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CONTEMPORARY ART, Blue, Purple, Aqua, Orange, Yellow, Green, Mediums…

- - - - Not all art is meant to be pondered. It does not all have deep philosophical, moral, symbolic, or even personal significance. It might not represent anything, document reality, educate, provoke feelings, or communicate the artist's individuality. Art can simply be sensational: this art is only about aesthetic experience.
    - - Dan Flavin
        
        Untitled (1970). Flavin said of his art: "It's as plain and direct an art as I think you'll find" and "It's an easy-in, easy-out situation." Viewers are not meant to stare at his art for long periods of time; if they do, they might start inventing context that isn't there. This art is what it is: florescent light placed intelligently in an architectural environment, creating a site-specific situation which is completed by the viewer. Donald Judd referred to Flavin's tubes as "a phenomenon."
      - Tony Smith
        
        Tau (1961-62). Smith, a former architect, modeled this sculpture from tetrahedral modules as a space lattice, with positive and negative space equally important. His work has a kinetic quality which demands a certain amount of action and involvement from the viewer. As with Flavin's work, the viewer is meant to encounter it and move on.
  - - - Stretching art into public space sometimes gave the audience participatory experiences. These opportunities to create art and to help determine an outcome were welcomed at this time. Many people felt vulnerable and not in control over their own lives due to civil unrest and our country's involvement in the highly unpopular Vietnam War. Additionally, people not in "high" society had typically been excluded from the art world.
    - - Yoko Ono
        
        Cut Piece (1964). In this performance, Ono sits on stage and invites audience members to come up, one by one, to cut a piece of her clothing off of her body. What and how much they cut is their choice. Each cut is a form of violence and reveals the vulnerability of the artist. It is also an indictment of that audience: it is in their power to refuse and allow Ono to keep her modesty, and yet they do not.
      - Rirkrit Tiravanija
        
        Pad Thai (1990). Collapsing the boundaries of art and daily life, Tiravanija created his local pad thai in a NY gallery. The audience, as participants, got to see it being made, eat it, and talk about it. The performance has been called a "globalizing moment," as the artist essentially sold an experience from his own culture to a largely white audience.
  - - - Photo documentation is more than its name suggests: it can be a way of experiencing artwork. It may be an alternative to seeing it in person if the work is difficult to get to (as in Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels) the primary or ONLY way of experiencing the work, or something in between-- a part of an in-person experience.
    - - Heather Cassils
        
        Becoming An Image (2013). In this unique performance, the audience experiences the work through photos as those photos are taken. In a dark gallery room, Cassils, a trans ceramicist, shapes a giant block of clay by beating and kicking it with her bare body as a photographer takes photographs. The audience can only see Cassils for a split second here or there as the camera flash goes off. The work is ephemeral and fleeting, and gives the viewer the sense of the enormity of what we keep in the dark from each other.
      - Tehching Shieh
        
        One Year Performance: Time Clock Piece (1980-81). Every hour for a year, the artist punched a time clock and photographed himself. He used stop motion animation technique to put these together into a film, where the viewer watches the passage of time through his growing hair. Experiencing Shieh's work in this way rather than in person emphasizes the fact that as an illegal alien, he is separated from society. As we watch the film, we try to imagine what it might have been like to make it, but most of us, safe in our citizenship, will never know.
      - Mary Miss
        
        Vs In A Field (1971). Like Shieh's performance, this work was designed to be viewed in photographs. Miss's reason was that she didn't want people to come up and look at the Vs as an object; she was interested in marking out space, and wanted to focus the viewer's experience on the space itself rather than the objects in it. This was not her only work designed to be experienced in photographs: she also made works in her small studio with no intention of showing them outside of it. Documenting work that nobody had seen was very new.
  - - - Durational art implies a specific construction of time, deliberately shaped to give the viewer a particular experience. Rather than encounter a work completely all at once, the viewer experiences it as it unfolds over time.
    - - Robert Smithson
        
        Spiral Jetty (1970). This work's durational experience has multiple levels. There is the time it takes to drive to its remote location in Utah, then the walk on the artwork itself, making your way over rocks and sand, the spiraling shape giving you views in all directions. You become aware of layers of time other than your own, such as the geologic time it took for gasses trapped in lava to form the pocked surface of the basalt rocks. As the lake is shallow, the appearance of the artwork shifts, sometimes becoming invisible as rising water covers it.
      - Andy Warhol
        
        Empire (1964). This 8-hour black and white film of the Empire State Building tested the limits of durational experience and of what people would accept as film. Designed as a cinematic film rather than an installation, this was not shown in a gallery setting where viewers could wander in and out; it was expected that people sit for the full 8 hours, a tough demand on an audience. Shown at silent film speed (16 fps) the viewer becomes perceptually aware of the flicker and mechanisms of the film projector.
    - - Performance, understood as process, liberates both artist and spectator. It is best understood across temporalities, i.e. past and present, or doing (the now) and done (the past; the object or accomplishment).
        As a singular act, performance cannot be recorded or documented because then it would become something else.
        But performance can also work across time - be reenacted - and then it becomes about past, present, and future (doing, done, redoing).
        Humans learn by doing (a form of belonging) and repetition, but performance adds to this the possibility of change, critique, and creativity. Performance can use the human body to transmit knowledge or, because it is a social construction, artificiality.
        
