art 315 Issues in Contemporary Art

Hey everybody. Okay, there we go. I was going to say we add a simple majority. So I was going to start and then we lost someone. But they’re back now. Okay. So I’m assuming everybody can hear me. If you can’t just type up let me know in chat. I’ve got it I’ve got it open. So today I’m going to go over some technical things, technical ideas. I’m not sure that that’s the right word for it. But a lot of terminology, a lot of what we might call like theory type stuff. Basically though, what we’re going to be doing is looking at my idea of stories and why stories operate it like they do. What are they, how do they work? And why am I giving them so much important it? So we’re going to sort of break, break this down, and look at a number of different ideas. I have described. Hang on. We go. Okay. Where’s my okay. Now my chats. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Boy, you’ll leave this for a week and you lose everything. Okay. So let me start by asking you. I have a bunch of images here. If I ask you to tell me to pick out the Lamborghini, which one is it? Somebody? Somebody just either pipe up or or write it in. Okay. Adam Adam says Lamborghini is top left. Adam, can you tell us a little bit about your process? How did you decide that that image is the Lamborghini? Can you maybe talk? And instead of type? Or does anyone disagree with Adam actually. So it’s the it’s the only car and I know Lamborghini car. Okay. Okay. Good. So first of all, you need to know that a Lamborghini is a car, right? And there’s only one car image up there. Now. I don’t actually know what a Lamborghini looks like. So I don’t even know if that is one or not. But let’s think about that process. What did I just say? I just said that I don’t even know or I don’t really know what a Lamborghini looks like. Right? So that means in order to identify something, I have to have some kind of knowledge of that thing, right? So what Adam said is that he knew the Lamborghini is a car. So he had in his mind, let’s say a picture of a car, right? And he compared all of these images appear on the screen to the image in his mind and said, which one matches this? Right? So that’s sort of the process that we go through. That’s how, that’s how things begin to take meaning, right? We learned that something is one thing. And then as we encounter new things, we can compare them, right? We can say, yeah, that looks like a car. I don’t know if it’s a Lamborghini or not, but it’s a car. I don’t know. There are no other cars up there. So it’s like if I were to ask you for the daffodil, right? If you know flowers, you might say there’s no daffodil there. Or if you know that the daffodils a flower, but you don’t know what it looks like. You might, you might pick the rows. Okay. So the idea is, we’re in a sense, right? We spend our lives collecting data. And our brains, store that data. And then we use it to understand the world around us, right? Makes sense. Here’s another example. F I said, which one of these images represents pride? Right? So that’s a much more abstract idea. You can’t necessarily relate. The concept of pride with a concrete image. But given your life experience, the things that you know, quote unquote, we’re going to talk about knowledge tonight also. Based on your life experience in what you know, you know, different things could represent pride to you. I was thinking the trophy because it represents an accomplishment of some sort, right? It shows a trophy is meant to be a signifier. We’re going to talk about that. That word can be a signifier of accomplishment. And in fact, competition and defeating competition, right? You don’t just earn a trophy for being one person in some event or whatever. Okay, So you follow me. How we give meaning to images that we encounter has everything to do with what we’ve learned or images that we have learned previously. Okay? And what I’m talking about very broadly, how come my buttons are working. Wait a minute. That’s weird, Okay. When I’m talking about very broadly is semiotics. Some of you may have come across that term before. Just generally speaking, we can think of semiotics as the study of signs. Okay? And this is from just Encyclopedia Britannica. And the a person in the picture there, his name is Ferdinand de so sure. He’s a linguist. And he talks about language and meaning and which is how we get to this idea of, of signs. Okay? Okay, what does all that mean? I use the term signifier before. So we have in semiotics the terms signifier and signified, okay? And this relates to linguistics. Obviously because they’re referring to language. Okay. Anybody familiar with this piece? Anybody know it? Yes, it’s the chairs. Great for Michela. Michela, you want to say something about the chairs? Can you tell people about them? You hear me? Yeah. I can hear you. When I did this was for I’m blanking on the, on the lecture class again, one of the core classes. But basically there were a bunch of, it was these three pieces in a museum. Defined as our ADA is basically the representation of a chair, whether through a definition, a physical, tangible, or an image. There the different parts of semiotics like icons, someone, signs and symbols, right? Right, Exactly. So in this example, when I say the signified, we might think of the object itself, right? Which is the chair, which is in the center. I should say. This piece, by the way, is by an artist named Joseph coast sooth KOL ACTH. And it is considered a kind of classic of conceptual art. And we talked a little bit about that last time. Conceptual art is a genre of art that focuses on the ideas. I like to say that. And I may have said this last week, so excuse me if I’m repeating myself. All art is conceptual in that all art