3. Pre modern ideas of the artist
• Prior to the Renaissance artists were
craftsmen - anonymous workers whose
objective was to fulfill the requirements
of their brief.
• In the Renaissance the artist was
hardly a free agent - contracts from
patrons made detailed demands on
what and how the artist was produce.
• Up until the birth of the modern artist in
the 19th century, artists usually ran
studio workshops where artworks were
frequently collectively produced -with
the ‘master’ taking responsibility for the
more intricate or difficult work (head
and hands).
5. Roots of the Modern artist - Romanticism -The Birth of the Individual
Henry Wallis (1830-1916)
Chatterton 1855-6
Tate Gallery, London
Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847)
Friedrich in his Studio (1812)
6. “when they are not sufferers for the human race,
they suffer for their own greatness, for the grand manner
of their being, for their hatred of philistinism. For the discomfort
they feel among the pretentious commonplaces, the mean
trivialities of their surrounding…”
Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1834, pg..99
7. The modern mythic artist
• A troubled, anguished member of
society - existing in the margins.
Elevated above society. ‘The happy
few’ - the ‘little church of the elect’. A
secular martyr -the artist battles
against a philistine society
• The artwork is an external material,
expression of this inner suffering.
Brush marks are the visual expression
of this pain. This expression is unique
and original. The artist has a
signature style all of his own. Marks of
distinction.
• A key element of the artistic
uniqueness is his refusal to follow the
norm -his work is an expression of a
subjectivity free of constraints. This
‘freedom’ is closely linked to ideas
about his ‘genius’.
• The artist is celebrated as possessing
a child like/ primitive essence
uncorrupted by society - “when we are
no longer children we are
dead” (Brancusi)
8. Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899)
Self Portrait (1895)
‘obstinate dreamers for whom art has
remained a faith and not a profession;
enthusiastic folk…whose loyal heart beats
high in the presence of all that is beautiful.”
Edouard Manet (1832-1883) Henri Murger “Scenes of Bohemian life”
The Artist (1875)
10. ‘Society always has a destructive
influence upon an artist.’
John Ruskin ‘The Stones of Venice’
“no merchant traffics in my heart.”
Robert Browning
14. Roots of this Demythologizing and debunking of the male artist as hero
• Neo Dada - Jasper Johns and
Robert Rauscenburg -
Duchampian legacy -
depersonalised subject matter-
readymades
• Pop - “I am a machine” - factory
aesthetic
• Minimalism - “What you see is
what you see”
• Feminist critique
• Conceptualism - collaborative
practice , anti -formal , anti-
optical
• Photography - the loss of aura
15. “I didn’t want my work to be an
exposure of my feelings. Abstract
Expressionism was so lively -
personal identity and painting were
more or less the same, and I tried to
operate the same way.
But I found I couldn’t do anything that
would be identical with my feelings.
So I worked in such a way that I
could say that it’s not me.”
Jasper Johns
Quoted in Gavin Butt Jasper Johns
“How New York queered the idea of modern art”
in ‘Varieties of Modernism’
Edited by Paul Wood
Pg. 324
16. Mr. Marcel Duchamp ‘the
celebrated, ‘charismatic’
anti-author, the critically,
insitutionally lauded anti
institutional critic.......
17.
18. The anti modern hero
• Warhol’s ‘rejection’ of
dominant notions of
authorship, artistic identity
and originality.
• The factory - pre-modernist
mode of unaccredited
‘exploitative’ production –
‘Drella’.
• Artworks that combined the
mechanical anonymity of the
machine and the production
line with ‘unoriginal’ pre-
existing readymade imagery.
• ‘I have nothing to say and
I’m saying it’.....
19. Feminist Critiques of the Male Author
“To encourage a dispassionate,
impersonal sociological and
institutionally orientated approach
would reveal the entire romantic,
elitist, individual glorifying and
monograph producing Frida Kahlo
substructure upon which the
profession of art history is based,
and which has only recently been
called into question by a group of
younger dissidents"
Linda Nochlin
Mary Cassat
“Why have there been no great women artists?’
21. Artist becomes Artisan
“What you see is what you see”
Frank Stella
Robert Morris
Untitled
1965
Frank Stella
‘Six Mile Bottom’
Metallic Paint on canvas
1960
22. Conceptual Art and Performance Art
Dematerialisation of the art object
Collaborative practice
anti formal - anti aesthetic
Art and Language
Map not to Indicate 1967
“In conceptual art the idea or concept
is the most important aspect of the
work. When an artist uses a
conceptual form in art, it means that
all of the planning and decisions are
made beforehand and the execution
is a perfunctory affair”
Sol LeWitt ‘Paragraphs’ 1967
23. GENERAL IDEA 1969-1994
Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson of General
Idea lived and worked together for 25 years.
