[upbeat music] >> Good, then we will dive in here. We've got lots to do today
and we've got a large task. [laughs] The assignment
I gave for myself today is to try to articulate what's going on in the
contemporary art world today. That is... A massive task, so I
think I'll begin with just disclaimers, there's too much going on so anything that I say in
two and a half hours or so is going to be partial, it's
going to be slanted and biased and I'm not gonna get to everything. I think, really, now that
we've gotten up to at least the year 2000, we'll
probably spend all of today in the last 10 years,
looking at work from the last 10 years, now that
we've gotten up to 2000, really we could spend a whole
'nother course just talking about the last 10 to 15
years or so 'cause I think there are important
shifts that are happening and there's a lot
happening so we could spend several classes just talking
about what's going on in photography, just talking
about what's going on in painting, or sculpture
or new media, video, so on and so forth so to begin
with, I'll just say, I feel totally overwhelmed
and totally overwhelmed with how many important
things we'll leave out, but I think as I've started
doing, putting this together I think what I'm gonna do,
I'm gonna try to include some examples from painting,
photo, sculpture and so on, I think, however for those
of you who are in painting classes, you'll tend to
get a pretty strong look at what's going on painting today, I think similarly with
photography, so I think this I'm gonna slant, I'm gonna
be slanted more towards installation, sculptural installation. I'll include photo and
painting, that sort of thing, some video, I'm gonna
try to touch a few things but we'll probably slant
more towards sculptural installation and I think that's... The kind of big splashy things
that are going on right now tend to be in that world,
okay, so with that disclaimer, in mind, let's try to set out a few... A few... Guidelines, I suppose. And kind of re-enter the train of thought. One could say that mostly
what we've been tracking in this semester, is postmodernism,
post modern art, right? We began the semester with
modern art, modernist art, which includes... Pollack and Rothko and
I think into minimalism, I want to include minimalism
in modernism even though not everyone would, but
I think as an extension of modernist art, modernist
thought and from there we looked at a lot of
the sort of subversions or critiques of modern art
that begin or probably begin in Duchamp, but start to gain... Steam with Rauschenberg
and Warhol and move us into conceptualism and
performance art and so on, we get all of these kind of
critiques of modernist art and deviations from it and
so for lack of a better term, we have postmodernism as
this overarching umbrella that includes a lot of
those disparate things that are coming after
modernism, but we get a lot of things in there, and that term... Certainly includes a lot of
different things on a more broadly cultural basis that we talk about postmodernism in
philosophy and in sociology and in politics and so on. So it's a big kinda messy
word, a big umbrella that holds a lot of different things, but if we had to summarize it very briefly, it's probably this, kind of... That all postmodern thought
and artwork has in common, is that it tends to directly
attack claims to totality. That's kind of a jargonish
word, but totalities are overarching explanations,
sometimes we use the word metanarrative to talk about
an overarching narrative that explains the world,
postmodernism is going to, postmodern thought, is
going to attack most claims to totality, finality,
authoritative explanations, they're gonna go after and
attack those in a variety of ways And so you get... The kind of famous phrase from.. Liotard, a French postmodern theorist, who says, postmodernism
is waging war on totality, that's what it is at the center of it, is we wage war on totality. Why? Or how, I suppose there
are a couple features that go along with that,
waging war on totality. First is it's going to emphasize the ways that we're embedded in
cultural, historical linguistic situations, right? You don't just think on your
own, your identity doesn't just sort of come from, you know... The womb or something, we're
all significantly formed, what we think about, what we value, our patterns and routines in life are... Considerably embedded in a
historical cultural situation. Good? So postmodern thought and
postmodern art is really going to go at showing how
culturally relative a lot of what you think and a
lot of what you value is. You think as a 21st century... Whatever. Middle class American. [laughs] And that's particular,
that shapes very much the way that you think,
the way that you value. Postmodern thought is really
going to point that out and because of that, it's
going to, one of the kind of threads of it or facets of it
is that it seems to kind of... Go after most notions
of objectivity and truth and originality, ideas of
kind of utopic solutions, sincerity, ideas of
expression, authenticity, authentic expression,
those sorts of things, it's going to go after
those all along the way, saying, ah, don't be
so naive about the way that your authentic expression is based on all sorts of things, like the
television that you watch. [laughs] Don't be so quick to conclude that you're right about this or that or that you know exhaustively
about a situation because let's backtrack and
look at all of the things that sort of go into you knowing a thing. You kind of get the sense, you
kind of get the idea there? If you're culturally, historically, linguistically conditioned
then postmodernism is going to critique the ways that you arrive at... Arrive at certainties or arrive at... Certain conclusions, yeah? Yeah, I mean... Yes, in a way Descartes
fuels the fire for that, but in another sense,
Descartes is the number one guy that they're going after [laughs] 'cause Descartes' whole
idea or his whole system seems to be this method of
I'm gonna, I have been cast into doubt about all sorts of
things, I've been cast into doubt about what I can know,
who God is, what's true about the world, and my
response is to remove myself to a warm comfortable room
and think through things one step at a time, trying to locate what can I be sure about? I can be sure that I exist
because I'm asking the question to begin with, so that
provides me a sure foundation and then I build on top of
it, so Cartesian thought is often known as
foundationalism where you can... Secure for yourself a
foundation, a logical foundation and then logically construct... A worldview and objectivity,
objectively kind of construct on top of that. Well, I mean, he... We owe a lot of... Modern science to Descartes,
a lot of modern mathematics. He made pretty... Strong arguments for the
existence of God and so on and so forth, based on this method. But he does, I mean,
you're right in the sense that he includes [laughs] It's probably a problematic enterprise from the beginning, very ambitious, right, he's very ambitious, and it's
problematic at the beginning so the postmodern critique of Descartes, there are a lot of parts,
you can kind of break him up at a lot of different points,
but you could start with what kind of foundation
