Art1100 LVA 22 Online

Art 1100

Joan Jonas“They Come to Us without a Word”U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2015

The New York School: a.k.a. Abstract Expressionism

•Action Painting

•Color Field

Modernist Sculpture

Movements Against Abstract Expressionism:

•Minimalism•Pop Art •Assemblages and Happenings •Earthworks•Conceptual Art

Chapter 22: Art Since 1945

Art after WWIIDecisively moves from Paris, to New York. Many European artists fled the Nazi regime and mixed with American avant-garde. By 1941, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst were all living in New York, where they altered the character and artistic concerns of the New York art scene.

New York became the cultural center for the arts.

Abstract Expressionism

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1949

The New York School: Action Painting

Abstract Expressionism:A continuation of European Modernism by combining Expressionism with Abstraction. Thus the painted gesture had to carry the expression.

•Looked to primitive myth for inspiration.•Used Jungian psychology’s idea of the collective unconscious. •Directness of expression was the most important quality.•Emphasized the artist’s gesture.

The artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches—and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources.

"The New York School" was not an actual school, but rather a nickname given to a hub of diverse artists that were exploring the creative subconscious with large scale canvases that are intended to engulf the viewer.

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)Lee Krasner (1908–1984)Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Franz Kline (1910–1962)Robert Motherwell (1915–1991)Mark Rothko (1903–1970) Barnett Newman (1905–1970)


In the late 1940s, Pollock pushed beyond the Surrealist strategy of automatic painting by taking his canvas off the stretcher, placing it on the floor, and throwing, dripping, and dribbling paint onto it to create a sublime abstract calligraphy as it fell.

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)Best-known Abstract Expressionist artist. Born in Wyoming and moved to New York in 1930. Pollock was self-destructive and an alcoholic by age 16. For most of the 1940s Pollock was free of alcohol, when he was supported emotionally by Lee Krasner and when he created his most celebrated art

Jackson Pollock, American, 1912 - 1956Male and Female c. 1942

Jackson Pollock, Blue (Moby Dick), 1949

Mark Rothko, Baptismal Scene, 1945.Gothic Jackson Pollock, 1944


http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=4675

Jackson Pollock, White Light, 1954.

“Action Painting” Painting that is the evidence of an action, such as Pollock’s pouring of paint.


Abstract ExpressionismThe New York School: Action Painting

Untitled, ca. 1948–49Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956)Dripped ink and enamel on paper


Jackson Pollock, Number 27, 1950, 1950.

"At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." -Harold Rosenburg

http://www.whitney.org/Collection/JacksonPollock

The New York School

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948

Abstract Expressionism: Action Painting

The New York SchoolJackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948

One is a masterpiece of the "drip," technique, the radical method that Pollock contributed to Abstract Expressionism. Moving around an expanse of canvas laid on the floor, Pollock would fling and pour ropes of paint across the surface. The canvas pulses with energy: strings and skeins of enamel, some matte, some glossy, weave and run, an intricate web of tans, blues, and grays lashed through with black and white. The way the paint lies on the canvas can suggest speed and force, and the image as a whole is dense and lush—yet its details have a lacelike delicacy.

The Surrealists' embrace of accident as a way to bypass the conscious mind sparked Pollock's experiments with the chance effects of gravity and momentum on falling paint.

Yet although works like One have neither a single point of focus nor any obvious repetition or pattern, they sustain a sense of underlying order. This and the physicality of Pollock's method have led to comparisons of his process with choreography, as if the works were the traces of a dance. Some see in paintings like One the nervous intensity of the modern city, others the primal rhythms of nature.


Jackson Pollock, Alchemy, 1947.


http://www.whitney.org/Collection/JacksonPollock

Jackson Pollock, Lucifer, 1947


Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956.

The New York School

Franz Kline, Chief, 1950.

The New York School

Kline, Franz, 1910-1962, New York, New York, 1953


Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 70, 1961Robert Motherwell

The New York School

Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 54, 1957Robert Motherwell

The New York School

Black Untitled, 1948Willem de Kooning


Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950.


Willem de Kooning, Woman IV, 1952-1953. Willem de Kooning, Woman and Bicycle, 1952-1953.


Woman, 1950Willem de Kooning

De Kooning made both figurative and abstract art at various points in his career, sometimes concurrently. Of nonfigurative work, he said, "even abstract shapes must have a likeness." In a legendary and emblematic exchange between de Kooning and the critic Clement Greenberg, the latter questioned whether a truly modern artist could justify figurative painting: "In today's world, it's impossible to paint a face." De Kooning's response: "That's right. And it's impossible not to."

Willem de Kooning

Two Women with Still Life, 1952


After Pollock...

Contemporary artists and critics interpreted Jackson Pollock’s innovation as the activity or action of painting and not necessarily the result. This led to an emphasis on the artist’s action, namely the beginnings of performance art.

But one critic realized that this resulted in the death of painting and argued a different stance.

Clement Greenberg

Greenberg’s Theory

If any art form is to survive the onslaught of mass media and make itself better it must do the thing that only it can do.This idea is called medium specificity.

