Module 1: Collage

Introduction

Collage is an artistic composition made from various materials — paper, cloth, wood, photographic fragments, and the detritus of everyday life — glued or otherwise affixed to a surface. As both a technique and a conceptual framework, it has been one of the most persistently generative methods in modern and contemporary art. This module traces the history of collage from its origins in early twentieth-century Cubist experimentation through the politically charged photomontages of the Dada movement, into the mass-culture commentary of Pop Art, and finally to a selection of contemporary practitioners whose work extends and complicates the form. Understanding collage means understanding how artists exploit the gap between the recognizable source material and the new meaning produced by its displacement and recombination.

Conceptual Background: From Cubism to the Present

The technique of modern collage owes its discovery to the French Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, working together at the beginning of the twentieth century. Before Cubism, painters were typically concerned with representing three-dimensional space by converting objects into basic geometric forms — cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders — so that the illusion of depth could appear on the flat canvas. During the 1900s and 1910s, Picasso and Braque began to interrogate these carefully constructed illusions of perspective. Rather than attempting to represent three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, they flattened three dimensions into two and painted the result. The object could be seen from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, overlapping and intersecting on the canvas in what became known as analytical Cubism — an approach that was, by the standards of the time, extremely abstract.

Further experimentation led to synthetic Cubism, in which the artist’s focus shifted from representing existing objects to constructing new ones within the composition. It was through this synthesis that artists began to incorporate actual physical materials into the painted surface: paper scraps, fabric, woven wicker, and other found textures. These early works were in many ways still paintings, but with collaged elements woven through them. This integration of heterogeneous materials into the picture plane had a profound influence on the avant-garde art scene throughout Europe and Russia.

Toward the end of the First World War, Europe was in shambles. In response to the destruction, death, and political upheaval, another group of artists — the Dadaists — took up and radicalized the collage techniques pioneered by the Cubists. The philosophy of Dada was a reaction to the horrible spectacle of war and constituted less a formal movement than a loose international grouping organized around city-specific clusters: the Paris group, the Zurich group, the New York group, and the Berlin group, among others. Where Picasso and Braque had generally been interested in still-life subject matter, the Dadaists used collage to create purposefully anti-rational works that defied the formal qualities accepted as art at the time, often carrying explicit political and anti-war agendas.

Important members of the Dada movement included Hannah Höch of the Berlin group, Kurt Schwitters of the Hanover Dadaists, and Max Ernst of the Cologne group. It was common for Dada artists to use collage as their preferred method precisely because the materials defied the notion of traditional art objects — paint and canvas gave way to waste paper, transportation tickets, candy wrappers, and other mundane items, which together communicated the absurdity of placing elevated value on art objects. The use of collage was especially important for the Berlin group, for whom it became an indispensable medium for criticizing the failure of the Weimar Republic, the chaos wrought by the First World War, and the later rise of the Nazi Party.

It was the Berlin Dada group, and Hannah Höch in particular, that pioneered the use of photographs in Dada collages, giving rise to a specific form known as photomontage. This technique used photographs and photographic reproductions from the mass media — newspapers, illustrated magazines — to comment on and criticize the ravages of modernity and the reach of government propaganda.

Collage continued as a vital art form into the 1950s and was adopted by artists working within Pop Art movements in both America and Europe. One of the earliest works considered to be a Pop Art piece was a collage titled Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Home So Different, So Appealing? by English artist Richard Hamilton, in which magazine images of then-modern consumer products and idealized bodies are assembled to comment on the fallacy of a better world promised by postwar consumer culture. Other members of the Pop movement who used collage include Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein, for instance, used collaged elements to establish patterning within figurative or semi-figurative images — an approach that emphasized the surface rather than the illusionistic layering typically associated with collage. The Pop artists used collage to comment on a rapidly changing Western culture shaped by television, mass production, American consumerism, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Collage remains an important and evolving art form, visible in works like David Hockney’s Polaroid photomontages and Kara Walker’s use of stenciling alongside cut paper.

Artist Sections

Isabel Martinez

Martinez’s photographic series exploits the formal logic of collage at the point of image capture rather than after the fact. In her series, two different photographs are joined vertically within a single frame using in-camera masks, creating a disorienting push and pull between foreground and background. As she has written, the scenes are brought together but never completely blended, and the resulting work constantly shifts the viewer’s focus between competing subjects, juxtaposing senses of leisure with landscape. Martinez dissects time by splicing images precisely — discarding half of each and combining the remaining halves — so that two separate narratives are legible within a single photograph. The intervals between them ensure that the images do not blend together; they remain distinct even as they occupy the same frame.

Louise Noguchi

Noguchi’s collage practice involves photographing herself in the same pose as a found photograph of a criminal or victim, then weaving together her own portrait and the found photograph into a single image. The resulting photographs mix gender and race; the innocent and the guilty are intermingled and identities are thoroughly blurred, leaving an androgynous and anonymous portrait. While it might appear that these images were made on a computer, they are in fact constructed from cut-up strips of printed photographs that have been physically woven together — a painstaking analogue process that produces an uncanny digital-looking result.

Hannah Höch

Höch was the sole female member of the Berlin Dada group, and arguably the most influential member in terms of using collage and photomontage — a fact that was largely overlooked until relatively recently. She adopted photomontage as her working methodology, and much of her art focused on questions of female identity. Unlike many of her male counterparts in the Berlin Dada group, Höch’s compositions are highly unified and contain a great deal of formal balance. The images assembled from fragments appear timeless, and her work consists of abstractions of known images as well as collections of symbols placed together despite their disparate source material and sometimes conflicting socio-political concepts.

Her series from the late 1920s, From the Ethnographic Museum, explored concepts of colonial expansionism and the exoticism of primitive cultures. In these photomontages, Höch mixes ethnographic artifacts with women’s body parts to make work about the alienation, idealization, and trivialization of non-Western cultures. Her work critically interrogates both colonial power relations and the gendered structures of the Weimar-era mass media from which she drew her source material.

Wangechi Mutu

Working with packing tape, fur, and found medical illustrations, Mutu’s collages address the misrepresentation and oppression of women. As an African-born woman, she is particularly concerned with African politics and colonialism. In her series Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumor, she uses nineteenth-century European medical diagrams as a basis for invented portraiture. The original illustrations, symbolic of colonial power, suggest a wide range of cultural preconceptions — from the supposed superiority of European scientific knowledge to the classification of nature and, by extension, race into genealogical hierarchies.

Mutu mixes images from popular fashion, pornographic magazines, ethnographic publications, and early medical diagrams with inks, paints, and other found materials. One work uses collage to create racial distortions that contrast the differences between stereotypes and the idealized image of a woman; the title of another derives from the original title of the medical diagram it covers — Adult Female Sexual Organs — raising the question of what may be considered arbitrarily taboo about women’s bodies in different cultures. The distorted heads paired with photographic eyes and noses function like masks, suggesting that women are those members of a culture who most often come to wear masks, literally or figuratively. Physical disease becomes a metaphor for social corruption.

Jennifer Murphy

Murphy’s collages are made from her own collection of old books, encyclopedias, and magazines, each image cut out by hand and then saved and filed away until she finds a use for it. In her work, all sorts of birds, snakes, dogs, and flowers are hand-stitched together to form skulls. These skulls are not glued onto a surface; they are more like two-dimensional sculptures that hang on a wall, fragile and intricate, referencing anthropological methodologies and scientific systems for the classification of life. The collages appear to be about the relationship between life and death: symbols of life come together to create a symbol of death. This meticulous process results in very fragile-looking compositions that simultaneously invoke and critique the scientific impulse to order and classify.

