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“A painter in a photographic age” - influenced by photography

Started with ‘found’ images to experiment with.

Painting of his daughter (Betty) influenced by Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring in that the positioning isn’t the traditional portrait posing

It’s interesting to me that he starts out by painting in a photorealistic way, and then intentionally blurs them.

“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit.”

We are living in a “post-historical moment,” in the sense that we have (relatively easy) access to history and all of the art that came before, and that there really isn’t any art making left that is unique - meaning that no matter what type of art you are making, you can see the influence of artists who came before you.

Richter grew up just outside of Dresden, and was a child when the city was firebombed by Allied forces during World War II. Dresden was almost completely destroyed; He grew up in East Germany during the period when the Berlin Wall was being built. The East German culture was moving away from the visual ideology that looked to heroic classicism, and toward more of Soviet realism. The art school he attended included indoctrination that said that his responsibility as an artist was to “move the state forward with a kind of naturalistic rendering.”  He moved to the west just prior to the Berlin Wall’s completion, and was immersed in a completely different visual culture: all about advertising, which he felt was just another form of indoctrination (I agree with that!). He found that he didn’t want to “own” any of the visual ideologies he had been exposed to thus far (Nazi/heroic classicism, Soviet/realism, and western/capitalism) - he wanted to transcend it.

One of the things I love about Richter’s blurred paintings is that they remind me of what we read in 1 Corinthians 13:12 - “For we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” When we look at these paintings, the image may be a little harder to discern, but it is still there.

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Fairfield Porter, Under the Elms, 1971-72

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Explored light and what it did to color; portraits, intimate landscapes

His painterly vision, which encompassed a fascination with nature and the ability to reveal extraordinariness in ordinary life, was heavily indebted to the French painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard

“The important thing for critics to remember is the ‘subject matter’ in abstract painting and the abstraction in representational work.” - Fairfield Porter

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·      No more art “capitals”

·      Interactive art

·      Installations

·      Art as political statement

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Ai Weiwei, Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds), 2010

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100 million hand painted sunflower seeds (Tate Modern)

The individual seed is lost among the millions, a critique of the conformity and censorship inherent in modern China.

Khmer Rouge: “To destroy you is no loss; to keep you is no benefit.”

But each seed is hand painted, unique—suggests that each person is as well

Sunflower seeds evokes a warm personal memory for the artist, who recalls that while he was growing up, even the poorest in China would share sunflower seeds as a treat among friends. The use of sunflower seeds as the basis of his installation was also designed to subvert popular imagery rooted in the artist’s childhood. Communist propaganda optimistically depicted leader Mao Zedong as the sun and the citizens of the People’s Republic of China as sunflowers, turning toward their chairman. Ai Weiwei reasserts the sunflower seed as a symbol of camaraderie during difficult times.

More than 1,600 artisans worked to make the individual porcelain seeds by hand in Jingdzhen, the city known as the “Porcelain Capital,” where artists have been producing pottery for nearly 2000 years. Porcelain, first produced during the Han dynasty in about 200 B.C.E. and later mastered during the Tang dynasty, is made by heating white clay (kaolin) to a temperature over 1200 degrees Celsius. The fusion of the particles within the clay during firing allowed artists to create vessels with thin but strong walls. Porcelain— a symbol of imperial culture in China—was also made for export via the Silk Road and became important to the creation of the idea of China in the West.

Mr. Ai’s use of porcelain comments on the long history of this prized material while also rejecting the common negative connotations of the modern term “Made in China.” Utilizing skilled artisans known for their exquisite craftsmanship to make objects that can only be differentiated one from another upon close inspection, alludes to the important porcelain tradition in Jingdzhen, as well as to the uniformity and diffusion of modern (cheap and fast) labor that is responsible for China’s hard-won place in the world economy. Sunflower Seeds asks us to examine how our consumption of foreign-made goods affects the lives of others across the globe.

