1. 1971 - 79
From Vito Acconci’s Open Book, 1974

2. Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1969-70

3. Site-Specific Art – Earthworks
• 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
Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1969-70
Hikmet Loe, Spiral Jetty, 2002
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCfm95GyZt4&feature=related

4. Site-Specific Art – Earthworks
Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76
James Turrell, Roden Crater, ca. 1970-present
Arizona
Andy Goldsworthy

5. From Self-Critique to Institutional Critique
Frank Stella, More or Less, 1964
Daniel Buren, Peinture-Sculpture, 1971
Guggenheim Museum, NYC

6. Institutional Critique (1971)
Haacke, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971

7. 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

8. “The Supreme Neutrality of Art”?
Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze
1912
Mark Rothko, Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange
Yellow on White and Red), 1949
George Grosz, The Pillars of Society
1926

9. Contemporary Institutional Critique
Mark Lombardi, from Global Networks, (a “narrative
structure”), ca. 2000
Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights, 1989

10. Performance/Body Art – “Flesh as Material” (Schneemann)
Pollock
Gutai
Kaprow
Oldenburg
Happenings
Minimalism Performance/
Body Art
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

11. Three Models of Body Art: Action, Task & Ritual
Carolee Scheneemann, Eye Body
1963
Vito Acconci, Trademarks, 1970
http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci_book.html
Christ Burden, Shoot, 1971

12. Recurrent Themes in Body Art
 Narcissism and aggression
against 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

13. Performance/Body Art – “Flesh as Material”
• 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
http://www.ubu.com/film/burden_selected.html Burden, Trans-fixed, 1974

14. Popular Body/Performance Art
David Blaine hanging upside down for 60 hrs
NYC, 2008

15. 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 Limits
1976
Parodied in
The Big Lebowski

16. Feminist Art – “The Personal is
Political”
• 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)
Sylvia Sleigh
Soho 20 Gallery
1974
Alice Neel,
Linda Nochlin
and Daisy, 1973

17. Feminist Art – Second-Wave
Feminism
Ana Mendieta, Untitled, from Silueta
series, ca. 1975

18. 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

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

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

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

22. Postmodernism 101
• 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
Levine, Untitled (After Edward Weston I)
1980

23. 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”

24. Cindy
Sherman,
Untitled Film
Still #39
1979

25. 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 &
#15
1978
Cindy
Sherman,
Untitled #230
1990

26. 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

27. Postmodernism 101
• 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.