Global Contemprary Gallery

GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY GALLERY

Let’s take a look at Global Contemporary Art in this two part gallery.

PART ONE

Contemplative Gateways

The advancement of technology has impacted the construction, display, documentation, and cross-cultural transmission of art and architecture.

Site-specific artworks allow viewers to interact with the art while their impermanence creates a time-specific accessibility, prompting the contemplation of the viewer.

Digital media allows viewers to access to the art after it is destroyed or no longer displayed, but the experience of and participation in the work is limited to the time it is displayed.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, a husband-and-wife team, began creating site-specific works in the 1960s. Their intention was to make the viewer aware of spaces and their aesthetic impact by concealing or reframing familiar environments. Not permanent, their works were installed for three to four weeks and live on only through documentation. Refusing government funding, Christo and Jeanne-Claude financed their projects through advance sales of photographs and preliminary drawings. A repeated aesthetic argument about their work is if the site being visited or the later images of it constitute their art.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed their concept for The Gates in 1979 and were inspired by the human scale, the flow of people walking through the streets of New York, and the tradition of Japanese torii gates. The proposal was initially denied in 1981, but permission was later granted in 2003.

Exhibited from February 12 to February 27, 2005, The Gates consisted of 7,503 gates that were 16 feet tall with 6-foot, free-hanging saffron-colored fabric. The artists intended the gates to appear like a golden river becoming visible through the bare branches of the trees in Central Park, emphasizing the organic and serpentine design of the walkways while the rectangular poles reminded the viewer of the grid pattern of the city blocks around the park.

The one-legged tori at the Sannō Shrine. Nagasaki, Japan.

The Gates took a form similar to and were inspired by Japanese torii gates, which are found at the entrance of Shinto shrines, like the Sannō Shrine, marking the transition from the unsacred to the sacred. In comparison to the Spiral Jetty, whose presentation changed but is still available in some form for viewers to participate in and experience, the presentation of The Gates can be seen only through photographs since the exhibition concluded.

Contemplative Remembrance

Monuments of remembrance often took the form of heroic images of the fallen or large, imposing obelisks or columns inspired by triumphal works. Rejecting the precedent of these earlier monuments, Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was of a Minimalist monument, where the names of the fallen take precedence over representative imagery. This lack of excess embellishment concentrates on remembering rather than representing those who died.

Lin drew on the language of Minimalism to create the memorial, constructing two simple walls of reflective black gabbro stone that meet to make an obtuse angle. Lin cut into the earth to allow visitors to descend along a walkway which, in Minimalist fashion, enables viewers to interact with the work and the terrain. Viewers engage with the names of the deceased, which are inscribed on the wall that rises alongside the walkway.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Washington, D.C., U.S. Maya Lin. 1982 C.E. Granite.

Lin’s representation is of an open healing wound, symbolizing the continual healing process of the individual and the country.

To create a narrative, the names of the fallen are recorded in the order in which they died. The act of finding a name and taking in the position of a deceased loved one’s name while seeing one’s own face reflected was intended as an opportunity for viewers to personalize the experience. Here they can reflect on the war and its costs and see themselves within the fallen soldiers.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Washington, D.C., U.S. Maya Lin. 1982 C.E. Granite.

Lin’s untraditional design was controversial, in a similar fashion to Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais in placement and figural representation. This controversy was compounded after it was revealed that Lin was Asian American. This is ironic, as the monument was intended to remember soldiers who died in the war in Vietnam, a country in Asia. The memorial lacks the figurative ornamentation normally expected in memorials and is submerged in the ground instead of rising vertically.

Writing on the Wall

Artworks like Rivera’s Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park challenge societal restrictions and are commentaries on social injustice. These themes are continued in the Neo-Expressionist movement.

Like the German Expressionists of the early 20th century, Neo-Expressionists portrayed recognizable objects, especially the human figure, in a violent and emotional way using vivid colors that had been rejected by previous art movements.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother. His teenage years were marked by trouble, including his parents’ divorce and a car accident that resulted in several injuries.

He ran away from home at the age of 15 and dropped out of high school. His father disinherited him as a result, and he spent the rest of his teen years living on the streets of New York. His earliest involvement with the art world was as a street artist, but he soon moved from graffiti and subway art into a Neo-Expressionist style that sought to translate the images and experiences of black America to a high-art setting and audience.

