Hello and welcome to the Orange County Museum of Art. My name is ----- and I am -----. I will be leading you on a tour through the Art Since the 1960s: California Exhibits exhibition. (ask ice-breaker questions)
This exhibit, curated by Karen Moss, gathers works from the museum’s permanent collection that focus on California artists who have contributed to the development of contemporary art from the 1960s to the 1990s. What do you consider art or how does one consider himself an “artist?” Does one become a painter by perfecting what he is trying to portray, or following the rules of society’s art rules by doing what all other artists are doing? Throughout this exhibit, you will see artists who have broken out of their comfort zones and have shown themselves as pioneers, storytellers, and historians breaking many art traditions. Art Since the 1960s: California Experiments captures artists who experiment with their artwork by adding personal experiences into their practices. You will soon see that these artworks are full of the artists’ own values and beliefs of what they consider art, and I invite you to join me in talking about how these artists rebel against society and become ground-breaking artists of society.
In this exhibit, there are many artworks that consist of daily objects which may not seem like art. Please be careful of where you are walking, as there are many delicate pieces on the floor and on podiums. We won’t be able to view all the pieces, but I want to remind you to stick together as a group and afterwards, you can come back and view the rest of the galleries.
Transition: We will first explore Pop Art. Does anyone know what Pop Art is? Pop Art was first termed in 1958 to describe new art work emerging in England that drew images from advertising and popular culture. In New York and California, artists began to draw on popular culture and the urban environment for their subject matter for their artworks. These artists reacted against abstract expressionism of the 1950s and responded to the bombardment of images in print, film, and electronic media, and mass media in general, and adopted commercial art techniques.
FIRST PAINTING: Andy Warhol- Mao Series, 1973
Take a few moments to study this painting: it may look familiar to you. Where else have you seen these images?
New York-based Andy Warhol is known for his iconic images of Campbell’s Soup cans, as well as other objects of commodity culture. He was generally perceived as a great New York Pop artist, but he was first embraced by the LA art world. In the late 1960s, he responded to the criticisms that his art work was not serious enough and began to create more political paintings.
Who do you see? Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong (1893-1967)
Who was he and what did he do?
He adopted photo-mechanical techniques from advertising to make his work. He felt that the direct application of pigment to the canvas was outmoded and limited. Early in his career, he began to utilize the silkscreen process to transfer photographed images to the canvas. He used this process throughout the 60s to reproduce multiple portraits of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy. At the same time he was making these prints, he duplicated images of mass-produced commercial products such as Campbell’s soup, suggesting that the media marketed celebrities just like products.
How is Mao depicted? Why?
Red rouge and blue eye shadow resemble graffiti. These details can be interpreted as commentary on the resemblance of communist propaganda to capitalist advertising media.
Do you think the media saw Mao as a celebrity?
What do you think was Warhol’s goal?
His Mao series references social and political issues prominent in mass media. His series mirrors representations of Mao that were displayed throughout China during and after the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). He was drawn to the subject because of the media’s attention to the opening of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s.
Why do you think Warhol chose to make prints of Mao? Is he equating Mao as a celebrity?
What’s the purpose of covering Mao’s face with the bright colors?
He shows his irreverent attitude toward China’s totalitarian propaganda
Flamboyant brushstrokes compete with the photographic image, forming color splashes on his clothing.
Warhol was interested in the transformation of Mao’s face into an icon. The power of his image of disseminated. Warhol is responding to his image as an icon rather than politics.
How is Warhol an artist/historian in this case?
To wrap it up, pop art is known as “the new painting of common objects.” Pop art interpreted images from consumer culture with black humor, irony, and criticism. CA pop artists especially wanted to show everyone their originality, even if they faced a lot of criticisms for being vulgar.
Transition: The next gallery we will enter is the assemblage gallery. Does anyone know what collages are? Assemblage is basically 3D collage. Assemblage artists drew influences from Picasso and the “ready-made” found objects of Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamp. During the 1950s, artists in San Francisco and Los Angeles used the medium of assemblage, using non-traditional everyday objects within the context of their work while keeping aspects of their original identities, as a new means of expression.
SECOND PAINTING: Ed Kienholz, End of the Bucket of Tar with Speaker Trail No. 2
What objects do you see?
-discarded bathtub filled with ash and charred material found at a junkyard.