Key Takeaways for Practice

Collage is a language loosely constructed from recognizable symbols, photographs, textures, objects, and the ephemera of everyday life, and it plays on the viewer’s understanding of those source materials to produce new meaning. Artists working with collage are aware that the reading of the source material inflects the reading of the finished work, and they use this dynamic to draw their audience in. Collage can take many formal configurations — from highly chaotic compositions where pieces overlap with a sense of fury, to highly ordered arrangements that build new figurative images from disparate fragments, to systematic processes of weaving that reveal something new in the conjunction. The fundamental insight of collage is that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Module 2: Analogue to Digital

Introduction

This module situates the practice of digital imaging within the longer history of photography, tracing a line from the earliest camera-less photographic processes of the nineteenth century through the twentieth-century avant-garde’s experiments with light and paper, and into the digital revolution that has transformed the tools and conditions of image-making over the past three decades. The central formal exercise introduced by the module — the “phony photogram” — purposefully places Photoshop in the context of photographic process, bridging the digital and analogue worlds by asking students to simulate, through digital means, one of photography’s most elemental techniques.

Conceptual Background: Photography and the Darkroom

A photogram is a photographic print made by placing an arrangement of objects onto photosensitive paper and exposing the paper to light, yielding an image of ghostly silhouettes floating in a void of darkened space. The first photogram was probably made around 1802. Unlike conventional photography, the photogram process requires no camera; the print is the direct result of the object’s shadow on the light-sensitive surface, capturing the silhouette of the object but none of its inner details — a constraint that can result in exquisitely beautiful and complex imagery.

Although analogue photographic techniques using film and chemicals have been in existence for more than 160 years, it has taken no more than twenty years for digital processes to replace most wet physical darkrooms. Instead of enlargers, chemicals, photographic paper, and film negatives, the contemporary digital studio is equipped with computers, monitors, hard drives, and portable storage. The few surviving analogue labs and darkrooms are generally found in art schools and professional photo labs. The beginning of the digital revolution in imaging can be traced to the 1960s, with the development of electronic image sensors. By the 1990s, the falling cost of these sensors had led to devices capable of recording millions of pixels, precipitating the consumer introduction of digital cameras and transforming everyday photographic practice.

At the same time, Adobe was developing the software that would become the dominant tool of digital image editing. Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990, and since then Adobe has released numerous successive versions of the software, each offering new tools, approaches, and innovations. Although Photoshop is a digital program, it is intrinsically linked to photography and photographic processes: many of its tools and effects have their roots in analogue darkroom practice. Curves, levels, the unsharp mask, overlaying images, adding textures, and retouching — all of these capabilities in Photoshop are derived from or reference analogue photographic techniques. Before the digital revolution, image manipulation was done by hand in the darkroom or at a desk by a retoucher, sometimes using an airbrush.

There are important conceptual differences that define the distinction between analogue and digital image-making. The digital process is fundamentally based on the multiple and the copy: there is no degradation in the act of copying, because the digital process converts visual information to numbers. In analogue photography, by contrast, there is a great deal more variability. The process takes considerably longer to produce an image compared to the near-instantaneous download of a digital camera file, and every copy introduces some degree of generational loss. Electronic images can be easily stored, manipulated, and endlessly reproduced. These differences are not merely technical — they carry profound implications for how we understand authorship, authenticity, and the material conditions of the image.

Photograms were part of an early stage in the evolution of chemical photography, initially used as a tool for scientific classification. As the process became less useful for this purpose, it was replaced by more sophisticated forms of photography and mechanical reproduction, and the making of photograms migrated into the realm of art-making. It is likely that photograms will very soon become an abandoned technology: while still practiced today by a number of artists, the availability of computers and software like Photoshop — which is capable of creating similar effects with greater efficiency — means that photograms are increasingly a dying art form.

Artist Sections

Anna Atkins

Atkins was a British botanist and photographer whose work represents one of the earliest and most remarkable bodies of photograms ever made. Her photographs of British algae, made in 1843, are considered to be the first photographic works ever produced by a woman, and the book in which they appeared — Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions — was the first book produced entirely by photographic means. Atkins used the cyanotype process, a variant of photogram technique, to create blueprints of plant specimens found in the sea. The resulting images, with their delicate lines and luminous silhouettes against a deep Prussian blue, demonstrate that the photogram technique, despite capturing only the outline of an object and none of its inner detail, can produce imagery of extraordinary beauty and scientific precision.

László Moholy-Nagy

Moholy-Nagy was an important artist, photographer, and designer working during the first half of the twentieth century who explored photography in a wide variety of ways. His approach was shaped by modernist ideas of formalism — about design, light, and time. In his photogram work (which he called Photograms or Fotograms), he exploited the graphic potential of the technique: even in a seemingly simple image of a single object, his compositions reveal strong graphic structure, interesting cropping, and a sense of time played out in the light and dark of the image. The strong contrast of light alongside subtle gradations of darkness adds depth to what the photogram technique usually produces as a flat composition. Moholy-Nagy understood the photogram not merely as a record of an object’s outline but as an exploration of light itself as a medium.

Contemporary Photogram Practice

Contemporary artists continue to find expressive possibilities in the photogram technique, demonstrating how ordinary objects can become thoroughly abstracted through this process. A contemporary example — photograms of lemon slices — illustrates how the technique can make the completely familiar unrecognizable: without the title Lemons Photogram, one might read the images as jellyfish or blood cells rather than citrus fruit. In such works, the composition itself matters enormously: the movement and depth produced by having some objects soft and out of focus, combined with cropping that allows forms to bleed off the edge of the frame, produces an image that is formally sophisticated while remaining indexically tied to the mundane.

Key Takeaways for Practice

Digital imaging is best understood not as a break from photographic tradition but as an extension and transformation of it. The tools of Photoshop carry within them the memory of the darkroom: the curve adjustment echoes the photographer’s hand in the developer tray; the dodge and burn tools recall the photographic printer masking the enlarger’s beam. Understanding where digital tools come from illuminates what they are capable of and how they can be used with intentionality and historical awareness.

Module 3: Defining Space

Introduction

This module addresses the construction and manipulation of pictorial space in visual art, shifting attention away from the concrete immediate world and asking instead how artists represent, deny, exploit, or complicate the spatial dimensions of the two-dimensional surface. Space is a part of formal design that is easy to take for granted, and yet its manipulation has always contributed centrally to the aesthetics and meaning of an image. Students of drawing and painting will already be familiar with the vocabulary of perspective, negative and positive space, and pictorial space; this module extends that vocabulary by examining a range of historical and contemporary works in which the treatment of space is the primary conceptual and formal concern.

Conceptual Background: Flat Space and Recessive Space

The history of pictorial space in Western art can be broadly organized around two poles. On one side is flat pictorial space, in which the two-dimensionality of the surface is acknowledged, exploited, or insisted upon rather than denied. On the other is recessive space, in which the artist uses perspective, foreshortening, tonal graduation, and other techniques to create the illusion that the surface opens onto a three-dimensional world. Both approaches have their own histories, their own aesthetic logics, and their own expressive possibilities. Many of the most interesting works of art hold these two tendencies in tension, creating images that simultaneously invoke and undermine the viewer’s spatial expectations.

The construction of recessive pictorial space as we know it is largely a Renaissance achievement. It was during the Renaissance period, when a wealth of scientific discovery and rediscovery was being made in Europe, that the use of perspective and high realism became the dominant mode. The influence of optics, including the study of lenses, shaped the art of the time and led to works of extraordinary illusionistic power. In contrast, earlier European Gothic painting, like earlier Japanese woodblock printing, tended to suggest narrative rather than realistic representation — perspective was crude and underdeveloped, with no real vanishing point, used simply to add objects to a story rather than to create the sensation of inhabiting a three-dimensional world.