        Performance is a social practice: it implies an audience.
        Performances take place at a designated space and time, and may pass quickly - leaving only a memory - or span hours, days, or years.
        Framing situates an act as performance. How the performance is framed can change its meaning.
        The paradox: "Neither true nor false, neither good nor bad, liberating or repressive, performance is radically unstable" yet "distills a truth that is 'more true' than life." Life itself is a stage.
  - - - What concerned him was theatricality, theater being "the negation of art." A work that relies on durational experience, and on the experience of the beholder, to garner meaning is not art. Minimalist (or what Fried called literalist) works fall into this category. Without meaning or metaphor, claimed Fried, there is nothing to discuss in terms of these works. They are "hollow."
        Fried believed that site-situational work, being "concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters" the work, is just like every day: "the situation belongs to the beholder-- it is his situation" and that includes even the beholder's body. Added to the imperative to defeat objecthood, therefore, is the imperative to "defeat or suspend theater."
- - - - Art is an expression of human consciousness.
        The world of phenomena which we perceive with our senses is an "amorphous stew" behind which are concealed eternal, unchanging forms. We perceive these forms through the supersensory perspective of theory.
        The material world (the amorphous stew) is an illusion.
        Matter is just the temporary stuffing which fills forms.
        Forms are containers cobbled together for phenomena. They are eternal and unchanging, and they equate with IDEA.
  - - - About
        
        Certain artistic mediums (fibers, beads, etc.) have historically been assigned a lower "status" due to their association with "feminine crafts," applied arts, and hobbycraft.
        In the second half of the 20th century, this status underwent a radical shift in some artistic circles, as many artists began to appreciate such materials for their own merits.
        Art made with "craft materials" still fights for its place in artistic discourse, but the inclusion of craft materials in fine art speaks to an era which is growing less medium-specific.
      - Artist
        
        Mickalene Thomas
        
        Unable to afford expensive art materials as a student, Thomas began using craft materials (rhinestones, glitter, sequins) in her fine art work. This gave the materials power.
        These materials also reflect herself and her identity and are a nod to the female artists throughout history who used them in their work.
        They are a symbol of our "will to adorn," meaning we dress to present a certain image.
        In Portrait of Mnonja (2010) these materials help Thomas evoke a new feminine ideal: power, sophistication, vulnerability, and beauty. Focused and thoughtful, Mnonja claims her space.
    - - About
        
        As a performance art medium, the human body became controversial when used in ways which harmed or posed danger to the artist.
        This tested the boundaries of what is acceptable as art.
        In extreme cases, the body is so abstracted from being human that it is perceived by the audience as medium only; thus, they may fail to intervene when the artist is in mortal danger.
        
        See also: Process - Reframing Roles - Object
      - Artists
        
        Chris Burden
        
        Shoot (1970). Burden stood against a gallery wall as a friend shot him. As his friend was not a great marksman, the bullet meant to graze his arm - releasing a single drop of blood - went all the way through his arm. Burden was taken to the hospital.
        Burden claimed his work was an attempt to control fate, or at least give the illusion that one could.
        
        See also: Context - About the Time
        
        He Yungchang
        
        For He Yungchang, doing extreme things to his body was a rejection of China's Communist rule and how that system regulates what one can and cannot do. Within his own body, he has freedom.
        In Dialogue With Water (1999) he hangs upside-down by a crane after a doctor had cut incisions into his arm. He slices his arm at the water in mimicry of Xugu, a 19th century Chinese artist known for eccentric works.
    - - About
        
        When artists decided that a lasting art object was unnecessary for the creation of art, they became free to employ elusive or impermanent mediums such as snow, air, or lightning.
        Such artwork was often conceived as social commentary, or in the case of Lightning Field, as a means of understanding our relationship with the environment.
      - Artists
        
        David Hammons
        
        Blizz-aard Ball Sale (1983). An example of social commentary, Hammons sat on a sidewalk in NYC and sold snowballs to passers-by as art pieces. As snow will eventually evaporate, the idea of adhering value to this impermanent medium undercut the art world's valuation of art objects. It also transferred power to a new audience which could not afford art made with traditional mediums (and priced accordingly).
        
        Yves Klein
        
        Transfer of a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1962). This work consists of documentation of the sale of an "immaterial zone," or empty space, in exchange for gold (half of which was tossed into the Seine River). Klein sold eight of these before his death.
        
        Walter de Maria
        
        Lightning Field (1977). The artist made an intervention: 400 steel rods set into a west New Mexico landscape. A situation now exists whereby the viewer may see and experience the drama, beauty, and power of lightning raining from the sky.
        As lightning is an elusive medium, however, this is no guarantee. And as one must sign up for a viewing day six months in advance, it is quite unlikely.
    - - Artist
        
        Chris Ofili
        
        Ofili is best known for intricate, sometimes abstract paintings incorporating beads, resin, magazine cutouts, and glitter.
        He addresses racial and sexual stereotypes in a somewhat humorous way, and references blaxploitation films, comic books, African cave paintings, rap music, and mythology.
        He says: "A lot of black art that came before was set up to critique the system. I thought that was boring. Basically, you would have to be right all the time. I'm not interested in being right all the time....I wanted to be sincere and outrageous and friendly and rude and experimental and conventional. I just wanted to try to be who I am."
        
        In The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) Ofili's use of elephant dung left some viewers aghast, despite its connection to African ideas of regeneration. Angels fashioned from pornographic magazine cutouts were also deemed offensive by some people; however, others argue that they address Mary's chastity, and allude to the hyper-sexualization of Black bodies in our society.
      - About
        
        Contemporary art has no shortage of divisive, sensitive topics (feminism, racism, gender identity, morality) but sometimes it is the medium itself that some viewers find objectionable or inappropriate.
        In some cases, artists use offensive materials to point out repugnant aspects of ourselves or our world.
        In other cases, their use is accepted by one culture, but is distasteful to another.
  - - - About
        
        In the 1920s, it was discovered that occupying a middle ground between painting and music, (through the medium of film) offered something painting could not: a sense of time and duration. The movements of abstract shapes and patterns related to each other over time.
        This work led to the alternative forms of film of the expanded cinema of the 1960s-70s, and then to the projected image installations of the 1990s.
      - Artist
        
        Walter Ruttman
        
        Lichtspiel: Opus 1 (1921). Dissatisfied with painting, Ruttman found the moving image and its temporal element more exciting.
        In this intermedia work, Ruttman unifies art and technology by painting images in oil paint on glass, then using a film camera to record, frame by frame, to show these paintings in motion.
        He found that oil paint on class could be easily shifted or wiped away, allowing for fluid moving images.
        
