Ren Robinson
Contemporary Art
Dr. McClintock
April 2015
Andres Serrano Curatorial Essay
Contemporary art is about questioning what you have been taught and what you know to be true or real. This is why Serrano’s work is a pivotal moment in photographic and art history. Andres Serrano is an artist that is not afraid to tap into the universal truths in life to illicit reactions. He focuses on religion, sexuality, gender, and race- all of which can define a person’s identity. Serrano then makes his viewer question these pre-conceived concepts of identity and their function in society with his art. He attempts to figure out what is accepted, and more than that, what is the taboo. Andres Serrano is an artist that has continued to push the boundaries
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And almost every biblical reference discusses the uncleanliness of semen, and the process one must take to cleanse yourself or your clothes after ejaculation. “When a man has an emission of semen, he must bathe his whole body with water, and he will be unclean till evening.” Untitled XIV stands in direct contrast to the biblical references. There is not the slightest hint of filth, uncleanliness, or depravity. There is nothing shameful. There is nothing sexual. There are no distractions, Serrano created a very clean composition with the photo of his ejaculate. It is simply…there. The Bible treats semen and the act of ejaculation as if its something shameful, something that must be tolerated, cleansed and forgiven; while Serrano’s In Trajectory series takes ejaculate and illustrates it in such away as to be more proud, a testament more so for the intrinsic beauty in the essence of masculinity.
Semen can turn into life just as easily as it can be a mess for someone to clean up; it is potentiality is constantly teetering on the edge. The use of semen is just another way to bring a true, raw, physical element to
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Serrano embraces this theory, but also criticizes it with his Morgue series. Serrano attempts to separate the corpse from their past identity. With his stylistic choices, the “portraits” present death and the way we think of death in a new light. Serrano, though, is not striving to portray the “life in death,” but rather tackling a new way for us to see death and life. Unlike post-mortem photography of the 19th and early 20th century, Serrano strives to keep the anonymity of the subject, stripping their identity. He leaves nothing distinguishable except for the titles that include the causes of death. These titles allow the viewer to pass judgment on the corpse. Serrano wants to express the unfairness and intrinsic bias in constructing opinions on the dead based off information like, Knifed to Death I and II information that many might associate with criminal activities. These corpses are not seen as individuals but as allegories. The black ink on the fingers in Knifed to Death I and II are another more literal example of the process of attaching criminal identity to the corpses, leading a viewer to come to the conclusion that “the dead are posthumously subject to a variety of identity categories different from what they may have chosen in life.” These corpses are being categorized and judged in death as they might have been in
Ester Hernandez is a Chicana artist, best known for her works of Chicana women. Ester’s goal is to recreate women’s lives to produce positive images of women’s lifestyle and to create icons. Her piece, Frida y Yo, contains the iconic painter Frida Kahlo. Frida, after being in multiple accidents causing long-term pain and suffering, began painting, mostly self-portraits, to portray her reality and glorify the pain. Similar to how Hernandez's goals are a juxtaposition to Frida’s artwork, the art piece Frida y Yo creates a juxtaposition between life and suffering and death and fortune.
Barbara Carrasco is an artist and muralist based in Los Angeles. Her works range from pen and ink drawings, to paintings, to posters and countless murals. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Barbara Carrasco is considered to be a renegade feminist. Her art is known for critiquing, dominant cultural stereotypes involving socioeconomic, race, gender and sexuality.(Revision history statistics "Barbara Carrasco" 2017)She is known for bringing awareness to the Chicano art movement and their sexist attitudes sometimes seen in Chicano art. Barbara Carrasco works in advocating to change treatment of women. I decided to do my research paper because I believe that there's a difference between how a Chicano depicts and paint images and how a Chicana depicts and paints images. As a Latina woman, learning about Barbara Carrasco
Works Cited Chin-Lee,Cynthia. Amelia to Zora: 26 Women Who Changed The World.Charles Bridge, 2005. Ergas, G. Aimee. Artists: From Michaelangelo to Maya Lin. UXL, 1995 Lin, May. Boundaries. Simon and Schuster New York, 2000. Cotter, Holland. “Where the Ocean Meets the Mountain”. New York Times May 8: C23.
Though people can look into color and composition, others can still even look into the source of the art itself. Cole goes deeper, delving into the source of the art, looking in particular into the idea of cultural appropriation and the view a person can give others. Though it is good for people to be exposed to different opinions of a group or an object, sometimes people can find it difficult to tell the difference between the reality and the art itself. Sometimes art can be so powerful that its message stays and impacts its audience to the point where the viewer’s image of the subject of the art changes entirely. Cole brings up an important question about art, however. Art has become some kind of media for spreading awareness and even wisdom at times, but in reality, “there is also the question of what the photograph is for, what role it plays within the economic circulation of images” (973). Cole might even be implying that Nussbaum’s advertisement can sometimes be the point of some media, and that sometimes the different genres of art can just be to make someone with a particular interest happy. One more point that Cole makes is that “[a]rt is always difficult, but it is especially difficult when it comes to telling other people’s stories.” (974) Truthfully, awareness and other like-concepts are difficult to keep going when a person or a group is not directly involved.
Sonia Romero is recognized for representing Latin American imagery and unity in her public works. Specifically, her public work located at MacArthur Park, Urban Oasis, 2010. The mural was commissioned by the Los Angles Metro and it is composed of 13 ceramic mosaic tile that are installed along two facing mezzanine walls. Each panel contains a white and black illustration centered in a circle contained within a square panel that is made of a cement to represent the industrial buildings around the neighborhood (“MacArthur,” n.d.). In the process of making this public work, Sonia Romero initially conducts research and observation studies of the community (Dambrot, 2016). In fact, the 13 illustrations either authentically represent the inhabitants of the community or the historical events that took place in MacArthur Park (Gilbert, 2012). Unfortunately, in society many diverse
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman’s photography is part of the culture and investigation of sexual and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970’s. It has been said that, “The bulk of her work…has been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture…(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections” (Sobieszek 229).
