In the painting white clouds over xiao

Art Appreciation

After reading Chapter 3/Themes handout on D2L, reading the Shepard Fairey article and going through the associated presentation you will complete this assessment. Assessments are different than homework assignments because these are meant for you to practice using the information you have learned without fear of failure. They are graded based on completion as long as you have followed directions and show that you have completed the D2L lesson the assessment is attached to in the content section. (By using the correct terminology)

Prompt: Consider the themes found in Chapter 3/Themes handout on D2L in relation to the site-specific installation, Ghostwriter, made in 1994 by Ralph Hemlick and Stuart Schecther. What is the artwork’s primary theme from the chapter? Provide visual evidence to explain your answer.

Even though you might think this artwork could fit more than one theme, be sure to select the one you think is the best fit. What is it's number one purpose? Why was it made? On the midterm, if you discuss more than one theme you will not receive credit for themes even if one of them is correct as the task asks you to identify the primary theme (meaning one) of the artwork.

Make sure that you provide clear visual evidence that explains the theme you have selected rather than just describing the subject matter. You want to "defend" your answer. Even if it is a theme I might not normally associate with the artwork sometimes your evidence can convince me to believe it could work because art is subjective. Vagueness is not your friend and without proper evidence you won't be able to convince me of much so be sure to be clear.

Note: All assessments MUST be written in complete sentences and in paragraph format. Failure to do this will automatically result in a ZERO. Write 1-2 paragraphs for this prompt.

Link for Shepard Fairey article: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-shepard-fairey-inauguration-20170119-story.html

In extending our modern concept of art outward to other cultures and backward in time, we observe that peoples throughouthistory have created visually meaningful forms. Whether those forms be paintings or textiles, buildings or ceramics, they have incommon that they are about something. This “aboutness” is what allows us to experience them as art. But what sorts of thingsare they about? One way to begin exploring the elusive concept of “aboutness” is to consider some broad areas of meaning that have been reflected in the arts of many cultures throughout human history. We can call these areas of meaning themes. No doubt, every person setting out to name the most important themes in art would produce a different list. This chapter proposes eight themes, from the sacred realm to art about art. Each one allows us to range widely over the world's artistic heritage, setting works drawn from different times and places in dialogue by showing how their meanings begin in a shared theme.

Just as a work of art can hold many meanings and inspire multiple interpretations, so it may reflect more than one theme. As you read this chapter, you may find yourself considering works discussed earlier in the light of the new theme at hand, or thinking about how a newly encountered work also reflects themes discussed earlier. This is as it should be. Themes are not intended to reduce art to a set of neat categories. Rather, they provide a framework for exploring how complex a form of expression it can be.

The Sacred Realm Who made the universe? How did life begin, and what is its purpose? What happens to us after we die? For answers to those and other fundamental questions, people throughout history have turned to a world we cannot see except through faith, the sacred realm of the spirit. Gods and goddesses, spirits of ancestors, spirits of nature, one God and one alone—each society has formed its own view of the sacred realm and how it interacts with our own. Some forms of faith have disappeared into history, others have remained small and local, while still others such as Christianity and Islam have become major religions that draw believers from all over the world. From earliest times, art has played an important role in our relationship to the sacred, helping us to envision it, to honor it, and to communicate with it.

Many works of architecture have been created to provide settings for rituals of worship and prayer, rituals that formalize contact between the earthly and the divine realms. One such work is the small marvel known as the Sainte-Chapelle, or holy chapel (3.1). Located in Paris, the chapel was commissioned in 1239 by the French king Louis IX to house an important collection of relics that he had just acquired, relics he believed to include pieces of the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, and other instruments of Christ's Passion. The king's architects created a soaring vertical space whose walls seem to be made of stained glass. Light passing through the glass creates a dazzling effect, transforming the interior into a radiant, otherworldly space in which the glory of heaven seems close at hand.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.1.htm#id_1259360431_001_030012
3.1 Interior, upper chapel, Sainte-Chapelle, Paris. 1243–48.

The Sainte-Chapelle is a relatively intimate space, for it was intended as a private chapel for the king and his court. In contrast, the Great Mosque at Córdoba, Spain, was built to serve the needs of an entire community (3.2). A mosque is an Islamic house of worship. Begun during the 8th century, the Great Mosque at Córdoba grew to be the largest place of prayer in western Islam. The interior of the prayer hall is a vast horizontal space measured out by a virtual forest of columns. Daylight enters through doorways placed around the perimeter of the hall. Filtered through the myriad columns and arches, it creates a complex play of shadows that makes the extent and shape of the interior hard to grasp. Alternating red and white sections break up the visual continuity of the arch forms. Oil lamps hanging in front of the focal point of worship would have created still more shadows.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.1.htm#id_1259360431_001_030015
3.2 Prayer hall of Abd al-Rahman I, Great Mosque, Córdoba, Spain. Begun 786 C.E.

In both the Sainte-Chapelle and the Great Mosque at Córdoba, architects strove to create a place where worshipers might approach the sacred realm. The builders of the Sainte-Chapelle envisioned a radiant vertical space transformed by colored light, whereas the architects of the Great Mosque at Córdoba envisioned a disorienting horizontal space fractured by columns and shadows. In both buildings, the everyday world is shut out, and light and space are used to create a heightened sense of mystery and wonder.

The sacred realm cannot be seen with human eyes, yet artists throughout the ages have been asked to create images of gods, goddesses, angels, demons, and all manner of spirit beings. Religious images may serve to focus the thoughts of the faithful by giving concrete form to abstract ideas. Often, however, their role has been more complex and mysterious. For example, in some cultures, images have been understood as a sort of conduit through which sacred power flows; in others, they serve as a dwelling place for a deity, who is called upon through ritual to take up residence within.

Our next two images, one Buddhist and one Christian, were made at approximately the same time but some four thousand miles apart, the Buddhist image in Tibet, the Christian one in Italy. The Buddhist painting portrays Rathnasambhava, one of the Five Transcendent Buddhas, seated in a pose of meditation on a stylized lotus throne (3.3). His right hand makes the gesture of bestowing vows; his left, the gesture of meditation. Unlike other buddhas, the Five Transcendent Buddhas are typically portrayed in the bejeweled garb of Indian princes. Arranged around Rathnasambhava are bodhisattvas, also in princely attire. Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have deferred their ultimate goal of nirvana—freedom from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—in order to help others attain that goal. All wear halos signifying their holiness. The buddha, being the most important of the personages depicted, dominates the painting as the largest figure. He faces straight front, in a pose of tranquility, while the others around him stand or sit in relaxed postures.

