Midterm PDF

- Caused a whole scandal - Cartoonish - Colors were not referential - Picasso responds by creating another scandal (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) - “Solid anchoring of sexual difference” - Shepherd flutist (right side) is the only male figure - Initially was a female nude - See 190...

- Caused a whole scandal - Cartoonish - Colors were not referential - Picasso responds by creating another scandal (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) - “Solid anchoring of sexual difference” - Shepherd flutist (right side) is the only male figure - Initially was a female nude - See 1906 file and add more - 1) Start with description of painting itself 2) Bring in historical context - the artist and then movements 3) Interpret - BAL (in upper right corner): - Conventions in French give this a particular meaning - Braque and Picasso eliminated personality, they saw themselves as scientists - The main argument by them is that the paintings are objective, quasi-scientific methods - Quasi-mechanical - More mechanical than Seurat - But Seurat has a mechanicity - Braque’s stencil is a step further - Linguistic sign equivalent to the pictorial sign - (Movement from pictorial to linguistic) - Mention Cubism generally pushing limits of the referent, but never cutting it - Braque spends time in Avignon - Writes to Picasso: he has discovered veneer that makes stuff look like nice wood - Uses in his artwork - Mass produced - Papier-collet - Braque was an apprentice of his father who was a house painter - Braque had the techniques from his father  - Decided not to paint, but use mass-produced object - Applied to virtual space of art Synthetic Cubism = the moment when materials that are not conventional to the fine art medium of painting (or sculpture) enter into the field of art object - Response to Braques use of veneer - Picasso found this intriguing and terrifying - Clue to the next logical step - Sticky paper is complete transfer from one realm to another - Cheap, phony, mass-produced forms - Echoes traditional aspects of Western painting, but also travestying Western painting at the same time - Combining two forms: paints a copy table that he makes - Literal + figurative object - Painting itself is a table - Tableau vs. tableau - Synthesizing the real world with the virtual world - Rope was used by sailors as framing in souvenirs - Not traditional art - Gesture of tension - Bringing in things that have been kept separate - Challenges conventions - Souvenirs are low-culture - Another way of pushing the boundaries of convention Readymade - Duchamp’s initiation as an artist is within the context of Cubism - Juxtaposes true objects - Elimination of handcraft - Duchamp’s particular choice of materials - Virtual space of sculpture/art - No pedestal (pedestal for sculpture as frame is for painting) - No separation from the rest of the world - Rupture of line from virtual space and actual space - Logic step from synthetic cubism - Crosses a red line - Picasso always pull back - Cubism = pushing the limit - Ex. cutting the referent - Juxtaposition of stool (static) and wheel (movement) - Generates a particular contradiction - Movement + temporality - Wheel = change, time - Wheel has a kinetic presence, it moves - Beckoning the viewer to participate - Duchamp says he uses it in lieu of a fireplace - same soothing effect - Urban fireplace Metaphysical - Giorgio de Chirico incorporates traditional pictorial strategies (in contrast with Cubism and the Readymade) - Explicit references to Mediterranean cultures - Classicism - Return to order with out of place additions - de Chirico is against avant-garde and the semiotic - Cubism is the plague for de Chirico - Introduces classical icons with modern icons - Presence of shadows implies memories - Shadow = has a soul - Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” = the psychological experience of encountering something as strangely familiar; incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling or eerie context - Memory images in de Chirico’s work are considered uncanny - Sigmund Freud, “dream-work,” = the unconscious ciphering that transforms that mind’s latent content into manifest content - His paintings don’t add up, just like in dreams - Figurative painting after synthetic Cubism - De Chirico doesn’t need a studio (a traditional space) - Surrealists site de Chirico for inspiration - de Chirico connects to Freud - Song of Love creates a sudden collision of objects from different contexts - Doesn’t respect spatial or temporal boundaries - Typical example of juxtaposition of models - Rebus: a puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures, letters, and words - Present the spectator with something they have to engage with - Different model of the relationship - Presentation of things that don’t add up - - - Hannah Hoch = first photomontagist - Photomontage is not the same as collage - Bringing together things that are jarring - Not a single work in Cubist collage that is considered photography - Cubism still maintained traditional arts → never crossed over - Photomontage has no traditional fine art elements - Compare photomontage to readymade - Both objects that are found (not made by the artist) - Did the invention of the photomontage necessitate the readymade? Pretty Girl - Peculiar hybrid of mechanical elements constituting features of humans subject - Transfer between human body and advertisement imagery - Trademark logo of BMW - Female figure holding a lightbulb where her head would have been - Wig with hand holding watch indicating the universal measurement of time protrudinging - Keeping time and regularization of time is now an integral part of daily experiences - Germany in the 1920s is probably slightly ahead of the US in terms of production of glossy illustrated magazines, certainly ahead of France - Extraordinary layouts, wide range of photographs  - Traces of de Chirico’s practice - Both of these conducted a different pictorial image - Reminiscent of de Chirico → also shadow like de Chirico and deep reading stage set Dada - Relationship between technology and meaning - More skeptical of technology - Juxtapose illogical with a space of meaning + representation - Juxtaposed like in dreams - Haussman wondered why humans liked technology when they are ruining people’s lives - Vladmir Tatin was a key sculptor - Became a cult leader - Anti-fascism - AIZ - Published copies of 400,000 (illustrateds were 500,000) - Heartfield became prominent anti-fascist figure - Has an audience of 400,000 per week - Growth of public for artistic production - Beyond historical context, look at implications of avant-garde art - Not just a return to (political) signification, but also representation - Reconstruction of political message - Presents the argument that if an artists wants to be political, s/he has to open discourse to lots of people - Not enough to just make a mark, but you need to open the circuits of conversation - Signification + dissemination - Political art: who is going to see it - Dissemination + distribution is a huge part of 20th century art - Shamanistic and robotic automaton - Mechanicity utterly dehumanized - But also pre-enlightenment medicine, pre-science - Grotesquely comical suit but with a cultic aspect as Ball presents himself of a quasi-dignitary of a new religion, “dada” - Presents a phonetic poem, Karawane, similar to the Scwitters poem from a few classes ago, just syllables - Can read this (and Dada) in the context of WWI - progress has led humans to an abyss of dada - During WWI, many artists migrated to Switzerland because it was neutral - Swiss movement of Dada emerges here, especially in Zurich, protest of the War and the society that allows it - Arp proposed a dada that was deeply self-reflective and resisted any attempt to re-iconize imagery - Arp produces this collage, one of about 20 he produced with the same title - In 1916, Arp became so frustrated by his classical training and its meaningless and anachronicity that he decided to destroy the sheet of paper by cutting it into cubes and threw the pieces on the floor - He’d realized the configuration of the scraps was more relevant than anything he had ever done - Connected to Duchamp’s use of chance and gravity - Referencing Mallarmé - Chance will get you out of the rut - The element that produces the work is ultimately gravity - Arp attacks traditional pictorial conventions and procedures - Leaves Hannover in 1935, fleeing the Nazis - Moves to Norway and builds another - Flees to England and makes one there - Relief sculpture that extends outside its frame, also a kind of collage - Took over his house: he removed the ceilings of his first and second floors - Accretion: adding of more and more - Beginning of installation art: house becomes the frame - Names it the “merzbau” - Merz is the name of his dada - Kommerz Bank: fragmented lexical structure - Fragmentation of language, assault on lexical structure of words - Subtitle of the work: The Cathedral of My Erotic Misery - Transforms family residence into a space reminiscent of German expressionist films - Melancholic arrest of expression, because it’s inside, in a private realm? Site of withdrawal, the anti-social? Recluse, exile, the mind? - Variety of materials, textures, surfaces - Amasses contributions from all his friends, something from the BODY - Like relics of the cathedral? - Transition of the attempt or desire to get away from the traditional autonomous artistic object - Transgresses beyond the singular object by giving the articulated work of art an architectural dimension - Russian artist - Constructivist - Conventional materials of the fine arts are no longer acceptable or viable for the production of modern art - Only legitimate materials are trash and garbage and industrial materials - Emphasis on the inherent structure, color, texture, of all tactile objects of industrial production - Material aesthetic: emphasis on inherent beauty of industrial materials - Complete opposite of Schwitters’ cathedral - Genre of the “monument” is normally celebrated, social and public, requires it to be recognizable as something we all share - While Schwitters’ cathedral is about him and his relationship to the object, the monument is about the spectator’s relationship to the object - This monument was meant to be built but that didn’t ultimately happen - Third international was post communist revolution in Russia - Tatlin’s was ultimately rejected, Lenin thought it was ridiculous and overly utopians - Apparently in technological terms it would have been possible to produce this so it wasn’t overly visionary but quite practical - This was meant to be twice the size of the Eiffel Tower, slightly higher than the Empire State - Meant to cross the two banks of the Moscow river as a bridge and as a utilitarian structure that could house various political institutions of the newly founded USSR - the Congress - Was supposed to rotate slowly and continuously at the speed of one full revolution per year - Movement, dynamic, change, revolution, themes of futurism - Ultimate answer - Epitome of painting - Literally ends representation in Western tradition - Does away with direction - Does away with transparency and reading depth - Does away with ambiguities - Most self-reflexive - Most rational object - The new icon - Icon of the new experience - Irrationality/rationality - Places it where an Orthodox Russian icon would be positioned - Non-rational - To suspend it across the corners of the room puts the viewer in a very different location vis-a-vis the art - Forces the spectator to consider the room itself - Why is it in the space of religion? - Malevich is aiming at new and fundamental at the same time - Modernist icon will replace the religion icon but will have the same function - Suprematis = supreme vision - Edges of square are not completely even - Almost redaction of representation itself - Black square obscures, negates all types of representation - What is lacking in his work is the dimension of process - No sign of brushstroke - Eliminated traces of making process - His places eliminates illusory bourgeois culture → see image where protestors are holding black square - Rozanova’s art is so radical - This painting is the most extraordinary painting in Russia - Quite unlike Malevich’s black square, which is self-referential - Also unlike Malevich’s black square, this has dimension - Unclear if it’s one green stripe or two white stripes - Title was given afterward - Figure + ground completely locked - Figure + ground = depth - abstract artists explore with this - Representation is seen to repress society - Role of art in relationship to the world - Art is a representation of the world? - Or world is a construction of art? - If you can represent an egalitarian virtual world, you can construct that in the real world - You don’t need an art degree to understand abstraction - Complexity must be learned - 3D in a 2D space: you have to learn to read it - You don’t need to learn these things when they are in the supreme form - There is evidence of how the painting is made - The spectator is reconfigures as they are supposed to identify with the making process: how would you do it? - Confronts the viewer with an immediacy - Reducing painting to its classic form - Purity - Basicness - End of constructivism and beginning of productivism - Constructivism: black square and vertical green line - artists imagining a world without hierarchy → creating, CONSTRUCTING a world - He is a constructivist, but this painting is not a constructivist painting - Propaganda poster that even the illiterate could comprehend - Russian revolution happens in 1917 - Russian avant-garde is trying to find the role of art in this new world - Art for the masses - Productivist: art has a function - Each section drawn by 1 person without seeing the others parts - Recognizing that as a group we all have a shared collective - Anyone can do this - Break the rational part of a composition - Outside rationality - Hard to rationally construct something like this - Record of unconscious experience in the same way a dream does - Dreams bring together lots of fragments - Tying it to surrealism + unconscious and the bourgeois order - Emphasis on chance - Mallarmé - - Semiotics and surrealism - Symbolic: the word “pipe” - Iconic: actual image of the pipe - Missing Indexical - Importance of the title? - What is the significance of the pipe? - Freud - surrealism  - Renders a critique of signs - Sign vs. reference - Sign = a perceptible or virtually perceptible item that stands in for something else - Referentiality = pointing to a referent; pointing to a thing or person that the image’s iconography refers to - Just a sign of the pipe - Image + word just signify a pipe, not actually a pipe Surrealism Focuses on a model of communication that intensifies social communication - Human unconscious - Becomes popular in advertising - Associates itself with Karl Marx too - Brings together freudian analysis with Marxist analysis - Psychoanalysis = individuality - Marxism = collectivity - Interested in individual psyche and the collective - Want to achieve something free of the rational thought of premeditation - Production of art that encourages chance - You don’t have to learn how to be a surrealist - Surrealists are not geniuses - Getting people to look anew - Not what you thought you were going to get - Estrangement = the displacement of the object, removing it from its expected context, “defamiliarizing” it. Once the object is removed from its normal circumstances, it can be seen without the mask of its cultural context. - Shocking the spectator - Make the world strange - Linking disconnected senses - Sexual connotation - - Most important composition (of what?) - 4 part human figures with exaggerated body parts - Drawing from cubism - Lam was a close friend of Picasso - Figures seems to emerge from + fuse with the jungle - Fusing is very popular within surrealism - Figures evoke a dream - Stalks suggestive of sugar cane - Hints at Afro-Cuban mysticism - Type of work produced for Mexico - Nativist history under pre-colonial times - Totally fictionalized account - Working conditions and living conditions are mythicized - Among most sought-after artists in the US. widely perceived as the real answer to conspicuous absence of US avante-garde Figurative realism: national socialism and communist - Return to figuration after dismantling in early 20th century is seen as a call to order - Think about how the Mexican muralist project fits into this. Because it also returns to neoclassical forms of representation - Sources