Lecture 31 -2, part 1: Jasper John’s Target with Four Faces appears on the cover of Artnews, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol begin using cartoons and advertisements as source material followed by Rosenquist, Ruscha, among others giving birth to the Pop

Art Movementpart 2: Pop Art’s response to American cultural values and idealism, the work of Andy Warhol

Jasper Johns

Your book discusses Jasper Johns and his Artnews cover. I would like to go into further detail about this artist. “Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. He began drawing as a young child, and from the age of five knew he wanted to be an artist. For three semesters he attended the University of South Carolina at Columbia, where his art teachers urged him to move to New York, which he did in late 1948. There he saw numerous exhibitions and attended the Parsons School of Design for a semester. After serving two years in the army during the Korean War, stationed in South Carolina and Sendai, Japan, he returned to New York in 1953. He soon became friends with the artist Robert Rauschenberg (born 1925), also a Southerner, and with the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Together with Rauschenberg and several Abstract Expressionist painters of the previous generation, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, Johns is one of most significant and influential American painters of the twentieth century. He also ranks with Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Munch, and Picasso as one of the greatest printmakers of any era. In addition, he makes many drawings—unique works on paper, usually based on a painting he has previously painted—and he has created an unusual body of sculptural objects.

Johns' early mature work, of the mid- to late 1950s, invented a new style that helped to engender a number of subsequent art movements, among them Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art. The new style has usually been understood to be coolly antithetical to the expressionistic gestural abstraction of the previous generation. This is partly because, while Johns' painting extended the allover compositional techniques of Abstract Expressionism, his use of these techniques stresses conscious control rather than spontaneity.

Johns' early style is perfectly exemplified by the lush reticence of the large monochrome White Flag (left) of 1955. This painting was preceded by a

Jasper Johns

red, white, and blue version, Flag (1954–55; Museum of Modern Art, New York) left, and followed by numerous drawings and prints of flags in various mediums, including the elegant oil on paper Flag (1957). In 1958, Johns painted Three Flags (Whitney Museum of Art, New York) bottom left, in which three canvases are superimposed on one another in what appears to be reverse perspective, projecting toward the viewer.

The American flag subject is typical of Johns' use of quotidian imagery in the mid- to late 1950s. As he explained, the imagery derives from "things the mind already knows," utterly familiar icons such as flags, targets, stenciled numbers, ale cans, and, slightly later, maps of the U.S.

It has been suggested that the American flag in Johns' work is an autobiographical reference, because a military hero after whom he was named, Sergeant William Jasper, raised the flag in a brave action during the Revolutionary War. Because a flag is a flat object, it may signify flatness or the relative lack of depth in much modernist painting. The flag may of course function as an emblem of the United States and may in turn connote American art, Senator Joseph McCarthy, or the Vietnam War, depending on the date of Johns' use of the image, the date of the viewer's experience of it, or the nationality of the viewer. Or the flag may connote none of these things. Used in Johns' recent work, for example, The Seasons (Summer), an intaglio print of 1987, it seems inescapably to refer to his own art. In other words, the meaning of the flag in Johns' art suggests the extent to which the "meaning" of this subject matter may be fluid and open to continual reinterpretation.

As Johns became well known—and perhaps as he realized his audience could be relied upon to study his new work—his subjects with a demonstrable prior existence expanded. In addition to popular icons, Johns chose images that he identified in interviews as things he had seen—for example, a pattern of flagstones he glimpsed on a wall while driving. Still later, the "things the mind already knows" became details from famous

works of art, such as the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (1475/80–1528), which Johns began to trace onto his work in 1981. Throughout his career, Johns has included in most of his art certain marks and shapes that clearly display their derivation from factual, unimagined things in the world, including handprints and footprints, casts of parts of the body, or stamps made from objects found in his studio, such as the rim of a tin can.”

Source: Jasper Johns (born 1930) | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Let us explore just a few more of Jasper John’s paintings.

Jasper Johns Periscope (Hart Crane), 1963

Jasper Johns, Fool's House, 1962 Jasper Johns, Jubilee, 1959

Jasper Johns, Map, 1962

Jasper Johns, Target 1958

Your book discusses Clement Greenberg's essay “Modernist Painting” I want to further address some of the topics he mentioned in this very important essay! I find T. R. Quigley’s summery of Greenberg’s essay to be very interesting! “Greenberg's concern in this essay is to argue that there is a logic to the development of modernist art and, in particular, modernist painting. He identifies the essence of Modernism as "the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself - not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence". (755) It is the intensification of a self-critical tendency that began with the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. "Modernism", Greenberg tells us, "criticizes from the inside [rather than from the outside], through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized." (Ibid.) This starting point has important implications for the thesis of autonomy. [See Clive Bell: "The Aesthetic Hypothesis".]

Self-Justification:According to Greenberg, every "formal social activity" requires a rational justification, i.e. there must be reasons given to justify a particular activity. Without this justification, the activity in question (e.g. painting, philosophy, physics, poetry, mathematics, etc.) is discredited and weakened. Many take the view that this is what happened with religion. Post-Enlightenment art (i.e. roughly speaking, art produced after the Eighteenth Century) was at once in precisely this situation of needing a justification. Thus, it was called upon to establish its own autonomy by means of a "deduction", i.e. an argument for its legitimacy and its capacity to provide us with experience that cannot be obtained through any other art or social practice.This process of self-justification must be done piecemeal - medium by medium. To be modern, each art form is eventually called upon to discover and exhibit, through its own procedures, the unique contributions that it makes to human experience as well as to art as a whole. As a result of this self-justification, each art form achieves greater specialization and security.

The Specificity of the Medium:The uniqueness of an art form ultimately depends upon the specificity of the medium, i.e. the characteristics that it shares with no other form of art.

Clement Greenberg

Once this specificity has been discovered, Greenberg claims, the progressive modernist is called upon to purge all elements not essential and specific to the medium. Nothing borrowed from the medium of another art can be tolerated. Thus, under Modernism, each art searches for "purity" and in that purity, absolute autonomy not only from other advanced art forms, but from mundane everyday life and popular (mass) culture as well. (All forms of popular culture are referred to by Greenberg as kitsch.) [See Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"]

In this sense, pre-Modernist realist painting presents a problem in that it tends to conceal the specificity of the medium and, hence, the purity of painting. That's because realism encourages the viewer to move through the surface and into the illusionistic space of the representation. Modernist painting, on the other hand, uses the painting itself to call attention to painting. The flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment - all these things that were denied by traditional painting are reasserted by modernist painting (which is, historically speaking, the work of Manet and his successors).