are you starting with? You're removing yourself
to a warm comfortable room. That already is extremely
culturally historically situated, not all people can do that and... Not all people would consider that a neutral place to start from. [laughs] You're writing your philosophy
in a certain language and that language comes
with certain assumptions and baggage and so on, this
foundation that you've set for yourself might not be so... Might not be so objective
or so neutral, yeah. Good, and that's really the... Issue, I think, is that... At the kind of root of
postmodernism is this assertion that there's no neutral place to stand, there's no neutral place
from which to do philosophy, no neutral place from
which to make art or... Practice in the market or whatever, there's no neutrality,
everything is already laden with values and
laden with assumptions. But the question there, the
next question should be, well, why, what is
motivating this critique? What really is the heart of postmodernism? Why do you have such a
problem with Descartes and with the various modernists? What's the issue for you? Why is it so important to assert
that there's no neutrality and the answer would be... That these claims to totality,
claims to objectivity and certainty, the claim of
the ability to authoritatively explain why the world
is the way that it is, those kind of claims have
the greatest potential for oppressing people is the idea, right, you are never so dangerous
as when you think you're absolutely right. [laughs] And so I think postmodern
thought is at its core underneath all of the
charges against it of being relativist and those sort
of things, underneath all of that is an ethical... Sort of revolt. It is criticizing... Claims to totality or... Claims to authority for
the sake of giving a voice to the people who get run
over in the process, right? So, most postmodern
thought will present itself as attacking power structures. It's going to talk a lot about inequality. It's going to talk a lot about... Sort of... Imbalances in power, imbalances in wealth and those sort of things. It's going to talk a lot
about the ways that women are marginalized by
traditional philosophy, traditional art making,
the way that minorities, ethnic minorities are
marginalized and oppressed by traditional conversations and so on. And so, postmodern thought, postmodern art is gonna go about
critiquing and hacking away at the western canon, at
the kind of western way 'cause postmodernism is
predominantly a western movement but it's self critical
and it's gonna go about hacking away at the canon, hacking away at the assumptions, the kind
of traditional discourses and so on. And it's gonna hack away at authority, the ability for anyone to
stand in a place of authority over others, and that includes
the author and the artist, which is why in a lot
of postmodern thought, postmodern art, you
have a dismissal of what the artist intended. The artist doesn't have authority
over what the thing means. It is... The meaning is contained in
the body, the social body, in the community and so on. And the primary way it's
going to do a lot of that, the primary way of doing
things, of doing these critiques is through parody and irony... And fragmentation,
deconstruction, dismantling the way you expect a thing to go and work, in order to draw your
attention to it and call it into question, call your
expectations into question, call social norms into
question and once again, the way that we go about doing
that often is through irony and parody and so on. Okay, does that make sense as a kind of brief articulation of postmodern thought? A bit of a review from several weeks back, but I think worth kind of rearticulating 'cause it'll get us going
where we're going today. I think it's important to
notice that postmodernity, postmodernism, rather,
postmodernism is primarily a critical stance. It is critical. Its primary posture in the
world is critical and ironic and self protective, I think. [laughs] It doesn't really affirm much. It's not very constructive, it's critical. Does that make sense? Its operations are primarily critical. So as we move forward into today and as we look at a lot of the efforts to push past postmodernism
and to start critiquing postmodernism, one of the
major problems that is going to be pointed out over and over again is that postmodernism
doesn't build a happy life on anyone's part, it is
just a critical tool, but it's not constructive, all right, so we'll get into that in
a bit, just to kind of... Attach all of that talk to artworks. A lot of the work that we
looked at both in class and in the museums from the
'60s, '70s, '80s and that's when you can kind of, if you
have to date postmodernism, you can probably date it from
the '60s through the '90s. [clicks tongue] That's probably
where you should date it. If you want to date it even more narrowly you can date it the '70s through the '90s. The '60s are sort of
transitionary in a lot of ways, but a lot of the work that
we've seen is very cold, very kind of removed, there
is little aesthetic value and that is, that is because
it's purposefully withholding traditional aesthetics,
traditional notions of beauty, traditional ways that art
should be done and so on and makes simple kind of
points very often like language is not transparent. [laughs] Language is loaded, language is... Is something, it is a thing. Language happens through
sounds and marks and on paper and in a room, those
things aren't neutral, they are constructed,
they've been decided on by the culture that you
come from and language, furthermore, is political,
it's always tied to a political structure or an economic
structure, so we get lots of language in postmodern art like here, as far as the eye can see. Which is... It's, once again, ironic,
it's an ironic phrase. That it suggests you're
looking as far as the eye can see, you're conjuring up
images of a deep landscape and so on, but by writing
it on the wall in this way, literally as far as the
eye can see is this wall. [laughs] So if you take
the phrase literally, you end up looking at the
institution, you end up looking at the walls of
the museum or the gallery and I think that's a pretty good example of how postmodern art is often wound up, there's a real critical
political edge to it, but there's, it operates
through kind of irony, parody, poking fun, humor, sort
of laughing out the side of your mouth a little
bit and central to I think a lot of this is the
strategy of interrupting, interrupting expectations,
placing things in unusual contexts like an advertising
sign that's supposed to... Read protect me from what I want. It disrupts the normal flow of things as a way of drawing attention to it and criticizing the normal flow of things and certainly much postmodern
work is going to go after the block of images that
inform your imagination, shape your imagination,
Hollywood is going to be a prime target, so we saw
this painting at the Geffen, this is Ed Ruscha putting
you on the other side of Hollywood, sort of
looking over the sign, the sign that tells Hollywood
what it is. [laughs] Reassures itself of what it is. He puts us on the outside of it to see the sort of glow,
he sort of disrupts, I guess in some ways calls
for us to get outside of it. We saw this painting,
