WEEK ELEVEN: FEMINISM

Why study feminism? 

Separated by waves/generational. Different levels of intensity. 

First wave of feminists, sufferagists. Plus all the movements that women arent mentioned in. Being organized, leaving the house, totalists, prohibition movement, conservationist, labor movements. Protection of children. Mostly upper class women. Upper east side manhattan, blue bloods

1971, women did not have voting rights until then. 

In england 1920-21; had to be 21 and to be  property owner.

SECOND WAVE: 1960s

Gloria Steinum

dont shave your legs, etc! 

biological difference between men and women that they do not want to acknowledge

Third Wave: Katy Roifey, Take Back the Night Marches

Stem areas: you think you have the choice to do whatever you want but you feel, as a woman, intimidated by the hard sciences or the pre-determined stereotypes of women cannot be anything they want, hard sciences, etc, more the dainty ways

Sexuality was squashed in second wave feminist, dressing provacative towards a man is selling yourself short, etc

WHY HAVE THERE BEEN NO GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS, 1971, Linda Nochlin

• Male masters of the Renaissance. Predetermined levels
• Historically, we have looked at art done by white men. The Renaissance men, Michelangelo, Raphael. Because the ideal of beauty is the ideal male nude. Winkelmann
• Sexuality is history has been more fluid, rigidity has  become a recent thing. 
• There is not a model of self, but there are selfs you have the deal with. You are a social being, that has to deal with family, bosses, relationship, what you see in the mirror before you go to bed.
• institutional and educational exclusion of women, not just formal, informal education. Process of self-selection. 
• art making is a bourgeiose production. Explains why art is the way it is. Aristocracy gives the patronage and the education options to pursue art. Women had duties that kept them from the Bourgiose production
• we live in a society that measure us by productivity but there are so many hours in a day. 
• part of lack of institutional and educational limitations of females, is the lack of accessibility. not allowed to study, but not allowed formal programs because of sex, not allowed to draw from a full nude male model they were draped. women could only make portraits of other women, still life, interiors (Mary Cassatt). Women were not allowed to paint HIstory paintings which were the TOP of the art realm
• p. 27. fringe requirements, closed to women. ability to travel freely, organizational factors, self-confidence, etc. Women did not have that 
• footnote number 8: female nude models wore masks at the classes late as 1886
• they were considered sluts and prostitutes at the best. 
• 
  

Nannette Solomon, Art historical cannon, sins of omission

• 345
• roland barthes, not just on death of the author, but before and after constructing of th ebook. the author is a monolithic thing that produces books. 
• same as the father to a child 
• anti-feminist way to describe how we make things. 
• always a relationship between the artist and the teacher, the artist and its creation, always father son. 
• balancec between submission and authority of the artist or teacher. geneology of influence. how we teach art, linear. creates a closed system that no one can enter
• women are kept out of that system because they are not able to be a part of the influence and stream line unless their fathers were artists and taught them
• outright oppression of women is more of a modern thing. more women making things as Artists made things in early Renaissance. Post-Enlightenment caused it all to change. 
• Janson
• exclusion of women artists from his textbook (all art books variations of his)
• he said that no woman artist was important enough to put in
• the works are archivements of the imagination and how it changed the history of art and now women has changed art
• he may hhave been gay? more issue with women then?
• what do you do about the omission?
• 351
• inserting women into the flawed art history canon just reafirms instead of challenges the system
• 
  

CRAIG OWENS

• postmodernism may just be created to include women
• difference of male and female and that is how we get through life. sexual identity. 
• p.11, what can be said in patriarchal society of art. Prizes vision over the other senses        
• we have many great women writers but when it comes to the visual world, it is dominated by men. 
• what is representation? what does it do to women. 
• art is no longer what it is about, it is about what art does. 
• feminists artists not wanting to engage in theory, footnote 19. because it could be an anti-feminist postmodernist movement

Laura Mulvey,  Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975

• two ways of looking:
• voyuerism
• identify with the subject as a measure of ego libido,
• p. 835 need to kill pleasure and make a new level of desire
• relies of psychoanalysis, a specific mode of looking. heterosexual man and heterosexual woman

BODY, Amelia Jones

• body as a representation of death. being is a representation of Death. 
• absense of the body (engagement of the body in art)
• 
  

THE GAZE, Margaret Olin, 

• literal art that is engagint with the art with fried
• art vs. objecthood. versus Fried's idea
• art is visual
• obecthood is tactile and thought of with 
• talks about mulvey article, 
• voyeuristic specticle, mulvey is the voyeur of men. I am watching you watching me. shames the male viewer for his gaze
• limits of mulvey, gays ,etc are ignored in her article
• cassatts work is often looked at by her reading this
• photograph is a representation, she is omitted from the interaction because she cannot reciprocate. 

