Daniel Boornstein wrote, "One of the oldest of ma's visions was the flash of divinity in the great man," (45). Could it be, that humans are endless dreamers, wandering between imaginative possibilities and composing or defining or guessing what is real and how close they can arrive to the divine nature of being? Is there a a yearning to see humanity in a super realm in the eyes of our shared existence? If creating that vision happens by construction with tools of thread. jewels, light bulbs, and mechanics, then flashes of divinity can be man-powered, manifested and recorded as artifact. 
            Two photographs of Billie Burke display her representation photographically as a spectacle. The luminous goddess is a construction. Billie Burke is a woman who is visually scripted by an artistic imagination. Her work as an actress involves the adaptation of character and construction of an external identity. The way Billie Burke is celebrated and photographically recorded is spectacle. Her persona is perceived as an actress n an ethereal realm, of the dream space, transforming the masterworks of fine art into film/photographic works. Burke is a well known Hollywood actress, famously recognized for her acting appearance in the movie the Wizard of Oz as Glinda.
            The vision of the great man, or woman, is performed by Burke. With respect to the figure, gesture, role playing and material interaction between herself and the objective of the overall imagery to communicate a desired essence, the otherworldly is sen. Her greatness is absorption of self into character. The way she presents herself before the lens of the camera is selective. She creates a visceral vision. There is this essence that exists in the space of her world that looks untouchable, like a place that heroines, or angels, or star travelers or spirits find havens within. She is expressively beautiful, displays a feminine and heavenly maternal fragility. She is calming and vivid, like the environmental naturalness of the exterior space of nature. When Billie Burke is photographed , the compositional framework of the films' edge translates from a rectangle to a window. Specifically her windows , invite gazes through them simultaneously opening to viewing spaces beyond interiority. Like windows, her eyes also express looking out, and admitting light inside. She is not trapped in a mirror of self reflection or vanity. She personifies windows and prisms; the rainbow operator as a great woman of visionary possibility and imagination.
             The actual look of Burke is phenomenal. In the monochromatic portrait dressed in a beaded gown with her arms behind her back, leisure and embellishment coexist. Inside that picture she looks like sje is dreaming and believing in something outside of herself, while in the full color picture, taken from the Wizard of OZ, she looks like her dream believing becomes realized. Intently focused on a specific path constituted by her eyelines, the look is sharp as if she followed the line of the wand. In both photographs her look is angular and head on. The poses in relation to her look is compositionally effective by the photographs decisive placement and geometric picture-snapping decisions.
          The zoom factor does not apply to looking at Billie Burke. If depth of field is understood as having shallow or long focal range, Burke's photographs are shallow focal ranges. The camera lens zoom out of focus and spans away from intimate proximity. Seeing Billie Burke is not about the up-close and personal view rendered by zooming in, sharp focus by a macro lens for scientific examinations. She is not viewed in these photographs in the under-th-microscope voyeurism stepping over-the-line boundary way. She is composed as a star in the distance, who does not come into the depth of field of an optically focused parallax from the onlooker or photographer. That soft sense of depth in space is gentle and blurry. Her space is not accessible to deconstruct, rather she is a "cynosure, the guiding stars of our interest,"(47). Billie Burke's presence is calculated for framing artistry for following eyes. Where she magically goes, in a bubble or in a iridescent array of beads and luxurious treasure, onlookers want to seee, and be guided by her rainbow jubilee reign. She is analogous to the Pied Piper. 

Pablo Picasso Hannah Hoch

Desmoiselles d’Avignon The Kitchen Knife Dada...

1907-08 1919-20

*The entire title is The Kitchen Knife Dada through the Large Weimar Beer Belly 
Cultural Epoch of Germany.In Hoch’s “Kitchen” piece there is a strong sense of feminine evolution and revolution with ties to the comments already made in Picasso’s “Desmoiselles d’Avignon.” Hoch builds upon the themes of construction of femininity by process as symbolic, as college is an additive practice and Hoch can create meaning through this story-telling art medium. Hoch dismantles meaning by using material and mass media against itself. You can also bring every day culture from newsprint and magazine into high art through collage. From a cubist approach you could think that there are multiple ways of reading newspaper and collage and text and therefore is like the multiplicity of angles and space in cubism. The symbols of circles and wheels convey a sense of political revolution presented in dada-ist space and yet holds a double meaning like the feminine roles physically are taking their turn like a wheel that initiates forward motion. The female is holding the tool for a political revolution with that wheel. The wheels and circles also represent the circle of life and reproduction. Hoch makes this piece at a time when prostitution ran rampant and there was a nexus of sex, violence and voyeurism in 
culture and appropriates feminine identity with the juxtaposition of Albert Einstein’s brain with machines running through it and a female dancer. This relationship suggests man is interested in technology not lust or female consumption, and the dancer plays with her own mind, poised, in control and as a heroine instead of a sexual object.

