Yvonne Rainer

 

Yvonne Rainer, 1964. Photograph Collection Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New York

 "NO Manifesto"

 

Yvonne Rainer, “Trio A,” 1973.
Performed as part of “This is the story of a woman who…,” Theater for the New City, New York, 1973.
Performers: John Erdman and Yvonne Rainer.
Photo: © Babette Mangolte

 

 

 

Born to self-proclaimed 'radicals'.

Grew up in San Fransisco.

Somewhat directionless in early adulthood.

Moves to New York with painter Al Held.

Takes dance classes...faces various insulting comments by mentors.

Early 60s...Rainer focused on choreographing her own pieces, favoring everyday movements and the chance procedures innovated by Cage and Cunningham.

Makes a major contribution to dance over the next decade and continues to be an influential innovator.

Then...

"I made the transition from choreography to filmmaking between 1972 and 1975. In a general sense my burgeoning feminist consciousness was an important factor. An equally urgent stimulus was the encroaching physical changes in my aging body."

 A few minutes of Yvonne Rainer’s fourth feature-length film, Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980);

 

See more here;

https://ubu.com/film/rainer.html

And again...

A return to dance in early 2000s.

Now still at it at age 85. Check this out!!!

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/arts/dance/yvonne-rainer-do-it-yourself-coronavirus.html

 

ART 125/FIST 318 Jean-Michel Basquiat

“I don’t know how to describe my work. It’s like asking Miles, ‘How does your horn sound?’” - Jean-Michel Basquait

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat Liberty, 1982-83

It's the subconscious as conscious, and consciousness. It's like thinking about writing something, along with visuals, color, forms that are not the obvious choices, but the real ones. It's lettering, like in drafting, and with that special 'E', of some intention, because everything truly means something. Filling up all the space with a very lovely teetering balance. It is a horn, but on a 2D surface.

Jean-Michel Basquiat made pictures that sing like a horn.

 

 

 

 

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, A Panel of Experts, 1982

 

 

ART 240 Brakhage's Mothlight as "Direct Cinema"

Here's the link to the article about this film.

https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-303014346/direct-cinema-j-hoberman-on-stan-brakhage-s-mothlight

Think about this use of cinematic technology. It's the actual thing as the film, but what you see is still  light. How can this change how we think about process? How may one subvert digital apparatus in a similar manor? How could electrical impulses be utilized in a more direct way?

ART 125/FIST 318 Meditations: Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin's paintings which utilize line, grid, and transparent layers of color that can be deceiving at first glance. Martin rejected the idea that art should be intellectual, and believed instead that art should come from spiritual inspiration. Her work is historically placed within the minimalist tradition (among other artists who created art using basic forms stripped down to their essentials) but on closer inspection, her paintings reveal the trace of the artist's hand.  The video below gives us a revealing glimpse at her meditative process of painting.

Agnes Martin, "Beauty is in Your Mind", Tateshots, 2015

Agnes Martin, Untitled (Image #4) 1998 

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1960

Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday, 1999

ART 125/FIST 318 Nancy Spero's Transparency

Nancy Spero in her studio, age 82, 2008

 

 "The personal and the political are indistinguishable."

The use of transparency in Nancy Spero's work, via layered line drawings and sometimes transparent media, seems to allow us to 'see-through' to a certain truth. Repeated figures blend into one, the individual morphs into a collective whole, power through unity persists. 

As a socially concerned artist and early feminist, Spero was a member of several activist groups. The war in Vietnam was a primary concern portrayed in her War Paintings, 1966-1970.

Nancy Spero. Kill Commies / Maypole, 1967. Gouache and ink on paper; 36 × 24 inches.

"I don’t want my work to be a reaction to what male art might be or what art with a capital A would be. I just want it to be art." - Nancy Spero

Spero was interested in making art which expressed the idea that the female figure could not escape the scrutiny of the male gaze.  Inspired by imagery from ancient and classical art, which idealized the human form, she began to make works that were so expansive that some pieces could only be seen in peripheral vision.  She often placed her figures in the extreme corner of a composition or room, or places on a wall that would be considered out of the line of direct vision to the viewer.

 'The classical is so ostensibly timeless and beautiful and serene, you can’t see all the craft around it; you just see the surface thing," Spero says. "And so I disrupt that." Printmaking provided a flexible means for Spero to experiment with these ideas. "Each one is quite individual. And I can make another and another and another."

Nancy Spero, The Somnambulist, 1987

Nancy Spero, Mourning Women No.3, 1989

Nancy Spero, Artemis, Goddess and Centaur, 1983

"Although Spero’s work can be beautiful, that is not its primary goal. "A lot of my work has explosions of anger and violence," she says. “I want my work to be telling and strong, but not in a masculine sense. Strong,” she continues, “in that it has a certain message—and it can be a strong message.” 

Says artist Kiki Smith, “Nancy’s work is radical. For people of my generation, she and Leon (Spero's late husband, artist Leon Golub) were role models as artists. There are very few people who represent their social beliefs in their work and lives, and they are two people who embody that." 

-Phoebe Hoban, In Memoriam Nancy Spero, ArtNews, November 2009.

Framing, Hierarchy, Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava, Graduation, 1949

Without the two main subjects, the girl in the formal dress and the Chevrolet billboard, this would be a very conventionally framed photograph of an empty lot. This balance creates a solid stage for these two unrelated elements to interact. Our eye is first drawn to the figure in the striking dress, contrasting with its murky, unglamorous surroundings. The girl’s posture leads us to the advertisement, which because of the way it’s cropped into, weirdly maintains its original graphic hierarchy, which emphasizes the text. Had the entire frame of the billboard been included it would become more objectified and less communicative. This relationship between figure and ad copy is further strengthened by scale, the billboard being at a distance which makes the car in close proportion to the girl. A generation before, during the great depression, it was a photographic cliché to show looming advertisements above soup kitchen lines. Here a relationship is established that is more complex and open to interpretation.

Roy DeCarava, Sun and Shade

 "A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being."

Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava, from the series The Sound I Saw

How to Make a Link 'Live' on Blogger

ART 125/FIST 318 Hannah Hoch's Gestalt Effects

 

Hannah Höch, Grotesk, 1963, photomontage, 9 7⁄8 x 6 5⁄8".

 

The principal of Gestalt, defined as 'an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts', was a popular concept used to better understand how humans perceive environments in the early twentieth century. Hannah Hoch (1889 – 1978) was a queer German Dada artist who used this idea to create collages that often create ambiguous juxtapositions.  Höch, has been identified by art historians as one of the most under recognized and under-rated female artists of the 20th century.  

Hannah Höch, Watched, 1925.

 

 Here we have an armed guard, whose head appears to be a simple egg, watching over an abstracted fabric flower, that looks a bit like a giant brain. Certainly we can speculate on what this combination of visual elements may imply, but the artist's intent isn't entirely obvious, and the viewer has to resort to associative logic to see, or feel, what this really may be.

Even when the artist's message has clear intent we are left with much to decode...

Hannah Höch,  

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimer Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920

Höch's most well-known artwork, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimer Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920, uses the medium of collage to critique the political chaos in Europe After WWI.  The video below explains the social and political context behind this iconic Dadaist work. It also identifies the various figures in the composition and decodes a lot of the meaning behind the imagery Höch uses.  It is important to think about how this collage was constructed from commonly available printed materials which were then manipulated in a way that transcends each individual piece itself and exemplifies the fragmented political moment in which Höch lived.

An additional layer of meaning is evident in the title of the piece, Cut with the Kitchen Knife... The use of a kitchen knife as art-making tool is a purposeful statement critiquing the marginalized role of women in art and in society at the time.  Many men involved in the Dada movement at the time often expressed opinions about gender equality in theory, but in practice actually did nothing to support or promote the women artists associated with the male-dominated group.  

ART/FIST 240 Jeff Koons Doc

 

 

Most of the music is dropped-out of this rip, but you can imagine the original Led Zeppelin tunes they used. The Zep does appear when they cover southern blues...let's think about that. 

Everybody seems to have an opinion about this guy. It's my guess that any curators who would believe that the idea of 'avant-garde' has lingered beyond the beatnik age would consider Koons the last gasp of avant-garde in visual art.

ART 125/FIST 318 Georgia O'Keeffe's Colors

 

Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, c. 1923, Georgia O’Keeffe.

 

Georgia O'Keeffe titled this work with the names of some of the prominent colors. The title here may become more of a poem than a description, alluding to the colors of a bruise and neglecting that it's largely a shade of lavender. It's a hint that this image may elude to a form of psychic distress, and the colors can take us there. Colors can be the ultimate subject of a painting, as mid-20th century artists who have painted monochromes have shown;

Yves Klein   Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 322)  1959

Pigment and synthetic resin on cardboard laid on gauze

8 3/10 × 6 9/10 in

O' Keeffe's paintings are my absolute favorite thing to run across in a museum. Her work often does not translate well in reproduction. It also doesn't really fall into some trend-of-past 'art movement' outside of a very organic form of abstraction.