just to include a couple that we've seen in the museums,
we saw this last field trip at the Getty, where you have a gas station that I think that not... Accidentally is a standard,
it's proclaiming a standard or itself as the standard, this
is very sort of artificial, almost a kind of movie
mockup or a set or something. A standard... Gas station. So it's a standard, a cultural standard, but it's not neutral,
it's very constructive, it's very cleaned up, it's very tied into with those lights, kind of flashing around the Fox Searchlight,
the lights going around. Our standards are tied up with images and economic
structures and so on. And... With a lot of this work as
is I think fairly obvious, you're going to get a lot
of critique of the history of images, historical
depictions of woman, of which this is a kind of spoof on Leo, not Leonardo, Raphael painting, mmm? Yeah, yeah, this is a
picture, it's a photo of a Raphael painting, yeah, yeah, yeah. And as we saw, there's going
to be pretty consistent critiques of how we narrate history so we looked at Fred Wilson
kind of mining the museum, revising the museum. And so out of kind of feminist
art you get a parallel... Critique that's coming
from, like, Romare Bearden in this instance, kind of
repackaging, reprocessing popular images of African Americans. And so you're gonna get a strong
emphasis in postmodern art on the mass produced image. As one of the things, at
least in the visual world, int he visual arts,
it's one of the systems that's kind of dramatically
affecting the way that we think and the way that we value things, good? And I think this brings up a... Perhaps the initial definition
of postmodernism I gave you was a little stuffy, a little
academic, it's pretty stuffy and academic, I think this
might help, this is a better definition, I think, one
of the best that I know of. This is by an author named
Umberto Eco who writes about everything, [laughs],
he's a phenomenal guy. He writes novels and he writes art history and he writes philosophy and everything. Anywhere, here's his definition,
I think of postmodernism. "I think of the postmodern
attitude as that of a man "who loves a very cultivated
woman and knows he cannot say "to her, I love you madly
because he knows that she knows "and that she knows that
he knows that these words "have already been written
by Barbara Cartland." Do you know who Barbara Cartland is? I didn't think any of you
were, this is Barbara Cartland. [laughs] It sort of says
everything you need to know about Barbara Cartland and
she writes books like this, five complete works of love and luxury. So you get the five titles of the novels and actually kind of love
that they all run together as one sentence. [laughs] Love climbs to hell to
heaven, caught by love, riding to the moon,
Diona and the Dalmatian. Okay, anyway, what Umberto
Eco is saying is that the postmodern attitude
is like someone who loves a woman madly but can't say
to her that he loves her madly because those words have
already been written by Barbara Cartland, so
if you say to someone, I love you madly, you're quoting
from the most sentimental and awful kind of pop culture. So something as deep and as important as loving another has in some ways been undercut by the barrage of mass media and sentimentality that's tied up in it. "Still," he says, "there
is a solution, he can say, "As Barbara Cartland would
put it, I love you madly. "At this point, having
avoided false innocence, "as though he was pretending
he didn't know Barbara Cartland already used those words,
"having said clearly that it is "no longer possible to
speak innocently, he will "nevertheless have said what
he wanted to say to the woman, "that he loves her, but he loves her "in an age of lost innocence." What's that, you're confused? I was trying to define
postmodernism with a story or a... [laughs] How is this the postmodern attitude? What is this, put it in your own words. Trivialized meanings, yeah,
and what trivializes meanings? Yeah, good, good good. That's... The meaning of something
as personal as I love you becomes trivialized
because we hear it too much and we hear it in sort
of awful situations, like a Barbara Cartland
novel, which love becomes such a thin and pathetic thing, to be... Pretty uncharitable to Barbara Cartland, it becomes a thin and pathetic
thing and so for me to say I love you madly suggests
that I am referring to the thin and pathetic
thing so I don't want to use that word or that
phrase, so what do I use? You had me at hello, no, I
can't do that, that's awful. And you start to... Kind of pull back the number
of, or the ways that you can articulate yourself and the
ways that you can articulate yourself honestly and genuinely
because it is so in danger of coming off as thin and
pathetic, sentimental, you know what I mean, yeah,
so what's our primary way of operating in this context? You are all aware of it, it's
irony and cynicism, right, you protect your vulnerability,
you protect your genuine... Statements to people, you
protect your sincerity, I suppose, by making sure
that whoever you're talking to knows that you're not
referencing the pathetic thing or the sort of thin way of loving a person and so we have a very ironic
and sarcastic culture. Especially youth culture
[laughs] is incredibly ironic and sarcastic and I think we
see it in the various ways that we relate to each other. On Facebook, it's just
embarrassing for someone to say something sincere on Facebook, right? 'Cause it's Facebook, like,
I'm saying the sincere thing for everyone and it's sort of everywhere and it will probably sound
like some other cheesy sincere thing that someone
said, and so we don't say sincere things on Facebook, we say clever things on Facebook, right? Sit and think, what's the
most clever kind of funny way that I can say this
thing that I want to say? Good job, I'm glad you're, you know... I'm glad your show went so
well, sometimes we can say those sorts of things, but
usually it has to be something more clever so that it doesn't
come off as being sort of falsely or naively sincere,
does that kind of get some traction with you, was
there a hand up somewhere, yeah? Right. Yeah, right, yeah, that's
right, that's right, and so the kind of cash value
of that is that it's hard to be sincere without
coming across as naive and sentimental. [laughs] Yeah, good, anyone else
want to clarify that, is that making a little
more sense, a little better? [laughs] That's okay. Okay, good, I think that pretty... Pretty nicely... Articulates the postmodern
attitude in my mind and it places all of us in it. [laughs] If this is the postmodern
attitude, I think most of us share in that. Because of the context that we live in and in that context
you can see why so much contemporary art is ironic
and cynical and sarcastic. And often it does it in sort
of the most elaborate ways by presenting false forms
of sincerity, like huge, Jeff Koons does all of his
work, is preoccupied with this. Large, naively sincere
monuments that are trite and childish and... Sarcastic. [laughs] I think because of that. Love is a packaged chocolate and he makes monuments
to this kind of trite exchange of love and
calls it Sacred Heart. There's no more sort of
trite way to represent a sacred heart than in this way. And Koon's work will do a