In Picasso’s cubist piece “Desmoiselles d’Avignon” you see 5 females who might 
be staged as what is believed to be prostitutes in a brothel and what is a continued 
alliance between modern art and marginalized subjects. You can realize that Picasso offers up the female for fantasy, masks her face with African masks and see their forms as fragmented figures as a sign of disjointed character, violence and victims of abuse or being broken. The style of cubism and adding multiple views of space also adds to the meaning while breaking space from its flatness. The females are being broken by shape, society, vandalized by the men who take their bodies over their brains, and being broken by reducing self-worth to be pimped out instead of attaining self-actualization. Does Picasso mean that these women are violent or impose violence upon men? By giving attention to Prostitution is Picasso addressing that women have a low influential role in an intellectual society, could be blamed for spreading disease like syphilis or is he pleading with culture to come to their rescue and put a Band-Aid on that situation? Picasso is attracted to the primitive side of humanity and thus features a debased sense of femininity regardless of his aim, he opens up the gesture for sexual invitation and removes a sense of feminine ideal or sacredness by exploiting the female in physical gesture and figurative position painting her legs open, chests out and masked, hiding her face. Yet is this marginalized highlight necessary for humanity to move forward? Does culture need to see its low points before having an upswing like Mayor Giuliani and William Bratton who applied the broken windows theory to urban decay in New York, meaning you have to monitor the vandalism in order to improve the 
conditions of a rotting society while attempting to improve its state.What both pieces have in common is the idea of masking the female face in black. Hoch’s piece shows one female in the top center with a blacked-out face and Picasso shows two females on the right in “black” or African faced masks. Why do 
these artists darken the faces? Perhaps Hoch finds that the female with inevitably 
receive dark shadows from the voyeurs that prevail in society like those that were in Picasso’s time of culture. Yet could black lead to rehabilitation within gender? That the females can still be blamed for sin, mystique, exoticism, despair, disease and violence. Or does black mean to absorb all the light and then in turn would be the brightest of the lot, even more so than Einstein? “Black” could also mean to ignore classical proportions, a touch of the exotic and without a history for Europeans to understand. Black can also mean carbon, after a fire and therefor read as sterile. Or does black lead to value and light? With more exposure to light, the principle idea is that the subject darkens and turns black or richer in value but in terms of physicality that could be a good thing, to be the most absorbent and hold the most value. Perhaps both artists are re-addressing Plato’s story of Phaedrus? Per chance the viewer is the charioteer of the human soul driving between the two horses. One is the intellect, reason and moral impulse and the other one is passionate, with appetite and has a righteous attitude. The artists represent Plato’s idea by suggesting the male idea and the female idea both running with the charioteer trying to stop the horses from going in different ways amongst sexual appetite through female gesture and decisions males make when confronted with this state of human behavior. How to confront prostitution and the reception of females in society is like charioteering the black horse and the white horse, 
the women are covered in dualities of black and white.

Pair Two: 

Marcel Duchamp Kasimir Malevich

Fountain Black Square

1917 1913-15

Malevich conceived in mystic and religious views and wanted to make art that 
could lead the viewer to a state of transcendence through abstract art. To him there was an order of the individual, a way to make profit and seek out a way to become a visionary leader. The black square represents Suprematism, an evolution of geometric abstraction that leads the artist’s realization that the idea or feeling is stressed or “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” over the representation of an object itself. The square is like a tool or a piece of grammar for this new language of non-objective art. Malevich wants to introduce a way of making art that is not Constructivist where man is an engineer who must produce something of value to society. The “Black Square” is a building block, or has place is an indexed code of images along with the circle to exist without things and realize concepts like a life without material experience. Duchamp’s “Fountain” is a work of art that appropriates meaning of object by re-introducing that meaning by titling the art and giving new meaning to an already identified object. Duchamp doesn’t create the object, by finds a mass produced urinal, physically rotates it and displays it in an art exhibition space with a new name, “fountain”. The title is ironic because fountain is something that you can drink from, or toss a penny into and make a wish, a source of water. Yet a urinal is a place of intimate bodily functions, yet it does also shoot water like a fountain. Duchamp was interested in putting emphasis on recognizing common objects as sculpture, and to appreciate the shape of the urinal that also references the shapes of the female and male reproductive anatomy. This action aggregates the power of art in public spaces because the object is not original. Duchamp physically rotates the object and also turns the art world with dada-ism pronouncing that the idea and concept of the art itself is equally important to 
the art. Idea is as important as physical manifestation and that the context of meaning changes by the artist. Duchamp can take a toilet and make you realize that the institutional setting gives meaning as the apparatus changes meaning by active viewing. Is art what you see, or what you think or how art leads you to thinking? Both Malevich and Duchamp consider that the idea the art represents and their concepts are the works of art themselves. Idea therefore is the goal of the art with “The Fountain” and 

“The Black Square”. 

