Global Modern and Contemporary Art
Art History 1019 Introduction to Global Modern and Contemporary Art 25 April 2016 Take—Home Final Exam *Due Thursday 12 May by 5pm (please send to TA via email attachment in Microsoft Word)
Please respond to any TWO of the following questions with essays of approximately 1,000words. Your exam as a whole, then, should be about 2,000 words in length.Essays must draw on course lectures, discussions, and readings. Please cite course readings with parenthetical documentation of author and page numbers and append a bibliography of works cited at the end of the document. Formatting of bibliographical entries should follow the format used on your course syllabus. For authors by whom we read more than one essay, if you are referring to both contributions in parenthetical documentation, utilize publication dates to indicate the specific essay: for example, Smith 1998 or Smith 2011.
1. Analyze the oeuvres of three contemporary artists or artist groups for whom a particular modern artist is centrally important. Why is the contemporary artist or artist group drawn to the modern artist in question? What does the contemporary artist/artist group embrace in their modernist forebear, and what do they reject? Which modernist approaches and ideas transcendtime and cultural space most readily? Which are most resistant to importation or translation?
2. We have encountered a range of artists interested in language during the second half of the semester. How have contemporary practitioners worked with, against, and across languages? Choose five contemporary artworks dealing with spoken or written language and explain how they relate to their makers’ ideals, artistic investments, and the cultural situations from which they come or in which they have been working. 3. In the second part of this course we have also studied a variety of temporal frameworks for understanding contemporary art. When is contemporary art? In your essay please address at least three of the temporal models about which we have learned and discuss artists, artworks, and scholarly writings pertaining to each.4. There are a number of historical and art historical events that have been used to mark theboundary between modern and contemporary art. Select one such event and explain how art making and the art world have changed as a result of it. Provide five examples of contemporary artworks or artistic phenomena that have been shaped by the event, analyzing in detail how a given work and the event are interrelated.5. Many contemporary artists address global capitalism in their works. Some engagements are rather positive, some primarily negative, while others are more ambivalent. Identify an artist corresponding to each of these three dispositions and explain how their production speaks to global capitalism. Which of the artists we have studied is most successful in interrogating global capitalism? What are the most useful tools or concepts you learned in the course for thinking about contemporary art and capitalism?
