art 315 Issues in Contemporary Art

Hey, everybody, hear me. Okay. Sounds good. Okay. I guess I need a haircut on. Okay. First, your papers. I will be emailing those back to you. Make sure that when you look at them, you have track changes on as well as comments. I went through and spelling, word choice, grammar, all that stuff. I went ahead and just make changes. So you’ll see them in track changes. And then of course, comment. I got a little behind. I was hoping you’d get them back to you sooner. So I did push the due date. Just a couple of days, so I have it due a week from tonight, next Wednesday. But for the the half of you that are here, I can be flexible on that. So if that’s not going to work for you, just let me know and we’ll and we’ll work something else out. Okay. I do want to go over before I start. Some some of the issues that came up in a lot of the papers. A couple, some grammatical things, and then also just some more content, content oriented things. So okay, i’m, I’m going to give you a sentence and then somebody tell me. Somebody tell me what is what is wrong with the sentence, okay? As an artist, his paintings are among the best. What’s wrong with that sentence? Anybody? Or is nothing wrong with it? I suppose I kinda gave that away. But what’s wrong? What’s wrong with that sentence? No. By the way, extra credit to Catherine, Makayla, and Adam for the for the dog pics? No. No. It’s it’s a grammatical issue to structural issue. Any artist? Yes. Okay. So here I’m All Right. Jack is on the right track. When you mean his paintings are the subject. The subject of what? Right? As an artist, okay? So the, the structure of the sentence is, as an artist, karma. And then what I gave you was his paintings are considered the best, are among the best. Whatever I set. The beginning of the sentence is a relative clause, okay? As an artist, now, as an artist refers to what? Refers to the person, not to the paintings, right? So if I say as an artist comma, then my, my clause needs to refer back to the artist. So I would say as an artist, he or she made paintings that were considered among the best. Do you follow me? So there’s a relative clause that addresses the subject of a sentence. And the subject has to begin the independent clause that follows. Now that sounds technical, but think of it this way. When you have, when you have that relative clause at the beginning of the sentence, just think about what it’s describing, right? So if it, as an artist, I’m describing the person, then the, the independent clause that follows needs to be about that person, right? So I can’t say his paintings, I have to say the artist. Okay. Makes sense. Oh, okay. This one’s easy. Titles of artworks and exhibitions get italicized, just like books. Okay. And let me see. Oh, and then this is somewhat stylistic, but it just, it, it makes verb for better and clearer writing is when you can use the active voice as opposed to the passive voice. I’m sure that you’ve heard that before from teachers. Instead of saying, I don’t know, I should have had an example ready for you. Instead of saying something like the paintings are becoming widely, widely admired by the public. You can say, if you want to make, if you want to keep the paintings and the subject, you could say. The paintings have garnered a lot of admiration from the public, right? So good. Try to keep it to a subject predicate instead of like an IS or becoming more things like that. It just, it makes for a tighter, tighter construction. Less words, more succinct, more clear language. Okay? Or the other, the other thing that comes up a lot. And this is kind of related to the very first thing I said, which is that when you use this or that, be explicit about what it refers to. So if you have a sentence that says something like the artists and his, and his paintings are really famous. In Russia. This, this is why, this is why the museum is so rich. Know that, that’s not good. I should have given you an example. But the problem is, is that when you have, when you have a sentence that has all these different parts to it. And then you have this, you can, you referring back, your reader doesn’t know which of the things you just talked about that this refers to. Okay. Same with that and same with it. You can I mean, the problem with it is as a construction is that yes, you can figure it out. But if the reader has to figure it out, that means there’s a better way to word it. Okay. So think about that. I noted it whenever it occurred on on people’s papers. So you’ll see it in the comments. And actually, it did happen a lot. So you’ll see it if you did it. Okay. On to some content things. I think the biggest thing that I call people out on was the phrase, along the lines of artists have the right to work with any subject matter that they whine. Okay? In and of itself, that maybe is not a problematic statement. But the real issue is why dogs that, that’s, that’s what I was asking, is like, why, why do artists have that right? Is some might say, okay, it’s guaranteed by the Constitution, right? First Amendment freedom of speech. But, but, but you know, what we actually talked about in the first class was how the constitution and the values and things, everything that’s going on. You know, that the Constitution supports. Now, we can actually scrutinize all that and ask, you know, what, what makes itself. Okay? So there are a lot of statements made in the papers where people are making these really kind of grand, grand statements about art and artists and without establishing a foundation for them. So for example, to say that art is freedom of expression. Why is art freedom of expression? Right? You know, artists, personal. You know what makes our personal. Okay? So the, the thing is with statements like that, you’re