Lecture 11 - The production & Critique of Institutions

Aim / Objectives

- To examine the historical development of practices of institution critique in relation to the corresponding development of the modern art gallery
- To demonstrate the importance of the art museum to the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in the 19th century
- To analyse Peter burger's theorisation of the twin development of aestheticism (formalist) art practice, and critical avant-gardism in the first three decades of the 20th century
- To consider the postwar cirque of the convention of the white cube through attention to Brian O'Doherty's Inside the White Cube, and Michael Asher's 1974 Claire Copley Gallery installation

Ideology

- Ideology for Marx - Form of social mystification
- Mans failure to comprehend his own alienation
- We are not free to think for ourselves regarding our position in the world
- The voice we have is a construct - an amalgamation of different voices

- Systems of beliefs, images, values, techniques of representation
- Social classes in conflict with one another attempt to naturalise their place in history
- Our life circumstances are rooted in our material situation
- Socially constructed in relation to many voices that all express thoughts and feelings
- Institutions such as schools and churches have an important role in ideology

France

Hubert Robert, Design for the Grande Galerie in the Louvre, Oil on canvas (1796)
- Neutral space of artistic display
- Specific political function - promoting values of the new regime

Michael Asher, Untitled (1974), (Installation view, Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles)

Lecture 10 - Deleuze and Guattari and Creativity

Aim & Objectives

To examine how Deleuze and Guattari draw emphasis to the constructed and contingent nature of social reality

(1) To contrast their model of creative, "rhizomatic" thought with traditional 'tree-like' models of thought based in sequential argumentation
(2) To examine Deleuze and Guattari's interpretations of processes of social change and development
(3) To consider how they propose individual people might transform themselves
(4) To contextualise these theories of change and development in relation to the concepts 'the virtual' and 'the actual' (central to their thinking)


Deleuze and Guattari

- Influencial in numerous fields - Architecture, music, geography, sociology, literature etc
- Collaboration developed against the student and worker protests in Paris
- Directly challenged the French state
- Let to the reassessment of the role of the activist in society

A Thousand Plateaus

- Tried to rethink social change
- Change was ongoing and incremental
- Revolt against the traditional modes of thought, represented by a tree-like structure
- Trunk - central thesis, branch - argumentation
- One line of arguments must sequentially lead to another
- Still continues to have resonance
- They suggested the reader takes in information in the same way you would listen to a record

Rhizomatic Thinking

- Drew idea from plant forms
- Underground stem that grows horizontally and draws up horizontal shoots
- Unforeseen configurations
- Provides an alternative mode of thought against the traditional 'tree-like' structure of thinking
- Linked through leaps of association - seemingly unconnected ideas
- Emphasised that ideas need to be invented - they are not 'waiting'

Saussure's model

Concept (signified)  <--->  Sound-image (Signifier)

- Concepts we use in thought and reading gain meaning from repetitive contextualisation
- Agreement of meaning through society
- Entirely constructed by a pattern of usage
- The Rhizo links objects, places, ideas
- Produced intentionally and unintentionally
- Become creative forces that create new configurations

Isa Genzken, Hospital (Ground Zero), 2008

- Represents chaos of urban landscape
- Manual production
- Held together in provisional ways
- Made of materials found in a shop, or even on the street
- Brought together in a configuration
- Takes on the form of an assemblage

The Assemblage

- Processes of arranging, organising
- Emphasise the convergence of food, furniture, people and so on in recognisable structures
- A dinner party or a school are examples of an assemblage
- Home is a place where we express comfort
- How places become meaningful
- Assemblages can be rooted / embedded in society

Language

- Language is not just about the transmission of messages
- Simple language use imposes a role upon the language user
- Value, power, prejudice

Zaha Hadid for MAXXI, national Museum of XX1 Century Arts

- Designed by Hadid as an assemblage
- Architecture flows around and in-between surround buildings
- Mutating in relation to people through the space

