History of 20th Century Art

1960-64

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

Greenberg & Jackson Pollock

Installation view of Pollock’s Number 13A, 1948: Arabesque, 1948

Greenberg’s Evolution of Modernist Painting

Manet

Monet

Cezanne

Picasso

Kenneth Noland, Whirl, 1960

Morris Louis, Saraband, 1959

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

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

Roy Lichtenstein, Popeye, 1961, oil

• 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

Lichtenstein & Mondrian – Pop vs. Modernism

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10, Pier and Ocean, 1915Lichtenstein, Golf Ball, 1962

James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1960/61-64, 12’

• Images from magazines, manipulated and collaged them in painted form

• From 1957-60, earned living as a billboard painter (sign painting techniques applied to large scale paintings)

• Appropriation of popular imagery (’49 Chevrolet, JFK campaign poster) with commercial design

• Kennedy assassinated in 1963

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 moved to L.A. from Oklahoma to study at Chinouard (now Cal Arts)

• First worked in advertising

• Involved in Ferus Gallery and included in groundbreaking Pop exhibition New Painting of Common Objects at Pasadena Art Museum (both organized by Walter Hopps) in 1962

• Applied Johns’s interest in signs & Duchamp’s interest in wordplay to a study of popular signage, language and typography

• Signs as abstract forms

• Isolates language to heighten ambiguity & mystery

1960 – Pop in America

Ed Ruscha, Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbQjmKA1V7o Ruscha, Rain, 1970, gunpowder and pastel on paper

The CoolSchool (clip)

Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961

1961 – The Blurring of Art & Life

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

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

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

…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

Valie Export, Tapp and Tastkino (Pet and Paw), 1968 (Viennese Actionism)

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3dsvy_yoko-ono-cut-piece_shortfilms

Fluxfests

• Multi-player games with Flux-Sports component

• Included activities like the "Slow Speed Cycle Contest" or the "Handicap Run," whose participants ran "while drinking vodka, eating porridge, eating ice cream, spitting… etc..”

• Reflected Maciunas’ belief that Fluxus events "must be simple, amusing, [and] concerned with insignificances”

• An exhibition in a hat (walked around Paris from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m.) became portable gallery Art is what makes life more interesting than art.

-Robert Filliou

Robert Fillou, Galerie Legitime, 1962

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

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M--oHOn4a0U

• 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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkQMJBlO0v8

Andy Warhol, Sleep, 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

• 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.

Warhol: Simulacral or Referential?

Warhol, Lavender Disaster, 1963, silkscreen Bruce Conner, Child, 1959