-old lamp with single bare bulb and hunk of matted fur to resemble shower head and reference to Nazi gas chambers
Keinholz challenged traditional attitudes toward painting and sculpture and used raw materials from the junkyards of society. Many “junk sculptors” as assemblage artists were called, roamed dumps and auto graveyards for manufactured castoffs which they assembled into evocative sculptures.
What story do the pictures tell?
-Red, cracked photographs documenting the life of a German soldier
What shape are the pictures arranged in?
-cruciform shape on tub’s waterline
What does this remind you of?
He created this piece while he was living in Germany. Does knowing this fact change your perspective of the work?
How does this piece break traditional art sculpture?
Eschewing traditional art materials and relying on preexisting objects, these artists further confounded traditional sculptural practices by gluing or welding together their disparate elements rather than modeling or carving original forms. Keinholz was a man attempting to shake up the status quo of elitist art culture.
How does the assemblage make you feel?
How does the music play into the piece?
What do story do you think Kienholz wanted to tell us? Do you look at the objects differently now?
-the power of common objects to evoke the horrific
How is Kienholz a historian in this case?
-his commentary on German atrocities during WWII
Assemblage artists seek to embody the multiple roles of inventor, storyteller, and historian. By changing the function of an object, the artist transforms information, allowing viewers to freely interpret the images, inserting their own histories, memories, and stories into the scene. These artists chose assemblage because the discovered objects offered the artist to challenge its original function and elicit a new meaning through them, such as sociopolitical commentary. Assemblages symbolize the fragmentation of postwar American society under a surface of supposed confidence.
I want to share something—Kienholz was not formally trained as an artist.
Is he still considered an artist, in your eyes, or is he a mere handyman? What constitutes an artist?
(Won’t do Antin’s 100 Boots for school group tours if video is playing)
Transition: We will now go into the performance and video art gallery. Artists in this period experimented with performance and video art by focusing on the artist’s own body and allowing the audience to have a participatory experience with the artist. With a televised media, this art celebrated the importance of personal, everyday experiences. This art challenged social norms and blurred the division between art and everyday life.
Fourth Painting: Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots
What do you see? Do you see a canvas?
She began this art pieces as a “photonovel” and distributed her work by mail.
What’s a recurring theme throughout the pieces?
100 boots. She placed these boots all over Southern CA and on her cross-country trip to NY for her exhibition at MOMA in 1973.
What story is she telling through this piece? Why boots?
Artist incorporates cultural and personal history into her art while taking a playful spin on social activism
-she’s a story teller: creates individual personalities and positions them in situations that are an amalgam of her own life
-She once said, “somehow it came to me in a dream. Big black boots. I got them at the army-navy surplus then printed them up on postcards.”
If I told you that the Vietnam War was occurring at this point, does it change the story the boots tell?
100 boots can show nameless, anonymous figures, reminding the viewers of the conflict’s many victims
Do you think the boots can take on a living form in her work? What do they seem to be doing in her postcards?
100 boots eventually became a hero of a fictional biography
-continuity of adventures dependent upon ability and interest of recipient to hold installments together in his head
So going back to how she distributed her work, how does this aspect in her art-making process make her work performative?
She made use of the new art distribution system to disseminate info to 1000 people over 2 ½ years. A conceptual picaresque novel. Each postcard was a sub-set of anywhere between 2 to 6 images forming narrative ensemble, a single adventure
What advantages/disadvantages does distributing art through the mail have for an artist? Do you think this method is considered a process of art?
It is a piece that she sees as a pictorial novel that was sent through the mail, came unannounced, unasked for. It came in the middle of people’s lives.
What mood do the postcards evoke? What if the pictures were taken in color? How would the mood change?
Though her artwork is playful, there is always an underlying social critique.
Transition: We will now enter the installation gallery. Installations are assemblages that are created for a specific space, but they alter the entire space. This art uses regular objects and materials such as painting, sculpture, text, media, light, and sound to evoke thoughts and moods. Through these works, viewers can immerse themselves in the perceptual experiences the works evoke.
What kind of history is she leaving behind? Is fictional history considered part of history?
Fifth Painting: Kim Abeles, Smog Collectors series
What do you see?
What did she use to create her piece?
What city is known for smog?
Abeles places stencils on objects and leaves them outdoors long enough to accumulate layers of smog that leave beautiful but ghostly representations on objects—harsh reminders of LA’s hazardous pollution.
