MODERNIDAD Y POSTMODERNIDAD

MAURIZIO CATTELAN

CLASE 3

CLASE 3

1. PRESENTACIÓN DEL CUADRO MODERNIDAD/POSTMODERNIDAD
2. FORMAR GRUPOS Y TRADUCIR LAS ENTREVISTAS.REVISAR LO QUE DICEN ARTISTAS SOBRE LO NUEVO. LEER LOS PÁRRAFOS MÁS IMPORTANTES.
3. EQUIPOS PARA ENTREVISTAS
4. CUESTIONARIO DE ENTREVISTAS
5. ESCOGER ENTREVISTADO
6. REALIZAR UNA INVESTIGACIÓN EXHAUSTIVA SOBRE EL TRABAJO DEL ENTREVISTADO
7. PRESENTAR LA ENTREVISTA EL DIA DE LA EVALUACIÓN PARCIAL. SE CALIFICARÁN LA PERTINENCIA DE LAS PREGUNTAS, EL CONOCIMIENTO DEL TEMA PARA CONVERSAR CON EL ENTREVISTADO, LA FORMULACIÓN DE LA PREGUNTA,
LA SUSTANCIA OBTENIDA DEL ENTREVISTADO. LIMPIEZA EN LA PRESENTACIÓN DE LA INVESTIGACIÓN Y TRANSCRIPCIÓN DE LA ENTREVISTA COMPLETA.

The Gutai Manifesto

With our present awareness, the arts we have known up to now appear to us in general to be fakes fitted out with a tremendous affectation. Let us take leave of these piles of counterfeit objects on the altars, in the palaces, in the salons and the antique shops.

These objects are in disguise and their materials such as paint, pieces of cloth, metals, clay or marble are loaded with false significance by human hand and by way of fraud, so that, instead of just presenting their own material, they take on the appearance of something else. Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us.

Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art the human spirit and the the material reach out their hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed to each other. The material is not absorbed by the spirit. The spirit does not force the material into submission. If one leaves the material as it is, presenting it just as material, then it starts to tell us something and speaks with a mighty voice. Keeping the life of the material alive also means bringing the spirit alive, and lifting up the spirit means leading the material up to the height of the spirit.

Art is the home of the creative spirit, but never until now has the spirit created the material. The spirit has only ever created the spiritual. Certainly the spirit has always filled art with life, but this life will finally die as the times change. For all the magnificent life which existed in the art of the Renaissance, little more than its archaeological existence can be seen today.

What still keeps that vitality, even if passive, may be primitive art or the art created after Impressionism. These are things in which either, due to skillful application of the paint, the deception of the material had not quite succeeded, or else, like Pointillist or Fauvist, those pictures in which the materials, although used to reproduce nature, could not be murdered after all. Today, however, they are no longer able to call up deep emotion in us. They already belong to a world of the past.

Yet what is interesting in this respect is the novel beauty to be found in works of art and architecture of the past which have changed their appearance due to the damage of time or destruction by disasters in the course of the centuries. This is described as the beauty of decay, but is it not perhaps that beauty which material assumes when it is freed from artificial make-up and reveals its original characteristics? The fact that the ruins receive us warmly and kindly after all, and that they attract us with their cracks and flaking surfaces, could this not really be a sign of the material taking revenge, having recaptured its original life? In this sense I pay respect to Pollock’s and Mathieu’s works in contemporary art. These works emit the loud outcry of the material, of the very oil or enamel paints themselves. These two artists grapple with the material in a way which is completely appropriate to it and which they have discovered due to their talent. This even gives the impression that they serve the material. Differentiation and integration create mysterious effects.

Recently, Tominaga Soichi and Domoto Hisao presented the activities of Mathieu and Tapi? in Informel art, which I found most interesting. I do not know all the details, but in the content presented, there were many points I could agree with. To my surprise, I also discovered that they demanded the immediate revelation of anything arising spontaneously and that they are not bound by the previously predominant forms. Despite the differences in expression compared to our own, we still find a peculiar agreement with our claim to produce something living. I am not sure, though, about the relationship between the conceptually defined pictorial elements like colours, lines, shapes, in abstract art and the true properties of the material in Informel art. As far as the denial of abstraction is concerned, the essence of their declaration was not clear to me. In any case, it is obvious to us that purely formalistic abstract art has lost its charm, so that the Gutai Art Society founded three years ago was accompanied by the slogan that they would go beyond the borders of abstract art and that the name Gutaiism (concretism) was chosen. Above all, we had to search for a centrifugal approach, instead of the centripetal one seen in abstract art.