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Flattened metal claps and bottleneck foil of liquor bottles woven together with copper wire

Aluminum mosaics; hard metal visually transformed into something soft

Reminder of the liquor European traders brought to Africa as barter; reference to trade, commodity

“The most important thing is the transformation. The fact that these media, each identifying a brand of drink, are no longer going back to serve the same role but are elements that could generate some reflection, some thinking, or just some wonder . . . They are removed from their accustomed, functional context into a new one, and they bring along their histories and identities.” - El Anatsui

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Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992

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"Eternal unlimited universe, love for humanity, and longing for peace in the world—these concepts become increasingly serious through the development of my philosophy of life and art."

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·      Issues of taste, kitsch, low art vs. fine art

·      Art as an object to be bought and sold, art that is not “made” by the artist

·      Idea of fragility of life

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Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988

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“Commodity Art”

Capitalized on artifice

Contracts out the actual labor of making objects

Explores the relationship of fine art to mass culture

Interested in issues of taste and how art functions as a commodity (like Andy Warhol)

Explores differences between fine art and “low” art—kitsch

Looks like mass-produced gift shop figurine, but life size (porcelain)

Captures and parodies the glitz of celebrity promotion

Also suggests fragility and impermanence—temporary nature of life and fame

Influences of Duchamp, Warhol, and Postmodern deconstruction

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Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991/2006

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·      Anti-elitist

·      Taking art to the masses

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Horn Players, 1983

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Stream-of-consciousness intensity

Alchemy=reference to alchemy of jazz

Ornithology=nod to jazz musician Charlie Parker, nicknamed “Bird”

Ear=allusion to musical instinct

Raw energy of improv jazz; also 1980’s hip-hop

Appropriates motifs, styles, and ideas from different periods

Reflects importance artists were increasingly giving to racial and ethnic identities

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·      A return to emotion after the detachment of Minimalism

·      A return to seeking influence from the past

·      A return to expressing contemporary issues

·      For many Germans, a time of confronting and coming to terms with the Nazi past (Kiefer, Richter)

·      For many, a reaction to corporate, capitalist culture (Polke, Longo)

·      Pluralism of styles vs. a logical order (Richter)

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Born in Germany just months shy of the end of World War II, Anselm Kiefer came of age in the late 1960s when the silence surrounding the crimes of the Nazi regime was ruptured by a vocal younger generation horrified by their collective German “past,” struggling to reconcile such shame and redefine what it meant to be German in a post-Nazi world.

Based on Paul Celan's poem, "Death Fugue," published 1947

“your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite”

mythological or biblical references (Shulamite refers to the heroine in the Song of Solomon)

historical subject or location (a Nazi Memorial Hall in Berlin).

suggestive of an oven (immediately bringing to mind the hyperactivity of the crematoria at the Nazi death camps)

transformed architecture meant to honor Nazi heroes into a memorial for their victims.

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Crossed from east Germany to west in 1961

Challenge to painting: “Painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic and inartistic thing that anyone could do.”

Anti-art gesture

Out-of-focus blurring, graininess, other flaws of photography emphasized

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Response to America’s infatuation with capitalism

Adopted Benday dots after Lichtenstein

Off-register imperfections

Draws attention to the means of reproduction; lacks the seamless perfection of American Pop art

Critical commentary on the infiltration of American media imagery onto German culture.

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Layers photographic reproductions onto underlying patterns of abstract motifs (from textile designs)

Space ambiguous: deep space and no perspective at the same time

In and out of focus

Nazi Guard tower

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oil, Mexican pots, bondo on wood

Brought new life into the 1980’s art scene in NY for viewers “starved by the lean visual diet of Minimalism and Conceptualism”

Grand scale, thematic, reviving religious and cultural archetypes

Incorporated three dimensions into a flat surface

“everything about Schnabel was oversize, including his ego”

“I’m the closest thing to Picasso”

Postmodern penchant to raid the art of the past and the present; motifs often appropriated, as in the figure holding a fruit basket is taken from a painting by Caravaggio

No narrative, no point in trying to interpret

Exudes a mood rather than a story

Said his paintings are “icons that present life in terms of our death”

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Robert Longo, Untitled (Men in the Cities Series), 1981

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“apocalyptic Pop”

Themes of love, death, and violence

Black and white charcoal drawings

Agony or ecstasy, dying or dancing

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Political and social themes

Drawing sequences in the form of friezes or scroll painting—up to  180 feet

Women from all eras and cultures

Dancers from ancient Greek vases, etc.

