Chapter 26
The New World: Postmodern Art
In This Chapter
Exploring Postmodern trends in architecture
Recycling art history
Navigating installation art
To be postmodern sounds oxymoronic. How can something exist after the modern, if modern is the present day? Wouldn’t that put it in the future? The trick to making sense of the term postmodern is to understand that when artists and art historians discuss Modernism, they aren’t talking about the present day or the here and now. (When they want to refer to the present, they use the term contemporary.) Modernism refers to a style and a period of art that stretches roughly from Cézanne and Gauguin in the 1890s (although some scholars track it back to Manet in the 1860s and others find its roots in Romanticism) to Donald Judd and the Minimalists of the 1960s and 1970s. During that time, Modernism dominated much of the art world; in architecture, Modernism was so widespread that it was dubbed the International style (see Chapter 23) — everybody was doing it. Some artists and architects still claim to be practicing Modernism even though most agree that it is no longer the dominant style. The new epoch is sometimes referred to as the Postmodern Age, suggesting that Postmodernism is not only an art movement, but also a major lifestyle shift.
In this chapter, I explore Postmodern architecture, then discuss Postmodern examples of painting, photography, digital, and multimedia art.
From Modern Pyramids to Titanium Twists: Postmodern Architecture
Modernism (and the International style in architecture) rejected tradition and embraced the innovations of industrial capitalism. Modernists placed great faith in technology and science, a view known as positivism. Architects like Le Corbusier (see Chapter 23) referred to houses as “machines for living” — and they did so as positivists celebrating the precision and reliability of machines. In architecture, that meant structures made from the latest industrial materials, usually with crisp, clean lines (no ornament) and an obvious function (nothing was done just for show).
After World War II, Modernism and positivism got an even bigger boost as economic conditions improved for the middle class in many countries. Jacking up the standard of living on such a vast scale implied that the Machine Age was working. People came to expect new houses, automobiles, televisions, toasters, dishwashers, and all the other creature comforts the modern age could churn out.
While people bought more toasters and embraced technology, the art world celebrated the rise of abstract art and the idea that artistic beauty (or art for art’s sake) transcends function (a thing’s usefulness). Many of the heroes of modern painting, such as Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock, were renegades whose every swipe of the brush (or stick) was viewed as an authentic and original stroke of genius. The raw and unpremeditated look of their modernist art vouched for its truthfulness.
Postmodernism began in the late 1960s and early 1970s when artists started to doubt the truthfulness and originality of Modernism and all the values of masculinity, progress, and positivism associated with it. Postmodernism began innocently enough with architects in the 1960s and 1970s saying “enough is enough” to the cockiness of the International style, its rigid restrictions about ornament, and its utopian claims of creating better public housing. In fact, some of the Bauhaus-inspired public-housing projects, such as Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe Project in St. Louis, had to be torn down because high-rises appeared to bring out the worst in people. The mood was ripe for a more popular architecture that would bring back some of the personality, diversity, and history that Modernism had dumped.
Viva Las Vegas!
There’s no better example of architectural diversity than the mishmash of buildings that line the strip in Las Vegas, Nevada. The closest thing Postmodernism has to a manifesto is the small book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), written by the husband-and-wife team of architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. This book documents the strip in Las Vegas in order to celebrate and learn from the car culture, hamburger joints, casinos, and urban sprawl that characterize that city. For Venturi and Scott Brown, “the seemingly chaotic juxtaposition of honky-tonk elements expresses an intriguing kind of vitality and validity.”
Postmodernism begins with this “messy vitality” and then explores the range of historic architectural forms that might better meet the needs of people and rev up the energy of any given space. There are no hard-and-fast stylistic rules akin to the steel-and-glass boxes of Modernism; Postmodern architecture has as many stylistic incarnations as there are kooky casinos in Vegas today. In fact, one Postmodern Disney hotel designed by Michael Graves in Florida assumes the shape of a giant swan, suggesting that architecture has turned into a form of sculpture.
