natalia_gubareva

Yeah, I've seen this image so many times, however never paid attention to the capture. Thank you a lot.

Thank you so much for this brilliant idea. I already wrote about Diane Arbus but I suppose I gonna re-write lots about her based on what you've just wrote about her.

 

There is only one thing I got confused I can't fing anywhere this image you're talking about "Miss Debutante 1930 at home". It's not in her book and Internet knows nothing about this owrk of her.

Kevin Farrell thank you so much for support and ideas. I think I gonna do what you have suggested. The only thing I'm confused a bit what photographers should I choose. I already started writing about Cindy Sherman. However, I'm confused if Sherie Levine would be considered to be a photographer post 60s? Most of her works were done after 1980s.

 

I was also thinking about taking Diane Arbus but I'm getting really confused what postmodern ideas and strategies she was expressing?

Well, if you added paragraph breaks and some punctuation, that would be a start.

 

It was ok in my word file and then when i copied it in here, it appered to be the way you see it. Sorry.

 

I'm really trying to write this paper but the whole art language for a non-native speaker is really hard to understand and especially to write. I really tried my best to tell the ideas expressed in this paper.

To H.P What problems? Yes, my first language isn't English but I'm heading my paper in English. For some reasons when I published this text here it made these symbols " and ' look like ?

Here is first couple of pages I wrote. Probably the most dificult writing I've ever done in my whole life :-) Thank you a lot.

 

The early 1960s was an important time of structural and cultural change in the world. The most significant of these changes were the rise of mass media communication and fast development of technologies. The end of World War 2, the destruction of Europe and its empires, the struggles for independence by its colonies had culminated in a new set of political, cultural and ethic ideas. The success of various social movements had increased the sense of identity by women, gay and lesbians, African Americans, and other previously discriminated groups. The world of art experienced a major alteration, the demise of modernism allowed for the bloom of new complex and ever-shifting ideas that led to an artistic climate of ?unprecedented intellectual ambition? known as postmodernism.

 

Keith Davis states that the leading artistic trend of postmodernism was ?a dematerialization of the traditional art object?. Artists started exploring the value of the idea of art and its place in society more than creating art of monitory value. However, the new ideas required new modes of expression and representation and photography has become one of the most important ones. As critic Andy Grunberg writes: ?Conceptual artist sough to rescue art from dominion of precious object, and photographs were considered ideal because they were so little valued ? until Conceptual Art helped them make them valuable?. Artists no longer viewed photography as a secondary instrument used for art?s reproduction and the medium to document. Instead, it has become central amongst contemporary postmodern artistic practices.

 

According to Douglas Crimp, photography can be seen as ?a watershed between modernism and postmodernism?. In the modernist sense photography couldn?t be considered an art because it acquires its autonomy and should be an independent form of expression from other disciplines to become a traditional medium. By understanding photography in this way, it can no longer be a tool for documentation, reportage, illustration etc. John Szarkowki attempts to make photography a modernist medium in terms of ?an art form that can distinguish itself in its essential qualities from all other forms? by saying: ?the pictures reproduced in this book [The Photographer?s Eye] have in fact little in common?these pictures are unmistakably photographs. The vision they share belongs to no school or aesthetic theory, but to photography itself?. However, photography is too multiple, too useful to other practices to be an art form within the traditional definition of art. Thus when photography was revaluated as a modernism medium, photography seemed to be one of the causes of the end of modernism due to its subversive nature.

 

Photography?s allowance to the museum on par with other traditional mediums, the growth of photography courses in university art departments, and rapid dissemination of a series of new approaches like Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Book Art, Body Art, Performance Art, Earth Art, Photorealism and many others let artists embrace photographic form of expression enthusiastically. The most famous painters in Pop Art era, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha, were amongst the first who started using photographic images and techniques in their works in the early 1960s. For example, Robert Rauschenberg began incorporating photographic reproductions of the originals to the canvas by means of silkscreen process. In Retroactive I (1964) he uses incompatible pictures of an astronaut, oranges, a portrait of John F. Kennedy and a stroboscopic photograph of Gjon Mili and overlaid them with bright strokes of paint. Like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol started using photo-silkscreen process to make paintings composed by means of photographs taken from the popular press. His most striking works include the repetitive images of Campbell?s soup cans, the bottles of Coca-Cola, S & H Green Stamps and others. Since that time more and more artists from various disciplines working in the postmodernist era started using photography as their medium.

 

Postmodernist artists made a strong emphasis on the nature and the power of representation which made photography the key postmodern medium. According to Walter Benjamin, the mediums of film and photography played a central role in the new cultural experience of media-dominated society characterized by mass production and expansion of images. He pointed out that in the world where everything is duplicated, there is no reality, there is only representation. Posmodernist artists sought to undermine this idea of representation. Since all the images referred to other images, copies of the copies, their favourite artistic strategies were appropriation, simulation, and pastiche. These strategies involve copying of already existing styles, images and symbols from other artists whom they admire to create a unique piece of work. This copying ?highlighted the status of representation as a perpetual re-presentation?.

 

 

Further I plan to write about Sherrie Levine and her appropriation. Then about Cindy Sherman and Diane Arbus.

 

thank you a lot for your ideas and help.

Today the most common used strategy in post modern practices around the world would have to be appropriation /Quoting. Appropriation/ Quoting involves borrowing symbols, styles and forms from any other artist, which they choose. Artists tend to reconfigure or redefine the meanings of the symbols used in order to suit their own needs or raise questions in society.

 

Can be considered from this that Robert Mapplethorpe was a post-modernist artist by borrowing Edward Weston?s style?

I also a bit confused about what postmodern strategy used Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman in their work?

I?m still deciding which 3 photographers post 60s I should discuss. I can?t choose between Diane Arbus, John Baldessari, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine or Ed Ruscha (it?s kinda confusing because I though he is more painter than a photographer, however our lecturer made a strong emphasis on him making him a postmodern photographer).

Thank you a lot for some ideas. I will write a couple of pages and post them in here. As a non-native speaker I found it really difficult to write about this topic.

 

Anyway, I kinda of follow the idea expressed by Douglas Crimp in his book "On the Museum's Ruins" and the idea that when artist started using photography as a medium for creating art like Ruschenberg and Warhol did, this is when new artistic approaches (Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism) appear and this is when that considet to be the end of modernism.

Hello everyone. I'm doing my paper on the following question: "How can

photography be thought of as a postmodern medium? Your discussion should define

and discuss various strategies used by 3 photographic artists working post

1960."

 

I did a lot of reading concerning this subject bit still a bit lost how I

should organize my essay to fully answer this question.

 

This is the concise plan of my essay: (Do you think I'm going into right

direction?)

 

1. History of that time. (End of war, end of colonianism, the rise of mass

media and technology. etc).

 

2. At the same time demise of Modernism and rise of Postmodernism.

 

3. Photography appered to be a watershed between Modernism and Postmodernism.

 

4. In modernism ph was treated as a tool for representation, as a medium to

document while in postmodernism it became central. (here I plan to write that

ph. couldn't be central because it contradicted with modernist's idea of art

practice that should be autonomous, because ph. participated in so many other

different practices. However, postmodernist artists sterted using ph as a

medium for making art like Rauschenberg, Warhol did etc.)

 

5. It also became postmodern because ph. embraced all the postmodern ideas:

appropriation, banalty, humour - parody, irony, playfullness, self-reference

etc.

 

I chose to discuss the following three artists like: Cindy Sherman, Diana Arbus

and Sherry Levine and their strategies.

 

What do you think, guys?

 

Any more ideas why ph is a postmodern medium?