Contemporary Issues

1990 - 2003

Jeff Wall, Picture for Women, 1979

1990 - 2003: Art Reflects on its History

• 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

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

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

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 Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/48511/detail/

Dave Chappelle, Racial Stereotype Pixies

Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998

The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque

• Black-paper cutout silhouettes & projections on white gallery and museum walls

• Inspired by fantasies of ante-Bellum South

• Extreme caricatures of Black slaves & slave-owners

• Depicts graphic subjects (sex, violence)

• Revision of older art forms, the silhouette & the cyclorama

Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998

The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque

http://video.pbs.org/video/1237715781/

Silhouette of GeorgeAnd Martha Washington

The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque

Gettysburg Cyclorama

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 KentridgeFelix in Exile

1994

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF5cngcXqSs

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

New Media

• Minimalism & the “expanded field”• Extended into film and video installations• Made possible by technological advances

in ’80s (projectors, etc)• Emphasis on viewer’s perception of the

work in context (spectatorship), ultimately subjective

• Reflects back on the viewer’s own body (sensations) immersed in a image-sound space

• In many cases, activating (through movement and sound) traditional art & its subject matter (ecstasy, conversion)

• Spiritual & religious meanings suggested by Viola’s work

• Uses elements (fire, water) as allegories of transformation

• The Sublime

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHqhaH6m9pY

Bill Viola, The Crossing, 1996

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4498864086957786589#

Viola, Reflecting Pool, 1977-79

The Sublime

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1jkoMfPa40

Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho (clip)

Pictorial Photography

Getrude Kasebier, The Sketch, ca. 1903

Pictorial Photography

Sam Taylor-WoodSoliloquy I, 1998c-type color print

Henry WallisThe Death of Chatterton

ca. 1856

Luca SignorelliLamentation Over

the Dead Christca. 1502

predella – base of analtarpiece

• 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 Canadians in home town of Vancouver

The Photographer of Modern Life

Jeff Wall, Storyteller, 1986

Manet, Luncheon on

the Grass1863

“a transgression against the institution of transgression” – Wall

Art of the 21st Century