Assignment Visual Art & Society
• Complete the Homework 6 QUESTIONS PART ONE
Homework Comprehension Questions: Please respond to the following questions?
1. What was Black Mountain College? Briefly describe the intellectual interests and ideas of its faculty and students.
2. Who was John Cage? How did he influence visual art in the 1950s?
3. Briefly explain how Alan Kaprow believed his work followed from Jackson Pollock.
4. Contrast the approach to painting represented by, respectively, Jasper Johns and the earlier Willem de Kooning.
5. What are some of the similarities and differences in Rauschenberg's combine painting series and his later silkscreens?
6. How would you sum up the stylistic and philosophical differences between the "Beat" generation and the earlier Abstract Expressionist artists? Which would you defend as more successful in their artistic accomplishments?
PART TWO
Discussion: Is a "happening" visual art?
1. After you've considered Alan Kaprow's "happenings," how would you defend these against the following simple deductive argument about aesthetics.
2. Premise 1: Art takes the form of human-made material objects with specific aesthetic attributes (line, color, texture, value, deliberate composition).
3. Premise 2: A happening involves loosely-orchestrated, performative encounters in which human-made material objects are secondary
4. Conclusion: A happening is therefore not art, though it may be some thing else (theater perhaps)
5. Try to undermine one of the premises. For example, how could you persuasively define art without material objects or specific attributes (thereby undermining premise 1)?