NORMA BROUDE, Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman or the Cult of True Womanhood

• very out, has a female partner, not lipstick lesbians. Very confrontational in the field
• pg. 36
• at the request of Palmer at the national COlumbia exhibition for the Woman's Building
• was not really reclaimed because no male figures and thus was called by critics, trivial

Jane Fonda on NPR interview

idea of genius being a myth and a construction of man, lineage from teacher and man, father and child issue again

WEEK TEN: POSTMODERNISM

This time for class, instead of all of the members reading the entire collection of assigned work, we each had a single article to read and present to the class. My article was by Michael Fried and it was his "Art and Objecthood" piece written in 1967. Link below if anyone wants to read it for themselves.
(http://atc.berkeley.edu/201/readings/FriedObjcthd.pdf)

The article was cut up into sections so I tried to take notes based on the individual parts of the article. My presentation probably wasn't as clear and understandable as I had hoped.

• I. 
  • Minimal Art, ABC art, primary structure, specific objects: ideological
    • declares and occupies a position (which can be formulated in words). Most have been by its leading practitioners.
      • this distinguishes it modernist art. Also sets differences between Minimal art (literal art), pop and op art. 
        • literalist art is more than an slice of the history of taste. belongs to natural history(of sensibility)
          • not isolated. expression of general and pervasive conditions in history.
          • defines or locates its position that is aspires to occupy.
          • literalist art conceives of itself not as what it aspires or what it is. 
            • motivated by specific reservations, or what it aspires to be
      • wants to be independent art
    • literalist case in painting: rests on two accounts
      • relational character of almost all painting
      • the ubiquitousness, virtual inescapability (pictoral illusion) of painting
    • the more important the shape of support becomes (as in modernist painting) the tighter the situation. 
      • the use of shaped supports like Stella is only prolinging the death
      • should move from the single plane to 3-dimensions
    • literalist POV on sculpture is more ambiguous. Judd calls Specific Objects as more than sculpture. Robert Morris: has own literalist work of lapsed traditions of Constructivist sculpture
      • only few disagreements, mostly agree. EX: opposed to sculpture that is like painting "made part by part and addition". Judd associates it with anthropomorphism, multi-spaced and inflected
      • they have value of wholeness, singleness, indivisibilty of work's being. Single Specific object
        • critical factor for both is SHAPE. shape of object secures its wholeness. emphasis on shape for the impression that most of judds and morris's pieces are hollow
• II.
  • shape also important in paintings of past years. Shape as fundamentary property VS medium of painting.
  • success of painting depends on ability to to hold a convincing shape- to stave off questions of whether or not it does so
    • question comes if paintings (things in question) are experienced as paintings or as objects
    • modernist painting: must defeat its own objecthood, crucial factor is shape that must belong to a painting. Must be pictorial but not literal.
    • all about presence: size or look of non-art. Non-art is sought in 3D where sculpture was and where everything material was not art. Greenberg. Flatness appreciated
    • objecthood = condition of non-art
    • contrast btwn literalist objecthood VS modernist paintings self-imposes imperitave that it could suspend own objecthood through medium of shape
• III.
  • answer proposed? Literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing  other than plea of new genre of theatre: which is now negation of art.
    • theatrical because literalist art more concerned with circumstances which beholder experiences literalist work
    • Morris's theatricality obvious: the physical distance and largness and psychically distanced. whats the subject into question, object.
• IV.
  • stage presence to literalist art. Theatrical quality
    • function, obtrusiveness, aggressiveness of literal work, the complexity extorts from the viewer a complicity
• V.
• latent or hidden naturalist, indeed anthropomorphic is at core of literalist theory and practice
• Tony Smith unfinished highway

I also took notes on the articles my classmates presented. 

• Krauss, Sculpture and the Expanded Field
• Robert Morris, Smithson, Christo, bruce "running corridors"
• Discussion of history of sculpture, almost synomous with monument
• site-construction
• marked sites
• sculpture 
• semiotic background. her diagram deals with that
• negation between landscape, architecture, sculpture
• not-landscape becomes landscape in sculpture (alice allcot. etc)
• move out of idea of based within a certain site or
• expanded field. new terms. new categories she pushes under Post-modernism
• critic talking, not really making anything
• post-modernism is the medium itself, possible argument of hers. 
• Craig Owens responds to this and thinks she is wrong. Earth Words was his response. Post-modernism isnt making up new categories he argues. 
• Craig Owens, Allegorical Impulse
• allegory: general idea- what it represents. Attitude as well as technique. Occurs when one text is doubled by another. Stories that want to convey meaning: usually have moral meaning, religious overtones, social messages
• why does he start with impulse?
• being revived in art. that is disappeared in moderism and is coming back in post-modernism
• allegorical imagery as appropriation
• sherry levine, EX. 
• hybridity
• site-specificity
• opening up a field of criticism for it. Look at what the thing is doing in critical realm rather than try to make new categories. How does it operate, how do we interact with it
• you could use this on objects other than art. literature. theatre. etc
• allegory and symbol
• tries to differentiate them but also relate them 
• allegory is a separate thing. 
• symbols are a part of the whole, 
• saying that post-modernism really isnt a new thing. he is arguing that allegory can be there as long as we re-argue what it is. 
• allegory is a closed system. goldilocks the story, and its meaning. what happens when you take away its meaning? can you? does it make it different. becomes the appropriation of goldilocks. itself a text.
• allegory is trying to account for post-modernism
• Boudriard
• Bourjes, poet. made a map so detail and big that it covered the land. changes depending on territory so people live on the map, eventually fraying and ruining it, becoming part of the land. people confused the map for the actual land
• similkra: copy for which there is no original   
• difficulty deciding what is reality and what is simulation
• illness: pretend to be ill and lay in bed all day. cough a lot
• nothing is real anymore?
• Simulations in our lives
• Religion:
• divinity revealed in icon: visible incarnation? authority? powerful and fascinating but are they actually god or the representation of god?
• if icons are just representations, is God just a simulation of something?
• define things by negating: describe things by what they are not
• Disneyland
• perfect model of all the entangled order of simulation. play at all worlds. Crowds drawn to minituratized.
• cycle of power in simmulation. either helps the simulation of power or the simulation falls apart and then makes a new power
• part one
• part two 
• Jameson
• main works: Van Gogh Peasant Shoes, Warhol Diamond Dust Shoes
• deconstruction of content
• uses Edward Munch's Scream to approach his point
• embodiment of the issues of human nature
• emotion projected out in desperate communication. lack of ears?
• expressive concept. modernist concept. separation of self, feeling of alientation in society of anxiety
• form identity 
• waning of affect. 
• commonification of human figure
• feelings in post-modern is 
• depth replaced with surface in post-modern 
• focus on raw material and content
• "like so many turnips, shorn from their earlier life world" the diamond dust shoes have no deeper meaning or place for the viewer
• Krimp /Hohoster
• Habermaus
• aethetic modernity
• no thingn such as post moderism. we live in a post modern culture but modernism is not yet complete
• 18th art institutes normal like, 19th art for arts sake, surrealists
• how we mimght be able to make it out of modernism. 
• problem is everyday expert.
• bourgeious and expectations viewers want from it. laymen people can see it and through education want to become experts on it
• competent consumer
• Leotard:
• anything goes: realism of money
• knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows

WEEK NINE: SITUATIONISM AND RADICAL THEORY

The topic of discussion today was The Society of the Spectacle which is a book written by Guy Debord. We had a little bit of preliminary discussion of our thoughts on the book before we finished off the class by watching the movie. It was very interesting but I am glad we took mini breaks between because the English subtitles were hard to read and the French narration was quite monotonous and I was worried I would fall asleep even though the film was engaging!

In our discussion we made some quick points.

• Debord was clearly a Marxist in his way of thinking. and that society at large is dark because we let ourselves be controlled
• the media does not always guarantee truth. We are consumed by the media and it was made to mold us to what society deems correct
• he did believe there was a way out of the spectacle and there is hope. He was a political activist. He sparked the 1968 almost revolution. Students to workers who were not authorized by unions stopped working. Over 1/5 of the workforce in Paris.
• The spectacle always lives in the present and is the social relation of images. Meditated by images
• The only real relation between people is through mediated images. The spectacle does away with history and the future. If the worker is always in the present, there is not hope for the future.
• The spectacle oppresses and represses the workers. 
• We have to use images to disrupt the spectacle. 
• Derive (way to, with our own body and movement, move with political leisure) and strategy. SI: Situationist (post-marxistsocialist) were the group he created and led. What if you moved through space not to do work?
• psychogeography: why space is what it is
• Michel Creterau (situationist piece) how to move the body to subvert mind and body
• Revolution happens through the individual. through the body
• Performance art comes around this time. 
• what it means to "soft-machine." to have your body owned by the state
• It was a call to arms.
• Even now the spectacle exists. It is our social relationship between people through mediated images. 
• religion is no longer needed. Media is the new religion.
• He made his film in 1973. He didn't necessarily want it to be a collection film but that's what it became. He had always been interested in film.
• His book really acts like a spectacle. It has no linear narrative, and you see only flashes of think thinking. He said it almost works like a script.
• His group of Situationists did not last long. He kicked out most of the founding members and then eventually disbanded the group. 
• The film was dedicated to his second wife Alice Becker. 

