I know we were all intrigued by all the bizarre actions going on in Inci Eviner’s video piece that we looked at in our artistic responses to Orientalism, so here’s that video if you want to watch for yourself and catch more unexpected things!

Thanks for thinking last class about the ways that art can help us make sense of war and also remember it. Our research librarian Martha shared this poem with me, which is by Yusef Komunyakaa and is about looking at the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial we discussed. Leaving it here in case it spurs more thought for you:

Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

(1988)

Loved seeing the bizarre and amazing collaborative drawings you made today while playing “Exquisite Corpse” — the Surrealists would be proud of your strange, fun creations!

In light of our conversations about Symbolism, Spiritualism, and the ways in which artists used their work to give viewers a transcendent, emotional, or mystical experience, I encourage you to go to see a Mark Rothko in person and see what you get from it! Bring a notebook and sit for a while with the painting if you feel really inspired. There are Rothko color field paintings on display at the Met and a couple of them at the MoMA too. If you go, tell us what you felt or discovered (or if you didn’t at all think it made you feel anything!)

We covered a lot during our session around Urban Space! If you want to see the all 60 panels of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series online, there’s a nice presentation of it on the Phillips Collection website. James Van Der Zee’s whole collection is now going to be co-managed by the Met Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem — about 20,000 prints and 30,000 negatives! Here’s hoping we get to see a lot more of his photos soon. You can watch a little video about that below:

It was great to see your takes and diagrams in respond to Rosalind Krauss’s dilemma: defining landscape, architecture, sculpture and Land Art (which also overlap!) I’ve attached photos below to document what you all came up with. Safe to say it can be hard to differentiate these four once we really start to think about them philosophically! If you are interested in seeing a contemporary Land Artist in action, I highly recommend watching either of the documentaries about Andy Goldsworthy mentioned in class: Rivers and Tides (2001) and Leaning Into the Wind (2018).

Great first session! Your drawings and instructive descriptions for your drawings were great (and creative!) We’ll come back to your definitions of “art history” and what makes something “modern” by the end of class to see if our ideas around these big concepts have changed over the course of the semester.