Why art matters module 5
- 2. Module 5 Art Creates Synergy and Change
- 4. Art influences society by changing opinions, by creating new narratives and by facilitating how people understand themselves and each other. Art is often a vehicle for social change. Artists have changed society throughout history. The power of art has been understood since the dawn of humanity. The images in the caves are as powerful today as they were when they were painted. Art is a universal language that crosses cultural barriers and gives people an understanding of other cultures and improves their understanding of one another. All societies and the cultures have been shaped by art, because it engages people emotionally. Only art preserves how it felt to exist in a particular place at a particular time. This is a unique ability of art, is what gives it its transformational power.
- 5. Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819. Oil on canvas. 13.75 × 23.5 feet. Louvre Museum, Paris THEODORE GERICAULT Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa was hung at the Salon in Paris in 1819, originally under the title of Shipwreck Scene. The visitors quickly recognised its reference, the wreck of the French frigate Medusa off the coast of Senegal in 1816, with over 150 soldiers on board. The critics were divided but it had a great impact on the public, becomig the most discussed artwork of that year. In this painting Gericault not only exposed the corruption that led to this catastrophe, he also depicted ordinary people struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances.
- 6. The shipwreck had scandalous political implications in France. The incompetent captain, who had not sailed for over twenty years, and who had gained the position through his connections, ran aground on a sand bank off the coast of Senegal on July 2, 1816. He saved himself and senior officers while leaving the lower ranks to fend for themselves. On 5 July 1816, about 150 people were set adrift on a quickly made raft. Only 15 survived the 13 days ordeal before they were rescued. Those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and were forced by circumstances to practice cannibalism. Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819. Oil on canvas. Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures
- 7. Géricault’s artwork depicting the raft and the people on it, was greeted with hostility by the government because it was an international scandal. The painting was included in the 1819 Salon, an annual exhibition of contemporary French art at the Louvre. It was awarded a gold medal, but it was not purchased for the Louvre as it was customary. The work’s macabre realistic portrayal of the dead and dying addressed a contemporary subject with remarkable conviction. Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa, mixed media on paper, 11.5 × 15.5 in, Louvre. This study is darker than the final work, and the positions of the figures differ from those of the later painting.
- 8. Jean Jérôme Baugean - An Illustration of the French frigate Méduse, 1810 - Image via wikimedia.org The Méduse was a 40-gun Pallas-class frigate of the French Navy, launched in 1810. The ship took part in the Napoleonic wars. The story of the wreck and gericaul’t painting of the raft stirred considerable public emotion., making it one of the most infamous ship wrecks in the history of sailing. After the wreck, French society was in an uproar over the royal appointment that led to French frigate Medusa's demise.
- 9. The Raft of the Medusa depicts an event whose human and political aspects greatly interested Géricault: The painter researched the story in detail and made numerous sketches. The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David had an enormous political impact during the time of the revolution in France, and it influenced Géricault's decision to also paint a current event. Théodore Géricault - The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19, on view in Louvre – Image savagemythology.com. This image shows the over-life-size painting
- 10. Jacques Louis David. The Death of Marat, 1793, JAQUES LOUIS DAVID The painting The Death of Marat, 1793, by French artist Jacques Louis David, could be considered the first truly political artwork. The artists depicted the aftermath of revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat’s murder, who was stabbed in his bathtub. Jean-Paul Marat was a French journalist and politician during the French Revolution. He widely published his views. He was renowned for his advocacy of basic human rights. Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer, while taking a medicinal bath for his debilitating skin condition.
- 11. Marat became a revolutionary martyr. David took a political moment, Marat’s assassination, and painted it with near- photographic precision. The painting of Marat’s death became an important piece of political propaganda. The painting was reproduced as an engraving which was widely circulated among the public. The most famous painter in Paris, Jacques-Louis David, immortalized Marat in The Death of Marat. Both, David and Marat were part of the Paris Commune leadership. Joseph Boze, Jean-Paul Marat, 1793
- 12. DADAISM Dada, and Dadaism, was an anti-war movement in Europe and New York. It was an artistic revolt and protest against traditional beliefs of a pro- war society. In 1916 Europe was two years into an apocalyptic war. That same year, Hugo Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings, opened Cabaret Voltaire, an artistic nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland. Other founding members were Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp. Its leaders would soon be joined by groups all over Europe and New York, who shared their contempt for the war, death, and destruction. Man Ray, Dada Group Bruce Silverstein Gallery
- 13. The Dada artists were also profoundly disillusioned with traditional modes of art making, therefore they often turned to experimentations with chance and spontaneity. Dada essentially declared war against war, criticizing the establishment’s descent into chaos. And of course, art takes the form of protest, when addressing political and social issues. Hannah Hoch’s collage epitomizes the Dada attitude towards war: that it is chaos. Hannah Hoch - Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the First Epoch of the Weimar Beer- Belly Culture, 1919, collage.
