2. • European and American
Sculpture in the 80’s responded
to the changing nature of society.
• What the writer David Harvey
has called the financialisation of
everything, the increasing
commodification and
commercialization of society and
culture.
• The neoliberal ideology,
Thatcherism...privatisation,
entrepreneurialism,
meritocracy...
• A society and culture increasing
dominated by consumerism.. an
age where everything has its
price.
2
Sunday, 7 October 2012
3. The 1980’S
“A zeitgeist of cynicism”
Sunday, 7 October 2012
8. Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde
• Avant Garde art should
be above, beyond,
distinct from the
academy and market.
The symbolic
embodiment of arts
freedom. An alternative
and antidote to the
commercial, managerial
‘spirit’ of capitalism.
The power of the ‘new’.
Permanent revolution.
Overthrowing the tyranny
of tradition.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
Sunday, 7 October 2012
9. Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde
Transgression and Critique
• Socially, morally, sexually
transgressive
• (Politically) critical of the
status quo
• Avant gardist work
expresses a sense of
alienation from the norms of
society - explicitly and
implicitly advocating a social,
political revolution as well as
an artistic one.
• The avant garde artist is
viewed as an outsider, a
rebel, a martyr – at a
distance from the ‘norm’.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
10. Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde
• Questions what is
permissible as art
• Focuses on subject
matter and material
previously ignored as
ignoble, base, vulgar or
banal
• Asserts that this trash or
kitsch possesses
aesthetic and intellectual
value
Sunday, 7 October 2012
11. • The Readymade
•
Key points about the readymade:
• The choice of object is itself a creative
act.
• By cancelling the 'useful' function of an
object it becomes art.
• The presentation and addition of a title to
the object have given it 'a new thoughtʼ.
• Duchamp's readymades also asserted the
principle that what is art is defined by the
artist (and the institution?).
• The readymade also raises questions
about how important skill (technique) is,
and how the value of an art object is Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
determined, and by whom.
The ultimate avant garde gesture(?)
• Source: Tate Gallery Website, Definitions.
11
Sunday, 7 October 2012
13. Changes to the Avant Garde
The birth of the culture industry - the start of a cultural cold war
• The old enemies and
old certainties of avant
gardist work were
threatened by the rapid
growth of popular
culture post 45.
• For many self professed
avant gardists popular,
mass or kitsch was the
new enemy
Sunday, 7 October 2012
14. The cultural apocalypse
“Our culture, on its lower
and popular levels, has
plumbed abysses of vulgarity
and falsehood unknown in
the discoverable past; not in
Rome, not in the Far east or
anywhere has daily life
undergone such rapid and
radical change as it has in
the West in the last century
and half”
Clement Greenberg ‘
The Plight of Culture’
Sunday, 7 October 2012
18. Avant garde practice 60’s + 70’s
Dematerialisation of the art object.
Political, anti aesthetic, anti commercial in form
and content.
• Performance
• Video
• Installation
• Feminist
• Conceptual
Sunday, 7 October 2012
19. Key Problem for the Modernist Avant Garde
• Opposition and
absorption.
• The radical is
domesticated.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
20. 1980’s
• THE RETURN OF THE
OBJECT
• THE RETURN OF
AESTHETICS
Bill Woodrow Blue Monkey 1984
Allan McCollum.1987
20
Sunday, 7 October 2012
21. New British Sculpture 80’s
• Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon,
Edward Allington, Bill
Woodrow.
• Transformation of found,
‘low’ objects from the urban
environment.
• Focused on issues around
production and consumption,
surplus and waste.
• “Simple domestic objects
were taken to pieces,
dysfunctionally altered” (B,
Taylor, Art Today)
21
Sunday, 7 October 2012
22. Bill Woodrow
Twin-Tub with Guitar 1981 22
Sunday, 7 October 2012
23. “What does it
mean to us on
a conscious, or
perhaps more
important,
unconscious level,
to live amongst
these and many
other completely
new materials?”
