[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withdrawn into herself, as well, sort of thinking about things on her own.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]
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]