arts analysis

ARTS 1A

Topic 8: Money

Previously we explored five methods of interpretation: Iconology Iconography Semiotics

Formal Analysis Stylistic Analysis

In this presentation we explore three additional methods of interpretation: • Economic Determinism • Marxism • Postcolonial Theory

First, click on the link below and watch the following short video, “Haas & Hahn: This is not the end”.

This is the second part of a two-part video. You do not need to watch part one for ARTS 1A, although you may do so if you choose.

[Turn off the closed-captioning option, as this video is subtitled.]

h"ps://youtu.be/tnLVfNKgssE

Pair 1: Haas & Hahn and Lorna Simpson

Haas & Hahn

I. Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, an artistic team who go by the name Haas & Hahn, acquired worldwide attention in 2006 when they established a relationship with residents of Vila Cruzeiro, an impoverished community in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Their idea was to work with local residents to paint large sections of the city. This work included both figurative murals as well as non-representational painting, where entire streets and buildings were painted in a range of colors. In 2012 the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania invited Haas & Hahn to relocate to Germantown, a low-income neighborhood with a distinguished history. It is the birthplace of the American antislavery movement, dating back to 1688.

Haas & Hahn

Philly Painting Germantown Avenue, North Philadelphia

2012

Acrylic paint on prepared walls

II. While living in Philadelphia, Haas & Hahn gained the support and participation of residents, business owners, and government administrators to paint the buildings located on both sides of a section of Germantown Avenue. They employed and trained local residents who had not worked previously as artists to oversee production and to paint.

Choosing to work in—and with—communities which experience devastating poverty, the art projects of Haas & Hahn may be explored in relation to economic determinism: within the field of art history, the practice of analyzing economic relationships to interpret a work of art. An economic determinist might examine Philly Painting to ask, “How does economic inequality among people in Philadelphia shape the production and meaning of this work of art?”

Haas & Hahn characterize their work as favela painting: community-based art production with the aim of making social change. They use this term to describe not only their projects but the larger institution which reflects additional facets of their work, including an academy and a foundation. It is likely that this term will eventually be used to describe similar projects practiced by artists in neighborhoods which struggle economically. “Favela” is a Portuguese word which has long been used by Brazilians to refer to a low-income urban neighborhood neglected by the government. Many people refer to favelas as “slums.”

S

Lorna Simpson

I. Brooklyn-born artist Lorna Simpson studied at the University of California, San Diego, with teachers who practiced conceptual art, performance art, poetry, and filmmaking. She combines photographs and text to produce work which requires viewers to consider the relationship between race and economic inequality. For Waterbearer, Simpson constructed a photograph of a young black woman pouring water from vessels in each hand. Some writers enthusiastically refer to this image as “beautiful,” partly due to its asymmetrical balance: a principle of design in which the visual weight of the forms achieves equilibrium despite being distributed unevenly throughout the picture plane. Beyond the ”beauty” of this image, many viewers feel compelled to ask, Who is this woman? What is the significance of the vessels, and the water she pours out?

Lorna Simpson

The Waterbearer

1986

Mixed media

SII. Closer analysis of this image invites consideration of the text below the photograph, which points to the woman’s lack of social power. She has important information, but “they” sought her out as a witness “only to discount her memory.”

African-American artist and writer bell hooks considers Waterbearer to be a counterhegemonic image: a work of art which seeks to critique or dismantle what is most powerful in a society. Such works, writes bell hooks, “fulfill longings that are oftentimes not yet articulated in words: the longing to look at blackness in ways that resist and go beyond the stereotype. Despite the tenacity of white supremacy as a worldview that overdetermines the production of images in this society, no power is absolute to the imagination. The practice of freedom in daily life, and that includes artistic freedom, is always a liberatory act that begins with the will to imagine.”

Pair 1

Analysis Exercises: Pair 1 1. Do Philly Painting and Waterbearer demand that viewers

think about economic inequality? If yes, how do they demand this? If not, what else do these works require from viewers?

2. Waterbearer includes the representation of a person, while Philly Painting does not. Does the inclusion of a person in Waterbearer lend greater meaning to this work, in terms of economic inequality? Why or why not?

3. Philly Painting is comprised of numerous colorful hues. Waterbearer is comprised of a range of black, white, and grey. To your eyes, is one of these works more visually powerful than the other, on the basis of the artists’ approach to color?

Pair 2: Pollock and Cellini

Jackson Pollock

I. In 1949, Life Magazine published an essay, ”Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The article noted that at age 37, Pollock “has burst forth as the shining new phenomenon of American art.”

How could a non-representational artist have risen to such fame in the U.S.?