lot of this appropriating of popular images, you know, a mermaid and the Pink Panther
and we're gonna put them together in this sort of
incoherent, I don't know, what kind of situation is it? I don't know. [laughs] A mermaid, I don't know,
is Pink Panther kind of the animated cartoon here or
is he just a stuffed animal? I don't know, the whole
thing is just sort of a monumental exercise in sarcasm. And so I think much of the most interesting postmodern artwork is going after the way
that our tales, our stories tend to be a piecing together and rearrangement of received
media images, for instance. And so a lot of work from
the '70s and '80s especially kind of looks like a blender. [laughs] Like a bunch of images from
all over places, traditional paintings, traditional
African artwork, porn, whatever else we get here,
a Lucian Freud painting just gets all blended up into one... Overwhelming noise, cacophony
of these images that are... Strung together. Incoherently. The harder you look, the harder you look. Sarcasm and criticism
is the primary posture of postmodern artwork, I think. So... I want to then... Call some of this into question. [laughs] I mean, certainly we have to
say the postmodern thought has had a lot of positive
effects, I think it has. Postmodern thought has
criticized things that really need to be criticized and
did need to be criticized. I think it's done a pretty
helpful job of highlighting the ways that our habits of mind and heart and body are shaped by cultural outlets, media, music, so on. I think it does a good job
of highlighting those things. I think postmodernism
has identified arguably idolatrous notions of
objectivity and certainty and... Authority, individualism,
neutrality, I think there are a lot of ways that
modernist thought was... Assuming too much. [laughs] About how objective it was,
how objective science is for instance, how... Much human reason and human
progress can accomplish and is a good thing on its own grounds. I think postmodernism has
sort of cut off at the knees a lot of those... Perhaps idols, potentially idols and I think it's also done
a pretty decent job in some ways and in a variety
of ways, in a lot of ways of critiquing real injustices
in the world, right? It went after people that
needed to be gone after and it went after ways,
really unhealthy ways that I think women were pictured
and treated in the world. I think it's gone after really
unhealthy ways that we tended to treat others and so I
think postmodernism has been really good on a lot of those points. However, postmodernism
as we've already said, tends to traffic in the
critical cynical ironic... Way of being in life. And that's not a healthy
way of being in life, I don't think, you can't live in cynicism as a healthy human being. I think, I had this
experience in the '90s, I went to college in the '90s, high school and college in the '90s and punk was big in the '90s. Punk is a kind of quintessential
postmodern movement whose posture is totally critical. I mean, there is nothing
affirmative about punk rock music. Every once in a while you
get a love song or something. Other than that, it is
critical and it is aggressively critical and I think I was, you know, I don't know if I was a
punk rocker, but I listened to a lot of the music and
went to a lot of the shows and at some point, at the
end of the '90s, I just, I said I am... Tired of being angry. [laughs] And I'm tired of being cynical, actually, I think that happened a
little later, 2005 or so, 2004, I'm tired of being cynical, I'm tired of being critical of everything because that's not a healthy way to live. And I think we could say
that more generally about a lot of sectors of our
culture that postmodern thought while it's done a good job
of criticizing certain things hasn't done such a good
job and certainly art hasn't done such a good job
of cultivating the virtues, the human virtues that we
care most about, like love and beauty and generosity
and hospitality, sincerity, faith, hope, and so on,
those are not really... Those are not really a kind of, [laughs], the words that would come
to mind to talk about postmodern art, right? So I think if we're
gonna talk about today, with the rest of class this
morning and this afternoon, if we're gonna talk about
what's going on now, I think what's going on is
in a lot of different ways, people, artists, philosophers
and so on trying to move past post modernity, the postmodern stance of
critical cynicism and irony. To something more constructive
and to offer something more constructive is
vulnerable and it is... Difficult. And there are a lot of
other points I think that we could critique postmodern thought, I'm not going to go into
them because I think it might be a distraction,
there are lots of other ways that we could criticize it,
but I think the main thing that I'll offer up here is that... We want to be healthy humans individually and as a culture and we've
got to start making artwork and we've got to start
behaving towards each other in ways that are more
marked by love and beauty and generosity, so in
the contemporary arts, there are a lot of people who are trying to bring those things
back in, and they go by a number of names, all of it
is sort of post, postmodern and that's sort of a goofy way of titling a period of time. But all of the other words
or phrase that have been attributed to it are
equally goofy. [laughs] So there are a lot of
things going on right now, I'll throw out a couple, all
of which are still parasitical on modernism, certainly there
are people who are saying what we're in now is a hyper
modern age in a lot of ways. It's not so much postmodern
but it's become hyper modern and there are certainly
sectors of our culture that certainly could
be called hyper modern and by hyper modern I mean
an even more amplified reliance on science and technology to... I don't know. Explain who we are and secure a good future, right? Science, biology, biological engineering, there's a lot of that stuff going on now that is really hyper
modern and just hasn't even really felt the impact of
postmodernism, it seems like, there are other people who are saying, one of the things that is going
on right now is not really a modernism or a
postmodernism, it's sort of a pseudo modernism, that it's marked by this kind of
shallowness and triteness that goes along with our
increasingly advancing technologies so we relate to each other
increasingly in short, misspelled phrases through
the internet and mobile phones and so on and so our
relationships to people are all mediated by clicking and surfing and doing those sorts of things, texting, and there are at least some
people who want to refer to that as a kind of pseudo modernism. It's a culture of superficiality. [laughs] I don't think that is what is
going on in certain corners of our culture but
probably not everywhere. One of the readings that
I gave you for today was by a guy named Nicholas Beurre, is how you pronounce that last name, he is a curator from
London, he lives in London and the reading that I gave you is called The Alter Modern
Manifesto, he wants to say that where we are now
and where we're going is into a kind of alter
modernism where we need to start being constructive
in the way that modernism presumed itself to be but
we have to take on board all of the critiques, the
right critiques of modernism, the postmodern level and
start a new kind of modernism, an alternate modernism,
an alter modernism. That is one that starts
from a globalized... Situation, a globalized condition. There are other people who
are calling things a variety of ways, I don't want
to go into all of them, but there are some people
calling for remodernism, a rebirth of beauty, a
rebirth of traditional... Attitudes towards... aesthetics and so on,
some people are calling it a meta modernism, I don't
know, there's this movement called the new sincerity that
are just these people that's like, let's just be sincere
to each other. [laughs] And I'm gonna make art that
is sort of grossly sincere and not worry about it, at
any rate, I think a lot of what's going on, a lot of these... Kind of... Calls to move past postmodern thought, common to all of those is a
request that we have renewed places for sincerity and
faith and love and beauty, those tend to be the things
that you see most often. Our art has become ugly, [laughs], our art has become uncharitable. Our art has become... Sparse. This, by the way, that I'm
showing you is an artwork. This won, I think it
was a 2007 Turner prize and it's called Lights Going On and Off. There's something hollow and missing about a lot of this postmodern
art that got so wrapped up in its own cynicism,
criticality, it's not offering... Anything to kind of keep
the human values we want. Okay, so I'm gonna fly
through a bunch of artists who were working in
this century, or, yeah, in this century, in this
decade and just sort of talk over the top of them,
so I think if you want a deeper engagement with any of these, you'll have to go back and do it, we'll say a
couple of things about 'em, but I'm just gonna slide over
the top of a lot of people and this afternoon then
I'll start digging in more carefully with a couple of artists. One of the things that's
going on, I think, today, is a continued critical posture. There's still a lot of this kind of... Work that is... Critiquing global politics
and international politics and so on, this is a guy
named Yinka Shonibare, he's born in Nigeria but he's
based in London right now. And this pretty
straightforwardly is called How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once. [laughs] And what's going on here? These two kind of elaborately dressed noblemen without heads in this standoff. A kind of... Colonial standoff or Cold
War standoff or something. And Shonibare has, a lot of
his work looks like this, these sort of little vignettes that include pretty elaborately constructed clothing, I mean,
in some ways it's related to fashion, [laughs],
but pretty elaborately constructed clothes that all seem to be taking their imagery
from Enlightenment era, modernist area thought, values
so he has this whole series called the Age of Enlightenment. This is his rendering of
Emmanuel Kant, what's that? Yeah, and so here's Kant. Critiquing reason, pure reason
and critiquing aesthetic judgements and so on but
doing so from a particular cultural position, one of
relative affluence and privilege. And he does a similar
thing with all of these Enlightenment thinkers, Adam Smith, and interestingly, I think, these are all Enlightenment figures and
he has left off the head. Emphasizing their bodies,
their bodily positions in the world, the clothes they wear. Their studies, it's their bodily
position he's emphasizing. Regardless of the head or
independently of the head, so to speak. And so I think sticking
with this critical line that is still running today,
but you seem to get more of a playfulness about it, the criticism is a little bit more playful,
less cynical, I think, and more aesthetically rich, I
think, the kind of conceptualism of the '70s that's cold
and dry is sort of a thing of the past, I think, for the most part. Here's Tom Friedman, this is
called Untitled Dollar Bill, it's one dollar bill but it's
made up of as you can see here 36 different one dollar
bills that he has cut up into this, using this pretty precise grid that he cuts these up,
reassembles them into one giant dollar bill, how do you
make sense of that, I mean, what does this look like to you? I mean, it kind of looks
like a pixelized dollar bill, but what makes it pixelized? I mean, they're made up of
dollar bills, actual objects but as you grow these
things into a larger image, or a larger system, the thing
gets increasing abstract, yeah I don't think it's legal, so
I don't know, I don't know how he did this, but I don't
think it's legal. [laughs] Oh well, I don't know. But it becomes this, as you blow it up, it becomes this increasingly
abstract pixelated thing. He also does so with consumer
packaging, a cereal box or nine cereal boxes that
he cuts up very precisely and pieces back together to
form one mega cereal box. And I think, not coincidentally, it is a Total, it's a totality, a sort of pun on that postmodern idea. He's making a totality
out of concrete pieces but the totality here
is consumer packaging. It's an image that
contains themselves cereal. Why does it need the box? Why does it need all this
lettering, I don't know, 'cause that's how we buy things. [laughs] We boy totalities through images, I guess. And there does seem to be,
I want to put some of these at the beginning, the sort
of continuation of a critical stance that seems to kind of have a... Continuation of
postmodernism, postmodernity, this is a guy named Kris
Martin, he's a Belgian, this is not the Chris Martin
of Coldplay, is it Coldplay, isn't the lead singer Chris Martin? This is not him, just in
case you're wondering. A kind of post-conceptual
artist if you will, a conceptual artist today. Each time he displays this
thing, it's a Ming dynasty ceramic vase that he did
not make but he displays it and every time he displays it,
he positions it in the room and pushes it over and it
shatters and he glues it back together, so every
time he exhibits it, it is a reconstruction of
a broken thing. [laughs] And so it continues to break more and more and accumulate more and
more glue, I guess trying to hold together this
artifact from the past and he does a lot of things
that do seem to be pointing us to the institution, the
art institution still and that's a kind of
typical postmodern stance. This is called TYFFSH,
which as I understand it, changes when he exhibits it,
it's thank you for flying and then it's the name
of the gallery, like... Mark Fox when he showed here
in LA, this work, Mark Fox, thank you for flying Mark
Fox, so it's an identification of the air balloon, the hot
air balloon with the gallery and I think you can enter
into it and it's being blown up, but there's this
kind of failure [laughs] that is here that seems
to be presented, a failure of the gallery system or
a failure of the gallery to really hold the aspects
of life that really make life enjoyable, and interesting, that the hot air balloon
functions when you're using it. When you bring it into
the gallery, it dies or something like that, and
I think he's a clever artist, in a lot of ways, and seems
to extend this kind of... Criticism, it's political
criticism, criticism of the art institution but does
