Welcome to Modern Art & Ideas! This course is designed for anyone interested in learning more about modern and contemporary art. Over the next five weeks, you will look at art through a variety of themes: Places & Spaces, Art & Identity, Transforming Everyday Objects, and Art & Society. Each week kicks off with a video that connects works of art from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection to the theme. You will hear audio interviews with artists, designers, and curators and learn more about selected works in the additional readings and resources. Throughout this course you will discover how artists: -- represent place and take inspiration from their environment, -- create works of art to express, explore, and question identity, -- use everyday objects to challenge assumptions about what constitutes a work of art and how it should be made, -- and respond to the social, cultural, and political issues of their time through works of art. Through the discussion forum prompts and peer review assignment, you will also have the opportunity to connect with other learners and explore how these themes resonate with your own life and experience.
Art & Society
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來自 The Museum of Modern Art 的課程
Modern Art & Ideas
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Module 5: Art & Society
Explore works of art created in response to the social, cultural, and political issues of their time. Gain a deeper understanding of history and contemporary society. Be encouraged to think critically about world events and how they are depicted.
與講師見面
Lisa MazzolaAssistant Director, School and Teacher Programs
Department of Education
We often think of the art world as separate from the real world.
This is rarely the case.
This video is called Art and Society, a theme we will explore using three works.
It's 1934, the height of the Great Depression.
Dorothea Lange was running a successful portrait studio in Berkeley, California.
The photographs she took of the social elite made her a good living.
[MUSIC]
But when she looked out her window,
she couldn't ignore that people were struggling.
>> We can't escape what's happening around us.
The theme of society allows you the opportunity to think more critically about
where is something coming from, and what's that point of view.
>> Lange left the studio and took her camera on the road.
Hired by a New Deal program, Lange travelled up and down California.
She was documenting the lives of the states newest residents, migrant workers.
Lange was driving back to San Francisco after a long assignment.
She saw a pea-pickers camp but kept driving.
20 miles down the road something made her turn around.
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet.
The family had arrived at the camp only to learn that the crop had been
destroyed by rain.
They were stranded along with 2,500 other migrants with no work and no food.
Lange took only six photos.
She sent her negatives off to Washington and within days,
supplies were rushed to the area.
The story, along with one of her photos, was printed in the San Francisco News.
The picture caught the public eye.
Lange’s final image did more than tell the story of government aid.
It connected with people.
It was republished.
It was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art.
>> Here we are, decades and decades later, but we really understand, or
can imagine, what that experience must have been like
in a way that is really tangible something that we can really relate to.
[MUSIC]
>> It's 1967 and America's involvement with Vietnam is escalating.
[MUSIC]
Declared the living room war, there was no escaping Vietnam.
[MUSIC]
[NOISE] Well, almost no escaping.
>> This broadcast has been brought to you by.
>> Actually adds body.
>> Drive a car.
>> But the 197- >> Lemon refresh Mr. Clean gets the dirt.
>> Martha Rosler was dumb-founded.
How could Americans be interested with the war one moment and
interested in a couch the next?
[MUSIC]
So she combined them.
To her they were inseparable.
She used magazines that came into the American household every day and
called the series House Beautiful, Bringing the War Home.
[MUSIC]
We need to constantly question becoming passive consumers of images to always look
to the margins.
What is it telling us not only by what's in the frame but
also what is the frame and what's behind the frame.
[MUSIC]
In 1991, New York was facing a different conflict.
>> The AIDS crisis was very much part of this political landscape that
was very much in conflict.
>> Where does he get off taking our tax money to promote homosexuality?
>> Politics will help cure aids.
Not doing anything but killing Americans.
>> So Felix Gonzalez Torres hangs two clocks on the wall.
There is never such a thing as an apolitical or inert artwork.
People were fearful and angry.
>> Gonzalez Torres used simple imagery as response to the era's uncertainty.
He used light bulbs, he used candy, he used clocks.
Two clocks touching set to the same time, that gradually go out of sync.
It could be circumstance or it could be sickness and
disease that suddenly brings you out of sync with something or someone.
It doesn't kinda hit you over the head right away.
It allows you to kinda linger there for a minute.
Its subtlety is its power.
Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Martha Rosler's House Beautiful Bringing
the War Home, and Felix Gonzales Torres, Untitled Perfect Lovers.
