Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help
- Decide whether Standing Woman is the work of a male artist or a female artist. What criteria do you use in your decision?
EXPERIENCING Interpretations of the Female Nude 1. Is there an obvious difference between the representations of the female nude by male and female artists? 2. Does distortion of the human figure help distance the viewer from the subject? 3. To what extent does the represented figure become a potential sexual object? Following are some suggestions for analysis. First, working backward, we can see that the question of the figure being a sexual object is to a large extent parodied by Tom Wesselmann’s Study for Great American Nude. The style and approach to painting are couched in careful design, including familiar objects—the telephone, the rose, the perfume bottle, the sofa cushions, the partial portrait—all of which imply the boudoir and the commodifi- cation of women and sex. The figure’s face is totally anonymous, implying that this is not a painting of a woman but of the idea of the modern American woman, with her nipple carefully exposed to accommodate advertising’s breast fetish as a means of selling goods. Even Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, a painting whose subject is more sensual than ideal, is less a sexual object than Wesselmann’s. For one thing, her body is less revealed than Wesselmann’s, and her face, shown to us in a mirror, is looking at her reflection, sug- gesting that she is in command of herself and is not to be taken lightly. The colors in the painting are sumptuous and sensuous—rich red fabrics, an inviting bed, and a delighted boy-god Cupid. Since Cupid is the archer who causes people to fall in love, could it be that some of the subject matter is Venus loving herself? What does the form of the painting reveal to you in terms of its content? Then, the question of the distortion of the subject is powerfully handled by Du- champ’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. This painting provoked a riot in 1913 because it seemed to be a contemptuous portrait of the nude at a time when the nude aesthetic was still academic in style. Duchamp was taunting the audience for art while also finding a modern technological representation of the nude on canvas that mimed the cinema of his time. Philip Pearlstein’s study of two nudes moves toward a de-idealization of the nude. He asks us to look at the nudes without desire, yet with careful attention to form and color. Finally, we may partly answer the question of whether women paint nude females differently by looking at Suzanne Valadon’s and Alice Neel’s paintings. Neel represents Margaret Evans in a manner emphasizing her womanness, not her sexual desirability. Hers is the only pregnant female figure—emphasizing the power of women to create life. Valadon’s nude makes an effort to cover herself while looking at the viewer. She is relaxed yet apprehensive. There is no attempt at commodification of either of these figures, which means we must look at them very differently than the rest of the paint- ings represented here. jac16871_ch02_017-041.indd 40 12/8/17 8:05 PM 41
WHAT IS A WORK OF ART?
Further Thoughts on Artistic Form Artistic form is an organized structure, a design, but it is also a window opening on and focusing our world, helping us to perceive and understand what is import- ant. This is the function of artistic form. The artist uses form as a means to un- derstanding some subject matter, and in this process the subject matter exerts its own imperative. A subject matter has, as edmund Husserl puts it, a “structure of determination,” which to some significant degree is independent of the artist. even when the ideas of the artist are the subject matter, they challenge and resist, forcing the artist to discover their significance by discarding irrelevancies. Subject matter is friendly, for it assists interpretation, but subject matter is also hostile, for it resists interpretation. Otherwise, there would be no fundamental stim- ulus or challenge to the creativity of the artist. Only subject matter with interesting latent or uninterpreted values can challenge the artist, and the artist discovers these values through form. If the maker of a work takes the line of least resistance by ignoring the challenge of the subject matter—pushing the subject matter around for entertaining or escapist effects instead of trying to uncover its significance—the maker functions as a decorator rather than an artist. Whereas decorative form merely pleases, artistic form informs about subject mat- ter embedded in values that to an overwhelming extent are produced independently of the artist. By revealing those values, the artist helps us understand ourselves and our world, provided we participate with the work and understand the way artistic form produces content. The artist reveals the content in the work—the content is revealed to us through the act of participation and close attention to artistic form. participation is a flowing experience. One thought, image, or sensation merges into another, and we don’t know where we are going for certain, except that what we are feeling is moving and controlling the flow, and clock time is irrelevant. participation is often interrupted—someone moves in front of the painting, the telephone call breaks the reading of the poem, someone goes into a coughing fit at the concert—but as long as we keep coming back to the work as dominant over distraction, we have something of the wonder of participation. summAry A work of art is a form-content. An artistic form is a form-content. An artistic form is more than just an organization of the elements of an artistic medium, such as the lines and colors of painting. The artistic form interprets or clarifies some subject matter. The subject matter, strictly speaking, is not in a work of art. When participating with a work of art, one can only imagine the subject matter, not perceive it. The subject matter is only suggested by the work of art. The interpretation of the subject matter is the content, or meaning, of the work of art. Content is embodied in the form. The content, unlike the subject matter, is in the work of art, fused with the form. We can separate content from form only by analysis. The ultimate justification of any analy- sis is whether it enriches our participation with that work, whether it helps that work “work” in us. Good analysis or criticism does just that. But, conversely, any analysis not based on participation is unlikely to be helpful. participation is the only way to get into direct contact with the form-content, so any analysis that is not based upon a participative experience inevitably misses the work of art. participation and good analysis, although necessarily occurring at different times, end up hand in hand. jac16871_ch02_017-041.indd 41 12/8/17 8:05 PM 42 ©2017 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: ©Fine Art Images/agefotostock Chapter 3