Tony Cragg
Tony Cragg
Kahzernarbeit 1985
23
Sunday, 7 October 2012
25. Bill Woodrow, Car Door, Armchair and Incident 1981
25
Sunday, 7 October 2012
26. Edward Allington
Oblivion Penetrated', 1982, mixed media. Collection Tate,
26
Sunday, 7 October 2012
27. “..their (New British Sculptors) attempts to render galvanised iron or
commonplace washing machines aesthetically relevant could be registered as
critical of 1980’s economic and social policy that was obsessed with
encouraging consumerist attitudes to every object and service. Assigning
status to derelict plywood or Formica could be taken as a sort of mischievous
play in territory that the new social policy tended to ignore: the forlorn
surfaces of public institutions , rubbish heaps, and the neglected spaces of the
inner city street”
Brandon Taylor, Art of Today 27
Sunday, 7 October 2012
28. NEW YORK ART NOW
SAATCHI GALLERY
1988
Jeff Koons, Robert Gober,
Peter Halley, Haim Steinbach,
Philip Taaffe and Caroll
Dunham
28
Sunday, 7 October 2012
29. The Great Divider
• Timely contemporary
response to ‘new times’.
Engaged with an increasingly
consumerist culture.
• Sign of decadence and
complicity of American
artistic culture, its selling out
to the values of mammon.
Jeff Koons
Basketball tank:
1985 29
Sunday, 7 October 2012
30. “The subjects of commodity
sculpture are advertising’s
language of signs, desire,
purchase , and making
collections. It is clean and
shiny art because it is
protected from touch and use
and available only to sight
[..] it belongs to the world of
ownership and exchange”
Andrew Causey, Sculpture Since 1945
Ashley Bickerton
‘Le Art’ 1987
30
Sunday, 7 October 2012
31. “Referring to the
tendency of avant garde art to
end up “above a sofa”, Bickerton
wrote
that his wall mounted
art ‘imitates the posture of its
own corruption...attempting to
forward the question of
precisely where conflict exists in
this morass of ideal, compromise
and duplicity”
B, Taylor, Art Today
31
Sunday, 7 October 2012
32. Appropriation
• Duchampian ‘tradition’
• Pictures Group
• Sampling, stealing...
• Questions notions of
skill, authorship and
artistic value.
32
Sunday, 7 October 2012
33. From resistance to complicity -the neo avant garde
“Shopping Sculpture”
Haim Steinbach
pink accent 2, 1987.
Two “schizoid” rubber masks, two chrome trash
receptacles, and four “Alessi” tea kettles on
chrome, aluminum and wood shelf.
Allan McCollum
Sunday, 7 October 2012
34. Death of the avant garde?
All art was reduced to the level of a
commodity. There was no
distance or alternative space for
the kind of critical, oppositional
‘alternative’ position modernist
avant gardist’s had adopted.
The modernist idea of radical art
being aligned with the ‘left’,
seemed here to be dispensed
with.
“the cynical inversion of the old
avant garde device of the
Haim Steinbach
readymade” Untitled (3 drinking containers), 1992
plastic, laminated wood shelf with objects
Foster, H, Art since 1900 21 x 23 x 7 cm
Sunday, 7 October 2012
35. Cometh the hour,
cometh the man
(devil?)
35
Sunday, 7 October 2012
37. The Anti Avant Gardist? - Reasons to be Cheerful Part 1
Bravo Bravo - baiting the art world
An ex wall street broker
Koons actively sought to
provoke a kind of moral
queasiness and repulsion
amongst the art world
intelligentsia. In his personae, his
unapologetic embrace of self
promotion, his relaxed attitude to
openly discussing money (the
elephant in the room for the liberal,
politically correct component of the
art world) and his dedication to
opening up the Pandora’s box of
taste and class, he ‘succeeded’ in
provoking the kind of shock,
irritation and disgust typical of the
‘modernist’ avant gardist.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
38. • ‘Pop culture figures are vicariously alluring, and this
is why they are so affectively charged. They can only
be grasped through a series of paradoxes’
• Steven Shavirio, Post Cinematic Affect, Zero books 2010.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
39. Koons’ celebrity
• I have basic point of
differentiation here, between
Koons and all those ‘celebrity’
artists who have followed him
(Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst) ,
namely that for my perspective
Koons presence, his personae ,
his performances within the
mass media, within celebrity
culture were always ‘unstable’.
