1. Contemporary
Issues
1990 - 2003
Jeff Wall, Picture for Women, 1979

2. 1990 - 2003: Art Reflects on its History
Yinka
Shonibare
Untitled
1997
• Intentional historicism Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Major
• Return to traditional art forms General Joseph Sabine, ca. 1700
• Revisionist approach (identity politics,
questioning tenets of modernism)

3. Race and its Representation
• Shifting notions of the
politics of identity
• From essentialist and
positive notions of identity
(blackness, femininity, etc) to
identity as a social
construction
• Complicates identity so that
it cannot be easily
categorized or stereotyped
• Uses critique of
documentary forms of racial
representation, personal
Adrian Piper, from The Mythic Being series
testimonies, ambiguous 1972-76
narratives, past art forms
• Photo-conceptualism

4. Portraits of Family Life
Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen
Table Series, 1990
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPDInpNoO50

5. Portraits of Community
Roy DeCarava, from The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955

6. Subversive Beauty: Troubling Typologies of Black Identity
Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer, 1986
Vermeer, Young Woman
with a Water Jug, 1665
Ellen Gallagher, Mr. Terrific from the DeLuxe series, 2005

7. The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
Dave Chappelle, Racial Stereotype Pixies
http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/48511/detail/

8. The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998

9. The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
• Black-paper cutout silhouettes &
projections on white gallery and
museum walls
• Inspired by fantasies of ante-
Bellum South
• Extreme caricatures of Black
slaves & slave-owners
• Depicts graphic subjects (sex,
violence)
• Revision of older art forms, the
silhouette & the cyclorama
Kara Walker, Camptown Ladies, 1998
http://video.pbs.org/video/1237715781/
Silhouette of George
And Martha Washington

10. The Politics of Identity: The Stereotypical Grotesque
Gettysburg Cyclorama

11. Disegno (Drawing) vs. Colorito (Color)
Giorgione, The Tempest
Michelangelo, Madonna and Child

12. The Odalisque: Challenging Disegno
Ingres
Delacroix
Renoir
Matisse

13. Drawing in the 20th Century
The Matrix (grid): Abstracting the Object
Mondrian
Pollock
The Grapheme: Abstracting the Subject
Erasure: Abstracting Time
Kentridge

14. Drawing & Time:
From Deskilling to Re-skilling
• Short film of animated
charcoal drawings using
erasure and stop-shoot
technique
• Felix in Exile (1994) one
of many “drawings for
projection”
• Recurring characters &
love triangle among
William Kentridge, from Felix in Exile, 1994
Soho Ekstein (a mine-
owner/capitalist), Felix
Teitelbaum (an
artist/self-portrait?), Mrs.
Ekstein (wife of Ekstein)
• Setting is Paris hotel
room, Felix gazing into
mirror at Nandi, a South
African surveyor,
looking back at him
• The gaze
• Apartheid ended in 1994

15. William Kentridge
Felix in Exile
1994
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF5cngcXqSs

16. Palimpsest
• Linear overlay
of forms
• Ancient
process
• Allegory of
memory, time,
history
• Kentridge’s
work a Ruffignac cave drawings
ca. 14,000 BCE
meditation on
the fate of
handicraft?
• Drawing as
obsolete
among new
technologies Robert Rauschenberg
Erased de Kooning
1953

17. New Media Bill Viola, The Crossing, 1996
• Minimalism & the “expanded field”
• Extended into film and video installations
• Made possible by technological advances
in ’80s (projectors, etc)
• Emphasis on viewer’s perception of the
work in context (spectatorship), ultimately
subjective
• Reflects back on the viewer’s own body
(sensations) immersed in a image-sound
space
• In many cases, activating (through
movement and sound) traditional art & its
subject matter (ecstasy, conversion)
• Spiritual & religious meanings suggested
by Viola’s work
• Uses elements (fire, water) as allegories
of transformation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHqhaH6m9pY
• The Sublime
Viola, Reflecting Pool, 1977-79
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4498864086957786589#

18. The Sublime
Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho (clip)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1jkoMfPa40

19. Pictorial Photography
Getrude Kasebier, The Sketch, ca. 1903

20. Pictorial Photography
Sam Taylor-Wood
Soliloquy I, 1998 Luca Signorelli
c-type color print Lamentation Over
the Dead Christ
ca. 1502
Henry Wallis
The Death of Chatterton
ca. 1856 predella – base of an
altarpiece

21. The Photographer of Modern Life
• Digital manipulation of
photograph recalls mid-19th
century painting & pictorial
photography
• Large color transparencies set in
light boxes
• Shift away from documentary
photography
• Questions the veracity of the
image
• Interest in pictorial composition,
size & narrative aligns it with the
history of figurative painting Jeff Wall, Storyteller, 1986
• To restore or make whole again
the fractured image (broken up
in collage, photomontage) in
avant-garde art by returning to
birth of avant-garde (Manet) &
photography (mid-19th century)
• Shows homeless native
Manet,
Canadians in home town of
Luncheon on
Vancouver the Grass
1863
“a transgression against
the institution of transgression” – Wall

22. Art of the 21st Century