Making Art

FORM & MEANING

TERRY BARRETT
University of North Texas

Professor Emeritus
The Ohio State University

~~onnect
Learn
_ Succeed>
 Postmodern Attitud es toward Art 211

based conflict in our post-9fll world, and

greed for money. It is not a simple or self-
explanatory work but highly dependent on
references external to itself.9

REJECTING ORIGINALITY
Postmodern artists attempt to free us from
the pressure of being wholly original in our
art making. In premodern times , such as
the Middle Ages , artists were anonymous
contributors to the community and self-
expression was not an ideal, nor was the
invention of new styles. However, in mod-
em times, since the European Renaissance
in fact, values shifted as the individual was
honored and personal freedom was extolled.
The "genius" artist was especially made
to be a champion of the new, the first, the 11.9 MONA HATOUM Deep Throat, 2006. Installation with a video image on
cutting edge. Postmodernists, on the other the plate giving a tour of the digestive system.
hand, are highly suspicious of the possibility
of being original and do not hold originality as a value. pleasure and enjoyment and carrying with it sexual
Many current artists encourage you to replace the pres- overtones. The modernist aesthetic experience is a
sure to be original with an awareness of the many visual heightened awareness of an object while one is both
texts that constitute your experience of the world, using disinterested and distanced. It is the enjoyment of
this awareness to create your own art. As American artist something for its own sake without wanting to possess
Joyce Kozloff observes, "All artists lift from everything it. Jouissance, in postmodern usage, refers to viewers
that interests them and always have-from earlier art, being so lost in a work of art that they lose all self-
other work that's around, or sources outside art."IO Such awareness and objective distance from the work being
awareness allows you the freedom to quote from other viewed. The concept of jouissance acknowledges a de-
sources as you add your own imprints and insights. sire for possession inflamed by art. The two approaches
to artworks are different, and the difference hinges
ACCEPTING THE ABJECT mainly on personal engagement (jouissance) with a
work of art versus a distanced and objective aesthetic
A base aspect of being human, such as a corpse, excre- appreciation of a work.
ment, vomit, and things associated with what a culture Vlado Mulunc's and Frank Gehry 's Dancing Build-
thinks of as shameful and wishes to hide, is known as ing (11.10), completed in 1996 in Prague, has a sense
the abject. Artists who accept the abject and use it in of jouissance about it. The architecture plays with and
their work make art that might seem ugly or repulsive. against modernist steel box and glass skyscrapers and
They confront us with the totality of being human and their formal austerity and rectangular rigidity. Dancing
ask us to accept the body and its functions knowingly Building collapses rigid modernist angles with sensu-
and willingly. ous curves. It destabilizes expectations of normality and
From afar, Mona Hatoum's Deep Throat (11.9) looks makes us want to experience the inside of the building.
like a pleasant table set for one. When you approach In a metaphorical sense, modernist architecture is male
the table, however, you see a scientifically accurate and phallic, and postmodernist architecture embraces
videotape of the human digestive system at work on feminine aspects.
food that has been swallowed. The activity of diges-
tion and elimination is a taboo topic while at the din-
ner table. Hatoum banishes the taboo and embraces by
implication other functions of the body usually avoided Postmodern Strategies
in polite conversation. Her art asks us to see what we
might prefer to ignore about life.
for Making Art
All of the postmodern strategies for making art em-
JOUISSANCE
brace to greater and lesser degrees the postmodern at-
The postmodernist version of the modernist aesthetic titudes just discussed. These strategies include working
experience is jouissance , a French word meaning collaboratively, appropriating, simulating, hybridizing,
212 Chapter 11 Postmodernist Approaches to Making Art

11.11 SAIRA WASIM, TALHA RATHORE, MUHAMMED

11.10 VLADO MULUNC AND FRANK GEHRY Dancing IMRAN QURESHI, HAS NAT MEHMOOD, AISHA KAHLlD,
Building, Prague, 1996. NUSRA LATIF QURESHI Untitled, 2003. Gouache and mixed
media on wasli (layered handmade paper), 10\6 x 7'12 in.

