art history final
Eduardo Kac, "The Eighth Day," 2001
"The Eighth Day" is a transgenic artwork that investigates the new ecology of fluorescent creatures that is evolving worldwide. I developed this work between 2000 and 2001 at the Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, Tempe. While fluorescent creatures are being developed in isolation in laboratories, seen collectively they form the nucleus of a new and emerging synthetic bioluminescent system. The piece brings together living transgenic life forms and a biological robot (biobot) in an environment housed under a clear 4 foot diameter Plexiglas dome, thus making visible what it would be like if these creatures would in fact coexist in the world at large.
Belmore, ayum-ee-aawach oomama-mowan: speaking to their Mother, 1991
"This artwork was my response to what is now referred to in Canadian history as the "Oka Crisis." During the summer of 1990, many protests were mounted in support of the Mohawk Nation of Kanesatake in their struggle to maintain their territory. This object was taken into many First Nations communities - reservation, rural, and urban. I was particularly interested in locating the Aboriginal voice on the land. Asking people to address the land directly was an attempt to hear political protest as poetic action."Rebecca Belmore
Characterize contemporary artists' approach to time.
A reference to Contemporary Art meaning "the art of today," more broadly includes artwork produced during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It generally defines art produced after the Modern Art movement to the present day. However, modern artwork is not just art produced during a specific time-frame. This genre of art does have its own approach or style that distinguishes it from others. Artists can do so much and represent time is different ways such as a linear line or a memory which evokes emotions. They can approach it in different ways such as kinetic art, cinema, or process art. They use it to deflate modernist interpretations of things, address change, or convey the processes of memoirs and dreams.
globalization
Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope.
Kehinde Wiley, "Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy-Carignano," 2008
After George Romney (Elizabeth Warren as Hebe), 2009 (above left) seems to replace the protagonist of the original 1775 portait with a contemporary male subject. Nevertheless, the 'youth' portrayed is not actually male at all, but a heavily disguised Mickalene Thomas, another successful New York artist. The resulting layers of identity are worthy of Shakespearean comedy: a woman posing as a young black male assuming a pose originally adopted by a young white female (who, in turn, was also masquerading as the Greek goddess Hebe).... In this work, Wiley's already fascinating portraiture takes on a riddling new depth.
Process art
Art that focuses on the process of it being made rather than the actual outcome of the piece
Why are contemporary artists interested in science? Characterize their approaches to this theme.
Artists are interested in the quest for knowledge about any observable things. A lot of artists either became amateur scientists or assisted scientists and learned to adapt. They adopted scientific tools and materials. Ex: Taxonomy and Bio Art.
José Bedia,"The Things that Drag me Along," 2008
Both Jose Bedia's crypto-symbolic figurative paintings and his compelling mixed-media installations suggest a ritual atmosphere: they are complementary aspects of the artist's ongoing exploration of the Afro-Cuban religions Santeria and Palo Monte. The Cuban folkways that Bedia's work engages are themselves rich and eclectic mixtures of various cultural traditions-African, Western Christian, even Native American-and it is precisely this...that fuels his work, that allows him to explore the complexity of postcolonial identity.
Gomez Peña, and Fusco, "The year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West" 1992-94
Coco Fusco premiered The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West in September 1992 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. The project was written, directed and performed in collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and consists of a multimedia installation, experimental radio soundtrack and several performances. The project is a creative investigation/interpretation of the history of how the "discovery" of America has been represented. The cage performance, a component of the project in which Gomez-Peña and Fusco present themselves as "undiscovered Ameridians" from an island in the Gulf of Mexico, has been carried out in Madrid, Spain; London, United Kingdom; Washington, D.C.,; Irvine, CA; and Minneapolis, MN. The performance was selected for the 1992 Sydney Biennale and the 1993 Whitney Biennial.
Patricia Piccinini, "The Young Family," 2002
Constructed from silicone and fiberglass, these hybrid sculptures investigate the potential rise of new and troubling developments through the advance of biotechnology and genetic manipulation, as in The Young Family (2002-03), a grotesque, wrinkly human-sow and her suckling offspring, made of silicone, acrylic, and materials like human hair and leather. Other figurative schemes include unexpected animal/human pairings, like Balasana (2009), a child with a marsupial on her back, and beast-machine hybrids that suggest animalized Vespas.
Mona Hatoum, « Corps étranger, » 1994.
