Minimalism
Where did the art go?

Minimalism

• Solved the problem of creating perfect aesthetic objects by simplifying them as much as possible
• It is like a poem made from one or two words
• The environment surrounding the work becomes very important

Donald Judd: 1928-94

• Used industrial processes to create pure aesthetic statements
• Thought that the presence of space in many abstract paintings made them a compromise with representational painting.
• Sought to create pure, concrete experiences that would be seen as patterns, not compositions.
• Judds "specific objects" are simple, modular solids-- "not naturalistic, not imagistic, and not expressionistic"-- which constitute clear optical unities through form, color, and surface. As series or sequences of variations on open or closed volumes, they articulate the floor, wall, or the whole room. Form and material exist in a close relationship with one another. The spaces between them are as much a component of the series as the solids themselves.
• Judd majored in Philosophy as an undergraduate and was a mathematician. He disliked the abstract expressionist idea of delving into the subconscious in art, preferring a more scientific (less voodoo) approach. He made art that was instantly verifiable. It was exactly what you saw and needed no decoding.

Frank Stella: 1936

• Began as a minimalist
• Became a Neo-Abstractionist
• Interested in form and aesthetics without subject matter
• In his early work, Stella repudiates abstract expressionism point by point: painting within the drawing replaced drawing with paint; overt regularity replaced apparent randomness; symmetry replaced asymmetric balancing; flat, deperesonalized brushing or open, stained color replaced the smudge, smear and splatter. The entire visible esthetic of abstract expressionism was brutally revised. Walter Bannard

Dan Flavin: 1933-1996

• Uses hardware store parts to create works of art that could be replicated by anyone.
• Sculpture becomes space rather than form
• The viewer becomes part of the work
• This is a series of works dedicated to the Russian constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885- 1953). Tatlin treated art in engineering terms and embraced industry and technology. Flavin described Tatlin as, the great revolutionary, who dreamed of art as science'. By using fluorescent lights which could be bought in any hardware store, Flavin challenged the viewers idea of art as dependant on an original object. His choice of a banal, mass-produced, 'modern' object has close parallels with the use of material from popular culture by contemporary pop artists, and with the found objects of Marcel Duchamp.
• Dan Flavin's light sculptures illuminate everything around them. His fluorescent lights don't just hang there. They inhabit space. They wash the walls with color, they mix colors so the white walls seem painted. They bathe space -- and visitors -- in a warm and completely artificial glow.

John Cage: 1912-92

• Experimented with music
• Wrote Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 Radios
• Wrote 433

Robert Ryman: b1930

• Minimalist/Conceptualist painter.
• Creates pieces that are about the activity of painting in the most concrete terms. What is the relationship between the paint and support?
• What is the relationship between a painting and the room? We have been trained to see painting as "pictures," with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of "seeing" painting. An image could be said to be "real" if it is not an optical reproduction, if it does not symbolize or describe so as to call up a mental picture. This "real" or "absolute" image is only confined by our limited perception. Robert Ryman
• Robert Ryman's lifelong inquiry into the notion of painting as a medium and a verbthat is, into paint as a viscous material that articulates its supportbegan as early as the mid-1950s. His principal concern over the decades has been with the presentation of a painted surface in relation to its underlying support. This ongoing investigation has yielded ever-new visual possibilities, however nuanced these may be. Anne Rorimer

Ellsworth Kelly: b1923

• Creates pieces that use the exhibition space as the negative space in the work
• Minimalist
• Concerned with direct experience

Photo-realism
Hey! That looks just like a photograph.

Photorealism

• Like Pop, a reaction against abstract expressionism.
• These artists use photography as a ready-made object and copy it using paint;
• Used slides, opaque projectors and other mechanical aids to transfer the mechanical image (photograph) onto canvas.
• The painting took another step away from nature, while seeming to present it even more faithfully.

Richard Estes: 1936

• Creates hyper real paintings, similar in effect to Van Eyck
• Paintings are exacting copies of photographs
• Many have a Hopperesque feeling of lonliness
• Urban, without the people

Chuck Close: 1940

• Uses photographs of his friends and family as the beginning point in an exploration of PROCESS
• His work is about HOW the work was made
• His work is also about capturing a moment, and mortality

Ralph Goings: 1936

• Uses the photograph as a found object
• Focuses on the transient, American highway culture of pickup trucks, trailers and diners
• The hyper reality of the paintings contrast with the plastic throwaway nature of the scenes

Audrey Flack: 1931

• Paints memento mori, paintings that remind us of our own mortality and thus the futility of greed and narcissism
• She composes items with metaphorical meaning
• She is concerned with womens issues
• Marilyn includes a lexicon of classic syumbols for vanity: make-up pots, lipstick and mirrors. The ephemerality of life: burning candle, the flower, the shifting hourglass. Eroticism: the open peach, orange and pears. She also includes a childhood photograph of herself, leaving no doubt that she is exploring her own vulnerabilities.

