After reading through the lectures and learning about Robert Rauschenberg’s “com

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After reading through the lectures and learning about Robert Rauschenberg’s “com

After reading through the lectures and learning about Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines,” Andy Warhol’s Silk Screens disaster works and David Hockney’s “multifaceted views” (joiners), choose only one and discuss how their methods in photography began trends that eventually came to dominate in terms of expanding the medium of art in the future (or the art of the here and now) in a two paragraph essay.
Each paragraph should consist of 5 to 6 sentences. Examples from lecture and supplemental readings should be made to demonstrate understanding. Answers that appear to meet the length requirement but do not say something of substance as in the example of short sentences meant to meet the quota will lose points.
Use Parenthetical References
First and foremost, please do not perform outside research. You have everything you need in the lectures. As this is a Zero Text Cost class, you should not have to seek information outside of the contents of this course.
All essays must contain parenthetical references at the end of each sentence explaining where the information was found (Baudelaire, 99). It is not necessary to create endnotes or a works cited section.
Examples of what to do:
These examples come from an upcoming essay written by Susan Sontag. This is how a direct quote should be handled from an external reading or from the module lecture:
According to Sontag, “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power” (Sontag 1).
Sontag hints at the notion that one no longer needs to travel to visit exotic places. All one need do is buy a picture of the place instead (DeAngelis Module 7).
When you paraphrase or take the info and write it in your own words, you still need to cite. This is how paraphrasing should be handled:
Many believe that when one takes a picture, they are collecting pieces of the world (Sontag 1).
16. Lecture
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
~ JFK

Aaron Shikler, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Official Presidential Official White House Portrait Photo of JFK, 1961
Portrait of the 35th U.S. President, Unveiled 1971
(This is a painting not a photograph)
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present
are certain to miss the future. Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”
~ JFK
The 1960’s was a time of cultural, economic, and political upheaval. Americans voted into office the youngest president ever at the age of 43. John F. Kennedy (“JFK”) was a bit progressive and invited artists and poets to the White House, which brought a new sense of vitality to the seat of government. JFK created a new frontier of social reform included aid to education, medical care for aged, extension of civil rights, formation of the Peace Corps and a physical fitness program. He also initiated an aggressive foreign policy that included the abortive Bay of Pig’s invasion of Cuba in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 that brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.
While there was an increase in the number of military advances to South Vietnam, astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969 and people thought it was staged. The reality that “surface appearance could not be trusted” was becoming increasingly clear.
At the time, the idea that photography was made of direct or unmanipulated pictures of the world was being replaced with the idea that photography had its own changing path that lived somewhere between reality and what the viewer saw.

Roland Barthes: Critic, Semiotician, French Literary Theorist
Barthes decoded the formal relationship of signs to one another and the symbolic logic of photography for the purpose of cultural analysis. Barthes discovered that the image yields a first message which is linguistic and is supported by captions or labels. Barthes wrote, “photography crushes all other images by its tranny.”
Roland Barthes, 1915 – 1980
Semioticians
Semioticians looked at how meaning is constructed and understood. They analyzed mental association to find hidden meaning and to understand how a society creates meaning. They did not limit their practice to language and included the photographer, the person who was able to communicate meaning in signs and symbols. Semioticians provided the historical foundation for modern structuralism
Semioticians maintain that the relation of words to things is not natural. It is assigned by society; thus, language is a self-contained system of signs made up of two components, the signified and the signifier:
Signified represents the mental association one has with a word which may or not be conscious and which is generated by the culture (the meaning or the connotation).
Signifier is the word itself that people use to define the material world around them (the representation or the denotation).

Inclusive Restroom Sign

No Left Turn Sign

Starbucks Logo

The “word” tree over the tree as a figure/sign/symbol
What does all this mean?
It means that when someone says the word “tree,” one may immediately sees a picture of a “tree” in their mind.
What does this have to do with photography?
A new debate ensued over what a photograph could mean, and the following questions resurfaced:
“Was a photo a witness to history or an equivalent to inner vision?”
“Was the meaning of a photograph determined by its maker, the editor, or a free floating idea? “
“Could two individuals read the same photo and ascribe different meaning to it based on life experience?”
”Was the meaning of the photograph written in a universal language or did outside influences determine the meaning?”
Structuralism and Photography: Structuralism Explains the Relationship Between Language, Literature, and Images
Structuralism looks at the signs and hidden underlying meanings of a society that can be decoded. The signs are compared to components of language that create meaning and examine how a society uses language as a “framework to understand the world.” Structuralists ask “how one sign might relate to another?” Photographers are part of this complex cultural structure of signs, which are filled with hidden messages and analyze their meaning based on experiences of both photographer and viewer.
