Hybridity: Using many kinds of media in one work of art often including but not limited to installations, video projections, and sound pieces (Gude). Hybrids can be a point of interest because they are nebulous and sometimes uncertain beings (Ward). Gazing: The act of gazing challenges assumed meanings. "The term gaze is frequently used in contemporary discourses to recognize that when talking about the act of looking, it is important to consider who is being looked at and who is doing the looking (Olin, 1996). Gazing, associated with issues of knowledge and pleasure, is also a form of power and of controlling perceptions of what is "real" and "natural." (Gude)." . Representin': Using art to address ideas, issues, and problems within one's own culture setting (Gude). O . o 3. IMAGES AS TEXTS TO BE INTERPRETED Semiotics: Study of language, visual language and the process by which texts become meaningful Signs: The SIGNIFIER + SIGNIFIED= the SIGN Anything can be a sign so long as someone is around to interpret the sign as signifying something else and being meaningful. Signifier: The physical form (word, shape, gesture, etc. that is a text to be read Signified: The concept the signifier represents What relationships between signifier and signified determines meaning?: Context Is the relationship of the meaning determined by the relationship of one sign to another? Is the meaning determined by what is not said? It is a possibility... just as an image can be defined by only the space surrounding it (negative space like the dog at the bottom of Daniel Richter's painting, "Tuwenig") What structures give meaning to the signifier (text)? Context O O O o امی Iconic: image possesses attributes of thing portrayed Symbolic: connection between text and thing portrayed is random (For example, there is no attribute of the word “dog" that refers to the animal) Paradigm: relationship of ideas to one another or two texts gain meaning by not signifying the other Index: The unique trace or remains of a thing or of an event. i.e. The mark left by a water glass or breath on a piano (Orozco) Intervention/Rupture What if the relationship between signifier and signified is disrupted? The message that comes across is different than before and you have a new meaning Can this disruption have intense significance? O o "Non semantic production of meaning intended to destroy visual and textual homogeneity (quality of being the same)". The disruption of a sign. 4. OTHER TERMS Code: The conventions that enable signs to be organized into meaningful systems. In order to be meaningful any text must have an audience familiar with its conventions. Postmodernist art works often display self-consciousness about their own 'codedness', and postructuralists stress the idea that codes are dynamic rather than static. Things start to get complicated when you realize that different audiences can bring different codes to the same text, yet find it equally as meaningful (Ward). Decoding: Interpreting codes to get at its meanings. Encoding: reading your own cultural codes into something O o Deconstruction: Associated with the work of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is a method of reading, which effectively turns texts against themselves in order to reveal repressed polysemy [Multiple meanings]. It involves looking for moments when the text rhetorical strategies (i.e. the language it uses, the way it is constructed) contradicts what the author claims to be saying (Ward). In a sense the one viewing the artwork is also looking for what the artist has not said or included in a piece. Doubling: Creating multiples of something intentionally in order to change the meaning of something Entropy: The unavoidable loss and destruction of energy in a system resulting in the breaking down and disintegration of an organization and a return to a state of in differentiation (From Hal Foster's textbook Art Since the 1900's). Flat: A visual awareness of the actual properties of the art piece. An emphasis on the actual flatness of the canvas. It is what it is. According to Malevich, The divisions of the pictures surface are determined by the support and ground of the picture itself not by the artists "inner life" (Kandinsky) I and Other: Ask: Who is the "We” (Maybe other students of your same major for example) that "I" personally identify with and who are "they "? (The "other" people not of your major perhaps) The "other" is someone in a societal group other than your own. Iconography Using images and objects in art work that focus on meaning versus form, style, etc. and often refer to texts outside of the art work itself. Iconography is commonly seen in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art (Foster). Kinesthesia: Breaking down the distinction between the body at rest and the body in motion. Synesthesia: breaking down the boundaries between the senses; creating a situation in which a viewer can use all of his or her senses while experiencing an artwork. Kitsch: A form of dissembling the nature of the material of which an object is made, a form that is largely a result of industrial production. For example, a silversmith no longer creates his work by hand but rather a machine stamps a design on the metal. This stamp is not Terms and Concepts Porado X manka Bradfordia 1. AESTHETIC STANCES Mimetic: representational; an object is used to symbolize something else. According to the American Heritage dictionary: Using imitative means of representation: mimetic dance. Formal: Concerned with the traditional elements and principles of design such as line, shape, color, etc Expressionist: Created to make the viewer feel and emotion Instrumental: Art that serves a purpose. For example, icons and Biblical story were portrayed through art to teach people who could not read about the Bible. Institutional: Made for the purpose of pleasing the public or satisfying the requirements of a structure. Salon art/ French Academic art vs. avant-guard art. Feminist /Multicultural: Making or interpreting artworks from the viewpoint of a societal group in some way outside the dominate culture Used to raise social awareness, enhance understanding of different cultures worldwide, and acknowledge the connections within the human race. Deconstruction: Images are texts that convey meaning so the separation of the image/form from its common or assumed meaning creates new meaning. By taking the meaning away from something, new meaning is created. 