Duane Hanson: 1925-96

• Works thrive on the tension between realness and artificiality
• Work is a commentary on American culture, or lack therof
• He shows us ourselves in ways we would rather ignore

Earth and Site
A new Breed of Landscape Artists
Earth and Site

• Artists resisted the incorporation of their work into gallery and museum capitalism by creating works that were too large to be contained in a gallery
• Recalls ancient works like Stonehenge
• Works are seen in contrast to, or in harmony with, the earth or universe

Robert Smithson: 1938-73

• Used nature as his gallery
• Created works that communicated mans interaction with his environment on a grand scale.
• Created works about Entropy
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics state that energy dissipates toward a disintegrated homogeneity of matter. Entropy negates the concept of progress on the scale of geological or astronomical time.
• The myth of the Renaissance still conditions and infects much criticism with a mushy humanistic content. Robert Smithson
• Non-site (PalisadesEdgewater, N.J.), 1968 Painted aluminum, enamel, and stone, 56 x 26 x 36 in. (142.3 x 66 x 91.5 cm), plus map and description of site

Spiral Jetty

Michael Heizer: b1944

• Creates works of vast scale that work with, and change the landscape.
• Sees sculpture as a place, not an object.
• In the mid-1960s, during the same period that Michael Heizer was making large-scale, shaped, "negative" paintings in his New York City studio, he began a series of trips to his home states of Nevada and California to experiment on the expansive raw canvas of the American desert landscape, where he created "negative" sculpture. The genre that he and his colleague Walter De Maria invented therelater dubbed "Earth art" or "Land art"changed the course of modern art history. Working largely outside the confines of the gallery and the museum, Heizer went on to redefine sculpture in terms of scale, mass, gesture, and process, creating a virtual lexicon of three-dimensional form.
• It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe. Small works are said to do this but it is not my experience. Immense, architecturally sized sculpture creates both the object and the atmosphere. Awe is a state of mind equivalent to religious experience, I think if people feel commitment they feel something has been transcended. . . . I think that large sculptures produced in the '60s and '70s by a number of artists were reminiscent of the time when societies were committed to the construction of massive, significant works of art. Michael Heizer

Christo and Jeanne Claude

• Christos work is about forcing us to see objects or our environment in new ways
• In his site works, the most important part of the work is creating the community cooperation each piece requires
• We live in an essentially economical, social and political world. Our society is directed to social concerns of our fellow human beings. That, of course, is the issue of our time, and this is why I think any art that is less political, less economical, less social today, is simply less contemporary. Christo

Over the River: Proposed
Walter de Maria: b1935

• Works with site specific pieces either by working with natural elements, or by bringing natural elements into urban settings.
• His work is frequently about measurement, and bringing both chance and mathematics into art.

Richard Serra: b1939

• Site specific artist
• Works with process
• Creates pieces that have a strong physical sense, frequently of danger Splash
• What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are. Richard Serra

Tilted Arc: 1981

Politics and Postmodernism
The Transition Into the Seventies

Thomas Kuhn: 1922-1996

• 1962 Writes: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
• Responsible for our current usage of the terms Paradigm, Normal Science and Scientific Revolutions
• Paradigm Theory, an idea of scientific philosophy postulated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: it holds that science will basically adhere to current beliefs and treat them as indisputable facts until a huge preponderance of evidence makes it impossible to continue with a scientific system. Thus flat-world theory was a highly successful paradigm of scientific thought for several thousand years. All experiments, observations and calculations seemed to prove that the earth was flat. That flatness was taken for scientific fact until someone actually physically sailed most of the way around the earth without falling off, thus making it necessary to adhere to a new system of scientific fact. Kuhn postulates that the vast majority of science basically attempts to prove what is already accepted as fact.