Structural theory gave hope to understanding a seemingly chaotic atomic world that saw Newton’s unified mechanical universe crumble into the physics of Einstein’s invisible particles theory. Structuralism offered the world a way to make it whole again.
Noam Chomsky, Born 1928
In the 1950’s, Noam Chomsky, an American linguist, revolutionized the study of language with his theory that innate structure, not sound, are the basis for speech. The idea that inherent, unconscious structure might serve as the foundation of understanding started philosophers and artists searching for the hidden structure that shaped meaning.
In the 1960’s, Chomsky accused the media of suppressing vital information important to understanding the Vietnam War. He accused the media of misleading people because he believed that in a democratic society, one should freely arrive at decisions and ideas. He said “images are not neutral containers and thus people must ferret out their meaning.” He further suggested that if the thing itself could no longer be trusted to supply an accurate and complete meaning, then photographers need to devise new ways of making images that offered insight into the world. He asks viewers not to passively accept an image at face value but to take responsibility by extrapolating their own meaning.
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
~ Noam Chomsky
Edward Steichen and “Hidden Persuaders”
Throughout the 1950s, Edward Steichen and his exhibition on the human family titled The Family of Man Exhibit reinforced the belief that photography was an exception for these “hidden persuaders” that shaped meaning.
Did You Know: The Great Modern Artist Pablo Picasso also worked in Photography too?
Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973
Painters like Pablo Picasso embraced photography and used it occasionally as revealed in his self-portrait above.
The Beginning of Postmodernism: “Combines” and Robert Rauschenberg
The photographic image was beginning to dominate and artists had to expand the medium. New definitions came out and painters like Rauschenberg exhibited “combines” by placing discordant and incompatible items together in one work of art. He made lithographs and silk screens which reflected his idea that painting relates to both “art and life.” Rauschenberg’s works are considered both photography and Pop Art.
Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled “combine,” 1964, Oil, silkscreen, canvas
Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I, 1964, Silkscreen
He used ready made vernacular sources to create motifs and pushed the content of high art to included mass communication, politics, and technology. His way of working was antithetical to photography’s unbroken view of reality of a single moment in time. In Rauschenberg Retroactive I, 1964, (depicted above) he saw the world as a camera saw it and selected, extracted, and assembled visual information.
Pop Art: A New Artistic Era
The pop art movement consisted of Assemblage, Conceptual Art, Environmental Art, Minimalism, Op art, Pop Art, and Photorealism. The struggle in the art world between painterly and photographic was revealed during this time.
Photography continued to provoke new attitudes, forms and iconography, and tended to reject painting. Photography captured race riots, Viet Nam, the assassinations of JFK (1963), Malcolm X (1965), MLK Jr. and RFK (1968). Photography may have even resurrected the myth of the doomed outsider. But the alternative community of artists conveyed a sense that anything is possible with new artistic visions, and this was true for photographers too but especially for writers.
Andy Warhol
Warhol found disaster paintings such as car and airplane crashes and also assassinations an interesting alternative to romantic notions as subject matter. In some cases, he produced the action over and over again. In doing so, he destroyed the original context of photography by distancing the viewer from the sense of horror; thus, leaving them uninvolved and even estranged from his works.
His advertising background influenced his work as he used pop culture items like the soup cans or coke bottles to mimic our ability to mass produce commodity and his works started conversation of the effects of technology on society.
Warhol saw the artist as a business man who has the right to sell anything. He once said that every person, every work, would be famous for fifteen minutes in his world. You may have heard this expression before. Warhol said “everybody wants to be famous.” Someone answered him with “yeah, for about 15 minutes.”
Warhol, Disaster Paintings, 1960s, Screen Printed Image of a Car Crash
Warhol, Silver Car Crash, 1963, (Sold for $105M in Nov. 2013 at auction)
Warhol, Coca Cola, 1962
Ultimately, art and artist no longer shared the responsibility to unmask things and explain the incomprehensible or provide morals or taste. It made no difference what art said now.
William Burroughs, Author of The Naked Lunch
Cover of the 1959 Olympia first edition, with misprinted title
William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs wrote The Naked Lunch. He was a beat writer and his book was ruled as obscene in the state of Massachusetts. Burroughs book contained vivid descriptions of homosexuality and drugs. A beat writer is someone who often focuses on a specific issue.
A few years later, in 1962, he wrote The Ticket That Exploded. He cut up and rearranged texts to free his work from linear time and cognitive thinking. He created a world made up of a mosaics of voices. He created a universe in which anything could happen because “nothing is true” and “everything is permitted.” Photographers such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney (to be discussed in the next module) also worked in a kind of “mosaic” style.
Diane Arbus
She came from an upper middle class Jewish family. While she created advertising photographs for her father’s store and later became a fashion photographer for magazine’s like Harper’s Bazaar, it was the outer fringe of society that interested her most. Perhaps this is so because she felt like an outsider herself. She died by suicide in 1971.