In those days we thought, and indeed still do think today, that the most important merits of abstract art lie in the fact that it has opened up the possibility to create a new, subjective shape of space, one which really deserves the name creation.

We have decided to pursue the possibilities of pure and creative activity with great energy. We tried to combine human creative ability with the characteristics of the material in order to concretize the abstract space.

When the abilities of the individual were united with the chosen material in the melting-pot of psychic automatism, we were overwhelmed by the shape of space still unknown to us, never before seen or experienced. Automatism naturally made the image which did not occur to us. Instead of relying on our own image, we have struggled to find an original method of creating that space.

The works of our members will serve as examples. Toshiko Kinoshita is actually a teacher of chemistry at a girls’ school. She created a peculiar space by allowing chemicals to react on filter paper. Although it is possible to imagine the results beforehand to a certain extent, the final results of handling the chemicals can not be established until the following day. The particular results and the shape of the material are in any case her own work. After Pollock many Pollock-imitators appeared, but Pollock’s splendour will never be extinguished. The talent of invention deserves respect.

Kazuo Shiraga placed a lump of paint on a huge piece of paper, and started to spread it around violently with his feet. For about the last two years art journalists have called this unprecedented method "the Art of committing the whole self with the body." Kazuo Shiraga had no intention at all of making this strange method known to the public. He had merely found the method which enabled him to confront and unite the material he had chosen with his own spiritual dynamics. In doing so he achieved an extremely convincing result.

In contrast to Shiraga, who works with an organic method, Shozo Shimamoto has been working with mechanical manipulations for the past few years. The spray pictures created by smashing a bottle full of paint, or the large surface made in a single moment by firing a small, hand-made cannon filled with paint by means of an acetylene gas explosion, etc., display a breathtaking freshness.

Other works which deserve mention are those of Yasuo Sumi produced with a vibrator or Toshio Yoshida, who uses only one single lump of paint. All their actions are full of a new intellectual energy which demands our respect and recognition.

The search for an original, undiscovered world also resulted in numerous works in the so-called object form. In my opinion, conditions at the annual open-air exhibitions in the city of Ashiya have contributed to this. That these works, created by artists who are confronted with many different materials, differ from the objects of Surrealism can be seen simply from the fact that the artists tend not to give them titles or to provide interpretations. The objects in Gutai art were, for example, a painted, bent iron plate (Atsuko Tanaka) or a work in hard red vinyl in the form of a mosquito net (Tsuruko Yamazaki), etc. With their characteristics, colours and forms, they were constant messages about the materials.

Our group does not impose restrictions on the art of its members, letting them make full use of their creativity. For instance, many different experiments were carried out with extraordinary activity such as art felt with the entire body, art which could only be touched, Gutai music (in which Shozo Shimamoto has been doing interesting experiments for several years) and so on. Another work by Shozo Shimamoto is like a bridge which shakes everytime you walk over it. Then a work by Saburo Murakami which is like a telescope you can enter to look up at the heavens, and an installation made of plastic bags with organic elasticity, etc. Atsuko Tanaka started with a work of flashing light bulbs which she called "Clothing." Sadamasa Motonaga worked with water, smoke, etc. Gutai art put the greatest importance on all daring steps which lead to an undiscovered world. Sometimes, at first glance, we are compared with and mistaken for Dadaism, and we ourselves fully recognize the achievements of Dadaism. But we think differently, in contrast to Dadaism, our work is the result of investigating the possibilities of calling the material to life.

We shall hope that there is always a fresh spirit in our Gutai exhibitions and that the discovery of new life will call forth a tremendous scream in the material itself.

(Proclaimed in October 1956, published in December 1956 in the art journal "Geijutsu Shincho")

Jiro YOSHIHARA

Is Newness Still New?

by Greg Lindquist

Can newness be considered new any longer? Is the concept of originality in contemporary art even possible or relevant? Interpreted as fresh, transformative, or even deliberately backward-looking, the idea of newness seems empowered by our own personal and idiosyncratic senses of perception, achieved via emotional, intellectual, and physical responses to art. While encountering art, is it our individual experience, together with our collective cultural participation (one informed by familiarity and repetition of exposure to the particulars), that develops a sensation of the new?

Inspired by Irving Sandler’s artist questionnaire “Is There a New Academy?” (published in ARTnews, Summer-September 1959), I surveyed 10 prominent emerging artist peers on this topic. My only definitive criteria for selection were that the artists’ work be highly visible, and that they be rigorously and intellectually engaged in discussing their work. I was also thinking about these artists in regard to their revisitation of the old by digesting influence or quotation, their use of recently developed materials and methods, or the incorporation of something unfamiliar from the cultural sphere into an art context. I began with a fairly vague, open-ended question: What does newness mean in your work with regards to growth, progress, originality, novelty, and freshness? There was intentionally no context provided for the definition of these words. Rather, the implied expectation was that the artists make these words their own (and thus new) by responding to the question.

The resulting voices collected here are diverse. While some responses explore newness as the embodiment of growth—in the artists’ use of material and conceptual explorations—other participants define development in their practice in relation to their environment, understanding of history, and/or marrying of sensibilities. Newness, then, becomes a grouping of ideas, concepts, and histories contextualizing each of these artist’s works. Some responses, stemming from disciplined routine and ritual studio practices, point to experiential growth (Joshua Abelow, Franklin Evans), while others reference the recombining of influences and environment (Ali Banisadr) and an elastic temporality stretching from the present (Josephine Halvorson). In addition, several display a self-aware engagement with political, scientific, and mythological histories (LaToya Ruby Frazier, David Brooks, Matthew Day Jackson, respectively). Lastly, other replies locate a socially conscious awareness and reinterpretation of capitalist and material contradictions (Liz Magic Laser, Mary Mattingly, Georgia Sagri).

The idea of newness is extended and challenged by the global reach of information technology. In this process, freshness is achieved by a synthesis of recombined and pre-existing elements. As in cooking, no work of art can be repeated exactly the same way twice. Making art becomes about the foraging of components and the reconstitution of history, influence, and the current moment. In the end, it is evident that we are continually reassembling universal and personal lexicons already used countless times before—but never exactly collected in this particular way—in a context that, until now, has never before existed.

Full Responses (Online exclusive)

It's hard to say exactly what newness is or means.  Literally, I suppose it means making something new, which I do all the time.  I feel most comfortable when I have many painting in progress, all over the floor of my studio.  I always want new paintings and drawings around.  I have a lot of anxiety when I'm in an empty studio.  But, I think the anxiety is good because it forces me to make new paintings and drawings again.  I'm always going through this process of filling up a room and then emptying it out.  I also think newness has something to do with this crazy thing called the Internet. I often think a work of art isn't complete until it has been documented and transformed into a jpeg. I wonder what that means.

—Joshua Abelow

Newness for me is about being able to combine and recombine many different elements that interest me into one place. It's a way of trying to make sense of the world around me.  This can be a combination of current events, art history and personal history. In this way I can function like an antenna—to capture what is in the air or in the subconscious—and then tune it into my work.   It's the juxtaposition of past & present that creates something original.

—Ali Banisadr

To elaborate on any concept of new, I look to Charles Darwin as one of our great pioneers in framing a unique, almost timeless, concept of what new is. Darwin establishes newness within the realm of biological and deep time scenarios: the theory of evolution. Within a Darwinian deep time scenario, critical distance is the default and new is the norm. The process of evolution mandates that all living things be in a constant state of flux—existing in perpetual response to relations with other subjects and their environments in the present. They change and adapt form based on those particular responses to other subjects in those particular moments, just before the next moment’s arrangements and then the next. The living world does not emerge along a predetermined plan. In other words, it materializes and takes momentary shape by virtue of the infinite reoccurring singular moments in the ever-marching present. These fluid relations are perpetually generative of something new, which is only to say different than the ones before or after them. As long as there is duration, trophic movement, competitors, and predators, as long as there are communities containing desires, ills, and misunderstandings, each remaining moment will be different, which is to say new than the one before or after it. The living world is a network of unfixed entities floating through ever-shifting circumstances, never anchoring, as the goal is to remain unfixed, providing the ability for adjustment, adaptability and consequently life. Stasis is to die. To frame out and separate any individual moment of “new” is to snuff the life out therein, or is, at least, to be deluded that this one moment of new is the new. Therefore, it must follow that there can never been an autonomous “new.” It is by its very nature beholden to its momentary context, which inevitably must change.

That said, I have expressed nothing new, but have simply re-arranged previous thoughts that have been thought before (namely, here, by Darwin), with nothing more than a new juncture of context and scale (by scale, I do mean their proportions but also their intensities or even their speeds). In my work, I do not seek out a thing that is “new,” which from Darwin’s perspective would be a delusion. I specifically seek out old stories, for old stories come with a critical distance. And as history has shown, new stories inevitably bear no difference to old stories, except in their context and their scale. To live free of delusion, one only needs to pay attention to the constant, uninterrupted stream of new(s), anything else leads to a state of stasis. In that sense, the “new” is the norm; it is daily life.

