Contemporary Issues

1990 - 2010

Damian Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007

Historical Revisionism & Traditional Art Forms

• Intentional historicism• Return to traditional art forms• Revisionist approach (identity politics,

questioning tenets of modernism)

Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Major General Joseph Sabine, ca. 1700

YinkaShonibareUntitled1997

Institutional Critique & Art as Ethnography

Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992, Museum of Contemporary Art, Baltimore

Renee Green, Seen, 1990, installation

Regression and Abjection

Kiki Smith, Blood Pool, 1992, painted bronze

Paul McCarthy, Tomato Heads, 1994

Race and its Representation

• Shifting notions of the politics of identity

• From essentialist and positive notions of identity (blackness, femininity, etc) to identity as a social construction

• Complicates identity so that it cannot be easily categorized or stereotyped

• Uses critique of documentary forms of racial representation, personal testimonies, ambiguous narratives, past art forms

• Photo-conceptualism

Adrian Piper, from The Mythic Being series1972-76

Portraits of Family Life

Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPDInpNoO50

Portraits of Community

Roy DeCarava, from The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955

Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer, 1986

Subversive Beauty: Troubling Typologies of Black Identity

Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Jug, 1665

Ellen Gallagher, Mr. Terrific from the DeLuxe series, 2005

The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/48511/detail/

Dave Chappelle, Racial Stereotype Pixies

Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998

The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque

• Black-paper cutout silhouettes & projections on white gallery and museum walls

• Inspired by fantasies of ante-Bellum South

• Extreme caricatures of Black slaves & slave-owners

• Depicts graphic subjects (sex, violence)

• Revision of older art forms, the silhouette & the cyclorama

Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998

The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque

http://video.pbs.org/video/1237715781/

Silhouette of GeorgeAnd Martha Washington

The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque

Gettysburg Cyclorama

Disegno (Drawing) vs. Colorito (Color)

Michelangelo, Madonna and ChildGiorgione, The Tempest

The Odalisque: Challenging Disegno

IngresDelacroix

RenoirMatisse

The Matrix (grid): Abstracting the Object

The Grapheme: Abstracting the Subject

Drawing in the 20th Century

Erasure: Abstracting Time

Mondrian

Pollock

Kentridge

Drawing & Time: From Deskilling to Re-skilling

• Short film of animated charcoal drawings using erasure and stop-shoot technique

• Felix in Exile (1994) one of many “drawings for projection”

• Recurring characters & love triangle among Soho Ekstein (a mine-owner/capitalist), Felix Teitelbaum (an artist/self-portrait?), Mrs. Ekstein (wife of Ekstein)

• Setting is Paris hotel room, Felix gazing into mirror at Nandi, a South African surveyor, looking back at him

• The gaze• Apartheid ended in 1994

William Kentridge, from Felix in Exile, 1994

William Kentridge, from Felix in Exile, 1994

William KentridgeFelix in Exile

1994

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaTnchoukdY

Palimpsest

• Linear overlay of forms

• Ancient process

• Allegory of memory, time, history

• Kentridge’s work a meditation on the fate of handicraft?

• Drawing as obsolete among new technologies

Ruffignac cave drawingsca. 14,000 BCE

Robert RauschenbergErased de Kooning1953

Pictorial Photography

Getrude Kasebier, The Sketch, ca. 1903

Pictorial Photography

Sam Taylor-WoodSoliloquy I, 1998c-type color print

Henry WallisThe Death of Chatterton

ca. 1856

Luca SignorelliLamentation Over

the Dead Christca. 1502

predella – base of analtarpiece

Jeff Wall, Storyteller, 1986

• Digital manipulation of photograph recalls mid-19th century painting & pictorial photography

• Large color transparencies set in light boxes

• Shift away from documentary photography

• Questions the veracity of the image

• Interest in pictorial composition, size & narrative aligns it with the history of figurative painting

• To restore or make whole again the fractured image (broken up in collage, photomontage) in avant-garde art by returning to birth of avant-garde (Manet) & photography (mid-19th century)

• Shows homeless native Canadians in home town of Vancouver

The Photographer of Modern Life

Jeff Wall, Storyteller, 1986

Manet, Luncheon on

the Grass1863

“a transgression against the institution of transgression” – Wall

Global Issues – Chinese Art

Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, 1994

Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism: Marlboro, 1992

Global Issues – Chinese Art

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern, London, installation, 2010

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern, London, installation, 2010

Global Issues – Chinese Art

• “Global” representation – the “multitude”

• 100 million handmade sunflower seeds laid on floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London

• Public invited to walk on, lay down on them

• Made by workers over several years in Chinese province which had historically made porcelain for Emperor

• Reflection on Chinese labor, modern economy, and identity

• Suggests Postminimalist anti-form and Pop Art’s interest in the mass subject