ARTH Exam Four
Die Brucke
-"The Bridge" 1905 -A group of radical German artists in Dresden -Name from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra: describes contemporary humanity's potential as a "bridge" to a more perfect humanity in future -Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff -Hoped it would be gathering place for "all revolutionary and surging elements" who opposed Germany's "pale, overbred, and decadent" society -Drawing on Van Gogh and Munch, traditional northern media to create intense, brutal, expressionistic images of alienation and anxiety in response to Germany's rapid and intensive urbanization -Favorite motifs: natural world and nude body
Collage
-A composition made of cut and pasted scraps of materials, sometimes with lines or forms added by artist -Picasso
Pluralism
-A social structure/goal that allows members of diverse ethnic, racial, or other groups to exist peacefully within the society while continuing to practice customs of own culture -An adjective describing the state of having a variety of valid contemporary styles available at the same time to artists
Postmodernism
-A strategy for making art -Reject the seriousness of Modernism, creating visually interesting, messy, contrary and political images that mock rules of Modern art -Appropriate or take images wholesale from both high art and popular sources, repositioning and recontextualizing them, making them partially their own, twisting and changing their meanings -Create new images and new meanings out of the old, welcoming oddity, contradiction, and eccentricity, questioning the idea of originality -Heralded a post-industrial, advanced capitalist society based on communication and info, and demanding a flexible population that embraces difference and change -Reflects pluralism (social and cultural diversity) of globalized society-constant in change -Embraces the vast visual culture of the 80s (computers, TV, video cameras, internet etc)
Color Field Painting
-A type of abstract expressionism -Painting large, flat areas of color to evoke more transcendent, contemplative moods in paint -Lavender and Mulberry by Rothko
Action Painting
-A type of abstract expressionism -Using broad gestures to drip/pour paint onto a pictorial surface -American Abstract Expressionists -Jackson Pollock
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
-Abstract Expressionism -1950 -Jackson Pollock -Used house paint as well -Laid canvas' on floor and dripped paint-more apart of painting -Made of tangled, string-like webs of color -Neutral: black, white, tan -Some straight lines: flicked paint loaded brush -Broke with convention that had to touch canvas with brush -Used sticks or cans to apply paint -Layered paint=see order -Worked without plans:not aware of what doing in painting, must get acquired, not scared about destroying image -Spontaneous improvisation: jazz -Titled after finished with friend's help -Thought art might speak for its time -What viewers should look for: looks passively no preconceived idea
Performance Art
-Also called Happenings (Allan Kaprow) -Pollak: physical enactment of the art of painting resulted in a work of art in its own right -Cage, Johns, and Rauschenberg: relied on spontaneous and unpredictable actions to provide a new set of variables for each of their events -Tears down barrier bw viewer and work of art bc comes to life and invades viewers' space-physically and intellectually -Radical and assaultive
Edgar Kaufmann House (Fallingwater)
-American Modernism -1937 -Frank Lloyd Wright -Sought to maintain natural sensibility, connecting his buildings to their sits by using brick and local wood/stone -Should no sit on landscape by coordinate with it -Commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann (Pittsburgh department-store owner) to replace family summer cottage on site of waterfall and pool -Wright decided to build new house right into cliff and over pool, allowing waterfall to flow around and under house -Large boulder where family had sunbathed used for central hearthstone of fireplace -Used cantilevers to extend series of broad concrete terraces our from cliff to parallel the great slabs of rock; painted a soft earth tone -Bands of windows and glass doors -Declare war on modern city "tear it down"
Guernica
-American Modernism -1937 -Pablo Picasso -1937 German air force bombed Basque town of Guernica, Spain; Blitzkrieg with target bridge so couldn't retreat -Heard day after, started sketches for mural that he had already been commissioned to contribute to Spanish Pavilion, 24 days prior -Final painting -Links this tragedy to ritualized bull fight where preordained death of bull symbolizes ever-present nature of death - Violence, suffering, and death -Black and white evokes sense of urgency and excitement of newspaper photo -Used to raise funds on tour after exhibition -International symbol of horrors of war and fight against totalitarianism -Bull: symbol of Spanish character and reference to legendary Minotaur; for surrealists represented irrational forces of human psyche -Horse and mother penetrated by spear; dead baby -Woman on right screams bc house on fire -Dead figure in center: dead soldier and slain picador (chief antagonist of bull and one who torments him on horseback with lance)
Formalism
-An approach to the understanding, appreciation, and valuation of art based almost solely on considerations of form -Formalist's approach tends to regard an artwork as independent of it time and place of making
Happenings
-An art form developed by Allan Kaprow in 1960s -Incorporating performance, theater, and visual images -Was organized without a specific narrative/intent -With audience participation, the event proceeded according to chance and individual improvisation
