Week 4

September 19, 2006

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951
Robert Rauschenberg. Erased deKooning drawing, 1953
Willem deKooning, drawing circa 1950
Marcel Duchamp, Door at 11, rue Larrey, 1927

Robert Rauschenberg, Automobile Tire Print, 1953
Robert Rauschenberg, untitled (double Rauschenberg), blue print, 1949

Robert Rauschenberg, Charlene, 1954
Robert Rauschenberg, Interview, 1955
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955
Robert Rauschenberg, Factum 2, 1957
Robert Rauschenberg, Factum 1 and Factum 2, 1957
Robert Rauschenberg, Reservoir, 1961
Robert Rauschenberg, Pantomime, 1961

Jasper Johns, Out of the Window, 1959
Jasper Johns, Thermometer, 1959
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954
Rene Magritte, The Treason of Images, 1929
Jasper Johns, White Flag, 1955
Rene Magritte, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1927
Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955
Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955
Jasper Johns, Gray Alphabet, 1956 and detail
Jasper Johns, False Start, 1959
Jasper Johns, Jubilee, 1959
Jasper Johns, Fools House, 1962
Jasper Johns, According to What, 1964

Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze II (can w/brushes), 1960
Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze I (Ballentine Ale cans), 1960

Brian O'Doherty on Rauschenberg: “The images were chosen not for the content they could unload on each other through juxtaposition, but for their nonspecificity….Their description of reality , at the time they were made, depended on this dissociative rather than associateive effect.  His art encouraged what could be called the city dweller’s rapid scan, rather than the art audience’s stare….Rauschenberg had introduced into the museum and its high-art audience not just the vernacular object, but something much more important, the vernacular glance.”

Leo Steinberg on the "flatbed" picture: “I tend to regard the tilt of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture….What [Rauschenberg] invented above all was a pictorial surface that let the world in again.  Not the world of the renaissance man who looked for his weather clues out the window; but the world of men who turn knobs to hear a taped message: ‘precipitation probability ten percent tonight,’ electronically transmitted from some windowless booth.”
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September 21, 2006

Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze I (Ballentine Ale cans), 1960
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
Jasper Johns, The Critic Sees, 1959

Piero Manzoni, Artist's Breath, 1960 (fiato d’artista)
Piero Manzoni, 3.10 meter line, 11.65 meter line, infinite line, 5.63 meter line, 10.75 meter line, 1959-60
Piero Manzoni, Merda d’Artista, 1961
Hans Namuth photographs of Pollock painting, 1950
Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961

Gutai Group
Kazuo Shiraga, Making a work with ones own body, material is mud, 1955
Saburo Murakami, Murakami Breaks the Big Paper Screen, 1957

Georges Matthieu, Homage to General Hideyoshi, 1957
Georges Matthieu painting Battle of Hakata, 1957
Yves Klein, untitled IKB monochrome, 1957
Yves Klein, Requiem #20, 1960 
Yves Klein, Pure Blue Pigment, 1957
Yves Klein, Victory of Samothrace, 1962
Yves Klein, Anthropometry, 1960
Yves Klein, models and audience for performance of Anthropometry, March 1960
Yves Klein, Painter of Space Hurls Himself into the Void, November 1960 and Le Dimanche November 27, 1960

Nam June Paik, Simple, 1962
Nam June Paik, Zen for Head, 1960
George Brecht, Drip Music (Rutgers University), 1963
George Brecht, Octet for Winds, 1965
Yoko Ono, Add Color Painting and Kitchen Piece, both 1966
Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail, 1966

Yves Klein, Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Zone, 1961 (first realized as Le Vide, 1958)
Arman, Cocktail Party, 1966
Daniel Spoerri, Kichka's Breakfast, 1960 (two views)

Allan Kaprow, Garage Environment, 1960
Allan Kaprow, Words, 1962  

Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai Manifesto (1956):
“With our present day awareness, the arts as we have known them up to now appear to us in general to be fakes fitted out with tremendous affectation….They are an illusion with which, by human hand and by way of fraud, materials such as paint, pieces of cloth, metals, clay or marble are loaded with false significance, so that instead of just presenting their own material self, 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….I pay respect to Pollock’s and Matthieu’s works….These works are the loud outcry of the material, of the very oil or enamel paints themselves.”

Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" (1958):
“We shuttle constantly between identification with the hand and the body that flung the paint and stood in the canvas and submission to the objective markings , allowing them to entangle and assault us....“There are two alternatives, one is to continue in this vein.  Probably there are many good “near paintings” that can be done varying the esthetic of  Pollocks without departing from it or going further—the other is to give up painting entirely—I mean the flat rectangle or oval as we know it....
Pollock left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or if need be, the vastness of 42nd street.  Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch.  Objects of every sort are the materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists.
An odor of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano, three taps on the front door, a sigh a scratch, a voice lecturing endlessly—all will become materials for this new concrete art."

George Maciunas:

"To establish artist’s nonprofessional status in society,
He must demonstrate artist’s dispensability and inclusiveness,
He must demonstrate the self-sufficiency of the audience,
He must demonstrate that anything can be art and that anybody can do it”


George Maciunas—“Fluxus objectives are social (not aesthetic)….Gradual elimination of fine arts….this is motivated by desire to stop the waste of material and human resources and divert it to socially constructive ends.  Such as applied arts would be (industrial design, journalism, architecture, engineering, graphic and typographic arts),  These offer the best alternative profession to fine artists."
"Fluxus is definitely against art-object as non-functional commodity—to be sole and make livelihood for an artist.  It could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art….Fluxus is therefore anti professional (against professional art or artists making livelihood from art or artists spending their full time, their life on art)"
"Fluxus therefore should tend towards collective spirit, anonymity, and anti-individualism.