Status Updates From Gardner's Art through the A...

David Wojnarowicz, gay activist during AIDS: When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body… I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear… I see the organs gradually fade into transparency… It makes me weep to feel the history of you of your flesh beneath my hands

Cuban-born Ana Mendieta: I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth

Andy Warhol: What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers by essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke.

Painting (1946) by Francis Bacon depicts the aftermath of WWII and is “unmistakably an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself” with what appears to be a carnivorous, presented as a political official, hovers amongst strewn carnage of meat

Paul Klee: Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible… the formal elements of graphic art are dot, line, plane, and space—the last three charged with energy of various kinds… Formally we used to represent things visible on Earth, things we either light to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things.

Strong feeling that the dada/surrealist activist Max Ernst was autistic or otherwise neurodivergent

Otto Dix: You have to see things the way they are. You have to be able to say yes to the human manifestations that exist and will always exist. That doesn’t mean saying yes to war, but to a fate that approaches you under certain conditions and in which you have to prove yourself. Abnormal situations bring out all the depravity, the beastiality of human beings…

Franz Marc “Blue is the male principle, severe and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, happy and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy.”

Van Gogh “Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter’s life… Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map… Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star”

The Thankful Poor by African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner depicts a black grandfather and his grandson praying before thanksgiving dinner. Forever Free by sculptor Edmonia Lewis shows an African American couple after being freed by emancipation

American realism gained popularity with the civil war, one piece being Winslow Homer’s depiction of a soldier returning to his work as a farmer. NYWeekly commented about George Washington and transition from war to peace as “Rome took her great man from the plow, and made him a dictator—we must now take our soldiers from the camp and make them farmers”

Realism painter Courbet “I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I will paint one.” Touché.

Rococo barque style takes previously asserted Renaissance styles and softens them, so that stable precise lines transform into curved complex patterns that are enhanced by mirrors reflecting these images into infinity

Chapter 21

English architecture feels just as uninspired as the French lol

Why does the French Renaissance look so expensively uninspired…

Chapter twenty

Triumph of the Name of Jesus in the nave of Il Gesù, a gilded ceiling painting depicting a barely visible Jesus in the center with sinners floating over the edge of the “canvas” edge

Artemisia Gentileschi THE Renaissance woman who painted scenes of feminism and “dark subject matter”, especially after the trial with her rapist. It’s believed that she made a self-portrait of herself when painting the human symbol of Painting in La Pittura. She also wrote several letters describing her struggles as a woman in a male-dominated industry

Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew where Jesus calls upon a Roman tax collector to a higher calling. Jesus’s hand is outstretched and limp, calling to mind Michelangelo’s God and Adam in the Creation of Adam. His hand and wrist is limp because the church considers Jesus to be the second Adam who redeems humanity after Adam led them to fall

Gianlorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is a sculpture of white marble made to look like the scene of Teresa, a Spanish nun, fainting from religious passion is taking place on a stage that is being watched by other statues set into a Lincoln seat in the walls

Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is a sculpture of white marble made to look like the scene of Teresa, a Spanish nun, fainting from religious passion is taking place on a stage that is being watched by other statues set into a Lincoln seat in the walls