Artist: Wolf Vostell
Date: 1972
Medium: Prints, Postcards
Size: sheet 5.375 x 7.125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1989.464 

Professor Mary Magada-Ward argues that "critical reflection demands procedures for enlarging our understanding and for correcting faulty vision. To my mind, these are the chief offices of contemporary artistic production."

She references Marcel Duchamp’s claim that “[art] is a product of two poles—there’s the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it."

This seems to suggest that Wolf Vostell's extention of Duchamp, "I Have Qualified Life Into Art," is something Duchamp himself advocated. The way we look at representations, artistic and otherwise, is arguably a vehicle to "qualify life into art," to see life itself as an analog of performance art.

Source for Magada-Ward: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2008)

Source for Duchamp: Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology (1977), Edited by George Dickie and Richard Scalafani

Artist: Zak Smith
Date: 2004
Medium: Drawings and Watercolors, Drawings
Size: each of 755 5.5 x 4.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2006.9.1-.755 

When asked by an interviewer if he was channeling Cold War anxieties from his childhood into the work, Smith answered, "I'll let the lit majors pick apart what the threat of nuclear annihilation has to do with a novel about a guy who is obsessed with a bomb, but as for me, I have always been interested in doom, airborne or otherwise."

Discussion:

How do the choices visual artists make when adapting literature (to drawings, paintings, or movies) add to our ability to analyze literature?

Choose a novel or short story and consider how you would choose to adapt it to a visual format. 

Source: The Quarterly Conversation, Interview by Terri Saul

Suggested Readings:

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Mark Leyner, The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Artist: Richard Prince
Date: 1989
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 75 x 116.0625 x 1.625 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2002.5

In an interview about the series of paintings that includes this work, Prince said, "I'd hit rock bottom. . . . I'd been working 10 years and I still wasn't known. So I wrote a joke in pencil on a piece of paper, and I'd invite people over and ask them, 'Will you give me $10 for this?' I knew I was onto something--if someone else had done it I would have been jealous. You couldn't speculate about it. So much of art depends on the critic as the umpire. With a joke there's nothing to interpret."

Source: Vanity Fair article by Steven Daly (Dec. 2007)

Discussion: 

Artists, including authors, often choose to channel their own experiences into their work. How can focusing on this help us understand a text?

Does this painting comment on gender or femininity? Is our understanding of people, or literary characters, biased by ideological views of gender roles?

Suggested Readings:

Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Joanna Russ, The Female Man

Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 1981
Medium: Photographs
Size: unframed 24 x 48 x inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1982.40

Professor Mary Megada-Ward writes: "Sherman’s success in the 'horizontals' is upsetting our habitual ways of looking at pictures of women—an achievement that . . . is due not only to the subject matter of these photographs but to their manner of presentation."

Discussion:

Compare and contrast how female characters are represented in a literary text with how Sherman is represented in this photograph. Are the authors and artists consciously choosing to represent women in a certain way?

How does our culture in general look at women? How do television shows, advertisements, films, and literature influence how we choose to see women?

Suggested Readings:

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Emile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise

Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 2002/2004
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 39 x 30 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2004.50

Philosopher Charles S. Peirce writes that meaning “lies not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thought."

Source: The Essential Peirce Vol. 1 (1997)

Discussion:

Does Sherman choose to represent women, and herself in particular, in a way that is unique?

How does her work compare with literary representations of female characters?

Suggested Readings:

Lorrie Moore, Gate at the Top of the Stairs

Rachel Ingalls, "I See a Long Journey"

Artist: Cindy Sherman
Date: 2000
Medium: Photographs
Size: framed 31.125 x 24.1875 x 1 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2001.19

Professor James Guimond argues that Sherman rebels against the "male gaze" by "acitvely casting [herself] as the subject of [her] own stories," controlling the mise-en-scenes and "select[ing] the formats of the images in which [her] self-representations appear." 

Source: Modern Fiction Studies 14.3 (1994)

Discussion:

Should female artists and authors choose to represent women in any particular way?

Should our choices in interpreting a text or work of art be influenced by the author's gender?

Suggested Readings:

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Artist: Ana Mendieta
Date: January – February, 1972/1997
Medium: Photographs
Size: each of 4 20 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2004.16.1-.4

This is a self-portrait by Ana Mendieta, who was a Cuban-American artist.

