User:JoniyourGSI/archive2

Wistfully Nostalgic for the Midterm Study Guide? Click Here (Archive 1)

It's Almost Over! Summer Beckons...But First: THE FINAL !

Hurry Up And Study!!

For the example of how to structure a test essay, and a list of what to include, just review the original (Midterm) page Here

I'm Coming To Get My Paper!!

Final Exam Structure : Major Course Themes and Metanarratives

For the final you will write 3 essays – in each of these you will compare and contrast the two images you see on the screen before you (just like the midterm). For each essay you will have only 30 minutes to write. IT IS NECESSARY that when 30 minutes are up you MOVE ON TO THE NEXT IMAGE whether or not you have said everything that you can or want to say about the prior image.

These comparisons will be in response to more open-ended questions than those from the midterm. So the question might be something like, “What kind(s) of urban space is figured in these images?” You should be able to generate a thesis argument in response to this question and then defend it in a clear, orderly and insightful manner, using visual observation/ formal description, and insights derived from class readings, lectures, section and your own knowledge. How does this image show, celebrate, critique, obscure, reveal, question modern urban space, etc.?

Here are some of the broad themes you have learned to think about in this class. Not all themes will apply to all images; and some images will engage with more than one theme. Try to know which of these themes apply to which of the images and how, in case you get a question based on the given theme.

• • Audience: Who is the intended audience for this painting? Did someone commission it? (Is there a patron?) Or is there a “market” for this image? Where did people see the painting? (What were the conditions of viewing?) Is it intended for a particular class of persons? Or gender? Or race? Is it telling the audience something or asking something from it?

• • (The) Body: What kinds of bodies are shown in this image (male, female, black, white, etc.)? Is this body given as self-possessed? Is it for sale? If so, who is selling this body and for what purpose? Is labor marked on this body? Or class? Or race? How did the artist’s own body (movement, brushstroke) figure in the mark-making in this artwork? How was this thought about? Does this object reject the anthropomorphic body? Why is this person shown dead? How is this body machine-like? Or animal-like? Or thing-like? (Or how is this thing body-like?)

• • Gender: Is the intended viewer for this image male or female? How can you tell? (I know that gender is different than biological sex, but I am just dashing this out, so please take this into consideration when I use terms like male/female) How does this image figure gender? Is this a positive or negative representation with regard to gender? What were the culture circumstances that attended the production of this picture of gender or gender relations? (Gendered spheres in social space). What is gender’s relationship to power in this image?

• • Orientalism, Primitivism, Capitalism, etc.: What is the underlying ideological discourse that informs this image? In what ways does this image problematize or deploy this discourse? Why would an artist want to engage with or resist these ideologies in this artwork?

• • Phenomenology: How does this image or sculptural form think about the object-world? Where does the artwork make you stand in your encounter with it? Does it make you think about the position or shape or size or weight of your own body? How? If you imagine yourself “in the picture” or if the object in the museum space seems to force you into “recognition of your own presence”, why? And how does this work? What formal strategies did the artist employ to achieve this effect?

• • Politics: What is the political meaning behind this image? What is the event portrayed? Is this image propagandistic? And to what end? How does the artist gain your sympathy to his/her cause?

• • Science: How is/are science or scientific theories deployed or represented in this image? Is this picture trying to convey a certain scientific idea? Did the creation of this image occur in tandem with any specific scientific movement or expedition? How did science use this image or images like this?

• • Spectatorship: Who is the ideal viewer for this image?; Who has the power to look in this culture?; Who is looking and who is looked-at in this artwork? How does gender figure in looking/viewing?

• • Studio Practice: Did this artist work in isolation? Or with a group of other artists? Did the artist want to create a method by which others could also make works in the same way? Was this artist engaged in a sharing or competitive relationship with another artist and how do we see that relationship in this/these work(s)? Did this artist work out-of-doors (en plein air)? Or indoors? Does this matter? How is this work a response to works that preceded it?

• • Urban/Rural/Natural: How does this image relate to the new urban spaces and entertainments that it pictures or exists within? How does this image create a mythic countryside? Why? What are the pictorial and formal strategies that give us a sense of change or movement or stasis?

Whole Final Study List for which I have Wikified the Links as possible...(Below)

* Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

* Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon in the Pest House at Jaffa, 1804, Louvre, Paris.

