1. Damian Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007
Contemporary
Issues
1990 - 2000
2. 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
Yinka
Shonibare
Untitled
1997
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
Mike Kelley, Dialogue #1, 1991,
installation
Paul McCarthy, Tomato Heads, 1994
7. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Billboard of Bed,
2012 (MoMa exhibition), based on 1992
installation
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
• 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
Untitled (Strange Bird)
1993
prints
9. “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
11. 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
12. Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993, internal casting in
concrete of 193 Grove Rd., Bow, east London
(destroyed)
13. Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993, internal casting in
concrete of 193 Grove Rd., Bow, east London
(destroyed)
Rachel Whiteread
• 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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rx_V7OnHeA
14. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974
Haacke, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings,
a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971
15. 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 series
1972-76
16. Portraits of Family Life
Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen
Table Series, 1990
17. 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
19. 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
20. The Abject Body
Kiki Smith, Blood Pool, 1992, painted bronze
21. Kiki Smith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cVn6YzOuGE
• 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
“Materials are sexy things…that
either have life or death in
them” -Kiki Smith
22. Disegno (Drawing) vs. Colorito (Color)
Michelangelo, Madonna and Child Giorgione, The Tempest
24. The Matrix (grid): Abstracting the Object
The Grapheme: Abstracting the Subject
Drawing in the 20th Century
Erasure: Abstracting Time
Mondrian
Pollock
Kentridge
25. 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
28. 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 drawings
ca. 14,000 BCE
Robert Rauschenberg
Erased de Kooning
1953
Notes de l'éditeur
Continuing AIDS Crisis, debates over welfare and increasing poverty, the two-term Presidency of Bill Clinton, the politics of identity (debates about affirmative action, etc), global economies and globalization, NAFTA, information superhighway (digital communications and the internet), global warming and growing environmental movements in resistance to global capitalism and exploitation of resources
Collaboration between DeCarava and poet Langston Hughes. Positive portrait of Harlem Life.
