Contemporary Art is the artwork produced in our time period. In this new century, forms of art took a new turn with artwork that artists during the Renaissance stage and middle ages would never believe. These new artworks go beyond the basic painting and sculpture method which is still in use but we get to see more photography, video clips and performances. With that being said, it is always a mystery of not knowing what form of art will be coming soon. One of the better experiences of contemporary art is the amount of diversity, though it is still a work in progress we have taken a huge step in the twentieth century.
One of my favorite stories of the female artists we have covered in class would have to be Marina Abromovic. Born on November 30th, 1946 in Serbia she had always struggled with her mother who constantly abused her. She had said in an interview how she had asked her mother for a nose job and she slapped her. Her life had taken a turn when she fell in love with art at a very young age. Soon she had went on to art school and later fell in love with an artist named Ulay. The two had begun working together and that is where things had gone bad. Soon they would break up in 1988, but she had continued to work in visual arts being an artist, writer and film writer. Her work dealt with body art, endurance art, and feminist art that percieved the mind. In 2010, she had her own exhibit at the MoMa where she had sat in a chair for eight hours a day and stared guests in the eyes which was called The Artist is Present. Her old lover Ulay had been one of the guests and when she opened her eyes she had begun to tear and reaching out to hold his hand.
Cindy Sherman is a Postmodern female artist that has portrayed many provocative and elegant photographs that were apart of the major rise of contemporary art building her name as one of the most influential artists in this movement. Chadwick explains, “Photographs reveal the instability of gender, and challenge the idea that there might be an innate, unmediated female sexuality” (Chadwick, 383). She had been the center of her own work by modeling for over 30 years making her body the subject. She had believed that a photograph had always spoke more than a painting. The most influential part of her photography is that she lets the viewer depict the picture making their own interpretation,
"In this photo, Cindy Sherman represents what Western society sees as the "ideal" woman: she is fit, pretty, blond, focused on her appearance, and dreaming of her man since he is not there to guide her. However, Sherman uses her photography to "expose the fiction of a real woman behind the images that Western culture constructs for our consumption in film and advertising media." Depictions of these "images" of feminity "enabled her to act out the psychoanalytic notion of feminity as a masquerade-that is, as a representation of masculine desire to fix the women in a stable and stabilizing identity."
Sherrie Levine is a postmodern artist but her style is strange, taking modern art and reforming it into her own. By doing working in this style she is trying to challenge the forms of modern art and patriarchy. This seems to be a common technique to challenge the male modern works in today’s world. Chadwick explains, “Levine’s work not only contests notions of originality and authorship but it situates those ideas within the premises of patriarchy. She does not pretend to be the maker of the original image; nor does she merely emphasize that “originality” in mechanical reproductions is ambiguous” (Chadwick, 384). In other words, she challenges the male authority and does not pretend to be the original maker of the artworks in her style.
Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, 1936
"The series, entitled After Walker Evans, became a landmark of postmodernism, both praised and attacked as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority, a critique of the commodification of art, and an elegy on the death of modernism."
Another contemporary artist we have mentioned in class whose work has touched me is Judy Chicago. About two weeks ago I had taken the trip to the Brooklyn Museum and had seen her famous artwork called the Dinner Party created from 1974 to 1979. This work is a triangular table that symbolizes equality with a total of 39 plates, she had chosen the 39 female artists that had an impact in the equality movement. The Dinner Party has been exhibited in 16 venues in 6 countries on 3 continents. Under the Dinner Party’s table lies the Heritage Floor consisting of 2000 tiles, and out of three thousand women artists 999 women artists’ names are Inscribed in gold luster.
Being born in Newark, Barbara Kruger had become conceptual artist and collagist. She had begun her artist adventures by photography. Soon after her style shifted into taking images and employing her art into it. Once I heard the situation between her and the well-known brand Supreme I was in shock. This had opened my eyes and proved to me that her work speaks to everyone who buys Supreme which is the majority of the people I know. Her font and format of the subtitles on her images had been stolen by Supreme. That box logo is the iconic symbol of supreme which many people will pay a lot for a purchase of that merchandise.
Judy Chicago Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face), 1981
"These rigorously composed mature works function successfully on any scale. Their wide distribution—under the artist’s supervision—in the form of umbrellas, tote bags, postcards, mugs, T-shirts, posters, and so on, confuses the boundaries between art and commerce and calls attention to the role of advertising in public debate."
Work Cited
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/barbara-krugerhttps://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/heritage_floor
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