Week 01 Introduction Three Case Studies + One School

Themes
- Immigration
- Displacement
- Exile

Time
1940-45, 1985

How are they worked out in art, not only by representing or reflecting a feeling of being not
at home. To take their identity, that position, and move into the domain of art that is
worked differently What does art allow when you move these political problems into the
aesthetic sphere in order to work on them, work through them

What techniques do artists invent in the space of political urgencies?

The commitment to an aesthetic, trying to invent an aesthetic in art based on the condition
of displacement, being a stranger in another land e.g. Victim of homegrown oppression,
marginalisation
- How do they make this condition not a weakness (repressed, ignored) but as a very
basis of being anartists
- How do you invent an aesthic from the position of being an exiled?

The Different Geographies:

Advanced art moved very quickly after the second world war, moved quickly because of
forced exiled, moved to New York primarily from the centres of Avant Garde –
Paris/Germany

ARSHILE GORKY (alias, play on the Russian author Maxim Gorky that he admired)
- Bridge figure between the traditions of Europe and the new world
Survived barely as a child in the Armenian Genocide  Boston, NY
- Dies quite young

Why does an artist fashion a new persona?

Become an artist, re-fashion one’s identity, along invented, imagined lives

When painting you are not just reflecting an experience/trauma, you are doing something to
it in paint, moving into the sphere of life and art and becomes something else (more than
reflecting history)
 At the early stage of his life where he is a copyist (of the Masters
of Modernism and the Old Masters from the Renaissance)

A dream space (space of imagination)

- It helps us start to think about Gorky Himself
- The old strategies of Avant Garde which had been
destroyed / displaced during the WW2 and being
reimagined/ dreamt up again
How one places oneself in that history can also be reimagined

- Looking at Picasso’s work immediately, doing something

with Picasso in his own work
Myself and My Imaginary Wife The face becomes a mask
(1933-34c)

Picasso in his early ‘primivatists’ paintings

Gorky’s Copyist phase
Self Portrait (1904) Picasso

Studied primitive works of Liberian cultures / African tribal objects and refashioning the
physiognomy into a mask
- The arched eyebrows
- Ellipsoid eyes (stretched out egg shape)
Borrows and takes from Liberian sculptures

Works it over in his own paintings

Post-impressionist, Paul Gauguin Tahitian Paintings

- Gorky is borrowing and working through the history of Modernism very strategically

Two Nudes (1906)

The face and the morphology of the body distorted into a kind
of ‘primitive’ objects

Gorky also looks at modernists from the late and mid 19 century – Paul Cezanne

Many artists go through this phase of copying, that is trying to place

themselves within the languages of art from the past
It is not about originality; we have to insert ourselves into the existing
languages of art practise to figure out where we lie within those
histories and techniques and take them else where

Why is it Cezanne?
- Tactility of painting (tangible – clear/definite, perceptible by touch)
T
- Painting is not only for the eyes alone (touch-based sense
painting), involves tactility (touch), the sense of the body and
space
When youSelf
putPortrait
a gesture
with
on a canvas, that is a touch, not a visual act
Self Portrait, 1928
Ashile Gorky
alone (howPalette,
do you compute
1890 that for spectators, how do you make touch seen? Or felt by
the eye) Paul Cézanne
Painting worked over 10 years, seems still unfinished
It depicts a young Gorky with his mother
- His mother dies during the genocide because of starvation during a
forced march
The painting is based a photograph of a child and his mother, Gorky is holding a
carnation, around the 20th century

When you move experience into the realm of art/painting, its transformed and
worked over differently
- Changed the portrait enormously
- In certain areas, the dress is flattened, when you move down it
becomes just gestures and stops resembling a dress
- The pigment on the face of the mother almost maps on to the
photograph
- Gorky’s face has changed, the photograph is black and white, and in the
painting, he has added colour to it

Themes: Return of the Dead, Mourning, loss of the loved object, desire in the
space of lost (Mourning according to Freud: working through loss and pain)
 The Artist and His Mother,
1926- ca. 1936

How do you fabricate/construct memories of a lost object?

Where does Gorky fit in the traumas of the 20th century?

Where does Gorky fit in the history of modernism from Picasso, Cézanne to
now?
- Both happening in the same surface

Photograph Art Movement

- Painterly flatten space / gestural space
Printing on the dress is removed, doesn’t look like anything it becomes abstract
marks when you move down the dress (painterly gestures)
- Movement away from representational period, figuration and a slide into
a non-representational  abstraction

His work starts to change, the figure is sliding away, decaying (mourning of the
figure in general), his painting will let go of figuration all together

Explore painting as materiality – pigment

Second version of this painting

 1941-42
European intellectuals/artists forced emigration, exiled.
The condition of exile becomes the condition of building
art after 1945. Surrealist Arrive and Gorky works changes
- The slide of abstraction of the dress in the Artist
and His Mother is in full force

Type of Abstraction: Bio-morphic abstraction (Not

geometric, cubic forms, seemingly biological but is
abstracted, not recognizable specimens in nature)
- Other dream space – A Garden, landscape
Painting from Gorky’s childhood memory
- A longing, desire for home, loss
- Violence of loss
How do make that felt in painting? Garden in Sochi, ca. 1943

Not a classic landscape scene

- Not a scene of nature, where artists since the renaissance looked to nature as a sight of revelry,
contemplation, relaxation, leisure
- Not a mere backdrop/stage for human pleasure
- No human
Nature is no longer passive and is doing something else
- We have it being freed from human possession, doing something on its own terms
How can we allow nature to be on its own, beyond the realm of the human?

Technique
Where is the foreground and background?
Background: white space
- background monochrome space bleed,
move in, leech in to the shapes
- Crosses over into the foreground, in which
foreground and background bleed into
each other in such a way we can’t quite
tell where things lie
- It’s almost as if the background it laid first
and chipped away at7 cut out, not painted
on top but dug through
- A very clear demarcation between drawing and The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944)
painting https://hu-is-clarice.com/Paper
- Drawing in a loose sense where we see the contours
lines, that bound what these entities are (shapes) very
clear blacklines
We see them very clearly and are not liquified into the figures that they depict but we also
see them starting to not be listened to quite clearly
E.g. Red figure painting, where the color, the painting leeches past the line
- The rules of painting started to be transgressed slightly that will point
to development soon
- Color and line start to be blatantly mixed
- Blue line / signified differently
Seems bounded, looks like a figure but when it escapes that line it means
something different, that is a paradox, is a tension that Gorky will trace
repeatedly
How do you make a single mark mean multiple things at once?
Resemble/ represent in multiple ways at one at the same time as it
moves across the surface

Background and foreground are disorientating

- Starting to mix
- Starts to become a case where the whole surface becomes mapped by a kind of
biomorphic modulating force in which we cannot see what is behind, or in front of
- Key moves of abstraction
Greenburg describes Gorky’s marks
- Calls these ‘homeless representation’
- At the level of gesture, the sense of being without a home
How do you make a gesture with no home?
Shapiro calls Gorky’s work - Vagrant
- The condition of being in exiled is being seen at the very level of paint to pigment to
surface
- As you move out of the contour lines, it becomes something else, different
The titles that make us think nature, violence and erotic are mixing in a way that is
transgressive, uncomfortable (in a good way perhaps)
We are starting to see Gorky realizing that we can make a mark
- Multiple things on the same surface at the same time
The violent separation of line and color
- Line demarcates certain smudges and area of
pigment
- Marks not made by the artist but nature, force of
gravity
- Based on a landscape
To find way to allow nature to represent itself on the
surface, not by human
What are nature’s gestures?
- The force of gravity, the slide of liquid down the
surface the flow of pigment
Gorky, Untitled
- Forms these biomorphic forms like the strange orifice start to also be natural forces
moving down a surface, drips, incorporation of nature itself as a process that is outside
the hand of the artists and obeys other laws, that escape the control of the artist
- At the same time, disciplinary diagrammatic (in form of a diagram) drawing
- Discipline mapping of the surface with the black lines, but then allowing colours to bleed
from that disciplinary grid, keeps the tension at play
Multiple types of gestures
- Gestures of the hand that makes liens
- Non gesture- flow of paint down the surface
The release of representation from the artist control becomes important

LOUISE BOURGEOIS
- Figure of displacement and travel, multiple bodies housed within the same body
Artistic subjectivity and identity along the lines of geographic location, ethnic identity and
the construction of gender, race and class *these nodes within identity
Gender identity constructed in art (forged and made again)
- French by birth and moved to and is based in New York (early age)

In her time, painting from life and

female figure was a way where an artist
would train
- That is the body that is the
figure through which countless
male artists honed their
technical skills upon which the
masculinist idea of the artist was
constructed
- You learn the skills of painting by
looking and objecting the female
figure
How does she work through that legacy,
that history, what is she going to do,
where is she going to take it? The violence of that history
- There is a transformation as we don’t have the full figure, torso and head
transformed into house/home
- The parts of the body reflected in the home
- The physiognomy of the face turned into the façade of the home
A whimsical and clear image and quite biting
 What do you do as a woman artist doing with the legacy of the female figure the nude? The
male gaze?
- Louise deals with it by putting it in its proper place, in the home where patriarchy is
constructed where the rule of the father begins and set its power structure in
motion
- The home, the domestic sphere where women were historically confined to the
labor of reproduction and care, the private sphere outside of the public sphere
outside the realm of work, economy, political the social, the realm of nature in
biology, reproduction, childcare
- That’s where the female figure needs to hunted back to, repositioned into and
thought
Femme Volage, 1951 Home and its violence, desire become the vocab of her work

