Friday, May 2, 2014

WEEK FIFTEEN: QUEER THEORY

In Nelson and Searls Giroux’s piece, “Queer,” they define queer theory in relation to gender theory, and that queer theory disentangles sex acts from gender identity and argues that sexuality is not an essential personal attribute but an available culture category. It attempts to show that there is no natural relation between anatomical parts and what those parts are meant to do or mean in a given context. They say that terminology is important and queer substitutes homosexual because it has ties to medical discourse and is no longer used in self-identification. There are many levels of sexuality and how people define sexuality so they are you cannot limit it to two terms homo and heterosexual when ideas of sex may or may not include genitals (187). Sedgwick and Butler argue that gender and sexuality are “performance discourses” and only secondarily about being (188). You are not born man, woman, homosexual, you become that through acts (189).
In “Queer Wallpaper,” Jennifer Doyle raises questions from her finding and viewing a pieces of ‘gay art’ (close up of male sexual acts) by Warhol in a gay bar. She states that by using queer in relation to art, we are saying something about the importance of sexuality in art (344). Study and discussion of sexuality in art is recent in art history but the subject of sexuality still remains on the outside of the official boundaries of the field (345). Since no one talks about sexuality, most don’t know that Warhol was one of, or the, most famous gay artist. Some of the most influential queer writing about art has taken place outside of the discipline (345).  It goes to say that art historians still don’t want to acknowledge sexuality playing a role in art. An artist’s queerness is in the domain of sexual but also how they make art and the kinds of relationships between people and the art they make (347).
Whitney Davis’s “Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History,” tells the history of who is thought to be the father of art history and how he raised the discipline from just being about artist’s lives and attempted systematic stylistic analysis, historical contextualization and iconographic analysis. Winckelmann integrated two methods of art history: formalism and historicism. He favored historic explanation over subjective aesthetic, political sexual response (41). He redefined classicism to form assigned it to the Egyptians, Archaic Greece, and the Etruscans as Hellenistic art was the pinnacle (42). Modern art history can be seen as an objective account of Winckelmann’s instructions- periodization, stylistic criticism, iconography, historicism, and ethical valuation. We need to give up art history as bringing something to live but as laying it to rest and let it be history (50).
Richard Meyer’s “Identity,” defines identity how individuals recognize themselves through shared conditions or qualities: race, gender, religion, class, or cultural origin. In the 1950s it was a popular science term but then it wasn’t assigned to particular racial, cultural or sexual differences, it was often used to designate a problem (345). Identity wants the affirmation of differences but also desires inclusion and equality (347). In the history of art, let artists decide to either embody their terms of gender, race, religion, and sexuality but also let it exceed or elude them (356). Artists desire to inhabit the space of identity but also avoid it.

Jonathan Katz’s article, “Passive Resistance: On the Success of Queer Artists in Cold War American Art,” was a bit difficult for me to decipher. It may have been how it was written or how he posed his points. Gay artists in the Cold war made art like every aspect of their lives, they appeared to function within the national consensus as anything else was too dangerous (11). Gay or queer self-identification was not very common for fear of what may happen to them in this hostile time both across the seas and at home. Katz wondered how such a despised group of people early on still remained center stage as the model of high cultural achievement and that was his answer (2). They used passivity as a mode of resistance to survive such a hostile culture for gays (15). They used techniques that would be seen at the post-modern. During the Cold War they could still make their art but had to remain partially hidden to enjoy their success. 

