Postmodern Art History

Pollock. Guardians of the Secret. 1943.

Automatic painting

Primitivism

Gottlieb. Labyrinth No. 2. 1950.

Pictographs

Geometric form and automatic painting

African and NW coast masks

Reservoir of world of forms

Pollock. Full Fathom Five. 1947.

Moving away from figures

Objects embedded, cigarettes, a key, and nails

Dense and encrusted

Reference to The Tempest (mythic depth)

Pollock. Number 1, 1948. 1948.

More open

Moving away from figuration

Hand prints

Energy and mood

Not meant to be understood as something, rather be felt

Expression of pollock directly

No subordinate part of the canvas

Spontaneity

Rothko. Untitled. 1951.

Delicate transitions

Blocking off colors/color field style

Finding abstract language to express contemporary life

Wanted to convey something from great themes of human condition

Liminal transitional moments between fields represent horizons, becoming, drawing into contemplation

Abstractions as performers

To be viewed in the dark

Made quickly but planned carefully

Newman. Vir Heroicus Sublimis. 1950-51.

Academic background

Concerned with producing work before language

Zips: lines of masking tape

Trying to produce moment of reception in viewer where they are the first signifier a new language

Dubuffet. Le Metafisyx. 1950.

Rejection of nazi fascination with tone and skin

Looks at innards, contents

Grotesque in proportion, breaking down ideals of form

Begins to collect children's, unskilled, and psychotic art--the tribal, folk, and outside

Intensely subjective, breaks down the noble subject and traditional technique and content

Rehabilitation of scorned values

Wols. Manhattan. 1948-49.

Reconstructed posthumously

Sartre called him the "best existential artist"

Insistence on darkness, lingering in suffering

Spontaneous and gestural

Fautrier. La Toute Jeune Fille. 1942.

Accused of treason by gestapo

Built up canvas with paper first, and then paint

Adulterated human form, debasing and confusing

Asks about torture

Are we not disturbed by pinks and greens--beauty is a mask holding the world

Vertigo after suffering

Not retreating back to classicism

Rauschenberg. Erased de Kooning Drawing. 1953.

Johns. Flag. 1954-55.

Not a flag

Modernist perception of colors + form

The content therein

Rejects duplicity: what you see is what you see

Rejection against ab ex

Formed, literal, not gestural

Dethroned material

Duchamp. Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette. 1921.

Johns. Target with Plaster Casts. 1955.

Rauschenberg. Bed. 1955.

Made of bed

Upright

Masculine art versus feminine handicrafts

Vulgar paint drops

Moore. Working Model for Reclining Figure (Internal and External Forms). 1951.

Bacon. Study of a Baboon. 1953.

Bataille

Animalistic

Human as animal, beastial

The mouth as a continuation of the spinal cord

Comments on civilization as animal

Rejects modernist progress

Degrades human and elevates animal

Klein. Anthropometries of the Blue Age. 1960.

Focuses on medium, modification of paint

Blue as a readymade paint

Sold at different prices

Manzoni. Merde d'artista. 1961.

Comment on artist's genius

Commodifying the artist and his "product"

Duchamp and the readymade

Beuys. Coyote. 1974.

Native American symbolism

Wall Street journal delivered daily--critique of business

Critique of Vietnam war

Used stretcher so as to never set foot on American soil

Colonization, extinction, threat

Paolozzi. Evadne in Green Dimension. 1952.

Allusion to classical mythology

Found aesthetic

Resists clear condemnation of consumerist culture

Independent Group. Parallel of Life and Art. 1953.

Science as affecting all things

Rupturing confidence in ability to set aside a space, vaulted and pure, for art

Splicing real into new aesthetic

Ambivalent critique of consumerism

Henderson. Head of a Man. 1956.

Against the "new man" of 20's -30's propaganda in fascist art

Kubota. Vagina Painting. 1965.

Anti-masculinist perspective didn't apply to Fluxus

Body horror for women, menstrual and disjointing for men

Argued that it trivialized Zen for Head

Lichtenstein. Brushstrokes. 1967.

Transition between machine made and handmade processing

Space between mass produced and expression of artist and aura

Warhol. Five Deaths Seventeen Times in Black and White. 1963.

Simulacrum

Cannot be traced back to an original

Trauma theory: the mind injured

Nightmares and repetition to the thing that the mind can't comprehend

A defense against trauma: "I want to be the exact same thing." Warhol

Camp and queering modern art

Artifice and exaggeration

Jorn. Le Canard Inquiétant. 1959.

Subversion and reap propitiation

Altering kitsch painting with bright paint

Reconciling avant garde and kitsch

Born out of devalorization and devaluation

Stella. Die Fahne Hoch! 1959.

Rejected ab ex lack of political movement

Nazi banner size (means flags on high!)

Built around stretcher, stretching canvas

Very far off the wall that it casts shadows

Blurs division between painting and sculpture

Foreshadows minimalist rejection of Greenberg's distinction between painting and sculpture

Andre. Magnesium Square. 1969.

Democratizing materials

Serialist

Repetition

Mass produced

Organizational and deductive structure

Lacks authorial marks

Gravity as a binder, democratic

Judd. Untitled. 1968.

Object and space as affected by viewer

Phenomenology

Rejected transcendent art

Morris. Installation at the Green Gallery, New York. 1964.

Post structuralist reconsideration of language

No form of form, only form

Nothing beyond the work

Gallery institution!

Buren. Untitled. 1968.

Men walking with paintings

Disembodied the work from the political and economic infrastructure

Buren Stripe

Broodthaers. Musée d'Arte Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures. 1972.

Portable gallery

No "actual" works of art

Called himself Artist Administrator

Illuminated problems W between artwork and institution

Absurdist taxonomy in organization of art in institutions ("this is not art")

Smithson. Documentation of film stills from Spiral Jetty. 1970.

Rupturing hermetic relationship of medium specificity

Sometimes moved materials into gallery (Asphalt Rundown)

Degradation of natural landscape by industry

Nature reclaiming

Cover of Art-Langauge, vol. 1, no. 1. May 1969.

Art & Language. Index 01. 1972.

Kosuth. Titled (Art As Idea As Idea). 1967.

Frustrates critical analysis

Intellectual probation replacing aesthetic inquiry

What and where is art

"When Attitudes Become Form." Exhibition installation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. 1969.

75% of exhibit in book

Protests of Vietnam war

Photographs of conceptual art

Distrust of the object and commercialization

Challenging art institution and American way of life

Weiner. A River Spanned. 1969.

Against the spectacle (Fluxus)

Art belongs in space between us, it doesn't need to happen to be

A pretension of freedom

Barry. Title and year as shown.

Optic nerve need not be the conduit through which value flows