mixing media, layering, mixing codes, recontextualiz-

ing, intertextualizing, confronting the gaze, using disso- In sixteenth-century India, a group of artists em-
nance, constructing identities, using narratives, creating ployed by the Mughal emperor Akbar produced exqui-
metaphors, and using irony and parody. I I Further, these site miniature paintings using hand-ground pigments
approaches to making art overlap; although one may on handmade paper. Khamsa, the miniature book con-
stand out in a particular work, none is used alone. taining the paintings, illustrates age-old tales of love,
war, religion, and political power. In 2003 , six young
WORKING COLLABORATIVELY Pakistani artists trained in the tradition of miniature
techniques made Untitled (11.11), one of twelve ex-
In premodern times, artists often worked as part of a quisite miniature images that make up the Karkhana
team; every artist had a specialty, and collaboration project (2003). The young artists are inspired by the
was an efficient way to produce works that needed MughaJ court atelier, or Karkhana, where a group of
many skills. In modern times, great value has been artists would work together on a single painting. Fol-
put on individual creations. Now, in the postmodern lowing the Mughal tradition, the contemporary Paki-
era, some artists are returning to collaborative working stani artists also used handmade paints and papers, but
methods instead of being a sole creator. If you work in a included coli aged photographic images, stencils, and
design field, you are likely to be part of a team of artists rubber stamps. Rather than working in one studio, they
and other creators. In the fine arts, you might find that worked across the globe, sending their jointly made
some projects-large-scale scu lptures, for example, or paintings back and forth to one another between Mel-
glassblowing- require collaboration, and others lend bourne, Chicago, Lahore, and New York City. One art-
themselves to it. ist begins an image on a sheet of paper and mails it
 Postmodern St rategies for Making Art 213

to someone else, who continues working on it before

sending it to someone else. The contemporary group
of six artists has a spiritual purpose in their collective
art making. They are responding peacefully and cre-
atively to cultural conflicts by working collaboratively
and across cultures in contrast to the rise of political
and religious violence worldwide following September
11 , 2001. 12

APPROPRIATING WHAT
..
•• •
ALREADY EXISTS •
The most direct and clearest challenge to modernist no-
tions of originality and works made by individual artists
is appropriation. To appropriate is to possess, borrow,
steal, copy, quote, or excerpt images that already exist,
made by other artists or available in the public domain
and general culture. Appropriation art of the 1980s and
after is especially informed by French artist Marcel
Duchamp 's "ready-mades," most famously Fountain
(11.12), an ordinary urinal that he signed and exhibited
as a work of art in 1917. Duchamp 's gesture was con- 11.12 MARCEL DUCHAMP Fountain, 1950 (replica of 1917
ceptual: he was challenging the prevailing definition of original). Porcelain urinal, 12 x 15 x 18 in.
art as pleasing aesthetic objects.

11.1 3 RICHARD PRINCE Untitled (Cowboy), 1989. Ektacolor photograph, 50 x 75 in .

214 Chapter 11 Postmodernist Approaches to Making Art

Contemporary American artists Jeff Koons (see to begin with, insubstantial semblances of real things or
11.5) and Barbara Kruger (see 11.1), discussed earlier events. The idea of the simulacrum asserts that we are
in this chapter, are both involved in appropriation as art. no longer able to distinguish between the real and the
Koons uses cultural icons such as Hummel figurines, simulated "hyperreal" of television, advertising, video
pop star Michael Jackson, artifacts of the NBA, and games, role-playing games , and all kinds of spectacles
mundane household items. He insists he is sincere in in contemporary society. In Baudrillard 's thinking, the
his work and that he is not critical toward what he dis- distinction between the real and the representation col-
plays. He rejects hidden meanings, believing that there lapses, and all we know are the signs of popular culture
is no gap between your perception of the work of art at and media. Any image moves from being a reflection
first glance and any deeper meaning in the artifact it- of reality, to a perversion of reality, to a mask of the
self. Kruger's work is informed by feminist theory and absence of reality, to pure simulacrum-having no rela-
is overtly and obviously critical of social injustices. She tion to reality at all. 14
appropriates photographs from popular culture, crops Betty Boop (11.14), a popular sexual icon, can serve
them, heightens their contrast, and adds text. The texts as an example of a simulacrum. The animated cartoon
she uses are also appropriated from popular culture, character appeared in a series of film s produced by Par-
but she subverts the texts with ironic twists of phrasing amount Pictures in the 1930s and has remained popular
and word choice, juxtaposing words and pictures. Like ever since. She is based on a real singer, Helen Kane,
Duchamp, both Koons and Kruger take material from who herself rose to fame by imitating Annette Han-
popular culture and use it for conceptual ends: Koons shaw, a jazz singer in the 1920s. Betty Boop, a copy,
wants to celebrate that culture, and Kruger wants to survives both Kane and Hanshaw, actual people-she
make fundamental changes in it. is a copy that no longer refers to an original but that has
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns taken on an independent life of her own.
a work of appropriated art by American postmodernist Photography, a medium based on copying, with the
Richard Prince, Untitled (11.13). He made it from one property of realistic-looking duplication, lends itself es-
of the images of a successful TV and print advertis- pecially well to playing with simulation by contempo-
ing campaign for Marlboro cigarettes. Prince selected rary artists. Gregory Crewdson, for example, is a pho-
a portion of the image and enlarged it, thus diminish- tographer who uses the conventions, techniques, and
ing its original sleekness and exaggerating its mechani- technicians of cinema to produce convincing-looking
cal means of production. The Metropolitan refers to simulacra in the form of still photographs. Untitled,
Prince's piece as "a copy [the photograph] of a copy Winter (11.15) is a photograph that Crewdson made
[the advertisement] of a myth [the cowboy]." The mu- with the help of a set designer, cinematographer, and
seum interprets Untitled as "a meditation on an entire professional actors. The image is a composite of two
culture's continuing attraction to spectacle over lived different shots: he used one central scan for the bed-
experience." Through his "rephotographing" of im- room and the man, and another scan for the woman.
ages, Prince intends to reveal that mass-media images The postproduction work with Photoshop software to
are "hallucinatory fictions of society's desires," under- refine the image was elaborate but adds to the realis-
mining their seeming naturalness. tic look. A professional crew may be beyond your art
Art critic Hal Foster tells us appropriation art reveals budget, but Crewdson 's idea of using realistic images
that " underneath each picture there is always another to subvert viewer trust in the truth of images is open
picture." Foster argues that the importance of appropri- to you.
ation is that it entails a shift in position: "The artist be-
comes a manipulator of signs more than a producer of HYBRIDIZING CULTURAL INFLUENCES
art objects, and the viewer an active reader of messages
rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or The process of mixing diverse cultural influences in
consumer of the spectacle." 13 Foster's remark relates to an artwork is hybridization. In postmodern terminol-
seeing any artifact as a text rather than as a solitary and ogy, it refers to "the processes and products of cultural
original work, as discussed earlier in this chapter. mixing which articulates two or more disparate ele-
ments to engender a new and distinct entity."15 Artists
SIMULATING THE "REAL" and theorists who want to disrupt simplistic divisions
of complex cultural generalities-such as Western/non-
The process of imitating or copying is simulation. Western, black/white, male/female, gay/straight-share
The related concept of simulacra, developed especially this meaning.
by Jean Baudrillard, a French theorist of postmodern- Sangeeta Sandrasegar is an Australian-born art-
ism, is a prominent theme explored by postmodernists. ist of Indian-Malaysian descent who explores in her
Simulacra (singular simulacrum) are representations artwork the intersection of diverse cultures in her life,
of things that no longer have an original or never had one relationships , and body. She brings together vastly
 Postmodern Strategies fo r Making Art 215