WEEK FOURTEEN: POSTCOLONIALISM

 Gayatri Spivak’s article, “Who Claims Alterity?” originated for a symposium and discusses class being the most abstract concept in writing of history in comparison with race and gender. She is not a historian by training and identities being a postcolonial feminist Marxist (p.1093).  She lists the four main legitimizing codes for colonization by imperialists as nationalism, internationalism, secularism, and culturalism (pg.1093).
            Frans Fanon in, “On National Culture,” shows the stand point of cultured individuals of colonized races and their demand for a national culture and the affirmation of such represents a special battlefield (pg.711).  The passion for a national culture is shared with an attempt to move away from Western culture that conforms them so they can connect with their roots. The claim of a national culture would help rehabilitate the nation and is a justification for hope and a future of the national culture.
            Edward Said in “Orientalism,” proposes that orient is mostly a European invention (pg.87).  The Orient was one of the deepest and most recurring images of “the Other” and it helped define the West as its contrasting image, idea and personality. The term is less preferred these days  as it is too vague and refers to colonialism but is still used in academia (pg. 88). Orientalism is a considerable dimension in the modern political-intellectual culture as it has less to do with the Orient as it does with the world as a whole (pg. 91).
            Okwui Enwezor’s “The Black Box,” is extracted from an essay that argues post-colonial conditions and implications it has on the avant-garde (pg. 519). The avant-garde is no longer in the realm of art but in culture and politics. Postcolonialism was a double move consisting of decolonization which was liberation from within, and to exceed the borders of the formally colonized and lay claim to the modern world through media, communication or images. It was considered postmodern’s saving grace but should be considered away from postmodern (pg.521).
            Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” describes how humans have been thought in antisocial and postcolonial writing. The science of climate change forefronts the idea of human being’s geological activity.
            The group project of “Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies” gives a sort of manual for understanding the lingo and the terminology found in postcolonial studies. The important words are bolded and then related and defined in the context of colonial studies as well as their places in literature, the society of colonial studies, and in other aspects of academia and the social world as a whole for easier understanding. 


Key Concepts of PostColonialism Studies
  • Alterity- state of being different. used as alternative to otherness. move away from term otherness, referred to as a subjective person to philosiphical questions, not being considered another person. another person who has another person and society.
    • preferred term because other suggests a controversial term frmo the enlightenment that isnt socially accepted anymore. 
    • accounts for social and political conditions
  • Ambilivalence
    • simulutaneas attraction and repulsion of an object
    • homi k bhaba
    • colonized exist in nature of attraction and repulsion of colonizer    
    • unwelcome because it creates mimicry and mockery of colonizer
      • you change what they are trying to teach you. goes both ways
  • Micegenation
    • fear of black man and white woman, carrying a contaminated child
    • fear of inter-racial mingling
  • Globalization
    • process of individualized and communities influenced by things world wide. process of the world becoming a single place
    • 3 camps
      • 1 sees good thing, access to tech, services, health care, poor people get held
      • 2, rejects globalization, form of domination by first world over third world. see it as a way to jusify hegemony
      • 3, more neutral, tries to critically engage and analyze the process of globalization
    • glocablization and imperialization, 113, demonstrates transumation of imperialization
    • transcultural, also the new imperialism as well
    • US, like the new imperialistic power after WWII, in control of money and a lot of culture, impose our culture on everyone else
    • Fiji, buying land which have the largest water source and thus the natives no longer have access to water and they cant do buy it. 
  • Hybridity
    • going native aspect
    • used instead of cross cultural exchange, removes the white washnes
    • creation of new transcultural forms in colonization
    • two species coming together to form a third that has traits of both
    • going native negativity, racial roots of it, influence of term in imperial discourse, such hybrids without constant up keep could revert back to primitive stock
    • afraid of the purity, contamination, of whiteness,
    • seeing meaning as product rather than intrinsic to objects, etc
  • Metropolis
    • usually not city, center, mother of colony, urban area usually
  • Mimicry
    • you mimic a colonizer, way of doing htings, you cant fully do it because it becomes a mockery in a way
    • mocking: just almost like a disrespectful appropriation