Artist Sections

Katsushika Hokusai

Hokusai was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter, and printmaker of the Edo period, best known for his extensive series of woodblock prints dealing with Mount Fuji as a subject. The most iconic of these prints, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, has become an internationally recognizable image. Woodblock prints of this period are characteristically graphic, featuring extreme flat areas of vibrant color, asymmetrical compositions, and a nearly complete absence of naturalistic perspective and cast shadow. There is, however, in some of these prints, a suggestion of foreground and background: a mountain clearly recedes, a figure on the shoreline occupies the foreground. Yet the flat graphic style denies where one spatial zone ends and the next begins, and the middle ground is often simply absent. These prints are somewhat like visual inventories of a scene rather than true depictions of naturalistic perspective space.

Roy Lichtenstein

Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein drew his sources from comic books, magazines, newspaper advertisements, and the Sunday funny pages, and his painting style was modeled after the appearance of print media. His canvases are characterized by bold outlines, Ben-Day dots, and colors that lack any gradations — they are fully flat. Without the tonal gradation that normally serves as a visual cue for depth, the suggestion of three-dimensionality is suppressed. Closely cropped compositions with little negative space further deny the illusory depth that painting conventionally provides, reinforcing the idea that space on a two-dimensional surface is always just an illusion and paying homage to the print-media sources from which his imagery derives.

Christian Schwarzwald

Schwarzwald’s large-scale wall painting consists of little more than a series of lines — some parallel and perpendicular, some at oblique angles. What is remarkable is how the brain attempts to make sense of them by reading three-dimensional forms: cubes and cuboids, box shapes, some with patterned marks suggesting interior contents. Schwarzwald has, however, deliberately installed these lines in the corner of a room, so that if the forms were genuinely three-dimensional, they would be touching at one end. This contextual cue forces the viewer to realize they cannot be three-dimensional, despite the brain’s insistence. By subverting a three-dimensional optical illusion we habitually seek in images, the artist denies recessive space in favor of a flat compositional surface.

Daniel Hafner

Hafner’s morpho-transformations are created from computer-generated imagery and present optical illusions that we read as three-dimensional objects. A vibrating unity of horizontal lines creates a visually flat plane of pattern — no space is indicated at all. It is only when lines are bent that viewers misconstrue this as movement out from the surface of the flat plane. Even simple changes in the direction of lines and the placement of colors are enough for the brain to read space where there is none. Hafner’s series is unsettling precisely because we know, rationally, that the lines cannot be springing forth from the surface, despite what they appear to do.

Manfred Mohr

Mohr is considered a pioneer of digital art, having used computers to make art since the late 1960s — long before tools like Photoshop existed, and at a time when computers were thought of exclusively as instruments of business and scientific research. His work references geometry, logic, and mathematics; he uses custom-authored algorithms and software to generate his artwork, and he is interested in lines, planes, and the relationships between them. Works from his series Color Space and Half Planes are two-dimensional renderings of six-dimensional shapes known as hypercubes. Though the mathematics behind such processes is considerable, the images are rendered so that viewers can only catch a glimpse of the full form with limited visual capacity. His automatic works produce compositions that alternate negative and positive flat space — black, white, and color function interchangeably as either, depending on how the viewer reads them — creating works with multiple readings that shift over time.

Lorenzetti Pietro

Although this fourteenth-century Gothic painting makes some attempt to represent architectural form, it exhibits a fairly shallow sense of pictorial space. Much like the early Japanese prints discussed earlier, this European Gothic work was meant to suggest a narrative rather than a naturalistic representation of a scene. While there is some effort to add perspective to the image, it is crude and underdeveloped — there is no real vanishing point for the viewer’s eye to be fooled by, and the monastery depicted is simply used to add an object to the story.

Antonio da Correggio

In contrast to the Gothic work, Correggio’s ceiling fresco at the Cathedral of Parma represents an extreme of illusionistic perspective — portraying upward movement using the techniques introduced during the Renaissance period, including foreshortening and a central vanishing point. Painted on the inner surface of a dome, the composition is very complex and suggests figures receding as if positioned higher and higher up into the heavens, far above the actual physical surface. The use of perspective here is a form of virtuosic illusion designed to erase the boundary between the painted surface and the architectural space it inhabits.

Bridget Riley

Riley’s painting creates an optical illusion of movement using changes in the value and size of dots to produce what appears to be a lit, bending surface. Her work belongs to the genre known as Op Art, which was popular during the 1960s and uses illusionistic tricks to confuse or manipulate the viewer’s eye. The dots appear to warp into the middle of the picture, as if the canvas surface had been bent or creased inward — an effect achieved simply by varying the size and tone of the marks. The fame of these artworks epitomized a way in which art reached a wider audience in the 1960s and influenced fashion and visual culture beyond the gallery.

Denyse Thomasos

Thomasos constructs projected fragmented space by building environments of overlapping lattices. Her content is political, referencing concrete structures like jails and addressing issues such as slavery. The work appears architectural and operates at very large scale — these are in reality very large works on paper. Within a single image, there is not one continuous space but many smaller spaces created by the overlapping lines; while many vertical lines run through the composition, the horizontal lines are skewed to meet at wide angles to each other. This produces something resembling a form of two-point perspective, except that many two-point perspective images inhabit the same surface simultaneously. The result creates the sensation of being able to move in and out of certain places in the image and explore around corners.

David Schnell

Schnell is a contemporary German painter who has created the illusion of deep space using one-point perspective. The extreme perspective he employs suggests artificial reality or the experience of looking through a lens. The eye travels back into receding, diminishing space much further than it should be able to, and the subject matter — a disorderly world in which near-photorealistic textures and colors appear dystopian — amplifies the sense of unease. The apparent emptiness of his painted spaces suggests an absence of something important; his use of warped linear perspective and the vanishing point gives the picture pictorial order while remaining deeply foreboding. In other works, Schnell paints strong compositions involving a dynamic collision of linear forms intersecting with each other — more abstract and less realistic, with a dreamlike quality, though still using a semi-realistic perspective.

Julie Mehretu

Mehretu works with abstraction but consistently references architecture and cities. There is a compression of time, place, and space in her compositions that becomes apparent when examining her elements of geometric abstraction. Her work is highly gestural and dynamic and is executed with more line than mass. The drawing often seems to take on an aerial perspective as if viewed from above, and she uses very different perspectival registers in the same image to keep her audiences guessing — yet they tend to resolve, after a period of looking, into something vast, like networks of streets and buildings seen from altitude.

Matthew Ritchie

Ritchie is a painter, sculptor, and new media artist who focuses on the ways people understand — and fail to understand — the universe. His work combines figuration (realistic forms we consider real) with abstraction (non-realistic forms we consider imaginary), using scientific imagery to generate compositions that reference space that is simultaneously flat and perspectival. Certain areas of color seem to twist and bend in space while a cloud of abstract shapes appears to hover above the canvas as if painted elements were suspended in fluid.

Key Takeaways for Practice

Space in an image is an illusion: it does not exist, but we understand the world we live in through three dimensions, and our perceptions can be manipulated into seeing space where there is none. Artists throughout history have experimented with a variety of methods to accommodate, subvert, or complicate this need to understand spatial relationships. The illusion of space can be achieved through line, pattern, shape, color, or all of the above. Understanding which tools produce which spatial effects — and choosing to use or withhold them deliberately — is central to the practice of visual art.

Module 4: The Power of Type

Introduction

This module addresses the incorporation of language and text into contemporary visual art, exploring the use of written words as a visual element in artistic practice. The idea of taking language and text as material for design is something we encounter every day, especially in popular media and advertising. Just as text and language convey messages of consumption through the logos and slogans of popular culture and commercial products, visual artists have used text as a method of conveying ideas and concepts that exceed what image alone can say. The artists examined here approach text from a variety of angles: some exploit the visual properties of letterforms independently of their semantic content; others collapse the distinction between seeing and reading; still others treat language as a found or appropriated object whose agreed-upon meanings can be radically shifted by very small changes.

Conceptual Background: Language and Conceptual Art

Language was a central concern for the conceptual artists working during the 1960s and early 1970s. Conceptual art, which bases its practice on concepts or ideas rather than traditional art materials or literal representation, often investigates the relationship and connections between text and language. One useful frame for understanding this relationship is the readymade — objects appropriated and used in a way other than their intended purpose. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is the most recognizable example: a mass-manufactured urinal on which he has signed the name of a fictional individual, R. Mutt, in order to make a statement about the role of the artist and the question of authorship. Similarly, the use of text as a readymade or found object exploits the fact that words are loaded with meaning and can be appropriated or remodeled. Words have an agreed-upon significance between people, but their meanings can be altered in major ways by very minor changes — a different typeface, a different color, a different spatial arrangement. In the examples of contemporary art in this module, text is given sculptural or painterly form; it is dissected and pulled apart, treated critically and playfully, used in a confessional manner or through references to popular culture.

Artist Sections

Kevin Schmidt

Schmidt’s work includes a billboard installed on the seasonal ice floes of Tuktoyaktuk, in Canada’s far north. The message on the billboard is taken from the Book of Revelation and has been rendered in all capitals, giving the text a commanding sensibility. Certain words are larger and carry more impact and emphasis, while the tightly packed smaller words suggest urgency by filling in all of the negative space, amplifying the end-of-the-world message. The artist installed this work so that it would eventually drift into the Arctic Ocean. The concept of setting a sign bearing an end-of-the-world message adrift on an ice floe at the edge of the inhabited world is both mythic and symbolic — the rising seas of climate change literalized into the physical disappearance of the sign itself.

Allan Switzer

Switzer’s sculptural text works are executed in chrome-plated or gold-plated water jet-cut steel. His piece Crank utilizes a gothic font — dripping, melting-looking letterforms that carry the visual vocabulary of the horror genre. The text is in all capitals, which formally holds the letters together to make a shape that is both weighted and direct, authoritative and menacing. As the font’s perceived size increases with each new line, the lower lines feel more heavily weighted than those at the top, and this graphic font is purposefully paired with the highly polished, reflective surface of chrome. The question posed by the text — Imagine that I know what you need — is first amplified by the gothic lettering and then challenged by the viewer’s own mirrored reflection in the surface. The viewer is made to ask: who is asking this question? Is it the artist, the viewer themselves, or something else?

In Refreshed, Switzer uses a similar gothic font to Crank, but this time the text — Refreshingly Grotesque in a Utopian Paradigm — is gold-plated, and the presentation is asymmetrical. The text achieves an animated, almost graffiti-like quality by fitting the letters together more loosely, as if they have been placed haphazardly. This makes the viewer focus on what words like grotesque and utopian can mean in this charged aesthetic context. Think about the pairing of grotesque with the gothic font, and the pairing of utopian with the sheen of gold.

Graham Gillmore

Gillmore’s canvases incorporate a colourful, painterly approach to text. He makes use of letter forms that are loosely executed but aesthetically engaging, and the content of the work is composed of personal and public confessions, giving the work a diaristic feel reminiscent of passing notes on paper or keeping a journal. The texts are composed as internal dialogues reflecting his interests and observations of people in his life, and are overall darkly comedic. Works such as Psych Test present the viewer with an overwhelming volume of marks and text spread across the picture plane — not unlike taking an examination. After the initial chaos subsides, patterns begin to emerge: colour allows for a gestalt reading of the composition, while word bubbles become visual objects held together by a network of lines. Viewers may read the text traditionally (left to right, top to bottom), follow the network of lines from bottom to top, or find their own path and make new words in the process.

Ed Ruscha

Ruscha is an Los Angeles artist associated with the Pop movement whose work engages extensively with text and signage. When he went to art school, he anticipated becoming a sign painter or working in advertising, but instead entered fine arts — an ambiguity between commercial and fine art that his work persistently explores. His painting of the Hollywood sign is particularly instructive. Note the sepia-tone monochromatic color scheme and the significant amount of negative space surrounding the word Hollywood, which has been placed off-centre near the bottom of the overall composition. This treatment plays off the word’s enormous cultural freight — fame, wealth, crime, heat and sunshine, poverty, stardom — and subverts the usual associations. Fame becomes isolation. Heat becomes coldness. The negative space, rather than being empty, is dense with implication.

In another work, Ruscha paints an advertising slogan over a sublime mountain landscape, linking natural beauty to consumption and credit. The letters are very crisp and architectural looking, their placement precise and mimicking the structure of an advertisement. The question it poses — Is everything for sale? What exactly are they selling? — is embedded in the formal language of the thing it critiques. Ruscha has said: I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again. This oscillation between semantic and visual registers is the characteristic movement of all his text-based work.

Christopher Wool

Wool’s large-scale stenciled text paintings consist of large blocky letters — the kind of text you would see in commercial sign painting — broken up across the canvas and made difficult to read. The source of the text for his most famous work, Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids, is from the film Apocalypse Now, and the fragmented presentation of this already evocative text adds layers of urgency and instability to the message. In other paintings, Wool omits vowel sounds, spelling trouble as TRBL and drink as DRNK — and yet it is still possible to interpret the text after adjusting for the discrepancies, which raises questions about how our brains process text and how that processing relates to the formation of language. In later works, Wool moves further from legibility, using stamps and mark-making that reference typographic elements — HTML code, proofreader’s marks, Morse code, graffiti tags — so that text begins to function as pure visual field rather than semantic content.

Kay Rosen

Rosen’s work distills the text-based practice to its most architecturally precise expression. As she has written: I love the shape of the letters. They are the architecture of text. Her installations use bold type in all capitals, painted in latex directly on the wall. With no other visual elements beside the typeface itself, she uses subtle methods to reinforce what we expect a word to mean while simultaneously deconstructing its construction. In Blurred, the letters BLU are painted blue and the letters RED are painted red, and the shared R wraps around the inside corner of a wall, comparing the design of letters with the design of architecture. The letters become inseparable from the space they inhabit; they almost seem to hold the wall together. In Intersection, the words HORIZONTAL and VERTICAL are painted on a wall so that their respective letter I’s cross at an exact intersection — the fourth letter of HORIZONTAL and the fifth of VERTICAL — creating an X-and-Y axis. Verticality and horizontality, as abstract ideas used to position all things in space, are here given literal visual form that also raises questions about what the words and the hypothetical lines they represent actually mean.

Douglas Coupland

Coupland’s series known as the Penguin works uses a cut-and-paste collage aesthetic to bring together old mass-produced Penguin book covers, sticky letters used for DIY signs, tape, and varnish into mixed-media compositions. The palette stays in the realm of print — black, white, red, and shades between — and the use of different-sized readymade letters gives the composition and its reading an abstract quality. The eye has to work to compose the words that Coupland has spelled out. These collages, originally shown in an exhibition called The Penguins, examine a period in human history when the mass-market novel carried a different cultural weight than it does today.