PART 2: Essay (25 minutes)

Choose ONE of the following

1. Using three examples, discuss the different ways in which artists treated the 
erotic, or the sensual/sexual body, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art. Consider not only how those treatments differ, but why they differ. (You may use the Picasso and the Hoch.) Matisse’s “Blue Nude” is a female display for spectator and pleasure of the male. Matisse uses color evocatively and descriptively and gives a sense that the world is about gratification, especially sexual gratification. Matisse hyperizes the contorted shape of the female by extending her hips and back in an un-natural way to give her body a dynamic profile. He exaggerates the curves of her hips and breasts to objectify her as a sex object. Her cognitive abilities and logical senses are not represented; she is disrobed and powerless to be seen in any way but in a erotic, sexual and sensual way. “Blue Nude” is a fauvist painting, with wild brushwork and aligned to impressionism where the color has more meaning than representing natural 
appearance and that objects in nature are not seen as separated from each other by defined contours the way the nature in the background is painted. He wished to use pure color squeezed from the tube to build new pictorial values apart from creating retinal vibrations. By the female is outlined by black and is the focus between the tension between female as a metaphoric flower and part of nature versus female as rejecting purity and becoming a symbol of male fantasy exploited for parts. Matisse also gives you a sense of contraction in this piece to achieve delimited space. The pure color also adds a sense of rawness, being primitive and reads with a high vibration of color adding to a dynamo effect of a strong sense of energy and attraction to lux and beauty for this “available” female. 

Picasso’s “Desmoiselles” appropriates forms of African art in hopes to convey a 
primal truth of physical humanity that is savage and raw as well. Picasso paints a 
female with a plasticity of form, not literal and makes his misery and view of human destitution prominent through his expression of the female. The blue tones of the background heighten melancholy, he features females on the margins of society, not queens and he distills forms into basic shapes. Picasso’s females are women who rely on sex for survival or a job. He debases the imagery of women to someone who is not sacred like the Madonna but emphasizes a woman’s role as a prostitute. She could demean herself by selling her body as object to the males and reduce herself to being stripped not only of clothes and political stability but to cast her amongst filth and embrace that through her body language that she is open to being used, stepped upon and spit out. Picasso’s rendering is not inviting, but perhaps denying prostitution of its appeal by fracturing, dismantling, vandalizing form through cubist style. The painting process acts like a physical and violent filter. Therefore the sex becomes ironic, as the allure is re-colored into a sense of rejection and sense of danger instead of beauty, lux and attraction. Picasso inverts the meaning of sex by pointing to the dualities of how sex presents itself, versus sex amongst nature and as part of creation. 
Hoch’s is last in this series of the evolution of feminine display. Hoch actually 

gives purpose to the female by casting her as a dancer, someone in control of her body 

with learned choreography and can set her gaze and meaning for herself. Hoch also 

inserts text as a way to reclaim literacy and insert new powers for artist to claim both 

word/text and image as a stronger sense of pictorial literacy and understanding of 

society, placing importance on narration, writing and history. Hoch also includes the 

female to be received on a canvas that is also embracing the genius of Albert Einstein, 

other females who are dressed, as well as pieces of collaged technology. This gives the 

female relationships that don’t only involve her sex, her appearance but include an 

intellectual world that she is a part of, not a shard within a fantasy. She is not primitive 

but becomes modernized and Hoch reconstructs a woman who can gain freedom, and 

yields a new woman. Hoch gives the most possibility to reading and interpreting 

femininity because her body is not the main focus, but is the abstractions and 

representations of the world that surrounds her.

What is

 

The white shoes are juxtaposed with a silver platter. It is an actual pair of 

shoes, a left shoe and aright shoe whose position is inverted making the 

display upside-down. Its heels are topped with meat décor that you might 

find on fancy chicken drumsticks. Oppenheim’s “Nursemaid My 

Nursemaid” symbolizes feminine containment and shows the elimination 

the females’ ability to be a hero by referring her to a cow. First, the title 

“Nursemaid/ My Nurse,” demotes, play-cates and undermines the female’s 

intellectual freedoms into being cornered position of male property. By 

dismantling her orientation and flipping her around is one way her freedom 

is stripped. Showing the underside of the shoe in some cultures is 

considered rude because it is the dirty party that touches the filth of the 

ground. In the artwork it’s evident that the dirt is on the ball of the shoe in a 

black tar hue against the light brown material. The pair of shoes cannot 

function upside-down, also handicapping her symbolically and undermining 

her ability to be in her place and in command. Its almost as if she is being 

subject to some one else’s control and being acted upon without say. 

