did they believe that one must be educated to view and understand a piece of art. -Its aesthetic practitioners, valuing originality over imitating overworked forms, reconceptualized the art object and the nature of performance through musical 'concerts', 'olympic' games, and publications. -Fluxus art involved the viewer, relying on the element of chance to shape the ultimate outcome of the piece. The use of chance was also employed by Dada, Marcel Duchamp, and other performance art of the time, such as Happenings. -The Fluxkit encapsulates a collection of multiples and printed items by artists orbiting Maciunas and those who had contributed to festivals and events organized by the group Fluxus since 1962. - The retrofitted attaché case, initially advertised for the price of $100, was among the most elaborate of the Fluxus Editions produced, packed with small objects to be held in the hand, read and manipulated. -The contents vary between each kit; however generally, Fluxus newspapers and announcements sit strapped inside the lid and the central compartment houses a built-in noisemaker by Joe Jones; Mieko Shiomi's Endless Box, comprised of nested paper cubes; Ay-O's Finger Box, harboring a tactile surprise inside; Alison Knowles's study of the legume, titled Bean Rolls; and approximately a dozen additional works—several of them performance score cards—kept in latched plastic cases. - Fluxkits also appeared at performance venues, such as New York's Carnegie Recital Hall, displayed with other Fluxus Editions for the audience to handle and purchase. -Along with collective authorship and self-representation, the tension between material and concept—the thing and the thought—was of main concern. In graphics and text, many Fluxus Editions propose actions or ideas and were intended to be held, read, and manipulated by their users -Perhaps most important of all of Maciunas's publishing activities remain the object multiples, conceived as inexpensive, mass-produced unlimited editions. -These were either works made by individual Fluxus artists, sometimes in collaboration with Maciunas, or, most controversially, Maciunas's own interpretations of an artist's concept or score. -Their purpose was to erode the cultural status of art and to help to eliminate the artist's ego.

Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52

-Merged abstraction and representation. Over the course of a career that lasted nearly seven decades, he experimented continuously, shifting his style to explore new techniques and forms of expression. -- -Such regular reinvention led to a body of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures characterized by boldness and innovation. As the artist once said: "Art should not have to be a certain way." -De Kooning took an unusually long time to create Woman I, making numerous preliminary studies and repainting the work repeatedly. -The hulking, wild-eyed subject draws upon an amalgam of female archetypes, from Paleolithic fertility goddesses to contemporary pin-up girls. -Her threatening stare and ferocious grin are heightened by de Kooning's aggressive brushwork and frantic paint application. -Combining voluptuousness and menace, Woman I reflects the age-old cultural ambivalence between reverence for and fear of the power of the feminine. -The surface of Woman, I presents an almost encyclopedic display of the physical possibilities of paint, ranging from thick to thin, rough to smooth, and opaque to translucent. -De Kooning prepared huge quantities of paint for this project, altering colors and textures continuously during the nearly two years he spent working on the composition. -Although it may appear rapidly and intuitively executed, it is the result of many preliminary studies, numerous painting sessions, the scraping down and re-painting of entire sections, and extended consideration by the artist. -At the center of this six-feet-high by five-feet-wide painting sits the woman of its title: a figure composed of an amalgam of sweeping brushstrokes in hues of white, gray, yellow, orange, green, blue, and pink. -Rough black outlines incompletely distinguish her form from the vigorous brushstrokes surrounding her. Broad-shouldered and ample-bosomed, she faces forward, with wide-open eyes taking up almost a third of her face and a virtually lipless mouth bearing long teeth. -Despite such heft, she appears flattened out, pressed up against the painting's surface. -De Kooning once summarized the history of female representations as "the idol, the Venus, the nude." -"Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It's more joyous." -he continually returned to the figure. The female figure was an especially fertile subject for the artist, whose paintings of women were among his most controversial works during his lifetime and remain much discussed to this day.

