“THE SUBJECTS OF ART,” Art History Undergraduate Conference, CSU, San Bernardino, Visual Arts Center Room 221, May 27 and 29, 4:00-6:00
The work of art conveys a special significance through the visual representation of the Subject as a means to evoke culture and identity. The Subject (after Foucault) is not simply the emphasis or focus of expression, it is a powerful position determined by historical and cultural constructions. The exploration of different issues, concepts and contexts in this two-day student conference pertains to these constructions that include community, society, gender, race, and sexuality as expressed in art.
Prof. Jane Chin Davidson, Chair of Panel: Tues, May 27, 4- 6, CSUSB, VAC 221
The Constructed Historical and Conceptual Subject
Emely Braswell, “The Warrior Class”
The Greeks had many aspects of life reflected in their artwork – from subjects of mythology to expressions of their ideals. One particular ideal was embodied by the warrior. This aspect was largely important to the people of Greece, especially when considering that in order to be a citizen of this society one must be a warrior. What comes with being a warrior is the ideal body, the test of strength, and the ability to fight and perform. The Olympic games were created for warriors to perform their strengths and prove themselves to the Greek community and to the gods. Olympia was the site of the Olympic games and the site of the temple of Zeus which made it an important city to the Greeks. The work of art played a major role in portraying the Greek ideal in which the importance of being a warrior was featured. The temple of Zeus presents the subject of the warrior and the aspects that come with the title through the sculptural program displayed on the pediments. This paper will explore the ways in which the sculptures on the temple represent a narrative from mythology, enhancing the significance of the location of the temple, the significance of the place of the Olympic games, as well as the significance of the city of Olympia itself.
Pam Lue, “Emancipation or Betrayal”
The Peasants’ Reform of 1861 (also known as the Emancipation Act) marked the end of an over one-hundred-year-old serfdom. Under the reform, the peasants were promised the full rights of free citizens and landownership. Peasants’ lives should be greatly improved after the reform. However, Vasily Perov’s Last Journey (A Peasant’s Funeral) completed in 1865, four years after the reform, presents a different scene. In the painting, a widow is with her two young children sitting on the sledge which carries a hastily knocked-together coffin on the way to bury her husband. The peasant woman does not engage with the viewers, but they can feel the frustration from the harshness of both her and her children’s lives. The only asset she owns is the cattle who leads them into an empty distance and uncertain future. Russian peasants’ lives were increasingly more difficult than before the reform. Most of them either walked away from their lands or were forced to sell their lands back to larger and richer landowners. They felt betrayed and deeply hurt by the imperial Russian government. Perov lived during the era when Russian Realist art reached its peak and many literary works focused on the peasants’ lives. Moral values and social needs became essential elements in literature and art. Last Journey was created to answer the social calling. The purpose of the work was to help people understand and realize the devastated situation peasants faced caused by the reform. I argue Perov’s painting functions to show the difficult lives of the peasants at the time, which was not caused by the reform itself, but caused by the way the imperial government officials implemented reform. Instead of helping peasants reduce their financial burdens, the government used the strict regulations of redemption payment and taxes, the unfair land allotment, and the authoritative peasant commune to force them from being bound to land to being bound to landowners.
Stephany Garay, “The Consequence of Conquest: Reinterpreting the Virgin Mary”
This essay presents a historical account of the famous painting The Virgin of Guadalupe (1531), and how the virgin was a re-interpreted as a symbol of past Aztec religion under the supervision of Catholic priests and Spanish conquistadors during the sixteenth century. I argue that due to the Spanish invasion and new beliefs forced upon the indigenous population, The Virgin of Guadalupe was re-interpreted and used as a new symbol of idolatry by fusing past Aztec goddesses with Marian images so that the conquered people may continue to worship in a form that they could understand, while being manipulated and forced to submit to the conquistadors. The indigenous population’s task of assimilating into a new society would have been difficult as they attempted to keep from angering their conquerors. Conversion was accomplished by articulating the new Catholic religion through comparing and creating analogies to the Aztec’s previous religion in terms that would have been deemed acceptable by the Catholic priests. The appearance and mythic lore of the painting The Virgin of Guadalupe was the exact event needed to bind the old ideals with the new ideals under the guise of a Catholic miracle that would have been tolerated by the oppressors. It was through art that the natives found a new way to survive the harsh realities of conquest that became of their state.
