ART SINCE 1975: FOUR WEEKS IN REVIEW
All images from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, 1978-87. Cropped from digital copy of Photostat image accessible via MoMA website here (link opens in new tab)
I have split my response into three sections, covering (1) my thoughts on the course in general, including its structure and performance of both teacher (you) and student (me); (2) my reactions to some of the content covered thus far; and (3) my reflections on how learning about art through this course has influenced my understanding of myself and the world.
COURSE
STRUCTURE
In terms of the structure of the course, I enjoy that each week is self-contained in terms of the main subject covered, but builds upon what we have learned previously. I was excited as soon as I saw the syllabus. My other art history course was taught essentially in chronological order, which, while it makes sense as a teaching strategy — I feel like I respond much better to and retain much more information with this course, taught topic-by-topic and with less of an emphasis on dates and more on ideas.
BENEFICIAL ASPECTS
I enjoy the journal entries and the fact that you are willing to spend the time to respond to each one. It is very engaging to have a professor invested in their students’ opinions and individual thought processes. I definitely plan to include more of my personal opinions and reactions in my next set of entries, now that I know what you are looking for. I also did not write my journal entries immediately following each class, and my goal for the next set is to have an entry composed within a few days of class — I think this will help me to remember more of my emotional and personal takes on each week’s subject, and inject more of that and less a summarization of my class notes.
I think that the required reading responses are a valuable weekly exercise as well. They force me to not only do my homework (that is, read) but also to think critically and from a place of inquiry about the subject of the reading material.
PERFORMANCE (STUDENT)
I feel like my engagement with the course is satisfactory, but I know that I can do better. I have this thing (…probably many humans do) where I have a fear of being wrong that stops me from contributing to class discussion. Ex: I knew that Andy Warhol’s (?) piece in week 2 (?) was Jackie Kennedy, but didn’t say it because I…thought I was wrong? I need to work to get over that.
In my personal life, I am very much somebody who loves to observe conversations and listen to other people’s ideas (and try not to silently judge them, sometimes) — I am not sure if this is related to me being an introvert, or if I am just more of a listener than a talker. This absolutely extends to the classroom, where I enjoy hearing other’s responses or reactions to ideas while privately contemplating my own. I do not feel as though I am getting less out of the class than those who are more active participants — I am participating actively, just not publicly. I put my energy toward taking detailed notes, and go home after each class with a lot to chew on.
PERFORMANCE (TEACHER)
I feel as though you encourage open thinking and work to engage us critically with thinking about art and art history. By having us collectively contribute to definitions of key terms or ideas each week, I think the material sticks a little better — and it doesn’t feel as though you’re just telling us how it is, but rather that you are more interested in hearing how we respond to and interpret and maybe even have epiphanies/discoveries from the material you give us, while guiding us along the way as necessary. It feels as though you as a professor are invested in our personal creative response to what we’re learning, and not just a standard/by-the-book academic one.
Some favorite quotes / asides jotted down in notes:
Modernism is based on internal, individual subjectivity, i.e. Pollock “barfing up his soul” onto canvas. Vs postmodernism, which is about external experiences / situations (week 2 notes)
“Avant-garde is dead” — Marin said this — there is no way for an artist to exist outside of the system (week 2 notes)
CONTENT
WHAT HAVE I LEARNED ?
WHAT HAS SURPRISED ME ?
I’ve learned a lot over the past four weeks. The more I learn, the more I understand how little I know. This only makes me want to keep learning. This probably never stops, right?
One subject that really surprised me was Week 3’s discussion on performance art — what was surprising was not necessarily the content (although much of it was new to me) but rather my reaction to the psychology of performance art. I was and am fascinated by the breakdown and exploration of the relationship between audience and performer (/ artist / body / art object) (week 3 notes).
Performance art — According to The Case for Performance Art, PBS — is about questioning of boundaries; social norms; expectations around art. It can make people feel uncomfortable. It is the onus of audience to put themselves in the position of the artist (psychologically, physically) (week 3 notes)
I could not stop thinking about The Square during this class. There is a scene in the movie where a performance artist keeps toeing a line, eventually devolving a formal banquet dinner into uncivilized chaos. From Rolling Stone:
A performance artist is invited to showcase “a piece” for the amusement and delight of a museum’s wealthy, well-dressed contributors. His forte is to pretend to be an ape, complete with metal arm extensions that let him replicate a a simian gait. He is extremely dedicated to this predatory primate act. And for over 10 minutes, viewers watch this “savage” knock glasses out of people’s hands, go after bystanders and [gulp] look for a mate while a crowd in formalwear try to remain as still as possible. To say that the showstopping set piece is nerve-racking would be putting it mildly.