has an idea of some sort behind it, right? But when I say conceptual art, I’m referring very specifically to a genre of art in a period of time and actually certain artists. So conceptual art, as it is for me, an art historical term. And I’m making a distinction between conceptual art and art that is conceptual art. Art that has a concept. Okay. Anyway, I was saying, so the term signified tends to or does referred to, in this case, the object of the chair. Now, the signifier is the way we indicate the signified. Okay. So I mean, I actually could say that my pointing at the object is a signifier, right? But more commonly we use words as signifiers. So the word chair. In this case, whether spoken spelled whatever. Chair is a signifier for the object that we sit on, which is the object that’s in the middle of this piece. Okay. So if that is my signified, the image of the chair, the photograph of the chair that’s on the left of your screen is a signifier, as is the word chair and the definition. Which is not really legible in this slide. But that’s what that is on the right. Okay. So that is signifiers and signified. And that essentially is how we communicate, right? That’s how language operates. Language operates as a system of signifiers and signified. And that’s how we communicate because we have a shared understanding of signifiers. Right? Like if I say chair, we may all have different images of chairs in our mind. But we essentially all know what a chair is, right? But the chair that I’m thinking of might be Coast It’s chair here. Or it could be, you know, a big fluffy chair at my, at my grandmother’s house or it could be a chair in a waiting room. Again, it all depends on your kind of life experience. The signifier is is sort of dependent upon you. But the signified is a shared understanding among us. And when I use the word us, I’m referring to culture. Okay. And I’m going to get to that in a second. So this shared understanding of signifiers, actually we’ll call that culture. I think maybe I want to wait to get to Leah tired until after we get through Stuart Hall. So remind me if I forget to come back to Leah type. So this is from Stuart Hall. He is a scholar, actually considered a kind of founder of cultural studies. And in cultural studies, one of the main issues is this idea of shared signifiers. Rate is like, how do we, how do we communicate? Like what is it that makes us a culture? And so he talks about how signifiers come to be. And he gives us different processes by which that can happen. But he also talks about images specifically. Although you could argue that words as images also go through this process. But regardless, it’s interesting to think about that. Let’s use chairs, an example. So the image of the chair is a reflection of a basic reality. The chair itself, the object, right? And then we can use the word chair to refer to a chair without ever having a chair present or even really having an experience of a chair. Right? And then number three, what that means is that I can have the word chair and understand what it refers to without ever having experience of an actual chair. Okay. And then number four, the, the kind of final conclusion about that is that the real object, the chair itself, is irrelevant compared to the idea or the signifier chair, which we all know. Okay. You follow me. And that number 4 is civil Akram, which is the reading that you have on by boat yard. And we’re going to talk about that. So I mean, one of the things we’ll actually okay, let me go back to an example that I’ve used before that I think is helpful to understand this is my house cleaning product advertisement, right? So if I have this necessitates a print ad, so it’s a single image. I have a single image promoting a house cleaning product. And that image. And number one here, it is a reflection of a basic reality. It shows a picture of a clean home. So let’s just assume that most of us would like to have a clean home, right? Or at least we have a sense of of what a clean home looks like. Number two, that image, that ad can become so prevalent. And the idea of that clean, a clean home become so prevalent that it becomes an ideal. Meaning. That’s what people think of when they think of a clean home, right? Like, you know, I don’t know. It’s all white and shiny. Okay. And so in number three, this ad now that has taken on this meaning of what it means. You know, it it tells us now what it means to have a clean home that masks the absence of the actual cleaning home, right? It doesn’t matter if that home exists or nine. But we all think it exists. Not only do we think it exists, we want it to exist. It’s an ideal that we now believe it. Okay? So the image. Now has this like amazing superpower, right? It started as just a kind of a reflection of something. And then it became came a way to represent it, to represent that thing. And then that representation has now become a kind of ideal. All right? And this idea of the image as not really representing something tangible anymore is what we call symbol Akram. Okay. I’m going to talk about that more when we when we get to budge yard. So I did say that we’re doing a lot of kind of like theory, kind of terminology stuff tonight. And I don’t necessarily need you to know the terms themselves. I mean, it’s up to you, however you learn and like to retain knowledge. But for me it’s, it’s the ideas that are important. So like if you’ve never used the term symbol Akram, that’s fine. But understand this idea of how an image begins to represent an ideal that does not necessarily correspond to reality. Okay? That’s, that’s the idea of a similar diagram. Okay? So Stuart Hall talks about representation, and this is like the image. The image taking on meaning, right? He gives us the