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.