1971 - 79

From Vito Acconci’s Open Book, 1974

Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1969-70

• 1500’ long, 15’ wide spiral made of black basalt and earth extending counterclockwise into reddish hued Great Salt Lake, Utah

• To introduce entropy into Minimalism in the “expanded field” (reclaimed by lake, periodically reemerges)

• Anti-monument• Reflects artists connection with

nature (likened to cosmos)• Cyclical nature of time & history

(return to primordial beginnings)• Reflects Earthwork artists interest in

American Southwest as canvas• Difficult to access (pilgrimage)• Now owned by Dia Art Foundation;

efforts to protect it from nearby exploratory drilling (oil), which would alter nature of work

Site-Specific Art – Earthworks

Hikmet Loe, Spiral Jetty, 2002

Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1969-70

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCfm95GyZt4&feature=related

Site-Specific Art – Earthworks

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76

James Turrell, Roden Crater, ca. 1970-present Arizona

Andy Goldsworthy

From Self-Critique to Institutional Critique

Frank Stella, More or Less, 1964

Daniel Buren, Peinture-Sculpture, 1971 Guggenheim Museum, NYC

Haacke, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971

Institutional Critique (1971)

Institutional Critique (1971)

• Series of works meant for inclusion in Haacke’s retrospective at Guggenheim Museum, NYC

• 146 views of buildings in Harlem & Lower East Side supported by text describing financial transactions

• Investigates real estate holdings of major figures (e.g. Harry Shapolsky)

• Information freely obtained from public library, though Haacke made these relationships more transparent (uncovered financiers behind names of holding companies)

• Exhibition cancelled when curator & artist refused to remove it from show (at request of director, Thomas Messer)

• Curator (Fry) never worked again in US and Haacke didn’t have exhibit in US until 1983

• Utilizes photo-conceptual (image/text) strategy to reveal “social system”

• “Juxtaposes social spaces as defined by architectural structures” (slum vs museum) – Rosalyn Deutsche

Haacke, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971

“The Supreme Neutrality of Art”?

Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze1912

George Grosz, The Pillars of Society1926

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Violet, Black, OrangeYellow on White and Red), 1949

Contemporary Institutional Critique

Mark Lombardi, from Global Networks, (a “narrative structure”), ca. 2000

Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights, 1989

Performance/Body Art – “Flesh as Material” (Schneemann)

Pollock

Gutai

Happenings

MinimalismPerformance/Body Art

Kaprow

Oldenburg

Hans Namuth, Photograph of Jackson Pollock painting, 1950

Fluxus

• Minimalist “objecthood” and presence (“being in the world”) fully realized in the use of the body as a tool in performance/body art

Three Models of Body Art: Action, Task & Ritual

Carolee Scheneemann, Eye Body1963

http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci_book.html

Vito Acconci, Trademarks, 1970 Christ Burden, Shoot, 1971

Recurrent Themes in Body Art

Narcissism and aggressionagainst the self (sadism and masochism)

Bodily endurance

Transgression (violation of social norms, taboos)

Ascetism—self-denial and active self-restraint

Transformation (physical spiritual?)

Voyeurism and exhibitionism (the artist/spectator relationship)

Art as ritual theater

Detail from Burden’s Trans-fixed

• Burden became famous in 1971 for his MFA thesis show (Univ. California at Irvine) in which he crawled inside a school locker for five days, a five-gallon jug a water above him, an empty one below

• Performed Shoot later that year (friend grazed his bicep with bullet)

• Here crucified on the hood of a Volkswagon beetle, the garage door opened, then rolled out with the engine running for two minutes (to signify screams), and pushed back in and door closed

• Trans-fixed a Duchampian play on words (car’s transmission, in a state of being transfixed, etc)

• Minimalist interest in body as object

Performance/Body Art – “Flesh as Material”

Burden, Trans-fixed, 1974http://www.ubu.com/film/burden_selected.html

Popular Body/Performance Art

David Blaine hanging upside down for 60 hrs NYC, 2008

Feminist Art – “Flesh as Material”

• Emerging 70s Feminist art focused on the female body as the locus of gender identity

• Schneeman first American artist to extend performative artmaking into realm of body art in early 1960s

• Showed kinetic potential of the body as brush (using paint, grease, plastic, garden snakes)

• Work became identified with 60s sexual liberation movement and considered proto-feminist

"I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material-- a further dimension of the construction... I am both image maker and image. The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring, but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative female will." -Schneeman on Eye Body

http://www.anyclip.com/movies/the-big-lebowski/maude-lebowski/

Schneeman, Up to and Including Her Limits1976

Parodied in The Big Lebowski

• Encouraged by 60s civil rights movements

• The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, 1963; Roe v. Wade, 1973

• Significant female art historians Griselda Pollock & Linda Nochlin

• Nochlin’s Why Have their Been No Great Women Artists? (1971) provided systematic account of exclusion of women from art

• Female artist collectives like AIR (Artist-in-Residence) in New York, Womanhouse in LA, and Soho 20 in NY, a gallery dedicated to work by women, all instrumental

• To politicize perceived “neutral” art forms (e.g. the female nude, abstract painting) to reveal male bias of modernist canon

• Inclusive of marginalized art forms (quilting, embroidery)

Feminist Art – “The Personal is Political”

Alice Neel, Linda Nochlin and Daisy, 1973

Sylvia Sleigh Soho 20 Gallery1974

Ana Mendieta, Untitled, from Silueta series, ca. 1975

Feminist Art – Second-Wave Feminism

Ana Mendieta, Untitled, from Silueta series, ca. 1975-76

Feminist Art – Second-Wave Feminism

• From Sileuta series, called “earth-body works”

• Documentary photographs• Performed during travels from Iowa to

Mexico (received MFA at University of Iowa)

• Leaves imprint of body in earth (actual body is absent)

• Addressing issues of displacement (Cuba her homeland—”cast out of the womb”) and the relationship between the female body and the earth

The obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is an objectification of my existence.

-Mendieta

Martha Rosler, “First Lady” from Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, 1967-72

Martha Rosler, “Cleaning the Drapes” from Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, 1967-72

Martha Rosler, “Balloons” from Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, 1967-72

• In 1977, Douglas Crimp invited by Helene Winer, director of Artists Space, to develop a show of young artists work—these included Sherman Levine, Longo, Kruger, Lawler, etc.

• Many of them were women-- photography still provided an avenue for female artists to explore apart from the male-dominated medium of painting

• Interest in multimedia (film, photo, magazine imagery)

• Image and archive as readymade• Instead of creating “original” objects, made

“pictures” (title of exhibition and future gallery, Metro Pictures)

• Appropriated mass produced imagery in an effort to question modernist notions of authenticity, authorship, and the original

• Interest is in “structures of signification” not origin

Postmodernism 101

Levine, Untitled (After Edward Weston I)1980

Feminist Art – The Gaze & Third-Wave Feminism

• In 1975, Laura Mulvey published “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

• Articulated main concerns for the third-wave feminism: construction of femininity in pop culture & psychoanalysis

• Visual pleasure in mass culture is designed to satisfy the heterosexual male “gaze” directed toward his desired object

• “Woman as image” and “man as bearer of the look”

• Demands a destruction of masculinist pleasure for a “new language of desire”

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #391979

Postmodernism 101

• Series of photos made between 1977-80 in which Sherman used her own self in various guises to personify cinematic archetypes (b-movie, film noir characters, etc)

• Examines the construction of femininity in popular culture (vs. viewing gender as essential)

• Subject still object of the gaze, but now the subject (and artist) controls it

• Appropriation

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #7 & #151978

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #2301990

Postmodernism 101 - Appropriation

Levine, Untitled (After Edward Weston I)1980 Edward Weston, Neil, 1925

Torso of a Youth, Hellenistic or Roman Copy, 2nd-1st

century BCE

• Depends on modernism for its meaning, existence• Paradoxical—both a rejection of and re-visitation of modernism• Does not privilege any style or medium• Understands time and history as cyclical vs. linear• Challenge to authorship• Myth of the origin• Appropriation of everything – mass media, art history• The readymade• Photo as simulacrum—copy without an original• Serial object or image• Self-referential and self-critical –analyzes the conditions in which the

material structure came to be and why. It critiques art making and its history. It critiques imagery itself.

Postmodernism 101