1. TMA J

3. The TMA Question Cut-off date: 27 April 2017.
Write no more than 2500 words.
This assignment counts for 26 per cent of your overall continuous assessment score (OCAS).
What would you identify as the most important characteristics of art since c.1975?
Your answer should include reference to works of art in the following areas: film, photography, performance and installation art.

4. The Official Guidance Notes
The success of the TMA depends on identifying the most important characteristics of art since c.1975 and justifying your choices.
The course team envisage that most of the TMA will be spent writing about film, photography, performance and installation art. They do, however, accept that “you may also wish to consider the development of some more conventional media”.
BUT an answer that focuses largely on painting and sculpture will be unbalanced. The question doesn’t require you to look at painting and sculpture, but it does require you to look at the others.

5. A Crucial Piece of Guidance
The course team give you this vital piece of guidance: “Try to anchor your arguments in discussion of specific art practices, and take care with your choice of works to discuss. Your arguments will be more convincing if they are grounded in careful and relevant analysis of works and/or artists”.
The biggest single fault on TMA scripts, even from very good students, is a failure to link arguments to specific art works and practices.

6. You cannot cover it all!
This TMA question ranges over a lot of ground and you cannot deal with it all. You will have to be selective.
There is no ‘right answer’ to this question
But there will be good and not so good answers
A good answer will contain a strong and clear argument, supported by intelligent consideration of well-chosen examples from the 4 media specified in the TMA question.

7. The Recommended Reading
The official guidance notes, as always, recommend certain texts for the TMA
You can range beyond these texts (e.g. if you use a specific artist who has a text in AIT)
Only use the recommended reading if it is relevant to what you are arguing
The Hal Foster text is likely to be relevant for everybody, though.

8. Postmodernism
Another way of framing this question might be to ask what are the main characteristics of postmodern art
The opening chapter of Book 4 by Paul Wood does contain a useful overview in this respect
Possibly even more useful is the introduction to Section VIII on Postmodernism in Art in Theory. This itemises some of the leading characteristics of postmodern visual culture.
You may be able to apply some of these to the important characteristics required by the TMA

9. The Time-Frame for the Question
The question asks you to identify “the most important characteristics of art since c.1975”
The “since c.1975” is a bit of a pain because it would have been useful to be more precise.
As a rule of thumb, I personally would not go back before 1973.
You could stick to the date of 1975 as a way of narrowing down examples.
You can use examples post 2000 if you wish (e.g. if you have studied A226), but you do not get ‘brownie points’ for doing so.

10. How do you decide what are ‘the most important characteristics of art since c.1975’?
There are two aspects to this –
You need to identify what the most important characteristics are, but you also
Need to explain why they are the most important characteristics – you need to build a case for their importance, in other words.
You can scrape a pass by identifying important characteristics, but for a good grade, you need a convincing argument as to why they are important characteristics

11. How do you decide what are ‘the most important characteristics of art since c.1975’?
Obviously, the employment of new technologies and new media are important developments in themselves.
But those new media developed to serve a purpose that older media such as painting and sculpture were less equipped to deal with – particularly the modernist view of those art forms as medium-specific and (following on from that) of art as autonomous. The decline of modernism and with it the ideas of autonomy and medium specificity are therefore important characteristics

12. How do you decide what are ‘the most important characteristics of art since c.1975’?
The new media and technologies were often used for the purposes of social and political criticism
Many of the artists who used them had an explicitly political agenda (e.g. feminist, post-colonial, socialist etc.). They were producing what Hal Foster called ‘Subversive Signs’.
You may remember from Book 1 that the growth of these new media coincided with the development of new forms of identity politics

13. The Importance of the 4 new media – performance/body art as an example
To build up your case for the significant characteristics of art post 1975, and to explain why a particular art form was important and useful, you also need to explore how the medium was used
In book 1, it was pointed out that body art collapsed the traditional distinction between the subject and the object in the art work. How might this bear upon the success and importance of performance based art? This kind of point needs to be made by referring to specific examples.

14. Kristina Stiles argues that performance is the only art form that has not been assimilated by global capitalism
It is a particularly effective political medium, she argues, because it uses the body to demonstrate controls imposed on the body
Performance has been used aggressively to counter images of women as the victims of male oppression and violence.
This is one reason why the history of performance has been linked to feminism

15. The Role of the Spectator
One important characteristic to consider is the changed nature of spectatorship and the different experience(s) offered to the spectator by the new art forms post 1975.
Hal Foster refers to the spectator as becoming an ‘active reader of signs’ rather than a passive consumer of art.
The experience might also be more interactive and/or visceral (think of Marina Abramovich’s Rhythm 0 below)

16. Gender Identity and the New Media
Possible examples

17. Ana Mendieta: Siluetas, 1976
Mendieta’s work is interpreted as (a) an attempt to construct an identity for herself to replace the one she lost when she was sent to the USA as a child (b) as a contribution to a more general discourse on identity – on the constructed nature of identity, for example (acquired rather than innate). The implication is that those who witnessed the performances would reflect on the instability of identity, including their own.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive

18. Carolee Schneeman: interior scroll, performance, 1975

19. Carolee Schneeman: interior scroll, performance, Performed in East Hampton,NY and at the Telluride Film Festival, Colorado.1975
"I thought of the vagina in many ways-- physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by it's passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual power. This source of interior knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess worship."