WEEK SEVEN: POST-STRUCTURALISM

Post Structuralis

m- BARTHES

-DERRIDA

-KRISTIA

Reception Theory- WOLFGANG KEMP

Phenomenology- MERLEAU-PONTY

-HUSSERAL

Discourse Analysis/Theory- FOUCAULT

Hermeneutics- HEIDEGGER

• Foucault: What is an Author?
  • the term author is different than the actual person who writes it
  • names have signification
  • the meaning of author has been altered and the name almost makes for a classification
  • content is not important but the author itself/ or the writing becomes a symbol for the author despite the content itself
  • particularity of writing disappears so there is a collection of work, cohesive,a collection of Twain
  • through authorship you are liberating yourself because you become something else
  • cohension of work, overarching theme or design, etc. brand to fit into the linear narrative of art
  • hegemonic discourse is what an author is
  • move from authorship to transcendental anonymity
  • cant just accept the lack of author that has left a void but interrogate it
  • many shifts during French Revolution
  • authorship by nature is a discourse and suggestive spce, not a void 
  • poster, letter, contract- non have an author. specific investigations of writing
  • authorship gives us a standard of quality, coherense, stylistic uniformity, temporal coherense (time date of author)
  • aart history no longer wants intent because there is no way to prove it, no biography because it has nothing to do with the understanding and interpretation of the works
• Barthes, Death of an Author
  • we know now a line of text is not a line or words but a multi-dimensional in which works clash, nothing original anymore, death of the "author-god"
  • master with original thought (like Mark Twain) is false because inspiration and thought has to come frmo someone
    • already come up with the same words. not linear
  • reading is where writing actually happens
  • impose an author onto a text limits and closes off interpretation of the text, limit of author relationship
  • white paintings of rausenberg in black mountain college. Cage sees them, landind strips, collect dust, collect life
  • reader in which all the interpretations of writing become found and lost. 
    • birth of the reader comes at cost of death of the author
  • expect our ideas to be legible in the real world
• Barthes, From Work to Text
  • the work is the thing (a book), the text is the discursive space that interrogates the book
  • plurality of meaning but not a cohesion of meaning, lack of meaning, 
  • rely on your personal perspective
  • respect for the manuscript and the authors declared intentions
    • way we establish cultureal hegemony, establish power
    • patriarchal system of power
  • freedom from the author, gives a source of pleasure in reading, of a work
  • meaning is a closed system
• postructionalism- antihumanist. meaning of meanings. promotes new way of looking at things. 
• "new art history"
  • no longer talking about history of art but of art history, discursive space, no tjust art works and their makers

WEEK SIX: SEMIOTICS

                Semiotics had me grappling with it in understanding and in order to pin down and put to paper what it meant for the history of art in the impressive collection of readings. Damisch questions the validity of semiotics attempt to analyze products of art because iconography already seems to have that job and offers that semiotics could just be a new label for a study in art that already existed (234). To understand iconography, the viewer must have pre-existing knowledge and operates in the privileged realm of representation (238). He argues the only way semiotics stands a chance in the history of art is when a modern image challenges the viewer’s taste and make them see works in a new light similar to the Impressionists (241).

            Panofsky confronts semiotics from a less straightforward perspective and instead shines light on the artist Poussin and discusses the signs and symbols he uses in his Classicist work. Poussin removes the intense drama from the Counter-Reformation that had so long shaped art into a calmer form and motif (258). The symbols are died down and less obtrusive giving a more relaxed semiotic interpretation of the scenes. Despite the misinterpretation of the meaning Et in Arcadia ego the new conception of the Tomb by Poussin retained the symbol of death but changed the moral (262,262).

            Marin continues with the Arcadian Shepherds but focuses on the iconographical approach rather than Panofsky’s iconographical anaylsis. As viewers we are not needed in the narration of the images and our interpretations are merely speculative (266). He states that the viewer does not need to interpret the signs of an image as we forget we are looking at a picture (276). The Arcadian Shepherds create iconic dialogue with their gazes as we have no need to apply meaning just simply understand them as they are (269).

            Bryson and Bal separate their article in sections of the work of art historians as they propose semiotic tools can further art historical analysis (244). The problem begins with context itself and art history’s definition oversimplifies rather than enriches the argument (243). The article references Derrida who insisted meaning rose from movement of sign to the next (247). Authorship is another problem they emphasize as it designates property and offers as little explanation of signs similar to context (254, 255). In art history it is almost impossible to remove the narrative study of genre to man to work (256).

            Barthes discusses mythology and displays it as belonging to general sciences, and coextensive with linguistics which is semiology (694). Mythology because it is a study of a type of speech as myths can be passed orally it is considered a type of sign by Saussure in semiology and it studies ideas in forms (694, 695). Semiology can be defined by the signified and the signifier and the sign, such as roses could signify a person’s passion and it is hard to dissociate roses from the message they typically carry (695, 696). The signifier is meaning or form, the signified is the concept, and the sign in relation of myths is signification and with this terminology a semiologist can discuess writing and pictures (697, 698). Schapiro, like Barthes, uses terminology of signifier and signified, influenced by Saussure. Schapiro focuses his article on what he calls the “image-sign” and how non-mimetic elements affect the overall picture. He examines whether or not pure convention of the signs are responsible for the mimetic elements or if they are rooted to the meaning originally in the sign. He mostly lists elements that concern him and the examples of the forms they take in art as frames and if the frame is the focus of the picture (11).

            Potts discusses the theory of sign and how, reduced to bare essentials, it can carry the ground of social conventions (21). Linguistic models have been brought into the study of art as it is our main means of communications (24). We endow an image with a sign as a personification as they psychologically charge and challenge us (29).

            Mitchell writes on trying to understand what an image is. He argues that you should not try to distinguish literal images from metaphorical ones. Words and images are often seen as invasions by literary analysis but he encourages it (52). He argues that art history would not exist if they could not describe the art it studies (53). 


