New Colossus, New York
This Thing is not like the other Things, Big Bird
This essay assignment is in two parts. In both sections you are asked to complete a written reflection of your experiences in this course. After the assignment deadline, you are required to return to this module to evaluatethree of your peers' submissions. Failure to do so will result in a full forfeiture on your grade (100% penalty) for this assignment.
Submission guidelines (please read them carefully):
More Cotán still-lifes: http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/cotan.php Part 1 This course asks how artists actively make a history for their own practices by thinking about their creative process as a “conversation” with a wide range of art from the past. How has this course helped you establish a greater sense of your own art historical awareness? To help focus your answer, you must include an example of a work from one of the lectures, the discussion forums, or any research initiated from your participation in this class. Choose a work that not only interests you, but has had an impact, no matter how small, on your creative practice as well. This section should be 300-600 words in length. Part 2 How has the process of receiving and giving feedback influenced your approach to your work? To help focus your answer, you must choose a work you provided feedback on or an example of feedback that you gave or received, and write about what impact of reviewing that work or giving/receiving that criticism had on your own practice. You may also use any or all of the following prompts to form your answer:
There are four sketchbook assignments in this class, and all of them are optional. (For required assignments, which are assigned in Weeks 4, 6, and 7, please go to Required Assignments.) All of the sketchbook assignments and their recommended follow up activity are posted on their respective weekly module page, but for your convenience, we have posted all of that have been assigned to date right here.Optional Sketchbook Assignment 1: My World and the Art World (Tracks A & B)This is an assignment I’ve given in my critique seminar for a number of years. It’s a good way to start a discussion about your assumptions about art (whatever they might be) and how those assumptions might constrain or enable your practice (whatever it might be). Again, this is an optional assignment but I encourage everyone to try it. If you are unsure about sharing your work in this class, I still encourage you to do it on your own. Don't think too much about it—just give it a go! Next week, we'll provide more information and examples about giving feedback to your peers' work. The critique is equally, if not more, important than the assignment itself. To complete this and other assignments in this class, please refer to this page in the Course Overview. INSTRUCTIONS:
Optional Sketchbook Assignment 2: Mental Map (Tracks A & B)It’s good to try to know yourself as an artist and visual thinker. And it’s interesting to learn from others. This week I’m asking you to tell your own story in images and words, and learn about things you might not know from other people’s stories.
Optional Sketchbook Assignment 3: Characters Drawn from Life (and Death)For this week’s sketchbook assignment we are offering two options: one for Track A learners (more visual-based), and one for Track B learners (a written response). Do one or the other, or both! Please note there is a separate forum for each track. Track A
Track B
Optional Sketchbook Assignment Follow Up (1, 2, and 3)Given our attention shifted from sketchbooks to required assignments last week, we would like to encourage students to return to those initial submissions another time. Please take a moment to give some feedback to your peers. For our third critique we are building on the prompt given in the first two assignments:
Optional Sketchbook Assignment 4: Keeping TimeAs last time, for this week’s (and the last) sketchbook assignment we are offering two options: one for Track A learners (more visual-based), and one for Track B learners (a written response). Do one or the other, or both. Please note there is a separate forum for each track. Track A
Optional Sketchbook Assignment 4 Follow UpRegardless if you did last week’s sketchbook assignment or not, or you are just joining us, please take a moment to give some feedback to your peers. For our fourth and last critique we are building on the previous prompt:
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This course is about the kinds of uses that artists make of art history. So each week, we will be visiting with a different artist to learn about a work of art that has been important to their thinking. This week, we met with Thomas Lawson, Dean of the School of Art, and Jill and Peter Kraus Distinguished Chair in Art, at Calarts. There's more biographical information on Tom at the end of this video. Now, let's turn our attention to the work that he chose: Diego Velázquez's <i>Las Meninas,</i> from 1656. So, Tom, maybe you'll tell us a little bit about how you think the painting works. >> Right. >> And why it interests you. >> Sure. Almost everyone who's invested in painting, in one way or another, has to think about this work at some point in their lives. But every now and again, a painter makes something that is something of a summation of his or her thoughts, and <i>Las Meninas</i> is that kind of painting. So that's why it's such a significant one. Because it's comes at the end of his life and career, so in some way it is a summation of what he'd been thinking, or what he'd learned. I mean, his entire career he was working for the King of Spain. I mean, that was his place-- a lot of it, making portraits of the Royal Family. But he was a painter, and he was a thinker and an intellectual. And so, as he was doing his job, he was also thinking about what it meant to do that, and what it meant to make representations of the world that he lived in. So one of the things about this painting, the <i>Las Meninas--</i> well, it's a very large painting. And it depicts an interior space in a way that both opens into, kind of, infinity, but also is very sort of self-enclosed. There's sort of the implication of there being a window on one side, with the light coming in, and there's a kind of cold light. On the other side of the canvas from where the light is coming in, there's this weird blockage to our view, which is the painted rendition of the back of a painting. Already, you get a sense of this sort of extreme self-consciousness-- that this is a painting that refers to painting. The subject of the painting is the infanta, a young little girl who's a princess, and her entourage. It seems like she's being prepared to be looked at. The ladies in waiting are kind of fixing up the last details of her costuming and everybody is kind of looking out of the picture at us-- the people who are looking at it. Slightly behind them, there's a kind a of cavalier-looking figure, with his mustache and beard, peering out from behind this canvas. And as you look at him, you realize he's holding a palette and a brush. I mean, he's the artist, and so he's looking-- in the way that an artist might be looking-- at us. You know, he's sort of looking seriously out of the picture-- again, sort of at us. On the back wall of the room, there are these dark paintings. And then there's this one that seems to have a kind of slightly interior light-- it kind of glows. In that little rectangle, there are these sort of shadowy representations of two people. You can infer, from the whole rest of the situation, that it's probably the parents of this little girl. It's the King and Queen of Spain. The disquieting part of that is that that circuit of, sort of, gazes and representations short-circuits the reality of the person standing in front of the painting. Because if you're standing there, looking into this view, you would expect-- and there's a mirror in the back-- you would expect to see yourself. The power relation of the monarchy eliminates you. Your [LAUGH] >> You can't be the king or queen, so you can't be there. >> You cannot, you certainly cannot be the king and queen. And of course, after all these centuries, you can't even be there, so there's another kind of layer of temporality that becomes quite interesting. For me, this painting manages to do all these terrific mind games about what you're looking at as you're looking at a painting. And, as a painter, that is a tremendously invigorating sort of notion, that you could build into your work at that level of self-conscious examination of the process in which you're engaged. Which makes it, in many ways, one of the earliest Modern paintings, because the Modern period, which I'm sure we'll get to plenty, is all about that