Contemporary Art Journal

Fine 319 Online Journal - Visual Analysis - Content from Lectures Exploring Themes and Movements in Contemporary Art

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Mariah Robertson, 11, 2012, Chromogenic colour photograph/photogram Mariah Robertson uses light sensitive paper and photographic chemicals to produce a range of abstract works that are the products of a highly experimental process. Much like the Abstract Expressionist artists focused on in the 1940/1950s, Robertson’s works embody the same gestural language. The hybridity of her works calls into question the materiality of photography. Is this a painting? Is it a photograph? Is it both? Is it something completely different altogether? Unlike a photograph, Roberson’s works are one shot; there are no negatives and no way to directly replete them. 11 stretches the length of it’s role and is displayed dropped over bars at the MoMA. Viewers can walk and observe the piece underneath it, very different to the way that photography is usually viewed. Because of it’s size and process, the artist is a part of a physically demanding work. Through their colourful nature, and sometimes large scale, works like 11,  both enchant and excite the viewers who stand amongst them.

Check out the video below to see more about Mariah Robertson’s process. 

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Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday,1999, Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas

Born in the 1930’s, Agnes Martin is a Canadian/American minimalist painter known for meticulous and intimately constructed large-scale paintings. With extreme serenity about them, Martin’s paintings confront the viewer nearly by their size. Slow and thoughtful, the artist’s hand is more obvious the closer one gets to the works. Made up of repetitive actions, her works are deliberate and have repetitive details about them that form a mediative practice for how they are created. Happy Holiday, 1999, is one of Martin’s later works that embodies minimalist ideals of reductivism, lack of figurative forms and do not have any representations. The only indication to subject matter is the title, perhaps referencing the feelings and colours used to produce it. A poetic work, it has a soft, gentle nature but is insistent about the space it occupies.

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Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988, Oil on canvas

Gerhard Richter combines photographic qualities with brush and paint in this realistic oil painting of his daughter Betty. Trained as a realist painter, Richter explores images that capture truth, blurring the lines between realism and abstraction. The work feels like a photograph and an oil painting simultaneously with the way Richter has captured a slight blur that only a camera can grasp.  To get his technique, the artist projects his images onto the canvas, often drawing references and imagery from newspaper. Though he works to capture truth from life, the truth cannot be truly conveyed through his work, it is the element that gets lost in translation between the photograph and finished painting. His small scale representational works challenge the way we view both paintings and photographs from an art historical stance, placing these works of a hybridity between traditional mediums and photography, into the contemporary painting realm.

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On Kawara, Date Paintings (Today Series), 1966-2013

Producing more than 3,000 works in this series over the course of four decades, On Kawara recorded dates on to individual canvases, a project that would end up spanning his entire life. Beginning in 1966, and working till his death in 2013, Kawara produced these works with a Japanese lacquer technique and a strict set of rules. If the painting wasn’t complete by the end it the day it was started on, he discarded it. Partway through the series he began making boxes to house the canvases, each lined with a newspaper from the same day the painting was finished on. This series challenges the way we think about time be creating a portrait of Kawara’s life. The works were not limited geographically, they accompanied the artist wherever he went on his travels, he didn't fail to add to the series while away. The series came to an end with his death, after dedicating his entire career to one single ongoing project his work. The “Today Series” is now part of the Guggenheim’s collection in New York.  

Check out the video below to see how On Kawara made his Date Paintings.

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Candice Breitz, Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), 2005 (Shown again above 2013)

With its emergence at the hight of the Vietnam War, Video Art is a self-reflexive, time-based medium that uses elements of performance art and photography to democratize the production of images. In a movement free from canonical traditional, artists Candice Breitz uses video to construct portraits of icons through video footage of some of their devoted fans. Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) uses 30 monitors to show 30 different videos simultaneously. Breitz recorded Italian fans of Madonna each singing the songs from her Immaculate Collection album. The result of the videos being played together created somewhat of a virtual choir. Her work brings together individuals with a common connection to turn each of their relationships to an icon into a single, collective work. The video footage showcases their individuality while presenting the viewer with an installation that confronts and engages their visual and auditory senses through sounds and video. This work analyzes icons from popular culture through the people who worship them.