Readymade
-An object from popular/material culture presented without further manipulation as an artwork by the artist
Violin and Palette
-Analytic Cubism -1909-10 -George Barque -Shows the kind of relatively small-scale still-life paintings that the two artists created during initial collaborative experimentation as moved together toward abstraction of recognizable matter and space -Not arranged in a measured progression from foreground to background in depth but push close to picture plane, confined to shallow space -Knits elements (violin, artist's palette, sheet music) together into singer shifting surface of forms and colors -Some areas they have lost their natural spatial relations and coherent shapes
Mural Painting
-Any art applied directly to wall
Found Objects
-Art created from undisguised, often modified, objects/products that are not normally considered art because they have a non-art function -Fountain
Assemblage (term)
-Artwork created by gathering and manipulating two and/or 3D found objects
Target with Plaster Casts
-Assemblage -1955 -Jasper Johns -Art should be anchored in real life -Questioned New York School of Clement Greenberg of formalism -Stretches formalism to limits and mocks it -Painting + sculpture -Square is canvas painted in encaustic (old medium using beeswax) applied with brushes or flat metal tools; hardens quickly so maintains texture of brush/tool of application -Sculptures on top: plaster casts of human body: hand, male breast, ear, penis in bright colors unrelated to true color and traditional colors -Attached through boxes-each with door -Commentary on nature of art -Parodies the nonhierarchical manner of Abstract Expressionism but target does indicating best place to be; neither are abstract -Fragmented/hidden body parts vs. sharply defined target shows position as gay artist in restrictive climate of Cold War America -Unclear purpose=changes per viewer
Canyon
-Assemblage -1959 -Robert Rauschenberg -"Work in the gap between art and life" -Made series of brightly lit blank paintings in which shadows cast be viewers=content -Part of a series called combines (combinations of painting and sculpture using nontraditional art materials) -Old family photos, public imagery (Statue of Liberty), fragments of political posters (center) and items from trash (drum) or bought, and projecting 3D forms like stuffed eagle on box and dirty pillow tied with cord and suspended from piece of wood -"Only myself successful when what I do resembles lack of order" -In Museum of Modern Art's The Art of Assemblage
Bauhaus Building
-Bauhaus -1925-26 -Walter Gropius -Argued that a true German architecture and design should emerge organically -Believed he could revive the spirit of collaboration of medieval building guilds that erected Germany's cathedrals -"The ultimate goal of all artistic activity is the building" but no architecture lessons until 1927; only enter after foundation course and received full training in design and crafts -Structure openly acknowledges its reinforced concrete, steel, and glass materials, there is also balanced asymmetry to its 3 large cubic areas intended to convey the dynamism of modern life -Glass-panel wall wraps around two sides of workshop wing of building to provide natural light while parapet below demonstrates how modern engineering methods could create light, airy spaces
Harlem Renaissance
-Blacks migrate to cities=New York -Called for greater social and political activism among blacks -Artists: Duke Ellington, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes -Intellectual leader: Alain Locke-argued black artists should seek their artistic roots in traditional arts of Africa rather than assimilate within mainstream American/European artistic traditions
Orphism
-Coined by Guillaume Apollinaire -Robert and Sonia Delaunay's art -After Orpheus (legendary Greek poet whose lute playing charmed wild beasts) implying similar power -Preferred the term "simultaneity": concept based on Michel-Eugene Chevreul's law of simultaneous contrast of colors that proposed collapsing spatial distance and temporal sequence into simultaneous "here and now" to create harmonic unity out of the disharmonious world -Envisioned a simultaneity that combined modern world of planes, phones, and automobiles with spirituality
Suprematist Art
-Coined by Malevich -The supremacy of pure feeling in creative art -Consisting of flat, geometric shapes collaged together
Lavender and Mulberry
-Color Field Painting -1959 -Mark Rothko -Influenced by Euro Surrealists and Jung -Vertical format and allowed colors to bleed into one another -Thought of his shapes as fundamental "ideas" expressed in rectangular form -Preferred to show paintings together in series/rows, illuminated indirectly to evoke moods of transcendental meditation
Assemblage
-Combining disparate elements to construct a work of art -Louise Nevelson: developed an Analytic Cubist-inspired version of assemblage
One and Three Chairs
-Conceptual Art -1965 -Joseph Kosuth -Not about beauty but the imperfect possibilities of communication visual or verbal -Visual rendition of semiotic theory -An actual chair, a photograph, and a dictionary definition of chair (an object, an imperfect visual representation or idea of the object, and a verbal abstraction of the object -Title indicated that we can read this work as one chair represented in 3 different ways as 3 different chairs -Demonstrates the impossibility of precise representation and communication on an idea -Which is the "real" chair?
