This course ran for some time and was an influence and inspiration for successive generations of artists at Glasgow School of Art. It is now presented via Zoom and is open to anyone: it will prepare you for further study and enhance your ability to reflect on your own art. If you wish to write an essay the course and my personal tuition with enable you to conduct your own critical inquiry into dominant models of advanced art. The course encompasses theoretical perspectives on the rapid expansion of the technologies of image reproduction, and broadens this out to gain a perspective on how the figure of the author/artist has been understood at different moments in the west. It also examines the desire to broaden the scope of artistic practice to release it from the purely aesthetic concerns of the autonomous art object. Aspects of the course question visual representation as instruments of control and power, and explain how consumer culture and the use of the techniques and materials of mass production influenced artistic practice. It also helps the students explore the problematic nature of both male and female identity and representation, and to understand the process of art’s reception and dissemination in and the influence of the artist-run movement.
The course will introduce you to key themes and developments within western art practice and theoretical perspectives since c.1960 to encourage interdisciplinary, critical reflexivity from within an open set of choices. You will be presented with variety of theoretical perspectives relevant to contemporary cultural practices to foster deep investigative approaches to new or unfamiliar areas of practice and theory.
You will gain knowledge of a visual vocabulary, critical debates and concepts appropriate for careers in a wide field of the visual arts and to make unbiased aesthetic and critical judgments. You will be able to recognise and understand major artists and theories deriving from the 1960s onwards, and will be able to assess the qualities of art in their historical, cultural settings associated with the themes of the course material. Through the course you will learn to use innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to generate new approaches to the history of representation understood and understand the significance of context to interpretation. You will also be taught how to enhance yourwriting and research skills and participate in discussion and debate that relates to historical and contemporary issues within their specialism.
A selection of artist are covered by the course with the first section moving from Greenberg’s medium-specific purity to Krauss’s model of sculpture in the expanded field to encompass modernism in dispute. The course also covers the shift from nature to culture with painting understood as a sign system. Cindy Sherman’s work becomes the basis for a focus on ‘the identity that is already spoken’ in terms of authorial meaning and intention. The importance of context is also introduced using Robert Smithson’s interest in combining absence and presence and Gordon Matta-Clark’s urban archaeology. Themes such as Louis Althusser’s conception of an ideological state apparatuses and its relation to representation and power are discussed alongside Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger’s subversion of media messages. Hans Haacke’s exploration of the politics of representation is presented alongside Martha Rosler and the problem of ‘speaking for others’ and Sophie Calle’s focus on presentation, representation and surveillance. Historicism and progress in art is explored via the work of Anselm Kiefer’s themes of history, mourning and melancholy and how this is also seen in anti-monuments and anti-memorials. Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons’ interest in desire and the commodity form is discussed alongside cultural tourism (the Disneyland syndrome) Baudrillard and sign-value. Gender, difference and identity are also a feature of the course in terms of representation and gendered Identity, how artists have avoided binarism and problematized masculinity. Specific movements such as Pop Art are explored in terms of Neo-Dada and the ‘Duchamp Effect. The artist run ‘movement’ is explored with a specific focus on Glasgow.
The theorists the course draws on covers a range of interdisciplinary work including: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Jean- Marina Warner, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock. These and other theoretical sources have been selected to aid the students in conceptualising their research question, understanding how to use research resources, finding and managing information, mapping the context and developing and managing a project of research. Practice as research and disseminating research outcomes are also a feature of the course.