P is for Poodle, 1983
Nazi Milk, 1979
Baby Makes 3, 1984
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/
is_3_93/ai_n13628926
23
24. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin (1936) http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
24
25. Jacques Derrida - Deconstruction
• …involves discovering the underlying
unspoken assumptions, ideas, and
frameworks that form the basis for thought
and belief. To read between the lines. To
take apart' those concepts which serve as
the rules for a period of thought.
• Deconstruction aims to argue that any claim
to truth is a falsification.
• Deconstruction aims to reveal that which
has been suppressed in the name of
coherence.
• Deconstructive thought frequently revolves
around a critique of binary oppositions - a
central deconstructive argument holds that,
in all the classic dualities of Western
thought, one term is privileged or "central"
over the other.
• The French writer Jacques Derrida in his
seminal text Of Grammatology argued that
within such binary thinking the first term is
always conceived as original, authentic, and
superior, while the second is thought of as
secondary, derivative, or even parasitic .
These binary oppositions and hierarchies
are what must be deconstructed.
26. The centred subject
The sovereign self - the subject is defined as
an ‘inner space’. This inner space contains
the consciousness, a repository of feelings,
memories and needs. It is the I or ego. It is
bounded, masterful and independent. It has
a core essence which in art, finds exterior
expression and manifestation in artworks. It
is cohesive.
This sovereign self is the source of all action.
It is perceived as free as it decides its own
goals. It engages in an ongoing process of
self-reflection, monitoring its own thoughts in
an ongoing internal monologue.
This subject is self sufficient and distinct form
everything outside of itself, including its own
body. To be a subject is to be capable of
making rational, objective decisions
regarding the self - being able to make your
situation or your body. This process leads to
self fulfillment .
27. The decentred self
“we are true to ourselves when we unflinchingly
face the fact that there is nothing to be true to”
• Postmodernism widely disputes this
notion of the bounded, sovereign self.
• In the work of various writers such as
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes,
these ideas of an essential, ‘eternal’
bounded self are undermined and
critiqued.
• In such work the self is seen as fluid
and dependent for its sense of self on
its context.
• It has limited powers of autonomous
choice
• It has multiple centres with diverse
perspectives - there is on one real me,
there a series of masks - identity is
‘performed’
• The self and our identity is constructed
or made - it is always culturally and
linguistically conditioned.
28. Roland Barthes - The Death of the
Author(1968)
• For Barthes artworks were a tissue of
quotations, with artists frequently
unconsciously quoting and collaging
from sources already present in the
culture. The act of creation for Barthes,
was then more a process of
assembling disparate fragments and
sources. There was no unique or
wholly original form of expression.
• The artwork is ‘a multi dimensional David Salle
space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash.
The text is a tissue of quotation drawn
from innumerable centres of
culture’ (Barthes)
• Barthes argued that the author has
little input into the meaning of an
artwork. For Barthes meaning was
something supplied by the reader or
viewer.
29. “The world is filled to suffocating. Man has
placed his token on every stone. Every word,
every image, is leased and mortgaged. We
know that a picture is but a space in which a
variety of images, none of them original,
blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of
quotation drawn from innumerable centers of
culture. Similar to those eternal copyists’
Bouvard and Pechuchet, we indicate the
profound ridiculousness that is precisely the
truth of painting. We can only imitate a
gesture that is always anterior, never
original. Succeeding the painter, the
plagiarist, no longer bears within him
passions, humours, feelings, impressions,
but rather the immense encyclopaedia from
which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on
which all the quotations that make up a
painting are inscribed without any of them
being lost. A paintings meaning lies not in its
origin, but it s destination. The birth of the
viewer must be at the cost of the painter”
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine “After Walker Evans”
30. “From the conventional viewpoint of art, the
death of the author/ artist is a grievous blow,
because it undermines the whole apparatus of
art history, based as it is on notions of signature
style and individual genius. It also undercuts the
basis of the art market.”
Postmodernism
Eleanor Heartney
31. Elaine Sturtevant
“There are few living artists
whose work can be said to
have had such profound
repercussions for the
intellectual, aesthetic and
material evaluation of art. For
over forty years, Sturtevant has
been engaged in repeating
works by many of the most
important artists of her time and
in so doing confronting head-on
the nature of origin and
originality. She has ruthlessly
demonstrated that no act can
be an ex-act copy and every
considered act must be
original, where the intention is
the source.”