so in fairly, I don't know, clever and... Fun ways. Like Bells, what are bells used for? What are bells associated with? [laughs] With note-taking. [audience laughs] And with... Church, the sacred, associated
with liberty and so on. When you weld two bells
together like this, it becomes this insulated thing that... Removes any function, it keeps
the bells from functioning so it's this kind of
inbred bell if you will or insulated bell. One more from Kris Martin. Are you familiar with this sculpture? Sort of, it seems somewhat familiar. But it's not, there's something missing. Yeah, it's based on
Laocoon, which we discussed at the beginning of this course as being this kind of ideal sculpture. Kris Martin does it and
removes the snake or the snakes and it is a weird thing,
huh, this story of Laocoon and his sons dying... Under a curse from the gods. A curse from Athena, I think it is. Curses him, curses them and the serpent, the sea serpents grab him, kill him. What does it do when
Martin removes the snake? There's this sort of
struggling, agonizing, but there's nothing there,
there's just this sort of general anxiety [laughs]
or general struggle. Maybe we could read it as
this kind of iconic image of Greek art, high
Hellenistic Greek art that... Has all of the divinity
gone and all of the... Kind of... Grappling with the gods gone, if you will, but what remains is just a
general anxiety and struggle, with oneself, perhaps
that's going on here. A couple other... Examples of... Kind of postmodern art that's
still disentangling itself from this general feeling
of malaise and pessimism. This is by a British artist
named Simon Starling. He has kind of come to fame
in the last couple of years. He won the Turner prize, the
British Tate Turner prize in 2008, I think it was,
nine, this is called autoxylopyrocycloboros. [laughs] And what this is is a
video of a performance. The artist salvaged a
sunken boat from Scotland, a lake in Scotland, and
he salvages it, he sort of gets it seaworthy again and
equips it with a steam engine and is trying to... Cross this lake by, only with the steam engine and
by burning the boat itself, so can he cross the... Lake using, powering with
a powered steam engine, this kind of image of
modernist technology, the steam engine totally
changes western culture, a sort of icon of modernist technology, he's going to power it with all he has in the structure itself of the boat, so it's a
structure that undermines itself and you can get a certain
ways with this but eventually he doesn't make it. And so I think you can kind
of regard this as a sort of parable of a self-destructive
system, a self-destructive structure, and I think
specifically, again, he's going after a steam
powered culture, I guess. A self-destructive structure. Doris Salcedo is a... Pretty compelling artist working today. This is her work for the
Istanbul Biennial, biennial or biennial-ey, and I think
that's worth pointing out that one of the things we get in the last 20 years especially is a huge expansion of
the art world, I mean, the center of the art world
all through the second half of the 20th century is
undoubtedly New York. New York City is the center of
the international art world. Now New York is prominent, but
London is extremely prominent Berlin is extremely prominent, and there are a number of cities... Outside of the western
world that are becoming important art centers,
like Istanbul, Turkey, there's a lot going on in India
right now, a lot in Korea. There's a huge show at
LACMA a couple years ago of sort of hot new Korean artists. There's a lot going on in China and so on. Doris Salcedo is a Columbian,
here showing in Istanbul, Istanbul Biennial, and
what do you see here, what is this? Chairs, a lot of chairs,
almost 1600 chairs. And they're all positioned
as though they're in line with the storefronts, right,
the face of the buildings, you have a building
that had been torn down so there's this empty hole
and she fills it with chairs in this way, why, what does that do? How do you read this? Of what? Abandonment, yeah, good, these
chairs have just been tossed, they feel tossed sort of
recklessly into the hole. Good. And so what's being abandoned? Chairs? I mean, it seems like all kind
of traditional wooden chairs, they seem to have some age to
them, she didn't just go out and buy 1600 chairs from Ikea
and then throw them in there. They seem to be traditional chairs, so an older culture, yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [professor laughs] Yeah, and once she does
that, this suddenly takes a pretty dark turn, I mean once
you start, are these people, a stand in for people,
then this suddenly becomes like a mass grave, it's
like a visual rendering of a mass grave. Yeah, yeah. And so to put it in line with... A kind of, in line with
the normal city street and the storefronts, the face
of the apartments and so on, she sort of puts this mass
grave in the middle of the city. It's fairly haunting and
fairly apocalyptic or fairly preoccupied with war or with
atrocity, with violence. International violence, I
mean, certainly more people than this have filled in mass
graves in the past few decades And Salceda does seem to
have this really heavy artistic practice, are any of you familiar with the turbine hall at
the Tate in London, yeah, some of you, there are
a few places you can go, as I was considering
what do I include today, I mean, a couple of the
sort of centers, you can see what's showing at major
museums in New York and LA, right, go look at the list
of exhibitions at the MOMA or the Guggenheim or
something and you'll find really prominent contemporary
artists working today. You can also go to the Tate
and the Tate, in London, has a lot of different
programs, one of its programs is that it has this massive,
massive turbine hall, it formerly was a... They built turbines or something there. And they commission a
different contemporary artist, maybe every six months
or so to do a massive large scale installation. I'll show you a couple of
these, but Doris Salcedo, when she got it, she cracked
the foundation of the Tate or did she, she didn't, I
suppose she didn't really, but it really looks like it. She created this crack,
running through the center of the museum. And it runs for quite a ways. She titles it Shibboleth,
which if you're not familiar with that word, a Shibboleth
is a kind of distinguishing practice of a specific region
or something like that. It's a word or a practice
that is specific to... A regional location. And it's usually identified
with a people group if you will, like a shibboleth... The way you use that word
tells me you're from Canada, that's a sort of shibboleth, oh? [laughs] It's kind of local jargon, if you will, so she titles this Shibboleth. A cracking foundation,
the modern art museum with a cracked foundation
and I still don't really understand how she did this because this thing is fairly deep, I mean, it goes down several feet and is just this giant crack
running through the museum. Which seems to be once
again a kind of continuation of sort of postmodern critical attitude, criticizing the institution
as being flawed, cracked at its foundation. For whatever that's worth. And I think this attention,
that heightened attention to culture, cultural
institutions, cultural norms, that we get in postmodernism