Subjectivation

- Deleuze and Guattari believed this is how we are constructed
- Our sense of identity is always under construction
- The subjects recognition is an afterthought
- The word 'I' is empty and can only be appropriated to different bodies
- Used as a self reference

Ideology

- Ideology shapes how we view ourselves and our shape in the world
- Circulate in any given society at any given time but some are able to dominate
- Those who get the means of productions 'shout the loudest'
- Privileged status of politicians and the media within society

The working day

- 'Shocked out of dream fantasies'
- Commuter -> Labourer etc
- Unique demands upon the individual - how we ought to 'behave'
- Roles defined by their context

Psycho-analysis

- Individuals reconfigure their own subjectivities
- Guattari's psychiatric practice
- Re-negotiated the role of the analyst
- The patient and analyst would take on roles
- Sets a process of change and development

Body without organs

- Initially developed by a play writer in the 1920s
- We are a structure
- Francis Bacon, Study of George Dyer, 1969

Seminar - Gaze in the Media

Berger

'Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at' - Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972

- Being objectified is being the target of someones gaze

- Panopticon - Objectified by an institutional gaze

- Gaze theory emerges specifically in the 1970's

- Grows with the emergence of Marxism and feminism

- Our society is one panopticon for women

Hans Memling, Vanity, 1485

- We are looking at the subject but she is looking into the mirror - no reciprocity

- The gaze is never challenged therefore we are 'allowed' to look

- When a gaze is returned, we are forced to interact

- 'Vanity' legitimises the gaze

- All art was created by men and those who bought into art were men

- Our society had always been patriarchal

- Structures - Religion, art, law, ways of thinking about the world

- Culture emerges that reflects this patriarchal dominance of men

- Unfairness in the 'base'

- Can trace this function through culture

- Mens fantasy of domination of women - an excuse, legitimisation

- Gaze = power

Alexandre Cabanel, Birth of Venus, 1863 & Manet, Olympia, 1863

- To be an artist in the 1863, you had to exhibit your work in the Salon (Paris)

- In 'Olympia', the subject returns the gaze with a challenging look; in the other, the gaze is averted

- Venus is the goddess of love, surrounding by cupids - a fantasy scene

- Olympia - modern goddess of love, the reality - the subject is a prostitute

- The 'disgust' masks over the reality

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538 & & Manet, Olympia, 1863

- Manet used a similar composition in his piece

- The gaze is met implying a certain intimacy

- Domestic setting / experience, less assertive

- Dog on the foot of the bed (cat in 'Olympia') - dogs are deemed as loyal 

- Ideologies and male fantasies played out - male domination

- Fantasies of female subservience to men

Ingres, Le Grand Odalisque, 1814

- Contradictory

- Childlike facial expression

Marx, Panopticism, Gaze

- Culture becomes a giant panopticon

- Giving women instructions to act a certain way, dress a certain way and so on

- Becomes a self-regulatory society

- Gaze from an entire culture

Seminar - Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality

Plato's allegory of the cave

- Used as a metaphor on how society operates
- Prisoners kept in the deepest part of a cave by slavemasters, shackled and bound
- Generations after generations born into slavery
- Unable to see much aside from shadows cast by their captors onto the walls of the cave
- Deliberate attempts by the captors
- Prisoners interpret these images as reality

21st century

- This allegory can be applied to the modern day
- These shadows relate to the media and advertising we are bombarded with
- The media has a controlling hand on what we see as reality

Baudrillard

- The gap between a representation of things and the reality of things
- How unreality masks reality
- Commodity culture and the apparatus that surrounds this (capitalism) create alternative realities which makes reality impossible to access
- Corporate / commercial images (those that surround commodities) disguise or change the nature of our understanding of the world around us