Diego Rivera was deemed the finest Mexican painter of the twentieth century; he had a huge influence in art worldwide. Rivera wanted to form his own painting fashion. Although he encountered the works of great masters like Gauguin, Renoir, and Matisse, he was still in search of a new form of painting to call his own (Tibol, 1983). His desire was to be capable of reaching a wide audience and express the difficulties of his generation at the same time, and that is exactly what h...
Bright colors jumping at you asking for attention, images so real viewers can not tell the difference. These are the thoughts that came to my head as I gazed at two works of art by two Mexican artists at MoLAA museum of art . I visited two museums, Bowers Museum of cultural Art in the heart of Southern California and the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach for my report unfortunately I only liked the works in MoLAA and will talk about it through out my paper. I will talk about two Mexican artists Rafael Cauduro and David Alfaro Siqueros that caught my eye, and made me want to learn more of them and their approach to art. Siqueiros caught my eye and interest because according to his biography “no individual associated with the arts with the possible exception of André Malraux, had been involved in direct political action more than David Alfaro Siqueiros” (Siqueiros Biography online). Personally that to me said a lot and that got me intrigued, and made me want to know more about him and his work. Cauduro on the other hand got me intrigued through his illusionistic approach to art and interpretation of his view of things. Eve thought they seem like different approach to art they are both similar in different ways.
Few Californians know hardly anything or nothing about California’s founding father. Fourth graders go on a field trip to a mission to learn about missions and then return to their regular lives, never wondering about missions again. Few of those children return to visit a mission. There is a chance that a few know of California’s founding father and who he was. Father Junipero Serra is that founding father who is just as important as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and several others. However he was a different founding father, a religious one who shaped California. Junipero Serra by Steven W. Hackel delves into Junipero Serra’s life and how he lived. Father Serra, a devoted Catholic, “devoted himself to the universalism of Catholicism, the suppression of individualism, and the renunciation of materialism.” (242)
She opens up her essay by saying “How surprised [Yorick] would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”(Mitford) Funerals are meant to protect people from seeing what kind of toll death has on their loved one; to remove the scars of being human. Kubler-Ross touches on this when she says “The more we are making advancements in science, the more we seem to fear and deny the reality of death. How is this possible? We use euphemisms, we make the dead look as if they were asleep” (Kubler-Ross) which connects to her opinion that death is feared and people take responsibility when a loved one dies, even if they had no impact on their death. The eradication of the sense of death is the key reason why the deceased are embalmed. Clifton Bryant discusses that the reason why people want to have their dead embalmed is because of “death anxiety”, that it is the collective phrase for all the different and complex fears of death. He later states that death anxiety is why we tend to have “death denial” and why we tend to avoid it wholly. “Likewise, the use of metaphors or euphemisms that serve to soften the harshness of death (e.g., passed away, deceased, expired) clearly represents a culturally approved attempt to deny or camouflage death's impact on our daily lives.”(Bryant) This reflects well on the point Mitford makes, when she says “[The funeral director] put on a well-oiled performance in which the concept of death played no part whatsoever” (Mitford) Kubler-Ross feels that death being ever increasingly more taboo the more
In writing this evolving story 3 major points served as a preamble. This cultural production is not the actual results of the new awareness, rather, is imposed by the European imaginaries during the time of Spanish exploration and colonization in the sixteenth century. Moreover, this presented art was a heterogeneous mixture of many communities that invade in the region and have never been monumental. Another important aspect is that the Latino Art and the related culture are dynamic and mutable. The art has expressed from of the immigrants and intersect across various styles and susceptibilities. In short, this art is not depicting the actual form of Chicano cultural values
In The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, Oscar Martinez comments on the injustices that occur while migrating from Central America. Central Americans are forced to leave their countries in fear of the inevitable consequences. The systematic abuse Central Americans endure while migrating is founded on that fear which results in more repercussions for migrants. The psychological effects of migrating is used by Martinez to give insight on the atrocities that happen in Central America. The corruption involved while migrating in Central America is against human rights and should be brought immediate attention internationally. Martinez uses the experiences of migrants to expose Mexico’s passivity on the subject and to expose readers’ to the hard truths that occur while migrating.
To many of her biographers and admirers she is simply referred to as Frida, an artist who self-consciously chose the practice of art as a means of survival and self-expression, while always referencing the political and cultural complexities that surrounded her life. Many of Kahlo’s paintings correspond to her passion for nationalism and the search for la ‘mexicanidad’ (Mexicanness; the unchanging philosophical essence of the Mexican). (Devouring Frida-94) As Kahlo’s life and work are studied under various cultural lenses, it is always apparent that her art and specific political views are based on the assertion that she embraced her Hispanic heritage and culture.
...the need for a balance between man’s true physical appearance and man’s true behavior is needed. For Serrano, his journey led to his discovery of that balance and for the “Def-ghi”, it was the balance between the cannibalistic and civilized nature of man, something that frightened him so much that he confined himself to the city where it masquerades as something refined.
The face is a central organ to personal identity. With it we can communicate human expression, feelings and characters with as little as the blink of an eye. On a deeper level, the face can be an art form that speaks to a universal understanding of the mind. Olivier De Sagazan uses the face to challenge conventions. He exposes human rawness and looks at cultural taboos. Sagazan’s artwork cannot be pinned down by language but by raw emotion. His unsettling performances represent visions of primitivism, agony, occult and other ancient cultural art forms that cover or deform the face in ways that can be both beautiful and confronting. Leading us to question, “What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?