1. Modernism in Dispute
The mid-1960s witnessed a series of challenges and revisions to the then dominant model of advanced art which was enshrined in the theory of Modernism. To begin the course we examine the focus on medium-specific purity and the influence of Clement Greenberg and how this was challenged.Greenberg’s 1961 essay ‘Modernist Painting’, argued that the identity and quality of visual art is guaranteed only by its self-critical investigation of its own medium-specific characteristics. This session examines the responses to this particular Michael Fried’s 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, which was last great rallying cry for the Modernist beliefs in the face of their attack by artists as various as Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson. They questioned the Modernist assumption that the work of art was an autonomous and self-sufficient entity. Other challenges can be seen in an opposition to the idea that art developed along a neat line of progression, with each successive movement being an improvement, or the emphasis placed upon originality and authenticity. Greenberg’s Modernism was base on a limited interpretation of the ideas of the philosopher Kant and Enlightenment rationalism to systems of binary opposition, to questions of otherness and exclusion, centrality and marginality, as well as progress and control. We also consider Rosalind Krauss’ use of a ‘Structuralist’ theoretical model that developed into a new orthodoxy based on the Frankfurt School and a small group of ‘post-Structuralist’ theorists. The themes in this session set the scene for much of the subsequent discussions of art practices from c.1965 to the present.
1. Medium-specific purity 2. Flatness, shape, objecthood 3. Modernity and the Enlightenment 4. Binary thought 5. De-centring the art work 6. Historicism and progress in art 7. Krauss’s model of sculpture in the expanded field 8. De-centring and the suppression of writing 9. The critique of originality.
2. The Paintings Are Dead
With modernist abstract painting, artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich—and more recent painters such as Pollock, Newman and Rothko—believed that it was possible for painting to offer compelling personal visions of a spiritual and transcendent reality which was superior to the impoverished experiences of the real world. The rapidly changing world since the Second World War caused a particular set of problems for painting to confront. What happened to the Utopian modernist programme of progress, liberation and wealth through the harnessing of science and technology?
Artists in the late 1950s (Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg) failed to be convinced that art could be the expressive vehicle for personal and original insights of value to all of humanity. Painting came to be interpreted not as spontaneous, original, individual expression, but based on already-existing signs and meanings. The fashion for structural linguistics (based on Ferdinand de Saussure) argued that language (and painting) was based upon the use of signs which generated meaning not by direct reference to the real world, but by reference to each other. These signs were not invented by any one individual, but were already in place within the culture in which an artist and audience work. Artists did not produce completely new and original signs but to ‘manipulate’ pre-existent signs. It was something of a dead end similar to Greenberg’s work but the rapid expansion of image reproduction led to learning about the world through reproduced images of it rather than direct experience. Images were taken for reality much like the contemporary advertising world.
Painting was theorised as not exempt from the endless circularity of signs, and that it can no longer lay claim to a special insight into either the world of external appearances, nor the inner world of the artist’s thoughts and emotions. Nevertheless, rather than rejecting painting as a redundant activity in the late twentieth century, artists tried to find new ways of dealing with painting’s unexpectedly precarious position.
Since Hegel over 200 years ago the history of art has been regularly punctuated by claims that painting has reached the end of the road, or outlived its relevance and its usefulness. Did painting loose it relevance only to be kept alive only by the art market which is only interested in paintings as superior kinds of commodities, not as important cultural and historical “statements”? Or did painting undergoing a fundamental change from which it will emerge as strong as ever?
1. The various lives and deaths of painting’s surface. 2. Richard Wollheim on the use of the surface and the fact of the surface. 3. The ‘fact’ of the surface and the literalization of paint. 4. Leo Steinberg and “the flatbed picture plane.” 5. From nature to culture: painting as a sign system. 6. The photographic condition of painting 7. Pictures of paintings: fakes and simulation.
3. The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ was published in Aspen magazine and although greatly misunderstood it argued that writers were not the only source of the meanings in their works. This idea was extend this to include artists. Although he later abandoned these ideas art as quotation rather than individual invention became fashionable. Theorists wrote on works of art as ‘texts’ inter-related to other texts and denied the individual artist mastery over his/her work: ‘authors’ were stripped of authority.
Rather than being a one-way process of transmission art was more like an open-ended invitation for the viewer to actively work on it—but wasn’t this always the case and how could these ideas be new? Much of this theoretical interpretation was confined to artists like Sherrie Levine who copied Barthes’ ideas with “the birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter”.
In this session we will examine a broad historical account of some of the differing ways in which the figure of the author/artist was understood at different moments in the west. The nature of individualism in artistic production and the notion of the individual in terms of capitalism, ownership rights, and market forces are considered. We also discuss the shift away from humanism and its emphasis on the individual person, in favour of an anti-humanist notion of the ‘subject’ by followers of Heidegger. Confusing deas such as these were picked up by critics who used Barthes, Derrida and Lacan to blend structuralism, semiotics (the study of signs) and psychology to ‘explain’ artists as diverse as Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Mike Bidlo, Richard Prince, David Salle and Sigmar Polke, who questioned in different ways the artist’s role, identity, function and authority over the content and meanings of their works.
1. Contemporary Copyists 2. European humanism 3. Victor Burgin ‘The absence of presence’ 4. The cultural value of the artist 5. Painting and the marketing of temperaments 6. The critique of expression 7. The Death of the Author 8.Cindy Sherman 9. David Salle 10. Intertextuality 11. The Fugitive Self Komar & Melamid
4. From Work to (Con)Text
All of the artists we will look at in this session have one thing in common: their desire to broaden the scope of artistic practice, to release it from the purely aesthetic concerns of the autonomous art object. They recognise that art is made, and exhibited, within the context of the interacting networks of the institutions of the art world and the broader social world beyond.
We return to the idea that the individual work is not entirely autonomous, self-sufficient and self-referential (as Michael Fried claimed of Anthony Caro’s sculptures), but is reliant upon the signifying system (based on semiotics) of which it is a part. We discuss whether this signifying system is part of a broader ‘extended situation’: an experience that incorporates the physical and psychological presence of the viewer and its environmental conditions.
We also look at the notion of ‘framing’ and how this relates to the concept of the ‘institutional context’ of artistic production. This is done through a summary of Daniel Buren’s theory of the function of the artist’s studio and on his contradictory disavowals of art as property, and of the artist as ‘author’. Marcel Broodthaers is presented as a more authentic critique with specific reference to his Musée de L’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-1972). Broodthaers refused merely to supply the gallery system with art objects so he could exercise control. He draws our attention to the power of galleries to organise meanings on behalf of the works they exhibit. We also discussion of the experimental work of Robert Smithson, looking at his early structuralist inspired Site/Nonsites and his ideas regarding: presence and absence; entropy and the work of art as providing more than a simply visual experience. The session closes with the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, based in a critique of modern urban architecture and how this is lost when he is interpreted using structuralist terminology.
1. From autonomy to contextuality 2. Framing 3. Expanded Cinema 4. The Institutional Context 5. Daniel Buren: the artist’s studio 6. Marcel Broodthaers: The Container and the Contained 7. Robert Smithson: Absence and Presence 8. Gordon Matta-Clark: urban archaeology
5. The Politics of Representation
This session deals with the question of visual representation as an instrument of control and power. This includes a brief discussion of the ‘aestheticization’ of social life, and the consequent difficulties of avant garde artistic strategies. An examination of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s argument that Realism was a form of conformism and that the modern artist should produce ‘incommunicable statements’ to disrupt the flow of information in a computerized society. This is related to his return to the Romantic idea of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘unpresentable’. This is followed by a brief discussion of the political merits of ‘difficulty’ within representation and an introduction to Louis Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses as a way of understanding why we seem to accept the world as it is. Both Althusser and Lyotard represent the extreme disillusionment of politics that fed into critical discourse in the late 1970s and 80s).
How the work of Jenny Holzer was interpreted as working outside the technological flow of images and messages (as suggested by Lyotard) is outlined with examples of Holzer attempts to ‘defamiliarize’ reality from within these systems. Barbara Kruger’s work is discussed in connection to Althusser’s ideas and its relation to mass media imagery; the relation of image to text; the significance of her use of personal pronouns such as “I”, and her use of stereotypes and ‘poses’.
Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-5) is examined in terms of its ‘destabilization’ of image andtext relations, and the problems of the artist ‘speaking on behalf of’ the subjects whom she represents. To close examples of Sophie Calle’s work (Suite Vénitienne, 1983) is outlined as focusing on ways in which the camera is used as an instrument of surveillance which transgresses the boundaries between public and private. The general conclusion is that representation is not a neutral activity, but one which has a profound effect upon our lives.
1. Aestheticisation 2. Lyotard: the Postmodern Sublime 3. Louis Althusser: the Ideological State Apparatuses 4. Mythologies: Roland Barthes 5. Jenny Holzer: the subversion of media messages 6. Interpolation 7. Barbara Kruger: Poses and Positions 8. Hans Haacke: the politics of representation 9. Martha Rosler: the problem of ‘speaking for others’ 10. Sophie Calle: presentation, representation and surveillance.
6. In The Ruins of History
This session is generally concerned with what has been described as the loss of history within contemporary culture. Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Nihilism’ and Frederic Jameson ideas on ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Culture’ are presented as illustrations of this ahistorical tendency. This is further investigated with Yves-Alain Bois’ distinction between viewing historical artefacts as commemorating specific people, places or events; standing in for a general historical period; and as simply signifying a dehistoricized and undifferentiated sense of ‘pastness’.
Lyotard’s concept of master (or grand) narratives, and the idea of history as a particular form of fiction is explained including Lyotard’s analysis of Descartes’ introduction of “I” into historical discourse, and the problems which this raises for a universal history of humanity. Frederic Jameson’s argument is explained as ‘borrowing’ from structural linguistics and from Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. This produced the idea that the ‘postmodern’ represents a ‘schizophrenia’ in which the passage of time has vanished, only to be replaced by the nightmare of an ever-recurrent present. This is related to critiques of historicist notions of progress within Modernist theories of art.
Kenny Hunter’s Hyperboreans (1992) are briefly presented as providing a critique of the racist and historicist elements lurking within the dominant version of the history of ancient classical art. Gerhard Richter’s Oktober 1977 (1988) is outlined concentrating on the problems faced by painting’s attempt to address contemporary history in the age of the photographic mass-media.
The interpretation of Anselm Kiefer’s work in terms of post-fascist German history is explored. Kiefer’s manipulation of the seductive imagery of fascism and its ambivalent relation to this imagery offers the viewer of his works the possibility of similarly ambivalent and disturbing responses.
1. History as undifferentiated ‘pastness’ 2. Lyotard: Master Narratives and History as Fiction 3. Frederic Jameson and the schizophrenic repetition of the present 4. Kenny Hunter’s Hyperboreans 5. Gerhard Richter’s Oktober 1977: history and the mass media 6. Historicism and progress in art 7. Anselm Kiefer: History, Mourning and Melancholy 8. Anti-Monuments Anti-Memorials.
7. Art/Commodities/Signs/Desire
This session begins with an introduction to Marx’s analysis of objects in terms of ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’. The discussion of the symbolic value of objects looks at the gift as a ‘thing which is not a thing’. Greenberg’s (1939) ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’ is examined in relation to the Modernist case for the rigid separation between ‘high’ culture and mass culture. This led to some critics suggestiing that the Modernist disavowal of the artwork as an object/commodity was a form of psychological ‘repression’. The use of the techniques and materials of mass production in the works of artists such as Morris, Andre, Flavin, Warhol, Stella, illustrate this ‘return of the repressed’.
A discussion of Alan McCollum’s Plaster Surrogates in terms of ‘serial production’, in which ‘difference itself becomes an object of consumption is related to Baudrillard’s theory of ‘sign-value’, Jameson on the changed status of the commodity since c.1945 and Baudrillard on the sign-system of commodities, and how it works like language in determining our identities.
