Update

Miami-based performance artist Maritza Molina will visit our class tomorrow. Since there's a student show, I'm thinking we can meet in Merrick 309-A as usual, go to the show and then come back in time for Maritza's presentation.

Kelly Flynn's Show

I'm proud to announce Kelly Flynn's exhibition of photographs, on November 11th, at Chelsea Galleria. Kelly is in our Art 106 class. We'll be there to support her. Chelsea Galleria, 2441 NW 2nd Avenue, Wynwood Art District. (305)576.2950

Pollock reigns!

Jackson Pollock's No. 5, 1948 just sold for a record $140,000,000. Keep working, you can make it!

Adler

Adler’s presentation was characterized by a contained intensity. I felt he really tried to express something one does not hear often about the uneasy relationship we have with the city. His idea of “in-betweness” stayed with me all night (as well as giving peoples and places the opportunity to exude beauty). I think his art is so much in tune with Baudelaire that he becomes the flâneur! What do you think?

Art & Society

Art does not happen in a vacuum. There is always a particular social milieu in which art is produced. Each culture has a distinct social organization of artistic activities that is associated with a specific attitude of artists toward their work (for example French Cubism happens in a different socio-political climate than Russian Constructivism). Artistic cultures arise from artists' relationships with other artists, their audiences; from their involvements with cultural systems not specifically artistic, from artists' technologies and ideologies. A change in any of these variables (no matter how small) can modify a given culture and give rise to new variants of it (as per the difference between Cubism and Italian Futurism).

The professional artist chooses what to make (she produces in order to sell). She is a specialist, competent in the techniques of her craft. In the visual arts, the professional artist works in her own studio, at times of her own choice. In the artistic profession, is not the ownership of the means of production that matters so much as the artist's sense that she rules upon her personal aesthetic sense. This is the predominant image of the artist in modern Western societies.

Totalitarian regimes provide the best examples of what happens when a modern artistic enterprise is subordinated to a political ideology. Artists are forced back into sort of clerical roles, with the difference that the ideology is imposed on them. Even when it does correspond with their ideological views, it conflicts with the conception of the professional role that they regard as their primary orientation within the sphere of art (as Maikovsky's disenchantment with the Bolshevik Revolution). Above, an example of the so-called Socialist Realism.

More recently, a third avant-garde has emerged: The anti-artistic avant-garde, which is alienated from the very notion of art and its practice as it's received in other versions of the avant-garde culture. Art itself and its academic extension, is perceived as "oppressive" and "exploitative," and the obligation of the artist (and of the art critic) is seen as the promotion of the "end of art". The very coherence of art is felt to be an imposition of an arbitrary system on the immediacy of "aesthetic experiences," which are to be pursued with a self-conscious repudiation of any deliberate control.

Political avant-garde culture: The artist sees himself/herself as alienated from "oppressive" and "exploitative" political and economic institutions and tries to create a new kind of art intended to undermine these institutions (German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht is an example). The bohemian and the political avant-garde overlap, and over time, one may change into the other.

Bohemian avant-garde culture: One of the distinguishable types of this artistic culture is the bohemian avant-garde, which tends to be alienated from all rational and utilitarian aspects of social organization and cultural tradition and aims to create a new kind of exaggeratedly irrational art and, perhaps even more important, an irrational style of life. (Typical of this group is the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire.) Its behaviour centres on the ambivalent and the self-consciously paradoxical: a tradition of pursuit of the new, the cultivation of a pleasureless hedonism, the development of systems for the liberation of spontaneity.

Artist as "genius": As conjunction of the artisan, clerical, and courtly cultures, the cult of genius emerged in the early 16th-Century during the High Renaissance and became fully developed in the age of Romanticism -at the beginning of the 19th century. The artist conceives himself as the "unacknowledged legislator of the world" (in the words of the English poet Percy Shelley), an autonomous, godlike creator of new orders of reality obedient only to his perceptions and the categories of his mind. He creates the unifying symbols of a developing civilization. Historically, the "genius" is the precursor of the professional artist of the 20th-Century. Artists like Raphael, Michelangelo, Mozart, Byron, Beethoven, Delacroix, etc, are notable examples.

