Reading Respond: Jerry Saltz on ’93 in Art

The reading talk about the Whitney Biennial art show in 1993. Numbers of artists bring their work together. More than 40 percent are female artists and quite a few were nonwhite. The form of artworks are varieties including paintings, site-specific sculpture, video, costumed show and even toy fire engine. Some work are about being openly gay and mostly art made by unknowns. 

Of course, the critics are different, but most people said they hate it. Complains and disregards are everywhere. Saltz said that people want things completely crazy even they don’t admit it. His future wife called the show a Watershed: combine all these different pieces together and direct them into several places. The fact that everyone hates this show made me like it and know that it’s important. 

Then, He briefly talked about the history of contemporary art. Two dominated stories in the eighties art are painting , big paintings,and “picture art”: a vogue for images, most time photography. Then, move to the early nineties, art was fed up with over commercialization. Artists focus on conceptualism, feminism, theory and pictures art. The later generation made artworks that were weirder and from more individual desires. Ninety-three matters because numbers of people starts to put pieces together and pack into new ways.  

Portrait Practice

 Sketch 

First Layer

Left - Brushstroke

Right - Smooth

Final Work

(Cover the half)

Left - Male

Right - Female

Reading respond: "For Slower Image"

The article argues that painting is the unique image with direct human contact. Though the mass medias (internet, film, TV shows, magazine and etc.) pelt thousands of images to us everyday, painting is still "alive". It has more human interactivity that artists put more time and thoughts into. Each work is out of accurate, thoughtful brushstrokes. Painting allows for a more intimate connection to human perception both from artist and the viewer. Sometimes, the texture and shading and unexpected certain shapes created by artists simply couldn't be graphic, because they were so visually sophisticated. Slow painting, slow images represents a slow post-industrial life that keeps everything real. 

As a film and photography major who also love painting, this reading is quite interesting, especially comparing to Bazin's article "The Ontology of the Photographic Image". I agree that paintings are unique but I think it has nothing to do with how much time and effort artists put into them. Photographers and filmmakers put tons of time, thoughts, ideologies and human interactivity into their works too. It's different from snap shots on Facebook! 

I'd more agree with Bazin's perspective. He argues that the invention of photography and cinema has freed the plastic arts form their obsession with realism. The transition from the baroque art to photography is not only perfecting the physical process, but also satisfied our psychological obsession with realism. The mechanical reproduction of making an image that man plays no part fills our desire for illusion. In simple words, people don’t need paintings to remember or reproduce a person or events anymore. 

Contemporary artists tend to abandon the kind of painting that simply copy the reality like a photograph. The objective character of photography, which has no creative intervention of man, marks the distinction with painting. This objective nature forced us to accept the real existence of the object re-presented in front of us, also as in time and space. Thus, it frees paintings to go back pursuing the pure aesthetic autonomy. 

old paintings

Paintings from last semester.