* Francisco Goya, The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, 1814, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

* Théodore Géricault, Raft of the “Méduse”, 1818-19, Louvre, Paris.

* Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

* Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

* Mary Cassatt, At the Opera, 1880 (see Griselda Pollock, figure 1), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

* Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-5, Art Institute of Chicago.

* Vincent Van Gogh, Vincent's Bedroom, 1888, (Lund, 122), National Museum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam.

* Paul Gauguin, Manao tupapau - Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892 (Tahiti) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

* Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City.

* El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919, (Lithograph, therefore multiple locations because multiple copies)

* Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the border between Mexico and the United States (Image and Explanation at bottom), 1932, (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Manuel Reyero).

* Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry or Man and Machine, North and South Walls. 1932-33. Mural/Fresco, Detroit Institute of Arts.

* Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

* Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1961, Tate Galleries, London.

* Eva Hesse, Hang-Up, 1966, The Art Institute of Chicago.

* Carrie Mae Weems, “You became a scientific profile” “A Negroid type”, "An Anthropological Debate” “& a photographic subject”, (Or Here), From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995-6 (four framed daguerreotypes with text) (See blackboard web-page and lecture 29 slide list) No location listed.

* Fred Wilson, Cabinetmaking, from Mining the Museum, Installation, Maryland Historical Society, 1992, (Traveling Exhibition (for now)).

Terms and Definitions ! (As defined by Prof. Olson; you need to define in your own words.)

*Salon – An exhibition of works of art; more specifically the biennial exhibition of paintings held by the French Academy of Painting during the 18th and 19th centuries.

*Orientalism – The imaginary representation of the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East, often denying the historical evidence of European colonial contact and war.

*Primitivism – The imagery, technical anachronisms and formal language used by Europeans and Americans derived from contact with non-Europeans or the return to a mythic indigenous past.

*Flâneur – Baudelaire’s male social type and model for modern painters who wandered through Haussmann’s Paris, collecting visual observations.

*Abstraction – Whether geometric or gestural, the arrangement of forms on a surface or in space without apparent reference (literary or figurative) outside of the artwork’s constituent materials and procedures.

*Cubism – The artistic movement based on the pictorial experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The radical simplification of formal relations into facets points to the conventionality of chiaroscuro and linear perspective.

*Dada – An artistic movement that began by using the anti-rational and chance procedures of automatism, collage and sound poetry in response to nationalism and the technological horrors of WWI.

*Easel Painting – Whether small or large in scale, a portable object made of paint on canvas in a studio or in the open air, often monumental in ambition and symbolic import.

*Mural Painting – Monumental, mythical and/or historical, site specific, commissioned art, using fresco or industrial techniques and materials.

*Harlem Renaissance – The vibrant literary, theatrical and artistic scene that took place in 1930s New York, often Afro-centric

*Photomontage – The cutting and pasting of found typography and photographic materials.

*Appropriation – The selection and reuse of imagery or found objects, whether mass-produced or taken from the history of art, sometimes without physical modification aside from a change of context.

*Abstract Expressionism – A mid 20th century American artistic movement; abstract painting based on the motivated chance procedures and psychic content of Surrealism and the epic ambitions of American mural painting. Also called Action Painting.

*Minimalism – Radically geometrical abstract art sculpture in which structure is based on the serial placement of identical, machine-made units rather than the suggestion of anthropomorphic form through joining or carving.

You Ask the Questions - I'll try to Answer Them !

Q: "I have a question about Napoleon in the Pest House at Jaffa; did we establish the reason for the number 32 on the man's hat? The man behind Napoleon?"

A: Gosh, I have looked and looked and I cannot find an answer. No one I have asked seems to know. Someone on "Yahoo Answers" said that maybe it is the number of a patient at the "hospital" but I really doubt that because in 1795-1805 people as individuals were not being tracked by numbers yet. Still, this will not be necessary to know for the final . If I ever do discover the answer I will post it on the Wiki page where it will live forever!

Q: I am reviewing my notes re Death of Marat and I found this:

From our class lecture on 3/13/08

"The story is Marat is receiving a letter from a friend of the revolution who is seeking money on behalf of her brother, asking for some kind of petition for charity - an act of charity that has been arrested - that is the moment that the person has come in with the letter - the letter here is the instrument that is the proxy for that person who would come in on false pretenses and had killed Marat."

