UVM ARTS221 FRASER

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

readings this weekend 3/27-4/1

please read the following short writings, and look up (quick google searches) all artists you do not know. I am only giving two readings in order to allow more time for looking up people.

Daniel Birnbaum, review: Painting in the Expanded Field, 1997
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n6_v35/ai_19353260/

Michelle Grabner, review of Painting at the Edge of the World, 2001
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/painting_at_the_edge_of_the_world/

Sunday, March 4, 2012

seemed relevant to discussions of the self

“It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get – the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” - David Foster Wallace

Friday, March 2, 2012

February 13 lecture notes

Bas Jan Ader

List of artist names from February 13 lecture:

Giotto

Leonardo Da Vinci

Caravaggio

Vermeer

Michaelangelo

Raphael

El Greco

Lippi

Poussin

Manet

Reynolds

Courbet

Millet

Thomas Cole

Lucio Fontana

Henri Matisse

Milton Avery

Jessica Stockholder

Daniel Buren

Andy Warhol

Martin Kippenberger

Jaspar Johns

Jim Shaw

Mike Kelley

Andreas Gursky

Rachael Harrison

Thomas Kinkaid

George Innis

Norman Rockwell

Turner

Richard Mosse

Carleton Watkins

Gustave Le Gray

Talbot Fox

Lumiere factory

Peter Davies

Stuart Davis

Giorgio Morandi

Amanda Ross-Ho

John Baldessari

Kevin Appel

Lynda Benglis

Bas Jan Ader

Alex Katz

John Currin

Tizan Haug

Bill Traylor

Alice Neel

Max Beckmann

Jenny Saville

Judith Linhares

Luc Tuymans

Dana Schutz

Selena Trepp

Jutta Koether

Josua Abelow

Polly Apfelbaum

Richard Wright

Sunday, February 26, 2012

appropriation post 3: next painting assmt

Jean-Michel Basquiet

Georg Baselitz

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.