Lecture Notes - Modernity & Modernism : an introduction

Modernity & Modernism : an introduction

Terminology

1760-1960 - Modernist project - philosophy of design.

We live in a postmodern world now.

Modern - positive connotation, improve to modernise, project of new and better.

Tate Modern, new labour new Britain.

New woman photomontage, Spanish Pavilion 1931, Paris International exhibition.

Will Holman Hunk 1851 - The Hireling Shepherd

The above image was the advent of industrialisation. New radical style at the time. Considered modern at the time but isn't modernist.

Paris, 1900 was the most advanced city on the planet. The city was dense, fast paced, populated.

The Eiffel Tower attempted to be modern and industrial.

Gallery de machines, new inventions, new technology - revels in modern and industrial aesthetic.

Trottoir roulant - electric moving walkway - Urbanisation (country to town transition).

City becomes a work place. Factories replace rural work. Rural, all day long work. Factory has shifts. City starts to develop own communication, roads, telegraph, railway, telephone.

1912 - world time was standardised to keep within the time tables of modernity.

Process of rationality and reason.

Enlightment - Period in late eighteenth century when scientific philosophical thinking made leaps and bounds and started to embrace new thinking. Religion and superstition was ditched for scientific facts [SECULARISATION] faith in self not God.

New forms of entertainment: cinema, shopping, music...

The city becomes product of our culture.

Caillebotte 1877 - Paris on a Rainy Day

Haussmanisation - Paris 1850's - new Paris

Old Paris architecture of narrow street and run down housing is ripped out. Haussmann ( city architects) redesigns Paris. Large boulevards in favor of narrow streets, which made street easier to be policed - social control. Also 'dangerous' elements of working class are moved outside the city centre. Centre becomes expensive middle class and upper class zone.

Subjects of paintings is the city - people in paintings gazing at city and buildings.

Scientists freaked out that modernisation would send people mad. Trains, roads, etc - experiment on attentiveness to sound location 1893/

Modernism brought:

• Affluence
• Alienism
• Class division rich/poor
• Inventions
• Steamship.
• Flaneur - wealth shown off by strolling around city. City is the site of enrichment and it became more confronted with class difference.

Fashion becomes a communicator; signifier of who you are.

Sheurat 1884-1886 - Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (pointillism)

At this time the whole idea of life changes, no working dawn till dusk, there are shifts instead, 'you time' is structured. The whole of life revolved around work.

Degas 1876 - L'Absinthe

Starts to look like a photograph, not centered, cropped, worker getting drunk because life is so rubbish.

Kaiser Panorama - 1883 - sit and look at images rather than sit and look at the world rather than go out an see it.

The Lumiere Bros - film of camera going up and down the Eiffel Tower. First film was of a train coming into a station and it had people screaming in the aisles.

Subjective experience - experience of individuals in the modern world. Starts to come close to understanding modern art.

Alfred Steglitz Flaitron building was built in 1900 in New York in a grid design. New building brought new views from above.

Paul Citroen 1923 - Metropolis

Edweard Muybridge - Descending stairs and turning around - 1884-1885 - new technologies used as a tool to scrutinise.

Giacomo Balla 1913 - The Speeding Automobile

Modernism in Design

• Anti-historicism.
• TRuth to materials - Eiffel Tower - no polish, looks industrial.
• Form follows function - function first then appearance.
• Technology.
• Internationalism - neutral language.

Anti-historicism - no need to look backwards to older styles

'Ornament is crime' - Adolf Loos 1908

Tattoos were seen as bad because of the need to decorate yourself.

Bauhaus - Renovate rules on art teaching and had the most progressive art school of the twentieth century.

Bauhaus building - futura font, windows for function, bare concrete.

Technology

• New materials
• Concrete
• New technologies of steel
• Plastics
• Aluminum
• Reinforced glass

Mass produced items made everything cheaper and more accessible.

Internationalism

• A language of design that could be recognised and understood on an international level - utopian aspect.
• System of neutralisation no matter where you are from.

Harry Beck - London Underground Map - 1933 - guide for function, distances not real on map, international design, neutrality.

Fraktor - Nazis front - invented in the 1930's. They shut down Bauhaus because they thought it was too progressive. Medieval, gothic, demonic race.

Lecture Notes - Postmodernism

Postmodernism

Modern, modernity, modernism.

