art 315 Issues in Contemporary Art

Hey everybody. Okay, there we go. I was going to say we add a simple majority. So I was going to start and then we lost someone. But they're back now. Okay. So I'm assuming everybody can hear me. If you can't just type up let me know in chat. I've got it I've got it open. So today I'm going to go over some technical things, technical ideas. I'm not sure that that's the right word for it. But a lot of terminology, a lot of what we might call like theory type stuff. Basically though, what we're going to be doing is looking at my idea of stories and why stories operate it like they do. What are they, how do they work? And why am I giving them so much important it? So we're going to sort of break, break this down, and look at a number of different ideas. I have described. Hang on. We go. Okay. Where's my okay. Now my chats. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Boy, you'll leave this for a week and you lose everything. Okay. So let me start by asking you. I have a bunch of images here. If I ask you to tell me to pick out the Lamborghini, which one is it? Somebody? Somebody just either pipe up or or write it in. Okay. Adam Adam says Lamborghini is top left. Adam, can you tell us a little bit about your process? How did you decide that that image is the Lamborghini? Can you maybe talk? And instead of type? Or does anyone disagree with Adam actually. So it's the it's the only car and I know Lamborghini car. Okay. Okay. Good. So first of all, you need to know that a Lamborghini is a car, right? And there's only one car image up there. Now. I don't actually know what a Lamborghini looks like. So I don't even know if that is one or not. But let's think about that process. What did I just say? I just said that I don't even know or I don't really know what a Lamborghini looks like. Right? So that means in order to identify something, I have to have some kind of knowledge of that thing, right? So what Adam said is that he knew the Lamborghini is a car. So he had in his mind, let's say a picture of a car, right? And he compared all of these images appear on the screen to the image in his mind and said, which one matches this? Right? So that's sort of the process that we go through. That's how, that's how things begin to take meaning, right? We learned that something is one thing. And then as we encounter new things, we can compare them, right? We can say, yeah, that looks like a car. I don't know if it's a Lamborghini or not, but it's a car. I don't know. There are no other cars up there. So it's like if I were to ask you for the daffodil, right? If you know flowers, you might say there's no daffodil there. Or if you know that the daffodils a flower, but you don't know what it looks like. You might, you might pick the rows. Okay. So the idea is, we're in a sense, right? We spend our lives collecting data. And our brains, store that data. And then we use it to understand the world around us, right? Makes sense. Here's another example. F I said, which one of these images represents pride? Right? So that's a much more abstract idea. You can't necessarily relate. The concept of pride with a concrete image. But given your life experience, the things that you know, quote unquote, we're going to talk about knowledge tonight also. Based on your life experience in what you know, you know, different things could represent pride to you. I was thinking the trophy because it represents an accomplishment of some sort, right? It shows a trophy is meant to be a signifier. We're going to talk about that. That word can be a signifier of accomplishment. And in fact, competition and defeating competition, right? You don't just earn a trophy for being one person in some event or whatever. Okay, So you follow me. How we give meaning to images that we encounter has everything to do with what we've learned or images that we have learned previously. Okay? And what I'm talking about very broadly, how come my buttons are working. Wait a minute. That's weird, Okay. When I'm talking about very broadly is semiotics. Some of you may have come across that term before. Just generally speaking, we can think of semiotics as the study of signs. Okay? And this is from just Encyclopedia Britannica. And the a person in the picture there, his name is Ferdinand de so sure. He's a linguist. And he talks about language and meaning and which is how we get to this idea of, of signs. Okay? Okay, what does all that mean? I use the term signifier before. So we have in semiotics the terms signifier and signified, okay? And this relates to linguistics. Obviously because they're referring to language. Okay. Anybody familiar with this piece? Anybody know it? Yes, it's the chairs. Great for Michela. Michela, you want to say something about the chairs? Can you tell people about them? You hear me? Yeah. I can hear you. When I did this was for I'm blanking on the, on the lecture class again, one of the core classes. But basically there were a bunch of, it was these three pieces in a museum. Defined as our ADA is basically the representation of a chair, whether through a definition, a physical, tangible, or an image. There the different parts of semiotics like icons, someone, signs and symbols, right? Right, Exactly. So in this example, when I say the signified, we might think of the object itself, right? Which is the chair, which is in the center. I should say. This piece, by the way, is by an artist named Joseph coast sooth KOL ACTH. And it is considered a kind of classic of conceptual art. And we talked a little bit about that last time. Conceptual art is a genre of art that focuses on the ideas. I like to say that. And I may have said this last week, so excuse me if I'm repeating myself. All art is conceptual in that all art has an idea of some sort behind it, right? But when I say conceptual art, I'm referring very specifically to a genre of art in a period of time and actually certain artists. So conceptual art, as it is for me, an art historical term. And I'm making a distinction between conceptual art and art that is conceptual art. Art that has a concept. Okay. Anyway, I was saying, so the term signified tends to or does referred to, in this case, the object of the chair. Now, the signifier is the way we indicate the signified. Okay. So I mean, I actually could say that my pointing at the object is a signifier, right? But more commonly we use words as signifiers. So the word chair. In this case, whether spoken spelled whatever. Chair is a signifier for the object that we sit on, which is the object that's in the middle of this piece. Okay. So if that is my signified, the image of the chair, the photograph of the chair that's on the left of your screen is a signifier, as is the word chair and the definition. Which is not really legible in this slide. But that's what that is on the right. Okay. So that is signifiers and signified. And that essentially is how we communicate, right? That's how language operates. Language operates as a system of signifiers and signified. And that's how we communicate because we have a shared understanding of signifiers. Right? Like if I say chair, we may all have different images of chairs in our mind. But we essentially all know what a chair is, right? But the chair that I'm thinking of might be Coast It's chair here. Or it could be, you know, a big fluffy chair at my, at my grandmother's house or it could be a chair in a waiting room. Again, it all depends on your kind of life experience. The signifier is is sort of dependent upon you. But the signified is a shared understanding among us. And when I use the word us, I'm referring to culture. Okay. And I'm going to get to that in a second. So this shared understanding of signifiers, actually we'll call that culture. I think maybe I want to wait to get to Leah tired until after we get through Stuart Hall. So