Being wrapped up in string feels like she female is in punishment or is at 

risk from being lost from itself, like tying her together can keep herself 

under control. “Nursemaid/ My Nurse,” symbolizes female as a product to 

be consumed like milk as the female is automatically identified as a 

servant or slave who milks by the white color. There is no evidence of the 

female being asked if it is her intention to be a milkmaid. There is evidence 

of binding, tying, enslavement as the shoes are tied up together nearly five 

times around. The real offense and degradation is the ironic play of serving 

the upside-down pair of shoes on a silver platter. Think to yourself and ask 

yourself, do ladies ever serve each other symbols of slavery and accept? 

Afraid not.  Are females objects or should females be objectified especially 

if some females become great world leaders. To this day you might ask 

yourself how does art influence great leadership in growing up female? 

Does putting her down or punishing the symbols of feminism become 

effective or hurtful? There were days when females were worshipped as 

the Madonna and the pelvic bone had sacred meaning and its triangular 

shape became a shape to represent female worship.  However, males 

have sold females into white slavery before and it could happen again as 

the Nursemaid/ My Nursemaid clearly represents. Nonsensical to put it 

mildly, unbeautiful to put it gently.

 William De Kooning’s “Woman I” is a colorful painting of an adult female 

sitting on a chair. The painting is very child-like in its idea of painting that 

freedom to express painting with strokes of judgment free action. Meaning, 

De Kooning doesn’t follow rules of Renoir, Rembrandt or Da Vinci. De 

Kooning is what are punk rock and rebellion and the Grateful Dead at The 

Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood to what are Mozart and Chopin playing at 

Buckingham Palace. It’s an animated work. The action lines and strokes of 

color are representational of the artist’s mood and the experience of 

making the painting is evident in the finished work. The symbol of feminists 

is the central focus. She is centrally composed and takes up 75% of the 

canvas and as a soloist appears isolated from company. Her body is 

foreshortened, being in the sitting position of the chair and her arms are 

folded across her lap. Her skin is white, blue, pinks, lavenders, and 

garishly outlined in blacks and browns. The frame of her build is strong, as 

if De Kooning painting her with the concept of an understructure, her 

skeletal frame is solid especially with broad shoulders and primitive. She is 

topless however, also appearing like a milkmaid.  Luckily her bottom half is 

robed in bright red and orange dress against a sloppily made background 

of rejected wisdom and organization. The colors are blotchy and fatigued 

not meticulous. Because the female is topless she is exposed either for her 

maturity, her symbols of motherhood and making milk, or is sexually made 

into a temptress. The similarity to Oppenheim’s “Nursemaid My 

Nursemaid” and De Kooning is the representation of female servitude and 

the action lines of crisscrossing over herself. Oppenheim worked with 

string to crisscross and De Kooning created wispy lines or string x-ing 

effects over the surface and through out the composition.  One is sculpture 

and the other painting yet both utilize angles of perspective and perception 

to achieved space, depth, unity and yet are on the verge of being taken 

down. The Woman I is nearly violent in facial expression with dinosaur 

teeth huge eyes filled with white and black paint and doesn’t express 

subservience but domineering power. Neither of the artworks appears 

fairytale like, but is threatening to feminine charms and beauty. 

Jackson Pollock’s “Number One” is a stylized abstraction in a rectangle. Pollock came 

like an artist into a space and produced imagery that suits that time during the 

1950s. His abstractions in painting are on the wall as a form of protection remaining 

staticly dynamic. Static because he action strokes reveal changes in culture, 

displacement of direct representation to painting as mobility and the movement of 

the artist to be meaningful. Static as in atmospheric electricity. Equilibrium is also 

enclosed in the painting as there is balance made by color, arrangement of drippy 

lines and cosmic circulation. The work protects artists from the innocent levels of 

finger-painting through mastery level because it makes a statement about freedom 

of expression and movement as an artist.  This stylized work makes meaningful 

cultural direction, as a painter does not need to paint in straight lines. Pollock’s 

painting in the row of history gives the illusion of moving but is trapped in cyclical 

patterns. His wrist and arm and back might be exaggerated in action compared to 

Watteau but he is coordinating hand eye coordination in method with the artists 

who came before his time as well.  It is okay to be messy and problematic if 

problematic means to create newness and offer a new taste to an old world. Pollock 

in a way is a refreshing compliment to painting. Barnett Newman’s “Onement I,” is 

about straightness and refinement with hazy accuracy. There is not a circle, nor a 

figure, yet an inline of uber simplicity. It is a playful attempt to warm the palette of 

humanity by painting love in rich hues of brown melting texture and wealth to 

pacify the visual reception into a careful thought. Instead of excess line like Pollock, 

