Lecture - The production and theoretical

Aim:


To examine the historical development of practises of institutional critique in relation to the corresponding development of the modern art gallery.


Objectives:

• To demonstrate the importance of the art museum to the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in the 19th century.
• To analyse Peter Burgers theorisation of the twin devlopment of aestheticist (formalist) art practise, and critical avant-gardism in the first three decades of the 20h century.
• To consider the post war critique of the convention of the white cube through attention to Brian O'Dohertys inside the white cube, and Michael Ashers 1974 Claire Copley Gallery installation.

Hubert Robert, Design for the Grande Galeries in the Louvre, Oil on canvas (1796)

Rise of bourgeoisie, came rise of new public art museum. A clammer to create  places of mans creations and its values in France. 

Need to rationalise shift in society - Louvre the core of this.

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty leading the people, oil painting, 1830

Marxist emerging french republic of the louvre as one of the first art museums in the world. Myth. Barthes, presented critiques on how everyday

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957.

Not the consciousness of men which gives them existence but their existence which determines their consciousness. 

Colour illustration of the great exhibition of the great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, 1851

Henri Matisse, the snail

Berger identified 2 development within modernist art, aesthetes tedancy, support my theorist - clive bell, artist such as batist. Avant garde tenancy, characterised by manifestations of DADA. Avant garde tenancy to re integrate art with life. 

Emerging soviet society, artists employed in cultural development, art entered into interaction with applied practises such as Graphic design, seen as propaganda, linked with social change. 

Exhibition poster, Manet and the post impressionists, Grafton Galleries, London, 1910. 

Fry - Harmonious combination of colour, shape, formal characteristics started to be understood as emotively expressive, could stand as equivalent to artists own feelings. E.g - 'Snail'

Values developed at turn of the century century - post expressionist art

'Paul Gaugan, Where do we come from?, What are we? Where are we going?, Oil on canvas, 1897

Cover of Der Balue Reiter almanac, 1912

Art become increasingly divorced from representations of nature

Censorship and 'Truth'

Overview
Notions of censorship and truth
The indexical qualities of photography in rendering truth
Photographic manipulation and the documentation of truth
Censorship in advertising, art and photography


Ansel Adams, 'Moonrise Hernandes New Mexico', c. 1941 - 2


'Moon over Half Dome',1960


Manipulation is not new - in above image
'Camera never lies' - Clearly it can
Manipulation in digital photography DOES happen - Whether to, or not, to 'Improve' an image.
'Original' Negative of slide
Is it the image in itself which gives it the quality, or is it the printing process.


He made countless reproductions using the same negative, through printing processes he could suggest different day times, weather etc


The idea that truth in photography (manipulation) isn't something new, has been practised for a long time using negatives.


'Five years before coming to power in the 1917 October revolution, the soviets established the newspaper Pravda....'


'Stalin with, and without, Nikolai Yezhov'


'Stalin with, and without, Trotsky'


Whats published to us isn't necessarily the truth, we are given a certain amount of truth.


http://homegame.org/news/


911 related advertisements in above link 'Flight simulator' etc Similar to Ad Busters


Kate Winslet on cover of GQ magazine, with legs elongated in photoshop.
First example of this manipulation and notions of truth. Is it affecting anyone by doing this?


'At that time (world war 2) I fervently believed just about everything, i was exposed to in school and in the meida. For example, I knew that all Germans were evil and that all Japanese were sneaky and treacherous, while all white Americans were clean-cut, honest, fair minded and trusting"
Elliot Aronson


'a deliberate and successful attempt by one person to get another by appeals fir reason to freely accept beliefs, attitudes, values, intentions, or actions.'
Tom L. Beauchamp, Manipulative Advertising


'Whereas representation tries to adsorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum' - Baudrillard


"It is a masquerade of information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the image' - Baudrillard


Baudrillard: 'The gulf war did not take place', 1995, in Poster, M
Saying it was designed to happen, for the media, took place at 6:30, ready for the news


Peter Turnley, 1991

An-My Le, Small Wars

Does it represent the harshness of war? Or is it just landscape photography.

Should we this in news? Or the more grim reality?

Censorship

The practise of policy of censoring films, letters, or publication.

Morals

Principles of behaviour in accordance to the standards of right and wrong.

