Ana Mendieta artwork:
She was born in Cuba and she was pulled out from her home land and traveled to US with her sister at age of 12 where she moved through various foster homes till she was reunited with her mother and younger brother later. She was enrolled in a school where she had to learn the English language. She was subjected to discrimination throughout her life especially in college where she learned art and became inspired by the earth-body artwork.
Her work was focused on blood to demonstrate the violence against women and also blood reflects a religious and spiritual aspects in her life. During her college education, she was inspired by the landscape. That is why her work was somewhat autobiographical because she worked on finding her identity throughout her life in homeland or in USA. She worked on many themes such as feminism, violence, life, death, identity, place and belonging. She likes to connect her body with the earth and be one thing.
Her life influenced her work in terms of being torn from her homeland. She used to draw her body connected to the earth or womb in another portraits because she considers that she reunite herself with the universe in which she returns to her maternal source. She used her body covered with blood in many of her works to reflect the violence against women through being an object of male desire. She used her naked body to demonstrate this idea. This reminds me with chapter 3 from John Berger when he described the difference between naked and nude bodies. “a naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become nude”. Also, her Cuban background played a role in her artwork demonstrating her ritualistic traditions through using blood, gunpowder, earth, and rock.
She used to demonstrate her work through short videos to describe a story or send a message. The most common one when she used blood in her both hands, her back was facing the camera and she drew two lines of blood over a blank wall. Also, “sweating blood” was one of the amazing video in which she connects herself to the human body being full of blood. She tried to reflect her sense of being a human who should have an equal opportunity in life regardless color, race or sex.
Chapter 3 from art of self invention for Finkelstein describes self as surplus “ the idea of the self as a convenience has strong appeal. It encourages a secular exploration of everyday life in which patterns of behavior and conventions can be recognized more justifiably as products of circumferences than simply being part of a well-rehearsed, lubricated and habituated regime.”
Andy Warhol:
His works explore the relationship between artistic expression,celebrity culture and advertising. He included painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Warhol created the "blotted line" technique through applying ink to paper and then blotting the ink while still wet for printmaking scale. Through using tracing paper and ink, he repeated the basic image and also to create endless variations on the theme.
His personal identity influenced his artwork through discovering many themes in his life. Concerning his religion, Warhol was a Catholic religious person. Many of Warhol's works depicted religious subjects such as The Last Supper (1986). The fact that Warhol's homosexuality influenced his work and shaped his relationship to the art world. Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his works draw from gay background culture. Warhol was inspired by fame, fashion, celebrity and Hollywood. As a boy living in Pittsburgh he found escape from his ordinary working class life in popular teen magazines and by collecting autographs from film stars. Warhol understood the nature of celebrity in American society. He succeeded in creating a powerful public image for himself with straight blonde hair and dark glasses. He became a master at cultivating his own celebrity profile as his fame grew. He constantly documented his daily life through photography and film, an early version of today’s social media. Art of self invention for Finkelstein, chapter 3 “identity” “At minimum the self is bifurcated, it has doubled; there is a conscious and unconscious, private and public, civilized and base, good and bad, and we can create ourselves as well-rounded beings from the management of these seemingly opposed elements”.
Money was one of Andy Warhol’s favorite subjects and he spoke openly about how much he loved it. Born into a poor family, he determinedly worked his way upwards into the high society he had always idolised as a child. Early on in his career he realised the potential to make money from art. In 1962 he made the work 192 Dollar Bills, featuring rows of printed dollar bills silk screened across the surface of a canvas. Also, Campbell’s paintings in the 1960s demonstrated daily products which he loved. He used death as a theme in many of his paintings. He was interested in painting valuable things that were lost through death such as his painting of Marilyn Monroe and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He drew skulls that present death as fact of the end of life. One of Warhol’s themes was time. In his photographs, prints and paintings he could freeze a moment in time and repeat it over and over again, while in his films he documented and slowed time down.Time Capsules is considered one of the paintings that demonstrate this theme.
Jean Michel Basquiat:
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in New York, 1960. His teachers, including artist Jose Machado, noticed his artistic abilities, and his mother encouraged his talent.mIn September 1968, at the age of seven, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street. His arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries; he eventually underwent a splenectomy. His mother brought him the Gray's Anatomy book during his stay in hospital to keep him occupied. This book influenced his future artistic outlook. When he was 13, his mother was committed to a mental institution and thereafter spent her life in and out of institutions. At 15, Basquiat ran away from home. He slept on park benches. He dropped out of high school and he stayed with friends in Brooklyn. He supported himself by selling T-shirts.
Basquiat’s paintings style was a combination of cartoon-like figures, often combined with words. His paintings focused on themes of racism, fame and wealth. His paintings focused on many themes such as jazz, bigotry, capitalism, mortality and drug abuse. Because he suffered from poverty and social inequality during his short life, many of his paintings focused on the urban beauty and decay on one hand and social injustices on the other hand. The human body, especially the head, was a central theme in his works, influenced by his reading of Gray’s Anatomy. This book had a great influence in his his painting. In his painting Irony of Negro Policeman (1981), Basquiat’s work commented on racism and the plight of African-Americans. The figures he painted were often black, but were sometimes overlaid with drawing attention to how race is portrayed.
Although he was a street kid, true, a teen runaway who had slept on benches in Tompkins Square Park, he was also a handsome privileged and intelligent boy. His knowledge and own beliefs were demonstrated through his work.
References:
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing:Penguin, 2008.
Finkelstein, Joanne. The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture. Tauris, 2007.
http://www.art.com/gallery/id--a27866/jean-michel-basquiat-posters.htm
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