Newman goes for minimal abstraction. I see the warmth of animal or primitive love 

by taking painting to a baseline of red on brown. The way a cardiologist traces or 

graphs a heartbeat is what I see in Newman. Newman strides vertically as if there is 

an elevator to the heartbeat that ascends vertically up to the utmost feeling of love. 

Pollock and Newmen both attempt to illuminate the canvas with abstract lines that 

are not easily translatable but offer an opening for your imagination to interpret 

their emotional context. In that case both painters represent art as freedom and 

subvert the expectation of perfection. 

Miro and Dali isolate objects in their magical realism and surreal paintings. Each of 

the objects in view is painted by itself within the composition. Meaning, each object 

has its own atmosphere, space, and separate vortex to itself in relation to the other 

objects in the work. That would mean a multitude of verisimilitudes or multiple 

truths occurring simultaneously like the figure with a white circle head to the 

balloon to the triangle to the environment. Yet the order or directionality of the 

movement within the piece is free. Is the triangle influencing the figure or is the 

figure controlling the balloon that then might warp afterward into the triangle or 

occupy the same horizon as the triangle eventually? There is a harmonious flow 

between the objects in the Dali and the Miro. Without columns or force, the gentle 

easy allows the viewer an invitation to seek meaning within the relatability of the 

multiple purposes of the objects. In Dali you wonder does a clock melt on a tree limb 

and is it because of an emotion or question what kind of character would place 

clocks in a desert, and what temperature would it take to melt a clock along the edge 

of a table. The painting of Dali is complex because it’s painted with a cool color 

palette yet temperature wise, it indicates high heat. The air seems arid and dry, but 

then hypocritically something like the metal clock suggests melting and wetness. 

Dali is ironic. Mire plays with cools and hot colors with compliments of green and 

red and somehow creates a neutral temperature because they don’t compete with 

each other.  While Dali creates space with a horizon line, Mire doesn’t use one, Miro 

emphasizes invisible ground and light without shadow. Each of the works is 

whimsical, has room to breathe, and invites you to look all the way around the 

volumes of objects in the invented imaginative world inside the frame of the canvas.

3.  According to Clement Greenberg, the history of modern art was essentially a 

history of painting’s drive toward self-referentiality or self-reflexiveness.   What 

did he mean by painting as a self-reflexive enterprise, how did he explain that 

drive towards self-referentiality or self-reflexiveness, and what are the strengths 

and weaknesses of his account?

To me, Greenberg meant self-referentiality and self-reflexiveness meant to keep in 

touch with yourself and design a piece of yourself through art. The danger of not 

creating self-portraits and ideas from within is losing you to the outside. Your 

thoughts are just thoughts until your communicating them. In art the methods of 

straight color, motion through brush stroke, rules of composition, arrangement of 

gallery installation, appropriation in da-da-ism etc. are functional ways to utilize a 

new technique that is not anchored to a time capsule. In other words the artists 

update the materials and techniques to be current with the present or even the 

future. It would be unrealistic to continuously create with a single process like oil 

painting on canvas. Thereby stencils and graffiti, stickers and pixels or toilets are 

mediums of courage that artists feel are necessary to represent modern ideas.   

Frederick Douglas wrote an autobiography to free him. He thought to gain wisdom 

by cleverly convincing a white to teach him how to read and write would not only 

give himself the rights to his life but to be education would yield a creative and 

righteous freedom. Art and learning self-referentiality or self-actualization is also 

freedom, like Free Speech. With knowledge he wrote himself to freedom. In Modern 

Art from fauvism surrealism to abstraction, the artists are pushing through 

imaginative or cognitive and cerebral experiences to make a statement or raise a 

question or propose solutions to society. The ideas of artists are being expressed 

through the laws and rules or creative breakthroughs of art. Color, composition and 

the translation of feeling and experiences are conveyed through the mediums. 

Therefore the isolation of object in magical realism is a mirror to the feeling of says 

separate identities and multiple senses occurring in a single reality. Dali shared a 

dream unrealistic dream space to comment about subconscious and his ideas of a 

secret, beautiful world within almost a pre-cognition to autism.