Wang Guangyi : Between Postmodernism and political pop

In the mid-1980s, Wang Guangyi espoused a humanist vision of art for post-Mao China. His series of paintings entitled "Frozen North Pole" sought to evoke, in the artist's words, "a kind of beauty of sublime reason which contains constant, harmonious feelings of humanity." Abstract human figures placed in orderly, grid-like arrangements face uniformly forward, as if moving toward an auspicious future. The message is utopian and optimistic: these humans are evolved creatures of rationality and feeling who are ready for an ideal world.[ more ]

Three years later Wang's art and ethos had undergone a complete reversal -- his new aim was "to liquidate the enthusiasm of humanism." Shifting to a cut-and-paste method and deploying Warhol-inspired references to mass culture, Wang began to produce Political Pop art rife with irony. He saw irony as a necessary tactic in the tense atmosphere that preceded the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. It was a reaction against the tragically sincere use of symbols (such as the Statue of Liberty) seen elsewhere in the showdown between Maoism and democracy.

Wang's new art appropriated communist propagandist images from China and mixed them with corporate advertisements from the West. They are literal depictions of the conflicted values descending over China. Poster-style Red Guard soldiers stand under the Coca-Cola logo; the kitsch of communism rubs elbows with the kitsch of capitalism; the art of assemblage mirrors the patchwork of contradictory ideologies that China endures. Both "Mao Zedong Age" (1991) and "Workers, Peasants, Soldiers, and Coca Cola" (1992) bathe the age of Mao in the aura of Hollywood, rendering the difference between the two indiscernible.

Wang suggests an affinity between the means employed by capitalism and those employed by socialism in the efforts to promulgate certain social visions. Both rely on popularized images and catch-words to create community -- be it a community of citizens or consumers. In fact, the difference between consumer and citizen dissolves in the post-history, contemporary world.

Lets Critic

‘Lost Identity’

Acrylic on Canvas

92 cm x 152 cm

2009

This artwork is tells about how someone change themselves from good to bad. These two images are self-portraits of the artist who reflect himself to a youth culture in his surrounded area nowadays. Punk is the metaphor for the negative element that influence the youth. The black and white portrait is the original appearance, and the colored portrait is the real-time appearance. He totally changes from it appearance and attitude. Although he turned himself into Punk, he still a Malay and a Muslim. But, Malay and Islamic lifestyle already get forgotten. The background also shows the changes between the bright colors to dark.

Quote by famous artist : Robert Rauschenberg

A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.
Robert Rauschenberg

An empty canvas is full.
Robert Rauschenberg

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.
Robert Rauschenberg

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.
Robert Rauschenberg

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.
Robert Rauschenberg

And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary.
Robert Rauschenberg

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.
Robert Rauschenberg

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.
Robert Rauschenberg

Every time I've moved, my work has changed radically.
Robert Rauschenberg

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.
Robert Rauschenberg

I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.
Robert Rauschenberg

I don't mess around with my subconscious.
Robert Rauschenberg

I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.
Robert Rauschenberg

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.
Robert Rauschenberg

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.
Robert Rauschenberg

I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don't maintain constantly the you can't refer back from one area to another area.
Robert Rauschenberg

I wouldn't use the same color in a picture in more than one place.
Robert Rauschenberg

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
Robert Rauschenberg

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.
Robert Rauschenberg

If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.
Robert Rauschenberg

One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there.
Robert Rauschenberg

Oracle was I had started it I guess two and a half years ago, maybe even longer than that, closer to three.
Robert Rauschenberg

Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.
Robert Rauschenberg

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.
Robert Rauschenberg

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.
Robert Rauschenberg

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.
Robert Rauschenberg

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
Robert Rauschenberg

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.
Robert Rauschenberg

Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965.
Robert Rauschenberg

You begin with the possibilities of the material.
Robert Rauschenberg

Quote by famous artist : Andy Warhol

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.
Andy Warhol

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.
Andy Warhol

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
Andy Warhol

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.
Andy Warhol

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.
Andy Warhol

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.
Andy Warhol

Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax-deductible.
Andy Warhol

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
Andy Warhol

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
Andy Warhol

I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say "figment."
Andy Warhol

I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.
Andy Warhol

I am a deeply superficial person.
Andy Warhol

I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.
Andy Warhol

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.
Andy Warhol

I like boring things.
Andy Warhol

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.
Andy Warhol

I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.
Andy Warhol

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'
Andy Warhol

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work," because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
Andy Warhol

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.
Andy Warhol

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?
Andy Warhol

I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money.
Andy Warhol

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.
Andy Warhol

I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is "In 15 minutes everybody will be famous."
Andy Warhol

I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.
Andy Warhol

I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.
Andy Warhol

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.
Andy Warhol

In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
Andy Warhol

Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?
Andy Warhol

It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger.
Andy Warhol

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.
Andy Warhol

Land really is the best art.
Andy Warhol

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
Andy Warhol

My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.
Andy Warhol

Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
Andy Warhol

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.
Andy Warhol

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.
Andy Warhol

Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.
Andy Warhol

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
Andy Warhol

The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it's much more exciting.
Andy Warhol

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Andy Warhol

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.
Andy Warhol

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.
Andy Warhol

Postmodernism (the definition) part II

When discussing Postmodernism, the most important thing to remember is that the ideals in this cultural movement stemmed from a reactionary desire of the population. Artists, composers, architects, and people with great minds were rising up against Modernism and the ideas it stood for, hence the birth of “Postmodernism.” Postmodernism was a retrogradation to Modernism.