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950

-Pollock had created his first "drip" painting in 1947, the product of a radical new approach to paint handling. -In this nonrepresentational picture, thinned paint was applied to unprimed, unstretched canvas that lay flat on the floor rather than propped on an easel. -Poured, dripped, dribbled, scumbled, flicked, and splattered, the pigment was applied in the most unorthodox means. -The artist also used sticks, trowels, knives, in short, anything but the traditional painter's implement to build up dense, lyrical compositions comprised of intricate skeins of line. -There's no central point of focus, no hierarchy of elements in this allover composition in which every bit of the surface is equally significant. -The artist worked with the canvas flat on the floor, constantly moving all around it while applying the paint and working from all four sides. -Autumn Rhythm is 207 inches wide. It assumes the scale of an environment, enveloping both for the artist as he created it and for viewers who confront it. -The work is a record of its process of coming-into-being. Its dynamic visual rhythms and sensation's buoyant, heavy, graceful, arcing, swirling, pooling lines of color are direct evidence of the very physical choreography of applying the paint with the artist's new methods. -- -Spontaneity was a critical element. But lack of premeditation should not be confused with ceding control; as Pollock stated, "I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident." -Pollock and his status as an American hero. Pollock's hyper-masculine persona and his status as a hero fit the needs of postwar America and made him the champion of Abstract Expressionism. -Autumn Rhythm became known as one of Pollock's more famous drip paintings because of its commanding large presences of black, white, and tan. -Large in scale, the painting seems to be its own life force as it requires interaction from the viewer. -Because there was no representation, the work is timeless allowing for viewers to connect readily with it and not feel alienated. -In a time when America was recovering from a terrible war and gender and sexual identity was being tested and shaken, a painting like Autumn Rhythm would be a comfort to the viewer as they are a very simple expression of a collective thought shared by Americans. -Pollock is taking on the role of American hero by looking inward to find an identity that can be expressed and shared by all. -He also felt that pouring technique was extremely liberating in that everything from his unconsciousness (his life, his beliefs, his feelings) was freed onto the canvas. -As Pollock began to produce more and more drip paintings, they began to grow in size to the point where they were confrontational with the viewer. -A term coined by art critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 to describe the work of artists who painted with gestures that involved more than just the traditional use of the fingers and wrist to paint, including also the arm, shoulder, and even legs. In many of these paintings the movement that went into their making remains visible. -Autobiographical elements of abstract expressionism--heroic artist behind the work.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962

-Pop Art -Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962, having overdosed on barbiturates. -In the following four months, Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. -Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. -By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. -The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star's mortality. -Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych is made of two silver canvases on which the artist silkscreened a photograph of Marilyn Monroe fifty times. At first glance, the work—which explicitly references a form of Christian painting (see below) in its title—invites us to worship the legendary icon, whose image Warhol plucked from popular culture and immortalized as art. -But as in all of Warhol's early paintings, this image is also a carefully crafted critique of both modern art and contemporary life. -With sustained looking, Warhol's works reveal that he was influenced not only by pop culture, but also by art history—and especially by the art that was then popular in New York. -For example, in this painting, we can identify the hallmarks of Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. -As in the work of these older artists, the monumental scale of Marilyn Diptych (more than six feet by nine feet) demands our attention and announces the importance of the subject matter. - -Furthermore, the seemingly careless handling of the paint and its "allover composition"—the even distribution of form and color across the entire canvas, such that the viewer's eyes wander without focusing on one spot—are each hallmarks of Abstract Expressionism, as exemplified by Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. -Yet Warhol references these painters only to undermine the supposed expressiveness of their gestures: like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he admired, he uses photographic imagery, the silkscreen process and repetition to make art that is not about his interior life, but rather about the culture in which he lived. -Warhol takes as the subject of his painting an impersonal image. Though he was an award-winning illustrator, instead of making his own drawing of Monroe, he appropriates an image that already exists. -Furthermore, the image is not some other artist's drawing, but a photograph made for mass reproduction. -Even if we don't recognize the source (a publicity photo for Monroe's 1953 film Niagara), we know the image is a photo, not only because of its verisimilitude, but also because of the heightened contrast between the lit and shadowed areas of her face, which we associate with a photographer's flash. -True to form, the actress looks at us seductively from under heavy-lidded eyes and with parted lips; but her expression is also a bit inscrutable, and the repetition remakes her face into an eerie, inanimate mask. -Warhol's use of the silkscreen technique further "flattens" the star's face. By screening broad planes of unmodulated color, the artist removes the gradual shading that creates a sense of three-dimensional volume, and suspends the actress in an abstract void. -Through these choices, Warhol transforms the literal flatness of the paper-thin publicity photo into an emotional "flatness," and the actress into a kind of automaton. -In this way, the painting suggests that "Marilyn Monroe," a manufactured star with a made-up name, is merely a one-dimensional (sex) symbol—perhaps not the most appropriate object of our almost religious devotion. -While Warhol's silkscreened repetitions flatten Monroe's identity, they also complicate his own identity as the artist of this work. -The silkscreen process allowed Warhol (or his assistants) to reproduce the same image over and over again, using multiple colors. -Once the screens are manufactured and the colors are chosen, the artist simply spreads inks evenly over the screens using a wide squeegee. -Though there are differences from one face to the next, these appear to be the accidental byproducts of a quasi-mechanical process, rather than the product of the artist's judgment. -Warhol's rote painting technique is echoed by the rigid composition of the work, a five-by-five grid of faces, repeated across the two halves of its surface. -Aside from radically changing our notion of painting, Warhol's choices create a symmetry between the artist and his subject, who each seem to be less than fully human: the artist becomes a machine, just as the actress becomes a mask or a shell. -Another word we could use to describe the presence of both the artist and the actress might be ghostly, and in fact, Warhol started making his series of "Marilyn" paintings only after the star had died of an apparent suicide, and eventually collected them with other disturbing paintings under the title "Death in America." -Her death haunts this painting: on the left, her purple, garishly made-up face resembles an embalmed corpse, while the lighter tones of some of the faces on the right make it seem like she is disappearing before our eyes. -Warhol once noted that through repeated exposure to an image, we become de-sensitized to it. -In that case, by repeating Monroe's mask-like face, he not only drains away her life, but also ours as well, by deadening our emotional response to her death. -Then again, by making her face so strange and unfamiliar, he might also be trying to re-sensitize us to her image, so that we remember she isn't just a symbol, but a person whom we might pity. -From the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, he may even be forcing us to relive, and therefore work through, the traumatic shock of her death. -The painting is more than a mere celebration of Monroe's iconic status. -It is an invitation to consider the consequences of the increasing role of mass media images in our everyday lives.