Horn Players. Jean-Michel Basquiat. 1983 C.E. Acrylic and oil paintstick on three canvas panels.

Basquiat’s work Horn Players celebrates legendary jazz musicians Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Basquiat represents the musicians with fractured figures and boldly colored graffiti-like words on a black background. This is suggestive of the rhythms of jazz music and the excitement of New York City. Horn Players challenged societal restrictions and the definition of art. Using jazz, which originated in African American communities, Basquiat connects societal symbols of black America for high-art audiences, underscoring the significant contributions of African American communities.

Revival

The prefix “neo” at the beginning of a word indicates a revival of or a new form of the word it precedes. In this case, it is both. Graffiti in Neo-Expressionism and Basquiat’s work is a revival of Expressionism. It took the social commentary and expressed it with vivid colors in new ways and using graffiti as a platform. This then elevated graffiti as an art form and made it more accessible.

Untitled is a powerful pictographic landscape in which Basquiat creates a mythical landscape composed of stick-like figures amid mystical symbols and mysterious marks.

The black male figures wear crowns, a component of his tag as a street artist, representative of their dignity and power.

He arms them with weapons, signifying that dignity and violence are complementary, a suggestion also made in the pictographic works of African tribal artists. Basquiat met Andy Warhol in 1982 and collaborated with him for several years after, resulting in a reciprocal boost to both careers, especially Warhol’s.

Graffiti

The use of graffiti has had a long and symbiotic relationship with degenerative, lowbrow art. The idea of painting or otherwise altering public property in the way street artists do is problematic in that it is technically illegal and is looked down on. However, the public and subversive nature of street art is part of its character and appeals to artists.

Banksy, pseudonym of an anonymous British street artist, exemplifies the degree of public showmanship necessary in the graffiti-art tradition pioneered by Basquiat. Banksy has even been caught on security cameras hanging his own work in the Louvre, which people then believed was supposed to be there.

Graffiti depicting graffiti removal by Banksy. Banksy (pseudonym). Leake Street, London. 2008 C.E.

Urban Art. Banksy (pseudonym). Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans, 2008.

In locations throughout the globe, he has created images that express wry political or social commentary; his pseudonym is indicative of his anonymity, despite his fame.

A significant commentary on the high-art view and illegal nature of graffiti—would cave paintings have been considered graffiti?

Banksy did a series of works in New Orleans in 2008 to commemorate the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. He created works on still-abandoned locations, like this filling station, where a flag-waving occupant of a rocking chair has been painted insouciantly below a spray-painted “NO LOITERING” notice. The New Orleans resident, an older man biding his time in his rocking chair, displays the U.S. flag, ironically commenting on the feeling that the federal government forsook New Orleans after Katrina.

Feminine Identity in Art

Questions of identity and broader cultural inclusion led artistic progression, prompting reflection on how artists reappropriate the past in new and innovative works. Gender roles and female identity in art characterized these artists’ searches for identity.

Ana Mendieta

Cuban-born Ana Mendieta labeled herself an Earth-Body sculptor, a type of Environmental artist. Arbol de la Vida (Mud,) part of the Silueta series, involves her body, or a silhouette of her body, photographed with mud, implying a physical and spiritual connection with the land, and expounding the female figure as an aspect of nature.

The work is impermanent but is documented in photography. Photographs of her work are displayed in galleries and sold as art.

Mendieta, who was sent to American foster homes as a 13-year-old to escape Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, said of her Silueta series, “[I] carried on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence.”

Arbol de la Vida (Mud), from the Silueta series. Ana Mendieta. 1973–1977 C.E.

 Her work is considered highly feminist by some and autobiographical by others. Violence against women is a common theme in her early works and was expanded to include violence against nature. The earth is compared to a nurturing female figure, like a mother, and the manipulation of the earth is interpreted as violence toward women.

Miriam Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro supported the legacy of female artists of the past and incorporated details from their art to reclaim the traditional “feminine craft” of textile and elevate it to “high art”.

To call attention to the similarity between quilting and collage, Schapiro coined the term femmage to describe the fabric collages she created and establish textiles as a legitimate art form.

In Conservatory: Portrait of Frida Kahlo, Schapiro inserts her features into an image of Kahlo, signifying Kahlo as a representative of herself and all female artists. She surrounds the figure with images of pots, flowers, and other objects traditionally related to the female form and role around her fictional depiction of Frida Kahlo, who is seated as a goddess in a painting that vaguely resembles one of Kahlo’s own works. Again this underscores Kahlo’s representation of all female artists.