Diane Arbus, Triplets in their Bedroom, New Jersey, 1963
She studied with Lisette Model whose motto was “the most mysterious thing is a fact clearly stated.” The feminist movement was on the rise and her desires shifted to a challenging style using frontal light and a flash to sharply depict a subject. She is said to have broken down public personas by removing them from people living in the margins of society to people who became archetypes of human circumstances. Her work exemplifies that one could indeed find the astonishing in the commonplace.
The concept of having triplet was distressing. It did not fit into the mold of how families should appear during this time. Perhaps because people thought that it did not align with the American dream; thus, making triplets an oddity. The American Dream at the time was to have two children. The first should be a boy and the second a girl. The family should live in a nice house with a picket fence and a pet dog perhaps. Dad goes to work. Mom does not. She stays home because she is a homemaker; thus, her job is to care for the children and take care of the house.
Diane Arbus, Eddie Carmel aka “The Jewish Giant,” at Home in the Bronx, NY, 1970
Diane Arbus said that a photo was a secret about a secret and the more you see, the less you know. She focused on secrets no one wanted to share and she said “freaks were born with their trauma. They passed their test in life; they are aristocrats.” Pathos is not felt of her subject but rather by the viewer. She believed they wanted to be “normal” and to be accepted just as we are accepted. She said, “any pain you feel that makes you avert your eyes is due to internal violence.“ She was basically saying it’s our problem if we cannot handle seeing people that are different and do not fit into the mold that most of society fits into. This was profound and insightful for this era in history. Arbus’ pictures are between the void of our inner self-perceptions and that of outer public reality. Her works appeared in Esquire Magazine and showed a new trend toward personal journalism.
Bruce Davidson, Circus Performer Jimmy Armstrong (aka Circus Dwarf), Palisades, NJ, 1958
From the Series The Dwarf and Clyde Beatty Circus
Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang, 1959
Bruce Davidson
Bruce Davidson’s images, like the new journalism of writer Norman Mailer and Hunter Thomson, contain authentic details of people and their situations. Davidson once did a photo essay about a circus little person and a French person and shows us a sympathetic representation of those who are not part of mainstream culture. In 1958, he photographed a New York City gang and their rituals such as hanging out under the boardwalk, drinking beer, dancing, etc.
Bruce Davidson, Two Youths, Coney Island, 1959
Joker in the pack: Bruce Davidson’s photographs of a Brooklyn gang.
In 1959, the 25-year-old photographer embedded himself with a gang
of teenage New Yorkers to create a moving portrait of postwar inner-city youth culture.
His works are about perseverance and holding onto your dreams and remind one of Walker Evans’ sharecropper from Hale County, Alabama. While Davidson shows the face of human dignity in the midst of tribulation, he takes it a step further by adding a sense of intimacy especially when considering what it take to endure in a hostile world. His works are not radical but rather compelling in our social conscience. The Garden Cafeteria couple is a great example of this.
Bruce Davidson, Garden Cafeteria, Lower East Side, NYC, 1973
Bruce Davidson, Woman outside Garden Cafeteria, NYC, 1973
Bruce Davidson, Man Eating Soup, Garden Cafeteria, NYC, 1973
Davidson gave photographic validation to the everyday effects on the disenfranchised and lonely within the urban landscape. Ultimately, he respects his subjects despite criticism. Some of Davidson’s photographic themes are the Los Angeles ghettos, Spanish Harlem, and the Holocaust survivors of the Garden Cafeteria. Displace Jewish persons found comfort at the Garden Cafeteria, which is why Davidson believed wholeheartedly that place matters. Perhaps because Holocaust survivors found other survivors at the Cafeteria.
Bruce Davidson, Circus Performer Jimmy Armstrong (aka Circus Dwarf), Palisades, NJ, 1958
For many, the circus is an enchanting and otherworldly place not just for children. The performance, the magic, the mystery and the fantasy, everything seems captivating and marvelous. But have you ever wondered what happens behind the curtains? Through photography, Bruce Davidson, invites us to take a peek backstage so that we can look into this lonely and not so glamorous life.
The 1970’s, Photography, and Higher Education
In the 1970’s, photography was offered as a course of study in Art Departments at higher educational institutions like ours. During this time, it received a pronounced injection of academic aesthetic discourse through the influence of the Society for Photographic Education (“SPE”) and the George Eastman House who formed the SPE. Studies in the field of photography offered teaching gallery and museum jobs for graduates. Universal photographic programs also emerged all over the United States.
Additionally, the study of the History of Photography became a popular course in higher education Art History Departments.