        See Expansion: Cinema
    - - About
        
        Working intermedially between ceramics and painting, at least in the way Woodman did (see "Artist" for example of her work) allows us the opportunity to reconsider what the basic, essential elements of ceramics and painting are.
        The collapse of each material, by leading to such consideration, could ultimately push each material forward.
      - Artist
        
        Betty Woodman
        
        Betty's Room (2011). Woodman has virtually collapsed the distinction between the flatness of painting and the three-dimensionality of ceramics under the rubric of domesticity and the role of the domestic.
        Here, an acrylic on canvas featuring a domestic interior (her bedroom) sits on the gallery floor, leaning against the wall. The vase-like shapes at the bottom are flat ceramic objects which appear to emerge from the pictorial.
    - - About
        
        Unifying art and technology, some early film artists developed a new way of looking at film stock: as a sculptural, manipulatable object which could be shaped, carved, and inscribed.
        Technology is given a sense of the handmade.
      - Artist
        
        Len Lye
        
        Free Radicals (1958). Lye carved directly onto the film stock, frame by frame, to create a wild assemblage of movement and pure abstraction, but one which is still connected to a history of music and movement in art.
        A New Zealand artist who worked closely with indigenous tribes, he has been accused of cultural appropriation for using music from an African tribe for this film.
  - - - Artist
        
        Anthony Caro
        
        Yellow Swing (1965). Caro's sculpture is well-crafted and displays the internal unity typical of Modernist artwork; his use of steel across all parts helps the viewer see this construction as a whole despite the variety of shapes.
      - Types
        
        Steel: Ductile and malleable, steel can be forged, rolled, extruded and welded. Its use in industry provided a plentiful supply of scraps and ready-made parts.
        Concrete: Particularly durable, concrete was suitable for outdoor sculptures, making it popular for public commissions.
        Plastic: A wide-ranging material, plastics can be hard and durable, soft and flexible, stitched, inflated, and colored.
      - Reasons for Use
        
        20th century artists veered from marble and bronze.
        One reason was practicality: the Industrial Revolution, with its rapid mechanization and technological innovation, had made certain materials plentiful and inexpensive.
        Second, the use of these materials in industry attracted artists who wanted their work to reflect the current modernized time.
    - - About
        
        Through the use of found objects, material is used not just for form or composition, but for an interrogation of the history and context of the material of the object itself, and a thinking through of how that can be refashioned, repurposed, or reincarnated into new forms and new possibilities.
        We see these things anew in a moment after their obsolescence.
      - Artists
        
        Amber Cowan
        
        Working primarily with recycled and vintage American pressed glass, Cowan investigates the history of the American Industrial Glass Movement. She creates fantastical wall sculptures from discarded pieces she finds at thrift shops and flea markets.
        In Sky Blue, Cobalt, and Slag (2015) each individual piece retains a kind of autonomy and history, even as Cowan unifies them, allowing them to spring to life as something fresh. There is both newness and legacy in these materials.
        
        Melvin Edwards
        
        Edwards composes artwork from found, industrial culture: steel scrap metal that recalls his family history of railroad workers, which he finds while wandering around.
        His investigation of this material is blended with a transhistorical way of thinking about legacies of slavery and the African diaspora.
        In Some Bright Morning (Lynch Fragments Series) (1963) the compressed tension between the solid masses of steel refers to lynching, fragmentation, and political activism. Welding takes away the ephemerality normally felt in something discarded.
        
        Bettye Saar
        
        Saar's innovative assemblages, incorporating "contemptible collectibles" like Mamie dolls, were a direct indictment of racist imagery.
        In Whitey's Way (1970) Saar lines up rows of white ceramic alligators, one of which holds a black child in its jaws, to reference legends of white people using black children as alligator bait.
        Later, unsure of the clarity of her message, Saar added another found object, a racist postcard, to the artwork.
        
        See Prisons: Dean Gillespie
    - - Artists
        
        Mary Duffy
        
        Stories of a Body (1990-). Born without arms, Duffy walks onto stage unclothed, presenting herself to the audience. In doing so, she reclaims her female body as one which is beautiful, sexual and normal. Her lack of arms is not an absence, but a mark of her personal experience.
        
        Tehching Hsieh
        
        One Year Performance: Time Clock Piece (1980-81). For 100 days, Hsieh, an illegal alien, punches a time clock every hour and photographs himself. The audience, viewing the photos, is made aware of time passing by seeing Hsieh's hair grow.
      - Origins
        
        More than a tool, the human body, through performance, became art itself.
        Performance art originated with Alan Kaprow's Happenings, which grew from his Environments. Kaprow was revolting against the exclusivity of the art world by placing art in public space, and thus into the audience's daily life.
        Photo documentation allowed each era recreating Kaprow's artworks to leave its own distinct interpretation, shaped by its own concerns, to posterity.
    - - Human / Nature Connection
        
        About
        
        Humans and their activities are depicted as part of the natural world, merged with the environment, or interconnected with the ecosystem.
        Artwork often explored the effects of time, and allowed for the natural, inevitable disintegration and evolution of the physical world.
        
        Artists
        
        Ana Mendieta
        
        Silueta Muerta series (1978). Mendieta dug, bled, or buried various objects to create the appearance of human figures emerging from the landscape.
        Rather than being physically represented, the human body has marked, or indexed, the natural form.
        Mendieta said she was marking the omnipresent female force in these spaces.
        
        Robert Smithson
        
        Partially Buried Woodshed (1970). Smithson deposited earth onto the roof of a woodshed at Kent State University until the central beam cracked.
        He was interested in entropy: the idea of negative growth, or the return to initial state. In this case, entropy refers to the cracking, breaking, and dissolving of the human-made shed back into the earth over time.
      - Human Intervention on Landscape
        
        Land Art Movement
        
        About
        
        Land art of the late 1960s-70s occurred as the environmental movement brought a growing awareness of human impact on the planet.
        The artists' goal was to mark the landscape with a human intervention in a place where humans are not normally present.
        Artists set up the conditions for a durational experience, which included the journey to seek out the artwork in addition to viewing or interacting with the artwork itself.
        
