Nineteen: April 27
Artist: Kara Walker Piece: Insurrection Medium: Cut paper silhouettes and light projections Year: 2000
Among the most sensational, and perhaps the most controversial, African-American artists to appear in recent years is Kara Walker, who emerged in 1994 fresh out of the M.F.A. program at the Rhode Island School of Design. Heavily influenced by her readings of such black feminist writers as Michele Wallace, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison, and especially the latter's Tar Baby, Walker found her subject matter in African-American history and, often, in her feelings as a black woman living in racist America. Simultaneously, her research led her to nineteenth-century silhouette portraits, simple black cut-paper silhouettes of the sitter, made by privileged white girls as part of their education and by itinerant portraitists for clients who could not afford full-blown portraits, whether on paper or canvas. Walker exploded onto the New York art world in 1994 with a 13-by-50-foot installation of life-size black cutouts titled Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War As It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, presented at the Drawing Center, a not-for-profit space. The scene is set in the antebellum South, filled with moss-laden oaks that frame such vignettes as white lovers leaning together to kiss, a small male slave mysteriously strangling a bird that appears to emerge from the opened legs of a female slave while the sword of a white gentleman appears to pierce the backside of the boy, and a slave girl performing fellatio on a white man. By 2000, Walker was adding projected silhouettes and colored lighting to her cut-paper installations, as can be seen in Insurrection, containing such lurid or unseemly events as a plantation owner surreptitiously propositioning a naked female slave behind a tree, a group of whites torturing a black, and a female slave, with a tiny baby on her head, trying to escape a lynching. Everything is exaggerated and caricatured, playing to stereotypes; many of the figures in her works are outright grotesques, having, for example, four legs or giant phalluses, thus hammering home the perversion and abnormality driving the emotions in her anecdotal, chimerical world. The cut paper is executed in unmitigated black, and the scene has the quality of a dream, actually a nightmare, its sense of violence, hysteria, and horror pushed to a feverish pitch by Walker's contours, which are jagged, spiky, and erupting with piercing sword- or daggerlike projections. This simple, detailless, flat, dark world seems to penetrate beneath the visual overload and superficiality of the fact-filled real world to expose the essence of human relations—a frightening psychological realm where the basic human urges and emotions of sex, desire, hatred, cruelty, love, sodomy, masochism, bestiality, castration, murder, and lust are played out. Walker's world is not just that of the antebellum South, it is also the world of today, where fraught race relations still plague American society and racial, ethnic, and religious conflict steeps the world in perpetual conflict. For besides giving Insurrection an oneiric quality, the projections pull Walker's antebellum scene into the present, for the light casts shadows of the viewers on the wall, thereby integrating the present, us, into Walker's nightmare and making us complicit in this horrific timeless occurrence.
Artist: Judy Chicago Piece: The Dinner Party Medium: Mixed media Year: 1979
Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique signaled the start of the feminist movement. Almost simultaneously a number of women artists began making work that dealt with women's issues. Nancy Spero made simple but powerful expressionistic drawings depicting violence toward women, while Mimi Smith made what is now recognized as the first American clothing art, objects such as a Minimalist Girdle (1966), constructed of rubber bathmats that capture the discomfort of women's clothing. The best-known work coming out of the women's movement is The Dinner Party , orchestrated by Judy Chicagoand made by over 400 women between 1974 and 1979. By the late 1960s, Chicago was a dedicated feminist, who in the early 1970s established a Feminist Art Program, the first of its kind, at California State University at Fresno. Shortly thereafter, with artist Miriam Schapiro, she started a second similar program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. The thrust of these courses was to encourage women to make art and deal with gender issues, which the art world, including university and art-school faculties, said she could not do because the work did not conform to the aesthetic norms of Modernist formalism that signified serious art. The Feminist Art Program was designed to provide support for women artists and to redefine aesthetic values in contemporary art. The Dinner Party reflects Chicago's shift from a maker of abstract Minimalist objects and paintings to works on feminist themes in alternative mediums and installations. It pays homage to the many important women who Chicago felt were ignored, underrated, or omitted from the history books. Chicago laboriously researched these lost figures. She then designed a triangular table with 39 place settings, 13 to a side, each honoring a significant woman, ranging from ancient goddesses to such twentieth-century icons as Georgia O'Keeffe. In addition, 919 other women's names are inscribed on the white floor tiles lying in the triangular intersection of the tables. Each place setting included a hand-painted ceramic plate that pictured a vagina executed in a period style. American poet Emily Dickinson's sex, for example, is surrounded by lace, and French queen Eleanor of Aquitaine's is encased in a fleur-de-lis. Under each place setting is an embroidered runner, often elaborate and again in period style. Instead of using bulldozers, chainsaws, hoists, and welding equipment as men did for their environments, Chicago intentionally turned to mediums associated with women—painted china, ceramics, and embroidery—and created an elegant, beautiful work that subtly operates on an epic scale, spanning millennia. Also present is a sense of community and ritual, for we feel as though Chicago has appropriated and transformed the Christian male theme of the Last Supper into a spiritual communion of women.
