Notes from Lecture series delivered by Gerald Deslandes at OCA lecture event 10 May 2014

Gerald delivered five lectures on the key ideas of the development of modernism and post modernism. As well as the notes handed out with the course, I took my own notes during the lectures as follows:

 

Progress, City and the Machine

Progress of artists influenced by economic and political background.

Enlightenment period saw us become healthier, more political, and more virtuous.  Removing idea of immorality as fear of God subsides.

Industrial Revolution overlays this - makes us richer and technological advances mean that different media can be used for art, e.g. Wedgwood ceramics.

Artists following liberal causes -  e.g. Wedgwood as a friend of artists and liberals designed ceramic badge depicting anti slavery.

1815-1840s saw a period of conservatism in art as people reacted against Napoleonism. Also artists like Gericault who thought Britain would be subject to revolution.

Millet, Courbet and others painting ordinary people in drab 'realism' style. Often know the people (e.g. Courbet Funeral at Ornans 1850-51 painted own family.

Even Constable, the friend of Wordsworth, included homeless person in The Vale of Dedham 1828 thus including a social statement in a landscape.

Morris's work demonstrated that you need something beautiful as well as useful, reacting against the depersonalisation of factory production. Reaction against the idea that artists should be excluded from functional ideas.

Impressionism was partly a throw back to bourgeoisie. City is not a hell hole but can be enjoyed, particularly by Baudelaire. Sense of alienation in Impressionism of not being caught up in what is happening in the city. "I am not involved."

Impressionists see not workers but street walkers, prostitutes as the archetypal urban citizens.

Photography frequently used as instrument of State, e.g. reformatory schools and prisons. Use as tool to show people with deformities and on the edge of society (e.g. sewer dweller).

Seurat shows people as forms, painted in deliberately mechanical way, response to photography.

Reaction against machinery is showed by work of Duchamp. Hannah Hoch and anti Dada movement continued trend after WW1.

Britons did not join in this movement. Retained faith in the future in designs by Holden, for example. Got his ideas from Bauhaus. In 1960s there was trend towards depersonalised work by the likes of Sol le Witt and Warhol. Work looks it has been made by a machine. Burren painted stripes. 

Primitivism and the Unconscious

Primitive means not just African and other art but the rediscovery of folk art. Representing non visual world: dreams. Adds a sense of their own feelings - true of that person's vision. (e.g. Gauguin - women watching archangel)

Countryside is represented as static and simple, antithesis to way city is represented. The Angelus 1857 represents peasant life, makes the image seem holy. Heads in prayer.

Matisse Calme et Volupte 1904 is epitome of South of France as somewhere wit simple relaxed way of life.

Loss of innocence Gauguin et al. Primitivism, exoticism and loss of innocence. Where do we come from What are We? Where are We Going. Expression of malaise with material advancement.

Freud overstated in importance but others, e.g. Frazer may have been important.

Simmel thought that city dwellers tended towards more self identifying behaviours. Different consciousness - more fragmentary. Ulysses  and Mrs Dalloway are literary demonstrations of same thing: thinking is disturbed and erratic.

Jung talks about how we are bound together by collective conscience, how our experiences are expressed. How do we represent these myths? Pollock goes back to Hiawatha and creates mythical images around them. Pollock uses processes that go back to native Americans, lives in country and is fascinated by the experience of nature.

Consumerism and Language

Greenberg: whereas renaissance seeks to conceal, modernism seeks to reveal. Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe by Manet. Figures are more 2d. You can see the joins - like a collage. No sense of a dialogue. Reveals how the painting is made.

Photography pushed art towards the Artist rather than the subject. Revealing the language of art: line, shape, colour, brush stroke.

Constructivists include Naum Gabo: produce something that had integrity. Was a programmatic way - go through steps rather than intuition. El Lissitsky deconstructs with Beat the Whites with the Red Edge.

Jasper Johns takes an old image of the US flag and repaints as an abstract notion of just stars and stripe. Ceci n'est pas une pipe by Magritte is another example. Broodthaers: the Farm mixes images of cows with names of cars.

The way we represent the world is not in the direct way but in all the ways it is not. What things are is what they are not.

Barthes Panzani demonstrates Italianicity. Breaks down how adverts and images and text look in two respects: denoted and connoted. Formal and content element of image come together in a sign.

Marx provides link. Value is based on the imaginary relationships. It is not the worth. Value is not intrinsic but how it relates to other things. Manet image of woman behind bar shows that what is for sale is not the drink but the woman. Desire and sexuality and consumerism is very much linked to how they are portrayed. Warhol portrayed emphasised just how little individuality there is in items. Images reflect images we have already seen. Celebrity culture imitates a role model.

Oliver Wendell Holmes - people will hunt real things in same way that people hunt animal skins (note 1).We are hunting the reality.

Feel rich, don't buy the car, buy the magazine.

See Peter Blake work. Can put disparate images together to make a new language.

This is a portrait of Iris Cert if I say so.

Martin gets into a strange row with US customs over an Oak Tree. US say it is an Oak tree it cannot be exported!

Guy Debord - we live in a world that shouts. Everything is a spectacle.

Parr - consumerism, disorientation.

Feminism and Multiculturalism

The Odalisque by Ingres (1814) is example of the close relationship of feminism and multiculturalism. Women were often exoticised in oriental dress to satisfy sexual imaginations of Victorian men.

Women artists were encouraged to paint flowers, or decorative art. Your work is charming, delightful, and not to be taken as serious art. They could not actually go out and paint. Could not go out alone, visit bars, restaurants, brothels. Separate from the city, from the world. In 1910, there was a women only art exhibition. Hysterical reporting, even that women who were breast feeding would find their breast milk would go sour if they attended the exhibition. 

Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun were examples of female artists who took self portraits. Many of them were beautiful women but self representation was not.

Cindy Sherman portrays herself. Revealing the processes of art.

Overlooked comparison between the way women and gay people are portrayed.

The Hackney Flashers work collaboratively to show images of home life and show these at the school gates and similar environments.

Sarah Lucas demonstrates how bits of women's bodies can be fetishized. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is very similar to Duchamp's coffee grinder image.

Maud Sulter does montages of African cultural objects superimposed on Swiss scenery.

Postmodernism and Globalisation

In 1970s have disillusion with US: Vietnam, Watergate. 80s see end of Soviet bloc and the opening up of China. The service economy takes over, more intangible. Digital revolution. World becomes more difficult to comprehend and represent. Tourism means people better educated. Images and visual experiences abound.

Gursky 99 Cent and Chicago Board of Trade intensify the complex of the image to demonstrate illegibility. Images of the world simply refer to other images. Hyper real world. World is illusion that refers to other illusions.

Morimura wants us to see that he is masquerading as something else.

Wallinger series of work.

Deacon makes objects that are functionless but using techniques that are redundant.

Note 1: the full quote from Wendell Holmes:

“Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth. The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection of forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are now. The time will come when a man who wishes to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial, National, or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form, as he would for a book at any common library.” (1859)

Accessed from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361/