three theories of representation, reflective, intentional, and constructionist. The reflective approach believes that meaning lies in the object. That language functions as a mirror. It reflects true meaning as it already exists in the world. Meaning that we’re chair. Write the word chair. The image of a chair can only refer to the object that we understand as a chair, a kind of, I don’t know. Whatever power of the universe exists to define these things. That power has ordained the word chair to refer to this particular object. Okay, so for whatever reason, the the representation, the signifier, reflects a kind of true existence. And you can see that that’s already kind of problematic. Speaker author, intentional approach. The speaker author imposes his or her unique meaning on the world through language. Words mean what authors intended them to me. So we might as a group, right? If I say, I don’t want to use the word chair anymore. Instead, I’m going to use Harold. Okay. I don’t know if there’s a herald in this class. I don’t think so. But I don’t mean herald the person. I mean herald the name. Okay. So instead of chair, we’re going to we’re going to say Harold. And we all in this group are going to agree that that’s, that’s the signifier that we will use for this object, formerly known as a chair. Okay, so that’s intentional. The, the, the previous one implies that there can be no other signifier. Because the signifier and signified are attached in whatever way the universe has, has determined. In an intentional approach. You know, I, as an individual, can impose my my meaning on a signifier. Okay? And then the third is things don’t mean like nothing has intrinsic or inherent meaning to it. We construct meaning using represents, representational systems. And the interesting thing there is we must not confuse the material world where things and people exist and the symbolic practices and processes through which repetition, meaning and language operate, blah, blah, blah, meaning is not inherently exist in things we members of a culture construct meaning. So it takes the intentional approach to the next step that I was describing that. So I, as an individual may say, we’re going to use the name Harold or the word harold to refer to what we previously called chair. Right? And then we as a group, all agree. Then Harold is thereby, it’s constructed. Harold is constructed as a meaningful sign for this particular object. But what’s really important there is the we of this. So the last, the last line there. Members of a culture construct meaning. Okay, So it’s shared, right? The importance of the signifier is that it is shared. The meaning is shared among a group. And then this is just a diagram that I came up with. To sort of explain all of this. At the very bottom, we have sort of the idea or the thing itself, which is represented by some sort of sign, might be a word, it might be a photograph, might be an image of whatever. And then the way that, that image, that representation takes on meaning is what we call the signifying practice. Okay? I mean, it, it seems like a kind of technical term, but really it’s just. Saying, you know, how do we understand what things mean, right? And basically, you could come up with a lot of, a lot of ways that happens. School is not the least of them were tied where literally taught what things mean. Right? And then when all of that is shared, we, we say that we form a culture. So the diagram is a shared system of codes are values which is not incorrect. But may be. Given what we’re talking about. You might want to think of it more as a shared system. A shared understanding of signifiers, okay, which I suppose there’s another way to say system of codes or values. But because we’re using this terminology, a shared understanding of signifiers, I think, is a good way to think about culture. Okay, So when Stuart Hall, as a scholar is involved in cultural studies, he looks at all of these aspects that I’m talking about here in this, in this diagram. So every aspect of sort of how things have representation assumes meaning is the subject of cultural studies. Ok. So interestingly, if we think back to Mr. Greenberg and this idea of the avant-garde and name what, what we think of the avant-garde artists as doing. Rosalind Krauss points out that the idea of originality is very much a cultural value that has come out of modernism, right? Modernism’s the one that thinks that the artist needs to be this particular way through this special, this genius, this talent, whatever. And that the originality of this artist person is what makes the work original. Which is what then makes it avant-garde, which will then propel our culture forward. Okay? Essentially, so when you see people. Signing their names really big. At the bottom of a painting or a drawing. What it is claiming is this idea that rather than crowds to talking about that big signature is claiming originality as the artist, right? Right. I mean, think about it. The whole point of signing your name we obeyed is that you’re saying I made this right and to somebody that maybe meaningful, right? Somebody not just your mom cares that you, a particular artist made this work. All right. I’ll tell you a funny story. I don’t know if you’ll find it funny. I made a painting for a benefit option for a non-profit organization. And typically I signed my work on the back. I don’t like to see signatures on the front because I consider them to be visual elements. For, for the most part, I find them distracting. But also I very consciously disagree with this idea that the signature of the artist makes the work valuable or are meaningful in any way. Anyway, so I did this painting and assigned it on the back as I usually do. The sponsoring organization