• Literature is best at telling a story.• Film is good for representing time.• Sculpture is about taking up space.•Painting is best at being “flat” and “optical”.

That's right Greenburg thought that the essential quality of painting was flatness and color. Painting, for instance, had to display it’s essential character, as an object..... Platonic?

Abstract Expressionism has two main styles.

1). Gestural “Action Painting”i.e. Jackson Pollock’s Drip Paintings

2). Flattened “Color Field” Paintingi.e. Rothko’s Stained Colored shapes.

Mark Rothko, American, 1903-1970No.25, 1947


In the early 1940s, under the influence of European Surrealism and of Carl Gustav Jung’s theories on the collective unconscious, Rothko abandoned the vestiges of Expressionism in his work and began using archaic symbols as archetypal images transmitting the emotions embedded in ancient myths.

Mark Rothko, American, 1903-1970Untitled, 1947


Mark RothkoUntitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red) 1949


“Color Field” Painting: Artists who used large, flat “fields” of colored shapes.Usually painted very thinly.

Championed by Greenburg because it was flat and “optical”

Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow, 1956.


Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow, 1956.


For Rothko, his glowing, soft-edged rectangles of luminescent color should provoke in viewers a quasi-religious experience, even eliciting tears. As with Pollock and the others, scale contributed to the meaning. For the time, the works were vast in scale. And they were meant to be seen in relatively close environments, so that the viewer was virtually enveloped by the experience of confronting the work. Rothko said, "I paint big to be intimate." The notion is toward the personal (authentic expression of the individual) rather than the grandiose.

For Greenberg flatness is the truthful condition of the surface of the painting. Renaissance perspective was a kind of lie perpetuated through illusion.

No. 5/No. 22, Mark Rothko,1950


Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, 1958.

In 1943, Rothko, with his friend the painter Adolph Gottlieb, wrote several philosophical statements that would continue to guide his painting for years to come:

"We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth."

The New York School: Color Field Painting


No. 37/No. 19 (Slate Blue and Brown on Plum)

Mark Rothko (American, born Latvia. 1903-1970)

1958.


Abraham

Barnett Newman (American, 1905-1970)

1949.

Onement III

Barnett Newman (American, 1905-1970)

1949



Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Barnett Newman (American, 1905-1970), 1950-51.

Abstract Expressionism: Color Field Painting


Helen Frankenthaler (born 1928) Photographer Alexander Liberman Published September 1975 ARTnews

Chairman of the Board

Helen Frankenthaler (American, born 1928)

1971

Abstract ExpressionismThe New York School: Color Field Painting


Helen Frankenthaler, Interior Landscape, 1964.

Helen Frankenthaler, Flood, 1967

Morris Louis, Tet, 1958.

Abstract ExpressionismThe New York School: Color Field Painting

Russet, Morris Louis (American, 1912-1962), 1958

The New York School: Color Field Painting



Alpha-Pi, 1960Morris Louis

Abstract Expressionism: Color Field Painting

Modernist Sculpture •Abstract forms•Increasingly using modern materials, steel, iron etc.•Interesting in using space interestingly.•The view changes as you circle the sculpture. “in the round”•Explored “negative space”.

Brancusi's Studio, ca. 1920Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879–1973)Gelatin silver print

Modernist Sculpture

The Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) settled in Paris in 1904. He admired the semi-abstracted forms of much art beyond the Western tradition, believing that the artists who made such art succeeded in capturing the “essence” of their subject.

Bird in Space, 1923Constantin Brancusi (French, born Romania, 1876–1957)Marble

Modernist Sculpture

Brancusi wrote,

“What is real is not the external form but the essence of things. Starting from this truth it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.”

Modernist Sculpture

Constantin Brancusi, (French, born Romania. 1876-1957)Bird in Space, 1928, Bronze

Modernist Sculpture

Constantin Brancusi, French, born Romania. 1876-1957The Newborn, version I, 1920 (close to the marble of 1915)Bronze

Constantin Brancusi, (French, born Romania. 1876-1957)Fish, 1930

Modernist Sculpture

Hepworth, Barbara, Dame, 1903-1975Forms in Echelon, 1938

Modernist Sculpture

Hepworth made exquisitely crafted sculptures punctuated with holes so that air and light could pass through them. This work consists of two biomorphic shapes carved in highly polished wood. She hoped that viewers would let their eyes play around them, letting their imaginations generate associations and meanings.

Modernist Sculpture

Hepworth, Barbara, Dame, 1903-1975Wave, 1943-4

Modernist Sculpture

Hepworth, Barbara, Dame, 1903-1975

Photograph of Barbara Hepworth with Armature for Meridian1958-9

Modernist Sculpture

Hepworth, Barbara, Dame, 1903-1975Meridian, 1958-9

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1957-58.

Modernist Sculpture

“A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass.” -Henry Moore

Henry Moore, Locking Piece 1963-4

Modernist Sculpture

Isamu Noguchi, Kouros, 1944-1945

Modernist Sculpture

Isamu NoguchiUntitled, 1945

"Akari E" lamp, ca. 1966Isamu Noguch

Modernist Sculpture

Alexander Calder, La Grande Vitesse

Modernist Sculpture

Alexander Calder trained as an engineer and took some art classes before traveling to Paris in 1926. Although not an official member of the movement, his sculpture was particularly admired by the Surrealists, with whom he exhibited on occasion.

