California State University, Sacramento



Themes in Contemporary Art

Gill Perry and Paul Wood

Read excerpt of Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” available on the course website under “Readings”

Chapter 1: Inside the Whale: an introduction to postmodern art

1. Why is “postmodernism” a confusing term?

2. Why do we use it?

3. What art and artists exemplified “modernist” painting?

4. Which critics defended “modernist” painting and on what grounds?

5. Which critics attacked “modernist” painting and on what grounds?

6. What does “visual muzak” mean?

7. What is “modernist” (formalist) criticism and how is it different from modernism and modern art?

8. What kind of art from 2000 does Paul Wood compare with modernist painting from the 1960s?

9. How are the criteria for judging or comprehending them different? Can the art of Stan Douglas or Ilya Kabokov be judged or comprehended in modernist/formalist terms?

10. What is “medium-specificity” and how is it “totally abrogated” in the art by Douglas and Kabokov?

11. What and when were the antecedents for Douglas and Kabokov?

12. Describe the paradigm shift or watershed that took place after 1960.

13. In what decade is the watershed located?

14. What “hybrid, politicised parctice” replaced modernist painting by the mid-1970s?

15. What were the main stages of this change?

a. What and when was minimalism and how is it like modernist painting AND violate its cardinal principles?

b. What did American painter Frank Stella object to in “relational painting”?

c. How did minimalist sculptor Donald Jud describe traditional composing and balancing?

d. What did Robert Morris link art to and why?

e. How was Morris’s attitude “American”?

f. What was the difference between the ideal viewer of modernist painting and Morris’s viewers?

g. How did Carl Andre describe his art?

h. What is a minimal artwork’s “ontological status”?

i. Where did minimal art lead that was a “no-go” area for Michael Fried, modernist critic?

16. What was the “post-minimal” explosion?

a. What happened in the late 1960s following minimalism?

b. On what basis does Wood compare 1968 and 1917?

c. What terms were used to describe the range of “post-minimalist” practice?

d. What art did “Conceptual Art” initially describe?

e. What turn did Conceptual Art take in the 1970s and what is “conceptualism”? What do they have in common?

f. What is the “figure-ground” in painting and how was it effaced by modernist painting?

g. How was “the problem of figure and ground” a sign of the exhaustion of painting that culminated in the move to the “specific object” of minimalist sculpture that moved off the wall into the space of the gallery?

h. What was the polar opposite of the “unitary form”? of minimalism and what did Robert Morris, Vito Acconci, and Bruce Nauman say about their “anti-form” artwork of the late sixties.

i. What did German artist, Joseph Beuys say about art and freedom and how does that relate to post-minimal, post-modernist shift in values?

17. When did the use of new materials begin to be placed outside conventional art exhibition spaces? What examples are given?

18. How is Robert Smithson’s Sprial Jetty of 1970 an example of post-minimal art in the “expanded field” of art activity?

19. How was Robert Smithson’s experience of the New Jersey turnpike a “theatrical” one and opposed to what art is, according to Michael Fried?

20. How did Smithson define art and how was it different from modernist painting and sculpture?

21. When did spaces open “through which modernity poured back into art”? What were artists addressing in their work that modernist painting and sculpture did not?

22. Is Greenbergian Modernism the same as modernism in general?

23. When did the world of our “modernity” begin and what are its characteristics?

24. What new changes characterize our own time? What year marked the turning point?

25. How did Ibram Hassan define postmodernism? Which figures were his examples and why?

26. What did Jean-Francois Lyotard mean by a “Let us wage a war on Totality”?

27. What is “consumer capitalism” and what did Fredric Jameson mean about there being nothing outside of it in the 1980s?

28. What effect did the domination of consumer capitalism have on art, according to Jameson?

29. How does Jameson compare Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes (1887) with Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980)? How does he feel we postmoderns are different from the moderns?

30. What is the critique of institutions that is part of contemporary art? How did Hans Haacke’s A Breed Apart “turn the techniques of advertizing back on itself”?

31. What did the 1970s work of Adrian Piper, Mierle Ukeles and Mary Kelly have in common?

32. Did Conceptual art “avoid the general commercialization” of modern art? When did it begin to be absorbed by the art market?

33. What art represented the backlash to conceptualism in the 1980s?

34. Which artists represent this so-called backlash? Why?

35. What two postmodernisms does Wood identify by the mid-1980s?

36. Is postmodernist art about formal innovation? What are the changes in its history about?

37. What themes animated art in the 1980s

a. How did Sherrie Levine question the cardinal principles of modern art: “originality” and “authenticity”?

b. What is “commodity art”? Who does Wood give as examples of commodity artists?

c. What was “abject” art of the 1990s? Whose art is given as an example?

38. What was the position of painting in postmodern art.

39. What kind of art is central to the worldwide system – production, distribution, and consumption – on a “spectacular scale”? Is it medium specific?

40. Can there really be a “non-commodity” art according to Wood?

41. What does it mean that a doll purchased by Mike Kelley for 50 cents sold for $40,000 when he “turned it into a work of art.”?

42. Is postmodern art as described by Paul Wood “avant-garde” as he defines it on page 37?

43. What did Chin-tao Wu argue in 2002?

What is Paul Wood’s thesis? Why does he title his introduction “Inside the Whale”?

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