THE CRITICAL PROCESS Thinking Some More About the Chapter Questions
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THE CRITICAL PROCESS Thinking Some More about the Chapter Questions CHAPTER 1 Andy Warhol’s Race Riot, 1963 the god’s chest and stomach muscles, which have been sculpted with Warhol seems most interested in the second traditional role of the great attention to detail, and in the extraordinary horizontality of the artist: to give visible or tangible form to ideas, philosophies, or feelings. outstretched left arm. Lyon presents herself to the viewer in the same He is clearly disturbed by the events in Birmingham. By depicting the terms. Rather than a passive object of display, Lyon is an active ath- attack on Martin Luther King, Jr., in the traditional red, white, and lete. By presenting herself in this way, Lyon asserts the power of the blue colors of the American flag, he suggests that these events are not female and implicitly argues that the female body has been “condi- just a local issue but also a national one. Thus, to a certain degree, he tioned” not so much by physical limitations as by culture. also reveals a hidden truth about the events: All Americans are impli- cated in Bull Connor’s actions. Perhaps he also wants us to see the world CHAPTER 5 Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City, 1989–91 in a new way, to imagine a world without racism. The second red panel The idea that reality might in some way be “virtual” suggests that its underscores the violence and anger of the scene. As horrifying as the space is somehow both “real” and not. That is, this space is mechani- events are, it is possible to imagine a viewer offended not by the police cal and electrical, other than human, and “apparent” but not tangible, actions but by Warhol’s depiction of them, his willingness to treat such as if in another dimension. It is two-dimensional insofar as it is creat- events as “art.” ed out of two-dimensional images. It is three-dimensional insofar as we enter it physically. If in experiencing such spaces we seem to move in CHAPTER 2 Two representations of a Treaty Signing at and through a two-dimensional image, this space must be totally illu- Medicine Lodge Creek sory. It suggests that we exist, or at least can exist, within illusion. The Taylor’s version of the events is the more representational by traditional entertainment possibilities of such spaces are limitless and exciting, Western standards, Howling Wolf’s the more abstract. In many ways, but in the wrong hands, such spaces could be used as devices of social however, Howling Wolf’s version contains much more accurate infor- manipulation and control. mation. Formally, they are very different. As a reporter, Taylor tries to convey the actual grove of trees under which the treaty signing CHAPTER 6 Tony Cragg’s Newton’s Tones/New Stones, 1982 ceremony occurred. It seems as important to him to represent the Cragg’s plastic pieces are arranged in a spectrum like that created by a trees and grasses accurately as the people present at the scene, but the prism. Not only light but also our whole material world passes through scene could be anywhere. In contrast, by portraying the confluence of Cragg’s prism. These fragments of everyday things are the “new stones” Medicine Lodge Creek and the Arkansas River, Howling Wolf of postindustrial culture, a plastic conglomerate of debris. “Newton’s describes the exact location of the signing ceremony. Taylor focuses his tones” are the colors of the spectrum itself. The irony of Cragg’s piece, attention on the U.S. government officials at the center of the picture, of course, is that color transforms this waste into a thing of beauty, a suggesting their individual importance. The Native Americans in work of art. The aesthetic beauty of this work is at odds with the mate- Taylor’s picture are relegated to the periphery of the action. Even in rial from which it is made. the foreground, their individual identities are masked in shadow. From Taylor’s ethnocentric perspective, the identities of the Native Americans CHAPTER 7 Bill Viola’s Room for St. John of the Cross, 1983 present is of no interest. In contrast, Howling Wolf’s aerial view shows The simple geometric architecture of the small cell contrasts dramati- all those present, including women, equally. Each person present is cally with the wild natural beauty of the scene on the large screen. The identified by the decoration of the dress and tipis. Women are valued former is closed and contained, classically calm, the latter open and and important members of the society. Their absence in Taylor’s work chaotic, romantically wild. The former is still and quiet, the latter suggests that women have no place at important events. In fact, it is active and dynamic. The larger room, lit only by the screen image, possible