basically assuming a kind of truth, right? And I’m asking you, how do you know that to be true? Right? You know, how how is it that essentially you can make that statement? Okay. So one of the things I, I I said also was that examples. And I’m sure you’ve been told this before also. Examples helpful that, right? So if you say art has the ability to change society, it can’t just sort of leave that hanging. You know, give me an example of a case where, you know, art had a profound impact on something in lieu of a kind of a historical or, you know, bigger kind of social example. I think personal personal examples are okay, right? I mean, I don’t have a problem with them. If nothing else, they help. Clarify what you mean by somebody. So if you say that art can change society. And the example that you have is a work of art that you saw and how it changed your opinion on a social issue? I think that’s fine, right? You can say, well, this was my experience and maybe other people will experience the same thing. Okay. So don’t just leave that kind of thing hanging there. I mean, obviously, the better kind of support for those statements are, or is scholarly support. Which means you’re referencing ideas that have already been sort of established and accepted. Not unlike the way science operates, right? So at readings from class are actually a really good way to do that. And, you know, the, the statements that I just addressed about are a lot of the things that you guys were saying about art are actually reflected in Greenberg if you think about it. Because this idea that the kind of rights that the artist has, the ability of the artist to change society. I mean, that’s all, that’s all quite, quite modernist. And Greenberg Ian. And just citing something like that, you know, citing someone like Greenberg helps to support your argument, right? Because essentially what you want to do with your writing is you want to show someone, want to show your reader, and you want to allow your reader to look at the evidence that you’re looking at, right? And have them evaluate it. Or at least see how you evaluate it and come to the conclusions that you come to write. You. You want to be able to say, I’ve taken all of these things into consideration. And therefore, I conclude this. Okay. Because otherwise then it is just sort of opinion. I, I don’t know if this is a great analogy, but like I keep thinking about sports conversations, right? You know, you can argue about people’s abilities, athlete’s abilities. Whose best, you know, who’s the go? Now that’s that. But like who’s the conversation always comes down to statistics, right? And what are the statistics doing? The statistics are supporting an argument. Like you can’t just say, well, he’s the greatest of all time because he has the best arm that we’ve ever seen. That. What does that mean? He has the greatest arm. So you want to talk about his passing yardage is touchdowns, all of that stuff. That is support for that opinion, right? And that’s the same thing that needs to happen in your paper. You want to show. And I’ll, I’ll make a science analogy also. I mean the whole point about like peer reviewed science journals, right? What they’re looking for is, can someone repeat the experiment and come up with the scene result, right? That’s, that’s the idea of science, that’s the idea of peer reviewed journals. Psych, How does that? Can I go through the same process and do I come up with the same result that that creates a kind of this idea of truth, right? Like it happens. And so what you want to do with the paper is similar. And this is why citations are really important. Okay, So you want to think about citations. If you’re citing something, the person reading needs to be able to use that citation and go exactly right back to the source where it came from and say yes or no, right? Because when you, when you quote something in writing, it’s out of context. You’re, you’re telling your reader what the context is. And they may want to go and look for themselves. Okay? Regardless, the idea is you need to present information in a way that someone else can sort of follow your process and come up with their own conclusions. You know, presumably they would be similar or not. But I mean, it’s not like science in that regard. That is the underlying goal. Okay? So I will send those to you. And then what we can do is if you have questions on my comments or anything that I did with your papers, you can try emailing me or if you would rather have a conversation we can we can zoom. Okay, Good. Just let me know. And we’ll and we’ll do it. Okay. Are there any questions about that? Okay. So okay, what I’m gonna do me shoot. I really wanted to show you this movie. So I am going to show the movie because your next paper involves this, this film. But if I do the lecture, what give me a show of hands? And this is not a big deal at all. It’s not a problem for me. If you would rather watch the movie on your own time. Give me a show of hands. Okay. So the problem is that I want to do a movie next week too, because your paper is going to involve both movies. So and tonight’s movie, okay. This is what I’m going to dip. We kind of did this before when I was on the road. So I’ll do it again. I’m going to kind of give you a summary of what tonight’s readings and stuff is about. And and then we’ll go to the movie. I did post everything online for you already. Do. Where’s Marie? I can know my PowerPoint is not open. That’s why. Lab and I can’t see. My PowerPoint is quitting on me again. Everybody go. There you are. Okay. Okay. Since I’m having PowerPoint issues anyway, let me just summarize. So last week we talked about semiotics, right? We talked about symbols, we talked about how things take on meaning. And if you were to think of