2. GUDE'S POSTMODERN PRINCIPLES Appropriation: The use of found materials and recycled imagery in artwork. "If one lives in a forest, wood will likely become one's medium for creative play. If one grows up in a world filled with cheap, disposable images, they easily become the stuff of one's own creative expression (Gude)." Taking possession of something, or taking something over, without permission. Seen as a key strategy of postmodernist arts, sometimes as a symptom of the end of originality (From Glenn Ward's book Teach Yourself Postmodernism). O Juxtaposition: Placing different elements together or in a context outside of societal norms to create comparisons, contrast, and/or intentional contradictions to create meaning (Gude). Recontextulization: Taking a familiar image and placing it in a different context to create meaning (Gude). Layering: Piling images on top of one another to create depth visually, mentally and to express complexity of culture (Gude). Interaction of text and image: "The interplay between the two elements (text and image] generates rich and ironic associations about gender, social possibilities, and cleanliness. Students who make and value art in the 21st century must learn not to demand a literal match of verbal and visual signifiers, but rather to explore disjuncture between these modes as a source of meaning and pleasure (Gude)". The text does not necessarily have to describe the art work and visa versa. respecting the metals natural resistance to stress but rather mimicking other motifs like flowers, logos, etc (Foster). Necessary incompleteness-"the very condition for modernity" 'In the moment' art requires viewer participation so it must be incomplete so the viewer can do some of the work. O Transparency /Opacity Transparency: The viewer is to look through the painting, drawing or sculpture to see the organic life of the model. It is a window into the ideal (Think about Rodin's The Kiss). o Opacity: The viewer is confronted by what the artwork is and he or she is not looking through” it to another ideal (Now think of Rodin's Balzac) The materials and the process of the creation of the artwork are sometimes visible as in Balzac. In other cases such as some painting from Matisse's, he is not trying to trick the viewer into seeing something that is not there (like flattening a picture plane to get rid of the illusion of depth) Undeceive the Eye: the picture plane is opaque and nothing is transparent O Ontology/ ontological: Greek: Ontos: being Logos: study, discourse. Emerged during the 17th century to define an area of philosophy relating to the essence of being. الي Primitivism: return to origin and primal bliss. This is a concept used by European viewers of the art of other places . Privileged Point of View: Different views trigger different reactions and one viewpoint of a piece is not necessarily better than another viewpoint. particularly hip hop. Eventually, I started rethinking hip hop, especially those strands of it that I felt held very unhealthy attitudes toward the black female body, since I didn't know if I wanted to be part of that discourse. Nowadays, the way that I usually work is that I come up with an idea and then begin to research. For instance, I'm working on a suite of paintings for an upcoming show all based around Gustave Caillebotte's The Floor Scrapers, so I went on Amazon and got a lot of art history books and texts on that artist and that period. I find that usually when I'm reading at night and I'm working during the day, there will be texts that jump out at me and I can extrapolate something from the text that then becomes a title. There's also an emotional relationship to the work and to the text that I'm reading, so through the naming and the form of the works- I use paper instead of just old paint-I want the viewer to think more broadly, to think about the social implications of the material, and maybe the social implications of the titles. COPELAND: What a fascinating way to describe the process, since it suggests that the titles like the materials you use in the work-are found objects, always sourced from elsewhere. BRADFORD: Yes. I always go to history. I'm comfortable there and I've always been a reader. My imagination opens up through reading because you have to create all of these visual images in your brain. COPELAND: That comment definitely helps to bring out the multisensory experience of engaging your works; the paintings are so tactile and so bodily, involving various senses in their address to and conscription of the viewer. One of the things that you noted earlier, which is suggested by the title James Brown Is Dead, is that music is a literal and meta- phorical touchstone for your practice. In other interviews, you've said that your work has its own particular tone, and, I think, its own particular rhythm: each work-Los Moscos comes first to mind-seems to possess a kind of propulsive energy that slows down or speeds up as the eye moves over it. With all of that in mind, could you say more about how music matters to and informs your practice, especially the tone that it establishes in relationship to a viewer? BRADFORD: I seem to toggle between arriving at abstraction through structure-pictorial or architectural or topographical or cartographic--and between arriving at abstraction through process. I would say that the process-based abstraction is probably much more aggressive, much more demanding, while the structural abstraction has a different tone to it, almost like Philip Glass. I need both. On the one hand, there's Miles Davis's decon- structed jazz, which slows down and takes apart, very architectural. On the other, there's civil rights music or rap, like early Biggie Smalls and Tupac that has a raw in-your-face insistence. I go between the two tones. COPELAND: I think one can feel that in the work, how that tension gives the paintings their energy and rhythm. I also think it's quite compelling how you describe the relation- ships between the various modes, since so often when we try to think about abstract visual forms and abstract musical forms together, the conversation tends to lapse into 816 Callaloo Art