3.3 Rathnasambhava, the Transcendent Buddha of the South. Tibet, 13th century C.E. Opaque watercolor on cloth, height 361⁄2″. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The second example, painted by the 13th-century Italian master Cimabue, depicts Mary, mother of Christ, with her son (3.4). Mary sits tranquilly on her throne, her right hand indicating the Christ child, who raises his right hand in a gesture of benediction. On both sides of her are figures of angels, heavenly spirit-messengers. Again, all wear halos signifying their holiness. As in the Buddhist painting, the most important personage dominates the composition, is the largest, and holds a serenely frontal pose.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.1.htm#id_1259360431_001_030020
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.1.htm#id_1259360431_001_030024
3.4 Cimabue. Madonna Enthroned. c. 1280–90. Tempera on wood, 12′71⁄2″ × 7′4″. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

O

THINKING ABOUT ART Iconoclasm

In arguments for iconoclasm, why is worshiping artworks themselves not the same as worshiping what they represent? On the other hand, how can art communicate religious beliefs, practices, and values?

n February 26, 2001, the Islamic fundamentalist rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban, issued an edict that stunned the world: all statues in the country must be destroyed, for they were being worshiped and venerated by unbelievers. The order targeted statues large and small, those housed in museums and those on view in public places. But the statues that

caught the public's attention were a pair of monumental buddhas. Carved into the living rock of a cliff face sometime between the 3rd and 7th centuries, they were originally cared for by Buddhist monks and visited by pilgrims during religious festivals. The monks and pilgrims left centuries ago, but the statues had survived. It seemed scarcely credible that they were about to be blown up, but that is exactly what happened. In early March, despite international diplomatic efforts, the statues were destroyed.

Why would statues be destroyed in the name of religion? Like many other religions, Islam has at its core a set of texts that invite interpretation. One of these, the Traditions of the Prophet, contains two objections to representational images. The first objection is that making images usurps the creative power of God; the second is that images can lead to idolatry, the worship of the images themselves. Historically, the warnings have led Muslims generally to avoid representational images in religious contexts such as mosques or manuscripts of the Qur'an, their holy book. Interpreted more radically, they have sometimes been used to forbid all representational images, no matter what their context. Our word for the destruction of images does not come from Islam, however, but from Christianity, which also has a history of destroying images in the name of spiritual purity. The word is iconoclasm.

Iconoclasm is derived from the Greek for “image breaking.” It was coined to describe one side of a debate that raged for over a century in the Christian empire of Byzantium (see page 353). Byzantine churches, monasteries, books, and homes were decorated with depictions of Christ, of the saints, and of biblical stories and personages. Yet during the 8th century, a movement arose against such depictions, and a series of emperors ordered the destruction of images throughout the realm. Again, the objection was idolatry. Christianity too has at its core a set of texts. The most important of these is the Bible, which contains a very clear warning against making images. The warning comes directly from God as the second of the Ten Commandments.

Centuries after the Byzantine episode, iconoclasm arose in western Europe when newly forming Protestant movements of the 16th century accused Catholics of idolatry. Protestant mobs ransacked churches, smashing stained glass, destroying paintings, breaking statues, whitewashing over frescoes, and melting down metal shrines and vessels. To this day, Protestant churches are comparatively bare.

Images have played an important role in almost every religion in the world. Many religions embrace them wholeheartedly. In Buddhism, for example, making religious images is viewed as a form of prayer. In Hinduism they may provide a dwelling place for a deity. The modern Western invention of “art” has seen many of these images moved to museums, and in the end this may have been part of the Taliban's point. We may not worship images for the deities they represent, but do we worship art?

(left) Large Buddha, Bamiyan, Afghanistan. 3rd–7th century C.E. Stone, height 175′. (right) The empty niche after the statue was destroyed. March 2001.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/15.1.htm#PG_353
We should not conclude from the remarkable formal similarity of these works that any communication or influence took place between Italy and Central Asia. A safer assumption is that two artists of different faiths independently found a format that satisfied their pictorial needs. Both the Buddha and the Virgin are important, serene holy figures. Bodhisattvas and angels, who are always more active, attend them. Therefore, the artists, from their separate points of view, devised similar compositions.

Politics and the Social Order Of the many things we create as human beings, the most basic and important may be societies. How can a stable, just, and productive society best be organized? Who will rule, and how? What freedoms will rulers have? What freedoms will citizens have? How is wealth to be distributed? How is authority to be maintained? Many answers to those questions have been posed throughout history, and throughout history the resulting order has been reflected in art.

In many early societies, earthly order and cosmic order were viewed as interrelated and mutually dependent. Such was the case in ancient Egypt, where the pharaoh (king) was viewed as a link between the divine and the earthly realms. The pharaoh was considered a “junior god,” a personification of the god Horus and the son of the sun god, Ra. As a ruler, his role was to maintain the divinely established order of the universe, which included the social order of Egypt. He communed with the gods in temples only he could enter, and he wielded theoretically unlimited power over a country that literally belonged to him.

When a pharaoh died, it was believed that he rejoined the gods and became fully divine. Preparations for this journey began even during his lifetime, as vast tombs were constructed and outfitted with everything he would need to maintain his royal lifestyle in eternity. The most famous of these monuments are the three pyramids at Giza (3.5), which served as the tombs of the pharaohs Menkaure, Khafre, and Khufu. Thousands of years later, the scale of these structures is still awe-inspiring. The largest pyramid, that of Khufu, originally reached a height of about 480 feet, roughly the height of a fifty-story skyscraper. Its base covers over 13 acres. Over two million blocks of stone, each weighing over 2 tons, went into building it. Each block had to be quarried with hand tools, transported to the site, and set in place without mortar. Tens of thousands of workers labored for years to build such a tomb and fill its chambers with treasures.

3.5 The Great Pyramids, Giza, Egypt. Pyramid of Menkaure (left), c. 2500 B.C.E.; Pyramid of Khafre (center), c. 2530 B.C.E.; Pyramid of Khufu (right), c. 2570 B.C.E.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.2.htm#id_1259360431_001_030045
The pyramids reflect the immense power of the pharaohs who could command such forces, but they also reflect the beliefs underlying the social order that granted its rulers such power in the first place. In the Egyptian view, the well-being of Egypt depended on the goodwill of the gods, whose representative on earth was the pharaoh. His safe passage to the afterlife and his worship thereafter as a god himself were essential for the prosperity of the country and the continuity of the universe. No amount of labor or spending seemed too great to achieve those ends.

Visitors to the pyramids at Giza originally arrived by water, disembarking first at one of the temples that sat on the riverbank (each pyramid had its own). From there, they would have walked along a long, raised causeway to a second temple at the base of the pyramid, which itself could not be entered. The temples contained numerous shrines to the dead pharaoh, each with its own life-size statue of him. Statues lined the causeways as well, and still more were inside the pyramid itself. Before our modern mass media, it was art that served to project the presence and authority of rulers to the people throughout their lands. During the days of the Roman Empire, in the first centuries of our era, an official likeness of a new emperor was circulated throughout the realm so that local sculptors could get busy making statues for public places and civic buildings.

One of the finest of these ancient Roman works to come down to us is a bronze statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (3.6). Seated on his mount, he extends his arm in an oratorical gesture, as if delivering a speech. His calm in victory contrasts with the spirited motions of his horse, which was originally shown raising its hoof over a fallen enemy, now lost. The Roman fashion for beards came and went, like all fashions. But the emperor's beard in the statue is significant, and part of the way he wanted to be portrayed. Beards were associated with Greek philosophers, and Marcus Aurelius' beard signals his desire to be seen as a philosopher-king, an ideal he genuinely tried to live up to.

3.6 Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. 161–80 C.E. Gilded bronze, height 11′6″. Musei Capitolini, Rome

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.2.htm#id_1259360431_001_030050
During the often violent transition into our modern era, art remained deeply involved with politics and the social order. The perspective of the artist changed profoundly, however. Instead of exclusively serving those in power, the artist was now a citizen among other citizens and free to make art that took sides in the debates of the day. Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People leaves no doubt about the artist's support for the Revolution of 1830, a popular uprising in Paris that toppled one government and installed another (3.7). Delacroix completed the painting in the very same year, and it retains the passion of his idealized view of the insurrection and the hopes he had for the future it would bring. At the center is Liberty herself, personified as a Greek statue come to life. Holding the French flag high, she rallies the citizens of Paris, who surge toward us brandishing pistols and sabers as though about to burst out of the painting. Before them lie the bodies of slain government troops.

3.7 Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People, 1830. 1830. Oil on canvas, 8′6″ × 10′10″. Musée du Louvre, Paris

When the painting was displayed to the public in 1831, it was bought by none other than Louis-Philippe, the “citizen-king” that the revolution had put in power. But perhaps the image was a little too revolutionary, for the new king returned the painting to Delacroix after a few months. In fact, Liberty Leading the People did not go on permanent public display until 1863, after a vast urban renewal program had minimized the possibility of angry citizens again taking control of the streets.

Where Delacroix glorifies violence in the service of democracy in Liberty Leading the People, Pablo Picasso condemns the violence that fascism unleashed against ordinary citizens in Guernica, one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century (3.8). Guernica depicts an event that took place during the Spanish Civil War, when a coalition of conservative, traditional, and fascist forces led by General Francisco Franco were trying to topple the liberal government of the fledgling Spanish Republic. In Germany and Italy, the fascist governments of Hitler and Mussolini were already in power. Franco willingly accepted their aid, and in exchange he allowed the Nazis to test their developing air power. On April 28, 1937, the Germans bombed the town of Guernica, the old Basque capital in northern Spain. There was no real military reason for the raid; it was simply an experiment to see whether aerial bombing could wipe out a whole city. Being totally defenseless, Guernica was devastated and its civilian population massacred.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.2.htm#id_1259360431_001_030054
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.2.htm#id_1259360431_001_030059
3.8 Pablo Picasso. Guernica. 1937. Oil on canvas, 11′51⁄2″ × 25′53⁄4″. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

At the time, Picasso, himself a Spaniard, was working in Paris and had been commissioned by his government to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World's Fair of 1937. For some time, he had procrastinated about fulfilling the commission; then, within days after news of the bombing reached Paris, he started Guernica and completed it in little over a month. The finished mural shocked those who saw it; it remains today a chillingly dramatic protest against the brutality of war.

At first encounter with Guernica, the viewer is overwhelmed by its presence. The painting is huge—more than 25 feet long and nearly 12 feet high—and its stark, powerful imagery seems to reach out and engulf the observer. Picasso used no colors; the whole painting is done in white and black and shades of gray, possibly to echo the visual impact of news photography. (Newspapers at the time were illustrated with black-and-white photographs; newsreels shown in cinemas were also in black-and-white. Television did not yet exist.) Although the artist's symbolism is very personal (and he declined to explain it in detail), we cannot misunderstand the scenes of extreme pain and anguish throughout the canvas. At far left, a shrieking mother holds her dead child, and at far right, another woman, in a burning house, screams in agony. The gaping mouths and clenched hands speak of disbelief at such mindless cruelty.

Like Liberty Leading the People, Guernica has had an interesting political afterlife. Franco's forces were triumphant. Picasso refused to allow Guernica to reside in Spain while Franco was in power, and so for years it was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When Franco died in 1975, the painting was returned to Spain, but there another debate ensued: Where in Spain should it stay? The town of Guernica wanted it. So did the town where Picasso was born. Madrid, the Spanish capital, won out in the end. The Basque Nationalist Movement, which would like to see the Basque territories secede from Spain, considers that Madrid kidnapped their rightful cultural property. Guernica is now displayed under bulletproof glass.

Stories and Histories Deeds of heroes, lives of saints, folktales passed down through generations, episodes of television shows that everyone knows by heart—shared stories are one of the ways we create a sense of community. Artists have often turned to stories for subject matter, especially stories whose roots reach deep into their culture's collective memory.

In Christian Europe of the early 15th century, stories of the lives of the saints were a common reference point. One of the best-loved saints was Francis of Assisi, who had lived only about two centuries earlier. The son of a wealthy merchant in the Italian town of Assisi, Francis as a young man renounced his inheritance for a life of extreme poverty in the service of God. He preached to all who would listen (including birds and animals) and cared for the poor and the sick. With the disciples who gathered around him, he founded a religious community that was eventually formalized as the Franciscan Order of monks.

The painting here by the 15th-century Italian artist Sassetta illustrates two episodes from Saint Francis' life (3.9). To the left, Francis, still a wealthy young man, gives his cloak to a poor man. To the right, Sassetta cleverly uses the house—its front wall made invisible so we can see inside—to create a separate space, a sort of “painting within a painting,” for the next part of the story. Here, an angel appears while Francis is sleeping and grants him a dream vision of the Heavenly City of God. The angel's upraised hand leads our eyes to the vision, which is portrayed at the top of the panel.

3.9 Sassetta. St. Francis Giving His Mantle to a Poor Man and the Vision of the Heavenly City. c. 1437–44. Oil on panel, 341⁄4 × 203⁄4″. The National Gallery, London

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.3.htm#id_1259360431_001_030071
These “painting within a painting” areas are called space cells, and artists in many cultures have used them for narration. The Indian painter Sahibdin made ingenious use of space cells to relate a complicated episode from the epic poem Ramayana, or Story of Rama (3.10). One of the two great founding Indian epics, the Ramayana is attributed to the legendary poet Valmiki, and portions of it date as far back as 500 B.C.E. Rama, the hero of the epic, is a prince and an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. He is heir to the throne of an important Indian kingdom, but because of jealous intrigue he is sent into exile before he can be crowned. Soon afterward, his wife, Sita, is carried off by the demon Ravana. The epic chronicles Rama's search for Sita and his long journey back to his rightful position as a ruler.

3.10 Sahibdin and workshop. Rama and Lakshmana Bound by Arrow-Snakes, from the Ramayana. Mewar, c. 1650–52. Opaque watercolor on paper, approx. 9 × 153⁄8″. The British Library, London

In the episode depicted here, Rama suffers a setback as he battles Ravana for Sita's release. The story begins in the small, rose- colored space cell to the right, where Ravana, portrayed with twenty heads and a whirlwind of arms, confers with his son Indrajit on a plan to defeat Rama, who is about to attack the palace. Below, the plan finalized, Indrajit is shown leaving the palace with his warriors. The action now shifts to the left side of the page, where Indrajit, aloft in an airborne chariot, shoots arrows down at Rama and his companion, Lakshmana. The arrows turn into snakes, binding the two heroes. The story continues on the ground, where Indrajit assures the monkey-king Sugriva that Rama and Lakshmana are not dead but successfully captured. In the yellow cell at the center of the painting, Indrajit stages a triumphal procession back into the palace, where, in the upper right corner, he is joyfully received by Ravana. Meanwhile, Sita, imprisoned in the garden depicted in the yellow space cell immediately below, receives a visit from the demoness Trijata, who takes her in a flying chariot ride (upper left) to witness Rama's defeat. Sahibdin's illustration was made for an audience who knew the epic tale almost by heart and would have delighted in puzzling out the painting's ingenious construction.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.3.htm#id_1259360431_001_030075
History has furnished artists with many stories, for history itself is nothing more than a story we tell ourselves about the past, a story we write and rewrite. In Altar to the Chases High School (3.11), Christian Boltanski draws on our memory of the historical episode known as the Holocaust, the mass murder of European Jews and other populations by the Nazis during World War II. Chases was a private Jewish high school in Vienna. Boltanski began with a photograph that he found of the graduating class of 1931. Eighteen years old in the photograph, the students would have been twenty-five when Austria was annexed by Germany at the start of the war. Most probably perished in the death camps. Boltanski rephotographed each face, then enlarged the results into a series of blurry portraits. The effect is as though someone long gone were calling out to us; we try to recognize them, but cannot quite. Our task is made even more difficult by the lights blocking their faces, lights that serve as halos on the one hand, but also remind us of interrogation lamps. We wonder, too, what the stacked tin boxes might hold. Ashes? Possessions? Documents? They have no labels, just as the blurred faces have almost no identities.

3.11 Christian Boltanski. Altar to the Chases High School. 1987. Photographs, tin biscuit boxes, and six metal lamps; 6′91⁄2″ × 7′21⁄2″. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.3.htm#id_1259360431_001_030080
Looking Outward: The Here and Now The social order, the world of the sacred, history and the great stories of the past—all these are very grand and important themes. But art does not always have to reach so high. Sometimes it is enough just to look around ourselves and notice what our life is like here, now, in this place, at this time.

Among the earliest images of daily life to have come down to us are those that survived in the tombs of ancient Egypt. Egyptians imagined the afterlife as resembling earthly life in every detail, except that it continued through eternity. To ensure the prosperity of the deceased in the afterlife, scenes of the pleasures and bounty of life in Egypt were painted or carved on the tomb walls. Sometimes models were substituted for paintings (3.12).

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.4.htm#id_1259360431_001_030088
3.12 Model depicting the counting of livestock, from the tomb of Meketre, Deir el-Bahri. Dynasty 11, 2134–1991 B.C.E. Painted wood, length 5′8″.

Egyptian Museum, Cairo

This model was one of many found in the tomb of an Egyptian official named Meketre, who died around 1990 B.C.E. Meketre himself is depicted at the center, seated on a chair in the shade of a pavilion. Seated on the floor to his left is his son; to his right are several scribes (professional writers) with their writing materials ready. Overseers of Meketre's estate stand by as herders drive his cattle before the reviewing stand so that the scribes can count them. The herders' gestures are animated as they coax the cattle along with their sticks, and the cattle themselves are beautifully observed in their diverse markings.

Another model from Meketre's tomb depicts women at work spinning and weaving cloth. They would probably have been producing linen, which Egyptians excelled at. In China, the favored material since ancient times has been silk. Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (3.13) is a scene from a long handscroll depicting women weaving, ironing, and folding lengths of silk. The painting is a copy made during the 12th century of a famous 8th-century work by Zhang Xuan, now lost. In this scene, four ladies in their elegant robes stretch a length of silk. The woman facing us irons it with a flat-bottomed pan full of hot coals taken from the brazier visible at the right. A little girl too small to share in the task clowns around for our benefit. If this is a scene from everyday life, it is a very rarefied life indeed. These are ladies of the imperial court, and the painting is just as much an exercise in portraying beautiful women as it is in showing their virtuous sense of domestic duty.

3.13 Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, detail. Attributed to the emperor Huizong (1082–1135) but probably by a court painter. Handscroll, ink, colors, and gold on silk; height 141⁄2″.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.4.htm#id_1259360431_001_030093
Moving from the Chinese scroll to Edward Hopper's Gas (3.14), we leave the exalted world of the imperial court for the everyday world of mid-20th-century America. In place of the women's sense of community in a shared task, we find a solitary man tending to the gasoline pumps at his small, roadside service station. (Yes, gasoline pumps once looked like that.) Hopper had a gift for depicting empty places and lonely moments. Here, he conjures that magical hour when artificial light mingles with the light of the dying day. Our eyes are drawn to the red of the gasoline pumps, then on into the shadows where the road disappears, as though we were forever leaving the scene behind, forever passing by. The man is alone. The road is deserted. (We would see the light from the headlights if a car were approaching.) On the gently lit signboard, Pegasus, the mythical winged horse, leaps into the sky, which will soon fill with stars. It is an ordinary evening, and Hopper celebrates its quiet, unassuming ordinariness.

3.14 Edward Hopper. Gas. 1940. Oil on canvas, 261⁄4 × 401⁄4″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Living in New York in the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg found that the visual impact of daily life had outgrown the ability of any single image to convey it. Instead, to communicate the energy and vitality of his time and place, Rauschenberg treated his canvas like a gigantic page in a scrapbook. The result is a kind of controlled chaos in which photographic images drawn from many sources are linked by a poetic process of free association. Windward, for example, includes images of the Statue of Liberty, a bald eagle against a rainbow, the Sistine Chapel with Michelangelo's famous frescoes (upper left), Sunkist oranges, Manhattan rooftops and their distinctive water towers (in red), building facades (in blue), and construction workers in plaid shirts and hard hats (in blue, lower right) (3.15). Part of our pleasure as viewers lies in teasing out their visual and conceptual connections.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.4.htm#id_1259360431_001_030097
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.4.htm#id_1259360431_001_030101
3.15 Robert Rauschenberg. Windward. 1963. Oil and silkscreened ink on canvas, 8′ × 5′10″. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

B

ARTISTS Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008)

How should we categorize the works of Rauschenberg? How does his style capture the culture and the events of his time? What are some of his dominant themes?

orn in Port Arthur, Texas, Milton Rauschenberg—who later became known as Bob and then Robert—had no exposure to art as such until he was seventeen. His original intention to become a pharmacist faded when he was expelled from the University of Texas within six months, for failure (he claims) to dissect a frog. After three years in the Navy during World

War II, Rauschenberg spent a year at the Kansas City Art Institute; then he traveled to Paris for further study. At the Académie Julian in Paris he met the artist Susan Weil, whom he later married.

Upon his return to the United States in 1948, Rauschenberg enrolled in the now-famous art program headed by the painter Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Many of his long-term attachments and interests developed during this period, including his close working relationship with the avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham. In 1950 Rauschenberg moved to New York, where he supported himself partly by doing window displays for the fashionable Fifth Avenue stores Bonwit Teller and Tiffany's.

Rauschenberg's work began to attract critical attention soon after his first one-man exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. The artist reports that between the time Parsons selected the works to be exhibited and the opening of the show, he had completely reworked everything, and that “Betty was surprised.” More surprises were soon to come from this steadily unpredictable artist.

The range of Rauschenberg's work makes him difficult to categorize. In addition to paintings, prints, and combination pieces, he did extensive set and costume design for dances by Cunningham and others, as well as graphic design for magazines and books. “Happenings” and performance art played a role in his work from the very beginning. In 1952, at Black Mountain College, he participated in Theater Piece #1, by the composer John Cage, which included improvised dance, recitations, piano music, the playing of old records, and projected slides of Rauschenberg's paintings. Even the works usually classified as paintings are anything but conventional. One has an actual stuffed bird attached to the front of the canvas. Another consists of a bed, with a quilt on it, hung upright on the wall and splashed with paint. Works that might be called sculptures are primarily assemblage; for example, Sor Aqua (1973) is composed of a bathtub (with water) above which a large chunk of metal seems to be flying.

In his later years, the artist devoted much of his time to ROCI (pronounced “Rocky”), his Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, which had as its goal promoting international friendship, understanding, and peace. Through ROCI he brought his work to Mexico, Chile, China, Tibet, Germany, Venezuela, Japan, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union.

We get from Rauschenberg a sense of boundaries being dissolved—boundaries between media, between art and nonart, between art and life. He said: “The strongest thing about my work . . . is the fact that I chose to ennoble the ordinary.”1

Robert Rauschenberg at home in Captiva, June 1992. Photograph by Richard Schulman.

The Statue of Liberty and the eagle are symbols of the United States, and the statue is more specifically a tourist attraction of New York. Sunkist oranges are an American product, but Rauschenberg likes their name as well: sun-kissed, kissed by the sun. In a repeat of the image directly below, he paints white all the oranges but one. The single orange becomes a sun, and the rest are clouds. “Sun-kissed” also applies to the rainbow, which is moist air kissed by the sun. It applies more generally to a clear day in New York, and in the company of the eagle and the statue it evokes the sentiments expressed in one of our most popular patriotic songs, which begins “O beautiful for spacious skies.” Again and again we find the optimistic gesture of raising up: Liberty raises her torch high, the rooftops hold aloft their water towers, the Sistine Chapel holds up its great vaulted ceiling, the construction workers build a skyscraper.

Looking Inward: The Human Experience An Egyptian official, a lady of the imperial Chinese court, and a gas-station attendant in rural America would all have had very different lives. They would have known different stories, worshiped different gods, seen different sights, and had different understandings of the world and their place in it. Yet they also would have shared certain experiences, just by virtue of being human. We are all of us born, we pass through childhood, we mature into sexual beings, we search for love, we grow old, we die. We experience doubt and wonder, happiness and sorrow, loneliness and despair.

Surely one of the most common of human wishes is to talk, if only we could, if only for a moment, with someone who is no longer here. Many religions embrace the idea that the dead form a vast spirit community capable of helping us. Many rituals have been devised to honor ancestors and appease their spirits. But all the rituals in the world do not compensate for the ache we sometimes feel when we wish we could speak to those who came before—to tell them what we have become, to ask for guidance, to compare experiences, to explain, to listen.

Meta Warrick Fuller's poignant sculpture Talking Skull depicts that wish being granted (3.16). Kneeling before the skull, naked and vulnerable, the boy seems to hear an answer to his pleading. On one level, Talking Skull embodies a universal message about the desire for communion beyond the boundaries of our brief lifetime. But it is also a specifically African-American work that addresses the traumatic rupture with ancestral culture that slavery had produced. Fuller was a pioneering African-American artist. Born in 1877, she pursued her artistic training in both the United States and Europe, mastering the conservative, academic style that brought mainstream recognition to artists in her day. Like many of her generation she sought out themes that would help American blacks reconnect with and take pride in their African heritage.

