From the Modern to the Post-Modern and Beyond: the Later 20th century by tennislove- "Modernism and 'Less is More; to Postmodernism and 'Less is a Bore!'" (Chapter 34)

Figure 34-59; The Dinner Party; by Judy Chicago; Celebrating women; 1979; multimedia, including ceramics and stitchery; NEW MEDIA

*In recent years, artists have investigated more insistently the dynamics of power and privilege, especially in relation to issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class *In the 1970's feminist movement, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro led the arts in the Feminist Art Program in California; in 1972, teachers and students in this program joined to create projects such as Womanhouse, an abandoned house in Los Angeles they completely converted into a suite of "environments," each based on a different aspect of women's lives and fantasies *Judy Chicago (born Judy Cohen in 1939) wanted to educate viewers about women's role in history and fine arts to establish a new respect for women and their art and to make art accessible to a large audience *Inspired by Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O'Keefe, and Louise Nevelson, Chicago developed a personal painting style that consciously included abstract organic vaginal images *She created The Dinner Party using craft techniques (such as china painting and stitchery) traditionally practiced by women to celebrate the achievements and contributions women made throughout history; she originally conceived the work as a feminist Last Supper attended by 13 women, a number that also refers to the number of women in a witches' coven (referring to a religion founded to encourage worship of the Mother Goddess) *In the course of her research, Chicago uncovered so many worthy women that she expanded the number of guests to 39 and placed them around a triangular table 48 feet long on each side; the triangular form refers to the ancient symbol for both woman and goddess and is also a symbol of the equalized world sought by feminism, and the notion of the dinner party alludes to women's traditional role as homemakers *A team of nearly 400 workers assisted in the creation and assembly of the work to her specifications; it rests on a white tiled floor inscribed with the names of 999 additional women of achievement from myth, legend, and history to signify that the accomplishments of the 39 honored guests rest on a foundation other women laid *Among the "invited" women at the table are O'Keefe, Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, Virginia Woolf, Sacagawea, and Susan B. Anthony; Chicago gave each guest a place setting with identical utensils and goblet, and then each also has a unique oversized porcelain plate and a long placemat or table runner covered with imagery that reflects significant facts about her life and culture—the plates range from simple concave shapes with china-painted imagery to 3D designs that seem to struggle to free themselves *The unique designs on each plate incorporate both butterfly imagery (ancient symbol of liberation) and vulval motifs (symbol of female sexuality and what the women from all time periods had in common); each table runner combines traditional needlework techniques, including needlepoint, embroidery, crochet, beading, patchwork, and appliqué *The work has a rigorous arrangement and sacramental qualities that bring viewers into considering feminist concerns; it has been exhibited in U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe before ending up in its permanent home in the Brooklyn Museum in 2004 *The runners incorporate decorative motif and techniques of stitching and weaving appropriate to the period with which each woman was associated

CRITIC HAROLD ROSENBERG ON ACTION PAINTING:

"At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or "express" an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. This image would be the result of this encounter."

MARK ROTHKO ON ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS:

"We assert man's absolute emotions. We don't need props or legends. We create images whose realities are self evident. Free ourselves from memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or life, we make it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is understood by anyone who looks at it without nostalgic glasses of history."

Figure 34-1; Painting; by Francis Bacon; Brutality of War; 1946; oil and pastel on linen; existentialism

*After the devastation of WWII, the Holocaust, atomic bombs, a pervasive despair, disillusionment, and cynicism emerged across Europe; gone was the hopeful optimism after WWI *Existentialism became popular, which asserted the absurdity of human existence and impossibility of achieving certitude; also atheism was promoted; roots of existentialism traced to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Sartre. *According to Sartre, if God does not exist, people must constantly struggle in isolation with the anguish of making decisions in a world without absolutes or traditional values *Pessimism, despair, brutality, and roughness characterized art of the immediate postwar period *Painting is a compelling and revolting image of a powerful figure who presides over a scene of slaughter; painted in the year after WWII ended, the work is an indictment of humanity and a reflection of war's butchery *The central figure is a stocky man with a gaping mouth and a vivid red stain on his upper lip, as if he were a carnivore devouring the raw meat sitting on the railing surrounding him; Bacon may have based this figure on news photos of Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, Benito Mussolini, or Franklin Roosevelt *The umbrella recalls wartime images of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who disastrously misjudged Hitler and was frequently photographed with an umbrella *Bacon suspended the flayed carcass hanging behind him like a crucified human form *He wrote, "I hope to make the best human cry in painting, to remake the violence of reality itself" based on what he called the "brutality of fact." *While working as an interior decorator, he taught himself to paint in the 1930's but produced few picture until the early 1940's, when the onset of WWII crystallized his harsh view of the world *He served as an air raid warden during the war, seeing that his neighbors got to safety during Nazi bombing attacks *Bacon's style was indebted to the Expressionist work of Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch as well as Picasso's figure paintings *He said that slaughterhouses and meat brought to mind the Crucifixion

Section 1: Modernism, Formalism, Expressionism

*American art critic Clement Greenberg wielded considerable influence from the 1940's to the 1980's and was instrumental in defining the parameters of modernism *The critical stance became a rejection of illusionism and an exploration of the properties of each artistic medium; believed that painting should embrace the flatness of the 2D medium and sculpture should embrace 3D—the arts achieve 'purity' by becoming 'abstract or nonfigurative' *Greenberg promoted the avant-garde, which he viewed as synonymous with modernism after WWII, but it continued to alienate the public *Modernism had its demise in the 1970's, when it seemed that artistic traditions had been so completely undermined that the movement simply played itself out; from this situation emerged postmodernism, which is more a cultural phenomenon than a style *Postmodernism's ability to accommodate seemingly everything in art makes it difficult to define the term; in contrast to the elitist, uncompromising modernism, postmodernism grew out of a naïve and optimistic populism *Postmodernism explored the relationship between art and mass culture and addressed such issues as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity

Figure 34-25; One and Three Chairs; by Kosuth; Conceptual art (the idea is more important than the execution); 1965; wooden folding chair, photographic copy of a chair, and photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of a chair; Conceptual art

*American artist Joseph Kosuth, a major proponent, operates at the intersection of language and vision, the abstract and the concrete, exploring the ways in which aesthetic meaning is generated *This piece consists of an actual chair flanked by a full-scale photo of the chair and a photocopy of a dictionary definition of the word 'chair'—asking the viewer to ponder the notion of what constitutes "chairness." *He said, "I felt I had found a way to make art without formal components being confused for an expressionist composition. The expression was in the idea, not the form—the forms were only a device in service of the idea. . . Like everyone else I inherited the idea of art as a set of formal problems. So when I began to re-think my ideas of art, I had to re-think that thinking process, and it begins with the making process. "Art as Idea as Idea" was intended to suggest that the real creative process, and the radical shift, was in changing the idea of art itself. In other words, my idea of doing that was the real creative content."

SECTION III: SUPERREALISM, ENVIRONMENTAL ART, ARCHITECTURE

*Like the Pop artists, the Superrealists were interested in finding a form of artistic communication that was more accessible to the public than the remote, unfamiliar visual language of the Abstract Expressionists or the Post-Painterly Abstractionists. *Superrealists expanded Pop's iconography in both painting and sculpture by creating images from the 1960's and 1970's with scrupulous fidelity to optical fact; also called Photorealists—reproduced minute, unsparing details

Figure 34-14; Die; by Tony Smith; Minimal art; 1962; steel; Minimalism (MINIMALISM was a sculptural movement that emerged in the 1960's and clearly expressed this endeavor: its name reveals its reductive nature)

*American sculptors also strove to arrive at purity as Greenberg advocated; they chose to focus on three-dimensionality as the unique characteristic and inherent limitation of the sculptural idiom *MINIMALISM was a sculptural movement that emerged in the 1960's and clearly expressed this endeavor: its name reveals its reductive nature *Minimalist Tony Smith created sculptures such as Die, a simple volumetric construction *Minimal artworks often lack identifiable subjects, colors, surface textures, and narrative elements, emphasizing their "objecthood" and concrete tangibility *In doing so, they reduced experience to its most fundamental level, preventing viewers from drawing on assumptions or preconceptions

Figure 34-31; Green Coca-Cola Bottles; by Andy Warhol; Repetition is art; 1962; oil on canvas; used silk-screen technique; POP ART

*Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was the quintessential American Pop artist; he had an early career as a commercial artist and illustrator that grounded him in the visual rhetoric of advertising *In paintings such as this one, he selected an icon of mass-produced, consumer culture of the time, choosing the reassuring familiar shape of the Coke bottle *The repetition and redundancy of the Coke bottle reflects the omnipresence and dominance of this product in American society, and the silk-screen technique (also used by Rauschenberg) allowed him to print the image endlessly—he was so immersed in the culture of mass production that he named his studio: The Factory.

Figure 34-30; Hopeless; by Lichtenstein; oil on canvas; Art in cartoons; 1963; Ben-Day Dots; POP ART

*As the Pop movement matured, images became more concrete and tightly controlled *Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) turned to the comic book as the mainstay of American pop culture; he was among the first to make art from the look as well as the subjects of popular culture *In paintings such as this one, he excerpted an image from a comic book, meant to be read and discarded, and immortalized it in monumental scale—aside from that, he was notably faithful to the original comic strip image *He selected a melodramatic scene from the popular at the time romance comic books; then he used the visual vocabulary of the comic strips: heavy black outlines, unmodulated color areas, and the familiar square dimensions *His printing technique, benday dots, calls attention to the mass-produced basis for the image (named after the inventor, newspaper printer Benjamin Day)—it involves the modulation of colors through the placement and size of colored dots. Lichtenstein used a stencil to make sure he got the dots right *Although some assume he merely copied the comics, he made subtle adjustments to strengthen and tighten the final image, such as compressing into a single frame the generic romance-comic story line, in which two people fall in love, face a temporary crisis, and then reunite to live happily ever after *His game with illusion vs. reality: the melodramatic comic-book emotions are presented almost reverently

Figure 34-4; Number 1, 1950; by Jackson Pollock (used Gestural Abstraction); Abstract expression; 1950; oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas; 2 groups: GESTURAL ABSTRACTION = relied on expressiveness of energetically applied pigment; CHROMATIC ABSTRACTION = focused on color's emotional resonance