Installation Art
-Contemporary art created for a specific site, especially a gallery or outdoor area, that creates a complete and controlled environment
Fountain (Second Version)
-Dada -1950 -Marcel Duchamp -Since Whistler's famous court case, most want-garde artists agreed that a work of art need be neither descriptive nor well-crafted but none would say art is primarily conceptual -Argued that art objects might not only be crafted (in part) by others, but that the objects of art could actually be mass-produced for the artist by industry -He creates commentary on consumption and on the irrationality of the modern age by arguing that the "readymade" work of art, as a manu object simply bypasses the craft tradition, qualifying as a work of art through human conceptualization rather than by human facture -Rejected and he resigned from Society of Independent Artists and published unsigned editorial in Dada journal detailing R. Mutt case.
Composition with Yellow, Red and Blue
-De Stijl -1927 -Piet Mondrian -Visual embodiment of Schoenmaekers's theory and De Stijl's artistic ideas -Uses 3 primary colors, 3 neutrals, and grid of horizontal and vertical lines in search of higher beauty and balance of forces -Opposing lines and colors balance a harmony of opposites he called a "dynamic equilibrium" which he achieved by carefully plotting an arrangement of colors, shapes and visual weights grouped asymmetrically around edges of canvas with center acting as blank white fulcrum -Hoped De Stijl would have applications in real world by creating entirely new visual environment for living, designed according to rules of "universal beauty" that, when perfectly balanced, would bring equilibrium and purity to work -Hoped to be world's last artist bc while art brought humanity to everyday life, when universal beauty infused all aspects of life, there would no longer be a need for art
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
-Deconstructivist Architecture -1993-7 -Frank Gehry -Creates unstable and Deconstructive building masses and curved winglike shapes that extend beyond building's reach -Developed design using CATIA CAD program -Steel skeleton covered by thin skin of silvery titanium that shimmers gold or silver depending on time and weather -From north resembles live organism, while other angles looks like giant ship-a reference to the industry on which Bilbao had depended=museum of city -Inside is very difficult space to display art
Improvisation 28 (Second Version)
-Der Blaue Reiter -1912 -Vasily Kandinsky -One of first to investigate theoretical possibility of purely abstract painting -Gave works musical titles like Whistler and aspired to make paintings that responded to own inner state and would be entirely autonomous, no reference to visible world -This he claimed represented the first truly abstract art -Colors leap and dance, expressing variety of emotions -For him painting was a utopian spiritual force -Saw art's traditional focus on accurate rendering of physical world as a misguided materialistic quest and hoped his paintings would lead humanity toward a deeper awareness of spirituality and inner world -Look at paintings like listening to a symphony; responding to this and that then on total experience
Futurism
-Developed from cubism -Emphasis on portraying technology and a sense of speed
Feminist Art
-Developed with women's liberation movement of 60s in three waves -1st: aim was increased recognition for women artists (past and present); also attacked traditional Western hierarchy that places "the fine arts" (painting, sculpture, and architecture) higher than "the crafts" (ceramics, textiles, jewelry making); embraced craft media; represented the physicality and sexuality of female body defined by women not men; defined gender in biological terms -2nd: defined gender in more relativist terms (Linda Nochlin-terms of canon (how art judged) must be challenged bc unfair to women); Called for reevaluation of the place of "feminine" arts (crafts); Laura Mulvey and John Berger challenged how women are looked at by men in life and art -3rd: addressed many issues relating to discrimination against or denigration of women like hybrid concerns like gender and class, gender and race, violence against women, post colonialism, transgenderism, transnationalism, and eco-feminism
Abstract Expressionism
-Drawing from but radically reimagining Euro and Am modernism -America -The art of a fairly wide range of artists in NY in 40s and 50s -Not formally organized but loosely affiliated group with common purpose -To express their profound social alienation after WWII and to make new art that was both moral and universal -Rivaled by formalists
Conceptual Art