continues through a lot of work going on
today but does so in... Different ways, we haven't seen before. This is an artist named Jason Salavon who's a photographer,
though he doesn't take many of his own photos,
he more takes photos, he doesn't take photos. This is called Portrait, Rembrandt
and what do you see here? How would you describe this? I mean, it kind of looks like
a Rembrandt portrait, right, but what's wrong with it? Ah. Yeah, you're getting close,
that's not quite what he does but you're on the right track. Yeah, he takes 100 Rembrandt
paintings, in this case, takes 100 of them, has high
resolution digital scans of them and he's constructed this
computer program that can analyze every pixel of the image
and add up the sort of color for all 100 pixels for
that, that one pixel from all 100 paintings and then
calculate the average color for all 100 of the
paintings at that pixel, does that make sense? And so then he prints it
out, it's a digital photo, a digital print that is the
average of all Rembrandt, or at least 100 or maybe
it's all Rembrandt portraits and what you get is
something, you get a portrait, but the portrait is not
of Rembrandt, the portrait is of the formula or the
convention for painting portraits, what you see here, what he
depicts is not a specific person but a norm, an average, a convention. And he does this not only from art history but from popular images, like
from the public, public images that he mostly takes off of the internet, takes these images, here
are 100 special moments, these are kids with Santa
and he loads these into his program and you get
the average of these 100 interactions with Santa and
what you see is a remarkable... Consistency, there's a norm
there, there's a formula almost for how we picture kids with
Santa and that's what he is giving to us, the cultural norm, not the specific people involved. The specific people involved
are all participating in a common cultural norm,
that seems to be his... Idea, his implication. And it's interesting to note
the artistic practice here, what does Salavon do,
he doesn't really, well, the thing he makes is a computer program. He's a programmer, is what he is. He is a computer programmer
who selects images, selects them, the artist
as this kind of person who surfs and clicks and texts
and those sort of things. He surfs the web and compiles
and averages these images. But I think his work is interesting. It's not just sort of
highlighting these cultural norms for the sake of criticizing
them, I don't think that's what's happening
here, because they're all, or a lot of them, are things
that are important to us, right, like marriage and Little
Leaguers and kids enjoying going to see Santa and
so on, these are things that tend to be important to us, but they have norms at work
in them and I think that's a more complex, more
interesting thing to say than just to sort of... You know, here are the cultural
norms that you're living by and I hack away at them
because they're oppressive or something like that, no, a
lot of norms that we live by are good for us. A lot of traditions are good
and it's okay that we're shaped by them, but when we
become conscious of them, we become conscious of
how they're shaping us, for better or for worse. He does a similar thing with homes. Taken out of the for
sale signs, for sale ads, and does them for different locations, so I guess this is the average
of 114 homes being sold in Dallas Fort Worth area. Here's Miami. And he is certainly also aware of... Not just kind of... Public domain photography, but also media, so these are the Late Night hosts, at least they were at the time. It was Leno, Letterman and Conan, I think? And he took I think 100 of
their opening monologues and averaged all of the
pixels, again, so you get this average moving image
so they are just all layered so you get them giving their
monologues in an average way. There's a real consistent
average, evidently, and then all of the voice,
all the sound is also averaged so you get this [babbles] That is really kind of
haunting, disturbing. And this heightened awareness
of cultural frames... And how they influence
the way we think, interact with each other, certainly
goes back to the gallery, once again, but there's
been, I think, a movement more often lately toward at
least what Nicholas Beurre calls relational
aesthetics, he wrote a book in the late '90s called
Relational Aesthetics, same guy that wrote Alter Modern Manifesto for your reading, and he says
that relational aesthetics, what's happening more lately
is since postmodernism heightens our awareness of
cultural frames of reference on thought and friendship and interaction, as we move past it we continue
that heightened awareness but the artwork starts from
those social interactions, from those relations,
those social relations, so this is a guy named Walead Beshty, he's a Los Angeles based artist, and what he does is he
does a lot of things. The photos on the back wall
are photographs that he takes on film and then as he
travels he includes them in the suitcases that get run
through the X-ray machines and it screws them up
and then he prints them because it's the process
for them getting there, it's the sort of, it's
evidence that he has, that these don't just
hang on a wall neutrally, they've come from somewhere
and they've gone through certain processes and same
for his minimalist sculptures. [laughs] His minimalist
sculptures look an awful lot like the Larry Bell cube we
saw at the Getty our last trip. He basically makes the same
things, these Larry Bell minimalist glass cubes
and then he mails them and he lets whatever happen to them happen and he mails them to the
gallery so he mails them to the gallery and their
instructions are to unpack the cube and to exhibit on the box
that it was shipped in as the pedestal, so you get
a removal of the pedestal, the traditional kind
of art gallery pedestal that sets it aside, sets it
apart from the rest of the world but rather the pedestal
positions it back into the world in a way, evidence of the... Kind of... Cultural rivers that it has come through, the hands that it has gone through. This probably isn't very
good press for FedEx, but this is probably not the average... Thing that you ship either. And so I think it's a critique
of minimalism and so on, but I don't know that critique
is heightened as much as... The social networks
that support the gallery and you get lots of these. And this heightened, I'll show
you just a couple more here. This heightened sense of
people, other people outside of the art galleries
being involved in the work I think marks much of
what's going on right now. There's much more of an
impulse towards artmaking as having to do with everyday
life in one way or another and it's tied into everyday life. This is an artist named Ai Weiwei, are some of you familiar with him? He's been very much in
the news this last year. He's probably the most
prominent Chinese artist working today and he's been really
outspoken against the Chinese government, and they are
not happy with that, so he gets hassled a lot,
that's an understatement. He gets hassled by them, he
got arrested earlier this year and just disappeared,
thrown in prison for two and a half months, I think, three months off the top of my head,
