INFO - 20th and 21st Century Art

Jump in Place, Feet Together

Context: Revolutionized study of biomechanics. Late 19th century mechanical drawing - modern authority - production of machine.

Message:

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Portrait of his Wife, Ernestine Nadar

Context:

Message:

Details:

Style:

Continuity: Chiaroscuro

Change:

Corsets

Context: Corset shop for cartoonists

Message:

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Parc de Sceaux. June, 7 a.m.

Context:

Message:

Details: Arostes and Pilatos approaching ruin - remain friends through tragedy/horrors - we are behind them - they look…into another world

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

La Bonheur de Vivre (Joy of Life)

Context:

Message:

Details: Arcadian landscape.

Style: No perspective/scale, outlines contain color, absolute physical freedom -cause for joy, life, pleasure. Fauve. Serpintine.

Continuity:

Change:

Dance

Context:

Message:

Details: No depth, painting surface holds everything together in space - what a pictorial surface can do/hold

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Studio with Eggplants

Context:

Message: sets standard to ground and tempo of many patterns - spaces framed in rectangles

Details: “Symphonic interior”

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Context: Not in salon. Trying to outdo Matisse.

Message:

Details: No place for the viewer to stand, fragmented. Of a brothel. Unnatural poses. African masks.

Style:

Continuity: Salon. Still life in front.

Change:

The Poet

Context:

Message: Not a symbolic/allegorical figure for modernity

Details:

Style: Dissected to the point of unrecognition

Continuity:

Change:

Maquette for Guitar

Context:

Message: Represents essence of thing without making thing!

Details: Tube of guitar inspired by tube in Grebo mask - not a representation or symbol but a stand in. Not functional at all.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Still Life, Violin and Fruit

Context:

Message:

Details: Shapes and colors being traded—>brings everything to the same surface.

Style: Paper colle. Remade into a new visual space.

Continuity:

Change:

Guernica

Context: Spanish Civil War, the Nazis bombed this town for Hitler’s birthday. Was a mural for the world’s fair. Immense brutality —> mammoth scale.

Message: Rouse workers of the world and gain international sympathy

Details: Bull v horse (republican fighters v fascists), woman screaming in pain

Style: Cubism, chaotic

Continuity: Reference to history paintings

Change: Figures are more recognizable

Le Courrier

Context:

Message: Challenges print culture?

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors

Context:

Message: What is the function?

Details: Female top, male bottom. Bachelors produce liquid that is then brought upward and is received by the bride.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

In Advance of the Broken Arms

Context: Readymade. Made via cypher with his friend.

Message:

Details:

Style: Dada

Continuity:

Change:

Fountain

Context: Sent of Society of Independent Artists as a test. Were supposed to accept every work.

Message:

Details: Urinal on its side with R. Mutt signed.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

L.H.O.O.Q.

Context: Letters sound like there is a fire down below

Message: Obscenity in mouth of masterpiece

Details: Machine produced Mona Lisa

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Rotoreliefs

Context: games of illusion painting/explaining a technique for showing space - perceptive depth -

Message:

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Suprematist Composition, White on White

Context: Suprematist: Pure form, free of politics, purity in abstraction and geometry

Message:

Details: Seeing something in what you thought was nothing because white was void in geometric pieces. Everything solid dissolves and yet still has form = revolution (ruin—> rebirth)

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Monument to the Third International

Context: Would be a government and communications tower. Would straddle river.

Message:

Details: Three glass stories, graduation, pushing physical palace forward to represent new government. At base a cube makes one revolution per year, pyramid once a month, top once a day.

Style: Shear image, practically ambitious

Continuity:

Change:

Proun LN 31

Context:

Message:

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Composition No. 10 (Pier and Ocean)

Context:

Message: Makes underlying universal harmony that is peace in WW

Details:

Style: Analytical cubism redefined to horizontal vertical lines.

Continuity:

Change:

Composition No. 2

Context:

Message:

Details: Black pushes it forward.

Style: Balance without a center.

Continuity:

Change:

Wassily Chair

Context: Made at Bauhaus. Inspired by bike handlebars. Produced industrially.

Message: Unity of craft and industry

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Senecio

Context:

Message: A consciousness for Bauhaus

Details: Puzzle/frown reflects something other than optimism; knows what came before and what is lost

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

The Master’s Bedroom It’s Worth Spending A Night There

Context: Animals from book

Message:

Details:

Style: Inconsistent perspective- fantastical space

Continuity:

Change:

Approaching Puberty

Context:

Message: with puberty approaching everything is falling aprt in classical premature state - we all will fall but not yet

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change: Reclining n*de made vertical

Accommodation of Desire

Context:

Message: Men’s desire for objects was desire for subject, souls, physical completion, flowing breathing and bleeding - wonder where surfaces are full of treachery - surrealists were sculptures - called critical objects

Details: Male nude against man becoming lion. Ants make eruptions

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Object

Context:

Message: Seems alive and also inanimate - cup becomes sexual fetish - metamorphosis - should a woman come up with such ideas?

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Untitled Photograph, From his book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Context: Great Depression

Message: Class difference in form of photograph

Details: Compositional tools to make clear rectangular backdrop (repeated liens of eye and mouth and wood), impenetrable distance

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Guardians of the Secret

Context: Reflects deep unease of WWII - chaos, secrecy, primal conflict. Ritualistic search for hidden truths.