Printmaking, collage

almost like a map of the range of human experience from birth to aging, war, and rape, to a celebratory dance of life—but depicted through images of women

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22 canvases

She was Inspired by cezanne

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Art that emerges after the Modernist movement that dominated the first half of the century, and in many ways opposite to the ideals of Modernism; characterized by:

·      Post-structuralism (the denial of fixed rules in forms or structures)

·      A return to ornament and embellishment

·      A reintroduction of historical references (beginning in architecture)

·      An interest in sense of place and local interests (vs. international style)

·      Appropriation as a deconstruction of the modernist myth of genius and of authoritarian control

·      Irony and skepticism

·      Emphasis on multiculturalism

·      Pluralism of styles vs. a logical order

·      Emphasis on collaboration vs. individual genius

·      A denial of fixed truths

·      Extension of Modernism, since it continues to question rules of the past

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Philip Johnson and John Burgee, AT&T Headquarters building, 1978-83, New York

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Reintroduced “history” into the vocabulary of modern high-rise architecture

Essence of Postmodernism: longing for symbolism and grandeur of the past but disembodied from the faith that inspired the original forms

Top section looks like Greek temple with columns, pediment

Broken pediment makes it look like  Chippendale style highboy chest, so it was nicknamed the “Chippendale building”; pun on skyscraper as a chest of drawers

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Michael Graves. Public Services Building, Portland, Oregon. 1980–82

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Full of paradox:

Flat and sculptural

Representational and abstract

Historical and modern

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Sherrie Levine, After Piet Mondrian, 1983

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Deconstructing artworks by male artists by redoing them in watercolor; deconstructs modernist myths

(for example, Foucault philosophy that the regulated geometries of modern society, from the calendar to the office building, coincided with authoritarian control

Painted on textbook reproduction: draws attention to the transformation of art into a commodity

Levine is asserting that no art is new; all art borrows from predecessors; also underline the status accorded male artists

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Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face), 1981

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Kruger shows how machines perpetuate objectification of women and how mass media manipulates images to sell; appropriates the look of a glossy magazine layout (she worked as a graphic designer at Mademoiselle); “your gaze hits the side of my face” refers to art being made specifically for the male gaze—presented for male pleasure

Shows how our response to images is manipulated by the construction of its presenter

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Barbara Kruger. Untitled (We Won’t Play Nature to Your Culture). 1983

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Barbara Kruger:

Dichotomy: We and You/ Maker and manipulated

About one’s agenda being imposed on another by hierarchies in culture

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Allan McCollum, 20 Plaster Surrogates, 1982-85

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Plaster casts of framed pictures, painted

Placeholders for the idea of works of art

Issues of class and art; wealthy collectors sponsor exhibitions, promote artists, and establish “taste”

Asks how anyone besides the wealthy can enjoy “souvenirs of that class of people who manipulate history to your exclusion.”

But ironic that these are bought and sold and put in galleries!

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #35, 1979

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Black and white film stills from nonexistent films

Appropriates stereotypical female roles from films, television shows, and commercials of the 1950’s and 60’s

Details of setting, background, clothes, wigs, makeup, lighting

Displays exquisite control over the tableaus; subject seems vulnerable to something outside the frame

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Sandro Chia, The Idleness of Sisyphus, 1981

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Sisyphus—story is cynical; shows contemporary businessman

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One of the most sensational work of the 70’s

occupied the entirety of Paula Cooper's SoHo gallery space.