Conservatory: Portrait of Frida Kahlo. Miriam Schapiro. 1988 C.E. Acrylic, collage on canvas.

 Faith Ringgold

A Harlem native, Faith Ringgold produced many works that provided sharp commentary on racial prejudice and gender roles. Her series The French Collection uses fabric as the predominant material, enabling Ringgold to single out the domestic range primarily associated with women. Dancing at the Louvre is part of a fictional story about an African American artist struggling in 1920s Paris and highlights the bias in treatment of race and gender.

The main character, Willia Marie, is modeled after Ringgold’s mother. The specific moment of Dancing at the Louvre is inspired about an experience Ringgold had with her children when she took them to Paris to see the Mona Lisa.

The paintings on the wall in the Louvre are all mothers and children, no men. This is significant as Ringgold is exerting her independence and power as an artist—she can represent who she wants.

Although she is painting a white, European location, she can portray African American females. It is the same idea with the characters dancing. There are no rules against dancing at the Louvre. Ringgold feels that the dancing occurred because the characters could dance, while other characters did not dance because they did not know how. It is not a matter of societal restrictions or boundaries, but of choice.

Dancing at the Louvre, from the series The French Collection, Part I; #1. Faith Ringgold. 1991 C.E. Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed, pieced fabric border

 

The Guerrilla Girls take a far more sardonic approach to the situation of women in the modern world—specifically how it mirrors their treatment in the past, with little progress. The Guerrilla Girls, formed in New York in 1984, are a group of anonymous women who use the names of deceased women artists as pseudonyms and wear gorilla masks as they engage in “guerrilla” war tactics to call attention to inequalities in the art world related to race and sex. This reflects the attack on women resulting in them feeling as if they are at war with oppression.

Very little is known about them. They are careful to maintain their anonymity, not disclosing their membership or location due to fear of retaliation from the art world they are part of and attacking their own context to promote change within it. In addition to promoting equality in art, the Guerrilla Girls tackle a number of feminist issues—gender-based discrimination in the workplace, sexual abuse, and human rights.

The group, which is still active, has published five books since 1995. Their actions include performance, public lectures, and the use of fliers and posters, such as the ironic poster, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. The propagandistic poster sarcastically lists the advantages women artists have, including “working without the pressure of success,” “seeing your ideas live on in the work of others,” and “not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius.”

Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. Guerilla Girls. 1988 C.E. Poster.

Another poster, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? challenges the high number of nude women as the subjects of art in the Metropolitan Museum, while the number of actual female artists is low. This brings out the issues of the female form as solely a source for male pleasure.

 

Not-So-Feminine Identity in Art

En la Barberia no se Llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop). Pepon Osorio. 1994 C.E. Mixed media installation.

Pepon Osorio’s installation En la Barberia no se Llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop) addresses the role of the barbershop in Latino culture and how it functioned as a rite of passage into Latino Masculinity.

Osorio explores the construction of Latino masculinity, or machismo.

This is especially significant as it brings out the expectations of men, both young and old. Young male volunteers posed in various masculine poses and were videoed, while older men were videoed discussing how machismo had shaped their lives. This emphasizes the lineage and generational connection that are brought out through the barbershop.

A building was painted to resemble a Puerto Rican barbershop, and inside, video monitors with no sound presented the Latino male body engaged in physical displays of masculinity like lifting weights or specific walks, while monitors in the windows played continuous videos of men crying. The walls and chair were decorated in symbols of masculinity like Latino athletes and entertainers, pushing the viewer to address the cultural expectations of Latino men, where young boys are told not to cry, in a space where the female is not allowed.

Organic Portrayals

A Polish sculptor and fiber artist, Magdalena Abakanowicz explores the expressive powers of weaving techniques, a mostly feminine art form, in large-scale artworks. Abakanowicz’s sculptures reflect her early life experiences under Nazi rule.

The change, dislocation, devastation, and poverty she experienced is conveyed in a large-scale, anonymous way so that anyone can see himself or herself in the work.

The use of fiber materials is symbolic for Abakanowicz—she views fiber as the basic element and building block of the organic world. Her work, Androgyne III, represents the torso, arms, and upper legs of a human body sitting on a wooden, ladder-like bench. It appears as a hollow shell and incomplete from the front, expressing the physical and spiritual condition of humanity and suggesting meditation, submission, and anticipation. The back is fully formed, representing the truth. The use of fiber shows the androgynous nature of the cellular makeup of the human body along with its connection to the earth.

