Jean-Michel Basquiet
Georg Baselitz
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Julian Schnabel
Sandro Chia
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Chapman Brothers
Ken Price
On February 27, we will discuss Hal Foster's "The Expressive Fallacy", and I will introduce a few other writings:
• Mira Schor's "Should We Trust Anyone Under 30 (x)"; from her blog A Year of Positive Thinking
http://ayearofpositivethinking.com/2011/06/20/should-we-trust-anyone-under-30-with-some-excerpts-from-recipe-art-and-other-essays/
• Bob Nickas' "Komplaint Dept. Richard Prince Vibration Yeah!"; from this month's Vice Magazine
www.vice.com/read/komp-laint-dept-richard-prince-vibration-yeah
and a first draft of my own writing (started Saturday upon reading Nickas's writing)
• "Some Complaints: On Komplaint Dept Richard Prince Vibration Yeah!"
to be posted after this post
I will also contextualize the Foster essay a bit by showing images of some of the neo-expressionist artists of the eighties he refers to throughout the essay, and we can re-visit some of the appropriation artists we discussed last week.
Through reading Foster's essay, we should be considering the conundrum he proposes about the possibility of "pure" expression given it's very status as a form, or even formula. In her essay, Mira Schor describes an assignment she devised around Foster's essay, which explores expression and appropriation as polar opposites. Students would make two works around the same subject, one expressive, and the other using appropriation strategies. Though she recounts the results as disappointing, we may attempt this same project, seeing if we can avoid that which was disappointing. Schor's assignment is ours (I am appropriating it! but with her permission), and is in blue type below.
Recently, in an effort to reinforce the link between seminar readings and studio practice, after my students read various standard texts on appropriation and simulation, including Hal Foster’s “The Expressive Fallacy,” I asked them to make two art works on the same subject, the first using appropriational techniques and strategies, the second working expressively. The results were disappointing. At first I felt that their use of appropriation was timid and inept, which seemed strange considering the pervasiveness of appropriation in the culture at large. Next it occurred to me that the real difficulty might lie in doing something expressively, with any authenticity or necessity at the level of the image, the story, the stroke, the line, the object. It is a strangely complex paradox: self-expression and authenticity form the bedrock of the rhetoric of art practice, yet the critique of authenticity and originality have been so effective (even when the artist is uneducated to theory), and also simulation, conventionalized commodification, and sampling are so present in every day existence, that the hardest challenge for an artist today is to make an authentic mark that represents personal or formal investigation. My students’ predicament suggests that current cultural conditions are such that Recipe Art may be the only solution for a majority of artists who are trapped between a surplus of cultural quotation and the present loss of access to anything passing for an “authentic” artistic gesture.