Corps étranger, a work produced by Mona Hatoum in 1994, offers an intrusion into the utmost privacy of the artist's body: a video, shot with an endoscopic camera, alternately explores the surface and the interior of her body. The video is projected in a circle on the floor of a cylindrical structure which the viewer enters through one of the two narrow doors situated on either side of it, while a soundtrack, broadcasting heartbeats as they can be heard from different parts of the body being examined by the camera, accompanies the video image. So for some ten minutes the camera, favouring back-and-forth movements, travels swiftly round the outlines of the artist's body, venturing turn by turn into its various orifices. Mona Hatoum, who is conscious during the medical examination, took part in the making of the video, revealing to onlookers the most remote parts of her body, those which, in principle, only the medical eye - that organ of inspection - has access to. This, first and foremost, is the meaning of the work's title, which designates the camera, as an extension of the scientific eye, as an external element penetrating the patient's body, appropriating it and then retrieving deconstructed images of it. To such a point that the examined body, which is nevertheless familiar, also becomes "foreign", as if unrecognizable, to the person to whom it belongs - not counting the fact that medical imagery is at times the revealer of an anomaly which the subject has no inkling of, further bolstering the feeling of alienation of the latter in relation to his or her own body.
William Kentridge, "Drawing from Felix in Exile," 1994
Drawing from Felix in Exile, 1994-2001. This is a unique work. In his drawings and animations, William Kentridgearticulates the concerns of post-Apartheid South Africa with unparalleled nuance and lyricism.
Fred Tomaselli, "Expulsion," 2000
Ever the idiosyncratic collector, artist Fred Tomaselli amasses actual pills and plants along with a range of images — among them flowers, birds, and anatomical illustrations — carefully cut from books and magazines. Pulling from this visual archive, Tomaselli creates baroque paintings that combine unusual materials and paint under layers of clear epoxy resin. He collages these materials into multilayered combinations of the real, the photographic, and the painterly. Drawing upon a range of art historical sources from Renaissance frescoes to 1960s Minimalism, and eastern and western decorative traditions such as quilts and mosaics, Tomaselli's paintings explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions. These handmade scenes reveal both troubling and enlightening details of our world.
Forensic aesthetics
Forensic Aesthetics positions "things" as "witnesses" and ascribes to them the power of speech and therefore an agency similar to that of the testimony of human witnesses of a crime. With a focus on the staging of such material witness accounts, the participants examine the political implications of calling on things.
Krzysztof Wodiczko, "Hiroshima Projection," 1999.
I proposed a projection, which was to take place the night of the anniversary of the bombing—which was a very important event worldwide, in Japan, and of course, most importantly, in Hiroshima. Well, the water is not innocent. The river is as much a witness as the A-Bomb Dome building reflected in the water. It was in fact the river that became a graveyard for both people and buildings. The river was where people jumped to their death because they thought that it would help them to cool their burns, but in fact it only contributed to a quicker death.
Ann Hamilton, "Offerings," 1991
In 1991 I worked in a three-floor row house adjacent to the Mattress Factory in the Mexican War District on the North Side of Pittsburgh. This early opportunity to meet the integrity of an entire building for the Carnegie International was one of three re- lated projects the same year, each a different scale and social circumstance: the San Paolo Biennial where related elements occupied a temporary two room gallery built alongside other spaces inside the vast Niemeyer build- ing where the Biennial is held, the four gal- leries of the original 1920's beaux arts galler- ies at the Henry Art Gallery at University of Seattle and this, the only domestic context.
Characterize contemporary artists' approach to identity.
In the 1980s, artists appropriated the style and methods of mass media advertising to investigate issues of cultural authority and identity politics. More recently, artists like Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Wall in Washington D.C., and Richard Serra, who was loosely associated with Minimalism in the 1960s, have adapted characteristics of Minimalist art to create new abstract sculptures that encourage more personal interaction and emotional response among viewers. Artists used it to address how society treated different groups or individuals Ex: James Luna and how society viewed the Indians as one extreme or the other (bad or good).
Amalia Ulman, "Excellences & Perfections," 2014.