Alexand Calder, Untitled, 1976

Modernist Sculpture

Like other sculptors of his generation, he explored negative space, removed sculpture from its pedestal, and hung it from the ceiling.

His sculptures are brushed into movement by air currents. Calder’s metal sculptures, which are attached to wire arms and hung from the ceiling, are termed mobiles.

Alexander Calder, Southern Cross, 1963

Modernist Sculpture

Alexander Calder, Ordinary, 1969

Modernist Sculpture

Anthony Caro, Early One Morning 1962

Modernist Sculpture

Anthony Caro, Yellow Swing 1965

Modernist Sculpture

The General Trend of Modernist Sculpture

Representative Abstract

David Smith, Cubi XXVII, 1965

Modernist Sculpture

David Smith came to sculpture through painting. He then worked in the WPA Federal Art Project. But skills learned in his youth in Indiana, where he had summer jobs working in a Studebaker car factory, eventually came to the fore in his art making. When he saw magazine illustrations of welded sculpture by Pablo Picasso and Julio González, he himself began welding metal constructions.

Becca, 1965David Smith (American, 1906–1965)Stainless steel

Modernist Sculpture

David Smith, Cubi XXVII, March 1965.

Modernist Sculpture

Later in his career, Smith would note the overwhelming potency of steel as a medium:

"What it can do in arriving at a form economically, no other medium can do. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, brutality."

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969.

Minimalism•Not about expression.

•Fabricated by experts and made with industrial materials, plexi-glass, aluminum, plywood etc.

•Serial or “counting” logic used form composition.

•Made the viewer aware of the space around them. Privileges a physical experience over emotion.

Robert Morris, Untitled 1965/71

Minimalism

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1669&page=1

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968. Stainless steel and plexiglass,

Minimalism

http://www.whitney.org/Collection/DonaldJudd

Minimalism

DONALD JUDD UNTITLED (1969-1971)

In the 1960s Donald Judd proposed a new way of making and experiencing art, breaking ground in the exploration of volume, interval, space and color.

He favored industrial materials such as aluminium, perspex, sheet metal and plywood. From the mid 1960s onward all of Judd’s works were fabricated by skilled specialists to his precise specifications. By encouraging concentration on the volume and presence of the structure and the space around it, Judd’s work draws particular attention to the relationship between the object, the viewer and the specific context of the object’s environment.

Minimalism

Donald JuddUntitled, 1976

Minimalism

Tony Smith, Die, 1962. Steel,

Minimalism

By 1961 Dan Flavin had begun to make Minimalist works using incandescent or fluorescent electric lights, such as Icon I1 which consisted of a monochrome painted wooden square with an incandescent light mounted on the top right edge. He frequently dedicated pieces to historic and contemporary art figures who inspired him.

Minimalism

Minimalism

Dan Flavin, Icon II (the mystery to John Reeves), 1961

By 1961 Dan Flavin had begun to make Minimalist works using incandescent or fluorescent electric lights, such as Icon I1 which consisted of a monochrome painted wooden square with an incandescent light mounted on the top right edge. He frequently dedicated pieces to historic and contemporary art figures who inspired him.

Dan Flavin, Untitled, 1964

Minimalism

http://www.whitney.org/Collection/DanFlavin

Dan Flavin, the nominal three (to William of Ockham), 1963Daylight fluorescent light, 6 ft. (183 cm) high, overall width variable

Minimalism

Dan Flavin, untitled (for Robert, with fond regards), 1977.

Minimalism

http://www.whitney.org/Collection/DanFlavin

Anti-modernismBecause of AbEx’s dominance of the market for $ and ideas. Subsequent artists sought to distance themselves from the aims of Abstract Expressionism and Modernist Sculpture.

Pop Art (art as mass culture and commerce)Assemblages and Happenings (art as real life)Earthworks (art in the landscape)Conceptual Art (art as idea)

Pop Art:In the late 1950-60s, several artists began to focus their attention on the explosion in visual culture, fueled by the growing presence of mass media and the rising disposable income of the postwar young.

For the first time in America, individual identity was determined by what people purchased largely dictated by television, film, and print advertising.

Pop artists critiqued the fiction of this new popular culture largely by embodying it totally.

Major figuresAndy WarholRoy LichtensteinClaes Oldenburg & Coosje Van Bruggen

Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961

Pop Art

Roy Lichtenstein, Masterpiece, 1962

Pop Art

Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke, 1965

Pop Art

Roy Lichtenstein actually painted the dot patterns and speech balloons from comic books and newspaper reproductions, in large, meticulously rendered frames. He also introduced much needed humor, making fun of himself and the art world.

Here his cartoon brushstrokes make fun of the Abstract Expressionist art movement. Even Classical Greece gets the comic book treatment? The very idea of individual expression in a consumer era becomes suspect. Can you express yourself truly outside of corporate or media branding?