In contrast with Abakanowicz’s Androgyne III, Wangechi Mutu’s Preying Mantra, as seen in the AP Art History Course and Exam Description, portrays the human form camouflaged by nature. The title alludes to the praying mantis, a predator insect that is typically green or brown and utilizes camouflage to allow it to ambush its prey. The adult female praying mantis will often eat her mate just after or during mating. The African female body is portrayed with machine-like features, including a cyborg-like eye and un-humanlike skin that appears to reflect the environment, giving an illusion of oneness with nature portrayed not as connection, but as subversion.

Androgyn III. Magdalena Abakanowicz. 1985 C.E. Burlap, resin, wood, nails, string

 

Cross-Cultural Reaction

Artists in regions that have been colonized and exploited by Euro-ethnic powers for economic gains are impacted by the resulting cross-cultural fertilization. The resulting artworks incorporate found objects and comment on the human and environmental costs of the exploitation.

 The Indigenous Americas

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith uses visual language to represent her investigation of the experience and assumptions related to Native American culture. Indian, Indio, Indigenous is a collaged work that evokes the mistreatment of both Native Americans and their land. The work is a symbolic landscape full of images that include George Catlin’s images of American Indians, a U.S. map, and pictographs of a bear, coyote, and deer.

These images, which are meant to both educate viewers and be perceived by them through their own experiences, coexist with patches of black and white paint and fabric, slashed and punctuated with red marks and the title phrase in blood-red. The canvas includes phrases “it takes hard work to keep racism alive” and “money is green: it takes precedence over nature”, linking racial discrimination and injustice with misuse of the environment.

Smith’s Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People) is a complex multimedia work that combines clippings from Native American newspapers, images chronicling the conquest of Native America by Europeans, and objects like Native American artifacts and contemporary sports memorabilia from teams with American Indian-derived names, including a hat from the Atlanta Braves and Red Man chewing tobacco.

Smith uses paint to comment on the implications of colonization of the Americans by European countries by having the canvas transition to red as the work progresses to the right, symbolizing the deaths of Native Americans in the conquest of the Americas and Mexico.

Indian, Indio, Indigenous. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. 1992 C.E. Oil and collage on canvas.

The Pacific

New Zealand artist Michel Tuffery comments on how imported product has replaced local Pacific Island foods used in feasts and gift giving in his artwork Pisupo Lua Afe (Corned Beef 2000). The term pisupo is used for canned food items in the Pacific, derived from pea-soup-o.

Since its introduction, pisupo has been a demanded food item eaten and gifted at feasts, weddings, funerals, and other special occasions in Samoan society. Pisupo Lua Afe (Corned Beef 2000), a sculpture of a bull made from flattened corned beef tins joined together with rivets, is a comment on how the imported item has become a staple and an integral part of Polynesian customs.

Pisupo Lua Afe (Corned Beef 2000). Michel tuffery. 1994 C.E. Mixed media

 

Africa 

The artist El Anatsui found the emphasis on Western traditions irrelevant, and Ghana’s own work ignored as he studied art in Kumasi. El Anatsui began to create a large body of work inspired by uli, an Igbo surface design system.

While very concerned with the survival and transmission of inherited traditions, Anatsui began to appropriate cast-off objects found in and around where he lives and using them to create immense wall sculptures that fold and wave like textiles.

Old Man’s Cloth is constructed from flattened liquor bottle labels fastened together with copper wire and alludes to the alcohol used as trade for slaves, exemplifying the connection between Europe and Africa.

El Anatsui discusses this: “Drinks played an important role in the relation between Europe and Africa. While engaging in trade, drinks were among items brought. This is like working with history in a sense. This was a point of contact between two countries.”

Old Man’s Cloth. El Anatsui. 2003 C.E. Aluminum and copper wire.

Lesson Summary

Global Contemporary art is used as social commentary and explores cultural, political, racial, and gender roles, along with exploring cross-cultural impact. Environmental installations and site-specific art enable viewers to interact with artworks, but only for a limited time. Art not only records and represents historical events, but it is used as propaganda to comment on social and cultural injustice to change the current cultural climate.