Chestnut Hill: Case in point
Postmodern architecture has had a spirit of whimsy from the get-go. When Robert Venturi designed the Chestnut Hill House for his mother in Philadelphia, he set out to parody the routine elements of a suburban house, using ordinary materials. The facade is oversized like a stage set from an old Western town; yet its triangular pediment is split down the middle in Baroque fashion. Each side of the facade has five windows, but they are handled completely differently on each side in a way that showcases the various modern standards: four-square pattern window, long horizontal strip window, single-unit window. The chimney is supersized — except for the last few feet where it shrinks back to its normal dimensions.
The Chestnut Hill House doesn’t look like a whacky funhouse from a distance — quite the contrary, it looks normal and suburban. But on close inspection, all the details are slightly off. You realize that someone has slyly undercut all the usual choices an architect would make. This “poking-fun-at” approach to design is part of a bigger postmodern trend: self-referential art making. Postmodern art includes lots of inside jokes and ironies that sometimes leave audiences and even house owners feeling like outsiders.
Philip Johnson and urban furniture
The skyscraper is pretty much a modern form of architecture — not one that has much reference to the past. The AT&T Headquarters Building in New York, designed by Philip Johnson (1906–2005) and John Burgee (1933–), is a pioneering exception that may rightly be called the first postmodern skyscraper.
Philip Johnson was an associate partner with Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building (an International style icon of architecture — see Chapter 23), so it’s surprising that he would mix several historic styles in the AT&T Building. Its most famous feature is the broken pediment at the top that looks like a scrolled bonnet on a highboy chest in the Chippendale furniture style. It’s as if a giant dropped his fashionable chest of drawers on the top floor of a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper. The Chippendale style includes tall legs, and Johnson’s building “stands” with tall legs (columns) at its base. This piece of urban furniture is actually a complex mix of styles. Its lower facade with a central oculus above a loggia (or colonnade) emulates the Pazzi Chapel, one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance architecture. Inside, a groin-vaulted space recalls the Romanesque period. The tower cuts an elegant and witty profile next to its boxy neighbors in New York’s skyline.
The prismatic architecture of I. M. Pei
Another late 20th-century convert to Postmodernism is the Chinese-born American I. M. Pei (1917–). Pei is known for his great modernist buildings such as the John F. Kennedy Library on Columbia Point, Massachusetts, and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. But when former French President François Mitterrand chose Pei to expand the Louvre in 1983, the architect began to explore how to give a modern building a historical look without simply imitating an outdated style. The Louvre is a series of royal palaces built over a 13th-century castle. Pei realized he couldn’t just add on a Modernist rectilinear entrance to the world’s greatest museum — it would look like a subway stop surrounded by ornate Renaissance and Baroque buildings. Instead, he reached back to the Ancient Egyptian form, the pyramid, updating it by using transparent glass instead of stone (see Figure 26-1).
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Figure 26-1: I. M. Pei’s Pyramide, Le Grande Louvre, is meant to be a bridge between old-school and new-school architecture. |
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John Garton
Few recent projects have ignited such heated debate as Pei’s Pyramide, Le Grand Louvre. Critics feared anything “new” would disrupt the architectural harmony achieved over several centuries. Others objected to a foreigner reshaping the heart of French culture.
Pei pushed the limits of contemporary technology to come up with his solution for the museum’s entrance and underground expansion. In the main entrance pyramid, diamond- and triangular-shaped panes are bound together by a web of steel girders and thin cables. For the strong, ultralight joinings or “nodes” that hold the tension structure in place, Pei turned to a Massachusetts-based company that made the rigging for the America’s Cup yachts. A specially manufactured colorless glass preserves the view of the historic palace both inside and outside the entrance, and a series of reflecting pools gives the impression that the structure floats upon water.
Pei’s expansion of the Louvre includes a sprawling, two-level complex of shops, meeting places, and exhibition spaces. These changes make the Louvre the largest museum in the world, with nearly 1.4 million square feet of space. Though geometric, precise, and modern in its detailing, Pei’s project is Postmodern in the way it breaks with the International style to reinvent a monumental form from ancient times.
Deconstructivist architecture of Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid
When many people hear the term deconstruction, they think of a wreaking ball and knocking down a building. But that isn’t what deconstructionist (or deconstructivist) architects mean when they use the term. For them, deconstruction means getting fancy and philosophical about their trade.