Pop Art

Roy Lichtenstein, Little Big Picture, 1965

Pop ArtPop Art

Roy LichtensteinNon-objective I, 1964Magna on canvas

Pop Art

Roy Lichtenstein, Blam, 1962

Pop Art

Pop Art

Roy Lichtenstein, Temple, 1964

Andy Warhol (1928–1987).Warhol created an immense body of work between 1960 and his death in 1987, including prints, paintings, sculptures, and films.

Born Andrew Warhola the son of Polish immigrants, Pittsburgh. After getting his degree in illustration he beginsworking as a graphic artist in New York. Later shifts to painting.

Pop Art

Pop Art

A Warhol shoe illustration for a fashion magazine, 1955.

Water Heater Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) 1961

Pop Art

His earliest paintings were of those very same kinds of advertising that he created.


Andy Warhol, (American, 1928-1987)Before and After, 1961

Pop Art

Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol , 1962

Pop Art


Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol , 1962

Pop Art

When Warhol first exhibited these thirty–two canvases in 1962, each one simultaneously hung from the wall like a painting and rested on a shelf like groceries in a store. The number of canvases corresponds to the varieties of soup then sold by the Campbell Soup Company. with a different flavor to each painting.

Warhol argued that past art demanded thought and understanding, whereas advertising and celebrity culture demanded only immediate attention,very quickly becoming uninteresting and boring.


Warhol also used a “grid” composition.

This is also an “all-over” style that assumes a kind of limitless expanse of objects that continue outside of the frame of the picture.

Like a supermarket aisle.

Pop Art

Andy Warhol, 100 Cans, 1962

Andy Warhol, (American1928-1987)200 Soup Cans, 1962

Andy Warhol reveled in the indirect process of printmaking that simulated mass production. He frequently used photographic silkscreen techniques to give a mechanical look, removed from the personal touch of the artist’s own hand.

His studio, “The Factory” as he referred to it, often included numerous assistants. His works present a sort of portrait of America in the sixties: products, people and symbols in a cool and detached view. The question never answered by Warhol is whether he was criticizing or celebrating popular culture.

Pop Art

Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Pop Art

Marilyn Monroe was a legend when she committed suicide in August of 1962, but in retrospect her life seems a gradual martyrdom to the media and to her public. After her death, Warhol based many works on the same photograph of her, a publicity still for the 1953 movie Niagara. As the surround for a face, the golden field in Gold Marilyn Monroe (the only one of Warhol's Marilyns to use this color) recalls the religious icons of Christian art history—a resonance, however, that the work suffuses with a morbid allure.

In reduplicating this photograph of a heroine shared by millions, Warhol denied the sense of the uniqueness of the artist's personality that had been implicit in the gestural painting of the 1950s. He also used a commercial technique— silkscreening—that gives the picture a crisp, artificial look; even as Warhol canonizes Monroe, he reveals her public image as a carefully structured illusion. Redolent of 1950s glamour, the face in Gold Marilyn Monroe is much like the star herself—high gloss, yet transient; bold, yet vulnerable; compelling, yet elusive. Surrounded by a void, it is like the fadeout at the end of a movie.

Pop Art

Andy Warhol, North American; American, 1928 - 1987, Marilyn x100, 1962

Pop Art

Andy Warhol, Untitled from the Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn) 1967

Pop Art

“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.”- Andy Warhol

"In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes."

•Had a studio called “the Factory” that made his work with him. Combined with his screen-print technique this made for limitless combinations of material.•Also made many films once the camera became affordable.•Started Interview magazine in the 80’s. •Managed the band, The Velvet Underground.

Pop Art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr8NE7r1szU

Bruce Davidson“USA. NYC. Andy WARHOL, painter. USA. NYC. The American painter Robert INDIANA (left) in the WARHOL studio”. 1964

Burt Glinn1965. Andy WARHOL with Edie SEDGWICK and Chuck WEIN.Date1965

Pop Art

In 1963, while Warhol was working on his Death and Disaster paintings, Art News published an interview with him by Gene Swenson:

G.S. When did you start with the “Death” pictures?

A.W. I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of the newspaper: 129 Die. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like “4 million are going to die.” That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn’t have any effect.

Pop Art

Orange Disaster #5, 1963. Acrylic and silkscreen enamel on canvas, 106 x 81 1/2 inches

Pop Art

Pop Art

Andy Warhol, Race Riot 1963

Pop Art

Andy Warhol, North American; American, 1930 - 1987Birmingham Race Riot, 1964, Screenprint

Andy Warhol, ( American, 1930 - 1987) Electric Chairs, Screenprints, 1971

Andy Warhol, still from film “Empire”, 1964

Pop ArtThe eight-hour, five-minute film solely of the Empire State Building.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMCeDBn1Zu0

Andy Warhol, Silver Clouds, 1966

AmericanTitleThe Souper DressWork TypeDressDate1966-1967

Pop Art

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Tomatoe Juice Box, 1964

Pop Art

Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes

"Well...I'd done all the Campbell's Soup Cans in a row on the canvas, and then I got boxes made to do them on a box--but that looked

funny because it didn't look real- I just had the boxes already made up though. They were brown and looked just like boxes, so I thought it would be great just to do an ordinary box."