*As the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York in the 1940's, American artists picked up the European avant-garde's energy in movements such as Cubism and Dadaism, suffusing much of the U.S. art of the 1940's through 1970's *ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM was the first major American avant-garde movement; emerged in New York and sometimes called the New York School *They are mostly abstract expressions of the artist's state of mind and are intended to strike emotional chords in the viewer ; they broadened their artistic processes to express what psychiatrist Carl Jung called the collective unconscious *Many adopted Surrealist improvisation methods such as "psychic automatism," turning inward to create a rough spontaneity and palpable energy *The viewer was meant to grasp the content of their art intuitively, free from structured thinking; 2 groups: GESTURAL ABSTRACTION = relied on expressiveness of energetically applied pigment; CHROMATIC ABSTRACTION = focused on color's emotional resonance *By 1950, Pollock developed his unique signature style and was producing large-scale abstract paintings such as this one, also called Lavender Mist *His paintings were composed of rhythmic drips, splatters, and dribbles of paint; the mural-sized fields of energetic skeins of pigment envelop viewers and draw them into a lacy spiderweb *Gestural Abstraction aptly describes his working technique: using sticks or brushes, he flung, poured, and dripped paint (oil, aluminum, and household enamels) onto a section of unsized canvas he rolled across his studio floor, a converted barn *He responded to an image as it developed, making art both spontaneous and choreographed—the emphasis on the creative process was esp. avant-garde as he walked around working from the four sides and literally could be in the painting *He parallels the work of Kandinsky but resolutely moved away from easel painting *The public derisively called him "Jack the Dripper"; his early death at 44 in a car accident cut short the development of his artistic vision *Pictures show no trace of Cubist picture space or hierarchical arrangement; almost every area is equally energized; married painter Lee Krasner *Pollock was born in Wyoming; studied in New York but rejected the "French cooking" of aesthetic refinement in European tradition *Self-destructive and alcoholic, he entered Jungian psychotherapy in 1939, and his therapist analyzed Jungian symbolism in the drawings Pollock brought in each week; Pollock gained a new vocabulary of symbols and a belief in the Jungian notion of images that tap into primordial human consciousness *He was a "jazz addict" also fascinated by Navajo sand painting (pouring colored sand on floor in symbolic patterns) which he saw at the Natural History Museum *He said he created art for "the age of the airplane, the atom bomb, and the radio"; his works do seem to embody the tensions of the Cold War

Figure 34-36; Marilyn; by Audrey Flack; Superrealism; 1977; oil over acrylic on canvas; memento mori and vanitas (appreciate time and life on earth)

*Audrey Flack was a Superrealist who studied the nature of photography and the extent to which photography constructs an understanding of reality *She said, "Photography is my whole life, I studied art history, it was always photographs, I never saw the paintings, they were in Europe. Look at TV and at magazines and reproductions, they're all influenced by photo-vision." *She incorporated photographic techniques: first she projected a slide image onto the canvas; next she used an airbrush to duplicate the smooth gradations of tone and color found in photographs *Her attention to detail resulted in mostly still-life paintings that depict a collection of familiar objects in great optical fidelity *In contrast to Warhol's Marilyn Diptych, this alludes to the traditional Dutch vanitas paintings with its references to death: in addition to black and white photos of a youthful Marilyn, fresh fruit (some cut), an hourglass, a burning candle, a watch, and a calendar all refer to the passage of time and the transience of life on earth

Figure 34-79; The Crossing; by Viola; Digital Sensory Experience; 1996; installation with two channels of color video projection onto screens 16' high; NEW MEDIA

*Bill Viola (b. 1951) explores the capabilities of digitized imagery, producing many video installations and single-channel works that often focus on sensory perception *The pieces not only heighten viewer awareness of the senses but also suggest an exploration into the spiritual realm; Viola was an American who spent years studying seriously Buddhist, Christian, Sufi, and Zen mysticism—he fervently believes in art's transformative power and a spiritual view of human nature and encourages viewer introspection *His recent video projects involve using such techniques as extreme slow motion, contrasts in scale, shifts in focus, mirrored reflections, staccato editing, and multiple or layered screens to achieve dramatic effect *The Crossing is an installation piece involving two color video channels projected on 16' high screens, shown either on the front and back of the same screen or on two separate screens in the same installation *In the two companion videos shown simultaneously, a man surrounded in darkness appears, moving closer until he fills the screen; on one screen, drops of water fall from above onto the man's head, while on the other screen a small fire breaks out at the man's feet *Over the next few minutes, the water and fire increase in intensity until the man disappears in a torrent of water on one screen and flames consume him on the other screen, accompanied by the deafening roar of a raging fire and a torrential downpour *Eventually, everything subsides and fades into darkness; this installation's elemental nature and presentation in a dark space immerse viewers in a pure sensory experience rooted in tangible reality

Figure 34-29; Canyon; by Rauschenberg; Combines media; 1959; oil, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, cardboard box, printed paper, printed reproductions, photograph, wood, paint tube, and mirror on canvas, with oil on bald eagle, string, and pillow; Rauschenberg said, "I only consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense."; "multiplicity of meaning"; POP ART

*Robert Rauschenberg was a friend of Jasper Johns; began using mass-media images in his works in the 1950's, setting out to create works that were open and indeterminate *He began by making "combines," which intersperse painted passages with sculptural elements—his personal variation on Assemblages—often looked like 2D paintings with sculpture attached *In Canyon, pieces of printed paper and photographs are attached to the canvas, and much of the unevenly painted surface consists of roughly applied pigment (like De Kooning); a stuffed bald eagle affixed to lower part spreads its wings as if lifting off in flight toward the viewer; then a pillow dangles from a string attached to a wood stick below the eagle *The work's components are presented in a jumbled fashion—some tilted, turned sideways, overlaying or invaded by part of another image, and the parts maintain their individuality *Rauschenberg's teacher at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, was composer John Cage—the most important nonvisual artist to influence modern art history: he studied with Arnold Schoenberg, whose rejection of major and minor scales paralleled the rise of completely abstract art. *Cage's most important innovation was that he opened his works to the random sounds of noise that we live with every day; he composed a piece for 12 radios, whose score consisted of instructions on how to turn their volumes and tune their dials, creating drastically different pieces in different locations & times; he set up situations where unpredictable events could happen to see what meanings might emerge *John Cage noted, "There is no more subject in a combine by Rauschenberg than there is in a page from a newspaper. Each thing that is there is a subject. It is a situation involving multiplicity." *As a student, Rauschenberg asked for a drawing by De Kooning and then erased it (with De Kooning's permission) to show what he thought of the older generation's art *Rauschenberg began to find ways to "work in the gap between life and art"; in 1951 he exhibited a series of blank white paintings, so that the lights in the room and the shadows cast by viewers became the content of the canvases (paralleling a work by Cage from the same period, 4' 33"—four minutes, 33 seconds of players sitting silently on the stage for that time so that any random sounds are the piece) *Rauschenberg said, "I only consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense." *This work features family photographs, public images (the Statue of Liberty—which might be a symbol of inviting viewers to make their own meanings of the work), fragments of political posters in the center, and various objects salvaged from the trash (flattened steel drum at upper right) and purchased items (the stuffed eagle)