ARTICLES
  • Black Box
    • culture and politics, avant garde no longer in art
    • degree to which globalization is in spaciality, cumulative affects, mediations of temporality. abolish great distances, but uneven
    • pg.21 a double move
      • decolonialization, liberation from within
        • ghandi, martin luther king
      • making empires former other visible, language, communication, everyday. 
    • distinquish pomo is different that poco
      • pomo- michael graves, historical past, take it out of a colonialist, modernist claims for truth, formal move, de-hierarchicalize. focus on the past
      • poco- subverse this. present and a future. not to be found in art, maybe art history or criticism, found in politics, history of avant garde in grand narratives
    • avant garde was foreground until it gets mainstream
      • avant garde in the arts is mainstream. hegemonic. grand narrative
    • we have the frontier, 
    • World Trade Center
      • reactions greatly different
        • some wanted to attack, some wanted to hurt them.  
    • all politics, more educated women are, less radicalism. 
      •    
    • Binaryism
    • 9/11 metaphor what is at stake in experimental politics, 
      • ground zero, metaphor, where do we locate it, what is its context, 
    • military response shows the weakness of the capital system
      • we came after them like they wanted to 
      • empowered them even more
    • call to action for art to respond but how to happen have no idea
  • Postcolonial studies and climate change
    • clarifies why we keep doing things to ourselves
    • subjectivity
    • page 5, human in homi bhaba
      • norm of the WASP is full civic participation and idea and everything is based against this norm
      • thrive or survive?
        • thriving is participating. having art is about thriving. if you are dying of thirst you dont have art. 
    • the stateless, illegal immigrants, those seeking asylum, these are the new colonists. 
      • they are screwed because of how the state exercising control
      • but sometimes captialism depends on them
        • work for nothing, be sexually harrashed and cant report, etc
          • mississippi chicken (film) shows conditions which stuff is produced
    • we stand on the threshold on which borders will become frontiers again
    • page 9.
      • spurred on 2007 report on climate change
      • HUmans in the Anthroprocene
        • global climate affect need for people to move, become colonists, etc, immigrants 
        • humans affect on their environment
        • who is the 'we' in the collective project
        • nature vs culture
          • human is natural force and is nature
        • humans are part of the natural history of the planet due to our effect on the planet
    • pg 11
      • global warming
      • picture of human, social scientists we have always imagined
      • humans act like geological force, liken humans as nonhumans but with agency
      • think of the two figures of the humans simultaneously. human and nonhuman
      • gaia theory, planet living, not floating biosphere
        • tests on daisys, etc very convincing
      • doesn't bring this up but talk about it in class: (life is a social construction, life does not exist) (all connected via media)
      • cant experience ourselves as geographical movement, we are collectively affecting but it is like stopping a tornado, you cant imagine after a few generations, and before
      • we are ontologically here. subject object nautre. we are the subject and the object is nature and thus we feel we can treat it badly
    • Wicked Problem        
      • 1973 climate change is not a one event problem. cannot be fixed
      • we all  have our own personal right system and we execute them on a daily basis. effected by our social positions
        • someone across the world will never buy a car, they have no need, they are worried about their three cows that are their livelihood
    • humans exist in two different modes
      • some who have justice, but know they wont have much of an impact
      • we collectively are indifferent or neutral. run up against our own limits. we see what needs to be done but we cant get together as a group to fix it, or cant care enough
      • we have a mode that is just as blind. people recycle and walk but we turn on the air conditioning that counteracts what we do. 
      • groupthink? mass crowd control?
    • climate change is all about politics
    • postcolonial condition is a political condition
    • profound human condition
    • last 65 million years of human condition have been fine but in the last 300 years are have messed up and hurt the planet
  • Orientalism, Edward Said
    • orient almost european condition, romance, themes, landscapes, etc, aesthetic catagory almost
    • liek race, very materially real, form of power.
    • academic discipline in academia, how we dont use it as often
    • as an apistomology, a way of thought, 
      • east versus west
      • the east is what the west measures itself. like that, it is a very real place. drastic. christianity versus buddhism. 
    • power is the most insidious, the way the East gets the Other. 
    • scientist, scholar, missionary, was in or thought about orient because he could think about it with little interest from the orient. 
    • orientalism is more a symbol of power over the people by europe, etc
    • a distribution of geopolitical context
    • way to understand, control, manipulate what is in your own world
    • these categories, same more about whiteness that blackness, 
      • more about The Occident than the Orient
      • less to do with the orient that it does with our world
    • orientalism is a cultural and political fact. 
  • Spivak, Who Claims Alterity?
    • she was critical of early post colonial works
    • she is feminist marxist.
    • the subject is not some random other, she identifies being indian born
    • the othered subject can be othered in such ways
      • the woman has a worse subject as other. the othered woman is even worse. 
    • lets look at gender and class and how they inflect this position and thought
    • institutionalized education, where you can make people listen
      • captive audience at least, may not exactly believe this point though
        • michelle wallace quote