contacts me and says, You didn’t sign your painting. And I said, Yeah, I did. It’s on the back. And then they said, Oh, yeah, but, you know, people one the painting signed on their front. And I said that’s not what I do. I I don’t know what you want me to do because I did sign it on the back. And I was actually quite far from from where my painting was at this point. And I said, well, you know, I can’t possibly come and sign it. And then the woman said, Well, can we sign it for you? And I think I probably laughed out loud. I think it was email so she couldn’t hear me. She denies laughing at it. But I said Sure. Go ahead and go ahead and sign it. Right. Which I think is completely hysterical because they’re signing my name is completely contradictory to why you would want the artist’s signature on the front of a piece, right? I mean, anyway, there’s an irony there that’s just, that’s just too funny. So the point here. Is that this idea of originality and of the artist as being original. This is all a signifier that really took hold. And it really assumed meaning through modernism. Okay? And it just, so this is what we’re going to call a story. This is a narrative of who the artist is. Okay? And then what we’re seeing with the postmodern artist is a kind of refutation of that idea. You know, I don’t have to be special, I don’t have to be original, I don’t have to be brilliant and I have to, I don’t have to be solitary. Rate. I can be who I am and still be an artist. So that is one example of that. Okay, so I’m going to go into this whole process now of I mean, if we have a signifying process, maybe we can talk about a D signifying process. I haven’t thought of that before. So what happens with postmodern artist is essentially they begin to dismantle these stories. Are these narratives that have created meaning for various ideas. So this like originality of the artist is one thing. That example. And you are right with his prints. Like he certainly did not think that that kind of originality was necessary to him or to the work that he wanted to make. Okay, So we looked at some of those artists last time. But I want to say that like in the 1960s, in particular, the real pioneers and postmodern art were the feminist artists. And I think for me, one of the ways it, one of the ways that I think about this is with the old feminist slogan. The personal is political. Okay? I don’t know if you all have heard that. But the point being that these women artists are saying vary. Explicitly that the story of modernism or the story of modernist artist does not apply to them that their whole life experience is so opposite of that. And in effect, they were excluded, right? I mean, they literally were excluded in that. We’re talking about male artists primarily, right? But the 1960s, we really see Feminism kind of start to break with these old ideas about art. And feminist artists are not just expressing their own realities, their own experiences, but they’re really changing what art is for kind of society, very broadly. Okay. So anyway, I have a quote here for you about early feminist art. And if you’re familiar with the waves of feminism, we can call this early, early stage in postmodern feminist art as essentialist. Okay? Essentialism is basically means that we boil down a thing or an idea to an essential core are an essential meaning or implication. And what the essentialist feminist position staked out was this idea that women are different from men. All right? And that you cannot apply these rules that you have laid down is essentially for men, right? Historically. And expect it to apply, to expect these rules to apply universally to women as well. Okay. And there you see patricia Matthews who wrote this the last, that the women have different expectations from and responses to human experience. And that is why we see, well, there’s a couple of things. So what, what the early feminists, early feminist artists focused on then was asserting their kind of womanhood or their identity as women. So we see a lot of images like woman centered images, okay? This is Georgia O’Keeffe might be familiar with her vaginal looking flower paintings. She actually never considered herself, or at least never labeled herself a feminist artist. But her work, because it did look very vaginal, was kind of appropriated by feminists and used as a way to talk about women’s identity. It’s more Georgia O’Keeffe. So gee, I wonder what that could be. Anybody familiar with this work? I’m trying to remember the year. So this is not 1960s, this is later. This is a ceramic insulation. And I can’t believe I’m blanking on earning Judy Chicago. And it’s called The Dinner Party. And what she’s done is she’s created a dinner party with unique individual place settings for women in history. And she’s tried to create the place settings so that they represent the woman who’s sitting at that particular place. I believe this one is Emily Dickinson. And I could not quite sure how that’s Emily Dickinson, but I do believe that that’s the case. So here’s the full installation of the dinner party. You can see all the different place settings. This was recently, if you look it up, it was recently recreate it. I think this may have been early 70s originally, and then recently within the last three years or so. They put it back together again and exhibited it. Exhibited it in New York. I can’t remember the venue. But you can look that up. So again, these are place settings, right? Like plates and stuff for individual women in history. And that one that I said was Emily Dickinson. And here’s another one we mentioned before. This is the Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi. So again, this, this work reflecting this essentialist feminist position, celebrating the