Coca Cola

- Haddon Sundblom was employed by Coca Cola in the 1930's to devise a christmas / festive campaign
- Coca Cola wanted the Santa Clause character to reflect their brand image - red and white was chosen
- They use this image as an annual advertising campaign
- Out of a multitude of different stories, Coca Cola chose this image
- This copy has replaced the 'reality' of Santa Clause - it has become almost impossible to trace its origin
- The reproduction has masked its historical roots

- Our investment in these images created by commodity culture (brand / advertising images) affect us as people - how these images affect us physically and emotionally
- Reality is replaced by images of reality which subsequently makes us forget about reality itself

Branding

- Something that is 'unreal' has an effect on the 'real'
- Blind taste test of Coca Cola and Pepsi under a brain scanner
- Subjects had similar brain activity when the brand was unbeknown to them
- When the subjects knew what brand of cola they were drinking, Coca Cola had a more obvious reaction
- We taste 'brands' as opposed to taste itself

Post-structuralism

- Baudrillard emerges alongside Barthes, Foucault, Cixous, Derrida, Delueuze etc
- Guy Debord - Author of the 'Society of the Spectacle'
- Maintained that commodity society had become an 'immense accumulation of spectacles'
- 'The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images'
- People who live through these 'things' rather than forming direct relations with these 'things'
- People become increasingly distanced form each other
- Investing in 'fake' realities

Baudrillard & Marxism

- Baudrillard is deemed a Marxist as he was analysing commodity culture
- Marx - Commodity = Use value (usefulness) & exchange value
- Baudrillard - Commodity = Use value, exchange value & sign value


- In a post modern society, the sign value has become an absolute - a key aspect
- Sign value - what various things connote

- Advertising companies try to add sign value to their commodities
- Consumers invest / buy into the sign value of these things
- Society develops a culture that is more 'fantastical' - one that is further away from the real
- We are dependent on the images of things as opposed to the reality of things

Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

- According to Baudrillard, simulacra are copies either of the thing they are intended to represent or stand in for or - in recent history - are merely copies of other copies
- A copy which 'supersedes' the original
- Hyperreal - simulacra after simulacra after simulacra
- It becomes impossible to access reality

- The copy is not produced by something 'real', they are produced by other copies
- Copies start to affect reality in concrete terms as society becomes more developed
- Simulacra had distinct phases in relation to historical phases of society
- It becomes impossible to distinguish the copy from the original

Disneyland

- Sleeping Beauty's castle became the Disney logo
- Walt Disney drew inspiration from a real castle but added an extra aesthetic
- This copy is informing peoples experience of the real world
- The original castle in Prague is visited by tourists due to its association to Disney

Christmas markets

- Designed to publicise tourism for Frankfurt in Germany
- Became a simulacra of German markets
- The Leeds christmas market is a copy of the one located in Birmingham
- The Birmingham market is now much larger than the original it had copied
- The link back to its reality is lost

New York Manhattan skyline

- Every film based on New York is a simulacra of New York itself
- Its romanticism is created by these copies through media and film

Reality

- The unreality causes new changes in the real
- Images replace reality and cause new reality

Lecture 9 - Censorship and 'Truth'

Objectives

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

How things are censored from us, what we are prevented from seeing
Notions of truth - we as public ought to have the right to know about
We don't have a choice as to what we see

Analogue & Digital

• Analogue photography becomes the original, unedited
• Reproductions = copies
• Manipulation in terms of digital photography - seen as a given, to 'improve' an image
• Digital photography is a code that 'exists'
• We believe there is much truth in an analogue photograph than a digital one

Ansel Adams


Moonrise Hernandes New Mexico, c. 1941-2

Photography captures a scene - 'the camera never lies' though it can

Surrounding mythology

Moon over Half Dome, 1960
Black and white photography
Is it the way he composed this that gives it the quality or is it as much in the printing?

