Modern Art Remixed: Exploring Modern and Contemporary Art
Beyond Boundaries
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Edgar Degas
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen 1880-1 Tate |
CANCELLED
This dynamic new introductory course offers a fresh and insightful look at modern and contemporary art, examining the developments, theories, concepts and myths that have shaped modern art over the last 100 years from a variety of perspectives. Led by art historians Mat Gregory and Jane Morrow, who led the course Re-view: Exploring Twentieth Century Art at Tate Liverpool last year, each weekly session combines themed illustrated presentations with workshops held in the galleries, exploring Tate Liverpool’s new collection display The DLA Piper Series: This is Sculpture.
Modern Art Remixed takes a thematic rather than chronological approach to the story of modern art, examining not only the techniques and materials employed by artists of the modernist period, but also the wider social and cultural context in which these art works were both created and received. More than just an introductory art history class, this is a unique opportunity to discuss the work of seminal artists up close and at first hand in an open and informal environment.
The course is delivered in three ten week terms, each of which is designed as an independent module so students can choose to attend all three terms or drop in to one term in particular. No experience necessary.
£120 (£95 concessions), booking required
Price includes refreshments
Price is per term
TERM THREE: BEYOND BOUNDARIES
Tuesday’s 4 May - 6 July 2010
18.00-20.00
Beyond Boundaries is the third and final instalment of the popular introductory course Modern Art Remixed. Modern art is frequently discussed in terms of the breaking of boundaries - successive generations of artists who have pushed the limits of what art can be, challenging conventions, and constantly redefining the role and function of art. This independent, ten-week term considers this notion, looking at specific points in the history of modern art to re-examine precisely what these boundaries have constituted (whether in terms of political divides, barriers between artists and institutions, or boundaries separating different creative practices) and question why such opposition has been so important to avant-garde art.
Week One: Return to Reality?
Throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century, avant-garde painting was in many ways dominated by a push towards greater degrees of abstraction, highlighted by movements such as Cubism, De Stijl, and Vorticism, and perhaps epitomised by the dominance of Abstract Expressionism throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, it was the official view of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1936, that the development of Modernist painting had culminated in two crowning achievements: Geometrical Abstract Art and Non-Geometrical Abstract Art. Yet this was neither the end of representational painting, nor the death of realism, and in this session we consider the ‘return of the real’ in painting throughout the second half of the twentieth century. From the Photorealism and Hyperrealism of the 1960s and 1970s, to the work of realist painters in the 1980s and 1990s, we consider the social, political, and cultural context underpinning these various reincarnations of realistic and representational painting.
Week Two: Back to School
With the rise of modernism and the breaking of academic tradition in the twentieth century, art schools have played a pivotal role in the introduction of pioneering new theories and practices to students. The Bauhaus, a German school formed by Walter Gropius in 1919, was the most influential school of its time, developed to generate artist craftsmen who would create functional forms of art and architecture that would integrate art and life. This session will explore how art schools such as Black Mountain College have presented and taught art throughout modernism, while also looking at how contemporary artists are educated in the practice of art, and what affect this has on the art world today.
Week Three: Myths of Silence, Oceans of Sound
From the Art of Noise manifesto of the Futurists, to the avant-garde performances, recordings, site specific installations, and immersive environments of artists since, sonic artists have continued to challenge traditional artistic conventions and audience expectations. This week’s session examines the ways in which artists over the past century have sought to explore and manipulate the way we experience – or don’t experience – the landscape of sounds that are surround us everyday, and to try and transform listeners’ experience and perception of the space they are inhabiting.
Week Four: The Power of Art
‘Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defense against the enemy.’ (Picasso, 1943)
For many artists of the twentieth century, art has provided a forum through which to critique modern society; a way to demonstrate against war and poverty, and attempt to bring about social change. From the Art Worker’s Coalition of 1969, who made numerous pieces confronting the Vietnam War (for example, the famous My Lai poster), to more contemporary artists such as Richard Serra and Mona Hatoum (who deals with the effects of war in the Middle East), we will examine how artists use a range of mediums, from photography and photomontage, to sculpture and video installation, to create art that confronts the viewer with some of the injustices in the world.
Week Five: The Politics of Picasso
In line with Tate Liverpool’s new exhibition: Picasso: Peace and Freedom (21 May - 30 August), this session focuses upon the intensely political work produced by Pablo Picasso after the Second World War. Examining his views on war and capitalism, his affiliation with the political Left, and the sometimes hostile reception of his work in America during the Cold War, we focus upon a fascinating period in this seminal artists‘ career. This week’s session will also include a special workshop delivered within the Picasso: Peace and Freedom exhibition space.
Week Six: Forbidden
Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art, was the title of an exhibition of artworks seized by the Nazi’s, and held in Munich in 1937. Its objective was to create public contempt for modern art, especially that created by Jewish, communist, and so-called ‘primitive’ artists such as Paul Klee, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso. Throughout history, certain governments exercised their powers to not only outlaw the display of certain types of art, but actually prevent its creation in the first place, as demonstrated by Stalin’s prohibition of Constructivist art. In addition to these historical interventions, we will discuss such issues in relation to contemporary art, examining the ideals and values underpinning the display and censorship of art in Western democratic society. We will consider, for example, works such as Eric Fischl’s post 9/11 response The Tumbling Woman, which had to be removed from public display in The Rockefeller Centre in New York.
Week Seven: The Museum as Modern Art
Alfred H Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (which was itself the first museum exclusively dedicated to modern art) declared that a museum should be ‘A machine to show pictures in.’ Throughout the twentieth century, a number of artists have maintained a complex relationship with the gallery as an institution. Just as artists from Joseph Cornell to Damien Hirst have referenced the visual language of the museum display in their work, the critical interventions of others such as Michael Asher and Fred Wilson have made the museum a constituent element of their practice. In this session, we explore a range of artists who have critically engaged with the history, conventions, roles, and functions of the museum, taking its collections and traditions as both the material and the subject of their work.
Week Eight: Identity Crisis
‘I am an artist, not an activist. I am creating work simply to entice a dialogue…I am only asking questions.’ (Shirin Neshat)
This week’s session will focus on cultural and social identity, discussing works by artists such as Shirin Neshat, who questions audience responses to images of Islamic Women, and Yang Fudong, who looks at the complex juxtaposition of past and present in China, and the presence of contemporary culture in a country embedded with tradition. We will also explore individual identity and youth culture, considering the art of Rineke Dijkstra whose piece I See a Woman Crying will be exhibited at Tate Liverpool from 27th April - 30th August 2010.
Week Nine: Polyartists and the Total Work of Art
From Wagner to John Cage, the notion of the Gestamtkunstwerk - the ‘total work of art’ - has been significant not only to the development of modern art, but to what we now identify and understand as postmodernism. In this session we will explore the importance of the ‘total work of art‘, exploring the work of artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Beuys, who sought to explore multiple disciplines, breaking down the boundaries that traditionally divided various creative practices. With this in mind, we will also discuss the notion of the Polyartist, a term invented and defined by Richard Kostelanetz as ‘…the individual who excels at more than one nonadjacent art or, more precisely, is a master of several unrelated arts.’
Week Ten: Ugly Beautiful
‘The chief enemy of creativity is good taste’ (Pablo Picasso)
One of the fundamental objectives of a number of key Modern artists and movements in the twentieth century was a complete rejection of aesthetics. Many believed that beauty and good taste were the characteristics of art valued by the bourgeoisie. However, in postmodern times it could be argued from one perspective that mass media and mass consumerism has fuelled society’s desire for beauty and design, and in this week’s session we will explore the extent to which beauty has made a comeback in art. From the decorative motifs of Beatriz Milhazes, to the geometric designs of Sarah Morris, we will question beauty’s place within modern and contemporary art, and its potential effect.
