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America’s Diverse Visual Culture. We will analyze works of art as a lens through which we can glimpse aspects of the American character: the hopes, the fears & aspirations, and also the problems, the absences, as well as the contradictions between the ideals and the realities.
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America’s Diverse Visual Culture We will analyze works of art as a lens through which we can glimpse aspects of the American character: the hopes, the fears & aspirations, and also the problems, the absences, as well as the contradictions between the ideals and the realities.
Art can turn things around Art can make us learn more about ourselves Art can teach us self-awareness Art can visualize problems Art can visualize solutions
What can works of art tell us about our identities? • What is there? What is present in the image? • What is left out? Absences can be just as important as what is there. • What is ideal? • What is real?
IMAGES • Images can inscribe our beliefs (ideologies), our dreams, our mistakes • We can always see proof of this by learning to LOOK & QUESTION • Images, Architecture, Sculpture all tell us something about ourselves
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851. Oil on Canvas; 12 2/5 x 21 1/4 in.
Washington Crossing the Delawareby Emanuel Leutze, 1851 • Heroic narrative or history painting-large12’5” X 21’3” • Crossing Delaware River into NJ Christmas Eve 1776 • Prince Whipple • Currier & Ives: Washington Crossing the Delaware (Color Lithograph) • Larry Rivers: Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1953 • Alex Katz: Stage set for Kenneth Koch’s Drama, 1961 • Robert Colescott: George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware, 1975 • Mad Magazine: Washington Cross-Dressing the Delaware • New Jersey Quarter
As with many American historical paintings, Americans usually saw, not the original, but an engraving or print. Most prominent were the often mangled copies by Currier and Ives. The Leutze painting of Washington at the Delaware was sharply adapted by these popular printers in the late 19th century. In the cartoonish Currier & Ives representation of Leutze's classic boat scene, the river is now choked with iceberg-sized chunks and the crew has been greatly diminished. Not surprisingly, in both prints, the solitary black figure has been excised -- much as he and his race were carefully eliminated from the history or Revolutionary America until recently.
American Gothicby Grant Wood, 1930 • Heartland (Iowan farmer) • Depression era • Winner of Harris Bronze medal • All newspapers & London in 1931 • Icon of American survival spirit • What is an icon?
Icons: • also i·kon ( k n ) • An image; a representation. • A representation or picture of a sacred or sanctified Christian personage, traditionally used and venerated in the Eastern Church. • NOW MEANS An important and enduring symbol • One who is the object of great attention and devotion; an idol: “He is... a pop icon designed and manufactured for the video generation” (Harry F. Waters). • Computer Science. A picture on a screen that represents a specific file, directory, window, option, or program.
American Gothic, by Gordon Parks 1942 • Depicts Ella Watson • Born in Kansas • Julian Rosenwald Fellowship in Photography in 1942 • Parody on the picture by Grant Wood
What is Installation art ? Installation art came into prominence in the 1970s; uses sculptural materials and other media to modify the way a particular space is experienced. Installation art is not necessarily confined to gallery spaces and can be any material intervention in everyday public or private spaces. Installation art incorporates almost any media to create an experience in a particular environment. Materials used in contemporary installation art range from everyday and natural materials to new media such as video, sound, performance, computers and the internet. Some installations are site-specific in that they are designed to only exist in the space for which they were created.
Some Native American Contemporary Artists: • James Luna: The Artifact Piece, 1986 (1990) • Jimmie Durham: Self-Portrait, 1986 • Jaune Quick-to-see-Smith: Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992 & Indian, Indio, Indigenous, 1992 • Jean LeMarr: They’re Going to Dump It Where? 1984
James Luna often uses his body as a means to critique the objectification of Native American cultures in Western museum and cultural displays. He dramatically calls attention to the exhibition of Native American peoples and Native American cultural objects in his Artifact Piece, 1985-87.
James Luna: Take a Picture with an Indian!, 1991. Life-sized figures. Black & White photographs mounted on foam core. Luna’s invitation provides 3 competing options. Each viewer must determine what dress code constitutes his or her version of a “real” Indian: the assimilated, the mythic, or the vernacular. The work pokes fun at vacationing white tourists who descend on Indian reservations with Kodaks & the desire to record a culture uncorrupted by their own materialism. Tape: “America likes to say, her Indian. America loves to see us dance. America loves our religions. America likes to name cars after our peoples. Take a picture with a real Indian. Love one. Take one home.”
Half Indian/Half Mexican, 1990. Intermarriage is the subject-here Luna demonstrates that he is the product of a Mexican father & a Luiseno mother. His double genetic strain is made explicit in the 3 photographs: left-pure Indian; right-convincingly Mexican; middle, composite close-up divided in half.
The End of the Trail by James Earle Fraser. No single work of art at the Exposition has attracted more popular applause than this. It has a gripping, manly pathos that makes a direct appeal. The physical vigor of the rider, over-tired but sound, saves it from mere sentiment. An Indian brave, utterly exhausted, his strong endurance worn through by the long, hard ride, storm-spent, bowed in the abandon of helpless exhaustion, upon a horse as weary as he, has come to the end of the trail, beyond which there is no clear path. It is easy to apply the message of this statue to the tragedy of the American Indian's decline upon the continent he once possessed. The sculptor acknowledges as his text these words of Marian Manville Pope: The trail is lost, the path is hid and winds that blow from out the ages sweep me on to that chill borderland where Time's spent sands engulf lost peoples and lost trails.
End of the Frail, James Luna, mixed media installation, 1990-91, various sites. Photo: Richard Lou
Jimmie Durham, Self-Portrait (1986) Mixed media Self Portrait, a flayed, full body nude, a red "skin," a hide or hiding -- is a bitter and witty icon displayed o n the wall. As though illustrating the dilemma of the 'invented Indians," the self-portrait is all surface. Durham, who has proudly called himself a "double Red," has branded a red star on his forehead, imprinted his chest and thighs with fish and his ankle with fern. He has sea shells for ears, bits of animal hide hair; one turquoise eye is just to show a little "Indianness," and the feathers revealed by an open chest cavity imply a certain "light-heartedness." "I have 12 hobbies! 11 house plants! People like my poems," are among the "captions" mapping such landmarks as an appendix scar, and defiantly "large and colorful" genitals. (Cahan 64)
Buffalo Bones In the mid-nineteenth century, professional white hunters began to thin the Western buffalo herds. They were slaughtered to provide buffalo robes to eastern buyers, but also as part of an official policy to destroy the Plains Indian's chief food source. Most carcasses were left simply to rot where they fell. In the photograph here, huge piles of buffalo bones are gathered up from northwestern plains.