3.16 Meta Warrick Fuller. Talking Skull. 1937. Bronze, 28 × 40 × 15″. Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.5.htm#id_1259360431_001_030123
Looking at Fuller's sculpture, we enter into the boy's thoughts through empathy. Fuller counts on this ability, and her artistry facilitates it by giving us numerous clues: the pose, the nakedness, the intense gaze, the open mouth. In Self-Portrait with Monkeys (3.17), the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo does not provide us with an easy way into her thoughts. She seems, rather, to hold us at arm's length with her gaze, to insist that we cannot truly know her.

3.17 Frida Kahlo. Self-Portrait with Monkeys. 1943. Oil on canvas, 321⁄16 × 243⁄16″. Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection

Kahlo began to paint while recovering from a streetcar accident that left her body shattered and unable to bear children. She would know periods of crippling pain for the rest of her life and undergo dozens of operations. Her first work was a self-portrait, as though to affirm that she still existed. She continued to paint self-portraits over the course of her career. In them she expressed her experience as a woman, as an artist, as a Mexican. Often, as here, she paints herself as the still center of a busy visual field. Wearing an embroidered Mexican dress, she regards us coolly, skeptically. Or perhaps it is herself in the mirror that she sees.

Her two pet monkeys seem both protective and possessive in their gestures. Their gazes tell us no more than hers, but she and they clearly share an understanding that excludes us. Behind them two more monkeys peer out from the foliage. Next to her head, as though she were thinking it, a bird of paradise flower displays its extravagant, flamelike petals—exotic, proud, desirable, and slightly menacing. European visitors admired Kahlo's paintings for their dream imagery, but she herself rejected such praise. “I never painted dreams,” she said. “I painted my own reality.”

One of the most reticent yet complete evocations of our existence and its fundamental questions is the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer's quiet masterpiece Woman Holding a Balance (3.18). Stillness pervades the picture. A gentle half-light filtered through the curtained window reveals a woman contemplating an empty jeweler's balance. She holds the balance and its two glinting trays delicately with her right hand, which falls in the exact center of the composition. The frame of the painting on the wall behind catches the light, drawing our attention. The painting is a depiction of the Last Judgment, when according to Christian belief Christ shall come again to judge, to weigh souls. On the table, the light picks out strands of pearls. Jewels and jewelry often serve as symbols of vanity and the temptations of earthly treasure. Light is reflected, too, in the surface of the mirror, next to the window. The mirror suggests self-knowledge, and indeed if the woman were to look up, she would be facing directly into it. Scholars have debated whether the woman is pregnant or whether the fashion of the day simply makes her appear so. Either way, we can say that her form evokes pregnancy, the miracle of birth, and the renewal of life.

2

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.5.htm#id_1259360431_001_030127
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.5.htm#id_1259360431_001_030133
3.18 Johannes Vermeer. Woman Holding a Balance. c. 1664. Oil on canvas, 157⁄8 × 14″. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Birth, death, the decisions we must weigh on our journey through life, the temptations of vanity, the problem of self-knowledge, the question of life after death—all these issues are gently touched on in this most understated of paintings.

Invention and Fantasy Renaissance theorists likened painting to poetry. With words, a poet could conjure an imaginary world and fill it with people and events. Painting was even better, for it could bring an imaginary world to life before your eyes. Poetry had long been considered an art, and the idea that painting was comparable to it is one of the factors that led to painting's being considered an art as well.

One of the most bizarrely inventive artists ever to wield a brush was the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch. When we first encounter his The Garden of Earthly Delights (3.19), we might think we have wandered into a fun house of a particularly macabre kind. The Garden of Earthly Delights is the central and largest panel of a , a painting in three sections. The outer two sections, painted both front and back, can close like a pair of shutters over this central image. Closed, they depict the creation of the world; open, they illustrate the earthly paradise of Eden (left) and Hell (right). Between Eden and Hell, Bosch set The Garden of Earthly Delights, which depicts the false paradise of love—false because, though deeply pleasurable, it can lead humanity away from the bonds of marriage toward the deadly sin of Lust, and thus damnation. Hundreds of nude humans cavort in a fantasy landscape inhabited by giant plants and outsized birds and animals. The people are busy and inventive in the things they do to and with each other (and to and with the animals and plants). They seem to be having a fine time, but their goings-on are so strange that we are both intrigued and repelled by them. Can these truly be delights?

triptych

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.6.htm#id_1259360431_001_030144
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/Glossary.htm#241538
3.19 Hieronymus Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights, center section. c. 1505–10. Oil on panel, 7′25⁄8″ × 6′43⁄4″. Museo del Prado, Madrid

A far more benign imagination was that of Henri Rousseau. Rousseau worked in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was acquainted with all the up-and-coming artists of the Parisian scene, and sometimes he exhibited with them. The naiveté of his expression came not so much from ignorance of formal art tradition as from indifference to that tradition. Rousseau loved to paint jungle scenes, but they were wholly products of fantasy, for in fact he never left France. Instead, he assembled his exotic visions from illustrated books, from travel magazines, and from sketching trips to the zoo, the natural history museum, and especially the great tropical greenhouses of the Paris botanical garden. Entering them, he said, was like walking into a dream. In his last painting, he gave this dream to a young woman (3.20). Reclining nude on a velvet sofa, she seems unsurprised to find herself in a dense forest of stylized foliage, serenaded by a dark-skinned musician wearing a loincloth. Perhaps it is his music that has cast this spell in which giant lotuses grow on land, lions are as tame as house cats, and a full moon shines during the day.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.6.htm#id_1259360431_001_030148
3.20 Henri Rousseau. The Dream. 1910. Oil on canvas, 6′81⁄2″ × 9′91⁄2″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

In her installation Love Is Calling (3.21), Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama created a space that we experience as a fantasy, though in fact it has its origins in her mental reality. Since childhood, Kusama has suffered from hallucinations in which small motifs suddenly multiply into infinity, covering everything in sight, including her own body. As a child, she feared she might dissolve into their proliferation and cease to exist. As an adult, she translates these experiences into art. Love Is Calling is an Infinity Mirrored Room, a room lined with mirrors so that anything in it multiplies in endless reflections. Kusama created her first Infinity Mirrored Room in 1965, carpeting its floor with stuffed fabric protuberances covered in red polka dots. She began to hold gatherings in which she painted people with polka dots as well. “Polka dots are a way to infinity,” she proclaimed. “When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment. I become part of the eternal, and we obliterate ourselves in Love.” In Love Is Calling, inflatable tentacle-like forms covered in polka dots descend from the ceiling and rise from the floor. Lit from within in shifting colors, they illuminate the darkened interior. A recording of Kusama reciting a love poem plays continuously. Only a few viewers at a time are allowed into Love Is Calling. There, they can obliterate themselves, if not in love, then at least in wonder and bliss.