 

GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY

PART TWO

Man, Machine, and Global Culture

Digital and video technology media serve as new vehicles for installation pieces within Contemporary art.

Nam June Paik’s family immigrated to the United States in 1950 due to the Korean War. His immigration coincided with events causing significant transformation of American culture: the construction of interstate highways, the popularization of television in homes, and the development of the first portable video camera. Paik pioneered the use of video as a primary medium the 1960s. Paik’s use of video makes a statement about the importance of television in our culture.

Paik employed music, performance, and video in many of his early works, arguing new technology would supersede painting and sculpture.

Paik’s sculptures’ incorporation of television sets playing video images–as both a modus operandi for his preferred medium and a representation of television’s place in popular culture– has continued in his body of work. Phiber Optik exemplifies a common theme in Paik’s work, the melding of humanity and technology. A robot-like figure composed of television sets sits astride a motorcycle, combining traditional art with the new art that Paik pioneers. Unifying man and machine, Phiber Optik is a visual representation of one of the first teenage hackers, Mark Abene. Phiber Optik was Abene’s handle and represented his online identity, and the work functions as a symbol of the blending of personas, one real and one digital.

Paik’s site-specific sculpture Electronic Superhighway can be seen in the AP Art History Course and Exam Description. It is a statement about the prevalence and power of the mixed messages transmitted by television in our society and the cultural connection formed by highways.

The work is a neon outline map of the United States set against a wall of several computer-controlled video monitors. This neon references highway scenery and motel signs. Each monitor displays rapidly changing soundtracked images that reflect each state’s culture and history, and in the case of New York, includes viewers in the work by showing their video image as they are viewing it. While Paik dismissed painting as passé, his intention of involving the viewer in the work harks back to da Vinci’s the Last Supper and di Bondone’s Lamentation.

Phiber Optik. Nam June Paik. 1995 C.E. Mixed media.

 Digital Spirituality

Bill Viola manipulates video installation and water to explore themes such as birth, death, and spiritual experience through heightened sensory perception and awareness.

His use of water can be traced back to a childhood incident where he nearly drowned in a lake, which he described as “the most beautiful world I’ve ever seen in my life… without fear and peaceful.”

The Messenger is composed of a large video projection produced for the interior of Durham Cathedral in England, a setting that amplifies the implicit spirituality of the work. A nude male figure slowly emerges from the watery depths, breaks the water’s surface to draw a deep breath, and sinks back into the dark void. Each time he rises, his breath becomes a forceful primal sound of life that resonates in the space of the cathedral.

Viola’s use of nudity in his works symbolizes the pure state of the soul. Images of submersion and drowning, symbolic of baptism, draw on his own spiritual experience when nearly drowning. The piece is a slow and cyclical meditation on the elemental act of drawing breath, representing the cycle of life and death.

The emergence of the figure from the water resembles rituals of spiritual rebirth found in many religious traditions. While Nam June Paik’s work explores and celebrates the interconnectivity between man and machine, Viola’s installations use technology to draw the viewer into a rhythmic, trancelike state of transcendence.

The Messenger

Viola uses similar elemental symbolism in The Crossing, a double projection of two videos on opposite sides of a 16-foot screen. One side is a video loop of a man slowly emerging from the background as water starts to fall on him, until it washes him away. This water symbolizes spiritual experience and rebirth. The other side shows that same man appearing and being engulfed in flames. The flames symbolize hell and spiritual experience. Both are set to a soundtrack that challenges perceptions and vision’s impact on them.

While viewers think they hear contrasting sounds of fire and rain, the sound is actually one soundtrack that they perceive differently according to the image they are watching. This emphasizes the concept of perception versus reality, causing a sensory and meditative experience and emphasizing the fine line of redemption in world religions.

Historical Appropriations

Cindy Sherman explores gender, and the way Western art presents the female body through the “male gaze”.

Her black-and-white photographs, called Untitled Film Stills examine the stereotypical ways women are depicted in film. Taking control of her own image and constructing her own identity, Sherman is the designer, actor, director, and photographer of the series.

In Untitled Film Still #15, the subject is a sexy female lead in bobby socks and high heels. She looks wistfully out of the window. Sherman takes the concept of representing women in art and popular culture and interprets it through the film still to show how women adapt and are expected to assume many different roles depending on their circumstances.

Untitled Film Still #15. Cindy Sherman. 1978 C.E. Gelatin silver print.