987 one foot-square painted steel plates stretching over an expanse of more than 150 feet

has an overall monumentality, but its small-scale panels invite intimate interaction.

She said she wanted to include everything

read from left to right; seven thematic sections; Introduction, Mountain, Line, House, Tree, Shape, and Ocean. Rhapsody adds joyful color and a narrative subject matter to the grid formation of Minimalist art of the 1960s.

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Joyce Kozloff, Mural for Harvard Square Subway Station, 1984

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Imagery runs from abstract  Islamic tiles, quilt patterns,  American folk art, farm animals, historical figures, etc.

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Took photorealism to sculpture

Closes the gap between art and life with a rude, decisive bang

Direct casting from live models  (like George Segal) in fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin

Adds to the textured reality of pores, wrinkles, and bulges, the coloration of skin, veins, bruises, etc.

Also adds clothing and accessories

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Vija Celmins, Untitled, (Big Sea No. 2), 1969

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Graphite and acrylic on paper

Allover composition (like pollock)

Surface becomes nearly identical with the picture plane itself—undermines sense of distance

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Photorealism: clarity of detail, reflected light

Also used airbrush

But reminiscent of Dutch 17th-century Vanitas paintings

Skulls, candles, fruit, hourglass, and other reminders of the inevitability of death

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Iconography= study of subject matter and symbolism in art

Iconology=the study of the symbolic meanings of images in art

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Richard Estes, Bus Reflections (Ansonia), 1972

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Emphasizes reflective glass, glossy look of photo—combines two or three photos

Uniformly sharp focus reinforces sense of flatness

So much visual information, clarity, and precision—never would be available studying the subject live

Agree?

Would have needed Multiple reference photos in order to show the front to back clarity. To get this clarity in a single photo would have been impossible because of the long exposure necessary. (Objects would have moved/been blurry)

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Post-Minimalist Painting, Photorealism, and Pattern & Decoration

·      Representational art re-emerges, but often with an emphasis on formal qualities and lack of narrative (Diebenkorn, Katz, Celmins)

·      Photorealism emerges as an extreme response to non-objective and Minimalist art; also as a response to photography

·      Re-emergence of symbolism (Flack)

·      Pattern & Decoration emerges as both a response to Minimalism and its lack of embellishment and as a homage to women’s art mediums of the past

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“As the trend toward progressively more radical abstraction intensified throughout the 1960’s, urged on by doctrinaire critical support, commercial hype, and media exposure, only exceptionally strong artists could maintain their aesthetic independence from the dominant mode.”

H.H. Arnason and Elizabeth C. Mansfield, History of Modern Art, 6th ed.,  2010, 525.

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Not literally symbolic, but the subject matter suggests meaning

Owned by MoMA, rarely loaned; one of most popular paintings there: Why?

Wyeth’s neighbor in Maine, crippled by polio

“limited physically but by no means spiritually

“magical realism:” everyday scenes imbued with poetic mystery

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Richard Diebenkorn, Man and Woman in Large Room, 1957

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California bay area artist—distance from NY scene

Quiet; the figures function as formal structure/shape but add psychological depth

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Came into late but considerable fame as a portraitist of such searching, psychologically penetrating power that she seemed to be ‘stealing” the souls of her sitters.

- Focus on eyes

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“I like to make an image that is so simple you can’t avoid it, and so complicated you can’t figure it out.” - Alex Katz

Katz made an early choice of figuration and stuck with it throughout the heyday of abstraction

But took influences from abstraction, such as broad fields of flat, clean color, simplified drawing, epic scale

Modern billboard look; takes cues from photography, advertising, movies

Tension between specific and abstract

Close up but inaccessible

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Courtney Mattison, Confluence (Our Changing Seas V), 2018. Glazed stoneware and porcelain

Corals are so sensitive that the slightest change to the temperature or chemistry of surrounding seawater can cause rapid devastation. Sea temperatures warmed by climate change stress corals and force them to lose the colorful algae that live within their tissues and provide an important food source, causing these coral hosts to ‘bleach’ white and starve.