'Everybody, everywhere want to modify, transform, embellish, enrich and reconstruct the world around him - to introduce into an otherwise harsh or bland existence some sort of purposeful and distorting alleviation'

Theodore Levitt, The morality of Advertising, 1970

E.g - Cadburys flake, A woman eating a chocolate bar can be related to fellatio, if one person thinks this, then probably many people do. Is it a problem?

Oliviero Toscani, United colours of Benetton advert 1992

Black child appears to have horns, white child angelic like.

Amy Adler - The folly of defining 'Serious' Art

Professor of Law at New York University

'An irreconcilable conflict between legal rules and artistic practise.'

The requirement that protected artworks have 'serious artistic balue' is the very thing contemporary and post modernism itself attempt to defy.'

Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette, 1989

Sally Mann, Immediate Family, 1984-92

Is this acceptable? Will it effect the children?

Tierney Gearon, untitled 2001

Final thoughts

Just how much should we believe the truth that is represented to us in the meida

And should we be protected form it

Is the manipulation of the truth fair game in a capitalist society

Should art sit outside censorship laws exercised in other disciplines

WHo should be protected, artist, viewer or subject?

Jean Baudrillard and post modernism

Aim - To examine and contextualise Jean Baudrillards theory of hyperreality.

To foreground Bauldrillards position, by shwoing how it develops out of a marxist critique of capitalism.

To examine how Bauldrillards analysis of advertising led him to argue that consumers engagements with commodities had begun function like a language;

To explore how Baudrillard extended this analysis into a fully blown theory of post modernism.

'The system of objects' 

'The mirror of production ' Integrated rise of mass media, developed argument about our engagement with reality

Hyperreal world - what we call reality is rounded in simulacra - 'Matrix' an example

Simucrlum - Similar to

e.g - Fight club 'Copy, of a copy, of a copy'

Matrix 'What is real' youtube clip

"How do you define real?" 

Simulcra - Pure construction, no reality outside themselves

Labour - Concept how we shape environment through industry, what we make and do, we are conditioned by our environemnt. Marx investigating how we become removed. 

Commodities - exchange value. We weight them up against each other - relationship is qualitative.

Once we start exchanging things, our contact with physical world becomes transformed, objects are forced to conceptualise to other objects. Indirect contact with world.

Workers labour becomes a commodity, directly engaging with the world around you, which suits your own needs is destroyed under capitalism as labour you do has to be exchanged for money. We have to sell ourselves to survive. Externalisation of worker, his work becomes an object, 

Product means nothing to us, we have sold our labour to purchase it,

Labour embodied in product is looked at in its ability to exchange

Peoples labour a commodity, to be bought and sold for a wage, which can then be exchanged for other commodities.

Transformation of production and consumption - capitalist production 'the principles of scientific management' advocated each labour process

Assembly line. first attempt Mass production

Post war period, boom in mass production.

Assembly line became a way of producing all consumer items.

Berger ways fo seeing chapter 7 "Publicity is not merely competing messages, its a language in itself used to create the same general proposal, publicity as a system only makes a single proposal, it proses that we transform ourselves and our lives by buying something more."

Williamson - Advertisements seek to address consumer desires, not how the product may be useful to us.

e.g - Car has human characteristics, we apply characteristics to car, then applies to our status when we own it.

 Advertising codes products through symbols, which differentiates them from other products. 

'Focus group on mad men' - Youtube

Products usefulness is superseeded by icons and symbols used by advertisements

Advertisement are forcing needed to coherce with products

Layout of department stores

Products arranged to be distinguished 

display window, brands etc play essential role in creating a coherent vision - Baudrillard

products arranged - linguistic sign

Concept (signified) - Sound - image (signifier)

Conventional relationship between word, pronunciation and object - Semitoics

Berger - advertisement as a system and language - creates a form of interaction with products

Adverts converge with eachother, all different, no reason for arrangement, continual consumer exposure, constitutes a system of signification of consumer desire

Post modernism - link between images and reality - simulacrum 

Experience saturated by media imagery

representation,(following reality) begins to shape the way we see reality itself

Cultural condition becomes that of hyper reality - images take on lives of there own, become templates for new realities

simulacrum overtaking reality - takes a code from concrete social relations and reemploys them within the media

Disneyland shapes by idea of american history, not reality. 

a Hyper real landscape, perfect model of simulation, play of illusions, overtly fantastical environmental, distract attention from reality outside of it. Distraction from corruption and crisis of world.