Pollock had an education, a strong work ethic, innovative ideas about subject and technique, a supportive community of artists— including his wife, the painter Lee Krasner—and a wealthy patron: Peggy Guggenheim.

Jackson Pollock

Mural

1943

Oil and acrylic on canvas

II. Six years before he was featured in Life Magazine, Pollock had written a letter to his brother Charles in which he identified a turning point is his career: Peggy Guggenheim had not only offered him a contract with her gallery, The Art of This Century, she had also commissioned him to paint a mural for her private residence: “8’ 11-1/2” x 19’ 9" with no strings as to what or how I paint it. . . . They are giving me a show November 16 and I want to have the painting finished for the show. I've had to tear out the partition between the front and middle room to get the damned thing up. I have it stretched now. It looks pretty big, but exciting as all hell."

Pollock’s Mural would not have been conceived or produced without the commission from Guggenheim. A commission is a formal request from a patron to an artist to produce a work of art to be owned by the patron, usually in exchange for a financial sum.

Prior to producing Mural for Peggy Guggenheim and obtaining gallery representation in The Art of This Century gallery, Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) was a government agency which employed more than ten thousand American artists affected by joblessness during the Great Depression. Those who received work through the WPA were professional artists commissioned to produce primarily works of public art.

Benvenuto Cellini

I. Whereas Jackson Pollock relied on the U.S. government as well as Peggy Guggenheim to sustain his career financially, sixteenth-century Italian metalsmith Benvenuto Cellini worked for several wealthy and politically powerful individuals, including King Francis I of France. Cellini was completely dependent on the king to supply him with a workshop, money to pay his assistants, and materials to make sculpture in fine metals such as silver and gold. Unlike Pollock, who could negotiate individual prices for works of art, Cellini relied on the generosity of the king of France to “reward” him for his work.

Cellini wrote an autobiography. One of the incidents he wrote about recalled the king’s annoyance that Cellini had tried to persuade the king to fund projects other than those he had commissioned.

Benvenuto Cellini

Salt Cellar

c. 1539-1543

Gold

II. A project Cellini persuaded the king to fund was a salt and pepper holder, produced in gold by means of metal casting: a technical process for making sculpture in which hot (liquid) metal is poured into a mold. As the molten metal cools it hardens, after which the sculpture is extracted from the mold. Given the prohibitive cost of using gold as a material for sculpture, the Salt Cellar would never have been completed if Francis I had not agree to supply Cellini with gold to complete it.

Like Lorna Simpson’s Waterbearer, Cellini’s composition is carefully balanced. The figures face each other, but they are not mirror images of each other. If the figures were mirror images of each other, we would refer to them as symmetrically balanced, but since they are not exactly the same, the term asymmetrical balance is more appropriate to describe Cellini’s design of this sculpture.

A land goddess gestures toward a small Classical temple designed to hold peppercorns while a sea god sits opposite her. Beside the sea god Cellini designed a small bowl to hold salt (this may be glimpsed on the far side of this table ornament).

Pair 2

Analysis Exercises: Pair 2

1. If you did not know that Pollock’s Mural and Cellini’s Salt Cellar had been made for patrons, would you have assumed instead that these works had been made for each artist’s personal use? Why or why not?

2. Both Mural and the Salt Cellar were made for their patrons to use or display in their homes. Is it apparent from looking at them that these works were meant to be placed in domestic rather than public spaces? Why or why not?

3. How would you characterize Cellini’s approach to forms? Natural, abstract, or ideal, and why? How would you characterize Pollock’s approach to forms? Natural, abstract, or ideal, and why?

Pair 3: Banksy and Edouard Manet

Banksy

I. Cellini worked for a king. Pollock worked for the U.S. government, then an heiress. Lorna Simpson uses an art dealer to sell her work. Haas and Hahn acquire funding for their projects through a foundation.

But how does a street artist make money? The artist Banksy is known for using spray paint and stencils to

produce imagery on surfaces the artist does not own. These works are designed to be part of the public domain. They are for all of us. But if Banksy produces a work of art on private property, the property owner may destroy or sell the work, or otherwise remove it from public view.

Banksy

Seasons Greetings Port Talbot, Wales

2018

Spray paint on cement block

• B a n k

d

(details)

II. Most of Banksy’s work may be seen in towns and cities in Great Britain. Perhaps the single work by Banksy identified in the country of Wales is Seasons Greetings.

One morning in December of 2018 a resident in the Taibach neighborhood of Port Talbot learned that Banksy had produced a painting on two exterior walls of his modest concrete-block garage.

