Semiotics of the Art Medium
Artworld and Art Market Culture
- Art/Not-Art: How to Tell?
- Learning to read in a system of relations.
- No there-there outside the meaning and value constructed in the
network of differentiations (binary and complexity).
- Encoding and decoding:
|
Not-Art
(Sometimes looks like Art)
|
Art
(Positioned against Not-Art)
|
Ironization,
subversion, or deconstruction?
|
|
Decorative
art
|
Non-decorative
|
|
|
Advertising,
pop media art
|
Intentionally
non-mass media, difficult, insider coding
|
Yes:
pop art, Warhol
|
|
Mass-produced
(mainstream posters, shopping mall galleries, commodities)
|
Unique
objects, carrying signs of artist's work, intervention of hand
|
Sometimes:
ironic use of consumer objects and images
|
|
Mass
culture, middle class notions of beauty, design, and "aesthetics"
|
Avoids
beauty and aesthetics (as kidnapped by mass culture). Strategies
used: intentions and interventions often "ugly," coarse,
rough, inelegant, primitive, outsider
|
Sometimes
|
|
Kitsch
(easy and easily reproducible visual clutter, often sentimental
or politically correct)
|
Subversion
of sentimental and received ideologies
|
|
Case Studies: Encoding of Material Medium
- All art media is subject to the already-encoded value system from
traditional high-art media (oil paint, marble, etc.) through modern
materials (acrylic paint, steel/metals, plastics, lighting, film, video,
etc.) to outside and newly introduced materials (organic, industrial,
found, biological, excrement, food, digital processes).
- All are constantly being repositioned in a network of systemic relations
(mediology).
Antoni Tapies
Use of debased materials, recreating common objects and forms (walls,
graffiti, worn and aged objects), primitive gestures and archetypal gestures
and marks.
Andy Warhol
- The
Piss Paintings (Oxidation Paintings): acrylic ground, metallic paint,
urine on canvas panels.
- Especially the Oxidation Painting of 1978 with diamond dust: a Warhol
tour de force.
- Merging of high/low, sacred/profane, ideal/excrement, diamonds/urine
- Warhol's revenge on abstract expressionism? Piss and cocks as painting
tools, humiliation of action painting and macho swagger of Pollock and
company.
- In the process, created amazing abstract works with metallic and chemical
oxidation.
- Commentary
on the "piss works" tradition in painting.
- Warhol
works and prices at Sotheby's
Other Cases: Rauchenberg, Johns, Hesse, Serra
Traditional High Art Medium: Prints
Helen Frankenthaler, woodcut print, Cedar
Hill (1983), Crown Point Press
Sean Scully, etching with aquatint, Sotto
Voce (1988), Crown Point Press
Martin Irvine, 2002 |