17. Lecture
Alternate Visions and a Changing Reality
Life Magazine, November 26, 1965
While Viet Nam ended in 1973 with a cease fire and withdrawal of troops, Watergate provided us with the uncertainty about government integrity. People looked to quieter and more peaceful times.
Richard Nixon, President of
the U.S., from 1969 – 74
Famous NYC Disco, Studio 54, 1972 – 86,
Most legendary Club in NYC
Jim Morrison, Lead Singer, The Doors
Ronald Reagan, President of
the U.S from 1981 – 1989

The 1960’s and 1970’s
The 1960’s were filled with screaming guitars. The 1970’s were filled with canned disco sounds. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, photographers practiced like a conservative minority. The Reagan revolution was ushered in during the 1980’s and led to a more pessimistic and restrained stance of diminished possibility in photographic prints. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment was alas disassembled.
Photography Finds Itself Once Again at a Crossroad:
Robert Adams and the New Topography
Robert Adams, a former English Professor, took a lighter approach to the new West. He saw it as a site of diverse interaction between nature and culture and perhaps a reaction to Truman Capote’s book, In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s book, The Executioners Song, where tales of heroic deeds were replaced with a senseless lack of respect for life.
Adams recognized that the grace, beauty, and order of the open American West had been obscured by the confusing commercial upheaval of freeways, strip malls, tract homes, and road signs. Robert Adams called it the new topography.
Robert Adams, Mobile Home Park,
Denver, Colorado, 1973 – 74
Robert Adams. Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968
Robert Adams, Mobile Home Park, 1973 – 74
Hue Masters: Joel Myerowitz, William Eggleston, John Pfahl, and Steven Shore
What do hue masters, Joel Myerowitz, William Eggleston, John Pfahl, and Steven Shore have in common? All of these photographers worked in color and pushed the use of color photography into the next century.
The Washington Post essay, Hue Masters, focuses on the works of these photographers. Link to essay: WAPO Hue MastersLinks to an external site.
What did people think of Color Photography?
Walker Evans dismissed color as “vulgar.”
Robert Frank said, “The colors of photography are black and white.”
Together they laid down the law for two generations of American documentary photographers who scorned color as the tool of advertisers and amateurs. A change in attitude can be traced to 1976, when a show of William Eggleston’s dye transfer prints opened at the Museum of Modern Art and, in effect, officially canonized color. Joel Meyerowitz and others had also taken advantage of the new, more controllable color processes that emerged in the 60’s, but it appears to have been Eggleston’s show — and MOMA’s blessing — that touched off the explosion of new color work that has since revitalized contemporary photography.
Joel Myerowitz, Bay/Sky, 1977
William Eggleston, Supermarket Boy, 1974
John Pfahl, Great Salt Lake, 1977
Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea, Los Angeles, CA, 1975
These photographers are not trendy or Avant-Garde, they are photographers who make personal images in the documentary tradition — straight, unmanipulated images that derive their forms and attitudes chiefly from black-and-white street photographers. All have mastered their craft, and though the taut modernist aesthetic prevails, many have loosened those bonds to allow the sheer romance of color to come into play, along with an occasional undertow of social concern. In that sense, they share the new tendency toward “content.”
Joel Sternfeld, American Prospects Book Cover with Color Photograph
For more of Sternfeld’s works, go to: Sternfeld American ProspectsLinks to an external site.
Like all good art, these photographs are not one-shot images, and layers of meaning slowly unfold only to the exploring eye. Joel Sternfeld’s “An American Prospect,” for example, seems on first encounter to focus mostly on the sheer beauty of the color in his landscapes and deserted factories, all bathed in exquisite light. Closer inspection reveals underlying tragedies such as the unsold rotting pumpkins above. Though his more direct attempts to show alienation among the middle class, some of his works are contrived as they represent contemporary society. Many of these photographs however evoke a sense of place and call to mind the works of Bruce Davidson especially his Cafeteria Garden photographs.
It also puts the old arguments for and against color to rest. Color has now become, in the hands of many of these artists, a tool that only a fool would argue against.
Credit: Jo Ann Lewis, WaPo, Dec. 15, 1984, Hue MastersLinks to an external site.
Edward Weston, 1886 – 1958
Walker Evans, 1903 – 1975
C O L O R Photography
The 1960’s and 1970’s saw the emergence of color photography especially for advertising, commercial works, manipulative advertising that pleases viewers as well as glorifying celebrity.
It was Walker Evans who once said:
“There are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.”
Why was color photography slow to be accepted?
The 1960’s and 1970’s saw the emergence of color photography especially for advertising and commercial works. It was not highly used because it was associated with the garish and decorative in terms of advertising; thus, it was deemed inappropriate for art photographs. Famous photographers at this time such as Edward Weston and Walker Evans truly believed this and refused to work with color for a while.

Please screen Color PhotographyLinks to an external site.
