THE EXISTENCE OR NON-EXISTENCE OF A CONTEMPORARY AVANT-GARDE
A comparative research on historical avant-garde, neo avant-garde and contemporary art practices.
Student: Claire Hoogakker Student number: 10246703
Supervisor: Dr. Gregor Langfeld Second reader: Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen
Date: 13 July 2016 Amount of words: 21.313
MA Thesis Art History: Modern and Contemporary Art University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam
Art always was, and is, a force of protest of the humane against the pressure of domineering institutions … no less than it reflects their substance.
- Theodor W. Adorno, Theses Upon Art and Religion Today, 1945.
! 1! Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 3
Introduction 4 - 6 Theoretical Framework 6 - 7
Chapter 1: The Praxis of Life 8 - 23 The Historical Avant-Garde and The Praxis of Life 10 - 13 The Neo Avant-Garde and The Praxis of Life 13 - 17 Contemporary Artists and The Praxis of Life 18 - 23
Chapter 2: Medium Specificity 24 - 35 The Historical Avant-Garde and Medium Specificity 26 - 29 The Neo Avant-Garde and Medium Specificity 29 - 32 Contemporary Artists and Medium Specificity 32 - 35
Chapter 3: Institutional Critique 36 - 51 The Historical Avant-Garde and Institutional Critique 38 - 41 Neo Avant-Garde and Institutional Critique 41 - 46 Contemporary Artists and Institutional Critique 46 - 51
Conclusion 52 - 55
Bibliography 56 - 61
Lists of Images 62 - 106 Chapter 1: List of Images 62 - 77 Chapter 2: List of Images 78 - 93 Chapter 3: List of Images 94 - 106
! 2! Acknowledgements
Firstly, I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor Dr. Gregor Langfeld for his time, his generous feedback and advice but most of all, for his trust in me and in this thesis. Besides, his course Thinking Modern Art: Modernism and Its Institutions and other courses given by Dr. Gregor Langfeld have proven to be of key importance for this research.
Secondly, I very much appreciate Dr. Johan Hartle’s way of teaching. His interesting course Art as Institution and Its Critique inspired me to write a paper on the subject of the possible existence of a contemporary avant-garde, which I eventually used as a starting point for this thesis.
Thirdly, I would like to thank Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen for taking the time to be the second reader of this thesis and for expressing her interest in the subject of this thesis.
Last but certainly not least, I want to express my gratitude towards my family, with in particular my grandparents Els and Willem Schrader, my mother Saskia Schrader, my uncle and aunt Reinier and Annemieke Schrader and my brothers Steyn and Lars Hoogakker, for always supporting me in my choice of study and for making my academic career possible.
Introduction
The avant-garde1 can be defined as ‘a group active in the invention and application of new techniques in a given field, especially in the arts, whose works are unorthodox and experimental’.2 If the avant-garde is defined in these terms, the logical conclusion would be to assume that at any given place and time, there would have been and there would be an avant- garde in some way. Since the emergence of the historical avant-garde3 at the beginning of the 20th century, there has always been a certain artist or movement that has strived to break boundaries and extend the limits of the institution of art and experimented with new techniques; all characteristics of ‘the avant-garde’. However, art historians, writers and critics mostly refer to the historical avant-garde and the neo avant-garde when speaking of a certain avant-garde, as if there has never been a subsequent avant-garde. But is this really the case?4 As the German literary scholar Peter Bürger states in his Theory of the Avant-garde, the historical avant-garde movements that emerged in the beginning of the 20th century in Europe can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated by these movements is art as an institution that is dissociated with the praxis of life. The aim of these movements was to intermingle art and the praxis of life.5 The historical avant-gardes wanted a certain ‘sublation’, or ‘Aufhebung’ in Hegelian terms, of art, roughly translated as ‘elevation’ or ‘detachment’ of art. The historical avant-garde did not want to destroy art, but rather, detach art from its seclusion in bourgeois society and transfer art to the praxis of life. Subsequently, after the Second World War, neo avant-garde movements emerged. Hal Foster defines the neo avant-garde as a “loose grouping of North American and Western European artists of the 1950s and ‘60s who reprised and revised such avant-garde devices of the 1910s and ‘20s as collage and assemblage, the readymade and the grid, monochrome painting and constructed sculpture”.6 As Foster states, “In post-war art, to pose the question of repetition is to pose the question of the neo avant-garde”.7 In other words, the neo avant-garde repeated previous historical avant-garde practices. In this case, the definition of the avant-garde as a group active in the invention and application of new techniques is not applicable to the neo avant-garde. However, the movement was still described as (neo) avant-garde. Why and how did the neo avant-garde get defined as avant-garde, when they were sometimes solely repeating historical avant-garde practices? Why are contemporary artists who are repeating historical or !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 In French, avant-garde means front- or advance guard or vanguard. 2 ‘Avant-garde’. The Free Dictionary. 2011. 13 December 2014
! 4! neo avant-garde practices, or inventing and applying new techniques in a given field, rarely referred to as avant-garde?8 In contemporary art, many artists and artist groups have been engaged with intermingling their art with the praxis of life and breaking and challenging the boundaries of the institution of art. These artists may have used existing historical avant-garde or neo avant-garde practices to accomplish this goal, but they also experimented and broke boundaries. The practices and means may have changed, but their main aims often have not. So, how did it come then, that there is not such a term as a ‘contemporary avant-garde’? Are all kinds of art accepted nowadays and sometimes even included in the institution of art, which could mean that therefore, this art no longer challenges or questions the boundaries of the institution of art? If one of the preconditions for a movement to be called ‘avant-garde’ is to challenge and question the institution of art rather than being included in these institutions, all avant-garde movements have failed in the end. After all, the historical avant-garde as well as the neo avant-garde movements have been institutionalised eventually.9 Contemporary art is also often perceived as shocking or provoking when it is first exhibited. However, the institution of art is ever changing and adapting to the art that is being made at the time. There is an interplay between the institution of art and the artists in this field. It seems as if there are no fixed boundaries and rules in the contemporary world of art.10
Each chapter of this thesis corresponds to a different avant-garde practice, technique and/or approach. In each chapter, I will compare the historical avant-garde, neo avant-garde and contemporary art practices to determine how avant-garde movements have developed over the last century, and speculate if there is such a thing as a ‘contemporary avant-garde’. Due to the complexity and broadness of this subject, I have chosen to limit this research to western artists, working and living in Europe and the United States. I will make a few exceptions for artists who have been living and working in Europe and the United States for a long time and who take part in the international discourse of the western art world. In the first chapter, I will focus on artists who were or are intermingling art and the praxis of life in order to make art more accessible for the average public and to detach art from its seclusion in bourgeois society. As explained before, this was prevalent in historical avant- garde practices and an important motivation and aim for these artists. However, intermingling art and the praxis of life was still significantly present in neo avant-garde practices. Is it still an important and recurring theme in contemporary art? I will examine the ways in which the historical and neo avant-garde and contemporary artists dealt with or are dealing with
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8 Hoogakker, Claire. Unpublished paper ‘The Existence or Non-Existence of a Certain Contemporary Avant-Garde’ for the course Art as Institution and Its Critique. Amsterdam: The University of Amsterdam, 2014: 6. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.
! 5! intermingling art and the praxis of life. In chapter two, I will examine the subject of the interrogation of medium specificity, a term invented and popularised by the American art critic Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994). In order to critique the institution of art, the relationship between the artist and their medium is interrogated.11 This is a common, recurring theme in historical and neo avant-garde practices. Further on in this chapter, I will explore if medium specificity is a common, recurring theme in contemporary art practices as well. Finally, in the last chapter, I will examine in which ways the historical and neo avant- garde and contemporary artists have used or are using institutional critique in their work. Institutional critique is an artistic practice that critically reflects upon its own place in the institution of art and the social function and concept of art itself. Institutional critique and such concerns have always been present and important in avant-garde practices, but it only emerged as a term in the 1970s. Then, artists started to critically reflect upon their work and their place within the institution and started writing about these issues. Is the use of institutional critique still relevant and present in contemporary art practices?
Theoretical Framework
My research is art historically relevant in the way that the subject of the possible existence of a contemporary avant-garde has not been fully explored so far, as far as I am aware of. However, scholars and philosophers such as Peter Bürger, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh and Arthur Danto have written a lot on the historical and neo avant-gardes, which I will use as a guideline. The German literary scholar Peter Bürger is of importance to my research with his Theory of the Avant-garde (1974), which is a fully elaborated theory of the avant-garde and the institution of art. Bürger’s concept of the institution of art is a framework within which a work of art is both produced and received. With his theory, Bürger argues that the connection between an individual artwork and history is dependent on the social status of art, its prestige and function in society.12 He has done thorough and focused research on mainly the historical avant-gardes. Therefore, I will use his writings in my sections on the historical avant-gardes. Hal Foster (b. 1955), an American art critic and art historian, has written many articles on mainly the neo avant-gardes, including The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996), in which he reorders the relation between the pre- and post-war avant- gardes. In What’s Neo About The Neo Avant-Garde? (1994), Foster proposes against Bürger that the neo avant-garde has produced new aesthetic experiences, political interventions and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11 Greenberg, Clement. ‘Modernist Painting’ In: Frascina, Francis and Charles Harrison. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Harper & Row Ltd, 1982. 12 Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984: 49-50.
! 6! cognitive connections.13 These writings on the neo avant-garde by Hal Foster will act as guidance in my sections on the neo avant-gardes. The German art historian Benjamin Buchloh (b. 1941) also responded to Bürger’s statements in Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art (1982). He asked critical questions about these statements, such as, “Was Dalí really planning to destroy the institution of art in the early 1930s?”14 Foster also redefined the avant-garde in other terms than Bürger and criticised the way Bürger left out the neo avant-garde in his theories. These disagreements are useful for my research. Arthur Danto (1924 – 2013), an American art critic and philosopher, is important for my research because of his writings The Art World (1964) and The End Of Art (1998). In The Art World, Danto explains what the art world entails, a “cultural context” or “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art”15. The end of art refers to the beginning of modern art, in which the imitation theory plays no role and there are no longer stylistic or philosophical constraints, but serves a new purpose. In this post-historical period, art has become philosophy, according to Danto. Additionally, many articles have been written on institutional critique recently, which is a recurring theme in contemporary writings. For example, Andrea Fraser (b. 1965), has, in my opinion, an interesting perspective on what is happening at the moment in the contemporary art world. She has written From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique in 2005, in which she explores and discusses the fact that practices now associated with institutional critique have become institutionalised.16
The main aim of this thesis is to compare contemporary art practices, their aims and results to those of former avant-garde movements, in order to examine if there could be such a thing as a contemporary avant-garde movement. I will compare case studies by the historical and neo avant-garde and contemporary artists. In the end, were these movements institutionalised? If so, does this mean that they failed in their first attempts to criticise and change the institution of art? And most importantly, if you compare these historical and neo avant-garde practices with contemporary art, what has changed and what does this make clear about the ever-changing institution of art? I will give a final conclusion formed with all my results drawn from the previous chapters, and I will subsequently answer my research question. After having said all this, the main question of this thesis will be: Is there a contemporary avant-garde according to the preconditions of the avant-garde movements, and if so, what would it entail?
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 13 Foster, Hal. “What’s Neo about the Neo Avant-garde?”. October, Vol. 70. (Autumn, 1994): 5. 14 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art”. Artforum (1982): 43-57. 15 Danto, Arthur C. “The Art World”. The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 61, issue 19 (15 October 1964): 477. 16 Fraser, Andrea. “Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”. Artforum. (September 2005): 287.
! 7!
Chapter 1 The Praxis of Life
! 8! Intermingling art and the praxis of life will be explored in this chapter. For the historical avant- gardes, one important way to reach this aim was to detach art from its seclusion in bourgeois society. According to Peter Bürger, the goal of the bourgeois was to maintain the autonomous status of art, art stripped of any social function and thereby, marginalising the artist.17 This autonomy coincided with the loss of social content. As Bürger explained, “The apartness from the praxis of life that had always constituted the institutional status of art in bourgeois society now becomes the content of works.”18 In other words, the more disengaged art became from the social world, the less it represented anything other than its own “apartness”.19 The historical avant-garde wanted to prevent this meaninglessness of autonomous art by bringing art back into the praxis of life with its social functions. This way, art became more accessible for a broader, less elitist and bourgeois public. While trying to achieve this fusion of art and life, the autonomous status of art and thus, art devoid of any practical or instrumental value20, is often negated. Besides, the concept of the artist as genius is destroyed if art is no longer autonomous and elevated, irreproducible and authentic. If this is the case and if artists and their art are thus not elevated or sublime, art can more easily become part of the praxis of life. Life and art can exist together in a symbiosis, in this sense. However, if art is a part of the praxis of life, art can be anything and anything can be art. Like Arthur Danto stated in The End Of Art: after the linear story of western art has now finished, “anything goes”.21 To summarise this concept, Danto did not mean that art is not being made anymore or that no good art is being made anymore. He solely claimed that a certain linear story of western art has come to an end in the way that the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) had predicted would happen. Danto explained it clearly in the following paragraph:
“[...] the master narrative of the history of art - in the West but by the end not in the West alone - is that there is an era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes […] In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story.”22
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17 Rabaté, Jean-Michel. A Handbook of Modernism Studies. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Limited, 2013. 18 Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984: 27. 19 Rabaté, Jean-Michel. A Handbook of Modernism Studies. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Limited, 2013. 20 Haskins, Casey. “Kant and The Autonomy of Art”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter, 1989): 43. 21 Danto, Arthur C. ‘The End of Art. In: After The End of Art: Contemporary Art and The Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998: 47. 22 Ibid.
! 9! This given of an era in which anything goes, with no special way works of art have to be, can be problematic for art historians and particularly challenging for art critics. How can you still criticise something and make a clear distinction between art and non-art, if anything goes? This difficult issue is still prevalent in the contemporary art world. It is something art critics, curators and other art professionals must deal with. Firstly, I will look at how the historical avant-garde dealt with intermingling art and the praxis of life. Following this, I will examine how the neo avant-garde coped with this issue and then, if and how contemporary artists are dealing with this.
The Historical Avant-Garde and The Praxis of Life
The historical avant-garde artists were the first to incorporate art into the praxis of life. Naturally, previous religious and realist art was also connected to and based on the praxis of life, but these aims were different from the historical avant-gardes. The difference is that religious artists strived to reach a broad audience for religious purposes and the realists strived to capture real life as realistic as possible. The historical avant-garde tried to reach this aim of the fusion of art and life with a variation of practices. This went from incorporating everyday objects into their works, to extending this even further by presenting everyday objects as art – like the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) did with his Fountain (1917) (fig. 1.1). As the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903 – 1969) stated in his Marxist aesthetic theories, “Today the only works which really count are those which are no longer works at all.”23 With this, he claimed that the only works that really count are no longer works in the traditional sense, but rather, artistic ‘projects’. These projects change the process of art’s reproduction and mediation in a critical manner. It is no longer about the authenticity or irreproducibility of an artwork, but about the ‘project’ and ideas behind it. Beginning around 1910, artists began demanding that true art would go beyond the intellectual and transform daily life. These ideas were merged with demands in the industrial marketplace, mass media and urban popular culture. Artists like the Dutch Piet Zwart (1885 – 1977), the Czech Karel Teige (1900 – 1951), the Czech Ladislav Sutnar (1897 – 1976), the Latvian Gustav Klutsis (1895 – 1938) and German artist John Heartfield (1891 – 1968) started using everyday materials such as newspapers and photographs to create collages and photomontages.24
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 Adorno, Theodor W. The Philosophy of Modern Music. London: Sheed and Ward, 1973: 30. 24 Witkovsky, Matthew. S. Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life: Early Twentieth-Century European Modernism. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2011.