        Artists
        
        Nancy Holt
        
        Sun Tunnels (1973-76). Holt's work in Utah's Great Basin Desert consists of four 9' diameter, 18' long concrete cylinders aligned in pairs on the axis of the rising and setting sun at summer and winter solstice.
        It is site-specific, located on a vast, flat, clear, uninterrupted expanse of land. It has the appearance of having been abandoned, and requires a long drive to find.
        The Sun Tunnels provide an anchor and scale in this expanse: a human-made frame of reference.
        The visitor walks around and inside of the cylinders, which frame views of each other and the landscape. Holes cut in them form constellations and throw light into the interior. Depending on the time of day and season, the experience can vary greatly.
        
        Michael Heizer
        
        Double Negative (1969-70). In the fluid landscape of the Nevada desert, Heizer cut divots into the earth in a straight line.
        Straight lines don't exist in landscapes like this, so the intervention of the human hand is evident.
        As with Holt's Sun Tunnels, the drive to find this artwork is long, and it is difficult without a GPS.
        Time of day affects how the sun hits the crevice, altering the visitors' experience as they walk to the edge and down into this slash in the land.
- - - - Nicole R. Fleetwood: "Marking Time" #
        
        Here in the richest country in the world, we use prisons as a catch-all for difficult problems: “a myriad of social, economic, political, ecological, and health crises.” The prison art studio is not just part of that constraint, however: it is a part of the broad cultural production within the prison, a place of "imaginative possibility" where "incarcerated people dream, plan, collect material, and make art that often goes undetected by prison authorities and unlicensed by teachers and administrators." It is important to consider art made by incarcerated people as part of the larger world of contemporary art. Failing to do so, forcing this art to remain outside of contemporary discourse, contributes to the "violent erasure" of this imprisoned population.
        Incarcerated artists work within particular constraints, such as limited availability of materials, and where they are not allowed to be making art, detection by prison staff. In spite of this, artists forge ahead, using their art practice to "resist the isolation, exploitation, and dehumanization of carceral facilities." In some cases, risks are great: to be "thrown in the hole," receive an extended sentence, or have possessions confiscated. Many consider the risks worth taking in order to assert their humanity and proclaim personal value and meaning when they feel largely forgotten by the outside world. Constraints become innovative experiments. Paint on leaves when there is no canvas; build a mural piece by piece, collage on bedsheets as they can be acquired; enlist the help of friends to stealthily procure found objects.
        Incarceration can strip away civil rights using the power to make visible and invisible. Carceral visuality keeps the imprisoned stigmatized as criminals and enforces the idea that their primary relationship is to the punitive state. This is far-reaching: "Convicts are never free," states artist Gil Batle, whether imprisoned or released. The growing interest in exhibiting carceral art may help change that.
        The importance to society of carceral art reaches even beyond concern for the civil rights of the incarcerated. "There are lessons here, developed by the punished and imprisoned, about how to create, to forge relations, and to embody and represent one's life under unimaginable conditions."
      - Museums
        
        Artists
        
        ASCO
        
        Spray Paint LACMA (1972). After the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art told this LatinX group that "Chicanos make graffiti, not art," they spray painted their names onto the side of the museum in protest. This combination of performance art and institutional critique was a foundational moment for graffiti, helping elevate what some consider a "low" art.
        
        Fred Wilson
        
        Cabinetmaking 1820-1960 (1992-93). Wilson is interested in how museum collections are displayed; a museum creates meaning according to what they want you to know. Part of a site-specific installation titled "Mining the Museum," Wilson sifted through collections at the Maryland Historical Society and placed four fancy parlor chairs facing a cruciform wooden whipping post. Without manipulating these objects other than positioning them, Wilson changes how you think about them. The fancy chairs may seem elegant without this context, but here the viewer wonders about the relationship of the people who sat in them to the person tied to the whipping post.
        
        Isaac Julian
        
        The Attendant (1993). Set in the Wilburforce Museum, which is devoted to slavery, this film follows a fictional Black museum guard on his rounds. In this critique, Julian identifies three spaces for revision: the establishment (museum) the history of slavery (largely written by white people) and historical artwork, specifically Francois-Auguste Biard’s painting, Scene on the Coast of Africa. He brings a history of slavery to life but refashions it as a gay BDSM fantasy. This flips the power hierarchy within the museum, putting the margins – here, the memory and fantasies of a gay, Black male (the attendant) – in charge.
      - Prisons
        
        Artists
        
        Dean Gillespie
        
        Spiz's Dinette (1998). Conspiring to work against the authority of the prison, inmate Gillespie enlisted the help of a network of friends to garner everyday materials like sewing pins, cigarette foil, and tea bags to enable him to build his miniatures. He worked at night, fashioning nostalgic models of Americana that reminded him of his childhood and life outside the prison. Collectors have recently offered to buy them due to carceral art gaining popularity, but Gillespie (who is now free) refuses to sell them. The strict conditions under which they were created has made him see them as family.
        