Like Warhol and Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) made ironic critiques of the new consumer culture, but in the case of the Swedish-born Oldenburg he turned his subjects into sculptural monuments.

“I'd like to get away from the notion of a work of art as something outside of experience, something that is located in museums, something that is terribly precious,”

Oldenburg declared. In 1961 he presented a new body of work whose subject matter he had culled from the clothing stores, delis, and bric-a-brac shops that crowded the Lower East Side. The earliest Store sculptures, which debuted in spring 1961 at the Martha Jackson Gallery,, are wall-mounted reliefs depicting everyday items like shirts, dresses, cigarettes, sausages, and slices of pie. Oldenburg made them from armatures of chicken wire overlaid with plaster-soaked canvas, using enamel paint straight from the can to give them a bright color finish. At the gallery, the reliefs hung cheek by jowl, emulating displays in low-end markets.

Pop Art

Claes Oldenburg’s “Store”

Oldenburg, Claes, 1929-Title StoreDate 1961

Claes Oldenburg’s “Store”

Environment Art: Creates a 3D space for people to have a whole range of sensory experiences—visual, auditory, kinetic, tactile. The viewer becomes a participant.

Artworks = props


Pop Art


Pop Art

"Empire" ("Papa") Ray Gun

Claes Oldenburg (American, born Sweden 1929)

1959.

Pastry Case, I


1961-62

Pop Art



Two Cheeseburgers, with Everything (Dual Hamburgers)


1962.

Pop Art


Oldenburg, Claes, 1929-, Sewing Machine1961, painted plaster

Pop Art

Claes OldenburgPepsi-Cola Sign, 1961

Pop Art

Pop Art

Men's Jacket with Shirt and Tie1961Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 41 3/4 x 29 1/2 x 11 3/4" (106 x 74.9 x 29.8 cm).

Claes Oldenburg, Soft Light Switches Ghost Version), 1971

version of a 1964 original. Claes Oldenburg, Soft Pay-Telephone, 1963.

Pop Art

Pop Art

Giant Soft Fan


1966-67

Oldenburg turned consumer products into bodies. They

were human scale, their skin sagged and they looked

exhausted.


Soft Calendar for the Month of August1962Canvas filled with shredded foam rubber, painted with liquitex and enamel. 41 3/4 x 42 1/2 x 4 1/4" (106 x 108 x 10.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Pop Art

Later in his career he turned more exclusively to public art projects. Oldenburg’s humor is evident in his large-scale public projects, such as LIPSTICK (ASCENDING) ON CATERPILLAR TRACKS, made for his alma mater, Yale University. Oldenburg was invited to create this work by a group of graduate students from the School of Architecture who specified that they wanted a monument to the “Second American Revolution” of the late 1960s, a period marked by student demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Oldenburg mounted a giant lipstick tube on top of steel tracks taken from a Caterpillar tractor.

Visually the sculpture suggests both the warlike aggression of a mobile missile launcher and the eroticism of a lipstick, perhaps in a play on the popular slogan of the time,“make love, not war.” The lipstick was to have included a suggestive balloonlike vinyl tipthat could be pumped up with air and then left to deflate slowly, but the pump was never installed and the drooping tip, vulnerableto vandalism, was quickly replaced with a metal one.

Pop Art

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969-1974 Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut Cor-Ten steel, steel, aluminum, cast resin; painted with polyurethane enamel

The lipstick monument was installed provocatively on a plaza in front of both the Yale War Memorial and the president’s office. Not surprisingly, Oldenburg was asked to remove it. In 1974, however, he reworkedthe sculpture in the more permanent materials of fiberglass, aluminum, and steel and donated it to Yale, where it was placed in the courtyard of Morse College.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Batcolumn, 1977, Steel and aluminum painted with polyurethane enamel96 ft. 8 in. (29.5 m) high, Harold Washington Social Security Center, 600 West Madison Street, Chicago

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Spoonbridge and Cherry , 1988. Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Stainless steel and aluminum painted with polyurethane enamel, 29 ft. 6 in. x 51 ft. 6 in. x 13 ft. 6 in.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Shuttlecocks, 1994.

Pop Art

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Plantoir, 2001.

Pop Art

NEO DADA

Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955.

Into the Sixties: “Neo-Dada”

Neo-Dada: New generation was re-using the strategies of the Dada movement..Used of everyday objects.“Assemblages”. Rejection of Abstract Expressionism.

Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958


White Flag, 1955, Jasper Johns


Robert Rauschenberg, (American, 1925-2008)Born in Texas. Created paintings with street trash and a collision of images.

Tried to create art that “worked in the gap between art and life.”

Into the Sixties: Assemblages

In the early 1950s, a generation of younger artists in New York challenged the assumptions of Abstract Expressionist artists. They believed that art should be firmly anchored in real life.

Robert Rauschenberg,White Painting (Three Panel), 1951

Robert Rauschenberg,Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953

By erasing another artist’s work, Rauschenberg makes “absence” his subject matter.