remind me if I forget to come back to Leah type. So this is from Stuart Hall. He is a scholar, actually considered a kind of founder of cultural studies. And in cultural studies, one of the main issues is this idea of shared signifiers. Rate is like, how do we, how do we communicate? Like what is it that makes us a culture? And so he talks about how signifiers come to be. And he gives us different processes by which that can happen. But he also talks about images specifically. Although you could argue that words as images also go through this process. But regardless, it's interesting to think about that. Let's use chairs, an example. So the image of the chair is a reflection of a basic reality. The chair itself, the object, right? And then we can use the word chair to refer to a chair without ever having a chair present or even really having an experience of a chair. Right? And then number three, what that means is that I can have the word chair and understand what it refers to without ever having experience of an actual chair. Okay. And then number four, the, the kind of final conclusion about that is that the real object, the chair itself, is irrelevant compared to the idea or the signifier chair, which we all know. Okay. You follow me. And that number 4 is civil Akram, which is the reading that you have on by boat yard. And we're going to talk about that. So I mean, one of the things we'll actually okay, let me go back to an example that I've used before that I think is helpful to understand this is my house cleaning product advertisement, right? So if I have this necessitates a print ad, so it's a single image. I have a single image promoting a house cleaning product. And that image. And number one here, it is a reflection of a basic reality. It shows a picture of a clean home. So let's just assume that most of us would like to have a clean home, right? Or at least we have a sense of of what a clean home looks like. Number two, that image, that ad can become so prevalent. And the idea of that clean, a clean home become so prevalent that it becomes an ideal. Meaning. That's what people think of when they think of a clean home, right? Like, you know, I don't know. It's all white and shiny. Okay. And so in number three, this ad now that has taken on this meaning of what it means. You know, it it tells us now what it means to have a clean home that masks the absence of the actual cleaning home, right? It doesn't matter if that home exists or nine. But we all think it exists. Not only do we think it exists, we want it to exist. It's an ideal that we now believe it. Okay? So the image. Now has this like amazing superpower, right? It started as just a kind of a reflection of something. And then it became came a way to represent it, to represent that thing. And then that representation has now become a kind of ideal. All right? And this idea of the image as not really representing something tangible anymore is what we call symbol Akram. Okay. I'm going to talk about that more when we when we get to budge yard. So I did say that we're doing a lot of kind of like theory, kind of terminology stuff tonight. And I don't necessarily need you to know the terms themselves. I mean, it's up to you, however you learn and like to retain knowledge. But for me it's, it's the ideas that are important. So like if you've never used the term symbol Akram, that's fine. But understand this idea of how an image begins to represent an ideal that does not necessarily correspond to reality. Okay? That's, that's the idea of a similar diagram. Okay? So Stuart Hall talks about representation, and this is like the image. The image taking on meaning, right? He gives us the three theories of representation, reflective, intentional, and constructionist. The reflective approach believes that meaning lies in the object. That language functions as a mirror. It reflects true meaning as it already exists in the world. Meaning that we're chair. Write the word chair. The image of a chair can only refer to the object that we understand as a chair, a kind of, I don't know. Whatever power of the universe exists to define these things. That power has ordained the word chair to refer to this particular object. Okay, so for whatever reason, the the representation, the signifier, reflects a kind of true existence. And you can see that that's already kind of problematic. Speaker author, intentional approach. The speaker author imposes his or her unique meaning on the world through language. Words mean what authors intended them to me. So we might as a group, right? If I say, I don't want to use the word chair anymore. Instead, I'm going to use Harold. Okay. I don't know if there's a herald in this class. I don't think so. But I don't mean herald the person. I mean herald the name. Okay. So instead of chair, we're going to we're going to say Harold. And we all in this group are going to agree that that's, that's the signifier that we will use for this object, formerly known as a chair. Okay, so that's intentional. The, the, the previous one implies that there can be no other signifier. Because the signifier and signified are attached in whatever way the universe has, has determined. In an intentional approach. You know, I, as an individual, can impose my my meaning on a signifier. Okay? And then the third is things don't mean like nothing has intrinsic or inherent meaning to it. We construct meaning using represents, representational systems. And the interesting thing there is we must not confuse the material world where things and people exist and the symbolic practices and processes through which repetition, meaning and language operate, blah, blah, blah, meaning is not inherently exist in things we members of a culture construct meaning. So it takes the intentional approach to the next step that I was describing that. So I, as an individual may say, we're going to use the name Harold or the word harold to refer to what we previously called chair. Right? And then we as a group, all agree. Then Harold is thereby, it's constructed. Harold is constructed as a meaningful sign for this particular object. But what's really important there is the we of this. So the last, the last line there. Members of a culture construct meaning. Okay, So it's shared, right? The importance of the signifier is that it is shared. The meaning is shared among a group. And then this is just a diagram that I came up with. To sort of explain all of this. At the very bottom, we have sort of the idea or the thing itself, which is represented by some sort of sign, might be a word, it might be a photograph, might be an image of whatever. And then the way that, that image, that representation takes on meaning is what we call the signifying practice. Okay? I mean, it, it seems like a kind of technical term, but really it's just. Saying, you know, how do we understand what things mean, right? And basically, you could come up with a lot of, a lot of ways that happens. School is not the least of them were tied where literally taught what things mean. Right? And then when all of that is shared, we, we say that we form a culture. So the diagram is a shared system of codes are values which is not incorrect. But may be. Given what we're talking about. You might want to think of it more as a shared system. A shared understanding of signifiers, okay, which I suppose there's another way to say system of codes or values. But because we're using this terminology, a shared understanding of signifiers, I think, is a good way to think about culture. Okay, So when Stuart Hall, as a scholar is involved in cultural studies, he looks at all of these aspects that I'm talking about here in this, in this diagram. So every aspect of sort of how things have representation assumes meaning is the subject of cultural studies. Ok. So interestingly, if we think back to Mr. Greenberg