kind of self-consciousness. And I think, even more than circuitive gazes, that vast blank canvas-- >> Mm-hm. >> is such a weird barrier to entry. This canvas, right in our faces here, is telling us that we cannot access everything. That there's a kind of a limit to what can be seen and understood, that there's something between you and a full comprehension of what's going on. >> There's the strangeness of spending so much time, as a painter, rendering the back of the canvas. >> Mm-hm. >> And how we're to understand the kind of investment of that, in relationship to the investment in rendering the garments of the infanta. >> Painters like Velázquez, and like Titian and others developed these techniques to represent satin and silk and different kinds of materialities-- and fur. So then, as you said, to devote so much time and care on representing untouched linen [LAUGH] that is dirty and a little dusty because that's what happens to the back of a painting. >> Mm-hm. >> And the raw wood of the stretchers-- I mean, these are base materials. These are not the fine materials of the painted world. >> And it's why, in fact, even though we're kind of looking at a reproduction now, to crib while we're talking, >> Yeah. >> it's just so important to go to see works of art in person. And it actually doesn't matter if they're masterpieces or not, it's having an understanding of the materiality of making. >> Yes, it's important, I think, to-- absolutely-- to see paintings. And, you know, to go back to <i>Las Meninas--</i> again, it is a very large thing. I mean, it's a significant... >> A machine. [LAUGH] >> Yes. I mean, it's intended to really take up your attention. I mean, you're not supposed to just walk past it. You are supposed to come and stand and look and consider all these various elements that are being presented. >> Almost immediately, this painting began to be written about and obsessed over, as you said, by legions of art historians, critics, artists, philosophers-- including Michel Foucault-- and over the centuries, too, artists have interrogated it, and taken it apart, and taken their measure in relationship to it, in various ways. >> I actually think that the, the <i>Demoiselles d'Avignon</i> >> That's interesting, yeah. >> Has a relationship to this that's not explicit, but just that it's using the conventions of a certain kind of figurative painting, that was prevalent when he was a student, to deconstruct the entire idea of representation and push painting into a whole new kind of realm. >> I agree with you. I do think there's a strong relation to the<i> Demoiselles d'Avignon,</i> by Picasso-- that Picasso obviously had this multifigure, complicated spatial composition in mind. But as an art historian, I couldn't really make that argument very well without being able to trace a kind of documented lineage of it. And as artists, we can say, 'I can see the conversation.' >> Right. Part of the job of being an artist is looking at other art. And when you're confronting older art, you're-- I mean, you're really looking at it in a contemporary point of view. You're not a historian. What's interesting to artists are particular problems that are confronted and solved, or not solved, or-- you know, things that succeed and things that fail. I mean, because we all like to look at failure as much as success, actually-- maybe, in some cases, >> Even more. >> More. Right. The Demoiselles d'Avignon thing is-- you know, it's a group of women who are looking at their viewer in different degrees of agression-- but there's absolutely no verifiable, historical connection to that. [LAUGH] Yeah. >> There's just the long chain of conversations-- >> A long chain of conversations and, actually, the knowledge that Velázquez was in the conversation in the latter part of the 19th century. Manet was a big fan. >> Oh, a huge Velázquez fan. >> Picasso looked at Manet, so we know that there's some kind of chain of custody of thought, [LAUGH] but it's not point-by-point. >> Right. >> Right. [MUSIC]. [MUSIC]
So, we spent the bulk of this week focused largely on visual storytelling as a matter of single images and, to a great extent, monumental scale. And we started out with that 17-foot-long bull in the caves at Lascaux, in France, and ended with the giant self-portrait of Murakami as an inflatable sculpture, in 2012. But I don't want to leave this topic without looking at one other set of conventions for storytelling in still images. Which is to say, we'll look at time-based work a little bit later on in this course. But, for now, I want to raise the question of sequential storytelling in single images, and to go back to early antecedents, as well. We're going to turn first to the Bayeux Tapestry that was done around 1070 in France. We don't know who the artists were, much like the cave paintings in Lascaux. We do know a lot more about the subject matter. This is a very, very long embroidered work, almost 270 feet in length, that tells the story of the Norman conquest of England, and in particular the Battle of Hastings. It's been referred to as a precedent for modern forms of sequential storytelling, both as a precedent for comic books and graphic novels, and also as a precedent for the conventions of story- boarding that are the foundations of cinematic storytelling, as well. So, it's worth thinking about it, for just a little bit. It, as I say, is one long piece of cloth that is divided up into multiple scenes. Most of the scenes are separated into frames by a kind of stylized architecture or trees, but not all of them. And some of the scenes focus on major events or confrontations-- the king receiving news of the impending battle, or the battle itself. But other scenes focus more poignantly and unremarkably on everyday life. Scenes of people eating. We get information about how people dressed, what kinds of tools and implements they used, and, importantly, what kinds of stories they thought it was important to tell. Those conventions of sequential storytelling persist in a variety of portable forms and that's mostly what I want to concentrate on today. So we're going to fast-forward from the Bayeux Tapestry, in 1070, to one example of the kinds of Books of Hours that characterize illuminated manuscript production in Medieval times in Europe. And so this is an example of a Book of Hours from the 15th century. Again, we're looking at portable works that tell a kind of story. And Books of Hours are very cyclical stories, tied to the seasons and changes in activity over the course of a year, that marry text and image on the same page. They were drawn from the stories of the Christian Bible, but they're highly prized as much for the window they offer onto the particulars of daily life in the Middle Ages, as for the familiarity of those Biblical references and stories. So medieval illuminated manuscripts, like this Book of Hours, are important early examples of artists organizing text and images on the pages of a book, in order to tell sequential stories. And I imagine the pleasure of holding this book in your hand was the pleasure of encountering, year after year, the same images and the same stories, and knowing that each year you encountered them was another year of your life-- another year of your life properly lived and lived in accordance with the spirituality of your historical moment. I want to turn from these works commissioned from within mainstream culture, if we can call it that, to works on paper focused around storytelling, and sequentially based, that were produced under more nomadic and more contested conditions. First, fast-forwarding to the mid-19th century in the United States to look at an example of what is called ledger art. That is to say, works on paper, done on mass-produced ledger composition books, by the Lakota Sioux Indians. The Sioux would have turned to these mass-produced ledger composition books partly as a matter of artistic curiosity and adaptability. It was an interesting new material to experiment with, and much different in its handling and in the way one could approach drawing than the animal skins that would have been used for drawing and painting in traditional Sioux culture. But, on the other hand, it was not a matter of choice, but increasingly a matter of imposition. As westward expansion continued in the United States, and U.S. military and U.S. settlers displaced native people from their traditional homelands and moved them into military encampments and then, ultimately, reservations-- the Sioux would have been disconnected from their traditional materials and their traditional habits of life in really traumatic form. So these ledger drawings are both a testament to artistic curiosity and a testament to the trauma of displacement, as well. And as we look in greater detail