Rauschenberg, Robert,Yoicks, 1953


Robert Rauschenberg. Bed. 1955

Assemblages: which Rauschenerg called “combines” are collaged trash, re-aestheticized into a composition.

Also critical of AbEx gestures.

http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78712


Robert Rauschenberg, Collection (formerly Untitled), 1954

Robert Rauschenberg, Rebus, 1955


Robert Rauschenberg, Factum I & II, 1957


Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59

Monogram (1955-1959). Rauschenberg placed on the ground an Abstract Expressionist–style painting serving as pasture for an Angora goat, which is stuffed and encircled by a pneumatic tyre. Because he used his heritage of Abstract Expressionism in a manner thought to be ironic and disdainful, Rauschenberg was accused by his enemies of the time of destroying painting. In fact, all his work seems to derive from assemblage.


Assemblages also critiqued the remove of abstract painting from “real life’ by the simplest means, they attached it directly to the surface of the picture. Here the Dada use of found objects was not skeptically motivated but rather idealistically motivated to return art to everyday subjects. Even if humorous.


Robert Rauschenberg, Buffalo II, 1964

“[Being in New Y o r k ] w a s t h i s constant, irrational j u x t a po s i t i o n o f things that I think one only finds in the city.”

Winter Pool, 1959Robert Rauschenberg


Robert Rauschenberg, Satellite, 1955

During the 1960s Rauschenberg became increasingly interested in performance, and he collaborated with the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the Judson Dance Theater. Much of Rauschenberg's later work used silkscreening, a practice that enabled him to explore his interests in repetition and process.

http://www.whitney.org/Collection/RobertRauschenberg


Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1955

http://www.whitney.org/Collection/RobertRauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg, Reservoir, 1961oil, wood, graphite, fabric, metal, and rubber on canvas


Robert RauschenbergDylaby, 1962

HAPPEN-INGS

Existentialism:• Popularized by philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)“Existence precedes essence”.

• No underlying universal order.

• Humans have complete freedom, to define humanity.

•This is both a blessing and an immense burden.

• The “Void”.Leap into the Void, 1960Yves Klein (French, 1928–1962)

The foundational tenet of existentialism is that ‘existence precedes essence’. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, a human being first exists, ‘encounters themselves in the world’, and defines themselves afterwards. This choosing of oneself is unavoidable: we are, Sartre says, condemned to be free, and are wholly responsible for our choices.

This stance proved highly influential in intellectual and artistic circles in the 20 years following the Second World War, starting in Paris.

Existentialism

Allan Kaprow in his Environment “Yard,” 1967

Into the Sixties: Happenings

Trained as a painter, Kaprow intuited an expanded scale and space from the work of Jackson Pollock. He also studied composition at the New School for Social Research in New York with John Cage (a close friend of Rauschenberg), whose use of nonmusical and ambient sounds as well as his openness to chance and accident made him a key figure of influence during this period. In 1965 Kaprow explained his evolution from collage to environments and happenings. His works expanded until they filled the gallery, creating an integrated environment for the spectator.

"I immediately saw that every visitor to the environment was part of it. And so I gave them opportunities like moving something, turning switches on -- just a few things. Increasingly during 1957 and 1958, this suggested a more 'scored' responsibility for the visitor. I offered them more and more to do until there developed the Happening.... The integration of all elements -- environment, constructed sections, time, space, and people -- has been my main technical problem ever since."



Although tightly scripted and planned, Kaprow's early happenings maintained an air of unstructured spontaneity. This was because they had none of the usual trappings of theatre -- plot, dialogue, character, or professional performers -- and no resemblance to the traditional visual arts.


Allan Kaprow in his Environment “Yard,” 1967 Pasadena edition with participants.

“Happenings”No identifiable stageLack of a storylineAnyone could be an actor/participantCannot tell between set, props or costumesNo set time period for completion

What does this sound like? Real life!


“A Happening is an assemblage of events performed or perceived in more than one time and place. Its material environments may be constructed, taken over directly from what is available, or altered slightly; just as its activities may be invented or commonplace.

A Happening, unlike a stage play, may occur at a supermarket, driving along a highway, under a pile of rags, and in a friend’s kitchen, either at once or sequentially. If sequentially, time may extend to more than a year.

The Happening is performed according to plan but without rehearsal, audience, or repetition. It is art but seems closer to life” -Allan Kaprow


The walls of the first room were covered randomly with words that were hand lettered on pieces of paper or stenciled on rolls of canvas, and which could be added-to by visitors and read in any order or direction.

Allan Kaprow, The Courtyard, 1962.

Kaprow's The Courtyard (1962) Composed of discordant noise, circling bicyclists, tires swinging from windows, and showers of spot-lit, glittering tin foil, The Courtyard was a modern-day fable (set in a hotel for transients on Bleecker Street) showing the ascension of a goddess in the guise of a teenage girl, dressed in a nightgown and carrying a transistor radio blaring the latest hits. During the piece, she slowly made her way through the audience and climbed a ladder up a giant mountainlike sculpture in the middle of the courtyard. Striking cheesecake poses for a pair of paparazzi on a mattress (the fan attaining the immortality of the starlet), the girl was then swallowed up by another mountain descending from the rooftop—a deus ex machina for our media age.