and this idea of the avant-garde and name what, what we think of the avant-garde artists as doing. Rosalind Krauss points out that the idea of originality is very much a cultural value that has come out of modernism, right? Modernism's the one that thinks that the artist needs to be this particular way through this special, this genius, this talent, whatever. And that the originality of this artist person is what makes the work original. Which is what then makes it avant-garde, which will then propel our culture forward. Okay? Essentially, so when you see people. Signing their names really big. At the bottom of a painting or a drawing. What it is claiming is this idea that rather than crowds to talking about that big signature is claiming originality as the artist, right? Right. I mean, think about it. The whole point of signing your name we obeyed is that you're saying I made this right and to somebody that maybe meaningful, right? Somebody not just your mom cares that you, a particular artist made this work. All right. I'll tell you a funny story. I don't know if you'll find it funny. I made a painting for a benefit option for a non-profit organization. And typically I signed my work on the back. I don't like to see signatures on the front because I consider them to be visual elements. For, for the most part, I find them distracting. But also I very consciously disagree with this idea that the signature of the artist makes the work valuable or are meaningful in any way. Anyway, so I did this painting and assigned it on the back as I usually do. The sponsoring organization contacts me and says, You didn't sign your painting. And I said, Yeah, I did. It's on the back. And then they said, Oh, yeah, but, you know, people one the painting signed on their front. And I said that's not what I do. I I don't know what you want me to do because I did sign it on the back. And I was actually quite far from from where my painting was at this point. And I said, well, you know, I can't possibly come and sign it. And then the woman said, Well, can we sign it for you? And I think I probably laughed out loud. I think it was email so she couldn't hear me. She denies laughing at it. But I said Sure. Go ahead and go ahead and sign it. Right. Which I think is completely hysterical because they're signing my name is completely contradictory to why you would want the artist's signature on the front of a piece, right? I mean, anyway, there's an irony there that's just, that's just too funny. So the point here. Is that this idea of originality and of the artist as being original. This is all a signifier that really took hold. And it really assumed meaning through modernism. Okay? And it just, so this is what we're going to call a story. This is a narrative of who the artist is. Okay? And then what we're seeing with the postmodern artist is a kind of refutation of that idea. You know, I don't have to be special, I don't have to be original, I don't have to be brilliant and I have to, I don't have to be solitary. Rate. I can be who I am and still be an artist. So that is one example of that. Okay, so I'm going to go into this whole process now of I mean, if we have a signifying process, maybe we can talk about a D signifying process. I haven't thought of that before. So what happens with postmodern artist is essentially they begin to dismantle these stories. Are these narratives that have created meaning for various ideas. So this like originality of the artist is one thing. That example. And you are right with his prints. Like he certainly did not think that that kind of originality was necessary to him or to the work that he wanted to make. Okay, So we looked at some of those artists last time. But I want to say that like in the 1960s, in particular, the real pioneers and postmodern art were the feminist artists. And I think for me, one of the ways it, one of the ways that I think about this is with the old feminist slogan. The personal is political. Okay? I don't know if you all have heard that. But the point being that these women artists are saying vary. Explicitly that the story of modernism or the story of modernist artist does not apply to them that their whole life experience is so opposite of that. And in effect, they were excluded, right? I mean, they literally were excluded in that. We're talking about male artists primarily, right? But the 1960s, we really see Feminism kind of start to break with these old ideas about art. And feminist artists are not just expressing their own realities, their own experiences, but they're really changing what art is for kind of society, very broadly. Okay. So anyway, I have a quote here for you about early feminist art. And if you're familiar with the waves of feminism, we can call this early, early stage in postmodern feminist art as essentialist. Okay? Essentialism is basically means that we boil down a thing or an idea to an essential core are an essential meaning or implication. And what the essentialist feminist position staked out was this idea that women are different from men. All right? And that you cannot apply these rules that you have laid down is essentially for men, right? Historically. And expect it to apply, to expect these rules to apply universally to women as well. Okay. And there you see patricia Matthews who wrote this the last, that the women have different expectations from and responses to human experience. And that is why we see, well, there's a couple of things. So what, what the early feminists, early feminist artists focused on then was asserting their kind of womanhood or their identity as women. So we see a lot of images like woman centered images, okay? This is Georgia O'Keeffe might be familiar with her vaginal looking flower paintings. She actually never considered herself, or at least never labeled herself a feminist artist. But her work, because it did look very vaginal, was kind of appropriated by feminists and used as a way to talk about women's identity. It's more Georgia O'Keeffe. So gee, I wonder what that could be. Anybody familiar with this work? I'm trying to remember the year. So this is not 1960s, this is later. This is a ceramic insulation. And I can't believe I'm blanking on earning Judy Chicago. And it's called The Dinner Party. And what she's done is she's created a dinner party with unique individual place settings for women in history. And she's tried to create the place settings so that they represent the woman who's sitting at that particular place. I believe this one is Emily Dickinson. And I could not quite sure how that's Emily Dickinson, but I do believe that that's the case. So here's the full installation of the dinner party. You can see all the different place settings. This was recently, if you look it up, it was recently recreate it. I think this may have been early 70s originally, and then recently within the last three years or so. They put it back together again and exhibited it. Exhibited it in New York. I can't remember the venue. But you can look that up. So again, these are place settings, right? Like plates and stuff for individual women in history. And that one that I said was Emily Dickinson. And here's another one we mentioned before. This is the Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi. So again, this, this work reflecting this essentialist feminist position, celebrating the qualities that are uniquely woman, right? So we do see a lot of vaginal imagery, a lot of A lot of emphasis on the female and the female form. This is, and you can read that it Susan B Anthony. So in addition to the ceramics, the artists also created these like kind of placemats. So that's pretty cool. This is Eva Hesse. This, I'm trying to remember the name of this. Wait, let me yeah. It's not it has to do with gynecological exam. I can't remember. I'm sorry. I can't remember the name of the