Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help
- What is the result of the attitude toward truth to materials in the works of Jeff Koons and Kara Walker? Is their work more interesting for defying the traditional views, or does it matter at all? Which of these sculptures most rewards your par- ticipation? Which of these sculptures would you most want to own? Is their work more interesting for defying the traditional views, or does it matter at all? Which of these sculptures most rewards your participation? Which of these sculptures would you most want to own?
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proteSt agaInSt tecHnology Explicit social protest is part of the subject matter of the works we will discuss by Trova, Segal, and Giacometti, although perhaps only in Trova’s Study: Falling Man (Wheel Man) (Figure 5-15) is that protest unequivocally directed at technology. Flaccid, faceless, and sexless, this anonymous robot has “grown” spoked wheels instead of arms. Attached below the hips, these mechanisms produce a sense of eerie instability, a feeling that this antiseptically cleansed automaton with the slack, protruding abdomen may tip over from the slightest push. In this inhuman me- chanical purity, no free will is left to resist. Human value, as articulated in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, has been reduced to human power, functions performed in the world of goods and services. Since another individual can also perform these functions, the given person has no special worth. His or her value is a unit that can easily be replaced by another. FIGURE 5-15 Ernest Trova, Study: Falling Man (Wheel Man). 1965. Bronze, 60 × 48 × 2013⁄16 inches. Trova’s sculpture portrays man as part of a machine, implying that in the machine age humans are becoming less and less human. Consider the unidealized human figure in comparison with the Greek ideal. ©Ernest Trova, Study: Falling Man (Wheel Man), 1965. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation, 1965. jac16871_ch05_091-120.indd 108 12/11/17 11:38 AM 109
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The thirty-six larger-than-life figures in Bronze Crowd (Figure 5-16) seem to be the same until one examines them and sees small differences. The absence of their heads is a sign of their having been stripped of dignity and individuality. The space between the figures is sufficient so that a viewer can walk in and around the group and begin to experience what it might be like to be one of them. In Bronze Crowd’s emaciated figures, the huge, solidly implanted feet suggest nostalgia for the earth; the soaring upward of the elongated bodies suggests aspi- ration for the heavens. The surrounding environment has eaten away at the flesh, leaving lumpy, irregular surfaces with dark hollows. Each figure is without bodily or mental contact with anyone. They stand in an utterly alienated space, but, un- like Falling Man, they are headless and unaware. And whereas the habitat of Falling Man is the clean, air-conditioned factory or office of Brave New World, the figures in Bronze Crowd are exposed and organized in soldierly fashion. Giacometti’s people (Figure 5-17), even when in neat galleries, always seem to be in the grubby streets of our decaying cities. The cancer of the city has left only the armatures of bodies stained with pollution and scarred with sickness. There is no center in this city square or any particular exit, nor can we imagine any communi- cation among these citizens. Their very grouping in the square gives them, paradox- ically, an even greater feeling of isolation. Each Giacometti figure separates a spot of space from the common place. The disease and utter distress of these vulnerable creatures demand our respectful distance, as if they were lepers to whom help must come, if at all, from some public agency. To blame technology entirely for the de- humanization of society interpreted in these sculptures is an oversimplification, of course. But this kind of work does bring out something of the horror of technology when it is misused. FIGURE 5-16 Magdalena Abakanowicz, Bronze Crowd. 1990–1991. Bronze, 71 × 23 × 15½ inches. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas. Magdalena Abakanowicz witnessed the occupation of Poland, her native country, by both the Nazi Germans and the Soviet Russians. Bronze Crowd portrays the aloneness that is possible in modern society. Abakanowicz has said, “A crowd is the most cruel because it begins to act like a brainless organism.” Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas. Art ©Studio Magdalena Abakanowicz jac16871_ch05_091-120.indd 109 12/11/17 11:38 AM 110
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accommodatIon wItH tecHnology Many contemporary sculptors see in technology blessings for humankind. It is true that sculpture can be accomplished with the most primitive tools (that, incidentally, is one of the basic reasons sculpture in primitive cultures usually not only precedes painting but also usually dominates both qualitatively and quantitatively). Never- theless, sculpture in our day, far more than painting, can take advantage of some of the most sophisticated advances of technology, surpassed in this respect only by architecture. Many sculptors today interpret the positive rather than the negative aspects of technology. This respect for technology is expressed by truth to its mate- rials and the showing forth of its methodology. Naum Gabo (Figure 5-18), one of the early adopters of current technology, used a number of modern materials, such as cardboard, acrylic plastic, and stainless steel, FIGURE 5-17 Alberto Giacometti, Swiss, 1901– 1965, City Square (La Place). 1948. Bronze, 8½ × 253⁄8 × 17¼ inches (21.6 × 64.5 × 43.8 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. This is one of a series of sculptures that became emblematic of the alienation of modern life in the decade following the end of World War II. Art ©2017 Alberto Giacometti Estate/ Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY. Photo: ©The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY FIGURE 5-18 Naum Gabo, Constructed Head No. 2, 1916 (enlargement 1975). Stainless steel, 70 × 54¼ × 48 inches. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Art ©Tate, London 2017 jac16871_ch05_091-120.indd 110 12/11/17 11:39 AM 111