Ends of Barns   Georgia O' Keeffe   1922

Sometimes it even veers towards a streamlined realism, especially in the more sentimental subjects of landscapes and buildings. But maybe this painting is ultimately more just about 'red' ? O'Keeffe grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm and quite a few barn paintings appear in her early work. 

 

The sign on the left marks the Georgia O'Keefe childhood home.

 

What's she's best known for of course are her enlarged flowers, her most accessible works.

Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1 (1936) on view at the Tate Modern

In 2014 her Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1 (1936) sold for $44.4 million, and O’Keefe became the most highly valued female artist ever.

ART 125/FIST 340 Frida Kahlo's 'Disrupted Symmetery'

Frida Kahlo’s 1939 oil painting “The Two Fridas.”

Between 1925 and 1954 Frida Kahlo painted 55 self-portraits. In most of these she confronts the viewer in a full-frontal, straight-on manner. This helps her bring you into her world. She wants you to feel her pain, and her passion.

'The Broken column' painted in 1944

Much of her pain was physical. Her health problems began when she contracted Polio at age 6. At age 18 a bus she was riding in was struck by a streetcar and she was impaled by a handrail and her pelvis, spine and leg received multiple fractures. It was during this bedridden recovery period when she began painting seriously. But she never did really recover. In her lifetime she would have 35 surgeries and would wear 50 different supportive corsets and a prosthetic leg.

'Self-Portrait with Monkeys' painted in 1943

Her damaged body did nothing to suppress the power that emanates from the inner self here. We are left to wonder what her understanding of 'self' really was and how she was able to so directly communicate something so intangible.

Much of the lore of her life surrounds her long, disrupted marriage to Mexican painter Diego Rivera. The well-known biographical movie, Frida (2002), is no exception;

ART/FIST 240 Printing in the Wriston Art Center Digital Lab

 The Wriston digital lab is in the lower level of the Wriston Art Center, in the near West portion of the building. Your LU ID will buzz you into the building and the room. Currently only one student can occupy the lab at a time. There is a sign-up sheet on the door if you wish to reserve time, and an 'un/occupied' sign on the doorknob. Only the back computer is hooked-up to the printer. Open your image in photoshop. If you set the screen brightness to 3 suns it will give you a good idea of what it may look like printed...most images need to be brightened up a bit. Check that the printer is powered-up. Insert an 8.5 by 11 sheet of the luster photo paper into the printer vertically with the shiny-ish side up, to the far right part of the paper slot. Make sure the printer dialog is set to 'professional'. Use this video to help navigate the printer dialog;

Most of these settings will not need to be changed. It is important to size your image so it is nicely placed on the sheet, as when we frame the 11x14s the amount of border, or bleed-off, is critical to the look of the framed image.

ART 125 / FIST 318 Francis Alys' lines

Sometimes we need to think about how lines on paper translate to life on the street. This photo shows Alÿs carrying a dripping can of green paint along the armistice boundary that Moshe Dayan marked on a map with green pencil after Israel’s War of Independence ended in 1948. It questions the physicality and cultural relevance of the Green Line, its function as a social and spiritual division in the city of Jerusalem, and its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

Sometimes form is created simply by the act of walking, as in this poignant and gorgeous 1997 film by Alys;

 

Francis Alÿs Cuentos Patrióticos, 1997 

"In his wanderings through his adopted home country of Mexico, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) addresses the topic of urban power structures – for instance, in his film Cuentos Patrioticos, which plays out on the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square. The square was laid out by the Spanish conquistadors as an emblem of their victory over the Aztecs and has repeatedly been the scene of demonstrations of power. In Alÿs’ film Cuentos Patrioticos we see a man taking a sheep on a lead in a circle around the large flagpole on Zócalo square. With every ring of the bell more sheep join the bellwether. Sheep are gregarious animals and accordingly, at the sight of the strange parade on this square so steeped in history, the automatic temptation is to see them as blind followers. In his film Cuentos Patrioticos Alÿs is referencing a real event which took place here in 1968. At the height of the political unrest thousands of civil servants were forced to demonstrate for the government on this central square in the Mexican metropolis. In an act both subversive and, at the same time, humorous, the civil servants rebelled against this directive in the following way: Although they did flock to the square, they turned their backs on the government platform and bleated like sheep. A framed text chosen by the artist and a postcard referring to the events are part of the work and are exhibited alongside the film." 

