analysis

ARTS 1A

Topic 4: Genre

First, watch the following short video, “Frank Wong: Chinese Historical Society of America”: 5 :

https://youtu.be/TrkaGV2VH70

Pair 1: Frank Wong and Mona Hatoum

Frank Wong

I. San Francisco artist Frank Wong has succeeded in transforming his memories of Chinatown into physical form. He makes miniature scenes of places he recalls from his childhood, each in the form of a diorama: a model of a scene with three-dimensional figures. For Dining Room, this former Hollywood prop master constructed tiny chairs, lamps, plates, and other objects associated with daily life to reconstruct a highly detailed setting that corresponds with his memory of this room.

Frank Wong

Dining Room From the “Chinatown” series

Before 2004

Diorama

geII. Each of the dioramas in Frank Wong’s “Chinatown” series is meant to evoke a scene of daily life rather than a specific historical event. As such, they should not be categorized as history subjects. While it might be tempting to categorize them as landscapes (after all, they conveya strong sense of place), the the environment is not the most important aspect of these works. Rather, Frank Wong’s goal is to recall the day-to-day experience of living in Chinatown when he was young. As such, these should be categorized as genre subjects: scenes of everyday activity. While the concept of what is “everyday” is different from artist to artist, the genre subject category includes representation of those types of activities considered ordinary and normal for many: bathing, shopping, working, sitting down for a meal, going to school, resting.

Mona Hatoum

I. In 2000, Palestinian-born artist Mona Hatoum assembled a bed, chairs, desk, toys, kitchen utensils and other objects often found in homes, to make an installation: an artist’s construction of an environment for the purpose of immersing observers in an experience. But viewers of this installation, Homebound, may not enter the gallery space in which it is located, since Mona Hatoum has directed that live electrical wires connect the objects, rendering the installation dangerous. Steel cables are stretched across the entrance to the installation to prevent observers from touching the objects and being electrocuted.

Mona Hatoum

Homebound

2000

Installation

II. When compared with Frank Wong’s Dining Room, Mona Hatoum’s Homebound offers an alternative approach to what constitutes “everyday living” for some people. Whereas Frank Wong desires viewers to enjoy the nostalgia and comfort he feels when he thinks about Chinatown’s past, Mona Hatoum offers the opposite: a setting where objects associated with daily living are fraught with conflict and violence.

Light is one of the elements of art, and both Frank Wong and Mona Hatoum have brought artificial light into the construction of these works of art. In Dining Room, three miniature lamps emit artificial light: incandescent, fluorescent, or neon light; in Mona Hatoum’s Homebound, large box lamps at the center glow and then diminish as the sound of the electrical current sweeps through the installation.

Pair 1

Analysis Exercises: Pair 1

Exercise 1: Frank Wong relied on personal memories to produce the diorama. While Mona Hatoum may or may not have relied on personal memories to produce Homebound. Still, why do genre subjects tend to provide the impression that the artist is sharing a personal experience?

Exercise 2: Both artists seek to give observers of these works a sense of “home”. Which, in your opinion, is a more powerful look at the concept of home, and why?

Exercise 3: Both artists chose to implement artificial lighting as a fundamental part of these works of art. Why do you think each artist chose to include artificial lighting?

Pair 2: Carrie Mae Weems and Johannes Vermeer

Carrie Mae Weems

I. Carrie Mae Weems’s series, the “Kitchen Table,” addresses domesticity, a theme sometimes explored by artists who utilize the genre subject category. Whereas genre subjects can include any aspect of everyday living, domesticity specifically refers to the concept of home life or family life. In the untitled photograph by Carrie Mae Weems included in this chapter, a woman and a man embrace near a table, upon which is placed a newspaper and what appears to be a glass of water. The setting is pared down. Only a few objects and pieces of furniture are included in the picture plane, requiring observers to focus on the couple.

Carrie Mae Weems

Untitled From the “Kitchen Table” series

1990

Gelatin silver print

II. One of the ways Carrie Mae Weems makes this photograph visually powerful is through her understanding and application of light value: the variation of light and dark in a work of art. The artist offers a range of light values, from very dark (the man’s shirt) to very light (note the artificial light above the heads of the couple), to variations of gray between the black and white, including a shadow on the rear wall which graduates from light at the bottom of the picture plane to dark at the top. By keeping the most extreme light values at the center—the darkest dark and the whitest white—Carrie Mae Weems keeps our attention where she wants it to be.