On April 19, 2014, Amalia Ulman uploaded an image to her Instagram account of the words "Part I" in black serifed lettering on a white background. The caption read, cryptically, "Excellences & Perfections." It received twenty-eight likes. For the next several months, she conducted a scripted online performance via her Instagram and Facebook profiles. As part of this project, titled Excellences and Perfections, Ulman underwent an extreme, semi-fictionalized makeover. She pretended to have a breast augmentation, posting images of herself in a hospital gown and with a bandaged chest, using a padded bra and Photoshop to manipulate her image. Other elements of the makeover were not feigned; she followed the Zao Dha Diet strictly, for example, and went to pole-dancing lessons often. Through judicious use of sets, props, and locations, Excellences and Perfectionsevoked a consumerist fantasy lifestyle.
Define "Place" (as opposed to space). Why are contemporary artists interested in this theme?
Place is the intersection between space and time and is an event and space is a place that scientists can calculate. Contemporary artists are interested in this theme because a place becomes a type of perspective and gives the artist a chance to allow the viewers to interact with their art.
Sierra, "workers who cannot be paid, ..." 2000
Santiago Sierra's work generates vitriol and enthusiasm in equal amounts. Known for his controversial installations in which hired laborers perform useless tasks in white-cube spaces—masturbate, crouch in cardboard boxes, have their hair dyed blond, sit for tattoos, hold up a heavy block of wood—Sierra aims to unmask the power relations that keep workers invisible under capitalism. He increasingly relies on techniques of obstruction and concealment, creating a variety of artificial barriers that point to real, if often unremarked, accessibility issues: immigrants' persistent and imprisoning poverty; laborers' disconnection from the work they do and from the product that is its ultimate result; everyone's complicity in preserving the structures that keep classes and peoples separate.
Odani, "Rompers," 2003
Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo was a £300,000[1] installation, the eighth commission in the "Unilever Series" (sponsored by Unilever), which takes place annually in the Turbine Hall, the main entrance lobby of Tate Modern in London. Salcedo's installation took the form of a 548-foot (167-metre) long, meandering crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall, a hairline crack at one end which expanded to a few inches of width and around two feet of depth at the other.[2] The crack was made by opening up the floor and then inserting a cast from a Colombian rock face.[2] A Tate spokesperson said, "She's not specifying how it's been done. What she wants is for people to think about what's real and what's not
Janine Antoni, "To Draw a Line," 2003
Since the early 1990s, Janine Antoni has been making sculptures, photographs, and videos that fuse an interest in the formal elements of art (such as line, shape, texture, form, process) with personal issues of the self, resulting in an exploration of gender politics and identity.
site-responsive
Site-responsive, as a term and as a practice, has its own twist on the alternative-venue trend. It specifically refers to the idea of artists responding to the space in which they're choosing to create their work.
Renee Cox, « Hott-en Tot, » 1994
Taking up Michele Wallace's call to interrogate popular cultural forms and unravel their relationship with the political discourse of the time, this paper begins by examining the popular discourse about Black female sexuality in the USA. White, cis-hetero-patriarchal cultural and visual imagination still represents Black women either as asexual and...
Gaze
The "gaze" is a term that describes how viewers engage with visual media. Originating in film theory and criticism in the 1970s, the gaze refers to how we look at visual representations. These include advertisements, television programs and cinema. It reflects the intertwining of visual control and power structures in society. Sense of sight, influences who we are as social beings (people copy celebs), MALE GAZE=WOMEN AS SEXUAL BEINGS.
Christian Marclay, "The Clock," 2010
The Clock is an art installation by video artist Christian Marclay. It is a looped 24-hour video supercut that feature clocks or timepieces. The artwork itself functions as a clock: its presentation is synchronized with the real time, resulting in the time shown in a scene being the actual time.
Panopticon/Surveillance (Foucault)
The French philosopher Michel Foucault revitalised interest in the panopticon in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish. Foucault used the panopticon as a way to illustrate the proclivity of disciplinary societies subjugate its citizens. He describes the prisoner of a panopticon as being at the receiving end of asymmetrical surveillance: "He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication." As a consequence, the inmate polices himself for fear of punishment. Mechanism of social control: those who can be watched can be controlled. To succeed surveillance has to be constant, omnipresent and invisible to those being watched.
Activist artists/activism in art
The aim of activist artists is to create art that is a form of political or social currency, actively addressing cultural power structures rather than representing them or simply describing them. In describing the art she makes, the activist artist Tania Bruguera said, 'I don't want art that points to a thing. I want art that is the thing'. Activist art is about empowering individuals and communities and is generally situated in the public arena with artists working closely with a community to generate the art.
