Answer each question with a well-composed in response to the artwork mentioned. This composed response may be in note form, and need not be formally written. However, “composed” does mean that a thesis statement in response to the question is presented and supported with a) close formal analysis as well as b) reference to the reading / Art Since 1900 and your notes. You are expected always to set the images into comparative (or better, dialectical) relation. Approximately 150-200 words each question.
1. Kurt Schwitters, Cherry Picture, 1921; Hannah Hoch, The Bride, 1930
‘Democracy without limits’ is a term proposed by Rosa Luxemburg in opposition to ‘bourgeois democracy.’ She subjected “democracy” –under quotation marks– to an examination of its internal limits and contradictions wherein she observed two mutually determinative antidemocratic dimensions: militarism and colonialism. The military apparatus assures containment and repression of popular insurrectionary movements from within, while on the other hand imposing on the colonized, by force of arms, the ‘benefits of western economic exploitation and domination.’ ” The domination of consciousness by the capitalist mode of [cultural] production is one part of the “imposition of the benefits of western economic exploitation.”
?Discuss the respective roles of technologically reproducible media and forms of commercial media in the avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s. Why, for the avant-garde, and for women practitioners in particular, is this engagement with capitalist realism and its cycles of progress and obsolescence as enforced by the commodity-form necessary for the political and aesthetic project of Weimar Dada?
2. Max Ernst, The Master’s Bedroom, Circa 1920 and Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball, 1930-1
??Discuss the model of temporality, of time and sequence, proposed by the Surrealist understanding of the unconscious. What is screen memory? What does deferred meaning entail? How does the concept of repetition operate? How does this affect the notion of authorship and meaning?
3. Jackson Pollock, Number 1 A, 1948; Piet Mondrian, New York City I, 1942??
“Art has always anticipated the determinations of valorization: it has therefore become abstract by following a real development, creating a new world through abstraction. In order to be an ontological experience, art does not need a concrete being. With the invention of the abstract (via capitalism), nature and the world have been entirely replaced by art. The Modern is this abstraction, this participation of the labor of each singularity (individuality) and its interchangeablity; an abstract community.” (Negri, Art and Multitude) ??
What is “all over composition” and why does it radicalize the very notion of the human? Discuss how each of these works was composed, the way that the grapheme is elaborated in each, and what model of creative agency and authorship each work offers. How are they dialectically related to one another against the common horizon of the mid twentieth century? How does the model of authorship suggested by each articulate the meaning of abstraction?
4. Raoul Ubac, Battle of the Amazons, 1930; Brassai, (Untitled) Nudes, 1933
Throughout the course, the female nude body has been a recurrent figure. Via close visual analysis of the above works, and via reference to other examples of the female nude discussed over the semester, discuss how artists have represented the nude female figure. What is the role of abstraction, and how does abstraction allow the artists to dislodge and/or reframe the meaning of the nude in their various representations?
5. Olga Rosanova, Green Vertical Stripe, 1918; André Masson, Automatic Drawing, 1924
Through various historical periods, and across different geo-political circumstances, art has been deployed in the service of revolution. Beginning with a thorough analysis of the above works, discuss how each artist’s work is bound up with the idea of revolution. What is the significance of medium and process for each artist, and how is this, in turn, speak to (or perhaps make a contribution towards) revolution?
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