divergent sources: Indian cultural myths, legends, and

iconography; Japanese manga pornographic images;
the romance of Hollywood films (from the Indian film
industry); and the sex and violence of Hollywood cin-
ema. Her usual medium is paper cutouts of couples and
singles that are influenced by the traditional henna de-
signs applied to the hands and feet of Indian brides. In
this way, she reflects on traditional customs and gen-
der roles in Indian society. As in the example from the
series Goddess of Flowers (11.16), Sandrasegar hangs
ornate paper cutouts a little bit away from the wall in
dimly lit spaces and projects overhead lights onto them ,
illuminating the cutouts and projecting shadows of
them on the wall. The artist's overlay of paper images,
space, and projected shadows reinforces the complexity
of cultural conditions and how we perceive them: we
have materiality (red paper), projections of it (light-
red shadows), and conceptual space in between (white
negative space).
Masami Teraoka is from Japan and lives in the United
States. His art reflects his experiences of two distinctly
different cultures. In the watercolor reproduced here,
AIDS Series / Vaccine Day Celebration (11.17), Tera-
oka draws upon the tradition of Japanese ukiyo-e wood-
block prints to show a couple picnicking on a beach in
11.14 BETTY BOOP

11.15 GREGORY CREWDSON Untitled, Winter, 2004 . Digital C-Print, 64'.4 x 94'.4 in. , image size 57 % x 88 in. , framed size
66% x 97 Ve x 2',1, in.
216 Chapter 11 Postmodernist Approaches to Making Art

11.16 SANGEETA SANDRASEGAR Untitled (no. 22), from the series Goddess of Flowers,
2003-2004. Paper, glue, sequins.

11.17 MASAMI TERAOKA AIDS Series I Vaccine Day Celebration, 1990. Watercolor study on paper, 29 x 43 in.
 Postmodern Strategies for Making Art 217

A corollary modernist principle is that each artform

does a certain thing best: for example, photographs
should not be made to look like paintings; paintings
ought to exploit their flatness; and architecture ought to
reveal its function and thus not hide heating ducts under
a false ceiling.
Modernists also tend to avoid mixing different me-
dia into conglomerates that ignore the individual and
"pure" identities of each. Each medium ought to be ex -
plored to determine what can be done with it and its
unique qualities.
Postmodernists reject these restrictive principles and
attitudes and freely employ mixed media, different
media in a single work of art. Robert Rauschenberg
began defying the restrictions with his "combines ," art
objects for which he intentionally mixed painting and
sculpture. In First Landing Jump (11.18), Rauschen-
berg mixed various media (cloth, metal, leather, electric
fixture , cable, and oil paint on composition board) and
ordinary objects (an actual automobile tire and wooden
plank) with an art object (painting on canvas), and he
makes the "painting" project off the wall like a "sculp-
ture." Today the mixing of media in one work of art is
common, but it was not always so.
11.1 8 ROBERT RAUSCH ENBERG First Landing Jump,
1961. Combine painting: cloth, metal, leather, electric fixture, LAYERING IMAGES
cable, and oil paint on composition board, with automobile tire and
Because of photomechanical reproduction, images
wooden plank on floor, 7 ft. 5'1. in. x 6 ft. 8% in.
are cheap and plentiful. In a process called layer-
ing, some artists pile images on top of each other,
Hawaii. They have just received a fax that announces changing the meanings of each of the images from
Vaccine Celebration Day. They dance, and he plays a what they originally meant or were intended for. To
samisen (three-stringed instrument) and flies a kite that make See (11.19), for example, Rachel Hecker lay-
reads "Celebration." Faxes and condoms blow away ered images of Tubby from the 1950s comic book
in the sea breeze along with cherry blossoms, reflect- Lulu and a digital sign with the word "see" over an
ing the artist's hope for good news about AIDS.16 The airbrushed female nude. The woman 's torso is from
painting, a pastiche of cultures and times, raises con- a 1950s painting manual, and it is suggestive of soft-
sciousness of an epidemic with global effects. core pornography. Tubby reacts to it, from a "two-
All of us are members of many cultures, whether, dimensional, dwarfed, and infantilized"17 male point of
like Sandrasegar and Teraoka, we have a mixed national view on his phallic surfboard. The word "see" in digital
or ethnic background, or whether we belong to differ- style is prominent. Each single image is clear enough: a
ent groups based on shared values, beliefs, norms, and cartoon character, a nude, and the word "see." By layer-
customs. You can make cultural influences visible in ing these simple images, the artist has complicated each
your work and explore ways to bring different cultures and made a new painting whose meanings are ambigu-
together to create a new, more complex entity. ous, posing questions such as these: See Tubby engage
with a woman? See the male gaze at the female body?
MIXING MEDIA See the woman's breasts and lips fragmented from her
body as if only some of her parts are valuable?
Many modernists uphold the ideal that any specific art China, China (11.20) employs layering to commu-
medium ought to be used purely, that is, artists ought nicate an idea about personal identity. It is one of more
to discover and exploit the nature of any given mate- than thirty porcelain busts made by Ah Xian, a Chinese
rial. An artwork made of wood should look like wood; artist who fled to Sydney, Australia, in 1990 for po-
plaster and concrete need not be disguised as something litical reasons. The busts are of anonymous men and
else, because they are beautiful media in themselves. women, young and old, heavy and slight. Bust 14, pic-
Some kitschy materials, such as glitter and Day-Glo tured here, is life-size, molded directly from the woman
paint, are not the stuff of art. who modeled for Xian. On the eyes of the figure the
218 Chapter 11 Postmodernist Approaches to Making Art