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for his constructivist sculptures. He was part of the modernist movement in Russia, and after World War II he moved to the United States, where he used modern engi- neering techniques for his work. David Smith’s Cubi X (Figure 5-19) illustrates truth to technological materials. The stainless steel cylinders of Cubi X support a juggling act of hollow rectangular and square cubes that barely touch one another as they cantilever out into space. Delicate buffing modulates the bright planes of steel, giving the illusion of several atmospheric depths and reflecting light like rippling water. Smith writes, I like outdoor sculpture and the most practical thing for outdoor sculpture is stainless steel, and I make them and I polish them in such a way that on a dull day, they take on the dull blue, or the color of the sky in late afternoon sun, the glow, golden like the rays, the colors of nature. And in a particular sense, I have used atmosphere in a reflective way on the surfaces. They are colored by the sky and the surroundings, the green or blue of water. Some are down by the water and some are by the mountains. They reflect the colors. They are designed for outdoors.7 But Smith’s steel is not just a mirror, for in the reflections the fluid surfaces and tensile strength of the steel emerge in a structure that, as Smith puts it, “can face the sun and hold its own.” FIGURE 5-19 David Smith, Cubi X. 1963. Stainless steel, 10 feet 13⁄8 inches × 6 feet 6¾ inches × 2 feet (308.3 × 199.9 × 61 cm), including steel base 27⁄8 × 25 × 23 inches (7.3 × 63.4 × 58.3 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Robert O. Lord Fund. Cubi X is Smith’s cubistic experiment representing a human figure in planes of polished steel, akin to the cubistic paintings of Picasso and others. Smith produced a wide collection of Cubi sculptures. Art ©The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: ©The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY 7Source: David Smith in Cleve Gray, ed., David Smith (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), p. 123. jac16871_ch05_091-120.indd 111 12/11/17 11:39 AM 112
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macHIne Sculpture Jean Tinguely is dedicated to humanizing the machine. His Homage to New York (Figure 5-20), exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, was not only a machine sculpture but a onetime sculpture performance. Tinguely introduced a touch of humor into the world of sculpture as he explored the subject matter of technology in the arts. For those present it was unforgettable. The mechanical parts, collected from junk heaps and dismembered from their original machines, stood out sharply, and yet they were linked by their spatial locations, shapes, and FIGURE 5-20 Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York. 1960. Mixed media. Exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Homage to New York was exhibited in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it operated for some twenty-seven minutes until it destroyed itself. This was a late Dadaist experiment. ©2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: David Gahr. jac16871_ch05_091-120.indd 112 12/11/17 11:39 AM 113
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textures, and sometimes by nervelike wires. Only the old player piano was intact. As the piano played, it was accompanied by howls and other weird sounds in ir- regular patterns that seemed to be issuing from the wheels, gears, and rods, as if they were painfully communicating with one another in some form of mechanical speech. Some of the machinery that runs New York City was exposed as vulnera- ble, pathetic, and comic, but Tinguely humanized this machinery as he exposed it. Even death was suggested, for Homage to New York was self-destructing: The piano was electronically wired for burning, and, in turn, the whole structure collapsed. eartH Sculpture Another avant-garde sculpture—earth sculpture—goes so far as to make the earth itself the medium, the site, and the subject matter. The proper spatial selection becomes absolutely essential, for the earth usually must be taken where it is found. Structures are traced in plains, meadows, sand, snow, and the like, in order to help make us stop and perceive and enjoy the “form site”—the earth transformed to be more meaningful. Usually nature rapidly breaks up the form and returns the site to its less ordered state. Accordingly, many earth sculptors have a special need for the photographer to preserve their art. Robert Smithson was a pioneer in earthwork sculpture. One of his best-known works is Spiral Jetty (Figure 5-21), a 1,500-foot-long coil 15 feet wide that spirals out from a spot on the Great Salt Lake. It is constructed of “mud, precipitated salt crys- tals, rocks, water,” and colorful algae, all of which are now submerged in the lake. At times it reemerges when the water level is low. Because the sculpture is usually hidden, it exists for most viewers only in photographs. This mode of existence offers some interesting problems for those who question the authenticity of such works. FIGURE 5-21 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty. 1970. Great Salt Lake, Utah. Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water; length 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide. Reaching 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake is one of the first and most influential of large earth sculptures. Utah officials stopped a recent move to drill for oil nearby. Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York, Photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni, Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York, Art ©Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY jac16871_ch05_091-120.indd 113 12/11/17 11:39 AM 114 CHAPTER 5 PERCEPTION KEY Spiral Jetty