New York School (Abstract Expressionism)
Title: "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" 1939
Author: Clement Greenberg
Argument: Greenberg argues that art has good and bad taste. Avant-Garde is good because it is hard for the public to understand it right away, so it must contain big/important/hidden meanings or reflections (e.g. Picasso's works have a "reflected" effect and no immediate presents). Popular art such as Kitsch is bad because it is easy to understand and ready to digest (e.g. Repin's works are products of American capitalism and consumerism).
Title: "Interview with Willam Wright" 1950
Author: Jackson Pollock
Argument: Pollock explains the concept of modern art being the expression of contemporary at the age we're living in. he also talked about using new techniques to make artists' statements and discover deeper meanings. The way to look at modern art is to look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to looking for. The way that Pollock approaches his painting is to allow more freedom and paint directly and immediately from his mind.
Title: "Lee Krasner as L.K." 1989
Author: Anne M. Wagner
Argument: Wagner explores the issue of gender in artists such as Lee Krasner. The gender identity, especially being Pollock's wife, influenced how Lee Krasner approached her work and understand herself as an artist. She sometimes is terrified by the fact that she is a woman and thus refused to produce a self in her painting. Another problem she faces is generating an otherness different than Pollock and that otherness should not be understood as a the otherness of women (social problem) → cause her to have anxiety and Wagner has negative feedback and commentary on L.K.'s struggle
Post-Painterly Abstraction (Color Field & Hard-edge Painting)
Title: "Interviewed by Diane Waldman" 1977
Author: Kenneth Noland
Argument: Abstraction art means dealing art solely with esthetic issues and abstract forms without sacrificing individuality. This means abstract art also shows the artists' style. Modern painting also means to paint in a more economical way and express things in a simpler way rather than a complicated way by the use of material. It is also about telling new things with new material and don't repeat a learned skill in a manipulative way. The importance of color: color can be mood and can convey human meaning because color has texture and 3D properties such as weight, density, and transparency... Making art is also very time-consuming and art takes practice.
Title: "Experiencing Louise Nevelson's Moon Garden" 2007
Author: Elyse Deeb Speaks
Argument: Nevelson's sculptural exhibition Moon Garden Plus One was composed of numerous abstract assembles that put together as a united whole and unified space. Such a vivid environment is seen as a dynamic, engaged, and experientially based relation between the spectators and [her] installation, so the viewer's perspective and understanding are also a part of Nevelson's art. Constructed entirely of wood, it creates an organic environment and viewers feel not only seeing the work but also entering into it. People often see the work as a whole rather than separate pieces. The wooden wall project a huge image that the viewers are invited to feel placed within. The use of light and shadow also creates a sense of mystery and fear, or even nostalgia for the old and lost caves. The experience is the art (not just seeing it). Nevelson herself is also a collector and thus experience represents the interaction between people and materials.
Title: "Nothingness Made Visible: The Case of Rothko's Paintings"
Author: Natalie Kosoi
Argument: Kosoi suggests that Rothko's paintings suggest a sense of nothingness because it allies with Heidegger's explanation: nothingness as anxiety within beings of slipping away. Essentially what is trying to be said is that it is this idea of nothingness that as human beings we are in constant anxiety about, anxious that one day we will slip away from existence, and die. It is this idea of nothingness that Rothko is trying to conceptualize and depict within his paintings.
Neo-DaDaism & Pop Art
Title: "Interview with Claes Oldenburg" 2015
Author: Barbara Rose
Argument: Oldenburg's work is pop art because he works with images and objects around him but he also transforms them. Even if the audience didn't understand the aesthetic properties, they could recognize the subject of the work. His use of soft material shows human quality, human shape, or the human process (such as food) and it started with his first partner Patty. He is also inspired by Freudian ideas about free association - take an object and simply put anything you want in that object
a sense of artist community at that time
Title: "Andy Warhol's Silver Elvises: Meaning Through Context at the Ferus Gallery in 1963"
Author: David McCarthy
Argument: In McCarthy's article, he uses Andy Warhol's focus on Hollywood celebrities to describe pop art's emphasis on mass media and modern art. In Warhol's Ferus exhibition, his choices of a full-body size Presley as a cowboy performer as well as the repetitive head of Taylor as a stereotypical woman portrait are essential demonstrations of pop art: found images from mass-media sources such as magazine shoots and movies. Such use of materials is similar to neo-dadaism, which also incorporates found images and common materials from everyday life. They also embrace the idea that art is for everyone. For example, Warhol states that "I don't think art should be only for the select few…it should be for the mass of American people". Indeed, his work's choice of popular Hollywood celebrity figures helps the audience to understand the subject of the art easily. In Neo-Dadaism, Rauschenberg's Bed (1955) also aims to create art closer to life and the public so that the audience can easily recognize these ordinary objects of their close association with daily experience.
McCarthy also explains the idea of stereotype and role-playing:
Warhol's use of Presley's image alarms the audience about the performance element of the western cowboy image. Western movies are a national myth of American masculinity and are products of carefully staged and performed ideology of manhood. Warhol's choice indicates how the mass media such as Hollywood movies create stereotypical figures to conceptualize subjects that are more complex than it may seem.