! 10! Photomontage is a technique that allows artists to use, rip and reassemble existing materials such as photographs, newspapers, and propaganda material to create a new, often surreal, image. We tend to think of collage as a modern technique, but there is nothing very new about this technique. A highly developed collage technique can be traced back to tenth century Japan, but it has only re-emerged in the first decade of the 19th century. These practices were often being used as instruments of propaganda, not necessarily as artworks. Using everyday materials such as newspapers and photographs that the masses are familiar with makes it easier to win over a mass audience. Creating new entities out of existing, everyday materials became one of many new common ways of integrating the praxis of life into the art world. As an art practice, photomontage revived with the advent of Cubism under leading figures like the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) and the French artist George Braque (1882 – 1963). The collage technique also has its roots in European Dadaism and Surrealism. The technique blossomed in Surrealist painting, sculpture and photomontage with artists such as the German artist Max Ernst (1891 – 1976), German artist Hans Bellmer (1902 – 1975) and American artist Man Ray (1890 – 1976).25 Secondly, as previously mentioned, the historical avant-garde artists started to incorporate everyday objects into their works and even present everyday objects as art works. In doing so, they wanted to blur the boundaries between an elitist, bourgeois fixed art world and the praxis of life. If anything can be art, anyone can be an artist. These works were named ready-mades: ordinary, everyday manufactured objects that an artist has selected and sometimes modified before putting it up for display. The term was originally founded to distinguish handmade objects from manufactured ones. Marcel Duchamp, the founder of the readymade, first introduced the readymade to the art world and appropriated the term. He started presenting these ordinary, everyday objects as art works with carefully chosen titles while seeking an alternative way for painting. By doing this, Duchamp was undermining the role of the artist as genius. Duchamp argued, “An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”26 However, he made clear that he did not intend to make a work of art out of it. As he said about his first readymade Bicycle Wheel (1913) (fig. 1.2), “When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'readymade,' or anything else. It was just a distraction."27 Additionally, the readymade defies the notion that art must be aesthetically pleasing. Duchamp selected everyday objects “based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste.”28 In doing so, Duchamp paved the way for conceptual art — works that are “in the service of the mind,” as !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 25 Wolfram, Eddie. History of Collage: An Anthology of Collage, Assemblage and Event Structures. London: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1976. 26 Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. New York: Viking, 1971: 47. 27 Ibid. 28 ‘Dada’. Museum of Modern Art. 19 February 2016
! 11! opposed to a purely “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye.29 Artists like André Breton (1896 – 1966), a French poet, writer, anarchist and founder of Surrealism and Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963), a Romanian poet, writer and performance artist and also a founder of the Dada movement, made lists of instructions on how to make art. This is an attack on the notion that art is made by an artist who is a genius and the only one who could make that individual, irreproducible work of art. Tasks like these can be executed by anyone and although the outcome may differ, the process is the same, and that is what counts with these kinds of works. The notion that any individual is able to make art implies that the artist is simply a workingman – not a genius or an elevated person at all. An example of one of these instructed works is making a cut up poem from an arbitrary newspaper.30 Tristan Tzara instructs the recipients to make a Dadaist poem in his Dada manifesto On Feeble Love and Bitter Love (1920) as follows,
To make a Dadaist poem
Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors. Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. Cut out the article. Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag. Shake it gently. Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag. Copy conscientiously. The poem will be like you. And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.31
Another way the historical avant-garde established an art world integrated with the praxis of life, is by providing no fixed meaning or content to works of art. The focus lies on the process and outcome of the art making. As Peter Bürger states in his Theory of the Avant-garde, “This refusal to provide meaning is experienced as shock by the recipient. And this is the intention of the avant-gardiste artist, who hopes that such withdrawal of meaning will direct the reader’s attention to the fact that the conduct of one’s life is questionable and that it is necessary to change it. Shock is aimed for as a stimulus to change one’s conduct of life; it is the means to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 29 Ibid. 30 ‘Notes on Peter Burgers Theory of the Avant-garde’. Other Room. 20 February 2016
! 12! break through aesthetic immanence and to usher in (initiate) a change in the recipient’s life praxis.”32 Bürger explains that the intention to shock the recipient in this way is problematic, since it is generally nonspecific. This does not ensure that the recipient’s behaviour will move in any particular direction. Another difficulty with the ‘non-specificity of the reaction’ as Bürger calls it is that nothing is as transitory as shock. Shock is by its very nature a unique, unexpected experience and is thus extremely difficult to make permanent.33
The Neo Avant-Garde and The Praxis of Life
As stated before, the neo avant-garde has repeated multiple historical avant-garde practices and often for the same aims, in this case: the negation of aesthetic autonomy and the fusion of art and life. The neo avant-gardes revisited historical avant-garde practices such as Dada, Surrealism and Constructivism practices including Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades and Alexander Rodchenko’s (1891 – 1956) monochromes. However, according to Peter Bürger, the real successors of the historical avant-gardes were the neo avant-gardes that were trying to create mass culture’s union of art and commerce and a ‘false sublation’ of the commodity form.34 This means elevating an everyday commodity object and ascribing this object an art status, which is by definition a false status. As Mark Freed explains, “False sublation refers to the process by which cultural artifacts, instead of challenging dominant life praxes, contribute to their circulation and thereby their normalisation.”35 Therefore, ‘false sublation’ can be seen as the failed outcome of the avant-gardes to counteract aesthetic autonomy by destroying the distinction between art and life. The result is the loss of a critical function for art.36 When thinking of a neo avant-garde artist who used these practices, the first artist that comes to mind is the American Pop artist Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987). Warhol was trying to create a union of art and commerce. Pop Art is a reference to popular culture and was challenging the conventions of the traditional fine art movements by drawing recognisable imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects.37 The main aim of the Pop Art movement was to fuse art and life by using popular, everyday imagery opposed to elitist cultural elements. This aim was often taken even further by highlighting kitsch or banal elements through the use of irony. Due to Pop Art’s use of found materials and imagery, the movement is often compared to Dada. Pablo Picasso, Marcel !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 32 Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984: 81. 33 Ibid. 34 ‘The Death and Life of the Avant-Garde: Or, Modernism and Biopolitis’. Mediations Journal. 3 March 2016 < http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/the-death-and-life-of-the-avant-garde#end_22> 35 Freed, Mark M. Robert Musil and the NonModern. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011: 49-50. 36 Ibid. 37 Shane, Eric. Pop Art (Art of Century). New York: Parkstone International, 2009: 30.
! 13! Duchamp, Man Ray, the French artist Francis Picabia (1879 -1953), the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887 -1948) and the American artist Alex Katz (b. 1927) are regarded as the European forefathers of American Pop Art.38 In 1961 in London, the Young Contemporaries exhibition called attention to the fact that a new movement of artists was bringing a ‘Pop’ consciousness into the art world. These artists included British artists David Hockey (b. 1937), Allen Jones (b. 1937), Peter Phillips (b. 1939), Patrick Caulfield (b. 1936 – 2005) and others. The attention to the use of popular and mass production and culture in art grew, especially in the United States of America. The following year, shows by American artists Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), Jim Dine (b. 1935), James Rosenquist (b. 1933), Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997), George Segal (b. 1934), Robert Indiana (b. 1928), Peter Blake (b. 1932), Tom Wesselmann (1931 – 2004), Wayne Thibaud (b. 1920) and Andy Warhol arose.39 Because of the clear resemblance in style, aims and the use of existing materials, the American Pop-Artists Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008), Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Allan Kaprow (1927 – 2006) are often classified as ‘Neo-Dada’. The term Neo-Dada was applied to artists who initiated a radical shift in the focus of modern art in the 1950s. These artists felt that there was too much focus on the paintings of the abstract expressionists at the time, which they found too emotionally charged, overly personal, excessively symbolic and too loose in painting style.40 The paintings of Robert Rauschenberg have often been compared to the works of Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaists due to the similarities in style and methods. In his work, Rauschenberg was mainly dealing with social issues. He used ephemeral, transient materials to emphasise the transience of life and mass production and culture itself. He used topics of everyday life in America, which were immediately recognisable and understandable for the American population, such as politics. For his work Retroactive 1 (fig. 1.3), he placed ex- president John F. Kennedy in the centre with surrounding elements referring to current news topics such as Apollo 11 and the Cuban crisis.41 As Rauschenberg himself said, "My work exists in the space between art and life"42 and “I do not want a picture to look like something it is not. I want it to look like something it is. And I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.”43 The American artist Jasper Johns started making bronze painted sculptures in the 1960s, such as Two Beer Cans (1960) (fig. 1.4), with which he also made Neo-Dadaist statements !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 38 Piper, David. The Illustrated History of Art. London: Chancellor Press, 2000: 486-487. 39 Shane, Eric. Pop Art (Art of Century). New York: Parkstone International, 2009: 30. 40 Hapgood, Susan. Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958-62. New York: Universe Books, 1994. 41 Sandler, Irving H. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties. New York: Harper & Row, 1978: 174–195. 42 ‘Movement Neo Dada’. The Art Story. 3 March 2016 < http://www.theartstory.org/movement-neo-dada.htm> 43 ‘Robert Rauschenberg’. Warhol. 10 March 2016
! 14! about art and life, art capitalism and mass culture.44 His most known paintings are his Flag series (1954-1955) (fig. 1.5), for which he mounted three canvases, strips of newspaper and paint on plywood. There was no big concept behind it as he said, “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.”45 By integrating everyday materials like strips of newspaper with a widely known and recognisable image as the American flag, it serves well to the Pop Art and Neo- Dada tradition. As Johns said himself, “Using the design of the American flag took care of a great deal for me because I didn't have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets - things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels."46 However, its execution demands close inspection. As an art critic of that time was wondering, “Is it a flag or a painting?”47 This ambivalence and blurred distinction between an artwork and an everyday common object fits right in with other Pop Art and Neo-Dada works. American artist Allan Kaprow wrote The Legacy of Jackson Pollock in 1958, in which he demands a ‘concrete art’ made of everyday materials such as "paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies”, as is written in the exhibition text for Untitled Environment at the Hansa Gallery in New York. The new subjects he wrote down were: “unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies, seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents. An odour of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano [...].”48 These staged, incoherent events that were in unusual settings involved spectators who became part of these happenings. The outcome is dependent upon the actions of these spectators and always differs, which undermines the notion that art should be autonomous. Allan Kaprow’s aim was to create pieces that were “as open and fluid as … everyday experience.”49 In doing so, he blurred the distinction between everyday life and art. As he himself explained and admitted, he was “not so sure” whether what he was doing was “art” or “something not quite art”.50 A common practice used to integrate art and life is to exhibit outside of the institutions of art in more accessible public places. The American artist Claes Oldenburg was one of the first artists who started doing this in America with his Two Store (1961-1962) exhibitions (fig. 1.6). For these exhibitions, he rented a shop in downtown Manhattan and filled it with everyday, mundane objects. This included emulations of consumer objects, such as a larger-than-life size hamburger, a gigantic ice cream cone and a huge slice of chocolate cake. By enlarging these
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 44 Shane, Eric. Pop Art (Art of Century). New York: Parkstone International, 2009: 30. 45 Lanchner, Carolyn. Jasper Johns. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010: 5. 46 ‘Flag’. Jasper Johns. 3 March 2016
! 15! everyday objects and by making them out of different materials, they are removed from their original context. Therefore, they can make a statement about mass-consumption and comment upon the materialism of that time. In this way, he has given them a new meaning and new measure of cultural life.51 The Factory was the studio where Andy Warhol worked and literally produced his art works almost as if they were commodities. The process of art making was quick and his works were being produced in large numbers at once. His work inevitably brings to mind his large silk screens of iconic images such as Marilyn Monroe (1962) (fig. 1.7), Che Guevara (1968) and Mao (1972), his stacked up Brillo Boxes (1964) (fig. 1.8), his Campbell’s Soup Cans (1961) (fig. 1.9) and his Coca Cola Bottles (1962) (fig. 1.10). In all these works, he combined sophisticated painting techniques with mundane, everyday, popular advertising images.52 These practices immediately bring to mind Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. This is not surprising, since Duchamp inspired Warhol tremendously. Warhol even owned several works by Duchamp. At first, Warhol replicated real Brillo boxes, soda cans and glass bottles and hand-painted them himself. Later on, he simply exhibited 500 manufactured cardboard Brillo boxes without modifying them at all. As previously stated, Marcel Duchamp depicted the works by many of his successors as merely ‘retinal’ art intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to “put art back in the service of the mind”. In 1964, Duchamp said about Warhol’s work the following praising words:
Pop Art is a return to ‘conceptual’ painting… If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is that concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.53
Other neo avant-garde artists known for their use of popular culture in their work are Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist and the British artist Richard Hamilton (1922 – 2011). Roy Lichtenstein is best known for his comic book series, for which he appropriated imagery from popular comic books. The topics he explored were mostly romance and war. One of his most famous works is Whaam! (1966) (fig. 1.11), which is a reference to aerial combat during the Second World War, when he was serving in the United States Army. Tom Wesselmann made collages from imagery he cut out from magazines, in which he combined art and popular culture. An example is Still Life #30 (1965) (fig. 1.12), in which he !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 51 Shane, Eric. Pop Art (Art of Century). New York: Parkstone International, 2009: 30. 52 Fowlkes, Irene. Americana Style a la Mode Retro: Postmodern Pastiche Between Culture and Commodity. Munich: Grin Verlag, 2009. 53 ‘The Influence of Marcel Duchamp on Andy Warhol’. Artre Public. 21 March 2013. 3 March 2016
! 16! put together a kitchen scene with everyday objects. For example, he depicted a pink refrigerator and popular food and drinks such as 7-Up and Rice Krispies. James Rosenquist explored political, environmental and commercial themes in his large-scale silk-screens. Recurring images are presidents and cars (for example in President Elect [1961-1962] [fig. 1.13]) and everyday objects like food and lipsticks. Richard Hamilton is known for one of the first Pop-Art works ever made, his collage titled Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) (fig. 1.14). It is a collage of a domestic, everyday scene filled with popular objects such as a tape-recorder, a telephone, a Hoover and a comic strip book. It is a reference to the many ways of communicating and shows his interest in popular culture and modern technology. All these examples have themes referring to everyday life. One of the artists who built upon the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades is the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945). In his text Art After Philosophy (1969), he credited Duchamp’s work with the following praising words, “giving art its own identity [as with] the unassisted readymade, art changed its focus from the form of language to what was being said.”54 In his work, he plays with linguistics and the visual. He has been examining how words relate to objects and thereby, he explores the role of meaning in art. His work One and Three Chairs (1965) (fig. 1.15) consists of a wooden chair, a photograph of a chair and a fragment from the dictionary with the definition of the word chair. He explores three representations of a chair and turns a simple chair into a debate and an object of reflection about our own conceptions. He assembled three existing objects and gave it new meaning by ordering and presenting it this way. He did the same with his work One and Three Shovels (1965) (fig. 1.16). He explains,
I used common, functional objects – such as a shovel – 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 the fact that the work itself was something other than simply what you saw.55
One and Three Shovels recalls Marcel Duchamp’s work Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915) (fig. 1.17), which is nothing more than a snow shovel with ‘from Marcel Duchamp, 1915’ painted on the handle. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 54 Coghlan, Niamh. ‘Is The Readymade Still Revolutionary?’. Aesthetica Magazine. 15 March 2016
! 17! Contemporary Artists and The Praxis of Life
Nowadays, contemporary artists are still using practices that intermingle art with the praxis of life and with that, negate the autonomous status of art. They do so in similar ways as the historical avant-garde and the neo avant-garde. Their practices vary from exhibiting at public places and involving spectators in their work, to using everyday objects in or as their work, such as utensils and mass media products. These practices may have developed over the decades with (technological) progress and changes in society, as is only natural. But in the end, the practices of the historical and neo avant-garde and contemporary artists with the same aims, namely blurring the boundaries between art and life, are not so far removed from each other as would have been expected given all the time that has passed. When you think of contemporary artists who have implemented these kinds of practices, the Young British Artists (YBAs) soon come to mind. This is a loose group of British artists that started exhibiting together in 1988 and soon after became known for their shock tactics, entrepreneurial attitude and openness to materials and processes. This period is often designated as a new and excitingly distinctive phase in British art history. The term Young British Artists was first used to describe British artist Damien Hirst’s (b. 1965) work in Artforum in 1992. In 1996, Art Monthly magazine also used the term ‘Young British Artists’.56 Ever since, the term turned out to be a powerful marketing tool and a term that was recognised worldwide. Other members of the YBAs include British artists Tracey Emin (b. 1963), Sarah Lucas (b. 1962), Cornelia Parker (b. 1956), Michael Landy (b. 1963), Gary Hume (b. 1962), Christine Borland (b. 1965), Angus Fairhurst (1966 – 2008) and Michael Landy (b. 1963). Many YBAs members were previous Goldsmith College of Art students in London, where it all started. Teachers at Goldsmith, including Michael Craig-Martin (b. 1941), were looking for new ways of art making while negating the traditional divisions between different media such as printmaking, painting and sculpture. There is not one YBA style or approach, but there are certain thematic and formal aspects that often recur in works by the YBAs. One of these recurring practices is the use of found imagery and materials, which is often perceived as shocking. The YBAs are open towards all kinds of materials, processes and forms with which art can be made and are exploiting and examining this to the fullest.57 Firstly, the British artist Damien Hirst is seen as one of the first and most celebrated and notorious members of the Young British Artists. He organised an exhibition titled Freeze in 1988 with fellow Goldsmith students such as Sarah Lucas, Michael Landy and Angus Fairhurst. Recurring themes in Hirst’s work are life and death. He takes elements from daily life,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 56 ‘Young British Artists’. Tate. 10 March 2016
! 18! sometimes dissects or adapts them and then he arranges and exhibits them. He explores these themes of life and death by using dead animals such as carefully ordered butterflies and sheep, cows and sharks preserved in formaldehyde. The best-known example of these animals is the work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) (fig. 1.18), a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a glass tank. For The Love of God (2008) (fig. 1.19) is an 18th century human skull inlaid with over 8000 diamonds. The skull reminds the viewer of (their) mortality, but in a glorified way. As art historian and old director of the Van Abbemuseum and the Stedelijk Museum Rudi Fuchs (b. 1942) stated, “The skull is out of this world, celestial almost. It proclaims victory over decay. At the same time it represents death as something infinitely more relentless. Compared to the tearful sadness of a vanitas scene, the diamond skull is glory itself.”58 Another work by Damien Hirst that is close to life is Pharmacy (1992) (fig. 1.20), an installation of medicine cabinets filled with carefully ordered pills and pharmaceutical packages. With this installation, Hirst explores the distinctions between art and life. He said, “I can’t understand why most people believe in medicine and do not believe in art, without questioning either.”59 Hirst is criticising and highlighting the amount of unquestionable faith we have in the pharmaceutical industry. He has added a fly killer and bowls of honey. He explains why,
I hope you’ll realise you’re like a metaphor for the fly. [You’re involved] because you’re one of the things milling around inside the environment. It is about a civilisation, the collapse of a civilisation. Something falling apart as it builds up. That’s how I read it, but if you walk in and think it is a chemist’s shop that is fine by me.60
This suggests that it does not matter to the artist if people are aware of the fact that they are visiting an (art) exhibition. The confusion that comes forth out of the great resemblance to a real pharmacy provokes a response from people. It makes them question their presence in the space and their mortality, which is the ultimate aim of the artist. Tracey Emin is a British artist best known for her confessional, autobiographical and personal art works. She uses a wide variety of media including photography, drawing, sculpture, film, neon lights and sewing. She often integrates her own life with her art by using elements or fragments from her personal life, such as used tampons, worn panties and slept in sheets. However personal her works may be, they are always almost direct responses to vital issues in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 58 Sterling, Bruce. ‘For the Love of God, it's Damien Hirst’. Wired. 17 January 2011. 3 March 2016 <://www.wired.com/2011/01/for-the-love-of-god-its-damien-hirst/> 59 Hirst, Damien. I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2005: 24. 60 ‘Pharmacy’. Damien Hirst. 3 March 2016
! 19! contemporary society and culture.61 Her work Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995) (fig. 1.21) consists of a tent embroidered with all the names of the people she has slept with between 1963 and 1995, as the title suggests. Another known work by Tracey Emin is My Bed (1998) (fig. 1.22), a work consisting of her own bed with slept in sheets, empty vodka bottles, tissues, stuffed animals, worn panties, cigarettes and condoms. She spent four days in this bed considering suicide after a painful breakup. By using these personal items from her private life, she is taking the fusion of art and life to an even further extent. Art critics have been wondering if this was the exact state of the scene when she left it after four days. However, the author Judith Flanders asked herself the question if any of those changes would make My Bed less real. She stated, “No, because it is not a piece of furniture, or even a story – it is a work of art.”62 So, even though this bed is taken from something as close to the artist’s own praxis of life as possible, the object is elevated and granted an art status now it has been exhibited and institutionalised. This often seems to be a problematic and recurring issue in relation to the avant-garde: at first, avant-garde artists are pushing against the conventional terms and established institutions, while eventually becoming part of that canon and get institutionalised themselves. Sarah Lucas is known for her installations made out of existing, everyday materials with which she creates new meanings and associations. Recurring themes that are thoroughly explored in her work are sexuality and gender. An example of this is Au Naturel (1994) (fig. 1.23) – an installation of everyday objects such as a mattress, melons, oranges, a cucumber and a bucket. These objects are references to male and female body parts. She does not modify these different elements; she simply rearranges them and creates new meaning by doing so. Lucas often reflects upon problems caused by gender inequality in life in general as well as in the art world. As author Amna Malik asks herself in the opening of her book Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel (Afterall): “Does art have a sex? And if so, what does it look like?”63 Malik argues that through much of Lucas’s work, the spectator is placed in a position to look at ‘sex’ in a dismantled way without any sense of morality or feelings of guilt, shame or embarrassment. She argues that with the satirical and derisive nature of Lucas’s observations, certain assumptions about what kind of art women make are violated.64 For Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) (fig. 1.24), Lucas placed two fried eggs and a kebab, as the title suggests, on a wooden table. The eggs are a reference to a woman’s breasts and the kebab to a woman’s genitals. Bitch (1995) (fig. 1.25) is an installation of a wooden table resembling a woman on all fours, with a white t-shirt folded over it, melons hanging in the chest
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 61 Merck, Mandy et al. The Art of Tracey Emin. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002. 62 ‘Tracey Emin Made A Work of Art Not An Unmade Bed’. The Telegraph. 30 December 2014. 10 March 2016
! 20! area, and a vacuum packed chicken breast fillet where her genitals should be. Both works make the viewer aware of the fact that these female body parts can be as disposable, cheap and undervalued as fast food.65 At the Venice Biennale in 2015, Sarah Lucas was invited to have a solo exhibition at the British Pavilion (fig. 1.26). For this, she cast lower cut-off body parts - legs and genitals in different positions - in plaster. Real cigarettes are poking out of female genitalia. She placed these plaster body parts on different everyday objects, for example a refrigerator. On the other side of the room she randomly placed a washing machine. Another installation was leaning on hundreds of Spam meat cans, which immediately reminds one of Andy Warhol’s tin Campbell’s soup cans. Lucas has made countless other installations, assemblages and sculptures out of toilets, cigarettes, food and other everyday materials and objects. She has also made many collages consisting of existing materials, such as newspaper cut outs and photographs. Lucas plays with distinctions between high and low art and culture in her work, and with this, she blurs the boundaries between life and art. The Blain Southern gallery in London held an exhibition in 2013 titled Tell Me Whom You Haunt: Marcel Duchamp and the Contemporary Readymade. The directors invited ten contemporary artists to make works in dialogue with Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, including the American artist Jimmie Durham (b. 1940) and the Kosovar-Albanian artist Sislej Xhafa (b. 1970). The exhibition examined in what ways artists today continue to respond to the phenomenon of ‘haunting’ and the activation of memory present in the art of Marcel Duchamp. The title of the exhibition refers to an old French proverb, “Tell me whom you haunt and I will tell you who you are”, which derives from André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja (1928). According to the gallery directors, the title refers to the idea that objects lose their function and meaning once they become recontextualised, “they cease to be one thing in order to become another”.66 As Mario Codognato, director of exhibitions and head curator stated, “Objects often have a multiplicity of meanings, dependent upon each individual’s experience of them. This exhibition seeks to explore the alternative meaning(s) bestowed upon objects through their placement in the gallery space, within which seemingly ordinary objects can be redefined as art.”67 One of these exhibited works was Rocket Ship (2011) (fig. 1.27) by Sislej Xhafa. The work consists of nothing more than a rusty wheelbarrow filled with chains of blue electric lights. However, by titling it ‘Rocket Ship’, the function and meaning shifts and changes. This practice is similar to what Marcel Duchamp did with his Fountain; he named a urinal !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 65 ‘Sarah Lucas on Being as Provocative as Ever’. The Telegraph. 10 September 2013. 2 March 2016 < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/10291955/Sarah-Lucas-on-being-as-provocative-as-ever.html> 66 ‘Tell Me Whom You Haunt: Marcel Duchamp and the Contemporary Readymade’. Blain Southern. 10 March 2016
! 21! ‘Fountain’. Thereby, he changed the function and meaning of the object and the way people perceive the work. The title for Xhafa refers to the dream of a better existence – migrating to a better place. However, dislocating the work would destroy it, since the lights have to be plugged in.68 This tension is palpable. American artist Jimmie Durham contributed the work Himmel und Erde Müssen Vergehen (2000) (fig. 1.28), which consists of a monumental, immense boulder crushing a lightweight, thin beige jacket. With this work, the title also plays with the spectator’s imagination and gives new meaning to these objects. Another contemporary artist who draws on the readymade in his work is the American artist Jeff Koons (b. 1955). He is known for his use of popular culture and banal subjects. Examples of this are his large reproductions of imagery such as balloon shaped dogs and large, plastic stuffed animals. For his series The New (1979-1980) (fig. 1.29), he mounted everyday household objects such as vacuum cleaners in Perspex boxes. In 1985, Koons started making a series of tanks (glass vitrines on black steel stands) for his first solo exhibition Equilibrium (1985) (fig. 1.30). The tanks are filled with distilled water and basketballs. The basketballs may be a reference to nostalgia or unattainable ambition, since the vitrines are closed off.69 He casted a group of objects in bronze, like a lifeboat and an aqualung and he hung a Nike poster on the walls to complement the basketballs. Koons explains the meaning of these objects as follows,
The tanks were an ultimate state of being ... The Nike posters were the Sirens – the great deceivers, saying “Go for it! I have achieved it. You can achieve it too!” And the bronzes were the tools for Equilibrium that would kill you if you used them. So the underlying theme, really, was that death is the ultimate state of being. What was paralleling this message was that white middle-class kids have been using art the same way that other ethnic groups have been using basketball – for social mobility. You could take one of those basketball stars, Dr. Dunkelstein, or the Secretary of Defense, and one could have been me, or Baselitz, or whoever.70
By saying that anyone could have been him, Koons undermines the notion of the artist as genius. Also, by comparing the use of art with the use of basketball in the way it is used for social mobility, undermines the autonomous and elevated status of art. One of the most recent examples of an artist who intermingles life and art is the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957). He is known for his political statements and institutional critique. It
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 68 ‘Sislej Xhafa’. Frieze Magazine. 2 March 2016
! 22! is possible to look at his work as a return to the historical avant-gardist concerns of the 1910s and 1920s in its connection between art and life.71 In February 2016, Ai Weiwei has made an installation of over 14.000 bright orange discarded life jackets (fig. 1.31) worn by Syrian refugees who arrived at the Greek island of Lesbos, where he set up a studio. He wrapped the life jackets around the five columns of the Concert hall in Berlin. Hereby, he comments on the humanitarian crisis and the European refugee policy. He demands for these issues to be seen and heard by putting it out there in the open air, in the midst of everyday life. He integrates these issues in daily life into art and uses art as a medium to try and change life. With these kinds of works, the boundaries between art and life become more and more blurred.
The practice of intermingling art and the praxis of life in order to make art more accessible to a broader public and a less elitist affair was the main aim of the historical avant-gardes. Marcel Duchamp was the first to put these ideas into practice with his ready-mades. Ever since, the notion of the artist as a genius was abolished to a certain extent, which changed the perception of the artist and art in general in a revolutionary manner. From then on, anything could be art. As Theodor W. Adorno has stated, it was no longer a matter of irreproducibility, authenticity or aesthetics. It became a matter of artistic projects, in other words: the notions and ideas behind an artwork. To reach the aim of commingling art and life, different elements from daily life were incorporated into their works – from the readymade to the collage and the écriture automatique to cut out poems. Ever since, neo avant-garde and contemporary artists have been elaborating on these principles. Think of Pop Art and Neo-Dada artists and contemporary artists who incorporated everyday objects into their work. Also, artists who executed performances and happenings or exhibited outside of the institutions of art strived to intermingle art and the praxis of life.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 71 Hindmarsch, Laura. ‘After the Neo Avant-Garde: Institutional Critique in the Works of Ai Weiwei’. Web.uwa.edu. 14 March 2016
! 23!
Chapter 2 Medium Specificity
! 24! This chapter will focus on medium specificity, a principle mainly used in aesthetics and art criticism. The term derives from the writings of the American art critic Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994) and is most closely associated with modernism. Greenberg stated that “the unique and proper area of competence” for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are “unique to the nature” of a particular medium. According to him, the artist should use techniques that the media in question particularly lends itself to. Artists should manipulate materials to produce objects that correspond with the provided possibilities of the specific medium.72 The avant-garde demands a significant revision in and examination of the relationship between the artist and his medium, in order to be able to criticise art and artistic production and examine the nature and practice of art. In Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940), Greenberg formulates the avant-garde’s aesthetics. He explains that the avant-garde does not so much “surrender to its medium”, but undermines and draws attention to the conventions of the medium’s customary usage. The avant-garde interrogates the principle of medium specificity itself, instead of solely handling her materials in a different manner than previous artistic movements.73 As Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781) puts it: “an artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium.”74 Medium- specificity is based on the distinct materiality of artistic media. The artwork is constituted by the characteristic qualities of the raw material.75 For example, for painting this would mean emphasising the flatness and abstraction of the medium, instead of making figurative or illusionist works. Today, the term medium specificity is used both to analyse artworks as well as to describe artistic practices. The American art critic and post-modern literary critic N. Katherine Hayles (b. 1943), for example, speaks of "media specific analysis”.76 As discussed by the Canadian critic Marshall Soules, this media specific analysis and medium specificity play an important role in the emergence of new media art forms, such as Internet art.77 However, there has been and still is a lot of debate as to what exactly a medium lends itself to. Also, there has
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 72 Greenberg, Clement. ‘Modernist Painting’ In: Frascina, Francis and Charles Harrison. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Harper & Row Ltd, 1982. 73 Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a Newer Laocoon”. Partisan Review 7 (July-August 1940): 296-310. 74 Schram, Suzanne. ‘Medium specificity: The Difference Between Analogue Literature and Electronic Literature’. University of Amsterdam: Masters of Media. 1 November 2009. 1 April 2016
! 25! been critique concerning the restrictiveness and destructiveness of artistic freedom within these theories. Hence, many art critics in the post-modern period have tended to stay away from principles such as these. These medium specificity and formalism principles arose along with the rise of modernism, with leading literary figures such as Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried and Roger Fry. Although these theories are specifically developed for modernism, I will try to apply these principles to historical avant-garde practices and contemporary art practices as well. Due to the multifaceted character and complexity of medium specificity, I have chosen to limit this research on medium specificity to painting and its modern equivalents.
The Historical Avant-Garde and Medium Specificity
In Arthur Danto’s The Art World, written in 1964, he is trying to explain what the art world entails and what art is in general. Danto makes distinctions between ‘real objects’ and ‘works of art’. As he stated, “We must be able to separate those objects which are works of art from those which are not, because […] we know how correctly to use the word 'art' and to apply the phrase 'work of art'."78 This goes back to Socrates’ notion that art is showing what we already know; artworks are like mirrors of nature. The use of artistic theories helps us to discriminate art from non-art. Without this, the existence of art would not be possible. Hence, the necessary link between an artwork and a non- art work is the art world and the people who take part in that art world (e.g. curators, directors). Danto further explains the Imitation Theory, the oldest theory on art, which says that artworks, in order to be artworks, must be "mimetic" - they must be copies or representations of something. For example, a painting of a person is an artwork, because it represents the person, but a completely abstract painting could not be classified as an artwork, as it does not represent anything. Danto speaks of Post-Impressionism, a movement that was not accepted as art when it first arose. At first, the art world labelled Post-Impressionist works as hoaxes, self- advertisements and visual counterparts of madmen’s cravings. To be able to accept Post- Impressionist works as art, a revolution in taste and theory was necessary. As Danto states, this transition happened in the following way: “The artists in question were to be understood not as unsuccessfully imitating real forms, but as successfully creating new ones, quite as real as the forms which the older art had been thought, in its best examples, to be creditably imitating.”79 RT, although Danto never specifically explains what the R stands for, is presumed to be !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 78 Danto, Arthur C. “The Art World”. The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 61, issue 19 (15 October 1964): 571-574. 79 Ibid.
! 26! "Reality Theory". There is a new focus on creativity; making new things, rather than imitating existing ones. The English painter and critic Roger Fry (1866 – 1934) described the Post- Impressionists as “genuinely creative aiming not at illusion, but at reality”.80 Danto speaks of Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and the Fauves and describes their works as non-imitations, “specifically intended not to deceive”. Although these artists often took their inspiration directly from daily life, the end results are not realistic or mirroring nature as accurately as possible. He gives examples of the drawings of Van Gogh and Cézanne and the unusual use of colour planes in works by Gauguin and the Fauves. A characteristic of the Fauves is the deformation of forms and contours, for example in Raoul Dufy (fig. 2.1) and Georges Rouault’s (fig. 2.2) works. Danto explains that Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters (fig. 2.3) is a non-facsimile of real-life potato eaters. It is not a copy of those potato eaters. It is, however, a real object, according to Danto. “It rather occupies a freshly opened area between real objects and real facsimiles of real objects: it is a non-facsimile, if one requires a word, and a new contribution to the world.”81 If an artwork is not a copy of real life, it becomes its own real, new and autonomous object. In Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940), Greenberg describes how the ‘l’art pour l’art’ notions of the historical avant-garde led to the dissolving of subject matter or content into form. This led to the ultimate state where the disciplines and principles of art became the subject matter of art. Non-representational or abstract art was the result. Greenberg discusses issues such as imitation, the importance of the medium and the historical significance of Cubism with reference to avant-garde painting. The article comes across as a defence of abstract purism. As he says, “It is not so easy to reject the purist’s assertion that the best of contemporary plastic art is abstract.”82 Greenberg defines the first two waves of the historical avant-garde, according to him. The first avant-garde consists of Gustave Courbet - “the first avant-garde painter” in his opinion - Edouard Manet and the Impressionists, because they attempted to emphasise the medium with a materialist objectivity. Often, there was a detachment from the subject matter or an indifference to it and a materialist emphasis on medium, visual experience and effect in painting.83 He regarded Gustave Courbet as both an avant-gardist and a materialist. As he wrote,
Courbet, the first real avant-garde painter, tried to reduce his art to immediate sense data by painting only what the eye could see as a machine unaided by the mind […] A new flatness begins to appear in Courbet’s painting, and an equally new attention to every inch of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Frascina, Francis. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. Harper & Row Ltd: New York, 1985: 221-223. 83 Ibid.
! 27! the canvas.84 (fig. 2.4).
The second wave of the historical avant-garde also had a clear preoccupation with medium, but according to Greenberg, these artists did so with the use of expressive resources such as music. Music appealed to the avant-garde because it is sensuous, pure and abstract. They tried to learn from music while trying to find the particular identity of the medium of painting. Painting had to return to its own purest form and had to be liberated from the imitation of effects. For Greenberg, this meant abandoning all sculptural or realistic imitating forms such as chiaroscuro or modelling. Lines had to be treated as colour, no longer as delineation of shape. Space and depth or three-dimensional illusions were reduced to flattened planes, pressed together on the two-dimensional canvas surface. For Greenberg, Cubism represents a decisive break with the past. As he stated, “The destruction of this pictorial space and with it the object was accomplished by means of the travesty that was Cubism”.85 However, the Cubists did not bring painting to full abstraction. He states that subsequent Dutch, Russian, German, English and American artists, rather than the French Cubists, have done this. This is where Greenberg makes a clear distinction between modern painting and avant-garde painting, and hereby, he divides the Cubists into avant-gardes and non-avant-gardes. He also excludes Surrealism from avant-garde painting because it had a tendency towards literature and subject matter.86 Clear and obvious examples of artists who have brought painting to full abstraction are the Dutch Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) and the Russians Kazimir Malevich (1878 – 1935) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944). Mondrian started out as an Impressionist and Post- Impressionist painter, painting mainly figurative landscapes, houses, churches, trees and windmills with an emotive use of colour. Later, around 1912-14 when Mondrian was living in Paris, he drew inspiration from Pablo Picasso and George Braque’s Cubist works and started painting in a Cubist manner. With Cubism, he reduced his subjects down to their most basic forms. Eventually, he carried this towards the point of pure abstraction. When he returned to Holland in 1914, he developed a simplified abstract style, which he called Neo-Plasticism. The works from this last period consist out of nothing more than a black grid of horizontal and vertical lines on a white background and the three primary colours yellow, red and blue (fig. 2.5).87 Mondrian stated, "I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects."88 Hereby, he emphasises the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and the fundamental quality of the object that is the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 84 Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a Newer Laocoon”. Partisan Review 7 (July-August 1940): 296-310. 85 Frascina, Francis. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. Harper & Row Ltd: New York, 1985: 223. 86 Ibid. 87 ‘Piet Mondrian’. Tate. 6 May 2016
! 28! flat canvas. Wassily Kandinsky is often credited with painting one of the first purely abstract works. At first, he was part of the artist group Der Blaue Reiter, which he started with the German painter Franz Marc (1880 - 1960). After Der Blaue Reiter disbanded, Kandinsky started abandoning all representational and associational elements in his work and started working towards full abstraction. An example of these works is Composition V (1911) (fig. 2.6), in which he combines continuous lines with colour patches. One of the most important and influential figures in geometric abstract art, next to Mondrian, is considered to be Kazimir Malevich. He is considered to be the pioneer of the Russian avant-garde and founder of Suprematism. Malevich’s Black Square (1915) (fig. 2.7) is his most radical work, together with his other Suprematist Compositions. Malevich also strived for non-representational, non-associative and non-objective art. As he said, “Black Square is meant to evoke the experience of pure non-objectivity in the white emptiness of a liberated nothing.”89 In the concluding part of the article, Greenberg states that he has no other explanation for the present superiority of abstract art than its historical justification. This statement traces back to the linear development from Edouard Manet to abstract art. Preserving the specific identity of painting as an art underlies this belief. As Greenberg states, “Abstraction is only one of several contemporary tendencies in modern art. It is historically the most significant and potentially the vanguard of avant-garde culture in painting.”90
The Neo Avant-Garde and Medium Specificity
In The Art World (1964), Arthur Danto discusses materiality and medium specificity in relation to the artworks of several neo avant-garde artists including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg. Danto wonders about Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (fig. 2.8). They have the same size as regular, factory made Brillo boxes. Warhol’s Brillo Boxes are made of plywood, factory made boxes are made of cardboard. “Why are Warhol’s boxes art and the ‘normal’ ones not?”91 is what Danto wonders. Warhol makes them by hand, but that is not the answer, as “Craftsmen are not artists either”.92 According to Danto, the difference lies in the theory of art. “This theory of art takes up the artwork into the world of art and keeps it from collapsing into the real object
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 89 Guggenheim Museum. Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism. New York: Guggenheim, 2003: 41. 90 Frascina, Francis. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. Harper & Row Ltd: New York, 1985: 221-223. 91 Danto, Arthur C. “The Art World”. The Journal of Philosophy. Volume 61, issue 19 (15 October 1964): 575-582. 92 Ibid.
! 29! that it is.”93 This theory of art gives it a different meaning and changes the ‘real’ object into a work of art. As Danto states, “It is but a matter of choice: and the Brillo box of the art world may be just the Brillo box of the real one, separated and united by artistic identification.”94 Other examples given by Danto are Roy Lichtenstein’s comic strip panels, which are around 300 cm tall (fig. 9). These works should be understood in terms of the Reality Theory. With these works, it is the scale that counts: these works are inaccurate as a reproduction because of the scale. He compares a black-and-white engraving made after a Botticelli with a photograph of a Lichtenstein panel. This black-and-white engraving would be inaccurate as a reproduction because of the lack of colour. Colour is of crucial importance for a reproduction of a Botticelli as much as scale is of importance for Lichtenstein’s panels. Lichtenstein’s comic strip panels are not imitations of existing comic strips, but “new entities”.95 Danto also speaks of the American artist Jasper Johns’ painted objects such as maps, flags and targets. According to him, these works cannot be imitations in the same way Lichtenstein’s comic strip panels cannot be imitations. His numeral paintings are self-contained. “A copy of a numeral just is that numeral: a painting of a 3 is a 3 made of paint” (fig. 10). He explains that any intended copy is a member of the class itself, which makes these works inimitable.96 Robert Rauschenberg’s work of a bed (fig. 11) consists of a real bed, the artist’s blanket and pillow, which he chose to use for an artwork when he lacked money to buy a canvas. The correct term for this is a combine: attaching found objects to a traditional picture plane. He splashed it with paint in a similar style to Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956) and scribbled it with pencil, after which he literally hung his bed to the wall like a canvas.97 Hanging his bed on the wall suggests his fear of a stranger climbing into his bed. Another artist who has made a “genuine bed” according to Danto is Claes Oldenburg (fig. 12). Oldenburg’s bed is narrower at one end than the other, which is called a ‘built-in perspective’, designed for small bedrooms. These skewed shapes create an illusion of depth. Oldenburg himself described the bedroom as the, “softest room in the house and the one least associated with conscious thought.”98 Danto compares Rauschenberg’s and Oldenburg’s beds and states that as mere beds, they are being sold for incredibly inflatable prices. But in the end: these are beds you could actually sleep in. He describes a certain hard-headed person who is not aware that these are artworks and takes them as reality. He could perceive the paint streaks on Rauschenberg’s bed as carelessness of the owner and the misshapenness of Oldenburg’s bed as clumsiness of the builder or as !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 ‘Lesson Three: Transforming Everyday Objects’. Museum of Modern Art. 18 April 2016
! 30! something custom-made. Mistaking art for reality is problematic and of frequent occurrence. Both of these works are made out of real beds and paint and meant to be reality, according to the Reality Theory. Danto wonders, “Can one have mistaken reality for reality? What, after all, prevents Oldenburg’s creation from being a misshapen bed?” Subsequently, this is equivalent to the question “What makes it art then?”. The artwork is a bed, not a “bed illusion”, according to Danto. He explains, “The paint streaks are not to be explained away. The bed is not a mere bed with paint spilled over it. It is a complex object fabricated out of a bed and some paint streaks. Like the human body, it is not just a body with some thoughts added, but a complex ‘conscious- body’, a unity, a whole.”99 The paint is not part of the real object, the bed, but part of the artwork. As to the identification of art, Danto states: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world.”100 For example, to understand and to see the previous examples as art, knowledge of artistic theory and of the history of New York painting is needed. In addition to knowledge of artistic theories, the world has to be ready for certain things. As Danto explains: “The world has to be ready for certain things, the art world no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the art world, and art, possible”101 and “[…] Nor would these things be artworks without the theories and the histories of the art world.”102 In conclusion, according to Danto, in order to see a work of art as a work of art and part of the art world, certain theories of art need to be applied and used, certain knowledge is needed and the timing has to be right. As mentioned before, Clement Greenberg was convinced that the best neo avant-garde art was being produced in America (especially in New York), rather than in Europe (especially France). He appreciated artists who were focusing on the flatness of the two-dimensional picture plane rather than seeking depth or illusion. Additionally, he considered an urge for purity, a focus on the unique characteristics of the medium one of the most important conditions for good art. This medium specificity was the only way to pure and true art, according to Greenberg’s formalist principles. Therefore, he admired Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock with his large-scale action paintings (fig. 13) and Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970), Clyfford Still (1904 - 1980) and Barnett Newman (1905-1970) with their abstract paintings (fig. 14 to 16). He described these artists as being part of and representing a new phase in modernist
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 99 Danto, Arthur C. “The Art World”. The Journal of Philosophy. Volume 61, issue 19 (15 October 1964): 576-582. 100 Ibid. p. 580 101 Ibid. p. 581 102 Ibid. p. 584
! 31! American art.103 At first, Greenberg greatly valued and appreciated these Abstract Expressionist artists, whom he regarded as highly original at first. However, he believed that the success of the movement led to painters who had more talent for imitating than for originality. Greenberg longed and hoped for a new generation of artists who would maintain the purity of the two- dimensional picture plane. Not long after, a second generation of abstract artists emerged, named Post-Painterly Abstraction. This was a new wave of artists who reacted against the gestural painting of previous Abstract Expressionists. They took abstraction and medium specificity to an even further level, with painting styles such as hard-edge painting, with artists like Frank Stella (b. 1936) and Ellsworth Kelly (1923 – 2015), systematic painting (such as Josef Albers’ [1888 – 1976] work), lyrical abstraction (including Mark Tobey [1890 – 1976]), colour stain painting (including Helen Frankenthaler [1928 – 2011]) and minimalist art (such as Robert Mangold [b. 1937], Agnes Martin [1912 – 2004] and Robert Ryman [b. 1930]) (fig. 17 to 24).104
Contemporary Artists and Medium Specificity
Contemporary art is pluralistic, which makes it harder to define certain art- and avant-garde movements than it was before. Nevertheless, many comparisons can be made between the historical and neo avant-garde and contemporary artists as to medium specificity. Many contemporary artists are still working with abstraction, but due to the increasing plurality of art, specific mediums like sculpture and painting have become less distinct and dominant. The pluralist character of contemporary art is being expressed with the use of different media; including photography, video art, installation art, digital art, performance art and internet art, as mentioned before. However, in my view, traces of medium specificity can still clearly be found. In fact, in 2013, ARTNews even declared the golden age of abstraction to be right now. According to the author Pepe Karmel, it is not illogical to see the periods of 1912-25 and 1947- 70 as the two golden ages of abstract art and to regard the current contemporary revival of abstract art as merely a silver subsequent period. However, he undermines this by describing how artists like Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Jackson Pollock were only being regarded as the giant, influential, art-changing artists they seem to us now in retrospect. This phenomenon seems to be ever present and never changing when defining the avant-garde. Karmel declared that abstract contemporary art that is now being made is not subordinate at all
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 103 ‘Clement Greenberg’. Visual Arts Cork. 1 April 2016
! 32! to the abstract art of the past. According to him, the most useful questions to ask about contemporary abstract art are: What themes and forms does it retrieve from the tradition of modern art? How have they been changed? And how has the artist used them to express the social, political, and spiritual experience of our own time?105 There seems to be a renewed focus on abstract art in the art world, with exhibitions such as Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 (2013) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Art of Another Kind (2012) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with a focus on the comparison between European and American abstract art of the 1950s. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis opened Painter Painter in 2013, focusing on fifteen abstract European and American painters who contributed to emerging developments in abstract painting. In the exhibition concept, the co-curators Eric Crosby and Bartholomew Ryan are asking: “At a time when artists may work without obligations to medium, why choose the materials of painting? What does it mean for an artist to assume the role of painter today? And just what is at stake for a new generation committed to painting?”106 One of the important statements of the exhibition is: “The exhibition posits abstract painting today as a means, not an end.” In this way, medium specificity can be used as a starting point itself, instead of the end result and ultimate aim. Also, they made clear that new, unconventional ways of art making were being explored and that the participating artists created new languages of abstract art. This resulted in the pluralistic crossing of paths with sculpture, poetry, film, performance and craft.107 However, the focus on the flatness of the two-dimensional surface is never omitted. One of the participating artists of the exhibition Painter, Painter is the American artist Alex Olson (b. 1978). A key characteristic of her work is the focus on the specific qualities of the used materials and the materiality of both the paint and the two-dimensional canvas. As she explained in an interview with Eric Crosby, “In fact, the way I approach painting is almost the opposite in that nothing is an abstraction of something else: it literally is what it is.” This reminds of Frank Stella’s statement, “What you see is what you see.”108 She also said, “A brushstroke will read as an image of a brushstroke and as a physical brushstroke. The overall look of one of my paintings is never precisely identifiable, but it is not an abstraction of something else either. It is its own thing”109 (fig. 25). Subsequently, Neo-Minimalism or Neo-Geometric emerged at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, with contemporary American artists such as Peter Halley, Sarah Morris and Rachel Harrison. The movement draws on earlier developments in Minimalist art !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 105 ‘Contemporary Abstraction’. ARTNews. 24 April 2013. 1 May 2016
! 33! and Abstract Expressionism. A characteristic of the works by Peter Halley and Sarah Morris (fig. 26 and 27) that stands out is the focus on architectural and monochrome structures such as rectangular cells and other angular shapes. Also, American artist Richard Serra’s (b. 1939) steel sculptures (fig. 28) have been described as “austere Neo-Minimalism” and “Post-Minimalist Art”, due to the differences in comparison to Minimalist Art.110 The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa wrote, “After the bacchanal of Post-Modernism, the time has again come for Neo- Minimalism, Neo-Ascetism, Neo-Denial and sublime poverty."111 A contemporary artist who clearly draws inspiration from Jasper Johns’ sign paintings is the American artist Wade Guyton (b. 1972). Signs have been used frequently in artworks ever since 1911-12, when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque used signs and letters cut from newspapers in their Cubist collages. As mentioned before, Jasper Johns became widely known for his flag, map and number series (fig. 2.9) and with this, changed the character of sign- and abstract painting. “His stencilled letters and regular grids came to convey meaninglessness instead of meaning. They didn’t express emotion; they repressed it.”112 And fifty years later, Jasper Johns still has a decisive influence on abstraction. Instead of painting his work by hand, Wade Guyton uses computers and digital inkjet printers. As described by Carol Vogel, Wade Guyton is, together with contemporary fellow artists Kelley Walker, Seth Price and Tauba Auerbach “at the forefront of a generation that has been reconsidering both appropriation and abstract art through the 21st century lens of technology.”113 In this article, Guyton is compared to Roy Lichtenstein because of the dotted pattern when you look at the elongated, blown up image of his work (fig. 29) on the computer. Besides, as to the mechanical way of working, he is compared to Andy Warhol, who said: “Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems.” Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, described Guyton’s work as follows:
You tap a keyboard with one finger and this very large painting emerges. It is gone against everything we think of as a painting. There are so many historical landmarks that precede him, so many artists who took the traditional notion of painting in a new direction. Pollock flung it; Rauschenberg silkscreened it; Richter took a squeegee; Polke used chemicals. Wade is working in what by now is a pretty venerable tradition, against the conventional idea of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 110 Fox, Wightman Richard and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993: 259. 111 Pallasmaa, Juhani. Architecture in Miniature, Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1991: 1. 112 ‘Contemporary Abstraction’. ARTNews. 24 April 2013. 1 May 2016
! 34! painting.114
Other artists who made or make use of the computer to produce paintings are the American artist Cindy Sherman (b. 1954), American artist Jeff Koons and the German artist Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), who reduced his paintings from 1990 into mere patterns by the use of Photoshop (fig. 30). Another artist who, like the previous mentioned artists, emphasises the two- dimensional, flat surface is Damien Hirst with his Spot Paintings (fig. 31). As Hirst said, his aim was “to create that structure, to do those colours, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour.” With these flat, coloured dots on this flat, white background, he emphasises the two-dimensional surface. He can be compared with Andy Warhol as well in the way that he replaced his own hands with his many assistants’ hands, like Warhol and his Factory. Eventually, his works appear to have been constructed mechanically, or at least “by a person trying to paint like a machine”.115
The historical avant-gardes, including the Cubists, turned away from realism and started to abolish imitating existing forms. The focus shifted to the materiality of the canvas and the paint. Subject matter and content became less important in favour of form, which eventually resulted in abstract and non-representational art. The neo avant-garde, with movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction, elaborated on these principles. They had a clear focus on medium specificity and materiality and took abstraction even further with painting styles such as hardedge painting, systematic painting and minimalist art. These artists negated gestural painting completely. Their aim was to emphasise the two dimensionality of the flat canvas instead of pursuing depth or illusion. This quest for complete abstraction seems to be continuous and timeless, since many contemporary artists are still making use of medium specificity and abstraction principles. In fact, they are pushing these principles even further by making use of machines such as printers and computers and the latest technologies.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 114 Ibid. 115 ‘Spots’. Damien Hirst. 2 May 2016 < http://www.damienhirst.com/texts1/series/spots>
! 35!
Chapter 3 Institutional Critique
! 36! Institutional critique is an artistic practice that reflects critically on the institutions of art and the social functions and concepts of art itself.116 Although the term institutional critique first appeared in print in 1975 with Mel Ramsden’s On Practice117, such concerns have always been an important part of modern art, particularly for the avant-gardes. Ramsden, a member of the conceptual art collective Art & Language, stated that the capitalist structure of the institutions of art and the art market had been internalised by the people participating in it. Therefore, it made resistance to participate close to impossible for those participants.118 These issues are still relevant in contemporary art. Since the first avant-gardes, artists have been criticising the dominant institutions of art that determine and define what art is and what art should be. The first defined wave of institutional critique only emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, with artists such as the German artist Hans Haacke (b. 1936) and the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938). At first, institutional critique took on many forms, including critical writings, (political) activism and artistic works and interventions. Benjamin Buchloh (b. 1941) has linked the emergence of institutional critique to the emergence of conceptual art. He even described conceptual art as a movement that emerged from institutional critique and "the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions".119 Buchloh explained this by stating that with conceptual art, the traditional criteria of aesthetic judgement have been altered. The definition of aesthetics and with this, taste and connoisseurship, has become a matter of institutional discourse. This is a discourse of power rather than taste.120 At the same time as conceptual art, in the late 1960s, land art arose. Hans Haacke was a participant of the land art movement, with fellow artists such as the American artists Robert Smithson (1938 – 1973), Walter De Maria (1935 – 2013), Michael Heizer (b. 1944) and Nancy Holt (1938 – 2014). Land artists rejected the institutions of art such as museums and art galleries by exhibiting outside these institutions. For example, Robert Smithson with his earthwork Spiral Jetty (fig. 3.1). Smithson even described the institutions of art as “spaces of cultural confinement and circumscription”.121 He explains this as follows: cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits. He even describes the institutions of art as cultural prisons that have a hold on the artists, instead of the other way around. Smithson believes that if an artwork is placed in a gallery, it loses its charge and becomes a surface or portable object disengaged from
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 116 Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson. Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings. London: The MIT Press, 2009: 8. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Buchloh,Benjamin. "Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions". October 55 (1990): 105–143. 120 Ibid. 121 Sheikh, Simon. ‘Notes on Institutional Critique’. Eipcp. January 2006. 10 May 2016
! 37! the outside world. He regards curators to be in the position to separate art from society, which goes back to the notion of ‘the praxis of life’. By doing so, curators neutralise artworks, make them ineffective and eventually, allow these works to become consumed by society.122 The second wave of institutional critique emerged in the 1980s, with artists such as the American performance artist Andrea Fraser (b. 1965), Renée Green (b. 1959), Christian Philipp Müller (b. 1957), Fred Wilson (b. 1954) and Mark Dion (b. 1961). With the second wave, the artists got a more central and clearly present role in their works, which were often performance pieces. Also, many artists of the second wave of institutional critique turned their criticism into writings, like Andrea Fraser with her essay From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique (2005). In this essay, she criticises the lack of distance “we” have towards these institutions of art. With “us”, she means people that are part of the art world (e.g. artists, curators, gallery owners, students). She states that “we” are part of those exact institutions. With these performances and writings, institutional critique became an art practice.123 Subsequently, a few art historians and writers spoke of a third wave of institutional critique that arose after the 2000s.124 According to them, the political and social role of art became a central theme with international, project-based and interdisciplinary works. The use of mixed, new media posed questions about the boundaries and structures of the museum. Institutional critique is still used as a means to pose questions about the status and role of the art object and institutional structures and processes.125 Although institutional critique as a practice only emerged in the late 1960s and the term did not emerge until 1975, I will try to apply this term to the historical avant-garde. Firstly, I will examine in what manners these historical avant-gardes expressed their critique towards the institutions of art. Thereafter, I will look at how the neo avant-garde (with a particular focus on conceptual art) and contemporary artists have been dealing with institutional critique. The museum as an institution is multifaceted and thus it can be critiqued from a number of many different standpoints, which has been done by these historical and neo avant-gardes and contemporary artists.
The Historical Avant-Garde and Institutional Critique
Institutional critique can be traced back as early as the first decades of the 20th century with the emergence of the first avant-garde movements such as Futurism and Dadaism. With regard to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 122 Smithson, Robert. THE COLLECTED WRITINGS. California: University of California Press, 1996. 123 Fraser, Andrea. “Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”. Artforum (September 2005): 287. 124 ‘Mel Ramsden’s Theoretical Critique of Institutions: A Close Reading of On Practice’. Art+Media. 28 February 2015. 1 June 2016
! 38! the museum, there were different perspectives. Duchamp was subversive towards it. Rodchenko, Kandinsky and Malevich wanted to reinvent it. Picasso declared that museums and art were lies by saying, “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies”.126 Art reflects upon the truths taken from reality, but it does not necessarily represent this truth, and thus, cannot be understood as truth. The Futurists wanted to ruin the museum.127 Futurism, an artistic movement that emerged in Italy in 1909, can be seen as one of the first avant-garde movements to incorporate institutional critique in their work and manifestos. The Futurists are known for their challenges to convention and uncontainable experiments that led to interdisciplinary and provocative artworks.128 The established institutions of art were a frequent target of historical avant-garde attacks, but these institutions were perhaps the most vigorously condemned by the Futurists in their manifesto. The founder of Futurism is the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti. In 1909, Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurism. The manifesto proposed an artistic philosophy in which the past would be abandoned and the future would be embraced. “We want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!”129 The Futurists called for a new aesthetic language that was not reliant on the classical heritage but instead focused on machinery, speed, violence and even war, industry, youth, modernisation and cultural rejuvenation. The Manifesto of Futurism consists of ten intentions, with the tenth intention being “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.”130 They also negatively compared the museum to other public places such as cemeteries and dormitories, saying:
Museums: cemeteries!... Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with colour-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!131
The Futurist’s contempt for the museum emerged from the notion that museums were too involved in the past. According to them, museums were exhibiting works by mainly old or deceased artists. Hence, they made the reference to cemeteries. Marinetti spoke of “the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 126 Earnshaw, Steven. The Handbook of Creative Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007: 406. 127 King, Alexandra. Revealing the Silent Message of the Museum: The Legacies of Institutional Critique. Gothenborg: University of Gothenborg, School of Global Studies, June 2012. 128 ‘Futurism’. Museum of Modern Art. 14 June 2014
! 39! historical disease” and the cult of the past. The Futurists felt that progress was being hindered in society due to the fact that museums and other institutions were stuck in the past. They longed for a disruption of the foundations and a “Nietzschean revaluation of all values”.132
The Dada artists in particular questioned the status of art and aesthetics in institutions. Marcel Duchamp can be regarded as the forefather of institutional critique. Dada was anti- aesthetic and anti-idealistic, but most of all anti-war and anti-bourgeois. However, they themselves announced a war with the establishment, with provocation and confrontation as their weapons of choice. Dada attacked traditional artistic values with provocative attitudes, statements, actions, manifestos and artworks. They questioned the status of art, object and the role of the artist as genius. Resulting from this, under the influence of Dada and Marcel Duchamp with his ready- mades, the term ‘anti-art’ emerged in 1913. Anti-art is a term applied to concepts that question art and reject strict definitions of art. According to the American philosopher and author of What is anti-art? (1975), George Dickie (b. 1926), there are at least four categories of anti-art: 1. Art in which chance plays a part. 2. Art which has strikingly unusual content. 3. “Ready-mades” 4. Actions by “artists” which do not result in any object-product.133 All these four categories are applicable to Dada practices. Firstly, art in which chance plays a part is characteristic of Dada art, as we have seen in the first chapter. The war caused a disbelief in logic, order and reason. The artist Jean (Hans) Arp (b. 1966) expressed his wish “to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order.”134 As mentioned before, Dada artists made use of automatic writing, poetry governed by chance and collages arranged by the laws of chance. It is clear that the second category ‘art which has strikingly unusual content’ can also be applied to Dada practices. In addition to this, they are also known for their use of the readymade, which questioned the role of the artist as genius. With anti-art and its practices, Dada was in protest against the bourgeois dominant institutions of art that affirm and preserve the basic assumptions of art, such as its mastery and autonomy.135 Dada’s main aim was to attack the established traditions and institutions of art. They tried to achieve this by organising demonstrations, writing manifestoes and producing works that posed questions about the role of the artist, the purpose of art, society and its institutions. The paradox and irony of Dada is that they claimed to be anti-art and even defined
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 132 Esposito, Fernando. Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity. Tübingen: University of Tübingen, 2015: 294. 133 Dickie, George. “What is Anti-Art?”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 33, No. 4 (Summer, 1975): 420. 134 ‘Dada’. Museum of Modern Art. 14 June 2016
! 40! themselves ‘anti-Dada’. Yet, their works were and are still exhibited and discussed as art. However, the aesthetic of their work is of secondary importance to the ideas it conveyed. As the Dadaist poet Hugo Ball wrote, “For us, art is not an end in itself, but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.”136 Nonetheless, their negative attacks on the institutions of art have had a great and positive influence on future developments in modern 20th century art. Additionally, they wanted to create a climate in which art was not paralysed by the restrictions and traditions of the established institutions of art and instead allow it to be alive in the moment. The author Blake Stimson states that institutional critique has its roots in the Salons des Refusés (salons of the rejected) with their urge to épater les bourgeois (shock the bourgeoisie), which goes back as early as 1863. He affirms that it has always been about reconciling the following opposites: public and private, council and museum, the exterior and the interior, harmony and critique and the political and the aesthetic, and bringing these opposites into harmony with each other.137 The Salon des Refusés was an exhibition of artworks that were rejected by the official Paris Salon jury. The jury was highly conservative; it expected and valued idealised realism. The exhibitions were divided into genres and hierarchy, from historical painting to portrait, landscape, the genre scene and lastly, the still life.138 They rejected works by artists such as Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro, Johan Jongkind and Édouard Manet with his (now regarded) masterpiece Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1862-63) (fig. 3.2). These rejected artists were not (all) part of the historical avant-garde, but it can be said that the foundation for the historical avant-gardes and their institutional critique was laid with the Salon des Refusés. Hence, even though institutional critique as an artistic practice did not emerge until the late 1960s, the roots of institutional critique lie in the beginning of the 20th century with the emergence of the first avant-gardes, specifically Futurism and Dada. These historical avant- garde artists have laid an important foundation on which subsequent neo avant-garde and contemporary artists have built on with their institutional critique practices.
The Neo Avant-Garde and Institutional Critique
From the 1960s onwards, neo avant-garde artists started to investigate and gradually challenge the roles of dominant people in the art world such as museum directors, curators and gallery owners. The first wave of institutional critique appears to have been initiated in the 1960s and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 136 ‘Dada’. Museum of Modern Art. 14 June 2016
! 41! ‘70s by artists such as Michael Broodthaers, Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke. “They investigated the conditions of the museum and art field, aiming to oppose, subvert or break out of rigid institutional frameworks.”139 They practiced art forms that were “site,specific, temporary, non-purchasable, outside the museum, directed toward non-art audience, [or] retreating from object to body to idea [...]”140, which resulted in land art and conceptual art works. The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924 – 1976) was one of the first artists to carry out powerful critique from this perspective. In 1968, he created his first fictional museum in Brussels, named The Department of Eagles, Museum of Modern Art (fig. 3.3). Highly charged political events of 1968 resulted in Broodthaers getting the idea to start analysing the relationship between art and society. As Broodthaers said about the museum, “It was born not via concept, but by way of circumstance; the concept came later.” This recalls the notion of the readymade of Marcel Duchamp, who once said: “This is a work of art” about his Fountain (1917), whereas Marcel Broodthaers said, “This is a museum”.141 By creating a fictional museum, Broodthaers critiques the logic of museums and questions how they determine the methods of working: how museums come into being and how collections come together. He has chosen to critique the ideological museum’s frame that is made up of different cultural, political and social elements. The problematic aspect with this fictional museum was that soon after it became reinstalled and exhibited in several institutions of art, which changed the ultimate aim of the work. As Argentinean artist Julio Le Parc (b. 1928) wrote in his text Demystifying Art (1968), “at present every art production will be absorbed quickly into the commercial cycle that transforms not only the meaning of art but also the very nature of this art.”142 Part of this fictional museum by Marcel Broodthaers is his work The Eagle From The Oligocene To The Present (1972) (fig. 3.4). For this work, Broodthaers exhibited 266 found objects with captions that read, “This is not a work of art” in different languages. In doing so, he questioned the museums’ role and power in exhibiting and ascribing a certain status to artworks when exhibiting certain works as art. By exhibiting works with captions “This is not a work of art”, he is doing the exact opposite; not assigning value and status to an artwork. Thereby, he emphasises and questions the museum’s role and power. At the same time, he questioned the role of the original artist as genius and the maker of original artworks by exhibiting found objects.143 Again, this reminds one of, and is an indirect reference to, Marcel Duchamp’s ideas of the readymade and with that, the destruction of the idea of the artist as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 139 Raunig, Gerald and Gene Ray. Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique. London: MayFlyBooks, May 2009: 14-15. 140 O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999: 95. 141 Alberro, Alexander. Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings. London: The MIT Press, 2009: 5. 142 Ibid. 143 ‘Institutional Critique’. Artsy. 24 May 2016 < https://www.artsy.net/gene/institutional-critique>
! 42! genius. It also calls to mind René Magritte’s Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe (1928-29) (fig. 3.5). There is a dialectical relationship between the sentence “This is not a pipe” and the painting of a pipe. It is not an actual pipe, but rather, a painting of a pipe. Magritte examines the gap between language and meaning and makes the viewer aware of this construction of meaning. With the corresponding The Treachery of Images series, Magritte critiques and questions the way in which the institutions of art attach meanings and attribute significance to certain images by writing captions and presenting artworks in a certain way. He strived to abolish the oppressive rationalism of bourgeois society.144 These tendencies and phenomena spread and influenced artists all over the world. For example, in 1969, Robert Barry (b. 1936) made a piece called Closed Gallery (fig. 3.6), for which he sent three different invitations for shows in Amsterdam, Turin and Los Angeles. The invitation card read: “During the exhibition the gallery will be closed.”145 As Barry explained, “My method of presentation is that I sort of start first of all with the idea of no presentation. And then I say, well, the next step, what is the least amount of presentation that I can get away with?”146 Hereby, he makes the visitor, or in this case, the receiver of the invitation, aware of concepts such as time and space that are constructed and imposed by the institutions of art. In 1968, the year of many student protests and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, Julio Le Parc and Enzo Mari withdrew from the Documenta 4 exhibition and called for “non- complicity with the dominant institutions”.147 At the same time, all over the world, from Buenos Aires and Rosario to Paris, Warsaw and New York, a prescriptive critique of the museum as an institution emerged in the arts. This critique was being expressed in various forms, from performing actions and demonstrations to boycotting exhibitions and organising public meetings.148 In New York, the Museum of Modern Art was the target of many protests in the 1960s by the Guerrilla Art Group (GAAG) and the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC). Their main critique was that the board of trustees consisted mostly of elite members, which goes against the idea of a democratic public institution. Mel Ramsden, in his writings On Practice (1975), critiqued the instrumentalisation of art and capitalist structure of the art market, with in particular the hegemonic dominance of the New York art world. He noted that “the administrators, dealers, critics, pundits” of his time had become “masters” and the New York artists had become “imperialist puppets.”149 In The Function of the Museum (1970), Daniel Buren critiques and analyses the way the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 144 ‘The Treachery of Images’. René Magritte. 2009. 4 July 2016.
! 43! museum enhances objects by giving it mystical and economical values. Also, he critiques the way the museum neutralises its objects and with this, gets rid of the historical value. According to Buren, the way art is installed and exhibited contributes to the sovereign status of museums. As he says, “Art is hung on the walls, carefully framed so that only the image is displayed. The non-visibility or (deliberate) non-indication/revelation of the various supports of any work is a careful camouflage undertaken by the prevalent bourgeois ideology to conceal the social and political consequences resulting from the museum’s machinations.”150 By this, he means that only the image is displayed, detached from its historical, political and social backgrounds. He criticises the authoritative power of museums that neutralise artworks and display works and captions in a manner that often solely serves their own interests. The German-American conceptual artist Hans Haacke (b. 1936) is one of the neo avant- garde artists most closely associated with institutional critique. In 1971, he wrote Provisional Remarks and described his projects of the 1960s and 1970s as “real-time social system[s] operating in an art context”.151 According to Haacke, his projects function as a link to reveal the assumptions and machinations of museums. He also critiques the instrumentalisation of the institution of art by political and economic interests and the dominant role of governmental institutions. As he wrote in The Agent in 1977, “the corporate state, like governments, has a natural allergy to questions such as ‘what?’ and ‘for whom?’” He is convinced that operators of the institutions of art such as curators, museum directors, art critics and art dealers, form a front to support neutral, unproblematic art that measure up to their economic interests. Haacke also critiques the commercial character of museums and galleries, saying “Commercial art galleries are powerful agents in that small segment of the consciousness industry which we know as the world of so-called high art”. According to him, this influence goes far beyond the sale of art and success in the art market and even determines which artists should receive important grants and academic positions.152 A work by Hans Haacke that is closely associated with institutional critique is MoMA Poll (1970) (fig. 3.7). The work consists of two transparent acrylic ballot boxes; one marked ‘yes’ and the other ‘no’. The question was: “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina Policy be a reason for you not voting for him in November?” 68,7% of the visitors voted ‘yes’ and 31,1% ‘no’.153 The work is a reference to the Vietnam War, which was ongoing at the time. Governor Rockefeller was closely associated and involved with the Museum of Modern Art, he was even on the board. With this work, Haacke is linking art to politics and criticising the Museum of Modern Art for being involved with such political events and figures. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid. 153 Osborn, Peter. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2005.
! 44! American conceptual artist Michael Asher (1943 – 2012) has drawn from the idea of the readymade with strong references to Marcel Duchamp. In 1977, he first participated in Skulptur Projekte Münster (fig. 3.8), an exhibition of sculptures in public places in the town of Münster. For this project, Asher exhibited a trailer in the city of Münster and relocated it every Monday. Ever since, he has repeated these practices every ten years for the Sculpture Projects in Münster. In 2007, Asher re-enacted it for the fourth time. He speaks of “dislocations” in reference to the art museum, which is, on the contrary, always at the same location. A museum as an institute has a fixed location and is framed by indestructible walls. Asher changes perspectives to make the viewer aware of the fact that we produce ideas and thoughts about logic and order automatically. The viewer is only noticing and aware of something when something is different or out of context. It is also a comment on the contemporary art market that expects and puts pressure on artists to constantly produce innovative works.154 However, Asher’s work is constantly new every time it is exhibited at a different location. In 1974, Michael Asher temporarily removed the partitioning wall and thereby the boundary between the office and exhibition space of the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles (fig. 3.9). By doing so, he architecturally and visually connected the commercial and aesthetic activities with office work, acting almost as a performance piece. Asher is criticising the unseen activities that happen behind closed doors in the institutions of art and the boundaries they impose between the public and the private. Another neo avant-garde artist known for his institutional critique is the French minimalist Daniel Buren (b. 1938). He became celebrated for combining the monochrome and the readymade into standard striped devices (fig. 3.10), to explore old paradigms of the institution of art. Buren began to use these signature stripes to draw attention away from the object towards the architecture, daily operations and network of economic, social and cultural forces of museum and gallery spaces. Hereby, he questions the neutrality of such spaces and undermines the aesthetic and monetary value of the exhibited objects therein.155 He concluded that what he found was “the parameters of artistic production and reception”.156 Buren himself has referred to the stripes as “visual tools” - an almost readymade, homogeneous device in its sidedness. He compared his work to Duchamp’s Fountain because of the way he comments on the powerful role the institution of art plays in defining what art is and the singularity of art. The large striped site-specific works transform every space they are exhibited in, by making them all
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 154 King, Jennifer. Michael Asher Skulptur Projecte in Munster. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007: 88. 155 ‘Daniel Buren’. Art in America. 16 April 2013. 7 July 2016. < http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/daniel-buren/> 156 Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999: 529.