Something I thought was fantastic is that she backs up the talk with her actions. It requires a significant amount of energy to fire kilns, power and ventilate the studio and transport pieces, so she makes every effort to recycle, reduce waste and water consumption, purchase bulk and local materials and only fire full kilns. She also works with conservation organizations to inspire a change in public awareness and support for a global network of marine protected areas—called Hope Spots—ranging from the deepest ocean to sunlit reefs and from the seamounts of the high seas to coastal seagrass meadows. The intent being to inspire action to explore and protect the ocean.

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Earth as canvas

Art as physical experience

Entropy—Art that changes with time

Site-specific sculpture

Taking art out of the gallery

Art that can’t be collected

Sculpture as monument (Vietnam Veterans Memorial)

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Christo and Jeanne-ClaudeThe Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979–2005 

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Maya Lin. Vietnam Veterans Memorial. 1982 

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Viewers start from left, representing the year 1959, where the first killed are listed;

Stone rises as more and more Americans die

Polished surface of granite acts like a mirror casting reflections of the living onto the names of the dead

Like an enormous tombstone

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Arc=trial for removal for tilted arc

1984 public forum for removal

1989 taken down

Two groups: make cases for removal and for keeping it; class is jury

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Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-88

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Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969-70

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Wishing to restore art to the realm of pure aesthetics, they strove to make work that was unsalable and uncollectable.

2 enormous cuts into the surface of Mormon Mesa in Nevada to a depth of 50 feet; displaced 240,000 tons of earth

In 1969 the art dealer Virginia Dwan funded the purchase of the 60-acre site for Double Negative and in turn the artist transferred the property deeds to Dwan. In 1971 Heizer prevented the Dwan Gallery from selling the work. Dwan then donated Double Negative to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA) in 1984, with Heizer’s blessing

Heizer reportedly worried that documentation in a museum gallery misrepresents sculpture that can be known only through physical experience

He called the site “that kind of unraped, peaceful religious space artists have always tried to put in their work.”.[5]

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Walter de Maria, Lightning Field, 1970-77

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400 stainless steel poles, with solid stainless-steel pointed tips; “work must be seen over a 24-hour period. Near Quemado, NM

Canvas is earth and sky

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Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah. 1970 

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The earth is the canvas; environmental scale

Just as time erodes civilizations and all things, the jetty will eventually disappear

Subject is entropy and change (salt encrusted, etc.)

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James Turrell, Roden Crater Project, 1982

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Sedona, Arizona

Moved hundred of thousands of cubic yards of earth and slightly reshaped the bowl of this extinct volcano

Enhanced its ability to create optical effects, transforming it into a vast “viewing space”

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude.  Running Fence,Sonoma and Marin counties, California. 1972–76

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How can art compete with mass media? The masses don’t go to art museums, so he decided to bring art to the people

Not lasting museum pieces: felt that the creative process was more important than the finished work:

the recording of the work by the media (let the media work for you—like Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol)

working with farmers to get their permission to use their land

getting local people to help with the construction

beauty of finished project: Jars us into seeing the environment in a new way; natural element of wind

Local people skeptical at first, but many were proud of it at the end; hard-hat workers moved by the experience; also by his total belief in what he was doing; charismatic, converted people to his art (story about one rancher who had fought it slept next the the fence one night with his son and had a transformative experience

Not elitist—brought art experience to normal people; link between fine art and real world

Cost 3 million dollars; Christo funded himself through drawings, but hundreds of thousands saw it vs. painting sold to private collector and never seen

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At Tate Modern;

Group Started in 1985: “conscience of the art world”

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Fly-posted their first posters overnight in the fashionable NY art district of SoHo, and have also displayed their work as advertisements on city buses.