Johannes Vermeer

I. The seventeenth-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer produced paintings best categorized as domestic genre scenes. Working in an era before artificial light was invented, Vermeer mastered the illusion of natural light: sunlight, moonlight, and firelight, in the paintings he produced. In The Lacemaker, sunlight falls upon the hands of the young woman, illuminating each facet of her fingers with a different light value. This leaves observers with an impression that there must be a window outside the picture plane to the right, which admits sunlight into the room. The wall at the back reveals a slightly higher light value to the left, suggesting there is an additional window outside of the picture plane, to the left.

Johannes Vermeer

The Lacemaker

c. 1669-1670

Oil on canvas

II. In addition to carefully incorporating the effects of natural light to make forms look natural, Vermeer often used a specific painting technique that allowed him to blend the edges of forms, resulting in the illustion of softer forms. The technique is: wet-on-wet, in which an oil painter places a layer of paint on top of paint which is still wet, enabling the layers to combine. You may remember that Vincent van Gogh (recall Chapter 1) used this technique, partly out of necessity, since he painted quickly. Vermeer did not paint quickly. Vermeer used the wet-on-wet technique because of the effects that were possible through use of this technique.

Pair 2

Analysis Exercises: Pair 2

Exercise 1: These works of art reveal very little about the location of the subjects, yet observers usually assume that the subjects are at home. Do you? Why or why not?

Exercise 2: Imagine that you gave permission to a photographer to follow you for an entire day as you do ordinary things. Describe an image of you engaged in an everyday activity that a photographer might capture. How is your ”imagined” image similar to, or different from, genre imagery by Carrie Mae Weems or Johannes Vermeer?

Exercise 3: Which artist—Carrie Mae Weems or Johannes Vermeer—has produced a more convincing glimpse of everyday life? Explain your answer.

Pair 3: Unidentified Greek and Roman artists

Unidentified Greek artist

I. Numerous works of marble sculpture dating from the third millennium B.C. have been found on the Cyclades, Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. These works are generally small and usually depict women in a reclining position, that is, lying down. Many appear to be pregnant. But some of the figures depict men, including the Male Harp Player featured in this chapter, a representation of a professional musician at work. This work of art is an example of an approach to sculpture called sculpture in the round, in which the object is freestanding, not attached to anything. Set in a museum case, you can walk around it and view it from any position.

Sculpture in the round Bronze age

Unidentified artist

Male Harp Player

c. 2700-2300 B.C.

Marble

II. The Male Harp Player offers a glimpse of everyday life within a community of Greek people who thrived during the Bronze Age: a historical period which dated from the fourth to the first millenia B.C., and which is characterized by the ability of people to produce bronze objects from an alloy of copper and tin. Bronze tools were likely used by ancient sculptors to produce works such as the Male Harp Player. Bronze is a harder and more durable substance than stone or other metals available to sculptors during that era.

Unidentified Roman artist

I. In the ancient Mediterranean world, Classical antiquity followed the Bronze Age, leading to the development of new technologies for sculptors. Classical antiquity refers to the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, dating roughly from the 8th century B.C. through the 4th century A.D., and is characterized by widespread development of language and culture. Many of today’s social practices and beliefs are rooted in political and religious ideas held by the Greeks and Romans during Classical antiquity.

In Interior of the shop of a cloth merchant, a marble sculpture produced during Classical antiquity, an unidentified Roman sculptor has designed a genre subject—a representation of people shopping—probably to be used as a shop sign on the exterior of a building. Some figures are seated, as if observing or waiting, while others stand, holding or testing cloth items featured in the store, including belts and pillows.

Unidentified artist

Interior of the shop of a cloth merchant

Before 300 A.D.

Marble

II. Unlike the Male Harp Player, this marble sculpture is an example of an approach to sculpture called sculpture in relief, where the figures emerge from a background of the same material, and to which they remain a part.