        James "Yaya" Hough
        
        I Am The Economy (2018). Hough's critique of prisons shows the Black body as a product of the system, churning out money while being treated impersonally, or as something other than human. It is a direct take on the violence of the prison situation, imagining the incarcerated as being callously put into a shredder for the sake of the economy, and points to a notion in Fanon's writing: of being treated as an "object in the midst of other objects."
    - - Franz Fanon: "The Fact of Blackness"
        
        We ALL have a sense of searching for meaning as an individual; we all look for our own purpose. However, the fact of Blackness, of being Black, is that you are treated as an "object in the midst of other objects" rather than as a subject or a human. You are not treated as someone who can find meaning in things and are not granted subjectivity.
        Whiteness, with its sense of purity, had to create something evil (had to have an opposite). So White people created the condition of Blackness in order to maintain their own status and power over Black people. Because he exists only in relation to the White man, there is no "being" for the Black man.
        Racial images and stereotypes end up defining what and who Black people can be. Things like "tom-toms" and phrases like "Sho' good eatin," cultural things which are outside of being and outside of individuals, are predetermining Blackness.
        Fanon writes: "I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men." He is searching for equality, or more importantly, the granting of basic humanity. Fanon is not just fighting against the idea of Black inferiority; he is fighting the idea of nonexistence, or nonbeing.
        
        Fanon presents this writing as a narrative of a man's journey toward realizing the social consequences of blackness. The story initially asserts equality among all men, but having to acknowledge Third Person Consciousness (a person is predetermined by body, race, and history) the character (Fanon himself) realizes that in order to assert himself as a Black man, he must accept being nonhuman.
        Fanon's journey goes from initial awareness (from the White stare) to shock (when a child on a train is frightened by “the Negro”) to an attempt to rationalize his equality with White people by pointing to science and philosophy (only to find that stereotypes override rationality, and White people have certain “intractable” lines that can’t be crossed, like racial mixing) to the Negritude movement (where he didn’t fit in either, because his lived experience was too Western).
        
        Fanon wants to find a way to think of Black life as a way of resisting or fighting against this idea of nonbeing, even though there is admittedly a long road ahead: "From time to time one would like to stop. To state reality is a wearing task."
      - About
        
        Some contemporary artists use their art to expose inequities and cruelties both past and present. Some, like Walker and Gary, force us to acknowledge what we already know but are tempted not to admit. Directing her commentary toward today's America, Walker reminds us that we still live with the consequences of our history of slavery in the form of continued racism and prejudices. Gary shows us places where Blackness is still unwelcome. Other artists, like Abramovic, expose vulnerabilities (here, our fear of relying on others). Critiquing society shines a light on both how far we have come and how far we have yet to go to reach equality in our society.
      - Artists
        
        Kara Walker
        
        The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableaux of Eva in Heaven (1995). Silhouette portraiture was popular in the 18th-19th century. Often private images were kept in the home to commemorate an absent figure, and can be considered emblems of White power and privilege. With their psychological flatness (we cannot see expressions, so are not given access to the internal lives of these figures) Walker is able to use these black paper cutouts "to try and uncover the often subtle and uncomfortable ways racism, and racist and sexist stereotypes influence and script our everyday lives."
        The idea of a script being followed relates Walker closely to Fanon, who likewise believed in a preexisting imposition on Black subjects of a certain way of being in advance.
        
        Ja'Tovia Gary
        
        The Giverny Document (2019). Filmed on the streets of Harlem and in Claude Monet's gardens in Giverny, France, this 41-minute film explores issues of bodily autonomy and safety of Black women. In doing so, it not only documents Blackness, but explores the spaces Blackness has not traditionally been allowed. We see, for example, performer Nina Simone singing "Feelings" in her own soulful way, then demanding (and receiving) applause, and Gary inserting herself into Monet's gardens, struggling to remain, but successful.
        
        Marina Abramovic and Ulay
        
        Breathing In, Breathing Out (1977). Abramovic was notorious for dangerous performances in which she put her body in some kind of danger. Such performances called out the apathy of audiences to images of violence in a striking indictment, as the audience frequently did not intervene to make sure she was okay. This performance, however, presents a different kind of exchange: she and her partner, Ulay, breathe in and out for each other. This is still about relying on someone else to take action to keep you safe and alive, but here is done with someone she trusts rather than strangers (an audience). This gives this work as sense of assurance and peace.
  - - - . To people in what Hooks calls the center, which refers to the space of the oppressor/ colonizer/ dominant culture, the word “marginalized” can have negative connotations—little power, little influence, different, other. But Hooks, who grew up in the margin (and chooses to locate herself there now, even though her physical location is within the hegemonic culture) refuses to accept that negative view. For Hooks, the margin is a place of radical openness: an inclusive place of power, creativity, and resistance where you can construct “a new world order…that does not demand forgetting” who you are.
        Importantly, Hooks is not advocating a return to the margin to separate from the center. Instead, unlike the “radical critical thinkers” at universities who only wanted to hear about her pain and struggle, then to re-write her stories and tell them back to her as their own – “no need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself” – she invites oppressors to meet her there in the margin, to “enter that space,” and promises to greet them as liberator rather than as colonizer. The benefits to be gained there are diverse viewpoints, rich stories, and depth for our more familiar histories.
        Hooks accepts the Black legacy of dispersal and fragmentation, but instead of feeling limited by it, she considers it a force for revealing more fully who she can become. This essay is a clarion call to transform the world rather than assimilate, and if read broadly, speaks to innumerable ways that people might feel they exist on the outside looking in. We can find our power there if we stop believing derogatory language that weakens us.
    - - Artists
        
        Kameelah Janan Rasheed
        
        Rasheed creates text-based work which she views as a collaboration between herself and the reader/viewer. She plays with language, writing something either very legible or very opaque, encouraging people to slow down and do the work of understanding it rather than rush to conclusions. It is an invitation to stop and think with her, and a proxy for thinking about how we can "read" other parts of the world with more care... like each other. If we pursue understanding, we can stop stereotyping. As a Muslim, she has experienced Islamophobia herself, and it has left her shaken.
        