 SEMIOTICS AND STRUCTURALISM

• semiotics: study of signs
• a non-mimetic element of an image
• word and image.         
• signifier and the signified
• Anthropology side
• Levi-Strauss
• Hurst
• leci n'est une pipe
• not a real pipe, symbol or representation of a pipe
• images probably more prevalent 
• picture worth a thousand words, etc
• seeing is believing
• Panofsky
• different interpretations of Et Arcadia in ego
• either "I too lived in Arcadia" "I am now dead"
• very tenses influence the translation
• Closed meaning that misinterpreated could lead to alternate readings
• communicational exchange
• what does it mean to represent?
• semiotics vs semantics
• discourse vs narrative
• Marin
• thinks Panofsky does not raise the correct questions
• open eliptical sentence where the verb is supplied by the reader in the translations. no closed meaning. Not two way dialogue. 
• incomplete sentence, some parts have been erased. intended to be indescernable
• could have specfic but not fixed meanings
• self-reflective history
• history itself representation of death, a fixed story and closed narrative not open to interpretation. 
• Poussin recognizes that the icon of the image continues to reinterate itself as modernly painted so it cannot be properly closed and fixed 
• representation is a process and not a close ended thing
• Bal and Bryson
• conneseurship:
• antique roadshow
• expert in specific fields. 
• value art based on specific narrative place in history
• craftsmanship, history, social history
• history and cultural history is the enemy of semiotics because of the past influence
• fixed way of viewing images
• context in text itself
• objective truth. offers up information that is truth
• fixed viewpoint again
• chicken and the egg. find stories and use them to explain the image
• reinforces its out existence
• metaphor is a literary construct 
• art history already uses metaphor and allegory so why not move into semiotics?
• Damisch
• root to history so the image means this because of history

WEEK FIVE: PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

This week we read a bunch of Frued, Jung, Lacan, Gombirch, and Bryson. You always hear about and, if you take a psychology class, you learn about Freud. I was exciting to finally read some of his work after always hearing about it. The fact is, you hear all these people saying all the old psychologists and psychiatrists wrote about it sex and it is true that there is a lot of sexual elements to these articles.