they tore down his studio, anyway, he's a fascinating character. Look into him more. In the Tate turbine hall
where Doris Salcedo did the giant crack, he did
this and this was last year, late last year, about a year
ago, and this is 100 million handpainted sunflower
seeds made out of porcelain and he filled the turbine hall
with these sunflower seeds that all refer not so much
to him but to lots and lots of people who have had
their hands on these and constructed, made them, painted them and I think there's something
going on here about... The... Seeds, they're sort of dead,
they're dead flowers in a way, reference dead flowers,
but they're also seeds, so they seem to imply new
growth, future growth, a future, much of his work
directly has to do with Chinese history, Chinese
culture, so one seems to... Want to refer all of these
back to these sort of artisans, workers, who are making
things like this, turning out things like this. And these have been shown in
a couple of different places. It's very popular. [laughs] When it showed in London
and Ai Weiwei seems to, a lot of the work seems to
have this collective entity. Like that the seeds are
somehow associated with people, fields and fields of
people, 100 million people, the masses, and he... Seems to handle that in other
ways like with these bicycles that all share wheels so they're
kind of this single entity, multiple individuals that are
kind of a singular entity. A common destiny but
it's also sort of futile, there's a futility here, huh? [laughs] Perhaps going in circles? Although if you're going
in circles together perhaps that's not such a bad thing. It might be better to
go in circles together than to journey to far
off places on our own, the Lone Ranger. And this... That ethos of connecting
with people, having the work more connected with
other people, not so much just the artist's genius
or something like that, although the artist,
the organizer is the one who often, whose name gets associated, but this ethos of the artwork
being connected to people and growing out of the
people and kind of yearning for something seems to be
pretty common right now. This is an artist named El Anatsui. Any of you familiar with
him, yeah, a little bit? He's a Nigerian artist and he
makes these massive textiles, is how they read. But they are textiles made
out of aluminum bottle caps but not just bottle caps
like from a Coke bottle. These are, like, the tops
and the sides of labels for liquor bottles and so
you have in these textiles... A massive number of presumably
emptied liquor bottles which seems to... Represent a group of people. One would presume... Hurting or... Depressed or hopeless or
something, I don't know, I guess you could associate
this with partying, celebration, but I don't know
that it's so much celebration. I mean, it's a beautiful
thing but it seems to be, a beautiful thing that has a
sort of dark underside to it, a dark past, a darkness
that's implied behind it, like hard liquor is not so much
always a celebratory thing. [laughs] Especially if you
put it in African context in which slaves were often
purchased with hard alcohol, whiskey, especially, back in
the day so these are often read as being... Kind of growing out of,
him collecting items from African culture that have a, perhaps a negative... A negative aspect to the
contemporary African culture and a negative aspect to the
traditional African culture in that it's wrapped up in
slavery and some of the effects of slavery and so he seems
to collect them from there, but then I guess redeem
them in a way, knit them back together, knit them
into this fabric that perhaps suggests warmth or
clothing or traditional... African textiles. They're pretty remarkable. And they come in a variety
of different formats, different labels, these
are labels that go around the side of the neck
rather than on the top and I want to do one more
and then we'll break. And what we're, I think where I'm going
here is this movement increasing movement away from... A postmodern cynicism or sarcasm and critique to something
that's post, postmodern that seems to be really interested in... Human concerns. [laughs] I don't know how else to say that. They seem to be more constructive,
redemptive, if you will so we'll end with this,
and they seem to be more community based, community oriented. This is made by a group
called Nucleo De Arte, and they are based in
Mozambique and what they did, there's been this program
in Mozambique over the last couple decades, last decade,
I don't know how long it's been going on and
the program is called transforming arms into
tools and so I still don't entirely know who runs this
organization or this program, but this art group is in one
way or another connected to it and what this program does is
it exchanges guns for tools or equipment, so sewing
machines, building materials, bicycles, evidently there
was one town that turned in so many guns that they
received a tractor. [laughs] And this comes on the heels of... An extended civil war in Mozambique where they weren't just
fighting with others, they were fighting internally
and killing each other, these communities, these
villages killing each other, fighting with each other and
so they eventually kind of negotiate peace and
then their next move was we need to start reconstructing
our lives and our villages and being at peace with each
other and so let's form a way that you can exchange
your tools of destruction for tools of construction
and it was a huge success. Evidently this program,
after it had been running for nine years, collected
more than 600,000 guns which is amazing, I don't
even know there are that many guns in Mozambique, evidently. So they collect 600,000 guns
and this group takes at least a portion of them and starts
welding these guns together into this tree form so all of
this is made out of ammunition Guns and ammunition clips,
those sort of things, and then they also made
animals, there's some animals that surround the tree, the tree of life. In what ways is this a tree of life? What's that? It neglected death, yeah, good. I mean, it represents
a tree, a tree of life but in a pretty tangible
way, it might really... Symbolize a broader... Renewal, redemption of life in this area, that each of these guns
is willingly given up, exchanged for something
more life nurturing and I don't think we
should say that, you know, all guns are bad or, I don't know, protecting yourself is bad or something like that,
but certainly in this case where you have civil war,
where things have become so poisonous and so violent that disarming is an
active, kind of willful... Move toward peace, this
is a sort of tree of life. And it comes out of not
so much a bunch of artists deciding what they're going to say or do for the context of the gallery or museum but artists working with a group of people and with a movement
that's going on in a place and constructing items out of that process so the object is a result
of a larger process and points to that larger process. This was exhibited in the
entryway to the British Museum, I believe, is where it is. >> Woman: Biola University
offers a variety of Biblically centered degree programs, ranging from business to ministry
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