-- from YouTube post

ART/FIST 240 More Kaari Upson

Kaari Upson. As Long As It Takes – Part I: The Head. 2007. Video with sound. 50 min., 8 sec.

Art 125/FIST 318 Smart Phone Art Phone...Welcome!

Hello and welcome to our online class! Here we'll be posting art on social media platforms while identifying and applying conceptual design concepts. The art you're making doesn't need to be created or posted with a phone...we are just assuming that this is how it will be viewed. This blog will be shared with my ART/FIST 240 class, which will explore related ideas.

The concepts we'll be implementing are taken from the Graphic Design The New Basics book, where our first reading acknowleges the influence of the Bauhaus school...

These ideas can take on broad applications...to sound, movement, or what-have-you.

Although we had a taste of this last term, the process of creating a community of artists across the country, and world, seems incredible to me! This is an amazing opportunity to learn about and appreciate everyone's art via public presentation on social media with a bit of background on process via your blogs.

Art 340/540 New Media- Paul McCarthy

What contemporary artist relates most directly to this Simulations book we're reading?...maybe Paul McCarthy, a multi-media madman (not at all really) whose work many consider to be about the most primal level of human experience. Maybe it is intuition that takes him to these hyperreal worlds, or maybe that butter and hamburger-covered head is packed full of late 20th century theory? We shouldn't care, in art it may not matter.
'The Painter' is so hilarious that it's almost dangerous for me to watch...

But what are we watching here...exactly? It's clearly satire, but it's a super-intense artist playing the role of a super-intense artist of maybe one generation back, in a way that becomes self-satire, particularly in its unmasking of artistic focus. It's humorous, but not 'comedy', the character drifts from being a clownish actor to being Paul himself, mocking his own work (tube of shit, etc.) and humiliating himself. Drifting from hyperrealness to simulation to...maybe even some kind of elusive true real.

His most recent work has been in virtual reality...

Here's a PowerPoint...


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oVNxUFzzuJXjQkR__EiGF-6PD8XVJhod/view?usp=sharing


YOU WILL NEED TO DOUBLE CLICK 2020mccarthy.pptx AND THEN SELECT THE CloudConvert APP TO OPEN THE FILE OR DOWNLOAD THE FOLDER TO YOUR HARD DRIVE.

Art 340/540 New Media; The World We Now Live In

Jean Baudrillard related to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown; How an actual sign can exist as a Sign

Coming soon to every corner.

Why do we live in the wold we now live in?

Learning from Las Vegas...

 And from Photography...

 Look at this PowerPoint!!!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ppb1LzQZSCtzkw2jXASHBkDNmpkpgezB?usp=sharing

 YOU WILL NEED TO DOUBLE CLICK llv.pptx AND THEN SELECT THE CloudConvert APP TO OPEN THE FILE OR DOWNLOAD THE FOLDER TO YOUR HARD DRIVE.

Art 330/530 Street Photography: Intimacy and Distance

The catalog and beyond

 Google Street View has a straightforward conceptual goal...to make a continuous panorama that encompasses every public street on earth.

Artists who make photographs in public spaces need not be so dogmatic in their approach. Saul Leiter sought-out small visual miracles, where aspects of the street came together in a 1/60th of a second that created brilliant, harmonious mosaics of color and form.

"'Seeing is a neglected enterprise,' Mr. Leiter often said. Where other New York photographers of the period were apt to document the city's streets discreetly- streets, people, buildings - Mr. Leiter captured the almost indefinable spaces where all three intersect, many of them within a two-block radius of the East Village apartment in which he had lived since the early 1950s." -(Margalit Fox, Saul Leiter, Photographer who Captured New York's Palette, Dies at 89, The New York Times)

"I go out with my camera because I enjoy catching certain moments. Of course I don't know that I'm going to get what I'm going to get. It takes time." -Saul Leiter,  In No Great Hurry: 15 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (Thomas Leach, director, 2014)

Saul Leiter, Taxi, 1956

Saul Leiter, Barbershop, 75, 1950's

Saul Leiter, Street Scene, 1959

Saul Leiter, Dog in Doorway, Patterson, 1952

Saul Leiter, Foot on El, 1954

Richard Renaldi, Touching Strangers

 

For some artists the street is a place for theater, where quickly orchestrated social maneuvers can unfold into tender, awkward moments that become monumental.