In association with... experimentation, innovation, individualism, progress, purity, originality, seriousness, self expression.

Postmodern condition characterised by - exhaustion, pluralism (a variety of approaches and topics), pessimism (perception of life on a negative aspect - glass half empty), Disillusionment with the idea of absolute knowledge.

Post modernism and modernism overlap - reaction to: modern life / technology / new materials / communication.

Jean Tinguely 1960 - Homage to New York (wheels and machinery)

Origins of Postmodernism

• 1917 - German writer Pudolph Pannwitz spoke of 'nihilistic, amoral, postmodern men'.
• 1964 - Leslie Fielder described a 'post' culture, which rejected the elitist values of modern culture.

1960's - Beginning

1970's - Established as term

1980's - Recognisable style

1990's - Dominant theoretical discourse.

Today - Tired and simmering.

Uses of term 'postmodern'

• After postmodernism.
• Historical era following the modern.
• Contra modernism.
• Equivalent to 'late capitalism' (Jameson).
• Artistic and stylistic eclecticism.
• 'Global village' phenomena : globalisation of cultures, races, images, capital, products.

The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977)

15th July 1972 3:32pm - Modernism dies. (Charles Jencks).

The demolition of Pruitt - Igoe development, St. Louis.

Le Corbusier 1927 - Plan Voisin (utopia and technological determinism, re-development idea).

Building to be re-developed for modern look.

Postmodern buildings:

AT + T Building - Philip Johnson NYC 1982.

Frank Gehry, Guggenheim museum, Bilbao, 1997.

J.F. Lyotard - 'The postmodern condition' 1979 - 'Incredulity towards metanarratives' - totalising belief systems, result=crisis in confidence.

Modern Movement (dominant post war):

• Simplified aesthetic.
• Utopian ideas.
• Truth to materials.

Postmodern aesthetics:

• Complexity
• Chaos
• Mixing materials/styles (bricolage)
• Re-using images: parody and irony.

Roy Lichtenstein 1965 - This Must Be The Place

Las Vegas - Postmodern city? Robert Venturi - Learning from Las Vegas 1972.

Claes Oldenburg 2001 - Dropped Cone

Computer animation, space, robots, future.

End of 1950's purest form of modernism painting was Formalism.

Andy Warhol 1978 - Oxdation Painting

Jenny Holzer 1983 - Abuse of power (statement art)

Piero Manzoni 1960 - Artists Shit

David Shrigley 2000 - Art Lovers (comic approach to abstract art)

Roy Lichtenshein 1965 - Red Painting (brushstroke)

Franz Kline 1957 - Untitled

'Advertising is the greatest form of the twentieth century' Marshall Mcluhan.

Low art appeals to senses and high art a creates a divide.

'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing'. 1956 Richard Hamiton

Robert Venturu 'I like elements which are hybrid, rather than 'pure', 'compromising' rather than 'clean', 'distorted' rather than 'straight forward', 'ambiguous' rather than 'articulated ', perverse as well as impersonal...'

'Generally postmodern artists like to mix the highbrow and the poplulist, the alienating and the accessible, and to 'sample' elements from different styles and eras. Now you can re-invent yourself endlessly, gaily pick and mixing your way thorough the gaudy fragments of a shattered culture'.

Cover of Roland Barthes 1976 UK edition of 'Mythologies' designed by Philip Castle.

Crisis in confidence... but ... also freedom, new possibilities, questioning old limitations, space for marginalised discourse, women's sexual diversity and multiculturalism.

'Neo TV' Umberto Eco

• TV quiz shows about TV shows.
• Out takes shows.
• TV news items about TV celebrities.
• Reality TV.

Eco, 1984 - Aguide to the Neo-TV of the 1980's.

Yoko Ono - Sky TV 1966

Katsuhiro otomo comics made into TV programmes.

Rebellion, God save the Queen - Sex Pistols.

Adbusters, Design Anarchy issue 2001.

Conclusion

• A vague disputed form/term.
• Postmodernism attitude of questioning conventions ( modernism).
• Postmodernism aesthetic = multiplicity of styles and approaches.
• Shift in thought and theory investigating 'crisis in confidence.
• Space for 'new voices'.
• Rejection of technological determinism?

Lecture Notes - The Document

The Document

'The need to bring things spatially and humanly 'nearer' is almost an obsession today, as is the tendency to negate the unique ephemeral quality of a given event by reproducing it photographically. There is an ever growing compulsion to reproduce the object photographically, in close up...' Walter Benjamin.

'Roy Stryker proved to me that you cannot photograph a bigot and say 'this is a bigot' because they have a way of looking just like everybody else. What the camera had to do was expose the evils of the people who suffered most under it' Gordon Parks.

'A photograph of a Krupp factory or the AEG says practically nothing about these institutions. REality itself has shifted into the realm of the functional. The reification of human relationships, such as the factory, no longer betrays anything about these relationships. And so what we actually need is to 'construct something', something 'artificial,' 'posed." Bertolt Brecht.

'A double leveling down, or a leveling down which double crosses itself? With the daguerrotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken - formerly it was only the prominent; and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same - so that we shall only need one portrait' Kierkegaard.

Joseph Nicephore 1826 - View from a window at La Gras (first existing photograph).

Frances Firth 1857 - Entrance to the Great Temple.

James Nachtwey - ‘ I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. These events I have recorded should not be forgotten and should not be repeated’.

Testimonies for humanity - starvation, war, poverty, wounds/scars.

Photographers used to be though of as an ‘invisible eye’. So did not affect the scene in which the photo was taken. This was not accurate.

High point of view - camera is in the distance and no one is looking at the camera, therefore the camera is not influencing the scene. For example:

The Roger Fenton piece has an artistic subjective element because it instructs the audience to view it differently because of its title.

Roger Fenton 1855 - Into the Valley of the Shadow of Death

William Edward Kilburn 1848 - The Great Chartists meeting at The Common

The Decisive Moment - Photography achieves its highest distiction - reflecting the moment in a never to be caught again time.

Document becomes a photographic art. Henri Cartier Bresson waited with his camera for ‘The Decisive Moment’.

Should photographers be concerned with aesthetics? Changing the aesthetics can distort documentation on an accurate scale.

Jacob Riis 1888 - Bandits Roost

Construction of documentation, false and staged slums. A middle class fantasy of the slums. Transition between natural documentation and constructions of reality. Jacob Riis bribed subjects with money and cigarettes to pose.

Always an agenda - Farm Security Admin photographers, would take may photographs but only use the ones which showed the right emotions they wanted to portray. The photo out takes can show more truth than the photos that are used as the final shot. The out takes give an insight into how the photographer thinks; images with wrong emotion, wrong content are rejected. There was a depression and 11million unemployed, mass migration of farm laborers 'Okies'. The photographs were both photojournalism and an emotive lobbying tool.

Photographers act and dress in a certain way to influence response.

The below Dorothea Lange image was designed to reference the Madonna and child image.

Dorothea Lange 1936 - Migrant Mother

Raphael - Madonna and Child

Carl Dammann - Ethnographic and Photographic gallery of many races of mankind

John Lamprey - Naked male figures.

Robert Frank - The Americans.

Cesare Lombrosso - Depression - people with depression were photographed and the images were laid over one another with the idea that you could create a perfect image of someone with/ or who would get depression because it would pick out certain characteristics.

War/conflict photos:

Robert Capa 'Normandy, France' - image of battleground shoes photographer at risk. Creating a shudder/smudge 'action' photograph. (Capa shudder).

Robert Capa 1945 - Normandy, France

Magnum group, founded 1947 by Cartier Bresson and Capa. Ethos of documenting the world and its social problems. Internationalism and mobility.

Don Mccullin and Robert Haeberle are two renowned names.

Don Mccullin

William Klein influenced scene. He pushed people, shoved cameras in subjects faces.

Bernd and Hilla Becher set rules for their photos, angle, frame, objects.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Conceptual Art - Art that couldn't be sold. Transient, uncommodofiable, However, it is now sold for thousands of pounds ironically.

Critical Realism

Allan Sekula creates a full story behind photographs, narrative through interviews, books, information all relevant to the subject.

Jeremy Deller 2001 - Battle of Orgreave

Ian Tomlinson G20 protests London, March 2009

Documentary Photography...

• Humanitarian perspective.
• Portray social and political situations.
• Facts of situation.
• People form subject matter.
• Straight forward unmanipulated.