Diego Irigoyen, “The Essence, the Meditative Process, and the Blank Canvas of Experience”
In exploring Martin Heidegger’s work, The Origin of Art (1936), I have become intrigued by the equipment quality of the art object and the essence it carries; in order to better understand the significance of art I have asked these three questions: why, how, and what? Why do we undergo the artistic process, how do we go about the artistic process, and what is it that we have as an end product? The Inuit, or more commonly known as the Eskimo, had a philosophy of art that valued the guidance of an internal intuition and not any aesthetic desire. The Inuit artist did not believe themselves to have ever created anything, but rather saw their carving process as an attempt to remove the veiling of an already existing object within the material. When this process became spiritually charged the end result was most often in the form of a mask, surreal and filled with visual puns, utilized in the retelling of the spiritual experience. Through the philosophical lens of the Inuit and mutual concepts of artistic de-materialization, I will examine the performative work of Marina Abramovic, and the post-performative object that attempts to document and recreate the experience. Performance art can cause the individual to vicariously live through the artist, molding an experience, and creating a narrative, one that is intricately tied between performer and observer. The sharing of an artist’s expression through performance leaves the “canvas” of experience blank, enabling the viewer or participant, to define their own experience. The post performance object, however, shares an artistically composed narrative that attempts to accurately represent the performance without the tainting of subjectivity, paralleling Inuit values. Here I argue that art is an experience shaping tool, and the process shapes the potential experience.
Alice Fay Bearden, “The Mural of the Plight of Judith Baca’s Community”
I argue that Judith F. Baca’s mural, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, functions to restore the history of the plight of the marginalized. The image from the 2754 foot wall that I am focusing on is from an event in the 1950’s. The Dodger Stadium was constructed in a neighborhood called Chavez Ravine requiring the residents to move from their homes, uprooting their existence. The Great Wall of Los Angeles, demonstrates a strong interest in the connection between social and racial justice in the arts. It was Baca’s idea to paint a history of the city of Los Angeles, however not the version located in history books but beside a ditch that contained an enormous concrete retaining wall. Baca, a feminist artist, learned a lot from her female household; she lived in an all feminine home that consisted of her mother, two aunts and her grandmother. Her grandmother was an herbal healer which strongly influenced Baca’s sense of Chicano culture. Baca founded a non-profit organization in 1976 to expand her work called the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). SPARC was created in a time of change. It has, since its beginning, been a facilitator for social revolution through the arts for artistic innovation. Hundreds of artists in a city of immigrants began to devise a new public art in the landscape of Los Angeles in the early 1970’s, which at that time was mural-less. A town founded and populated by diverse people such as mulattos, Mexicans, Indians and their mestizo descendants was without artistic representation in public spaces.
Elizabeth Alvarez, “Photography vs. Painting: Robin Eley”
My discussion is centered on Robin Eley’s painting Immaculate (2013), which is a realistic painting. And since it is very realistic looking and resembles a photograph, I am calling it a hyper realistic painting even as hyperrealism can mean something different overall. To paint in this way, so realistically, in today’s digital era of photography, the work appears redundant and useless because a camera can do it better. There are two sides to my study; one is in considering hyper-realistic painting as an unworthy practice in the age of high technology. My argument is that Eley’s painting Immaculate represents the value of painting over photography. The title Immaculate suggests the idea of purity, which will be important to my study. In today’s artistic practices, the ability to shoot a photograph and then edit it later to arrive at what we want is endless in opportunity; that was not the case just decades ago. Artists could only create and edit realistic art through paintings and not by photography. There was no freedom in photography because there was a limit; such as the limits of black and white photography. Artists such as Robin Eley are bringing back realistic paintings, and the criticism of such works are not favorable. Hyper realistic paintings are phenomenal, and my paper explores the reasons why Eley mimics the photograph. The idea that the artist is returning to paint what can technologically be done by a camera suggests a return to the capabilities of “human” creativity.