• Freud Symbolism in Dreams
• distortion in dreams due to censorship. If eliminated, dreams would still not be understandable
• become aware of reason for obscurity of dreams in gap technique
• silent elements. Associations of single elements in dreams
• translations for objects in dreams. Similar to modern dream interpretation books?
• constant translations could make a norm we hear and then integrate into our dreams from our own knowledge. So it could be viewed in an overview sense rather than the dreamers interpretation
• meaning symbols associated with set meanings despite the dreamer
• constant relation of dream element and translation is symbolic one. symbol of unconscious dream thought
• substitution of part for the whole
• allusion
• imagery
• symbolic
• Symbols allow the meaning of dreams to be understood without having to question the dreamer. If symbols commonly appear, personality and life conditions known, an interpretation could be make immediately
• appeals to vanity of interpreter and impresses dreamer. Not meant to trick and should not be proposed that symbol method replaced free association.
• During interpretation, the analyst must not know the events of previous day that stimulated the dream.
• Associations of persons analyzed are sources we gain our knowledge from of what is called mental situation
• Symbolism is not peculiar to dreams nor exclusively characteristic of them. Use of symbolism in dreams was not a discovery of psychoanalysis. Philosopher K.A. Scherner. Psychoanalysis confirmed the discovery through modifying it
• Symbolic relation is essentially comparison but subject to particular condition though we cannot say what they are. Not all objects in dreams can be symbolic
• Fascination that the dreamer is unaware of the symbolic relation but makes use of it
• Houses often representations of the human body, family, birth and death and nakedness
• houses are often interpreted as male if smooth and as a woman if rough
• parents are Kings and Queens to be exalted in dreams while children and siblings are vermin, little creatures
• Birth was referenced by water, falling into or climbing out, saving someone from it or being saved. Those fit into the relation of mother and child
• Dying is often represented by a journey or traveling
• Clothes and uniforms often stand for nakedness
• And of course the many sexual symbols
• Symbols for male genitals: Number 3. Penis represented by similar forms. Sticks, poles, trees, umbrellas. Also penetrating and injuring: weapons, fire-arms. Objects that contain water. Objects able to elongate. Rise in defiance of gravity. Balloons, zeppelins. Symbolize erections as the dreamer flies up
• Females are usually symbols enclosing a space or acting as a receptacle. Pits, hollows, caves, ships, cupboards, stoves, rooms. Snails and mussels. Church and chapel are symbols for women. Breasts represented by apples, peaches, fruit.
• Pubic Hair for both sexes: Woods and thickets, complicated landscape of a woman's genitals
• female organ also a jewel case for a place to put sweetmeats
• House supports
• Wood symbolizes woman and mother. German and Greek root words
• Death is a journey: ex. you tell small children a person has gone away instead of death
• Freud Phantasy-Making and Art
• Day dreaming is/similar to phantasy making
• relinquished pleasure in physical life to continue mental life. free from demands of reality in our phantasies
• in day dreams is imaginary happiness and return of gratification
• non-distorted precursor to a night dream
• unconscious is when we have night dreams and conscious for day dreams
• path from phantasy to reality is art. Turns away from reality and transfers interest and libido on creation of wishes in life of phantasy
• true artists can collaborate his day dreams so they lose the personal note to become enjoyable to others
• ability to mold material until it expresses the idea of his phantasy faithfully
• In phantasy: able to win the love of women, honor and power
• Freud Relation of Poet to Daydreaming
• akin to writing of imagination. Gives hope to one day become a writer
• writers distance themselves from each other. Non-writers think that everyone has the heart of a poet
• writer does the same things as a child at play. The writer and child create a world of phantasy that is taken seriously and lots invested within it while they also keep it separate from reality.
• Tangible objects and capable things of representations are called Plays while people who present them are Players
• things in real life produce no pleasure so poets are needed
• as people grow, they cease to play and give up the pleasure of doing so
• cannot give up pleasure so they trade it for something else. Give up real objects to indulge in phantasy
• Adults become ashamed of their day dreams and conceal them because they are a continuation of play. An adult knows that they shouldn't play or day dream and instead make their way in the world. So they hide their day dreams
• unsatisfied people make phantasies. Impelling wishes either erotic or to exalt the person making them. Wishes could employ events in present to plan a future based on the pattern of the past
• Jung On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
• investigation required between psychology and art
• art is a psychological activity. so it can be approached from a psychological angle. Art comes from psychic motives
• only the process of art that is the creation process not its essential nature is psychology. Question of art not by psychologists but side of aesthetics
• similar to religion. it art and religion cannot be explained they become mere subdivisions of psychology
• artistic creation can only be attempted to be explained
• neuroses as work of art through professional bias? never occur to layman's eyes
• poet influenced by his father, mother, sexual repression relationships
• scientific treatment of art reveal personal threads that artist intentionally or not put into work
• Freud thinks maybe reach back into childhood as part of influence of creation
• psychopathia sexualis
• "every artist is a narcissist"
• reductive method of  Freud is medical one
• investigate morbid psychic phenomena. Getting around consciousness to reach psychic background or unconscious
• responds that repressed contents must have negative traits-infantile sexual, obscene, criminal- so unacceptable to conscious
• strips work of art from shimmery robes and exposes nakedness and drabness of Homo sapiens
• conscious contents give us a clue to unconscious background are incorrectly called symbols by Freud. Not true symbols, since his theory just have role of signs or symbols of subliminal process 
• Freud's technique of interpretation is obviously one-sided and therefore erroneous, displays bias
• to truly psychologically analyze art, must ride itself of medical procedure
• escaped from limitations of personal and soared beyond the personal concerns of creator
• meaning and individuality of work of art inhere within it and not it its extrinsic capacities according to own laws and shaping itself to fulfillment of own creative purpose
• prose as well as poetry spring wholly from authors intention to produce particular result. exercises keenest judgement and choose words with complete freedom. material completely under his control. expresses what he wants and nothing else.
• such as Athena from Zeus's head
• sometimes poet thinks he knows exactly what he is saying but actually tells more
• primordial image, archetype is a figure, a demon human or process, that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears when creative fantasy is freely expressed
• Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function
• small child can recognize reflection in mirror by themselves or with mother holding the,
• Ideal-I: root-stock of secondary identifications
• Truth and Stereotype
• "temperament" or "personality" or artist, their selective preferences, may be one of the reasons for transformation and interpretation of the same image
• also including the style of the period and the artist
• natural adjustment in "mental state" which we perform automatically looking at old illustrations
• stylized. we know the trees didn't truly look like that but we understand they are trees
• style rules even when an artist is trying to reproduce nature faithfully. artist can only render what his tool  and medium allow. technique restricts freedom of choice
• George Inness and Lackawanna Valley. Paint 5 tracks when there was only 1. Hid with a puff of smoke which wasnt there. Lied in the advertisement rather than painting what he saw. 
• Ex: Bayeux tapestry told of Battle of Hastings but was not what it actually looked like
• sometimes qualities of actual subject but liberties taken
• not a process of abstraction, a tendency to simplify. represents the first approximate category rather than tighten to fit the form it is to reproduce
• danger to confuse how figure is drawn with the way it is seen
• reproduce simplest figures constitutes process itself by no means psychologically simple. essentially constructive or reconstructive character, subjects employed, reproduction was mediated pre-eminently through agency of verbal and geometrical formulae
• medieval art student- problem of tradition through copy (hieroglyphic to cat)
• misinterpretation of the draftsman
• the familiar will always remain likely starting point for rendering the unfamiliar: existing presentation will always exert its spell over artist even while he tries to record the truth
• Leonardo himself has  been known to have made mistakes in his anatomical drawings
• View of Derwentwater by Mr. Chiang Yee. Seeing English scenery through "Chinese eyes"
• painting is an activity and the artist will therefore tend to see what he paints rather than to paint what he sees.
• no neutral naturalism. the artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a "copy" of reality
• phrase the "language of art" is more than a loose metaphor. between spoken words which are conventional signs and painting which uses "natural" signs to "imitate" reality
• Home to the layman, how much of what we call "seeing" is conditioned by habits and expectations
• rests on confusion of pictures, words, and statements
• if art is conceptual, can not be true or false, like pictures, can only be useful for the formation of descriptions
• language does not give name to pre-existing things or concepts so much as it articulates the world of our experience

WEEK TWO: MODERNISM

I am very behind in my posts. Taking six classes this semester, four of them being art history classes and one being another seminar and working has made me feel extremely overwhelmed. I need to do much better to catch up and not fall behind as badly as I have so far.