piece. I'll have to look that up and let you know. But so, you know, kind of implying woman, woman centered imagery. But in it's titled definitely letting you know that that's the case. And again, and again here. This is also Eva has. So this is a sculptor named Louise Bourgeois. And she has a lot of these fun pieces. I think I am a quote from her coming up. Yeah, here it is. I I, I love this. So she says everything I'm interested in is a personal problem and I have to see my problems and visual shapes before I can deal with them. There was a mounting tensions arising from my physical encounter with the physical material and out of it grows what I want to say. Okay. I'm just going to summarize this by saying that she's talking about like dealing with her life, right? In her work. And that's really what all of these women artists are doing. Fundamentally. It's just that the things that they're talking about in the way that they want to talk about them have not fit into earlier prescriptions of art that was dictated, that was dictated by, by men. Catherine is saying that she's been, she's looking at Louise Bourgeois work for inspiration. I mean, I just think that Louise Bourgeois is a really interesting person, incredibly prolific artist during her lifetime. But also just. I hate to use the word authentic because I think it's so overused and it, it really plays into those modernists, tropes that i'm, I'm trying to dismantle for you. But I think she's she's really kind of sincere and expressing herself in her work. And and I and I appreciate that. And I also appreciate that there is a kind of tongue-in-cheek quality to the work. If you're familiar with the art 21 series. It's available online. Made by PBS videos of artists in their studios talking about their work. It's perfect. They're just short, like 50 minutes each. And there is one of Louise Bourgeois. I highly recommend it. She's very interesting, very interesting person. So anyway, this piece, as it's another work of hers, it's called mammal rank, which refers, refers to breast. And I just thought it was funny that she made this piece and said that for her. It's about her father because I, apparently he was a philanderer. And so she says that she created this piece about her father going from woman to woman. She imagined, I guess this series of breast that he would go from one to the next. And then this was another piece of hers. I'm not sure of the title on this one. So this is an artist named Nancy Spero. I think a lot of these that I'm showing you are, I'm mostly prints and drawings. This is from a larger installation piece called goddesses. And like we've been talking about, you can see here, what she has done is served excavated images from history that celebrate womanhood or women. This is another image from that work called goddesses. And you can see more images. These are scrolls, as I recall. Very tall, so kind of wall almost wall height. And this is this is the point. I think Nancy Spero is articulating for a lot of the women of this, of this time period. Just of this kind of political and artistic climate. Male artists never have to defend themselves since male specialization is never challenged. It is taken for granted as universal. Women artists will know when they arrive at equal status. That utopian day, when the art world takes for granted that our subjects are no more illogical or over specialized than those of male artists. It's the problem of finding, inventing if necessary non male points of view of not using language and body language that are inherited from male priorities, which is what I have gone and done, right? So it's like, it's like asking the question, Is there a difference between a woman artist as opposed to an artist who is a woman, right? Certainly an issue that a lot of artists of color we're also facing. So what Nancy Spero is saying is that a lot of the earlier work, there was a need for it to be qualified as a woman artist is kinda like, you know, our discussion about women. College women's basketball versus, you know, just college basketball, right? And that's what Nancy Spero sayings like, you know, art is just art until it's made by a woman, then it's like woman art. But rather than take that as a kind of negative labels, these women artists were really proud to assert themselves and tell their stories. So one of the, one of the other things that we see at this time, and also because of this emphasis on the qualities of women and then, and the focus on women as being physical or the physical characteristics of women. We see performance art really beginning to happen. Here. We saw some performance art last time. The hands haka, I'm sorry, veto a conchae. Staff and Chris Burden. Interesting, right? It was very much about kind of power, a very male oriented subjects. The masturbation. I mean, it's just interesting that, that, that was the work that was sort of being shown and regarded as new. But the women were really breaking ground with performance. And I think this is, this is a really great point. Is that performance was so new, at least as a kind of fine art form, right? That it did not have this tradition behind it. This male dominated tradition of who, who was making the work and what the work was about. And also this art historian, Sherry GKE. I like this idea. We're onstage every moment of our lives acting like women, right? So this idea that women are always sort of made to perform. And then by taking performance art, they are kind of owning it, right? So this is an interesting piece that there's video of this online. If you want to watch the actual video of it. This is an artist named Faith Wilding. I think she's still teaching out of Carnegie Mellon. The piece is entitled waiting in. What she does is she goes out on stage and she said, and she recites things that women wait for, like waiting for the water to boil, waiting for him to come home, waiting to be asked to the prom. You know, just and you can see her facial expression, this kind of mundane quality. But it was really speaking to not only women's kind of roles to perform, but also secondary, a secondary kind of status that men did not necessarily encounter. This is a very famous piece. I do not know if there's video of this uncapped. Remember? We have a bootleg version that I got the shell but I had to give it back. It is Bye. Performance artist named Cara Lee Schneemann. And it's called Meat Joy. And I don't know if you can really tell. But so these people are dancing around with raw meat. Okay, So I mean, they're definitely allusions to body, physical form, male, female, that sort of thing. But currently Schneemann, you'll see in the next, in the next image. Was one of these artists who very much. Kind of asserted herself through presenting her body. This is another image from Meat Joy. And this is the piece. Yes. Meet MCAT. Yeah. You got that right leg from the butcher? And I realized that a butcher but yeah, so that's that looks like chicken feet actually down here or maybe it whole chickens. I don't know. Anyway. Okay, so that's more Meat, Joy. And then okay. So this piece is entitled scroll. This is currently Schneemann still. And what she did with this. So that's an actual scroll that she made, rolled it up and she inserted it in her ******. And then the performance was that she Good. Pull it out out and read from the scroll wheel on which she had written criticisms from men, mostly men artists and critics. And mostly criticisms having to do with her as a woman. And the quality, quote unquote, of her work, right? So we're going to see that especially next week. The stuff that we're looking at, there's all of a sudden it becomes this question of quality like, well, what is good work, right? What is whereas bad work? And what the feminists, artists and others argue is that the criteria for what made good work