        Heather Cassils
        
        Additionally mapped under "photo documentation," Cassils is here also due to their work addressing the history of LGBTQIA violence, representation, struggle, and survival. They direct our gaze toward the human condition, using their own body to address how we see each other and how we seek to manipulate ourselves and our lives.
      - About
        
        Under-represented voices are rising up and speaking through art, sometimes specifically about their experience. Artists who are part of the LGBTQIA community or who practice minority religions are now an important and recognized force in today's art world. Because their art covers broader subject matter than just their place in these communities, they are scattered all around this mind map. Some which are described elsewhere include Mickalene Thomas, Heather Cassils, Andy Warhol, and Isaac Julian.
    - - About
        
        BIPOC voices were well represented in this class, so much so that it is difficult if not impossible to decide on "representative" artists. What we can derive from this is that the overall significance of this group cannot be overstated! BIPOC artwork explores not only issues of race and representation, but material, performance, feminist work, LGBTQIA issues, abstraction, dance, history and more. It is not definable simply by the skin color of its makers.
      - Artists
        
        Kevin Jerome Everson
        
        Ninety-Three (2008). Everson uses 16mm film to document the everyday, quotidian social life of Black Americans, particularly in the industrial Midwest. In this film, a 93-year-old Black man breathes in and out, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake for 3 minutes in slow motion. The film speaks to the idea of labor and the passage of time: he has had a long life, perhaps one of difficulty and struggle, and that is mimicked here. The tonal range of the black and white film also focuses the viewer on the formal experiment Everson conducts in this: as the man vanquishes more candle flames, the film grows steadily darker until the viewer would not even know this is a Black man. The audience too is left in darkness, as this is shown in an unlit gallery, connecting them to the man they watch.
        
        Maren Hassinger
        
        Leaning (1980). Hassinger is a Black artist whose work does not speak directly to issues of race. She is interested in dance and performance, not just in terms of the body, but in the role of her materials. The 32 bundles of wire and rope in this piece are splayed at the top and bottom to stand on the ground, and there is a sense of motion or play between them that opens up new ways to think about the space between them. Hassinger's art, through abstraction, challenges the dominant modes of representative logic that seem to require of artists the burden of representation.
    - - About
        
        Representation for disability in the arts can take various forms. Art made by a disabled person isn't necessarily disability art, which refers to art where disability is the theme. The wheelchair dancer Alice Sheppard, for instance, who spoke here at Alfred U., uses her chair to create compelling movements, but those movements are about the dance and expression rather than her disabled legs themselves. Other disabled people might use art to tell the world about their experience or to normalize their atypical bodies.
      - Artist
        
        Mary Duffy
        
        Cutting The Ties That Bind (1987). Duffy confronts the viewer with her naked body, reappropriating it and taking control to redress what she sees as an imbalance in media representation of the disabled. Feeling like she is already stripped bare by people's naked stares, and more especially by the medical profession, she reveals the hypocrisy in the idea that a human without arms is not generally considered beautiful, yet the paragon of classical beauty, the Venus de Milo, is similarly armless and considered perfection. She considers her work an "exploration of difference."
    - - About
        
        For some marginalized artists, giving themselves a voice through creating art was risky. Illegal aliens risk deportation. The incarcerated risk punishment. Through their artwork, the viewer is able to gain a sense of what life is like when one occupies a marginal, unsafe position in society.
      - Artist
        
        Tehching Hsieh
        
        Outdoor Piece (1981-82). Hsieh rented out his apartment and lived outside for one year. To passers-by, it would not be apparent that he was performing an art piece; if he built a fire to stay warm or took a bath in the East River, he would just be seen as a homeless person. As with true homeless people, we do not gain an interior view of his experience, even through the map on which he noted the structure of his days. He is performing the invisibility and lack of recognition of people marked by their civil status. Particularly as an illegal alien, he is a "non-person," marked by being excluded or outside society.
        
        Jesse Krimes
        
        Apokaluptein 16389067 (2014). Krimes, a working-class artist who was publicly shamed after being sentenced to federal prison, used 39 individual bedsheets and a collage of print media images (using hair gel and a spoon to transfer them) to create a visual narrative based on the Greek word "Apokalupsis," which has to do with revelation, an unveiling, or disclosing the truth of something. Smuggling each sheet out through the mail individually over three years, he was able to stitch the artwork together after he was released, making both the artwork and himself whole at the same time.
  - - - Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantanamo Bay (2017-18). Guantanamo Bay was a carceral facility established during the War on Terror which became notorious for cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment of the people housed there. Although this show had been approved by US Forces, the Pentagon tried to shut it down and took control of detainee artwork thereafter, calling it property of the US government. What they found dangerous was the fact that through what Fleetwood calls carceral aesthetics, prisoners were able to take control of their own narrative and image in a way that might diminish the larger objectives of the US state.
      - Abstraction vs. Representation. The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s-70s was focused on reforming the image of Black Americans to combat hurtful stereotypes. They wanted art to be representational so that its message was perfectly clear, and they ignored or outright opposed Black artists working in abstract modes. The fact that this art doesn't fit the narrative of African American art history places the burden of representation on artists without power. LGBTQIA artists shoulder this burden as well. The work shown here is Water Composition III (1970) by Senga Nengudi, who was ostracized by most of her peers for being "outrageously" abstract.
    - - Philip Guston Now Exhibit. The four museums intending to show Guston's work postponed the exhibit for four years, citing anxiety over possible public response to Guston's KKK imagery and a need to reframe their programming to show more perspectives for the issue. Critics argued that the museums were afraid to show this work because they might be called out for their own BIPOC inequity problems.
    - - About
        
        Some artists test the limits of what is considered acceptable in terms of public taste. Art can cause controversy due to its medium (like Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary) the danger to the artist in making it (like Marina Abramovic's Rhythm 5 or He Yungchang's Dialogue with Water) or perceived morality (as in Carolee Schneeman's Fuses).
      - Artists
        
        Carolee Schneeman
        
        Fuses (1967). Considered a landmark in Structural Filmmaking, Experimental filmmaking, and Expanded Cinema for how it fuses the bodies of the figures with the film stock itself, Schneeman's most famous work caused a stir among feminists. Portraying herself and her partner having sex in various ways for 30 minutes, this film was intended to be a portrait of sexualized bodies, but one that is nonjudgmental of straight, heterosexual sex. Feminist critics of the 1970s were outraged, seeing this work as an act against women and against femininity.
        