The Guerrilla Girls wear gorilla masks for public appearances and use the names of famous deceased artists as pseudonyms

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Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

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“Aunt Jemima has been armed and empowered with a new identity. She’s done making pancakes.”

Re-appropriates derogatory imagery as a means of protest and symbol of empowerment for black women.

Emerging from a historical context fraught with racism and sexism, Saar’s pivotal piece works in tandem with the civil rights and feminist movements. The cotton balls at the feet of the Jemima figure, the broom, and the image of the woman with the white child each speak to specific roles into which African American women were historically allocated. Saar takes these painful memories and alters them, arming the stereotypically docile mammy figure with a gun and hand grenade and giving agency to the traumatized icons of the past.

Aunt Jemima has been armed and empowered with a new identity. She’s done making pancakes.

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Art to inspire social change/change in attitude

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Art to inspire social change/change in attitude

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David Hammons:

Sculpture was provoked by a group of neighborhood teenagers, who were playing basketball when they should have been attending school and who told the artist that the road to success lay in sports, not education

Response: designed 40-foot-high basketball hoops decorated with wind chimes (suggest native American spirit catchers meant to filter out bad dreams) and bottle caps (associated with wasted lives and alcoholism but arranged in geometric patterns suggesting African textiles and beadwork)

About setting realistic higher goals, such as getting an education, as opposed to unrealistic objectives, such as becoming a professional basketball player—unreachable

Installed in Brooklyn—has “cool” accessible level

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Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, 2010

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People seeking connection

- “Nowhere to go, but into yourself.”

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Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway, 1995

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Monitors behind each state with different imagery

Prevalence of tv in America, rapidly changing

Most Americans experience the world through tv screens; tv=real life

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All the characters are fake – gibberish, whether you can read chinese or not

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“I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art came about in 1971, right after Baldessari’s symbolic ‘funeral’ for his old art. The artist didn’t always make such thought-provoking conceptual art,  but in the 1970’s he became frustrated and even disgusted with his early works. He ceremonially set ablaze his early paintings, symbolically leaving behind all concept of traditionally ‘interesting’, or ‘beautiful’ art. This struck such a powerful chord with me because over the last year, I’ve struggled with making any type of art. I’ve put off drawing due to lack of inspiration, lack of desire, lack of faith in my own skills and abilities. . . . When I saw Baldessari’s work, however, I asked myself what art was to me. Maybe I was struggling with making art because I was so caught up in drawing what other people wanted me to draw, or painting what I thought other people would like to see. . . . Baldessari’s work motivated me to find out how I could change that. I too wanted to metaphorically burn my old art and start afresh, experimenting with ideas I’ve never made time for, using mediums or tools I’ve been too afraid to use. As I stared at the repetitious sentence, “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” I realized the power of conceptual art. . . . Because of my experience with Baldessari and his work, I’ve come to enjoy making art again, even if it is weird or bizarre or experimental. It also helped me to better understand our role-models of modern art. I was able to see the beauty in Pollock’s paint splatters, Newman’s zips, Rothko’s color fields, Hoch’s collage, and even in Duchamp’s Fountain. There is no clear definition of art, and often it can be hard to dictate what is boring or what is interesting, but what it really boils down to is a communication. Art is a conversation between artist and artwork, artwork and viewer. What makes art art is up to the individual.”

Aislin Enright

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Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965

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Addresses the impossibility of separating language from thought

3 representations of “chairness” evoke Plato’s Theory of Forms, which holds that the true form of something exists only in the idea of that thing; all representations of the idea are degraded versions

Also semiotics=the study of signs

Kosuth didn’t make the chair, take the photograph, or write the definition; he selected and assembled them together.

But is this art? And which representation of the chair is most “accurate”? These open-ended questions are exactly what Kosuth wanted us to think about when he said that “art is making meaning.”

By assembling these three alternative representations, Kosuth turns a simple wooden chair into an object of debate and even consternation, a platform for exploring new meanings.