The Purpose of Photography is Growing: Performance Art
Photography has a new job at the end of the twentieth century. Photography captures performances and preserves them for future use. Photography of performance art reaches a larger audience now. This point cannot be emphasized enough.
Chris Burden 1946 – 2015
Performance art tried to give a documented look at contrived situations. Photographs of performance art are pictures of a real body engaged as a forum for cultural critiques. A perfect example of this is found in the works of artist, Chris Burden, who had his friend shoot him on film. Needless to say, this is not something that should ever be attempted.
It’s a performance piece of art that has been captured and preserved for future use and to show to larger audiences. Performance art is an open ended classification for art activists that includes elements of dance, music, and poetry, theatre, and video performed before live audiences.
At 7:45 p.m. on November 19, 1971, performance artist Chris Burden was shot. Standing still inside an empty gallery space surrounded by white walls, he watched as his friend pointed a loaded rile at his left arm from a distance of approximately fifteen feet. Ten people observed the scene; they stood to the side. The trigger was pulled, and a black and white photograph was taken to document the event.

Chris Burden Getting Shot on Camera
Ponder this for a Moment
We now come to realize that EVERYTHING in the world is USED and SAVED in PHOTOGRAPHY and FILM…This is a defining moment in the history of photography. I am sure you can relate to this. Think about how many pictures you have saved on your SmartPhone and in the Cloud.
The Performance Artist
The goal of the performance artist is to provide a more interactive experience to a larger audience.
Bruce Nauman, Portarit of the Abstract Fountain, 1966
This is a performance piece of the shirtless artist spewing water
like that of a fountain. It pays homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (urinal)
and also questions the role of the artist. This work of art
also speaks to Nauman’s own vision that “The true artist is an amazing luminous fountain.”
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, Rozel Point in the Great Salk Lake
Smithson used corporate funding and large construction equipment such as earth movers to
create the shape of a spiral jetty that is still apparent now that the waters have receded. Eventually, nature
will take back this temporary or ephemeral (aka Earthwork) performance piece through erosion and the passage of time.
This work has been preserved thanks to the great medium of photography.
Christo, Running Fence, 1976, Hills of Sonoma and Marin Country, Northern California
Christo created a temporary structure with flowing drapes that bend
in the wind and was intended to mimic the curves of the hillside. As it was a temporary or
ephemeral work of art made from 240k yard of fabric and 90 miles of steel cable, it
only existed for two weeks in September, 1976. This work has
been preserved thanks to the great medium of photography.
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger spent ten years as a graphic designer for various women’s magazines that extolled beauty, fashion and heterosexual relations before she began to make photomontages resembling billboards with texts that question capitalism’s relationship to patriarchal oppression and the role consumption plays within this social structure.
Barbara Kruger, Born 1945
Barbara Kruger believed that, because of computers, etc., photographs no longer belong to the world of the real but rather to the unreal.
Barbara Kruger, Your Body is a Battlefield, 1989
In her works, Kruger asks “Who speaks?” “Who is silent?” “Who is seen?” “Who is absent?“
These questions focus on how cultures are constructed through pictures and words, and how we are seduced into a world of appearances – into a pose of who we are and aren’t. On both an emotional and an economic level, images and texts have the power to make us rich or poor
Barbara Kruger, Remote Control, Power, Culture and the World of Appearances, 1994
She made confrontational photographs using mass media images like block type from advertising. Not just for museums, public venues too, and commercial formats putting her images and slogans on billboard and even department store shopping bags. Some consider it stylish.
In her book Remote Control, Power, Culture and the World of Appearances, 1994, she deconstructs consumerism, the power of the median, and stereotypes of women to show how images and words manipulate and obscure meaning. She works with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be, and what we become. Her works ask “who speaks?” “Who is silent?” “Who is seen?”
She visualizes what Roland Barthe suggests in his work, The Rhetoric of the Image, and shows viewers the tactics that photography uses to impose their messages and reveal hidden ideological agendas and power. She sees stereotypes of women as instruments of social power determining who is in and who is out. She uses certain phrases such as “Who is bought and sold?” and “Your manias become science?” It goes to the core of the male demonstration of financial, physical, and sexual power.
She reuses commercial images and is not interested in action but in stereotypical transformation of action into gesture. She uses pronouns such as I and My and You and Your to build attraction, emphasis, and significance by connecting the addressee to the speaker. Personal pronouns do not carry gender and allow one to enter the artwork free of that.
Welcome to the Postmodern Era.
The Postmodern Era is Now.
So, what is Postmodernism?
Postmodern is a dissolution of traditional values. There are lots of noticeable differences between artistic mediums now. Art has become less distinct and concepts and processes are comingled. New forms of art are ambiguous and contrary, and the desire to create pure articulated works is waning.