CBS Evening News, June 20, 2014

Richard Renaldi, From the series "Touching Strangers"

From; The New Yorker Magazine - 24 Hours at the Epicenter of the Pandemic

Richard Renaldi, 12:11p.m. Washington Square Park

Richard Renaldi, 12:21p.m. Greenwich Village

Richard Renaldi, 1:53 p.m. SoHo

Art 340/540 New Media; Carved in Stone (?)

COUNTERFEIT;

The Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park is a full-scale copy of the original Parthenon in Athens. It was originally stucco and was later rebuilt in concrete.


PRODUCTION;

Erik Sommer’s sculpture/installation “Volvo 240”: a real Volvo, coated completely in concrete.

SIMULATION; 

 The Stucco Angel 

 The Wisconsin Concrete Park is an outdoor museum with 237 embellished concrete and mixed media sculptures built between 1948 and 1964 by Fred Smith.

 It's only a recording...

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14Ot-70NTxLqCj2XArB_uYgOhUIrtLWcQ?usp=sharing

YOU WILL NEED TO DOUBLE CLICK humanoid.pptx AND THEN SELECT THE CloudConvert APP TO OPEN THE FILE OR DOWNLOAD TO YOUR HARD DRIVE.
 

Art 330/530 Photo; Simulated Windows: The Politics of Landscape

 Intuitively we may believe an objective image of a landscape could exist, but can it? Won't even a formalist's agenda highly mediate our viewing experience? Is the depiction of a landscape always an act of consumption?

Colorama #274, Surfers and surfboards, Peter Gales, 1966

The Colorama was a backlit 18x60 foot photographic display located inside New York City's Grand Central Terminal from 1950 to 1990, a virtual window looking onto a fictionalized, idealized world where constant consumption and snapshot making abound, and the landscape is often prominent.

Grand Central Station, 1963

The colorama below, art directed by Norman Rockwell, has all the subtle satire of his magazine cover illustrations.

Colorama #126, Amdursky and Baker, Closing a Summer Cottage, 1957

Herb Archer. FAMILY CAMPING, LAKE PLACID NY, July/Aug 1959

Peter Gales, Colorama that appeared in Grand Central Station Aug. 26th, 1968

Rebecca Solnit, in her book, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art writes, 

"The desert is famously a place of silence. A place without language, to some extent, unnamed, unmapped, unfamiliar, corresponding to no familiar categories of experience, not truly outside representation but challenging to it.  It was, for a long time, literally a territory without a map, the last part of the continent to be explored and mapped, and much of what is now the (Nevada) Test Site seems to be the last part of the contiguous forty-eight states to be mapped.  Baudrillard would still be lost out here. Much of the difficulty the desert of the American West presented was linguistic and categorical: it did not correspond to what was known by easterners and Europeans.  It is not only because the Spanish arrived earlier that many aspects of this place - arroyos, mesas, playas, bajadas - have Spanish names, but also because there are no English words for such landforms...

Richard Misrach, "Simulated Window" Wendover Airforce Base, Utah, 1986

The politics of the simulacra carry a different weight inside the Enola Gay bunker.  Misrach's "Simulated Windows" shows a slab of drywall that closed off that bunker's view of the outside world on which military personnel drew and labeled "simulated scenery," "simulated bush,"...in a collection of images as clever and cold as anything by David Salle or Richard Prince, except that the detachment of these amateur artists is quite likely to be literally lethal, since it is not safely becalmed in the cultural driveway....Nuclear war and the U.S.military can be called, among other things, totalizing discourses, discourses that could be examined most clearly out here among some of the most crucial landscapes of the cold war....

Too, such a landscape at such a time makes demands that undermine the art histories we might call "landscape theory." Clouds here are not equivalents, the landscape is not a pathetic fallacy, because to hear it speak purely of self is to drown out urgent political histories, which affect that self profoundly. Both modernism and post-modernism are essentially urban, eastern practices. In both, landscape has been considered the most pedestrian, unintellectual of the themes of visual art, a kind of mental picnic. To find politics in its most virulent and secret form out in the desert upends those traditions. The landscape is no longer a given, but a threatened territory. The primary landscape tradition for Western civilization is that of the pastoral, in both literature and art: the pastoral as the antithesis of the city, a refuge from the politics and corruption of cities, a place of virtue, a place significantly outside history and ruled by cyclical rather than linear time. The pastoral at its most banal is the resort, vacationland, campsite. This tradition has made it hard to reinvision the landscape as instead the complex place in which futures are being prepared, secret wars carried out, poisons dispersed, histories inscribed." (Solnit p.75-78)