the biggest difference, or at least a huge difference between modernism and postmodernism is that modernist believe that there is a meaning to things that is fixed. Okay? So that like tonight, idea of quality, the word quality to a modernist has specific criteria. In order for things to be said to have quality, they have to meet certain criteria. Post-modernists would say that this notion of quality is relative. Okay? And what we have when we started looking at feminist artists and kind of other artists, other with a capital O is that they are saying that the kind of meaning that modernist gave to the word quality excluded them. Okay, so this is, now if you think back to the feminists artists that we looked at and this whole idea that women, women’s experiences were not valued in the modernist kind of view of what makes art important, right? And so feminists were asserting their own experiences and the way they wanted, the way they wanted to make art in saying that it was valid and important. And so when we start to have that happen, we see other groups, artists from other backgrounds, asserting their identities and their experiences also. So the 60s, well into the EDs. We have women artists, artists of color, gay artists, artists with Identities that we’re not conventionally part of the modernist approach. Wanting to show their work and have it be value in the same way that other, other’s work was being value. Okay, I’m going to try my PowerPoint again. Oh, I have to share my screen. Okay. So the article that I gave you to start off essentially told he lays out this the debate or the question of quality. And really what ends up happening is that modernism gets equated with a kind of white male Western sensibility. And we have kind of the art world trying to embrace everybody else. Okay? So I mean, it sets up what I’ve really difficult problem because it’s like, all right, If you’re not kind of European or Western, white, male and straight, how do you include everybody else? Right? I mean, how can you possibly include everybody else? But that’s what happens during this time period. So what are the first exhibitions to do that was this one at the Pompidou Center, is called magician to the left there. And essentially brought in artists from other parts of the world that we’re not sort of considered part of Western culture. And you can see, it’s just like when you, when you say that, that’s what you wanna do, it really becomes a quite unwieldy project in terms of scope. Okay. But so these were artists from Africa. I think mostly from Africa because this was in Paris. Also, I think South America, Asia, basically nine non-European, non-Western countries. So artists that in a lot of respects were not recognized in contemporary Western art. Another show, this was in New York. That also did the same thing, but two very different in a different way. And it was called the decade shell. And it was shared among the the new museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem. I can’t remember the name of the Hispanic museum. It’ll come up here in a minute. But basically it was the same kind of idea. And this was Barbara Kruger we saw before. This is her this is her PPI. So the 1980s, if you’re familiar with, it, was the Reagan era. So super conservative. You know, in a, in a traditional conservative way, not the way conservative seem to be today. But there were a lot of issues in terms of social issues, social welfare, things like that. Where people felt that benefits were going to those who had money and those who did not were not, were not being served by the government. So anyway, the artists, here we go. So the collaborative was the New Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. And the artists. This is from the New Museum of annual report. 200 works by 94 hours of Hispanic, Asian, African American, Native American, and European heritage. So the exhibition with issues oriented rather than a stylistic overview, et cetera, et cetera. What SHE actually it’s none in the cover of the book, is it? So that the kind of subtitle of the exhibition is the new museum, a framework for identity in the eighties. So and you can see in the second paragraph, they had a decade Joe was addressed as it relates to larger issues of sexuality, race or religion, age, history, myth, politics, and the environment. So again, it essentially tried to include everyone that felt excluded from this kind of modernist prescription for art. So one of the artists that I want to start with is Jimmie Durham. And he’s an American Indian artist. Although you should. We could do a whole, a whole course on him. Really interesting person. He doesn’t really like any of the terminology. He doesn’t consider himself American Indianism can consider himself Native American. And basically he says, Why? Why should he let anybody label him? So he, he talks a lot about language. And you can see that this point here is that he believes that English is a language of colonial powers, right? Imperialism. And the vocabulary of it reflects that. And again, this goes back to this idea of semiotics, which is that we’re talking about language. And, and this goes also to my kind of thesis about storytelling. Great stories are told through language. And language is how we indicate meaning in language is how we understand things around us, right? But so if that language is somehow biased or tainted, we need to think about that and be able to allow for other, other ways of giving meaning and understanding. This was a screenshot that’s finding. Okay, So this is a piece of Jimmy germs. It’s called, there’s plenty more where these came from. And you can see that he just put together these objects and he’s given them labels. So there’s, there’s a close up. You can see red chalk spark plug