        See Controversial Mediums / Offensive: Chris Ofili
        
        See Controversial Mediums / Human Body: He Yungchang
- - - - Postmodernist sculpture had expanded so far from what came before it that it couldn’t be talked about or appreciated in the same terms. Instead of simply concluding that certain artworks weren’t sculpture because they didn’t align with historical precedent, Krauss looked for a way to expand the field with a new framework – a logical structure – which would make a place for them in it.
        Her Klein diagram posits four categories: sculpture, site construction, marked sites, and axiomatic structures, all equal, all connected with each other in various ways, and all falling under the same umbrella. In mathematics, each of the four elements of the Klein model is its own inverse, and Krauss’s model claims that as well.
        
        When people derided environmental art as “not landscape” yet “not architecture either,” forcing sculpture into an ontological absence (unable to be classified) she used their argument against them. According to this math model, if a pair of negative terms oppose each other, they can be transformed through inversion into “the same polar opposites but expressed positively.” The work is now SOMETHING, not just a negative, and it therefore makes sense to discuss it.
        Krauss challenged the status quo, and because she did this, she empowered artists to keep expanding the possibilities of what they make, and she empowered the viewer/beholder to expand what they look at, experience, and talk about.
    - - About
        
        A fundamental change occurred regarding our conception of what sculpture is and how we interact with it (and with space). The new land art presented visitors with a different kind of presence: one that was incomplete without the durational experience of the viewer (or "beholder," as Fried would say). This stood in direct opposition to Modernist work (see Caro) which was available in its entirety all at once.
        The sense of sculpture having infinite malleability is something Krauss resisted at first, but it increasingly made more sense. In her essay, she writes: "The very term we thought we were saving, sculpture, has begun to be somewhat obscured. We had thought to use a universal category to authenticate a group of particulars, but the category has not been forced to cover such a heterogeneity that it is itself in danger of collapsing."
      - Artists
        
        William Lamson
        
        Mineralogy (2017-2020). This site-specific installation is contained within a partially collapsed former WWII armament building, the "Partially Missing Building," in Wendover, Utah. It transformed a 9' x 15' former bathroom through the geologic process of evaporating saltwater. The room is filled with objects from the artist's dad's basement - books, a clock, pictures, etc. - and vessels which Lamson repeatedly fills with saltwater from nearby salt flats. As the water evaporates, salt encrusts the objects and vessels, and additionally expands into their surroundings, covering tables and dripping down walls.
        Similar to Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed from thirty years prior (but on a smaller scale) Lamson is exploring the effects of time, allowing for and encouraging the natural, inevitable disintegration and evolution of our physical world.
        
        See "Non-traditional Mediums: Nature"
        
        Michael Asher
        
        Pamona College Project (1970). An example of what Krauss would call an Axiomatic Structure on her Klein diagram (existing between architecture and non-architecture) this work makes us think about architecture in a different way. Asher opened up the doors to this gallery but put nothing in it. As the day progresses, the sun streams in and moves around the space, invading and slicing the architectural space.
        This project exemplifies the difficulty of categorizing sculptures in the expanded field. Although obviously architectural because of the building used, the "marking" action of the sun on the human intervention initiated by Asher connects this work additionally to the category of Marked Sites.
    - - About
        
        In the 1960s-70s, film began expanding beyond its common usage in terms of narrative, and instead took on other diverse forms, exploring alternative narratives, multi-projector and multi-screen films, and installation environments. These explorations were forerunner to the projected image installation work of the 1990s. As with other expansions, artists were thinking about mediums in ways that reached beyond themselves, asking different sets of questions about moving and projected images in contemporary art, and what we think about film itself as an art form. Experimentation began as early as the 1920s, as artists realized that the moving image offered a way for forms to relate to each other over time in a way not possible with painting, sculpture, or drawing.
      - Artists
        
        Stan Van Der Beek
        
        Movie Drome (1963-66). This site-specific, environmental installation was meant to overwhelm the viewer's senses. It presented a confluence of media-based practices all together in one space, combining architecture, music, and film/moving images. Visitors laid on the floor on blankets as multiple projectors (slide, 16mm film and more) beamed images all over the dome's interior, while on stage there was a light show and often a live band.
        Gene Youngblood's book Expanding Cinema points out that this type of work was about expanding consciousness, not just about having more projectors and images. There was a social Utopian ideal behind it that offered a sense of community as it expanded people's minds through cinematic apparatus. This was particularly important amid widespread resistance to the Vietnam War.
        
        See Materiality: Intermedial
        
        Michael Snow
        
        Wavelength (1967). Structural film (characterized by fixed camera position, flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography) like this thought about the different components that make up the filmic/cinematic experience and exploited them, both to put the viewer in a strange, possibly even uncomfortable position in relation to the images, and to make us think about what the experience of a film is - what is happening when we watch it and the expectations we bring to it as far as what we expect to happen.
        In this 45-minute film, Snow presents a wide view of a room. The camera, positioned in the back, zooms closer and closer to a picture on the opposite wall as a soundtrack follows sine waves. There is a narrative element as people move in and out of the room, but this is about the seemingly endless progression forward of the camera, perhaps symbolizing a metaphoric role of consciousness as well as the film experience itself. The viewer is made to think about the projector, not just the image.
    - - About
        
        While not actually termed an "expansion," performance represented a new way to create, present and experience art, thereby expanding our conception of art! Like land art and some cinematic expansions (like Van Der Beek's Drome) performance often moved art beyond the gallery and into public space. This led to a reframing of not only what art is, but also of the artist's role and audience's role in that work of art.
        When the audience becomes part of the performance, the artwork to some extent becomes about them. Will they step in, for example, if the artist is in danger? Or will that artwork become an indictment of their lack of awareness, culpability, or inaction?
        And what of the artist's role? Is it self-oriented, helping the artist deal with some personal issue or follow some insight? Or is it audience-oriented, meant to empower perhaps, or teach empathy?
      - Artists
        
        Carolee Schneeman
        
        Interior Scroll (1975). Slightly before the rise of Feminism, a number of artists responded directly to how the female body is presented in a male dominated art world. At issue is the vulnerability of that body, but also the presence of a spiritual interiority that can't be seen from the outside.
        Male filmmakers and art critics of the time criticized Schneeman's feminist, natural take on the world. In response, Schneeman wrote the harsh words of one critic on a scroll, stuffed it in her vagina, then pulled it back out of her naked body on stage, reading the words out loud to her audience.
        Schneeman thinks of the vagina as "the source of sacred knowledge, ecstacy, birth passage, and transformation." By literally internalizing the criticism, then forcibly removing it from herself, Schneeman stripped the words of their power.
        