qualities that are uniquely woman, right? So we do see a lot of vaginal imagery, a lot of A lot of emphasis on the female and the female form. This is, and you can read that it Susan B Anthony. So in addition to the ceramics, the artists also created these like kind of placemats. So that’s pretty cool. This is Eva Hesse. This, I’m trying to remember the name of this. Wait, let me yeah. It’s not it has to do with gynecological exam. I can’t remember. I’m sorry. I can’t remember the name of the piece. I’ll have to look that up and let you know. But so, you know, kind of implying woman, woman centered imagery. But in it’s titled definitely letting you know that that’s the case. And again, and again here. This is also Eva has. So this is a sculptor named Louise Bourgeois. And she has a lot of these fun pieces. I think I am a quote from her coming up. Yeah, here it is. I I, I love this. So she says everything I’m interested in is a personal problem and I have to see my problems and visual shapes before I can deal with them. There was a mounting tensions arising from my physical encounter with the physical material and out of it grows what I want to say. Okay. I’m just going to summarize this by saying that she’s talking about like dealing with her life, right? In her work. And that’s really what all of these women artists are doing. Fundamentally. It’s just that the things that they’re talking about in the way that they want to talk about them have not fit into earlier prescriptions of art that was dictated, that was dictated by, by men. Catherine is saying that she’s been, she’s looking at Louise Bourgeois work for inspiration. I mean, I just think that Louise Bourgeois is a really interesting person, incredibly prolific artist during her lifetime. But also just. I hate to use the word authentic because I think it’s so overused and it, it really plays into those modernists, tropes that i’m, I’m trying to dismantle for you. But I think she’s she’s really kind of sincere and expressing herself in her work. And and I and I appreciate that. And I also appreciate that there is a kind of tongue-in-cheek quality to the work. If you’re familiar with the art 21 series. It’s available online. Made by PBS videos of artists in their studios talking about their work. It’s perfect. They’re just short, like 50 minutes each. And there is one of Louise Bourgeois. I highly recommend it. She’s very interesting, very interesting person. So anyway, this piece, as it’s another work of hers, it’s called mammal rank, which refers, refers to breast. And I just thought it was funny that she made this piece and said that for her. It’s about her father because I, apparently he was a philanderer. And so she says that she created this piece about her father going from woman to woman. She imagined, I guess this series of breast that he would go from one to the next. And then this was another piece of hers. I’m not sure of the title on this one. So this is an artist named Nancy Spero. I think a lot of these that I’m showing you are, I’m mostly prints and drawings. This is from a larger installation piece called goddesses. And like we’ve been talking about, you can see here, what she has done is served excavated images from history that celebrate womanhood or women. This is another image from that work called goddesses. And you can see more images. These are scrolls, as I recall. Very tall, so kind of wall almost wall height. And this is this is the point. I think Nancy Spero is articulating for a lot of the women of this, of this time period. Just of this kind of political and artistic climate. Male artists never have to defend themselves since male specialization is never challenged. It is taken for granted as universal. Women artists will know when they arrive at equal status. That utopian day, when the art world takes for granted that our subjects are no more illogical or over specialized than those of male artists. It’s the problem of finding, inventing if necessary non male points of view of not using language and body language that are inherited from male priorities, which is what I have gone and done, right? So it’s like, it’s like asking the question, Is there a difference between a woman artist as opposed to an artist who is a woman, right? Certainly an issue that a lot of artists of color we’re also facing. So what Nancy Spero is saying is that a lot of the earlier work, there was a need for it to be qualified as a woman artist is kinda like, you know, our discussion about women. College women’s basketball versus, you know, just college basketball, right? And that’s what Nancy Spero sayings like, you know, art is just art until it’s made by a woman, then it’s like woman art. But rather than take that as a kind of negative labels, these women artists were really proud to assert themselves and tell their stories. So one of the, one of the other things that we see at this time, and also because of this emphasis on the qualities of women and then, and the focus on women as being physical or the physical characteristics of women. We see performance art really beginning to happen. Here. We saw some performance art last time. The hands haka, I’m sorry, veto a conchae. Staff and Chris Burden. Interesting, right? It was very much about kind of power, a very male oriented subjects. The masturbation. I mean, it’s just interesting that, that, that was the work that was sort of being shown and regarded as new. But the women were really breaking ground with performance. And I think this is, this is a really great point. Is that performance was so new, at least as a kind of fine art form, right? That it did not have this tradition behind it. This male dominated tradition of who, who was making the work and what the work was about. And also this art …