• To be critically gone in the
mainstream......
Sunday, 7 October 2012
42. The Anti Avant Gardist?
Reasons to be Cheerful part 2
No Irony (?)
• While the majority of his
contemporaries used or
appropriated objects from
consumer culture in an
ironic, critical reflection of
the soullessness of
consumer culture, Koons
openly stated he picked
figures like Popples
because he had a deep
affection for them -
because he responded to
them -because he ‘loved
them’.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
43. "I like the things that I like, I like
colour, and I like materialism and I
like seductiveness. And to me
these things are absolutely
beautiful. And if I didn't think these
things were beautiful and they
weren't spiritual to me I wouldn't
work with them".
Jeff Koons
Sunday, 7 October 2012
44. Reasons to be cheerful (?) part 3- Collapsing Critical Distance
Sunday, 7 October 2012
45. “The regimentation of human movement, activity and perception accompanies
the geometric division of space/ It is governed by the use of time-keeping
devices, the application of standards of normalcy, and the police apparatus. In
the factory, human movement is made to conform to rigorous spatial and
temporal geometries.”
Peter Halley
Sunday, 7 October 2012
46. I find art's ability to guide,
direct, and manipulate to be
exciting. The only direction I
see for art is as a tool for
manipulating it public on
every level - a political tool. I
don't know if this places art
above, below or parallel with
advertising. [...] The
techniques are the same.
The audience is the same. I
can never tell the difference
between them and us. We
are them. I am mass as
much as I am I.
Jeff Koons
Sunday, 7 October 2012
48. Reasons to be Cheerful Part 4
Crafty anti modernism
“my god it actually looks like he loves these…things!”
• In 1986/7 the material
execution of Koons work
radically changed. While
artists such as Haim
Steinbach continued to use
readymade’s, Koons went to
extraordinary lengths and
costs to have everyday toys
and trinkets remade and
enlarged by American and
Northern European
craftsmen .
Sunday, 7 October 2012
52. The unacceptability of being a Fan -’illegitimate pleasure’
Up until this point the choice
had seemed straightforward
enough for an artist
appropriating popular culture:
either you brought suspicion on
yourself or you brought
suspicion on popular culture. In
all appropriationist work
suspicion fell squarely on the
culture outside art. Despite the
talk of postmodern art existing
in a transformed position in the
culture, there was still the old
prejudice that art was a
superior form of culture, and
therefore the only cultural form
in a privileged enough position
to criticise.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
54. Reasons to be cheerful part 5
Talking pleasure in learning to love
Sunday, 7 October 2012
55. • For Koons his love of popular forms
was a form of submission, for sure,
but a submission that casts him/you
neither as victim nor victimiser, but in
some way both. To think of Koons'
relationship to popular culture, as a
form of love is to have him entangled
in the operations of power,
exploitation and seduction to which
he is not blind but submits
nonetheless. This is the case,
anyway, so long as it isn't assumed
that love is always sweet, never
critical, and can stomach no tension.