Robert Rauschenberg, Rebus, 1955

-Rebus belongs to a body of work in which Rauschenberg integrated three-dimensional objects with two-dimensional paintings. -His friend Jasper Johns coined the term Combine for such works, describing them as "painting playing the game of sculpture." -Made from layers of everyday materials found in the neighborhood of his Lower Manhattan studio (comic strips, political posters, fabric, and drawings), this work maintains a flatter, sparser surface than most of the artist's Combines. -Robert Rauschenberg's enthusiasm for popular culture and, with his contemporary Jasper Johns, his rejection of the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. -A prolific innovator of techniques and mediums, he used unconventional art materials ranging from dirt and house paint to umbrellas and car tires. -In the early 1950s, Rauschenberg was already gaining a reputation as the art world's enfant terrible with works such as Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), for which he requested a drawing (as well as permission) from Willem de Kooning, and proceeded to rub away the image until only ghostly marks remained on the paper. -By 1954, Rauschenberg completed his first three-dimensional collage paintings—he called them Combines—in which he incorporated discarded materials and mundane objects to explore the intersection of art and life. -"I think a picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world," he said. -The paintings of Abstract expressionist figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning are indexical in that they stand effectively as a signature on canvas. -In contrast, Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Rauschenberg seemed preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols.

Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947

-Relinquished part of authorship "Autographic gesture", signature-like dribble of paint that would translate private feelings and emotions directly onto the material field of the canvas, without the mediation of any figurative content. -Full Fathom Five was among the first drip paintings Pollock completed. -Its surface is clotted with an assortment of detritus, from cigarette butts to coins and a key. -While the top-most layers were created by pouring lines of black and shiny silver house paint, a large part of the paint's crust was applied by brush and palette knife, creating an angular counterpoint to the weaving lines. -"Like a seismograph," noted writer Werner Haftmann "the painting recorded the energies and states of the man who drew it." -Since their first exhibition, critics have come to recognize that drip paintings such as this might also be read as major developments in the history of modern painting. -With them, Pollock found a new abstract language for the unconscious, one which moved beyond the Freudian symbolism of the Surrealists. -He broke up the rigid, shallow space of Cubist pictures, replacing it instead with a dense web of space, like an unfathomable galaxy of stars. -He even updated Impressionism, creating pictures that seem to glitter with the effects of light, and yet which also suggest the pitch dark and anxious interior of the human mind. -Rosenberg describes this as an "action painting", when the artist is the actor and the canvas is his stage. It does not take the viewer to watch a clip of Pollock on Youtube to see how he produced the artwork. -The movement of the artist is automatically mimicked in display. -To even further push the concept, the canvas represents the mind of the artist and the paint the content of the mind. -In the mind of the artist, the canvas is not a canvas anymore, but it is him. -The handling of color and paint represents the perception of a feeling or whatever the artist is thinking at that moment. -Painting is the same impulse as routine—extension of life, extension of the body moving, part of the routine, such as handwriting—indexical of the hand moving in a way that captures the singularity of expression -Index the body moving through each line becoming a trace of Pollock; "an arena in which to act." -But for Clement Greenberg, the critic who was the painter's strongest advocate, the significance of his technique lay in its formal achievements: flatness and medium specificity, does away with idea of skill,, non-hierarchal use of the paint, foregrounding the paint and the canvas and the color. -It managed to detach line from its traditional role of defined shapes and volumes, and it broke away from the rigid, shallow, demarcated space that had dominated painting since the advent of Cubism, replacing it with a loose, open web of space.

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981

-Richard Serra wanted passers-by to have a very different relationship to public sculpture. -His 1981 sculpture Tilted Arc was a 12-foot-tall, 120-foot-long, 15-ton steel slab that cut across Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. -Instead of focusing on the optical experience of sculpture—looking at it from a distance—Serra wanted passers-by to experience the sculpture in a physical way. -He said that the long, curving metal sheet would "encompass the people who walk on the plaza in its volume," altering their experience of the space as they moved to and from the surrounding government buildings. -Serra shared this interest with many of his minimalist colleagues such as Dan Flavin and Robert Morris, who sought to engage the spaces surrounding their sculptures. -Minimalist artists considered their audience as moving beings with changing perspectives, not static viewers. -For example, Tilted Arc could seem like a lyrical curve from some vantage points and an imposing barrier from others. -The sculpture was commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), as part of its "Art-in-Architecture" program, which commissioned large-scale, permanent artworks for new government buildings. -However, Serra's work would not be permanent. -Serra saw public art as a way to expose and critique the surrounding public space, not to beautify it. -This approach made Titled Arc a target of criticism from the moment of its installation in 1981. N -New York Times art critic Grace Glueck called it "an awkward, bullying piece that may conceivably be the ugliest work of outdoor art in the city." -Employees of two government divisions that were housed on Federal Plaza collected 1,300 signatures requesting the removal of the sculpture. -However, this criticism did not gain real traction until William Diamond became the GSA administrator in 1984 and took up the cause. -Diamond held a public forum about Tilted Arc, in which 180 federal plaza workers, art critics, artists, curators, and other concerned parties expressed their opinions about the piece. -Another New York Times critic, Michael Berenson, wrote that ''Tilted Arc is confrontational. But it is also gentle, silent and private." -Proponents of the sculpture stated that removing the sculpture at the request of a few would infringe upon Serra's First Amendment right to free speech, and therefore was un-American. -Some emphasized that difficult artworks often become masterpieces only after an initial controversy (for example, Manet's Olympia). -Serra and his supporters also stated that the artwork was site specific—that it was designed specifically for the Federal Plaza space. -Because Tilted Arc engaged with its surroundings, it could not simply be moved to another location like other sculptures. -The removal of the sculpture from Federal Plaza would destroy it. -Opponents of Tilted Arc felt that the public had not been adequately consulted. -Indeed, the GSA amended its policies in 1988 to include more public awareness programming around each of its new sculptures. -Furthermore, they found the resulting sculpture to be yet another rusting eyesore in New York City. -Some argued that the sculpture "attracted" graffiti and rats. -Others contended that the sculpture compromised the security and surveillance of the plaza, making the surrounding buildings more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. -Many of those who defended Tilted Arc felt that Diamond and the rest of the jury had already made up their minds to remove the sculpture before the public forum began. -Indeed, in spite of the fact that 122 people spoke in favor of the Tilted Arc and 58 against, the jury voted to remove the sculpture. -The forum, however, brought up larger issues about the audience for public art. -Who was the audience for this public sculpture? Was it the 180 concerned art critics and bureaucrats that attended the forum? The 10,000 people who worked in federal plaza? All New Yorkers? All Americans? -Serra sued the GSA, claiming violations of his contract, his copyright, and his right to Free Speech. -A court found that the government owned the sculpture and thus could do as it saw fit. -In 1989, the sculpture was removed in pieces and put in storage indefinitely. -Not long after the removal of Tilted Arc, the GSA contacted landscape architect Martha Schwartz to re-imagine the plaza. -Her design included mound-shaped hedges and long, curving benches. -Proponents said that this restored the "use value" of the space by allowing office workers to enjoy their lunches on the plaza, while opponents said that it made the plaza into an ordinary park space that lacked the drama and artistry of Serra's work. -Should public art be practical? Provocative? Beautiful? Brash? Who is the audience for public art? Who gets to have a say in the process of commissioning new art? The history of Tilted Arc looms over these debates.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970

-Robert Smithson made the decision to move his work into the great outdoors in the late 1960s, when he became disenchanted with the galleries, which he described as "mausoleums for art", too bound up with commodification and commercialism, which were alien to the true and free artistic spirit. -Smithson wanted to reconnect with the environment - hence works like Spiral Jetty, which also reflected his interest in science and geology. -To create the 457 metre long spiral, Smithson bulldozed material from the shore into the lake. -It is a man-made, artistic creation but unlike most gallery art, it lies horizontal and dwarfs the human spectator, who feels that sense of smallness he or she experiences when in the presence of nature's beauty, or perhaps contemplating the stars. -Outer space was very much on Smithson's mind when he created Spiral Jetty. -In 1969, just prior to its creation, Neil Armstrong had become the first human to set foot on the moon, and mankind was reevaluating its relationship with the cosmos. -The jetty resembles a galaxy in its shape. However, the spectator walks around it in an anti-clockwise direction, and is thereby prompted not just to consider cosmology but also to move backwards through geological time. -The northern section of the Great Salt Lake, where Smithson chose to site Spiral Jetty, was cut off from fresh water supplies when a nearby causeway was constructed by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1959. -This encouraged the water's unique red-violet coloration, because it produced a concentration of salt-tolerant bacteria and algae. -Smithson particularly liked the combination of colors because it evoked a ruined and polluted sci-fi landscape. Water transformed color based on the hour--mutability. -And, by inserting the Jetty into this damaged section, and using entirely natural materials native to the area, Smithson called attention to environmental blight. - -Nevertheless, he also sought to reference the importance of time in eroding and transforming our environment. -The coiling structure of the piece was inspired by the growth patterns of crystals, yet it also resembles a primeval symbol, making the landscape seem ancient, even while it also looks futuristic. -somewhere in between landscape and not landscape (a marked site). -to go to the Spiral Jetty one must go through Golden Spike, a site rooted in American history, and you must travel through history in a way that history is liberalized. -the width is indexical of the bulldozer's width -used local materials -used the spiral structure of salt crystals to inspire the shape of the jetty. -exists according to the logic of entropy (order to disorder) -salt developing on the rocks changes the color and overall appearance of the Jetty. -also economic, legal and social forces of entropy--opens the question of the future. -What if the state of Utah does not renew the lease? -How will the visitors over time affect the work? -intensely site specific. -terminal basin, was largely freshwater, but no outlet, so water collects then evaporates so dense with minerals and salt. -almost nothing can live there -created lots of opportunities where land and water could meet one another -sand now fills in where the water is so changed based on natural forces, entropy, the way things break down. -power of nature, smallness of man. -vastness of American landscape -shape of spiral appears in nature quite frequently, symbol of ancient and universal, occurring in many world cultures. -idea of spiral or whirlpool -sculpture rooted in the 20th century, Earth day. -environmental movement, man ruining nature -relationship between growing industrial nature of US and the landscape when europeans arrived -very powerful sense of the passage of time, art becomes part of the process of nature, and cannot be conserved -taking art off the wall and outside the commercial, cannot be bought or sold -experience of art in the world -have to drive to Salt Lake City to see this, vast empty space in American West -however, there is video and aerial photographs, exist through their documentation, but can only experience fully in person -museums as places where we lock away art from time hurting them, but time becomes a natural process here where museums try to do the impossible -Dia Art Foundation came under control of this, what does it do with it? -Made the decision to regularly document the object -the tendency of all things is to move from order to disorder-entropy-things coming apart here -imposing geometric order into this vast space -his intervention is slowly coming apart -over million of years, this will come apart, and makes us aware of our own lifespans in the grandeur of time. -epitomizes change and unpredictability