in the past excluded them, right? So there's no way that you don't like this kind of work was going to be accepted by someone like timing Clement Greenberg, for example, right? It's just not within his belief system of what art should be. Okay? So, but you know, what these artists are doing is they're just, they're really taking that and they're saying, they're just throwing it back at critics. And saying, you know, I, I'm going to be who I am and do the work that I want to do. This is an artist named Eleanor and 10, this is actually more performance work. And what she did, I can't remember the name of this series, but she did a number of video pieces. Where she role played basically. So here you can see she's a nurse. And just with this is same as the idea of women always having to perform. A kind of corollary to that is women having to perform roles, right? Like specific roles. Gosh. Okay. I'm just going to go through this just so you have exposure to it. But again, not something that is necessarily that Bible for you to know. But so do so SAR, we mentioned linguistics. This is referred to as structuralism. And if you want to think of it this way, structuralism is sort of more akin to modernism because of how it operates as a system. And fundamentally, I'm just going to jump all the way down at the bottom. That signifiers and signified are connected in their meaning. Okay? So I mean cat, the word cat, the animal are always the same thing. Okay. That's, that's the short of it. So structuralism believes that these are kind of, these are fixed. Okay, fixed meaning. And Levi Strauss, anthropologist, I'm just putting this up here because this is a way of showing how people were arguing that the meaning of signifiers was or is in itself a kind of truth. Right. So when do so sure. Is saying that, you know, the signifier and signified are, are connected. Anthropologists like Levi Strauss are explaining why. And they use terms universal, right? Just like everything is universal. And that is supposed to explain, explain a lot. But if you think about it, this idea of universality, it really connects to ideas of science, right? Like this thing of natural laws. And that's, that's what these guys are talking about. And yes, I'll just the first one I think is maybe. The more important underlying various myths are constant universal structures to which all myths can be reduced. So I'm talking about stories, right? I've been talking about stories. And what Levi Strauss would argue is that you can tell all different kinds of stories. But the, the meaning of each, the intrinsic meaning is the same. So for example, good versus evil, right? Doesn't matter the structure of the story. We're still talking about good versus evil. And you can't dismiss like what is good and what is evil. Because they sort of, they are what they are. Of course then if we have structures and we have to have post-structuralism. And you can, you can link post-structuralism, post-modernism in your thinking. That is probably the easiest way to do it. So modernism, structuralism and then postmodernism, post structuralism. And what post-structuralism says, we encountered Jacques Derrida before. Post-structuralism basically says meaning is not inherent to any particular sign, right? It's always, it's always up for grabs. And then the bottom line, the problem representation is that meaning is an illusion. So the idea that things mean things is only because we perceive it that way, right? Like meaning can always be changed is what post-structuralism sort of offers, which is really kind of what postmodernism talks about. So we get to this idea then of deconstruction. And I think the term deconstruction has become sort of fairly commonly used. And in popular culture. I mean, I love that. You know, I'm cooking shows. They have these deconstructed dishes, right? Like I don't know what that I see recently. Like deconstructed, deconstructed Rubin sandwich, right? But it's used very literally in that. Deconstruction is often used to mean that something has been taken apart right? Into it, into its discrete unit or individual units, which is not untrue. But there is, there is another sense to it. I'm going to come back to this. No. I thought I had another slide I met. I guess it's here, it's in this one. So the important, one of the important things to think about with deconstruction is. Not only is it sort of the dismantling of something or taking something apart into its individual pieces. But it's also noting that there is in the meaning of something and opposing, an opposing meaning. So, for example, well, I'll use the term, this is from Derrida, this idea of inherent contradictions, right? So if I, if I see the term college basketball and I understand that it's only referring to men, right? The implication is that there's an opposite, which is female. Women. You follow me. So when you're deconstructing something, right? And in the process of deconstruction, It's not just that you're sort of looking at the individual pieces, but you're also looking at what is being implied. Okay? So for example, at this, maybe this may be a better, more helpful example. Cowboys and Indians, right? The old, the old Western trope. Cowboy is a hero. He's strong, white guy. He saves the day. Indian. If Indian is opposite, right? Then think about all the things that cowboy is. And then is Indian, not those things. Okay, You see what I'm saying? So one of the things that deconstruction does is it doesn't just break things down into parts. But it also says, by valuing something in this way, are we devaluing the opposite of it at the same time, right? So is it possible? I'm just stretching the deconstruction idea a little further. Is it possible then to say that male and female are always equal or the cowboy and Indian are always equal. Do you follow me? Right, because deconstruction shows us with, in certain examples that that's not the case. Right? That by asserting the positive of one thing. We may be implying the negative of its opposite or of another thing. Okay? So that's, that's an important aspect of deconstruction that's not popularly considered. Okay. The, the reason that this is part of that is because it's part of the idea that the meaning is an illusion, right? The things have an inherent meaning to them. Okay, I'm going to go on because my art examples will probably make that clear than that I'm doing. So this is, this is a good quote which we will sort of unpack as we look at that, as we look at the art critic Roland Bart talks, he writes a lot about photography. Actually has a really good book, if anyone's interested, called is it? I think it's mythologies. And he looks at this idea of stories. And how they, how they create meaning. That is perceived as true, right? But is, is nine or is open two, open to alteration? So anyway, he talks about moving from work to text. And I don't think we may have had this in that, that chart that I showed you about postmodernism and modernism. But you remember how I was saying that modernism likes art to be self-contained, right? He doesn't want it referring to anything outside of itself. It wants it to be like what it is. And it doesn't want the viewer relate to be involved, not to be involved in the meaning of the work. Modernism want the work to sort of impart to the viewer and not, not the other way around. But minor postmodernism believes that the viewer completes the work and the way that bar talks about it, he uses the term text. So we see, we see that use a lot, a lot more now as opposed to the word work. And basically, all that means is a text. This open work is closed. The, the expression death of the author. If you've heard that comes from this idea. Actually, not unlike the end of, end of art or a painting is dead. This idea that the author is the complete master of the work, is sort of thrown