LECTURE NOTES
Looking at a wide contextual rang of artists and image making.
LASCAUX CAVES - Th earliest known form of visual communication to Western scholars (17,300 years ago) These are mystical images, not just a recording of animals, they are images of power and almost are there to be feared.
"RED EARTH CIRCLE" - This is trying to say that something is similar between the ancient art and the modern art and that there is some primal, deep, human connection to image making.
ROTHKO CHAPEL - People seem to have an emotional response such as crying when they look at these famous pieces of work, and it has been said that looking at them feels like you are falling into the void. Although, we question that maybe they are feeling this way because they know they're expected to?
BASILICA OF SAN FRANCESCO, D'ASSI, ITALY - The images have a sense of other-worldliness and people go to a gallery or a place like this as a form of pilgrimage. These images were commissioned by the church to show their might and make you feel lesser when viewing them, whether this be poorer or less spiritual.
MONA LISA - Is this a famous image because culture tells you it is? People feel the need to queue for hours to see it so that they can get a photograph of it for themselves, people now feel the need to document and record everything in their lives on a digital format. This may be because the form of image making is again something primal to us and something that is very important.
BERGER (1972) WAYS OF SEEING - Thinking about what happens when people are able to reproduce an image and say put it on a t-shirt. This is when images start to be re-contextualized and it's now in the hands of everyone who can interpret in their own way instead of being told what it is meant by the hierarchy, in fact it is a challenge to cultural hierarchy.
BANKSY, GRAFFITI ART - This has always been about taking art outside of the galleries, which are only for the elite and a particular type of people, and putting it where everyone can see it. On the other hand, the strange part is that graffiti art such as Banksy's is now being drilled from the wall and put in galleries and sold for thousands, when does the cycle end?
JACKSON POLLOCK - Represents how people can fall into the myth of the hero and their artwork is more than what it looks like, in fact its records of the psyche and their unconscious flowing out of them, but does this just make the artist seem more important than what they really are?
ROY LICHTENSTEIN, RED PAINTING (1965) - This is a piece where Lichtenstein has made an attack using pop-culture against the high culture. The point he's questioning is does a splash of red paint really mean anything and if you think it is then you are falling under the myth of what others are telling you the image means.
SOCIALIST REALISM - Very popular in socialist cultures, Joseph Stalin limited artwork that was created to be only how his vision of how things should be, this was culturally limiting for Russia. The red flag was an iconic image in socialist realism as it signified the blood of the martyrs.
ALBERTO KORDA ( 1960) GUERRILLERO HEROICO - The image of Che Guevara was made more than just a guerilla and now has been re-contextualised into an image of style instead of revolution. But. does doing this make him timeless, does image make a human timeless?
SHEPARD FAIREY (2008/2011) HOPE - This artist made the campaign for Barack Obama but then re-contextualised his own image to a movement of faceless anarchy.
STEVE BELL (2015) - Shows how image can be made as a response to the power, you can use visual communication as a political weapon if you want to.
DUCK IN NUTZILAND, DISNEY (1943) - Sometimes communicating very plainly, like done in this animation, can get to a wider audience. This animation was meant for children and the animators had the power to manipulate and doctor what were world views. (Images are nothing without context)
NICK UT (1972) - This catalysed the counter culture and the moderate culture with just a shocking image, it had the power to make change and to also rewrite history. Without images like these it would possibly be forgotten the horrors of the war and simply be focused on the successes of it.
CONSTABLE (1821) THE HAYWAIN - A depiction of England and is this now what people think England is or was like? People may feel this represents the soul of England when actually it is a fictional image and very subjective. Artists who have created images through time have commonly been commissioned to pant or worked to briefs, so a lot of the time the images may be of false pretences. This painting for example, was actually painted during a time where there was a class war ongoing and now this painting is of lies, yet people believe it is the truth.
GAINSBOROUGH (c1750) 'MR & MRS ANDREWS' - Again, paintings were commissioned a lot of the time to show power and wealth and not about feelings and truths. This painting was to show others how much they had in comparison to you, it was an image about power.
D&G (2015) - Advertising in the modern day image displays a perfect life and that wee are incomplete without this life and the was to that is through consumption.
OLIVERO TOSCANI (1982-96) - Blood stained clothes, animals suffering from oil spills and a man on his death bed, all images used purely for shock but to sell clothes? But, are these images purely used for the sake of gaining custom, or is that wrong to say. Perhaps they were pushing the limit of visual communication and were instead sending a message.
VICTORIAN POST MORTEM PHOTOGRAPHY - People believed that this was a great way to cheat death in a way, as after they had died they still lived on through this image.
MY LAI MASSACRE - The image is powerful in the fact that a photograph such as this one can record something that may have been forgotten, it recorded this murder and the people that were murdered lived again through this image. The photographer explains that taking the photograph was his form of activism.
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