In this lecture segment, we are talking about
art in the 1960s.
with a focus on Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual
Art, which will bring us to the end of the
modernist trajectory we’ve been tracing.
We talked about the alienation of the public
by Abstract Expressionism and the swing back
to the natural world, in part as a reaction
to AbEx.
In the mid-1950s with the rise of Pop Art,
artists in Britain and the US elevate popular
culture to the level of art.
We’ve talked about the hierarchy of art
creation—with history painting at the top,
finely crafted objects made by an artist,
oil on prepared canvas.
But Pop Art gets rid of this hierarchy and
elevates the everyday, the mass produced,
the consumer goods to the level of art.
Pop artists appropriate or take something
out of one context and move it to a new context,
an act of appropriation.
Individual styles, media and techniques of
these artists vary as you see in this slide,
with the shuttlecock at the Nelson-Atkins
Museum or these large-scale depictions of
comics by another artist—but they all return
to the representation of identifiable objects
and the objects they choose to depict are
from popular culture.
Andy Warhol is a commercial illustrator and
graphic designer in New York City—who pivots
from working for corporations and ad agencies
to working as an independent artist.
He depicts objects from popular culture—the
stuff we find in grocery stores and living
rooms—painting these objects by hand, as
you see in this series of Campbell’s soup
cans that he initially displayed as if they
were on the shelf in a grocery store.
Similar to what we saw with Duchamp’s Fountain
and his readymades, Warhol is also interested
in recontextualizing and appropriating the
everyday to create art, but he replicates
and reproduces the object.
He gradually removes the artist’s hand from
the process and begins screen printing his
work.
Right now, you may be wearing a screen-printed
shirt or silkscreened shirt—in this process,
a screen receives an image through a photographic
process that hardens the screen around the
image and makes it impervious to ink and then
that image is used as a stencil.
The item to be printed is put underneath the
screen, and ink is squeegeed over the stenciled
screen, with the ink moving through the fabric
screen to create the print.
Screen printing is a fine art medium today,
but then, it was not—it was a mass-production
technique for fabrics, prints, and packaging
and allowed many prints to be made from a
single image or screen, so works could be
produced in multiples.
Warhol separates his process from the gestural
emphasis of much of AbEx and instead uses
a way to replicate imagery quickly.
He even called his studio “The Factory”
referencing the mechanical approach to producing
multiples.
He returns to the natural world and the popular
object in this work of art that depicts Marilyn
Monroe.
He loved using celebrity portraits in his
work—they allowed him to have a dialogue
about consumerism and art, commodities, and
consumption.
After Monroe’s death, he worked with a promotional
photo of her from a 1953 film.
He used silk screen to replicate her image,
referring to her constant presence in the
press.
The colors he uses are jarring and do not
relate to the natural world.
The movement from color to black and white
and the disintegration of the image may refer
to the end of her life, as if the black and
white images are like stills from a strip
of film.
By using a diptych, which is a format for
an altarpiece (we’ve talked about polyptychs
and triptychs before), he in essence makes
a modern religious image like an icon.
She becomes a product, instead of a person.
Warhol and other Pop artists returned to the
natural world by depicting consumer objects,
even a celebrity like Marilyn Monroe, often
doing so using their chosen media such that
they referred to mass production techniques
or even used them, like screen printing.
Through replication and changes in color,
Warhol expresses that Monroe was a commodity,
a celebrity, a product, an object, not a subject.
The 1960s saw the rise of Minimalism, which
was a different reaction to AbEx.
Instead of returning to the natural world
via the popular object, minimalist artists
create works of art grounded in human experience.
They focus on sculpture and stress objecthood—that
objects exist in space and that viewer should
engage with works of art within their own
space.
Characteristics of minimalism include that
what you see is what you get—minimalist
objects are nothing more than what they are.
There is no illusionism, no expressionism,
they are authentic, truthful, and pure.
They often use geometric shapes that are just
what they are.
These geometric forms are simple and often
repeated and use mass-produced objects, which
is another approach they take to making their
works accessible for viewers.
We see industrial and non-fine art materials
in Minimalism.
And they direct attention to the materiality
of the work, and not to the artist’s hand,
which is the opposite of what we saw with
the prominence of the artist’s hand in Gestural
Abstraction.
There is no subject matter beyond the form
of the object.
And their works of art are not shown on pedestals
removed from the viewer, but are in the viewer’s
space.
This object by Tony Smith called Die visualizes
these characteristics of minimalism.
It is a 6-foot cube of steel—what we see
is what we get, no illusionism, it is what
it is.
Smith also did not make the work himself—he
called a welding company and requested, “"a
six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel
with diagonal internal bracing” which is
exactly what we see here.
The dimensions correspond to the human body,
even the human body in death, referencing
the phrase “six feet under”—the sculpture
is six feet in each direction, not so big
that it towers above the viewer, and no so
little that it is dainty—but correlates
with human size.