-Extension of Minimalist move from handcrafted art object -Argue that "idea" and "form" are separable in art -At times a physical object is an appropriate vehicle for a work of art, at other times a performance is more appropriate, and other times a conceptual manifestation in form of written or spoken instruction -"Dematerialized" the art object be suggesting that the catalyst for a work of art is a concept and the means by which the concept is communicated may vary -Usually leave behind some visual trace, in the form of a set of instructions, writing on a chalkboard, etc -Driven and noncom modifiable bc leaves behind no precious object for purchase, though collectors now collect remaining "trace" objects
Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life)
-Fauvism -1905-6 -Henri Matisse -Nude in foreground plays pan pipes, another herds goats in right mid-ground, lovers embrace in foreground while others dance -Like Cezanne's The Large Bathers -Academic in scale and theme but avant-garde in respects like way figures appear "flattened" and in distortion of spatial relations bw them -Emphasized expressive color, drawing on folk-art traditions in his use of unmodeled forms and bold outlines
The Dinner Party
-Feminist Art -1974-79 -Judy Chicago - Dedicated to hundreds of women for $250,000 -Large triangular table with white cloth and 39 places have been set -On a triangular "Heritage Floor" with 2,304 hand-made, glazed ceramic tiles covered with inscriptions (999 names of historical women) -Each place setting=multimedia; woven runner with stitch work that identifies particular woman; ceramic used to create plates, flatware, and goblets; embroidered napkin -Porcelain plates=focal points bc large size and painted sculptural forms; tipped up to face viewer -Begin with prehistory and antiquity women then middle ages; place setting resembled woman -Most plates are abstract female genitalia -Triangle: symbol of both feminine and equality sought by feminism -13: number of men at Last Supper, number of witches in coven -Traditional women's techniques arguing for recognition -Mixed reaction
Pop Art
-Focused attention on explosion of visual culture fueled by presence of mass media and growing disposable income of postwar generation -Originated in Britain but developed in US in 60s at time when individual and mass identity was increasingly determined by how people looked and dressed and what they displayed and consumed -Homes, cars, and visible display of objects-both within him and on person-reflected life as portrayed on TV, in films, and in print advertising -Critiqued superficiality of pop culture's fiction of the perfect home and perfect person
Electronic Art
-Form of art that makes use of electronic media or refers to technology and/or electronic media -Outgrowth of conceptual art and systems art
Activist Art
-Fueled the Culture Wars of 90s -AIDS and government inaction spilled over to art -Angry art about the body, AIDS, and identity, and well as with continued clamoring for acknowledgment of discrimination faced by people of different races, ethnicities, classes, and sexual orientation -Culture Wars about artists searching for place in world while so many were fading from it
The Migration Series, Panel No. 1: During World War I There Was a Great Migration North by Southern African Americans
-Harlem Renaissance -1940-41 -Jacob Lawrence -Migration Series: 60 panels show Great Migration: a journey that had brought Lawrence's own parents from South Carolina to Atlantic City, NJ -First panel -Black migrants stream through doors of Southern train station on way to Chicago, NY or St. Louis -Boldly abstracted silhouette style, with flat bright shapes and colors draws consciously and directly (like Douglas) on African visual sources
Bauhaus
-House of Building -Founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar 1919 -Strict geometric shapes and lines of Purism and De Stijl too rigid and argued true German architecture and design should emerge organically -Brought together German architects, designers, and crafts makers here, where collective creative energy used to created an integrated system of design and production based on German traditions and styles -Believed he could revive the spirit of collaboration of medieval building guilds that made German cathedrals -The ultimate goal of all artistic activity is the building -No formal training in architecture there until 1927 -Foundation courses and full training in design and crafts first
Analytic Cubism
-Initiated by Braque and Picasso of 1909 and 1910 -Broke objects into parts as if to analyze them -Picked them apart and rearranged them -Resemble the actual process of perception, during which we examine objects from various points of view and reassemble our glances into a whole object in our brain -Picasso and Braque conformed to principles of composition to communicate meaning
