Marcel Duchamp

• DuChamp is considered the father of Dada art (discussed during German Expressionism) and the grandfather of Conceptual Art.

• Many have called Sol Le Witt the father of Conceptual Art although there are many claims for fathers and mothers of the many types of Conceptual Art.

Postmodernism’s effect on Contemporary Art

• This is one of three lessons talking about conceptual, performance, interdisciplinary, installation art and new media arts.

• Performance art involves performers, still, films are not necessarily performance art, and a video of a play is a performance but doesn’t fit the definition. Video is usually the documentation of performance art but when the performers create a narrative not primarily dependent on their actions, then it can be either video art, new media art or interdisciplinary art.

• Interdisciplinary art refers to a discipline outside of the usual art traditions such as digitally altered x-rays of the human body, or a piece about depression that depends heavily on psychology.

• Installation art is somewhat architectural. It is modification of a space to transform or effect a person’s experience. Like much performance art, the audience is actually an interactive part of the work.

• New media arts use computers and new technology (plastics and polymers or physical media like found objects as well) to create a new kind of artifact. Some of these are sculptural and others are on DVD and like a song, only exist for us when played.

Conceptual Art

Art Where the idea takes precedence over the artifact or object created.

Generally there is abstraction at work, a frequent lack of naturalism, and while we tend to think of ideas as thought oriented, are often

emotionally or spiritually oriented.

Sol LeWitt

Sol le Witt’s instructions• Sol le Witt would send instructions instead of

actual art works. In theory, being able to fax (email) an art show proves that the ideas are the art, the objects, merely stand ins created by skilled technicians.

• In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. – Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", Artforum, June 1967.

• The following are also installation art made with the above process.

This is a site specific work of

art. Site specific works depend on the

location to keep their meaning. This would be very different without the pond, for

example…

?

• These next pieces cross are conceptual sculptures titled “splotch” with numbers such as “splotch #5”. Sitting as they do on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof deck, they invite a comparison to the city skyline and also help us become more aware of our emotional and subconscious responses to any skyline.

Splotch

Now What?

• In your sketchbooks in groups of two or three you will design works of art based on minimalist ideas.

• This is the lesson we won't “read too deeply into the art”

• Use the handout provided to guide you through the process

Robert Indiana

Discussion Starter: Is this pop art or installation-style conceptual art?

Rachel WhitereadEmbankment

• Tate Modern

• February 19th 2006 at 6:47 PM Posted to London To Do, UK Life

• After having a delicious breakfast at 202 again and meeting up with Kath from Oxford, we went to visit the Tate Modern down at Southbank. It is a huge warehouse building directly opposite the Millenium bridge and located next to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Entry is free except ot some special exhibits, but the rest of the collections are free to view. The gallery shows some interesting collections such as the Embankment structure by Rachel Whiteread pictured below.

Other collections were a little disappointing to me, but mainly because they were far too abstract for me to understand or even try to understand. A good example is one in which red paint was “violently” thrown at a canvas so that it would achieve some message which I couldn’t quite get immediately out of a canvas simply covered in red paint. My most favourite of the collection was the Andy Warhol room that showed a number of his works (including the Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy ones) and described his interesting motivations behind them.

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• In June 1998, the Public Art Fund inaugurated its most ambitious project to date: Water Tower, British artist Rachel Whiteread's first public sculpture in the United States. Water Tower, a translucent resin cast of the interior of a 12'2" high by 9' wide wooden water tank, was raised 7 stories to rest upon the steel tower frame of a SoHo rooftop. Water Tower was visible from street level at the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street. Situated among two functioning water tanks, it was described by the artist as a "jewel in the Manhattan skyline." On a cloudy day, the weathered surface of the original tank's interior was visible, providing a ghostly form. In bright sunlight the translucent resin became a beacon of refracted light, and at night the unlit sculpture disappeared against the darkened sky. Poetic yet incongruous, Whiteread's Water Tower powerfully represented a need for public sculpture to be physically present yet ephemeral.

• Water Tower is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

• Artist Bio• Rachel Whiteread was born in London in 1963 and continues to live

and work there. She was educated at Brighton Polytechnic and the Slade School of Art. Following a series of solo and group exhibitions--Metropolis in Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau (1992), Doubletake at London's Hayward Gallery (1992) and Documenta 9--Whiteread achieved international recognition in 1993 for her first public art commission, House: a concrete cast of the interior architectural space of an entire East London row house. In that same year she also became the first woman to be awarded the Tate Gallery's prestigious Turner Prize. In addition to many exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the world, including the British Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Whiteread has pursued an interest in public projects through many commissions, including one for the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna.

• Sponsorship• Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower was sponsored through Beck's New

York Arts Program. It was also made possible through the support of the Charles Engelhard Foundation, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, Werner H. and Sarah-Ann Kramarsky, The Silverweed Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs Cultural Challenge Initiative, and friends of the Public Art Fund.

• Location• Water Tower was located on the rooftop of a building on Grand Street,

visible from the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street.

Gordon Matta-Clark

Oldenburg in the 60’s• Is usually associated with the pop art

movement. Still, he frequently attended happenings which were events where artists gathered and started what is now known as performance art. While the works are considered Pop Art, you can see that the artists themselves crossed all boundaries. In the end, we tend to call things by the character of the object created even though all his works built upon one single conceptual idea.

Conceptual vs Pop Art:Claes Oldenburg, clothespin: two views, Philadelphia, PA

What’s our relationship to these objects? Are they still useful? Are

they pop art or conceptual art?

• Claes Oldenburg\Batcolumn-001.jpg

Inside or outside?

• These next images of the Wexner Center, Ohio State’s art library and Le Centre Pompidou, an art school in Paris show how ideas like Sol le Witt’s were applied to architecture. Foucault, a philosopher, had theories about traces that played heavily in these two designs as well.

Inside or outside?

The towers above are traces of

the original armory that used to be

at this location

Centre Pompidou

• Inside and outside? What is our expectation? What does this tell us about ourselves?