- 14. Dada was a world view, a philosophy, adopted by a loose international network of artists aiming to create alternative visions of the world opposed to the destructive world they lived in at the time. The artists affiliated with Dada did not share a common style or approach. Though the cabaret was to be the birthplace of the Dadaist movement, it featured avant-garde artists, including Marinetti, the founder of Futurism. The cabaret exhibited also Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Ernst. The New York Dada art movement arose almost independently. The New York counterpart tended to be more whimsical and less about the violence that was happening overseas. Hugo Ball performing at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916
- 15. Jean Arp explored the art of collage and the potential for randomness in its creation. Profoundly affected by the trauma of modern warfare, Arp and his fellow Dadaists held reason and rationality responsible for World War I, which they expressed by employing new, antirational aesthetic strategies, including the use of chance. Arp made a series of collages according to the laws of chance by tearing paper into pieces, letting them fall to the floor, and pasting each scrap where it happened to land. He ceded control to the randomness of chance as a way of accepting what was happening in the world during WWI. Jean (Hans) Arp. Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance), 1917. Torn-and-pasted paper and colored paper on colored paper, 19 1/8 x 13 5/8"
- 16. One of the most influential Dada practices, one that continues to this day, was the invention of mixed media installations. This began with the First International Dada Fair in 1920, which featured an assortment of paintings, posters, photographs, and two- and three- dimensional mixed media art. Dada, and Dadaism, was a means of exploring the role that art, and the artist, played in a society that was undergoing a seismic shift. Before Dada fine art was struggling with technological change. First International Dada Fair, Galerie Otto Burchard, Berlin, 1920 (Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)
- 17. New York groups and Paris Dada was less overtly political than Dada in Germany. The group’s performances, photographs, mixed media collage, and installations emphasized the absurd and challenged social norms. These interests, combined with imagery that reflects psychological states, led many of the Paris Dada group to join the Surrealists. Raoul Hausmann, A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement, also known as Dada siegt (Dada Triumphs), 1920, photomontage and collage with watercolor on paper, 33.5 x 27.5 cm (private collection)
- 18. PABLO PICASSO He was the most influential artist of the first half of the 20th century, for co-founding the Cubist movement and the co-invention of collage, and for the wide range of styles that he explored. Picasso was born in southern Spain. Although he lived most of his adult life in France, he remained a Spaniard. Although Picasso was living in France at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he was deeply affected by it.
- 19. Picasso had been a quiet supporter of the Republicans, but he did not insert his political views into his art. After the start of the civil war, the artist created a series of powerful satirical pieces, such as Dream and Lie of Franco, (I and II) to support the Republicans. To further support to the Republicans, the artwork was made to be printed and sold in postcard format as propaganda. Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica is one of the best-known works of social commentary art of all time. The painting brought to light the brutality and absurdity of war in a way that has always provoked powerful reactions. The scene is based on a journalist’s first-hand account of the bombing of Guernica by Fascist troops, which took place during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The way it was painted created a powerful image of the horrors of war. The painting allowed its content to cross cultural and linguistic divides. The painting is a message to a world-widel audience — the first artwork intended as a global appeal for peace.
- 20. Guernica in ruins, 1937, photograph (German Federal Archives, bild 183-H25224) In 1936, a civil war erupted in Spain between the democratic Republican government and fascist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, who attempted to overthrow them. Twenty five bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosive and incendiary bombs on the village for more than three hours. Twenty more fighter planes killed civilians trying to flee.
- 21. Fires burned for three days. Seventy percent of the city was destroyed. A third of the population were wounded or killed. The attack outraged the world because it involved the bombing of civilians by a military air force. Guernica is an "appalling drama of a great people abandoned to the tyrants of the Dark Ages . . .All the world can see, can understand, this immense Spanish tragedy." (Amedé Ozenfant) Guernica in ruins, 1937, photograph AP.