at this particular example, done by an anonymous artist, and probably around 1868 to 1876, we can see all of the traces of that relationship between traditional and contemporary, between Sioux culture and European and American culture. On the one hand, there's that beautiful figure of the warrior mounted on horseback, with that amazing feathered headdress. And he's being confronted by another warrior holding an American-made rifle. These drawings, I think, are a really poignant and compelling transition to the last example of sequential storytelling that I want to look at today. And that's Marjane Satrapi's <i>Persepolis</i>. We could have looked at a number of works by contemporary graphic novelists who use the comic book form to tell very serious and complicated historical stories. Art Spiegelman's work on the Holocaust would be another example, the work of a number of graphic novelists on the events of September 11th, 2001, would be another example. This is the graphic novel in contemporary form, and so we see multiple story panes on the same page. We see the ability to mobilize what, really, are cinematic conventions in graphic novel form. Everything from the close-up to the great mise-en-scène set at the bottom of this picture-- crowd scenes and individual expression. And also the use of that kind of gap between frames, to allow a transition from scene to scene that is not seamless, but narratively driven. The other thing I find really powerful about <i>Persepolis,</i> and why I wanted to use it as our final example of sequential story telling is, on the one hand, I think Satrapi has made an amazing use of black-and-white to tell a story that is stark, but not really black-and-white, because it is the story of conflict within a culture and of the displacement of people from their homeland. And it carries all the weight of that displacement, and of the combined horror for and nostalgia for the homeland that she left. The final thing that I think is important about this particular graphic novel, and its bridge to some of our concerns later in this course, is it is a graphic novel that manages to migrate very successfully to the screen while holding onto its graphic conventions. And that, I think, is a tribute to the fluency of Satrapi's drawing style, but also to the fierceness of her resolve, that the story would migrate from page to screen with all of its stylistic character intact. 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Now we're going to shift gears just a little bit, to ask a question from a slightly different perspective, and to say this: By the mid-20th century, various forms of photographic reality had really displaced painting's authority as a mode of conveying current events and as a mode of translating current events into historically significant and memorable ones. People got their news from the television. And even their sense of history was greatly augmented by photographic representations. At the same time, photography didn't occupy the same space on the wall as history painting had in the museum. So, it sort of framed our collective memories of contemporary events, and of history, but it didn't offer the same satisfactions of a museum-going experience, as did monumental painting and sculpture. So we find an artist like Jeff Wall-- an artist who is actually formally trained in art history, and at the same time, an artist who's preferring to work in photographic media-- asking himself, 'can photography compete with history paintings?' Can it compete with painting on the walls of the museum, to offer a similar viewer experience, and offer the rewards of a similarly intended mode of composition as the grand tradition of history painting? So, we're looking at Jeff Wall's <i>A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai),</i> from 1993. And the first thing to say about this work is that it's very large. And the second thing to say about it is it's not a photographic print on a wall, but a photographic transparency that has been mounted in a very large scale lightbox, so that you are looking at the photographic image saturated with light from behind the image. And that gives it a glowing sort of hyperrealistic quality. It also gives it some of the lusciousness of oil painting, as well. And that's certainly something that Wall would have been after. Wall makes a deliberate nod to art history in the composition of this painting, which is taken from a woodcut print from a very famous series called <i>36 Views of Mount Fuji</i> that was done by Katsushika Hokusai, in the early part of the 19th century. So, this is Ejiri Station, in Suraga Province, in Japan. And we can recognize a similar theme. Mount Fuji is just a simple line in the background. And in the foreground is this marvelous sweep of figures being disrupted by a sudden gust of wind, and papers and their hats being swept into the sky by the force of that wind. So, it's a woodblock print, and a woodblock print takes a certain amount of time to do. But it's a woodblock print, as all the prints in this series did, that focuses on these kinds of very temporal and ephemeral moments of weather, season, and small incident that makes them seem almost photographic in nature, even though this work was actually done before photography was invented. When we turn back to Wall's image, we can see that what he's really striving for is to get all the grace and the complexity of the composition by Hokusai, but using photographic technology. So, the longer you look at this photograph, the more you start to think about how marvelously complex the array of windswept papers are, arranged in the sky. And how deeply and almost durationally intended the work seems to be. So, Wall is asking a question. What would it be like to treat photographic technology, not as a form of hunting and capturing reality on the fly, out in the world-- in the conventions of documentary photojournalism, for example-- but to approach it from the perspective of the painter, where every decision about the composition could be carefully planned, deeply intended, and organized by the artist themself in relationship to every other detail of the composition? Ironically, he ends by making photography into a very slow technology indeed. One in which the work of assembling, digitally, this composite photograph is equivalent to the work of making a very painstaking and detailed realistic painting. We could go on at some length to explore how photographic artists in the late 20th and early 21st century have interrogated the terms of history painting, have asked photography to occupy the same space in the museum and give a similar weight to the significant events of the contemporary moment. And you can find links to a few other artists in the supplementary materials for this course lecture. But, instead, I want to make a little bit of an abrupt detour at the very end. And it maybe a little surprising, but let me try to convince you otherwise. We are looking at a work by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. It's one element in a larger installation called <i>Ego,</i> that he did in 2012. This is a monumental self-portrait of the artist posed as a seated Buddha. And it's not made out of marble, and it's not made out of bronze. It's, in fact, a large inflatable. So it's drawn from pop culture technologies, and it's asking those pop culture technologies, in the space of the museum, to be as monumental as a stone sphinx, or a great Buddha, for that matter. Murakami has said about this work that, "I have to produce work that will be able to survive and have relevance in a hundred or two hundred years' time." "Like the stuff in the Louvre." Well, you can spend some time looking at this work, at your leisure, and deciding for yourself whether or not Murakami succeeds in his ambition. Certainly, there's a variety of opinions on this point. But the thought I want to leave you with is the thought of Artists asking, what kinds of technologies, what sorts of forms of figurative representation, can hold up to the monumental conventions of the past, and can do the work of storytelling in a way comparable to those great history paintings that we began this week with? [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