Jean Baudrillard: b1929

• The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
• Society of the Simulacra, an idea of social philosophy invented by Jean Baudrillard which holds that our current society is only a simulation created by media and consumerism. Baudrillard believes that America has become Disney Land and that the homogenizing influence of mall culture and franchising have effectively destroyed any true sense of place and purpose in American Society. Baudrillard postulates that what we wear, what we want, what we want to look like, what we do and what we believe are primarily constructs fed to us by large corporations whos primary goal is not the betterment of society, but to make money. In other words we all wonder through life waiting for someone else to tell us who we should be, and what we should do.
• An earlier stage in the economys domination of social life entailed an obvious downgrading of being into having. Then having is further downgraded into appearing. As vision focuses on representation instead of reality, it becomes more abstract and more easily deceived. Commodities themselves have become the spectacle that replace true experiences.
• Chair
• Deconstruction, a literary-philosophic idea of equalized interpretation popularized by Jacques Derrida in France in the 1960s: it holds that each individual has a great a chance of correctly interpreting written work as any other individual due to the steps involved in forming and understanding language. Thus even a simple word such as red will have as many shades of meaning as there are individuals that read the word. Deconstruction had a distinctly socialist agenda. By questioning the integrity of western scholarship, and exposing the underlying biases of literature and history, deconstructive philosophy had the effect of radically rewriting history to be more inclusive of the achievements of women and racial groups whose achievements had been largely ignored in the canon of western literature, art, and history. A typical deconstructive thought would be that the only thing a book of history has identified without bias is the number of pages it contains. Many ideas we have now of political correctness and revisionist history are the offspring of deconstructive thought.

Structuralism
There is no word for that in my language

• Eskimos have at least 7 totally separate words for snow, depending on type.
• We are limited in how we perceive reality because of the limitations of language.
• The structure of language and meaning give clues to the hierarchies societies are based on.
• Societies are difficult to change because, often the language necessary to explain the need for change does not exist.
• woMAN, HIStory, feMALE, LADy, huMAN
• Chick/Hen, Fox/Dog/Bitch, Cow, Nag, Bird
• Hysteria
• Penetrate/Enclose, Hard/Soft, Protect/Nurture, Male/Female, Son/Daughter, Rational/Emotional
• How does our language help determine the roles of men and women?

Michael Foucault: 1926-1984

• Writes about the structure of power. Using prisons, schools and hospitals as illustrations.
• Writes about the relationships between knowledge and power
• Writes about the need for modern society to create enemies
• Foucault's argument is modern societies use punishment and discipline to produce "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the modern industrial age - bodies which function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to a) constantly observe and record the bodies they control, b) ensure the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies is being controlled. That is, discipline must come about without excessive force through careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct form through this observation.

Jaques Lacan: 1901-1981

• Radically re-reads psychology and Freud.
• Brings linguistics and structuralist thought to psychology
• Important concepts in the formation of self, desire and other.
• Power of the Gaze
• Lacan found that much of Freudian psychology had been based on the presumption of the female as being less than the male. Females were defined in Freudian psychology by what they lacked. (Think penis envy).
• Lacan developed a way of seeing much of psychology, human behavior, and modern society as the maintenance of desire; desire for sex, commodities, fulfillment, conformity, individuality.
• One of Lacans most influential concepts is the determining power of the Gaze.
• This idea holds that in western society men have largely been able to create the images that women have felt obligated to form themselves into. This happens because men have been able to present women as objects and themselves as subjects. Once a woman has been trained to see herself as an object, she will attempt to become the type of object most prized by the subject.
• Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Angelina Jolie are among the most worshipped celebrities in Hollywood, down to their individual body parts. Nicole's nose, Catherine's eyes, and Angelina's lips were the most requested facial features of 2003, according to a recent survey of patients of the Beverly Hills Institute of Aesthetic and Reconstructive Surgery. And that's just the tip of the scalpel when it comes to the ballooning popularity of cosmetic surgery.
• By the end of the 1960s artists saw themselves as part of a growing counterculture. They sought new ways to undermine established social systems, governmental biases, and the artist/gallery/collector/museum relationship in art itself. They questioned norms, standardization, measurement, meaning, privilege and hierarchies.

Postmodernism
now what now

• Lumps together several art movements, most of them neo-
• Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Abstraction, Neo-Conceptualism, Neo-Geo
• Postmodern art focuses on current cultural and philosophical concerns often by revisiting historical styles of painting.
• Postmodernism typically offers questions, but seldom answers

Joseph Kosuth: b1945

• Conceptual Artist
• Primary concerns are the structure of language, and the formation of meaning.
• The way in which we form meaning from signs effects the way we formulate self

Hans Haacke: b1936

• Conceptual Artist
• Highly charged political and social content
• Concerned chiefly with systems of economics, government and control

Performance and Body Art
Some Current Context on the Human Body as Sculpture Site

Is it Possible for Art to Be Universally Beautiful?

