Postwar Women Artists
Postwar Women Artists Transcript
Postwar Women Artists Transcript
Artists on Art Audio Transcript
Intro: montage of interview excerpts overlapping, with music
HOCKNEY: If your eyes are still, you’re dead!
Revolution and Rebellion: Political Activism in 20th-Century Art Transcript
Intro: Sound collage taken from the interviews below.
NARRATOR: Welcome to our audio tour about modern art made after 1950. This tour is about revolution and rebellion. We’ll look at how artists have defied convention and embraced political change and their own role in advancing it. There is no neat narrative here, but there are some incredible stories.
In 1987, Xu Bing completed his master of fine arts degree in printmaking, and presented the woodblock print piece Five Series of Repetition as his thesis project. The series showed the evolution of carved wood blocks over time, starting with prints of uncut woodblocks, and finishing with prints where nearly all of the wood had been carved away. In this printing, we see a midway point in the series, in which the carved scenes of farmland are fully etched, their forms not yet chipped away.
© Xu Bing Studio, photo: LACMA
Based on Lui Shou-Kwan’s Wood Houses in the Mountains, Background Story is one in a series of works by Xu Bing that recreates modern and historical ink landscape paintings in light-box installations. Though Background Story appears as a peaceful, idyllic landscape from the front, a look behind the piece reveals that it is composed of trash and natural debris, contrasting the historical landscape with allusions to the contemporary polluted environment.
© Helen Ting, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva
© Xu Bing Studio, photo by Fang Chao
In these two works, artist Irma Blank explores the relationship between breath and text. As if inviting us to read it, Dal Libro Totale is bound like a book. Instead of words and letters, though, we find repetitive drawn-out strokes, rhythmically punctuated by blank spaces. This illegibility repeats in Abecedarium with ultramarine blue bands that grow darker at the center, mimicking the spine of a book. So how can you read these? Simple. Breathe in…
© Irma Blank, photos by Michael Brezinski, courtesy of the artist and Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Impressed by the colorful water in Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan Province, China, Liu invented his zimo technique. Spraying water, ink, and colors on a large sheet of tracing paper and allowing them to mix spontaneously, he then laid another sheet on the top. When the two sheets adhered, the elements in between seemed to transform into rippling water. The artist then separated the two sheets, cropping and editing to make this fantastical and ethereal image.
© The Liu Kuo-sung Archives, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva