Postmodernism

Untitled 32

  
 
 
Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still #32. 1979.
Preble, Duane, Sarah Preble and Patrick Frank. Artforms. Seventh ed. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002.
Learning Community #5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

untitled

William Eggleston.  Greenwood, Mississippi.  1970.
Marien, Mary Warner.  Photography: A Cultural History.  Second edition.  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Huntsville, AL

William Eggleston. Huntsville, AL
(Man in a Motel Room). c. 1969-70.
Art photographers generally didn't appreciate color photography because:
Didn't like its commercial associations
The media was degraded once amateurs enthusiastically adopted color film
Color images looked average instead of artistic
Color needlessly prettified the image
 
 
"There are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar." - Walker Evans

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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William Eggleston.  Memphis, Tennessee.  1970.

Szarkowski said of the 1976 Eggleston exhibition, that the works were "perfect: irreducible surrogates"
 
Art critic Hilton Kramer responded, "Perfect?  Perfectly banal, perhaps.  Perfectly boring, certainly."
 
Eggleston's website

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo-Transformation

Lucas Samaras. Photo-Transformation. June 13, 1974.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

untitled

Lucas Samaras. Photo-Transformation. 1974.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo-Transformation

Lucas Samaras. Photo-Transformation. October 25, 1973.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painters increasingly drawn to using photographs as source material

Big Self Portrait

Chuck Close.  Big Self-Portrait.  1968.  8’ 11 ½” X 6’ 11 ½”.
Fineberg, Jonathan. Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. Second edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000.
 
photorealism = genre of painting that developed in the late 60s and early 70s as a response to Pop Art that reproduced photographic effects and illusions through meticulous detail often achieved by the use of projection devices

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betty

Gerhard Richter. Betty. 1988.
http://panathinaeos.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/betty_19881.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Environment exhibition at the Eastman House in 1975
 
Topography = a detailed graphic representation of the surface features of a place or object
New Topographics = landscape photography that rejects the notions of the picturesque and the sublime, focusing on the human-altered landscape
 
 
Characteristics of New Topographics approach:
Emotionally detached
Encyclopedic gathering of information
Focused on the banal and avoided the dramatic, heroic and the transcendental
Dispassionate and objective

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bernd and Hilla Becher. Typologies of Water Towers. 1972.
http://lespetitespestes.blogspot.com/2010/12/bernd-und-hilla-becher.html
Bernd and Hilla Becher. Blast Furnaces. 2007.
http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Artwork_Detail.asp?G=&gid=942&which=&aid=2179&wid=425349264&source=inventory&rta=http://www.artnet.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Industrial Facades

Bernd and Hilla Becher.  Industrial Facades.  1984 - 1994.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lewis Baltz.  Southwest Wall, Ware, Malcom & Garner, from the New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California.  1974.
Marien, Mary Warner.  Photography: A Cultural History.  Second edition.  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lewis Baltz. New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, #23. 1974.
http://caraphillips.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/fotografo_di_riferimento_lewis_baltz_01.jpg

 

Irvine Ranch Series

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Adams.  Denver.  1970 - 74.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Post-Structuralism = philosophical approach based on the idea that words and photographs are unstable and cannot be trusted, and that everything is a momentary construction with no ultimate meaning or truth.

 

Edward Ruscha. Amarillo, TX, from Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations. 1962.
http://whitney.org/Collection/EdwardRuscha/2004461

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Edward Ruscha.  Every Building on the Sunset Strip.  1966.
Joselit, David.  American Art Since 1945.  London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

 

"They are not statements about the world through art, they are statements about art through the world." - Ed Ruscha

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ed Ruscha.  Some Los Angeles Apartments.  1965.
http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=4397

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Historic Context
1980s
1973
Watergate scandal
1974
President Nixon resigns
1981
AIDS first recognized as a disease, given the name "Gay Related Immune Deficiency"
MTV founded
1981 - 1989
The "Reagan era"
End of the Cold War
1986
GRID renamed AIDS
 
Chernobyl nuclear accident
1987
"Black Monday" stock market crash leads to world-wide recession
1989
Robert Mapplethorpe dies of AIDS
 
Student protestors massacred in China's Tieananmen Square

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postmodernism = the period following modernism. Postmodernism is often seen as a rejection of the Modernist notions such as the superiority of subjective expression of unique intellects, high culture versus kitsch and abstraction versus figuration.

untitled

David Hockney.  Pearblossom Hwy.  1986.
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~mdst322/hockney_pearblossom.jpg
 
Belief that no single truth exists
Embrace diversity and questioning
Promotes parody, irony and playfulness
Jouissance = enjoyment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cindy Sherman
1954 -

 

Untitled 6

Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still #6. 1977.
Cruz, Amanda and Elizabeth A. T. Smith.  Cindy Sherman: Retrospective.  Chicago:  Thames & Hudson, 1998.