Figure 34-37; Spiral Jetty; by Robert Smithson; Earth art; 1970; black rock, salt crystals, earth, red water (algae) at Great Salt Lake, Utah; Environmental Art

*Robert Smithson was a leading American Environmental artist; used industrial construction equipment to manipulate vast quantities of earth and rock on isolated sites *Spiral Jetty was one of his best-known pieces—a mammoth coil of black basalt, limestone rocks, and earth that extends out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah *He was inspired when he drove by the lake and saw abandoned mining equipment from a failed attempt to extract oil from the site; he saw this as a testament to the power of nature and to humankind's inability to conquer nature *This completed monumental work runs 1,500 linear feet into the water *Smithson insisted on designing the work in response to the location itself, wanting to avoid the arrogance of an artist merely imposing an unrelated concept on the site *His quote on viewing the site: "As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. The site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty." *He also chose the spiral form after researching the Great Salt Lake and discovering that the molecular structure of the salt crystals that coat the rocks at the water's edge is spiral in form; Smithson filmed the construction of Spiral Jetty in a movie that describes the forms and life of the whole site *Fluctuations in the lake's water level frequently place Spiral Jetty underwater *Smithson sought to illustrate the "ongoing dialectic" in nature between constructive and destructive forces *He also chose the spiral because unlike Modernist squares, circles, and straight lines, it is a "dialectical" shape, one that opens and closes, curls and uncurls endlessly and suggests perpetual coming and going; also appears in various ancient rock art

Figure 34-26; The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths; by Nauman; Conceptual art; 1967; neon with glass tubing suspension frame- window or wall sign

*Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) abandoned painting in the mid-1960's, when he turned to object-making using rubber, fiberglass, and cardboard as well as creating photographs, films, videos, books, and large room installations plus performance art *His interest in language and wordplay allies him with the Conceptual artists, although humor and whimsy play a much larger role in his art *This was the first of his many neon sculptures, which he chose as a medium because it was not identified with an artistic function *He was determined to discover a way to connect objects with words and to encourage contradictory and nonsensical arguments *This sculpture spins out an emphatic assertion, but he explained that "It was kind of a test—like when you say something out loud to see if you believe it. It was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it." *Other Conceptual artists pursued the idea of art as idea more than product by using invisible materials, such as inert gases, radioactive isotopes, or radio waves, causing viewers to base meaning on what they know about the properties of these materials and pushing art's boundaries to a point where no definition of art is possible *In Stokstad p. 1161, he creates Self-Portrait as a Fountain borrowing the name from Duchamp's famous urinal

SECTION IV: POSTMODERNISM IN PAINTING, SCULPTURE, AND NEW MEDIA (PAGES 1068-1090)

*By the 1970's the inclusiveness of postmodern architecture extended to painting, sculpture, performance, etc. *Just as postmodern architects include historical references, postmodern artists also comment on or reinterpret historical styles; writings about postmodern art often refer to Neo-Minimalism, Neo-Pop, and Neo-Romanticism, among others *Also, scholars assert that postmodernism erodes the boundaries between high culture and popular culture, a separation which modernists staunchly defended *Many postmodern artists reject the notion that each artwork contains a single fixed meaning, and their work in part explores how viewers derive meaning from visual material

Conceptual Art

*CONCEPTUAL ART: the logical conclusion of the avant-garde's relentless struggle against artistic convention; Conceptual artists believed that the "artfulness" of art lay in the artist's idea rather than its final expression—they pushed Minimalism to its logical extreme by eliminating the art object itself; although they always produced something to look at, it was often only a printed statement, a set of directions, or a documentary photograph *The idea began with Marcel Duchamp, who said that making art should be a mental rather than physical activity; every art object begins as an idea, and carrying out the idea is perfunctory, and so the goal was to do away with the valuable art object ("dematerialize it") while still exposing the artist's thought *Deemphasizing the art object kept art from becoming simply another luxury item; some artists did not want to make works that would sell in elite galleries and then decorate the homes of the wealthy; others noted that museum governing boards often consisted of corporate executives from companies that practiced discrimination or earned money from warfare or exploiting natural resources. Artist groups picketed and protested outside most major museums in the late 1960's and made their priority to make art that avoided the system *CONCEPTUAL ART is based on the premise that if an idea is good, the art piece will also be good, a standard that could apply to many works of art. *For example, Michelangelo's work on the Sistine ceiling was very creative in envisioning the relationship between God and people in a new way; the idea of God reaching out to Adam was the masterpiece, and all he had to do was paint his idea. Many artists had a similar skill level at the time, but no one thought as creatively as Michelangelo did—by this reasoning, Michelangelo was a good Conceptual artist

Figure 34-74; "When I put my hands On Your Body"; by Wojnarowicz; Dealing with AIDS; 1990; gelatin-silver print and silk-screened text on museum board; NEW MEDIA

*David Wojnarowicz (1955-1992) was a gay activist who had seen many friends die of AIDS and dedicated the latter part of his career to making images dealing with issues of homophobia and AIDS *This is one of his disturbing yet eloquent works on the tragedy of the disease, "When I put my hands on your body" *Here the artist overlaid a photograph of a pile of skeletal remains with evenly spaced typed commentary that communicates his feelings about watching a loved one die of AIDS by movingly describing the effects of AIDS on the human body and soul *He juxtaposed text with imagery, which paralleled the use of both words and images in advertising; the public's familiarity with this format ensured greater receptivity to the artist's message. He also died of AIDS in 1992.