Lawrence Weiner

Weiner is closely associated with his founding role in the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and has used language as a material for making art since 1967. He is known for replacing physical objects with text in the presentation of his work, and he manages to relate the content of each piece without specifying any of its physical qualities while still leaving the audience with a clear understanding of his intent. His installation Offsides, painted on a wall in a gallery courtyard, uses two vertical lines to bracket the text and establish boundaries, allowing him to create what might be called conceptual sculptures — works open to vast interpretation that would be limited if rendered as actual physical objects. As critic Lynn Cooke has written, in language Weiner found a medium for representing material relationships in the external world in as objective a manner as possible, eliminating all references to authorial subjectivity and all traces of the artist’s hand.

Ken Lum

Lum’s works Please Leave (2001) and Hanoi Travel (2000) both feature the kind of everyday signage found outside small local businesses — the movable plastic letter signs that can be rearranged by hand. In his early years, Lum worked with a neighbor who was a sign painter; he did not photograph existing signs but actually constructed them. What is extraordinary about his work is the way he mixes commercial signage and public messages with private narratives to create an ambiguous reading, displaying messages infused with the unexpected — tragedy, humor, ironic subject matter. The juxtaposition of small business sign formats with personal and sometimes devastating messages reveals hidden meanings and taboos that people often try to ignore. They show the viewer two sides of the world simultaneously: the public facade and the private experience. The irony of seeing something like Disneyland Fun in the Sun alongside The People’s War, or finding parallels between the language of financial consultancy and the language of threat, is carefully constructed from the simplest possible visual materials.

Key Takeaways for Practice

In all of these examples, it becomes clear that text can function in many ways as a visual element. When working with text, it is important to carefully consider choices and to understand the different treatments — color, font, orientation, letter spacing, weight, balance, and negative space — and the effects each will have. Due to its strong cultural presence and semantic loading, text can impact the reading of a work in drastic or subtle ways.

Module 5: Culture Jamming

Introduction

Culture jamming is the practice of exposing the truths behind commercial commodity culture and corporate strategies, directing the public to think critically about the messages that brands and advertising companies target them with. Culture jammers modify identifiable logos, reconfigure advertisements, and change billboards to alter the meaning and context of those messages. Jammers are socially and politically motivated; they frequently use parody and humor when altering existing ads, turning the high-gloss visual language of advertising back on itself to reveal its underlying assumptions and agendas. This module introduces students to major practitioners of culture jamming — from organized collectives to individual artists working in the tradition of guerrilla intervention — and examines the strategies they employ to make visible what commercial culture obscures.

Conceptual Background

Advertisements can be extraordinarily powerful because they speak in a highly developed visual language that audiences have been trained over decades to recognize and respond to. Culture jammers recognize and rely on the fact that people today are more visually sophisticated than at any previous point in history. This visual sophistication — the capacity to recognize all manner of images and to understand their references — is the result of living in an environment saturated with advertising, mass media, television, the internet, and all manner of print. Culture jammers exploit this sophistication: they use the very fluency of the audience to make visible the architecture of persuasion underlying everyday commercial imagery. By appropriating the visual language of highly recognizable ads — beautiful bodies, clear bold text, professional lighting, slick graphics — and then subverting the expected outcome, jammers rewrite the meaning of familiar images in ways that require very little additional information to decode.

Artist Sections

Adbusters

Adbusters is a not-for-profit anti-consumerist group founded in 1989 in Vancouver. Their mandate is to inspire social activism through alternative media, and they offer some of the most prolific and incisive criticisms levied against corporate culture. Their campaigns include Buy Nothing Day, in which people are asked not to purchase anything for a day, and Digital Detox Week, in which people are asked to give up television, computers, video games, cell phones, and all other digital devices for seven days. They are most famous for their spoof ads — satirical parodies of recognizable advertising campaigns.

When viewing Adbusters imagery, it becomes clear that by appropriating the visual language of existing highly recognizable ads, the collective is able to rewrite the expected outcome of the advertisement in order to shed light on the archetypal design strategies used by advertising to push a consumerist agenda. The ads make use of a combination of text and image, and it is often the subverted text that alerts viewers to the fact that they are looking at an anti-ad — partly because of how deliberately slick the anti-ad appears. While the underlying message of these anti-ads is generally very clear, they also raise questions about issues that are either glorified in traditional advertising or glossed over: anti-feminist depictions of women, unrealistic body images, the value of human life, environmental destruction, social inequality, and addiction.

Ron English

Ron English is an American artist who uses culture jamming to subvert large corporate agendas and to shed light on what he considers corporate lies. His practice involves subvertising — infiltrating existing billboards on the street, hijacking them, and replacing paid advertisements with his own artwork. He contradicts the tagline or slogan of the original ad, using characteristically altered and carefully rendered images to create signage that is equally captivating but entirely different in intent. His work is interesting not only for its imagery but for the guerrilla tactics he employs: the extra element of disrupting an existing channel of paid advertising adds a performative dimension to the work. Where Adbusters uses organized alternative print media, English’s intervention physically displaces the original advertisement and replaces it with something that occupies exactly the same space.

Billboard Liberation Front

The Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) is another counterculture organization that has worked since 1977 toward the rewriting of advertising messages to expose underlying truths. Working in a similar fashion to English’s subvertising, the BLF modifies existing billboard advertisements by painting over sections of taglines or collaging new text onto the surface with the purpose of drastically changing the intended meaning of the original advertisement. Their approach is somewhat less focused on creating entirely new images than on minimally intervening in the existing ad to reveal what was already implied. In one example, modifying an ad’s tagline to read She is a thing of beauty — removing the word beauty — creates a statement full of false ambiguity: is the man in the ad referring to the woman, or to the beer? The loss of the word beauty helps to prove what was already embedded in the original ad: that the woman was being objectified all along.

Martha Rosler

Rosler is a prolific artist who has been working since the early 1960s in media ranging from video, photography, performance, collage, and written work. Much of her practice addresses the subjugation of women, the political landscape, and the semiotics of written and body language. Transparent Box, or Vanity Fair, is part of a series of photo montages made in the early 1970s and is comprised of advertisements typically found in popular magazines sold primarily to women, combined with stark visuals taken from pornographic magazines. Using an approach reminiscent of Hannah Höch’s photomontage method, Rosler makes a statement about the absurdity of the original advertising context, in which women are photographed in their underwear in strange poses that suggest shame and cover their identities. By slightly altering the image, she makes visible what was already subliminally present in the source material.

Ellen Gallagher

Gallagher appropriates ads from vintage popular magazines and interprets them as art through the lens of race. Many of the ads she appropriates were for products marketed to African-Americans to change their appearances — wigs, skin bleaches, and other devices. Using different techniques of printmaking, including lithography, digital imaging, and collage, Gallagher covers all significant visual references to race in the ads, often leaving the copy text untouched so that the original message is now juxtaposed to an absence of racial signifiers. The collages do not simply block out racial markers; they create unusual and surreal creatures and patterning in the spaces left behind. In another work, she uses this method of erasure to take out all signifiers of race, simultaneously raising questions about how people construct their own identities and recognize the identities of others.

Key Takeaways for Practice

The strength of culture jamming as a practice lies in its use of the audience’s own visual literacy as a weapon. The more sophisticated viewers have become at reading commercial imagery, the more effective a well-executed culture jam can be. The technique also raises important questions about appropriation, parody, and the law — and about the ethics of intervening in public spaces and existing media channels.