Art critic turned Minimalist Donald Judd studied
philosophy and was fascinated by issues of
truth and what is real in life and art.
He created many of these stacks, rectangular
units evenly placed on a wall.
To him these were real, three-dimensional
objects that dispensed with tradition in painting
or sculpture.
This untitled work is an object, it’s not
illusionistic, not depicting or referring
to anything else.
We know exactly what it is made out of—we
can look at it and grasp it.
We have 10 copper boxes hung at even intervals
in a stack on a wall.
It’s tangible, truthful, made of simple
rectangular forms.
The viewer can tell what it is and see the
construction of the work, which was probably
not built by the artist, but instead built
by a fabrication team according to the artist’s
instructions.
There is no manipulation by the artist’s
hand.
If we compare it to a hand from Michelangelo’s
David, we see Michelangelo trying to use stone
to create the appearance of skin and veins—Judd
rejects this as dishonest, as not true to
material and not providing an authentic experience
for a viewer.
His work is scaled to be approachable for
a viewer, who sees themself reflected in the
work of art –the space is real, not pretend—this
person literally stands here to the side of
a different stack and engages with the work.
It’s a true experience of an authentic work
of art that dispenses with the hand and the
subconscious of the artist, illusionism, fine-art
media, and symbolism—it is just what it
is.
So, it’s a bit of a found object, with having
been made in a factory and the artist not
crafting it himself, instead he crafted the
idea and conceived of its form without having
manipulated its form.
Minimalist artists often made objects based
on ideas, with objects usually being made
by fabrication teams.
As the 1960s continued, artists focused on
the ideas behind works of art—and the written
expression of the concept or idea becomes
the work of art.
In conceptual art, we deal with art as idea—something
separate from how it looks.
Let me repeat that—the artist did not care
about how the work of art looked.
For the artist, the work of art was an idea.
Conceptual art, at its root, derives from
Duchamp in his ready-mades like the shovel
and the urinal that changed the definition
of an artist from one who crafts objects for
viewers to enjoy visually to one who takes
something from the regular, ordinary world
and recontextualizes it and gives it new meaning
through language and context.
Remember, if Duchamp had not bought this urinal
and chosen to give it a new purpose as a work
of art, it would have been used as a urinal
in a bathroom.
Its transformation into an art object has
nothing to do with how it looks—it has to
do with how Duchamp used words to defend submitting
this as a work of art for an exhibition.
The artist has the power to turn it into a
work of art, without changing how it looks
at all.
Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth was born in
1945 and as of 2019, he is still living.
In the mid-1960s when he was about 20 years
old, he began to create what he called One
and Three works that consisted of a copied
dictionary definition of an object, the object
displayed, and a photo of the object displayed
in that location—you see an example here
in his One and Three Shovels, which clearly
alludes to Duchamp’s appropriation of a
snow shovel.
Kosuth explains his One and Three works, saying,
“"I used common, functional objects - such
as a chair - and to the left of the object
would be a full-scale photograph of it and
to the right of the object would be a photostat
of a definition of the object from the dictionary.
Everything you saw when you looked at the
object had to be the same that you saw in
the photograph, so each time the work was
exhibited the new installation necessitated
a new photograph.
I liked that the work itself was something
other than simply what you saw.
By changing the location, the object, the
photograph and still having it remain the
same work was very interesting.
It meant you could have an art work which
was that idea of an art work, and its formal
components weren't important."
Each One and Three works consists not of the
objects you see here—but of the idea.
So, this is Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs—and
so is this, and this, and this—all four
of these different sets of chairs are the
same work of art.
Each includes a dictionary definition, photo,
and physical chair and are the same work of
art, because the work of art is just an idea.
It does not matter what the chair looks like—the
work of art is about the idea, not about the
aesthetics.
We are not seeing a finely crafted art object—instead,
we see art as idea, no skill in the creation
of objects required to produce this.
Scholars refer to this as the “dematerialization
of the art object” –the work of art is
not unique, it can’t be bought or sold—the
work of art is an idea.
Conceptual art in this way reacted to Minimalism
by not featuring the object and emphasizing
the object—and it also undermined the gallery
system for selling works of art.
With the elimination of the art object in
Conceptual art, we reach the endpoint of the
trajectory of modernism that we first introduced
in the mid-nineteenth century with Realism.
If the art object is no longer the focus of
art creation now, then what is art and what
is art supposed to be about?
What is the job of an artist?
It’s as if the questions artists were asking
about art and its role had been answered via
modernism—we saw artists working to create
something new, to use their art to solve or
reveal social problems, to reject academic
art and the classical tradition, to create
art about itself, and to show an artist’s
individual response to the world—and now
artists needed to ask new questions, provide
different answers, and reframe who they were.
Artists respond to this torsion and lack of
definition in myriad ways in the 1970s, as
we enter a period of great diversity in art
production in the United States.