are all western;aesthetic based on greek and roman codes and conventions - Kahlo focused on trauma, dreams, and everyday life - Engaged in individual identity - Frequently made multi-layered self-portraits because she didn’t have access to models - Connect to Nochlin because she didn’t have access to the art world - Needed to pose as a male model to interact with misogyny - Westernized woman - Haircut - Suit - Rituals of transition so that a woman can be a successful artist at that time - Even what was discarded (her hair, her previous identity) are rather animated - They look like they have become alive and almost threatening - Dialogue between the former self and the current self Meta Fuller - sculptor who studied with Rodin Ethiopia - only African country that was independent (at the time) - Meta Fuller: people are “awakening again” - This sculpture depicts Mary Turner rising from the mob - Mary Turner was lynched in a mob - Meta Fuller seeks to combat white supremacy through art - - Aaron Douglas moved away from realist paintings - With the funds from the Works Progress Administration, Douglas made murals - He made a series of murals about the “Aspects of the Negro Life” and this is the final one - Depicts a musician standing on a tire, showing the power of the African American as an artist and how he is supported by the industry of the North (symbolized with the tire) - At the same time, there is a tension between industrialization and music and art - There are many icons of Manhattan, the skyscrapers, and the Statue of Liberty right next to the musician, symbolizing the attainability and the proximity to freedom - Douglas’ murals were well known by the Harlem community and they advanced the Renaissance goal of pride  - Lawrence is an artist from Harlem - The “Migration Series” is a series of 60 small paintings - Each caption combines history, sociology, and poetry - The Migration Series shows the migration from the hardships of South to the industry of the urban North - The Scenes of travel, including this one, appear to be rising upwards or going in a certain direction - There is a sense of movement toward the future and the hope that that future brings - The series represents a move away from an oppressive context but not in an idealized way - It shows both the optimism and the difficulty - It also show the race riots in the north Movements Semiotics - Referentiality = pointing to a referent, pointing to a thing or person that the image or iconography refers to - Signification = the meaning represented or conveyed either literally or figuratively - Sign = a perceptible or virtually perceptible item that stands in for something else - Signifier = the sound we utter when we pronounce, “cat, “ or the letters we write when we write the word down - Signified = the concept of cat - Signifier + Signified = SIGN - Signs are arbitrary = there is no natural link between the sign and its referent - Iconic = the icon of the sign (ex. A picture of a cat)  - Symbolic = the symbol of the sign (ex. The word “cat”) - Indexical = the remnants of the signified (ex. Cat footprints, paint on a canvas indexes the artist) - BAL (in upper right corner): - Conventions in French give this a particular meaning - Braque and Picasso eliminated personality, they saw themselves as scientists - The main argument by them is that the paintings are objective, quasi-scientific methods - Quasi-mechanical - More mechanical than Seurat - But Seurat has a mechanicity - Braque’s stencil is a step further - Linguistic sign equivalent to the pictorial sign - (Movement from pictorial to linguistic) - Mention Cubism generally pushing limits of the referent, but never cutting it - Braque spends time in Avignon - Writes to Picasso: he has discovered veneer that makes stuff look like nice wood - Uses in his artwork - Mass produced  - Papier-collet - Braque was an apprentice of his father who was a house painter - Braque had the techniques from his father - Semiotics and surrealism - Symbolic: the word “pipe” - Iconic: actual image of the pipe - Missing Indexical - Importance of the title? - What is the significance of the pipe? - Freud - surrealism - Renders a critique of signs - Sign vs. reference - Sign = a perceptible or virtually perceptible item that stands in for something else - Referentiality = pointing to a referent; pointing to a thing or person that the image’s iconography refers to - Just a sign of the pipe  - Image + word just signify a pipe, not actually a pipe Primitivism = a search for new beginnings; a search for human experience unspoiled by modernity - Caused a whole scandal - Cartoonish - Colors were not referential - Picasso responds by creating another scandal (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) - “Solid anchoring of sexual difference” - Shepherd flutist (right side) is the only male figure - Initially was a female nude - See 1906 file and add more - Most important composition (of what?) - 4 part human figures with exaggerated body parts - Drawing from cubism - Lam was a close friend of Picasso - Figures seems to emerge from + fuse with the jungle - Fusing is very popular within surrealism - Figures evoke a dream  - Stalks suggestive of sugar cane - Hints at Afro-Cuban mysticism Synthetic Cubism Synthetic Cubism = the moment when materials that are not conventional to the fine art medium of painting (or sculpture) enter into the field of art object - Synthesizing real world with the virtual world - Response to Braques use of veneer - Picasso found this intriguing and terrifying - Clue