Post on 14-Jul-2015
Group Discussion Questions(write down your answers and hand in at the end of class)
How does Clement Greenberg define modernism?
How does he apply this to the development of modernist painting since Manet?
In what ways do you think this notion of flatness will be addressed & challenged by 1960s art?
Close Read: 1960b
The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence…
Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art…
It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained, however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. For flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art.
-Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, 1960
Mondrian
Close Read: 1960b
1960
• How does Louis’s Saraband reflect Greenberg’s characteristics of modernist painting?
• Almost purely optical (resists tactility of Pollock’s work)
• Shimmering, translucent veil created by dripping down side of canvas
• Removes artist’s hand• Is Greenberg protecting high
modernist art from the emerging Pop Art movement (aka kitsch)?
Is Pop Art anti-modernist? Is it a joke on modernism?
Morris Louis, Saraband, 1959
Roy Lichtenstein, Brushtroke with
Splatter, 1966
Lichtenstein & Mondrian – Pop vs. Modernism
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10, Pier and Ocean, 1915Lichtenstein, Golf Ball, 1962
Nouveau Realisme
http://www.nytimes.com/video/arts/design/100000000761945/tinguely.html
Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York, 1960
LIFE magazine 1949 (Pollock)
1964 (Lichtenstein)
What makes an artist “great”? What makes him (or her) awful?
Terms used to describe (and ridicule) Pop Art:
• deadpan• Neo-Dadaist • plagiaristic• kitsch
• unoriginal• ironic• banal• cool
• From 1961-65, Lichtenstein made series of paintings based on comic books
• Known for these works though also devoted much of career to updating old masterworks (Monet, Cezanne)
• Interested in simplicity, unification, clarity of vision, questions of form
• Criticized both for content and process
1960 – Pop in America
Roy Lichtenstein, Popeye, 1961, oil
Elzie Crisler Segar, Popeye the Sailor, ca.1930, comic strip
Content
• appropriatedpopular image• brought “low”art form (comic)into “high” artcontext
Process
• appropriated image• seemed to directly copy (but didn’t)• sketched panels, projected and traced sketches• Thick contour lines, primary colors Benday dots
So, is Pop Art Anti-Modernist?
• Lichtenstein interested in new “possibilities for painting”
• Experimenting with modernist form using an unconventional process
• “Lichtensteinized” modernist issues (brushstroke, flatness, the grid, the readymade)
I don’t draw a picture in order to reproduce it—I do it in order to recompose it. Nor am I trying to change it as much as possible. I try to make the minimum amount of change. - Lichtenstein
Edouard Manet, Dejeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863
Marcantonio Raimondi, Judgment of Paris, 1520
Lichtenstein, Rouen Cathedral, 1969
Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1894
James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1960/61-64, 12’
The face was from Kennedy's campaign poster. I was very interested at that time in people who advertised themselves. What did they put on an advertisement of themselves? So that was his face. And his promise was half a Chevrolet and a piece of stale cake. -Rosenquist
1960 – Pop in America
Rosenquist, F-111, 1965
Ruscha, Rain, 1970, gunpowder and pastel on paper
1961 – The Blurring of Art & Life
• Oldenburg opens The Store in New York’s East Village (sells painted handmade plaster sculptures ranging from $25 - $800)
• Interested in art as ordinary commodity• Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Theater
performs Happenings there• Kaprow installs Yard in NYC courtyard
(fills with tires)
• Both artists interested in ephemeral & collaborative art events (Happenings), and in reusing discarded urban detritus (like Dubuffet)
These things [art objects] are displayed in galleries, but it is not the place for them. A store would be better. Museum in bourgeois concept equals store in mine. - Oldenburg
Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961
Claes Oldenburg, The Store, 1961
Allen Kaprow, “Un-artist”
• Interested in blurring boundaries between art & everyday life
• To challenge all artistic conventions• Known for his Happenings• Loosely scripted events, no logical
narrative or point• Characterized by ephemeral (cannot be
reproduced), whimsical, seemingly spontaneous nature
• Integrated multiple media, allowed for chance occurrences & audience participation
• Context/environment very important• Resists becoming a commodity• Household included men building towers,
women nests; smoke-flares throw; jam licked off a car and set ablaze
(no audience present)
Happenings are events that...happen...they appear to go nowhere and do not make any particular literary point. -Kaprow
Kaprow, Household, 1964
Hugo BallKarawane
1916Dada
performance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXdPAnNQIcg
Household Revisited2008
The Legacy of Jackson Pollock
Pollock…left us at a point where we mustbecome preoccupied with and evendazzled by the space and objects of oureveryday life…Objects of every sort arematerials for the new art: paint, chairs, food,electric and neon lights, smoke, water and
old socks, a dog…
Young artists of today need no longer say “Iam a painter” or “a poet” or “a dancer.” Theare simply “artists.” All of life will be open tothem. They will discover out of ordinary thingsthe meaning of ordinariness.