Artist: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Piece: Running Fence Medium: Fabric Year: 1972-1976
Christo Javacheff met his French-born American wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon in Paris in 1958. There, the couple were interested in creating a social dialogue and provoking their audience to think about their immediate world. In one work, Christo and Jeanne-Claude dammed up a narrow Paris street with a neat Minimalist-looking stack of barrels, preventing passage. However, they are best known for wrapping unidentified objects in fabric, stimulating viewer curiosity about the object as well as the reason for the gesture. In 1964, they moved to New York. Their goal was to operate on an environmental or architectural scale, which they first did on a small scale in 1961 in Cologne and on a large scale in 1969 when they wrapped a 1-million-square-foot section of a rocky coast in Australia. Since then they have wrapped enormous buildings, and a bridge, and surrounded 11 islands with floating fabric, creating site-specific sculptures. Reproduced here is Running Fence, proposed in 1972 and executed in 1976. On the one hand, the work looks like Minimal Art, since it consists of predetermined mathematical units that extend to fill an allocated space, here the 24½-mile hilly terrain in California's Sonoma and Marin counties, with one terminus literally ending in the ocean. Each segment is 18 feet high and consists of cloth attached to steel poles. But this work is not only about the object itself, which was removed by the artists after being displayed for two weeks. Rather, it includes the entire process of implementing the concept: from the endless negotiations with government officials and landowners (mostly ranchers), the acquiring and supervising of an enormous workforce, the manufacturing of the work, and removal of it. It took four years to produce, the largest stumbling block being the tremendous community resistance. But the dialogue resulted in a raised consciousness about the land. It forced people to look at the land, and to think about it, recognizing how it was financially, emotionally, and aesthetically valued. The use of the word "fence" in the title specifically raised issues about how the land was to be used, and for whom. Once installed, Running Fence transformed the landscape. The fence itself was like a fleet of ships sailing across hill and dale. Probably hundreds of thousands of people came to experience it. In a documentary of the project, one rancher, who had fought the installation, described how he and his son slept next to the fence one night—listening to it ripple in the wind, watching the stars—in effect undergoing a transformative experience. And then it was gone. Nothing was left, except memories of experiences, pieces of the cloth, which were given to the landowners, and hundreds of drawings that Christo had made to finance the $3.2 million project, which Christo and Jeanne-Claude paid for themselves.
Artist: El Anatsui Piece: Dzesi II Medium: Aluminium Liquor Bottle Caps and Copper Wire Year: 2006
El Anatsui was born in Ghana, and studied art at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, his education focusing on contemporary art, largely made in a formalist, Modernist tradition. In 1975, he began teaching at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, where he lives today. Initially working in clay and wood and reflecting traditional Ghanaian and Nigerian art and themes, he now works with the flattened metal caps and bottleneck foil of liquor bottles, weaving this metal together with copper wire to create what look like enormous, luxurious tapestries or fabrics. These brightly colored aluminum mosaics, such as Dzesi II, evoke Nigerian and Ghanaian textiles and designs, the hard metal being visually transformed into something soft. For Anatsui, these caps are a reminder of the liquor that European traders brought to Africa as barter and therefore could be seen as a reference to trade, commodity, and even the beginning of globalization. The artist has also said that "metals and liquor in many cultures, especially African, have this association with the spiritual, with healing. Just think about the many ways a hand must open metal caps to pour out schnapps for prayers and libations." In Dzesi II, the protrusion of concentric circles placed within a square suggests something ritualistic. According to the artist, this form came about "with thoughts about the zero sign, 0/Ø—which can mean a lot or nothing. And I think is a kind of harking to Adinkra symbols I had worked with earlier." Adinkra, which translates as saying farewell, are West African symbols, printed on fabric originally worn at funerals, although they have wider uses now. The symbols encapsulate aphorisms that help mourners meditate on life, and the concentric circles, according to Antasui, are the "king of these signs, the most conspicuous and attention-grabbing, which I think has focus-inducing properties." The central zero is thus a form upon which to mediate. And it is also a Postmodern void to which viewers can assign meaning. Not only does the meaning of the work have a Postmodern ambiguity, but so does the form of the sculpture itself. For travel, the artist folds these enormous reliefs until they are small enough to fit into a box; when unfurled, they do not automatically resume their original shape, allowing curators and collectors in the artist's absence, and with his blessing, to restructure the work, implementing what Anastui calls a "nomadic aesthetic."
