Contemporary Arts Center Docent Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art History

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Contemporary Arts Center Docent on Modern and Contemporary Art History Modern versus Contemporary Dead Living Objective Subjective Rejection Manipulation Isolated Communal

Ransom By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through

-Dan Cruickshank Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

1 Contemporary Arts Center Docent on Modern and Contemporary Art History Modern versus Contemporary Dead Living Objective Subjective Rejection Manipulation Isolated Communal Modernism what is it? And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined. -John C. Ransom By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression. -Dan Cruickshank Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. -Charles Baudelaire Modern culture is constantly growing more objective. Its tissues grow more and more out of impersonal energies, and absorb less and less the subjective entirety of the individual. -Georg Simmel Modern Trends in the Early Twentieth Century ( ) Henri Matisse Fauvism Pablo Picasso Cubism Umberto Boccioni Futurism DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 11

-Umberto Boccioni Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it.

2 Marcel Duchamp Dada Interesting Quotes What I am after, above all, is expression. - Henri Matisse We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. -Pablo Picasso What is truth for the painters of yesterday is but a falsehood today. -Umberto Boccioni Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object. -Marcel Duchamp The Armory Show, 1913 Works shown by Picasso, Duchamp, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Rodin, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and numerous American artists, including John Marin and Marsden Hartley DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 12

3 Modern Reactions to War ( s) Rene Magritte Surrealism Picasso s Guernica Jean Dubuffet Art Brut Jackson Pollock Gestural Abstraction/Action Painting Abstract Expressionism Mark Rothko Chromatic Abstraction/Color Field Abstract Expressionism DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 13

Moving Toward Contemporary Art: Assemblage (Neo-Dada) and Pop Art (1950 1970) Robert Rauschenberg Neo-Dada Andy Warhol Pop Art Interesting Quotes Pop-Fine-Art is a profession of approbation of mass

-Richard Hamilton What s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.

4 Moving Toward Contemporary Art: Assemblage (Neo-Dada) and Pop Art ( ) Robert Rauschenberg Neo-Dada Andy Warhol Pop Art Interesting Quotes Pop-Fine-Art is a profession of approbation of mass culture, therefore also anti-artistic. It is positive Dada, creative where Dad was destructive. Perhaps it is Mama. -Richard Hamilton What s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. -Andy Warhol DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 14

5 Challenging Visions: Performance Art, Op Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art ( s) Yoko Ono Performance Art Donald Judd Minimalism Victor Vasarely Op Art Joseph Kosuth Conceptual Art DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 15

6 Interesting Quotes Theater takes place all the time, wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading one that this is the case. -John Cage The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting. -Donald Judd In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. -Sol LeWitt DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 16

national histories), a crisis in ideology when ideology no longer seems transparent.

7 Postmodernism what is it? The postmodern as a historical/cultural "condition" based on a dissolution of master narratives or metanarratives (totalizing narrative paradigms like progress and national histories), a crisis in ideology when ideology no longer seems transparent. -Jean-François Lyotard : Postmodernism as a movement in arts and culture corresponding to a new configuration of politics and economics, "late capitalism;" transnational consumer economies based on global scope of capitalism. -Frederic Jameson Notable Themes Questioning Norms YasumasaMorimura Jenny Holzer The most profound things are inexpressible. -Jenny Holzer DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 17

8 The Environment and Place : Nam June Paik Carlos Amorales Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence. -Nam June Paik DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 18

9 Outsider Art and Graffiti : Keith Haring Shepard Fairey Images that are in public space that aren t advertising reawaken a sense of wonder. -Shepard Fairey DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 19

10 Gender and Sexuality : Robert Mapplethorpe Judy Chicago "Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle." -Judy Chicago DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 20

11 Race, Nationality, and Religion : Adrian Piper SairaWasim When nations trade together they make peace not war. -SairaWasim DOCENT HANDBOOK ART HISTORY 5 21

JEFFERSON COLLEGE COURSE SYLLABUS ART107 MODERN ART. 3 Credit Hours. Prepared by: Blake Carroll. Revised by: Blake Carroll May 2016

JEFFERSON COLLEGE COURSE SYLLABUS ART107 MODERN ART 3 Credit Hours Prepared by: Blake Carroll Revised by: Blake Carroll May 2016 Dr. Michael Booker, Division Chair, Communication & Fine Arts Ms. Shirley