Figure 34-6; Woman I; by De Kooning (gestural abstractionist); Raw abstraction; 1950-1952; oil on canvas; abstract expressionism

*Dutch-born Willem De Kooning also developed a gestural abstractionist style *Even figures rooted in figuration display the sweeping gestural brush strokes and energetic application of paint typical of gestural abstraction *A ferocious looking woman with staring eyes and ponderous breasts appears out of a jumbled array of slashing lines and agitated patches of color; her toothy smile, inspired by an ad for Camel cigarettes, seems to turn into a grimace *The female figure was partially inspired by models on advertising billboards and also suggest fertility figures and a satiric inversion of the traditional image of Venus, goddess of love *Process was important to De Kooning as it was to Pollock; he worked on this painting continually for two years, painting an image one day and then scraping it away the next day to begin again. His wife Elaine (also a painter) estimated he painted approx. 200 images of women he scraped away on this canvas before settling on this one *He also created nonrepresentational works dominated by huge swaths of color; his images suggest rawness and intensity—his dealer said he occasionally brought him canvases with ragged holes in them from overly vigorous painting *Unlike Pollock, he still used brushes and an easel; he said, "Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure."

Figure 34-19; Hang-Up; by Eva Hesse; "Non-Art" art; 1965-1966; acrylic on cloth over wood and steel; Minimalism- mostly NON ART

*Eva Hesse was a Minimalist in the early part of her career but moved away from the severity characterizing much of Minimalist art, creating spare and simple sculptures that also have a compelling presence *Using nontraditional materials such as fiberglass, cord, and latex, she created Minimalist sculptures whose pure form appears to crumble, sage, and warp under the pressures of atmospheric force and gravity. *She was a Jew in Nazi Germany (born 1936) and was hidden by a Christian family when her parents and elder sister had to flee the Nazis. She was not reunited with them until the early 1940's just before her parents divorced. These extraordinary circumstances gave her a lasting sense that the central conditions of modern life are strangeness and absurdity. *To capture these qualities in her art, she created informal sculptural arrangements with units often hung from the ceiling, leaned against walls, or spilled out along the floor *She wanted her pieces to be "non-art, non connotative, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort." *This piece looks like a carefully made empty frame sprouting a strange feeler that extends into the room and doubles back to the frame; she wrote that in this piece for the first time "her idea of absurdity came through" and that Hang-Up "has a kind of depth I don't always achieve and that is the kind of depth or soul or absurdity of life or meaning or feeling or intellect that I want to get." *This sculpture suggests the fragility and grandeur of life amid the pressures of the modern age; fragile herself, she died of a brain tumor at the young age of 34

Figure 34-40; Guggenheim Museum; by F. L. Wright; New York; Organic forms; 1943-1959; Architecture

*Frank Lloyd Wright ended his long career with his design for the Guggenheim Museum, an example of his "organic" architecture that sculptures a concrete spiral in New York City *He used reinforced concrete almost as a sculptor uses clay to create a building inspired by a snail shell *He introduced curves and circles into some of his earlier plans, and the spiral became the next logical step; it brought the circle into the third and fourth dimensions *Inside the building, the shell shape expands toward the top; a winding interior ramp connects the gallery bays, illuminated by a skylight strip embedded in the museum's outer wall *Visitors can stroll up the ramp or take the elevator to the top and walk down the gently inclined ramp to view the art *Thick walls and the solid organic shape give the building a sense of turning in on itself; also, the interior viewing area opens onto a 90' central well of space that seems to be a sheltered environment secure from the bustling city outside

Figure 34-11; Mas o Menos; by Frank Stella; Purity of paint; 1964; metallic powder in polymer emulsion on canvas; Post-painterly abstraction (no evidence of the artist's brush)

*Frank Stella eliminated many of the variables associated with painting; his simplified images of thin, evenly spaced pinstripes on colored grounds have no central focus, no painterly or expressive elements, limited surface modulation, and no tactile quality *He said, "What you see is what you see," reinforcing the notion that artists producing advanced art must reduce their work to its essential elements and that the viewer must acknowledge that a painting is simply pigment on a flat surface *Later, Stella used a metallic paint normally applied to radiators, chosen because it "had a quality of repelling the eye" and it created an even flatter, more abstract effect than the soft black enamel of his "Black Paintings." *He continued to develop the possibilities of the shaped canvas; he used thick stretchers (pieces of wood) that give his works the appearance of slablike objects

Figure 34-27; Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different?; by Richard Hamilton; Pop art; 1956; collage; POP ART

*Full title of this collage is Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? *Richard Hamilton, a group member, was trained as an engineering draftsman, exhibition designer, and painter—very interested in the way advertising shapes public attitudes *He consistently combined the elements of popular art and fine art, seeing both as belonging to the whole world of visual communication *The fantasy interior of this collage reflects the values of modern consumer culture through figures and objects cut from glossy magazines: includes references to mass media (television, the theater marquee outside the window, and the newspaper), to advertising (for Hoover vacuums, Ford cars, Armour hams, and Tootsie Pops), and to popular culture (such as the girlie magazine, Charles Atlas, and romance comic books) *Such artworks stimulated wide-ranging speculation about society's values, and its intellectual toying with mass-media meaning and imagery typified British and European Pop art *Richard Hamilton was kicked out of the Royal Academy for having "low standards," but he rightly reasoned that modern mass culture (movies, TV, etc.) had taken over many of the previous functions of traditional art, such as showing us ideal beauty (now found in pin-ups) or commenting on society (now in TV news) or giving us heroic narratives of larger than life figures (now seen in movies); finally, if art is seen as symbolizing the times by its style, we now have this in car bodies and the latest consumer goods *Hamilton called the people in this collage Adam and Eve *The movie theater is showing The Jazz Singer, the 1927 film with the first spoken sound track *On the wall in the favored place above the TV set is a portrait of John Ruskin, the moralizing art critic *Hamilton respected popular culture and worked with it: he later designed an album cover for the Beatles ("White Album") and his fellow Pop artist Peter Blake designed the "St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover

Figure 34-82; A Short History of Modernist Painting; by Tansey; Critique of art history; 1982; oil on canvas; three panels each 4' 10" by 3' 4"; NEW MEDIA

*In Postmodernism, referencing the past or historical styles moves beyond simple quotation and involves a critique of or commentary on fundamental art historical premises. Postmodern art is about making art; people have described it as a self-consciousness on the part of the artists about their place in the continuum of art history *In this humorous piece, American artist Mark Tansey (b. 1949) provides viewers with a tongue-in-cheek summary of the various approaches to painting artists have embraced over the years *Tansey presents a sequence of three images, each visualizing a way of looking at art: at the far left, a glass window encapsulates the Renaissance ideal of viewing art as though one were looking through a window; in the center image, a man pushing his head against a solid wall represents the thesis central to much of modernist formalism—that the painting should be acknowledged as an object in its own right. Modernism, especially the type promoted by Clement Greenberg in the 1960's and 1970's, was based on the rejection of imitation and illusion as a primary artistic goal. * In the image on the right, Tansey summarizes the postmodern approach to art with a chicken pondering its reflection in the mirror, revealing postmodern artists' self-consciousness or awareness of their place in the art historical continuum

Figure 34-32; Marilyn Diptych; by Warhol; Mass culture 1962; oil, acrylic, and silk-screen enamel on canvas; POP ART

*In another of his mass-produced images, Warhol created this one of Marilyn Monroe shortly after her apparent suicide in 1962 *The strip of pictures in the work suggests the sequential images of film, the medium that made her famous; some are in black and white and some are in color, like her movies *The face that Warhol portrays is a publicity photo, not of Monroe- the person-but of Monroe the star—all the viewer sees is a mask, a persona that the Hollywood myth machine generated; the garish colors and the flat application of paint contribute to the masklike quality *Like the Coke bottles, the repeated image emphasizes her status as a consumer product, especially in the media frenzy following her death *The diptych form was inspired by altarpieces depicting saints; by symbolically treating her as a saint, Warhol shed light on his own fascination with fame (He famously said that mass media would enable everyone to become famous for fifteen minutes.) *He said, "The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all."

Postmodernism

*In contrast to the simplicity of modernist architecture, the terms most often used to describe postmodern architecture are pluralism, eclecticism, and complexity. While the modernist work was reductive, the postmodern vocabulary of the 1970's and 1980's was expansive and inclusive; they argued that the uniformity and anonymity of corporate skyscrapers were unsuited to human social interaction and diversity and they embraced messy and chaotic urban life.

SECTION II: SCULPTURE, PERFORMANCE ART, CONCEPTUAL ART, POP ART (PAGES 1043-1054) Figure 34-16; Vietnam Wall; by Maya Ying Lin; Power of minimal; 1981-1983; Washington, DC, black granite, each wing is 246' long; Minimalism

*Maya Lin was born in 1960 and designed this monument in 1981 at age 21 *The austere, simple memorial, a V-shaped wall constructed of polished black granite panels, begins at ground level at each end and gradually ascends to a height of 10 feet at the center of the V. The names of the 57, 939 casualties and those still missing are incised on the wall in order of their deaths *Also, Lin set the wall into the landscape, enhancing an awareness of descent as one walks along the wall toward the center *When she designed this simple monument, she gave a great deal of thought to the purpose of war memorials and concluded that a memorial "should be honest about the reality of war and be for the people who gave their lives." She "didn't want a static object that people would just look at, but something they could relate to as on a journey, or passage, that would bring each to his own conclusion. I wanted to work with the land and not dominate it. I had an impulse to cut open the earth, an initial violence that in time would heal. The grass would grow back but the cut would remain."

Figure 34-70; Public Enemy; by Hammons; Viewer introspection; 1991; Photographs, balloons, sandbags, guns, and other mixed media; New York; NEW MEDIA

*Nurturing viewer introspection is the driving force behind David Hammons' art, installations combining social commentary with sensory elements to push viewers to confront racism in American society *He created Public Enemy for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NY in 1991 *He encouraged viewer interaction by scattering fragrant autumn leaves which crunched as they walked on the floor and putting helium-filled balloons that brushed the visitors throughout the gallery *The central element are the large black and white photographs of a public monument depicting Teddy Roosevelt triumphantly seated on a horse, flanked by an African American man and a Native American man both appearing in the role of servants *Around the edge of the installation were piles of sandbags with both real and toy guns propped on top, aimed at the statue; by selecting evocative found objects and presenting them in a dynamic manner that encouraged viewer interaction, Hammons attracted an audience and then revealed the racism embedded in received cultural heritage and prompted reexamination of values and cultural emblems

POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION

*POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION developed out of Abstract Expressionism, even though Abstract Expressionism conveyed passion and visceral intensity and Post-Painterly Abstraction has a cool, detached rationality emphasizing tighter pictorial control *The term was coined by critic Clement Greenberg, who saw this art as contrasting with "painterly art" characterized by loose, visible pigment application; evidence of the artist's hand is conspicuously absent and seemed to embody his idea of purity in art *One variant is hard-edge painting, with its razor-sharp edges, clearly delineated shapes, and resolute two-dimensionality

Figure 34-49; AT&T Building; by Johnson & Burgee with Simmons Architects; Classic elements; 1978-1984; New York; Architecture