This has been the subject and the matter for much of my work, and allowing the subject’s myriad of relations to briefly collapse in on each other acts as a material catalyst for each project. It gives them momentary form. A sculpture like “Preserved Forest” (2010 - 11) muses upon one of our oldest of stories—deforestation—by using the very materials radically altered and altering the landscape of the world’s lungs, the Amazon. The sculpture is an action that collapses the notions of deforestation and mass road development with that of an organic abyss. Through decomposition and the fossilization of a forest cross-section drowned in concrete, the sculpture changes daily and resists any sense of stasis inherent to composition. A work like “Adaptable Boardwalk with 3 Genetic Drifts” (2011) renders the linearity of a boardwalk as an elastic space from which to adapt and change form in response to relations with other subjects. The project “Still Life with Stampede and Guano” (2011) subjects concrete lawn sculptures depicting lifesize stampeding elephants, roaring lions and rearing horses , to the ignoble defecation of wild seabirds. The ironies detailed above are imbued within these domestically familiar but exoticized faux beasts. D isplaying ferocious poses, they stand frozen for eternity, while “living with” seabirds at the Florida Keys Wild Bird Center and acquiring a quasi-painterly patina of guano—indexical traces of real life lived. For the beasts, their referents, and their avian accomplices are collapsed into a form derived from a series of reoccurring singular moments of living.

To this end, sculpture and its makers are actors, dynamic and unfixed, as they participate in the network of generation and entropic dissemination through momentarily new junctures of context and scale beholden to the ever-marching present.

—David Brooks

Newness in my work exists in the eternal conflict between the repetition of the familiar and the hope that process will allow for newness in form, content and my understanding of the work. The repetition encompasses the routine (two cups of coffee and a semi-conscious stare at the walls, floor and the stuff packed into the studio). Even in this repetition, the temporal (today versus any prior day) and the actual light, which passes through three north-facing windows and a skylight in the southwest corner of the studio, adjust the experience of my morning stare. It’s the same but never quite. Repetition carries over into the repetition of my artistic processes. My hope is that because the processes are open, my work is open to growth and an experience of newness.  I am not so interested in originality or novelty, but rather, growth, expansion, and freshness.

—Franklin Evans

Newness in Contemporary art could be possible depending on the artist's intentions and clarity.

In photography, new advancement in technologies has pushed formal and aesthetic approaches to the point that photographers do not have to rely on cameras. But, in my own practice the use of the camera is essential in order for me to speak back to the historical significance of social documentary work of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when photographers were committed to addressing social and political progress in the United States. The future of our country is an urgent matter that needs to be addressed and archived. I locate myself within this historical continuum conceptually by documenting how current ideologies surrounding revitalization in rust-belt cities are impacting our social landscape. The aesthetics of my work are not new, but the concepts and concerns deal with new social and theoretical debates in the 21st Century. This balance adds on to the growth and legacy of documentary work.

—LaToya Ruby Frazier

I don't tend to use those five words often, either about my own work or more generally. Painting is an elastic practice that stretches outwards from the present: it recalls its past and inspires its future. In my mind, making a painting is by nature always a new experience—sensually, intellectually, in so many other ways. What may be new is that the role of an avant-garde is no longer a cultural imperative, and neither is the narrative of progress. For me, history is not determining, but a resource—not to scavenge callously, but to access consciously.

   —Josephine Halvorson

Innovation is at the very core of what we deem important when evaluating (in every sense of the word) contemporary art.  Originality is also important in this consideration.  Both innovation and originality reside principally in the arena of mythology because so much of the conversation that revolves around these notions includes the "unique genius" practitioner.  This mythological creature shares the characteristics of Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians: otherworldly and slipping through time with no apparent history.  

History is not a drag or anchor but a foundation on which to build, or a ledge from which to dive into the abyss of the future. In both cases, the colors, forms, languages, and structures are embodied in all of us, informed by our shared history.

The process of innovation begins when finding fluency in the language of one’s practice. To innovate, there must be a recognition of the shortcomings in the existing language that requires new verbs, nouns, adjectives, prepositions, etc. Innovation occurs in the details; it is always slight in relation to human history. Though the leaps are small (more akin to hops), I believe that every small innovation is a reinvention and that there are only new ideas.  The "epiphany" is a fallacy—it only occurs when we do not, or are not able, to pay enough attention to the slow progress of our ideas and engagement with our environment.

—Matthew Day Jackson

The demand for the new is a double-edged sword: on the one hand it places the artist at the whim of a somewhat sinister dimension of consumerism, and on the other hand, I am disappointed by art that lacks the ambition to innovate the conversation. An artwork is never inherently new, but we can strive to break down concepts and methods, to digest and reconstitute them anew. Most recently I have been looking to the journalist as a role model of someone who insinuates themselves in an ongoing dialogue between the media and the public. My idealized model of the journalist I’d like to emulate is someone whose commentary takes up pre-existing terms to offer a new perspective that has the potential to impact the situation at hand.