Guy Debord, The Naked City, 1957

-Situationist -During its lifespan of 15 years as an avant-garde cultural movement, the Situationist International (1957-1972) shed light upon many of the conditions and limitations of urban society - laying considerable focus on the way maps held a stern, designated structure over one's perpetual spatial awareness in cities such as Paris and New York. -- -Self-proclaimed front-runner of the Situationist International, Guy Debord was interested in a far more elastic and inspiring exploration of one's aesthetic environment. -Searching beyond the obvious limits of publicised maps, Debord was the drive behind the 'derive'. T -This psychogeographical term was developed in order to define the journey of introspection within our environment and to challenge the 'question of the construction and perception of urban space' --The French 'derive' translates literally to the English 'drift', and refers to an 'unplanned journey through a landscape'. -Removing the structures of cartography, Debord manipulates the derive in his "psychogeographic" map entitled 'The Naked City' (1957). -Deliberately fragmented, Debord's composition of 19 sections of a map of Paris demonstrates a "subjective and temporal experience of the city as opposed to the seemingly omnipotent perspective of the planimetric map." For centuries, mapping has been used as tactic to allow navigation of space and place, providing dependable directions to get to your destination. - -Yet challenging the theory of objectivity, 'The Naked City', as an example of Situationist maps, provides "a useful example of visualizing a subjective view of the city." -A technique to relinquish the confines of structural capitalism, derive allows any person to become an explorer of their own right. -promotes and organises the exploration of the contours of cities, urging a realisiation of our surroundings, in which "the private and the public, imaginal and concrete, intersect and overlap." -The situationists were a group of avant-garde artists that came together in 1957, led by the Marxist Guy Debord. -They desired a life free from the conditioning of the capitalist system, which they used as inspiration for their political and artistic undertakings. -Guy Debord wrote the situationists' most influential manifesto of ideas under the title Society of the Spectacle (1967). -The main concept behind the manifesto is that mass media and advertising create an artificial reality in which true everyday existence is hidden behind. -This artificial reality Debord called the Spectacle. -As a way of reacting to this dominance over society by the media, the situationists developed methods for everyday experimentation, the most notable being psychogeography. -Guy Debord defined the term Psychogeography as "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals." -It was an inventive method for exploring cities, aimed at helping pedestrians to sway from their predictable trajectory. -The ideal outcome was that pedestrians would become more aware of their overlooked urban surroundings and would begin to see new possibilities of experiencing everyday life in the city. -Perhaps Debord's most remarkable concept within psychogeography was his notion of the dérive (the drift). -The dérive was an unplanned walk through the urban landscape, which was navigated by the individual's emotional reaction to the surrounding cityscape. -It was a method of wandering, in which the subjects trajectory was determined by the city's psychogeographical mapping. -The situationists also used maps, making alterations to them in order to help instigate unpredictable trajectories. -The users of the map choose their own route through the city by using a series of arrows that link parts of the city together. -Other experiments with maps existed including one undertaken by a friend of Debord who wandered through a region of Germany whilst following directions from a map of London. -The situationists encompassed other intellectual devices into their walks for example, when they were manoeuvring within the landscape they would try to be aware of how their surroundings could be used to draw them toward the past. - -Cities were seen as historical landscapes, whose structure and appearances were shaped by temporal events that were buried but never completely erased.

