May 6 th, 2009 Wednesdays 6:30 - 9:15 p.m. Bryce Walker Art 1010: Week #14 Art Since 1945

ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker 2 Things to discuss today Art BINGO (replaces quiz 6) Art News? Art Since 1945 Assignment #4 Art Assignment

ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker 3 Art Since 1945 Items to be covered: 1. The New York School 2. Into the Sixties: Assemblage and Happenings 3. Art of the Sixties & Seventies 1. Pop Art 2. Minimal Art and Earthworks 3. Real, Super Real 4. Conceptual Art 5. Feminism and Feminist Art 4. Art of the Eighties: Postmodern World? 1. The Painterly Image 2. Words and Images, Issues and Identities 3. Performance and Installation 4. The Digital Realm 5. Being Human: Life of the Body, Life of the Spirit 6. Opening Up to the World

ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker 4 The New York School “In the aftermath of World War II most of western Europe was completely devastated. The United State, while exhausted, was not. No bombs had fallen or battles been fought in New York, as they had in London and Paris and Amsterdam and most of the cities of Germany.” “Not a school in the sense of an institution or of instruction, the New York School was a convenient label under which to lump together a group of painters also known as Abstract Expressionists. Abstract Expressionism had many sources, but the most direct influence was Surrealism, with its emphasis on the creative powers of the unconscious and its technique of automatism as a way to tap into them.”

The New York School Jackson Pollock Developed the “drip technique.” To create such work as painted on it indirectly, from above, by casting paint from a stir-stick. Layer after layer, color after color, the painting grew into an allover tangle of graceful arcs, dribbled lines, spatters, and pools of color. There is no focal point, no composition. A critic of the time coined the term “action painting.” Pollock said that this method of working allowed him to be “in” the painting, to forget himself in the act of painting...” ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker5 “Number 1” Pollock, 1949

The New York School Wilhelm De Kooning De Kooning admitted that he began each painting form a magazine photograph of a beautiful woman, yet as he worked, they mutated into grimacing monsters. We can see the painting as reflecting de Kooning’s conscious and unconscious feelings toward women. Forceful gestures keep trying to establish a painting about the act of painting, but against this effort the image keeps reasserting itself, demanding to be recognized. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker6 “Woman IV” De Kooning, 1952

The New York School Mark Rothko Another form of abstraction that came into prominence in the postwar period is known as Color Field painting. The work of Mark Rothko in the late forties through the sixties usually features one or more soft-edged color rectangles floating in the larger color rectangle of the canvas. The inner rectangle has sides parallel to the canvas edges, and its boundaries are blurred and gently blended, causing the inner sections to float. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker7 “Orange and Yellow” Rothko, 1956

The New York School Louise Nevelson Nevelson arranged wooden crates, dowels, balusters, and other odds and ends into large, standing, wall-like compositions. By painting her works in a single color she emphasized the formal values of her materials—their lines, curves, and angles—as opposed to their real-world origins. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker8 “Royal Tide II” Nevelson, 1961

The New York School Jasper Johns Johns took the casts from the same person, making a series of anonymous mechanical multiples from a unique individual. Like all of Johns’ favorite motifs, a target is not only a familiar but two-dimensional, abstract, and symbolic. Is the painting a representation of a target or a target? What is the difference? It also teases us into thinking about aesthetics and emotional distance. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker9 “Target with Four Faces” Johns, 1955

Pop Art Andy Warhol The most enigmatic of Pop artists was Andy Warhol, who frustrated critics by refusing to explain what he meant by such a painting as 100 Cans. He called his studio the factory, and there he and his assistants manufactured his art. The use of photographic silkscreen gave the images a mechanical look removed from the personal touch of the artist’s own hand. He produced images of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and Brillo boxes. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker10 “100 Cans” Warhol, 1962

Pop Art Roy Lichtenstein Lichtenstein often based his imagery on the comic book. Many of his paintings are large, meticulously rendered frames adapted from comic strips, accurate down to the dialogue in the speech balloons and the dot pattern of crude newspaper reproduction. The artist did not hesitate to introduce a touch of irony by poking fun at himself and the art world in proclaiming this work a “masterpiece.” ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker11 “Masterpiece” Lichtenstein, 1962

Minimal Art and Earthworks Frank Stella Stella’s approach was fundamentally different in one important way: Unlike Abstract Expressionist and their heirs, he did not conceive of his work as a visual field that the viewer would see into but as an object the viewer would look at. Stella used color to divide the parallelogram into two equilateral triangles. His composition consists in repeating two of the three outlines o each triangle again and again, producing a series of chevrons (Vs) of diminishing size in bands or color. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker12 “Valparaiso Flesh and Green” Stella, 1963

Real, Super Real Don Eddy Don Eddy’s New Shoes for H would seem to be an exception to other pop art. But in fact this is not a painting of a store window but a painting of a photograph of a store window, One of the trends this produced was known as Photorealism, meaning the particular kind of realism that the camera produces. He was interested in the double layer of information that windows offer by being both transparent and reflective. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker13 “New Shoes for H” Eddy, 1973

Art Since the Eighties: PostModern World Renzo Piano and Richard Rodgers The term Postmodern was first used to describe architecture like this. Encased in scaffolding, pipes, tubes, and funnels—all color-coded according to function—it looks like a building turned inside out. A new direction was called for, but instead of building on Modernist ideas and progressing forward, architect reached both backward-adapting ornaments and forms from traditions as distant as ancient Egypt-and outward—looking seriously at common, everyday architecture. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker14 “Georges Pompidou National Center of Art and Culture, Paris” Piano & Rodgers, 1977

The Painterly Image Jean-Michel Basquiat Many young New York artists drew their energy from street life, the punk scene, and the graffiti images that then were appearing on subways, storefronts, and almost every urban surface. One of these painters was Jean-Michel Basquiat, who began as a graffiti artist in the late 1970s. His work came to attention of gallery owners when it was included in an exhibit of street art in ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker15 “Golden Griat” Basquiat, 1984

The Digital Realm Cai Guo-Qiang Performance in one way in which contemporary artists have “raised the volume” of their work in order to reach a public accustoms to such enveloping experience as film, television, dance clubs, and rock concerts. Another way has been through the form of installation. Like performances, installations can create an absorbing theatrical experience, though it is one in which the actors have gone and only the setting for the play remains. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker16 “Dream” Guo-Qiang 2002

Being Human: Life of the Body, Life of the Spirit Bill Viola Video artist Bill Viola’s means are simple, even if the technology behind them is advanced. using high-speed, high-definition video, he recorder a series of bodies falling or diving into water. the images and their accompanying sound were then radically slowed down. Most of the videos are projected upside-down, so that the figures plunge upward. the effect is extraordinary. ART1010- Intro to Art, Bryce Walker17 “Departing Angel, Fire Angel, and Birth Angel” Viola 2001