Modernism focused heavily upon subjectivity in its art, literature, and film. The idea of classifying and understanding on the deepest possible intellectual level is descriptive of Modernist values. Toward the close of the 20-century, however, Modernist claims were beginning to be rejected; no longer did there seem to be a dire need to be able to know all, create all, and do all. Instead, people began to wonder if everything had been thought, made, and done. The next step for artists was to rebel against this omnipresent desire for depth and create works of art that could just be, instead of needing to represent a greater or more important idea. Because of this shift in focus from the subjective toward the objective, a major defining factor of Postmodernism is appropriation. Postmodernists would use many works of other people-- artists, musicians, or architects, put them all together in collage-like fashions-- and would imply no deeper meaning to the new piece of work than what was visible on the surface. The question that was presented by Postmodernists is whether there is anything to truly be gained from the vast subjectivity, finding meaning in all things, which had been so common during Modernist times.

A Greater Understanding
To truly comprehend the idea of Postmodernism, it is easiest to contrast its visions to those of Modernism. First, Modernists were concerned with creating a sense of individualism for everyone. Related to this desire to be unique was the drive to establish new ways of doing and progressing, or the avant-garde. Moreover, there existed an overarching idea that the world, reality, and life were ultimately decipherable once all of the laws of the universe were grasped.

So to understand Postmodernism, take all of the ideals Modernism and reverse them. In other words, Postmodernists were more skeptical about both the possibility of progression and of the individuation of the artist. The strive toward creating the avant-garde was shunned because it was believed that people were products of representations and that their creations and ideas were simply being reconstructed from old ideas. No longer did the public pursue the answers of the world and search for meaning in everything; now concentration was on the shallow. That is to say, Postmodernists were concerned not with the meaning or value of things, but strictly with the surface of things. Also, while Modernists focused on individualism, Postmodernists focused on fragmentation; the belief that one’s work is not his or her own, but an appropriated collection of the completed works of others. Because with this appropriation and eschewing of the avant-garde, postmodern artists often take an idea from another work of art; a play, a story, or a painting, and rework it into something different. For example, composer Laurie Anderson borrowed lyrics from an opera and incorporated them into her song "O Superman," a minimalist piece of music with an electronic sound; this is one way in which postmodern artists use appropriation to create.

Postmodernism

Art is probably the most omnipresent postmodernist vehicle with the greatest variability. Postmodernists lashed out against Modernism with an explosion of art of numerous different mediums. The style of postmodern art is difficult to describe with one holistic summarization, so it is easiest to think of the style as a joining together of various art forms used throughout art’s history; the goal of postmodern art is to separate the works as far away as possible from the monotony and blandness of modernist art, so all forms of art come together to create visually stimulating, unique, and original pieces of appropriated art. The overall impression of postmodern art is one of pastiche and appropriation, often promoting parody or irony. It also aims to blur the boundaries between high art and low art.

Barbara Kruger is an example of a postmodern artist; her magazine cutout-like pieces speak for issues of the self and identity. Kruger worked for a fashion magazine, and her art pieces incorporate appropriated media images with strong, pithy phrases that often relate to objectification of women and other cultural issues that women face.

Installation art pieces are also prevalent in the postmodern art world. Jenny Holzer’s installation art displays textual messages she calls “truisms,” short phrases similar to Kruger’s work, with channels often used by the media such as billboards or LED signs. Holzer’s work, much like all installation pieces, is conceptual and doesn’t require much craftsmanship; installation artists typically use manufactured or found objects, which is a popular Postmodernist feature.

Andy Warhol is often considered a pop artist, but his work loudly speaks to the intentions of postmodernism as well. He is perhaps best known for his multi-colored and repetitive images. Warhol’s main objective in his art pieces was to mimic the pervasiveness of the media in culture, and demonstrate how the amount of cultural images produced is so overwhelming that there is tendency to feel affectless toward them. Because of this objective, Warhol appropriates iconic cultural images, of objects or of people, in his art which creates a very postmodern feel. Warhol’s work also speaks to the postmodern art trends in that he tried to display a sense of cool, as opposed to being hot and full of feeling, which was such a Modernist theme.

http://www.wsu.edu/~lauren_clark/pomoart.html