Flatness as the Defining Feature of Painting:Modernism reasserts the two-dimensionality of the picture surface. It forces the viewer to see the painting first as a painted surface, and only later as a picture. This, Greenberg says, is the best way to see any kind of picture.For example, since sculpture is inherently three dimensional, it is absolutely necessary that modernist, i.e. pure, painting eschew any illusion of three-dimensionality. It must do this in order to sustain its autonomy. This is the real rationale for abstraction; not simply to avoid representation, but to avoid the impurity and inauthenticity of representing three dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. [Cf. Bell.] A painting is to be looked at, not looked into. Its space is to be traveled through with the eye alone. According to Greenberg, this sort of resistance to sculptural effects is very much a part of, and can be found in, the historical tradition of painting in the West.

Jasper Johns - "Numbers in Color", 1958-1959

The Historical Continuity and Teleology of Painting:This testing of the indispensable in any given medium is not tied to a pull towards freedom. (It is not, as Nietzsche would say, a Dionysian feature of artistic practice.) Rather it is a self-disciplining of art. (In that sense, Nietzsche would claim, it is Apollonian.) It is a testing of the limiting or boundary conditions specific to an art form. This movement in art has never been followed explicitly; it has not been a program followed consciously by artists. Thus, the individual achievements of artists seem to be a vehicle for the larger unfolding pattern or rationale. (Cf. Hegel's theory of history.) In other words, picture-making seems to have a logic of its own and is part of a continuous development within a tradition. In other words, Modernism is not a radical breaking away or liberation from all that is old and established in art. It is not something radically new. It is merely art's self-awakening.” (Quigley)

If you are interested you may find the essay “Modernist Painting” in its entirety online at: http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html

I appreciate that we are getting into some rather complicated ideas, concepts, and issues! As the class progresses our topics will become more complicated! So, please stay involved and studious! So far, in this class we have traveled through decades after decades of art and society! Keep in mind just as technology has grown exponentially both in applications and complexity since 1870 to present day, so has philosophy, science, and art! I feel that many of you are beginning to understand that not all art should be judged solely on its physical/aesthetic qualities. This understanding of art is rather superficial, just as you wouldn’t want to judge

Andy Warhol

a book by its cover, neither should you judge a work of art just on the way it appears. It takes work , research, and contemplation to understand many of the concepts that the artists we are discussing are trying to express through their artwork. This is how much of the “wall” between artists and the general public has been created. When some people do not immediately “get it” they don’t want to put the energy into trying to figure it out.

As you are all becoming aware though (through your hard work and study), many of the artworks we have discussed are making far more sense to you so, that “wall” is falling! Or, at least you understand why many individuals would consider something art, even if you don’t. Well, enough ranting for a moment! We are going to discuss a very exciting group of artists! A few of you may have even heard of some of them before, such as Andy Warhol. Another artist that invokes many to say, “what’s the point?” Or, “Who cares it’s a bunch of soup cans, how is that art?” Just as before I ask you to consider the artists themselves, what they may have been trying to say, as well as, some of the societal issues of the time these artists were working in.

I want to discuss the beginnings of the Pop Art Movement. “The term Pop-Art was invented by British curator Lawrence Alloway in 1955, to describe a new form of "Popular" art - a movement characterized by the imagery of consumerism and popular culture. Pop-Art emerged in both New York and London during the mid-1950s and became the dominant avant-garde style until the late 1960s. Characterized by bold, simple, everyday imagery, and vibrant block colors, it was interesting to look at and had a modern "hip" feel. The bright color schemes also enabled this form of avant-garde art to emphasize certain elements in contemporary culture, and helped to narrow the divide between the commercial arts and the fine arts. It was the first Post-Modernist movement (where medium is as important as the message) as well as the first school of art to reflect the power of film and television, from which many of its most famous images acquired their celebrity. Common sources of Pop iconography were advertisements, consumer product packaging, photos of film-stars, pop-stars and other celebrities, and comic strips.

Andy Warhol

David Hockney A Bigger Splash 1967

Pop-art, like nearly all significant art styles, was in part a reaction against the status quo. In 1950s America, the main style was Abstract Expressionism, an arcane non-figurative style of painting that - while admired by critics, serious art-lovers, and experienced museum-visitors - was not "connecting" with either the general public, or with many artists. Very much a painterly style, the more abstract and expressive it became, the bigger the opportunity for a new style which employed more figurative, more down-to-earth imagery: viz,(sic) something that the wider artist fraternity could get its teeth into and that viewers could relate to. Thus Pop-art, which duly became the established art style, and which in turn was superseded by other schools after 1970.

In some ways, the emergence of Pop-art (and its ascendancy over Abstract Expressionism) was similar to the rise of Dada and its broader based successor Surrealism (and their ascendancy over Cubism). Both the superseded schools (Abstract Expressionism and Cubism) involved highly intellectual styles with limited appeal to mainstream art lovers. True, Dada was essentially anti-art, but the years during which it flourished 1916-1922 were marked by great polarization and political strife, and as soon as things calmed down most Dadaists became Surrealists. In any event, as explained below under Aims and Philosophy, Pop-art shares many of the characteristics of Dada-Surrealism and is indebted to it for several techniques derived from Kurt Schwitters' collages, the "readymades" of Marcel Duchamp, the iconic imagery of Rene Magritte and the brash creations of Salvador Dali (eg. Mae West Lips Sofa; Lobster Telephone).

And if Surrealism was essentially internalist, and escapist in nature, while Pop-art was defined by external consumerist forces, both were consumed by the need to make a strong visual impact on the general public. Another artist who may have had an impact on Pop-art, is Edward Hopper (1882-1967) the realist painter of urban America. Although his painterly style is very different from most pop works, his simple images of ultra-American everyday scenes (eg. "Night Hawks", 1942 and "Gas", 1940) were well known to the pop generation, and may have informed their paintings.

Claes Oldenburg Geometric Mouse Scale A 1969

Andy Warhol Electric Chair 1965

British Pop-Art emerged from within the Independent Group - an informal circle of artists including painter Richard Hamilton, curator and art critic Lawrence Alloway, and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, that met in the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

From the first meeting, in 1952, when Paolozzi presented a number of collages assembled from magazine clippings and other "found objects", including his (now) celebrated collage entitled "I was a Rich Man's Plaything" (created 5 years previously in 1947) their discussions centered largely around the artistic value and relevance of popular mass culture. Four years later, in 1956, another member of the group, Richard Hamilton, produced his own collage, "Just what is it that makes today's homes so appealing?" (left bottom)- which, along with Paolozzi's 1947 collage, is regarded as one of the earliest examples of British Pop-Art. In 1961, a number of Pop-style works by Derek Boshier, David Hockney, Allen Jones, RB Kitaj and Peter Phillips, featured in the Young Contemporaries Exhibition. In 1962, further publicity was given to British Pop when the BBC screened "Pop Goes the Easel", a film by Ken Russell which explored the new movement in Britain.

Meanwhile in America, during the mid-1950s, the art world was being rocked by a number of artists attached to small movements (eg. Neo-Dada, Funk Art, Lettrism, Beat Art, Polymaterialism, Common-Object, to name but a few), many of whom were incorporating articles of mass culture in their works. They wanted their art to be much more inclusive than traditional styles (like Abstract Expressionism), so they used non-art materials and focused on ordinary, easily recognizable subjects that expressed the popular culture of the day.

Among this upsurge of innovation, work by Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Johnson (1927-95) and Jasper Johns, was beginning to make an impact on the important New York art scene. Between them, they opened up a whole range of new subject matter: Johns, with his paintings of flags,

Richard Hamilton Just What Is It that Makes Todays Homes So Different So Appealing 1956

George Segal The Diner 1964-66

targets and numbers, as well as his sculptures of objects like beer cans; Rauschenberg, with his collage and assemblage art, and "combine paintings" (in which a painted canvas is combined with various objects or photographic images - such as: "Monogram" [1955-9] comprising a stuffed goat with a tire around its middle) of stuffed animals, Coca-Cola bottles, and other items; Johnson with his celebrity collages of James Dean, Shirley Temple and Elvis. Other influential pioneers and advocates of Pop-art were the composer John Cage (an influential teacher at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina), and the Performance artist Allan Kaprow.

This rising tide of new thinking was further enhanced by renewed interest in earlier avant-garde movements like Dada and Surrealism, whose enduring vitality was reinforced by the influence, if not the actual presence, of several ex-Dadaists and Surrealists, like Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and local converts, such as Joseph Cornell. That said, it is important to state that while American avant-garde artists of this period (especially Rauschenberg) were indebted to earlier Europeans (like Duchamp, Schwitters et al) for establishing certain traditions (like collage), their unique focus was on producing art which reflected the reality of contemporary America.

By the early 1960s, a cohort of Pop-style artists began to gain fame through solo exhibitions in places like New York and Los Angeles, several of whom used commercial printmaking techniques (eg. screen-printing) to create their art, rather than traditional painterly methods. These new talents included: Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Andy Warhol. Several works, later to become icons, were shown for the first time. They included Lichtenstein's comic strip oils, Warhol's silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's soup cans, and Oldenburg's monumental vinyl burgers and ice-creams.

Strangely, until late 1962 or early 1963, these artists were still labeled by critics as New Realists or some other such term. Thus the two important art shows held in the autumn of 1962 - one curated by Walter Hopps at the

Tom Wesselmann Great American Nude 1964

Roy Lichtenstein Drowning Girl 1963

Pasadena Art Museum, the other at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York - were entitled "The New Painting of Common Objects" (Pasadena) and "New Realism" (New York). Only hereafter was the term Pop-art used as a technical name for the movement, partly due to the critics discomfort with the term Realist, and partly due to the presence in New York of Lawrence Alloway - now a curator at the Guggenheim Museum - who advocated the adoption of the term.

From 1963 onwards, Pop-art spread throughout America and, helped by British Pop-artists, established itself on the Continent. The movement's rise was aided by parallel growth in other areas. In economics, via the growth of the world economy in general and the American economy in particular; in science, via the spread of television; in contemporary music, (which itself became known as "Pop") through the miniaturization of radio, increased record production, the appearance of cult groups like The Beatles, and the phenomenon of pychedelia; and lastly through an expanding art market.

During the later 1960s, Andy Warhol emerged as the Damien Hirst (an artist we will discuss later) of his day, gaining fame and notoriety in equal amounts for his iconic celebrity screenprints, his conceptualist film work, his increasingly sleek art production methods and his self promotion - at least until he was shot and seriously wounded on June 3, 1968. Roy Lichtenstein, too, became a household name through his comic-strip blow-ups and several prestigious retrospectives on both sides of the Atlantic. Meantime, Rauschenberg won the Grand Prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, and maintained his avant-garde reputation by helping to form EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) in 1966 to boost collaboration between artists and engineers, while Johns maintained his high standing by winning first prize at the 1967 Sao Paulo Biennale.

Perhaps inevitably, having weathered the conformity of the 1950s, and the panic of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), American Pop-art reached its peak during the second half of the 1960s, only to find itself infected and undermined by the angst of the Vietnam War era, and the corresponding rise of anti-Americanism.

Robert Rauschenberg Choke

Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe 1962

The Aims, Philosophy and Methods of Pop Art

No international art movement that lasts for more than 15 years and encompasses all known art types, genres and types of media, as well as entirely new forms, can be summed up in a few sentences. Even so, no understanding of Pop-art is possible without taking into account the following concepts which help to characterize its core.

Instant MeaningThe basic idea behind Pop-art was to create a form of art with instant meaning. This was in sharp contrast to the super-intellectualism of Abstract Expressionism with its esoteric canvases so beloved by arts professionals. To achieve their goal of instant meaning, Pop artists experimented with new commercial processes, like acrylic painting, collage on canvas using materials not normally associated with painting, and silkscreen printing. In addition, the imagery and color schemes for most Pop-art painting and sculpture was taken from high-profile and easily recognizable consumerist or media sources such as: consumer goods, advertising graphics, magazines, television, film, cartoons and comic books. People and objects were presented in bright, often highly-contrasting colors, while compositions were typically very simple and visually appealing to the general public.

Art Can be Made From AnythingUp until the 20th century, traditional fine art painting was normally done in oils: sculpture in bronze, stone or wood. Furthermore, subjects were typically those deemed worthy of aesthetic treatment: the human nude, the human face, the classic landscape, genre-scene or still life. Even Cubism, despite its revolutionary nature, tended to observe many of these artistic conventions. Then came the First World War and the anti-art movement known as Dada. This movement initiated the idea that art can be created from all sorts of stuff, including the most banal everyday scraps of material. Pop-artists maintained and developed this idea. They presented the modern world of popular culture with whatever materials they though appropriate, no matter how low-brow or trivial.

Claes Oldenburg Floor Cake 1962

The Idea is More Important Than the Work of Art ItselfAlso, up until Dada, the essential feature of traditional fine art was the work itself - the painting, sculpture, etching, carving or whatever. Without a "work of art", there was nothing. All attention was therefore focused on the quality of the finished product, and the skills required to produce it. Dada rebelled against this by celebrating the "idea behind the artwork" rather than the work itself. Many Pop-artists continued this tradition of Conceptual Art. They placed more importance on the impact of the work, and less importance on the making of it. Like the use of low-brow materials, this emphasis on a work's concept and impact was interpreted as an attempt to debunk the gravitas of the art world. This was partly true: some Pop artists did share the anti-art and anti-aesthetic credo of earlier Dadaists. However, mainstream Pop was more positive and more concerned to create new forms of expression, using new methods and new pictorial imagery, than to denigrate tradition. Indeed, many Pop-artists saw themselves as contributing to, rather than junking, fine art.

A More Inclusive and More Relevant Style of ArtNo matter how exquisitely conceived and painted, and how well received by influential art critics like Clement Greenberg (1909-94), Harold Rosenberg (1906-78) and others, Mark Rothko's monumental works of Abstract Expressionism were largely unknown to the American (or British) public at large. In contrast, almost everyone recognized Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and numerous other celebrities, as well as the popular foods and other branded products brands that rapidly became the staple subject of Pop-art. Thus from a very early stage, Pop-art declared its intention to reject the elitist character of traditional or high-brow art in favor of populist pictures of well-known subjects.

For most people in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a trip to an art museum entailed a tedious trawl past rows of obscure paintings, most of which were neither understandable nor entertaining. Typically, most famous works (and the artists who created them) could not be appreciated simply by viewing them, but required close study of a

Jasper Johns Field Painting 1963-64

Andy Warhol Campbell Soup Cans

museum guidebook. Pop art was instrumental in opening up the world of painting and sculpture to ordinary people who, perhaps for the first time in their lives, could instantly recognize and appreciate the exhibit in front of them. They might not like it, but they were far less likely to feel intimidated by an everyday image they could relate to. In this sense, Pop-art made museums and galleries more relevant to the general public.

(http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/pop-art.htm)

Alex Katz, Ted Berrigan, 1967 Robert Indiana LOVE 1967

Andy Warhol

Perhaps one of America’s most famous artists, if not the most famous Pop-Artist of all time is Andy Warhol. “Born Andrew Warhola in a working class suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 6th 1928 to Slovak immigrants (Ondrej and Julia Warhola [Varchola in Slovakia]). Warhol showed an early interest in photography and drawing, attending free classes at Carnegie Institute.

Warhol's father worked in a coal mine, and the family lived at 55 Beelen Street and later at 3252 Dawson Street in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The family was Byzantine Catholic and attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Andy Warhol has two brothers John and Paul. His father died in an accident when Andy was 13 years old. Warhol came down with St. Vitus' dance in third grade, an affliction of the nervous system causing involuntary movements which is believed to be a complication of scarlet fever. He was frequently bed-ridden as a child and became an outcast amongst other students. When in bed he drew a lot, listened to the radio and collected pictures of movie stars.

Years later Warhol described the period of his sickness as very important in the development of his personality and in the forming of his skill-set and preferences. The 1940s in America was psychologically grim. The country had just recovered from the Depression and the Second World War had brought the cruel outside world to the hearts and minds of isolationist-minded Americans. The average man worried about protecting his interests at home from Fascists, Communists and atomic bombs. It was an atmosphere of conformity and insecurity.

Andy was the only member of his family to attend college. In 1945 he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now known as Carnegie Melon University), where he majored in pictorial design. Upon graduation, Warhol moved to New York with fellow students Philip Pearlstein and Phil's wife Dorothy Kantorand found steady work as a commercial artist working as an illustrator for several magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker.

Andy Warhol about the age of 3, with his mother Julia and brother John, 1932(Andy is the boy on the right)

Andy Warhol

The Beat movement was there, slamming the mentally lethargic, decadent attitude of the middle class. Artists and writers were out to alter the public consciousness. New York was also the home of breakthrough creativity in the commercial arts industry. Madison Avenue was the advertising and editorial hub of the world. It was the perfect place for an illustrator to make a living.

"Well, Andy was immediately employable. I was a very uncertain thing—my portfolio was one of those elaborately worked out, intellectualized things about the US Constitution (2B), and unfortunately, I hit New York in the beginning of the McCarthy era, and as soon as I walked in and somebody saw it, they immediately assumed I was some sort of political kook ... Andy went right to the heart of the matter, he knew—that's what I mean by he was immediately employable; he was only interested in illustration, and they were very direct." - Philip Pearlstein.

He became well-known for his whimsical ink drawings (left bottom) done in a loose, blotted ink style which were shown at the Bodley Gallery in New York. He also did advertising and window displays for retail stores such as Bonwit Teller and I. Miller. Ironically, his first assignment was for Glamour magazine for an article titled "Success is a Job in New York." Throughout the nineteen fifties, Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist, winning several commendations from the Art Director's Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. During this period, he shortened his name to "Warhol." In 1951 he won his first ADC Award for a CBS record illustration. Andy also had his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in 1952, exhibiting Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. Subsequently, Warhol's work was exhibited in several venues throughout the fifties including his first group show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1955.

In 1953 the artist produced his first illustrated book, A is an Alphabet and Love is a Pink Cake, which he gave to his clients and associates. In 1956 he and other pop artists had an important group exhibition at the

Hand-colored studio portrait of Shirley Temple with handwritten inscription: "To Andrew Worhola [sic] from Shirley Temple", 1941 (Perhaps proof of an early preoccupation with Pop Culture?)

renowned Museum of Modern Art. With a burgeoning career as an illustrator and artist, he formed Andy Warhol Enterprises in 1957. Warhol also traveled to Japan, Southeast Asia, Italy and Holland in 1956 and had two exhibitions at the Bodley Gallery. The work for I. Miller, Harper's Bazaar, and Noonday Press won him additional ADC awards and business was booming so he hired several assistants: (http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/popart/Andy-Warhol.html)

“In the late 1950s, Warhol began to devote more energy to painting. He made his first Pop paintings, which he based on comics and ads, in 1961. The following year marked the beginning of Warhol’s celebrity. He debuted his famous Campbell’s Soup Can series, which caused a sensation in the art world. Shortly thereafter he began a large sequence of movie star portraits, including Marilyn Monroe,(left top), Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor. Warhol also started his series of “death and disaster” paintings at that time.Between 1963 and 1968 Warhol worked with his Superstar performers and various other people to create hundreds of films. These films were scripted and improvised, ranging from conceptual experiments and simple narratives to short portraits and sexploitation features. His works include Empire (1964), The Chelsea Girls (1966), and the Screen Tests (1964-66). Warhol’s first exhibition of sculptures was held in 1964. It included hundreds of replicas of large supermarket product boxes, including Brillo Boxes and Heinz Boxes (left bottom). For this occasion, he premiered his new studio, painted silver and known as “The Factory”. It quickly became “the” place to be in New York; parties held there were mentioned in gossip columns throughout the country. Warhol held court at Max’s Kansas City, a nightclub that was a popular hangout among artists and celebrities. By the mid-1960s he was a frequent presence in magazines and the media.

Warhol expanded into the realm of performance art with a traveling multimedia show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured The Velvet Underground, a rock band. In 1966 Warhol exhibited Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds at the Leo Castelli Gallery.

Warhol self-published a large series of artists’ books in the 1950s, but the first one to be mass-produced was Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), published in 1967. Two years later he co-founded Interview, a magazine devoted to film, fashion, and popular culture. Interview is still in circulation today. His later books include THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), Exposures (1979), POPism (1980), and America (1985). Most of his books were based on transcribed conversations.

In 1974, Warhol started a series of Time Capsules: cardboard boxes that he filled with the materials of his everyday life, including mail, photos, art, clothing, collectibles, etc. The artist produced over 600 of them and they are now an archival goldmine of his life and times.Throughout the 1970s Warhol frequently socialized with celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Truman Capote, both of whom had been important early subjects in his art. He started to receive dozens—and soon hundreds—of commissions for painted portraits from wealthy socialites, musicians and film stars. Celebrity portraits developed into a significant aspect of his career and a main source of income. He was a regular partygoer at Studio 54, the famous New York disco, along with celebrities such as fashion designer Halston, entertainer Liza Minnelli, and Bianca Jagger. In 1984, Warhol collaborated with the young artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. Warhol returned to painting with a brush for these artworks, briefly abandoning the silkscreen method he had used exclusively since 1962.

In the mid-1980s his television shows, Andy Warhol’s T.V. and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes were broadcast on New York cable television and nationally on MTV. He created work for Saturday Night Live, appeared in an episode of The Love Boat and produced music videos for rock bands such as The Cars. Warhol also signed with a few modeling agencies, appearing in fashion shows and numerous print and television ads.Warhol was a prolific artist, producing numerous works through the 1970s and 1980s. His paintings, prints, photographs, and drawings from this period include: Mao, Ladies and Gentlemen, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Shadows, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Dollar Signs, Zeitgeist, and Camouflage.

Andy Warhol  Cow, 1966 

Warhol’s final two exhibitions were his series of Last Supper paintings, shown in Milan and his Sewn Photos (multiple prints of identical photos sewn together in a grid), exhibited in New York. Both shows opened in January 1987, one month before his death.

Critics’ opinions differ regarding the social commentary in Warhol’s work. The artist was deliberately evasive about his intentions and his work allows for diverse and often contradictory readings. As noted by one biographer, Warhol thought that the electric chair reflected a “typically American way to go.” Does this preclude a statement on capital punishment? Or does the artist see the chair as merely another American icon; a Campbell’s soup can, Marilyn Monroe figure or Coca-Cola logo? Warhol seems to adopt, as art critic Robert Rosenblum maintains, “the stance of an aesthete-observer in the face of any subject, whether a stalk of asparagus or a murder.”The social intent of his work may lie in its very ambiguity and the possibility for multiple interpretations. Do Warhol’s portraits pay homage to Jackie’s stately example of mourning—her public grief as the widowed First Lady? Or do they mirror, in their constancy and repetition, the media’s relentless portrayal of the events surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination? In this work, as in others, the artist seems to both celebrate and critique American culture.

Fame infatuated Warhol. His art reflects an ongoing fascination with Hollywood and celebrity culture. In the 1960s, Warhol achieved his own celebrity status. His Ray -Bans and black leather jacket cut a stylish image of New York underground cool. Warhol was featured prominently in magazines and news stories. People clamoring to see the artist’s enigmatic figure mobbed the opening to his 1965 retrospective at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In the 1970s, Warhol’s nightly forays into Studio 54, the premier club of the time, solidified his iconic reputation. Business flourished as the rich and famous commissioned him to paint their portraits. By this time, Warhol had traded in his downtown leather jacket for an uptown tux. He was seen with everyone from country singer Dolly Parton to President Jimmy Carter. The 1980s saw yet another Warhol incarnation as he hosted Andy Warhol’s TV and modeled high fashion.

Andy Warhol Little Electric Chair, 1964-1965

Andy Warhol Vote McGovern, 1972

Filmmaker, photographer, painter, commercial illustrator, music producer, writer, and even fashion model--Warhol was a true radical in his approach to art. The breadth and significance of his influence has made him one of the most important artists of our time. He challenged traditional boundaries between art and life, art and business, and different media. In the process he turned everyday life into art and art into a way to live the everyday--collecting, documenting, reproducing, experimenting and collaborating with the people, places and things around him. Warhol’s enthusiasm for life was rivaled only by his love of the methods of capturing it. He loved the framing device--the camera, the silkscreen, the empty box, the tape recorder, the shopping bag; the telephone—as much as the content it framed. Perhaps Warhol’s greatest innovation was that he saw no limits to his practice. His Pop sensibility embraced an anything-can-be-art approach--appropriating images, ideas and even innovation itself.(http://www.warhol.org/aboutandy/career/#ixzz13gkxjV48)

Fame nearly killed Warhol. “In 1968 Valerie Solanas, a periodic factory visitor, and the sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) walked into the Factory and shot Warhol. The attack was near fatal and he was briefly declared dead (doctors opened his chest and massaged his heart to help stimulate its movement again).

On June 3rd 1968 she arrived at The Factory and waited for Warhol in the lobby area. When he arrived with a couple of friends, she fired three shots from a handgun at Warhol. She then shot art critic Mario Amaya and also tried to shoot Warhol's manager, Fred Hughes, but her gun jammed. Just then, the elevator arrived. Hughes suggested she take it, and she did, leaving the Factory.

That evening Solanas turned herself in to the police and was charged with attempted murder and other offenses. Solanas made statements to the arresting officer and at the arraignment hearing that Warhol had "too much control" over her and that Warhol was planning to steal her work. Pleading guilty, she received a three-year sentence.

Andy Warhol Mao, 1972

Warhol refused to testify against her. The attack had a profound impact on Warhol and his art, and The Factory scene became much more tightly controlled afterwards. For the rest of his life, Warhol lived in fear that Solanas would attack him again.

"It was the Cardboard Andy, not the Andy I could love and play with," said close friend and collaborator Billy Name. "He was so sensitized you couldn't put your hand on him without him jumping. I couldn't even love him anymore, because it hurt him to touch him." While his friends were actively hostile towards Solanas, Warhol himself preferred not to discuss her.