Characterize artists' interest in the "body" in the period 1980-2009
The body has to do with the soul, spirit, and mind. The body is tangible and can show a lot of different things about a person and so it was used to express views in photos, videos, and performances. It even had a sexual part of it in art. also a shell
Bill Viola, "The Crossing," 1996
The elemental force of water is made more explicit in the two-channel work The Crossing, which revolves around a freestanding, double-sided projection screen. On one side, a man walks in slow motion out of the blackness to eventually confront the viewer at over life-size. Dripping water from above gradually becomes a torrent, overwhelming the figure, whose form is eradicated. The scene replays after the water dissipates. On the reverse side, the same man approaches, this time to be consumed by rising flames. Part violent destruction, part peaceful transcendence, The Crossing is indicative of Viola's use of nonspecific spiritual processes drawn from a host of disparate belief systems.
post-human/cyborg
The human organism is not entirely organic anymore.
Catherine Opie, "Chicken," 1991
The image "Chicken" (lower right) has entered a larger popular culture forum because it is used prominently in promotional materials and in the opening credits of the cable television series The L Word (one of the characters is a museum curator in California). When I first saw this photo I didn't realize the person in the photograph was a woman but I did peg it as an Opie because the Chromagenic prints are easily identifiable and the camera available to just a few elite photographers. The intentionally forced and obviously faked identities in this series speak to our recent discussions of photography as an arbiter of "the real."The technology, to me, is more interesting than the image itself, and it adds a level of construction, predetermination, and staging that exceeds even Opie's elaborate theatrics.
What is a theme (as opposed to subject matter)
The theme is the lesson or main idea. ... The difference between the theme and the subject matter relies in finding the point or the reason. The subject is what a piece is about, the theme is what you are supposed to learn from the subject matter. Theme is the recurring idea or element in a piece of art and subject matter is the object or picture ect. that makes up the physical appearance of a work of art.
Parker, "Anti-Mass," 2005
This sculpture is constructed from the charred remains of a Southern Baptist church with a predominantly African American congregation, which was destroyed by arsonists. After Parker learned of the arson, she received permission to use the timbers of the burned church to make this piece. In the title, Parker (who was raised Catholic) uses the word "mass" as a reference to both the elemental substance of the universe and the sacramental ritual at the center of the Christian faith. In this way, the realms of science and religion are brought together to emphasize the power of creativity over violence and destruction. Parker's cube appears to defy gravity, the title a witty allusion to this fact, and the sculpture floats ethereally in the air while remaining a monumental object of quiet meditation and reflection.
Super hybridity
Thus, 'super-hybridity': 'super' not because it's superior, but as a reflection of how hybridization has moved beyond the point where it's about a fixed set of cultural genealogies and instead has turned into a kind of computational aggregate of multiple influences and sources. Gonjasufi - and any contemporary artist similarly devoted to a trans-contextual approach - is neither a mere product of his background nor just another eclecticist; his sources are super-diverse, but are parts of a detailed puzzle forming the larger picture of a life between anger and equanimity, sociability and loneliness, city lights and desert, advanced tech-iness and the deliberately antediluvian. There's method in this madness.
Essentialism
To be an Essentialist about art one holds that art, all types of art, all styles of art, in all cultures, and across all time, has a fixed set of essential or defining properties. Philosophers put this by saying there is a fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of art.
Sugimoto, "Permian-Land," 1992
To craft his exquisite black-and-white images, Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a 19th-century-style, large-format camera, exploring his idea of photography as a method for preserving and modeling time. "Endeavors in art are...mere approximations, efforts to render visible unseen realms," he says. Influenced by Surrealismand Dada, Sugimoto's work is intimately connected to Marcel Duchamp, as in his series "Conceptual Forms" (2004), (inspired by Duchamp's The Large Glass, 1923), large-scale black-and-white photographs of mathematical models and tools. Ongoing subjects include dioramas, theaters, Buddhist sculptures, and seascapes—the latter captured in a famous series of near-abstractions, coupled with specific geographic titles. A supreme craftsman, Sugimoto often varies the length of exposure to achieve tonal richness, as in "Joe" (2006), photographs of Richard Serra's works that function as visual memories more than documentation. "I imagine my vision then try to make it happen, just like painting," he says. "The reality is there, but how to make it like my reality."
Pierre Huyghe, "The Third Memory," 2000
Using time, memory, and the texture of everyday experience as his mediums, Pierre Huyghe conflates the traditional dichotomy between art and life. Working in an array of cultural formats—from billboards and television broadcasts to community celebrations and museum exhibitions—he reformulates their codes and deploys them as catalysts for creating new experiential possibilities. A mode of perception that lies in the interstices between reality and its representation is the subject of his two-channel video, The Third Memory (2000), which reenacts the 1972 hold-up of a Brooklyn bank immortalized in Sidney Lumet's acclaimed film Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Wafaa Bilal, "And counting..." 2014
Wafaa Bilal's brother, Haji, was killed by a missile at a checkpoint in their hometown of Kufa, Iraq in 2004. Bilal feels the pain of both American and Iraqi families who have lost loved ones in the war, but the deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public. and Counting... addresses this double standard as Bilal turns his own body — in a 24-hour live performance — into a canvas, his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell. The 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by red dots (permanent visible ink), and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties are represented by dots of green UV ink, seemingly invisible unless under black light. During the performance people from all walks of life read off the names of the dead. Also, Bilal is asking each visitor to donate $1 which will go to the group Rally for Iraq, to fund scholarships for Americans and Iraqis who lost parents in the war. Based on official numbers of casualties, one dollar for each would mean $105,000 in scholarship money.
Rhizome
a horizontal, underground stem that produces new leaves, shoots, and roots
Tyson, "Large Field Array," 2007
abstract, nature, science Between the purple foil stamped covers of this thoroughly engaging catalogue lay a plethora of installation shots and well chosen details of the more-than-100 sculptural works that went into Tyson's recent show at Denmark's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
bio art
art that is created with living, changing organisms
James Luna, "The Artifact Piece," 1987
case filled with sand and artifacts, such as Luna's favorite music and books, as well as legal papers and labels describing his scars.[3] The work looked like a museum exhibit and was set in a hall dedicated to traditional ethnographic displays. The marks and scars on his body were acquired while drinking, fighting, or in accidents. Critics praised Luna's ability to challenge conventional understandings and displays of the Native American identities and presumptions about his own personhood by putting his own body on display.[12] He performed "The Artifact Piece" in 1990 at The Decade Show in New York City.[12]
Relational Aesthetics
focuses on human relationships and social spaces rather than emphasizing art objects in private galleries, homes, or museums
The Institute for Figuring Hyperbolic Crochet, "Coral Reef," 2005
n association with the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Institute For Figuring Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is showing this Fall at the Chicago Cultural Center. Each year the Humanities Festival is organized around a thematic principle, with this year's theme being Climate of Concern. As a work inspired by the devastating effects of global warming, the IFF Crochet Reef represents the theme at a major exhibition accompanying the Festival. On show are six new crochet sub-reefs, including a large new atoll formation. In addition to the IFF reefs, the exhibition includes a wondrous sister-reef crocheted by the citizens of Chicago - an effort that has been orchestrated by the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
Hybridity/syncretism
quality of cultures that have characteristics of both the colonizers and the colonized
Virtual reality
the computer-generated simulation of a three-dimensional image or environment that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way by a person using special electronic equipment, such as a helmet with a screen inside or gloves fitted with sensors.
Song Dong, "Projects 90 Song Dong," 2009
the personal and the universal, the poetic and the political. Presented here for the first time in the United States, Waste Not is an installation of the full complement of worldly goods belonging to the artist's mother, Zhao Xiangyuan (1938-2009)—including the wood frame of her house. Song's mother was typical of the generation of Chinese who lived through the hardships of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s abiding by the dictum wu jin qi yong (waste not).
Define "Spirituality." Why are contemporary artists interested in this theme?
the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things. His work is about questions and he really deeply, deeply let me know that art doesn't have to be understanding parallel to religion, but the other way around—religion has to be understanding parallel to art. To him, all work he is doing, or what an artist is doing, is to put up the questions, not give the answers Spirituality is the common yearning to belong to something great than ones self. It has to do with religion, an institutionalized formal practices with a recorded history. Religion=Identity. The sublime.
Xenobia Bailey, "Sistah Paradise's Great..." 1993
this installation is part of an ongoing project by Xenobia Bailey called Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk. On view is the section, Mothership 1: Sistah Paradise's Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent, which is inspired by the lack of historical documentation on the enslavement of Africans in America. Bailey creates a tactile representation of a mythology designed to explain the presence of Africans in America. She relates the history of colonization to contemporary struggles for justice and equality for African Americans. Working primarily in crochet, Bailey employs African craft traditions to connect African American heritage and African culture.