to argue that Taylor’s drawing is about hierarchy and power, seems dark and foreboding. The cell, lit by a soft yellow light, seems while Howling Wolf’s is about equality and cooperation. inviting. Time is a factor in terms of our experience of the work. If we approach the cell, our view of the screen is lost. When we stand back CHAPTER 3 Suzanne Lacy’s Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, from the cell, the rapid movement on the screen disrupts our ability to 1993–94 pay attention to the scene in the cell. The meditative space of the cell Lacy’s work clearly gives tangible form to her feelings about the experi- stands in stark contrast to the turbulent world around it. And yet the ences of aging women in America. By isolating them on a beach, sepa- cell represents captivity, the larger room freedom, both real freedom rated from those who need to hear them, she underscores their isolation. and the freedom of imaginative flight. In doing so, she also represents the experience of aging in America, the experience of being caught between the culture’s compassion for the CHAPTER 8 Claude Monet’s The Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil, 1874 aging and its willingness to ignore them. The image of these women, in Monet uses one-point linear perspective to create the bridge. A grid- white, in this setting, also helps us to understand the beauty of their like geometry is established where the bridge’s piers cross the horizon aging, a fact that we might otherwise ignore, and thus Lacy helps us and the far riverbank. The wooden support structure under the bridge understand our world in a new way, eliciting not only our admiration but echoes the overall structure of grid and diagonals. In this the picture is also a certain hope for our own endurance, the dignity of our own mat- classical. But countering this geometry is the single expression of the uration. The stark contrast between the orderliness and “civilized” qual- sail, a curve echoed in the implied line that marks the edge of the ity of the tables on the beach and the natural “wildness” of the shoreline bushes at the top right. A sense of opposition is created by the alter- suggests the power of the human imagination to transform our prejudices nating rhythm of light to dark established by the bridge’s piers and in through art. the complementary color scheme of orange and blue in both the water and the smoke above. The almost perfect symmetrical balance of the ISBN CHAPTER 4 Zeus, or Poseidon, c. 460 BCE, and painting’s grid structure is countered by the asymmetrical balance of 0-558-55180-7 Robert Mapplethorpe’s Lisa Lyon, 1982 the composition as a whole (its weight seems to fall heavily to the In the Greek bronze, the submission of the male body to the discipline right). There are two points of emphasis, the bridge and the boat. We of a mathematical geometry is especially evident in the definition of seem to be witness to the conflicting forces of nature and civilization. 526 The Critical Process A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. CHAPTER 9 David Hammons’s Out of Bounds, 1995–96 CHAPTER 14 Martin Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T. Washington, 1996 This work reflects Hammons’s sense of social responsibility. It also Made of a sapling that probably could bear little or no actual weight, captures something of his sense of humor, playing, as it does, with tra- Puryear’s ladder is purposefully dysfunctional. Not only does this ditional notions of what might constitute good drawing. Certainly a impracticality serve to announce the piece as a work of art, it under- basketball is a much less refined tool than, say, a fine brush or a scores the difficulty of the struggle faced by Booker T. Washington, graphite pencil. And dirt is an almost defiantly coarse medium in each rung on the social ladder that, metaphorically speaking, ascends which to draw. One would imagine that he would find the fact that to equal rights, becoming smaller and smaller and more and more frag- this drawing is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art ile. The “artificial perspective” thus created suggests a “vanishing deeply ironic—even funny. point” somewhere in the future, where the two sides of the ladder (white and black in American culture?) come together—a point, as we CHAPTER 10 Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, 1967, and know, that is a visual illusion. And yet, because Puryear has forced the San Francisco Silverspot, 1983 perspective—it recedes, that is, into space, far too dramatically—it Marilyn Monroe died a suicide in 1963, as much an endangered suggests that the point where the difference between the races might species as the Silverspot butterfly: a human being whose identity had vanish (that racial “vanishing point”) might be nearer than it appears.