Portfolio Task 1 - Schumacher & Ettlinger and Savile Lumley image comparison

Response to:

Compare and contrast the two images in relation to the following:-

1. The choice and organisation of font and style of illustration.

2. The purpose and meaning of the image.

3. The target audience of the image.

4. The social and historical contexts relevant to the production of the image.

The Uncle Sam Range (1876) Advertising Image by Schmacher & Ettlinger, New York

This image emphasises power, class and society. It is an advertisement selling an Uncle Sam cooker. At a glance my eyes are immediately drawn to the man sat in wealthy looking clothes and the man with a world for a head. The well dressed man looks to be sat round the table for dinner with his family. His body language is very open and upright showing his power. This imagery mirrors images of Abraham Lincoln and that of a president. It is aimed at middle class/ lower class men who want to buy the cooker to become like the man pictured. He is glancing over at the 'world' and offering him food from the cooker, representing their ability to feed the worlds needs. The 'world' is sat writing a list of countries and foods they eat. This shows ignorance towards the worlds needs because the only food written under the Irish section is potatoes, and different way to cook them. The 'world' has a joker-like smile on his face, blissfully unaware of his ignorance; he looks like he is the well dressed man's partner.

This picture target audience is emphasised by the use of colour. Everything is red, white and blue with stars, in the style of the American flag (curtains, carpet, wallpaper, clothing), to show they are patriotic American's. The colours are also very bold to create a rich, luxurious, appealing feel too attract potential customers. There is a clock in the background, however it doesn't have the normal 1-12 numbers on it, the hands are pointing at the dates 1776 and 1876. America became independent in 1776 and the clock represents a century of independence. The American's are asserting their independence and new found power upon the world by offering them their goods and a product which gives you authority and power. Also, in the background there is an image of an American building symbolizing a celebration of America's birth and freedom/independence.

I find it interesting the fact that the cooker is what is being advertised, yet it is half way off the page, the man and the world are the focal point. Advertising campaigns are the same today; celebrities are used to advertise a product and make it more appealing. For example a celebrity will be holding an ipod. The ipod is tiny and the celebrity takes all the lime light, you are buying the celebrity because of their status, wealth and beauty not the company/product.

Poster by Savile Lumley 1915

This is a propaganda poster from the war, aiming to encourage men to join the war. It focuses on emotion and direct questioning. Admissions to the army dropped dramatically after the initial surge, due to bad stories and deaths. It is trying to make the audience feel guilty or how they will feel when they have kids in the future and they ask ' Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?' and they have nothing to say because they didn't fight for their country. He is staring right at you with a cold look in his eyes, which engages the audience immediately. It creates worries for people who have not yet enrolled in the army as to weather they will still be a man if they do not take part. There is symbolism of patriotism, the boy is playing with toy soldiers, these soldiers are galmourised. Soldiers who are fighting in the war will not wear these red, typically English suits. This is a typical outift for soldiers who are protecting the Queen. This gives the impression that if your fight in the war you are fighting for the Queen. The boy shows that he idolises the soldiers, showing that they are a great image and he wants to play with them because they are something to look up to.

Girl is looking is a history book, reading about the war. The war has gone down history and the father is not part of it. The poster describes the war as 'Great' assuming that we are victorious. It is also written with capitalisation showing it is an actual name now.

I would say this poster was aimed at middle class citizens because the working class would have already enrolled by this time and the middle class are happy dodging the war, so they need some gentle persuading and gilt tripping to put the numbers of soldiers up.

In comparison

In the uncle Sam's picture the colours are very vivid and rich to emphasise wealth whereas in the war poster the colours are muted and warm, to represent a standard family's house so that it relates to the audience more. Sam's picture is about the dream of becoming like the well-dressed man, whilst the war poster is the reality of what could happen if you don't join the army. In both images the type is quite small and not in your face, but the images are both composed so that your eyes naturally flow to read the text at the bottom. Sam's pictures chose to use a font that looks quite authoritive, as if to be in command and ordering you to buy his cooker, in comparison the war posters font is swirly and looks like handwriting to make it more personal. Both posters are persuasive but aimed at different target audiences. For a start uncle Sam's is for America and the war poster is for Britain. Both posters I think are aimed at middle and lower class citizens, trying to sell the ideal thing, status. The war photo was made in 1915 when the war had started trying to liberate people to take part for their country. Uncle Sam's picture was made in 1876, a century after America gained independence, and also is patriotic and is showing what 'America' can do for you.