-Allen KaprowThe Legacy of Jackson PollockArtnews, 1958
Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock painting, 1950
…and everyone can do it. - Fluxus credo
Everything is Art…George Maciunas, Name Cards of Fluxus Artists, 1966
• George Maciunas, leader of Fluxus, organizes series of exhibitions in Wiesbade, West Germany
• Of all 60s movements, Fluxus was the most open, international, experimental “non-movement”
• It resisted prevailing styles, pop and minimalism
• Considered every action a form of art, from washing one’s hair to making a salad (Alison Knowles)
• A DIY aesthetic, it valued simplicity over complexity
• It organized concerts, festivals, performances, publications, mail art, artist books, actions
• It insisted on viewer participation
1962 – More Blurring of Art & Life: Fluxus Emerges
Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963
1962 - “Everything is in flux…everything flows” (Heraclitus)
• Maciunas associated fluxus with human physiology, molecular transformation, and chemical transformation
• Neo-dadaist?• East Meets West• Feminist
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Kyoto, Japan, 1964
Shigeko KubotaVagina Painting
1965
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3dsvy_yoko-ono-cut-piece_shortfilms
Fluxus Performances
Alison Knowles, Newspaper Music, 1967 (rendition)
Nam June Paik, Zen for Head, 1962 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J41s_VnKrcM
Nam June Paik, Unprotected Music: Solo for Violin (rendition), 1962
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FgAT4pH21w
1962c – Early Minimalism
• Like in painting (the figure & ground), artists desired to dismantle illusionism in sculpture
• To resist the figurative and Surrealist qualities of 40s and 50s sculpture
• Inspired by previous styles and movements, including the Readymade and Russian Constructivism
• The Readymade (the florescent light tube) multiplied to create a “near-serial generation of structures”
• Flavin assembled these in a pyramidal structure to pay homage to Vladimir Tatlin & his Monument for the Third International (a Russian Constructivist monument to modernity and industry ca. 1920)
• Flavin’s Catholic background adds a spiritual component to his sculptures (as cathedrals bathed in light?)
• The material and the immaterial
Dan FlavinMonument for V.Tatlin, 1969
Chartres Cathedralca. 1200
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument for the 3rd International, 1919-20
Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, Readymade
From the Constructed Object to the Found Object
I always thought I'd like my own
tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and
no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say
‘figment.’ - Warhol
1964 – Warhol
Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait (in Drag), 1981
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deRMRh8Zjgg
• From Pittsburgh, PA, born in 1928• Studied at Carnegie Institute, then
moved to NYC• Became successful commercial
illustrator (Vogue, New Yorker)• In 1960, decided to become an
artist and made first paintings of Batman, Popeye, Dick Tracy
• 1962-63 was watershed year—first Campbell’s Soup cans, first “Disaster” and Marilyn paintings, and first films, “Sleep” and “Kiss
• Began The Factory in 1963 (until 1967)—transformed painting into a mass produced activity
1964 – Warhol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr2Unu5WHXA
Andy Warhol, Kiss, 1963
Warhol, Shoe, illustration ca.1956
Warhol, White Burning Car III, 1963, silkscreen
The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel. —Andy Warhol, 1975
In what ways does Warhol’s work address the concept of the simulacrum?
• From “Death in America” series• Photos taken from news sources (often
not printed)• Depict car accidents, electric chairs, civil
rights demonstrations• Many reflect controversial current
events/issues• Reflects early TV age where images of
death and disaster (war, plane crash, etc) brought into home
• Repetition suggests obsessive fixation on trauma (to master fear or wallow in it?)
• Simulacral (copy without an original - Barthes) or referential (form of social critique? (Crow) Both?
• Mass subject (“anonymous victims of history”, pyramid builders, war victims)
• The punctum (Roland Barthes)
1964 – Warhol
Warhol, White Burning Car III, 1963, silkscreen
If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.