WEEK THIRTEEN: RACE THEORY PART 2, AMERICAN INDIAN, JEWISH, ASIAN, CHICANO AND LATINO CULTURES

  • Cornel West: New Cultural Politics of difference        
    • world view, but also co-opted
    • you need action outside of institutions to make change
    • impressionism was very outstandish and crazy during contemporary but presently it seems very conservative
    • white affirmation of black genius. needed whiteness to make him a great writer, otherwise he was just 'another black writer'
    • paternal almost, they all had one white guy helping them up.
    • being smart is cool, working hard and being deligent, it is 'the thing to do' rather than play video games. 
    • pg. 95 
      • big problem with intellectual space, sterling rhetoric (versus) and reality. glowing principles and actual reality
    • space of
    • Age of Europe, culture of fragments
    • little can be established unless verified by some institution
    • no one cares about academia except for academia
    • west wants to be known as a good writer, as good as the white men, but he writes differently. he can only get noteriety from white recognition
    • demythification
    • hhow does one aqcuire resources to survive? cultural capital. self confidence to succeed. 
      • engage the capitalist machine?
      • talented seduction. temp seduction. Talented Temp
        • is it black artists who separate themselves from whites like rap or R&B
      • option
        • shuns solidarity
      • critical organic analyst
        • attuned to best what has to offer. grounded. intellectual freedom fighters
    • call to arms. margin, difference, otherness, 
      • (susan samberg says women take themselves out of business by thinking of wanting children and familes and take themselves out.)
    • not specific on what to do
  • Jessica Horton and Chersie Smith
    • aboriginal art is a white construction
    • identity no longer relevant in making of art?
    • post-idenity couold refer to america as being post-race but not the case
    • you have to recognize the difference, the separation of others, recognize how where you come from is different and if you come with/from more than others
  • Janet Berlo
    • some items are not meant to be displayed. some items are meant only for a limited display such as shamans, families, etc
    • we assume the gaze and artifacts are something everyone should see
    • bodies and bones of ancient peoples stuck in museum basements, where they cannot be laid to rest 
    • like James Luna piece, take a picture with a real indian
    • 1830-1930
    • lines between the jewelers case and the specimen case are very slim to none.
    • there are some african art exhibitions but there is no history about pathology, who owns the pieces, the history behind the pieces
    • some of cultures are not for visual entertainment
    • importance of authorship, it matters who makes things, in an anti-Barthes kind of way. 
    • pg. 13 art species versus art objects
      • art as species, versus african arts as artifacts
      • turn art into an artifact of culture, or a species of something
  • Joann Moser, Interview with
    • very chronological. starts with what is happening/happened with China and then moved to now. 
    • pg. 84
      • not taught eastern or wester art history. not proletartian enough. art and literautre is just part of the cultural machine
    • chinese is not a Romance language
    • camera.
    • fortune cookie
      • not an actual chinese thing
    • history is more like a verb
    • made landscape painting to keep herself going
      • not the process
    • abc artists- american born chinese artists
    • memory versus nostalgia
      • different because broken and almost gone.
      • nostalgia is a desire for something that still exists but maybe not see or encounter much
    • becoming american, learning everything new and sometimes wanting to go back to China
      • can never be the same as if she never left china
  •     race, gender, class in american studies classes. 