The courtly artist is a craftsman of ordinary social standing, directly dependent upon a secular royal court -or a household of the high nobility. He is usually socially involved with this household as a vassal, royal favorite, or court artist. He produces for the high aristocracy for which he works, without actually being a member of it. The artist is ennobled by his art, permeated with "noble" attitudes: heroic exaltation, fashionable late-medieval despair, or refined Rococo or Rajput sensuousness. Artists like Rubens, Velazquez, Goya, David, are salient examples.

The clerical artist is very much a craftsman, subordinated to a moral community, which he is committed to serve and to defend by his work. By his association with this tradition, the artist gains in prestige, but also acquires a moral responsibility which the pure craftsman is not bound by. The clerical artist belongs to a moral community, which provides him with criteria for judging which works of art are worth making. He is submissive to the discipline of the moral community of which he is a part. Boticelli, Raphael, El Greco, Zurbaran, are examples of artists in the service of the church.

The artisan is a member of a specialized collectivity, such as a guild or a workshop set up by a state or a church -who works on order and for pay only. Such artist develops the pride of good craftsmanship and habits of regularity and reliability in his work and does whatever style or content is required by the client.

Folk artists are nonspecialized members of their community and closely involved with all of its activities. Their art has symbolic elements which define and give shape to the community. The themes are linked with folktales, abstract stylization (geometric ornamentation of utensils). This artist lives more powerfully in her imagination than the rest of the group. She creates by following traditional patterns. Much art is produced spontaneously for oneself, or in friendship or for communal enjoyment, rather than for pay.

Artist Adler Guerrier is coming this Thursday. It should be an interesting presentation.

Update

1- Below, find this week's issue. 2- This week is pretty hectic for me, so I'm going to ask you to post your comments by Wednesday 12 noon (at that time the post comments-section will be closed). 3- For those applying for writing credit, it would be better if you could send me an earlier draft (via email). 4- By the way, how was Carlos?

The art market

For the last few years, the media have trumpeted contemporary art as the hottest new investment. At fairs, auction houses and galleries, an influx of new buyers--many of them from the world of finance--have entered the fray. Lifted by this tidal wave of new money, the number of thriving artists, galleries and consultants has rocketed upwards. Yet amid all this transformative change, one element has held stable: the art market's murky modus operandi. In my experience, people coming from the finance world into the art market tend to be shocked by the level of opacity and murkiness," says collector Greg Allen, a former financier who co-chairs MoMA's Junior Associates board. "Of course, there's a lot of hubris--these people made fortunes cracking the market's code, so they tend to think the opacity is someone else's problems. But the mechanisms are not in place to eliminate ethical lapses or price-gouging, and the new breed of collectors is definitely more likely to pursue legal options. And once things go to court, a lot of the opacity gets shaken out." The art trade is the last major unregulated market," points out Manhattan attorney Peter R. Stern, whose work frequently involves art-market cases. "And while it always involved large sums of money, there was never the level of trading and investing that we have now. I'm increasingly approached by collectors who have encountered problems." Stern represented collector Jean-Pierre Lehmann in his winning case against the Project Gallery, which captivated the art world by revealing precisely what prices and discounts Project Gallery Chief Christian Haye had offered various collectors and galleries on paintings by Julie Mehretu--information normally concealed by an art world omerta. --Time To Reform The Art Market? by Marc Spiegler for The Art Newspaper, 2006.

Update

I need your inputs for this week's issue (Female Art) and that's it (as far as homework goes). 1- "It sounds like a paradox, but it is a very simple truth, that when to-day we look for 'American art' we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it." That's Henry James, observing the state of American art in 1887. 2- David Lock wins the Art on Paper Award. 3- Thefts from the Hermitage? 4- Artist Carlos Betancourt is coming on Thursday. It should be fun.