Artist: Felix Gonzalez-Torres Piece: Untitled (billboard of an empty unmade bed) Medium: Billboard Year: 1991
Felix Gonzalez-Torres , who joined the collaborative Group Material in 1980, produced some of the most powerful AIDS-related art, although his work encompasses a wide range of social issues. Gonzalez-Torres, who was born in Cuba and came to the United States in 1979 when he moved to New York City from Puerto Rico, can be described as a Conceptual artist utilizing the established Minimalist mode. He is a quintessential Postmodern artist, since his art is issue-drive and seemingly oblivious to the concept of style. His mediums include, for example, two identical wall clocks hung side by side, which—while, like all of his work, they have no one intended meaning—can be viewed as lovers who fall in and out of synchrony as the batteries fade and are replaced; a string of lightbulbs, the lights evoking tears, or even souls, and like the batteries in the clocks are replaced in the event that they burn out; and a pile of brightly wrapped candy, which visitors may choose to take and eat and may or may not be replenished over the course of the exhibition of the work. Like so many artists of the 1980s, Gonzalez-Torres took his work out of a specifically art context and into the public domain. As part of a 1991 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he arranged for a black-and-white photograph of an empty, unmade bed, in which two people had slept, to be installed on 24 billboards around the city. A classic Postmodern picture, it was highly suggestive and subject to broad interpretation. Despite being devoid of text, the simple image of an unmade bed spoke volumes. It conjured thoughts of intimacy, relationships, and love, as well as of loss, absence, and death. For some viewers, the image of the empty bed evoked the thousands of men, women, and children who had become victims of the AIDS epidemic, creating public awareness and discussion of the disease. In contrast to the overt propaganda of Gran Fury, Gonzalez-Torres's work is poetic and understated. Gonzalez-Torres died of AIDS at the age of 38.
Artist: Robert Smithson Piece: Spiral Jetty Medium: Rock, Salt, Earth Place: Great Salt Lake, Utah Year: 1970
One of the most famous earthworks, works of art created by manipulating the natural environment, is Spiral Jetty, a site-specific sculpture made by Robert Smithson in 1970. Smithson, who was a friend of Serra's, became a prominent figure in the New York art world in the mid- to late 1960s because of his articles on art, which often took an environmental approach to discussing land and nature. He also became known for his nonsite sculptures, which were "landscapes" consisting of rocks and stones from specific sites (often in neighboring New Jersey) that Smithson put into geometrically shaped metal bins or mirrored boxes on a gallery floor. A map or aerial photograph showed the actual site of the "landscape." Instead of painting a landscape, Smithson was re-presenting the real thing in the form of what looks like a Minimal sculpture. What a viewer was witnessing was the entropy, or steady degradation, of the land as it was removed from one site and taken to another. Like Hesse's sculpture, Smithson's Minimalist-looking sculpture is full of references and issues, which is apparent in Spiral Jetty. The work is 1,500 feet long, 15 feet wide, and involved moving 6,650 tons of earth and black basalt. It is located at Rozel Point, a remote area of Utah's Great Salt Lake, whose surrounding landscape looks like an industrial wasteland because of the rusting, discarded mining equipment littering the vicinity. Just as time consumes civilization, and all things for that matter, so too will the jetty eventually disappear as it erodes into the lake. The spiral form, as it wraps around itself, going nowhere, and trapping microorganisms that turn the water red, seems like the relic of a prehistoric civilization. Rather than just a minimal geometric shape to be admired for its own sake, Spiral Jetty is a powerful sculpture that utilizes time as a major component to speak about the entropy of all things.
Artist: Cindy Sherman Piece: Untitled Film Still #15 Medium: Gelatin silver print Year: 1978
While Kruger and the Gorilla Girls appropriate the propagandistic look and power of advertising, Cindy Sherman focuses more on how film structures identity and sexuality. She is also interested in revealing how viewers impose meaning on images. Beginning in 1977, Sherman began a series called Untitled Film Stills, in which she photographed herself in situations that resemble stills from B movies. For each, she created a set and a female character that she played herself, wearing different clothes, wigs, and accouterments so that she is unrecognizable as the same person from one 10-by-8-inch still to the next. It is conceptually important that she is always the actress, for her metamorphosis represents the transformation women undergo subliminally as they conform to societal stereotypes reinforced, if not actually determined, by the mass media. In Untitled Film Still # 15, Sherman plays the "sexy babe" who seems to be anxiously awaiting the arrival of a date or lover. But is this really what is happening? Sherman leaves the viewer guessing. She may suggest a narrative, but in her untitled works, she never provides enough information to securely determine one. In effect, the story a viewer imagines says more about their own backgrounds, experiences, and attitudes than it does about the picture itself, which remains ambiguous. Her "babe" could very well be dressed for a costume party instead of a date, and her look of concern could be for something occurring on the street below. Innumerable stories can be spun from this image, taking into account such details as her cross pendant or the spindleback chair and exposed-brick wall, which seem to conflict with her youth and the lifestyle her clothing suggests. Remove any one of these motifs, and the story would change. Through what seems a simple strategy, Sherman brilliantly reveals the complex ways in which images become invested with meaning and how we are programmed by the media to interpret them.
Race
a group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.; an ethnic group.
Site-Specific Art
is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork.
Feminism
the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.