Artists believe that meaning cannot be determined by surface appearance since everything, from a photograph to a TV show, is a text that must be decoded. The act of decoding or deciphering the text to unveil the hidden assumption is called deconstruction. Deconstruction is a term coined by Jacques Derrida. Derrida, a French Philosopher and Semiotician, concedes that to find true meaning is like trying to find your true reflection in a hall of mirrors.
The notion that there is not a single truth of experience is the core of postmodern thinking. To find the essence of the thing is almost impossible. Postmodern thinking disallows the notion of artistic intention, reference, and meaning.
Photography is not the stimulus of Postmodern thinking but rather the consequence of it.
Picture of Cindy Sherman, Born 1954
Cindy Sherman Explores Gender Because “Gender Matters”
Assuming authority and control over public representation was the foundation of Cindy Sherman’s work. She incorporates and subverts images of women from popular magazines to questioning the media’s presentation of women. She wants to reveal how a magazine cover acts as a façade to conceal the real individual and encourages the viewer to look beneath the surface of an image to see what is really taking place.
Cindy Sherman
She appropriates the 1950’s black and white movie publicity formats that assume female roles and its objectification of women. Her technique is based on self portrait blending artifice and authenticity but can be considered performance art. Her photographs question the stereotypes representing all female types in the media and raise issues about personal and social ideals for both sexes.
Cindy Sherman, Film Still #3, 1977
Cindy Sherman, #43, 1979
Cindy Sherman, #21, 1978
Film Stills Credit: ArtleadLinks to an external site.
Her works of distracted women, played by herself, in ambiguous and unclear angst ridden situations utilizing color to maintain a sensual edge possessing qualities of formal composition, control of light, and a sense of play that delivers aesthetic pleasure. She makes psychological images of the masking of self identity. In the 90’s, she focused on attacking the fetishes of the male gaze and sexual rage and revenge.
Credit: http://www.thebroad.org/art/cindy-sherman/
The Famous “Picture’s Generation”
As gender, social issues, values, and culture have been examined artistically, philosophically, and socially, they gave rise to a group of artists called the “Pictures” generation. The name was born out of an exhibit held at Artists Space in New York in 1977. It was the 1970’s and 1980’s and specifically a Buffalo, NY, gallery consisting of students and faculty from New York City to the California Institute of the Arts. The appropriation of images and ideas from mass culture including advertising, movies, and television united their works. After Minimalism and Conceptual Art, the act of “re-presentation, not representation”—how images that surround us can be recycled to craft new interpretations of the world and ourselves—seemed to be the most viable and perhaps the only creative option available. As time passed, other writers and artists joined this group.
Richard Prince and Deconstructing the M Y T H
Richard Prince says the world has all the photographs it requires and there is no need to make any more. You have seen them all. Postmodernists suggest one should appropriate images. Prince further suggests that most know the world through second hand images only.
As the original disappears, so does its mythic values. We now emphasize the act of choosing as the artistic feature. Now photographers used radical cropping and or enlarging of details that prove new areas of inquiry into the presentation of gender through posing and stereotype.
David Hockney, Born 1937
David Hockney and Showing Time in Photographs
Some might not realize that David Hockney is a great painter because he is mostly known for his photographs. What makes Hockney even more interesting is his belief that photography would never equal painting. He said “Photography is only good for mechanical reproduction.” He also said “Photography can’t show time.” And he further said “There are few good photographs, and those good ones that do exist are almost accidental.”
He thought photography failed because there weren’t too many truly memorable photographs. He did not see photography leading us to a new way of seeing. Hockney admits that photography may have other possibilities but it is only the medium of painting that could extend the way of seeing.
Multifaceted Views aka Joiners: They Look like Cubist Works
Hockney’s photo collages and montages in which are referred to as multifaceted views or joiners did catch the public’s eye in the 1980’s. He noticed in the late sixties that were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He thought these photographs looked distorted however. While he was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles, he took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. But upon looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as if the viewer was moving through the room and time was passing. He began to work more and more with photography after this discovery and even stopped painting for a period of time to exclusively pursue this new style of photography.
With this process, Hockney was able to overcome the limited perspective of a stationary camera and the singular point of view that represents only a small period of time. “All photographs share the same flaw,” he said. He believed they lacked lived time. Cubism supported Hockney’s desire to create multiple reference points in a photograph. In essence, this would make his photographs Cubist in nature.
Credit: https://photomuserh.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/david-hockney-photography-will-never-equal-painting/Links to an external site.
Mother I, Yorkshire Moors, August 1985 #1 (1985) by David Hockney
The Desk, Cibachrome Print
Why Alter Time and Space?