Early Works
She moves to New York and begins to make these figures in the early 50s
known as personages. Her work starts to lodge itself somewhere between
abstraction and figuration, representation and abstraction in which these are
seemingly bodies (based on her own body and friends) - Figments of people
- The bodies by certain physical attributes, about the size of a body,
stand vertically with its pedestal (feet) on the ground
However, they are also not like bodies
- it is not bounded beings like we tend to think of our bodies that has its
own orders separate from the world outside
They are not whole, pieces forged together, slid together down this
pole and that is part of the violence of her work
Spiral woman, 1951-52 The way in which the body is constructed on these rods and arranges
the scraps into something that might look like a body
- Denying this idea that the body that is something whole, apart from its
environment instead
- It is something that is built form tis environment, built form the scraps
of the world and becomes whole (imagined to be a body)
- Just pieces of wood slide down the rod
Feminist tactics:
The sense that she is internalizing a certain violence that has already done to
the female body. This notion that the female figure is just a collection of parts
that can be isolated by the male gaze (face, leg, shoulder)
- These pieces can be dissected and removed from the body as a whole
being and isolated as objects of pleasure for the gaze
That is a condition of violence that needs to be denied, destroyed
transformed by the artist
One-way Bourgeoise tends to do this, is to internalize it.
 - This is a body of parts, but to make that ‘partness’ disturbing to the gaze, not a part
that one can take pleasure in anymore but as a collection of parts that points out the
violence already being done to certain bodies
There are also bodies aren’t human, non-human, biomorphic, fungal, rizo matter, mold-like
Why does Bourgeoise turn to forms of growth in biology that is outside the human,
Look like swarms, colonies of fugal, alien colonies
Release art from the human and put it in touch with the other bodies that are non-
human
- The human isn’t some special being, apart from the other animals that exist but is in
line with them
The human starts to be transgressed, the borders of the human become animal
The human is the privilege entity seems to be denied

Quarantania, I (1947-53)
ROMARE BEARDEN
Collages
- Comes out his politicization within the group of black artists in Harlem, a spiral group
- Beginning to consider of a group, the status of African American artists within the
white privilege system of art and culture at large, in line with the right struggle for
civil rights in the United States and else where
- Within that group, Bearden changes
The Dove (1964) his approach drastically
Forging of identity in the condition of
displacement and repression and loss
Photo montage
Life on the street in Harlem
- Figures, animals, dove, dog on the
street
- Life, culture, sociality, interaction
- forms of making art that are not
considered artistic but exist on the
street, graffiti, chalk marks of children
(These are forms of drawing and making
considered outside of art, the privilege
system, make their way into the photo-
montage)
Photo montage lets the artist represent figures that are undeniably multiple
- source comes from multiple photographs, it is a hybrid
- Multiple life, its identity is a multiple being
The sense that identity is also not formed in a matter (e.g. pigment)
But that is constructed from the stuff of the world, whether it is mass media, magazine. That
identity is constructed in the space of art, it is not there before and is just reflected in a
picture. The picture constructs identity in the making of it

The body as multiple, multiplicity

This is not one whole being
- Identity will be constructed along multiple lines, race, gender, class, location
- Re-forging and remaking identity
- The face can become a collective place
- we are not just individuals, but already collectivities

Patchwork Quilt, 1970

What do we do with the female nude that for centuries have been told to recline for the
male gaze?
Considering this body along the lines, construction of race
How to make it participle in other traditions – craft-based like quilt, sewing *forms
considered lower than art
- Other histories outside the realm of western art
- Realms of representation and writing that were primitive, considered outside the
western tradition
- How do we hybridize, make those tradition talk to one another?

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

Have been touched by the traumas of the second world war
After 1945 – How do we make the condition of loss for the basis of a new type of art
A condition of loss, full of potential for generating new forms of making
New forms of education, making, learning, being together e.g. school (place for social)

1933: John Rice writes to Josef and Anni Albers

- Founding members of modernism
- Masters of Bauhaus in Germany
How can colour change meaning based on its environment as you move it from one
background to another, or if you place another colour next to it

In order to destabilize the power of art making

Weaving – line and colour are fused
- We turn to textile to make connections between everyday life and the space of art
Feminist approach, attempt to make art in touch with everyday life, exploration of
abstraction (the fusion of line and colour)
Divide, enter into space
A condition of exile puts you in touch with other traditions that then needs to be woven
together
 Traditions of your home country and you find in the foreign space other traditions you
need to take into account. How can we find new traditions and forge new identities after
the loss of identity
A place in which artists of diverse identities can came and re-forge new types of making
for the post war period and participate in the new stories to come