A discussion of ‘desire’ as a manifestation of our drive to overcome ‘lack’, and how desire is directed towards objects and commodities is related to Laura Mulvey’s interpretation of Freud and Lacan’s contested notion of the ‘Mirror Stage’ and how this might be related to ‘desire and the commodity form’. In relation to these ideas Haim Steinbach’s work in terms of the commodity’s relation to cultural tourism and the Disneyland syndrome. The session closes with an analysis of Jeff Koons’s use of commodities in his early work (c.1979-c.1987) in terms of sexuality and desire.
1. Use-value and exchange-value 2. The case of the manufactured gift-item: ‘It’s the price that counts’. 3. Modernism and the Art Object 4. Repression… and the Return of the Repressed) 5. Alan McCollum’s art and serial production. 6. Baudrillard and ‘sign-value’ 7. The eroticism of sight. 8. Haim Steinbach…and cultural tourism 9. Jeff Koons: Desire and the commodity form.
8. Difference and Identity
This session begins with a discussion of the problematic nature of both male and female identity, with reference to Marina Warner on the 1992 New Contemporaries, and Ludmilla Jordanova’s critique of Linda Nochlin’s ‘Women, Art, Power’. What emerges is that gendered identity may be thought of as a position within representation. This is extended with Griselda Pollock on ‘What’s wrong with ‘Images of Women’?’ and a note on how the interest in Structuralism focused on ‘difference’ and the problems of binary systems of thought.
Questions arise as to the value of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories for understanding the construction of gendered identity, with the figure of ‘Woman’ as historically a token of exchange, and as gift. Questions on the value of Derrida’s notion of Woman ‘as’ the truth of untruth are also raised in connection with his notion of ‘deconstruction’. Lacan’s theory of the Imaginary and the Symbolic order is analysed along with the influence of Hélène Cixous and the Imaginary as the site of the feminine and essentialism in terms of mediums and imagery and iconography.
The female body as the basis for feminist art practices are illustrated with Helen Chadwick’s Of Mutability (1984-6). The session closes with a discussion of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-78) as an exemplification of aspects of Lacan’s theory of gendered identity.
1. Representation and Gendered Identity 2. Problematizing Masculinity 3. Gendered identity as a position within representation 4. The psychoanalytic approach (Lacan: the Symbolic Order) 5. The Imaginary as the site of the feminine: essentialism in mediums and iconography 6. The female body and feminist art 7. Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, 1973-78
9. Reception
This session looks back at some aspects of the course to address Art’s reception in terms of the process whereby new directions in art become the received wisdom by the ‘Art World’, and how they are critically evaluated and marketed. Mainly we focus on the reception of Pop Art and the changes it ushered in with the development of the art market and then go on to discuss ‘postmodernism’ by trying to explain October Magazine’s influence and also highlight the A New Spirit in Painting exhibition in the early 1980s.
With the ‘Artworld’ we contrast of Mayer Schapiro and Arthur Danto’s ideas. The lack of a social history of art is problematised. Danto’s conception of the ‘Art World’ is examined in terms of the preoccupation with the ‘death of painting’. The ‘climate of opinion and the horizon of expectations’ is used as a term to explore the effects of the nexus of private galleries, expensive art magazines, contemporary art museums, critics, dealers and collectors. Neo-Expressionism and neo-Conceptualism’s differences and similarities are set out along with the role of critical discourse in the formation of movements, groupings or styles of art is itself criticised.
Another related problem in understanding the reception of art is the question of ‘where did it come from’, its provenance; and this is sometimes very distorted and confused or staged. Lawrence Alloway and Pop is set out as an example of a complex origin. The term ‘Neo-Dada’ is outlined as emerging in the 1950s to describe a type of art made between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Oldenburg’s ‘Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks’ in New Haven in 1969 is discussed along with student’s interest in Herbert Marcuse. The revived interest in Marcel Duchamp is discussed in terms of how his legacy encouraged a transfer on to the linguistic, photographic, and site-specific operations within which ‘Conceptual art’ was defined’.