• Can Dance = Art?
• Can Music = Art?
• Can Architecture = Art?
• Can Ideas = Art?
• Can Found Objects = Art?
   
• Oct 4
  9:10AM: walks E on Christopher, N side of street.
  9:28AM: she walks into A&P, Christopher St & 7th Ave.
  9:59AM: she leaves A&P and walks W on Christopher.
  10:03AM: she enters building, 95 Christopher St.
   
• Oct 5
  10:21AM, Christopher St & 7th Ave, SW corner: Man in brown jacket -- he crosses 7th and enters IRT subway station, uptown side.
  10:31AM: he boards Broadway local, uptown.
  10:38AM: he gets off train, 28th St; he walks S on 7th Ave, turns E on 27th St.
  10:42AM: he enters building, 105 W 27th St.
   
• Oct 6
  10:36AM, 14th St & 6th Ave, NE corner: Man in red jacket -- he walks N on 6th, W side of street.
  10:38AM: he stops at 15th St, SW corner, and hails cab.
  10:44AM: he gets into cab.

Yoko Ono: b1933

• Conceptual, Musical, and Performance Artist
• Work involves issues of gender, politics, and race.
• Work is about becoming vulnerable and empowering yourself at the same time.

Chris Burden: b1946

• Conceptual or Performance or Body Artist.
• Early work explored the limits of human endurance, fear, and taboo.
• Later work explored political systems
• In 1971 Chris Burden held a gallery reception. A crowd of people showed up in an empty gallery. Burden walked out with two of his friends. One filmed while the other shot Burden in the arm. Performed during the Vietnam war this artwork had an even larger impact.

Anselm Kiefer: b1945

• Neo-Expressionist painter.
• Works in a postmodern style, pillaging aesthetics and stories from multiple time periods in order to create works of deep personal meaning.
• In his endeavor to explore his identity and heritage through art making, he boldly confronted Theodor Adorno's declaration: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Early works, like Winter Landscape (1970) and Man in the Forest (1973), highlight human suffering and loneliness. In 1973, Kiefer turned his attention to architecture, painting a series of large-scale canvases set in the wood-grained attic of his home. With highly symbolic titles, including Father, Son, Holy Ghost (1973) and Germany's Spiritual Heroes (1973), these interiors possess a distinct psychological charge, much like van Gogh's representations of his own bedroom. The cavernous attic is a metaphor for the artist's mind, a universe in which conflict and contradiction are resolved through creation.
• Parsifal II 1973

  Oil and blood on paper laid on canvas
  on paper, unique

  This painting refers to Parsifals defeat of the evil knight Ither, whose name appears beside his broken, blood-spattered sword. Parsifals mother, Herzelayde, had tried to raise her son in ignorance of the violent chivalry of his ancestors. Her efforts failed, however, and Parsifal, whose sword is depicted here as gleaming and intact, went on to become a knight. Kiefer may have seen a parallel between Parsifals peaceful upbringing and the attitude of the post-war generation in Germany, scarred by the brutality of their countrys recent history

• Kiefer made several works on the theme of Arminius, the chieftan of a Germanic tribe who attacked the Romans in the Teutoburg forest in 9 AD. Celebrated by a number of dramatists and poets as a founding moment of German nationhood, the battle was also adopted by Nazi propagandists. These woodcut portraits of generals, politicians, philosophers and writers include those who eulogised Arminius. Kiefer has commented 'I chose these personages because power abused them'. The fire may allude to Nazi book burnings, or could suggest a new Germany rising from the ashes of the past.
• The title indicates the grandeur of Kiefer's ambition. The original German title Abendland, written in black paint on the right side of the painting, derives from a study of history, Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West], written by Oswald Spengler and published in 1918. The painting therefore refers directly to the weariness and moral disillusionment of a century wracked by titanic struggles.
• A recurrent motif in his work is the path through desolation. In Twilight of the West the path is the railway tracks that cut the countryside in half, urging the eye deep into a blighted industrial hinterland. Perhaps the tracks lead to a concentration camp or perhaps the single track that divides into two separate lines symbolizes the partition of Germany. Most likely Kiefer intends his iron road to function as a pictorial 'via dolorosa', a moral guide through life's hardships.
• This large painting is part of a series of works called Let a thousand flowers bloom, a sentence adapted from Chairman Mao's famous exhortation to the Chinese people, Let a hundred flowers bloom. The painting includes a portrait of the young Chairman Mao Zedong, the legendary Chinese leader, whose face became a worldwide icon. By placing it at the top of a tree, Kiefer turns it into a sort of flower-head. Instead of there being hundreds or even thousands of different flowers, when Chairman Mao ruled China, there was, in fact, only one, repeated over and over again: that of Mao himself.