New artworks challenged the notion that human experiences were singular and stable. Artists became concerned with real time, knowledge, and process. The thinking was that if one is forced to focus on time/space, then one would be required to examine the underlying structure of how an image is experienced.
Hockney assailed the sanctity of images. Hockney explained his multifaceted representations of a subject. Hockney was dissatisfied with the way photographs rendered depth and represented time and space. He believed people gave conventional photographs only a brief look because theylacked lived time and life was precisely what they did not have.
David Hockney, Pearblossom Highway, April 11-18, 1986
Hockney believed matter is in constant movement. So how does one convey this?
Hockney’s answer was in making numerous photographs of a scene and arranging the resulting prints in a Cubist like collage in a multifaceted view (also known as joiners). He brought together an expanded collective of components observed over time and fabricated a grand and constantly changing entirety of a scene. By interrupting space and displacing time, he breaks the perspective of the Renaissance window carrying his swaying synthetic images beyond the edges of the frame and dissolving the rectangle.
Andres Serrano, Born 1950
Andres Serrano and Culture Wars of the 1980’s
Andres Serrano is an American artist notorious for the controversial content of his photographic works. While Serrano considered himself a conceptual artist, he described himself as a traditionalist in terms of photography. His best-known pieces are large format images of objects (frequently religious in nature) and studio portraiture, often featuring titles that unambiguously describe the process of creating the work. These processes have included submerging a crucifix in urine, taking photographs of recently deceased bodies just brought into a city morgue, and producing portraits of members of the Ku Klux Klan.
In the late 1980’s his practice was highlighted as an example of work that was deliberately confrontational and designed to shock the audience. His potent mix of religious imagery, bodily fluids, sex, violence, and death was labelled obscene by conservative politicians and advocacy groups. His photograph Piss Christ in particular becoming a flashpoint in what became known as the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980’s and 1990’s in America. Serrano has always maintained that shock is not his primary goal, and points to the formal qualities of the images, their relevance to political issues (such as intolerance or sensationalism) and their relation to particular moments in Art History as being his key motivation and intention.
Credit: The Art Story SerranoLinks to an external site.
Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987
His photograph was attacked by U.S. Congressman and religious leaders. He intended not to malign religion but to return to the sacred concerns of the creative process. His work is informed by his own Catholic upbringing which helped him redefine his relationship with God. For him, art is a moral and spiritual obligation that cuts across all manners of pretense and speaks directly to the soul. He does large scale photos of bodily fluids open to discourse around social anxiety surrounding drugs and sexual relationships by which HIV virus is transmitted. Use of text is his way to connect the corporeality of his own body with the spiritual nature of Christ.
He changes the depiction of the solemn nature of certain symbols. He changes the depiction of the crucifix into representation of rebellion. He challenges boundaries formed by class and race, and between abstract and representation, photography and painting, and belief and disbelief. Whatever he photographs, he attempts to take a formal tradition and subvert it by inventing abstracted images that one might take for granted in an attempt to question not only photography but his own experience and social reality.
Reception of Piss Christ
He bordered between sacred and sensational. Piss Christ is a public funded work and New York Senator Alphonse D’Amato ripped up the photograph from the exhibition in disgust. The crucifix is suspended in a bubbly, reddish-yellow liquid. The glowing around the cross made it seem as if it were done with religious fervor by a faithful or a deviant person because the title suggests the use of urine.
Patronage
His work was supported and funded by a few different foundations, one being the Rockefeller Foundation, but the National Endowment for the Arts was the only one criticized because it channeled public money.
What is it about Piss Christ that ignites so much controversy?
Piss Christ is both attractive and repulsive. Serrano’s goal was to achieve the two extremes of utter pleasure and utter revulsion. And, he is successful indeed in this endeavor. At first glance, one is pleasantly surprised by the beauty of this piece. However, when one finds out the contents of the liquid, they become offended, angered, and generally displeased. It was especially offensive to people of faith and reflective of a time when there was a national sense of urgency about the future. It fueled a longing for traditional values.
The Helms Amendment
Serrano’s work placed government funding of the arts under scrutiny. The Helms Amendment was set into place to insure that funded art could not be obscene. It had to be of serious literary, artistic, political. or scientific value.
Serrano’s controversial works did not end here. Check out his website if you so desire Andres SerranoLinks to an external site.
Andreas Gursky, Born 1955
Well known artist for digitally manipulating his photographs
since the inception of technologies that permit this.
Andreas Gursky is perhaps the best-known member of a loose association of German artists under the tutelage of the conceptual photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Gursky’s photos feature scenes involving enormous amounts of information. Subtly enhancing and adjusting the structure of the overwhelming visual settings, Gursky allows viewers to assimilate and consume more than we are usually able with our eyes alone. His images are symbols of both contemporary life and the classical need for order.
