Postmodern criticism and art

Appropriation Irony Parody Deconstruction Identitity Gender All these characteristics of the postmodern in art can be found in the work of Marcel Duchamp and his Dadaist contemporaries Man Ray Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy 1921-22 Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q. 1919-40

Marcel Duchamp The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) In this work Duchamp portrays human sexual functions in the form of an improbable machine. The Bride section is at the top and must be fertilised by the male section below. Duchamps ironic machine is painted on glass, with appropriated images such as the chocolate grinder and the occulists rings, recycled images from earlier works by the artist, and Random and accidental elements such as the shots and the cracks in the glass.

Appropriation, Mechanical Reproduction

Andy Warhol Dick Tracy 1960

Andy Warhol Auto portrait 1966

Appropriation

Yasumasa Morimura Futago, cibachrome photographic print 1990 print, 1990

Appropriation, Identity and Gender

source Actress Ursula Andress Julie Rrap Camouflage # 1 (Ursula) photograph mounted on lexcen 2000

Appropriation and Gender

Julie Rrap Overstepping digital print 2001

source

Ren Magritte, Le Modle Rouge III, 1937

Appropriation

Julie Rrap Untitled (after Manets Olympia) 2002

source

Edouard Manet Olympia 1863

Identity

Tracy Emin Everyone Ive ever slept with 1997

Identity

Tracy Emin Theres a lot of money in chairs

Identity

Tracy Emin Helter Fing Skelter 2001

Tracy Emin
Emin's art is one of disclosure, using her life events in works ranging from story telling, drawing, filmmaking, installation, painting, neon, photography, appliqud blankets and sculpture. Emin exposes herself, her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in an incredibly direct manner. Often tragic and frequently humorous, it is as if by telling her story and weaving it into the fiction of her art she somehow transforms it. From the White Cube Gallery, London

Identity and new media

Marc Quinn Self 1991 Frozen Blood (re-cast 1996)

Marc Quinn Alison Lapper Pregnant White marble

 Blood sculpture 'melted'

Self was bought for a rumoured 13,000 One of the Brit Art movement's most remarkable works, a sculpture made entirely of human blood, may accidentally have been destroyed. According to a report in The Guardian, there has been speculation in the art world that Self, by Marc Quinn, had melted after the refrigerator it was stored in was disconnected by builders. The work, which is a life size cast of the artist's head, is made out of in nine pints of his own frozen, congealed blood. It has to be kept refrigerated or it will melt. The work is owned by Charles Saatchi, the key patron of Brit Art, and the owner of the Saatchi Gallery along with one of the biggest private collections of contemporary British art. It has been reported that builders who arrived to extend Mr Saatchi's London kitchen at the request of his partner, TV chef Nigella Lawson, unplugged the kitchen freezer where the head was kept. They discovered the mistake when red liquid was found oozing across the floor.

Identity, race and culture

Chris Ofili The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) Ofili's work is made up of paper collage, oil paint, glitter, polyester resin and elephant dung on linen.

Identity, race and culture

Lin Onus Fruit Bats, 1991

New media

Damien Hirst The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) Shark suspended in a formaldehyde bath

A comment by the artist

'[After] the first piece of art I ever sold, I paid someone else to make the next one, so I could actually keep going out drinking.' (Damien Hirst).

Appropriation

GoyaThe Disasters of War Plate 39 Great Deeds - Against the Dead

source

Jake and Dinos Chapman Great Deeds Against The Dead (1994)

Appropriation and irony

The exhibition, Works from the Chapman Family Collection 2002, paid ironic homage to the fast food giant McDonalds through a fictional collection of rare ethnographic objects. The objects were carved from aged wood and presented in a parody of traditional museum displays. They appeared genuinely authentic until a closer inspection revealed the corporate symbolism of the hamburger chain. Issues of colonialism, capitalism, racism and globalisation are inherent in the work yet no critique or political statement is offered by the artists. Rather, the Chapmans aim is to unearth the contradictions and hypocrisies present in contemporary culture, posing questions but providing no answers. Saatchi paid 1m for their widely praised Works from the Chapman Family Collection, a group of totemistic wooden figures with a mysterious yen for fast food.

Appropriation, Irony, Parody

source Glen Baxter Trouble At The Design Museum

Gerrit Rietveld Red-Blue Chair 1917

Irony

a late Mondrian

Glen Baxter Im still not entirely convinced it is a late Mondrian drawled Buchanan

STELARC Third Hand

Photographer: F.Parr Image courtesy of Sherman Galleries

Mike Parrs performance Malevich (A Political Arm) performance for

as long as possible For thirty hours between the third and fourth of May 2002, a man sat in a gallery with his only arm nailed to the wall.

From: Mike Parr: internet performance Adam Geczy

The origin of performance art can be located in 1917 in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire, where Hugo Ball, his partner Emmy Hennings and several other notable Dadaists, spouted nonsense verse to accompany nonsense acts to protest the Great War and the preciousness of art in general: no more cute art in frames, no more static art that only makes the philistines richer. From its beginnings, then, a critical part of the content of performance art has been its ephemerality. Once performed, or in fact at any given moment during the performance, it can never be the same again.

Site specific installation

Richard Long A Circle in Alaska Bering Straight Driftwood 1977

Gallery installation -unconventional media

Richard Long Untitled 2003 River Avon mud with acrylic medium on wood

Site specific installation

Andy Goldsworthy Red Pool, Scaur River, Dumfriesshire, 1994/95

Site specific installation

Andy Goldsworthy Snow Spires, Ellesmere Island 1994/95

Artists statement -Andy Goldsworthy

"At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient-only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete." -Andy Goldsworthy Andy Goldsworthy hit the headlines in June 2000 when he placed 13, one-ton snowballs around London for a Brit Art exhibition.

Andy Goldsworthy Installations Grise fjord, Ellesmere Island March/April1989

Jean Tinguely Homage to New York.

A self-constructing and self-destroying work of art. Demonstration in sculpture garden of Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 17, 1960

New Materials and Technology, Playfulness

Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, 1997.

Appropriation

Robert Venturi Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1962

source :Leon Battista Alberti The Church of San Francesco, Rimini, Italy 1446-68

The Architecture of Deconstruction

Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, Paris 1983-91

Appropriation
Two Follies: Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, and Pirro Ligorio Villa Bomarzo 16th Century

The Architecture of Deconstruction - the architectural realisation of Derridas theories Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette One aspect of the Parc de la Villette's deconstructive nature is its inversion of the traditional hierarchy of structure over ornamentation. The insides of structures are, in places, exposed on exteriors and used as decoration. The site also demonstrates how formal construction principles can be co-opted by purely ornamental considerations. The result is wonderfully disorienting to say the least. From the standpoint of poststructuralism, the Parc de la Villette participates in deconstruction's elevation of the signifier to a more active relationship with the signified.

postmodern new technologies, escalation of shock

"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually." Damien Hirst

postmodern appropriation, recontextualisation (see next frame for possible source)

New York 9/11 Tribute in Light memorial 3/11/02 to 4/13/02

possible source

Albert Speer The Cathedral of Light German Nazi Party Rally at Nuremburg 1934

Feminism, Parody, Irony and Political Dissent

The Womens Homeland Terror Alert System

The Guerilla Girls