- 22. In 1936, the newly elected Spanish Republican government asked Picasso to paint an artwork for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. The theme of the Exposition was a celebration of modern technology. Picasso painted Guernica, an overtly political painting. The painting depicts the events of April 27, 1937, when Hitler’s German air force, acting in support of Franco, bombed the village of Guernica in northern Spain. The city had no strategic military value. This was the first time in history an aerial bombing of a civilian population was carried out. The Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International World’s Fair, 1937.
- 23. Picasso said the painting was simply an appeal to people about massacred people and animals. ”In the panel on which I am working, which I call Guernica, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain into an ocean of pain and death.” The Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International World’s Fair, 1937.
- 24. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, 11 x 25 feet. Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain.
- 25. Guernica, which Picasso painted in 1937, is an expression of his outrage against war and his most political work. The artist decided on a stark monochromatic palette of gray, black and white which may be a reference to the original newspaper reports and photographs in black and white. The compositions has a dramatic intensity, and a visual kinetic energy of jagged movement. Millions of visitors at the Paris World’s Fair have seen it. The painting has since become the twentieth century’s most iconic representation of destruction and war. Picasso painting Guernica; photo by Dora Maar
- 26. Pablo Picasso, The Horse in its new position, after revisions. 1937 The painting is a complex work with layers of antiwar symbolism as a protest against the fascist coup led by General Francisco Franco. No artwork has become as important a symbol of anti-war movements as Guernica. From the late 1940s through the ’60s, Picasso’s creative energy never waned. Living in the south of France, he continued to paint, make ceramics, and experiment with printmaking.
- 27. THE PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT The Resettlement Administration (RA) was a federal agency created May 1, 1935, as part of the New Deal. The agency, planned by the federal government, included the relocation of struggling urban and rural families to specifically created communities. The Resettlement Administration also funded projects recording aspects of its work, including, The Film Project, The Photography Project, and the Sidney Robertson Cowell's recordings of folk songs. Dorothea Lange. Abandoned farm north of Dalhart, Texas. 1938. Credits: Dorothea Lange; The Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
- 28. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) succeeded the Resettlement Administration in 1937. The Resettlement Administration (RA) and The Farm Security Agency (FSA) hired photographers for The Photography Project to document the rural poverty of the Great Depression. Both RA and FSA are well known for the influence of their photography program which ran between 1935 and 1944. Dorothea Lange, Eighteen-year-old mother from Oklahoma, now a California migrant, 1937. Gelatin silver print. Library of Congress
- 29. DOROTHEA LANGE The Farm Security Agency (FSA) used the pictures as a powerful tool to show the problems the nation was facing, and what the government was doing about them. Over the course of seven years a talented group of photographers, including Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Walcott, John Vachon, and Dorothea Lange, took more than 200,000 images. Dorothea Lange, one of the photographers hired to document the plight of poor farmers, contributed to humanizing the consequences of the Great Depression. Lange in 1936 holding a Graflex 4×5 camera atop a Ford Model 40 in California, photographed by her assistant Rondal Partridge.
- 30. Dorothea Lange, White Angel Breadline, 1933, printed ca. 1950. Gelatin silver print Early in her career, Lange established a portrait studio. Her work mostly involved photographing the social elite in San Francisco. At the start of the Great Depression Lange changed her focus and started to photograph struggling people. White Angel Breadline is one of the first photographs outside of her studio. The photograph depicts a group of men lined up outside White Angel Jungle food bank, familiar scene during the Great Depression. During the decade of the 1930s about 300,000 impoverished people moved to California.
- 31. Lange documented the lives of many displaced people and the social and economic upheaval of the Depression in powerful images. Lange became the best known documentary photographer of the era. Dorothea Lange. On U.S. 99. Near Browley, Imperial County. Homeless mother and youngest child of seven walikng the highway from Phoenix, where they picked cotton. Bound for San Diego, where the father hope to get on relief “because he once lived there”. November 1939. Gelatin silver print.
- 32. Dorothea Lange. Oklahoma mother of five children, now picking cotton in California, near Fresno. November 1936. Gelatin silver print. Lange’s photographs did more than any other media to humanize the cost of the Great Depression. She documented the suffering and uncertainty of the economic hardships, and she captured the hopelessness in people’s empty stares. The people in her photographs are on the move which looks more as if they are trying to escape. Their old vehicles look as if they are themselves on the verge of collapse.