Deconstruction is a type of philosophy and a way of reading literature developed by the French intellectual Jacques Derrida. Among other things, deconstructivists argue that no literary work has an absolute meaning — everything’s open to interpretation. For example, if an author describes a situation as “dark,” the deconstructionist won’t assume that “dark” is negative. He will analyze the passage without that preconception.
The goal of deconstructivists is to break down literary passages or architectural problems and analyze them without taking anything for granted. For example, in architecture we assume that roofs should slant to spill off rain. A deconstructionist roof might twist and turn and appear to do somersaults like the one at Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry — yet in spite of that, rain still rolls off of it. By clearing away the clutter of preconceptions, the deconstructivist architect is able to find highly original ways to solve old problems.
Peter Eisenman (1932–)
In his designs, the deconstructivist Peter Eisenman often breaks the rules by uniting unrelated elements (incongruous building parts) and by adding structures that have a symbolic rather than a practical purpose.
The Wexner Center for the Visual and Performing Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, designed by Eisenman, is a showcase of deconstructed spaces and unrelated elements. The crenellated redbrick tower near the entrance looks like a medieval castle that’s been chopped in half by the architect. It’s literally split down the middle.
Between the two halves of the tower, a grid of windows allows you to “see through” the structure into the courtyard beyond. The crenellations are echoed in other castlelike sections of the building, making the Wexner Center look like a medieval fortress superimposed on a Modernist glass box. The dungeons-and-dragons appearance is intended as a tribute to the castlelike Armory building that previously stood on the sight. (It was destroyed by a fire in 1958.)
In a nearby part of the building, the architect sliced a playful scoop out of the brickwork and filled it in with another window grid. An even more bizarre visual spoof is the large, grid-shaped awning made of square, white steel pipes that projects over the entrance. The trouble with this awning is that it doesn’t protect you from the weather. The grid spaces are empty! What’s the point of that? The mock awning has a symbolic rather than a functional purpose, which you can contemplate while you soak under it in the rain. In Eisenman’s words, the square white pipes create a “metaphoric microcosm of the urban grid.” The Ohio State campus grid and the surrounding city grid don’t mesh; they are 12.5 degrees askew. Eisenman aligns them symbolically with his mock awning (which is lined up with the spine or backbone of the building itself) to indicate that all parts of a city should get along, not fight each other at 12.5-degree angles!
Frank Gehry (1929–)
A less intellectualized form of deconstruction is practiced by one of the most popular contemporary architects, the Canadian-born Frank Gehry. Gehry seems to follow his instincts more than his intellect. His own house built in Los Angeles in 1978 has a devil-may-care haphazardness about it. The walls and roof slope at odd angles and the materials are ultracheap: corrugated metal siding, plywood, and chain-link fencing. It looks like the kind of house a builder might construct if he were drunk! But for the past two decades Gehry’s deconstructivist works have been large buildings made from expensive materials.
Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (completed in 1997), looks vaguely like a ship (see Figure 26-2), dominating the skyline of the Spanish industrial port of Bilbao. The giant, steel-framed museum is clad in sheets of titanium that reflect the weather and lighting conditions — bringing the environment onboard! In that sense, you never see the same building twice. Its curved surfaces bend and sway, even as the massing of the building gives it a bulky solidity. In this and later works, Gehry’s buildings seem to erase all boundaries between architecture and sculpture. The building is a shape or a thing first, and then a building. Against the gridlike regularity of most cities, Gehry’s designs seem like living organisms with silvery skins.
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Figure 26-2: Frank Gehry’s streamlined Guggen-heim Bilbao Museum is his crowning achievement of decon-structivist architecture. |
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Courtesy of Spanish National Tourist Office
Gehry’s first European structure was the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany (1989). That museum was unveiled at the same time that the Vitra Company (furniture designers) commissioned Zaha Hadid (see the following section) to build her famous firehouse next door, creating a sort of deconstructivist mecca in southwestern Germany.
Zaha Hadid (1950–)
The Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid is a deconstructivist architect whose biggest inspiration seems to be Russian Suprematism, especially the artist Kazimir Malevich (see Chapter 23). Hadid is also an active painter and her designs look like dark Malevich compositions that have exploded into the 21st century.
Her Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein is among her most famous works. It juts out in multiple sharp angles, as if the reinforced concrete had stopped the motion of an explosion. The building’s long, pointed plains and sharp intersections provide a metaphorical sense of speed for the firemen. The conventions of architecture have been deconstructed to the point that there are no gutters, pipes, or cladding on this building — only the precise angularity of concrete slabs and cantilevers. Never the most functional of fire stations, the building has been converted into a showroom for Vitra’s chair collection.
Making It or Faking It? Postmodern Photography and Painting
Today many Postmodern artists express doubts about progress, post- industrial capitalism, and grand arts movements. The themes of Postmodern artists such as photographer Cindy Sherman and painter Gerhard Richter (both discussed in this section) are usually personal and self-critical. Both artists often look ironically at the past, and occasionally treat art history as a grab bag of styles and images to be rummaged through. Like other Postmodernists, Sherman and Richter thrive on remixing things and creating hybrids that remind viewers of the originals while adding something distinctly contemporary.
The pop singer Madonna is sometimes labeled Postmodern for the way she continually reinvents her persona with every tour. Can anyone say what the “true” Madonna is like? A morphed image and the meanings it creates are more significant and “true” to Postmodernists than claiming to understand the essence of the original. They believe modern life is in flux, everything blends and blurs. Nothing is stable. There are no absolutes. Both Cindy Sherman and Gerhard Richter change hats as often as Madonna. In the case of Sherman, the real person seems to disappear behind all the disguises.
In the following sections, I cover the art of the Postmodern photographer Cindy Sherman and the Postmodern painter Gerhard Richter.
Cindy Sherman: Morphing herself
Since 1977, photographer Cindy Sherman (1954–) has caught the world’s attention by photographing herself in all sorts of campy costumes, makeup, and wigs. She endlessly reinvents herself as a kind of generic “everywoman,” but often in roles assumed by women in 1950s and 1960s cinema, porn movies, or Old Masters portraits (portraits by great painters from the Renaissance through the 18th century).
In her series of 69 photos, the “Untitled Film Stills” (shot between 1977 and 1980), Sherman adopts stereotypical female roles from popular ’50s and ’60s film culture: the blonde-bombshell librarian, the wanton white-trash housewife, the sexy prairie princess, and so on. Sherman’s shots are so convincing that they look like actual B-movie stills. She meticulously re-creates the costumes, attitude, and period look, down to the wallpaper and lampshades. So what’s the point? Is she trying to bring back the ’50s or are these “remakes” a subtle commentary on our view of women, then and now? If so, how does Sherman signal the viewer that the photos are parodies?
In “Untitled Film Still #6, 1977” (see Figure 26-3), Sherman assumes a Debbie Reynolds/Tuesday Weld look and curls seductively on a bed in white panties and a black bra. Her porcelain-doll face hints that the scene is a put-on. Also, the camera practically plasters Sherman onto the wallpaper like a pin-up girl. Other than that, the imitation seems like the real thing.
After admiring herself in her black hand mirror, the woman glances up into the leering eyes of an out-of-the-frame voyeur, who, judging by the woman’s reaction, is about to pounce. Her facial expression and pose are frightened, vulnerable, and inviting, all at the same time — just the right cocktail of “oh-no” and “oh-yes” to titillate ’50s and early ’60s film audiences without red-flagging the Hays Office (Hollywood censors). The pose and look are so steamy that you know the camera is about to cut.
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Figure 26-3: In Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Still #6, 1977” the photographer poses as a B-movie sex kitten curled on her bed under the gaze of an unseen voyeur. |
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Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures
Gerhard Richter: Reading between the layers
The widespread use of photo-manipulating software such as Photoshop means that most photography has lost its reputation for telling the truth. People now routinely suspect that even news photography has been modi- fied to some degree. As many Postmodern artists predicted decades ago, the simulacrum (fake version of a thing) would become more powerful and useful than the authentic object — like plastic flowers and artificial Christmas trees.
One painter whose brushstrokes have hovered between the simulated and the real is the German-born Gerhard Richter (1932–). Richter began by creating photo paintings from black-and-white photographs — not to imitate them, but because the ordinariness of, say, a family snapshot made it a neutral starting point on which he could build layers of paint. Instead of a “reality” composed by the artist, the photos (many of them taken from books and newspapers) offered a more objective snapshot of life. Also, painting over photos gave Richter’s art a hand-me-down look, implying that reality is always recycled. The layers he builds also help indicate this view.