From Wikipedia

"On the 13th of July 1793, David's friend Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday with a knife she had hidden in her clothing. She gained entrance to Marat's house on the pretense of presenting him a list of people who should be executed as enemies of France. Marat thanked her and said that they would be guillotined next week upon which Corday immediately fatally stabbed him."

I guess the content of the letter does not matter as much as what the letter stood for. Please comment."

A: Well they are both right and both wrong. Charlotte Corday went to Marat's house with the intention of killing him. She was a Royalist, meaning that she liked the King / Ancien Regime / Absolute Monarchy. She was also, like many people during the Revolution, frightened by the escalating violence (ironically). She thought that by killing Marat she would save 100,000 lives. Marat was a Revolutionary who wanted Fraternity, Equality and Liberty -- by any means necessary.

So Corday devised a scheme to get close to Marat so she could kill him.

She took a note with her to Marat's house which asked for some kind of charity. That was going to be her ruse. Marat was in charge of making sure that widows who had lost their husbands fighting for the Revolution were taken care of. Hence the letter SHOWN IN THE PAINTING (Letter A) which says, "Marie Anne Charlotte Corday au citoyen Marat. Il suffit que je sois bien Malheureuse pour avoir Droit a votre bienveillance." Which basically means "From Charlotte Corday to Citizen Marat, It suffices to say that I am truly Unfortunate for me to have a Right to your benevolence...”

Now that is just the grammar of the French, which seems strange to us when reading it in English. But we can see that she is addressing him as “Citizen” – Citizen is a title that French Revolutionaries called each other, like “Comrade” in Leftist Russian circles or “Che” in South American ones – so she is already pretending to be someone she is not (a fellow Revolutionary) in the salutation. She is saying that she is really in need, truly unfortunate, enough that she has a reason to ask him to take pity on her.

Marat IN THE PAINTING is shown as having been killed while taking a moment from writing a note (Letter B) saying, "Vous donnerez cet assignat à la mère de cinq enfants don’t le mari est mort pour la défence de la patrie” (The note laying on the box, written for another woman, not Corday) to read Corday's note (A)(the "Marie Anne Charlotte Corday..." one in his hand).

This letter (B) (on the box) that he was writing when he was interrupted by Corday's visit, was to give funds to the mother of five children who was married to a man who died fighting for the Revolution (Patrie = country but the Revolutionaries believed that fighting for the Revolution and fighting for the country were the same thing).

Now, Corday really *had* written this letter (A) THAT WE SEE in his hand IN THE PAINTING, and she carried it with her to see Marat. But in REAL LIFE, at the last minute she changed her mind and instead went to see Marat under the pretense of turning in people she claimed to be against the Revolution – some people say that she named a number of Girondists and that Marat himself wrote down their names as Corday dictated them to him (Letter C). Another source (and one that I trust more (T. J. Clark) says that she wrote a note naming the names of counter-revolutionaries in her native city of Caen and used this note/information to gain an audience with the tub-soaking Marat (he had severe eczema and did most of his work in the bath!) Then she killed him.

Later when she was arrested, they found the letter (A) THAT WE SEE IN THE PAINTING hidden on her person, never having been given to Marat. Thus, MARAT himself HAD NEVER in fact SEEN THE LETTER (A) that David places in his hand IN THE PAINTING because she had never given it to him. Thus, showing the letter that was only discovered after the murder is a rhetorical move to show how deceived Marat was by Corday and how it was because of his goodness and Revolutionary values that he died. It is much more honorable to be shown as helping poor women than taking down the names of the enemy in order to behead them, after all. The painting is a sort of fiction that David perceived as showing a "higher truth" than the truth of mere historical facts. This was a painting about the morality of Marat - a man who died loyal to the cause and doing the right thing!

Like a martyr painting of a Saint who dies in his belief in God, David makes a martyr of Marat - dying in his faith of the Revolution. Marat is forever fixed in the moment of his death - never to change his mind; never to betray his cause, and always to have these letters (A, B) - the very attributes of his justness - within his grasp, testifying to his moral justness and dedication to the Revolution.