Now we're going to look a little bit more closely at what happens when artists decide to take their stories from contemporary life-- to rip them from the headlines, if you will. David was doing that a little bit with the <i>Intervention of the Sabine Women</i>. He was choosing that theme in response to contemporary events. But the painting I want to spend a bit of time looking at in this lecture is, again, one of my favorites. It's Géricault's <i>Raft of the Medusa,</i> from around 1818-1819. This is, genuinely, an enormous painting. If the movies existed in the early part of the 19th century, Géricault might have wanted to make a movie, instead. But, instead, it's a painting that aspires to all, I think, the spectacle that will become cinema in the late 19th and early 20th century. We are looking at a scene that is, as I said, literally ripped from the headlines. The Medusa was a French frigate that ran aground off the coast of Mauritania-- what is now Mauritania-- in 1816. And it was seen as an incredibly scandalous French naval disaster. Many people died. The evacuation of the ship was extremely disorderly. The accident was due to the captain's error. In the end, nearly 150 people were put onto a make-shift raft-- there weren't enough lifeboats to go around-- and they were put on this enormous make-shift raft that almost immediately began to sink, the minute that many people were on it. There was scarcely no food, and scarcely no water, and what food and water there was, much of it fell overboard. And by the time rescue comes, there are only 15 people left alive on that raft. Some of them died of dehydration, some of them jumped overboard in despair, some of them were thrown overboard because the raft was sinking, and some of them were ultimately eaten by the survivors, in a desperate attempt to stay alive. And so, it is definitely a sensational scene. We're looking at the moment just before rescue comes. In the very, very distance, on the horizon, you can see a tiny ship, and that's what the figures in the mid-ground are gesticulating towards so frantically. I would like you to spend a little bit of time looking at this painting, because it places you right in the midst of the action. As you stand in front of it, you are literally in the ocean, and there's a kind of falling of bodies towards you, into the foreground-- the bodies of the dead and dying, already a ghastly sort of sickly green-yellow tinge, as if even those people who are still alive are nearly amongst the dead. As you go further into the painting, and start to go from the mid-ground to the background, it's almost as if you're swept up in the frantic effort of signaling to help, as well, until you reach the very apex, where an African sailor is waving his shirt aloft, trying desperately to get the attention of the ship in the background. It's a painting in which you see the male nude, but that male nude has become something kind of corrupt and decaying. And, in fact, Géricault went to the morgue in Paris to study from dead flesh, in order to get at precisely the kinds of effects that he was interested in. And the painting became quite an obsession to him, as well. It's a painting that doesn't literally include references to some of the more horrific and sensational aspects of the survivors' experience. But if you look in the foreground, where an older male figure holds the body of his dead son, that figure is posed in a way that those who were versed in classical mythology would have recognized-- Ugolino from Dante's Inferno. And Ugolino, in fact, resorted to cannibalism. So, you have that sense in which savvy viewers would have gotten just what was going on, even if they hadn't read the headlines. Painting in the 19th century, and especially paintings this large, were indeed spectator sport. They were appreciated by those in the know, who had a lot of training in art history or a great sense of art connoisseurship. But they were also enjoyed by people from all walks of life who would have appreciated the great effects of realism, the-- in this case-- extremely sensational story and its topicality, as well. When we look at this painting by the American painter Winslow Homer, called <i>The Gulf Stream,</i> from 1899, it's a strange little work and it it's much smaller in size, but it takes on that thematic of tragedy at sea. We see a lone African American sailor stranded on a boat-- we think, off the coast of the United States, in the Gulf. And he's surrounded by sharks that are terrifying and also a little bit funny in their literalness. There's a way in which one can't help-- I think-- now, as a contemporary person, when one looks at this painting, to think a little bit about the movie Jaws and the way in which the shark was terrifying when it came and popped out of the sea by surprise. But if you got a chance to stare at it for a while, it became something a little bit ludicrous and mechanical-looking. And these sharks also have that kind of combination of a horrific realism and something that almost verges on caricature, at the same time. Homer would have had things like <i>The Raft of the <i>Medusa</i> in mind, even as he's trying to make a more American scene. And it's worth saying that this painting was greeted with mixed reaction, as it were. On the one hand, this sort of sensational, strange scene that wasn't literally ripped from the headlines, but seemed as if it had to come from somewhere. And then, also, the kind of awkwardness with which it hints at the disaster that is coming from the man- eating sharks in the water, circling the boat. So, now, with these two paintings in mind-- Géricault's <i>Raft of the <i>Medusa</i> and Homer's <i>The Gulf Stream--</i> I want to spend the rest of this lecture looking at two works by the contemporary American painter Kerry James Marshall. Marshall has set for himself an extremely important project: and that is to say, to paint contemporary history painting, but to paint it in a full recognition of the possibilities and gaps of history painting. Its strengths and its weaknesses. Its predilection for certain kinds of stories, and its overlooking of other kinds of stories. The first painting that we're going to spend some time with is his <i>Great America,</i> from 1994. And I wanted to say from the outset that I had the idea to look through the Marshall works with relationship to Géricault and and Homer because I had the great good fortune to see a Marshall exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington recently. And I want to just give a shout out to the National Gallery for giving me such great things to think about and to look at. So, <i>Great America,</i> from 1994, takes on a really important and really almost un-representable subject. And that is to say, it's interested in the experience of the Middle Passage-- the experience of enslaved people being transported from Africa to the Americas during the period of slavery. And I say almost un-representable because it is really hard to imagine how deeply scary and how deeply awful that must have been-- to be ripped from your home, taken on a boat under very poor conditions to God-knows-where, and have the rest of your life be taken out of your will and out of your power to determine what it was going to be like-- to spend the rest of your life in slavery. And in order to represent this subject, Marshall makes some really interesting and some really difficult sorts of choices. When we look at this painting, we are not sure what historical moment we're in, actually. Something like the present moment, but at the same time something that seems almost dreamlike or fantasy-like. We are looking at a group of African figures loaded onto a little kind of carnival boat ride, moving into the distance towards a dark tunnel. A kind of amusement park ride where some kind of uncertain and scary-- we think, based upon the little ghosts that are poking out-- experience awaits them. So, how can it be that something like a carnival ride could represent something as terrible as the experience of being brought into slavery in the New World? Well, first of all, I think it is because it sort of says, 'I have insufficient tools to represent the nature of this experience.' And at the same time, 'I'm going to do it nonetheless,' through marshaling cues of contemporary life that people can identify with. What is it like to be poised on the edge of a really scary amusement park ride, where you know you're going to be terrified but you don't know the future that awaits you? Middle Passage wasn't like an amusement park ride, but Marshall also tells you very clearly that he knows that, with the word that's inscribed on the top center of the painting. That word, WOW, written in white on a red kind of bloody, dripping banner is a very ironic' WOW'. It's the irony of the insufficiency of an exclamation to evoke the terror of this particular experience. Most of the meaning of this painting is made by mobilizing competing and compounding cues drawn from the history of art. So, on the one hand, we have a little bit of a nod to traditional perspectival painting in the way that the little boat is set on an orthogonal and seems to recede into the background. And then, at the same time, the canvas is absolutely flattened by those scroll designs that go across the foreground, that