Green Coca Cola Bottles by Andy Warhol in 1962.

In Green Coca-Cola Bottles, Andy Warhol selected an icon of mass-produced, consumer culture of the time, the Coca-Cola bottle. The familiar curved Coke bottle was part of the visual imagery American consumers encountered frequently.

Warhol used a visual vocabulary that reinforced the image’s connections to consumer culture. The technique of printing for rendering the painting's surface further reinforced the painting's relationship to the then-current consumer milieu in which print media was so frequently encountered, and of course is still frequently encountered.

The repetition and redundancy of the Coke bottle is merely reflective of the product's virtual omnipresence in American society.

The silk-screen technique allowed Warhol to print the image a multitude of times. The bottles are of course very similar to one another, but also obvious are variations one to the other. So immersed was Warhol in a culture of mass production that he not only produced numerous canvases of the same image but also name his studio "The Factory".

Hanson, Supermarket Shopper                                                      Super realistic sculpture of a plump woman pushing a shopping cart over- flowing with items.Sculpture is thought to be a direct representation of a real person but this is not the case. Hanson was not trying to duplicate life, he was making a statement. This was to be the portrait of modern Americans. Meaning average mid aged Americans are: fat, smoking, in her curlers, going to the market to shop/buy things. This can be interpreted as: overconsumption, boring and lonely Americans, becoming more and more isolated. Meant to give the people an outside look at who they are or who they are becoming.

 Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? was created in 1956 for the catalogue of This is Tomorrow where it was reproduced in black and white and also used in posters for the exhibit. The collage depicts a muscle-man provocatively holding a Tootsie Pop and a woman with large, bare breasts wearing a lampshade hat, surrounded by emblems of 1950s affluence from a vacuum cleaner to a large canned ham. Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? is widely acknowledged as one of the first pieces of Pop Art and his written definition of what ‘pop' is laid the ground for the whole international movement. 

 The collage consists of images taken mainly from American magazines. The principal template was an image of a modern sitting-room in an advertisement in Ladies Home Journal for Armstrong Floors, which describes the "modern fashion in floors". The title is also taken from copy in the advert, which states "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? Open planning of course - and a bold use of color."

(Richard Hamilton)

Carl Andre, Lever

honestly, couldn't find much other than that it was convtroversial because of its simplicity. (there is literally no need for artistic ability to complete this and manipulating it has no effect on the piece, aside, of course, from removing all the bricks.)

Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson 1970

Built entirely of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah, it forms a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake which is only visible when the level of the Great Salt Lake falls below an elevation of 4,197.8 feet (1,279.5 m).

At the time of its construction, the water level of the lake was unusually low because of a drought. Within a few years, the water level returned to normal and submerged the jetty for the next three decades... (this goes on and off as the weather changes) It is now largely white against pink due to salt encrustation and lower water levels.

(from the description of the documentary chronciling the jetty's construction) Smithson combines his interest in geology, paleontology, astronomy, mythology and cinema, stating that he had an interest in documenting "the earth's history". In conjunction with filmed sequences of the jetty, Smithson incorporates footage of dinosaurs in a natural history museum and the ripped pages from a history text. During this scene Smithson critically refers to the institutions of history: "the earth's history seems at times like a story recorded in a book each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing". Smithson's narrative supports an alternative view of historical discourse and the art object's placement or production outside of the museum institution.

The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organized. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by rotating Herstory Gallery exhibitions relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table.
 

Many conservatives criticized the work for reasons summed up by Congressman Robert K. Dornan in his statement that it was "ceramic 3-D pornography", but some feminists also found the imagery problematic because of its essentializing, passive nature. However, the work fits into the feminist movement of the 1970s which glorified and focused on the female body. Other feminists have disagreed with the main idea of this work because it shows a universal female experience, which many argue does not exist. For example, lesbians and women of ethnicities other than white and European are not well represented in the work.

The aesthetics of the  installation consists of a singular Television set playing back her recorded performance. A table is tilted to show its interior under the Television. Chairs are laid out in a pyramid manner as two frames are located on the wall next to the Television.  This is all cornered. Now the performance is the main feature and Adrian Piper is seen cornered against a wall. What Piper talks about is related to her ethnicity and how she classifies herself as “Black”. Piper imposes the viewer into bringing out their racist subconscious for analysis. She discards aesthetics and focuses on psychology. 

A very good analysis: She says, “I’m black.”

Does that upset us? Do we think she is making a big deal of her race? Do we think she is seeking attention to make it as an artist? Do we think she must hate whites?  If we think any of these things we are assuming that anyone who can pass for white should, that white is better than black.