Module 6: The Art and Act of Social and Political Engagement

Introduction

Many artists are inspired to create politically motivated works of art. The art examined in this module is both socially and politically engaged, and it actively uses a language of dissent, humor, shock, outrage, and irony to expose and discuss social injustices. Artists throughout history have used both text and image to shed light on issues including war, corporate greed, the AIDS epidemic, gender inequality, genocide, poverty, racial persecution, sexual repression, environmental destruction, and government propaganda. The works examined here span a range of media — painting, collage, photography, poster design, text-based installation — but they are unified by the fact that many of them have either existed as political posters or lend themselves to that form. Posters have been and continue to be an important method for raising public awareness of social injustices, and their low cost of manufacture and easy distribution make them an appealing form for artists whose intent is to raise questions about the world we live in.

Conceptual Background: Art and Political Protest

Since the development of reproduction technologies like printing presses, posters have been a primary channel for disseminating both propaganda and protest. Even in the age of computers and digital communication, printed posters remain an important method for delivering a message. Their reproducibility, their lack of required user interaction, and the authenticity that audiences project onto them means that posters still serve a vital function in public culture and many artists, activists, and socially motivated individuals remain very aware of this. They are part of the language of dissent.

Artist Sections

Pablo Picasso

Picasso created Guernica (1937) to bring attention to the fascist bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica by German and Italian warplanes during the Spanish Civil War. The painting represents the suffering of civilians and the tragedy of war, and has since become an internationally recognized anti-war symbol. Painted in black, white, and gray — to make the subject matter feel more somber — the composition demands that the audience work very hard to decipher what they are looking at. Picasso allows the shapes making up the composition to mingle and merge, creating other shapes and figures in the negative spaces. This overwhelmingly dense composition, in which twisted human and animal figures and forms are fused together, feels horrific and unnatural in ways that are inseparable from its subject matter.

The Vietnam War Poster

The anti-war movement around the Vietnam War was a seminal event that provoked outrage across the United States, taken up by students and alive in campuses across the country. One poster produced for a protest at the University of California appropriates a painting by Goya of the god Saturn devouring his children, poignantly referencing the many young soldiers and protesting students who had been killed in what many considered a questionable war. The graphic simplicity of the composition and its singular use of one color helps to broadcast a clear message that is simultaneously allegorical and deeply felt.

Martha Rosler

In addition to the culture-jamming work examined in Module 5, Rosler has produced a two-part photo collage series in which she integrates images of domestic settings and showroom homes with images of war and destruction. The first collage addresses the Vietnam War and the second addresses the Iraq War. In the later series, fashion models and home décor are collaged with soldiers and warfare, creating images that make the viewer aware of the consumption of mass media and the way in which war is domesticated through television.

Alfredo Jaar

Chilean-born artist Jaar’s work The Eyes of Gutete Emerita serves as witness to women’s suffering in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. When Jaar visited Rwanda in August of that year, he traveled to Kigali where the violence had been centered. On August 29, he went to the Ntarama Church, forty miles south of the city, where 400 Tutsi men, women, and children had been gathered and slaughtered on April 15. When Jaar and his interpreter were there, they met a woman named Gutete Emerita. She told them about seeing her husband and sons murdered during the massacre and then escaping with her daughter. In creating this work, Jaar made the decision not to show the result of the carnage — the bodies still lying at the site — but instead to describe it in text. Then he shows the eyes of the woman whose expression he cannot forget. The text accompanying the work documents precisely who Gutete Emerita is, what she witnessed, and what she survived. The use of eyes rather than the catastrophic imagery of the genocide itself is a form of restraint that is also a form of witness: her face is the face of someone who has seen an unbelievable tragedy and now wears it.

General Idea and Robert Indiana

General Idea was a Toronto arts collective formed in the late 1960s that worked together until the mid-1990s. In one of their most widely distributed works, they took pop artist Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE logo — a comment on the commodification of a simple concept — and reconfigured it into another four-letter word: AIDS. The logo was published and disseminated in the form of wallpaper, posters, and postcards. Using Indiana’s famous logo to spell out AIDS makes a connection between the fear and hate felt by those diagnosed with the disease and the broader economics of human experience. Everyone seeks love; no one seeks AIDS.

The SILENCE=DEATH Project and Gran Fury

The SILENCE=DEATH graphic is one of the most powerful examples of activist art from the twentieth century. The inverted pink triangle it features is a reference to the worst discrimination faced by homosexuals in Nazi Germany, when they were forced to wear inverted pink triangle badges in concentration camps. Silence Equals Death protests the taboo surrounding public discussion of sex and homosexuality during the 1980s, drawing a parallel between the extreme cruelty of the Nazi regime and the hostility and indifference facing homosexuals over the preceding decades, particularly during the AIDS crisis. The logo and inverted pink triangle, originally produced by the collective known as Gran Fury, became the main symbol for the AIDS awareness organization ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), whose mandate was to fight indifference toward the issues of AIDS and to bring the crisis to an end.

Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous feminist activists formed in 1989 who fight for gender and racial equality. They are best known for using guerrilla art — art that subverts the norm through impromptu and alternative channels — to promote feminist concerns. Masked avengers who do not reveal their identities, they create text-and-image works that use humor and documented facts to respond to sexism and racism in the art world, film, and popular culture. One of their most famous works responds to the gender imbalance of artists represented in major museums, using the methods of culture jamming to make visible what the institutional art world prefers to leave invisible. They are artists, curators, and art historians who have personally experienced discrimination in the male-dominated world of art.

Barbara Kruger

Kruger had an early career as a graphic designer, and some of those influences carried forward into her art. She is famous for using found black-and-white images with text and red bars overlaid on them — propaganda-style — to comment on corporate greed, patriarchy, stereotypes, and political issues. Her inclusion of personal pronouns (Your body is a battleground, I shop therefore I am) directs the message toward the viewer and can have a profound and lasting effect on the public. Her messages are usually very short but very poignant, containing a kernel of verifiable truth delivered with the visual force of commercial advertising turned against itself.

Wang Guangyi

Wang Guangyi is an artist identified with Political Pop, a movement that arose in China in the late 1980s and mixes images of socialist realism with pop art. In his works, Wang combines well-known and recognizable propaganda images from the Chinese Cultural Revolution with icons representing Western capitalism — Coca-Cola, Prada, Rolex — critiquing how global advertising of Western consumer goods has infiltrated communist China and how the visual languages of socialist propaganda and capitalist advertising are, at a structural level, disturbingly similar.

Jenny Holzer

Holzer is an American conceptual artist who works primarily with text and has been doing so since the late 1970s. Among her most well-known work is a series of statements known as Truisms, publicized in a variety of ways including LED signs, bronze plaques, and projection. The work examined in this module was inspired by the atrocities of the war in Bosnia, and specifically by the rape of 30,000 to 50,000 Bosnian, Croatian, and Muslim women by Serbian soldiers. The title is taken from a German word meaning murder plus sexual pleasure. The words are written on human skin, and feature different perspectives regarding the rape of these women — the text of the observer, the perpetrator, and the victim. The use of skin as a medium is visceral and imbues the work with a vulnerable subtext that extends the horror of the subject matter into the body of the artwork itself.

Lex Drewinski

Drewinski is a well-known graphic and fine artist from Eastern Europe who uses highly stylized compositions and colors — almost like those seen on public signs — to create ironic and often funny visuals with an anti-establishment message. His work on the pollution problem created by the automobile industry uses graphics that strongly reference something universally recognizable, without overcomplicating his point. The mask worn by a figure, suggesting that one should breathe exhaust, is presented in such an over-the-top fashion that it seems absurd — until the viewer realizes that everyone does in fact breathe car exhaust every day. This use of humor through visual jokes can be very effective, but it must be executed carefully to avoid deflating the critique into pure comedy.

