AD603 Critical Theory

After this reading, I thought in depth with racial identity. I really like her idea. As you know American society has a big problem with discrimination and prejudice especially racism. We can find easily the conflict with other race in american society. I think most white people prefer categorize into who is a white or not white, also black people concern about who is a black or not black. I think it is a dangerous theory.

Actually I am a minority in America. I am not a White or Black. I am an Asian. I was born in South Korea. Those are my racial identity. When I was in New York, I’ve had a same experience with this issue. I had Japanese friend, who name was Koji. We always have being together. If we met some American, who asked us, “Where are you guys from?” Koji said, “I am from Japan”, and I said, “I am from South Korea”. After realized where we from, American treated Koji with respect and interested in him, because he is just from Japan. I think most American feel like Japanese is superior in Asia, seeking that I don’t know why? Maybe they ride Japanese car… Actually I am not making unnecessary fuss as Adrian with racism. This is my real experience in America.

Here is my idea. For example, “A is a good. B is not A, therefore B is a bad”. “A is a white, B is not White, therefore B is bad” “Japan is a major power in Asia, so A (Japanese) is a good, B (other Asian) is not Japanese, therefore A is more interesting then others”. This is very dangerous contradiction theory. I don’t know why this theory becoming from my idea. But I am sure about this simple contradiction theory makes a big problem in our society. Actually this theory is just my personal opinion for this week readings.

** This is a very good artwork by Adrian Piper.
Please listen the soundtrack.

Soundtrack Sample.
http://www.adrianpiper.com/art/g_safe_music_frames.shtml

Here is the presentation idea of Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Rosalind Krauss. I hope this would be useful to you.

What sculpture is
- Historically bounded category
- Logic of sculpture
-Inseparable from the logic of the monument
-Commemorative representation

1. Sit in a particular place
2. Speak in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place

- Pedestals : mediate between actual site and representational sign
-During centuries of Western art

Examples)
Marcus Aurelius (equestrian status)
Conversion of constantine (Bernini)

The logic began to fail!!!
- Late in the 19th century
- Fading the logic of monument

Examples)
Gates of Hell (1880)
Balzac (1891) by Rodin

-multiple versions can be found in a variety of museums in various countries, while no version exists on the original sites.
- negative condition : sitelessness, homelessness, an absolute loss of place -> modernism : loss of site, producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential

Modernist sculpture

Two characteristics

1. the sculpture reaches downward to absorb the pedestal into itself and away from actual place
2. the sculpture depicts it own autonomy through the representation of its own materials or the process of its construction.

Example)
Brancusi

1. Cock : the base becomes the morphological generator of the figurative part of the object
2. Caryatids and Endless Column: the sculpture is all base
3. Adam and Eve : in a reciprocal relation to its base

-  base : transportable, the marker of the work’s homelessness
- express parts of the body : fragments, loss of site
- from early 1950
- pure negativity
- a kind of black hole in the space of consciousness

Example)
Robert Morris
- inverse logic, pure negativity (combination of exclusions)

 Sculpture
- ceased being a positivity
- category that resulted from the addition of not-landscape to the not-architecture
- according to the logic of a certain kind of expansion,

Diagram (p42)
Not-architecture = landscape, Not-landscape = architecture

Examples)
Labyrinths, mazes : both landscape and architecture

- not to say that they were an early, or a degenerate, or a variant form of sculpture
- part of universe or cultural space

 Expanded field
is generated by problematizing the set of  oppositions between which the modernist category sculpture is suspended.

- once this has happened, there are 3 other categories that one can envision
- now sculpture : no longer the privileged middle tern on the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities.