3.21 Yayoi Kusama. Love is Calling. 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, tile, acrylic panel, rubber, blowers, lighting element, speakers, and sound; 14′61⁄2″ × 28′45⁄8″ × 19′113⁄8″.

© Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore; Victoria Miro, London; KUSAMA Enterprise

3

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.6.htm#id_1259360431_001_030152
“M

ARTISTS Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929)

Why does Kusama refer to herself as an obsessional artist? What might the polka dots she so often paints have to do with the hallucinations she experiences? She has spoken of herself as an outsider. Why?

y art originates from hallucinations only I can see,” Yayoi Kusama says matter-of-factly. “I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. . . . I create pieces even when I don't see hallucinations, though.” The first two sentences fascinate, but we would do well to pay attention to the third sentence as well, for it hints at the discipline, ambition, and willpower that have enabled her career.

Kusama was born into a prosperous family in the city of Matsumoto, Japan. By her own account, her childhood was not a happy one. Her father chased after women; her mother was verbally and physically abusive. Kusama drew incessantly, and she began to experience the hallucinations she has often described in which a small motif multiplies uncontrollably across her field of vision.

At 19, Kusama enrolled briefly in art school to study nihonga, Japanese-style painting. On her own, she absorbed current directions in European and American art through magazines and journals. Always prolific, she exhibited hundreds of abstract works on paper, which began to attract critical notice.

Convinced that the future lay in New York, Kusama left Japan for the United States in 1957. She was determined, she said, to become a star. As her calling card, she conceived a series of monumental, monochromatic paintings called Infinity Nets—vast expanses of canvas covered with small loops of paint. “They were about an obsession: infinite repetition,” she says. A few years later, her reputation now growing, she turned her attention to sculpture, covering domestic objects with stuffed fabric protuberances that were unmistakably phallic. She called it her Sex Obsession series, created in response to her fear of sex. Her first installation followed quickly in 1963—a salvaged rowboat bristling with stuffed fabric protuberances set in a room whose floor, ceiling, and walls were papered with silkscreened posters of a photograph of the sculpture. Present at the opening was Andy Warhol, who three years would raid the idea for his now famous Cow Wallpaper. Next came the first Infinity Mirrored Room, which contained an endlessly reflecting accumulation of stuffed fabric phalli painted with red polka dots. Polka dots became Kusama's trademark motif as she moved away from making objects for gallery display to creating happenings in the streets, in clubs, and in her studio, where she painted polka dots on naked participants. She gave performances, made an experimental film, and founded a fashion company, all as part of her art.

Kusama returned to Japan in 1973. Her re-entry into conservative Japanese society was traumatic. Plagued anew by hallucinations as well as by physical illnesses, she moved permanently to a psychiatric hospital in 1977. She began writing novels (twelve have been published to date), and although she continued to make art, she rarely exhibited outside Japan.

In 1989, a major international retrospective recalled Kusama to Western memory and introduced her to a new and enthusiastic generation. Since then, her career has surged and she has become one of the most popular and widely recognized artists in the world—a star, in fact. “I have had so many hardships, with people saying various things about me,” she told an interviewer. “Time is finally turning a kind eye on me. But it barely matters, for I am dashing into the future.”

Yayoi Kusama in her installation Love is Calling, 2013. © Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore; Victoria Miro, London; KUSAMA Enterprise

4

5

6

The Natural World As humans, we make our own environment. From the first tools of the earliest hominids to today's towering skyscrapers, we have shaped the world around us to our needs. This manufactured environment, though, has its setting in quite a different environment, that of the natural world. Nature and our relationship to it are themes that have often been addressed through art.

During the 19th century, many American painters set themselves the American landscape as a subject. One of the first of these was Thomas Cole, who as a young man had immigrated to America from England. Cole's most famous painting is The Oxbow, which depicts the great looping bend (oxbow) of the Connecticut River as seen from the heights of nearby Mount Holyoke, in Massachusetts (3.22). To the left, a violent thunderstorm darkens the sky as it passes over the mountain wilderness. To the right, emerging into the sunlight after the storm, a broad settled valley extends as far as the eye can see. Fields have been cleared for grazing and crops. Minute plumes of smoke mark scattered farmhouses, and a few boats dot the river. Cole even gives us a role to play: we have accompanied him on his painting expedition and climbed up a little higher for an even better view. On a promontory to the right, we see the artist's umbrella and knapsack. A little to the left and down from the umbrella, Thomas Cole himself, seated in front of a painting in progress, looks up at us over his shoulder.

3.22 Thomas Cole. The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm). 1836. Oil on canvas, 4′31⁄2″ × 6′4″.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Cole developed the painting in his studio from a sketch he had made at the site, though he also introduced a number of inventions to make a more effective composition. The shattered and gnarled trees in the left foreground, for example, are a device he often used, and even the storm itself is probably a fiction, though he certainly could have seen such storms. But the view of the river bend from the mountain, a famous sight in Cole's day, is largely faithful to his observation. In contrast, Wang Jian may never have seen the view he depicts in White Clouds over Xiao and Xiang (3.23), nor would his audience have expected him to. Landscape is the most important and honored subject in the Chinese painting tradition, but its purpose was never to record the details of a particular site or view. Rather, painters learned to paint mountains, rocks, trees, and water so that they could construct imaginary landscapes for viewers to wander through in the mind's eye. Here, we might stroll along the narrow footpath by the water's edge to the pavilions that sit out over the lake, visit the rambling house nestled in the hillside, or stand in the pavilion on the overlook higher up, taking in the scenery. Whereas Cole's painting places us on the mountain and depicts what can be seen from a fixed position, Wang Jian's suspends us in midair and depicts a view that we could see only if we were mobile, like a bird.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.7.htm#id_1259360431_001_030172
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.7.htm#id_1259360431_001_030176
3.23 Wang Jian. White Clouds over Xiao and Xiang. 1668. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper; height 4′51⁄4″. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

In his inscription, Wang Jian writes that his painting was inspired by a work by the early 14th-century master Zhao Mengfu, who in turn admired Dong Yuan, a 10th-century painter known for a view of this same region. In just a couple of sentences, Wang Jian situates himself in a centuries-old tradition of painterly and poetic meditations on the Xiao and Xiang Rivers and the Jiuyi Mountains they flow through, a landscape rich in historical, literary, and artistic associations. All of that was more important to the painter and his audience than topographical accuracy.