I am taking a leap backwards to catch up to weeks I did not have a precis in but had to take notes and read the articles nonetheless. I will readily admit that almost all of the readings we have done have felt like they flew right over my head. I have tried my hardest to understand and connect the dots but I always feel a tiny bit behind. I will try harder and take better notes when I am reading. Discussing them in class really does help me understand all the dense material we read.

For Week Two we had articles over modernism. We had readings by Harrison, Kant, Foucault, Greenberg, Pippin, and Habermas. Being my first week, I read them and felt a bit overwhelmed with the level of reading and the degree of writing in these articles. I did have some previous knowledge of Greenberg so it helped a little bit. I mostly made notes in the margins of my printed notes and highlighted parts I found to be important. I discovered quickly that while it was more easily read, it was harder to find what I wanted to read about to follow along in class without separate notes. This point on I did better and wrote notes as I read online.

MODERNISM

• Thomas Hart Benton on the cover of Time, December 24, 1934
• Start papers with a quote from Foucault
• Artists will pick and choose from the writings of art historians
• part of the dialogue artists have to use. 
• Hegel is the way we teach art history, how we teach art history. Move in a linear motion to something "greater". Linear model of understanding progress in art

GREENBERG

• degree in English (literature) . Grew up in New York. Worldly New York Jew. Being Jewish during WWII. wrote Kitsch when around 28-29. Very left leaning, mysoginyst. 

        AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH

• After Romanticism the world keeps moving WEST
• Italy: West to Paris: THEN WWII: West then to New York
• lots of Europeans came over to America, NY
• Cultural influx
• NY Steals the idea of Modern Art (1945 American art even considered)
• Separates Avant-garde and Kitsch by the distinction between intellectual/ wealthy art from the newly coming art of the newly wealthy and earning money
• high art considered abstract
• mention sentimental, "precious moments," kitschy
• focus on the medium, flatness, etc
• politics: propaganda, Mussolini, Hitler.
• political regime are now patrons: Catholic Church, etc, war, hitler
• Avant-garde: superior consciousness of history. keep culture moving
• Front Guard: term of military
• not useful to those in power because it is innocent, pg. 20
• "high art." People no longer have time to learn the language, the history behind high art to enjoy it or communicate it to the 'common people'
• people of the working class do not have time to busy themselves with high art
• despite the attempt at teaching, the masses go to entertainment culture
• Kitsch: easy to absorb that type of feeling into propaganda
• Nazi Germany, etc
• kitschy art became a weapon too easily,
• why Greenberg was so afraid of it, as a Jew
• does not see it necessary
• kitsch would not be possible with mass production, industrialism
• kitsch, destroying folk culture
• become  the first universal culture
• "native cultures" being corrupted
• before globalization had the chance to corrupt, that is why is upset. Placing getting kitschy art in the most remote places, folk culture being oventaken by industrialization
• folk is more an interpretation of handmade and local, while kitsch is trying to replace it with art with a sense of control
• (IMAGES IN SLIDE SHOW)
• Hart Benton, Arts of the West, 1932
• images help in rebuilding of American, New Deal
• post-war modernism? 
• teacher of Pollock
• Pollock, Auntumn Rhythm: Num. 30, 1950
• said he wanted to go in reverse of his teacher's style
• Greenberg liked him: flatness, purity, only comparable to itself, to painting, no illusionistic, something you get all at once
• Hans Namuth Photographs of Jackson Pollock, 1950
• Harold Rosenberg/Clement Greenberg
• Rosenberg said art is in the action, but Greenberg did not agree because it was like theatre
• Mark Rothko, Yellow Band, (1903-70)
• went from Gestural to color field
• also approved by Greenberg
• opticallity of you, you get it all at once
• Barnett Numan
• thrived under Greenberg because he would go into their studios and give them ways to paint their art
• american gov used kitschy posters to promote freedom, also send paintings of abstract paintings abroad into Europe, places that were occupied
• after war, and in Soviet Union, sent abstract art into gallery shows next to local kitschy local gov art to show what you can do in a free nation
• Normal Rockwell
• Regionalist, Greenberg though were backawter and not approved of
• Only thought of white males in his appropriate and praise of art. Not inluding women, colored people, etc
• Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, Number 11, 1952
• Helen Frankenthaler, Mountain
• Morris Louis
• Kenneth Noland, Turnsole
• Jules Olitski
• spray paint to make his optical paintings
• Robert Motherwell
• worked at Black Mountain College

TOWARDS A NEWER LAOCOON

• Why did we move to abstraction and why it has to become pure
• Jean-Leon Gerome, what was wrong with art
• painting suffered the most under the Romantics. Death of painting
• our eyes are supposed to have the ability have an all over, take into account of the entire plane of the canvas. Immediate
• literature painting not good because it makes you linger and then makes you think of something other than the painting itself. does not satisfy a self-criticality
• there could never remain a pure abstraction because now we think of what Greenberg said about flatness and no longer are just obseving the painting itself. So his own ideals are no longer relevant
• very powerful legacy, Greenberg
• Baudelaire and Manet go hand in hand, friends
• Courbet has representation in his painting but on the canvas destroys it so you just focus on the paintings
• Vibration of painting as the opticality that you get the entire painting at once
• Manet achieves flatness
• puts opposition in colors, 
• no modeling, creates flatness
• takes historical subject matter, Olympia vs Venus of Urbino
• held at bay by her glance, representation to reinfornce flatness, a prostitute, 
• Olympia, typical name of prostitute at his time