Aspens
Made countless reproductions using the same negative
Uses different lighting, shades, exposure times and was able to suggest completely different times of day
Deliberate and conscious decision to print more than one image
Truth in photograph is not new that comes with digital photography
It is something people have been practising for many years through film

Stalin

Stalin with, and without, Nikolai Yezhov (around 1925)
Stalin with, and without, Trotsky

• Doctoring of imagery
• What is published to us is not necessarily the truth
• Sinister - political agenda
• Is the government only allowing us to see a certain 'truth'

Airbrushing

Kate Winslet on cover of GQ magazine, with legs elongated in photoshop

• We take airbrushing for granted, as the norm
• This example caused a scandal at the time
• Notions of truth - is it really affecting anyones world?
• Photography in newspapers - documenting the truth
• We read and believe it, though is it less frivolous than airbrushing in magazines?

Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier, 1936

• Capa was photographing during the Spanish Civil War
• It has long been questioned whether this photograph was authentic
• Does it matter? Is it indicative of what is happening in war?

"At that time (WW2), I fervently believed just about everything I was exposed to in school and in the media. 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

Does accompanying text alter the way we interpret a photograph? And does this alter the 'truth'?
Does it project a certain way of thinking that is different to the 'truth'?

'A deliberate and successful attempt by one person to get another person by appeals for reason to freely accept beliefs, attitudes, values, intentions, or actions'
Tom L. Beauchamp, Manipulate Advertising, 1984

Baudrillard & The Gulf War 

'Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin'...'whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum'

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

• Baudrillard believes the war was largely undocumented
• 'The Gulf War did not take place'
• Manipulated representation not the war

Peter Turnley

• Peter Turnley was a photojournalist working in the Gulf War in 1991
• Digital processes at this time was relatively new
• An image can be exposed to millions of people via the internet instantaneously 

'Most of the photographs I made of this scene have never been published anywhere and this has always troubled me'...'I feel that is a part of my role as aphothournalist to offer the viewer the opportunity to draw from as much information as possible'.

• Disturbing, graphic photographs
• Do we need to be shown these in order to understand the real 'truth'
• Does colour make a photograph more 'real'

An-My Le

Fine Art photographer who documented world events
Is there a place for tho or is Turnely's work more 'valid'?
Does it demonstrate the harshness of war?


Censorship

Censorship - 'The practice or policy of censoring films, letters, or publications'
Censor - 'A person authorised to examine films, letters, or publications, in order to ban anything obscene of objectionable'

'Everybody everywhere wants 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

A meaning says more about the observer than it does the picture
Is it indicative of the viewer?


Benetton

• Oliviero Toscani who has built a career on his use of photography that does intend to shock
• United Colors of Benetton - somewhat shocking and controversial imagery
• Challenges society perceptions of race, sex, sexuality etc
• Clothing is secondary to the imagery itself
• 'No such thing as bad publicity'

The ASA deemed this 1991 poster to be a poor reflection on the advertising industry and ordered the advertisers not to repeat the approach. If people are complaining about these images, is censorship required?


Amy Adler - The Follow of defining 'serious' art

• Professor of Law at NY University
• 'an irreconcilable conflict between legal rules and artistic practice'
• The requirement that protected artworks have 'serious artistic value' is the very thing contemporary and postmodernism itself attempt to defy

The Miller Test, 1973

Asks three questions to dermic whether a given work should be labelled 'obscene'

1. Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
2. Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette, 1989

• Much of her work revolved around her family, particularly her young children
• Is it going against the moral standards a mother should have?
• Does the fact that she is her child alter the way we interpret the photograph?

Tierney Gearon

'I think that the pictures are incredible innocent and totally unsexual. I don't crop them, I don't retch them and the shots are never staged.'

Final thoughts

• Just how much should we believe the 'truth' represented in the media?
• And should we be protected from it?
• Is the manipulation of the truth fair game in a  Capitalist, consumer society?
• Should art sit outside of censorship laws exercised in other disciplines?
• Who should be protected, artist, viewer, or subject?