history f art

Woodbury University, Department of Art History, summer 2018 History of Contemporary Art Instructor: Nicholas Kersulis

Tu/Th 9:00 am – 12:45 pm Cabrini Hall 207

ARTH 205.AA Guidelines for the midterm essay questions Font: Helvetica Font Size: 12 pt. Document Size: 4 – 6 pages Spacing: 1.5 or double-spaced Margins: 1” all around Content and Subject Matter 1. Answer all four of the essay questions presented below, using between 150 and 200 words for each answer: be sure to number your answer appropriately. Re-pasting the question onto your final will not count towards your word count. 2. Develop a critical argument for each essay question by choosing a group of concepts and ideas that we have discussed in class; then, integrate quoted texts into your critical argument. Be sure to cite your sources and include page numbers from the assigned readings. 3. When using a quoted text, set it up by offering the reader context through paraphrasing one or more of the concepts taken up in the quoted text. Then write a response to the quoted text that further integrates the concept as a whole into your argument. 4. It is important that you show an understanding of the specific terms that are particular to the assigned readings: i.e. capitalist production, paradox, or Taylorism. 5. Layout your pages with quoted text and cite your sources with appropriate page numbers and author information using the MLA (Modern Language Association) style for research papers: i.e. larger quotes should be distinguished from the main body of text with deeper margins, no quotation marks, and need to be single spaced. A Suggestion First write your answers out as if writing for an in-class assignment. Next, type them up including the quoted texts that address your chosen concepts and ideas, and then fine- tune the paper with a detailed understanding of grammatical problems. Please consult someone in writing services before turning in your paper. 1. In her structuralist essay Grids (1978), Rosalind Krauss points out that for many 20th Century artists the grid carried a multitude of contradictions. She explains how Symbolists in the late 19th Century used windows similarly, where the material presence of their panes of glass was shown disrupted by their mullions (vertical bars). It was this contradiction of terms that made their work Modern: the windows depicted or

experienced as transparent and opaque at the same time. Regarding his Compositions, Krauss then states how Piet Mondrian expressed the schizoid structure of the grid through an exacting use of its ability to imply two conflicting readings. She is led to ask, “Is what we see in a particular painting merely a section of an implied continuity, or is the painting structured as an autonomous, organic whole?” In other words, is the painting part of a much larger space that is implied or is the substrate/painting a world into itself? Using Composition 1A (1930) & Composition 2 (1922), name and describe the two conflicting readings and how the grid is able to occupy both positions at once. 2. Claes Oldenberg The Street (1960) Performance and multi-media installation that first showed at the Judson Gallery, Judson Memorial Church; and then, without performance, at the Reuben Gallery: both venues in New York City. The Store (1961-2) Acting as proprietor, Oldenberg rented a commercial storefront in the East Village of New York City, where he temporarily displayed many plaster reliefs that were for sale. Given the different physical and social contexts of each of these works, elaborate upon the paradoxical content of The Street and The Store as explained by David Joselit in 2003. How do each of these two works relate to Joselit’s argument that shows how television mediated public space? Elaborate upon their subject matter, the forms of the individual objects, the forms of the entire installations, and Oldenberg’s use of the “artist’s hand.” 3. The paradoxical structure of the mass ornament is abstract, but it is not a mere abstraction. It mirrors, re-enacts, or mimics the reality of capitalist production. Siegfried Kracauer explains that the mass ornament is a form we can understand rationally as degrees and circles, waves and spirals, but how does it become systematically used within the larger structure of mass culture? He states that, "A system oblivious to differences in form leads on its own to the blurring of national characteristics and to the production of worker masses that can be employed equally well at any point on the globe." How does Kracauer see the ability of this earlier form of globalism as it reifies human nature and then exploits it in the name of profit? 4. Premise: True to one of the Laws of Thought that help define Dialectical Materialism, Siegfried Kracauer pits reason against nature and truth against myth. In the guise of mythological thinking, nature constantly seeks to defend itself against the interventions of reason; conversely, reason does not submit to the rule of nature. In the context of this premise, name the Law of Thought employed and explain what mythological illusions have challenged the power of reason historically and how these factors have become manifest within Modernism and The Mass Ornament. Keep in mind that Kracauer’s concept of the mass ornament critically analyzes capitalist production during Modernism by pointing out how mass culture is consumed.