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Art as idea

Art that can’t be collected

Improvisation/Art as experience

Art with a political point

Semiotics: The study of signs

Plato’s Theory of Forms: The true form of something exists only in the idea of that thing; all representations are degraded versions

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The idea is the work of art; any painting, sculpture, drawing, print, photograph, or building created in response to that idea is simply a piece of documentation of the idea

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Joseph Beuys, Table with Accumulator, 1958

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About the idea;

Accumulators conduct electricity; Clay balls cannot, but the earth (clay) is the source of all the power

Beuys felt that art could heal; (postwar)

Wanted to return to the mystical and power of nature

Also wanted to send a message of community over individuality

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-Stain painting (Frankenthaler, Louis)

-Clement Greenburg and his definitions of Modern Art, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Minimalism

-Hard-Edge Abstraction

-Mass production methods in sculpture (Donald Judd)

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Abstract but not flat anymore

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Modernism? Flat, abstract—but no artist’s hand; no interest in paint for itself

Minimalism:

Why Jasper’s dilemma? - Jasper Johns used paint thickly and painterly

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Entirely flat, pinstripes=lines of canvas showing through

Canvas now has a life of its own—not rectangular; sculptural (blurs distiction between painting and sculptures)

No push-pull of space

“What you see is what you see.” No hidden meanings, symbols, references: stripped down vocabulary=Minimal Art

(so why title?)

Geometrical precision

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More than 11 feet wide;

Reduced painting to a barebones simplicity: Hard-Edge Abstraction; machine precision

Geometric shapes in solid primary and secondary colors; no figure and ground; all on same plane

Only about color and movement; no reference to artist; no reference to  subject or meaning; strips everything else away

Left side fixed, right side has movement?

Figure/ground relationships change?

Unlike many painters of his generation, he often based paintings on observations in the world; interplay of shadows, outlines of buildings, etc.

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Smith believed one had to experience art—not merely stand in front of it

Both memory and movement are required for the appreciation of the work.

What does the word cigarette imply? Small, cast-off, trash?

But this is large, solid, permanent, not easily cast-off or discarded

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Questions traditional categories of painting and sculpture

Reliance upon geometry, mathematical measurements; emphasized conceptual rather than emotional content; favored materials and processes of mass production

Lacks artists’ hand; not personal; no sign of artist except in concept

Non-art materials: plexiglass, fluorescent tubes, galvanized steel

Wanted to make art that did not look like art—nothing but what you see; no references

Admire what you see: scale, color, texture, proportions; takes away base, glass case—props that announce an object to be a work of art

“A work needs only to be interesting.”
Donald Judd

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Great barrier in space; not just to look at

Often minimalist artists envisioned large-scale structures that had to await patrons for the final realization of their projects

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Dan Flavin. the nominal three (to William of Ockham). 1963 

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Medium is fluorescent tubes of light; reduced to bare essentials (no paint, no canvas, etc.); where else could you go?

Art that can’t be collected; Is there anything still traditional? museum setting

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Acrylic on canvas

Clement Greenberg took Morris Louis to Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953; he was so affected by Mountains and Sea that he and fellow artist Kenneth Noland began to stain canvases themselves

Louis applied extremely runny paint to an unstretched canvas allowing it to flow over the inclines surface; eliminated the brush even more than Frankenthaler

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Helen Frankenthaler, Interior Landscape, 1964

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Little sense of paint texture, but still seems to be interested in the quality of paint itself

Central motifs float within a rectangle surrounded by irregular light and dark frames. These frames create the feeling that the center of the painting is opening up in a limited but defined depth

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Helen Frankenthaler. Mountains and Sea. 1952 

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1.Influenced by painterly abstraction; flat, interested in emphasis of the picture plane

2.Less emphasis on evidence of the artist’s gesture/paint texture

3.More sharply defined compositions

4.Open design—elements go beyond bounds of the artwork

Developed Stain painting: put canvas on the floor like Pollock, made quick charcoal sketches, poured thin oil paint on it, tilted it to allow paint to run (didn’t use brush)

Paint bled into unprimed canvas; translucent like watercolor; not tactile like impasto; couldn’t see artist’s hand: post-painterly abstraction (evolved from abstract expressionism)

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Pop Art

Term coined by British artist Richard Hamilton in 1957:

“Popular, (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous and Big Business.”