- 33. Dorothea Lange. During the cotton strike, the father, a cotton picker, has left his wife and child in the car while he applies to the Farm Security Administration for an emergency food grant. Shafter, California 1938. Gelatin silver print. Library of Congress. The documentation of the extreme poverty helped raise awareness about the disastrous living conditions the migrant families lived in during the Depression. The program also employed out-of- work writers and photographers.
- 34. By 1932, things deteriorated further and many American men lost their jobs and were unable to find employment. In addition to the economic devastation brought on by the Recession, in 1934 the Great Plains were experiencing severe droughts and dust storms. Repeated windstorms created huge clouds of dust, killing livestock, and destroying crops. These poor conditions drove an estimated 60 percent of families out of the Midwest, that became known as the Dust Bowl. Dorothea Lange, Mother and child of flood refugee family, near Memphis. Gelatin silver print. Library of Congress.
- 35. Farmers created the environmental disaster by cutting large swaths of forest to plant. Inclement weather and huge wildfires made the land even less yielding. By 1940 well over two million people had left the Midwest, nearly 10 percent of them moved permanently to California. Russell Lee. Government sign promoting land terracing to prevent erosion. Taylor, Texas. April 1939. Gelatin silver print. Credits: Russell Lee; The Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
- 36. Dorothea Lange. Mother and children on the road, Tulelake, Siskyyou County, California. 1939. Gelatin silver print. During the Depression it was common to for families to put their possessions piled up high in their vehicles. As they drove, sometimes the cars broke or ran out of gas, and they would be stuck on the side of the road. Some were stuck for a hours. Other were stuck for days if their vehicles broke beyond repair or they didn’t have money for gas. Some ended up living on the side of the road for weeks.
- 37. Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 11 1/8 x 8 9/16 in. “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother in the sparse lean-to tent, as if drawn by a magnet,” Lange later wrote. Lange, an experienced portraitist, believed that one could understand the plight of migrants by getting closer through tightly framed images of children and the mothers, whose faces are showing worry and resignation.
- 38. © Keith Haring Foundation Photo by Tseng Kwong Chi | © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York KEITH HARING AND THE AIDS EPIDEMIC Haring completed numerous public projects in the first half of the 80’s, a time a new illness began spreading among the gay community in the United States. Today, we know this illness as HIV/AIDS, but at the time, there was very little known about it.
- 39. Keith Haring’s artworks were displayed in public places on street corners, and public buildings, breaking down the barriers between high and low art. In the early 1980s Keith Haring created hundreds of chalk drawings in New York subway stations. He drew on unused advertising space, which was covered with black sheets of paper. Although Haring was not a graffiti artist he was fined and arrested many times for defacing property. The artist’s subway drawings are a combination of studio and public art.
- 40. Keith Haring embraced the subway system as a laboratory for communication and engagement. His work was exposed to more people than it would have been in a museum, and to people that never went to a museum or gallery.
- 41. © Keith Haring Foundation Photo by Tseng Kwong Chi | © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York In 1986 Keith Haring opened the Pop Shop in downtown Manhattan. Haring considered the Pop Shop as an extension of his work, a fun store where his art could be accessible to everyone. “The use of commercial projects has enabled me to reach millions of people whom I would not have reached by remaining an unknown artist. I assumed, after all, that the point of making art was to communicate and contribute to culture.” (Keith Haring)
- 42. Keith Haring. Stop AIDS, 1989. poster artwork © Keith Haring Foundation In mod 1980s, a number of artists and activists started to speak up, to help spread awareness about AIDS. Their art fought stigmatization, and encouraged more funding for life-saving drugs. Haring’s artworks are full of energy generated by fear, anger, or action. They engage the viewer visually and conceptually, while some are direct calls to action. The artist used his talent to raise awareness and to affect change.
- 43. Without words, Haring’s work looks fun and cheerful. However, the words Ignorance=Fear, Silence = Death change everything. They change the whole meaning of the artwork. The painting confronted people about the stigma and disease and the need to fight. The words ad a level of anxiety that pull the viewer in. By the late 1980s, AIDS was a clear threat to life in America. The statistics were the reason people experienced high levels of anxiety. When Haring created Ignorance = Fear, one American was being diagnosed with HIV every minute. Four people were dying of AIDS every hour. By 1991, 100,000 Americans died of AIDS. Ignorance=Fear, Silence=Death, 1989. Poster for ACT UP, 24x43 Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation
- 44. Haring, among others artists, was able to raise awareness about AIDS in a way that led to dramatic changes, including better public information about the disease and more funding for treatment. By the early 1990s, AIDS drugs were widely available in the US, making it so that AIDS was no longer a death sentence. Their art also challenged people to question their own discrimination of gay and lesbian individuals, which has contributed to the incredible progress we see today.
