October 29, 2012
Reviews:
- Don’t use “genius”, “beautiful”, “great”, “good”
- Can say “in my opinion the artist uses paint beautifully because he layers colour over…”
- Description is important, factual info, going beyond text in gallery
- Analysis - “handles paint” & discuss how he layers paint over others; Evan Penny - technical
aspect, using hyperrealism & define; if you say “it had a surreal feeling” explain how (surreal
feeling, creating a sense that I was surrounded by real people); & link it back
- Question use of adjectives
- Factual information: what it looks like, size & scope of it, define it (is it a photograph; Evan
Penny - it’s not just sculpture, it’s photos too)
- Not for someone who’s seen it
- Hone in to a couple pieces
- Installation as a medium for art - e.g. Film playing at the same time
- Installation of how the exhibit was set up - if significant (deliberately set up in a certain way -
or badly set up)
VIS120 Final Exam
Date: Wed Dec. 10, 2012
Time: 2:00- 4:00
Location: SS2117
Minimalism
- Kasimir Malevich - called first Minimalist (even though he was 40 years ahead; Suprematist)
- 1913 - Suprematism - wholly manmade, not found in nature
- 1960s - Minimalism; reaction toAbstract Expressionism
- Minimalists were influenced by composers John Cage; composer sat down at the piano for 4:33
and did nothing => performance is not about music but about listening
- Audience = listening to acoustics of room itself
- Artist, like musician, wanted audience to complete work - 1959 - Yayoi Kusama - not Minimalist but similar style: she covered the canvas with black
paint and then layered lightly on top
nd
- “Is originality in art necessary in the future? Not necessarily” - 2 wave ofAbstract
Expressionists wanted to be original and new
- Kusama distanced herself from newness, originality
- Tailored canvases to size of gallery walls where they’d be exhibited
- Dot works - exploration of obsessive tendency - repeating actions over and over nearly
infinitely
- Made up to 100 watercolors a day
- Obsession in art = generational (those who grew up during traumatized childhood in WWII)
- Freud: trauma in childhood leads to OCD in later life
- Kusama was 12 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour; 15 when US dropped atom bomb on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- Kusama - not Minimalist but related to and inspired Minimalist artists
- Most Minimalists started as painter
- Frank Stella - only one remained known as a painter in Minimalist style
- Born in 1936 in Massachusetts
- Art recognized for innovations
- Made it as an artist at age 25 (most artists we’ve looked at until now didn’t gain recognition
until 40s)
- Cast aside illusionistic space for reality
- Die Fahne Hoch = same proportions as Nazis’banners
- Black paintings = 1958-1960; 24 paintings
- Shaped canvas - white spaces aren’t the canvas
- Wanted to replace subjective, symbolic, surrealist nature ofAbstract Expressionism with logic
- Painting about painting - referencing themselves across the surface
- Six Mile Bottom - commercial paints, house painting brush
- “Only what can be seen there is there… you can see the whole idea without any confusion”; no
reference (AE had references - e.g. Motherwell to Spanish Civil War; De Kooning to female
figure)
- Six Mile Bottom = first shaped canvas - Reaction to action of Abstract Expressionism
- Frank Stella:
- Started with big, expansive gesture => compromised at the end
- Flatness = necessity for modern art at the time
- Flatness and depth = hard to penetrate; keeping the viewer from “reading” the painting
- First thing you do is see the painting, not how it’s done
- Making it hard for critics to write about => simple, doesn’t “do much”, can’t explain
how one part relates to another
- Reaction that art was an illusion => Minimalists wanted art to be stripped down to materials so
you can see what it really is, not a sculpture/painting of something
- Agnes Martin - she considered herself Abstract Expressionist, but she’s more Minimalist
- Discovered the grid in 1960 = emblem of Modernism, thought it represented innocence
- Symmetry, indeterminate colours, repetition of small units, perfection of nature
- Experience - represented in art = wordless and silent
- Different approach than Stella but same look
- Night Sea = impression of quilted surface; flattened geometric space, getting rid of “the real”
- People think it’s landscape => her work consists of straight lines; beauty and freedom you
experience in landscape
- Minimalists wanted truth in materials
- Closer you get to contemporary times, more fluid artists’work is stylistically to surrounding
movements
- Sol LeWitt = worked in MOMAbookstore; found Tatlin and Muybridge’s art
- Returned to basics: square and cube but not interested in industrial objects
- Muybridge & Russian Constructivism = inspirations; made objects that he called “structures”
rather than sculpture
- Artists become picky with language - subtly nuanced vocabulary (picture vs. painting; structure
vs. sculpture
- Aim of artist = give viewer information, not instruct; avoid subjectivity
- Serial artist doesn’t try to make beautiful
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