Chicago's Dinner Party In Feminist Art History example essay topic

This world is full of different concepts, ideas and emotions that artists tries to express in their works. Every each one has it is own unique way and in this assignment I learned about some Earth Art, Conceptual Art, Visual and Installation Art. The first artist I want to write about is Paik, Nam June who was born in 1932 in Korean. He is an American performer and conceptual artist works mainly with video, integrating visual images with music.

His works like Fin de Sie cle II, Three Elements and Electronic Super Highway incorporated hundreds of television monitors, challenging the viewer with many unforgettable images and sounds. Holding a magnet to the face of a TV screen distorts the picture in strange and wonderful ways. Reconsidering and challenging our ideas about the way television or video should appear or perform is the main idea of Nam June Paik's art. He was educated as a musician in Japan and Europe and in 1964 he arrived in New York to bring his ideas in the so called Fluxus art movement then changed the limits of conventional artistic theory. He proceeded to experiment with film and video even though his most experience was in music and he also had a performance background. His production of spectacular installations of video monitors built into indoor as well as outdoor sculptures.

Converting regular TVs into a machine building wall maps of the Unites States using invisible lines around dozens of video monitors, Paik has created a vivid movement of the 20th century. Recent exhibition at the US Museum, this book opened up an excellent overview of Paik's involvement with the New York art world of the Sixties, of his growing fame as a designer of freestanding video sculpture, and of the numerous video works. "The World of Nam June Paik" is the best description of Paik works (Guggenhteim 15). Paik has left an incredible footprints in the art world. He was very popular and worked with a lot of famous people like: Joseph Buys, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and the Fluxus founders. He created some of the most popular works in 50's and 60's, with his destroyed pianos and his Charlotte Moorman variations.

He has generated a long trail of single-channel videos, famous performances, landmark exhibitions, and impressive catalogs, along with an extensive secondary critical literature. He had been sponsored by major US Companies and has produced giant works, including a piece designed for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul that contains over a thousand video monitors. He created bigger piece for the Atlanta Olympics (Nguyen 2). Paik's "superhighway works" has two main ideas one leads to the past and historical forms of transport and communication, and another underlines the present, the electronic highway, two big video installations with forty-eight projections and five hundred monitors. Paik's is bringing the question of time with ought bias.

Although he used the word, he didn't address the future (Guggenhteim 15). Paik's works considered to be historical, extraordinary even though many consider TV performances unrelated to art. Paik's robots, built from old TV sets, are all about history -- the history of design, of art, of TV's centrality to our lives. They are a tribute to the past and a commentary on the present. The Family of Robots series speaks to TV's fifty years of familiarize, the news, network, and families. Unlike the movies, which are about romance and the youthful couple, TV constructs extended families, often including several generations (Guggenhteim 15).

The second artist is Robert Smithson who is considered to be a controversial artist. For some people, he is the last great "avant-garde" artist, while for others he is one of postmodernism's artist. There are many interpretations of artist Robert Smithson, with extremes ranging from the image of a socially engaged artist to that of a hopeless nature romanticist, from an important writer but insignificant artist, a genial filmmaker, and so on (Reynolds 1). Nerveless, Robert Smithson still remained a symbol to contemporary art throughout the twenty-five years that have passed since his death. Smithson's works challenge, in a surprising and unforgettable way, underlining the subjective and our relationship to visual elements.

Robert Smithson had a collection of his personal papers and his library, which were donated to the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, concentrated on the historical and principal ideas to recognize Smithson's complexity, in both artistically and philosophical way. Smithson created art narrow vision world's boundaries. Robert, considered New Jersey a place where he could create works for specific sites while enjoying outside beauty of nature, and it's creative process. Reynolds his reader to follow Smithson's way of thinking through his own notes and sketches.

His articles, the images he clipped from magazines, and the photographs he took. The unforgettable project was discussed with jargon and has stereotypical approach that may confuse the reader. Reynolds concentrates at one of the major artists of the 1960's, art critic and historian Better that opens up a new era of Earthworks movement and its exponents. His chronological survey reconsiders political, philosophical activities of the late part of the decade (Reynolds 6). His 12 color and 99 black-and-white images; highly considered for all art collections, academic libraries, and large public collections as well. During this period, there was great ambivalence about the purity of art, the need for a market to support it.

With clarity and insight, the author traces the careers of the artists and their relationships to their work, one another, and the world of art critics and dealers. The result is a remarkable combination of insight and intellectual enthusiasm that, rare in a scholarly work, is easily accessible and a pleasure to read (Elizabeth 1). Judy Chicago isn't only an artist but also author, feminist, educator. She was an active social feminist thorough her entire life and an author of many publications throughout the world. Her art is popular not only in the United States but also in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, a number of the books she has authored have been published in foreign editions, bringing her art and philosophy to thousands of readers worldwide (Hamel 1).

After a long time of professional art practice, Chicago allowed Feminist Art and art education through a new program for women at California State University. Judy brought her program to the California Institute of the Arts where, with another artist, she created the Feminist Art Program. The famous Womanhouse, was the first work that underlined female point of view in art. The Womanhouse had an unbelievable influence of and this ideas provoked to initiating of a worldwide Feminist Art movement (Doubleday 2). In 1974, Chicago brought up the issue of women's history to create her most influential work, "The Dinner Party". This multicultural project became a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization.

"The Dinner Party" became the biggest issue of art history and is had been published in many fields. The importance of The Dinner Party, along with Chicago's role as the founder of the Feminist Art movement, was examined in the 1996 exhibition, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (Denham 4). Chicago's other big project was the "Birth Project". She designed a monumental series of birth and creation images for needlework which were made under her supervision by skilled needle workers around the country. The Birth Project, exhibited in more than 100 venues, employed the collaborative methods and a similar merging of concept and media that characterized The Dinner Party. Exhibition units from the Birth Project can be seen in numerous public collections around the country including the Albuquerque Museum where the core collection of the Birth Project has been placed to be conserved and made available for exhibition and study (Bruce 7).

While completing the Birth Project, Chicago also focused on individual studio work to create Powerplay. In this unusual series of drawings, paintings, weavings, cast paper, and bronze relief's, Chicago brought a critical feminist look to the gender concept of masculinity, exploring how dominant definitions of power have became the world in general - and men in particular. The thought processes involved in Powerplay, the artist's long concern with issues of power and powerlessness, and a growing interest in her Jewish heritage led Chicago to her next body of art (Wallen 1). Another of her big works was the Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light, which premiered in October, 1993 at the Spertus Museum in Chicago, continued to travel to museums around the United States until 2002. Holocaust Project evolved from eight years of inquiry, travel, study, and artistic creation; it includes a series of images merging Chicago's painting with the photography of Donald Woodman, as well as works in stained glass and tapestry designed by Chicago and executed by skilled artisans. For many decades, Chicago has produced works on paper, both monumental and intimate.

These were the subject of an extensive retrospective which opened in early 1999 at the Florida State University Art Museum in Tallahassee, Florida. Organized by Dr. Viki Thompson Wylder, who is a scholar on the subject of Chicago's oeuvre, this was the first comprehensive examination of the body of Chicago's art (Wallen 2). Chicago returned to teaching, having accepted a succession of one-semester appointments at various institutions around the country - beginning with Indiana University where she received a Presidential Appointment in Art and Gender Studies. In 2000, she was an Inter-Institutional Artist in Residence at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 2001, with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, she undertook a project with students at Western Kentucky University commemorating the thirty-year anniversary of Womanhouse. Working with students, faculty, and local artists, Chicago and Woodman developed a project titled At Home, reexamining the subject of "the house", this time from the perspective of residents of Kentucky who have a keen sense of place and home.

In 2003, Chicago and Woodman will team-teach again, facilitating an ambitious inter-institutional project in Pomona, California (Wallen 4). Bruce Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He has been recognized since the early 1970's as one of the most significant and provocative of America's contemporary artists. Nauman inspiration is in the everyday simple activities like speech, walking. Bruce soon after graduating from the University of Wisconsin and then the University of California, realized he will become a very famous and successful artist. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.

He started to work with the mediums of sculpture, video, film, printmaking, performance, and installation, Nauman concentrates less on the development of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can transform or become a work of art. A survey of his diverse output demonstrates the alternately political, prosaic, spiritual, and crass methods by which Nauman examines life in all its details, mapping the human arc between life and death. The text from an early neon work proclaims: "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths" (Danto 1). Bruce Nauman's works have a lot of commands, and since views on language are said to have had a marked influence on Nauman's art, it is some time useful to think of those works as having absolute straight logic of language games -- which means, since the commands are often directed at us, that we are meant to do something in response. Nauman's in contrast with works of art like Judy's Chicago that provokes only an aesthetic response that sometimes more serious and selfish but in a way more active, on our part. Designed as plays in language games, they address us less as viewers than as participants.

His works of art is very hard not to appreciate but sometimes hard to fully analyze and understand (Danto 2). For example, we can analyze some of the commands that would be easily understood. Then at the game the base ball, striking is a way of not playing the game. So he is thinking of what we might call strike-proof games, where it is, as Continental thinkers like to say, "always already" too late to refuse to do what one is asked. Some times reading the information can be easily compared to a game the analogy would en example with a baseball game.

Alongside such commands one might think of logically non-nondisobeyable ones or "Don't read this sentence!" The next time conversation flags, you might try to think of some examples of your own. It is interesting but true. Most of the time we do not realize how many times a day we respond to commands and Nauman is trying to get our attention on it (Adams 4). He want us to analyze everyday routine thinks and commands.