Based on Oleg Kulik : https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/18/arts/on-becoming-a-dog-by-acting-like-one.html
The idea of the body as an art object is interesting to me because it forces the artist to break down barriers and boundaries between public and private. Interrogating the limits of the body as performance artists do must involve a certain degree of discomfort, and I give performance artists a lot of credit for that.
I also think about how I feel when I step outside of my comfort zone, whether I’m sharing my space with strangers at a large public social event or a small circle of close friends. When I do something I’m uncomfortable with or fearful of, I adopt a fake-it-til-you-make-it mindset — which has me thinking, how much of our everyday life is really our own little performance art show? This also made me think about how “African American youth often perform visibility and represent themselves through visual effects, practices that typically take place outside the traditional frames of painting…” and how “many young men in metropolitan cities were keenly aware of the importance of being seen being seen,” as highlighted in Kehinde Wiley’s works and explored in our Week 4 reading.
WHAT HAVE I FOUND PARTICULARLY INTERESTING ?
As I mentioned in my journal entry for Week 2, the work of Richard Prince and Gerhard Richter has stuck with me. Both, in their own way, pushed back against a traditional conception of “an artist,” Prince by exploring what it means to be the “creator” of an image, and Richter by defying any attempt to attribute a single, defined, signature creative style or approach to his work.
Jenny Holzer’s text-based works are intriguing to me because I see her as an artist moving fluidly between the boundaries of writing and fine art — sort of in parallel to how Barbara Kruger moves through the boundaries of design and fine art (week 2 notes). “She is an artist of words, not images; she could be described as an artist for whom words are images.” (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/07/arts/art-view-jenny-holzer-the-message-is-the-message.html)
The words themselves are meaningful and thought-provoking, but the variety of ways in which she has installed and publicized those words have have power and purpose and meaning behind them as well. I think I am so drawn to her works because of how she both understands and subverts the idea of “the medium is the message,” using the exhibition of her words — how or where they are displayed — to create additional impact beyond the “pithy, ironic, and often disturbing statements” themselves (quote from MoMA gallery label, of Living series: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/106991).
The New York Times piece quoted above describes her signboards:
They may be a sequence of truisms or a string of inflammatory statements. The subjects may be private responses to sex or general expressions of anxiety about nuclear war. All the texts are phrased in ways that make them seem private and public, solitary and shared. There may be so many voices in a work that the point of view is impossible to determine. … Their originality comes from the accumulation and manipulation of voices. There is a point of view. Holzer…wants to make room for thoughts and feelings that people keep to themselves and that art has generally excluded.
I think that this effectively summarizes the power behind her work. Her pieces almost parallel performance art in the way that they depend on the audience / viewer for meaning.
CONNECTIONS
I feel as though each week I gain a better understanding of the contexts — historical, political, social, personal — in which art is created. This has given me the ability to think more critically about what art might be suggesting beyond its immediate appearance or explicit subject matter.
The material we’ve covered in class so far, particularly my new understanding of modernism (art based on internal, individual subjectivity) versus postmodernism (art about something–social, economic, philosophical–external), has me thinking about how and why art is made. Is art driven only by aesthetics or pure feeling more or less valuable than art created in response to some particular debate or purpose or question or criticism?
From the Week 3 roundtable feminism reading:
“I am not working on any art projects ‘about’ anything at this point. Like many of my peers, I feel the need for a different kind of process. I’m interested in images that don’t pass through language (as in ‘I’m going to make a picture of this’). I’m visually exploring queer sexualities and emotions, using suggestive abstract forms. I’m interested in direct, visceral images, in the experience of physically feeling a painting before understanding its visual strategies or its art-historical lineage.” (page 60)
Rothko is one of my favorite artists — without knowing much about him — simply because of the intensity of the response I have to his (later) works. The quote above reminded me of why I am so drawn to his paintings — I physically feel them.
I took this course because, as a digital humanities grad cert student, i am interested in combining data and tech with the humanities. Coming from a computer science background, I never really felt like art was an accessible academic thing for me, which was at serious odds with my personal interests.
This class has made me super excited to continue pursuing my studies in something along the lines of digital humanities. I feel like I could take any subject, and explore it from an art history perspective, and also explore it with some sort of more quantitative approach, and marry the two to come up with interesting ideas or conclusions or theories.
digital x human 