11.19 RACHEL HECKER See, 1984. 11.20 AH XIAN China, China, Bust 14,1 999. Porcelain in
overglaze polychrome, enamels with flowers of the four seasons
and butterfly design , 14 Y, x 13 x 9 in.

artist has layered a bright orange butterfly; he covers

her lips with flowers. He has layered similar subject per doll kits but uses a racist image of a black man as
matter on her head and shoulders. The sources of the the doll, with various stereotypical props. The props
images are traditional Chinese patterns found on plates visually signify racist attitudes with signs that are used
and bowls and vases in the Ming (1364-1643) and to denigrate African Americans: a football, a hair pick,
Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Through these busts and a gun, a banana, a tie, a handbag, a chicken, and a knife.
the images he places on them, Xian visually expresses Within our culture, most of us know how to read these
the thought that Chinese culture is part of a Chinese signs, or "signifiers": the football can be associated with
person, no matter where he or she dwells. 18 racist notions of blacks ' supposed superior athleticism
. and inferior mental capability; the gun with the imag-
MIXING CODES ined threat of violence posed by black males; the hand-
bag with purse snatching by black males; and so on.
A "code," in postmodern discourse, is a system of signs The figure itself is coded with oversized lips, braided
and a set of conventions for how the signs are to be hair, and white minstrel gloves and shorts similar to
used. Signs within a culture are arbitrary, not natural. the ones Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse wears (Mickey
We communally agree, for example, that at a traffic Mouse himself is a derivation of a black minstrel fig-
intersection, green means go and red means stop. A ure). By mixing the code of paper doll workbooks made
problem with codes is that we use them so effortlessly for children into the image, Charles suggests that rac-
that they seem natural rather than invented. All images ism is learned at home and at an early age.
rely on codes, but usually we are so aware of the codes
that we do not even think about them. A driver's license RECONTEXTUALIZING
from a state in the United States is coded: it contains
THE FAMILIAR
words; the state symbol; a series of short black lines
that we know as a bar code, but the content of which we Related to the mixing of codes, another postmodernist
cannot readily decipher; other numbers; abbreviations; strategy is recontextualization, "positioning a familiar
and a colored picture of a head without a body that we image in relationship to pictures, symbols, or texts with
read as an identification photograph. Some artists make which it is not usually associated in order to gener-
us consciously aware of codes in everyday life and how ate meaning in an artwork."1 9 Fred Wilson is a con-
they shape our perceptions by mixing them together temporary master of recontextualization. He forages
and juxtaposing them. through museum collections and rearranges objects to
Michael Ray Charles, an African American artist, give them power through unusual juxtapositions. In a
uses mixed codes to unmask racist biases. In Cut and detail from his exhibition Mining the Museum (11.22),
Paste (11.21), he appropriates a coded system from pa- he has placed a wooden post used fo r whipping slaves
 Postmodern Strategies for Making Art 219