WEEK TWELVE: RACE THEORY, PART 1, BLACK CULTURES

Bell Hooks, in the article “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” mass culture dictates pleasure is found in racial difference. The stereotype of blondes have more fun has been replaced with imagined trysts with “The Other” (pg. 366). There is a contemporary revival of the interest in the “primitive” which black people and those “non-white” fall under. “Fucking is the other” has become the new desire (pg.367). Face and ethnicity is something to “shop” for in potential sexual partners (pg. 368). Primitive revivalists think that non-whites have more experience so they are more sensual, getting a bit of the Other. They don’t see themselves perpetuating racism.  
Michele Wallace takes the topic of racism in “Hell and Back: On the Road with Blac Feminism” and writes in an almost autobiographical approach. Early in the provinces, black women were supposed to be brainwashed to be feminist, to stand their ground, and she finds it so easy to be black feminist now because of how she was raised. She is honest in her short comings of being a feminist and being a black woman and what that meant in her life. Followed her mother into feminism with her help forms (WSABAL) which is now associated with the Guerilla girls. She wore pseudo African apparel to impede sexual propositions because she was black and sexualized.
In her other article, Michele Wallace confronts the ideals of Modernism and Post-Modernism and where black culture has a place in its formation. ”Nigger, black and schwartze” often interchangeably used to mean abject “other” (pg.40).She explains that modernism and Picasso and cubism took heavily from African art. High class art had to borrow from Africans even if they couldn’t admit it. Black criticism was blocked from the discussion of Modernism, because it is defined as exclusively white and blocked primitivism (pg.47).The tribal objects in Modernism weren’t discovered but instead stolen or appropriated. The temptation to subsume primitivism or neo-primitivism in modernist criticism only occurs because white males continue to dominate and control postmodern criticism (pg. 49)
Henry Louis Gates in “The Black Man’s Burden” compares the Harlem Renaissance movement in NY 1920s to a film interpretation made in Britain during the 1980s called Looking for Langston. The film argues that social identities represent the way we participate in an historical narrative (pg.77). New York and London, in this film become interlaced past and present and blues, jass, Motown: a trans temporal dialogue on the nature of identity and desire and history (pg.78). It was gay as it was black but neither exclusively (pg.78). The film is presenting an aesthetic that can embrace ambiguity but is not a naïve celebration either. It compels its audience to rewrite history as it doesn’t with African American modernism.
Derrick Bell in “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory,” brings up a book published called The Bell Curve. He dicusses blacks in comparison to whites in the realm of academia. The Bell Curve states that blacks score 15 points less than whites on the SAT but in truth they actually score higher. Their results are tampered with to keep whites in the leading position. Blacks are often hired at jobs to make the company feel good about itself for having a black person on staff but the situation turns hostile when the black person actually succeeds.
Cornel West’s article, “Nihilism in Black America,” clearly outlines the two camps in society: the liberal structuralist and the conservative behaviorist. Both discuss the plight for Black America but neither really address the threat of nihilism in black culture. The groups argue that nihilism existed before slavery but was kept in check with boundaries they black community erected. Over time they are crumbling and soon there will be a relapse into nihilism. The politics of conversion may control the issue but never cure it.

In Michele Wallace’s last article, “The Culture War within Culture Wars,” she goes to show that by trying to repair the culture, it is usually still being damaged or causing self-harm to itself, such as Black History month. Black artists end up making what some believe to be racist art or demeaning, even those not trying to end up creating something they don’t wish to. 

  • HELL AND BACK: WALLACE
    • 1997 written 
    • autobiographical piece but also enlightening from her experience
    • black intelligencia
    • honest about her own short comings
      • what she does in this piece
      • malcolm x being shot down
      • vietname
      • experience in the bronx, harlem, music
      • the anxiety and stress of the mother daughter relationship. She always calls her faith not mom
      • wrote for the Voice, left-handed magazine
  • DERRICK BELL
    • He fights about success
    • Black people score at least 15 points less white poeple on SAT because they squew the interpretation of the data based on a book calle The Bell curve. Which this wrong. Blacks usually get higher on ther scores. 
    • Lots of Race issues, arguments, riots, spurned on by the unequal success of the black men versus the white men. Though the academic community feels satisfied that they hired a black person to their staff as if it was some great deed. but when he starts to make something of himself, they turn hostile. Treat him not as well because they are jealous and regret hiring him because he is gaining stature rather than them, white men. 
  • WEST
    • two camps:
      • liberal structuralist
      • conservative behaviorists
  • MICHELE WALLACE, CULTURE WARS ARE CULTURE WARS
    • war is happening in white culture

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.