Contemporary Art

When I starting thinking about this assignment I realized that I didn't really know what Contemporary Art was, or rather what time frame it encompassed. I had always kinda lumped it together with Modern Art, I guess. So, to be honest, I Googled it. Yes, I admit, I am studying art, but I don't know everything about it. It is mainly art made after 1960, but some say that 1970 seems to be the most accurate starting place because it marked the end of easily classified movements. Which does seem to make sense. A "movement" in art would last decades in earlier centuries. Whereas now there may be a lot of movements but they may only involve a small number of artists and only last a short period of time. Or artists are working in movements that cannot be classified. "Movements" are not so much centered around style but are connected to cultural and social issues.

To further help in defining art today the article we read in class states, "Art is such an unregulated field of endeavor that any disposition within the catalogue of human conceptual and emotional responses can be released into art. The gates are flung wide open. No theme is disallowed because it is too sentimental, too vulgar, or too sacred." Based on this statement, the last sentence in particular, I chose these three contemporary works.

Photographer Nan Goldin, "documents her life among friends, loves, and acquaintances who make up what she had called her recreated family." This "family" was made up of the "gender-bending, substance abusing, club-going culture of New York's downtown scene." Her photos remind me of Renaissance paintings, minus the cigarettes and beer cans. The compositions are classic and the beautiful, lush colors bring to mind rich oil paints used by the masters. Each photo invites the viewer inside "the private dramas of people and situations normally considered to be on the outer reaches of social acceptability."

This photograph in particular, Greer and Robert on the Bed, portrays an intimate moment in an intimate setting. This "sentimental" snapshot may not be something the two in the picture want to remember, as their insecurity is oozing out, but it was important to Goldin. Her intention, I believe, wasn't to create memories of good times or fun adventures, neither was it to create artfully rendered photographs; but it is almost a photo diary of her and her friends' emotional journeys that so many of us can relate to, albeit in different ways.

Quotes and picture from www.guggenheimcollection.org

This next artist is provocative and controversial, and he strives to be so. Italian artist, Maurizio Cattelan isn't playing it safe. He his making his art purely for the reactions that they will entice from the viewer. He has been described "as one of the great post-Duchampian artists, and a smart ass too." While his talent as an artist cannot be argued (his realistic wax figures are almost too lifelike!) it is the "vulgar" context in which they were created that receives all the attention.

"The Ninth Hour" is a sculpture depicting Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite. "The work which takes its title from the hour of Jesus Christ's death, was featured in the Royal Academy in London's Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art." When displayed in Poland members of the parliament tried to remove the meteorite and stand the figure up. As crude as this work is it sold at Christie's for 3 million dollars, proving that nothing is off limits as a subject. There will be an audience for it somewhere, and it often seems like it is these kinds of works that garner the largest audiences. Again, Cattelan knew what he was doing.

Quotes and pictures from www.orbit.zkm.de

Howard Hodgkins defines himself as a "representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations." His paintings seek to display the "sacred" "memories of encounters with friends" and places. While he usually paints on a smaller scale, his paintings can take years to finish alluding to the fact that these works are indeed sacred to him.

It is written that "his work comes directly out of the French tradition known as Intimism. It assumes that the ordinary, day to day relationships of an artist's domestic life is deeply interesting as a subject for painting...because it shows that life obliquely, in its ordinary quality, just like yours and mine, and then slightly transcends its commonplaceness, thus giving up hope of meaning by analogy, in our own lives." This painting, Tears, Idle Tears, is allowing the viewer into something very intimate to the painter, for as the brushwork reveals this was done with emotion, but it may also remind the viewer of the idle tears they themselves have cried making the emotion a sacred one.

Quotes from www.artchive.com. Picture from www.artknowledgenews.com