alongside wooden furniture of the same pe-

riod from the collection of the Maryland
Historical Society. Similarly, Wilson's jux-
taposition of steel shackles and silver tea
sets in other works displays the brutality
that coexisted with gentility in slave own-
ers'lives.
Yolanda Lopez appropriated the widely
displayed sacred image of Our Lady of
Guadalupe and recontextualized it into a
political artwork, Portrait of the Artist as
the Virgin of Guadalupe (11.23). The artist
says that her series of Virgin images is her
way of "questioning a very common and
potent icon of the ideal woman in Chicano
culture";
At a time in our hi story when we were looking
to our past historically and cu lturally I wanted
the Guadalupes to prompt a reconsideration of
what kinds of new role models Chicanas need,
and also to caution against adopting carte blanche
anyth ing simply because it is Mexican. By doing
portraits of ordinary women-my mother, grand-
mother, and myself-I wanted to draw attention
and pay homage to working-class women, old
women, middle-aged over-weight women, young,
exuberant, self-assertive women. Church groups
that were offended by the work were absolutely
correct. The works are also an attack on the au-
thoritarian, patriarchal Catholic church. 20

By changing the context of a known

image, you can radically alter the image's
original meanings and uses.
PS·8

CUT AND PASTE

INTERTEXTUALIZING SIGNS
The term intertextuality refers to the shap-
ing of one sign's meaning by other signs.
Each sign constitutes a text to be read. 11.21 MICHAEL RAY CHARLES Cut and Paste, 1994. Acrylic on paper,
Many postmodernist strategies of art mak- 60 x 35 in .
ing rely on intertextuality, especially hy-
bridizing, layering, mixing media, mixing
codes, and recontextualizing. For example,
Masami Teraoka's AIDS Series / Vaccine
Day Celebration (see 11.17), which illustrates hybrid- refer. We need to be aware of a variety of texts and how
izing, uses the sign of cherry blossoms drawn from tra- they interact in an artwork or design. The ad agency
ditional Japanese pictures, pictures of faxes that refer to knows the references of its ad for condoms (11.24), and
AIDS, and representations of condoms. Each of these it also knows its target group, namely, young people
signs has many conventional associations, and when who are or will be engaged in sexual activity. The ad
they are mixed into a single work, they then shape the plays with references to animals made of balloons,
meaning and significance of the other signs in the work. namely, rabbits, which are known for prolific procre-
In Japanese visual culture, cherry blossoms signify pos- ation. The ad is inclusive of multiple gender roles,
itive aspects of spring and romance, but in Teraoka's showing rabbits engaged in ways of procreating that
watercolor, such a reading is confronted by the dangers are not biologically accurate for the animals. Its use of
of unsafe sex in an age of AIDS. balloon-like condoms, with pastel colors, is a humor-
To construct meanings about works with multiple ous appeal for safe sexual practices. Its audience will
references, we need to know to what those references be able to read its multiple texts.
 CONFRONTING THE GAZE
The concept of the gaze originated in film
theory in the 1970s and was first identified
as "the male gaze"-the tendency of Hol-
lywood films to represent women in ways
that heighten the sexual or erotic aspects
of their bodies, because that was believed
to be the way men looked at women. Such
representations usually position the maker,
and thus the viewer, as the active subject
and the woman as the passive object. Film
theorist Laura Mulvey argues that the fe-
male body in film too often has a "to-be-
looked-at-ness." The male gaze is also
pervasive in mass-media advertising, used
11.22 FRED WILSON Cabinet Making (detail: Whipping Post), 1820-1960, to sell any and all kinds of products and
from Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson. services.
Art critic John Berger sees the gaze at
work in many paintings and sculptures of
the past as well. He argues that these im-
ages are the result of men's desire to legiti-
mately eroticize and then stare at women.
Worse yet, male painters and patrons some-
times cast the blame for the pleasure on
the woman. Berger writes, "You painted a
naked woman because you enjoyed look-
ing at her, you put a mirror in her hand and
you called the painting Vanity (11.25), thus
morally condemning the woman whose
nakedness you had depicted for your own
pleasure. " 21
Postmodern artists do not adopt the
tradition of the gaze so much as confront
it. Cindy Sherman's large series of photo-
graphs Untitled Film Stills brings critical
attention to the male gaze. In each of the
works, Sherman appropriates the look and
feel of unnamed Hollywood movies and
dresses and poses herself as their vulner-
able female characters (11.26).
Since the late 1970s, feminists have
considered the possibility of "the female
gaze," whereby the female is in the position
of a subject who actively desires males or
females. Some female artists, such as Brit-
ain 's Tracey Emin, make work based on
their own sexual lives. Emin made a blue
. tent she called Everyone I Have Ever Slept
With 1963-1995 (11.27). Appliqued to the
inside walls are names of her many sexual
partners. Later, she made My Bed, an instal-
lation that includes a mattress with white
rumpled sheets and pillows, pantyhose,
11.23 YOLANDA M. LOPEZ Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of and a towel. Heaped at the bottom of the
Guadalupe, 1978. Oil pastel on paper, 32 x 28 in. bed are vodka bottles, slippers, underwear,
220
 Postmodern Strateg ies for Making Art 221