make you feel you're almost in a kind of billboard or signboard sort of space. Some of the elements of the painting are very precisely rendered-- the little carnival boat, the kind of stylized waves around the boat that mimic the curlicue decorations on the boat. And then others are painted in a really loose and brushy manner that calls forth another set of painterly language conventions that are used to evoke emotion. Which is to say that Marshall, coming of age as a painter in the late 20th century, would have had very much on his mind the example of abstract expressionist painting in the mid-20th century as a primary and highly-valued mode of representing human emotion, and particularly of representing kind of existential crisis. So all that drippy, muscular, painterly painting done by folks like Jackson Pollock in the mid-20th century was taken to be a sort of moment when art was trying to represent feelings and emotions and states of being that were beyond the ability of representational painting to grasp. And Marshall signals to us that he knows all about that, and also signals, in a way, its insufficiency, as well, because rather than kind of luscious, gooey blobs and drips and swipes of paint across the canvas, you get these kind of flat and drippy and sort of dried out references to abstract expressionism, at the same time. Right next to <i>Great America</i>, I had the opportunity to see this work-- Marshall's <i>Gulf Stream,</i> from 2003. And it's a tremendous juxtaposition. Once again, it gives you a sense of the range of Marshall's command of painting, painting languages, and art-historical references. You should be thinking about Homer's <i>Gulf Stream</i>, because certainly Marshall was when he was making this work. But this time, rather than a kind of sea-battered boat with one desiccated, weakened African body on the ship just waiting to be shark bait, you have this beautiful sailing vessel with the sail making this, again, lovely orthogonal sweep across the canvas, giving you this sense of depth. And this time, you see a middle-class Black family out for a ride on the ocean. The painting is large and it's organized, at the same time, almost like a souvenir picture postcard-- that kind of decorative frame of rope and netting that goes around the outside edges, and even has a bit of glitter mixed in it. The Pelican and the little piers of the dock in the foreground that give you this kind of postcardy feel. You feel like you should be in an idyllic scene, but the sea is sort of choppy and ominous clouds are gathering on the horizon. And once again, you're not sure whether these people are enjoying themselves or are about to run into trouble. And I think that kind of ambivalence about the security of experience is crucial to understanding African American experience, throughout American history and even to this day-- where, I think, you know, even for middle-class families, and one could say that this is a sort of representation of middle-class leisure, there's this sense, for African American families, of being never quite as securely invested in those rights and privileges as one's white counterparts. And those are the real circumstances of race relations to this day, as much as we try to contest them and interrogate them and, hopefully, make things better. And Marshall gives you both sides of that. And he gives you both sides of that so wonderfully, on the one hand, because of his deep respect for and understanding of history, and his thoughtful address to the historical experiences that he's trying to represent. And, on the other hand, out of his deep respect or deep address to and deep interrogation of the conventions of history painting, which he knows so well. And knows well enough to be able to take them apart and put them back together in the making of new meaning and new stories in his work. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
So, our major questions for this week are: how do artists tell stories? What stories do they tell and why? And who gets to tell them? That is to say, who gets to be an artist? And under what conditions? And what skills and abilities do you need to have, to work according to certain conventions? We ended last lecture by talking a bit about how artists purposefully rejected the language of history painting and the representation of heroic figures, in order to tell other kinds of stories and to make other kinds of memorials. Today, we're going to delve a little bit deeper into the awareness of how the conventions of history painting provided a platform for artists to question the academic tradition of painting; to question the terms of history, and its relationship to contemporary life; and to question mainstream notions of appropriate subject matter for ambitious painting. So, to do that, we're going to go into depth a little bit on one painting in particular, and it's a great one. It's Edouard Manet's <i>A Bar at the Folies-Bergèr</i>e, from 1882. This is a good-sized painting, but it's certainly not anywhere as large as something like David's <i>Intervention of the Sabine Women</i>. It does use the same convention of a female figure facing forward, facing the audience, although she seems to be a bit more betwixt and between going into action. Here, she seems to be about to serve someone a drink at the Café Concert, one of the big music and dance halls in Paris in the 19th century. And she also seems a little bit withdrawn into herself, as well, sort of thinking about things on her own. It's a really complicated painting in the way it's organized. If you look in the foreground plane, you see mostly a kind of organization of still life objects, and it's no accident. Manet spent a lot of time looking at 17th century Dutch still life, and he would have had images like the one that we showed earlier-- by Klaus Heyda-- in his mind as he was organizing the front of this picture plane. He's putting still life first. And still life, in terms of the hierarchy of genres of painting-- of what is the most important-- was sort of, as you'll recall, at the bottom of the hierarchy, with history painting at the top. Then your eye moves up, and you encounter the woman barmaid who is waiting for the next customer, it seems. And then you look into the background, and you see a magnificent mirror, in which the attendees and participants at the Café Concert are arranged in balconies. And as you look to the side, you see that, in fact, the barmaid's reflection seems like she's leaning slightly forward to attend to a male customer that is coming in from the upper corner of the frame. This painting is built around an interplay between what you see in front of you and what you see reflected from, supposedly, behind you. And that's the illusion that's put on display. It's also a painting that is insistently in the contemporary moment. We're not gesturing towards the ancient past or mythology. We are supposedly in 1882, in Paris. And that's really purposeful on Manet's part. Manet is making an argument in this painting that the painting of everyday life, the painting of contemporary life, the painting of modern life, is essential to our understanding of the contemporary moment. And it can be as equally ambitious, and as equally powerful as the tradition of history painting that he very well knew, as a French painter in the 19th century. In this, he's finding common cause with a group of painters around him-- painters and poets, as well-- and their manifesto, if you will, was a text by the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, who wrote an essay called "The Painter of Modern Life," and made a great argument for the primary duty of painters, in the mid-19th century, as being to paint their contemporary context. To paint the factual representation of modern life, and not to be painting from mythology or from the ancient past. The painting's illusion sets up another interesting question, and it's a question that was crucial to an understanding of 19th century public life. And that is to say, what is this woman selling? And there's been a lot written about this painting, in that regard. So, in order to get at that question, it's important to understand that this is a working woman. This is a woman who has to find her own daily bread, and is doing so by being a barmaid. Middle-class women did not work, properly speaking, in the 19th century, for the most part. And they, largely, also didn't appear in public as unescorted-- they would be with their husband, they would be with their fathers or brothers, or at least with other women. So here's a woman on her own. And the other thing that people would have known, in the 19th century, is that it was really tough for a woman on her own to make a living. The cost of living in Paris was high, just