-Interest in mass media, consumer culture

-Reaction to elitism and deep emotion of Abstract Expressionism
-Similar to Dada in love of ready-made, common objects
-Interested in materialism of consumer culture
-sought a mass-produced look
-Abstract Expressionism had become “high art;” new artists wanted something less elitist

-Everybody can understand, available to all (but not! Irony)

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Claes Oldenburg, Floor Cake (Giant Piece of Cake), 1962

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Started designing stuffed-fabric props (his wife did much of the sewing) for performance art works

Led to transforming hard, rigid objects into soft, collapsing versions

Said he made symbols of his time

What rules is he breaking? -

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Reference to Duchamp, who also made a transformation of a toilet

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Breaking rules?

Nothing more mundane than cheap, mass-produced comic books

But acrylic and oil paint on canvas! And a diptych! Brings into the realm of fine art, but looks like cheap comic print, with benday dots - But is it a comic?
- Removed from narrative

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“I don't draw a picture in order to reproduce it—I do it in order to recompose it ... I go all the way from having my drawing almost like the original to making it up altogether.”

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Imagery of mass media; took “low art” forms (commercial art) and made it into “high art”;

Revealed manipulative impact of mass media

Make art that doesn’t look like art (idea from Environments, Happenings)

Looked to comic books, newspapers; liked the bold outlines, lack of depth/dimension

Known for seeing beauty in low art

Blurs distinctions between fine art and mass culture

Used benday dots; when seen up close, they become flat abstract patterns

Reveals cultural stereotypes of men and women at the time – and poking fun at the stereotypes

Artist’s hand/presence not visible; machine-like (opposite AE artists)

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Next to Dali, most publicity prone; kept himself in the news, outlandish, threw spectacular parties

Was making art based on comic books at exactly the same time as Lichtenstein; turned to commercial design

Began as a commercial artist: illustrator of women’s shoes; fascinated by manipulative role of advertising and product packaging; also by impact of mass media on public opinion

“I want to be a machine.” opposite Pollock (wanted to be one with nature)

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Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans. 1961–64 

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Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1961-64: images from everyday life (like Dutch art) but no reverence, not carefully arranged, no hidden symbolism or meaning

He said he ate Campbell’s soup for lunch every day for 20 years—repetitive, also like on the grocery shelf

All 32 types of Campbell’s soups at the time; monotonous, repetitive (indifferent vs. emotionalism of abstract expressionism)

Called studio the Factory; used silkscreen process; removes artists’ hand, individualism

Workaholic, highly involved in process; but gave illusion of barely touching work

Art is a commodity; name brand product, not necessarily about technique or craftsmanship (you want to buy a Warhol)

Pervasiveness of advertising, mass production, uniformity, consumerism: a portrait of America

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Gold background: like an icon painting of Mary

Commentary on how we worship celebrity figures

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James Rosenquist, Portion of F-111, 1965

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Oil on canvas with aluminum

10 feet high and 86 feet long; surrounds the spectator
Started as a billboard painter, working on the scaffolding high over New York’s Times Square

Experience of painting on an enormous scale critical to his work

Mix of heroic and mundane;

Also jarring: named after an American fighter-bomber; little girl beneath a bullet-shaped hairdryer: anti-war statement

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Indiana made painted word images that were often bitter indictments on modern life, but this is the one that he is remembered for

Made in many versions

Polychrome aluminum

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California (UCDavis)

Realist tradition going back to Chardin, Dutch still lifes

Carefully arranged, lusciously brushed and colored

Thick impasto—creates the type of substance it depicts

Thiebaud insisted that these works reflected his nostalgia and affection, not an indictment of American culture