Bansky authenticated this work by posting a a video of it on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BrkqwhnlNjR/?utm_source=ig_web_b utton_share_sheet

At the end of the video, a camera pans upward from the garage to reveal the smokestacks of a nearby factory, Tata Steel Strip Products. The owner of the garage, Ian Lewis, is one of 4,000 workers at this steel plant.

On one wall, Banksy painted a child and a sled. The child holds out his or her arms as if to welcome falling snow and sticks out his tongue to catch a snowflake. But around the corner, painted on another wall of the garage, is the source of the falling ”snow”: a garbage fire. The snow is actually ash rising from a burning fire, emitting a dark cloud of pollution. The child does not realize she or he sticks out his tongue to catch ash rather than snowflakes.

The prior August, four months before Banksy produced this work, a resident of Port Talbot, Gary Owen, had posted a request to Banksy’s Instagram account:

“Could you do some art in Porttalbot, the steelworks is making lots of dust every day and the locals are sick of it. TATA owns the works and don’t care, seagulls with gas masks comes to mind..lol”

According to a BBC report published on December 20, 2018, the owner of the garage, Ian Lewis, conveyed a desire to protect Seasons Greetings to make sure “it is here for everybody”. One month later The Guardian reported that Lewis had sold the work to English gallery owner John Brandler. Four months later, in May of 2019, Brandler relocated the work to a former police station in Port Talbot, where it could continue to be viewed by locals.

In February of 2022, Brandler arranged to have Seasons Greetings transported to Essex, England. The work is now in storage.

Of the many methods that may be used to explore the meaning of Banksy’s Seasons Greetings, it is appropriate within this topic presentation to consider ways that this work fits into, or runs counter to, our understanding of who pays for art and how an artist gets paid.

Who “commissioned” this work? Arguably Gary Owen, by suggesting an idea to Banksy on Instagram. But Gary Owen did not pay Banksy to make this work.

And who was the initial ”owner” of Seasons Greetings? Arguably Ian Lewis, who discovered it painted on the walls of his garage. But Lewis did not purchase it. Moreover, he was determined to protect it so it could remain in Port Talbot for “everybody.”

The fact that Ian Lewis recognized that Seasons Greetings was intended by Banksy to be shared by everyone in Port Talbot is significant. Lewis was a factory worker at Tata Steel Strip Products, and as such he was a member of Port Talbot’s proletariat, that is, workers who sell their labor by the hour. The factory itself is managed by an international bourgeoisie, wealthy members of the middle class who employ workers. And the gallery owner, John Brandler— what is his social class? Within a traditional discussion of social class, Brandler would be regarded as a member of the bourgeoisie, since he is the (fairly wealthy) owner of a business which employs workers.

But how does the artist fit into this story, as a financial earner? It was Lewis, the property owner, who was paid by Brandler for this work, but Banksy produced the labor.

Part of Banksy’s project as an artist is to call attention to ways in which people and institutions profit financially from associating themselves with street artists. Banksy’s website lists current exhibitions of his work for which the artist offered no consultation, gave no permission, and received no funding.

Are you a street artist? If you are, how do you support yourself financially?

If you were Banksy, how might you make money as an artist, without selling art itself?

Edouard Manet

I. Scholars interested in economic determinism sometimes use categories of social class which became popular through the writings of nineteenth-century German political and economic theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. These writers advocated for a system (now called Marxism) in which workers own the means of their own production, hence eliminating the need for a middle class. The terminology used in this presentation to explore categories of social class is a reflection of Marxism.

Edouard Manet, a professional painter who lived in Paris in the nineteenth century, was a contemporary of Karl Marx. Unlike Cellini, Manet spoke and wrote little about his own work. But many art historians, including T.J. Clark, whose essay we explore in our reading exercise, finds in Manet’s paintings an affinity for the ideas of Marx and Engels.

Edouard Manet

Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (A Bar at the Folies- Bergère)

1882

Oil on canvas

d

II. Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (A Bar at the Folies- Bergère) is a much more complex painting than meets the eye, and scholars have interpreted it in dozens of different ways. Examining this work from the standpoint of Marxism allows us to ask, What was the bartender’s social class? What was the social class of her customers? What was the (labor) relationship between the bartender and her clients?

When exploring this work, Clark discusses the bartender not as a member of the middle class (the bourgeoisie) or the working class (the proletariat). Rather, he believes she located herself somewhere in between.

Perhaps she was a working class woman who was asked by her boss to dress like a middle class woman so that her middle class clients would be more comfortable ordering drinks from her. If this was the case, she could be designated as a member of the petite bourgeoisie: the lower middle class.

In any case, she is probably exhausted, right?