to the next logical step - Sticky paper is complete transfer from one realm to another - Cheap, phony, mass-produced forms - Echoes traditional aspects of Western painting, but also travestying Western painting at the same time - Combining two forms: paints a copy table that he makes - Literal + figurative object  - Painting itself is a table - Tableau vs. tableau - Synthesizing the real world with the virtual world - Rope was used by sailors as framing in souvenirs - Not traditional art - Gesture of tension - Bringing in things that have been kept separate - Challenges conventions - Souvenirs are low-culture - Another way of pushing the boundaries of convention Stephane Mallarmé - In the late 19th century, he begins to lament the instrumentalization of language - Words no longer mean multiple things - Chance is our last savior - During WWI, many artists migrated to Switzerland because it was neutral - Swiss movement of Dada emerges here, especially in Zurich, protest of the War and the society that allows it - Arp proposed a dada that was deeply self-reflective and resisted any attempt to re-iconize imagery  - Arp produces this collage, one of about 20 he produced with the same title - In 1916, Arp became so frustrated by his classical training and its meaningless and anachronicity that he decided to destroy the sheet of paper by cutting it into cubes and threw the pieces on the floor - He’d realized the configuration of the scraps was more relevant than anything he had ever done - Connected to Duchamp’s use of chance and gravity - Referencing Mallarmé - Chance will get you out of the rut - The element that produces the work is ultimately gravity - Arp attacks traditional pictorial conventions and procedures Readymade Readymade - Duchamp’s initiation as an artist is within the context of Cubism - Juxtaposes true objects - Elimination of handcraft - Duchamp’s particular choice of materials  - Virtual space of sculpture/art - No pedestal (pedestal for sculpture as frame is for painting) - No separation from the rest of the world - Rupture of line from virtual space and actual space - Logic step from synthetic cubism - Crosses a red line - Picasso always pull back - Cubism = pushing the limit - Ex. cutting the referent - Juxtaposition of stool (static) and wheel (movement) - Generates a particular contradiction - Movement + temporality - Wheel = change, time - Wheel has a kinetic presence, it moves - Beckoning the viewer to participate - Duchamp says he uses it in lieu of a fireplace - same soothing effect - Urban fireplace Metaphysical Metaphysical - Giorgio de Chirico incorporates traditional pictorial strategies (in contrast with Cubism and the Readymade) - Explicit references to Mediterranean cultures - Classicism - Return to order with out of place additions - de Chirico is against avant-garde and the semiotic  - Cubism is the plague for de Chirico - Introduces classical icons with modern icons - Presence of shadows implies memories - Shadow = has a soul - Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” = the psychological experience of encountering something as strangely familiar; incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling or eerie context - Memory images in de Chirico’s work are considered uncanny - Sigmund Freud, “dream-work,” = the unconscious ciphering that transforms that mind’s latent content into manifest content - His paintings don’t add up, just like in dreams - Figurative painting after synthetic Cubism - De Chirico doesn’t need a studio (a traditional space) - Surrealists site de Chirico for inspiration - de Chirico connects to Freud - Song of Love creates a sudden collision of objects from different contexts - Doesn’t respect spatial or temporal boundaries - Typical example of juxtaposition of models - Rebus: a puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures, letters, and words - Present the spectator with something they have to engage with - Different model of the relationship - Presentation of things that don’t add up Photomontage = the process and result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging, and overlapping two or more photographs or fragments of photographs Hannah Hoch = first photomontagist - Photomontage is not the same as collage - Bringing together things that are jarring - Not a single work in Cubist collage that is considered photography - Cubism still maintained traditional arts → never crossed over - Photomontage has no traditional fine art elements - Compare photomontage to readymade - Both objects that are found (not made by the artist) - Did the invention of the photomontage necessitate the readymade? Pretty Girl - Peculiar hybrid of mechanical elements constituting features of humans subject - Transfer between human body and advertisement imagery - Trademark logo of BMW - Female figure holding a lightbulb where her head would have been - Wig with hand holding watch indicating the universal measurement of time protrudinging - Keeping time and regularization of time is now an integral part of daily experiences - Germany in the 1920s is probably slightly ahead of the US in terms of production of glossy illustrated magazines, certainly ahead of France - Extraordinary layouts, wide range of photographs  - Anti-fascism - AIZ - Published copies of 400,000 (illustrateds were 500,000) - Heartfield became prominent anti-fascist figure - Has an audience of 400,000 per week - Growth of public for artistic production - Beyond historical context, look at implications of avant-garde art - Not just a return to (political) signification, but also representation - Reconstruction of political message - Presents the argument that if an artists wants to be political, s/he has to open discourse to lots of people - Not enough to just make a mark, but you need to open the circuits of conversation - Signification + dissemination - Political art: who is going to see it - Dissemination + distribution is a huge part of 20th century art Weimar Dada  - Traces of de Chirico’s practice - Both of these conducted a different pictorial image - Reminiscent of de Chirico → also shadow like de Chirico and deep reading stage set Dada - Relationship between technology and meaning - More skeptical of technology - Juxtapose illogical with a space of meaning + representation - Juxtaposed like in dreams - Haussman wondered why humans liked technology when they are ruining people’s lives - Vladmir Tatin was a key sculptor - Became a cult leader Futurism - Machines are the future - Embrace of the machine Pretty Girl - Peculiar hybrid of mechanical elements constituting features of humans subject - Transfer between human body and advertisement imagery - Trademark logo of BMW - Female figure holding a lightbulb where her head would have been - Wig with hand holding watch indicating the universal measurement of time protrudinging - Keeping time and regularization of time is now an integral part of daily experiences - Germany in the 1920s is probably slightly ahead of the US in terms of production of glossy illustrated magazines, certainly ahead of France - Extraordinary layouts, wide range of photographs - Russian artist - Constructivist - Conventional materials of the fine arts are no longer acceptable or viable for the production of modern art - Only legitimate materials are trash and garbage and industrial materials - Emphasis on the inherent structure, color, texture, of all tactile objects of industrial production - Material aesthetic: emphasis on inherent beauty of industrial materials - Complete opposite of Schwitters’ cathedral - Genre of the “monument” is normally celebrated, social and public, requires it to be recognizable as something we all share - While Schwitters’ cathedral is about him and his relationship to the object, the monument is about the spectator’s relationship to the object - This monument was meant to be built but that didn’t ultimately happen - Third international was post communist revolution in Russia - Tatlin’s was ultimately rejected, Lenin thought it was ridiculous and overly utopians - Apparently in technological terms it would have been possible to produce this so it wasn’t overly visionary but quite practical  - This was meant to be twice the size of the Eiffel Tower, slightly higher than the Empire State - Meant to cross the two banks of the Moscow river as a bridge and as a utilitarian structure that could house various political institutions of the newly founded USSR - the Congress - Was supposed to rotate slowly and continuously at the speed of one full revolution per year - Movement, dynamic, change, revolution, themes of futurism Anti-fascism - Anti-fascism - AIZ - Published copies of 400,000 (illustrateds were 500,000) - Heartfield became prominent anti-fascist figure - Has an audience of 400,000 per week - Growth of public for artistic production - Beyond historical context, look at implications of avant-garde art - Not just a return to (political) signification, but also representation - Reconstruction of political message  - Presents the argument that if an artists wants to be political, s/he has to open discourse to lots of people - Not enough to just make a mark, but you need to open the circuits of conversation - Signification + dissemination - Political art: who is going to see it - Dissemination + distribution is a huge part of 20th century art Zurich Dada - Shamanistic and robotic automaton - Mechanicity utterly dehumanized - But also pre-enlightenment medicine, pre-science - Grotesquely comical suit but with a cultic aspect as Ball presents himself of a quasi-dignitary of a new religion, “dada” - Presents a phonetic poem, Karawane, similar to the Scwitters poem from a few classes ago, just syllables - Can read this (and Dada) in the context of WWI - progress has led humans to an abyss of dada - During WWI, many artists migrated to Switzerland because it was neutral - Swiss movement of Dada emerges here, especially in Zurich, protest of the War and the society that allows it - Arp proposed a dada that was deeply self-reflective and resisted any attempt to re-iconize imagery - Arp produces this collage, one of about 20 he produced with the same title - In 1916, Arp became so frustrated by his classical training and its meaningless and anachronicity that he decided to destroy the sheet of paper by cutting it into cubes and threw the pieces on the floor - He’d realized the configuration of the scraps was more relevant than anything he had ever done - Connected to Duchamp’s use of chance and gravity - Referencing Mallarmé - Chance will get you out of the rut - The element that produces the work is ultimately gravity - Arp attacks traditional pictorial conventions and procedures - Leaves Hannover in 1935, fleeing the Nazis - Moves to Norway and builds another - Flees to England and makes one there - Relief sculpture that extends outside its frame, also a kind of collage - Took over his house: he removed the ceilings of his first and second floors - Accretion: adding of more and more - Beginning of installation art: house becomes the frame - Names it the “merzbau” - Merz is the name of his dada - Kommerz Bank: fragmented lexical structure - Fragmentation of language, assault on lexical structure of words - Subtitle of the work: The Cathedral of My Erotic Misery - Transforms family residence into a space reminiscent of German expressionist films - Melancholic arrest of expression, because it’s inside, in a private realm? Site of withdrawal, the anti-social? Recluse, exile, the mind? - Variety of materials, textures, surfaces  - Amasses contributions from all his friends, something from the BODY - Like relics of the cathedral? - Transition of the attempt or desire to get away from the traditional autonomous artistic object - Transgresses beyond the singular object by giving the articulated work of art an architectural dimension Suprematism - Ultimate answer - Epitome of painting - Literally ends representation in Western tradition - Does away with direction - Does away with transparency and reading depth - Does away with ambiguities - Most self-reflexive - Most rational object - The new icon - Icon of the new experience - Irrationality/rationality - Places it where an Orthodox Russian icon would be positioned - Non-rational - To suspend it across the corners of the room puts the viewer in a very different location vis-a-vis the art - Forces the spectator to consider the room itself - Why is it in the space of religion? - Malevich is aiming at new and fundamental at the same time - Modernist icon will replace the religion icon but will have the same function - Suprematis = supreme vision - Edges of square are not completely even - Almost redaction of representation itself - Black square obscures, negates all types of representation - What is lacking in his work is the dimension of process - No sign of brushstroke - Eliminated traces of making process - His places eliminates illusory bourgeois culture → see image where protestors are holding black square - Rozanova’s art is so radical - This painting is the most extraordinary painting in Russia - Quite unlike Malevich’s black square, which is self-referential - Also unlike Malevich’s black square, this has dimension - Unclear if it’s one green stripe or two white stripes - Title was given afterward - Figure + ground completely locked - Figure + ground = depth - abstract artists explore with this - Representation is seen to repress society - Role of art in relationship to the world - Art is a representation of the world? - Or world is a construction of art? - If you can represent an egalitarian virtual world, you can construct that in the real world - You don’t need an art degree to understand abstraction - Complexity must be learned - 3D in a 2D space: you have to learn to read it - You don’t need to learn these things when they are in the supreme form - There is evidence of how the painting is made - The spectator is reconfigures as they are supposed to identify with the making process: how would you do it? - Confronts the viewer with an immediacy - Reducing painting to its classic form - Purity - Basicness - End of constructivism and beginning of productivism - Constructivism: black square and vertical green line - artists imagining a world without hierarchy → creating, CONSTRUCTING a world - He is a constructivist, but this painting is not a constructivist painting Productivism - Propaganda poster that even the illiterate could comprehend - Russian revolution happens in 1917 - Russian avant-garde is trying to find the role of art in this new world - Art for the masses - Productivist: art has a function Surrealism - Each section drawn by 1 person without seeing the others parts - Recognizing that as a group we all have a shared collective - Anyone can do this - Break the rational part of a composition - Outside rationality - Hard to rationally construct something like this - Record of unconscious experience in the same way a dream does - Dreams bring together lots of fragments - Tying it to surrealism + unconscious and the bourgeois order - Emphasis on chance - Mallarmé - - Semiotics and surrealism - Symbolic: the word “pipe” - Iconic: actual image of the pipe - Missing Indexical - Importance of the title? - What is the significance of the pipe? - Freud - surrealism  - Renders a critique of signs - Sign vs. reference - Sign = a perceptible or virtually perceptible item that stands in for something else - Referentiality = pointing to a referent; pointing to a thing or person that the image’s iconography refers to - Just a sign of the pipe - Image + word just signify a pipe, not actually a pipe Surrealism Focuses on a model of communication that intensifies social communication - Human unconscious - Becomes popular in advertising - Associates itself with Karl Marx too - Brings together freudian analysis with Marxist analysis - Psychoanalysis = individuality - Marxism = collectivity - Interested in individual psyche and the collective - Want to achieve something free of the rational thought of premeditation - Production of art that encourages chance - You don’t have to learn how to be a surrealist - Surrealists are not geniuses - Getting people to look anew - Not what you thought you were going to get - Estrangement = the displacement of the object, removing it from its expected context, “defamiliarizing” it. Once the object is removed from its normal circumstances, it can be seen without the mask of its cultural context. - Shocking the spectator - Make the world strange - Linking disconnected senses - Sexual connotation - Kahlo focused on trauma, dreams, and everyday life - Engaged in individual identity  - Frequently made multi-layered