out the window because the understanding is that the reader is needed to complete the work, right? So the authors not just imparting kind of sensibility or awareness of something, but the author is sharing something that the reader then completes. For themself. Okay, again, let me get to the art and we'll see this, see better examples of it. So crisis of representation, essentially, just what we've been talking about, is that the meaning of things is, is malleable. We can change it, right? Some people want things. What the meaning of things to be fixed. But a lot of people are saying, or other people are saying no. Okay, so here let me get to these examples. So the next generation, this is a quote from art historian Irving Sandler. Yes, it's a really good book on contemporary art, but it only goes through, I might only go through like the 90s anyway. So he's using the term second generation feminists. But if you've taken women's studies, we really call this the third generation. The first generation was the Suffragette Movement. The second-generation would be what we're calling the essentialist feminist. And then this third generation, Sandler is going to second-generation, or what we'll call the deconstruction feminist. And the big difference there is that the essentialist feminist were all about woman, right? Like woman as an ideal woman, as different for man. Woman as a set of values and experiences that had been excluded from art and all these social, social, social processes of creating meaning. Anyway. So this, the deconstruction feminists are saying that the idea of woman in and of itself is an unfixed category. Which is why they refer to the earlier wave of feminist as essential, essentialist feminist, right? He census feminists believe that women are this second, third generation feminists. Deconstruction of feminists are saying, No, that's not the case. That. Women are what women want to be basically. And they are about sort of dismantling old ideas of what it means to be a woman. So this is what I was just saying is that the deconstruction feminists are about redefining what it means to be a woman other than in relation to male, maleness are men. So this is a work by somebody help me with her name. I can't believe I'm blanking on it. Anyway. She used to be an Ad Director. Thank you. Thank you. Adam. Barbara Kruger. She should be an Ad director, a Madison Avenue. And I decided to leave that world behind in focus, I'm fine art. But she definitely uses the advertising world as material. And what she's done is she's used that vernacular to re-inscribe. Well, what she's doing is she's deconstructing, write this kind of mythologies of men and women and re-inscribed being new meaning to them. So you'll see that a lot of postmodern art is very ironic. That there is a lot of irony in the work. More Barbara Kruger, I think I have an installation. No, I don't have an installation view. I have to show it next time. So what she's done is you said these are individual works which says, oh, created installation pieces, room size stuff, wall-sized, images like this. Again, playing on ideas of woman Ness, right? But so this is why I talk about irony and sort of deconstruction. So she's taking ideas of what women We're, or maybe sometimes are told to be. And then she's appropriating them and reinscribe them with her own, her own meaning. Another artist that was interested in, along the same lines is Cindy Sherman, photographer. And G and a famous series, famous body of work called The Untitled, Untitled Film Stills. And what she did was she created a series of self portraits of herself in the guise of various female stereotypes in film. So these are not actually film stills their photographs. But what she wanted to do was to sort of capture this idea of female stereotypes that were being perpetuated by film. This is maybe one of the more famous ones from, from this series. So you can see, I mean, she's definitely playing with this idea of the male gaze, right? I mean, these women are being presented for men to look at. And the role that they're playing is subservient just based on the position. The pose, I'm sorry, I'm going to go back. Right? So very different from like currently Schliemann's now performance work. And that she was I mean, she was using her body in a way that was empowering for her. And what Cindy Sherman and other deconstruction feminists are saying is that in R, contemporary or at least at the time, the contemporary context, you cannot portray women's bodies and not, and not somehow engage the male gaze, right? And so that's what she's doing in these film stills. This is another artists like Barbara Kruger using contemporary technology, add language, vernacular. Her name is Jenny Holzer. She became really well-known for doing these rolling LED, LED screens and just signs like this. There's big time square one. What was that word? Calm. So she won her well-known works actually this, this is part of it. I think it's called truisms. Just would take these like little kind of little cliched statement and make a whole series of them like one after the other. And that's what would roll across on, on the LED screens. There's another example. She also did a really cool one where she had the big electronic billboard on a truck. And then she drove around with different messages. And then here, this is o I think this is her truisms that she then exhibited like this at the Guggenheim, right? So the text, it moves. So it's sort of like roll through each level of the Guggenheim of the different statements one after another. Okay, So this is the next artist, but just, let me just summarize. I keep going the wrong direction. Okay, So clearly one of the things that's happening here that's very different from the earlier male-oriented work that we were seeing before. Is that not only is the audience kind of being actively engaged in the work, but the audience is being sought out, right? I mean, like some of this stuff, like the advertising imagery. I mean, the whole point of it is to interact with an audience. And to sort of point out things that these artists wanted people to know. Okay? And so this collective women artists called the Guerrilla Girls, took this on very specifically. With, they're like poster and fire campaigns. What the Guerrilla Girls would do is take information like this, right? How many women had one person exhibitions at New York City museums last year? Guggenheim at 0, the mat hasZero, the modern had won and the Whitney had 0. So this, I don't remember how big it was if it was like a poster size or flyers eyes, but actually I think they made them in different sizes. Anyway. So this kind of thing get plastered all over. What then was Soho was, was the place. But they were taking information and making sure that he got distributed. And it was weren't information about women artists. And this is another really interesting. Aspect of the Guerrilla Girls. And I think you'll see how it criticizes an aspect of modernist art. They all wore gorilla masks and they kept their identities secret. So people did not know who the Guerrilla Girls actually were. Oh, and I should point out that it's gorilla. I think it was on the previous slide. It's gorilla. Isn't on this slide. They usually have it. Oh, there it is. And bottom-right. Gui. I LL a gorilla as in warfare, not gorilla as an apes. So they were our collaborative and they did not want their individual identities to supersede the importance of the, of the collective. So they all wore masks and they kept their identity secret. And so they use the term, the name Guerrilla Girls. Right? And that's very contrary to modernist thinking. You know, where the artist is, this solo, solitary makers and genius. So this is a later, actually the piece itself. I don't think it's that late. This is an artist named Janine Antoni. And