Download - Week 11 Lecture, 20th Century
History of 20th Century Art
1960-64
The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence…
Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art…
It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained, however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. For flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art.
-Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, 1960
Mondrian
Greenberg’s Evolution of Modernist Painting
Manet
Monet
Cezanne
Picasso
1960
• How does Louis’s Saraband reflect Greenberg’s characteristics of modernist painting?
• Almost purely optical (resists tactility of Pollock’s work)
• Shimmering, translucent veil created by dripping down side of canvas
• Removes artist’s hand• Is Greenberg protecting high
modernist art from the emerging Pop Art movement (aka kitsch)?
Is Pop Art anti-modernist? Is it a joke on modernism?
Morris Louis, Saraband, 1959
Roy Lichtenstein, Brushtroke with
Splatter, 1966
LIFE magazine 1949 (Pollock)
1964 (Lichtenstein)
What makes an artist “great”? What makes him (or her) awful?
Terms used to describe (and ridicule) Pop Art:
• deadpan• Neo-Dadaist • plagiaristic• kitsch
• unoriginal• ironic• banal• cool
• Part of exhibition “This is Tomorrow” organized by the Independent Group in London
• Collection of artists and critics, including Lawrence Alloway, who coined the movement’s name, “Pop”
• Found artistic possibilities in the spectacle and American consumer culture
• To challenge conservative British art establishment
• This exhibition consisted of 12 exhibits, designed by 12 different teams, each made of a painter, sculptor and architect
• Group 2 (including this collage) showed “utopia of capitalist spectacle” including popular objects (jukebox) and pictures (Marilyn Monroe)
1956 – Pop in the U.K.
Richard Hamilton, Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956
POP! “pop-psychological parody of postwar consumer culture” – Art Since 1900
Richard Hamilton, Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956
Dad as bodybuilder with Tootsie Roll Pop (as Phallis? Fetish?)
Al Jolson in blackface in The Jazz Singer
Mom wearing pasties and lampshade for a hat
Framed cover of Young Romance Comic (forerunner 0f soap opera)
Ford emblem (as family crest?)
Hoover vacuum ad
telescopic view of the moon
• From 1961-65, Lichtenstein made series of paintings based on comic books
• Known for these works though also devoted much of career to updating old masterworks (Monet, Cezanne)
• Interested in simplicity, unification, clarity of vision, questions of form
• Criticized both for content and process
1960 – Pop in America
Roy Lichtenstein, Popeye, 1961, oil
Elzie Crisler Segar, Popeye the Sailor, ca.1930, comic strip
Content
• appropriatedpopular image• brought “low”art form (comic)into “high” artcontext
Process
• appropriated image• seemed to directly copy (but didn’t)• sketched panels, projected and traced sketches• Thick contour lines, primary colors Benday dots
So, is Pop Art Anti-Modernist?
• Lichtenstein interested in new “possibilities for painting”
• Experimenting with modernist form using an unconventional process
• “Lichtensteinized” modernist issues (brushstroke, flatness, the grid, the readymade)
I don’t draw a picture in order to reproduce it—I do it in order to recompose it. Nor am I trying to change it as much as possible. I try to make the minimum amount of change. - Lichtenstein
Edouard Manet, Dejeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863
Marcantonio Raimondi, Judgment of Paris, 1520
Lichtenstein, Rouen Cathedral, 1969
Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1894
• Images from magazines, manipulated and collaged them in painted form
• From 1957-60, earned living as a billboard painter (sign painting techniques applied to large scale paintings)
• Appropriation of popular imagery (’49 Chevrolet, JFK campaign poster) with commercial design
• Kennedy assassinated in 1963
James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1960/61-64, 12’
The face was from Kennedy's campaign poster. I was very interested at that time in people who advertised themselves. What did they put on an advertisement of themselves? So that was his face. And his promise was half a Chevrolet and a piece of stale cake. -Rosenquist
1960 – Pop in America
Rosenquist, F-111, 1965
• Ruscha moved to L.A. from Oklahoma to study at Chinouard (now Cal Arts)
• First worked in advertising• Involved in Ferus Gallery and
included in groundbreaking Pop exhibition New Painting of Common Objects at Pasadena Art Museum (both organized by Walter Hopps) in 1962
• Applied Johns’s interest in signs & Duchamp’s interest in wordplay to a study of popular signage, language and typography
• Signs as abstract forms• Isolates language to heighten
ambiguity & mystery
1960 – Pop in America
Ed Ruscha, Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbQjmKA1V7o Ruscha, Rain, 1970, gunpowder and pastel on paper
The CoolSchool (clip)
1961 – The Blurring of Art & Life
• Oldenburg opens The Store in New York’s East Village (sells painted handmade plaster sculptures ranging from $25 - $800)