        Ulysses Jenkins
        
        Mass of Images (1978). This is a recorded performance which engages black stereotypes perpetuated by American media. The video cuts between Jenkins (accompanied by a stack of televisions) and examples of blackface and racist stereotyping from American film and TV. Jenkins repeats the mantra: "You're just a mass of images you've gotten to know from years and years of TV shows."
        At one point, Jenkins raises a sledgehammer to smash the TVs, but finds himself unable to. The images have power over his ability to define himself. This political work points directly to the question of Blackness and the way it's determined from the outside.
        
        See Fanon: The Fact of Blackness
      - See "Non-traditional Mediums"
  - - - Around the world, the tea bowl’s symbolic significance is generally understood, implying a certain “metaphysics, a code of conduct, and a mode of life, as well as a reduced and austere aesthetic,” according to Arthur Danto.
        However, since ceremonial tea drinking is not part of our culture in the U.S., Jones looks at aspects of thingness (namely the subject-object relationship and its presence beyond function or its material) to help us consider the question of cultural appropriation of the tea bowl form.
        Artists around the world have felt drawn to this form but generally value it for different reasons than Asian cultures. American potters, including several potters connected with Alfred, recognized the bowls’ harmonious aesthetic qualities and wanted to learn their throwing and glazing processes, or study their formal attributes of balance, form, and weight.
        Looking at tea bowls as “things” helps us appreciate the values underlying their physical attributes. However, curators and ceramists in Japan note that Westerners don’t truly understand the tea bowls, many having seen them only in books rather than having had the chance to experience them with all five senses by holding them and drinking out of them.
    - - About
        
        Artists may engage with the past for a number of reasons. They may feel a shared outlook or affinity for a particular artist, as He Yungchang feels for Xugu. They may be looking for inspiration, as Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt were as they traveled to Stonehenge and other prehistoric rock structures, ancient ruins, and mining districts as they prepared to construct their land art. They may admire certain forms and want to replicate them, as ceramic students at Alfred have with Japanese teabowls, or admire and want to work with materials no longer available, as Amber Cowan admires vintage pressed glass.
      - Artists
        
        Amber Cowan
        
        Cowan, working primarily with recycled and vintage American pressed glass, is investigating the history of the American Industrial Glass movement. She creates fantastical wall sculptures from discarded or abandoned glass and cullet that she acquires in thrift shops, flea markets, or glass dumps. As most glass in the past was made in large quantities using industrial equipment, there are mountains of it left over! Most of the colors, textures, and pieces she is drawing from are from chemical compositions no longer produced, so her work provides a unique connection to the history of this material.
        In Snail Passing Through the Garden of Inanna (2019) Cowan connects not only to glass history but to mythology: Inanna was a Sumerian goddess, a combination of Athena and Aphrodite.
        The chalice in the center indicates something being gathered, perhaps memories or stories.
        
        See "Found Objects"
        
        Warren MacKenzie
        
        Teabowl from the Bailey Collection of Contemporary Ceramics (unknown date). MacKenzie studied pottery under Bernard Leach, who emphasized Japanese aesthetics. MacKenzie in turn infused functional wares with Japanese-style forms and processes. Gallerists and collectors, seeing the similarity of his wares to Japanese teabowls, labeled them as such; however, MacKenzie explains that they are not imitations, but rather show Japanese influence on distinctly American work.
        It was not actually the form of the teabowl that he sought to imitate. He was interested in the fluid Japanese forming process on the potter's wheel, and their gestural glazing.
    - - About
        
        For some artists, leaving a mark on history by creating their own art is not enough; they want to enable others to do the same in the future. These are the teachers. Successfully moving beyond the communities where they grew up through their artistic accomplishment, they head back. They acknowledge and even embrace their roots while giving others the means and courage to shine.
      - Artists
        
        Roberto Lugo
        
        Lugo, a ceramist and educator who labels himself a "ghetto potter" and teaches at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in his hometown of Philadelphia, PA, does not limit teaching to the classroom. Setting up his wheel on the often dangerous streets of Kensington where he grew up, he will teach anyone who asks how to throw a pot. His aim is not necessarily to encourage people to become potters, but rather to show them that they have skills they might not have realized they had. Where they take that knowledge is up to them.
        Seeing art as an equalizer, Lugo in 40 Cooler 4 (2016) has painted graffiti onto a porcelain vessel. In this way, he elevates what many consider "low" art (or even a crime). In doing so, he elevates the people who create graffiti too.
        
        Zanele Muholi
        
        Dimpho Tsotetsi, Parktown, Johannesburg (2014). Describing herself as a visual activist, Muholi uses visuals (photographs) to create awareness of Black and LGBTI communities in South Africa, capturing moments, truths, and realities which may otherwise have been hidden from much of the world. Recognizing the value of the contribution of her subjects (much like Mickalene Thomas) she refers to them as "participants" in the work.
        Muholi will teach anyone interested in photography how to take pictures. She even provides the cameras. She created an organization called Inkanyiso to ensure a platform for others to share their lives and work. Most of the team members are lesbian.