Unit 3:

Modernism, Postmodernism…
then What?

ARTS 1301, Art Appreciation

Pre-Columbian American Art

Map of Olmec Territory

Mound C-1 (The Great Pyramid)
La Venta, Mexico

c. 350 BCE, Olmec

3D Model of Complex A (foreground) and Complex-C

Overview of the Olmec people

Jadeite Mask

c. 900-400 BCE

Olmec

Analyzing a piece of Olmec art

Example of later Maya jade carving

Colossal Head
(Monument 1)
La Venta, Mexico

c. 900-400 BCE

Olmec

Colossal Head During Excavation

Olmec Rubber Ball

Map of the Tuxtla Mountains and Olmec Settlements

Ball Court
Copán, Honduras

738 CE, Mayan

Xochicalco Ballcourt

Basic Design of the Mesoamerican Ballcourt

Ballgame Hoop

The Myth of the Hero Twins

Mural from El Tajín depicting Human Sacrifice

Reviving the Mesoamerican Ball Game

Teotihuacán
Ciudad de México

c. 50-250 CE

Map of Teotihuacán within Modern Mexico

Archaeological Map of the Teotihuacán Excavation

Architectural Model of Teotihuacán

Model of the Pyramid of the Sun

Artist's rendering of how the city may have looked

The Astrological Features of Teotihuacan

The Pyramid of the Sun seen from the Pyramid of the Moon

Aerial view of both Pyramids and the Avenue of the Dead

Map of Maya Territory

Castillo
Chichén Itzá, Mexico

c. 800-900 CE, Maya

Castillo before excavation

Red Jaguar Statue found in top room of Castillo

Inside El Castillo

Tikal Temple 1 (aka Temple of the Giant Jaguar)
Tikal, Guatemala

c. 732 CE, Maya

Walking through Tikal

Tikal Aerial View

Tikal Revealed by LiDAR

LiDAR Mapping of Tikal

LiDAR Mapping of Tikal

LiDAR Mapping of Tikal

Extent of Aztec/Mexica Territory

The founding of Tenochtitlán,
(folio 2 recto of the Codex Mendoza)

from Mexico City, Mexico

1541–1542 CE

Aztec/Mexica

Ink and color on paper

Mictlantecuhtli and Quetzalcoatl (folio 56 of the Borgia Codex)

from Puebla or Tlaxcala, Mexico

ca. 1400–1500 CE | Aztec/Mexica | Mineral and vegetable pigments on deerskin

Templo Mayor
(Reconstruction view with cutaway)

Tenochtitlan, Mexico City, Mexico

Aztec/Mexica

ca. 1400-1500 CE

Excavated view of Templo Mayor Ruins

Reconstruction of the Templo Mayor Complex

Map of Tenochtitlán

Reconstruction of the Great Temple Complex

Coatlicue
from Tenochtitlán, Mexico City, Mexico

Aztec/Mexica

ca. 1487–1520 CE

Artist's Rendering of Coatlicue

Ancestral Pueblo
Territory

Cliff Palace
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

c. 1150-1300 CE, Ancestral Puebloan

Artist's Rendering of Cliff Palace

Examining a Piece of Pueblo Pottery

The Life of Pueblo Pottery

Pueblo Bonito
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

mid-9th to mid-12th century CE, Ancestral Puebloan

Interior room of Pueblo Bonito

Pueblo Bonito Site Plan

Diagram of a Kiva

Entrance to a Reconstructed Kiva

Interior of a Reconstructed Kiva (left) & Great Kiva (right)

Artist's Rendering of Pueblo Bonito

A Conversation With Native Americans on Race

Adorno, Politics, & Pop Art

Untitled

Donald Judd

1969 CE
Brass and colored fluorescent Plexiglass on steel brackets

Mas o Menos (More or Less)

Frank Stella

1964 CE | Metallic powder in acrylic emulsion on canvas

Untitled

Frank Stella

1966 CE

The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham)

Dan Flavin

1963 CE | Fluorescent lights

"It is what it is, and it ain’t nothin’ else. . . .  There is no overwhelming spirituality you are supposed to come into contact with. . . . It’s in a sense a “get-in-get-out” situation. And it is very easy to understand. One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find."
- Dan Flavin

Die

Tony Smith

1962 CE | Steel

"I just picked up the phone and ordered it."

-Tony Smith on the making of Die

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Richard Hamilton

1956 CE
Collage

Hopeless

Roy Lichtenstein

1963 CE | Oil on canvas

Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day Dot Painting Technique

Oh, Jeff … I Love You, Too … But …

Roy Lichtenstein

1964 CE | Oil on canvas

Green Coca-Cola Bottles

Andy Warhol

1962 CE
Oil on canvas

The Evolution of Warhol's Style

Campbell's Soup Cans

Andy Warhol

1962 CE | Synthetic polymer paint on paper

Silkscreen printing in action

Campbell's Soup Cans (Tomato Soup)

Andy Warhol

1962 CE
Synthetic polymer paint on paper

Celebrity through the eyes of Warhol

Marilyn Diptych

Andy Warhol

1962 CE | Synthetic polymer paint on paper

Gold Marilyn

Andy Warhol

1962 CE

Synthetic polymer paint on paper

Floor Cake

Claes Oldenburg

1962 CE | Canvas and polymer paint

Plug

Claes Oldenburg

1970 CE | Painted steel

Spoonbridge with Cherry

Claes Oldenburg

1988 CE | Painted steel

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks

Claes Oldenburg

1969 CE (reworked, 1974) | Painted steel, aluminum, and fiberglass

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks

Claes Oldenburg

Canyon

Robert Rauschenberg

1959 CE

L.H.O.O.Q.

Marcel Duchamp

1919 CE

Pencil on paper reproduction (postcard) of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Marcel Duchamp

1912 CE
Oil on canvas

Brief Overview of Marcel Duchamp

Fountain

Marcel Duchamp

1917 CE
Porcelain

No, not rejected. A work can't be rejected by the Independents. It was simply suppressed. I was on the jury, but I wasn't consulted, because the officials didn't know that it was I who had sent it in; I had written the name "Mutt" on it to avoid connection with the personal. The Fountain was simply placed behind a partition and, for the duration of the exhibition, I didn't know where it was. I couldn't say that I had sent the thing, but I think the organizers knew it through gossip. No one dared mention it. I had a falling out with them, and retired from the organization. After the exhibition, we found the Fountain again, behind a partition, and I retrieved it!

-Marcel Duchamp, 1971

Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.

He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.

From The Richard Mutt Case, 1917 CE:

Fountain, (second version)

Marcel Duchamp

1950  CE
Glazed earthenware

Sold in 1999 at Sotheby's auction house to a private collector...

...for $1.7 million

That's equal to $3.35 million in 2024

Fountain, (2/8)

Marcel Duchamp

1964 CE
Glazed earthenware

Brillo Soap Pads Box

Andy Warhol

1964 CE

Plywood and paint

Photo taken during the 1964 exhibition at the Stable Gallery

Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box

Andy Warhol

1964 CE | Plywood and paint

Sold at Christie's auction house for $1.2 million...

Set of Four Boxes

Andy Warhol

1964 CE

Plywood and paint

One and Three Chairs

Joseph Kosuth | 1965 CE

Work No. 88

Martin Creed

1995 CE

Work No. 338

Martin Creed

2004 CE

Work No. 944

Martin Creed

2008 CE

Interview with Martin Creed, Conceptual Artist

Visual Studies

Visual Culture

The study of the visual aspects of culture, including art, design, media, and everyday objects, and how they shape and are shaped by social, political, and cultural contexts.

Also digs into how images, objects, and visuality communicate meaning and influence social dynamics.

Insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unimagined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or the reality they purport to depict.

-Martin Jay

In so doing, we necessarily have to ask questions about technological mediations and extensions of visual experience.

Semiotics

The study of signs and symbols, and how they communicate meaning through visual and cultural codes.

Visual Studies Terminology

Representation

The way in which images, objects, or ideas are depicted or portrayed, often reflecting and reinforcing cultural values, ideologies, and power structures.

Gaze

The way in which the viewer's perspective is constructed and influenced by cultural, social, and power dynamics, such as the male gaze or colonial gaze.

Visual Rhetoric

The use of visual elements to persuade or influence an audience, often employed in advertising, propaganda, and political imagery.

Visual Literacy

The ability to interpret, analyze, and create visual messages.

Surveillance

Monitoring and regulation of individuals and populations through visual technologies and practices, which can reinforce racial and social hierarchies.

Visuality

The structures and power relations of looking, being seen, and vision in society.

Liberty Leading the People

Eugène Delacroix

1830 CE | Oil on canvas

The Barricade (Memory of Civil War)

Ernest Meissonier

1850 CE

Oil on canvas

Liberty Leading the People (Romanticism)

The Barricade (Realism)

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn

Ai Weiwei

1995 CE

Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)

Ai Weiwei

2010 CE

Untitled
(I shop therefore I am)

Barbara Kruger

1987 CE

Untitled

Barbara Kruger

Date unknown (late 20th-century)

Untitled

Barbara Kruger

1987 CE

You're seeing less than half the picture

The Guerrilla Girls | 1989 CE

Guerrilla Girls wearing their signature Gorilla Masks

Do Women Have to be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?

Guerrilla Girls

1989 CE

“To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.

(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.)

Nakedness reveals itself.

To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded.

The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”

Nudity is placed on display.

To be naked is to be without disguise.

― John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972 CE

Sleeping Venus (a.k.a. The Dresden Venus)

Giorgione & Titian

c. 1510 CE | Oil on canvas

Venus of Urbino

Titian | 1538 CE | Oil on canvas

Examples of the "Venus Pudica" pose

Grande Odalisque

Ingres

1814 CE | Oil on canvas

Odalisque

Delcroix | 1825 CE | Oil on canvas

Odalisque

Delcroix

Grande Odalisque

Ingres

Olympia

Manet | c. 1863 CE | Oil on canvas

"Olympia" Destroys Convention

Olympia

Manet

Venus of Urbino

Titian

Portrait (Futago)

Yasumasa Morimura | 1988 CE | Photography

Sleeping Venus

Venus of Urbino

Portrait (Futago)

Olympia

Grande Odalisque

Odalisque

Modernism & Art

An Overview of 'Modernism'

Impression-Sunrise

Claude Monet

1872 CE | Oil on canvas

Example of Monet's techniques

La Moulin de la Galette

Auguste Renoir

1876 CE | Oil on canvas

Reading

Berthe Morisot

1873 CE | Oil on canvas

Bridge Over a Pool of Lilies

Claude Monet

1899 CE
Oil on canvas

The Sower

Vincent Van Gogh

1888 CE | Oil on canvas

The Night Café

Vincent Van Gogh

1888 CE | Oil on canvas

The Bathers

George Seurat

1883-1884 CE | Oil on canvas

The Bathers

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

(Rococco)

Cornelia Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures

Angelica Kauffman

(Neoclassical)

Mont Sainte-Victoire

Paul Cézanne

1902-1904 CE | Oil on canvas

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever.

-Claude Monet, 1874 CE

Merely think, here is a little square of blue,
here an oblong of pink,
here a streak of yellow,
and paint it just as it looks to you,
the exact color and shape,
until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you.

The Large Bathers

Paul Cézanne

1906 CE | Oil on canvas

Composition VIII (The Cow)

Theo van Doesburg | 1917 CE | Oil on canvas

-Theo van Doesburg, Principles of Neo-Plastic Art, 1919 CE

The visual artist can leave the repetition of stories, fairy-tales, etc., to poets and writers.

The only way in which visual art can be developed and deployed is by revaluing and purifying the formative means.
Painterly means are:
colors, forms, lines and planes.

Grey Tree

Piet Mondrian

1911 CE | Oil on canvas

Tableau I

Piet Mondrian

1921 CE

Violin & Palette

Georges Braque

1908 CE
Oil on Canvas

Years of research had proved that closed form did not permit an expression sufficient for the two artists' aims. Closed form accepts objects as contained by their own surfaces, i.e., the skin; it then endeavors to represent this closed body, and, since no object is visible without light, to paint this 'skin' as the contact point between the body and light where both merge into color.

This chiaroscuro can provide only an illusion of the form of objects.

In the actual three dimensional world the object is there to be touched even after light is eliminated.

Thus the painters of the Renaissance, using the closed form method, endeavored to give the illusion of form by painting light as color on the surface of objects. It was never more than  'illusion.'

—Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism, 1949

Dimensionality & Hypercubes

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Pablo Picasso

1907 CE
Oil on canvas

Gertrude Stein

Pablo Picasso

1906–1907 CE
Oil on canvas

Still Life with Chair-Caning

Pablo Picasso

1912 CE | Oil and oilcloth on canvas

Violon

Pablo Picasso

1911-1912 CE
Oil on canvas

The Persistence of Memory

Salvador Dalí

1931 CE | Oil on canvas

Exploring Surrealism

Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)

Meret Oppenheim

1936 CE | Fur-covered cup

The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images

René Magritte

1928–1929 CE | Oil on canvas

Surrealism & Meaning

The Son of Man

René Magritte

1964 CE | Oil on canvas

Golconda

René Magritte

1953 CE | Oil on canvas

Magritte was fascinated by the seductiveness of images.

—Charly Herscovici, 2007 CE

Ordinarily, you see a picture of something and you believe in it, you are seduced by it; you take its honesty for granted.

But Magritte knew that representations of things can lie.

These images of men aren't men, just pictures of them, so they don't have to follow any rules.

This painting is fun, but it also makes us aware of the falsity of representation.

An Interview with Dalí

Postmodernity

End of
Unit 3

2024.3 ARTS 1301: Unit 3 (RiAA)

By Jonathan Morgan

2024.3 ARTS 1301: Unit 3 (RiAA)

ARTS 1301, Lone Star College, Prof. Morgan | Updated Fall 2024

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