Press Release
Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
2006
32. Allan McCollum
Haim Steinbach
pink accent 2, 1987.
Two “schizoid” rubber masks, two chrome
trash receptacles, and four “Alessi” tea kettles
on chrome, aluminum and wood shelf.
Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds
from Marianne and Sheldon B. Lubar, Vicki and
Allen Samson, and Dr. and Mrs. James Stadler.
34. Jef Koons
An ex wall street broker
Koons actively sought to
provoke a kind of moral
queasiness and repulsion
amongst the art world
intelligentsia. In his personae, his
unapologetic embrace of self
promotion, his relaxed attitude to
openly discussing money (the
elephant in the room for the liberal,
politically correct component of the
art world) and his dedication to
opening up the Pandora’s box of
taste and class, he ‘succeeded’ in
provoking the kind of shock,
irritation and disgust typical of the
‘modernist’ avant gardist.
35.
36. Reasons to be Cheerful Part 4
Crafty anti modernism
“my god it actually looks like he loves these…things!”
• In 1986/7 the material
execution of Koons work
radically changed. While
artists such as Haim
Steinbach continued to use
ready mades, Koons went to
extraordinary lengths and
costs to have everyday toys
and trinkets remade and
enlarged by American and
Northern European
craftsmen .
• For the art world this was
disturbing - he appeared to
be taking this stuff seriously.
38. Reactions and Reactionary
The Return of Painting
“the criterion for determining the
order of aesthetic objects in the
museum throughout the era of
modernism – the self evident
quality of masterpieces – has been
broken, and as a result anything
goes”
Douglas Crimp
“On the Museum’s Ruins”
in Postmodernism edited by Hal Foster
45. “I’ve always said there’s no personal language only a selection of
language.”
Schnabel in conversation with Sarah Kent
46.
47. “Neo-expressionism appears as a problematic response to the loss -
of the historical, the real, and of the subject. By and large neo-
expressionists would reclaim these entities as substances; the work,
however, reveals them to be signs – and expressionism to be a
language. This finally is the pathos of such art:it denies what its
practitioners would assert. For the very gestures that insist on the
presence of the historical, the real, and of the subject testify to
nothing so much as desperation at their loss. There is an idealism
here, to be sure, but it is an idealism shown to be idolatry, a
fascination with false image that mimics the presumed attributes of
authenticity when it is in fact just the hollow mask with which a
frustrated, defeated consciousness tries to cover up its own
negativity”
Hal Foster - The Expressive Fallacy
Recodings
51. “He effectively
deconstructs the
immediacy of
expressionism and
suggests that, far from
unique and original, its
program leads logically
to the production of
empty signifiers and
serial paintings”
Hal Foster on Richter
pg. 63 Recodings
53. BRING ON THE BOTCHING
“skills and references which up till then had
been taken as essential to art making of any
seriousness – are deliberately avoided or
travestied, in such a way to as to imply that
only by such incompetence or obscurity will
genuine picturing get done”
T.J Clark
60. “In placing her favourite classics
from the realms of fashion and
design on a pedestal and elevating
them to the status of tradition
shaping museum exhibits, Sylvie
Fleury emphasises the interaction
and interchangeability of art, design,
and fashion in terms of social value
and significance in an attitude of
unquestioning acceptance that goes
beyond Jeff Koons still deliberately
provocative gesture of translating a
trivial object into the material of high
art”
Renate Wiehager
64. Vitamin P is an image-heavy book offering
an overview of the state of painting today,
and documents the most recent concerns
and ideas among contemporary painters.
In the wake of new media such as
installation, video, performance and digital
art, the traditional medium of painting has
enjoyed a renaissance among a recent
generation of artists. Alongside the
evergrowing reputation of significant living
painters such as Gerhard Richter, Agnes
Martin and Peter Halley, many younger
artists have chosen painting over any
other medium, and are exploring new
means to broaden the traditional field of
"oil on canvas". It is this younger
generation (who emerged in the 1990s)
that Vitamin P aims to represent in an A-Z
survey of 114 of its leading, new,
international practitioners, with each artist
illustrated by numerous examples of his or
her works, accompanied by a short
explanatory text. Often moving beyond
the most traditional image associated with
this medium, Vitamin P hopes to illustrate
the richness, eclecticism, dynamism and
contemporaneity of the practice of painting
today. Barry Schwabsky's introductory text
offers a critical survey of the evolution of
painting since the late 1950's