Typically, Richter blurs images — both the base image and the new images. He said, “I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.” Blurring images also suggests that the boundaries of people and places are imprecise and open to interpretation.
Even as he adds layers, Richter scraps away some of the new paint to let the underlayers peak through. In this way, he shows that the old doesn’t disappear, it just gets reworked.
Despite this borrowing and revising, Richter created a style of large abstract works that are all his own. His Abstract Painting (750-1) of 1991, for example, is a large canvas filled with brilliant colors that have at times been applied or dragged across the surface with a squeegee. Dappled color patterns emerge as the paint fills in some areas but leaves holes in others (revealing the past and signaling that the rest of the painting is a revision of it). This effect becomes increasingly complex as he builds up more and more layers of paint. The result is what you might call a palimpsest (a manuscript that has been written in once, then scraped down and written over a second time — some of the old words tend to peek through). Think of old weathered billboards in which multiple slogans start to appear. The difference with Richter’s painted archaeology is that all the surfaces are pure color/paint and the intermingling of old and new has a purpose.
For more details about Richter’s art and technique, see Chapter 29.
Installation Art and Earth Art
An installation is an environment that the viewer navigates or somehow interacts with. Sometimes installations are set up in galleries and sometimes they confront viewers in public spaces. Usually, they consist of many elements and can include sound, video, paintings, sculpture, commercial objects, and anything else the artist wants to weld to his artificial environment. Although installation art is temporary, it tends to interact with the viewer more aggressively than a painting on the wall.
In the following sections, I examine the work of four installation artists: Judy Chicago, the team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and earth artist Robert Smithson.
Judy Chicago: A dinner table you can’t sit down at
Feminism is a chapter of art history that began to gain mainstream attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Linda Nochlin, a leading feminist art historian, wrote her famous 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, it struck a chord with female artists who recognized the unfair treatment they were receiving in a male-dominated art market. Even the subject matter and values of much of the leading art seemed to cater to an alpha-male view of the world. Would there be different interpretations of traditional subjects if women were making the art ? Artists such as Mary Kelly, Suzanne Lacey, Sylvia Sleigh, and Adrian Piper began exploring these issues. In 1971, at the California Institute of Arts, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro formed the world’s first Feminist Art Program.
A famous example of installation art addressing feminist issues is Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979). Chicago’s installation features an elegant triangular dinner table (the triangle has long been associated with femininity) set for 39 famous female guests — some historic, some mythical. None of the guests shows up because all the historical ones are dead, which is part of the poignancy and message of the installation. Many great women never enjoyed the recognition they deserved. Chicago inscribed the porcelain floor under the table with the names of 999 other famous women in gold. The number 3, often considered a mystical number, factors into 39 thirteen times. Thus, 13 great women sit on each side of the table, as 13 men gathered at the Last Supper.
Here the women face one another and the notion of “head of the table,” usually associated with male domination, is abolished. The historic guests include the pharaoh Hatshepsut (whose name and monuments were often suppressed by later generations of male pharaohs), the Greek lyric poet Sappho, Empress Theodora (see Chapter 9), Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegard von Bingen (the great medieval mystic, writer, and composer), Christine de Pizan, Artemesia Gentileschi (see Chapter 14), Susan B. Anthony, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Each woman’s place is designated by a ceramic plate, chalice, and place mat on which her name is inscribed. The place mats are made with various needlework techniques (embroidery, needlepoint, and so on) that reflect the era in which each woman lived.
It’s a wrap: Christo and Jeanne-Claude
American writer Max Eastman said for an object to be considered art, it must be so beautiful that we don’t want to use it (see Chapter 23). The Bulgarian-born Christo Javacheff (1935–), known simply as Christo, and his wife Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–) have a similar aesthetic. If you shut off an object’s function by concealing it behind fabric or some other wrapping material, the aesthetics of the thing (cloaked and disguised) step into the limelight. For example, Christo might wrap a milk bottle so you can’t drink from it or a suitcase so it’s impossible to open. With its function suppressed, the contours and essential form of the dressed-up milk bottle or suitcase become apparent.
Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude started wrapping tin cans and magazines with canvas and fabric and eventually graduated to wrapping buildings and landscapes. In some ways, wrapping a building is like putting a picture frame around it that shouts “Look at me — I’m art.” Christo’s “frames” call attention to spaces, places, and things that otherwise go unnoticed or barely noticed. A Christo-wrapped building stops being its everyday self and becomes something to enjoy aesthetically — until the wrapping comes off.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s largest works include Wrapped Coast — One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, in which the duo and a team of 130 assistants wrapped a mile of Australian coastline; Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972–76, where Christo and Jeanne-Claude circumscribed an area with about 24 miles of white nylon; and Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980–83, in which the duo wound pink fabric around 11 islands, making each one appear to float in a pink pool surrounded by the sea.
Although Christo and Jeanne-Claude don’t always wrap, they almost always use fabric. In The Umbrellas, Joint Project for Japan and U.S.A. 1984–1991, they altered the landscape in two countries simultaneously by dressing them in 3,100 colorful umbrellas. On October 9, 1991, 1,340 umbrellas turned a Japanese valley 75 miles north of Tokyo into a kind of tent city made of bright blue umbrellas that harmonized with the surrounding greenish-blue mountain peaks. Simultaneously, in California, 1,760 umbrellas transformed a valley 60 miles north of Los Angeles into a playful inland beach.
Robert Smithson and earth art: Can you dig it?
Robert Smithson’s (1938–1973) earthworks (on-site sculptures from natural elements extracted from the surrounding environment) weren’t built to last — they were meant to fall apart. Smithson’s most famous work, Spiral Jetty (1969–1970), was built on ten acres of Great Salt Lake coast in Utah. He constructed the 1,500-foot spiral from earth, rock, and salt — all on-site materials. One reason he chose this location is because the saltwater tides would eventually carry away his sculpture like a kid’s sand castle. However, after being submerged for 29 years, Spiral Jetty reemerged in 1999 following a drought that lowered the lake’s water level. Smithson chose the spiral shape because it appears in both seashells and galaxies. The spiral also suggests both infinity and eternity (the antidote to decay). The resurrection of Spiral Jetty highlights that symbolism, perhaps more than Smithson ever planned on.
What’s the point of a sculpture that doesn’t last? One of Smithson’s goals is to give us a fast-motion model of the decay of a civilization or a civilization’s monuments. In the case of Greek and Roman ruins, we witness the decay from only one point in time, our own. Smithson speeds up deterioration, enabling the viewer to see the entire process. Usually, he records his work with photos because his installations are often constructed in remote locations.
British-born sculptor and former Kent State University art professor Brinsley Tyrrell and his students invited Smithson to Kent State from 1969 to 1970 to build an earthwork on campus. According to Tyrrell, Smithson wanted to “tip a truckload of mud down a hill and photograph it while it flowed. Well, in January mud won’t flow downhill in Ohio.” Smithson decided to return to New York, but Tyrrell asked him if there was something else he’d like to try. “He said he’d always wanted to bury a building,” Tyrrell recalls. With Tyrrell’s assistance, Smithson obtained permission from KSU to bury an old farm shed on university property. So he rented a backhoe and, with the assistance of Tyrrell and KSU students, dumped 20 loads of dirt on the woodshed until the spine of the structure cracked. That creative-destructive act triggered the decay of Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed. Nature would do the rest.
One of the messages of Smithson’s work is that decay is inevitable and can have aesthetic value. There is something poetic and nostalgic about a Roman ruin or van Gogh’s famous depiction of withered sunflowers.
Whether the destruction and death that followed on the Kent State campus was inevitable is another question. On May 4, 1970, a contingent of Ohio National Guardsmen (who came onto the campus with loaded weapons) opened fire on student antiwar demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine. Shortly afterward, someone painted “May 4 Kent ’70” on Smithson’s structure in large white letters. Partially Buried Woodshed became the unofficial memorial for the dead and wounded students. In other words, it began to acquire its own history.