! 45! homogeneous and alike, which questions the role these institutions and spaces inhabit and the values we attach to these spaces.157
Contemporary Artists and Institutional Critique
Firstly, in the 1980s, a wave of feminist artists and writers emerged that critiqued the institutions of art for predominantly consisting of male artists and staff members. The American art historian Linda Nochlin (b. 1931) wrote a groundbreaking essay in 1971 on gender inequality and discrimination, titled Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?158 Many of the artists that were part of this new wave of feminist artists such as the American artists Louise Lawler (b. 1947), Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) and the collective The Guerrilla Girls (emerged in 1985) drew on forms taken from advertising and graphic design. These took the form of billboards, videotapes, posters and flyers in order to question and criticise the nature of representation in both the art world and the media.159 The artist and photographer Louise Lawler is recognised for her work that highlights the gender inequality in the institutions of art. In 2013, she re-enacted her piece Birdcalls (1972) at Dia:Beacon, which comments on the fact that the exhibited artists at important institutions of art are predominantly male. Between 1972 and 2013, apparently not much has changed. In 2013, still only four of the 25 artists who were on long-term show at Dia:Beacon were women. Birdcalls is a sound installation that turns the names of male artists including Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Joseph Kosuth, Gerhard Richter and Sol LeWitt, into birdcalls (fig. 3.11).160 By doing so, she rather belittles and ridicules the egos of these well-known and well-respected male artists, to emphasise the gender inequalities in the art world. Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger appropriates and alternates existing images combined with text. An example is Your Gaze Hits The Side of my Face (1981) (fig. 3.12), which is an image of a classic female statue, the symbol of female beauty in traditional art history. However, the text suggests that the work should be interpreted as a dominant and aggressive male gaze at a female object that silences women from taking part in the discourse.161 This explores the concept of the gaze and with that, the ideas of control, domination, behaviour and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 157 Considine, Austin. ‘Daniel Buren Between The Lines’. Art In America. 24 January 2013. 12 December 2014
! 46! oppressive culture.162 It is a reference to the way women are often silenced and not taken seriously in the art world and thus are undermined in the institutions of art and by the people who are part of those institutions. The Guerrilla Girls describe themselves as “feminist masked avengers in the tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Wonder Woman and Batman.” They expose sexism, racism and corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture with facts, humour and outrageous visuals.163 With their work, they have expressed critique on several institutions of art, such as the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York. For example, they designed a poster with a naked guerrilla on it (fig. 3.13) that read, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are women.”164 The American conceptual artist Mark Dion (b. 1961) examines in what ways dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of the natural world and above all, history and knowledge. He sees it as his duty as an artist to go against the grain of these dominant cultures and to challenge these perceptions and conventions. He examines and appropriates scientific methods of ordering, collecting and exhibiting. In doing so, he questions the distinctions between the objective and rational and the subjective and irrational scientific methods. He is mainly known for his curiosity cabinets, such as Cabinets of Curiosities (2001) (fig. 3.14), for which he relocates and reorders objects in an atypical manner to make the viewers aware of the construction of knowledge about nature. His main aim with these works is to question the authoritative, scientific voice of the dominant institutions that construct and impose these constructions of knowledge.165 In the late 1980s and 1990s, the in the previous section described practices by the neo avant-gardes were developed into diverse artistic projects by new protagonists like Renée Green (b. 1959), Christian Philipp Müller (b. 1957), Fred Wilson (b. 1954) and Andrea Fraser (b. 1965); the second generation of institutional critique. Second wave practices continued, however, to circulate under the name of institutional critique.166 The American writer, artist and filmmaker Renée Green is also known for her complex installations that address and question the construction of knowledge. She consistently gives the spectator a central role in the process of deconstructing genealogical discourses and assuming subject positions. A feature that recurs in her installations is the production of interactive environments. This motivates the viewer to take on the role of an equal participant in the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 162 Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson. Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings. London: The MIT Press, 2009: 14. 163 ‘Our Story’. Guerrilla Girls. 15 May 2016
! 47! construction of meaning”.167 By interacting with the audience, she makes the participants aware of these constructions of meaning. For example, her installation Import/Export Funk Office (1992-1994) (fig. 3.15) at the Witney Biennale reminds of a library or an archive because of the ten steel shelves with books and magazines and the plaque that reads ‘Collectanea’. In the archival materials, there are many references to black culture and theory. According to Green, it does not represent black culture as an identity, but it asks the viewer to construct an image of it themselves. By doing so, she tries to pursue an ethical demand by her archival practice.168 Updated artistic models of historical conceptualism and institutional critique with an expanded notion of site-specificity are characteristic of the work of Berlin-based Swiss conceptual artist Christian Philipp Müller. In 1992, he had his first solo exhibition named Fixed Values (fig. 3.16) at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, for which he placed a model auction house inside of the museum, where he exhibited and ‘auctioned’ souvenirs from his previous works. The objects were numbered and assigned an estimate value, just like in an auction catalogue. This way, the exhibition was mimicking an auction of the artist’s own artistic oeuvre. The installation took up four rooms of the museum and consisted of objects and methods of value producing commercial and museological displays.169 With this site-specific work, he critiques and questions the ‘fixed values’ in contemporary art.170 Art works that are exhibited in museums are normally not for sale, let alone up for auction. However, auction houses ascribe certain fixed monetary values to these works, and museums ascribe a certain value to works when exhibiting these works, which Müller both criticises by doing exactly that. The African-American artist Fred Wilson (b. 1954) is known for his work that underscores the issues surrounding the validity of museum displays, ethnic inequality in museums and museum representations of “the cultural other”.171 In 1992, he created an exhibition project titled Mining the Museum (fig. 3.17), for which he turned the museum inside out by solely exhibiting objects from the museum’s archive. These objects would otherwise perhaps never have been exhibited and therefore would have remained unseen.172 He aimed to show “the power of objects to speak when the ‘laws’ governing museum practices are expanded and the artificial boundaries museums build are removed.”173 For his piece Guarded View (fig. 3.18), he critiques the roles of ethnic minorities in museums by exhibiting black mannequins
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 167 Alberro, Alexander. Renée Green: Shadows and Signals. Barcelona: Fundación Antoni Tàpies, 2000. 168 Munte-Goussar, Stephan et al. Education Within a New Medium, Knowledge Formation and Digital Infrastructure. Berlin: Waxmann, 2008: 318. 169 ‘Unfixing Values Essay’. Christian Philipp Mueller. 1 June 2016
! 48! dressed in security uniforms. He himself worked as a museum guard and explains, “[There’s] something funny about being a guard in a museum. You’re on display but you’re also invisible.”174 The mannequins are exhibited as sculptures to look at, whereas these are headless. Therefore, they are incapable of looking back at us, which makes them powerless. For his piece Picasso/Who Rules? (fig. 3.19), he adorned Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) with tribal masks in order to attack Picasso’s interest in, and appropriation of, ethnographical collections and tribal masks from ‘primitive’ cultures. Wilson was seen on videotape asking questions such as, “If my contemporary art is your traditional art, is my art your cliché?” and “If your contemporary art is my traditional art, is your art my cliché?175 For example, Wilson’s traditional art (in this case, the tribal masks) is used, appropriated and exhibited as contemporary art (at the time) by Picasso. By asking these questions, he puts western and primitive cultures opposite to each other to emphasise racial inequalities in the art world. Ethnic art is often presented as primitive art in western institutions of art. This is viewed and determined from a western perspective, whereas these cultures often have completely different opinions and views on these matters. The American art historian James Meyer described the New York-based performance artist Andrea Fraser as an important developer of new approaches and strategies in institutional critique practice. He stated that artists such as Fraser and Fred Wilson used the museum itself as primary source material, developing approaches that involved new kinds of strategy.176 Fraser’s performance piece Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (fig. 3.20), which took place in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989, is one of the most renowned examples of this newly approached institutional critique in contemporary art. It is a performance in which Fraser takes over the persona of a museum tour guide under the fictional name Jane Castleton. During the performance, she led the visitors through the museum while talking about art and corporate and private censorship. Fraser did not just show the gallery spaces, but also the restrooms, the museum shop and the café. With this performance, Fraser criticises the official, imposing and authoritative voice of the institution.177 This voice is telling you what to look at, what to think and how to perceive art. In this case, she is taking over this voice in order to emphasise this dominance.178 One of the most contemporary and internationally known practisers of institutional critique is the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957). Weiwei has been influenced by many western historical and neo avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 174 ‘Collection: Guarded View 1991’. Whitney. 21 June 2016 < http://collection.whitney.org/object/11433> 175 Ibid. 176 ‘Andrea Fraser’. Frieze. April 2002. 11 December 2012
! 49! Joseph Beuys. He has also been influenced by artistic practices such as the readymade and institutional critique. He has distinguished himself from traditional Chinese art with his work since the start of his career, although he often refers to China’s self-alienation, past, present and future in his work. He is not only critical of the institutions of art, but also of China’s government, which even led to his detention and house arrest in 2011. For example, in his performance piece Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) (fig. 3.21), he smashed an ancient antique Han dynasty ceramic urn on the ground.179 With this, he questions cultural values and social history. He criticises the glorification and exhibition of traditional cultural Asian objects as art by Western institutions and collectors. The Berlin-based artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, consisting of the Danish artist Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961) and Norwegian artist Ingar Dragset (b. 1969), started working together as a duo in 1995. Ever since, they have been challenging and uncovering the way in which art is represented and experienced with the use of institutional critique. For their exhibition Taking Place (2001-2) at the Kunsthalle in Zürich, they demolished existing walls, built new ones, painted walls and opened up office spaces and activities for visitors to see what is normally hidden behind closed doors (fig. 3.22). This work evokes Michael Asher’s work and its aims at the Claire Copland Gallery in 1974 (fig. 3.9). For The Welfare Show (2006) (fig. 23) at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Elmgreen & Dragset investigated the welfare model and social-cultural power structures within the Western world. They examined topics such as health care, economics, immigration, travel and the role art plays in society. Since 1997, the duo has made a series of works titled Powerless Structures (fig. 3.24), which examine the ways in which institutions such as hospital and prisons, but most of all museums and galleries, act as a means of social control.180 Alongside those already discussed, many other contemporary artists are practicing institutional critique in their work in order to change the way we relate to and encounter the institutions of art. For example, The Serpentine Gallery organised the first solo exhibition by the New York-based contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (b. 1961) in 2005. The show recreated a full-scale functioning replica of his New York studio and apartment (fig. 3.25). As a visitor you could cook, take a bath, lie down on the sofa, in other words: feel at home. This is an unusual and unfamiliar feeling to most gallery and museum visitors. Tiravanija often creates situations in which the divisions between art and life are removed.181 He criticises and takes down the invisible (social) barriers between life and the institutions.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 179 ‘Ai Weiwei and The Unilever Series’. Telegraph. 1 June 2016
! 50! Also at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2005, the Russian New York-based artist duo Ilya and Emilia Kabakov had a solo show titled The House of Dreams (fig. 3.26). For this show, they transformed the Serpentine Gallery into a meditative space with multiple cubicle- like spaces closed off with curtains with beds in the middle where visitors were invited to lie down.182 This work has a similar effect to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s in the unusual feelings it must have brought up with visitors and the taking down of the social barriers between the institutions of art and visitors.
Despite the fact that the term ‘institutional critique’ did not emerge until the 1970s, this practice can be traced back to the emergence of the Salons des Refusés and the first historical avant- gardes with their urge to shock the bourgeoisie. One of the first historical avant-garde movements to incorporate institutional critique was Futurism. In the Manifesto of Futurism, the Futurists claimed that they wanted to destroy institutions such as museums and libraries. The Dada movement in particular questioned the status of art, the role of the artist as genius and aesthetics in institutions. They were against the bourgeois and elitist character of the institutions of art and their power to determine what art is or should be. The Dadaists even invented the term ‘anti-art’. The neo avant-garde incorporated institutional critique in their land art and conceptual art works. Institutional critique is still prevalent in contemporary art. The difference is that the critique is more focused and specialised in certain themes, such as racial or gender inequalities in the institutions of art.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 182 ‘Ilya and Emilia Kabakov House of Dreams’. Serpentine Galleries. 1 June 2016
! 51! Conclusion
In the first chapter, it became clear that everything started with Marcel Duchamp’s signed porcelain urinal titled Fountain (1913) and his Bicycle Wheel (1913), which shook up the art world and changed the perception of art for good. The readymade challenged the notion that art should be autonomous, irreproducible and authentic. The notion of the artist as genius was destroyed and from then on, the notion of what art was, was altered. Ever since, artists have been drawing upon these readymade practices and the ideas that they brought about. Additionally, drawing imagery and texts from newspapers and photographs to create collages, assemblages or poetry, was first introduced by the historical avant-gardes. Another way to try to achieve the fusion of art and life is to exhibit outside of the institutions of art and to execute performances and happenings. Subsequent neo avant-garde and contemporary artists have been and are still drawing on such practices. Concluding from the previous results in this chapter, it can doubtlessly be stated that the neo avant-garde and contemporary artists have been drawing on, and are still drawing on, historical avant-garde practices. Their practices and aims, in this case intermingling art and the praxis of life, are often unmistakably similar. It is obvious that the historical avant-garde artists have left behind an important legacy for subsequent artists to build on. However, this makes the term ‘avant-garde’ even more problematic. If certain avant- garde practices are repeated by a subsequent ‘avant-garde’ movement, is it still able to possess the same shock factor or value and can it still be defined as avant-garde? As Hal Foster stated, to pose the question of repetition is to pose the question of the neo avant-garde.183 Subsequently, contemporary artists have been drawing upon former historical and neo avant-garde practices. Does this mean that this art is not advanced or valuable? According to Hal Foster, this is not the case. He believes that the neo avant-garde has produced new aesthetic experiences, cognitive connections and political interventions. Therefore, other criterions arise by which art can claim to be advanced.184
In looking at medium specificity, it appeared that there are many similarities between the historical and neo avant-garde and contemporary artists as regards to dealing with this. We have seen that the historical avant-garde started to relinquish imitating existing and realistic forms. They began to focus more on the materiality of the paint and canvas. Characteristic for these artists is the deformation of form and the dissolving of subject matter or content into form, which led to non-representational and abstract art and ultimately, complete abstraction. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 183 Foster, Hal. ‘Who’s Afraid of the Neo Avant-Garde?’. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the end of the Century. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996: 4. 184 Ibid p.14
! 52! At the time of the neo avant-garde, medium specificity and materiality became important matters in the art world. There appeared to be a renewed focus on the flatness of the two-dimensional picture plane, the negation of depth, illusion and gestural painting, an urge for purity and a focus on the unique characteristics of the medium. It became clear that what makes these works artworks is not the materiality, but the fact that these are new entities, not imitations. Theories of art are also of the utmost importance as they elevate these works up into the art world and prevent the art from merely being considered objects. Many contemporary artists are still commonly focusing on the flatness and two dimensionality of the picture plane, rather than seeking illusion or depth. This often leads to full abstraction, which is of frequent occurrence in contemporary painting. It is clear that there is an ongoing development in the use of medium specificity, the focus on the characteristics of the particular medium and working towards full abstraction. Techniques and mediums have changed and developed, as is only natural over a large period of time. For example, the use of computers and printers to produce artworks has increased immensely over the past decades. Nevertheless, it can be said that the previously named focus points have not changed much with these historical avant-garde, neo avant-garde and contemporary artists and that there is a clear, ongoing trend to be seen as to medium specificity.