*Philip Johnson made one of the most startling shifts in 20th century architecture, from the severe formalism of the Seagram Building to a classicizing transformation of it in his AT&T Building in New York City *This building was instrumental in the transformation from modernism to postmodernism, from organic "concrete sculpture" and the rigid "glass box" to elaborate shapes, motifs, and silhouettes freely adapted from historical styles *The 660' high slab of the building is wrapped in granite; Johnson reduced the window space to 30% of the building. The exterior design is classically tripartite, having an arcaded base and arched portal, a tall shaftlike body segmented by slender mullions and a crowning pediment broken by an orbiculum (a disclike opening); its 36 oversized floor reach the height of an ordinary 60-story building *This arrangement refers to the base, column, and entablature system of ancient Greek structures and Renaissance elevations *Also, the pediment indented by the circular space resembles the crown of a typical 18th century Chippendale high chest of drawers; it functions as an ironic rebuke to the rigid uniformity of modernist architecture—Johnson seems to have intended a pun on highboy and high rise *Critics favoring modernism were not amused by his "humor" and controversy raged *The AT&T building's originality and departure from convention seem related to the innovation of the Chysler Building *This is now the Sony Building *The round notch at the top and the arched entryway at the base recall the coin slot and coin return of old pay telephones; he wanted a formal, decorative elegance

Figure 34-28; Flag; by Jasper Johns; Commonly seen; 1954-1955; encaustic (hot wax), oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood; POP ART

*Pop Art flourished in the U.S. largely due to high-profile Hollywood, Detroit, and Madison Ave. *Jasper Johns (b. 1930) was interested in drawing the viewer's attention to common objects in the world—what he called "things seen but not looked at," so he did several series of paintings of targets, flags, numbers, and alphabets *The surface of this piece is highly textured due to his use of encaustic, an ancient method of painting with liquid wax and dissolved pigment; first he embedded a collage of newspaper scraps or photographs in wax and painted over them quickly with encaustic—the translucency of the wax allows viewers to see the layered painting process *His images also raise questions about the difference between representation and abstraction

Figure 34-52; Pompidou Center; by Rogers and Piano; Deconstruction; 1977; Paris; Architecture

*Richard Rogers (British) and Renzo Piano (Italian) collaborated using motifs and techniques from ordinary industrial buildings in their design for the Georges Pompidou National Center of Art and Culture in Paris *The anatomy of the 6-level building is fully exposed, much like an updated version of the Crystal Palace *However, the architects also made visible the Center's "metabolism": they color-coded pipes, ducts, tubes, and corridors according to function (red for the movement of people, green for water, blue for air-conditioning, and yellow for electricity), much like in a sophisticated factory *Critics disparagingly refer to the complex as a "cultural supermarket" and point out that its exposed entrails require excessive maintenance to protect them from the elements *But the building is popular with visitors, who enjoy the flexible interior spaces and the festive colors of the structural body *The building includes: art galleries, industrial design center, library, science and music centers, movie theaters, rest areas, and restaurant; the sloping plaza in front of the entrance has become part of the local scene *At all hours of day and night, tourists, peddlers, street performers, and Parisians fill the square in front *Such secular activities used to occur in front of cathedrals, now in front of an entertainment and cultural center

POP ART

*Some artists in postwar years resolutely pursued avant-garde abstraction, but others felt its introspective nature alienated the public, and they felt instead the power of art to communicate to a wide audience is most important—not in reactionary or academic work but in less commitment to formal issues (ex: Pop Art, Superrealism, Environmental Art) *POP ART reintroduced the devices—signs, symbols, metaphors, allusions, illusions, and figurative imagery—which the recent avant-garde artists had removed in the quest for purity; Pop artists not only embraced representation but also consumer culture, mass media, and popular culture, thus making it more accessible and understandable to the average person (Pop art is short for popular art) *The roots of Pop Art can be traced to a group of young British artists, architects, and writers who formed the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in the early 1950's and were particularly interested in advertising, comic books, and movies and the meaning of symbols from this mass culture (most products in this piece are American) *Such artworks stimulated wide-ranging speculation about society's values, and its intellectual toying with mass-media meaning and imagery typified British and European Pop art *The name Pop Art is distinguished from Assemblage in that all its imagery or techniques are mass-produced, thus giving it a slicker look with more ironic, cynical, detached attitudes

ENVIRONMENTAL ART:

*Sometimes called Earth art or earthworks, emerged in the 1960's, mostly site-specific and existing outdoors *Many artists of this movement also used natural or organic materials, including the land itself *Related to the ecology movement of 60's and 70's and its concern for pollution, depletion of natural resources, and dangers of toxic waste plus litter, urban sprawl, and compromised scenic areas—widespread concern led to establishment of Environmental Protection Agency *Artists and their works became part of the national dialogue on these issues *Environmental art had a clear avant-garde dimension, but it is mostly populist in the way it moves art out of galleries and into the public sphere *Most encouraged public interaction with their works, but ironically, the remote locations of many earthworks have limited public access

Figure 34-9; Cubi XIX; by David Smith; Stainless steel weld; 1964; abstract expressionism; monoliths

*The metal sculptures of American David Smith shared tenets with the Abstract Expressionists *He learned to weld in an automobile plant in 1925 and later applied his technical expertise to his art; also working in large scale at the factories helped him visualize possibilities for monumental metal sculpture *After a number of experiments, he created his Cubi series in the 1960's, which consists of simple geometric forms—cubes, cylinders, and rectangular bars—in homage to Cubism *He created large-scale sculptures by piling these stainless steel forms on top of one another, then welded together; presents a balance that seems ready to collapse, creating visual pleasure *Despite the geometric vocabulary, Smith composed the works in a way that suggest human characteristics; he added gestural elements reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism by burnishing the metal with steel wool, producing swirling random-looking patterns that draw attention to the two-dimensionality of the sculptural surface. This treatment captures the light hitting the sculpture, activates the surface, and imparts a texture to the surfaces *A native of Indiana, Smith first studied painting, then defied traditional, vertical monoliths