• Interested in art as ordinary commodity• Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Theater
performs Happenings there• Kaprow installs Yard in NYC courtyard
(fills with tires)• Both artists interested in ephemeral &
collaborative art events (Happenings), and in reusing discarded urban detritus (like Dubuffet)
These things [art objects] are displayed in galleries, but it is not the place for them. A store would be better. Museum in bourgeois concept equals store in mine. - Oldenburg
Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961
Claes Oldenburg, The Store, 1961
The Legacy of Jackson Pollock
Pollock…left us at a point where we mustbecome preoccupied with and evendazzled by the space and objects of oureveryday life…Objects of every sort arematerials for the new art: paint, chairs, food,electric and neon lights, smoke, water and
Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock painting, 1950
Allen Kaprow, “Un-artist”
• Interested in blurring boundaries between art & everyday life
• To challenge all artistic conventions• Known for his Happenings• Loosely scripted events, no logical
narrative or point• Characterized by ephemeral (cannot be
reproduced), whimsical, seemingly spontaneous nature
• Integrated multiple media, allowed for chance occurrences & audience participation
• Context/environment very important• Resists becoming a commodity• Household included men building towers,
women nests; smoke-flares throw; jam licked off a car and set ablaze (no audience present)
Happenings are events that...happen...they appear to go nowhere and do not make any particular literary point. -Kaprow
Kaprow, Household, 1964
Hugo BallKarawane
1916Dada
performance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXdPAnNQIcg
Household Revisited2008
…and everyone can do it. - Fluxus credo
Everything is Art…George Maciunas, Name Cards of Fluxus Artists, 1966
• George Maciunas, leader of Fluxus, organizes series of exhibitions in Wiesbade, West Germany
• Of all 60s movements, Fluxus was the most open, international, experimental “non-movement”
• It resisted prevailing styles, pop and minimalism
• Considered every action a form of art, from washing one’s hair to making a salad (Alison Knowles)
• A DIY aesthetic, it valued simplicity over complexity
• It organized concerts, festivals, performances, publications, mail art, artist books, actions
• It insisted on viewer participation
1962 – More Blurring of Art & Life: Fluxus Emerges
Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963
1962 - “Everything is in flux…everything flows” (Heraclitus)
• Maciunas associated fluxus with human physiology, molecular transformation, and chemical transformation
• Neo-dadaist?• East Meets West• Feminist
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Kyoto, Japan, 1964
Shigeko KubotaVagina Painting
1965
Valie Export, Tapp and Tastkino (Pet and Paw), 1968
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3dsvy_yoko-ono-cut-piece_shortfilms
Fluxfests
• Multi-player games with Flux-Sports component
• Included activities like the "Slow Speed Cycle Contest" or the "Handicap Run," whose participants ran "while drinking vodka, eating porridge, eating ice cream, spitting… etc..”
• Reflected Maciunas’ belief that Fluxus events "must be simple, amusing, [and] concerned with insignificances”
• An exhibition in a hat (walked around Paris from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m.) became portable gallery
Art is what makes life more interesting than art.-Robert Filliou
Robert Fillou, Galerie Legitime, 1962
Fluxus Performances
Alison Knowles, Newspaper Music, 1967 (rendition)
Nam June Paik, Zen for Head, 1962 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J41s_VnKrcM
Nam June Paik, Unprotected Music: Solo for Violin (rendition), 1962
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FgAT4pH21w
I always thought I'd like my owntombstone to be blank. No epitaph, andno name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say‘figment.’ - Warhol
1964 – Warhol
Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait (in Drag), 1981
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M--oHOn4a0U
• From Pittsburgh, PA, born in 1928• Studied at Carnegie Institute, then
moved to NYC• Became successful commercial
illustrator (Vogue, New Yorker)• In 1960, decided to become an
artist and made first paintings of Batman, Popeye, Dick Tracy
• 1962-63 was watershed year—first Campbell’s Soup cans, first “Disaster” and Marilyn paintings, and first films, “Sleep” and “Kiss
• Began The Factory in 1963 (until 1967)—transformed painting into a mass produced activity
1964 – Warhol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErSj1GkBF3M
Andy Warhol, Sleep, 1963
• From “Death in America” series• Photos taken from news sources
(often not printed)• Depict car accidents, electric
chairs, civil rights demonstrations• Many reflect controversial current
events/issues• Simulacrum or social critique?
1964 – Warhol
Warhol, White Burning Car III, 1963, silkscreen
The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel. —Andy Warhol, 1975
If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.