20. Carolee Schneemann: Interior Scroll, textual record, 1975, Tate
The text on the scroll was taken from a super 8 film Schneemann had begun in 1973 entitled Kitch’s Last Meal. It recounts a conversation with ‘a structuralist film-maker’ in which the artist sets intuition and bodily processes, traditionally associated with ‘woman’, against traditionally ‘male’ notions of order and rationality.

21. Marina Abramovich: Rhythm 0, 1974
There were 72 objects on the table that spectators could use on the artist as desired, duration 6 hours. Objects included knives and a gun.

22. “I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.” - Marina Abramovic
Those who used the objects to attack Abramovic’s clothes and body were not exclusively male, but males were considerably in the majority

23. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, 1973
After child-birth in 1968, Ukeles became a mother and fell out of the picture as far as the art avant-garde was concerned. In a rage, she wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969, which re-described as art much of the service work undertaken by wives, mothers etc.

24. Martha Rosler: Semiotics of the Kitchen. 1975. Video
Rosler intended the video to challenge "the familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings -- the securely understood signs of domestic industry and food production."

25. Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1979

26. Caravaggio: Young Bacchus
Cindy Sherman: Untitled, 1992

27. Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party, 1979, Mixed Media

28. Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party, 1979, Mixed Media - detail

29. Louise Bourgeois: Passage Dangereux, 1997

30. Adrian Piper: Cornered, 1988 [A work that deals with her identity as a black woman]

31. Ethnic, National and Cultural Identity
Possible examples

32. Santiago Sierra: 133 persons paid to have their hair dyed blond, 2001, Venice Biennale

33. Jeff Wall: Mimic, 1982

34. Allan Sekula: Fish Story 1987-95

35. Allan Sekula: Fish Story 1987-95

36. CARLOS AMORALES Amorales Vs. Amorales, 2001 Born in Mexico City in Lives and works in Mexico City and Amsterdam. The free wrestling world, an enormously popular sport in Mexico, is Carlos Amorales' favourite field of operation. With the help of mask-maker Ray Rosas, the artist has created a fictional alter-ego called "Amorales", impersonated by different performers in order to explore themes such as identity, social conventions, eroticism.

37. Santiago Sierra: Wall Enclosing a Space, Spanish pavilion, Venice Biennial, Venice Italy, 2003

38. Serra covered the word “España” on the Spanish Pavilion’s facade with black plastic and sealed the building’s entrance with cinderblocks, caused a similar outrage. Visitors who walked around to the back door and showed Spanish passports to the uniformed guards there were allowed to enter, but all they found in the pavilion were scattered remnants from the previous year’s installation.

39. Santiago Sierra on his ‘empty’ pavilion for the Venice Biennale, 2003
In the context of the biennial we are all playing at national pride, and I wanted to reveal that as the principal system of every pavilion. I had fun covering the word “España” on the facade of the building. In other situations I can play a bit with themes, but the biennial piece was already marked: it had to talk about the concept of the nation, of the representation of Spain, about the significance of those pavilions—because you can’t forget that the countries that participate in the Biennale are the most powerful ones in the world. I mean, there’s no pavilion for Ethiopia. So the theme was already a given. People received it well, although the Spanish press took it as a provocation, when it was simply a reflection.
A nation is actually nothing; countries don’t exist. When astronauts went into space they did not see a line between France and Spain; France is not painted pink and Spain blue. They are political constructions, and what’s inside a construction? Whatever you want to put there. And in fact the pavilion wasn’t empty: there were leftovers there from previous shows. It was an act of respect to the history of the place. But the work was also the people who were passing by it. The piece was not the empty space but rather the situation.
The Spanish ambassador wanted to enter without documentation, but I had told the guards that their salaries depended on him, so contrary to my will and that of the patrons, he got in. In the art world you always work for the powers that be: banks, governments and so on. Who else can pay for an exposition in a museum? 

40. Joseph Beuys: I like America and America likes me (Coyote), performance (filmed), A work that used the coyote as a symbol for the treatment of native Americans in the USA

42. The Critique of Representation
One of the important developments during the 1970s was the emergence of forms of art that sought to (a) to expose the ideological uses of imagery [Burgin, below] and (b) the inadequacies of conventional forms of representation [Sekula and Rosler, below]
These artists made the viewer think about the condition of representation itself – to question what they were looking at, rather than (for example) just assuming that documentary photography is a ‘truth-telling’ medium

43. The Critique of Representation
Dave Beech’s DVD on video art also contains some very interesting arguments in this respect.
He suggests that much video art deliberately opposes (and thus criticises) the visual forms of conventional TV and video. Unlike conventional TV, the viewer is made aware of what he/she is watching.

44. Allan Sekula: Aerospace Folktales, 1973, 51 b&w photographs in 23 frames, three red canvas director's chairs, six potted fan palms, three CD players, three speakers; three simultaneous, unsynchronized CD recordings

45. Victor Burgin: Possession (1985)

46. Martha Rosler: the bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974 – 1975)

47. Jeff Wall: Mimic, 1982

48. Other important characteristics
One notable feature of art since 1975 is that it often took place outside a museum or gallery context. This might be because:
The artist wished to avoid involvement with the official institutions of art
The work might be site-specific, and take its meanings/significance from its location
The work was explicitly to do with the landscape and had strong environmental connotations.

49. Other important characteristics