BEING A CRITIC OF THE ARTS
The goals of responsible criticism aim for the fullest understanding and par-ticipation possible. Being a responsible critic demands being at the height of awareness while examining a work of art in detail, establishing its context, and clarifying its achievement. It is not to be confused with popular journalism, which can sidetrack the critic into being flashy, negative, and cute. The critic aims at a full understanding of a work of art. You Are AlreAdY An Art CritiC On a practical level, everyday criticism is an act of choice. You decide to change from one program to another on television because you have made a critical choice. When you find that certain programs please you more than others, that, too, is a matter of expressing choices. If you decide that Albert Inaurrato’s film Revenant is better than John Ford’s film The Searchers, you have made a crit- ical choice. When you stop to admire a powerful piece of architecture while ignoring a nearby building, you have again made a critical choice. You are ac- tive every day in art criticism of one kind or another. Most of the time it is low-level criticism, almost instinctive, establishing your preferences in music, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, and video art. You have made such judgments since you were young. The question now is how to move on to jac16871_ch03_042-057.indd 42 12/8/17 8:11 PM 43
BEING A CRITIC OF THE ARTS
a higher-level criticism that accounts for the subtlest distinctions in the arts and therefore the most-complex choices. What qualifies us to make critical distinctions when we are young and unin- formed about art? Usually it is a matter of simple pleasure. Art is designed to give us pleasure, and for most children the most pleasurable art is simple: representa- tional painting, lyrical and tuneful melodies, recognizable sculpture, light verse, action stories, and animated videos. It is another thing to move from that pleasur- able beginning to account for what may be higher-level pleasures, such as those in Cézanne’s still lifes, Beethoven’s symphonies, Jean Arp’s sculpture Growth, Amy Lowell’s poem “Venus Transiens,” Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex, or David Si- mon’s video triumph The Wire. One of the purposes of this chapter is to point to the kinds of critical acts that help us expand our repertoire of responses to the arts. PArtiCiPAtion And CritiCism Participation with a work of art is complex but also sometimes immediate. Partici- pation is an essential act that makes art significant in our lives. We have described it as a loss of self, by which we mean that when contemplating, or experiencing, a work of art we tend to become one with the experience. As in films such as Citizen Kane, Thelma and Louise, or Dunkirk, we become one with the narrative and lose a sense of our physical space. We can also achieve a sense of participation with paint- ing, music, and the other arts. The question is not so much how we become outside ourselves in relation to the arts, but why we may not achieve that condition in the face of art that we know has great power but does not yet speak to us. Developing critical skills will help bridge that gap and allow participation with art that may not be immediately appealing. In essence, that is the purpose of an education in the arts. Patience and perception are the keys to beginning high-level criticism. Using painting as an example, it is clear that careful perceptions of color, rhythm, line, form, and balance are useful in understanding the artistic form and its resultant content. Our discussion of Goya’s May 3, 1808 (Figure 2-3) in terms of the empha- sis of the line at the bottom of the painting and the power of the lines formed by the soldiers’ rifles, while in contrast with the white blouse of one of the men being executed, helps us perceive the painting’s artistic form. Coming to such a huge and demanding painting with enough patience to stand and perceive the underly- ing formal structures, while seeing the power of the color and details designed to heighten our awareness of the significance of the action, makes it possible to achieve participation. From there it is possible to go back to the Eddie Adams photograph Execution in Saigon (Figure 2-2) and decide whether the same kind of participation is possible and whether the formal significance of the photograph is comparable. Any decision we make in this context is an act of art criticism. three Kinds of CritiCism We point to three kinds of criticism that aim toward increasing our ability to partic- ipate with works of art. In Chapter 2, we argued that a work of art is a form-content and that good criticism, which involves careful examination and thoughtful analysis, jac16871_ch03_042-057.indd 43 12/8/17 8:11 PM 44
CHAPTER 3
will sharpen our perception and deepen our understanding. Descriptive criticism aims at a careful accounting of the formal elements in the work. As its name implies, this stage of criticism is marked by an examination of the large formal elements as well as the details in the composition. Interpretive criticism focuses on the content of the work, the discovery of which requires reflection on how the formal elements transform the subject matter. Evaluative criticism, on the other hand, is an effort to qualify the relative merits of a work. Descriptive Criticism Descriptive criticism concentrates on the form of a work of art, describing, some- times exhaustively, the important characteristics of that form in order to improve our understanding of the part-to-part and part-to-whole interrelationships. At first glance this kind of criticism may seem unnecessary. After all, the form is all there, completely given—all we have to do is observe. Yet we can spend time attending to a work we are very much interested in and still not perceive all there is to perceive. We miss things, often things that are right there for us to observe. Good descriptive critics call our attention to what we otherwise might miss in an artistic form. And more important, they help us learn how to do their work when they are not around. We can, if we carefully attend to descriptive criticism, develop and enhance our own powers of observation. Descriptive criticism, more than any other type, is most likely to improve our participation with a work of art, for such criticism turns us directly to the work itself. Study Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (Figure 3-1), damaged by repeated res- torations. Leonardo unfortunately experimented with dry fresco, which, as in this case, deteriorates rapidly. Still, even in its present condition, this painting can be overwhelming. CONCEPTION KEY Kinds of Criticism 1. In Chapter 2, which portions of the discussion of Goya’s May 3, 1808 (Figure 2-3) and Adams’s Execution in Saigon (Figure 2-2) are descriptive criticism? How do they help you better perceive the formal elements of the works?