1. Damian Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007
Contemporary
Issues
1990 - 2010

2. Historical Revisionism & Traditional Art Forms
Yinka
Shonibare
Untitled
1997
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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

3. Institutional Critique & Art as Ethnography
Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Baltimore
Renee Green, Seen, 1990, installation

4. Regression and Abjection
Kiki Smith, Blood Pool, 1992, painted
bronze
Paul McCarthy, Tomato Heads, 1994

5. Race and its Representation
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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 series
1972-76

6. Portraits of Family Life
Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen
Table Series, 1990
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPDInpNoO50

7. Portraits of Community
Roy DeCarava, from The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955

8. Subversive Beauty: Troubling Typologies of Black Identity
Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer, 1986
Vermeer, Young Woman
with a Water Jug, 1665
Ellen Gallagher, Mr. Terrific from the DeLuxe series, 2005

9. The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
Dave Chappelle, Racial Stereotype Pixies
http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/48511/detail/

10. The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998

11. The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
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Black-paper cutout silhouettes &
projections on white gallery and
museum walls
Inspired by fantasies of anteBellum South
Extreme caricatures of Black
slaves & slave-owners
Depicts graphic subjects (sex,
violence)
Revision of older art forms, the
silhouette & the cyclorama
http://video.pbs.org/video/1237715781/
Silhouette of George
And Martha Washington
Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998

12. The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
Gettysburg Cyclorama

13. Disegno (Drawing) vs. Colorito (Color)
Michelangelo, Madonna and Child
Giorgione, The Tempest

14. The Odalisque: Challenging Disegno
Ingres
Delacroix
Matisse
Renoir

15. Drawing in the 20th Century
The Matrix (grid): Abstracting the Object
Mondrian
Pollock
The Grapheme: Abstracting the Subject
Erasure: Abstracting Time
Kentridge

16. Drawing & Time:
From Deskilling to Re-skilling
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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 mineowner/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

17. William Kentridge, from Felix in Exile, 1994

18. William Kentridge
Felix in Exile
1994
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaTnchoukdY

19. Palimpsest
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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 drawings
ca. 14,000 BCE
Robert Rauschenberg
Erased de Kooning
1953

20. Pictorial Photography
Getrude Kasebier, The Sketch, ca. 1903

21. Pictorial Photography
Sam Taylor-Wood
Soliloquy I, 1998
c-type color print
Henry Wallis
The Death of Chatterton
ca. 1856
Luca Signorelli
Lamentation Over
the Dead Christ
ca. 1502
predella – base of an
altarpiece

22. Jeff Wall, Storyteller, 1986

23. The Photographer of Modern Life
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Digital manipulation of
photograph recalls mid-19th
century painting & pictorial
photography
Large color transparencies set in
light boxes
Shift away from documentary
photography
Questions the veracity of the
image
Interest in pictorial composition,
size & narrative aligns it with the
history of figurative painting
To restore or make whole again
the fractured image (broken up
in collage, photomontage) in
avant-garde art by returning to
birth of avant-garde (Manet) &
photography (mid-19th century)
Shows homeless native
Manet,
Canadians in home town of
Luncheon on
Vancouver
the Grass
1863
“a transgression against
the institution of transgression” – Wall
Jeff Wall, Storyteller, 1986

24. Global Issues – Chinese Art
Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism: Marlboro,
1992
Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, 1994

25. Global Issues – Chinese Art
Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern,
London, installation, 2010

26. Global Issues – Chinese Art
• “Global” representation – the
“multitude”
• 100 million handmade sunflower
seeds laid on floor of Tate
Modern’s Turbine Hall, London
• Public invited to walk on, lay down
on them
• Made by workers over several
years in Chinese province which
had historically made porcelain for
Emperor
• Reflection on Chinese labor,
modern economy, and identity
• Suggests Postminimalist anti-form
and Pop Art’s interest in the mass
subject
Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern,
London, installation, 2010