Sherman exemplifies both the relationship of male and female and that of contemporary and historical perspectives in her Untitled (#228), from the History Portraits series, which can be viewed in the AP Art History Course and Exam Description. Here, Sherman portrays Judith from the Apocrypha, a portion of the Catholic Old Testament. Judith was an attractive Jewish widow who devised a strategy to save the city of Bethulia, her home, which was threatened by King Nebuchadnezzar’s Assyrian army under the command of Holofernes. Judith seduced Holofernes while he was drunk and then decapitated him. When the Assyrian soldiers came to storm Bethulia, they retreated when they saw Holofernes’s head.

Sherman worked from the representations in paintings done in the style of Italian, French, and Northern European painters of the 16th and 17th centuries. The story of Judith returning with Holofernes’s head has been represented in works by Sandro Botticellli and Cristofani Allori. Sherman’s Judith has rich tapestries hung behind her, symbolizing the domestic expectations of women. She is clothed in a red robe with a black sash, reminiscent of the clothing represented in Botticelli’s work.

In contrast to the traditional representations of Judith, the graphic nature of the beheading is represented in Sherman’s by the knife and the blood-stained left hand. The head of Holofernes is in her right, represented by a wrinkled, grey, balding mask.

Sherman’s representation of Judith is significant as she is a historical figure who used her feminine nature and seduction to achieve a goal, exploiting herself. This is a departure from previous representations: The grotesque is representative of female interpretation of the subject as opposed to the male, sexualized version.

Off With Her Head

Yinka Shonibare is a British-Nigerian artist who considers himself biracial, being from both England and Nigeria. The artist expresses his frustration with the continual cultural push to classify a person as one race. His works, including The Swing (after Fragonard), exemplify this duality and comment on the superficiality of race. Influenced by The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Shonibare’s representation is a headless mannequin clothed in batik fabrics with African-inspired prints. This portrayal raises both political and cultural questions for the viewer.

The Swing (after Fragonard). Yinka Shonibare. 2001 C.E. Mixed-media installation.

 

The Swing. Jean-Honoré Fragonard. 1767 C.E. Oil on canvas

 Why Headless?

The headless mannequin is a direct reference to the French Revolution and use of the guillotine. The extravagant lifestyle of the monarchy before the Revolution is reflected in Fragonard’s The Swing.  Shonibare is bringing to light the irony of the Rococo style, the extravagant and promiscuous lifestyles of the monarchy, and the consequences thereof.

 Why African-inspired Prints?

The use of batik fabric in the European-inspired dress is symbolic of colonialism and the relationship between Europe and Africa. Batik fabrics have inspired international fashion and are associated with West African nations. Worn by millions of Africans today, the brightly colored and patterned fabrics originally came from Indonesia and were imported by Dutch colonists to Africa. They are now made by African women and are symbolic of their identity.

Dreamings in Action

Artists portray their cultural influence and tradition within their artworks. Indigenous Australian artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye was born around 1910 but did not start working artistically until 1977, when she started working with batik.

In 1988, she began painting in acrylics on canvas. Her painting Earth’s Creation portrays a traditional narrative of the creation myth and the time of the Dreamings, inspired by her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder.

Earth’s Creation. Emily Kame Kngwarreye. 1994 C.E. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas.

The Dreamings were spirit beings who created ceremonies and sacred objects, or Aboriginal Laws, so they would be remembered and are important in all portions of indigenous life. Native Australian art symbolically links Indigenous Australians with these ancestral spirits. Those who practice this traditional religion believe that they are descended from the spirit beings and associate themselves with specific places related to the ancestors’ stories and transformations.

The elders were responsible for the hierarchal system of training and initiation in which the knowledge of the sacred Dreaming stories are presented to individuals in stages over a lifetime. Kngwarreye was a lifelong custodian of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere. Kngwarreye believed her Dreaming was the source of the creative power and her knowledge. The dynamic and contrasting qualities of her brushstrokes and colors exemplify the ancestral power of the Dreamings in nature.

Kngwarreye’s response when asked the meaning of her works, “whole lot, that’s whole lot”, representing her impression of existence through her experience in the Dreamings.

 

Bark painting depicting three spirit figures, super-natural beings of the Dreamtime

Chaos and Harmony

In contrast to the culture and tradition portrayed in Kngwarrey’s work, African artist Julie Mehretu is entirely removed from African stylistic influences and seeks to express the search for a new African identity and its movement, accommodation, and change and represent its convergence with other cultures on the canvas.

