| stephanie johnson ST. MARY'S PROJECT, 2010 | ||||
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Annotated Bibliography Anastas, Rhea and Michael Brenson, eds. Witness to Her Art Art and writings by Adrian Jenny Holzer and Kara Walker were the main focus in my investigation of this compilation of artists’ writings and critics’ interpretations of their works. Both women use poignant and, at times, disturbing text to conjure a powerful response within the viewer. Holzer’s piece Lustmord was a series of photographs of text printed in women’s blood in a German newspaper, which made people more afraid of a tiny speck of actual blood which had been brought into their own living rooms as opposed to thinking about or having compassion for women who were being raped and murdered in Bosnia. Her work centers on the content of the texts as well as their context. Kara Walker uses text as a means to give the silhouettes she works with a psychological voice. She channels these words that are raw, messy, angry, and erotic in order to allow her stereotypical cutouts to be discussed as human. Avedon, Richard. An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1993. This book is a collection of images shown in three sections which track three crucial illusions in Avedon’s life. First, the illusion of laughter and the fine line between “hilarity and panic;” second, the illusion of power; and third the loss of all illusions. The first section is dominated by women, the second section focuses on hiding within power and ambition, and the third section shows how when people let go of their roles they become immersed in beauty, intellect, illness, and confusion. Avedon makes a resonating point that no one lives chronologically. “Each moment reaches backward and forward to all other moments.” These photographs show a wide range of subjects and a wide range of emotion and reality. Bronfen, Elizabeth, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Peggy Phelan. Pipilotti Rist. New York: This book shows photographs of Rist’s work which centers on installations that incorporate video and audio elements. Most of the text is interviews with Rist. She speaks about her influences including Yoko Ono and Joan Jonas. She says that often times her subject matter finds her and she prefers to work alone or with a few assistants. She is grateful to pop culture because she has always found inspiration in the commercial aspects of art. Calle, Sophie. M’as-tu vue. New York: Prestel, 2003. Calle’s work is shamelessly, unreservedly, and uproariously directed at herself. She uses direct language and her own personal experiences as inspiration for and the content of her artwork. Her work is very conceptual and she is often experimenting with the social behavior of others. In her piece, The Sleepers, she invited strangers and acquaintances into her bed and had them take turns sleeping there for a period of twenty-four hours. She photographed her subjects every hour. In another work, The Hotel, she became a chambermaid for a month and photographed the rooms that she cleaned. She also wrote about her experiences and feelings about the people in the rooms, based on how the room looked to her and what belongings were scattered about. Calle has the ability to make the viewer experience what she has been through in a very documented, but at the same time, very visceral way. Chadwick, Whitney, ed. Mirror Images Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation. Chadwick’s discussion of Claude Cahun was of interest to me in this text. Cahun was not a well-known photographer during her time, but it has been said that she is the ancestor that Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin never knew they had. Cahun worked through issues of identity, especially the female identity. She often dressed as female stereotypes and incorporated language on her clothes or as the title of her work. This was used to make the viewer question these stereotypes. She also incorporated the mirror and her reflection into the photographs that she took which made it seem that she was creating another world to display herself in. Davis, Melody D. The Male Nude in Contemporary Photography. Philadelphia: Temple This book describes the realism of photography as “the most mimetic of visual media.” The male nude in photography has often times seemed more absent than present in photography. So many times it is lost to the female nude, which is much more prevalent. This books takes the reader through nude self-portraiture, specularized photographs, and demonstrates the allegorical nude figure. Artists such as John Coplans, Robert Mapplethorpe, George Dureau, and Joel-PeterWitkin are featured in order to demonstrate the many significant forms that the male takes in photography. Goldin, Nan. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc., Guare, John. Chuck Close Life and Work 1988-1995. New York: Yarrow Press, 1995. Close’s portraits display individuals who seem to have a larger than life importance because they are displayed on such a huge scale, but really they are his friends and relatives. As he moved on his work became looser and freer. He began to paint painters such as: Cindy Sherman, Francesco Clemente, and Lucas Samaras. All of the portraits that he creates stun the viewer with their complete purity. They appear to be huge passport photos. The landscape that he works from is the human face which stares out at the viewer, but his later work moved away from cool objectivity into a new realm that added a psychological dimension to the work. He did this by transforming the portrait into a mosaic. He not only explores the human face with “exquisite objectivity,” but also chooses to partake in the joy of painting by using marks that are similar to pointillism in order to create the minute details of the face. Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood, eds. Art In Theory 1900-2000 An Anthology of This is an anthology of artists’ writings as well as critic’s writings from Greenberg, Rosenberg, and others. This compilation makes the lines between modernism and postmodernism clearer and it places art within the context of changing ideas. Importance and hierarchy within works vary between time period, artist, and critic. This book gives insight as to where each piece falls and what values it is contributing to or in dialogue with. Hills, Patricia. Alice Neel. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995. Alice Neel was a painter who was not interested in doing what was expected of her. At a time when Abstract Expressionism was at the forefront she was more interested in the human subject and the psychology of a person. Feeling is of the utmost importance to her and the quality of her work is a messy perfection. Her work is rough and shocking, she did not want to paint girls in fluffy dresses, she wanted to get at the heart of a person and create an impact. Speaking of her work she says, “I was the feeling, but that didn’t entitle me to anything, you know.” The people in her life weave themselves in and out of her work and she has the ability to capture the essence of an individual. Jones, Amelia, ed. Sexual Politics Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History. Sexual Politics initiates a reevaluation of the impact of the feminist movement on the visual arts as well as on other facets of our culture. This exhibition includes more than one hundred works by fifty five artists covering a span of thirty-five years, from 1960 to the present. This book contextualizes feminist art and displays the many dimensions and mediums that have been used to represent similar subject matter. Koster, Thomas. 50 Artists You Should Know. New York: Prestel, 2006. Koster lists and describes the work of fifty influential artists, whose work has transformed the art world. This is very beneficial because it allows the reader to think about what makes artwork successful and what allows a piece to stand the test of time. Everyone would ultimately like their work to be remembered and these artists have certainly accomplished this. Also, it is important for an artist to be aware of other well-known artists as well as more obscure artists in order to keep a balanced outlook on what kind of work you hope to create. A familiarity with these artists will allow one to discuss art more fluidly with someone who may not be as familiar with art, but who has most likely heard of at least one of the people mentioned here. Leibovitz, Annie. At Work. New York: Random House, 2008. Leibovitz brings the reader into the process of creating her photographs. Her first subjects were her family and this spawned an interest that has flowed into the realm of advertisement, conceptual art, and more personal photographs. She has nothing against the commercial world of art, but she does have a separation in her mind between what kind of image makes a magazine cover and what kind of image really makes a portrait. For example, when she photographed Demi Moore during her pregnancy she felt that the photo would make a great cover, she did not see it as a portrait because she said if it were a portrait Demi would not have been covering herself and she may not have been looking at the camera. Leibovitz brings an interesting perspective to the deciding factors of what makes a portrait a portrait and what constitutes as advertisement. Leppert, Richard. The Nude The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western The theme of this book surrounds the fact that all meaning, including the meaning of paintings, result from social practices that are in a constant state of flux and are under challenged by people holding diverse and conflicting interests. Art and its consumption by viewers are social practices. In order to consider how paintings have functioned, it is important to understand that visual representation operates with the specificity of the medium. Each medium has its own set of principles. Sight and language have a great influence on how representations do their job. Nead, Lynda. The Female Nude Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. New York: Routledge, Schwartz, Gary. Rembrandt’s Universe: His Art, His Life, His World. London: Thames Selz, Peter and Kristine Stiles, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art A This books brings artists’ writings to the viewer in an accessible way. Not only are many artists included in this work, but each artist will often times either have an intention statement or writing that is specific to a particular work of theirs. There are also a lot of interviews within this book, which allows the reader to get a sense of contemporary artists on a personal level. Through these interviews it is easier to get an idea of what is really important for them to communicate. Streitmatter, Robert. Sex Sells! The Media’s Journey from Repression to Obsession. Streitmatter investigates the many ways in which sexuality has become a part of our daily lives through the media and how this has changed over the course of time. Playboy magazine brought pornography into the mainstream, James Bond brought sex into the movies, Cosmopolitan magazine celebrated the sexually active woman, Madonna brought sexual issues to the forefront in music, and Sex and the City brought sex to cable television. This book talks about when various sexual thresholds were crossed, where the media has “gone too far” regarding sexual content, and why such remarkable changes have occurred in a fifty year period. The changing roles of men and women regarding sexuality are also explored within this work. Sussman, Elisabeth. Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror. Eds. David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, This book has reproductions of some of Nan Goldin’s most famous photographs. Her friends speak about her and the way in which she captured everyone’s attention. “In person she was electric.” Nan Goldin was able to meet more people in New York after a few months than most people who had been there for years. She brought interest and sympathy, but also challenged people to be themselves. She knew everyone and was interested in everyone, even the scary and the shy. People avoided her because they were afraid she would lure them into opening up. Her pictures made people uncomfortable, but at the same time they were drawn to her because they wanted to have some sort of stardom. At a time when people claimed to make art, her work was the real deal. “And it had been made in your presence, while you were too fucked up to button your coat, by someone who was manifestly just as fucked up as you.” Tomkins, Calvin. The World of Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968. New York: Time-Life Tomkins brings history and context into the life and work of Marcel Duchamp. Instead of focusing completely on his ready-mades and the Dada movement, Tomkins allows the viewer to visualize the world that Duchamp lived in, which was ultimately the catalyst for the work that he produced. Williams, Julia Lloyd. Rembrandt’s Women. New York: Prestel, 2001. Williams displays a lot of Rembrandt’s paintings, drawings, etching, and studies of the women that were in his life, the women that he happened to come in contact with, or the women who commissioned him to create a portrait of them. His paintings often have religious connotations, but his treatment of the female form and his choice in models, women that were his lovers, all point to his interest in combining the expected universal story with people that he knew intimately. His work creates a subtle, intimate take on an old notion of storytelling and allegory.
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