chapter 14: entertainment and visual culture

Pour Your Body Out

Pipilotti Rist

Ancient Greek comedies and tragedies were first performed in ___.

natural settings.

• Eventually magnificent theaters were then designed to add visual significance to these dramas, like the Theater at Epidauros

• This style is the oldest and set precedents for all auditoriums and amphitheaters that follow

Theater at Epidauros

Polykleitos

theatron

tiered seating area

skene

building used for backdrops and dressing rooms

architect Joern Utzon’s thoughts on his design of the Sydney Opera House

“functional sculpture” or “organic architecture” (influenced by the platform architecture of Mesoamerica)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Frank Lloyd Wright

Organic architecture is rooted in the work of ___.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Gehry's "Walt Disney Concert Hall" architecture is ___ and ___.

deconstructivist and neo-modernist

Trained as a sculptor, Frank Gehry creates buildings that are:

irregular, colliding, sculptural, disorienting, asymmetrical, no apparent central point

In the Roman Empire, rulers built bathhouses, theaters, amphitheaters, circuses, arenas, and stadiums for ___.

the pleasure of their subjects, and they adorned those structures with art.

Citizens of Ancient Rome Enjoying the Baths of Caracalla

• imperial bath w/ palatial interior; the site for many relaxing, sporting, and cultural activities

Central Park

Frederick Law Olmstead, Calvert Vaux

• built over the historical black community Seneca Village

The Hakone Open-Air Museum

Hakone, Japan

• cultural treasures and natural treasures mix in this park-museum

Las Vegas

Mixed-use features; The casinos are lavish visual experiences of brilliant lights, historical replicas, and original art.

Sports arenas

Architecture provides a framework and a setting for the drama and spectacle of sports events.

Colosseum, aka. Flavian Amphitheater

Rome, 70—80 CE

• admission was free to all; but seating was reserved by rank

• blood sports banned in 523 CE

• ambitiously engineered, because of the political importance of the building + the events

Bull Jumping

palace complex at Knossos, Crete

1550—1450 BCE

wall painting

• Minotaur: half-man + half-bull beast, to whom young men and women were sacrificed

• bull also symbolizes fertility + strength

Ball Players

Maya, MX

1000—1200 CE

vase painting

• elaborate padding and costumes were worn by Mayan ball players

• adorned w/ earrings and + large animal headdress, showing that ballplayers enjoyed high status in Mayan society

• patterns and insignia cover the players’ clothing

Acrobat

early pre-classical MX

1200—600 BCE

light clay

• graves had burial offerings w/ figurines of: ballplayers, musicians, dancers, acrobats

• indicate that these ancient peoples prepared for an afterlife full of entertainment

Boy Playing a Flute

Judith Leyster (NL)

1630—1635

oil

• Holland at the time = predominantly middle class + Protestant → music was not written for grand productions for nobility or for elaborate rituals for the Catholic Church; music was instead often performed in the middle-class home

• painting documents the presence of music in ordinary middle-class homes in the Netherlands in the 1600s

Harp Player

Cycladic Islands (Greece)

2500—1100 BCE

marble

• sculptures of male musicians were found buried in graves along with plank marble goddess

• musician + instrument seem almost combined in the simplified, smooth forms

• precise attention was given to the hands and fingers

Musicians and Dancers

from the tomb of Nebamun, Thebes, Egypt

1400 BCE

fresco

• reflects the culture’s style of entertainment and its fixation with funerary rituals and the afterlife

• style of fresco = relaxed, contrasting w/ depictions of high-ranking Egyptians: ladies’ hair is loose, soles of their feet are shown; two women face the viewer head-on rather than in profile

• the dancers are small, indicating their lesser rank

ART IN ENTERTAINMENT:

This artwork straddles the borders dividing art, popular culture, and entertainment. These works also have components of sound, music, movement, or dance.

Art and Dramatic Productions: The visual arts have long been part of dramatic productions, especially in ___.

masks, puppetry, set design, costumes, and graphics. Theater has in turn influenced the visual arts particularly, Performance Art.

Jane Avril

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (FR)

1899

lithographic poster

• artist: well known for his street posters of Paris nightlife; a favorite subject was Jane Avril, a singer and dancer at the famous cabaret Moulin Rouge

• influenced by Japanese prints

Bunraku performance

Japan

1900s

• traditional form of “doll drama”

• puppeteers are accompanied by a singer-narrator + a musician

• singer describes the scenes, voices all the roles, and makes comments to enhance the drama

scene from The Lion King on broadway

Julie Taymor (designer + director), NYC

mid 1990s

• Taymor’s background includes Indonesian masked dance, Bunraku puppetry, and Western opera

Summerspace

Music by Morton Feldman, choreography by Merce Cunningham, set and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg; John Cage, Musical Director of the Cunningham Dance Company.

