In this learning pathway, we look at how artists express and interpret our world and how art relates to and interprets nature, the body, identity, sexuality, politics, and power.
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Throughout many parts of the world, there are groups of Indigenous peoples who are recognized as descendants of the first peoples, aboriginal peoples, or native peoples of a particular region. Indigenous peoples often try to maintain their unique cultural, linguistic and social traditions and identity, even when settler cultures are introduced to their home territories.
Self-portraits direct an artist’s gaze inward. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs from the 1970s and 1980s include fashion, portraiture, floral arrangements and documentary subject matter. His self-portraits combine elegance in form with an autobiographical journey in content as he travels as a young gifted artist through the darker side of the New York gay S and M scene and ultimately to his death from AIDS at age thirty three.
Nature has been identified in art going back to the cave man. It starts to become prominent in the Italian Renaissance, especially Venice, where there was not a lot of landscape other than the sea. Constable brought landscape painting to the English in the 18th-century when he painted a countryside remembered before the land was divided up with hedgerows. Astronauts have commented how beautiful the earth looks from space and that we ought to appreciate where we live. There is something comforting about landscape the more we remove ourselves from it.
Art contributes to many social functions too. Parades feature colorful banners, extravagant floats and plastic inflatable characters from pop culture. Many ceremonies and rituals rely on works of art to act as vessels for the spirit world. Totem poles tell elaborate stories, using real and mythic animals to illustrate them. The Tsimshian and Haida totem poles pictured at right have a hierarchical structure to them so that the most important character in the story is at the top of the pole.
The experiences of politics, conflict and war have been represented in works of art for thousands of years. They become documents, signifiers and symbols for power, remembrance, culture and national pride.
The aftermath of war gives rise to memorials as vessels of remembrance for those who died. They are literally touchstones for families, friends, communities and entire nations to grieve. As works of art they provide a public space of honor and resolve to never forget the lives and sacrifices made by those who go to war.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. is an example. Designed by the architect and sculptor Maya Lin, its abstract formal design, wedge shape and placement created a new approach to traditional memorial design ideas. The work is set into an earthen embankment facing out to the viewer. It’s made with a dark gabbro stone that when polished produces a highly reflective surface. The names of 58,191 soldiers killed or missing during the conflict are cut into the stone face. Visitors walk a gently descending pathway towards the center of the memorial, the wall of names becoming larger as you go, to a height of ten feet at the middle. As they stare at the rows of names on the wall visitors see their own image reflected back. The path rises as you walk toward the other end.
Like so many other things we experience in our world that translate into art, those that engender ideas of peace and tranquility take many different forms. Some of these are iconic, others transitory and changing.
Upon successful completion of this learning pathway, you should be able to:
