Contemporary Issues

1990 - 2000

Damian Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007

Historical Revisionism & Traditional Art Forms

• Intentional historicism• Return to traditional art forms• Revisionist approach (identity politics,

questioning tenets of modernism)

Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Major General Joseph Sabine, ca. 1700

YinkaShonibareUntitled1997

Institutional Critique & Art as Ethnography

Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992, Museum of Contemporary Art, Baltimore

Renee Green, Seen, 1990, installation

Regression and Abjection

Mike Kelley, Dialogue #1, 1991, installation

Paul McCarthy, Tomato Heads, 1994

Word Presentations

• Interdisciplinarity

• Stereotypical grotesque

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Billboard of Bed, 2012 (MoMa exhibition), based on 1992 installation

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Billboard of Bed, 2012 (MoMa exhibition), based on 1992 installation

• Installation & print work• “Queering” of conceptual art

and feminist art strategies of 60s and 70s

• Draws on multiple strategies (Minimalism, Postminimalism (“stacks”), Pop, Photoconceptualism, etc.)

• Requires viewer participation• Active with more outspoken

“agitprop” art (=agitation + propaganda) collectives (e.g. Group Material)

• AIDS awareness, gay inclusivity

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-TorresUntitled (Strange Bird)1993prints

Felix Gonzales-Torres, Untitled (Portrait ofRoss in L.A.), 1991, candies

“And that is one thing that bugs me about artists who are doing so- called gay art and their limitation of what they consider as an object of desire for gay men. When I had a show at the Hirshhorn, Senator Stevens, who is one of the most homophobic anti-art senators, said he was going to come to the opening and I thought he's going to have a really hard time explaining to his constituency how pornographic and how homoerotic two clocks side-by side are…We have to restructure our strategies and realize that the red banner with the red raised fist didn't work in the sixties and it's not going to work now. I don't want to be the enemy anymore. The enemy is too easy to dismiss and to attack. The thing that I want to do sometimes with some of these pieces about homosexual desire is to be more inclusive. Every time they see a clock or a stack of paper or a curtain, I want them to think twice.”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres in a 1995 interview with Robert Storr

Mark Dion, Flotsam and Jetsam (The End of the Game, 1994, mixed-media

Mark Dion

Mark Dion, Flotsam and Jetsam (The End of the Game, 1994, mixed-media

• Interdisciplinarity & ethnography• Collector of curiosities & detritus

(artist as curator)• Site-specific, often unfinished

installations• How we understand nature through

display• How this display communicates

ideological positions• Over production of goods and waste• Flotsam & jetsam = ship’s

wreckage, discarded & unwanted goods

I am pessimistic and can only imagine the world hurtling toward disaster and becoming a place of less wonder, less diversity (biological and cultural) and greater inequality and conformity. I am not the artist to turn to for answers about how to fix things. I am the guy you call when you want to know how bad things are and how we got here. That’s my job, to chronicle disaster. -Dion, DIS magazine interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Nzo0foijI

Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993, internal casting in concrete of 193 Grove Rd., Bow, east London (destroyed)

Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993, internal casting in concrete of 193 Grove Rd., Bow, east London

(destroyed)

Rachel Whiteread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rx_V7OnHeA

• One of group of British female artists• Engaging strategies of 60s and 70s

(conceptual art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, site-specific art)

• “Expanded field” (Krauss)• Geometric simplicity, ephemerality• Applied psychological and subjective

content (absence and loss, the body, death)

• One of series of negative casts of objects associated with the home (bathtub, a bed)

• Cast in rubber, resin, plaster, concrete• House – cast of negative space

(minus roof) in working-class area of London, previous house scheduled for demolition

• Stood for a few months, then demolished amidst controversy

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974

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

Race and its Representation

• Shifting notions of the politics of identity

• From essentialist and positive notions of identity (blackness, femininity, etc) to identity as a social construction

• Complicates identity so that it cannot be easily categorized or stereotyped

• Uses critique of documentary forms of racial representation, personal testimonies, ambiguous narratives, past art forms

• Photo-conceptualism

Adrian Piper, from The Mythic Being series1972-76

Portraits of Family Life

Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990

Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPDInpNoO50

• Photoconceptualism• Inspired by early African-American

photography & Harlem Renaissance• African-American identity

(photoarchivist of contemporary black family life)

• Critique of gender roles in the home (“spaces of domesticity”)

• Single view, two or more figures seated under brightly lit kitchen table

• Accompanied by text in third-person voice

Portraits of Community

Roy DeCarava, from The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955

Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer, 1986

Subversive Beauty: Troubling Typologies of Black Identity

Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Jug, 1665

Ellen Gallagher, Mr. Terrific from the DeLuxe series, 2005

The Abject Body

Kiki Smith, Blood Pool, 1992, painted bronze

Kiki Smith

• Trauma and the abject body (mother and child)

• Childhood fantasies & fears• The death drive

• Malformed female child in fetal position, covered in blood

• Continuation of AIDS crisis, debates over identity politics

Kiki Smith, Blood Pool, 1992, painted bronze

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cVn6YzOuGE

“Materials are sexy things…that either have life or death in them” -Kiki Smith

Disegno (Drawing) vs. Colorito (Color)

Michelangelo, Madonna and ChildGiorgione, The Tempest

The Odalisque: Challenging Disegno

IngresDelacroix

RenoirMatisse

The Matrix (grid): Abstracting the Object

The Grapheme: Abstracting the Subject

Drawing in the 20th Century

Erasure: Abstracting Time

Mondrian

Pollock

Kentridge

Drawing & Time: From Deskilling to Re-skilling

• Short film of animated charcoal drawings using erasure and stop-shoot technique

• Felix in Exile (1994) one of many “drawings for projection”

• Recurring characters & love triangle among Soho Ekstein (a mine-owner/capitalist), Felix Teitelbaum (an artist/self-portrait?), Mrs. Ekstein (wife of Ekstein)

• Setting is Paris hotel room, Felix gazing into mirror at Nandi, a South African surveyor, looking back at him

• The gaze• Apartheid ended in 1994

William Kentridge, from Felix in Exile, 1994

William Kentridge, from Felix in Exile, 1994

William KentridgeFelix in Exile

1994

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaTnchoukdY

Palimpsest

• Linear overlay of forms

• Ancient process

• Allegory of memory, time, history

• Kentridge’s work a meditation on the fate of handicraft?

• Drawing as obsolete among new technologies

Ruffignac cave drawingsca. 14,000 BCE

Robert RauschenbergErased de Kooning1953