Identity
-Investigate their individual and group identities-a growing and more complex concern in new millennium-in wide range of ways, breaking down traditional distinctions bw medium and message in the process and dissolving boundaries to create art this is interesting, exciting, difficult, and confusing as world today
Gesturalism
-Method of painting characterized by energetic, expressive brushstrokes deliberately emphasizing the sweep of the painter's arm or movement of the hard -Expresses artist's emotions and personality -Emphasizes physical act of painting itself, drawing attention to "process of creating"
The Two Fridas
-Mexican Modernism -1939 -Frida Kahlo -Double self-portrait -Presents an identity split into two ethnic selves: European one (Victorian dress) and Mexican one (traditional Mexican clothing) -Reflects stormy relationship with Diego Rivera, married in 1929 divorced in 1939 -Mexican Frida whom Diego loved and Euro Frida he did not -Two Fridas join hands and the artery running between them begins at a miniature portrait of Rivera as a boy held by Mex, travels through exposed hearts of both and ends in lap of Euro who attempts but fails to stem the flow of blood -She suffers from broken pelvis in accident at 17 and endured lifetime of surgical interventions; work alludes to constant pain and Aztec custom of human sacrifice by heart removal
Cubism
-Most influential of modern before WWI -Picasso and Braque -Analytic and synthetic -Well liked by artists everywhere -Deconstructing things into cubes
Postmodern Architecture
-Move away from sleek glass-and-steel boxes of International style and reintroduce quotations from past styles in 1970s -Origins in Jane Jacobs and Robert Venturi-rejected abstract purity of International Style by incorporating elements drawn from popular sources into design -Criticized by Venturi: ignored human needs in quest for uniformity, purity, and abstraction; challenged postmodernism to address the complex contradictory, and heterogeneous mix of high and low architecture that made up modern city; encouraged new arch. to embrace eclecticism and reintroduced references to past arch styles into own designs and began to apply decor to his buildings
Cremaster 3: Mahabyn
-New Media: Film -2002 -Matthew Barney -Cremaster Cycle: developed an arcane sexual mythology-gender mutability -Cremaster controls ascent and descent of testes and sexual differentiation in embryo -3: Describes construction of Chrysler Building in NY and features Richard Serra as architect and Barney as Serra's apprentice -Barney and leopard woman transform into Masons by donning modified Masonic costume -Entire cycle addresses crisis of identity experienced by white, middle-class, heterosexual male artists in America during era dominated by identity politics
Nonrepresentational
-Not representing anything
Site-Specific Sculpture
-Of a work commissioned and/or designed for a particular location
Video Art
-On rise bc development and widespread availability of hand-held video cameras -Rejected traditional forms and meanings to make art that was deliberately non precious, using video image to address the place and prevalence of tv in our culture -Very popular today-most contemporary video art is digitally produced
Dada
-One of the first artistic movements to address slaughter and moral questions of WWII -A Transnational movement with distinct local manifestations that arose almost simultaneously in Zurich, NY, Paris, and Berlin -Questioned the concept of art itself -Mocked the senselessness of rational thought and foundations of modern society -Embraced a "mocking iconoclasm" even in name bc Dada is just baby talk in German, hobbyhorse in French, yes yes in Romanian and Russian etc -Annihilated conventional understanding of art as something precious, replacing with strange irrational art about ideas and actions rather than objects
Neo-Expressionism
-One of the first international expressions of Postmodernism -Launched by 2 highly visible exhibitions in London (A new Spirit) and Berlin (Zeitgeist) in 1980s -In these exhibitions were large-scale figural paintings recovered luxury of painted surface -Almost all male artists
"Degenerate Art"
-Organized by Nazi leadership in 1937 -Attempt to ridicule the banned Modern art and erase its makers -Nazis said avant-garde Modernism is sick and degenerate: presenting the confiscated paintings and sculptures as specimens of pathology and scrawling slogans and derisive commentaries on walls of exhibition
Hurling Colors