Mehretu was born in Ethiopia in 1970 but moved to the U.S. and traveled extensively. The themes of displacement and relocation recurs in much of Mehretu’s work and not only exemplify her experiences in change and identity, but those of others who were displaced by choice or by force.

Stadia II. Julie Mehretu. 2004 C.E. Ink and acrylic on canvas.

Many of Mehretu’s works represent places where people congregate and pass through during their lives, symbolizing community. Stadia II is a portrayal of a round stadium with tall walls like the Colosseum and overlaid with international emblems, flags, and corporate logos. The drifting background implies a sense of fluctuation and dislocation found in the chaos of the composition. By evoking multiple layers of time, places, and space, Mehretu conveys a sports metaphor in one image that explores competition, advertising, power, war, fanaticism, and media.

By paralleling her image with the Colosseum, the place where Roman warriors fought to the death for the entertainment of the people, Mehretu causes the viewer to reflect on nationalism, commercialization, and politics while using duality to represent change and evolution. This solidifies her exemplification of the new African identity.

Mass-Production

Not only can art be influenced by tradition and culture, but it can reflect the absurdity of culture.

Jeff Koons was raised in York, Pennsylvania, and studied painting in both Chicago and Maryland. In his Banality series, which shows evidence of the influence of Duchamp and Warhol, Koons uses kitsch and elevates the anonymous, cheaply produced objects to a high-art level to combine high art, craftsmanship, and massive scale.

In Pink Panther, Koons portrays a popular cartoon character in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in a sexualized position with Jayne Mansfield, an actress, performer, and centerfold model of the 1950s and 60s.

The sculpture is pastel colored and made of porcelain, giving it a glossy appearance. Koons’s sculpture functions as a commentary on middle-class values, exemplifying the commercialization that begins in childhood with cartoons and materialism of kitsch and continues with sex symbols in film and popular culture.

“Koons, simply put, is Duchamp with lots of ostentatious trimmings. This is not a pretty sight. Duchamp’s ready-mades have an almost monastic austerity. Koons has bulked them up, transforming the ultimate insider’s art into the art that will not shut up. For Koons’s supporters, and they are legion, this is an anti-tradition that has become an honorable tradition, with all that implies about the risks and rewards of legitimacy. The art historians, with their addiction to neat chronologies, will tell you that Duchamp begat Rauschenberg and Johns, who begat Warhol, who begat Koons.”

Jed Pearl (American art critic and author)

While Koons’s work exemplifies the influence of pop culture, the manipulation of mass production within the artwork of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei exemplifies his political activism and philosophies.

Ai Wewei is an outspoken critic of the Communist Party. In January of 2011, the Chinese government razed his studio. His work represents contemporary Chinese engagement both with the art world at large and with the continuing issue of government censorship of the arts in China.

Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds) consists of millions of unique, hand-crafted, porcelain sunflower seeds. Each seed was individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the city of Jingdezhen, China. This is significant as they were mass-produced but unique, which conflicts with the idea of mass production.

The seeds also carry personal associations for Weiwei—they were a common street snack shared by friends and related to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. During this time, propaganda images depicted Chairman Mao as the sun and the mass of people as sunflowers turning toward him, and individuals were stripped of personal freedom. But for Weiwei, the sharing of sunflower seeds was a gesture of human compassion in a time of uncertainty, poverty, and repression.

Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds).

In comparison to Koons’s use of porcelain as kitsch, Weiwei ‘s use of porcelain is significant as it is one of China’s prized exports. The seeds were displayed in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Museum from 2010 to 2011. Each separate seed challenges the readymade concept of the works of Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons and is a commentary on the human condition.

The individual seed is part of artwork and is an artwork to itself.

The works parallels human existence where each is an individual and important, each is also part of something bigger. This also exemplifies Weiwei’s political philosophies as an observation on the reduction of the individual in Communism.

Nature, Sexual Identity, and Spirituality

Some artists reflect the influence of culture and tradition, other represent relationships with nature, spiritual yearning, and sexual identity.

Kiki Smith was trained as an emergency medical technician and draws on her EMT experiences to present the human body not as a poetic expression of the soul but as a fragmented container of organs, flesh, bone, and fluid.