“What is a Happening?A game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing.”

–Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow, Household, women with clothesline 1964.


Anarchic events intended to break through the complacency and conformity of mainstream American life and described by Susan Sontag at the time as "animated collages."

Allan Kaprow, Household, women licking jam off of a car, 1964.


Fluids, Allan Kaprow, 1967 recreated LA MOCA 2008


Contemporary Version: Flash Mob,Pillow Fight in NYC, 2012

EARTHWORKS

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969.

Minimalism•Not about expression.

•Fabricated by experts and made with industrial materials, plexi-glass, aluminum, plywood etc.

•Serial or “counting” logic used form composition.

•Made the viewer aware of the space around them. Privileges a physical experience over emotion.

Minimalism into Earthworks

Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1–9), 1969 (detail)

Earthworks:“Site-specific” art made from and incorporating the landscape.

Takes the physical presence of Minimalism outside!

Also meant as a resistance to market forces, inability to sell the work, only experience it directly.

Mirror Stratum, Robert Smithson (American, 1938-1973, 1966


Smithson made both: “Non-sites”- samples of mineral or vegetable material taken outside their natural situation.

“Sites”- works created outside of the gallery or museum, on the site of the geological environment chosen by the artist.


Corner Mirror with Coral, Robert Smithson (American, 1938-1973), 1969


Earthworks

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970


Earthworks


Earthworks

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) created SPIRAL JETTY one of the most significant earthworks, in 1970.This is a 1,500-foot spiraling earthen jetty that extends into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. To Smithson, the Great Salt Lake represented both a primordial ocean that cultivated life and a dead sea that killed it. Smithson liked the way that skeletons of abandoned oil rigs along the lake’s shore looked like dinosaur bones; his jetty was supposed to remind viewers of the remains of ancient civilizations. Smithson also incorporated one of the few living organisms found in the otherwise dead lake into his work: an alga that turns a reddish color under certain conditions.


Earthworks

Spiral Jetty, visible from satellite, via Google Earth

Earthworks

Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977. Near Quernado, NM. Stainless steel poles, average height 20' 7 1/2", overall 5,280' x 3,300

Earthworks

The Lightning Field, 1977, by the American sculptor Walter De Maria, is a work of Land Art situated in a remote area of the high desert of western New Mexico. It is comprised of 400 polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer. A full experience of The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning, and visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible in the field, especially during sunset and sunrise. In order to provide this opportunity, Dia offers overnight visits during the months of May through October.

Earthworks

Walter De Maria. The Vertical Earth Kilomter,1977. Kassel, Germany

The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), located in Kassel, Germany, is a one-kilometer-long solid brass round rod five centimeters (two inches) in diameter, its full length inserted into the ground with its top reaching flush to the surface of the earth.

Nancy Holt, Views Through a Sand

Dune, Narragansett Beach, Rhode Island, 1972

Early works of Nancy Holt, such as Views through a Sand Dune were simple interventions into the landscape that enhanced or altered the viewer’s experience of that environment.

Earthworks

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-1976

Earthworks

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-1976 (view through two tunnels)

Earthworks

Nancy Holt, Dark Star Park VA, 1979-84

Earthworks

Michael Heizer Double Negative, 1969., Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada

Earthworks

The trenches line up across a large gap formed by the natural shape of the mesa edge. Including this open area across the gap, the trenches together measure 1,500 feet long, 50 feet deep, and 30 feet wide (457 meters long, 15.2 meters deep, 9.1 meters wide). 240,000 tons (218,000 tonnes) of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone, was displaced in the construction of the trenches.

Located the Nevada desert, Double Negative can be visited by anyone with a set of directions, a sturdy vehicle, and good walking shoes. Still, as with most Land art, most of us will know it only through photographs.

Earthworks

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969

"As long as you're going to make a sculpture, why not make one that competes with a 747, or the Empire State Building, or the Golden Gate Bridge."

- Michael Heizer

Michael Heizer, City, 1972-?

Earthworks

Levitated Mass, Michael Heizer, 2011-12

Earthworks

Olafur Eliasson, Weather Project 2008

Earthworks

Earthworks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vds6z9HzgaY

CONCEPTUAL ART

John Baldessari, An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer . . ., 1966–68.

Conceptual Art: Took thought as the important art experience.

Used objects to produce interesting conditions, not for enjoyment.

Heavily influenced by Plato.

http://www.whitney.org/Collection/JohnBaldessari

What Is PaintingJohn Baldessari1966-68

Conceptual Art

Conceptual art literally “dematerialized” the art object by suggesting that the catalyst for a work of art is a concept and the means by which the concept is communicated can vary. The conceptual work of art usually leaves behind some visual trace, in the form of a set of instructions, writing on a chalkboard, a performance, photographs, or a piece of film, and in some cases even objects.

Conceptual art is theoretically driven and is noncommodifiable because it leaves no precious object behind for purchase, although collectors and many museums now collect the “trace” objects left behind. Realize that the mass media and the flow of information in the 1960’s and 1970’s was only growing.