we're going to see more of her work. But I think this might be a good time for me to go back. I wanted to revisit the attire. So one of the readings I gave you was John France while the attire, the post-modern condition, a report on knowledge. The, the reading I gave you is just a small section. It's like the first section of his book. And that's the title of the book. Not just this section, but this first section. It's broken down into units that I think help us understand the point, what he's what he's saying. And also kind of the point of what I'm saying. And the idea of stories. Liate our talks very specifically about this idea of stories, but he calls them narratives. And then he refers to Meta narratives. Metanarratives would be sort of like the, the whole, the big story rank the overarching belief system that we learn in the form of a story. And. He's one of the first people to use the term postmodern in the sense that it applies across, across fields. So we looked at how modernism is in literature, music, architecture, right? Well, we did talk about postmodernism, not just an art, but also literature as well. In fact, we can talk about postmodernism in almost any field of political science. History. Because what lieth hard is asserting here, I think the title helps us with this. He's saying that it's a report on knowledge, right? And so this idea of stories and meaning and signifiers and signified to. And all of that. I mean, what we're basically talking about when I'm talking about is this idea of knowledge. The nature of knowledge. How, how we as individuals in a society come about our knowledge and what that knowledge can do, right? And so one of the things that Lee attire talks about is that modernism, as it was, sort of believed in and practiced, did not or could not really apply in the current technological climate. So what he calls computerized societies. And this was, he, he was writing in 1979, right? So this, this book is from 1979. So I mean, that was just so long ago already. But, and let me just take you through these first five elements. And I'm just going to summarize them as a way to share his argument with you. Basically, he says that in the nature, given the nature of technology and its role in our contemporary society. Knowledge and information are no longer like privileged. What do you call a privileged possessions, right? Like they're open, they're open to everyone. And in fact, you can think of it just in terms of like social media, rain, how many people get information from Twitter or Facebook? So knowledge is everywhere. People have the ability to participate in those conversations, which leads to the problem number 2, legitimation. What knowledge, what information is legitimate and what isn't. Right? So dealing with that question. We come to the method that he describes that he calls language games. And I think I'm not sure if I'm correct that the term language games that actually comes from just saucer. So I mean, it's based in linguistics. It's not a thing that lieth I came up with. But essentially, it's about what we've been talking about, which is the signifying practices. You know, how, how is meaning made? How do things take on meaning? How do signifiers come to represent signifies, right? And then he talks about the social bond, meaning how? Well I call the culture, right? How our shared understanding of signifiers and modernism no longer applies to our current situation. And then he refers to that as the post-modern perspective. And in a way, the way to think of post-modern perspective is that it's all up for grabs, right? It's like if if no one is excluded and everyone is included, then what what knowledge are we talking about? That I mean, where did, where does meaning come from? If, if there are so many sources, essentially. And I think this is a very interesting discussion that he has. I mean, if you're interested in reading the whole book or more of the bucket is available online in PDF. But he talks about narrative knowledge versus scientific knowledge. And I think there's a really good way to think about it, especially today. In our, in our political situation. Narrative knowledge. Is that knowledge in a way that's sort of passed down, right? I mean, I can't think of a really good example of what we call old wives tales. I mean, that is a kind of of knowledge. Actually, the attack does explain it pretty well. He talks about narrative knowledge as the knowledge we gain. Not just, I mean, not folk learning or even science, but just the knowledge that we gain from eating food we like or you know, enjoying nature or these kind of experiential knowledge. As well as what I just said was just called like old wives tales, as opposed to scientific knowledge. Which is right, doing experiment, test your hypothesis, blah, blah, blah, repeatable experiments, that sort of thing. The scientific knowledge kind of purports to be objective in that respect. But narrative knowledge is what he says ends up being more powerful in a way I don't, he doesn't use the term powerful. But I mean, so the examples are all around us. I mean, anti-vaxxers. Don't worry. You don't have to wear a mask. I mean, it's just the idea that science has become political shows us the power of narrative knowledge, right, versus scientific knowledge. It's amazing to me how these ideas are so applicable today. Who, ever since 2016, so much of this stuff. Has this been really relevant? Anyway? So that's the big, the big issue with Leah tired. And so part of the post-modern condition, this idea of the report on knowledge is what is the nature of the knowledge and who who controls it. Okay. And then, oh my goodness. Okay. That's where I am. I want to get get back to Janine Antoni here. So Janine Antoni, I can't remember the year that this piece was done. But this is a piece called loving care. I think you probably all too young to know of a product, haircare, hair color product. I think it was called easy care. Easy care, loving care, something like that. Anyway. So she used it and she gets it. She does have long hair. She used it to paint the floor of the gallery. So she's making a painting with her head. And she's referencing a lot of things with this work. One is kind of abstract expressionist painting. The other is the can't remember his name. There was, there was a conceptual artist. He had nude women covered in paint. Make body prints on walls. I can, I'm blanking on the name. Anyway. So a lot of like sexist stuff from mid-twentieth century art is coming out in this particular piece. Also the, the use of her body. But this is the quote that sums it all up. I feel attached to my artistic heritage and I want to destroy it. Okay? So, um, I, I inserted the LEA type in here because what Janine Antonius is specifically addressing is this kind of knowledge and her need to separate herself from it and establish her on her own kind of presence. But you can see it's a very strong statement that she wants to destroy it. And I think we should not be neglectful of the emotional investment, right, that this work has for these artists. Again, I'll say the personal is political. These are artists that are addressing life experience in a context where they feel excluded. Or were then experience where that life experience has not been acknowledged, are valued. And there's a very strong emotional foundation to that kind of work. This just a couple more pieces from Janine Antoni. I love this. This is called lick and lather. These are self portrait busts that she made. On the right side of your screen. Those bus are made of soap. And on the left side of your screen, those bus are made of chocolate. And if you know the, the first bus on each side, the face is disfigured. And I think I have yet. So literally, she licked the chocolate and she lather the soap. And that's what happened to