CA10: Global Contemporary

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how to create meaningful public art and how art responds to and impacts our relationship with the built environment.

The artists complicate an environment that was, in fact, entirely invented in the mid-19th century to express the Victorian ideal of the pastoral and picturesque landscape.

The Gates were tied to the paths that meander through the park. This was done for two reasons: to avoid drilling thousands of holes into the soil and potentially harming the root systems of adjacent trees, and because Christo and Jeanne-Claude were inspired by the way the city’s pedestrians navigate its paths. Thus, in contrast to the works in Biscayne Bay and Rifle that divide and isolate forms in the landscape, The Gates aligned itself along pre-existing pathways of movement.

Response to haters: he Park itself is not an untouched natural space.

Bureaucratic collaborators

cost 21 million dollars INDEPENDENTLY Funded

Art designed to end Childhood

endow the works of art with a feeling of urgency to be seen, and the love and tenderness brought by the fact that they will not last

Freeze Time - Name does not do this

Reflection - other worldly

Monument Very different than Allegorical, traditional sense

Cut into the Earth - How the environment effects the art = healing

Abstract - meaningful - intimate - controversy

Modern, but deeply rooted in tradition = A Korean identity

Vertical parallel brush strokes of ink blend and bleed from one to the other in a stark palette of velvety blacks and diluted grays. The feathery edges of some reveal them to be pale washes applied to very wet paper, while the darkest appear as streaks that show both ink and paper were nearly dry. The forms overlap and stop just short of the bottom edge of the paper, suggesting a sense of shallow space—though one that would be difficult to enter

“literati painting.”

Chinese poetry was considered the noblest art and “ink wash painting” was its twin, because writing a poem and making a painting used the same tools and techniques—one resulting in words, the other a picture. In their simplicity and reductiveness, the style of ink wash paintings created centuries ago often seem to match Western notions of abstraction

Song’s exploration of tone (the shades of black and gray) and the effects produced by the marks of the brush, the wet paper, and dripping ink, has led some to think that these abstract, formal qualities are the real subject of this very modern-looking work

Korea’s "Sumukhwa" or Oriental Ink Movement of the 1980's

traditional theme: a group of pine trees can symbolize a gathering of friends of upright character.

CONNECTIONS TO : 137. Illustration from The Results of the First Five-Year Plan, Varvara Stepanova(essay, and 212. Chairman Mao en Route to Anyuan (essay,

• Trained in Propaganda
• Wood Block Print - Low, non elite
• Letters that are void of Meaning - WHAT IS THE RESULT?
• Landscape through text

…we, as family, lost our identity. We were deprived of our social position and…thrown out of society. We were punished for being rich. So I had to hide my background. I had to lie. I had to invent.”

Familiar Materials to the artist

COLD WAR POLISH ARTIST UNION : Social Realism demanded images of smiling workers and a perfected society.

Abakans (below), a series of monumental fiber sculptures

androgynous, with their sexual characteristics de-emphasized - focus on the humanity of the figures rather than their gender.

Backs and seated figures = CHILLING

Abakanowicz draws on her personal history, but her sculptures possess an ambiguity that encourages multiple interpretations that speak broadly to human experience. Androgyne III alludes to the brutality of war and the totalitarian state. The body is a husk without arms, legs or a head. It is an expression of suffering, both mournful and disturbing.

Each contains a set of four symbols that are associated with Western representations of the Muslim world: the veil, the gun, the text and the gaze. While these symbols have taken on a particular charge since 9/11, the series

FREEDOM AND REPRESSION

The veil has been coded in Western eyes as a sign of Islam’s oppression of women. This opposition is made more clear, perhaps, when one considers the simultaneity of the Islamic Revolution with women’s liberation movements in the U.S. and Europe,

THE “gaze” in this context becomes a charged signifier of sexuality, sin, shame, and power.

THE GUN

THE IMPORTANCE OF TEXT IN ISLAMIC ART

An old master painting

Biblical heroine Judith holding the head of Holofernes

Cindy Sherman—known for embodying and enacting images from popular media—has imagined a Renaissance interpretation of the Old Testament hero Judith, and photographed herself in the part.

ANXIETY: Sherman has drawn upon Renaissance and Baroque images of Judith with the head

Kitsch

a word of German origin, refers to mass-produced imagery designed to please the broadest possible audience with objects of questionable taste (think of objects and images with popular, sentimental subject matter and style).

an affront to taste

based on the 1960s B-list Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield

Postmodernism: the artist as critic of mass culture

Duchamp = provoke

CINDY SHERMAN paraded the clichés of femininity before an audience that consumed critical theory about the constructed nature of reality and the oppressive manipulations of mass media.

Artists—postmodern artists—were supposed to counter the banality of evil that lurked behind public and popular culture, not giddily revel in it as Koons seemed to do.

