Dan Graham "Homes for America"
Wayne Thiebaud "Three Machines "
Ed Ruscha, "Every Building on the Sunset Strip"
"Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas."
Larry Sultan"In Repin's picture the peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of pictures--there is no discontinuity between art and life, no need to accept a convention and say to oneself, that icon represents Jesus because it intends to represent Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much of a man."
Andreas Gursky "99 Cent""In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it upon the medium of his own craft"
Norman Rockwell "Freedom of Speech"
"Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations."
"Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations."
Kitsch is easy enough to identify when you are using the dated aesthetic of Normal Rockwell or this glorious example of 70's kitchen art as a set of visual guidelines. Ask any art history student to identify the most memorable images that result from reading Greenberg's "Avant-garde and Kitsch" and Rockwell's images will no doubt surface. Yes Rockwell is the poster child of Kitsch in the most basic understanding of the concept. Anyone who has been trained to have an analytical eye towards images can dismantle this Rockwell's ideologies in a heartbeat. The impassioned look of the powerful working class american citizen--it's just too easy. Same with the kitchen art. It is a representative of the all too undervalued category of craft, and additionally decked-out in 70s colors. Both of these two pieces just reek of mid 20th century american nostalgia--not that this is a value judgement. What I am pointing out here is that when kitsch is seen to look like this, it is not difficult to jump on Greenberg's bandwagon. There is Mondrian and there is Rockwell--easy enough to understand. Greenberg's contrast between Picasso and Socialist Realism is just as manageable.
The rest of these images are not placed here in order to make an argument for them as some kind of more contemporary kitsch. Far from it. Sultan and Gursky are two of my favorite contemporary photographers, and are considered as "high" as "high-art" can get in the contemporary sense. I put the rest of these images here as offering very different yet all "high-art" takes on some form of Americana. Theibaud and Gursky both take candy as their subject matter in the Greenbergian sense, yet choose two media with different associations, and stand in for two very different movements within contemporary art. Much is at stake when Theibaud uses the medium of paint as a pop artist, just as it is when Gursky manipulates digital photographs.
If I were to try and design some kind of argument that would encompass all of these images it would no doubt have to exist in the form of a book. So instead what I am doing with this virtual exhibition is allowing you, the viewer, to try to navigate these images with the proposed concepts in mind.
The Status of Kitsch in America--how do we identify it when it is not as transparent as Rockwell? How do we understand Greenberg's notion of Kitsch NOW? Can we see it as transparently when it is not as dated as these two obvious examples?
Mass Production as an American Value--as it is frequently explored in post-modern art. How do we tie this to Kitsch (without referring to the easy answer, that is, Rockwell's jab at Greenberg with his image of the viewer admiring a Pollock. Again, TOO EASY.)
And finally, what about Greenberg's "Russian Peasant"? What about the notion that there is some kind of innate human conception of taste that is linked to an accurate representation of the visual world? Bazin refers to this as the psychological desire of the plastic arts, or the drive to duplicate the world. We know what Greenberg says about the peasant's view of Picasso, but what about Cy Twombly? If Greenberg's point with this comparison is that the "uncultivated" viewer will prefer the representation of narrative and identifiable figuration that is found in Soviet Realism, then what can we say about photography? It has an excuse for narrative that painting doesn't (that is, some notion of indexicality that still exists in the real world even if it has long since been denied in academia.) Contemporary tastes in photography still mostly necessitate figuration of some sort, if not narrative. But I'll stop before this turns into a plea for abstract photography to be taken more seriously, or we could be here all day...
postscript: If you were not in Chicago this fall check out the smart museum's past exhibit "Heartland" as well.
The rest of these images are not placed here in order to make an argument for them as some kind of more contemporary kitsch. Far from it. Sultan and Gursky are two of my favorite contemporary photographers, and are considered as "high" as "high-art" can get in the contemporary sense. I put the rest of these images here as offering very different yet all "high-art" takes on some form of Americana. Theibaud and Gursky both take candy as their subject matter in the Greenbergian sense, yet choose two media with different associations, and stand in for two very different movements within contemporary art. Much is at stake when Theibaud uses the medium of paint as a pop artist, just as it is when Gursky manipulates digital photographs.
If I were to try and design some kind of argument that would encompass all of these images it would no doubt have to exist in the form of a book. So instead what I am doing with this virtual exhibition is allowing you, the viewer, to try to navigate these images with the proposed concepts in mind.
The Status of Kitsch in America--how do we identify it when it is not as transparent as Rockwell? How do we understand Greenberg's notion of Kitsch NOW? Can we see it as transparently when it is not as dated as these two obvious examples?
Mass Production as an American Value--as it is frequently explored in post-modern art. How do we tie this to Kitsch (without referring to the easy answer, that is, Rockwell's jab at Greenberg with his image of the viewer admiring a Pollock. Again, TOO EASY.)
And finally, what about Greenberg's "Russian Peasant"? What about the notion that there is some kind of innate human conception of taste that is linked to an accurate representation of the visual world? Bazin refers to this as the psychological desire of the plastic arts, or the drive to duplicate the world. We know what Greenberg says about the peasant's view of Picasso, but what about Cy Twombly? If Greenberg's point with this comparison is that the "uncultivated" viewer will prefer the representation of narrative and identifiable figuration that is found in Soviet Realism, then what can we say about photography? It has an excuse for narrative that painting doesn't (that is, some notion of indexicality that still exists in the real world even if it has long since been denied in academia.) Contemporary tastes in photography still mostly necessitate figuration of some sort, if not narrative. But I'll stop before this turns into a plea for abstract photography to be taken more seriously, or we could be here all day...
postscript: If you were not in Chicago this fall check out the smart museum's past exhibit "Heartland" as well.
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