taylor

Piero Manzoni, Socle du monde, 1961

my favorite piece of sculpture - ever.

It's french for pedestal for the world. It's genius. It's *Minimalist yet relates to all of these other ideas going on in art. It incorporates its surroundings like a *site-specific piece. It has a sense of humor about art, like *Pop art and *Dada.

It's the wittiest damn cube I've ever seen.


nutshelled art history:

*MINIMALISM - objects are stripped down to their elemental, geometric form, and presented in an impersonal manner. Squares, rectangles, primary colors, all black, all white, etc. Developed as a reaction against and is completely the opposite of Abstract Expressionism -(think not Jackson Pollock slinging paint).

When you see it you think - "I could have made that" or "a machine made it, how is that hard?" It's the idea that's hard. It doesn't matter who actually makes it, it's coming up with the idea. That's minimalism, think it up, send it to a manufacturer, hmm... actually a lot like the way most things we own are made.

*POP ART: think Warhol - soup cans, Marilyn Monroe. Lichtenstein - giant comic strips. Basically it's just like hip hop, only in the art world and about 30 years earlier. take all of this stuff that is everywhere in culture, rework it, and use it to comment about society. Hip hop in its earliest forms commented on urban life, pop art commented on consumerism and celebrity. "how is that art? he didn't even paint it or take the photo" ...ahh but he did come up with the idea for the marketing. He showed us how rediculous some of the things people will buy are.

*DADA: European artists opposed to WWI. It's absurd to sit in trenches and take turns charging each other for 20 yards of ground. Ah, a shovel, I say it is art. Absurd you say? Yes, but that is the point. The world is absurd. think Duchamp

*SITE SPECIFIC - a work that relies on its surroundings to make it work. Examples would be Cristo, a crazy frenchman who wraps buildings, islands and other things in fabric. Others would be, Robert Smithson who built spiral jetty, a giant dirt path swirling out off the bank into this lake.