In the third chapter, it became clear that institutional critique has been an important artistic practice since the first historical avant-garde movements, although ‘institutional critique’ as a term did not derive until the 1970s. Dominant institutions of art that determined what art was or should be were the target for critique in many historical avant-gardist works. However, the paradox is that these avant-gardes often wanted to be acknowledged as artists and for their art to be exhibited in these museums and galleries, which often happened in the end. The first defined wave of institutional critique emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The main aim of these artists was to question and criticise the authoritarian role of the institutions of art. Their aims were similar to those of the historical avant-garde, as well as their practices. The second wave of institutional critique is considered to have emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Their practices assigned a more central and present role to the artists and their voices, which resulted in many performance pieces and critical writings. Supposedly, a third wave of institutional critique emerged after the 2000s. However, based on my previous results, I would state that the first wave of institutional critique could be traced back to as early as the 20th century with the emergence of the first historical avant-gardes. They have laid an important foundation of institutional critique on which subsequent neo avant-garde and contemporary artists have built on and are still building on today. Looking back at the development of and changes in institutional critique, it is clear that
! 53! institutional critique has become increasingly specific. It appears that there has been a shift from a broad range of critique on the dominance of the institutions of art and their power to determine what art is or should be (with the historical and neo avant-gardes), to more specific points of critique such as gender and racial inequality (from the second wave on). Nonetheless, critique on the dominance and power of institutions of art is still adequately alive and actual in the contemporary art world. But how specific institutional critique practisers may be, institutional critique is an ambiguous and complicated matter, perhaps now more than ever. As Andrea Fraser wonders, “How can artists who have become art historical institutions themselves, claim to critique the institution of art?”185 Fraser speaks of certain nostalgia for institutional critique at a time when artists could still take up a critical position outside of the institution. According to Fraser, institutional critique has been institutionalised and therefore, there no longer is an ‘outside’ of the institution.186 If artists themselves have become part of the institution, how are they still able to analyse and criticise it in a neutral, objective manner? Thus, the question that arises is, does this destroy the possibility for the existence of a certain ‘contemporary avant-garde’?187
To conclude with answering my main question, is there a contemporary avant-garde according to the preconditions of the avant-garde movements, and if so, what would it entail? I would say that, according to the preconditions of the historical and neo avant-garde movements and by comparing their practices with contemporary art practices, there are clear similarities to be seen. Intermingling art and the praxis of life, using medium specificity and institutional critique are still prevalent in contemporary art, as we have seen. However, the fact of the matter with the avant-garde is that, almost by definition, no avant-garde is adequately theorised or defined by its own time. This is challenging, because it must anticipate both historiographic and critical accounts to catch up to be able to be defined in retrospect.188 The term avant-garde is mostly applied after the avant-gardes have been institutionalised. Otherwise, they would not be known and/or valued, or at least not as much. The avant-garde is regarded as being able to bring about changes in the art world and change the perception of art. To get to this stage, operators who are part of the institutions of art need to know about these works and artists first. For example, some of the previously discussed contemporary artists are currently not seen or described as avant-garde. However, they presumably will be in a few decades, just like their predecessors were eventually defined as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 185 Fraser, Andrea. ‘Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’. Artforum. (September 2005): 287. 186 Ibid. 187 Hoogakker, Claire. Unpublished paper ‘The Existence or Non-Existence of a Certain Contemporary Avant-Garde’ for the course Art as Institution and Its Critique. Amsterdam: The University of Amsterdam, 2014: 6. 188 ‘Avant-garde’. The Chicago School of Media Theory. 20 June 2016
! 54! avant-garde once they had become institutionalised. The paradox with this is that it is quite impossible for artists to be regarded and valued as an artist and disengage the institutions of art simultaneously. Artists need the institutions to be regarded as an artist, to make a name and living for themselves and to be taken seriously as an (‘avant-garde’) artist. Duchamp was only valued and known once he exhibited his first ready-mades. Would his work have never been exhibited in institutions, he would have never been known; at least not to the current extent. Besides, the definition of the avant-garde itself is quite questionable, which describes the avant-garde as “experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics. The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm.”189 This suggests that the avant-garde should consistently be innovative and experimental, which inherently means that it should never repeat previous avant-garde practices. However, many neo avant-garde artists have repeated historical avant- garde practices. Subsequently, contemporary artists repeating previous avant-garde practices are also repetitive. They are not always as innovative or experimental as the first avant-gardes. But is this even still possible? In this age, it seems as if everything has repeatedly been done before. In final conclusion, it can be stated that the term avant-garde is quite ambiguous and questionable and often, inconsistently and retrospectively applied. Therefore, it is hard to answer my main question firmly and undoubtedly at the current moment. I can solely compare the historical and neo avant-gardes with contemporary artists, discover trends and speculate about the future, as I have done. However, if there would be a contemporary avant-garde today, it would presumably not be defined at the current moment. For now, we can look back in retrospect to all the historical and neo avant-garde artists who have laid the cornerstone of the foundation on which contemporary artists are still building on today. Let us wait and see if these contemporary artists become institutionalised and possibly be defined as avant-garde in a few decades. All we can do is patiently wait to see what is awaiting us in the future of art.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 189 ‘Avant-garde’. English Dictionary. 20 June 2016
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! 61! Chapter 1: List of images
1.1. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, porcelain urinal and paint, 61 x 36 x 48 cm, the original is lost.
1.2. Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913, metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool, 129.5 x 63.5 x 41.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
! 62!
1.3. Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I, 1964, oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 213.4 x 152.4 cm, Wadsworth Athenuem, Hartford, Connecticut.
1.4. Jasper Johns, Two Beer Cans, 1960, painted bronze, 14 x 20.3 x 12.1 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel.
! 63! 1.5. Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958, canvas, newspaper and paint on plywood, 77.8 × 115.6 × 11.7 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
1.6. Claes Oldenburg. Pastry Case, I. 1961–62, painted plaster sculptures on ceramic plates, metal platter, and cups in glass-and-metal case, 52.7 x 76.5 x 37.3 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection.
! 64!
1.7. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1962, silkscreen print, 91.5 x 91.5 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
1.8. Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes, 1964, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood, 43.3 x 43.2 x 36.5 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
! 65! 1.9. Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962, synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
1.10. Andy Warhol, Green Coca Cola Bottles, 1962, acrylic, screenprint, and graphite pencil on canvas, 210.2 × 145.1 cm, Whitney Museum of Art, New York.
! 66! 1.11. Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!, acrylic paint and oil paint on canvas, 196,3 x 172,7 x 406,4 cm, Tate Gallery, London.
!1.12. Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #30, 1963, oil, enamel and synthetic polymer paint on composition board with collage of printed advertisements, plastic flowers, refrigerator door, plastic replicas of 7-up bottles, glazed and framed colour reproduction, and stamped metal, 122 x 167.5 x 10 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. !
! 67! 1.13. James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1961-1962, oil on masonite, 228 x 365.8 cm, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. !
1.14. Richard Hamilton, Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956, digital print on paper, 26 x 25 cm, Tate Gallery, London.! !
! 68!
1.15. Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965, Wood folding chair, mounted photograph of a chair, and mounted photographic enlargement of the dictionary definition of "chair", chair 82 x 37.8 x 53 cm, photographic panel 91.5 x 61.1 cm, text panel 61 x 76.2 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
1.16. Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Shovels, 1965, three shovels and a mounted photographic enlargement of the dictionary definition of “shovel”, dimensions and collection unknown.
! 69!
1.17. Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915, readymade snow shovel from the Schwarz edition of 1964, 132 cm high, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
1.18. Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, tiger shark, glass, steel and formaldehyde solution, 217 x 542 x 180 cm, Saatchi Collection, London.
! 70!
1.19. Damien Hirst, For The Love of God, 2008, human skull encrusted with diamonds, 17.1 x 12.7 x 19 cm, collection unknown.
1.20. Damien Hirst, Pharmacy, 2012, glass, faced particleboard, painted MDF, beech, ramin, wooden dowels, aluminium, pharmaceutical packaging, desks, office chairs, foot stools, apothecary bottles, coloured water, Insect-O-Cutor, medical text books, stationery, bowls, honey and honeycomb, dimensions variable, collection unknown.
! 71!
1.21. Tracey Emin, Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-1995, 1995, appliquéd tent, mattress and light, 122 x 245 x 214 cm, Saatchi Gallery, London.
1.22. Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998, mattress, linens, pillows and objects, 79 x 211 x 234 cm, Tate, London.
! 72! !1.23. Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel, 1994, water bucket, oranges, melons, cucumber, mattress, 84 x 168 x 145 cm, Saatchi Gallery, London.
1.24. Sarah Lucas, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992, wooden table, two fried eggs and a kebab, dimensions unknown, Saatchi Gallery, London.
! 73! 1.25. Sarah Lucas, Bitch, 1995, wooden table, t-shirt, melons and chicken filet, dimensions unknown, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
1.26. Sarah Lucas, British Pavilion at Venice Biennale, 2015, dimensions and collections variable.
! 74!
1.27. Sislej Xhafa, Rocket Ship, 2011, wheelbarrow and electric blue lights, dimensions unknosn, CHRISTINE KÖNIG GALERIE, Vienna.
1.28. Jimmie Durham, Himmel und Erde Müssen Vergehen, 2000, jacket and rock, 70 x 120 x 35 cm, CHRISTINE KÖNIG GALERIE, Vienna.
! 75!
1.29. Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles, New Shelton Wet/Drys 5-Gallon Doubledecker, The New Series, 197.9 x 51 x 137 x 71.5 cm, Tate Gallery, London.
1.30. Jeff Koons, Three Balls Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985, glass tank with distilled water and basketballs, 53.6 x 123.8 x 33.6 cm, Tate Gallery, London.
! 76! 1.31. Ai Weiwei, Untitled installation, 2016, dimensions unknown, Konzerthaus, Berlin.
! 77! Chapter 2: List of images
2.1. Raoul Dufy, The Three Umbrellas, 1906, oil on canvas, 59.7 x 73.7, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
2.2. Georges Rouault, Dancer for the Ballets Russes, 1905, oil on canvas, dimensions and collection unknown.
! 78! 2.3. Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885, oil on canvas, 82 x 114 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
2.4. Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1850, oil on canvas, 165 × 257 cm, destroyed during World War II.
! 79!
2.5. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red, 1937–42, oil on canvas, 72.7 x 69.2 cm, Tate, London.
2.6. Wassily Kandinsky, Composition V, 1911, oil on canvas, 190 x 250 cm, private collection.
! 80!
2.7. Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on linen, 79.5 x 79.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
2.8. Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes, 1964-69, silkscreen ink on plywood, 50.8 x 50.8 x 43.2 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
! 81! 2.9. Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!, 1963, oil on canvas, 170 cm × 400 cm, Tate Modern, London.
2.10. Jasper Johns, Numbers in Colours, 1958-59, oil and paper on canvas, 169 x 126 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.
! 82!
2.11. Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955, oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 191.1 x 80 x 20.3 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2.12. Claes Oldenburg, Bedroom Ensemble, 1963, wood, vinyl, metal, artificial fur, cloth, and paper, 300 x 650 x 525 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
! 83! 2.13. Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950, oil on canvas, 266.7 x 525.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
2.14. Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow, 1956, acrylic on canvas, 236.2 cm × 206.4 cm, private collection.
! 84! 2.15. Clyfford Still, PH-401, 1957, oil on canvas, 287 x 292 cm, Clyfford Still Museum, New York.
2.16. Barnett Newman, Cathedra, 1951, magna on canvas, 243 x 543 cm, Barnett Newman Foundation, New York.
! 85! 2.17. Frank Stella, Concentric Squares, 1966, oil on canvas, 160 x 320 cm, private collection.
2.18. Ellsworth Kelly, Green, Blue and Red, 1962-63, oil on canvas, 231.1 x 208.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
! 86!
2.19. Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1964, oil on masonite, 121.9 × 121.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
2.20. Mark Tobey, White Space, 1955, tempera on paper, 20.5 × 31.5 cm, Guggenheim Museum, New York.
! 87!
2.21. Helen Frankenthaler, Hotel Cro-Magnon, 1954, oil on canvas, 172.7 × 205.7 cm, Courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee.
2.22. Robert Mangold, Imperfect Circle, 1973, screen print, 25.3 x 25.3 cm, private collection.
! 88!
2.23. Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963, incised gold leaf and gesso on canvas, 190.5 x 190.5 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2.24. Robert Ryman, Classico 5, 1968, oil on paper, 236.9 x 224.8 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
! 89!
2.25. Alex Olson, Record, 2012, oil on linen, 129.5 x 91.4 cm, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago.
2.26. Peter Halley, Accretive Cognition, 2010, oil on canvas, 203 x 208 cm, Mary Boone Gallery, New
! 90! York.
2.27. Sarah Morris, Untitled, 2001, screen print on paper, 73.7 x 73.7 cm, Tate, London.
2.28. Richard Serra, The Matter of Time, 2005, Installation of seven sculptures, weatherproof steel, varying dimensions, Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Guggenheim.
! 91!
2.29. Gade Wuyton, Untitled, 2010, Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 213.4 × 175.3 cm, collection of the artist.
2.30. Gerhard Richter, 919 Strip, 2012, digital print mounted between aludibond and diasec, 198 x 218 cm, Marian Goodman Gallery, London.
! 92! 2.31. Damien Hirst, Chlorpropamide, 1996, household gloss on canvas, 193.04 x 238.76 cm, Portland Art Museum, Portland.
! 93! Chapter 3: List of images
3.1. Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, mud, salt crystals and rocks, 460 m x 4600 cm, Utah, United States.
3.2. Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, 1862-63, oil paint on canvas, 208 x 264 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
! 94!
3.3. Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art The Department of Eagles, 1968, dimensions variable, Brussels.
3.4. Marcel Broodthaers, The Department of Eagles, Museum of Modern Art, 1968, dimensions variable, Brussels.
! 95! 3.5. René Magritte, Ceci N’est Pas un Pipe or The Treachery of Images, 1928-29, oil on canvas, 63.5 × 93.98 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
3.6. Robert Barry, Closed Gallery, printed invitation on paper, Amsterdam: Art & Project, December 17– 31, 1969, and Turin: Galleria Sperone, December 30, 1969, dimensions and collection unknown.
! 96!
3.7. Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll, 1970, two acrylic ballot boxes, dimensions unknown, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
3.8. Michael Asher, Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, 2007, dimensions unknown, caravan, Münster, collection unknown.
! 97! 3.9. Michael Asher, Untitled, 1974, dimensions variable, Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles.
3.10. Daniel Buren, Installation of ‘Stripes’, Prospect ’68, dimensions unknown, 1968, Düsseldorf.
! 98!
3.11. Louise Lawler, Birdcalls, 1972, list of names used in the sound installation, dimensions unknown, Dia Art Foundation, New York.
3.12. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits The Side of my Face), 1981, photograph, red painted frame, 138.1 x 101.6 cm, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.
! 99! 3.13. Guerrilla Girls, Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?, 1989, poster, 27.9 x 71.1 cm, Tate Gallery, London.
3.14. Mark Dion, Cabinets of Curiosities, 2001, variety of materials and objects in wooden cabinet, dimensions variable, Weisman Art Museum, Minnesota.
! 100!
3.15. Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office, 1992-1994, variety of materials and dimensions, Whitney Biennale, New York.
3.16. Christian Philipp Müller, Fixed Values, installation view, 1992, dimensions unknown, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
! 101!
3.17. Fred Wilson, Metalwork 1793-1880, from the exhibition Mining The Museum, 1992, metal, dimensions variable, The Contemporary & Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.
3.18. Fred Wilson, Guarded View, 1991, wood, paint, steel and fabric, dimensions unknown, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of the Peter Norton Family Foundation.
! 102!
3.19. Fred Wilson, Picasso/Who Rules?, 1991, installation view and close-up, oil and wood on canvas, dimensions unknown, Collection of the Matthew & Iris Strauss Family Foundation, Rancho Santa Fe, California.
! 103!
3.20. Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989, documentary photographs of performance, dimensions unknown, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
3.21. Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, documentary photographs of performance, dimensions unknown, private collection.
! 104!
3.22. Elmgreen & Dragset, Taking Place, installation views, 2001, dimensions unknown, Kunathalle, Zürich.
! 105! 3.23. Elmgreen & Dragset, The Welfare Show, installation view, 2006, dimensions unknown, Serpentine Galleries, London.
3.24. Elmgreen & Dragset, Powerless Structures, 2003, iron, MDF, paint, silkscreen lettering, 80 x 120 x 40 cm, Sculpture Biennial Münsterland, Münster.
! 106!