the face. So you can see given that the quote about destroying her artistic or destroying her attachment to art, her artistic heritage. She's addressing a lot of, a lot of issues here. The one thing you don't get just from looking at these images is the smell so strong? When you see this piece and smell the chocolate and the smell of the cell. It is really very overpowering. And then this is a piece she had called lik. I just showed you like another. This is called no, a G and a W. And it's a huge block of chocolate. And the marks that you see in the chocolate, our actual teeth marks where she died. She not the chocolate off. And then, so this was at a Whitney Biennial. We're going to talk about that show next week. She nod off chocolate and then fabricated it into women's cosmetics, products like lipstick can't pack. And then she had them in a showcase, a display case next to, next to the giant chocolate. So I mean, it's not subtle. But I think she was making a statement that resonated for people, even if it wasn't necessarily kind of multi-layered or anything. So I'm going to go back to this idea of this in lab gram. The, the terms in monochrome comes from this quote from Ecclesiastes. The symbol outcome is never that which conceals the truth, is the truth which conceals that there isn't it? The symbol Akram is true. So again, in the, the important thing about this idea of similar background is that it is an image that supposedly represents a reality. But that reality does not exist. The image and the supposed reality represents is an ideal that people have come to believe in and uphold isn't ideal. So one example of a simple Akram would be, oh wow, I use the example of the, of the Clean home thing. I have. I have a dog example. I don't know if this is helpful, but I I think of dog breeding. And if you know anything about the world at dog shows, what what what dog dog breeders do is they try to breed to what's called the breed standard rate exactly what the BRI is supposed to be. And in many dogs, that breed standard is based in a historical function of the doubt whether it would be hurting or hunting or water rescue. But the, what the breeders are doing is they've set a standard for how the dog should look based on how the dog historically function. Alright? Now the thing is, is that bred dogs hardly ever perform those functions anymore. So the idea is that it should look alike. It can perform the function, although it never has to. Okay, You follow me. And what has actually happened is that some breeds, like a German Shepherd dogs, have completely changed over time. Physically from what they historically were when they function as herding dogs. So I am not sure if that was a helpful example or not. But I think you can probably think of some just, it's the idea of an image. Or this one might be a more concrete image, BDMS, right? I mean, luckily we're getting out of that now. But those skinny, skinny models, right? I mean, as, as a standard of beauty, they existed in the kind of fashion world are modeling world. But was that a true standard of beauty? Kind of in the real world? In the world where people I'm live, sort of regular lives. And so buggy or makes this conclusion about similar gram and, and why, why he talks about it when the real is no longer what it used to be. Nostalgia assumes it's for me. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality, of secondhand truth, objectivity and authenticity. In other words, because the thing because the signifier or I'm sorry, the signified, if it never really existed. No longer exists for the signifier, right? Then the signifier is referring to something that no longer is no longer with us. And so what happens is we have to we have to. To create other other kind of signs that support the original one. I can't be a very good example of that. It's very hard. Well, let me let me try. Oh, okay, here's a good one. Going back to my household cleaner example. So if this immaculate, clean home doesn't really exist, what we, what we do is we try to create or advertising does anyway, tries to create a sense of need around products that can make that happen, right? So that immaculate home is a kind of symbol I problem. And then we create all these other similar graph plural, right? To support the original. Guess, their dog, those are good. Okay, I think that actually is kind of a hard concept to end on. And I believe it or not, I actually wanted to sell a movie tonight. I don't know why I thought I would have time for that. The movie is actually on your syllabus for next week. But it should have been on the syllabus for this week because it relates to some Malacca and simulations. The movie is called me and you and everyone we know. And it's by an artist named Miranda July. I gave you a website link on the syllabus to her page out decide about the movie. It's kind of hard to find it online. It's available through Amazon Prime, but you have to get a separate subscription to IFC. And I think there's another one. Anyway, you can get like a free trial just to watch the movie. Wow, I talked a lot. Darn it. That movie is really good to talk about. Some Malacca and simulations are similar chakra. But it's also really good to have like an actual discussion about that film because there's a lot to unpack. I mean, it is very multilayered. Let me think about it. Maybe we can watch it together. Next week. I will at least maybe start a discussion on it on Canvas. In case you want to watch it between now and next week. And then maybe next week I'll save it to the end. Anyway. Don't quote me on that. I have to decide. But I'll also your discussion on the film because at least I can give you a heads up for things to be looking out for. In thinking about some Malacca similar lack gram is actually a really important concept. I want to make sure that you, you get it, you understand how, how it operates. But okay. So anyway, don't worry about that. I figured out for next time. By the way, everybody thank Michela for pointing out to me when my links don't work. So everything should have worked fine for tonight's readings. And I checked next week everything all the links are working. So I'll try to keep on top of that so they don't we don't have those dead links anymore. Got rough drafts will try to get those back to you asap. Think of anything else? What's March tenth of the links? Adorno. Alright, I'll take a look. I thought I, I link them both to PDFs because they're linking to other sites that have them. But yeah, it just is not helpful. I think it's just better for for for us to have the actual PDFs. But I'll go back, I'll go back and take a look. But tonight's work and next week's work, I'll go back. I do. I have PDFs for almost everything. I just was linking to websites because I thought that would be easier. But I'll just link to PDFs. Okay. I'm fried hour. How about you? All right. So email me with questions about anything. I figured out how to do the how to get these recordings on Canvas. So I don't know if you've noticed that. But so when this one is available, I will, we'll publish it for you. And also the same with same with the slides. So I think I think that's probably good for tonight. Wow, that's crazy. We have five minutes and 32 seconds left of class and counting down. But that's okay. All right. So yeah, I think that's it for me for tonight. We've covered a lot of ground and yeah. So just let me know if any questions or anything come up and then I'll try to get everything up on Canvas as soon as it's all. As soon as it's already. Okay. Is that good for everybody? So next week I want everybody to have dog pictures on their on their profiles. I I was just kidding. Don't tell don't tell people. I said that. Don't report me. Okay. I'm going to stop sharing and an end our Zoom. Okay, thanks everybody. Have a good week. Bye. Thank you.