cigarette packs, condoms,

Polaroid self-portraits,
and a fluffy white toy. ..
Her works are both con-
fessional and confronta-
tional concerning her role
as an active sexual sub-
ject rather than a passive
sexual object. The work
of Sherman, Emin, and
others challenges you to
a greater awareness of the
implications of how you
represent women in your
own work.

USING
GETITON.~
DISSONANCE
Lack of harmony or agree-
ment between elements 11.24 Ad for bunny condoms, 2008. Designed by Fitzgerald & Co. Advertising, Atlanta. Art Director:
in a work causes tension Fernando Lecca; Copywriter: Jerry Williams; Photographer: Arian Camilleri.
referred to as dissonance.
As we saw in Chapter 5,
clashing colors can create visual dissonance in a work.
In what Print magazine calls a personal project, Cecilia
Cortes-Earle created an award-winning poster (11.28)
employing dissonance between a plaything for a
young girl-a would-be page from a cutout book-
and young girls as playthings in the international sex
market. The text at the bottom of the page lists statis-
tics of young children involved in the international sex
market.
Contemporary Dutch painter Robert Smit (11.29)
combines dissonant images to open the possibility of
new meanings. His strategy of painting is directly in-
fluenced by his reading of the important German phi-
losopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).
Influenced by the philosopher, the artist says, "What I
do is join contrary, opposing, diverse images together
in order to construct new meanings that reach a new
level."22 Smit is engaged in an ongoing ambitious proj-
ect that will eventually compose one massive work on
a wall that will be a grid of sixty-four squares, 7 by 7
feet each, made up of thirty-two pairs of images. Each
diptych is composed of two canvases of divergent im-
agery, allowing the artist and the viewer to construct
a new conceptual and emotional synthesis of the two
canvases. Smit paints one of the two adjoining can-
vases. He generates the other piece photomechanically
and has it digitally printed onto a similarly stretched
canvas. When he puts the two square canvases of the
same size next to each other to form a diptych, Smit
then decides whether and how to alter each part of the 11.25 HANS MEMLING Vanity, c. 1485. Central panel from a
pair for an effective synthesis. tryptic , oil on oak, 20.2 x 13.1 cm.