Josie Reyes, “Lying to Our Selfies: The Myth of Self Portraiture”
The myth of self-portraiture is that a special truth is being exposed in contrast to other portraiture. In reality, self-portraiture and other portraiture reveal the same level of truth. The viewer cannot avoid this myth of “specialness” nonetheless and perceives a self-portrait as the artist’s unveiling of a secret representation of his or her self. This paper will discuss how Chuck Close’s Big Self Portrait (1967-1968) is as an example of a work that lives up to the fictions that are unavoidable between artist and self-portraiture. This work exemplifies the difference between the artist in the portrait and the artist in everyday life. What is really being represented in a self-portrait is a persona, and it remains in the viewer’s control to determine whether or not the persona is believable. Artists such as Close attempt to create neutrality in portraiture. This neutrality is unreachable due to the viewer’s perception and the artist’s subconscious. The principal premise of my argument is in the emergence of the “selfie” that has changed the way we understand portraiture. The amount of people creating self-portraits without formal art training has increased, and it can be argued that there is a reflective and therapeutic experience created by the average selfie taker. But the myth remains. The selfie actually serves as a device for the individual to choose how the viewer perceives the subject based on the myth that because it is a self-portrait, it must be the truth.
Diana Dominguez, “The Mirror as a Reflection of the Abysmal Subconscious”
Anton Semenov’s graphic media work The Mirror of Destiny (2007) depicts a grim creature holding a mirror that shows a little girl sitting on the ground with her back turned to the viewer and surrounded by a dark abyss. I believe this image reflects the viewer, although, it does not reflect the viewer’s physical image, but serves instead as a psychoanalytical, subconscious reflection of ourselves. In The Mirror of Destiny this might suggest a “destiny” of being vulnerable and alone or even the fear of being vulnerable and alone a deeply rooted fear of our own subconscious psyche. Oddly painted scenes derived from the subconscious are much like the work of the Surrealists. By Modernist standards, Semenov’s work would not be categorized as a work of “fine art” due to its popular culture quality, which displays metaphysical, nightmarish creatures and objects. Regardless of these Modernist views, Surrealist psychoanalytical principles can still be applied to The Mirror of Destiny, and thus, denote its value as an artistic subject. The Mirror of Destiny is considered as a low, popular culture work because of its graphic media; some may not even consider it to be art at all. In this paper, I will defend its validity as a work of art by arguing that Surrealist principles can be applied to it while tying in formal analysis and ideas of the symbolism of the mirror in conjunction with the symbol of the abyss used in art. My discussion will explore the meaning of the subconscious and what these symbols of the mirror and abyss can mean. The Surrealist context will provide a postmodernist acceptance of the current phenomenon of aliens and zombies from the otherworldly imagination.
Yeojin Yun, “The Empire of Light”
In this paper, I will explore the different theories in regard to the personal and expressive meanings behind Rene Magritte’s painting The Empire of Light (1954). I argue that through the symbolism of daylight, Magritte’s expression of the unconscious functions to mourn the tragic loss of his mother. The Surrealist aim was to create a new expression of the unconscious, of dream, and illusion. Magritte’s personal life and philosophy were unveiled through an interview recorded with his wife Georgette. Although he claimed he always felt the greatest interest in the subjects of night and day, the traumatic event of the death of his mother remained an influence in his paintings of the unconscious. For instance, empty houses emblematize the night his mother disappeared, depicting his feelings of depression. He regarded Surrealism as the knowledge of absolute thought and although many surrealists had a kinship with psychoanalysis, Magritte had a negative attitude toward scientists overall. Through many techniques, the Surrealists recorded their pattern of thought and the flow of impulse. Freud’s theory of the unconscious along with automatism and depaysement were highly successful methods, which enabled Magritte to express the underlying human spirit.