Kim Abeles was born in Missouri in 1952 during a time when industry was thought to save the world and make it crystal clean like a new kitchen. It’s ironic because industry now harms the world. Her environmental and urban artwork is a result of a childhoold in the steel town of Pittsburgh and her 1978 move to smoggy LA. By 1980, her downtown LA studio next to sweatshops and the harsh streetlife provoked her to create artworks about “real” life. Since 1985, she created these series and projects about air pollution.
The Smog Collectors materialize the reality of the air we breath. She places stencil images on transparent or opaque materials, then leave these on her roof of her studio and let the matter in the heavy air fall upon them.
What was she trying to say through her work?
They are reminders of our industrial decisions: the road we took that seemed so modern.
Looking at these pieces, how does it make you feel?
Her art looks so delicate and beautiful, but we are confronted with the realization that these images are the result of deadly pollution.
What do you think art’s purpose is? Only for enjoyment or other things? Name examplesAn outreach, advocacy purpose
Kim Abeles is a positive for change. She serves as a constant reminder of the responsibility of every citizen to take active part in the life of their city. She is not the type of artist who is isolated in a studio, creating work that relates only to an educated elite, but a craftsperson who speaks to everyone, especially children.
She creates sculptural contraptions to collect visual or auditory data over an extended period of time. The collected “facts” become elements from which she creates artworks.
Recently, she’s been working with the urban environment, feminism, aging, HIV/AIDS, and labor. She is a concept-seeker and an object-maker.
How does her artwork make her a historian?
Transition: The Neoconceptual practices gallery is the final gallery of this exhibit. This gallery consists of artists of the 1990s who have incorporated their struggle between personal identity and contemporary social issues into their work. They gained influence from conceptual artists of the early generation and added new perspectives on producing artwork that included a broader range of voices, such as those who challenged societal stereotypes related to race, gender, and sexuality. These artists of diverse backgrounds challenged the art world still largely dominated by male white artists.
Sixth Painting: Lorna Simpson, Wigs
Take a minute to study the painting. Notice the types of wigs and also read the text. Be careful not to lean in too closely to the artwork.
What do you see?
She started out as a photographer, but she expanded the possibilities for black-and-white photography in a number of ways. She is best known for her combination of images and text to address issues of identity, race, and gender in society.
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960. Her earliest photographs documented the street life of New York, Africa, and Europe. She explored the way people, especially black women, are identified, classified, and judged based on their physical attributes and personal styles.
What do some of the text boxes say? What do they refer to?
Who wears these? Why? Can both conceal and reveal identity
What material are these painted on? Does it refer to anything?
-felt refers to women’s cult of domesticity, women are known for sewing and staying at home
How does the felt change the piece? What if it was on just regular photograph paper?
Photographs normally reflect life, while her image on felt seem to absorb it.
Lorna Simpson was interested in how people are stereotyped by appearance. She was particularly interested in the obsession women have with their hair, especially African American women.
How did she arrange her work? What’s holding them up?
She arranges wigs and other hairpieces like archaeological artifacts in order to question the ways we identity, classify, and judge hairstyles as cultural or sexual signifiers.
Look at the work closely. Is there a wig that’s different than the rest?
All the hair is jet black except for one image of a blond, Barbie-doll-like wig, and all the wigs are shown as if seen from the back of a head. The wigs look as if they’re portraits. With the ambiguous text and image, Simpson makes us aware that meaning depends upon context, use association, and power.
How does this piece change an aspect of society?
She refers specifically to the identity of African Americans and how they conform to, or rebel against, prevailing white standards of beauty of braiding, dying, weaving, and processing their hair.
How is she challenging the art world?
Simpson believes that art, especially photography, has the ability to change the world for the better. She alludes racism, slavery, and other aspects of African-American experience in society. More specifically, she uses materials, such as felt, that are normally associated with women to reveal issues that relate to women of color.
(pubic hair discussion, if asked: women’s struggles with sexuality)
What kind of power do you think everyday objects now have?
These artists have challenged the art world through their materials and subject matter. From the artists we saw today, you saw how through their artwork, they became historians and storytellers, telling a part of society we never knew about. We saw how southern Californian artists are so unique in their subject matter and materials. Some artists have used postwar urban industrial materials, evidence of LA’s economic influence and have brought youthful freshness to the scene. Other artists have created communities and challenged authorities and LA’s complex politics. LA still hosts an active art culture, despite lack of funds and the demise of public space. Art remains a significant component of the city’s cultural life, and it is our duty to experience and support them and bring them to surface. Thank you for coming and stick around to look at the many other works created by other artists who are changing the way we look at art.