Key Takeaways for Practice

Political posters have and continue to be an important method for raising awareness of social injustices and for protest. Since the development of reproduction technologies, posters have been a primary channel for disseminating both propaganda and protest, and even in the age of digital communication, the printed poster retains a vital function. Perhaps it is their reproducibility, or their lack of required user interaction, or the authenticity that audiences project onto them — but the poster remains part of the language of dissent.

Module 7: Self-Reflection

Introduction

What is a portrait? What is a self-portrait? A portrait captures the likeness and spirit of a subject. It can speak to us directly, elicit an emotional response, suggest a story, and stimulate memories. Portraits are used to comment on identity, class, and social conditions; they can tie into memory and experience. They are taken throughout a person’s life — in yearbooks, at special occasions, to celebrate and to mark the passage of time through ritual. Portraits are both snapshots and documentaries. They are staged and constructed, formal and informal. A self-portrait reveals something about the person making the photograph or image — their personality, feelings, or identity. It may be real, but it may also be entirely fictitious. This module explores a range of photographic practices that engage with portraiture and self-portraiture in ways that are honest, constructed, oblique, playful, and sometimes all of these at once.

Conceptual Background

The tradition of portraiture in Western art is a long one, and the concerns it raises — questions of likeness, identity, representation, authenticity, and the relationship between the inner self and its outward appearance — have taken on new dimensions in the era of photography and digital imaging. Photography democratized portraiture; the self-portrait became available to everyone with a camera. At the same time, photography introduced new questions about the relationship between the image and the real: does a photograph capture truth, or can it construct and deceive? The artists in this module work with these questions directly, exploiting the tensions between candidness and staging, likeness and constructed identity, presence and absence.

Artist Sections

Tracey Baran

Baran’s photographic images feel honest, intimate, and personal. They are records of everyday life — the unmonumental events and the subtle moments. She makes work not about the big story but about small moments in time, and the images read like short entries in a visual diary. She works in an off-the-cuff manner, preventing herself from pre-censoring her ideas by capturing moments on the camera and then choosing the work from the moments she has collected. This results in photographs that seem relatable, recognizable, and truthful. They are not snapshots — they take some staging — but they have a snapshot quality about them. Compositionally they are very strong; the use of light is often dramatic and the color palette is rich and painterly. Objects and props chosen by Baran are important to the meaning of the work, including elements like a mirrored table and her own nakedness, which expand the reading of the scene beyond simple documentation.

Alec Soth

Soth’s series The Last Days of W. spans both terms of the Bush Jr. presidency. The two works discussed here have no people in them — they convey a form of emptiness, and yet they can still be considered portraits precisely because of this emptiness. We are left to wonder who should be in them. As Soth has said about assembling the collection, he was not trying to accomplish much — worn out, like most Americans, by the end of the administration, he was simply making pictures. The colors are muted and faded. The compositions are stark. The horizon line is consistently placed near the middle of the image. The work feels sad, lonely, isolated, abandoned, depressed, and weary. These affective qualities are inseparable from the political subject matter and the question of how a photograph of an empty room can function as a portrait of a presidency.

Sarah Jones

Jones is a British artist who photographs domestic settings and people, primarily adolescent girls, to explore the relationship between the private and the public. Much like Soth’s work, Jones often creates images that are void of actual human figures but still suggest the presence of a person. In her work Colony, there is no person, but the ruffled blanket and the damaged wall hint at the impression of someone having been there before the picture was taken. We feel worried about the missing person, or perhaps as if we are witnessing the aftermath of some event. In Camilla, Jones includes a girl who hides her face behind her hair, photographed in a setting so clean and organized it looks like the layout of a home design magazine. The viewer feels like a voyeur to something private and ambiguous, left with questions about the identity of the girl and why she might be hiding under a bed.

Elina Brotherus

Brotherus is a Finnish-born artist who works in photography, video, and painting. The photographs discussed here were taken during a period in the artist’s life when she felt more unstable and unsure of herself — specifically on an artist’s residency in France, where she did not know the language and used post-it notes as a learning aid. As a portrait, these photographs communicate several important things, the most significant being the artist’s self-identification as an outsider in a foreign culture. Le Nez de Monsieur Cheval feels candid, except for the clown nose, which raises the question of intent: is this authentic isolation, or staged performance? Compositionally, the photograph is unbalanced, with nearly all of its objects on the left side. In her own words, Brotherus has said: I do believe in the profound sameness of the image. People die, and new ones are born. People fall in love, and they separate. In every person’s life, there are both large and small tragedies, much and little happiness. That is why fragments from my life might seem familiar to others as well. In a way, I provide viewers with a blank screen, a surface on which to project their own feelings and desires.

Laura Letinsky

Letinsky’s photographs are references to the historical genre of Dutch and Flemish still-life paintings. The tradition of still life is often overlooked as a form of portraiture because it traditionally lacks the presence of a person’s likeness — instead presenting a collection of artfully arranged objects. What audiences sometimes overlook is that the objects in a still life can be thought of as personal belongings: we as humans tend to define ourselves, our personalities, our likes and dislikes by the things we keep. A painting of things we care about can say as much, and ultimately more, about who we are than a representation of our likeness. Historically, still-life artworks included objects like food, expensive dishes, and vessels — symbols of wealth and power. Letinsky uses a variation on this idea: instead of using coveted objects that a person might proudly display, she photographs leftovers, the remnants of what is left after the objects have been consumed. This further suggests that there was a human presence, and that this presence can be defined by what it leaves behind. Her placement of fruit and vegetables is compositionally very specific, and the angle of the shot feels precarious, lived-in.

Yasumasa Morimura

Morimura is a Japanese artist who appropriates the faces and bodies of female icons — classic Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe, as well as historical painting subjects like the Mona Lisa — and photographs himself as them. By donning makeup and dressing as the women in question, and by borrowing the color schemata of the time periods in which these women existed, Morimura creates work in which his identity is highly malleable, crossing gender, age, and culture, playing with the cult of the famous. The work speaks about how a person is identified by the costumes they wear: the famous women being impersonated are recognizable because of the identities and costumes they have themselves assumed. For his impersonation of Audrey Hepburn, Morimura dresses as she appeared in Breakfast at Tiffany’s — as the character Holly Golightly — so that the photograph is of Morimura dressed as Hepburn dressed as Golightly: an impersonation of an impersonation. This multiplication blurs the lines between where one person ends and the next begins, asking the fundamental question: whose portrait are we looking at?

Cindy Sherman

Sherman also uses herself as the subject of her photographs, and has taken images of herself in a wide variety of roles and costumes for decades. Like Morimura, she uses observation and parody to examine a wide variety of roles and personalities, but where Morimura impersonates specific historical or cultural figures, Sherman tends to assume character types associated with a stereotype — characters that are, in a sense, everyone’s and no one’s. Take note of her use of body language in addition to costume and makeup to create characters: in the photographs discussed here, she poses as the Southern Belle or Contessa, and the images look like cameos of people we recognize but do not know. Sherman makes the images with the intent that the viewer can tell they are constructed; in a more recent development in her series, she shoots herself in costume in front of a green screen, and her characters have begun to age, adding a new temporal dimension to a body of work already deeply invested in the performativity of identity.