-Performance Art -1956 -Shozo Shimamoto -At 2nd Gutai Exhibition (to pursue possibilities of pure and creative activity with great energy) -Performed by smashing bottles of paint against a canvas on the floor -Pushed Pollock's gestural painting technique to the point where the work of art resided in the performance of painting, not in object produced -Gutai usually destroyed the result after end of performance
Marilyn Diptych
-Pop Art -1962 -Andy Warhol -Publicity shot from 1953 film Niagara (sleeping pill overdose of 1962) -Silkscreen-press ink through silk mesh-each color=new screen -Subtle changes in pics -Colors in left=bold seems cheaply reproduced=reminds of quality of advertising -Remind us of identical items on store shelf or Monroe's constant presence in media -Black and white side resembles celluloid film with repeated, flickering image -Obsessed with celebrities and death -Allude to medieval Christian Icon=points to reverence our culture holds toward celebrities
Rebellious Silence
-Postcolonial -1994 -Sherin Neshat -From "Women of Allah" photo series -Explores how Iranian women are stereotyped in West, claiming their Islamic identities are more varied and complex than perceived -Each woman portrays both a part of an Iranian woman's body (like hands or feet) overwritten with Farsi text and a weapon -This: woman wears traditional chador but face exposed, overwritten with calligraphy and bisected by rifle barrel -Calligraphy and rifle protect her from viewer but create sense of incomprehensibility or foreignness that prompts us to categorize her -Looks at us-returning gaze; challenges us to acknowledge her as individual but also to see her as a stereotypical Iranian woman -He confronts our prejudices while raising questions about position of women in contemporary Iran
Spiral Jetty
-Postmodernism: Earthworks -1969-70 -Robert Smithson -Sought to illustrate the "ongoing dialectic" in nature between the constructive forces that build the shape form, and the destructive forces that destroy it-reflects this -Salt Lake in Utah -The salty water and algae of lake suggest both the primordial ocean where life began and a dead sea that killed it -Abandoned oil rigs dotting lake's shore brought to mind dino skeletons and remains of vanished civilizations -Used spiral because its an archetypal shape that appears in nature (galaxies, seashells) and used in human art -Opens and closes, curls and uncurls endlessly suggesting growth and decay, creation and destruction, or the perpetual "coming and going of things" -No maintenance be done, now covered with crystalized salt
Untitled Film Still #21
-Postmodernism: Gender -1978 -Cindy Sherman -Resemble publicity stills from early 1960s, but actually contemporary photos of Sherman herself in which she poses, appropriately made-up, in setting that seem to quote from the well-known plots of old movies -Appears to be a small-town "girl" recently arrived in big city to find work -Others from series show her as Southern belle, hard working housewife and teen waiting phone call -Critics bc question culturally constructed roles played by women and criticism male gaze -By her assuming photographer and model, she complicates relationship bw the person looking and person observed and subverts the way in which photos of women communicate stereotypes
Primary Colors
-Red, yellow, blue
Surrealism
-Revolt against logic and reason -Embracing irrational, disorderly, aberrant, and violent social interventions -Offshoot of Dada from poet Andre Breton -Published Manifesto of Surrealism, reflecting Freud's conception of human mind as battleground where irrational forces of unconscious wage constant war against rational, orderly, oppressive forces of conscious -Sought to explore humanity's most base, irrational, and forbidden sexual desires, secret fantasies, and violent instincts by freeing the conscious mind from reason -Studied acts of "criminal madness" and the "female mind" -Only way to improve war-sick society is to discover more intense "surreality" that transcended rational constraint
Synthetic Cubism
-Second major phase of cubism -Artists created complex compositions by combining and transforming individual elements as in a chemical synthesis -Bottle of Suze (Picasso)
Process Art
-Some artists refused to eliminate personal meaning from their work -In opposition to Minimalism explored the physicality, personality, and sensuality of the process of making art
Minimalism
-Sought to dematerialization of the art object -Sculptors Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Carl Andre proposed ABC Art, Primary Structures, or minimalism -Produced slab-or boxlike sculptures, frequently fabricated for them from industrial materials like Plexiglas, fluorescent lighting, steel, and mirrors, rejecting gesture and emotion in handcrafted objects and traditional materials -Asked viewers to comprehend art objects as united wholes without focal point, allowing energy of work and viewers' interest to be dissipated throughout object in kind of entropy