A RESPONSE TO MODERNISM

While modernism championed painting, form and originality, postmodernism foregrounded photography, subject matter, and the reproduction, and responded to modernism's search for the profound by presenting the quotidian and banal aspects of experience. Postmodernism grounded the rarified atmosphere of genius that was prevalent in modernism in the politics of everyday life.

fascination with and reverence for the natural world, religious narratives and mythology, the history of figuration in western art, and contemporary notions of feminine domesticity, spiritual yearning, and sexual identity.

female protagonist who is based on Little Red Riding Hood as well Sainte Geneviève, the Patron Saint of Paris. Geneviève is herself often associated with Saint Francis of Assisi DOMESTICATE WOLVES

Feminist Approaches to Narrative

placement of “woman” amidst the natural world

“predator” and “prey” or Companions

NON-LINEAR The artist continuously re-imagines tropes she has used in past works, with the result that her practice does not seem to progress through discrete artistic stages.

body’s vulnerability and made reference to feminist theories of the “abject,” which conceived of the body as a messy, porous, and boundary-less system.

Lying with the Wolf is an extension of this yearning to connect the earthly with the spiritual and the personal with the collective.

Faith Ringgold’s Dancing at the Louvre is all about breaking the rules,

STORY QUILTS: The series tells the fictional story of Willia Marie Simone, a young black woman who moves to Paris in the early 20th century. Told through text written around the margin of each quilt, Willia Marie’s adventures lead her to meet celebrities such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, Sojourner Truth, and Rosa Parks on the road to becoming an artist and businesswoman.

he world of folk art and craft than European traditions of fine art. in an art world dominated by European traditions and male artists, Ringgold uses this narrative format to literally rewrite the past by weaving together histories of modern art, African-American culture, and personal biography. This practice reflects the shift toward postmodernism in art of the 1980s and 1990s. I

POSTMODERN ART

Typical of much postmodern art, Ringgold’s work appropriates recognizable imagery and alternative artistic practices to offer critical cultural commentary.

From Series “The Quincentenary Non-Celebration,” illustrates historical and contemporary inequities between Native Americans and the United States government.

suggesting that Native Americans had been lured off their lands by inexpensive trade goods. The fundamental misunderstanding between the Native and non-Native worlds—especially the notion of private ownership of land—underlies Trade.

LAYERED IMAGERY = COMPLEXITY

Smith’s art shares her view of the world, offering her personal perspective as an artist, a Native American, and a woman.

Manifest Destiny

REFERENCE TO: #165 Painted Elk Hide

At nearly twenty feet wide and nine feet high, Emily Kwame Kngwarreye’s painting Earth’s Creation is monumental in its scale and impact, rivaling Abstract Expressionist

Comprised of gestural, viscous marks, each swath of color traces the movement of the artist’s hands and body over the canvas

BATIK - Wax & Ink

Earth’s Creation documents the lushness of the “green time” that follows periods of heavy rain, and makes use of tropical blues, yellows and greens. The piece has often been likened to Claude Monet’s studies of seasonal and temporal change, and given its formidable, room-filling scale, a comparison to the artist’s Water Lilies of 1914-26

We have to reclaim time itself, wrenching it from the "time is money" maximum efficiency, and make room for it to flow the other way – towards us. We must take time back into ourselves to let our consciousness breathe and our cluttered minds be still and silent. This is what art can do and what museums can be in today’s world.

manipulation of filmic time , reduces the speed of playback to an extreme slow motion, high-speed film

increase his or her own awareness of detail, movement and change. This is consistent with the artist’s intent to reignite the longstanding relationship between artistic and spiritual experience

Religious symbolism

VARIETY: Viola’s education and artistic practice have long been guided by questions of “how we see, how we hear, and how we come to know the world.”

Technological experimentation

Sacred space

The continuing integration of historical art into contemporary public and religious life inspired Viola to design installations that mimicked the forms of devotional paintings, diptychs, predellas and altarpieces

self-annihilation” represented in the figure’s disappearance at each conclusion also serves as a metaphor for the destruction of the ego. In the artist’s words, this action “becomes a necessary means to transcendence and liberation,”

SILLOUETTES, INSTALLATION, PROJECTION MADE FOR A READER THAT IS NOT THE ARTISTS

viewers shadows project on the wall with those of the silhouettes

Focus on the THEME without luxurious materials

Civil War Era setting. STEREOTYPES - Inspiration from the Movie "Gone with the Wind" which romanticized White Civil War South without being

tolerance for imagery that occupies the nebulous space between racism and race affirmation.

Darkytown Rebellion does not attempt to stitch together facts, but rather to create something more potent, to imagine the unimaginable brutalities of an era in a single glance.

LOST HISTORIES"I’m not making work about reality; I’m making work about images. I'm making work about fictions that have been handed down to me, and I'm interested in those fictions because I'm an artist, and any sort of attempt at getting at the truth of a thing, you kind of have to wade through these levels of fictions, and that's where the work is coming from.”2