Rosalind Krauss’ October is analysed as encouraging what Rule & Levine (2012) termed ‘International Art English’. Hal Foster (also with October) in 1983 used Postmodernism to mean a cultural and political resistance to the status quo, and distinguished between complicity with or resistance to capitalism within several competing definitions of postmodernism in the 1980s. This is contrasted with Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s essay in Social Text that offered a critique of ‘postmodernism’. This is combined with an examination of A New Spirit in Painting opened at the Royal Academy in January 1981.
In conclusion we return to Linda Nochlin’s 1969 essay that asked “Why are there no great women artists?” which also relates to the idea of ‘artworld’ and how it had grown up to supply the market that was discouraging to artists who were not white, middle class or male.
1. Danto’s Artworld 2. The climate of opinion & the horizon of expectations 3. A New Spirit in Art Marketing 4. Pop’s Provenance—where did it come from? 5. Neo-Dada: Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks 6. The Duchamp Effect 7. Rosalind Krauss’ October& International Art English 8. ‘Transgressing the Boundaries’ 9. A New Spirit?—Conclusion
10. Art Magazines
In this session we look at Art Magazines historically. Should we accuse, forgive or condemn or celebrate them. We study how small groups influenced art, the different ways they operated, how their language, imagery, their theory and practice, indicate common themes. Art Magazines help us place artists socially to see their community. Each of the magazines has a story that we can now tell, this mythology, helps us interpret and assess motives—were they searching for the authentic, the erudite, the opulent, money, a different model of art beyond the dictates of formalist critics, fame? We find out about the influence of the artist run movement and this aspect still speaks to us about artist’s discovering their own capabilities and potential. This included self destructive/creative infighting, pomposity, stupidity and pretentiousness, notoriety, and confrontation with authority: the price you pay for freedom. At best it represents thinkers thinking beyond their means to discover new horizons, a new sense of what is and what is not problematic—and all of them focus on what mattered to their contributors and editors or what needs to be done.
1. View (1940-1947) Charles Henri Ford 2. Propyläen (1798-1800) Johan Wolfgang von Goethe 3. Avant Garde (1968-1972) Ralph Ginzburg and Herb Lubalin 4. Aspen: The Magazine in a Box (1964-1969) Phyllis Johnson 5. Avalanche (70-76) Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp 6. Real Life (1979-1994) Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan 7. Art-Rite (1973-1980) Mike Robinson, Joshua Cohn and Edit DeAk 8. FILE (1972-1987) AA Bronson, Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz. 9. Interfunktionen (1968-75) Friedrich Heubach with Benjamin Buchloh 10. dé-coll/age (1962-1969) Wolf Vostell 10. October (1975-).
11. Transmission
Mostly the final class is about ‘artist run initiatives’, or ‘artist run spaces’—or even the ‘artist run movement’— and we will talk specifically about Transmission Gallery and its largely ignored origins, its emergence in Glasgow in the 1980s and its development up to the mid- to late 1990s. I’ve then picked three artists who share a different involvement or association with Transmission: Peter Thomson, Julie Roberts and Michael Fullerton. What I’m trying to get at: the spirit that is also alluded to in the quotes above. To try to connect things up a third part will look at Artist-run initiatives more generally, trying to find the roots of what influenced people here in Glasgow in the 1980s and elsewhere. Questions will remain as to what the core features of artist run projects were, they greatly differ, the models they offered continue to evolve; but what was their trajectory, what have we lost and gained, what aspects of the avant-garde that they drew from fell away, and what does the period have to tell us about artistic practice now?
1. Transmission Gallery’s largely ignored origins 2. The Writers 3. Transmission 4. Peter Thomson, 5. Julie Roberts 6. Michael Fullerton. 7. The Artist-run movement
New Minds Eye 