Female art

First, we would have to make a distinction between female art and Feminist art. Whereas the first is a label for art made by women, the latter addresses very specific socio-political issues regarding the exploitation of women by men. Feminism is right about the suppression and dislocation of women from the public sphere (since the Renaissance until the end of the Twentieth Century; just look at the disproportion of male and female artists in Modern art history). 1- An important alert to feminist issues came in the 1970’s, with artist Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, a work that used several traditionally “feminine” art-mediums to teach women’s history (Chicago’s work represents the ways in which feminists began to explore their oppression through art). Why is it that the early avant-garde (Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, De Stijl, etc) were essentially male-driven movements? I don’t want to dwell in the causes of this phenomenon, which has been well-documented by Feminists such as Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectics of Sex or Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, among many others. 2- Since the 1960’s female art has brought forth a new attention to materials: ceramics, latex, rubber, fiberglass and yarn. There is a return to fiber media: weaving, quilt-making, etc. Formally, female art is generally characterized by a biomorphic, more fluid focus. In performance/art, video and photography, women have explored gestures of objectification and exploitation from a different perspective than those found in male performances (which tend to be more heroic). 3- Although art is universal, the claim that art has no gender is not necessarily true (See post-feminism). Can you think of particular female art themes? Go ahead.

Elke Krystufek's "Silent Scream" (2000's). Elke Krystufek emerged in the early '90s with in-your-face performances and installations dealing with femininity and sexuality as filtered through pop culture. Taking her cue from '70s body art--particularly its Viennese branch-Krystufek uses her own image, often distorted, debased, disguised, or made sexually explicit, to confront viewers with collective (and mostly suppressed) revulsions and desires. Krystufek’s art is about herself, her ego and her life. For ten years now, her impertinent performances have exhibited a voyeuristic/exhibitionistic dynamic that dissolves the boundaries between the public and private realms.

No class this Thursday

Dear kids: Due to personal problems, I will not be able to make it to our ART 106 class. We're not meeting this Thursday. Tomorrow I’ll post a take-home for next Thursday.

More erotica

Talking about masterful, academic, virtuosistic, detailed-oriented erotica!

K.H.

K.H.'s presentation left me wondering about the many different facets of this thing we call art criticism (she kept talking about "community"). What are your thoughts?

Balthus' Nude With Cat (1949). The work of Balthus does not fit neatly into an art historical category and he deliberately discourages the classification, preferring each viewer to appreciate his paintings directly. This does not imply that he worked in a vacuum, free from discernable literary and artistic influences, but more his desire to be considered as an individual rather than a member of a movement or part of an established style. A number of themes or subjects do recur in his art, the most important being depictions of prepubescent female figures. While such works are not devoid of an erotic content they are actually a coherent examination of burgeoning sexuality. Nude with cat is a study of unselfconscious sensuality, and whether the intimacy is regarded as overly confronting is very much left to the viewer, as the artist intended.

David Hockney's Man Taking a Shower (1966): "Hockney's vision . . . is stamped by his homosexual stance. In one sense, this undoubtedly limits his work: those of us who are not homosexual will never simply feel the same way about those delicate pink lines with which he tints the buttocks in his otherwise black-and-white drawings of young boys."-- Peter Fuller, Art Monthly, no. 49, September 1981.

(This paragraph is taken from Wikipedia): Michelangelo's The Last Judgment was an object of a heavy dispute between Cardinal Carafa and Michelangelo: The artist was accused of immorality and intolerable obscenity, having depicted naked figures, with genitals in evidence, so a censorship campaign (known as the "Fig-Leaf Campaign") was organized by Carafa and Monsignor Sernini to remove the frescoes. When the Pope's own Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, said "it was mostly disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully, and that it was no work for a papal chapel but rather for the public baths and taverns," Michelangelo worked da Cesena's semblance into the scene as Minos, judge of the underworld. It is said that when he complained to the Pope, the pontiff responded that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell, so the portrait would have to remain.

Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia (1601). Much scholarly and non-scholarly ink has been spilled over the alleged eroticism of the painting. Yet the homoerotic, not to say pederastic, content was perhaps not so apparent to Giustiniani’s generation as it has become today. Naked boys could be seen on any riverbank or seashore, and the eroticisation of children is very much a cultural artefact of the present-day rather than Caravaggio's. -- Fragment taken from the Wikipedia

John Singer Sargent's Madame X (1884). The painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1884 as Portrait de Mme *** and created a scandal. It's considered one of Sargent's best works: "The Salon was in an uproar. Here was an occasion such as they had not had since Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe and L'Olympia. The onslaught was led the lady's relatives. A demand was made that the picture should be withdrawn. It is not among the least of the curiosities of human nature, that while an individual will confess and even call attention to his own failings, he will deeply resent the same office being undertaken by someone else. So it was with the dress of Madame Gautreau. Here the distinguished artist was proclaimed to the public in paint a fact about herself which she had hitherto never made any attempt to conceal, one which had, indeed, formed one of her many social assets. Her sentiment was profound. If the picture could not be withdrawn, the family might at least bide its time, wait till the Salon was closed, the picture delivered, and then by destroying, blot it as an unclean thing from the records of the family. Anticipating this, Sargent, before the exhibition was over, took it away himself. After remaining many years in his studio it now figures as one of the glories of the Metropolitan Museum in New York".-- Evan Charteris, John Sargent, Benjamin Blom, NY, 1927

Update

Are you into gardening? This Thursday, Kathleen Hudspeth is coming to class. Among other things, she'll talk about The Next Few Hours, arguably Miami's best art blog.

Bert Rodriguez

How about Bert's presentation last night?

Body Art

Over the course of the last 50 years, artists have investigated the aesthetic frontiers of the body. A central notion of human identity, the idea of the physical body and the human self -as stable - has eroded (think of two world wars, the Holocaust, Viet-Nam, AIDS, plus the redefinition of the body in light of the developments in psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, medicine, etc). Artists have investigated the temporality, contingency and instability of the body within and beyond cultural boundaries. One can generally define several areas of investigation: 1- The gesturing body, or the performing body: A dual role of object and subject that becomes public and gets transformed by activism (here we have the FLUXUS performances of Ono, Klein, Beuys, Nauman, etc). 2- The ritualistic body, as one finds in the Viennese Actionists' use of the symbolic language of torture, slaughter and sacrifice (among them Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl, as a way to deal with the horrors of post-War Nazi Austria). Or the self-mutilated body of Gina Pane and Mike Parr and the dying body -as bravely documented by Hannah Wilke. Also the desecrating body (as in Serrano’s Piss Christ). 3- The body as "participatory," as in Chris Burden's symbolic antics, Carolee Schneemann performances and Yayoi Kusama's staged "orgies." 4- The body as identity; whether expanding the idea of gender (the transgender phenomenon), sexuality or race, identity is characterized as a cipher in constant evolution (through the use of props, masks, costumes or any other disguises). In this category, we have the works of Pierre Moliniere, Lynda Benglis, Laura Aguilar, Paul McCarthy and others. 5- The idea of body as boundary: The artist's body is the limit between the private and the public realms and what is inflicted upon that body is inflicted somehow in the social or collective body. These artists examine issues of power, control and intimacy regarding liberties we can and cannot take within our own bodies. In this category we have the works of Dennis Oppenheim, Vito Acconci, Gina Pane, William Wegmann and Marina Abramovic -among others. To better understand the context of body art, take a look at these interesting topics: body piercing, corseting, scarification, infibulation, self-flagellation.