Julian Schnabel

• Neo-Expressionist
• Film Director
• Master Marketer
• Paintings are dramatic conglomerations of ego, energy, emotion, and intellect. Good, bad, pretty and ugly; sometimes simultaneously.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-88

• Neo-Expressionist or Graffiti artist
• Began as a graffiti artist/writer.
• Created works of intellectual complexity, and seeming childlike abandon.
• Communicates inner turmoil, and the formation of self.
• In the late seventies, brief, cryptic messages began to appear on the streets of Manhattan, all signed SAMO. These subversive, sometimes menacing statements "PLAYING ART WITH DADDY'S MONEY" "9 TO 5 CLONE" "PLUSH SAFE ... HE THINK" piqued the curiosity of viewers around New York and soon gained notoriety in the art world.
• Untitled demonstrates Basquiat's consummate and complex abilities as a painter, and his frequent use of images, like this skull, as semi-self portraits. Contrary to many observers of his life who, with veiled racism, considered him a primitive, "wild child" talent, Basquiat's endeavors were informed by a long-standing and sophisticated interest in the devices of painting.

David Salle: 1952

• Uses the deconstructive strategies to question perception
• Presents well ordered visual and verbal chaos
• Creates paintings that communicate in similar ways to culture

Mark Tansey

• Post-Modern Painter
• Uses images to question meaning, value, and reality in art.
• Uses humor and irony

Robert Longo

• Robert Longo's works are typically brash and eye-catching. They take the power of the photographic or filmic image and marry it to large-scale artworks that often escape categorization as strictly painting, sculpture, or media art. As he has said, "My work exists somewhere between movies and monuments."

Eric Fischl: 1948

• Explores the hidden underbelly of normal American suburban life

Barbara Kruger: 1945

• Conceptual artist
• Concerned with control, equality, and structures of power
• Works with language
• The large, bold artworks of Barbara Kruger assimilate images taken from the deluge of mass media that is so predominantly a part of contemporary society. Pictures and words derived from television, film, newspapers and magazines comprise the media's powerful ability to communicate. It is by mirroring this fact that Kruger creates her own sexual, social and political messages, and effectively challenges the stereotypical ways the mass media influences society's notions about gender roles, socials relationships and political issues.

Jenny Holzer: 1950

• Conceptual artist
• Works with words
• Examines power and stereotype

Cindy Sherman

• Challenges fixed identity for women by presenting many versions of herself.
• Makes the viewer aware of stereotypes for women in art and the movies
• Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential achievements in art of the past two decades, the Film Still series comprises an imaginative catalogue of female roles derived from Hollywood movies of the 1940s to the 1960s, all played by Sherman herself. With originality, wit, and intelligence, she used pop culture as a ready-made artistic vocabulary to map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that emerged in postwar America.

David Levinthal: 1949

• Toys R Us
• Examines reality and society through its toys
• Blurs the boundaries between reality and plastic
• We live in a simulated society

Jeff Koons: 1955

• Deliberately undermines the art world while concurrently enjoying fantastic success within it
• Master of irony
• Claims absolute sincerity

Damian Hirst: 1965

• Challenges what art can be
• Focuses on mortality, religion and the absurd

Lorna Simpson: 1960

• Uses photography and words to comment on American society, norms, sexuality, gender issues and race.

Ron Mueck

• Post-Modern sculptor
• Uses movie model making technology and changes in scale to confront us with our humanity.
• Before establishing himself as a sculptor in London in the mid-1990s, Ron Mueck had a twenty-year career as a professional puppet-maker and puppeteer in Australia and as a model-maker for Australian and British media. His works are typically made by creating clay models/forms that are then cast in silicone or polyester. The artist often shrinks or inflates the scale of his shockingly real figures of babies, children, and men; here the seated figure is nearly seven feet high. For Untitled (Big Man), Mueck used an airbrush to apply the final smooth layer of paint, which convincingly resembles human flesh. In addition to being an exploration of anatomy and illusionism, Untitled (Big Man) is a study in color; blue eyes and veins contrast with the yellow undertones of hairless pink skin. Mueck's sculpture, unlike the classical nudes of Ancient Greece and the European Renaissance which celebrate human beauty and proportions, presents the viewer with a monumental yet unidealized version of the human body that emphasizes its physical presence, fleshiness, and weight.