Of course we cannot know that Marat thanked Corday and said that the people she named would be guillotined (as the Wikipedia page would have it) because she killed him! We never will know what actually happened in their fatal meeting! His last words were, (some say he yelled these, some say he wrote them), "À moi ! ma chère amie ! à moi !" Which is like "Oh My! My dear friend! Oh My!" (Nice to the end!)

An interesting side note is that after Corday was guillotined her executioner slapped her face (on her disembodied head) and she looked back at him in anger and horror! When people were guillotined their heads continued to be conscious and active for a little while!

Oh Looky! A bad but informative YouTube film about the assassination of Marat!

Q. Are we supposed to describe the images in detail like we did for our papers or can we assume our audience has seen the images?

A. No, for the test you can just "Point" at the image. Of course it is still interpretive, meaning that you need to say things about the image and then analyse them, or show how something you are talking about is shown in the image, but you will not have time to describe the painting in detail. Please refer to the example I wrote on the Midterm page, since the comparison essays are the same on the Final as they were for the Midterm.

Q. In the exam format on bspace, it says we’ll have 25 minutes to define 5 terms. I thought I heard somebody say it was going to be different this time or something...I just want to know if it will be 5 in 25 or if it has changed.

A. I am pretty sure that you will be given 5 terms and 25 minutes (or maybe 30) in which to define them. You need to define them in your own words and not just parrot the exact definition given by Prof. Olson (to show that you understand).

Q. I was just going over my notes for the test and I have a question about Gauguin: I have in my notes that "Spirit of the Dead Watching" was compared to the Manet's "Olympia", and that it can 'help us understand it more fully.' But then I don't really understand how. I was thinking maybe just the comparison of women and how they are viewed, basically the misogyny that is happening, although I just didn't think that this is the whole story. Maybe you can help me out.

A. Well, I don't think he meant that SOTDW can help us understand Olympia in any absolute way, but that seen together we can pull out and contrast certain themes. Olympia is important because we first see that Manet is painting a real person, a prostitute from the present day and not a mythological goddess like "Venus" (see: Titian's Venus of Urbino) or some high-class courtesan. This removes the "female nude" from her robe of "art" and shows her for what she is - a nude woman being presented to the male gaze for pleasure. But then where's the pleasure? There is a big problem because this is a self-possessed nude woman being confrontational - meeting your gaze. She knows what you want and you are going to have to pay to get it! People found this extremely problematic because it sort of shattered their little fantasy world and brought the female nude into a system of commodity exchange - both in terms of prostitution and in terms of selling paintings like this one. That's why people had all those reactions about how she looked dirty etc. They couldn't say what really bothered them about the painting. Additionally the painting puts the viewer in the role of a "john" - a prostitute's client. There are also these racial undertones as Olympia is attended to by this black woman in the background. So in this one painting you have dynamics/politics of race, class and gender being played out in new ways.

Now in SOTDW you might think that in the Edenic paradise of Tahiti one would be away from these "Modern" problems but are you really? What are the power structures at play in *this* image? Who is this woman? Who is that mask-like figure in the background? Is the black woman in the Olympia painting related more to the masked figure in the background of SOTDW or to the woman on the bed? Does it matter that Olympia and (Gauguin's teenage wife / nude on the bed in SOTDW) are shown in different postures hiding and revealing different aspects of their bodies? What kind of thinking has Gauguin brought with him to Tahiti? Can you really ever get "outside" of culture? Also pay attention to how these images are formally similar...the beds, the "Flatness" etc.

Q. I have a question on the painting Napoleon in the Pest House at Jaffa...I remember in section we talked about the idea of the rational and the irrational i think we established that because Napoleon was rational, he could have not been hit with the plague, however his soldiers who were afriad they were struck with the plague. My question is that, if Napoleon and the French are seen as rational, and the middle east is this irrational idea, why do the Arabs appear to be healthy and helping the French? Or is the plague like some magic the arabs have under their sleeves to attack foreigners? I'm confused, and this question is probably confusing...but...