• all components performed together but also independent of one another, w/ aspects of improvisation and chance

• visual artist provided the design of the costumes and backdrops in this experimental dance production

• set design = another area of overlap between the visual arts and performing arts

performance art

incorporates live action and mixed media and is presented before an audience

• first performances were 1960s “Happenings” organized by Allan Kaprow, who believed that art, like life, should be unstable, transitory, and ambiguous

Household

Allan Kaprow

May 1964

Performance “Happening”

• Kaprow, believed that art, like life, should be unstable, transitory, and ambiguous. What happened was what was important

• opposes previous Western thought; artworks = pure, transcendent, universal objects meant to endure

Lyre

from the tomb of Queen Puabi, Ur (Iraq)

2685 BCE

wood, gold + shell inlay, lapis lazuli

• similar to a harp

• blue-bearded bull = naturalistic w/ highly stylized details, outlined eyes + patterned beard

• craftsmanship distinguishes this lyre as part of an ancient royal burial

• beneath bull’s head: 4 scenes made of shell inlaid in bitumen depicting a fantastic banquet, fables, or the myth of Gilgamesh

Eastern Iatmul Hand Drum

East Sepik province, PNG

1900

wood, fiber, shell, animal hide, red + white pigment

• in Melanesia, men make + use drums in ceremonies for: a boy’s initiation to placate ancestor spirits; magical rites

• slender, hourglass-shaped drums: usually decorated w/ ancestral + head-hunting symbolism

Open Circle Dance

Sioux, USA

Kevin Locke

1900s

• All movements have spiritual significance + together = visualizations suggesting unity of all things in the universe + individual growth, change, and metamorphosis

• parts of dance recreate image of eagle soaring in flight, suggesting that parts of nature (including human beings) belong to the spiritual world in the heavens

• Another configuration represents the caterpillar, which, during the dance, will become a graceful butterfly

• performance climax: “Hoops of Many Hoops,” all things of the universe come together; part of hopeful Sioux prophecy for peace among all people

Kanaga Masked Dancers

Dogon, Mali

1900s

• performers tell their culture’s story about how death entered the world

• masks, carved by the performers, have several interpretations: a bird in flight, a mythological crocodile, a god in the act of creation

visual culture

area of academic study; deals w/ images + visual objects produced in industrial + postindustrial nations, + the ways those images are disseminated, received, and used

Visual culture is also concerned with spectacle. This could be:

• the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games

• miles of neon lights on the Las Vegas strip

• a celebrity making an entrance

• a grand immersive video installation

• a Hollywood blockbuster movie

Film, television, and cartoons:

• are based on sequential images

• narrative is a key element

• dependent upon technology

film + TV = fertile areas of investigation bc of embedded social messages + Hollywood spectacle

cartoons

long history in drawing, printmaking, and newspapers; entertain or promote political causes; comics = the sequential images tell a story

Gasoline Alley (Sunday newspaper comic strip)

Frank King

May 10, 1931

• Rather than advancing the story lines in the weekday editions, the Sunday editions of this comic strip were often philosophical observations on the nature of life or explorations of the world

• boy + his Uncle Walt doodling designs w/ a compass, echoing concurrent developments in abstract art

Maria Candelaria (Xochimilco)

directed by Emilio Fernández

1944

• golden age of Mexican Cinema

• documents the now-lost culture that flourished in the floating gardens of Xochimilco, which once produced most of the food and flowers for Mexico City

I Love Lucy

1951—1957

sitcom

• 1950s, television became an important and omnipresent medium, adding layers to our complex visual culture

• TV shrank the world; people could witness events from far-off places right in their living rooms on the small screen

• Much of the humor was communicated visually, through facial expression, gesture, and body language. This series is considered one of the all-time classics of American television.

Cremaster 1: The Goodyear Chorus

Matthew Barney

1995

color print in self-lubricating plastic frame

• Barney created Cremaster films; imagery promotes personal, free-associative meanings instead of narrative

• All Cremaster films borrow from Hollywood types, ex: Cremaster 1 references Busby Berkeley musical extravaganza

• Cremaster 1: The Goodyear Chorus = a color print, based on a film still

Animation grew out of ___.

flip books, in which a series of drawn images seem to move as book pages are flipped rapidly.

Animation is ___.

labor-intensive if completely hand-drawn, an average of 14,000 drawings are required for a ten-minute animation sequence.

Traditional animation

drawn on transparent sheets, foreground figures can be moved across an unchanging background

Claymation

uses clay sculptures that are photographed while being moved in tiny increments

Computer animation

characters are plotted as a series of points and vectors and made to move with mathematical computation

Girl Reaching Out to a Robot

2010

• The evolution of technology and media-based art will bring more complex and exotic forms of entertainment, coexisting side by side with traditional forms.

• Art, design, technology, and entertainment will be integrated in new ways and will include functionality and educational purposes.