Today was our last lecture for the semester, and we really picked up the pace to finish the material.
We started by finishing our discussion of Modernist Art, starting with Pop Art and moving through Minimal and Conceptual Art. Pop art started in Great Britain, drawing inspiration and appropriating figures and characters from popular culture. In America, artists like Andy Warhol took everyday items and tabloid images and elevated them to a higher artistic status by reproducing their likenesses on silkscreen prints to comment on the societal ills of consumerism and the emotionally detrimental nature of celebrity. Warhol’s techniques eliminated any trace of his handiwork, a model borrowed and built upon by Minimalist artists later in the 20th century. Minimalist artists like Richard Serra were primarily concerned with playing with forms in space — often in a confrontational and precarious manner. Many minimalist artworks, like Serra’s 4-5-6 outside of our Museum, are site-specific and exist to inform and contemplate motion around a space. Conceptual Art is a more perfunctory affair, in that it places a greater emphasis on the idea of an artwork as opposed to its final product.
The ideas and philosophies of modernism began losing steam around the 1980s when the Deconstructivist philosophies of Foucault, Derrida, and Sartre were adopted by artists in droves. Deconstructivists contended that no text (i.e. work of art) could have any definite meaning, and is in a state of constant flux depending on its presentation and who is experiencing it. As artists began to abandon the ideas of a linear progression of art, artists began to create referential works that centered around certain ideas and issues. Anselm Kiefer, for example, created multimedia ‘paintings’ that harped on the trauma and psychological reconstruction of Germany following the Second World War. Other artists, like Martin Puryear, crafted abstract and simple sculptures meant to call into question the distinction between fine art and handicraft. In essence, art since 1980 has seen a panoply of individuals and groups making art about things and questions they are passionate about.