Koons' love for Popples, in this view,
needn't mean that he was utterly
naive, nor that consumer culture is
innocent, presents no danger, or has
no unctuous effects. Rather, Koons
'falls for' popular culture despite
himself, and despite its subjection of
him.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
56. Judith Williamson in her book “Consuming
Passions” in 1985 wrote about one of the
limitations of critical engagement with the products
of consumer culture. Williamson noted, that while it
was more than common to discuss how
commodities channel our desires for ‘the need for
change, the sense that there must be something
else’ into ‘the need for a new purchase, a new
hairstyle, a new coat of paint’ what was always
lacking in this discussion was any sense of how
‘consuming products does give a thrill, a sense of
both belonging and being different’. In essence,
there’s no obvious understanding of why the
products are successful as products. Why there
are attractive, entertaining - pleasurable.
Williamson regarded this as something of a major
handicap to unraveling and examining the global
success of the entertainment industry.
56
Sunday, 7 October 2012
66. Criticisms
• Complicity with the
market.
• Betrayal of arts radical,
oppositional potential.
• Sentimental, ‘frivolous’,
celebration of vacuous,
banal, ‘kitschy’ culture
66
Sunday, 7 October 2012
67. • “Koons is not exploiting the
media for avant garde
purposes. He is in cahoots
with the media. He has no
message . It’s self
advertisement, and I find
that repulsive. ‘
• Rosalind Krauss quoted in Pop LIfe,
Tate Gallery.
67
Sunday, 7 October 2012
69. • Koons re-imagined or rethought some central ideas about what it
might mean to be an artist in the 1980’s.
• He thoroughly dispensed with the idea that artists could or
should operate outside the entertainment or culture industry. For
Koons arts absorption into entertainment was inevitable and they
might as well seize the opportunities that would arise for making
art more popular, accessible and visible.
• While he rejected what he saw as outmoded ideas about how art
should be made (i.e solely by one artist) his use of other
craftsmen to fabricate his work created art works where the
technical and material quality of the finished work was central.
We could say his postmodernism was anti-modernist in this
respect.
• His aesthetic and moral ‘transgressions’, his ‘shocks’ weren’t
always typically avant gardist in tone or content. The shocks that
accompanied his work arose from his assertion of loving popular
Sunday, 7 October 2012
71. Affective labour
• One of the ways Koons’
succeeded’ was by being
good at communicating
(cynics might say
operating).
• In this respect he was a
very good at ‘affective
labour’ or ‘emotional
labour’.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
72. Emotional Labour
• According to Hochschild, jobs
involving emotional labor are
defined as those that:
• 1 Require face-to-face or voice-
to-voice contact with the public;
• 2. Require the worker to
produce an emotional state in
another person;
• 3. Allow the employees to
exercise a degree of control
over their emotional activities.
• Display rules refer to the
organizational rules about what
kind of emotion to express on
the job.
72
Sunday, 7 October 2012
73. • Forms of emotional labour
• Surface acting, involves "painting
on" affective displays, or faking;
Surface acting involves employee's
presenting emotions on his or her
"surface", without actually feeling
them. The employee in this case
puts on a facade as if the emotions
are felt, like a "persona".
• Deep acting wherein they modify
their inner feelings to match the
emotion expressions the
organization requires.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
74. Affective emotional labour
• ‘the management of feeling
to create a publicly
observable facial and bodily
display the emotional
labourer is required to
‘induce or suppress feeling
in order to sustain the
outward countenance that
produces the proper state of
mind in others’
• Ivor Southwood, Non Stop Inertia, pg. 23
Sunday, 7 October 2012
75. • ‘In these ways the worker
performer manufacturers the
final product: the desired
emotional state in the
customer. A large part of the
effort of emotional labour is
taken up with creating the
impression that the act is itself
natural and effortless because
to show that it is contrived
would invalidate the exchange
and spoil the product”
• Ivor Southwood,Non Stop Inertia, pg24
Sunday, 7 October 2012
76. • ‘Whilst early on in his career
there was some
acknowledgement of the
strategies behind the work, in
interviews and statements
made in the years since,
Koons has persistently stayed
in character with an a-critical
tone...’
• Capitalist Realness Catherine Wood quoted in Pop
LIfe, Tate Gallery.
76
Sunday, 7 October 2012
