Hi, I have a 1500 word Art essay due, and wondering if there were any artists you could suggest and how you might go about approaching it. It is from the 2001 HSC Conceptual Framework.
“Artists interpretations of the world are constrained by their time and place”
Evaluate this statement with reference to particular examples.
I am not the best writer so any help would be appreciated.
Hey there and welcome to the forums!
For this question, I'll probably go with the following artists and artworks:
1. Still Life with Chair Caning - Pablo Picasso
2. Fountain - Marcel Duchamp
3. The Merzbau - Kurt Schwitters
4. Campbell's Soup Cans - Andy Warhol
But I honestly think you can do ANY artworks/artists for this question as it is a very flexible question:
The way I would approach this question is by this:
> How an artist's artwork is influenced by movements/prominent practices during their time.
For Picasso, you can say that the industrial revolution had a HUGE impact on his painting because this allowed for cubism (artists didn't need to portray the world in an accurate manner because of the introduction of photography, thus allowing for experimenting and whatnot)
For Duchamp, the French salon influenced Duchamp to revert to the industrial wasteland as inspiration for his work and commented on the significance of an artist's conceptual ideas and how it was more important than the final look of the work (definitely an issue that hasn't been discussed before. In the past, artworks only existed because they were commissioned. Now artists had complete control of what the final look of an artwork looked like)
For Scwhitters, here's my analysis on his work 'Merzbau'
In this installation artwork called ‘Merzbau’ by the German artist Kurt Schwitters, it appears to be an assemblage of rubbish in his studio. Schwitters was an avid rubbish collector and loved to transform them into art. The found objects dramatically invaded his studio and eventually became the Merzbau. His studio became part sculpture and part environment and took over a time period of fourteen years and covered eight rooms. Every wall and ceiling was covered with a range of collected miscellaneous objects. By doing this, Schwitters gives the objects a new purpose and a new meaning. However, it is unknown what the final product looked like due to its ever changing and ongoing nature. Merzbau was not only a reflection of Schwitters’ artistic practice, but also a response to the First World War. The defeat of the Germans has lead to Schwitters withdrawal from reality and taking refuge in his artmaking process. The need to find beauty and meaning in discarded objects can symbolically represent Schwitters’ attempt to rebuild the dysfunctional German society as a result of the war. Schwitters’ artistic practice of assembling to create a new found purpose in discarded objects has question traditional views of art.
Essentially, Schwitter's goal was to create art out of discarded objects as a cultural response to World War 1.
For Warhol, his previous job as a screen printer and the rise of consumerism during his time made him create a series of works to present these industrialised objects as art, but as well as to comment on society's ongoing problem with consumerism.
Hope this helps!