like modern cities today, in a lot of ways, and the wages paid to people who worked in the service industry were low. And so, often times, women who had to work to support themselves resorted to prostitution on the after hours-- had tofind other ways to cover their costs. And so, there's a question about contemporary life set up in this painting, in a very a very sly and a very deliberately ambiguous way. Here is a woman who is facing her male customer. What is for sale? Is it the bottles of champagne and oranges and liquors that are arranged on the marble table in front of her? Or is it her own body that the male customer might be negotiating for? So, interestingly, by the mid 19th century, the painting of the heroic male nude signaled the ambitions of history painting, at the same time that the painting of everyday women signaled the ambition to address contemporaneity, to address modern life in its current form. And those two things were seen in opposition to each other, so that when we look at another beautiful painting by Edouard Manet, this one called <i>Plum Brandy, </i>from around 1878, we can see Manet taking on that theme persistently, precisely to signal his allegiance to the terms of contemporary painting and the terms of contemporary life. That means everyday life in its most unremarkable forms. Again, not scenes of urgency or heroicism, but scenes of contemplation, or actually nothing-in-particular happening. I love this painting because it seems to me a kind of pendant, in a way, to the <i>Bar the Folies Bergère. This woman is on her own in public. She's stopped, at the end of her work day, to have a plum coated with liqueur, which was a kind of not-too-expensive thing that a working-class woman could treat herself to, in the 19th century in Paris. She's also smoking a cigarette, and you have, again, that rehearsal of the relationship between something like a still life in the foreground-- the glass of plum brandy on that marble-top table, just like the sort of marble-topped counter in the bar at the Folies-Bergère-- but this time there's no kind of illusionistic is-she-or- isn't-she, no kind of play of indeterminacy about what she is. She's a woman at rest. A woman who earned her rest, clearly, and has taken that moment in public. Because the subject matter is so everyday, and is so unremarkable, it's the work of painting that comes more and more into view. And as opposed to the kind of smooth surfaces that characterized history painting in the hands of David 50 years earlier, for example-- 50 to 75 years earlier-- here you see a much rougher and more expressive handling of paint. Just look at the thickness of the handling of paint in the simple decoration that's on her hat. The beautiful attention to the hand holding the cigarette. These kinds of optical interrogations of everyday life-- how an artist sees the world around him, and how he represents it in his own particular manner-- become the calling cards of ambitious painting, as a kind of split between the academic tradition, and what gets called an avant garde tradition, begins to widen in the 19th century. So, now we're going to leap a hundred years ahead to say that, by the 1970s, those traditions of representing everyday life, and representing everyday life primarily as women's work and primarily as a function of, oftentimes, male artists working out the terms of their own individual handling of paint and their own distinctive style on a platform of representations of domestic life-- women engaged in domestic activities and private life-- has hardened sufficiently to, again, be something to be interrogated and something to react against in very pointed ways. So, we're looking at a work from a series of so-called film stills that Cindy Sherman did in the late 1970s. And this one's dated from around 1977. They're all untitled. They're photographs, and they're photographs that are set up and staged. That's Cindy Sherman, the artist herself, who is turning the camera on herself as she enacts a series of personas that seem like they might be drawn from narrative film. So there's that, again, that gesture to story telling. But at the same time, you don't precisely know what film they're drawn from. So you have a sense of the relationship to film, but no tracking back to an exact film. She's in a kitchen interior. It's a very contemporary kitchen interior in the 1970s. You can see the Morton salt container in the foreground, the Joy dishwashing detergent in the background. And there's some kind of droll gesture to that is-she-or-isn't-she question that was a part of the <i>Bar at the Folies-Bergère,</i> as well. She seems to be cooking, and she seems to be posing at the same time. She's in kind of everyday housewife attire, with the apron, but she also has a little bit of a come-hither posture. So, the photograph is riffing on all those questions that were set up by the <i>Bar at the Folies-Bergère</i>, but this time the questions are in the hands of a woman artist using her own body as a performative vehicle for storytelling. And here she is again, out on the streets. The woman in the streets, just as we saw, in a different way, in the woman at the bar in <i>Plum Brandy</i>. She's taken on a bit of a different persona, sort of the young working woman come to the big city for the first time. Again, you feel like you are in a narrative context, but you're not quite sure what might have come just before this particular film still, or what might have come afterwards. And again, we're in a story in which we are seeing a rehearsal of a kind of conventionalized story of everyday life in the big city-- the young woman come to start a new career or go to work. And at the same time, it's being taken apart as a matter of a performative and artificial self-representation-- a kind of representation-as-masquerade-- that calls into question the role of women, in art, as something only to be looked at, and never as doers and makers. We're going to end with that question, with another work from the 1970s by another American woman artist, Martha Rosler. And it's a great video performance piece, and I think you should be able to get a link to it and look at the whole thing, although we're just going to see just a little bit of it here, now. It's Martha Rosler herself, the artist, that we're looking at, again. She's, again, in a very unremarkable kitchen interior. This particular work, as opposed to the film stills, is not gesturing to cinema and film, but to television. And in particular, I think, to some of the cooking shows that were so popular in the 1970s. So, Martha Rosler is facing the audience, again, like the barmaid at the Folies-Bergère in Manet's painting. She should be a happy housewife, but as you proceed through the video you see that, as a performing body, she's spelling out the alphabet using culinary utensils-- and sometimes in kind of menacing ways, as well. And that sets up a set of questions about the performative eloquence of the human body that's not the heroic male nude, but this time the sort of everyday, unremarkable housewife. At the same time that the everyday, unremarkable house wife is not passive and simply an object available to be seen, but active-- gesturing meaningfully and even aggressively at the camera. And by the end of the video, she is actually, almost in a kind of semaphore fashion, spelling out the the final letters of the alphabet-- X, Y and Z-- with her own body. Again, putting a question forward to us about what kinds of bodies tell stories, what kinds of bodies can be eloquent in a textual and signifying way, and who owns the terms of representation. Is the pictured woman a passive object to be represented, or is she a maker of representations, and very polemical representations, in her own right? [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