De Stijl
-Started by Piet Mondrian on Netherlands and Theo van Doesburg and started magazine called De Stijl (The Style) -Became focal point for Dutch artists, architects and designers after war -Van Doesburg argued that beauty took two distinct forms: sensual or subjective beauty and a higher, rational, and universal beauty -He challenged his artists to aspire to universal beauty -Mondrian sought to accomplish this by eliminating everything sensual/subjective from paintings -Followed MHJ Schoenmaekers's ideas about Theosophy-arguing that an inner visual construction of nature consisted of a balance between opposing forces like hot and cold etc and that artists might represent this inner construction in abstract paintings by using only horizontal and vertical lines and primary colors
Suprematist Painting (Eight Red Rectangles)
-Suprematism -1915 -Kazimir Malevich -Moscow avant-garde -Arranges 8 red rectangles, set diagonally on white ground-pure abstraction -"Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings: 0.10," where exhibited 39 pieces consisting of flat, geometric shapes collaged together
Birth of Liquid Desires
-Surrealism -1931-31 -Salvador Dali -Large yellow biomorphic form (organic shape resembling a living organism)-looking like monster's face, a painter's palette, or woman's body-that serves as backdrop for four figures -Woman in white embraces a hermaphroditic figure who stands with one foot in a bowl thats being filled with liquid by 3rd figure, partially hidden while 4th enters a cavernous hole on left -Thick black cloud above poses question "Consign: to waste the total slate?" -Simply painted what his paranoid-critical mind had conjured up in his nightmares -Defy rational interpretation although trigger fear, anxiety and regression into own mind
Bottle of Suze
-Synthetic Cubism -1912 -Pablo Picasso -Collage -Center, assembled newsprint and construction paper suggest a tray or round table supporting a glass and bottle of liquor with actual label -around it, pasted larger pieces of newspaper and wallpaper -Multiple perspectives: top of blue table tilted to face us, and side of glass. bottle stands on table, label facing us, while we can also see round profile of its opening and top of cork- -Elements evoke not only a place-a bar-but also an activity-the viewer alone with a newspaper enjoying a quiet drink -Newspaper disrupt quiet mood bc address First Balkan War which led to WWI
Der Blaue Reiter
-The Blue Rider -Named for a popular image of a blue knight, the St. George on the city emblem of Moscow -St. George=spiritual leader in society, Blue Rider=spiritual leadership -First exhibition in Dec 1911 and included 14 artists with range of styles (realism to radical abstraction) -Munich by Vassily Kandinsky -Franz Marc (?)
Critical Theory
-The study of history, literature, art, culture etc from perspectives that assume that there is no "objective" academic stance possible and that all knowledge is situated in particular circumstances -Facts are rarely really facts but instead reflect biases/beliefs of those writing them
Earthworks
-Usually very large-scale, outdoor artwork that is produced by altering the natural environment
Fauves
-Wild beasts of color -Derain, Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck -Explosive colors and blunt brushwork -Coined by Louis Vauxcelles -Bc of Salons in France -Rethought picture's surface -Mountains at Collioure by Derain
Postcolonial Discourse
-With more migration and expansion of global communications and economies, questions of personal, political, cultural, and national identity in 90s -Began to address issues of contested identity and the identity struggle of postcolonial peoples and to investigate the dissonance produced by transnational (mis)communication bw conifers and post colonized -Shirin Neshat and Rasheed Araeen
Modernism
-Works of art are precious objects -Rejected decorative in painting/sculpture -Architects: embraced plain geometric shapes and undecorated surfaces of skyscrapers-in reaction to Art Nouveau -Includes impressionism, cubism, bauhaus, surrealism, futurism, pop art, and op art
The Holy Virgin
-Young British Artists -1996 -Chris Ofili -Hated by Giuliani and Catholic leaders -Brooklyn Museum of Art funded by Giuliani so he withheld payment and filed suit in court to revoke lease -Response: violated 1st amendment and won -Giuliani said fostered religious intolerance but court said "no legitimate interest in protecting any/all religions from views distasteful to them and taxpayers must pay -Surrounded by butt-butterflies and elephant poop