- 45. FIGHT FOR EQUALITY The Guerilla Girls are an anonymous group of artists that has spent the last thirty years vocally fighting racism and sexism in the art world. They do this bringing the facts to people’s attention - in this case that “less than 5% of the artists in the Modern art section of the Metropolitan Museum in New York are women, but 85% of the nudes are female”. This poster has become a symbol of advancing female representation in art Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres La Grande Odalisque, 1814 Oil on canvas. Louvre, Paris.
- 46. The group formed in response to the International Survey of Painting and Sculpture exhibition held in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition included 169 artists, less than 10% of whom were women. Female artists had played an important role in American art of the 1970s. But in the early 1980s when artwork prices rose steeply, women were almost eliminated from museum and gallery exhibitions. In 1985 the Guerrilla Girls began a poster campaign that targeted museums, dealers, curators, and critics, to expose the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream exhibitions and publications. The Guerilla Girls
- 47. BARBARA KRUGER is known for her combination of type and image that conveys a cultural critique. Her works examine stereotypes and consumerism, layering text over mass-media images. Her artworks are black-and-white, red accented, in Futura Bold Oblique font. Kruger uses language to convey her ideas. “I'm fascinated with the difference between supposedly private and supposedly public and I try to engage the issue of what it means to live in a society that's seemingly shock-proof, yet still is compelled to exercise secrecy,” she explained of her work. "Untitled (I shop therefore I am)" by Barbara Kruger, 1987. Image via Mary Boone Gallery
- 48. JENNY HOLZER is an American l artist whose work focuses on the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces. In the late 1970s, she used about 300 commonly held truths and clichés, she titled Truisms, printing them on stickers, T-shirts and posters. Later Holzer started using electronics. In the 1980s she was an active member of Colab, participating in the famous The Times Square Show. Her goal is to sharpen people's awareness of the platitudes they are fed daily. Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1984 Metal, light emitting diode units and plastic
- 49. ART AND TECHNOLOGY CAN CHANGE THE WORLD Overt the past several decades artists increasingly used emerging forms of media and technology to match the way we experience the world. They used mass media, and new technologies to raise questions and shape our understanding of the future, as well as the potential of technology to change the world. Nam June Paik was born in Seoul, Korea on 20 July 1932. The family fled the Korean War, travelling first to Hong Kong and then to Japan. Nam June Paik. Bakelite Robot, 2002. Video, 5 monitors and radios.
- 50. In 1953 Nam June Paik started his studies in musicology at the University of Tokyo. He moved to Germany in 1956 where he continued his studies in musicology, philosophy and art history in Munich, Freiberg and Cologne. Paik worked in the studio of the West German radio station WDR. There he was exposed to the work of avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mary Bauermeister. In 1958 Paik attended the Darmstadt International Summer School Course for New Music where he had met John Cage who was experimenting with audio synthesizers. Later he met in Cologne Joseph Beuys, and others. These encounters greatly influenced Paik’s career. Nam June Paik, Global Encoder, 1994
- 51. In 1964 year Paik moved to New York and began working on projects with the cellist Charlotte Moorman. They collaborated until Moorman’s death in 1991. Technology became one of the primary subjects of his art, which he regarded as instrumental in global communication. Paik worked with , laser artist Horst H. Baumann to create Laser Video Space in 1982. As technology continues to shape our future, many artists today are using technology to change the world. Charlotte Moorman performs Nam June Paik's "TV Cello Wearing TV Glasses" in New York in 1971. (Takahiko Iimura photo)
- 52. Art has the power to effect real change in the world. Pablo Picasso once even went so far as to declare, “Painting is not made to decorate apartments; it is an offensive and defensive instrument of war against the enemy.” Some artworks throughout history have revolutionized the way we think about politics, social issues and even art itself. From cave paintings to soup cans, these are the paintings that have had an undeniable, impact on the art world and beyond.