[MUSIC]
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]
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]