Pair 3

Analysis Exercises: Pair 3

Exercise 1: In what ways does a Marxist approach to these works open up ways of thinking about them that you may not have previously considered?

Exercise 2: In what ways does a Marxist approach to these works shut down alternative ways of thinking about them? In other words, if we spend too much time thinking about social class, what important aspects about these works might we miss?

Exercise 3: Consider that both Banksy and Manet are naturalists in their approach to form. Do you think painters who seek to explore aspects of social class in their work should be naturalists? Why or why not?

Pair 4: Titus Kaphar and Théodore Géricault

Titus Kaphar

I. In 2011, Titus Kaphar was invited to Bermuda to produce a work of art inspired by a painting in its National Gallery. In response, Kaphar produced Tax Collector, a full-scale copy of a portrait in oil by English artist Thomas Gainsborough, originally painted around 1763. After Kaphar finished painting his copy of Gainsborough’s work, he installed it next to the original. He then shocked viewers by entering the museum disguised as a janitor and proceeded to cut the representation of Englishman Thomas John Meldycott out of the painting Kaphar himself had produced. Upon removing the representation of Meldycott, all that was left of the portrait was its landscape background.

Kaphar placed the cut-out fragment into an industrial-size garbage can. He removed his coveralls to reveal that he was wearing a suit. The performance was over.

By attacking a copy of a painting that represented a British colonizer, Kaphar symbolically attacked the history of colonialism itself. Colonialism is the practice of one country gaining control of another to exploit its resources for economic purposes.

Titus Kaphar

Tax Collector

2011

Oil on canvas; performance

d

II. An American artist of African descent, Kaphar wrestles with legacies of imperialism and colonialism in the “New World.” Postcolonial theory is a method of interpretation closely related to economic determinism, in which the effects of imperialism and colonialism are analyzed to interpret works of art. Interpreting Tax Collector by means of postcolonial theory allows us to ask, “In what ways have imperialism and colonialism shaped the production and meaning of this work of art?”

Kaphar produced Tax Collector in Bermuda, an island colonized in the eighteenth century to increase the prosperity of the British Empire. The British forced enslaved people to produce the labor that made the colony profitable. By taking a knife to his copy of Gainsborough’s painting he reminds us of the violence of colonizing practices. At the same time, he claims a space for himself in a place previously associated with European elites—the island’s National Gallery.

Kaphar’s Tax Collector was a successful project, in that it raised awareness about the violence of Europe’s imperial past and stimulated new questions about the legacy of imperialism. One affiliate of Bermuda’s National Gallery stated the following about Kaphar’s project in Bermuda:

“I wanted to know how local artists and international artists would respond to our collection. And primarily to look at the relevancy of it. Is it relevant today? Do we even need this collection? And if we have it, why do we have it? I’m concerned now, based on the work, and based on what the performance was, Where we go next?”

Théodore Géricault

I. Like Great Britain, France was an imperial power. In 1819, Théodore Géricault, an ambitious young artist in Paris, submitted to the salon a painting which points to the French colonization of northern Africa. The salon exhibitions at the Académie Royale in Paris were the primary means by which academically trained artists in France could gain public recognition.

Geŕicault’s painting, Raft of the Medusa, depicts survivors of a shipwreck that occurred near the shores of Mauritania in July of 1816, an event which was widely reported in the French newspapers. Nearly 150 people tried to survive on a section of the ruined ship Méduse, adrift at sea for close to two weeks. Only fifteen survived. The French ship had been on a mission to formally accept the return of the colony of Senegal from Great Britain, part of a peace agreement between European nations.

Théodore Géricault

Raft of the Medusa

1818-1819

Oil on canvas

d

II. While Géricault worked hard to re-create the suffering of those on the raft—he even interviewed some of the survivors— the artist nonetheless produced figures that are invariably large and strong. Géricault was taught at the French academy to idealize human forms.

In Raft of the Medusa, many of the figures strain to get the attention of a rescue ship on the horizon. An African man—one of the ship’s crew members—stands at the apex, or highest point, of two pyramids of figures. Géricault probably did not intend for viewers to see this man as a slave (the emancipation of slaves had been declared in France as early as 1794), but trading enslaved people for financial gain remained an offense which went largely unpunished in some French colonies until as late as 1848.

Members French government were furious with Geŕicault for submitting this work to the salon. When he failed to win the recognition he had hoped for, he brought this painting to England, where officials at the academy in London allowed him to display it.

Pair 4

Analysis Exercises: Pair 4

Exercise 1: Kaphar’s Tax Collector and Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa are works of art that were meant to be displayed, discussed, and written about by members of the public. How might artists interested in exploring themes of imperialism and colonialism produce works suitable for private rather than public consumption?