Warhol barely survived. He never fully recovered and for the rest of his life had to wear a bandage to prevent his injuries from worsening. Years later, his wounds would still occasionally bleed after he overexerted himself.”(http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/popart/Andy-Warhol.html)

Valerie Solanas

Andy’s Mother (right) just after the shooting

Alice Neel World of hurt 1970

Andy Warhol's 1962 Campbell's Soup Cans

Andy Warhol Brilo Box 1969

1969 Esquire magazine

Andy Warhol Skull, 1976

Andy Warhol Statue of Liberty, 1962

Richard Avedon Andy Warhol, artist, New York City 1969 Richard Avedon Andy Warhol, Artist, New York City, August 14, 1969

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Let us also discuss Roy Lichtenstein. “Born into a middle class family on October 27, 1923 in New York City, Roy Lichtenstein attended public school until the age of 12, before being enrolled into a private academy for his secondary education. The academy did not have an art department, and he became interested in art and design as hobby outside of his schooling. He was an avid fan of Jazz and often attended concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He would often draw portraits of the musicians at their instruments. During 1939, in his final year at the academy, he enrolled in summer art classes at the Arts Students League in New York under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh.

On graduating in 1940, Lichtenstein left New York to study at the Ohio State University which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts. His studies were interrupted by a three year stint in the army during World War II. He returned to his studies in Ohio after the war and one of his teachers at the time, Hoyt L. Sherman, is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his future work (Lichtenstein would later name a new studio he funded at OSU as the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center). Lichtenstein entered the graduate program at Ohio State and was hired as an art instructor, a post he held on and off for the next ten years. In 1951 he had his first one-man exhibition at a gallery in New York, the exhibition was a minor success. He moved to Cleveland in 1951, where he remained for six years, doing jobs as various as draftsmen to window decorator in between periods of painting. His work at this time was based on cubist interpretations of other artist’s paintings such as Frederic Remington. In 1957 he moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again. It is at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style, a late convert to this style of painting; he showed his work in 1959 to an unenthusiastic audience. He began teaching at Rutgers University in 1960 where he was heavily influenced by Allan Kaprow, also a tutor at the University. His first work to feature the large scale use of hard edged figures and Benday Dots was Look

Roy Lichtenstein

Mickey (1961, National Gallery, Washington DC) (see left top). In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers or cartoons. In 1961 Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtensteins work at his gallery in New York, and he had his first one man show at the gallery in 1962, the entire collection was bought by influential collectors of the time before the show even opened. Finally making enough money to live from his painting, he stopped teaching in the same year.

Using oil and Magna paint his best known works, such as Drowning Girl (1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York), feature thick outlines, bold colors and Benday Dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduction. Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackles the way mass media portrays them.

His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Gallery, London), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, featuring a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane with a dazzling red and yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoetic lettering WHAAM! and the boxed caption "I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky..." This diptych is large in scale, measuring 1.7 x 4.0 m (5'7" x 13'4"). (see next slide)

Most of his best-known artworks are relatively close, but not exact, copies of comic book panels, a subject he largely abandoned in 1965. (He would occasionally incorporate comics into his work in different ways in later decades.) These panels were originally drawn by lesser known comic book artists such as Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv Novick, and Jerry Grandinetti, who rarely received any credit. Artist Dave Gibbons, said of Lichtenstein's works: "Roy Lichtenstein's copies of the work of Irv Novick and Russ Heath are flat, uncomprehending tracings of quite sophisticated images." Lichtenstein's obituary in The Economist noted that "this is to miss the point of Roy Lichtenstein's achievement. His was the idea. The art of today, he told an interviewer, is all around us."

Roy Lichtenstein Hopeless 1963

Roy Lichtenstein Whaam 1963

During the seventies and eighties, his work began to loosen and expand on what he had done before. He produced a series of “Artists Studios” which incorporated elements of his previous work. A notable example being Artist's Studio, Look Mickey (1973, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis) which incorporates five other previous works, fitted into the scene.

In the late seventies this style was replaced with more surreal works such as Pow Wow (1979, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst,Aachen).

In addition to paintings, he also made sculptures in metal and plastic including some notable public sculptures such as Lamp in St. Mary’s, Georgia in 1978.

His painting Torpedo...Los! (next slide) sold at Christie's for $5.5 million in 1989, a record sum at the time, one of only three artists to have attracted such huge sums for art produced within the artists lifetime.

In 1995 Lichtenstein was awarded the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation in Kyoto, Japan

In 1996 The National Gallery in Washington DC became the largest single repository of the Artists work when he donated 154 prints and 2 books. In total there are some 4,500 works thought to be in circulation.

He died of pneumonia on September 29, 1997 at New York University Medical Center. Twice married, he was survived by his wife, Dorothy, who he wed in 1968 and by his sons, David and Mitchell, from his first marriage.”

(http://www.artinthepicture.com/artists/Roy_Lichtenstein/Biography/) Roy Lichtenstein Girl at Piano, 1963

Roy Lichtenstein Torpedo...Los!

At this point in class we are going to discuss two very difficult Art Movements to understand, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Minimalism, is certainly one of those kinds of art that makes the general public scratch their heads and ask, “Is this art?” the answer to most individuals is immediately, no. I ask you once again to keep an open mind, and reflect on how sometimes the most simple things are worth exploring. Minimal Artists were highly interested in the incredibly subtle ways in which we perceive art. Remember truth, honesty, and purity of expression were also all topics these artists were deeply interested in! I promise if you can survive the first part of this lecture I will reward you with the Photorealism Movement ! A movement many find very interesting!

“Though never a self-proclaimed movement, Minimalism refers to painting or sculpture made with an extreme economy of means and reduced to the essentials of geometric abstraction. Minimalist art is generally characterized by precise, hard-edged, unitary geometric forms; rigid planes of color—usually cool hues or commercially mixed colors, or sometimes just a single color; nonhierarchical, mathematically regular compositions, often based on a grid; the reduction to pure self-referential form, emptied of all external references; and an anonymous surface appearance, without any gestural inflection. As a result of these formal attributes, this art has also been referred to as ABC art, Cool art, Imageless Pop, Literalist art, Object art, and Primary Structure art. Minimalist art shares Pop arts rejection of the artistic subjectivity and heroic gesture of Abstract Expressionism . In Minimal art what is important is the phenomenological basis of the viewer's experience, how he or she perceives the internal relationships among the parts of the work and of the parts to the whole, as in the gestalt aspect of Morris's sculpture. The repetition of forms in Minimalist sculpture serves to emphasize the subtle differences in the perception of those forms in space and time as the spectator's viewpoint shifts in time and space.” (http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/glossary_Minimalism.html ) 

Tony Smith Free Ride 1962

Tony Smith Free Ride 1962

Minimalism was a, “term used in the 20th century, in particular from the 1960s, to describe a style characterized by an impersonal austerity, plain geometric configurations and industrially processed materials. It was first used by David Burlyuk in the catalogue introduction for an exhibition of John Graham’s paintings at the Dudensing Gallery in New York in 1929. Burlyuk wrote: ‘Minimalism derives its name from the minimum of operating means. Minimalist painting is purely realistic—the subject being the painting itself.’ The term gained currency in the 1960s. Accounts and explanations of Minimalism varied considerably, as did the range of work to which it was related. This included the monochrome paintings of Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella and Brice Marden, and even aspects of Pop art and Post-painterly Abstraction. Typically the precedents cited were Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, the Suprematist compositions of Kazimir Malevich and Barnett Newman’s Abstract Expressionist paintings. The rational grid paintings of Agnes Martin (next slide) were also mentioned in connection with such Minimalist artists as Sol LeWitt.