self-portraits because she didn’t have access to models - Connect to Nochlin because she didn’t have access to the art world - Needed to pose as a male model to interact with misogyny - Westernized woman - Haircut - Suit - Rituals of transition so that a woman can be a successful artist at that time - Even what was discarded (her hair, her previous identity) are rather animated - They look like they have become alive and almost threatening - Dialogue between the former self and the current self Indigenismo = a political ideology that emphasizes the relationship between the nation state and indigenous nations and indigenous minorities - Most important composition (of what?) - 4 part human figures with exaggerated body parts - Drawing from cubism - Lam was a close friend of Picasso - Figures seems to emerge from + fuse with the jungle - Fusing is very popular within surrealism - Figures evoke a dream - Stalks suggestive of sugar cane - Hints at Afro-Cuban mysticism - Type of work produced for Mexico - Nativist history under pre-colonial times - Totally fictionalized account - Working conditions and living conditions are mythicized - Among most sought-after artists in the US. widely perceived as the real answer to conspicuous absence of US avante-garde Figurative realism: national socialism and communist - Return to figuration after dismantling in early 20th century is seen as a call to order - Think about how the Mexican muralist project fits into this. Because it also returns to neoclassical forms of representation - Sources are all western;aesthetic based on greek and roman codes and conventions Harlem Renaissance: Meta Fuller - sculptor who studied with Rodin Ethiopia - only African country that was independent (at the time) - Meta Fuller: people are “awakening again” - This sculpture depicts Mary Turner rising from the mob - Mary Turner was lynched in a mob - Meta Fuller seeks to combat white supremacy through art - - Aaron Douglas moved away from realist paintings - With the funds from the Works Progress Administration, Douglas made murals - He made a series of murals about the “Aspects of the Negro Life” and this is the final one - Depicts a musician standing on a tire, showing the power of the African American as an artist and how he is supported by the industry of the North (symbolized with the tire) - At the same time, there is a tension between industrialization and music and art - There are many icons of Manhattan, the skyscrapers, and the Statue of Liberty right next to the musician, symbolizing the attainability and the proximity to freedom - Douglas’ murals were well known by the Harlem community and they advanced the Renaissance goal of pride  - Lawrence is an artist from Harlem - The “Migration Series” is a series of 60 small paintings - Each caption combines history, sociology, and poetry - The Migration Series shows the migration from the hardships of South to the industry of the urban North - The Scenes of travel, including this one, appear to be rising upwards or going in a certain direction - There is a sense of movement toward the future and the hope that that future brings - The series represents a move away from an oppressive context but not in an idealized way - It shows both the optimism and the difficulty - It also show the race riots in the north Movements List 1. Semiotics 2. Primitivism 3. Synthetic Cubism 4. Mallarmé and Chance 5. (Assisted) Readymade 6. Metaphysical 7. Photomontage 8. Weimar Dada 9. Anti-fascism 10. Zurich Dada 11. Suprematism 12. Productivism 13. Surrealism  14. Indigenismo Constructivism - Role of the artist changing - Akin to the role of an engineer Productivism - To make a propaganda ad - Illiterate masses - Agit-prop 5-6 sentences - for 20 minutes?? No rubric Backdrop of this whole midterm is interwar period Cubists make a painting with rules, like a machine Synthetic Cubism - adds stuff from virtual spac Jump from Dada to Surrealism Dada - break down fragment Surrealism - the unconscious, Freud, - What to do when all of the other types of art have failed → subconscious Bonheur de Vivre vs. The Jungle - Depicting nature - How is nature being idealized? - Matisse focused on appropriating culture, stepping out of his day to day life to create a utopian fantasy - What is the role of women? - Lam is returning to the narrative that he believes as home - How does an Afro-cuban artist use primitivist forms? - Fusing: are they coming from or to the jungle? - Welcoming/not welcoming? Still Life with Chair Caning vs. Bicycle Wheel Black Square vs. Vertical Green Stripe - Figure/ground relationship - Malevich: very clear that you have a black square on top of a white background - With Vertical Green Stripe (title given afterwards): total collapse of the figure/ground: what is the figure? What is the ground? - If there was a border around Vertical Green Stripe, there would have been more of figure/ground - Also about the process - You can see the process in Black Square, whereas you can’t see the process of Rectangles Arranged According to the Laws of Chance vs. Exquisite Corpse Hannover, Merzbau vs. Model for the Third International - Private vs. public The Meaning of the German Salute vs. Pretty Girl - Both mechanistic Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair vs. Mary Turner - Representation of women - Changing role of the woman artist - Kahlo: the new woman, her haircut, Westernized suit, masculine presentation - Fuller: seeing a different concern with lynching and mob violence - Kahlo was self-taught whereas Fuller learned from Rodin