curl, empty plant. But so this is funny, right? Because what he’s doing is he’s showing you how we label things. And he’s showing you how kind of arbitrary language can be. Like. Down here we have glass from Murano, the famous Merino glass from, from Venice. And then on the left side, those are the little piece that says Mark Diddy, which is why Tuesday? Luna? Yes, it’s Tuesday. But then he’s written under it, lucidity, which is Monday. Right? I mean, so he he’s totally He’s showing you things and he’s using language that maybe is approximate, but not quite what we, what we expect. And then you can see there’s a little writing at the bottom. I put this paint just to make the work more artistic. And then he has under that paint ink and words. And on the far right it says actually it is to hide a mistake. Okay, So aid. And actually a lot of the native artists use language a lot as ways to critique not just their situation, but 10 of the powers that be. So here’s one of the things that, so this is a list that Jimmie Durham came up, came up with. And essentially the vocabulary on the left is what sort of the mainstream applies to Indians. And then on the right is the terminology kinda for everybody else, right? So the terms that we use in our everyday language, he’s just he’s pointing out. That because of, because of their ethnicity, that different languages applied to Indians as opposed to kind of white mainstream society. This is a different native artists. Now his name is Edgar Heap, a birds. But you can see that he also uses the English language in his work. And you see the word natural there is for us backwards. There are a number of Native artist who do that with English. Again, as a way to emphasize how the language has affected their identities and their lives. This is also agar. And this is also agar. Sorry, I didn’t have my, uh, my chat open. I didn’t catch your comment, jack. I’m looking at it now. Yes. I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, this whole idea of semiotics. It, it might seem really theoretical, but if you think about it, you know, language is so important. And I’m not just talking about verbal language because images are also a kind of language right there also how, how we communicate, how we understand things, how we share meanings. For example, the issue that we have today. I mean we by we, I mean society. Well, English-speaking society. Where the with pronouns is like how pronouns can be inclusive versus exclusive. How someone who does not identify as male or female does not have a pronoun in English, right? I mean, I opt to use they. But that’s very confusing for people. Because then other people think I’m referring to a plural, right? Unless they’re, they’re used to that convention. And some people just don’t like the need for anything other than he or she. Really, languages is limiting as much as it allows us to communicate. It also limits how we communicate. For example, in the Philippines, we do not have gender pronouns. Third person singular is, is non-gender. So we don’t have, we don’t have that kind of confusion. This is true. I guess we could say that emojis are gender neutral in a way. Although it is interesting. I would say that if I had had to guess, I guess but I would’ve just assume that those emojis were male. But I mean, for no particular reason other than, you know, the male normative society in which, in which I’ve been raised. Yeah, That’s cool. Michela. So you can you can ask your mom about the language. Yeah. So I mean, it makes sense for the native native artists and native communities to be suspicious of English, right? And I don’t know if you’re familiar with this history of the what did they call them? They can believe I’m blanking. They, there were schools. One of the more famous ones was in Western Pennsylvania, actually somewhere around Pittsburgh, where they would take native children and basically teach them sort of Western ways. So they wanted them to sort of no longer use their native languages, but to use English. And then they top-down sort of English manors and English dress and essentially westernize them is this idea of westernizing. But yeah, so language, language plays a big, big part in that way. Okay, this is more, this is more Edgar, Edgar heap of birds. His work is very much like this and that it is oriented around verbal language. So actually, so these artists that I’m showing you, Jimmie Durham, aggregate birds and now this is an artist named Lorna Simpson. These are upside, these are from the decade shell. And so Lorna Simpson is an African American woman background in photography. Where you can see in this piece. She’s also using text. And what she is doing, juxtaposing text and image. As she’s asking us, or at the very least, she’s emphasizing a relationship between the text and the images. It’s like, if I see this image and these words, how do I, how do I understand the words? Right? Is the fact that I see this African-American woman impactful to how I, how I read these high, read these words. And I will say that for me. This image with the words lasso and news or is very, I don’t even know. It just, it gives me a very visceral response. Right? I mean, obviously it makes me think of lynching. Yes. So what the question is, this is, is it’s almost like Word associate, word association, but through different means of communication. It is because, so if I were to just see, well, noose might be a little different. I think I might I might given sort of my personal concerns, I would probably still think I would have lynching in the back of my mind when it went to news. But lasso. I do. Well also because it’s next to news. I would go to to lynching. I mean, all of this. I would go to lynching because I see African-American person there. And then, I mean, and