Example Artists)
Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman…

- no longer described as modernist -> postmodernism (historical rupture, structural transformation of the cultural field)

Site Construction
landscape + architecture

Examples)
1970 ‘Partially Buried Woodshed, Robert Smithson
- Robert Irwin, Alice Aycock, John Mason, Michael Heizer, Mary Miss, Charles Simonds

Marked Site
landscape + not-landscape

- Actual phhysical manipulations of site + other forms of marking

Examples)
Spiral Jetty, Smithson (1970)
Double Negative, Heizer (1969)

- Serra, Morris, Carl Andre, Dennis Oppenheim, Nancy Holt, George Trakis…

Impermanent marks
Examples) 
Depression, Heizer
Time Lines, Oppenheim
Mile Long Drawing, De Maria
Mirror Displacement in the Yucatan , Smithson
Richard Long, Hamish Fulton :  Photographic experience of marking
Christo - Running Fence : impermanent, photographic, political example of marking a site

Axiomatic Structure
architecture + not-architecture

- intervention into the real space of architecture through partial reconstruction, drawing, the use of mirrors
- photography is used

Example)
Nauman - video corridors (abstract conditions of openness and closure)

Expended field and postmodernism
Expended  field’s two features
1. the practice of individual artists
2. question of medium

- these are different from modernism
- modernist demand for 1. purity and 2. separateness o the various mediums

Postmodernism :
the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium - photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself, might be used

- no longer organized around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or the perception of material
- organized instead through the universe of terns that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation
- within an one of the positions generated by the given logical space, many different mediums might be employed.

Examples)
Joel Shapiro : in the neuter tern (not-architecture + not-landscape) + setting of images of architecture within vast fields(landscape) of space 

Conclusion
Expanded field of postmodernism occurs at a specific moment in the recent history of art. These address the root cause - the conditions of possibility - that brought about the shift into postmodernism, as they also address the cultural determinants of the opposition through which a given field is structured.

I am really happy with this week’s reading even though I could not understand his entire theories, however I personally agree with Foucault’s ideas very much although I could not find out any relations between graphic design as well. According to the reading, the space is very important our life, and It has to be correlation with our history and desire “The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and knows at us, is also, in itself, a heterogenous space.”(p.23) 

I think most people have their Utopia and want to live, because utopia is everything is perfect, however unfortunately it is imagined place. ”Utopia are sites with no real place They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.” (p.24) However hetrotopias are real places.

Actually I used to live in several cities such as Seoul (where I was born), Tokyo, Boston, San Francisco and New York, because feel like just want to live there, and get some ideas from their life styles. I think now realized that I tried to find the space of authenticity from each cities, It is a real hetrotopias.

When I was in Japan, I dropped across Yayoi Kusama’s, Japanese artist, art work at museum. First time I watched her works, I felt like craze about dots. However I can get her thinking a little bit at this time. I think dots world is the Utopia as well as hetropias for her. I personally matched Kusama’s works with Foucault’s six principles of heterotopology.

The First principle, heterotopias of crisis –> heterotopai of deviation

The Second principle, “Can make an existing heterotopias function in a very different fashion” (p.25)

The Third principle, “Capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces that are in themselves incompatible.” (p.25)

The Fourth principle, “most often linked to slices in time”"Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit”(p.26)

The Fifth principle, “always presuppose a system of opening and closing that boyh isolates them and makes them penetrable” (p.26)

Mirror Room (Pumpkin). 1991

Infinity Mirror Room. 1965 (synchronized light bulbs and mirrors)

The Six principle,”they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles” (p.27)

More about Yayoi Kusama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RegxhTu748

   I have been liked the idea of Freud’s theory since when I studied psychology in undergraduate, however, I could not expected to think about theory between Freud and art.  After reading this week, I found the logic of artists’ thinking and their concept of works. Actually I realized that Freud had been enormously influence on Surrealism (also Dadaism), especially most outstanding Surrealism artists like Joan Moro, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dail, who concerned about their artistic contents were dream, madness, abnormal, and bad dream, which are an unconscious matters. In Freud’s view, the id is unconscious which is not contact with reality.

   Actually I agree with his theory the Ego and id, I think most surrealism subjects related to id and unconscious I am pretty sure is not Ego or Super-ego, because they always deal with personality, unconscious experience and illusion, they tried to avoid the reality rather than fantasies, which means they wanted to say some dreams or fulfillment in their paintings than conscious mind and real life as well.  