Discussion:

Compare and contrast the way Mendieta has chosen to represent herself with Cindy Sherman's work.

How does literature influence the way we view women? Can it create biases or distortions?

Suggested Readings:

Gioconda Belli, The Inhabited Woman

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Artist: Alec Soth
Date: 2005
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 36 x 30 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2006.57

This photograph is from Minnesota artist Alec Soth. Writing in the New Yorker, Vince Aletti discusses the "elusive subjects" of Soth's photography, people who have "gone off the grid": "[Soth's] portraits are lovely and sympathetic. Working through his own ambivalence--what he describes as 'the desire to run away and the knowledge that you can't'--Soth takes us to a place that's almost as seductive as it is forbidding."

Source: New Yorker (Feb. 28, 2012)

Discussion: 

How has Soth chosen to portray this bride? Would your opinion of the photograph be different if it were taken by a female photographer?

Do literary representations of marraige and weddings influence society?

Suggested Readings:

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

Artist: Frank Gaard
Date: 1999
Medium: Paintings
Size: overall 44.25 x 84.1875 x 1.25 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2010.39.1-.4

In an interview, Gaard explained the use of caricature in his art: "[Y]ou try to demystify the way that someone chooses to look. . . . I was trained intellectually to think of the painting as an object that I'm designing using colors and forms, but by adding the element of the caricature I was playing that middle-ground of abstraction. The figure is abstracted but recognizable as a figure."

Source: BOMBlog Interview by Jonathan Thomas (Mar. 12, 2012)

Discussion:

Characterization in literature is very different from characterization in art, but are there similarities? 

How do the choices authors make about allusions and caricatures in their writing influence our ability to analyze it?

Suggested Readings:

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault

Artist: Wolfgang Tillmans
Date: 1991
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 12 x 16 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1995.128

Writing in Interview magazine, Bob Nickas argues that Tillmans' work exposes that "there should be new ways of questioning what it is that we see."

Source: Interview by Bob Nickas, Interview Magazine

Discussion:

How do the choices artists and authors make in representing characters allow us to question what we see?

Since domestic life is often considered private, can literature or art reveal anything about the domestic sphere that would otherwise remain hidden and unknown?

Suggested Readings:

A.M. Homes, Music for Torching

Kelly Link, "Stone Animals"

Artist: Peter Hujar
Date: 1985
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 19.8125 x 15.8125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2008.61

Peter Hujar was a New York artist active during the 1970's and 1980's, part of a community of downtown artists.

From his website: "Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar's photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way."

Source: The Peter Hujar Archive

Discussion:

Like artists, authors often carefully choose what to show and what to leave out. How does this affect their work?

What does this photograph say about our culture's views of superficiality and artificiality?

Suggested Readings:

James Joyce, Dubliners

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

Artist: Rosemarie Trockel
Date: 1988
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: 2.125 x 9.25 x 12.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1994.148.1-.5

From the ArtsConnectEd website: "Rosemarie Trockel is a German artist known mostly for her sculptures and installations that question 'women's work,' sexuality, and culture."

Discussion:

This work challenges the viewer to choose whether the shirt is associated with Justine, Juliette, or both. What does that choice say about women, sexuality, and/or culture?

Is the political meaning in this work too ambiguous? Should literature be more or less explicit when it has a political message?

Suggested Readings:

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

Artist: Katharina Fritsch
Date: 1982
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: overall 12 x 3.25 x 2.25 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1991.44

On the ArtsConnectEd website, Fritsch says: "The uniqueness disappears in my work, but essentially it disappears long before, in every souvenir shop. And the strange thing now is that every individual plaster figure does retain a certain aura, even in quantity."

Discussion:

Does Fritsch's choice to mass-produce her art diminish its artistic value? Does it affect the message of the art?

How do artistic and literary depictions of religion differ?

Suggested Readings:

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Artist: Anish Kapoor
Date: 1985
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: overall 55 x 91.5 x 40.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1987.117

Recently, Kapoor released his own version of the "Gangnam Style" video. In the Los Angeles Times, David Ng writes. "Kapoor's video contains references to the Pussy Riot group from Russia; Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, the Bahraini human-rights activist; and Tan Zuoren, the imprisoned Chinese activist. The video also makes references to a number of journalists who have been killed reporting human-rights stories around the world."