Nature has been more than a subject for art; it has also served as a material for art. The desire to portray landscapes has been matched by the desire to create them for the pleasure of our eyes. A work such as the famed stone and gravel garden of the Buddhist temple of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, Japan, seems to occupy a position halfway between sculpture and landscape gardening (3.24). Created toward the end of the 15th century and maintained continuously since then, the garden consists solely of five groupings of rocks set in a rectangular expanse of raked white gravel and surrounded by an earthen wall. A simple wooden viewing platform runs along one side. Over time, moss has grown up around the rock groupings, and oil in the clay walls has seeped to the surface, forming patterns that call to mind traditional Japanese ink paintings of landscape. The garden is a place of meditation, and viewers are invited to find their own meanings in it.

3.24 Stone and gravel garden, Ryoan-ji Temple, Kyoto. c. 1488–1500, with subsequent modifications.

The simplicity of Ryoan-ji finds an echo in Spiral Jetty, an earthwork built by American artist Robert Smithson in 1970 in the Great Salt Lake, Utah (3.25). Smithson had become fascinated with the ecology of salt lakes, especially with the microbacteria that tinge their water shades of red. After viewing the Great Salt Lake in Utah, he leased a parcel of land on its shore and began work on this large coil of rock and earth. Smithson was drawn to the idea that an artist could participate in the shaping of landscape almost as a geological force. Like the garden at Ryoan-ji, Spiral Jetty continued to change according to natural processes after it was finished. Salt crystals accumulated and sparkled on its edges. Depths of water in and around it showed themselves in different tints of transparent violet, pink, and red. Spiral Jetty was submerged by the rising waters of the lake soon after it was created. Recently it resurfaced, transformed by a coating of salt crystals.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.7.htm#id_1259360431_001_030181
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.7.htm#id_1259360431_001_030184
3.25 Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970. Black rock, salt crystals, earth, and water; length of coil 1,500′.

Art and Art Artists learn to make art by looking at art. They look at the art of the past to learn about their predecessors, and they look at the art of the present to situate themselves amid its currents and get their bearings. It should not surprise us, then, that artists often make art about art itself—about learning, making, and viewing it; about its nature and social setting; about specific movements, styles, or works.

Jeff Wall is an artist who often sets up a dialogue with earlier art in his work. A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (3.27) shows him thinking about Hokusai's Ejiri in Suruga Province (3.26). Wall takes seriously the idea, touched on in Chapter 2, that photography has taken over from painting the project of depicting modern life. But he does not practice photography in a straightforward way, going into the world to take pictures of objects he sees or events he witnesses. Instead, he uses the technology of photography to construct an image, much as a painter organizes a painting or a film director goes about making the artificial reality of a film. He builds a set or scouts a location, he sets up the lighting or waits for the right weather, and he costumes and poses his models. Often, as here, he uses digital technology to combine many separately photographed elements into a single image. Wall displays the finished works as large-format transparencies lit from behind. A Sudden Gust of Wind is almost the size of a billboard, a glowing billboard.

3.26 Hokusai. Ejiri in Suruga Province from Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji. c. 1831. Polychrome woodblock print, 95⁄8 × 147⁄8″. Honolulu Museum of Art

3.27 Jeff Wall. A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai). 1993. Transparency in lightbox, 7′67⁄8″ × 12′45⁄16″. Courtesy the artist

Typically, what Wall wants us to see only comes into focus once we have the “art behind the art” in mind. Hokusai's Ejiri in Suruga Province is from Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji, a series of views of daily life in Japan linked by the presence of the serene mountain in the distance. Like Hokusai, Wall sets his scene in a nondescript place, a flat land that is nowhere in particular. He re-creates the two trees, the travelers, and the wind-scattered papers. But there is no sublime mountain in the background, nothing to give the scene a larger meaning or sense of purpose. Without knowing Hokusai's print, we would not realize that the most powerful presence in Wall's photograph is an absence, the mountain that is not there.

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.8.htm#id_1259360431_001_030194
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.8.htm#id_1259360431_001_030191
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/2.htm#id_1259360431_001_020001
Whereas Wall's photograph links back to a specific work of art, John Baldessari's delightful video Six Colorful Inside Jobs playfully addresses the idea of art itself (3.28). Baldessari's father was a landlord, and in his youth the artist used to help out by painting the apartments. As he tells it, “I used to occupy my mind as I was painting the walls by saying to myself, ‘Now I'm painting a wall, now I'm making a painting.’ And it would just be a conceptual exercise—the physical activity was the same, I was just calling it differently each time. So I began to think about, well, what separated one from the other? Why was one different?”

3.28 John Baldessari. Six Colorful Inside Jobs. 1977. 16mm film transferred to video (color, silent), 32:53 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

Years later, Baldessari reached back to this experience to create Six Colorful Inside Jobs. He hired a man to paint the floor and walls of a windowless room a different color each day for six days, while a film camera mounted overhead recorded a bird's-eye view of his progress. The colors he chose are immediately familiar to any art student: red, yellow, blue, green, orange, and violet—the three primary and three secondary colors of the color wheel (see 4.24). Each day's work took the painter about four hours, which Baldessari then compressed to five frenetic minutes.

The overhead view and the allover color work to flatten the space, making it look like a monochrome (one-color) painting. How strange, then, when a door opens and a little man enters. Scurrying around with comic energy (and pausing occasionally for a cigarette break), he repaints the painting, then lets himself out. A few seconds later, he returns, having evidently changed his mind: the painting should not be orange, but yellow!

The six days of the project slyly refer to another famous act of creation, the biblical one. On the seventh day, we presume, the painter rests. Six Colorful Inside Jobs is about work as art and art as work. As any artist will tell you, bursts of inspiration are wonderful, but a great deal of creating a work of art is just work—putting in the hours to get it done.

7

https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/3.8.htm#id_1259360431_001_030199
https://html1-cluster-e.mheducation.com/smartbook2/data/140856/highlightmhe/4.4.htm#id_1259360431_001_04