After the work of such critics as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, analyses of Minimalism tended to focus exclusively on the three-dimensional work of such American artists as Carl André, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, LeWitt, Robert Morris and Tony Smith, although Smith himself never fully subscribed to Minimalism. These artists never worked or exhibited together as a self-defined group, yet their art shared certain features: geometric forms and use of industrial materials or such modern technology as the fluorescent electric lights that appeared in Flavin’s works. Minimalists also often created simple modular and serial arrangements of forms that are examples of Systems art. LeWitt’s serial works included wall drawings as well as sculptures.Judd and Morris were the principal artists to write about

Minimalism. Judd’s most significant contribution to this field was the article ‘Specific Objects’ (1965). (also mentioned in your reading) Judd’s article began by announcing the birth of a new

Dan Flavin "Monument" for V. Tatlin 1 1964

Agnes Martin. Tremolo. 1962

type of three-dimensional work that could not be classified in terms of either painting or sculpture and, in effect, superseded both traditions. Judd’s concept became retrospectively identified with his own boxes and stark geometric reliefs of the period . Originally, however, he explained his idea with reference to the work of a heterogeneous selection of artists, including Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Klein, Yayoi Kusama (b 1929), Claes Oldenburg, Richard Smith, Frank Stella and H. C. Westermann (1922–81). The article was also copiously illustrated with works by such artists as Richard Artschwager, Flavin, Jasper Johns, Phillip King, Morris, Rauschenberg, Stella, and with one of Judd’s own pieces. Judd distinguished the new work by means of its compositional ‘wholeness’, which, unlike previous art, was not ‘made part by part, by addition’. He was later to focus the critical implications of this distinction with a dismissive reference (1969) to the ‘Cubist fragmentation’ of Anthony Caro’s work. For Judd, his own work achieved its formal integrity principally by adapting into a third dimension the ‘singleness’ that he observed in the compositions of such painters as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.

Morris’s influential ‘Notes on Sculpture’ appeared a year after Judd’s article. In it he established the criteria by which his own recent work could be evaluated. Like Judd, he repudiated an aesthetic based on Cubist principles. ‘The sensuous object, resplendent with compressed internal relations, has had to be rejected’ (Artforum, v/2 (Oct 1966), p. 23). In its place Morris proposed a more compact, ‘unitary’ art form. He was especially drawn to simple, regular and irregular polyhedrons. Influenced by theories in psychology and phenomenology, Morris argued that these configurations established in the mind of the beholder ‘strong gestalt sensation’, whereby form and shape could be grasped intuitively. Judd and Morris both attempted to reduce the importance of aesthetic judgment in modernist criticism by connecting the question of the specificity of the medium to

Donald Judd Untitled (Stack) 1967

Barnett Newman Voice of Fire 1967

generic value. Nevertheless, a distinction between the categories of art and non-art was maintained with Judd’s claim that ‘A work needs only to be interesting’.

For Greenberg and Fried, Minimalist work was united by the threat it posed to their modernist aesthetic. The modernist response to Minimalism was outlined in Greenberg’s ‘Recentness of Sculpture’ and Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ (both 1967). Both critics were troubled by claims for Minimalism as a new art form, and were also concerned at the Minimalist elimination of complex compositional relations and subtle nuances of form, which they believed to be essential qualities of modernist sculpture. The critical resistance that Minimalism met in its initial stages persisted, and censure arose not only from modernist critics but also from the tabloid press. This was particularly evident in the abuse that was given to André’s sculpture made from building bricks, Equivalent VIII (1966; London, Tate), (left) upon the occasion of its exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in 1976.

From the 1960s the Minimalists’ work remained remarkably consistent, continuing its geometric and serial forms (e.g. LeWitt’s Cube Structures Based on Five Modules, 600×800×700 mm, 1971–4; Edinburgh, N.G. Mod. A.). Conceptual art inherited many of the concerns as well as the contradictions of Minimalist discourse. Attempts were made by Joseph Kosuth, among others, to resolve its complex views on the relationship between aesthetic judgment and the art object. Minimalism’s sense of ‘theatricality’ stimulated much subsequent work in the fields of installation and performance art, where it helped facilitate a critical engagement with the spectator’s perception of space and time. The concept of ‘theatricality’ was first used in connection with Minimalism by Michael Fried to characterize the absence of ‘presentness’ in the spatial and temporal experience of the art work. While Fried was critical of this situation, his analysis led, by default, to a reassessment of Minimalism from an anti-humanist perspective.” (Want)

Carl Andre Equivalent VIII 1966

We have seen the term, “Conceptual Art” used a number of times when discussing Sol LeWitt’s work. In fact he is often labeled a Conceptual Artist. Keep in mind he can be both a Minimalist and Conceptual Artist. Artists are not always confined to being involved in one art movement. Often, an artist starts out in one movement, making a certain type of art. During the course of his or her life they may move into a completely different style of artwork or be involved with another movement.

One of the things interesting about Minimalism and Conceptual Art is that it shares many similarities and philosophies. So often you will hear the names of one artist used when discussing both movements. I want to discuss Conceptual Art further. “Few artistic movements are surrounded by so much debate and controversy as conceptual art. For conceptual art has a tendency to provoke intense and perhaps even extreme reactions in its audiences. After all, whilst some people find conceptual art very refreshing and the only kind of art that is relevant to today's world, many others consider it shocking, distasteful, skill-less, downright bad, or, and most importantly, not art at all. Conceptual art, it seems, is something that we either love or hate.