Imagine we're standing in one of the caves in Lascaux in France. We're surrounded by amazing drawings of human figures, and animals, and abstract signs. Many of them in mineral pigments, and some of them even etched into the stone. There's a figure of a bull that's almost 17 feet in length. There are animals standing with crossed legs, which give us just a little bit of a hint of a deeper space, or something like perspective. These paintings were done nearly 20,000 years ago. And we can't really know why, or who did them. But when we look at them, we feel a sense of connection to our deep human past. And that connection is around the desire to make stories visible; the desire to make sense of life through drawing and other forms of representation; and the desire to create a connection to the world around us by giving images of that world back to our fellow human beings-- and making sure that they become a part of history, as well. And we're back to a painting we've seen already once before. Jacques-Louis David's 'Intervention of the Sabine Women', from 1799. We've talked about its complexity. We talked about the weight of human figures. Now I want to talk a little bit about the circumstances of the making of the painting, and about the story that it tells. The painting picks up from an earlier painting by Poussin called, 'The Rape of the Sabine Women', and it tells the story of the founding of Rome, but it tells it as a story of reconciliation between two warring groups-- the Romans and the Sabines-- who just so happen to be husbands and fathers of the same women. And we see them just as they are about to go to war. And we see a woman, one of the daughters and wives, intervening between the men, asking them to stop and make peace instead. This is basically a great painting about reconciliation. It's a great story of the founding of a nation. But it's a story that's told through a family perspective, a perspective of various sides of a family coming together despite their differences. David conceives of this painting while he's actually in prison for his involvement in the Reign of Terror-- that's the most radical and bloody period of the French Revolution. There, he's visited by his estranged wife, who happens to support the monarchy and is pretty upset about David's revolutionary tendencies. And likewise, so is David, because the reprisals for those involved in the Reign of Terror were the most severe. Robespierre, the leader of that period had already been put to death. And David was really afraid that he was going to be put to death, as well. So he embarks on this painting that will take him four years to make. And it's a four-year-long apology to his country for his involvement in that revolutionary moment, and to his wife for his involvement in that moment, as well. And it's kind of amazing to think of your husband making a four year apology to you. So I think those of us who are married might stop and pause and think about the enormity of that for just a moment. It's a very public painting, again, on a monumental scale, that manages to make a sort of bridge between the ancient past, the past of Roman history, and the present moment-- the moment of the French Revolution. And makes it in a grand and public way, using the language of neoclassicism-- with the kind of heroic, robust figures-- nudity used as the language of classicism, as well. But also as a private story, as well. A story of a family reconciliation, and also a story, most notably, in which women take a primary role. Well, David's painting works for him. It makes a splash, as a painting, and it convinces the new government that he's no longer a threat. It's avidly viewed by paying customers at the Louvre until 1805, and David himself goes from being a painter of the revolution to a painter of empire. And he does some really amazing paintings of Emperor Napoleon in the early part of the 19th century. So, we're looking at a moment where artists of ambition had the job of giving public images back to that public, that created a connection between the historical past and the contemporary moment. And we're looking at David as a really amazing practitioner of what gets called, in the lexicon of the Academy of Fine Arts-- the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris-- history painting. That is to say, paintings done on a monumental scale that have complex compositions with multiple figures, often nude, and they take a great deal of time and materials to make, it's worth saying-- that four- year-long apology-- and also a great deal of fluency in drawing. One apprentices and learns to draw the male nude over a period of years in order to get to this level of expertise. So, these paintings were largely supported by the state, and the ability to to make such a painting depended partly on all the things that we think about artists having. You know, a certain kind of gift for art, a certain dedication to their craft, but also an access to a certain form of education. So, one of the questions that will preoccupy us for the rest of today's lecture is, who has access to the stories and the skills, the time and materials it takes to make a history painting? And I found myself thinking about this again when I first came to CalArts because at my previous school, San Francisco Art Institute, which has quite a good painting department, anatomy and figure drawing was taught in the painting school. And at Cal Arts, anatomy and figure drawing is taught in the animation program, and the School of Visual Arts is-- there are many painters there-- but is largely invested in developing conceptual skills, and it's the animation program that is really invested in developing anything approaching the kind of fluency of treatment of the figure that you see in David's work. So, we're going to make another big historical leap-- so stay with me-- from David's <i>Intervention of the Sabine Women</i>, to Picasso's major monumental mural painting, <i>Guernica</i>, from 1937. This work is 25 and a half feet long and more than 11 and a half feet high. It was shown to the public for the first time in July, 1937 in a Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, and it is also a story that uses Picasso's very individualized and stylized language of motifs and form to tell a very contemporary story. Earlier that year, in 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by air raid-- saturation bombed by German military planes, helped out by a few Italian military planes. And it was really the first saturation bombing in history, and one of the first moments when an act of war was carried out against a wholly civilian population in modern history. And it opened up an era of people being afraid for their lives in times of war, irrespective of whether they're soldiers and in the military, or civilians and supposedly safe at home, that in many ways lasts until this day. So, Picasso painted this particular painting out of a great feeling of urgency. He manages to complete the whole work in about five weeks, to be in the Spanish Republic's pavilion. And it is often regarded as one of the most quintessential statements of an artist being able to mobilize their own personal pictorial language in the service of public storytelling, public memory-making, public expression, in 20th century art. Picasso's <i>Guernica</i> demonstrates its profound affinity with the tradition of history painting, even in its modern iconography and its modern pictorial structure. But it's worth saying that Picasso actually had access to that tradition, in part, because he had classical training as a young artist. His father worked at the art school in Barcelona, and Picasso was introduced to classical drawing, and demonstrated incredible fluency in it from a very early age. At the same time, it's worth thinking about who did not have access to this kind of training, and what that meant in terms of the kinds of stories that could be told. So, I show you this photograph by Thomas Eakins. It's a photograph of the women's modelling class at the Pennsylvania Academy Studio, in about 1882. And what you see is the women's drawing class, obviously, and they're not drawing from the heroic male nude. They're not drawing from a living nude model, they are drawing from a cow. And that was because, at the time, it was thought to be really inappropriate and lacking propriety for women to be exposed to the male nude in public, and to be drawing from the nude in general. That seems really antiquated now, but it had real consequences for women artists in the 19th century. So when we look at a work like Rosa Bonheur's <i>The Horse Fair</i>, from 1853 to 1855, we should be understanding it as more than just a painting of animals. Rosa Bonheur was a major figure in 19th-century French art. She was active throughout the mid-to-late 19th century, and she had all the ambitions of a history painter. And we can see that in, actually, the compositional organization of this painting, the complex intertwining of figures, the heightened sense of emotional drama and urgency. But we're in everyday life in Paris. We're not in ancient Rome or ancient Greece. And we are seeing an artist who did not have access to classical training, because it simply wasn't possible or appropriate for women to do so, and yet had looked very, very carefully at the history of heroic painting, and tried to take it on in her own terms. It took a great deal of doing on her part, we should say. She learned figure drawing on the hoof. She went to the slaughter houses and to the horse training yards in order to study the animals from life. She spent a great deal of time trying to develop a fluency in organizing complex forms through animal models. She had to actually