Kyungsun Kim, “Harmony from Deconstruction beyond in A Needle Woman”
Persistent debates in the field of contemporary art have underscored the matter of the human subject, ever since cultural theorists have questioned the way that female artists and non-Western artists have been pushed to the “margins” of the official text of art history. But how exactly do people come to be marginalized according to cultural identity? In terms of subjectivity, the hegemony of European knowledge distorted or misrepresented non-European culture and art, and it sometimes functioned as implicit justifications for the colonial and the imperial ambitions of European power. The implication is still powerful and monopolizes the perception of art and knowledge to this day. It has become essential that cultural difference is brought into the question of the subject itself and not be kept outside of the matter of subject. The post-colonial artist, Kim, Sooja validates cultural identity and displaces the hegemony of a European theory for art. A Needle Woman (2001) created by Kim, Sooja presents a combination of performance, installation, and video art, addressing the issues of the “deranged” self and others. Through interpreting A Needle Woman, my research goal is to prove that the death of the subject turns into subjectivity itself. I state that through the method of deconstruction in art, the fundamental difference of things can be recovered. Through A Needle Woman, Kim, Sooja, dialectically blurs the boundaries between exoticization and cultural domination, rejecting a systematic role-play of cultural contrasts. Kim, Sooja pursues a delicate equipoise in which difference constitutes a fundamental essence for harmony. At the same time, A Needle Woman articulates the death of the gaze and the polarization between objectification and dominance. Ultimately, Kim, Sooja transforms the metaphysical and cultural location of the subject.
Patricia Zambrano, “Dos Fridas, Un Camino: An Icon’s Path to Straighthood”
Frida Kahlo has been a cultural icon in the United States for nearly forty years, a phenomenon that began twenty years after her death. The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s and the concurrent Chicano Movement, which were started to combat patriarchy and white supremacy respectively, both appropriated her image in ways that could be used against the political system being resisted. While both movements fought against oppression, they also engaged in it on some level themselves. These movements provided no space for people with intersectional identities and in fact were both anti-queer. Ironically, they both chose a poster child in Kahlo who fit those very identities that they excluded. I position my argument in conversation with Judith Butler, particularly her work on unity and the ways in which it serves to set up an exclusionary norm of solidarity as well as her writings on heteronormativity. I also draw upon Irma Dosamantes-Beaudry’s argument that the creation of cultural symbols functions to generate illusion and possession. Both the Women’s Liberation and Chicano Movements succeeded in mainstreaming Frida’s image in order to fit their agendas, and as a result, Kahlo was “de-queered.” I will be looking at the numerous readings of her painting entitled Las Dos Fridas (1939) in order to show how these movements fractured Kahlo’s multiple identities, focusing on one part and not the whole.
Timothy Haerens, “Put Another Ken on the Barbie”
Since her conception and introduction to the world in 1959, the Barbie doll has become an American icon. According to the Mattel toy company, two new Barbie dolls are purchased every second, making her the most financially successful and, quite possibly, the most culturally influential toy ever sold. Carrying the quintessential female shape and ideal attributes such as blond hair, tall, Caucasian, and the ability to be or do anything she wants, Barbie is seen as the symbol of feminine perfection to generations of Americans and a prominent factor in defining our concept of female beauty. In his series of photographs entitled Bad Barbie (1972), photographer David Levinthal stages and captures Barbie in provocative scenarios that trigger strong reactions and responses from the viewer. My study of Levinthal’s extraordinary work addresses such questions as: What about Barbie makes her idolized by some and despised by others? What effect does Barbie have on heterosexual men and women? Do Levinthal’s photographs capture the essence of who Barbie is in American culture? What does the absence of genitalia in the photographs convey about how America sees the female body? How do Levinthal’s photographs motivate the viewer to see Barbie? How do his photographs encourage viewers to see themselves? However, just because Barbie was monumentalized in Levinthal’s Bad Barbie photo series doesn’t mean he chose her for the subject of his art. I argue that the subject of Bad Barbie is the viewer who judges, objectifies, and strips Barbie of the positive human qualities that are represented by this American icon.