Gursky began digitally manipulating his prints as new photographic technologies were invented. Some technologies, including a framing system to hold large, face-mounted photographs attached to Plexiglass, Gursky even helped develop. In Gursky’s works, the viewer must accept the (unknown) inauthentic qualities of the scene within a seemingly objective recording of our world.
Credit: Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light
Andreas Gursky, F1 Boxenstopp I, 2007
Chromogenic print mounted on Plexiglas in artist’s frame
F1 Boxenstopp, 2007, features four monumental images. Brilliant colors and compositional arrangement codify the flurry of organized but frantic activity of a Formula One pit row. The pit crews, placed underneath a long row of spectators, give the photographs a serene, tranquil balance despite the intense, frenzied event. The result is a typical Gursky effect, a detached aesthetic view of a spectacle that manages to retain its visual stability.
Gursky, Stock Exchange II, 2008
Gursky, Antarctic, 2010
Gursky, Ocean, 2010
For more on Gursky, go to: Andreas GurskyLinks to an external site.
18. Lecture
Thinking About Photography and the Future
Idea
________
Over Subject
Art becomes cerebral and atransmitter off cultural messages. In the social turbulent 1960’s, artists rethought roles of photography, photographs, and viewers.
The Conceptual Approach is Preferred to Modernist Formalism Now
The practice shifted from modernistic formalism to the conceptual approach. The goal was to emphasize compositional elements and tonal elements of the straight print. In this conceptual approach, the idea takes precedence over how subjects were depicted. It’s about the idea of the thing now. Conceptual art is the art of choice.
Understanding Conceptual Art
Conceptual art offered a way to circumvent commercialism and supply a concrete framework for cerebral works of art. Now you have to think about what you see. Conceptual artists adopted photos and undervalued the art establishment as organizing mechanisms for transmitting cultural messages.
Example of how a word becomes a symbol.
We all know the word “tree.” When you hear the spoken word “tree,”
the picture of a “tree” usually comes into one’s mind.
Artists applied aspect of Semiotics or symbols as discussed in previous chapters in feminism and pop culture examples and used the camera as the recording device of choice.
Making Artless Works Now
Artists purposefully made dead pan portraits that appeared to be aesthetically artless and bore resemblance to traditional fine art objects. They were upset about the bourgeoisie expectations by choosing intangible intellectual concerns over discernible aesthetic visual ones. The attempt was to revamp mainstream culture.
Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., 1995,
This is a 49-channel closed circuit video installation,
neon, steel and electronic components.
Nam June Paik: An Artist Intended on Commenting on American Culture
Nam June Paik saw America’s culture as being obsessed with bright shiny things, television, and also moving pictures. Paik was one of the first to use video in his art. As artists were moving in this direction, a new artistic movement was born. It was announced by a 1969 group show “TV as a Creative Medium.” Held at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, the show included one of Paik’s interactive TVs, and also premiered another one of his collaborations with famed Cellist Charlotte Moorman.
TV has Become a New Medium of Creativity
This new artistic medium was well-suited to the speed of our increasingly electronic modern lives especially for Paik and his associates. It allowed artists to create moving images more quickly than recording on film (which required time for negatives to be developed), and unlike film, video could be edited in “real-time,” using devices that altered the video’s electronic signals. Furthermore, because the image recorded by the video camera could be transmitted to and viewed almost instantaneously on a monitor, people could see themselves “live” on a TV screen, and even interact with their own TV image, in a process known as “feedback.” In the years to come, the participatory nature of TV would be redefined by two-way cable networks, while the advent of global satellite broadcasts made TV a medium of instant global communication.
For more on this, For more, go to: Khan Academy and Nam June PaikLinks to an external site.
Electronic Superhighway
To design this monumental map of the United States, the artist Nam June Paik arranged 336 televisions on a scaffold and overlaid it with almost 600 feet of neon. Fifty DVD players send multimedia simultaneously to screens populating each state. When Nam June Paik came to the United States in 1964, the interstate highway system was only nine years old, and superhighways offered everyone the freedom to “ see the USA in your Chevy.” The enormous size of the country, the metal, the neon, maps, motels and restaurants on the open road were a marvel to experience.
Paik augmented the flashing images “seen as though from a passing car” with audio clips from The Wizard of Oz, Oklahoma, and other screen gems, suggesting that our picture of America has been influenced by film and television. Today, the Internet and twenty-four-hour broadcasting tend to homogenize the customs and accents of what was once a more diverse nation. Paik was the first to use the phrase “electronic superhighway,” and this installation proposes that electronic media provide us with the images and adventure that we used to leave home to discover. But not anymore. It is important to realize that Electronic Superhighway is real. It is an enormous physical object that occupies a middle ground between the virtual reality of the media and the sprawling country beyond our doors. Credit: www.americanart.si.eduLinks to an external site.
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