Contemporary Issues
1990 - 2010
Damian Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007
Historical Revisionism & Traditional Art Forms
• Intentional historicism• Return to traditional art forms• Revisionist approach (identity politics,
questioning tenets of modernism)
Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Major General Joseph Sabine, ca. 1700
YinkaShonibareUntitled1997
Institutional Critique & Art as Ethnography
Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992, Museum of Contemporary Art, Baltimore
Renee Green, Seen, 1990, installation
Regression and Abjection
Kiki Smith, Blood Pool, 1992, painted bronze
Paul McCarthy, Tomato Heads, 1994
Race and its Representation
• Shifting notions of the politics of identity
• From essentialist and positive notions of identity (blackness, femininity, etc) to identity as a social construction
• Complicates identity so that it cannot be easily categorized or stereotyped
• Uses critique of documentary forms of racial representation, personal testimonies, ambiguous narratives, past art forms
• Photo-conceptualism
Adrian Piper, from The Mythic Being series1972-76
Portraits of Family Life
Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPDInpNoO50
Portraits of Community
Roy DeCarava, from The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955
Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer, 1986
Subversive Beauty: Troubling Typologies of Black Identity
Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Jug, 1665
Ellen Gallagher, Mr. Terrific from the DeLuxe series, 2005
The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/48511/detail/
Dave Chappelle, Racial Stereotype Pixies
Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998
The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
• Black-paper cutout silhouettes & projections on white gallery and museum walls
• Inspired by fantasies of ante-Bellum South
• Extreme caricatures of Black slaves & slave-owners
• Depicts graphic subjects (sex, violence)
• Revision of older art forms, the silhouette & the cyclorama
Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998
The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
http://video.pbs.org/video/1237715781/
Silhouette of GeorgeAnd Martha Washington
The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
Gettysburg Cyclorama
Disegno (Drawing) vs. Colorito (Color)
Michelangelo, Madonna and ChildGiorgione, The Tempest
The Odalisque: Challenging Disegno
IngresDelacroix
RenoirMatisse
The Matrix (grid): Abstracting the Object
The Grapheme: Abstracting the Subject
Drawing in the 20th Century
Erasure: Abstracting Time
Mondrian
Pollock
Kentridge
Drawing & Time: From Deskilling to Re-skilling
• Short film of animated charcoal drawings using erasure and stop-shoot technique
• Felix in Exile (1994) one of many “drawings for projection”
• Recurring characters & love triangle among Soho Ekstein (a mine-owner/capitalist), Felix Teitelbaum (an artist/self-portrait?), Mrs. Ekstein (wife of Ekstein)
• Setting is Paris hotel room, Felix gazing into mirror at Nandi, a South African surveyor, looking back at him
• The gaze• Apartheid ended in 1994
William Kentridge, from Felix in Exile, 1994
William Kentridge, from Felix in Exile, 1994
William KentridgeFelix in Exile
1994
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaTnchoukdY
Palimpsest
• Linear overlay of forms
• Ancient process
• Allegory of memory, time, history
• Kentridge’s work a meditation on the fate of handicraft?
• Drawing as obsolete among new technologies
Ruffignac cave drawingsca. 14,000 BCE
Robert RauschenbergErased de Kooning1953
Pictorial Photography
Getrude Kasebier, The Sketch, ca. 1903
Pictorial Photography
Sam Taylor-WoodSoliloquy I, 1998c-type color print
Henry WallisThe Death of Chatterton
ca. 1856
Luca SignorelliLamentation Over
the Dead Christca. 1502
predella – base of analtarpiece
Jeff Wall, Storyteller, 1986
• Digital manipulation of photograph recalls mid-19th century painting & pictorial photography
• Large color transparencies set in light boxes
• Shift away from documentary photography
• Questions the veracity of the image
• Interest in pictorial composition, size & narrative aligns it with the history of figurative painting
• To restore or make whole again the fractured image (broken up in collage, photomontage) in avant-garde art by returning to birth of avant-garde (Manet) & photography (mid-19th century)
• Shows homeless native Canadians in home town of Vancouver
The Photographer of Modern Life
Jeff Wall, Storyteller, 1986
Manet, Luncheon on
the Grass1863
“a transgression against the institution of transgression” – Wall
Global Issues – Chinese Art
Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, 1994
Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism: Marlboro, 1992
Global Issues – Chinese Art
Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern, London, installation, 2010
Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern, London, installation, 2010
Global Issues – Chinese Art
• “Global” representation – the “multitude”
• 100 million handmade sunflower seeds laid on floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London
• Public invited to walk on, lay down on them
• Made by workers over several years in Chinese province which had historically made porcelain for Emperor
• Reflection on Chinese labor, modern economy, and identity
• Suggests Postminimalist anti-form and Pop Art’s interest in the mass subject