Message:

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change: Challenges rationalism and formalism bridges surrealism and abstract expressionism

Lavender Mist: Number 1

Context:

Message:

Details: Violent, splatters

Style: Colors optically combine into lavender

Continuity:

Change:

Excavation

Context: Not seen as a formalist

Message: Not a specific meaning, overall human situation

Details: Contains image of WWII

Style: American Abstract Expressionism

Continuity:

Change:

Study for Woman 1

Context:

Message: Post-war

Details: Negotiation of figures. Magazine smile.

Style: Energy of a survivor, aggressive, sensual

Continuity: Against formalism; abstract expressionism

Change:

Composition no. 10

Context: Wanted viewers to look from an arm’s length away

Message:

Details: Emotionally charged

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Bed

Context: Needed cheap materials

Message:

Details: Heavy paint. Makes into bed.

Style: Abstract expressionist (focus on internal)—>bed

Continuity: Pollock

Change:

Target with Plaster Casts

Context:

Message: Identification and targeting. Forces everything to be seen in a colored lense.

Details: Little body parts in different colors above the target.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

White Flag

Context:

Message: Calls upon obedience to higher powers; yet not conforming

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

100 Cans

Context: Done with stencils. SIlk screen. Inspired by repetition of tabloid/press photo.

Message:

Details:

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Red Race Riot

Context:

Message:

Details: Uses images from black man being attacked by a dog. Background to highlight violence. Anger.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Indianapolis

Context: if you are not part of Black community, see the other as the best part of you - step away from the modern mirror to be yourself

Message: Captures the ego of americans. Recognize all others as people —> respect. Recognizes cracks in the American drea of invidualiyu.

Details:

Style: Direct and stable —> strength

Continuity:

Change:

Sun and Shade

Context:

Message:

Details: color line of Jim Crow laws in new way - lifted from line - black and white are now just light effects

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Self-Portrait

Context:

Message:

Details: working light in new way, in mirror, not perfect identification, fleeting, fall in and out of focus, light of day complicates, regions of shadow, uncertainty in shadow - mistrust of image

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Untitled Film Still #56

Context: Not a film still

Message:

Details: Represented 50s, 60s models. Outdated generic gendered forms act like a mask. Uses the logic of the mirror to recognize self. Can’t find herself under the mirrors.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Untitled (from Silueta series)

Context: Traces to being a child dragging across the beach.

Message:

Details: Only known in images. Will disappear and go back in nature. Goes where museum and mirrors couldn’t. Solitary activity.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

African-American Flag

Context:

Message: Inspire, rally

Details: Colors of liberation of black community - Pan African

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Concerto in Black and Blue

Context:

Message:

Details: Empty room gave people blue lights. We are all blue. Space activated by people.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Untitled

Context: Made in the wake of his gay lover’s death. Artist was AIDS activists, refused to adopt “gay artist” title, refused the body images of US mass media

Message:

Details: Just a bed slept in by two people. Broad enough to be about anyone.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Untitled (March 5th)

Context:

Message:

Details: Two electric bulbs on as if always night; power of love.

Style:

Continuity:

Change: Installation art

Spiral Jetty

Context:

Message: A road to nowhere

Details: Dumped basalt into lake.

Style: Echoes natural patterns, tying artwork to geologic time and entropy. Was supposed to be hella ephermeral.

Continuity:

Change:

La Jetee

Context:

Message:

Details: Post war anxiety and trauma - created after WWII and during height of Cold War - apocalypse, horror of technological progress (nuclear war, time travel), displacement and impossibility of return

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Many Mansions

Context: Trumpeting of critical regionalism in painted form.

Message: Happiness/family life of the gang zone bound by Christian faith

Details: A pastoral scene in a gang zone

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Cremaster 4

Context: Cremaster muscle controls temperature zone of testical

Message:

Details: searching for differentiation, is stuck, not given pleasure of ideal eye - not chance of metamorphosis, tension is palpable

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Untitled photograph of the ongoing collective project, The Land

Context: A rural farmland in Thailand that is sustainable, collaborative site for art, agriculture, and architecture. Living, evolving communal space.

Message:

Details: Dissolves into a nothing, a noplace “utopia”

Style:

Continuity:

Change: Art is no longer about objects to view but situations to participate in,

One Million Kingdoms

Context:

Message:

Details: Creates one million kingdoms. Begins in 1969 moon landing and switches to Vene’s Journey to Center of the Earth. Nothing is more powerful than attraction of the abyss.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Ubu Tell The Truth

Context:

Message: Story of apartheid

Details: Vicious trith underho radial metamorphosis or just madness? Scenes of falling, torture.

Style: Combines Man with a Movie Camera with Ube

Continuity:

Change:

Dammi I Colori

Context:

Message:

Details: Colors will provide sign that change is coming after communism.

Style:

Continuity:

Change:

Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest — Part I

Context:

Message: Reflects on post war Italy. reimagines ancient Chinese philosophical ideals through contemporary lens.

Details: Go to a yellow mountain - a place on border of no-place of eternity (daoist)

Style:

Continuity:

Change: