What is an Author?

What is an Artist?

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Pre modern ideas of the artist

• Prior to the Renaissance artists were craftsmen - anonymous workers whose objective was to fulfill the requirements of their brief.

• In the Renaissance the artist was hardly a free agent - contracts from patrons made detailed demands on what and how the artist was produce.

• Up until the birth of the modern artist in the 19th century, artists usually ran studio workshops where artworks were frequently collectively produced -with the ‘master’ taking responsibility for the more intricate or difficult work (head and hands).

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Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847)Friedrich in his Studio (1812)

Henry Wallis (1830-1916)Chatterton 1855-6Tate Gallery, London

Roots of the Modern artist - Romanticism -The Birth of the Individual

“when they are not sufferers for the human race, they suffer for their own greatness, for the grand mannerof their being, for their hatred of philistinism. For the discomfort they feel among the pretentious commonplaces, the meantrivialities of their surrounding…”

Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1834, pg..99

The modern mythic artist • A troubled, anguished member of

society - existing in the margins. Elevated above society. ‘The happy few’ - the ‘little church of the elect’. A secular martyr -the artist battles against a philistine society

• The artwork is an external material, expression of this inner suffering. Brush marks are the visual expression of this pain. This expression is unique and original. The artist has a signature style all of his own. Marks of distinction.

• A key element of the artistic uniqueness is his refusal to follow the norm -his work is an expression of a subjectivity free of constraints. This ‘freedom’ is closely linked to ideas about his ‘genius’.

• The artist is celebrated as possessing a child like/ primitive essence uncorrupted by society - “when we are no longer children we are dead” (Brancusi)

Edouard Manet (1832-1883)The Artist (1875)

Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899)Self Portrait (1895)

‘obstinate dreamers for whom art has remained a faith and not a profession; enthusiastic folk…whose loyal heart beatshigh in the presence of all that is beautiful.”

Henri Murger “Scenes of Bohemian life”

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“no merchant traffics in my heart.”

Robert Browning

‘Society always has a destructive influence upon an artist.’

John Ruskin ‘The Stones of Venice’

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Maurizio Cattelan Martin Kippenberger

Mocking the Modernist Artist

Roots of this Demythologizing and debunking of the male artist as hero

• Neo Dada - Jasper Johns and Robert Rauscenburg - Duchampian legacy - depersonalised subject matter- readymades

• Pop - “I am a machine” - factory aesthetic

• Minimalism - “What you see is what you see”

• Feminist critique • Conceptualism - collaborative

practice , anti -formal , anti-optical

• Photography - the loss of aura

Jasper Johns

“I didn’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings. Abstract Expressionism was so lively - personal identity and painting weremore or less the same, and I tried to operate the same way. But I found I couldn’t do anything that would be identical with my feelings. So I worked in such a way that I could say that it’s not me.”

Jasper JohnsQuoted in Gavin Butt“How New York queered the idea of modern art” in ‘Varieties of Modernism’ Edited by Paul WoodPg. 324

Mr. Marcel Duchamp ‘the celebrated, ‘charismatic’anti-author, the critically, insitutionally lauded anti institutional critic.......

The anti modern hero

• Warhol’s ‘rejection’ of dominant notions of authorship, artistic identity and originality.

• The factory - pre-modernist mode of unaccredited ‘exploitative’ production – ‘Drella’.

• Artworks that combined the mechanical anonymity of the machine and the production line with ‘unoriginal’ pre-existing readymade imagery.

• ‘I have nothing to say and I’m saying it’.....

“To encourage a dispassionate, impersonal sociological and institutionally orientated approach would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual glorifying and monograph producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based, and which has only recently been called into question by a group of younger dissidents"

Linda Nochlin

“Why have there been no great women artists?’ Mary Cassat

Frida Kahlo

Feminist Critiques of the Male Author

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You don’t need a Penisto be a Genius

Guerilla Girls

“What you see is what you see”

Frank Stella

Frank Stella‘Six Mile Bottom’Metallic Paint on canvas1960

Artist becomes Artisan

Robert MorrisUntitled 1965

Conceptual Art and Performance Art

Dematerialisation of the art object

Collaborative practice

anti formal - anti aesthetic

“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form in art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair”

Sol LeWitt ‘Paragraphs’ 1967

Art and LanguageMap not to Indicate 1967

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P is for Poodle, 1983

GENERAL IDEA 1969-1994Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson of General Idea lived and worked together for 25 years.

Nazi Milk, 1979

Baby Makes 3, 1984

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_3_93/ai_n13628926

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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical ReproductionWalter Benjamin (1936) http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Jacques Derrida - Deconstruction• …involves discovering the underlying

unspoken assumptions, ideas, and frameworks that form the basis for thought and belief. To read between the lines. To take apart' those concepts which serve as the rules for a period of thought.

• Deconstruction aims to argue that any claim to truth is a falsification.

• Deconstruction aims to reveal that which has been suppressed in the name of coherence.

• Deconstructive thought frequently revolves around a critique of binary oppositions - a central deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged or "central" over the other.

• The French writer Jacques Derrida in his seminal text Of Grammatology argued that within such binary thinking the first term is always conceived as original, authentic, and superior, while the second is thought of as secondary, derivative, or even parasitic . These binary oppositions and hierarchies are what must be deconstructed.

The centred subject

The sovereign self - the subject is defined as an ‘inner space’. This inner space contains the consciousness, a repository of feelings, memories and needs. It is the I or ego. It is bounded, masterful and independent. It has a core essence which in art, finds exterior expression and manifestation in artworks. It is cohesive. This sovereign self is the source of all action. It is perceived as free as it decides its own goals. It engages in an ongoing process of self-reflection, monitoring its own thoughts in an ongoing internal monologue. This subject is self sufficient and distinct form everything outside of itself, including its own body. To be a subject is to be capable of making rational, objective decisions regarding the self - being able to make your situation or your body. This process leads to self fulfillment .

The decentred self

• Postmodernism widely disputes this notion of the bounded, sovereign self.

• In the work of various writers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, these ideas of an essential, ‘eternal’ bounded self are undermined and critiqued.

• In such work the self is seen as fluid and dependent for its sense of self on its context.

• It has limited powers of autonomous choice

• It has multiple centres with diverse perspectives - there is on one real me, there a series of masks - identity is ‘performed’

• The self and our identity is constructed or made - it is always culturally and linguistically conditioned.

“we are true to ourselves when we unflinchingly face the fact that there is nothing to be true to”

Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author(1968)

• For Barthes artworks were a tissue of quotations, with artists frequently unconsciously quoting and collaging from sources already present in the culture. The act of creation for Barthes, was then more a process of assembling disparate fragments and sources. There was no unique or wholly original form of expression.

• The artwork is ‘a multi dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotation drawn from innumerable centres of culture’ (Barthes)

• Barthes argued that the author has little input into the meaning of an artwork. For Barthes meaning was something supplied by the reader or viewer.

David Salle

“The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotation drawn from innumerable centers of culture. Similar to those eternal copyists’ Bouvard and Pechuchet, we indicate the profound ridiculousness that is precisely the truth of painting. We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. Succeeding the painter, the plagiarist, no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather the immense encyclopaedia from which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A paintings meaning lies not in its origin, but it s destination. The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter”

Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine “After Walker Evans”

“From the conventional viewpoint of art, the death of the author/ artist is a grievous blow, because it undermines the whole apparatus of

art history, based as it is on notions of signature style and individual genius. It also undercuts the

basis of the art market.”

Postmodernism Eleanor Heartney

Elaine Sturtevant

“There are few living artists whose work can be said to have had such profound repercussions for the intellectual, aesthetic and material evaluation of art. For over forty years, Sturtevant has been engaged in repeating works by many of the most important artists of her time and in so doing confronting head-on the nature of origin and originality. She has ruthlessly demonstrated that no act can be an ex-act copy and every considered act must be original, where the intention is the source.”

Press Release Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London 2006

Haim Steinbachpink accent 2, 1987.Two “schizoid” rubber masks, two chrome trash receptacles, and four “Alessi” tea kettles on chrome, aluminum and wood shelf.Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from Marianne and Sheldon B. Lubar, Vicki and Allen Samson, and Dr. and Mrs. James Stadler.

Allan McCollum

Ashley Bickerton‘Le Art’ 1987

Jeff Koons

Jef Koons

An ex wall street brokerKoons actively sought toprovoke a kind of moralqueasiness and repulsionamongst the art worldintelligentsia. In his personae, hisunapologetic embrace of selfpromotion, his relaxed attitude toopenly discussing money (theelephant in the room for the liberal,politically correct component of theart world) and his dedication toopening up the Pandora’s box oftaste and class, he ‘succeeded’ inprovoking the kind of shock,irritation and disgust typical of the‘modernist’ avant gardist.

Reasons to be Cheerful Part 4Crafty anti modernism“my god it actually looks like he loves these…things!”

• In 1986/7 the material execution of Koons work radically changed. While artists such as Haim Steinbach continued to use ready mades, Koons went to extraordinary lengths and costs to have everyday toys and trinkets remade and enlarged by American and Northern European craftsmen .

• For the art world this was disturbing - he appeared to be taking this stuff seriously.

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“the criterion for determining the order of aesthetic objects in the museum throughout the era of modernism – the self evident quality of masterpieces – has been broken, and as a result anything goes”

Douglas Crimp“On the Museum’s Ruins” in Postmodernism edited by Hal Foster

The Return of Painting

Reactions and Reactionary

Christopher Le Brun

Howard Hodgkin

Ken Currie

Anslem Kiefer

German Neo Expressionism

Sandro Chia

Francesco Clemente

Eric Fischl

Peter Halleyblack cells with conduit twice 1988acrylic,and Roll-a-tex on canvas

Post - Conceptual Painting

Julian Schnabel

“I’ve always said there’s no personal language only a selection of language.”

Schnabel in conversation with Sarah Kent

“Neo-expressionism appears as a problematic response to the loss - of the historical, the real, and of the subject. By and large neo-

expressionists would reclaim these entities as substances; the work, however, reveals them to be signs – and expressionism to be a language. This finally is the pathos of such art:it denies what its

practitioners would assert. For the very gestures that insist on the presence of the historical, the real, and of the subject testify to

nothing so much as desperation at their loss. There is an idealism here, to be sure, but it is an idealism shown to be idolatry, a

fascination with false image that mimics the presumed attributes of authenticity when it is in fact just the hollow mask with which a

frustrated, defeated consciousness tries to cover up its own negativity”

Hal Foster - The Expressive FallacyRecodings

Gerhard Richter

“He effectively deconstructs the immediacy of expressionism and suggests that, far from unique and original, its program leads logically to the production of empty signifiers and serial paintings”

Hal Foster on Richter pg. 63 Recodings

Sigmar Polke

“skills and references which up till then had been taken as essential to art making of any

seriousness – are deliberately avoided or travestied, in such a way to as to imply that only by such incompetence or obscurity will

genuine picturing get done”

T.J Clark

BRING ON THE BOTCHING

Art and Language

Martin Kippenberger

Meanwhile in the real world....• Dj• Sampling• Impact of

digital culture on ideas about originality, authorship.....

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The Post Death Author

Sylvie Fleury

“In placing her favourite classics from the realms of fashion and design on a pedestal and elevating them to the status of tradition shaping museum exhibits, Sylvie Fleury emphasises the interaction and interchangeability of art, design, and fashion in terms of social value and significance in an attitude of unquestioning acceptance that goes beyond Jeff Koons still deliberately provocative gesture of translating a trivial object into the material of high art”

Renate Wiehager

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Takashi Murakami

Matthew Ritchie

Beatriz Milhazes

Inka Essenhigh

Lucy McKenzie

Vitamin P is an image-heavy book offering an overview of the state of painting today, and documents the most recent concerns and ideas among contemporary painters. In the wake of new media such as installation, video, performance and digital art, the traditional medium of painting has enjoyed a renaissance among a recent generation of artists. Alongside the evergrowing reputation of significant living painters such as Gerhard Richter, Agnes Martin and Peter Halley, many younger artists have chosen painting over any other medium, and are exploring new means to broaden the traditional field of "oil on canvas". It is this younger generation (who emerged in the 1990s) that Vitamin P aims to represent in an A-Z survey of 114 of its leading, new, international practitioners, with each artist illustrated by numerous examples of his or her works, accompanied by a short explanatory text. Often moving beyond the most traditional image associated with this medium, Vitamin P hopes to illustrate the richness, eclecticism, dynamism and contemporaneity of the practice of painting today. Barry Schwabsky's introductory text offers a critical survey of the evolution of painting since the late 1950's