Smith also explores the subjugation of the female body and its erotic interpretation by male artists by using the female’s inner biological systems to represent gender in her art. Her work breaks down the barrier of skin to expose these parts that are usually kept hidden from view and from our own recognition of our real nature.

Ribs is a rib cage constructed out of terracotta, a delicate material that reiterates the concept of fragility, evoking a shudder from the viewer because it deals so coldly with carnal realities.

In Lying with the Wolf, Smith strays from her previous portrayals of the female body and depicts a female nude reclining beside a wolf. The work is one in a series that explores women’s relationships with animals using representations found in visual, literary, and oral histories. The woman is based on the fairy tale character Little Red Riding Hood and Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris who was believed to have had a close relationship with animals and was able to domesticate wolves.

The woman and wolf are depicted as at peace rather than as predator and prey, in an almost sexualized pose. This reflects oneness and union with nature along with a yearning to connect the earthly with the spiritual and embodies the complex relationship of humans with animals.

Ribs. Kiki Smith. 1987 C.E. Terracotta, ink, and thread.

Lying with the Wolf. Kiki Smith. 2001 C.E. Ink and pencil on paper.

 

Racial Divide

Artists intentionally explore the impact of European colonization and its influences. The art of Doris Salcedo, a Columbian-born sculptor, is influenced by her life in Columbia and the impact of European cultures there. Shibboleth is Salcedo’s statement about racism and represents the gap between white Europeans and everyone else.

The word shibboleth is Hebrew in origin and is derived from a story in Judges 12:6 of the Old Testament and Torah. The Gileadites used the pronunciation of the word as a test to identify members of the tribe of Ephraim who were trying to secretly return to their home territory. If they couldn’t say it correctly, they were revealed as Ephraimites and killed. It is now used to mean a custom, principle, or belief that distinguishes a group of people. It is used as a division, a way to exclude those deemed unsuitable.

Shibboleth was installed in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Museum. It is a wound-like crack in the floor that extends through the building, starting as a thin line and expanding to almost a foot wide at its widest point. The work is as much about the crack as it is its emphasis on the negative space, the area around the crack. The crack is filled with a steel mesh fence that is symbolic of the barriers used to define boundaries and divisions.

Salcedo said that “it represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. The space which illegal immigrants occupy is a negative space. And so this piece is a negative space.”

Shibboleth

What Happens After Postmodern Architecture?

The fluctuation in architectural styles in modern art is exemplified in the International Style of Villa Savoye, the connection and unity with nature in Fallingwater, the Postmodern complexity of the House in New Castle County, and the innovation of modern skyscrapers like the Seagram Building. Architecture in the 20th century provided interpenetration of the interior and exterior spaces and incorporated new materials and technologies.

Guggenheim Bilbao Museo

The Guggenheim Bilbao Museo is notable for its innovative postmodern architectural design. Frank Gehry, the architect, designed the Guggenheim to be a collapsing collection of units that is harmonious with the landscape. A combination of irregular asymmetrical and imbalanced forms covered in limestone and titanium gives the building a Space Age character.

At the top is a flower-shaped projection, and a glass-walled atrium in the center allows the infusion of natural light and open views of the landscape. The Guggenheim is an example of Deconstructivism in its imbalance, asymmetry, and irregularity, which is reflected in both the exterior and the interior. The organic, sculptural structure also demonstrates the abilities of computer-assisted design with interconnecting, flowing spaces and dynamic curves.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts

The MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts was also a result of computer-assisted design. The architect, Zaha Hadid, champions the use of pure colors and abstract geometric shapes to express feeling in creative art and harmony with the environment. Her goal is to evince an emotional effect from the viewer through unadorned planes in dynamic arrangements.

The MAXXI is a composition of bending oblong tubes that overlap and intersect, and Hadid paid specific attention to the natural lighting by using thin concrete beams on the ceiling together with glass covering. Many facets of the exterior are reflective due to the glass covering used. Another example of Deconstructivism, the building was designed to provide a fluid interior without redundant wall divisions or interruptions.

MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts.

 Lesson Summary

Artists like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola manipulated technology, like television and video, to create artworks that exemplify cultural and spiritual connections. Other artists appropriate and re-appropriate artworks to explore and reflect cultural, historical, and gender relationships or as a reaction to cultural influence. Architecture in the 20th century provided interpenetration of the interior and exterior spaces and incorporated new materials and technologies.