Conceptual art can be considered the aesthetics of information.

Conceptual Art

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1963 replica of 1917 original.

The importance of Duchamp’s “Fountain” is not in the object, rather it is external to it. i.e. what it makes you think about.

Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965,

Conceptual Art

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965,

Joseph Kosuth presents the dictionary definition, a photo, and an actual chair. Which is the best representation? He shifted his art into ideas and documented them in ways that had little or no material or aesthetic value. Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one: a visual code, a verbal code, and a code in the language of objects, that is, a chair of wood. If both photograph and words describe a chair, how is their functioning different from that of the real chair, and what is Kosuth's artwork doing by adding these functions together?

Joseph Kosuth, One and Eight—A Description, 1965

Conceptual Art

•Conceptual artists used counting logic to make the composition. •Eliminates the “hidden genius” of the artist. •Makes the work more understandable to the public.•Elimination of artistic subjectivity.

Minimalism into Conceptual Art

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Serial Project, I (ABCD), Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), 1966.

Conceptual Art

Sol LeWitt like the Minimalists, uses basic forms, in the belief that "using complex forms only disrupts the unity of the whole"; like the Conceptualists, he starts with an idea rather than a form, initiating a process that obeys certain rules, and that determines the form by playing itself out. The premise of Serial Project demands the combination and recombination of squares, cubes, and extensions of these shapes, all laid in a grid.


•Conceptual art frequently involved “re-framing” or naming of an activity or object as art.

•The art object is then a form of language to suggest an idea or evidence of the ideas implementation.

Conceptual Art

“When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”

-Sol Lewitt

"The aim of the artist would not be to instruct the viewer but to give him information. Whether the viewer understands this information is incidental to the artist; he cannot foresee the understanding of all his viewers. He would follow his predetermined premise to its conclusion avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloging the results of his premise.”

-Sol Lewitt

Conceptual Art

Lines in Four Directions, Superimposed in Each Quarter of the Square Progressively

Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007)

(1971).

Conceptual Art


Untitled (Something which can never be any specific thing)

Robert Barry 1969

Conceptual Art


William Anatasi

William AnastasiSubway Drawing, 1968

Conceptual Art

Nine Polaroid Portraits of a Mirror, 1967William Anastasi

Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art

Piero Manzoni:Magic Base, 1961

Piero Manzoni, Italian painter and conceptual artist. He was self-taught as an artist. Shortly after he began painting he started to question the traditional aims and methods of the artist, expressing the nature of his searching in both writings and the objects that he produced.

Pictured below is the Magic Base, a plinth that would transform the person who stands upon it into an artist.

Artist's Shit No. 014, Piero Manzoni (Italian, 1933-1963)May 1961

Conceptual Art


Piero Manzoni “BASE HOLDING UP THE WORLD” SOCLE du

MONDE, 1961

Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art

During the last period of his life he realized his most monumental work, Socle of the World (1961), an iron block that supposedly served as the ‘base of the world’.

Manzoni’s pedestal, (and Conceptual art in general) can allow you to dramatically shift your perspective on the world.

It allows a “re-framing” of our viewpoint.

Hans Haacke born 1936Condensation Cube1963–5MediumPerspex, steel and waterObject: 305 x 305 x 305 mm

Conceptual Art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKRly5xc0_g

Hans Haacke born 1936, A Breed Apart, 19787 photographs, black and white and colour, on paper on hardboardImage, each: 910 x 910 mm. Tate

Seurat’s ‘Les Poseuses’

Haacke outlines the changes in ownership of the painted sketch along with some biographical data. The work charts the change of the painting from a work of art with little value to a commodity worth more than 1,000,000 dollars and kept in a bank vault.

Hans Haacke Seurat’s ‘Les Poseuses’ (small version) 1888-1975

(1975)

Institutional Critique: Conceptual art that criticizes unjust museum or social practices.

Hans Haacke: Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, suite of panels with photographs and typed text, 1971 (Paris, Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne);

I GOT UP, 1970On Kawara

Conceptual Art

Considered the most personal and intimate of his works, I GOT UP is part of a continuous piece produced by On Kawara between 1968 and 1979 in which each day the artist sent two different friends or colleagues a picture postcard, each stamped with the exact time he arose that day and the addresses of both sender and recipient.

Conceptual Art varies greatly depending on the information that it is using. It can be cold, or inviting, it can be mechanical, political or romantic depending on the interests of the artist.

Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art

ConclusionBy the end of the 1960’s art at that time included wildly different media and practices under it’s umbrella. It could be a happening with no record, or an abstract oil painting. It could be a comic book or a mirrored box on the floor. By and large the art styles of the explosion of creativity in1960s’ still forms the basic units of contemporary art today. You still see Pop Art, Performance Art, etc. The artists are still working through the implications of all of this expansive thinking.

One thing is clear by 1975 however. The Modernist project, that of International Style housing, and Greenberg style Color Field Painting, or Modernist Sculpture is at best not in touch with the world, or at worst represents an idealism that doesn’t consider the perspectives of huge classes of people. An alternative to European Modernism is needed…. enter Postmodernism.

Art1100 LVA 22 Online

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