A. It is a complicated painting...all you need to know is something like: Napoleon believed that the French soldiers were getting sick, not from a disease but from an irrational fear. Napoleon saw himself as rational -- remember he believed in Enlightenment values and so he believed in science which at the time said that you couldn't contract Bubonic Plague from casual contact. Because Napoleon was "rational"-- believing in science, and because science said that you could not get the plague from touching someone, Napoleon set out to show the soldiers that if they stopped being afraid they would stop being sick. He showed this (In the painting) by touching the sick soldier's "buboe" (pus and fluid filled lymph node - a symptom of the disease).

The Arabs in the painting are physicians / doctors - hence, either they are educated like scientists and not afraid, (and therefore not sick), or else, because they lived in the Middle East all the time, they had naturally acquired genetic immunity to the disease. I am not sure what Napoleon thought about the Arab doctors or exactly what Gros wants us to think about them.

Napoleon absolutely believed that the disease existed, he just didn't think his men really had the disease. Remember when we talked (later during Freud) about "Hysterical pregnancy"? The body can manifest many conditions if the mind believes something strongly enough (consciously or unconsciously). Napoleon thought that this soldiers were hypochondriacs who would get well if they were rational and stopped being scaredy-cats.

And besides, rhetorically (in the period in which Gros is painting) it would be even more embarrassing to be a French soldier depicted as even more irrational than an Arab, right? Because of all the things we have learned about the discourse of Orientalism!

But then remember that Napoleon cannot have his cake and eat it too! In the painting you either accept him as rational and hence fearless (because there is nothing to fear) but then he cannot also be seen as courageous -- because courage is about knowing that something is very dangerous and doing it anyway. Thus, it isn't a heroic painting, but a rather strange and perverse one that is amazing nonetheless!

Q. So I was just wondering what piece of art I should use were I to get the term flaneur on the final...I've thought about it, but I just have no idea what to come up with.

A. How about the Caillebotte painting with the man and woman walking in the wide boulevard of newly Haussmannized Paris...with the wet cobblestones? -- Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877, oil on canvas 221x276cm, Art Institute of Chicago.

That should work! (Did we look at this? hmm - I know I showed it in section!)

Q. I was looking over the terms that we will define on the final exam tomorrow, and I don't recall seeing a photomontage in class (or maybe I did, but I didn't know that it was one!); I was wondering if you could steer me in the right direction so that I can provide a proper example if the term comes up on the test. I will be very grateful!

A. How about Richard Hamilton, "Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?", 26 x 25 cm, 1956?

Q. The definition of Orientalism says the " deny(ing) of historical evidence of European colonial contact and war." But in Gombrich, it says that Gros' Napopleon in the Pest house utilizes the concept of orientalism... Can we use this as an example of orientalism?

A. Yes, Gros's "Napoleon in the Pest House at Jaffa" is definitely an example of Orientalism.

Q. For an example of "Salon" can I use Chatles X Grance distributing decoration at the Paris Salon of 1824--- or should i stick to the Wrath of Medusa (as a painting that was placed in a Salon versus the Salon space).

A. Well I am not sure what the first painting you refer to is, but Prof Olson definitely said that you could use "Raft of the Medusa" as an example of a painting exhibited at the Salon. Note! It is RAFT! Not WRATH. See, they are on a floaty wooden thing in the ocean. Did you miss section that week?

Q. "Abstraction" does this terms also refer to a lot of the Jungian theories discussed in Jackson Pollock's art? Can we use his work also to describe Abstract Expressionism Kazimir Malevich, Black square 1915 work for defining abstract work too- but not expressionism? I feel like "expressionism" deals with the spontaneity found in pollock's work.

A. You can use Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm" for (Abstract) Expressionism and use Malevich's "Black Square" (or better, El Lissitzky's "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge") for Abstraction. Expressionism does have more to do with spontaneity in ABEX.

Q. Is Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, dada work? In Gombrich, it describes as a turn to "anti-art," child-like art, can you please comment.

A. We took Dada off the list because Professor Olson never actually talked about it. He referred to it a few times but then remembered that he hadn't actually ever said anything about it, so during the review we took it off the list.

Q. Just for clarification, the only things we will be tested on for this final are the items on the Final study sheet. Nothing from the midterm (midterm review sheet-- i suppose that many concepts will be carried over, but in particular we are not getting tested on those slides/vocabs etc?..)

A. The Final just covers the items on the list that Professor Olson handed out in class (also on bSpace). It is not comprehensive, meaning that it only covers things we have studied since the Midterm.