Exercise 2: Both artists received a traditional academic art education. In what ways do these works of art reflect that the artists were trained traditionally within art academies?

Exercise 3: Titus Kaphar’s work is partly based on a performance. In what ways is Géricault’s work like a performance?

Pair 5: Lionel Wendt and Graciela Iturbide

Lionel Wendt

I. Théodore Géricault produced Raft of the Medusa in Paris. While this painting includes representation of colonized people, it was produced far away from the French colonies. Titus Kaphar produced Tax Collector in Bermuda, currently one of the Overseas Territories of Great Britain. While Bermuda continues to be a colony, Kaphar himself is an American; he traveled to Bermuda to complete this work as a guest of the local government. Neither Géricault nor Kaphar were themselves colonial subjects when they produced these works.

But Sri Lankan artist Lionel Wendt was a colonial subject when he produced Untitled (Portrait and Profile with Turban) in the 1930s.

Lionel Wendt

Untitled (Portrait and Profile with Turban)

c. 1930

Solarized gelatin silver print

d

II. Wendt lived and worked in Colombo, Sri Lanka, which was a crown colony of Great Britain from 1796 through 1948. Wendt, who died in 1944, did not live to see the decolonization of the island, that is, the political process process by which a country becomes independent of its colonizer.

Wendt was born into an influential family and he traveled to Britain to study law from 1919 through 1924. In addition to becoming a qualified lawyer, Wendt was deeply interested in European classical music and art, to the extent that he studied at the Royal College of Music in London. He also familiarized himself with the work of avant-garde artists, that is, experimental artists who place themselves at the forefront of new art movements. For example, Wendt became interested in Surrealism.

Upon returning to Sri Lanka, Wendt and his friends became determined to make and support art which took seriously the tendencies toward modernism demonstrated by British and European artists, while simultaneously respecting traditional Sri Lankan culture and history. He achieved this goal in Untitled (Portrait and Profile with Turban), in which his subject, a Sri Lankan man, appears twice in the picture plane photographed in high contrast. Consider the unusual, bold outline around the forms. Wendt achieved this effect by briefly turning on the lights while printing this photograph in a darkroom, a technique pioneered by Man Ray, an American avant-garde artist who relocated to Paris in 1921. Wendt’s approach to making art demonstrates his belief that the future of Sri Lanka should be informed by European developments in technology while remaining rooted in the island’s traditional values and history.

Graciela Iturbide

I. Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide turned to the study of photography in the early 1970s, after the death of one of her children. Just as Lionel Wendt was influenced by the work of American photographer Man Ray, Graciela Iturbide was drawn to the work of photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who became her mentor early in her career. Within the context of our discussions in ARTS 1A, a mentor is an experienced artist who advises, encourages, and advocates on behalf of a less experienced artist.

Like Bravo, Graciela Iturbide sought out subject matter which reflects everyday life, not only in Mexico City but also in the rural countryside.

Graciela Iturbide

Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert)

1979

Gelatin silver print

d

II. Graciela Iturbide’s Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert) points to this artist’s commitment to the representation of a wide range of cultures within Mexico. Accepting a commission from a federal agency, the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico, to document indigenous people, she demonstrates that the lives of rural people are as complex and dynamic as the lives of city folks.

Her subject, a woman whose back is turned toward us, towers over the landscape into which she strides while holding a large radio in her right hand. The diagonal lines formed by her arms intersect with the horizontal line of the hills, creating the illusion of both movement and stability. And what do we imagine she hears on the radio? Our answers say far more about us, of course, than they say about Iturbide’s subject.

The Sonoran Desert is shared by the U.S. and Mexico, allowing Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert) to be an addressed a borderlands image, that is, relevant to the regions near a border. If this photograph documents a moment in the life of an indigenous woman in the borderlands, within a discussion of postcolonial theory we must consider her relationship to two separate nation-states as well as two historical projects of colonialism: the Spanish Empire from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, and the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With this visually powerful photograph Graciela Iturbide reminds us that all people who live in places which are colonized, or have been decolonized, are the heirs of economic struggle.

Pair 5

Analysis Exercises: Pair 5

Exercise 1: Both of these photographs rely on the use of gelatin silver print technology to fix an image on paper. This technique yields a range of light values but offers no primary or secondary color hues. In what ways are these works visually powerful?

Exercise 2: Both of these works include representations of people. Do you think they are portraits? Why or why not?

Exercise 3: Would you refer the people in these photographs as colonial subjects? Discuss each separately then compare them as you respond to this question.