Soon letters poured in to local newspapers demanding that the woodshed be dismantled. People viewed it as an eyesore rather than art and perhaps as a reminder of something they wanted to forget. Partially Buried Woodshed absorbed that history, too. In 1975, an arsonist’s fire bomb burned away half of the controversial building. Partially Buried Woodshed was diminished, but its history kept growing. The university then planted trees around the crumbling shed to protect and conceal it, adding another layer of history to it. In February 1984, the site disappeared, except for a few pieces of concrete foundation; the university apparently bulldozed it into oblivion.
Perhaps more than any of his other works, Partially Buried Woodshed met Smithson’s goal of “acquiring its own history.” Even though only a few slabs of foundation concrete remain — and a few preserved fragments like the one in Figure 26-4 — Smithson’s earthwork continues to acquire history. It is now considered a landmark of conceptual art.
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Figure 26-4: Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed, created on the Kent State University campus, became a magnet of local history. |
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Jesse Bryant Wilder
Glow-in-the-Dark Bunnies and Living, Genetic Art
Even as the mechanical age seems to be subsiding, a new biomorphic age is announcing itself with the mapping of the human genome. Movies such as Jurassic Park fantasize about how close we are to reversing the linear notion of time and the evolution of species. In that movie, dinosaurs are brought back to life using DNA trapped inside amber. Why? Because the scientists have discovered how and the results would make for an interesting theme park! As crazy as that nightmare may seem, individuals and multinational corporations have been cloning and genetically engineering at a surprising rate. Some artists want to expose these practices and others want to use similar processes to make aesthetic objects. Will this be a nightmare, or will the artists, like great artists of the past, reveal things that we didn’t know about our era?
The divisions between art and the fields of science or medicine have become blurred in unusual ways. The performance artist Orlan, for example, makes videotapes of herself submitting to a series of cosmetic surgeries that bring her actual appearance into conformity with a Photoshopped image she composed from pictures of Old Masters paintings by Leonardo, Botticelli, and others.
Another performance artist, Stelarc, has prosthetic devices affixed (sometimes surgically) to allow him certain super- or cyber-human capabilities. For example, in 2000 he constructed a “manipulator” that extends his arm to “primate proportions.” He also developed a computerized Extra Ear that functions as an Internet antenna.
But many artists practicing in this sphere are out to raise awareness about the “art” of biotechnology and the processes that make it a trillion-dollar industry. For example, the Critical Art Ensemble, a collaborative group started in 1987, brings its art activism to audiences by a combination of restaging events in the history of biotechnology and displaying actual bacteria, genetically altered material, or similar samples in a shocking way. Their recent Germs of Infection (2005) actually distributed Serratia marcescens, a harmless bacteria that simulates anthrax, into the air ducts of a Berlin gallery and then concluded by scientific testing that the space was “a suitable site for an anthrax attack.” No one was harmed during the test; it was done to draw attention to a similar test that was conducted at the Pentagon in 1945 and led to a proliferation of germ-warfare programs. The artists’ intention was to use fear to educate people about a time when those panic buttons were pushed in a non-art context and people made the wrong choices.
Nothing seems more God-like or fearful than transgenic engineering, the formation of new combinations of genes from one or more organisms that are then reintroduced into a living organism. You might say that this is where Postmodernism meets science. It was once believed that species’ boundaries were for the most part impenetrable. However, with the various genome proj- ects, we now know that genes of differing species can be easily spliced in endless combinations with no clear limitations (like cultivating cranapples or other hybrid fruits). The consequences are of course unknown.
The Brazilian-born artist Edoardo Kac has created an infamous work of art meant to draw the public’s attention to transgenic engineering: the glow-in-the-dark bunny. The bunny’s name is Alba. She was created in a laboratory in Jouy-en-Josas, France, by splicing in the genetic material from a glow-in-the-dark jellyfish. Alba looks like a normal rabbit, but under blue light she glows fluorescent green! Kac’s hope was to create an installation in which he and his family would live with Alba. They would occasionally be either videotaped or placed behind a protective glass that allowed visitors to observe the whole family in their “natural” habitat. Think of a cross between a history museum diorama and the reality TV show Big Brother. Kac’s idea borders on such controversial cruelty to animals that, under pressure, the lab has never released Alba to the artist for exhibition. Nonetheless, transgenic engineering is one of the many alarming developments of a Postmodern art obsessed with replication and simulation.