Key Takeaways for Practice

Portraiture is a complex subject, and the examples covered in this module are far from exhaustive. As is evident, portraiture can be didactic and purposeful, truthful or uncomfortable, instantaneous or layered, staged or false, formal or candid, devoid of likeness or very personal. Portraits are documentaries of a person — of their way of life, their personality, their feelings, their identity, and their thoughts. They may be real, but they may also be fictitious. Thinking carefully about these distinctions and the choices that enable them is essential to working meaningfully in this genre.

Module 8: The Impact of Technology

Introduction

On a daily basis, technology affects practically every aspect of our lives. We engage with it constantly, and even when we think we are away from it, it surrounds us in one form or another. Technology is a great enabler — it allows us to adapt the natural world to meet our daily needs and helps us to connect with the world on an unprecedented scale. And yet there are those who believe that the pursuit of technology over everything else will lead to humanity’s demise. This module asks students to think critically about these competing positions, using a key theoretical text as a foundation and a set of contemporary artists who have engaged directly with the relationship between technology, nature, identity, and the future as its primary content.

Conceptual Background: Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction

The theoretical foundation for this module is Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). Benjamin was a theorist and critic of culture’s use of technology; his essay examines photography as a radical transformative technology that had fundamentally changed the way people thought about the world, sparking a great deal of debate about the virtues and problems of mechanical reproduction — particularly in the sphere of art. The essay introduces the concept of the aura — the unique quality of an original work of art, its presence in a particular time and space — and argues that mechanical reproduction destroys this aura by separating the reproduced object from its origin. Photography is, in this account, the technology that delivered us into the world we now live in, along with television and the telephone.

In the digital image-making world, some people lament the fact that evidence of the hand — the traces of traditional methods of image-making — is being erased. The computer seamlessly translates algorithms and data into images so readily that it is always threatening to replace other modes of image-making. Digital montage allows for the seamless integration of the real with the fictional; there are no visible seams, no evidence of construction. Moreover, digital content is infinitely repeatable: the original and the copy are always the same, always exact — whereas analogue content changes over generations, and every copy carries traces of its own reproduction. This raises fundamental questions about what it means to preserve, represent, and experience something in a digital age.

These questions are not purely abstract. The current generation is so tied to technology that living without it seems almost impossible. Nearly every student on university campuses, high schools, and grade schools is engaged with texting, instant information, and new gadgets adopted at breakneck speeds. But does all this connectivity come at a cost? Can we handle new digital technologies responsibly? What does the future look like for the generations that follow?

Artist Sections

Ilkka Halso

Finnish photographer Halso’s series The Museum of Nature intelligently challenges how we can imagine the natural environment of the future. This collection of images captures a series of man-made structures that enclose nature, protecting it like a relic or artifact. Using photographs of landscapes and three-dimensional digital manipulation, Halso visualizes a future in which nature has become a rare display — an endangered artifact to be preserved behind glass and steel. He manages to truly visualize the future we most desperately do not want to see become a reality.

Halso’s work explores the concept of rescuing and restoring nature in much the same way we currently preserve cultural artifacts. For this pessimistic vision, he combines three-dimensional models of man-made architectural structures with digital photographs of landscapes and plants. What is most interesting about his approach is that it explores not only the notion that nature is endangered by us, but also the arrogance implicit in believing that nature can only find its salvation through us as well. He points to this arrogance by pushing the concept to an extreme and referencing the way in which we already attempt to save some animal species by keeping them in captivity. The images are seamless and colorful; Halso expertly takes perspective and lighting into consideration when augmenting natural elements with the man-made structures, and his color palette is saturated, making the scenes look idyllic — until the viewer remembers what they are actually looking at and how it is framed. They almost look like misguided corporate propaganda ads for environmental consciousness. His work is ironic: it suggests that we will not save the natural world because we morally should or must, but rather that we will rescue nature so that it may be kept as a commodity, a relic, or a form of entertainment.

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally recognized for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigation of issues that are now central to our social world: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, the interfacing of human and machine, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. The works discussed here are all part of her Phantom Limb series, created during a period beginning in the 1980s. In these photomontages — created without digital means — she combines female bodies with various technological gadgets usually associated with watching or being watched. The imagery can be read in several ways: perhaps the artist is alluding to how technology has taken control of our lives, or to how we have traded privacy for connectivity, or perhaps she is referencing the figure of the cyborg — the meeting of human and machine.

In any case, these photo montages seem to address the relationship of the human body with technology, and to ask where the line of technology’s interface is drawn. Where does the body stop and the technology begin — when you are watching television? Using a camera? Talking on the phone? Technology is often understood as an extension of our bodies; for Hershman Leeson, the next logical step is that technology might as well be our bodies. The title Phantom Limb refers to the clinically defined experience of amputees who are certain they can still feel a body part that is no longer there. Cleverly, the artist suggests that we would lament the loss of certain technologies in much the same way we would an amputated limb.

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison are a collaborative pair of artists who work in mixed media to create images belonging to their Architectural Brothers series. Many of the images show a solitary man hopelessly trying to fix nature: the land appears scarred and exhausted, and the dullness of black-and-white with simulated photographic grain makes the prints seem like old documentary evidence of a world long forgotten — and yet one that still lies in our future. These surreal images show the impact that humanity has made on the planet, with the solitary man — or sometimes several copies of the same man — functioning as a mythical figure trying futilely to repair the world with limited means and by impossible methods. Pulling a blanket of grass to usher in spring. Gathering all the trash with a wooden rake. Teaching birds to fly as one would fly a kite. Posing as a tree in the midst of a scene of deforestation.

The process used to create these images is technically elaborate. The ParkeHarrisons print their photographs from larger paper negatives made by cutting and pasting a variety of images together. The underlying mechanics of this technique — including the seams between individual images — are carefully painted out in the negative. A photographic print is then made and often painted with a layer of varnish or beeswax. The resulting work crosses many photographic barriers to provide a hybrid of painting, photography, and performance art. As the artists have written: We have the privilege of constructing our world — the world we inhabit and the world that inhabits us. We give form to worlds that were once impossible and even unthinkable. We act on our surroundings and intervene in the course of events as never before. The universe in which we live has become malleable. It thus becomes particularly important that we assume responsibility for the landscapes we create and the worlds we imagine.

Isabelle Hayeur

Hayeur’s ongoing concern with urban sprawl and its consequences inspires her to make work about the conformity of suburban life. Her modified photographs reveal a built hybrid environment of places that do not exist: they are amalgamations of prefab generic homes that have become common across North America over the last sixty years, and increasingly so over the past decade. This building style represents the decentralization of cities and is entirely dependent on a lifestyle built around the automobile, the oil industry, and the continuous consumption of land. Her images are unsettling and eerie — something is amiss very quickly when looking at them. They look purposefully unnatural, with missing windows and doors and textures that seem out of place. The homes feel transported and disruptive in their settings, commenting on the growing trend of the loss of unique places in exchange for uniformity and so-called progress. Hayeur is very critical of our obsession with tearing down the old to replace it with the new, and her work visualizes the psychological and environmental cost of a built environment designed entirely around consumption.

Key Takeaways for Practice

Technology is a double-edged sword that everyone must wield in the modern world. Every benefit it offers, in its various incarnations, comes at a price. The artists in this module are united in their critical engagement with technology — not as a force to be rejected, but as one to be scrutinized, interrogated, and understood in its full complexity. The question before any practitioner working in digital imaging is how to proceed: can we fix our world with technology? Does it hold the key to a better future? Or will we be presented with problems and consequences we had never even considered? Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction remains a vital touchstone for these questions, and engaging with it seriously is a prerequisite for thinking clearly about what it means to make images in the twenty-first century.