Summary Notes on all art eras including artwork and artist research and analysis
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Course
Visual Arts and Music
Institution
12th Grade
Explanations of each art era and important artists that within them. Deep analysis of artworks with facts to write a good essay, even includes "mock-essays" on question 5 artworks.
Grade 12 Art notes
Question 1: visual literacy, unseen artworks [15]
Question 2, long questions: Dada, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop art [15]
Question 3, short questions: contemporary international art [20]
Question 4, long questions/mini-essay: resistance art [20]
Question 5, essay: contemporary SA art [30]
- Six facts per artwork
1. Dada
The fountain
LHOOQ
The gift
False mirror
2. Surrealism
The seer
A dream caused by the flight of a bee near a pomegranate around the
moment of waking
Swans reflecting elephants
The disintegration of the persistence of time
3. Abstract expressionism
Abstract painting no. 4
4. Pop art
Gold Marilyn
Soft toilet
5. International contemporary art
How to explain pictures to a dead hare
7000 oak trees
Self
One in three chairs
For the love of god
The physical impossibility of death in the mind of something living
Lightening field
6. Resistance art
1976 riots
Forced removals
Butcher boys
(strip) oh yes girl
Migrant labourer
Trojan horse II
7. Contemporary RSA art
Long live the dead queen: I am a lady
Pinky pinky: model Prisoners
Make your house a castle
Plastikos
Colour me series: traced
Mealiepap pieta
Smoke drawings
Tragodia I
Skin craft
,DADA
Question 2
Dada was the response to the war and to the existing conventions of the art world. the
dada artists wanted to push boundaries, challenge the system, and encourage the
viewers to think about what they were looking at, to ask questions and think deeply
about what was placed in front of them. This was done through ready-mades,
challenging ‘pretty’ aesthetics, and generally causing trouble when appropriate. Dada
is existentialist, and this is evident in the mediums and choices made by the artists.
Meaning of DADA:
- The word DADA was taken from the infant French word for a hobby horse. The
randomly picked word embodied the meaningless and arbitrary nature of dada.
- It was a nihilistic and anarchic attitude or state of mind that destroyed the
traditional conventions of art in the same way the war destroyed many people's
lives. Dada’s nonsensical and irrational nature was a further protest to the war
which was viewed as irrational and nonsensical.
Aggressive, absurd, and uncompromising like the war
Emotional, spontaneous, humorous
The war left people disillusioned and poor and Dada acknowledged the
feeling of loss of purpose.
- Dada was very individual, being a state of mind and having no specific style
dada was filled with experimentation which allowed artists to stumble upon new
ideas and concepts randomly.
Nihilism:
- Taking comfort in Nihilism
- Everything is meaningless but it is up to humans to create meaning
- Horrors of war exposed previous values and ideals
- Soldiers basically saying wtf I don’t get paid enough for this shit and it is
pointless
Characteristics
- Irrational, illogical
- Emotional, intuitive, and spontaneous
- Fostering the anger, aggression, and destruction of war
Mimicked the nature of war
- Experimental and anarchist, conceptual
- Only accepting the reality of imagination
- First anti-art movement that criticized capitalism and war
Capitalistic nature of art and consumption, material value because of the
artist compared to value because of the actual piece
Readymades and chance:
- Took objects random objects that were mass-produced in capitalistic industries
and turned them into art through placement, concept or fuck it because they
said so (art conventions of material value)
- Allowing fate or the concept of chance to affect how art comes out as humans
have corrupted the world with their rationality and need for control (tainted
imaginationsubconscious)
, - Established art meant nothing anymore, chance made as much meaning and
made more sense than the art of a 'rotten' society
Jean Arp
The principles of chance were used to create a new type of collage. Instead of cutting
paper, he would tear and drop the sheets, allowing to fall and sticking them how they
arranged themselves. He believed it was his task as an artist to court the muse of
chance and thus eliciting from her organic concretions.
Constellation According to the
Laws of Chance
1930
Painted wood
549mmx698mm
Tate museum
He painted and dropped the
pieces of wood, sticking them
down where they landed, relying
on "lady luck" to arrange the
wood.
1. Lady luck, taking away human control
2. Goes against the idea of an artistic genius
Marcel Duchamp
Duchamp was acknowledged as a futurist and was believed to be the greatest thinker
and liberated artist of the 20th century. He used performance art, installation, kinetic
art, Readymades, appropriation, wrapping objects and various other revolutionary
concepts.
Readymades
Duchamp stood by the principle that artistic creation depended neither on established
rules nor manual artisanship, and his ready-mades were an extreme demonstration of
this principle.
- Found, banal, functional everyday objects that were mass-produced in a
capitalistic industry and placed in the context of a gallery as a form of art to
convey meaning.
- The purpose of the object was altered from utilitarian to aesthetic
- Caused outrage and shock as it was seen as a blatant disregard for the concept
of artistic genius (material value of art)
- Provocatively titled them and signed them with a
pseudonym (false name)
Fountain [a readymade sculpture of a urinal turned on its
side and signed]
, - Stated that whether he made the object or not was immaterial, and what
mattered was that he had chosen the object.
Established art meant nothing anymore, chance had as much meaning and
made more sense that the art of a 'rotten' society
- Human greed corrupts, the natural and uncontrolled is the only meaningful
thing, humans ruined the world
The Gift
Man Ray
An iron is transformed into a new and potentially threatening
object, by the addition of a row of nails. The nails and the evocation
of desire, violence, and hot metal, suggest a paradox with the
work's title, 'Cadeau' the French word for 'Gift'. The idea is not only
to make it useless but also to counter its original purpose by an
ambivalence of the senses. Hostility and aggression of the
movement. Can be interpreted deeply, but in the true nature of
Dada, this can be completely banal and arbitrary and the attempt
to grasp a rational meaning for the artwork embraces what they
were protesting. Human rationality and desire to understand and
control a meaningless object. Humour and mocking
Ripping clothing nudity
The False Mirror
Magritte
Looking into someone's eye and seeing an endless blue sky,
the painting alludes to the eye being the mirror of the soul.
This image allows the viewer to travel into the inner space of
the mind. Inner and outer worlds are one. In the 'False Mirror',
the address of the eye cannot be located. He invented the
double reality of images, by adding layers of poetic thought
and mystery. The eye is the mirror of the soul, but the soul,
and the idea of one’s true self cannot be seen through
rationality. Instead it is something abstract as the soul and
the concept of self is something that is felt on a level beyond
that of rationality. Therefore, the eye is a false mirror of the
LHOOQ, Duchamp [a postcard of Mona Lisa vandalised with a
moustache and beard, with text which colloquially translates to “she
has a hot bum”]
- Designed to provoke. It is vandalising something as famous and
beloved as the mona Lisa asking for controversy and
conversation about how we assign value to art
- Superficial appreciation of the Mona Lisa
- Inherently playful and not serious, much like the dada
movement
- Starts to ask questions about what would happen if the actual
Mona Lisa were vandalized and that would automatically
challenge the art world
- Many people would be challenged by the sexual nature of the title, and how the
facial hair plays with gender
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