petition the Parisian police to be able to wear pants to go to work in such places as slaughterhouses and horse yards, where women weren't supposed to be, in the first place, but women in large and cumbersome crinoline dresses, as it was fashionable to wear in the mid-19th century, would have really had a hard time doing any kind of artistic work. In all sorts of ways, the history of art in the 20th century-- and the 21st century, for that matter-- is a history of greater and greater questioning of access to vocabulary and tools and times and materials, of what kinds of stories can be told and who will tell them, of how we relate to our past and how we relate to our present. Judy Chicago's <i>The Dinner Party</i> is one example of a pointed questioning of the conventions of history painting. When we turn to something like the work we're going to end with today-- Maya Lin's <i>Vietnam Veterans Memorial,</i> from 1982-- we see an incredibly powerful solution to the challenge to create a work that functions effectively as a site of collective memory in the absence of collective consensus on what one's feelings about that memory should be. It's worth stating, for all of us, and especially those of us who might have not have been born then, that the 1960s and '70s and '80s, in the United States and elsewhere, were a time of great conflict and cultural upheaval. Linn's decision to create a monument through rigorously abstract forms that substitute, for a narrative story, the simple recitation of the names of those who died in the Vietnam war, created incredible controversy, at the time, because it rejected the language of a sort of classical heroicism. And at the same time, it has proven to be one of the most effective sites for collective memory in American history. People go everyday to the wall to find the names of family and friends, and to remember, just for a moment, that past and what they lost as a result of that past. But it stands not only as a place of reconciliation-- and we started off talking about conflict and reconciliation-- but as a sight of permanent contestation over the language of expression. Because when we look at the monument that's sited right next to it, Fredrick Hart's <i>The Three Soldiers,</i> from 1984, we see a question posed, permanently, about the appropriate language for remembering and representation of important moments of history, important moments of collective memory, and important moments in national identity. Should the language be abstract? Should it be representational? Should it gesture towards the language of the heroic body and the classical past? Or should it find new forms to address the contemporary circumstances of history and memory? These questions are irresolvable. But they're questions that we'll continue to think about in the rest of this week's lectures. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
So now I want to talk for just a few minutes about what you need for this course. The first thing you need, and I say this with all sincerity, is you need an open mind and a deep sense of curiosity. It isn't really helpful to go into a course thinking that you know it all already, or trying to measure what you know against what somebody else in the class might know, including the teacher. It really is going to be much more helpful to be questioning about what you know. Be willing to follow down ideas and track down more images, if you want, from things that you see in the class, and come to it knowing that I think one of the most amazing things about the internet is, not only can we teach courses like this, but you have an amazing resource in terms of an almost endless and inexhaustible archive of materials to search through. The second thing I'm going to recommend, that you need for this class, is some sort of a sketchbook. I think this is such an important thing to have as an artist and as a creative person in general, and developing a sketchbook habit is a very good thing to do. There's a variety of ways in which you can approach this. My favorite way is a traditional sketchbook-looking sketchbook. And I tend to like them quadra-lined, but you may like blank pages, you may care more about the heft of the page; there's endless ways of thinking about this. The reason that I like these kinds of notebooks is that the spiral binding allows you to innerly put things in it without, sort of-- it gives you some room to add to them. So, I brought in, just to show you briefly, some of my project sketchbooks that I've kept from my own work. And you can see that they're kind of a mess, but your sketchbook is supposed to be a place for permissions, right? A place where you can put all your ideas and not edit them too quickly, because it's those unedited ideas that you may come back to later on. So, this should be a space where anything goes and it's okay. So, you can see me keeping images that I want to think about more for projects. I like to layer them over other images and texts, that is, either my own writing or quotes and other sources that I'm working from. I tend to sort of work from project to project-- and here's some of the funnier ones that I've worked on in the national parks in San Francisco. So it becomes a place where you always know you're going to find the ideas that you've had, or the images that you especially want to keep hold of and think about longer. I also, oftentimes, will keep a box for a class or a project, and that box is for all the loose things that I can't jam into the sketchbooks. And then, again, you have a kind of ready-made archive of materials. And you can see that there's media work and recordings that I've kept, along with various notes, typed scripts, email correspondence. On the other hand, if this all seems incredibly old-fashioned to you, and you really have fully embraced a digital culture, there's many different ways to keep a sketchbook online. One of the ones that I like the most-- and I'll turn this so that you can see it a little bit on the camera-- is to work in a blog kind of format. And this is a particularly clever art blog called, "Lines and Colors." But you can see that it's a place where you can put images that you're thinking about, links to other resources. You can cut and paste text. I tend to think about these kinds of blogs as almost the digital equivalent of old-fashioned scrapbooks. And I certainly have treated the Facebook page for this course as a kind of scrapbook, or place to put things that I thought you might be interested in, or I wanted to remember to refer back to in the class. So, it's up to you how you keep your sketchbook, but I think you will really lose something if you don't take part in that part of the class. One of the things you don't need for this class are any textbooks. It's in part because-- and I'll probably talk about this from time to time-- it's in part because many of us who have been art historians for a long time have a sort of vexed relationship to the notion of art-historical textbooks, in general. They're really super expensive, and for as much as they have in them, they're always leaving out something that one feels is very important. Any book is a process of putting things in and also leaving things out. And you should be aware of that. Same could be said for this course, for sure. So there are no assigned textbooks or readings, but there are books that will be recommended. I've already recommended books on the Facebook page, and there will also be links, as it's possible to do so, to texts that would be interesting supplemental reading or might sort of give you another way into the material of the course. This really is meant to be a course about looking and thinking, and not about keeping up with lots and lots of reading. At the same time, finally, one of the things that you should take really seriously is the doing of the assignments. And that's not just because you want to get a certificate of achievement, or what have you, but because several of the assignments are designed to create wikis or archives of class knowledge that we've built together. So, when I ask you to do an assignment, for example, about works of art or texts that have been very important to you, it's because, as much as you say what's important to you, you can learn from what somebody else has said about what's important to them. And if we do that work together, we will have created something really amazing by the end of this course. [MUSIC] |
AuthorThese are images from CalArts coursera course, Live! Art History for Artists, Animators, Gamers - with Dr. Jeannene Przyblyski. THEN, I decided to also preserve the lecture texts here. ArchivesFinal Reflective Essay Assignment (Track A)
Baroque incl Sánchez Cotán Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber Categories |