This divisive character is, however, far from accidental. Most conceptual art actively sets out to be controversial in so far as it seeks to challenge and probe us about what we tend to take as given in the domain of art. In fact, this facet of evoking argument and debate lies at the very heart of what it is trying to do, namely to make us question our assumptions not only about what may properly qualify as art and what the function of the artist should be, but also what our role as spectators should involve, and how we should relate to art. It should come as no surprise, then, that conceptual art can cause frustration or vexation – to raise difficult and sometimes even annoying questions is precisely what conceptual art in general aspires to do. In reacting strongly to

  Robert Morris Untitled  1965/71

  Robert Morris Untitled  1967

conceptual art we are, in other words, playing right into its hands.The first difficulty that a philosophical investigation of conceptual art encounters has to do with isolating the object of examination, or at least the category of objects under scrutiny. In the words of the art historian Paul Wood,

[i]t is not at all clear where the boundaries of ‘conceptual art’ are to be drawn, which artists and which works to include. Looked at in one way, conceptual art gets to be like Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left but a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small number of artists… Then again, regarded under a different aspect, conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge around which the past turned into the present. (Wood 2002, 6)

On a strict historical reading, the expression ‘conceptual art’ refers to the artistic movement that reached its pinnacle between 1966 and 1972 (Lippard 1973). Amongst its most famous adherents at its early stage we find artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Joseph Beuys and Mel Ramsden, to name but a few. What unites all conceptual art of that period is the absorption of the lessons learnt from other twentieth-century art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism and the Fluxus group, not to mention the attempt to once and for all ‘free’ art of the Modernist paradigm. Most importantly, perhaps, conceptual art sought to overcome a backdrop against which art's principal aim is to produce something beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. Art, early conceptual artists held, is redundant if it does not make us think. Yet most artistic institutions are not conducive to reflection and continue to promote a consumerist conception of art and artists based on beauty and technical skill and this, conceptual artists in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s agreed, must be denounced. The job of conceptual artists is instead to encourage a revisionary understanding of art, artist, and artistic experience.

Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (26 November 1965), performance documentation at Galerie Alfred Schmela, Düsseldorf.

Whilst conceptual art in its purest form might arguably be limitedto works produced during these five or six years nearly half a century ago, it seems overly narrow – certainly from a philosophical perspective – to limit our inquiry to works produced during that period alone. For although the work created during that time might generally be conceived as more directly anti-establishment and anti-consumerist than later conceptual art, the spirit of early conceptual art seems to have carried on relatively undiluted into the very late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as witnessed by pieces such as Tracey Emin's Unmade Bed, Damian Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, (next slide) and The Chapman Brothers' My Family.

The highly individualized character of the intellectual exploration that conceptual art urges us to engage in has always been such that any attempt to pinpoint a specific common denominator other than this general vision and approach to art, art-making and society at large invariably fails to catch its very essence. The means of artistic expression, we are told, are infinite and the topics available for questioning and discussion are limitless. It belongs to the very nature of conceptual art, then, to be – like Lewis' Cheshire cat – elusive and slippery. Conceptual artists, be it Joseph Beuys or Damian Hirst, pursue artistic originality and representation in every possible way. For that reason, one might find ourselves obliged to replace the slightly lofty cliché according to which there are as many definitions of conceptual art as there are conceptual artists with the further claim that there are, in fact, as many definitions of conceptual art as there are conceptual artworks.

Nevertheless, in the midst of this deliberately produced uncertainty about the nature of conceptual art, a handful of characteristics and general aims do seem to recur, and although they should not be seen as criteria for conceptual art strictly speaking, they may be considered tenets fundamental to (most) conceptual art.

Joseph Beuys, I like America and America likes me 1974 installation

Damian Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991

The Limits of Art and the Role of ArtistsFirst and foremost, conceptual art challenges our intuitions concerning the limits of what may count as art and what it is an artist does. That is to say, works of conceptual art encourage us to think about the kind of things that may be considered to be art, and about exactly what the role of the artist should be. It does so, on the one hand, by postulating ever more complex objects as candidates for the status of ‘artwork’, and, on the other hand, by distancing the task of the artist from the actual making and manipulating of the artistic material.

A characteristic way in which conceptual art explores the boundaries of the artwork is by questioning where the realm of the artistic ends and that of utility begins. Continuing the tradition of Marcel Duchamp's readymades such as Fountain, or Bottlerack, it sets out to overthrow our traditional conceptions of what an art object should be made of and what it should look like. The artwork is a process rather than a material thing, and as such it is no longer something that can be grasped merely by seeing, hearing or touching the end product of that process. The notion of agency in art-making is thus particularly emphasized. In many cases, the ‘art-making’ and the ‘artwork’ come together, as what is sought is an identification of the notion of the work of art with the conceptual activity of the artist. Conceptual art, politicised and influenced by events such as the ‘May Days’ in Paris (1968), the ‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy (1969), the Vietnam War, and the rise of feminism, promotes a rapprochement between art-making and criticism – both artistic and social – by raising questions about the products of artistic activities and the very purpose of art. To use the words of Joseph Kosuth, it ‘both annexes the functions of the critic, and makes a middle-man unnecessary.’ (Guercio 1999, 39).

Artistic MediaAs a direct result of its examination of what may properly qualify as art and its ensuing very broad conception of what may constitute an art object, conceptual art rejects traditional artistic

  Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965.

  Joseph Kosuth, Four Words Four Colors 1965.

  Mel Ramsden's secret painting.

media such as conventional painting or sculpture. Instead, it adopts alternative means of expression, including performances, photography, films, videos, events, bodies, media, new ready-mades and new mixed media. In a nutshell, then, nothing whatsoever can be ruled out in principle as possible artistic media, as can be seen, for example, in Richard Long's photograph of a line made in the grass by walking Bruce Nauman's nine minute film of the artist himself playing one note on a violin whilst walking around in his studio and Piero Manzoni's act of signing a woman's arm.

Art as IdeaThe most fundamentally revisionary feature of conceptual art is the way in which it proclaims itself to be an art of the mind rather than the senses: it rejects traditional artistic media because it locates the artwork at the level of ideas rather than that of objects. As process matters more than physical material, and because art should be about intellectual inquiry and reflection rather than beauty and aesthetic pleasure, the work of art is said to be the idea at the heart of the piece in question. In the words of Kosuth, ‘[t]he actual works of art are ideas’ (Lippard 1973, 25). For conceptual art, ‘the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work’ (LeWitt 1967, 166). Art is ‘de-materialized’; art is prior to its materialization and is ultimately rooted in the agency of the artist. If art is de-materialized in this fashion, it is less likely, or so the early conceptual artists held, to be institutionalized.

The claim that the conceptual artwork itself is to be identified with the idea that may be seen to underlie it has far-reaching ramifications. It not only affects the ontology of the conceptual artwork but also profoundly alters the role of the artist by casting her in the role of thinker rather than object-maker. Moreover, it calls for a thorough review of the way in which we perceive, engage and appreciate artworks. Further still, it links art so intimately to ideas and concepts that even a principled distinction between the domain of art and the realm of thought seems difficult to preserve.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conceptual-art/)

Dan Graham View Interior, New Highway Restaurant, Jersey City, NJ 1967

Exam III

Vocab:

AssemblageCombinesHappenings/Performance ArtPop ArtMinimalismConceptual Art

Artists:

Robert RauschenbergJohn CageJasper JohnsAndy WarholRoy LichtensteinJoseph Beuys

Artwork:

Target With Plaster Casts 32-1Erased Willem de Kooning Drawing Lect 31 slide 15Marilyn Diptych 32-10How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 32-15