Figure 34-3; Man Pointing; by Alberto Giacometti; existential human; 1947; existentialism; bronze

*The spirit of existentialism is best expressed in Alberto Giacometti's sculptures *Sartre, Giacometti's friend, saw the artist's figurative sculptures as the epitome of existentialist humanity: alienated, solitary, and lost in the world's immensity *Giacometti produced sculptures based on human models early in his career, but around 1940 he abandoned such direct observation and began to work from memory *His sculptures from the 1940's such as this one were thin, virtually featureless figures with rough, agitated surfaces; rather than conveying the solidity and mass of conventional bronze figure sculpture, these figures seem swallowed up by the surrounding space, imparting a sense of isolation and fragility *For many artists, figuration was a way to keep one's art close to the human condition, to preserve a connection to humanity, or to express some kinship with the wounded, the displaced, and the dead *He had previously worked in an abstract mode related to biomorphic Surrealism, but the war caused a crisis in him; abstract art was merely "decorator stuff," he said, irrelevant to postwar humanity *Sartre wrote that Giacometti's figures reminded him of the "fleshless martyrs of Buchenwald (concentration camp)" and that his figures were "between nothingness and being."

Figure 34-8; No. 14; by Rothko (chromatic abstractionist); Meaning in color; 1961; oil on canvas; Abstract expressionism- Rothko sought to bring together 2 divergent human tendencies that Nietzsche called the Dionysian and the Apollonian

*The work of the chromatic abstractionists exudes a quieter aesthetic, with color creating the emotional resonance *Mark Rothko, born and Russia and moved to the U.S. at age 10, dealt with universal themes in his paintings *His early paintings were figurative in orientation, but he soon came to believe that references to anything specific in the physical world conflicted with the sublime idea of the universal, supernatural "spirit of myth," we he saw as art's core of meaning *He expressed his beliefs about art: "We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We assert that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art." *In works such as this one, he created two or three large rectangles of pure color with hazy, brushy edges that seem to float on the canvas surface, hovering in front of a colored background *When properly lit, these paintings appear as shimmering veils of intensely luminous colors suspended in front of the canvases *Rothko intended the color juxtapositions as more than decorative, as a doorway to another reality, and he was convinced color could express "basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom." He said, "The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point." *However, Rothko was convinced of Nietzsche's contention that the modern individual was "tragically divided," so his paintings are never completely unified but remain a collection of separate parts—often his larger than lifesize images echo the divided human form *Known as Color Field painters; Rothko sought to bring together 2 divergent human tendencies that Nietzsche called the Dionysian and the Apollonian: the rich color represents the emotional, instinctual, Dionysian element whereas the simple compositional structure is its rational, disciplined, Apollonian counterpart

Figure 34-46; Seagram Building; by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe & Philip Johnson; Steel and glass; 1956-1958; New York; Architecture

*This is the "purest" example of corporate skyscrapers: the rectilinear glass and bronze tower in Manhattan designed for Seagram Company by Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson *Appealing in its structural logic and clarity, easily imitated, quickly became the norm for postwar commercial high-rise buildings *The architects deliberately designed it as a thin shaft, leaving the front quarter of its midtown site as an open pedestrian plaza *It appears to rise from the pavement on stilts; glass walls surround even the recessed lobby *Since the structural elements are recessed, it appears to have a glass skin interrupted only by the thin strips of bronze that anchor the windows *Its bronze metal and amber glass windows give the tower a richness lacking in nearby buildings; the architects had a large budget so they used bronze instead of standardized steel, showing their love of elegant materials *Mies van der Rohe and Johnson carefully planned every interior and exterior detail to create an elegant whole, including the light to make it impressive both day and night *Mies was a former Bauhaus staff member and refugee from Nazi Germany; he always used (in schools, houses, office buildings) the simple, rectilinear vocabulary that personified the modern, efficient culture of postwar capitalism *When Mies was criticized for building glass boxes, he pointed out the subtle mathematical relations that exist between various rectangles on his building and said, "Less is more."

Figure 34-42; Notre-Dame-du-Haut; by Le Corbusier; Sculpted forms; 1950-1955; Ronchamp, France; Architecture

*This small chapel on a pilgrimage site in Ronchamp, France, presents viewers with a fusion of architecture and sculpture *Le Corbusier designed it to replace a building destroyed on the site in World War II *It has an intimate scale, stark and heavy walls, and mysterious illumination from deeply recessed jewel-toned stained glass windows—creating an aura reminiscent of a sacred cave or medieval monastery *The structure may look free-form, but Le Corbusier actually based it on an underlying mathematical system, like a medieval cathedral *A frame of steel and metal mesh was sprayed with concrete and painted white except for two interior private chapel niches with colored walls and the roof left unpainted to darken naturally with the passage of time *The roof appears to float freely above the sanctuary, but it actually is elevated above the walls on a series of nearly invisible blocks *Le Corbusier's preliminary sketches indicate he linked the design with the shape of praying hands, with the wings of a dove (representing both peace and the Holy Spirit), and the prow of a ship (a reminder that the Latin word used for the main gathering place in Christian churches is nave, meaning "ship") *Its monumental impression as seen from afar is somewhat deceptive: one exterior wall contains a pulpit facing a spacious outdoor area for large-scale open-air services on holy days, but the interior holds 200 people at most

GERIP

*WWII and its global devastation set the stage for the 2nd half of the 20th century; the U.S.'s dropping atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima changed the geopolitical Balance and nature of international conflict *U.S. and Soviet Union divided the world into spheres with nuclear power a threat *International hostilities and political uncertainty still characterize the world situation *Change in the U.S. has been marked by civil rights struggles and a "youth culture" which rejected the norms and standards of the past *The relative economic stability in the U.S. was a major factor in the shift of the artistic center of the world from Paris to New York