   In addition, Freud was talked about childhood conflicts with parents and sexual desire. “At a very early age the little boy develops an objects-cathexis for his mother, which original related to the mother’s breast and is the prototype of an object-choice on the anaclitic model; the boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him. For a time these two relationships proceed side by side, until the Boy’s sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them” (p.640) I believe that most artists’ works influenced by their life of childhood and personal experience, it is not limited on Surrealism artists.  I would like to introduce my favorite Photographer Jan Saudek. He was born in 1935 and resides in Prague, Czech Republic, also His father and family was a Jew. Since he was 5 years old in 1938, many of his family members persecuted and died by Germans during the World War II.  He survived the war and became a serious art photographer. His works based on themes of personal erotic freedom, nudes, dream imagery and innocent. Some people can say that some his works like pornography. However In my view, Jan Saudek is a great artist not even photographer. Atually I don’t know what happened his childhood, however I can imagine from works how difficult of his childhood and unusual, which involved the unconscious thinking. Many of Saudek’s models include his wives, girlfriends, cousin, children, and himself. I’d like to say that the concept of his work is human and family but is abnormal; it would be involved sense of sexuality. I think sometimes his works are represent Oedipus situation or feminism; also gives me the feeling of macabre and grotesque, because the subjects are not concern about the ego or super-ego. “What I really do is portraits of the soul”. Jan Saudek said.

Photography by Jan Saudek 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OewcX2UzMqo&feature=related

Jan Saudek documentary Film preview.

First of all, I think that Karl Marx’s theories have influenced on research studies, it doesn’t matter the methods hold direct or indirect, affirmative or negative. Which means Marxism is one of the strongest in field of theories.

The Article, Marx for beginners by Rius, gives us a very clear summary of basic knowledge, such as Karl Marx’s life history, his ideology, and theory. I think the harmony was very important method of his thinking, because he thought the capitalism system has a lot of economic problems with balance, especially private property. From the article, “Harmony between the classes would be ideal, of course, and an equitable redistribution of wealth and peace for all… It’s not on because the capitalist system has only one aim, profit, based on private property, which is obtained by exploiting the labors of the proletariat…” (p. 94), gives us the main idea of Marx’s theory. According to Marx’s letter to Engels, He anguished over living deepest poverty. I think his ideology started with unfair poverty, therefore, he was interested in wages of workers.

 “While the boss, the capitalist and the rich man make a fabulous profit from the workers labour, the poor fellow doesn’t make a penny extra for his work..”(p. 102). Actually I agree with Marx’s wages theory, therefore I would like to take the lead with wages designer. In my opinion, the designers are the proletariats, because as you know some of outstanding designer’s design products have the own copyrights and profits. But most designers, who are employee of companies, do not have private products copyrights, even though they themselves designed it. Company doesn’t pay more than designer’s salary although company makes good profits by good designs. I think we need to define designer a word as slave or proletarian from the following sentences. “ The slave is sold once and for all. The proletarian must sell himself by the hour or the day. Each individual slave, being the direct property of a master, has his existence assured, be that existence ever so wretched..”(p. 111).

  One the other hand, the capitalism has problems with unfair profit system, there is a necessity to think the capitalism once again. According to “Introduction to critical theory by David held” critical theorists defended the probability of an independent moment of criticism from the Marxism. “the work of the critical theorists revolves around a series of critical dialogues with important past and contemporary philosophers, social thinkers and social scientists.” (p. 16) I think that the competition is resolved through increasing nations’ productivity even companies, but proletariats do not have own motivations, especially communist countries, because of equal wages, therefore, most communist countries had been struggled with economic crisis. 

Actually some people often say that critical theorist is criticized the works of others, it is negatively defined critical theory, however I would like to say that the critical theory should be given more weight than Marxism. From ‘reification’ by George Lukacs, “Drawing on Marx’s analysis of the structure of commodities in Capital Simmel’s account of the commodification of culture, and Weber’s work on rationalization, Lukacs attempted to show reification permeates all spheres of life”(p 22). Actually I am very interested in the ‘reification’ theory, but honestly I could not understand yet, so I will try to investigate it later on. 

After those readings, I would like to say about the values of culture. I think culture involved the arts and social history, which has a vital force by itself; above all the culture value will not be able to change with the money such as proletariat’s salary.

Here is the links to some of information for copyright, and artists wage.

Copyright and Licensing:

http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/copyright-and-licensing

Specific Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates. (Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers):

http://www.bls.gov/OES/current/naics4_711500.htm

Hourly Rate Survey Report for Job: Graphic Artist / Designer

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Graphic_Artist_%2F_Designer/Hourly_Rate