Robert Morris, Untitled (L Beams), 1965-66

-The Minimalists often stayed away from traditional art materials, and instead embraced the techniques of manufacturing, commercial materials, and industrial fabrication in order to eliminate the evidence of the artist's hand normally found in, for example, brushstrokes. -Minimalists rejected the idea that art should reflect the personal ideas and expression of the artist -Unfortunately, any photograph of Robert Morris's Untitled (L-Beams) is going to miss the point if we want to understand the object both in an artistic and material sense. -Morris wanted to expose the conditions of perception and display and the fact that these conditions always affect the way we comprehend the art object—sculpture always exists somewhere in relationship to someone at sometime. -This specificity, Morris felt, had not been investigated enough, even by the many avant-garde experiments that define Modernism. -By placing two eight-foot fiberglass "L-Beams" in a gallery space (often, he showed three), Morris demonstrated that a division existed between our perception of the object and the actual object. -While viewers perceived the beams as being different shapes and sizes, in actuality, they were the same shape and of equal size. -In direct opposition to Modernism's focus on the internal syntax of the object, that is, how the object can be understood as something "self-contained," Morris chose instead to examine the external syntax; the theatricality of the object—the way an object extends out from itself into its environment. -In a series of essays written in the late 1960s, Morris observed how he wanted to make sculpture: -A function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision [...] for it is the viewer who changes the shape constantly by his change in position relative to the work. [...] -There are two distinct terms: the known constant and the experienced variable. This last line is revealing as it demonstrates the crux of L-Beams. -No matter how hard we try, we can't reconcile what we see and what we know. -Morris' objects appear one way, "the expierenced variable," but in our minds we identify them to be another, "the known constant." -Informed by theories of the body and perception, including his reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Morris explored the circumstances of the art object as we actually encounter it. -He asked, why do we ignore the space and conditions of display in the presentation of art? Why do we only focus on the object? What about everything that circumscribes it; from its frame, to the wall that it is hung on, to the shape of the space that we put it in. -Like other artists of his generation, Morris pursued an advanced education in art history and earned a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University. -Furthermore, Morris was associated with the Judson Dance School, an experimental group of performers who sought to push the conceptual boundaries of dance. -These experiences informed Morris's understanding of what art could be, both in relation to the gallery and to history. -One of Morris's best-known Minimalist pieces, Untitled (L-Beams) lacks any texture, trace of the artist's hand or figural content that would otherwise distract the viewer from pure engagement with the arranged forms. -The work is composed of three L-shaped forms identical in every way, but positioned differently - one lying on its side, another resting on two edges, and the third standing erect. -The forms' configuration causes them to be perceived as varying in size and shape. Morris's concern with the experiential aspect of the piece is revealed in his use of polyhedrons -three-dimensional solids with flat faces and straight edges whose forms and shapes could be readily grasped by the viewer. -It also underpinned his instructions that the work be arranged differently each time it was to be exhibited so that viewers would experience the work differently as well. -Robert Morris's deceptively simple sculpture Untitled (L-Beams) presents us with a subtle perceptual puzzle. -Although its three elements are identical in shape, they appear different from one another based on their varying orientations. -This allows us to view the same form simultaneously from multiple perspectives, so that the act of seeing becomes an implicit subject of Morris's work. -This effect is heightened as we move around the sculpture, becoming aware of how our response to it is affected by our bodily position. -Morris was one of the founding figures of Minimalism in the 1960s, a movement that became known for its stark forms and industrial materials, as well as its rejection of traditional artistic techniques such as modeling and casting. -The repeated elements of Morris's sculpture invoke the processes of commercial manufacture, like so many products from an assembly line. -Yet the artist has indicated that the three units may be configured differently for each space in which they are presented, thereby introducing an element of play that counteracts the work's otherwise inert and imposing forms.

Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992

-The purpose of the exhibition was to address the biases museums have, often omitting or under-representing oppressed peoples and focusing on "prominent white men". -Wilson took the existing museum's collection and reshuffled them to highlight the history of African-American and Native American Marylanders. -This reassembly created a new viewpoint of colonization, slavery and abolition through the use of satire and irony. -Wilson juxtaposed historically important artifacts with each other to address the injustices in history and the injustices of not being properly exhibited. -The entrance of the exhibition displayed three busts of important individuals: Napoleon, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay displayed on pedestals. -To the left of these busts were empty black pedestals with the names of three important, overlooked African American Marylanders: Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Banneker, and Harriet Tubman. -The installation titled "metalwork" arranged ornate silverware with slave shackles to address that the prosperity of one could not have been achieved without the other. -Similarly, "Cabinet Making" addresses more subjugation by having antique chairs gathered around and facing an authentic whipping post, incorrectly reported by several publications to have been used on slaves. -In fact, the post had been used to punish wife-beaters in the Baltimore City jail. However, these false assumptions helped bolster Wilson's idea that the exhibit was "charged by what you bring to it." -Pieces such as "Cabinet Making" encouraged visitors to interpret the works however they saw it, to think critically and acquire a new perspective. =Other works included cigar-store Indians turned away from visitors, a KKK mask in a baby carriage, a hunting rifle with runaway slave posters and a black chandelier hung in the museum's neoclassical pavilion made for the exhibition. -The exhibition was successful in that it made visitors more historically conscious of the racism that is an integral part of American history. -""Mining the Museum" worked because it was suggestive rather than didactic, provocative rather than moralizing" -More than 5,000 people viewed Wilson's exhibit and helped him create other similar exhibitions around the United States. Critics would coin this new type of work as "museumist art"