—Liz Magic Laser

Utilizing recording devices and tools of dissemination such as photography and video, I first invent and intervene with sculptural forms to facilitate the story I need to tell. By interceding in urban or rural space with itinerant, architectural sculptures created to move through it, I’m commanding a larger narrative around them by organizing people to inhabit them, working with officials for permits, and barter-partners for necessities. The sculptures have a life-cycle and take on a life of their own as a journeying living experiment for inhabitants whose experience is dependent on chance circumstances, interactions, and the vagaries of daily life. Using forms and imagery that dominate our lexicon of particular times and places, I’m re-examining and reinserting the perceived meanings into a continual construction of a present and building of multiple futures. 

Through these drifting stories I’m asking: can there be instances situated far enough outside of the larger apparatus of standardization and commodification, that instead attract and repulse through narratives about communal spaces while bringing people together to grapple with their presence? I use art to contend with political, economic, and environmental circumstances and to work out proposals for improving human coexistence. Newness, which has for a while been directly in tandem with marketing new products to people across the world, may be less important than learning from multiple pasts to inform possible presents and futures. Exceptional thought naturally grows out of a combination of perspectives and a reexamination of narratives that inform through multiple interpretations.

—Mary Mattingly

It is certain, I believe, that we are living important historical moments. I am currently in Greece, a country that everyone is observing in order to understand the sociopolitical and economic shifts regarding the future of Europe and the Globe. For me, I take Gertrude Stein’s words: “There is no change lighter. It was done.” If newness is that which we are seeking, then the changes we are part of alter only the images surrounding us. Our actions will be merely a desire to transform physical, material representations. It seems, though, that this is not the deeper and urgent motivation of the current social uprisings and political changes. The term I would like to use is nowness rather than newness. Nowness for me is the political responsibility that each one of us seeks for him/herself and for all when we meet in the public sphere. It is presence, commitment to the events of the moment. It is the environments we create with our bodies when we gather to share ideas, intellectual and material resources, and change our lives by actions and not by choosing mediators. It is when we actively demand rights, such as the freedom to assemble, without waiting from power, that the political and economic elites acknowledge those rights and give them to us. We take that which is already ours.

It is by the effort for nowness that we are taking power. The mass media and the sterilized academic scenes analyze the social struggles and the cultural changes only as a desire for newness… They don’t understand that without drastic participation, each one with different capacities, in the physical and virtual spaces of interaction, exchange and production, that we cannot eliminate inequality, social polarizations and the idea of private property, which are the call of nowness; there are many moments of nowness, and they are new as the new of the now.

—Georgia Sagri

CLASE 2

PRESENTACIÓN DE LA LECTURA:

a) EPÍLOGO SOBRE LA SENSIBILIDAD POSMODERNA.

DEL ARTE OBJETUAL AL ARTE DE CONCEPTO. SIMÓN MARCHÁN FIZ. LIBRO COMPLETO PDF

TIEMPOS MODERNOS

METROPOLIS

PRUITT IGOE

THE DUDE. EL SER POSMODERNO

EL BORREGO. CAFÉ TACUBA

Soy anarquista, soy neonazista.

Soy un esquinjed y soy ecologista.

Soy peronista, soy terrosrista, capitalista

Y también soy pacifista.

Soy activista, sindicalista, soy agresivo, y muy alternativo.

Soy deportista, del rotarac, politeísta

Y también soy buen cristiano.

Y en las tocadas la neta es el eslam

Pero en mi casa si le meto al tropical,

Me gusta el jevimetal, me gusta el jarcor.

Me gusta patric miler y también me gusta el gronch.

Me gusta la maldita me gusta la lupita

Y escucho a los magneto cuando esta mi noviecita

Me gusta andar de negro con los labios pintados.

Pero guapo en la oficina siempre ando bien trajeado.

Me gusta aventar piedras, me gusta recojerlas,

Me gusta pintar bardas y despues ir a lavarlas.



b) TEXTOS SOBRE LO NUEVO. PRESENTACIÓN DE LECTURA Y ARTISTAS.

c) PROYECCIÓN DE VIDEOS

LIZ MAGIC LASER

d) HACER GRUPOS Y ESCOGER TRES ARTISTAS, CRÍTICOS, ETC
e) ELABORAR UN BOCETO DE ENTREVISTA
d) CONTACTAR A LOS ARTISTAS

PLAN DE MATERIA

INTRODUCCIÓN A NUEVAS TENDENCIAS DE LA PLÁSTICA