My mission: Invite people to the pink area to create art and enlarge the world.
곰브리치는 말했다. “미술은 아름다운 것이 아니라 새로운 것이다. (…)미술가에게 요구되는 유일한 과업은 ‘새로운 것’의 창조다. 미술이라는 것은 존재하지 않는다. 다만 미술가들이 있을 뿐이다”
시중의 유행과 작품 판매의 유혹에 흔들리지 않고, 무엇이 ‘새로운 미술’인가에 대한 질문을 던지며 우직하게 길을 걷는 이들의 외로움을 안다. 그 실존적 불안을 어떤 화가는 작가로 성공하려면 ‘우기기, 버티기, 쑤시기’ 세 가지를 잘해야 한다는 말로 표현했다.
Art Since 1950 (Part I) | Art History Teaching Resources
Based in Washington DC, Virginia B. Spivey (author) received her A.B. in art history from Duke University, and M.A. and Ph.D. in art history and museum studies from the joint program at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She has over 20 years teaching art history in museum and higher education settings, including MoCA Cleveland, UNC-Asheville, Georgetown University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art; and as an independent educational consultant, she developed expert content and learning resources for clients such as Smarthistory.org and Pearson-Prentice Hall’s Higher Education Division. Her professional service includes tenure as chair of CAA’s Education Committee and a member of ISSOTL’s Advocacy and Outreach Committee.
Prior to her current position as Director of AP Art History at The College Board, she served on AHTR’s leadership collective as a contributing editor and editor in chief, and she spearheaded AHTR’s 2015 initiative to establish Art History Pedagogy and Practice, where she continues to serve as co-founding editor.
Jon Mann (editor) is an Adjunct Lecturer at Lehman College, a Senior Contributor at Artsy, and a lecture contributor and editor at Art History Teaching Resources and Art History Pedagogy and Practice.
Kaegan Sparks (editor) is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Publication Associate in Critical Anthologies at the New Museum, New York.
- How does this object show the influence of art we’ve studied in class?
- How does it depart from these earlier practices in either form or meaning?
- When/where was this object produced?
- How does it reflect (or not) its historical context?
Online:
In addition to survey texts, an extraordinary amount of material on this period is available online. Specific links are included with the content suggestions below, but other excellent resources include:
Art21: PBS mega-site on contemporary art. Features video interviews with artists, a critical blog, and an encyclopedia of artists and related information.
ArtBabble: A “channel” combining video content from major museums. Allows browsing by art period and style, medium, and museum. Hosted by Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Artsy: An online database of contemporary artworks and content developed in partnership with museums and galleries worldwide.
Hyperallergic: Serious and playful art commentary.
Khan Academy (Art History: Toward a Global Culture): Formerly Smarthistory, this site includes short videos and essays contributed by scholars with expertise in all areas of art history. Content-based quizzes offer students good self-assessment/study tools.
Museum Websites:
The Art Institute of Chicago
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Museum of Modern Art, NY (MOMA)
National Gallery of Art, Washington (NGA)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM)
Tate Modern, London
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Glossary:
Abstract Expressionism (The New York School)
Action Painting /Color Field (Color Imagist) Painting
Assemblage
Benday Dots
Carl Jung
Clement Greenberg
Environments (term coined by Alan Kaprow to describe installation practices of the 1950s and 1960s)
Existentialism
Gutai
Happenings
Hard Edge Painting
Harold Rosenberg
John Cage
Minimalism
Pop Art
Post-Painterly Abstraction
Proto-Pop (Neo-Dada) (terms used to describe art of the 1950s that incorporated elements of material culture and served as a precursor to Pop Art of the 1960s)
Art Since 1950 (Part II) | Art History Teaching Resources
Based in Washington DC, Virginia B. Spivey (author) received her A.B. in art history from Duke University, and M.A. and Ph.D. in art history and museum studies from the joint program at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She has over 20 years teaching art history in museum and higher education settings, including MoCA Cleveland, UNC-Asheville, Georgetown University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art; and as an independent educational consultant, she developed expert content and learning resources for clients such as Smarthistory.org and Pearson-Prentice Hall’s Higher Education Division. Her professional service includes tenure as chair of CAA’s Education Committee and a member of ISSOTL’s Advocacy and Outreach Committee.
Prior to her current position as Director of AP Art History at The College Board, she served on AHTR’s leadership collective as a contributing editor and editor in chief, and she spearheaded AHTR’s 2015 initiative to establish Art History Pedagogy and Practice, where she continues to serve as co-founding editor.
Jon Mann (editor) is an Adjunct Lecturer at Lehman College, a Senior Contributor at Artsy, and a lecture contributor and editor at Art History Teaching Resources and Art History Pedagogy and Practice.
- How does this object show the influence of earlier artists of the post-1965 period?
- How does it depart from these earlier practices in either form or meaning?
- How does it reflect (or not) its historical context?
The rapidly changing landscape of twenty-first-century art ensures much of the art discussed may soon be less relevant—if not completely obsolete—to the student of contemporary art!
Glossary
[Note: The definitions provided below are generalized summaries.]
Body and Performance Art: a range of creative practices that employ the human body as the primary material of art, often known through photographs, video, or other means of archival documentation.
Conceptual Art: Conceptual Art refers to a number of artists working in the late 1960s and 70s who emphasized the initial concept over their final artist product. The term may also be applied more broadly to any artists with more conceptual interests.
The “Dematerialization” of Art: Lucy Lippard and John Chandler coined “the ‘dematerialization’ of art” to describe numerous art practices emerging in the mid-1960s that diminished or eliminated the material object of art.
Earthworks/Land Art: Artworks that exist in the natural landscape or that employ environmental elements, Earthworks and Land Art emerged amidst the conceptual and process-based practices of Post-Minimalism, although the terms are often applied more broadly to any art of the past or present that highlights the relationships of humanity to nature.
Feminist Art: A term used to reference the historical emergence of artists inspired by the Feminist Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s who explored ways to give artistic form to the political, social, and personal experiences of women, Feminist Art is a term more broadly applied to any artists who emphasize feminist issues or focus on the interests of women through their art.
Institutional Critique: Offering social or political commentary, Institutional Critique is a strain of conceptual art practices that highlight institutional power structures and subvert traditional systems of display and exhibition.
Minimalism:A distinctive style of abstract art that first emerged in the early 1960s to describe sculpture, Minimalism is sometimes used to describe related practices in other artistic media and disciplines.
Pop Art: Developing in the early 1960s, Pop Art is characterized by its reference to popular culture and the mass media.
Post-Minimalism: Post-Minimalism refers to many practices and artistic styles that emerged after the 1960s that were characterized by formal abstraction and an heightened interest in materials and issues of artistic process.
Postmodernism: A set of related philosophical beliefs, critical approaches, and artistic practices that developed in the 1970s and 1980s, Postmodernism rejected the universalist assumptions of Modernism by exposing and deconstructing dominant ideologies.
Relational Aesthetics: a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in the late 1990s to refer to a variety of artistic practices that encouraged human interaction and social exchange. This is related to the emergence of Social Practices art, which further build on these methods toward goals of political activism and social justice.
Social Practices art / political activism / social justice
Pop Art and Minimalism [Slide: Warhol and Judd] provided a catalyst for the new artistic formats that emerged in the mid-1960s. These emerged in a broad context of social unrest, characterized by student protests, anti-war sentiments, and the rise of the Feminist, Civil, and Gay Rights movements. The result was to dismantle established traditions and institutions of authority throughout contemporary culture.
In a 1968 essay “The Dematerialization of Art,” Lucy Lippard and John Chandler acknowledged the shift away from painting and sculpture in favor of art that emphasized creative process and conceptual interests over the final object. Although terms “Conceptual,” Process-Based,” “Earth or Land Art,” and “Performance” are used to classify art of the period, these categories quickly explode into a network of diverse but related styles, practices, philosophical concerns, and interdisciplinary interests that anticipate the plurality of Postmodernism and late twentieth-century art.
LeWitt’s work opens up discussion of central themes of idea, language, process, form, artistic authority, and viewer interaction. Taken to the extreme, conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth and the British Art-Language collective often eliminated the material object and instead presented their ideas through language itself. Artists like John Baldessari relied instead on photographic or other methods of documentation to record their creative process and to raise issues around artistic authority, the role of institutional context, and the commodity value of art in culture.
Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1973) highlights the intersection of conceptual practices with body art and performance and their relationship to emerging feminist interests of the period. Antin’s work addresses traditional representations of women, cultural ideals of female beauty, and her dual role as an object and maker of art. This example is a conceptual work of art, based on Antin’s initial idea to show the physical changes in her body over 37 days as she lost ten pounds, a process that she systematically documented through a series of photographs. It might also be considered a performance, done privately using the artist’s body as its medium and made public through the archival photographs now exhibited in the gallery.
Art Since 1950 (Part II) | Art History Teaching Resources
Based in Washington DC, Virginia B. Spivey (author) received her A.B. in art history from Duke University, and M.A. and Ph.D. in art history and museum studies from the joint program at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She has over 20 years teaching art history in museum and higher education settings, including MoCA Cleveland, UNC-Asheville, Georgetown University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art; and as an independent educational consultant, she developed expert content and learning resources for clients such as Smarthistory.org and Pearson-Prentice Hall’s Higher Education Division. Her professional service includes tenure as chair of CAA’s Education Committee and a member of ISSOTL’s Advocacy and Outreach Committee.
Prior to her current position as Director of AP Art History at The College Board, she served on AHTR’s leadership collective as a contributing editor and editor in chief, and she spearheaded AHTR’s 2015 initiative to establish Art History Pedagogy and Practice, where she continues to serve as co-founding editor.
Jon Mann (editor) is an Adjunct Lecturer at Lehman College, a Senior Contributor at Artsy, and a lecture contributor and editor at Art History Teaching Resources and Art History Pedagogy and Practice.
Conclusion: Contemporary Art History
Like our world in the twenty-first century, today’s art is characterized by the multiplicity and connectivity of globalization. For example, Yinka Shinobare and Xu Bing make art that blends Western practices with non-Western traditions and reflects the intermingling of different cultures, and Julie Mehretu’s large-scale paintings resemble visual maps that suggest the overlapping histories and pathways that connect us all.
What we find is that contemporary art history is a topic, possibly a field, that is currently under construction.
- Have students brainstorm key themes in art since 1950 (perhaps treated holistically with Art Since 1950, Part I). What new themes do they think will be important to artists in the next five years? In the next twenty years? In the next century?
- Create a visual concept map that draws lines connecting different artists of the contemporary period (1950–present). Have students look for common influences, materials and practices, and issues explored by artists of this period. How might this map differ from similar maps made for earlier periods?
- What other contemporary art forms not discussed in this class do students enjoy? How might these reflect (or not) ideas and interests of the contemporary artists we’ve studied in class? This might include film, music, animation, illustration/graphic arts, video games, design, or fashion. Can students make a case for why they might be included in the study of contemporary art history?