MODERNISM: Harrison

• Modernity
• Modern is also like contemporary
• Modernization like industrialization
• Modernism, movement in various fields: music, literature, art
• Modernity: the condition to be modern in a specific time
• David first modernist in lots of ways
• Modernism is a social and a formal problem
• Paris post revolution, mass production, prositutes on the streets, new social phenomena (women on streets w/o companions, voyeuristic Paris, Prostitutes wear same clothing as upper class lady) Social codes of class kept upper from lower but now a growing middle class
• "Luncheon on the Grass", scene we will not be a part of, flat paper doll of the prostitute, no room for mistinterpretation.
• Baudelaire: modernity does not exist in real life and only produced in "art" in representations.
• to be a Modern Person, is to understand ones own construction. You produce yourself. You are not happening, you are making yourself as a product. 
• art inseperable from morality and utility
• Epoch, big period, era
• Baudelaire enjoyed Manet because he took up the portraits and images of people, the lies of social class enabled by industrialization
• Courbet, country side middle class land owners, lower class move to city to try and find work
• funerals and burials become a place of class because lower class individuals could not pay for tickets to go to pay respects and if they could afford the ticket, they could not afford to be off of work
• Recall flatness by classical sculpture but use line. Use off black box to limit paintings as an illusion
• Modernism allows for this to exist

MODERNIST PAINTING: Greenberg

• we get to purity because art has to justify itself
• optical illusion, using representation in subject matter, seen into but not seen as a window, no moving into the space but can see into it optically all at once

WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? Kant

• enlightenment is courage to think for oneself with a bit of obediance
• Praise Frederick II of Prussia for his tolerance of religion and arts, etc. Progressive leader
• Kant tries to pat Fred on the back while showing other leaders how to be great with a little bit of pushing
• Enlightenment (capital E) is scientific and religious of the time. Politically important, during American and French Revolution. Final break from feudalism
• enlightenment (lower case e) is Kant's idea. Think for oneself, etc. Exercising things the Enlightenment promoted. Broadening ones mind. 
• tied to observation as the way to learn about the world and yourself
• abandon religion in favor of science.  Scientific method. When modern science comes into play. Through experience and observation.
• can grow through experience and become different, smarter.
• not fixed to your social statement
• Rousseau, John Locke, etc
• focuses on religion because Fred II is Protestant and big fan of religious freedom
• very Critical of Catholic Church during Enlightenment because of the power it held in many kingdoms, religion is nothing without faith
• Privately, you are a cog in a machine and must stick with certain rules of what is expected of you
• Publically you are allowed to speak your mind on whatever you desire
• only allowed that type of speech because of a democratic system
• Enlightenment is seen as betterment in present day. Experience. 
• you have a theory and then argue it and prove a point, etc
• We are a work in progress. Calls to arms
• WHY DOES GREENBERG GO TO KANT?
• universality, universal truth
• examination of the self
• always history and constemporary
• how they appear and how they really are
• think critically, modernity is the moment when the self is critical
• Foucault says that the main questions to ask ourselves in enlightenment is how do we come to know ourselves, how do we fit it the social sphere? how do we react to our own actions?

HABERMAS

• marks the moment of modernity as a self critical one but ebings to mark philosphy as a self critical and self reflexive thing.
• one would exercise (in foucaults words) an etemology, engaged in the contemporary moment you are in and understand the historical moments that are produced through the structures of which you understand yourself. 
• idenity producecd through fields of knowledge, in the widest sense
• science, math, language
• problems with foucaults reading of kant is his writings on power
• doesnt seem to apply his own analysis of Kant and rather takes Kant at his word and doesn't acknowledge that Kant comes from a certain historical moment. 
• Kant doesnt deal with power, Fred is just a pawn in system of power, give and take, no middle class, no one to rise up and rebel
• wouldn't appeal to middle class person working in factory, etc
• how can you explode something when you are part of the result of it?

WHAT WAS ABSTRACT ART? Pippin

• brings together all the strains, dealing with self, paintings, modernity, etc
• gradual dematerialization of understand
• towards greater abstraction. painting ends with romanticism, the arts will go on and end in poetry
• connect the self through is concept of the spirit (god, gheistheim, divine) 
• divine is errative humanism, manifests itself in self criticism, critical thought
• Hegel anticipates abtraction, flat painting, has inadequetly addressed
• beauty and pleasure to education, self-consciousness
• meaning making becomes about art making, the self actualized through art becomes art is the most self reflexive. anticipates abstraction
• nature is not human, not divine but illusion
• the eye sees without the mind, with the theory behind it, Greenberg Modernism. Move later
• social self is tied to art, rooted is philosphical discourse
• Cant go from Kant to Greenberg, much in between and he leaves out a lot. 
• we are not beyond modernism, footnote 31
• modernity bigger project, misreading to see them as responses as formal problems in paint as they are tied to social issues, historical, religious and basica philosophical problems of being.

Modernity is an on-going project