Postmodern criticism and art

Man Ray Marcel Duchamp as Rrose

Selavy 1921-22Marcel Duchamp

L.H.O.O.Q. 1919-40

AppropriationIronyParodyDeconstructionIdentitityGender

All these characteristics of the postmodern in art can be found in the work of Marcel Duchamp and his Dadaist contemporaries

Marcel Duchamp The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)

In this work Duchamp portrays human sexual functions in the form of an improbable machine. The “Bride” section is at the top and must be fertilised by the male section below.

Duchamp’s ironic machine is painted on glass, withappropriated images such as the chocolate grinder and the occulist’s rings, recycled images from earlier works by the artist, andRandom and accidental elements such as the “shots” and the cracks in the glass.

Appropriation, Mechanical Reproduction

Andy Warhol Auto portrait 1966Andy Warhol Dick Tracy 1960

Appropriation

Yasumasa Morimura Futago, cibachrome photographic print 1990 print, 1990

Julie Rrap Camouflage # 1 (Ursula)photograph mounted on lexcen

2000

source Actress Ursula Andress

Appropriation, Identity and Gender

Julie Rrap Overstepping

digital print 2001

Appropriation and Gender

René Magritte, Le Modèle Rouge III,

1937

source

Julie Rrap Untitled (after Manet’s ‘Olympia’)2002

Appropriation

Edouard Manet ‘Olympia’ 1863

source

Tracy Emin Everyone I’ve ever slept with 1997

Identity

Tracy Emin Theres a lot of money in chairs

Identity

Tracy Emin Helter F…ing Skelter

2001

Identity

Tracy Emin• “…Emin's art is one of disclosure, using her

life events in works ranging from story telling, drawing, filmmaking, installation, painting, neon, photography, appliquéd blankets and sculpture. Emin exposes herself, her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in an incredibly direct manner. Often tragic and frequently humorous, it is as if by telling her story and weaving it into the fiction of her art she somehow transforms it….”

From the White Cube Gallery, London

Marc Quinn Self 1991

Frozen Blood (re-cast 1996)

Marc Quinn Alison Lapper Pregnant

White marble

                                  

Identity and new media

• Blood sculpture 'melted'

• Self was bought for a rumoured £13,000One of the Brit Art movement's most remarkable works, a sculpture made entirely of human blood, may accidentally have been destroyed.

• According to a report in The Guardian, there has been speculation in the art world that Self, by Marc Quinn, had melted after the refrigerator it was stored in was disconnected by builders.

• The work, which is a life size cast of the artist's head, is made out of in nine pints of his own frozen, congealed blood.

• It has to be kept refrigerated or it will melt. • The work is owned by Charles Saatchi, the key patron of Brit Art,

and the owner of the Saatchi Gallery along with one of the biggest private collections of contemporary British art.

• It has been reported that builders who arrived to extend Mr Saatchi's London kitchen at the request of his partner, TV chef Nigella Lawson, unplugged the kitchen freezer where the head was kept.

• They discovered the mistake when red liquid was found oozing across the floor.

Chris Ofili

The Holy Virgin Mary (1996)

Ofili's work is made up of paper collage, oil paint, glitter, polyester resin and elephant

dung on linen.

                                       

Identity, race and culture

Lin Onus Fruit Bats, 1991

Identity, race and culture

Damien Hirst The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone

Living (1991)Shark suspended in a formaldehyde bath

                                             

New media

A comment by the artist

'[After] the first piece of art I ever sold, I paid someone else to make the next one, so I could actually keep going out drinking.' (Damien Hirst).

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Great Deeds Against The Dead (1994)

                                        source GoyaThe Disasters of War Plate 39

Great Deeds - Against the Dead

Appropriation

“The exhibition, Works from the Chapman Family Collection 2002, paid ironic homage to the fast food giant McDonald’s through a fictional collection of rare ethnographic objects. The objects were carved from aged wood and presented in a parody of traditional museum displays. They appeared genuinely authentic until a closer inspection revealed the corporate symbolism of the hamburger chain. Issues of colonialism, capitalism, racism and globalisation are inherent in the work yet no critique or political statement is offered by the artists. Rather, the Chapmans’ aim is to unearth the contradictions and hypocrisies present in contemporary culture, posing questions but providing no answers.”

Saatchi paid £1m for their widely praised Works from the Chapman Family Collection, a group of totemistic wooden figures with a mysterious yen for fast food.

Appropriation and irony

Glen Baxter Trouble At The Design Museum

Appropriation, Irony, Parody

source Gerrit Rietveld Red-Blue Chair 1917

Glen Baxter “I’m still not entirely convinced it is a late Mondrian”

drawled Buchanan

Irony

a late Mondrian

STELARC Third Hand

Photographer: F.ParrImage courtesy of Sherman

Galleries

Mike Parr’s performance “Malevich (A Political Arm) performance for

as long as possible” “For thirty hours between the third and fourth of May 2002, a man

sat in a gallery with his only arm nailed to the wall.” 

From: Mike Parr: internet performance

Adam Geczy

• The origin of performance art can be located in 1917 in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire, where Hugo Ball, his partner Emmy Hennings and several other notable Dadaists, spouted nonsense verse to accompany nonsense acts to protest the Great War and the preciousness of art in general: no more cute art in frames, no more static art that only makes the philistines richer. From its beginnings, then, a critical part of the content of performance art has been its ephemerality. Once performed, or in fact at any given moment during the performance, it can never be the same again.

Site specific installation

Richard LongA Circle in Alaska – Bering Straight Driftwood 1977

Gallery installation

-unconventional media

Richard Long Untitled 2003

River Avon mud with acrylic

medium on wood

Andy Goldsworthy Red Pool, Scaur

River, Dumfriesshire,

1994/95

Site specific installation

Site specific installation

Andy Goldsworthy Snow Spires, Ellesmere Island 1994/95

Artist’s statement -Andy Goldsworthy

• "At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient-only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete." -Andy Goldsworthy

• Andy Goldsworthy hit the headlines in June 2000 when he placed 13, one-ton snowballs around London for a Brit Art exhibition.

Andy GoldsworthyInstallations

Grise fjord, Ellesmere Island March/April1989

Jean Tinguely Homage to New York. A self-constructing and self-destroying work of art. Demonstration in sculpture garden of Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 17, 1960

Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, 1997.

New Materials and Technology, “Playfulness”

Robert Venturi Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1962

Appropriation

source :Leon Battista Alberti The Church of San Francesco, Rimini, Italy 1446-68

Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette,

Paris 1983-91

The Architecture of Deconstruction

Two Follies:Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, andPirro Ligorio Villa Bomarzo 16th Century

Appropriation

The Architecture of Deconstruction- the architectural realisation of Derrida’s

theoriesBernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette

…One aspect of the Parc de la Villette's deconstructive nature is its inversion of the traditional hierarchy of structure over ornamentation. The insides of structures are, in places, exposed on exteriors and used as decoration. The site also demonstrates how formal construction principles can be co-opted by purely ornamental considerations. The result is wonderfully disorienting to say the least. From the standpoint of poststructuralism, the Parc de la Villette participates in deconstruction's elevation of the signifier to a more active relationship with the signified.

"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually." Damien Hirst

postmodern – new technologies, “escalation of shock”

New York 9/11 “Tribute in Light” memorial

3/11/02 to 4/13/02

postmodern – appropriation, recontextualisation (see next frame for possible source)

Albert Speer The Cathedral of

LightGerman Nazi Party Rally at Nuremburg

1934

possible source

Feminism, Parody, Irony and Political

Dissent

The Guerilla GirlsThe Women’s

Homeland Terror Alert System