She is cornered: if she says she is black it upsets white people. And yet if she passes for white not only is it based on sick values, it means she has to listen to all the racist stuff whites say about blacks behind their backs.

further information at: http://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/adrian-piper-cornered/

Jenny Holzer began the Truisms series in 1977 as a distillation of an erudite reading list from the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City, where she was a student; by 1979 she had written several hundred one-liners. Beginning with a little knowledge goes a long way and ending with your oldest fears are the worst ones, the Truisms employ a variety of voices and express a wide spectrum of biases and beliefs. If any consistent viewpoint emerges in the edgy, stream-of-consciousness provocations it is that truth is relative and that each viewer must become an active participant in determining what is legitimate and what is not. Since the Truisms, Holzer has used language exclusively and has employed myriad ways to convey her messages. Selections from her Inflammatory Essays series, for example, appeared on unsigned, commercially printed posters, which were wheat-pasted on buildings and walls around Manhattan.

When such Holzer phrases as abuse of power comes as no surprise and money creates taste flashed from the Spectacolor board above Times Square in 1982, it marked her first appropriation of electronic signage. In doing so, she brought her disquieting messages to a new height of subversive social engagement. Her strategy-placing surprising texts where normal signage is expected-gives Holzer direct access to a large public that might not give “art” any consideration, while allowing her to undermine forms of power and control that often go unnoticed.

In Holzer's 1989 retrospective installation at the Guggenheim Museum, blinking messages from her various series, programmed to an insistent but silent beat, raced the length of an L.E.D. display board installed along the winding inner wall of Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral ramp. The museum's rotunda was transformed into a dazzling electronic arcade. In bringing her art from the street to the museum, Holzer focused on an audience that differed markedly from the unsuspecting passerby. The Guggenheim visitors who stood beneath the revolving ribbons of red, green, and yellow texts were more likely to be aware that this installation brought up such issues as the viability of public art, the commodification and consumption of art, and the conflation of the personal and the political—in short, some of the pressing issues of American art in the 1980s.

Judd, Untitled, (1968 or 1969)

In the early 1960s Donald Judd abandoned painting, having recognized that “actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”¹ His move into three dimensions was coincident with a growing acknowledgment among other artists of his generation of the physical environment as an integral aspect of an artwork. Minimalist sculpture broke with illusionistic conventions by translating compositional concerns into three dimensions, rendering the work a product of the exchange between the object, the viewer, and the environment.

The simple shape of Untitled (1968), with its slightly recessed upper surface, is readily intelligible as a whole and thus avoids the compositional effects that for Judd diluted a work’s power. As the artist’s exploration of three-dimensional space became more complex, his aversion to such effects was manifested in a number of strategies designed to subordinate a work’s individual components to the whole. Like the rectangular shape with which he began, Judd’s rows and progressions are legible systems that reoccur in his oeuvre. In its repetition of serial forms and spaces, the vertical stack of Untitled (1969) literally incorporates space as one of its materials along with highly polished copper, creating a play between positive and negative that coheres as a totality. 

Nauman, Waxing Hot, (1966-67)

Honestly, I couldn’t find much about this other than the guy thought it was funny to take common phrases and turn them into images. That’s it. I did read elsewhere that is open to multiple meanings, though I am not sure if this was the artist’s intent. If anybody remembers more about this particular photo from class, feel free to add what you know cause I couldn’t find anything.

Rather than present the viewer with the bare written instructions for the work, or make a live event of the realization of the concept (in the manner of the Fluxus artists), Kosuth instead unifies concept and realization. One and Three Chairs demonstrates how an artwork can embody an idea that remains constant despite changes to its elements.

--

Interesting things to keep in mind as presented by the MoMA: Does the inclusion of an object in an artwork somehow change it? If both photograph and words describe a chair, how is their functioning different from that of the real chair, and what is Kosuth's artwork doing by adding these functions together? Prodded to ask such questions, the viewer embarks on the basic processes demanded by Conceptual art. […]Chasing a chair through three different registers, Kosuth asks us to try to decipher the subliminal sentences in which we phrase our experience of art.

Hesse, Repetition Nineteen III, (1970)

First, it is important to note that Repetition series was a yearlong project where Hesse kept repeating her sculpture. This particular version was third in her cylinder container phase. It was important to her that it did not adhere to the rules of aesthetics. (She later did another project because she felt that this was too pretty) Hesse was also interested in materials; Repetition Nineteen III was made with polyester resin and fiberglass. Hesse also commonly used latex.

The yearlong Repetition project shows how Hesse carried an idea from medium to medium and form to form – or perhaps better, how an idea thus carried her. Repetition was for Hesse not just a matter of style, but a foundation of sculptural process.

Link to a good video explanation: http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/3/86

"The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" was exhibited in 1972. It was a wooden box displaying a full-figured, smiling black mammy, a kerchief wrapped around her head. She's holding a broom in one hand — and a rifle in the other.

It was about the way African-American women were treated as sex object, as domestic soldier. And it was about this particular woman's revolt to be free of that image.

"I'm the kind of person who recycles materials but I also recycle emotions and feelings," Saar says. "And I had a great deal of anger about the segregation and the racism in this country. And so this series sort of evolved. And if feel like if I had to say what was my contribution to the art world and to the world in general as an African American woman, [it] would be this series."

Saar wants the viewer "to be seduced by my work. That's the part that's essential — to have beauty. I want my piece to crook a finger, say to viewer, check this out."