It is obvious that social, political, or economic conditions can alter the nature and meaning of art.
This is clear in the Baroque period through the example of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers. The Baroque period was heavily concerned with reinforcing natural rhythm and a sense of time into the artwork produced.
Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers represents the four continents that were recognized in Bernini’s time, which were Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas, via the four major rivers that were associated with each of these continents – the Nile, the Danube, the Ganges and the Rio Della Plata respectively. The way it is designed enables the water to flow over the figures in a very natural way, invoking both a sense of time and of nature, rather than the carefully directed streams that were important in the earlier Renaissance.
We might look at some of these figures today and consider them somewhat stereotypical or even racist, such as the figure of the Nile, whose head is covered, forcing him to live in perpetual darkness. The entire fountain works to support a 54-foot Egyptian Obelisk dedicated to the sun placed in the center, removing its original Egyptian context, which remains largely unknown and imbuing it with a new meaning in its Roman location.
A large bronze hen pigeon was placed on top of the fountain to symbolize the peaceful work of the Church watching over the world as well as the family of the Pontiff who commissioned the work.
As time progressed, emphasis became more interested in the expression of emotion rather than the depiction of perfect form. Herbert James Draper created “The Pearls of Aphrodite” during the Romantic period.
This painting features a tall, honey-blonde near-nude figure standing upon some rocks. Her hair billows around her white body like a protective cloak and is held from her head by a golden circlet. Her pose, as she stands, is leaning slightly back away from the picture plane with one arm raised to hold a string of pearls up by her slender neck and the other hand extended out and curved slightly around her body to hold the other end of the pearls. The shape of her arm seems to suggest a graceful ballet movement which, combined with her contrapposto stance, gives the energy of the painting to Aphrodite herself Aphrodite is nude on the upper portion of her body with the pearls falling gently across her small cleavage and her white body itself stands as the typical revered white column usually associated with antiquity, but softened by flesh. Her lower body is loosely draped with white gauze only slightly whiter than her skin, representing purity and godliness, which were the ideals of the feminine, but also draped with a red cloak barely visible behind her, representing her more sexual nature as these ideas had developed in the social realm.
Jenny Holzer was born in Ohio in 1950 and embarked on a lifetime of learning, primarily within the design and artistic fields. It was her Truism series that brought her fame as she took her art out of the context of the lengthy text, image, and interior spaces and into the streets in bold, clear, concise statements. “The ‘Truism’ dramatized a depersonalized and amoral information landscape throughout juxtapositions. Holzer has since produced a variety of texts with points of view ranging from inflammatory manifesto to feminist or parental concern to bleak resignation. In all of her work she links ideological statements with the forms and meanings of architecture” (Stuart Collection, 1992). Although she lives and works in New York, her work is known throughout the country for its biting reflections on political issues of the day coupled with her blatant attempt to involve the average consumer in the interaction.
Holzer attempts to defamiliarize reality from within accepted symbolic systems. Rather than presenting images as truth, Holzer works to present words as truth by resorting to culturally adapted slogans through her abbreviated Truisms, an exhibition she started in 1977 and which continued to be displayed as late as 1990. In the below image, the Guggenheim Museum takes on a special tri-color LED displays in 1990 to display Holzer’s slogans. She challenges the idea that art must be preserved within enclosed spaces for a select few before she’s even said a word. By using many cliché-type slogans in her digitized electronic sign display, Holzer visually challenges her audience to ‘hear’ these culturally accepted sayings that have been thrown about since childhood, but largely ignored.
What isn’t explicitly written out, but is understood, is that one is expected to think about what these slogans mean, introducing one level of the sublime into the public sphere in which she displays her work.
References
Guggenheim Museum. “Untitled.” 2008. Web.
Stuart Collection. (1992). “Jenny Holzer.” San Diego, CA. Web.