Category: Uncategorized (Page 5 of 48)

We started our class discussion with Pop Art, which stands for “popular art”. The artist that we looked at was Andy Warhol. His art was made by using a silkscreen and was mostly of popular culture images. He used his art to make comments on society. For example, his Cambles Soup Cans was a series of prints that commented on mass production. The cans had different flavors but appeared very similar in the final print.

We then spoke about the Post Modern Era. We started with an example by Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party. This is a triangular arrangement of tables with places for specific people. Their specific table setting is meant to emulate their work, and there are even more names on the floor. All of the name are women.

In our discussion on Pop Art, we talked about Andy Warhol. He used the silkscreen process, which involves projecting an image onto a screen and then using that screen to make prints, on images from popular culture. These remarked on different aspects of society. Cambles Soup Cans comments on mass production. It is a series of prints of very similar Cambles soup cans of different types of soup. It goes beyond the simplification and worsened health benefits to the deterioration of culture.

In the Post Modern Era which started in 1980, Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party. It is comprised of a triangle of tables set will places for specific people. The names for each setting is on a tapistry in front of it. On the floor which the table is raised on there are even more names. All of the names are of successful women which this work celebrates.

The changes in architecture reflected a rejection of the simple international style. Robert Venturi wrote a manifesto of this new architecture. His quote, “Less is a Bore” sums up this architecture. It was meant to be exciting and interesting while also drawing form traditional architectural elements, as seen in the Gugenheim Museaum. There are some elements which persist through this drastic change in architecture. Modern advances in architecture such as metal skeletal structure are still utilized.

In today’s class we wrapped up our discussion of Postwar art and then shifted into our final topic, Postmodern art. We discussed why the era has its specific title, as the works created in this period seem to have moved beyond the ideas of Modernism. We began with Pop Art, an interesting and colorful movement that used mass media to make important statements about consumerism and pop culture, led by its most popular artist, Andy Warhol. We then shifted to a discussion of modern art on campus with the works of Richard Serra and Sol Lewitt. We talked about the works of several postmodern artists, in which the political statements being made were more obvious than in most other periods. The breadth of work created is vast and unique, and shows the spread of art and architecture to areas previously left isolated.

For our final lecture class, we finished up Post-War art and then discussed Post-Modern era. Starting off with Pop Art, which often included images taken from mass media and slightly altered. Many works, such as Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe series, commented on the fascination with fame. Others, such as Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, commented on mass production and the “American Dream”. Sticking with the theme of minimal artist intervention came Minimalism, which served as a counterpart to abstract expressionism. Moving into the Post-Modern era, art left the notion of progress behind. The belief of deconstruction was important in this period, where there essentially is no fixed meaning of art. There was a multitude of different styles and media.

The Post-Modern Era marks a distinct break in the linear progression of art. Previously art movements were defined by being greater or do something newer than the generation before them. Now art is almost entirely about personal expression, artists are not trying to best those who came before them and are free to create art however they please. One of the most important artists of the post-modern era was Basquiat. Basquiat began as a graffiti artist with his iconic tag “SAMO@”, which was a play on the phrase “Same old…”. He would place his tag in different areas of SoHo which was the neighborhood where most art galleries were located in New York. He originally started off working in a group with 2 other graffiti artists but eventually started branching out and working on his own. This angered his partners and led him to abandon graffiti and switch to painting.

His Horn Players really highlights his graffiti roots in the way it is done a very rushed and messy style, similar to how graffiti is done. Basquiat draws a lot of inspiration from jazz music in this work. He is attempting to pay homage to a genre that black artists created. The work is improvisational just as jazz musicians often improvise while playing. He includes the names of 2 famous jazz musicians – Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. He also includes the word ornithology, the study of words, multiple times, as a reference to Charlie Parker’s nickname “Bird”.

Today’s lecture focused on art post-World War II and particularly looked at the new art scene developing in New York City. After the Americans became the liberators of Europe during WWII, there was a shift in the center of the art scene from Paris to New York. The new styles we see being born in this era are abstract expressionism and action painting or gestural abstraction. Jackson Pollock is the pioneer of action painting with drip technique. His style is the natural evolution of surrealism. He would meticulously drip and splatter paint onto a canvas on the floor. He had immense control over the paint, despite the wild look of the painting.  Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 is one of his greatest works and the viewer can clearly see how it is a record of a certain activity. The focus of the paint in the center and less paint, as it approaches the edge of the canvas, highlights the control Pollock had over the paint.

A contemporary of Pollock is William de Kooning who became a major abstract expressionist after immigrating to America. His Woman I is a part of a larger series of portraits of women. Similar to Pollock his works are all about gesture and how the paint was applied. With Kooning’s works, we see the total abolishment of figure and ground. The same attention is given to the figure as is to the ground and they feel on equal plains.

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.

In today’s class, we looked at post-modern art. In this era of art, there has been a shift to greater focus on themes and narratives. One part of class that I found very interesting was our discussion of Maya Lins vietnam memorial at the national mall in Washington DC. Up to this point I dont think we have discussed any memorials as art pieces. In highschool I spent sometime studying memorials as scultpture so I enjoyed coming back to that in this post modern era of art.

Additionally, I found it is interesting to discussion the works at the museum here at Colby. Since we walk past or interact with these installations so regularly, it is very easy to forget that we are constantly surrounded by modern art here at Colby.

One thing that came up in class was Jean-Michael Basquiat and his role as a graffiti artist. I have always been interested in graffiti and how it is a form of art. It is complicated since alot of graffiti, even if very impressive, is vandalism. I think it is hard to grapple with how we appreciate works like Jean-Michael Basqiat’s early graffiti.

We opened with some works by Picasso, and my favorite was debatably his most well-known: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. There’s something almost eerie about the work; it’s confrontational, with the subjects in full frontal. Picasso’s works were not representational (in the sense that they were not a reproduction of reality, not “mimetic”, as Prof. put it.) Instead they are free from “real-world” restraints of line color, and plane.

I found interesting Prof’s comment on the usage of stenciled text in analytic cubist works. As with newspaper clippings and bits of wallpaper, text serves as an element of reality snuck into the abstraction. We talked a bit about how this reflected Henri Bergson’s philosophy regarding the multi-faceted-ness of the experience. Cubism is painted from a multiplicity of vantage points, allowing the viewer to simultaneously experience individual perceptions of reality.

We moved onto Dadaism, and talked a bit about its upcomings. Following the first industrial war came the death of the ideal of progress through technological innovation, and the positive perception of industrialization in general. With this came an overall mistrust of human civilization and a retreat into the nonsensical.

Duchamp’s “Fountain” has been my favorite ever since I was little, but now even moreso. The way Duchamp took reduction to the extreme, reducing the role of the artist to pointing at a urinal and calling it art is incredulous and iconic.

Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas delves into the conflict within the cultural portions of her life coming from her Hungarian Jewish father and Indigenous mother. She also draws from the cultural artwork of her mother. She is inspired by retablos and Ex-Votos

The building Bahaus was made to house the elements of a school. This workshop like school embraced modernity. The building reflects this in its utilitarian elements combining both art and technology. One element of this is the metal infrastructure. This allows for the glass curtains which wrap around the walls.

During the Postwar movement, the capital of art moved from Paris to America. In America artists such as Jackson Pollock practiced action painting. This process involved a physical movement which the artwork records. In his work, Autumn Rythm he uses the drip technique in almost a dance like movement.