she’s obviously playing on that, right. And then this in red, feel the ground sliding from under you, right? That’s what they would do. In a hanging, right? You would be standing on somebody and they would remove it. So this is another piece by Lorna Simpson. And this actually I think maybe point out more of what we’re talking about in terms of when you see the images, what do you think of? And then when you see her words, how does that relate to sort of your first impression? So I’m not going to read all of that, but I do have a close-up of the last panel which says, sometimes Sam stands like his mother. The idea here is that this, these images are, you’re supposed to be like very mundane, right? But you can see she has a black man. Dressed in white in this background, which emphasizes the color of his skin. There’s this really strong contrast in general. But the text is very mundane. And that’s her point, is that when we look at these images, we may think one thing. And I think she’s asking us if what we think or if what her text says fits into what we were thinking. And I think she’s assuming that it doesn’t fit. That we had other we had other thoughts in mind. This is another artist now her name is Adrian Piper. Adrian Piper is mixed race, African-American and white. And so her work addresses a lot of this dichotomy. Ideas of white and black. She has a series of drawings called vanilla nightmares. And she uses these ads from the New York Times. And she draws into them. So you can see she’s playing with this idea. We’re on this idea of white women and black men and this kind of sense of threat. This is more of her perineal and nightmares. So this is now an artist collective called grand theory. And again, this was the eighties. As I was saying, in the Reagan era, the velocity of economics was called trickle down. Meaning you invest in the, the upper levels of the economy and the prosperity at the top then trickles down. And history pretty much showed that wasn’t the case. That isn’t, isn’t how the economics worked. But what that meant was that if you were sort of lower down in the in economic status, you were not getting support for various things. And you might know that one of the really big issues that happened in the eighties at this time was eight. And the Reagan administration was very much criticized for not putting money into aids research. So there was a lot of activism around that. And this group called Grand Fury made it their, their business. To address the fact that the government was allowing tens of thousands of people to die from the disease. And you can see, like we talked about with pop art. And before, that the language of the art is that of advertising. So it is meant, it is meant to interact with everyday life and to show and to show what. It just show what is going on to people who might not, might not know about it. Right? So kind of like the Guerrilla Girls with their posters of information about women in the art world. So what grand theory was doing was presenting information around around eight aids research. And specifically what was happening to gay men at the time. So this is, you can see the hand print, right? So grand theory was doing this work through throughout New York. Again, like the Guerrilla Girls. It was in its kind of like, you know, Gorilla, gorilla are. But this one, just as an example. They actually took out an ad in The New York Times. So it’s a full-page ad. 1 million people with aids isn’t a market that’s exciting. Coming from a pharmaceutical company, right? So essentially, the argument was, aids was disproportionately affecting. Well, it was considered a gay disease first of all, and then it was disproportionately affecting men of color. And it was not considered a lucrative market, right? That’s what this New York Times ad is saying. So We have another artist’s collective called Group material. In-group material, similar to grand theory, taking up a kind of anti-establishment position. You’ll know that this idea of artists collectives is very postmodern, right? The modern, the modernist prescription was the solitary artist alone in a studio or in a mountain somewhere. You know, creating out of individual genius. Whereas now and this More activist oriented art world. We have artists coming together, working together, whose individual identities is less important to them than the issues that they’re working with. Her. This is a piece by group material. Oops, wrong way. I forget the name of this, but the so they had little house on the the lower west side or lowered lower west side. And what they did was they opened up the house neighborhood. And they asked people to share an important object of their, their lives and their culture that they could display very way to look at. So in a sense, this exhibition that they created in their house represented the entire neighborhood in which they lived. Because all of the people participated. And this, this was part of the same exhibition on the, on the walls. And I think this is very reflective of the eighties and how people lower, lower socio-economic kind of levels in society felt about their place. We get up in the morning with the mourning isn’t ours. We get ready for work, but the work isn’t ours. We go to the workplace with the workplaces and hours. I mean, essentially feeling very much disenfranchised from the entire social social climate and social structure. This was another, forget the name of this. But this was also organized by group material. This is meant to be, as you can see, it’s pretty obviously like a school. But it’s different art from other different artists, members of group material, just addressing all kinds of issues. Okay, so we started with feminist artist. We’ve looked at artists of color. We’ve looked at gay …