Command and fashioned it into a work of art that his devotees admire extravagantly: Pay Attention! Well, this in fact comes in more than one version. Of this the critic John You writes: "By describing both our experience and our specific existence, Pay attention... ' successfully integrates our awareness with our sensations. We do what we see". This work is not in the show of Nauman's work at the Museum of Modern Art (which runs until May 23), but a kinder, gentler version is: Please pay attention, a collage this time.

Of this, the show's curator, Robert Store, writes, "By reading the words on this collage, one automatically grants their plaintive request. Much of Nauman's work... draws the viewer into its constructs and often controls the way it is absorbed, either by demanding feats of concentration or imagination or by limiting the viewer's movements. The main point of this peace is to make spectators think about everyday commands our responds (Adams 7). Regular museum experience wouldn't make you think about things like that. We do what we see remember. And our so doing is the meaning of the work.

S o viewing is but a stage in our response, and the rest is something the philosophical cross-examiner will force us to admit was an action. Admittedly, a fairly mild and tepid action, even if, once in front of the work, we could not help performing it. We did pay attention. Older art works were already discuses and viewed by many people as well as Art historians.

But nobody would think about paintings and other art works so much in depths. So artists were instructed to represent Christ and the martyrs as suffering, and it is reasonable to suppose that the tremendous expressiveness of these representations was calculated to arouse feelings of compassion in the viewers that could not help but strengthen the latter's bonds with those subjects of torture, humiliation and crucifixion. I have deliberately lapsed into the idiom of "viewers", but of course those upon whom these works were to have had the desired effects were first of all Christians, and then too were usually engaged in some religious activity like praying before an altarpiece when they experienced it (Adams 3). The altarpiece was composed in such a way as to enhance the bond between the saint prayed to and the supplicant.

Whether or not this worked out was a matter of how astute Baroque psychology was and then how manipulative Baroque artists were capable of being. But the hope was something religious art often and political art always aspires to: that some change of state would be induced by seeing the work. And certainly that happens sufficiently often that only against a formalist aesthetic would it be remarked upon at all. We approach works of art as viewers but leave them as altered beings, whether the alteration was something calculated or may be will be some time later. Even though, this alteration is something that may happen or not; it is not something entailed.

Similar the ordinary game of command and obey, in which there is space for insubordination, the soul may not respond: Some of those work looks too contrived, or too cold, or one is simply not in the mood. Grateful Baroque patrons would then have been for a form of response that cannot go wrong, where simply to view the work is to be in the altered state, however one may want or try to resist -- where resistance is, strictly speaking, unthinkable. To see "Pay Attention" is to pay attention. Until now, the question cannot but raise as to what, beyond having been trumped in a forced language game, has been achieved. What have we been paying attention to? To the command and to nothing else.

This moment we pay attention to the lettering, to whether the lettering goes forward or backward, to whether the command is plaintive or ugly, we are no longer in compliance with the directive but rather are attentive in the ordinary way in which we regard works of art in galleries -- we are outside the horizons of the language game. So the artist's victory is fairly trivial. It is a kind of joke. Like writing "Behold!" when there is nothing to look at but the imperative itself (Elizabeth 1).

It may seem a rather minor work for this degree of critical examination, but it typifies the Nauman idea. It is peremptory, invasive, aggressive; it uses coarse language (in its lithographic version); it straddles (in the collage version) the boundary between a work of art and a poster -- an admonition on the wall of the machine shop to watch what one is doing -- and hence raises the deep ontological questions that have been with us since at least; it similarly straddles the boundary between writing and image that has come to define an entire genre of art-making; and it uses (again in the collage version) unprepossessing, even proletarian materials, which defined the Minimalist movement with its various ideologies and established an aesthetic axis between American art in the late sixties and such European art movements as Arte Po vera, winch gave Nauman a widely appreciative audience on the Continent. All this has made Nauman the cynosure -- the focus of rapt attention, to make an internal connection between artist and work -- of our advanced curatorial. Four outstanding curators have collaborated in bringing this exhibition to their respective institutions (Adams 9).

In conclusion, while working on this assignment I got to learn few new concepts got to reed in depth about the works of feminist Judy Chicago, absolutely amazing Nam June Paik, beautifully creative Robert Smithson and deeply philosophical Bruce Nauman. I think each and every artist is very unique and interesting. I personally liked most Nam June Paik for his creativity. I also found earthworks of Robert Smithson very touching and beautiful.

Judy Chicago and Bruce Nauman have some similarities in a way that they both very analytical and philosophical and both were involved in social issues. Overall, I can say I enjoyed this assignment very much and hopefully one day I will get a chance to see those works in real life not on a picture.