Sculpture in the round and sculpture in relief are not techniques in themselves; rather, they represent different approaches to three-dimensional representation of subjects. Once a sculptor determines that a work will be made in the round or in relief, the sculptor can then choose tools and materials to engage in a technical process to complete it.

Pair 3

Analysis Exercises: Pair 3

Exercise 1: Unlike works by Carrie Mae Weems and Johannes Vermeer, in which people were represented at home, these works by ancient Greek and Roman artists were meant to represent people working in public places. What indicates this?

Exercise 2: What are the advantages of observing a work of art sculpted in the round? What are the advantages of observing a work of art sculpted in relief?

Exercise 3: Describe the specific actions of the figures in these works. While genre subjects are scenes of everyday activities, how active are the subjects in each of these works?

Pair 4: Gérôme and Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative

Jean-Léon Gérôme

I. The French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme specialized in the production of genre paintings based not on every-day reality but on every-day fantasy. For The Bath, he imagined a setting in which an enslaved woman with brown skin bathes a woman with pink skin. Everything in the picture plane, from the text on the tiles above the two women to the fountain, the bath shoes, the garments, and the jewelry, were designed by Gérôme to transport viewers to an alternative reality. Gérôme participated in a mode of cultural production which Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said called Orientalism: a widespread European tendency to stereotype people and places in “the East” as timeless, uncivilized, and exotic. The world depicted in The Bath did not exist but instead was based on French ideas about people who lived in places as diverse as Turkey, Asia, and northern Africa.

Jean-Léon Gérôme

The Bath

c. 1880-1885

Oil on canvas

II. Gérôme was a successful and popular painter in nineteenth- century France. One reason for this was his approach to technique: he was a highly detailed painter who exercised careful control of his brush. The Bath reveals many such details, which continue to affect viewers’ perceptions of its forms, since the greater the detail, the more viewers are inclined find a painting believable. Another aspect of this artist’s work which resulted in his popularity was his narrow approach to concepts of female beauty. The seated woman in The Bath is an example of a body type that many heterosexual men in Paris in the 1880s found both beautiful and sexually appealing.

While Gérôme was a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts), more than two thousand students received instruction from him in his atelier, or teaching workshop. Through his teaching, Gérôme had a significant influence on cultural production in France which extended well into the twentieth century.

Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative

I. The Jagonari Educational Resource Centre in London was designed by Matrix, a feminist architecture cooperative formed in 1980 to explore women’s issues in relation to built forms. A cooperative is an organization that is owned and managed by its members.

Members of London’s Bangladeshi community, and Bangladeshi women, in particular, worked with Matrix to achieve a successful design for the center. They sought a design which would acknowledge architectural forms associated with their heritage, yet not call too much attention to their cultural differences, given their concerns about racism. Racism is one of the ramifications of the stereotypes perpetuated by Orientalism.

All the women of South Asian descent who worked with Matrix to design and construct the Jagonari Educational Resource Centre had been racially harassed while living in London, so safety was a primary concern. From the beginning of the project, it was determined that protective grilles would be placed over the windows.

Members of Matrix designed grilles which evoked traditional Islamic design but with an exaggerated geometry, allowing for a modern look. The decorative grilles were fundamental to the project’s success and are present in the original model.

Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative

Model of the Jagonari Educational Resource Centre London

1984-1987

Brick with steel grilles

II. In addition to producing the Jagonari Educational Resource Centre, the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative published a book, Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment, wherein, among other things, they advanced the concept of domestic work as labor. Matrix is an outgrowth of the New Architecture movement, a British group which urged architects to take more seriously the needs of the actual users of buildings. When designing public buildings, architects have traditionally been concerned with pleasing those who paid them rather than the needs of a building’s users.

Pair 4

Analysis Exercises: Pair 4

Exercise 1: Gérôme imagined a world beyond the borders of France for his patrons. In what ways did the Matrix Feminist Design Co- operative also exercise imagination in working directly with people of South Asian descent to produce a cultural center in London?

Exercise 2: Safety was a concern for Matrix and its patrons in the design of the Jagonari Educational Resource Centre. How did Gérôme create the illusion of a safe environment for the woman receiving a bath in his painting?

Exercise 3: The Jagonari Educational Resource Centre was a public building yet has grilles over its windows. What contrasting elements exist within The Bath by Gérôme?