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Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, MoMA, 2010

With roots in Surrealism and Dada, the Performance Art movement had a significant focus on the body and the dematerialization of the art object. During her 2010 retrospective at MoMA in New York, Marina Abramovic’s central piece had her sit in the middle of a gallery space for 8 hours a day spanning a two month period. The installation featured her sitting across from a chair which viewers could occupy one at a time, for as long as the wished. Focusing on stillness and being present through eye contact, Abramovic did not speak a word as she gazed across a table at the viewers before her. Many viewers had deeply emotional responses to sitting with the artist. The piece was extremely physically demanding for Abramovic who prepared for over a year. She was surprised at the number of people, and the duration of time, that they sat with her over the course of the piece. In one of the busiest cities in the world, the connection to one another that viewers craved was evident to the artist. A direct response to the alienation felt by those living in the digital age, Abramovic’s performance created a grounds for which human connection could be found.

Video of performance highlights below.

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Ann Hamilton, Event of a Thread, Installation, New York, 2012

Ann Hamilton’s Event of a Thread, an installation installed in an empty warehouse in New York, went beyond the gallery walls to deliver an experiential work dependent on spectator interaction. The fabric hung in the middle of the space directly responds to the movement created by the swings that viewers ride on. As the swings move back and forth they trigger connected ropes that pull the fabric in a weaving motion both horizontally and vertically. Event of a Thread created an intimate indoor space that was responded to in similar ways to that of an outdoor park. Leisure and play were direct results of viewer interaction that the artist had not predicted. Some people took part in swinging while others lied on the ground below the fabric, just watching it move in a meditative sort of state. Hamilton’s “indoor park,” designed by an artist and driven by the viewers, is an example of how installations are heavily dependent on viewer participation. The hung fabric would be static without the movement of the swings. If no one sat down, there would quite literally be no motion or movement in the piece, completely missing the intended experience created by the artist.

Watch the piece in action below.

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Donald Judd, Untitled (Stack), 1970, aluminum and plexiglass

Donald Judd’s work, like the piece above, is an example that clearly illustrates the minimalist school of thought by using industrial materials, repeated geometric forms and eliminating any means of representation from the work. Judd’s “stacks,” as they are affectionately known, use aluminum and plexiglass to challenge the gallery space and the way we view sculpture, while not implying any existing meaning or content outside of the physical work. There is reference to painting in the way that the light cast from the plexiglass reflects a bold orange hue onto the flat wall from which the piece is mounted. The highly reflective surfaces of the polished aluminum reflect the environment, taking on each space in a difference way. The scale of the work challenges viewers who stand before it as it mirrors the verticality of the human body and extends beyond the space a viewer occupies. The viewer is reflected back upon themselves, making them a part of the work. By not having a title, there is no suggestion of what the work is about, if it’s about anything other than being an art object that occupies space. Rather, the highly reflective surfaces of the polished aluminum reflect the environment, taking on the surrounding gallery in a difference way depending on where it is installed.

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Define “conceptual”: Conceptual art rejects standards in art of what art looks like. It pushes beyond that to challenge the value of art and abandons the school of thought that beauty+ skill measure the success of a work. It rejects the brutal simplicity of minimalism, embraces a wide variety of art making including elements of performance, text, language, ephemera, non-traditional media and a renewed interest in the “readymade”. Conceptual art is self reflexive/conscious. There does not have to be a physical work (i.e performance) and works are often iconic and/or satirical. Questions the artist as author.

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Andy Warhol, Brillo Box (Soap Pads), 1964, Acrylic Silkscreen on Wood, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Artists in the Pop Art Movement are known for using recognizable imagery from mass culture and incorporating it into their works. Andy Warhol’s, Brillo Soap Pads Box, is an example of a work that captures the defining aspects of the Pop Art Movement. This work challenges the distinction between low and high culture by blurring the lines between the mass produced and elements of low culture, and putting it in the context of high art (i.e a gallery setting).  It asks the viewer to rethink the way we view products in stores and art in traditional settings, begging questions about what constitutes as a work of art. Warhol challenges traditional ideas of sculpture in high art by creating a piece that does not resemble that of a Greek statue or marble bust. Since the boxes resemble a real product made on an assembly line in the hight of the post WWII manufacturing era, this piece draws emphasis to the art object being a commodity. Since the boxes can be easily replicated, and displayed in a multitude of ways, the value of the individual object is questioned. What gives a work value if it is not original, and is easily replicated? There is no longer an original to compare the other boxes to, making them equal in value. Does the setting dictated whether or not they can be valued as art objects? Or is it the artist’s image and their process that win the work the approval of the masses?

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Define “contemporary”: The art of today. A period of art that embraces a diversity of materials, ideologies, methods, concepts and subjects. A break with modernism’s ideology; there is a lack of uniform and no “isms”. Contemporary art accepts a variety of intentions and styles happening at the same time; encouragement of hybrid art making. Focus on artists working in the 21st Century and often comments on contemporary the contemporary issues of today.