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0, 1974

-Work of performance art -The work involved Abramović standing still while the audience was invited to do to her whatever they wished, using one of 72 objects she had placed on a table. -These included a rose, feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, and a gun loaded with one bullet. -There were no separate stages. Abramović and the visitors stood in the same space, making it clear that the latter were part of the work. -The purpose of the piece, she said, was to find out how far the public would go: "What is the public about and what are they going to do in this kind of situation? -Abramović described it later: "What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you." ... " -When the gallery announced the work was over, and Abramović began to move again, she said the audience left, unable to face her as a person. -Audience members were modest and timid at first, repositioning her arms, using the items nervously. -Then they became more bold. They placed objects on her. They took pictures of her and posed her with the photographs. They played with her body. -Then they became aggressive. They poured oil on her head. They pricked her with the thorns of the rose. They cut her clothing. They cut her. One participant actually licked her blood. -They carried her around the room half-naked, then put her on a wooden table and stabbed a knife into the table between her legs. -One participant put a bullet in the gun and pointed it at her head, and held it there, finger on the trigger, until another audience member eventually pushed the gun away. -At the end of the six hours, the curator announced that the performance was concluded. Abramović stood up, tears in her eyes, blood dripping from her neck, and walked towards the audience. -The audience scattered. Nobody wanted to confront the active, animated version of the passive figure they had been abusing. -For me, this performance art is a powerful demonstration of what happens when people are given the message that it's acceptable to denigrate a human being. -Humanity is cruelest when presented with a passive victim -Marina Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. -The body has always been both her subject and medium. -Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. -This particular blend of epic struggle and self-inflicted violence was borne out of the contradictions of her childhood: -both parents were high-ranking officials in the socialist government, while her grandmother, with whom she had lived, was devoutly Serbian Orthodox. -Though personal in origin, the explosive force of Abramović's art spoke to a generation in Yugoslavia undergoing the tightening control of communist rule. -he tensions between abandonment and control are at the heart of her series of performances known as Rhythms

Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

-mixed-media assemblage -Women artists, such as Betye Saar, challenged the dominance of male artists within the gallery and museum spaces throughout the 1970s. -Organizations such as Women Artists in Revolution and The Gorilla Girls not only fought against the lack of a female presence within the art world, but also fought to call attention to issues of political and social justice across the board. -Betye Saar addressed not only issues of gender, but called attention to issues of race in her piece The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. -Even though civil rights and voting rights laws had been passed in the United States, there was a lax enforcement of those laws and many African American leaders wanted to call this to attention. -Through the use of the mammy and Aunt Jemima figures, Saar reconfigures the meaning of these stereotypical figures to ones that demand power and agency within society. -The background of The Liberation of Aunt Jemima is covered with Aunt Jemima advertisements while the foreground is dominated by a larger Aunt Jemima notepad holder with a picture of a mammy figure and a white baby inside. -The larger Aunt Jemima holds a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other, transforming her from a happy servant and caregiver to a proud militant who demands agency within society. -A large, clenched fist symbolizing black power stands before the notepad holder, symbolizing the aggressive and radical means used by African Americans in the 1970s to protect their interests. -Aunt Jemima is transformed from a passive domestic into a symbol of black power. -She has liberated herself from both a history of white oppression and traditional gender roles. -Emerging in the late 1800s, America's "mammy" figures were grotesquely stereotyped and commercialized images of black women used to sell kitchen products and objects that "served" their owners. -These included everything from broom containers and pencil holders to cookie jars. -"I wanted to empower her. I wanted to make her a warrior. I wanted people to know that black people wouldn't be enslaved by that."