Source: Los Angeles Times Culture Monster blog (Nov. 23, 2012)

Discussion: 

Should artists and authors from cultures facing discrimination use their work to challenge or resist that discrimination?

Can the choices authors and readers make create a positive change in political struggles for empowerment?

Suggested Readings:

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy

Artist: Gary Simmons
Date: 1991
Medium: Mixed Media, Multiples, Other
Size: each installed 48 x 26 x 0.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1997.106.1-.6 

Gary Simmons is an American artist whose work examines race and collective memory. 

Writing in ArtWrit magazine, Oksana Katchaluba explains that Simmons' work looks at how "aspects of culture are continually impacting our collective view, in particular movies and popular culture as providers of a less formalized education."

Source: ArtWrit, Vol. IV (Fall 2010)

Discussion:

How do literary and artistic representations of different races and cultures strengthen or weaken an "us versus them" binary?

Can literature about race influence the choices we make in our daily lives, or is its influence merely academic?

Suggested Readings:

Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man

ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Artist: Robert Mapplethorpe
Date: 1984
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 19.75 x 15.8125 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2006.78

Another New York photographer who died of AIDS-related illness in 1989, Robert Mapplethorpe is associated with images of radical gay culture, the eroticization of black men, and political controversy, as he was one of the "NEA Four" artists attacked by conservative media and politicians for controversial art.

Discussion:

Is it still controversial for an artist or writer to choose to portray non-straight characters?

From Oscar Wilde to Susan Sontag, our literary canon has numerous queer authors. How important is an author's sexual identity when analyzing her texts?

Suggested Readings:

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Martin Amis, "Straight Fiction"

Artist: Robbin Murphy
Medium: Media Arts, Internet Art, Other, text, Web, video, visual, virtual
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #:
URL: http://artnetweb.com/iola/mrnetart/index.html

Robbin Murphy is an American artist best known for his arguments challenging Intellectual Property law and its effects on the relationship between artists and museums and galleries.

Source: artnetweb.com

Discussion:

Is it acceptible for an author to appropriate images, ideas, or even entire texts from previous material? Is there a line being authentic and inauthentic art?

Certain behavior scientists have proposed a theory that men are conditioned to try to impress men more than they are conditioner to impress women. Is this persuasive?

Suggested Readings:

John Knowles, A Separate Peace

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Artist: David Wojnarowicz
Date: 1990
Medium: Prints, Edition Prints/Proofs
Size: each 22.75 x 30 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1991.55.1-.2

According to Professor Todd R. Ralow, for Wojnarowicz images "are the bridges and tools that can bring knowledge of the workings of power, the constitution of current orders, and the possibility of resistance to the foreground."

Source: MELUS, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Fall 2006)

Discussion:

Although Wojnarowicz frequently chose to include themes of the body and sexuality in his work, Four Elements is ambiguous. Is there a social or political message?

In 2010, religious groups persuaded the Smithsonian to remove a short film by Wojnarowicz from an exhibit because it included a scene juxaposing a crucifix with ants. Was the museum's choice to give in to censorship acceptable?

Suggested Readings:

David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Artist: Larry Johnson
Date: 1983
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet, each of 6 20 x 24 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1997.103.1-.6

In this work, Johnson presents the names of six film stars: James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Montegomery Clift, Clark Gable, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo. ArtsConnectEd says that "[e]ach of them died unexpectedly . . . Their names, floating like film credits in a picture-perfect blue sky, evoke the immortality-as-commodity they've gained through the movies."

Source: ArtsConnectEd

The Sal Mineo companion image can be seen here.

Discussion:

American celebrity culture frequently includes tragic events, including many stars who die young. Does the way our culture views celebrity lead to this?

Does the way artists and authors choose to represent celebrities affect our culture? Or do other media mostly shape our view of fame?

Suggested Readings:

S. Paige Baty, American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic

Nathanael West. The Day of the Locust

Artist: Richard Prince
Date: 1992
Medium: Photographs
Size: each of fourteen 20 x 24 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2000.98.1-.15

From ArtsConnectEd: "The archetypal cowboy images, though cropped, are reproduced facsimiles of originals from Marlboro advertisements. The artist began rephotographing them after the company became the target of an antismoking campaign and was forced to stop using its famous model, the Marlboro Man."

Discussion:

Can the choices artists make when recontextualizing familiar images change the way we view those subjects?

Think of a book from a previous era where the characters seem to be prototypical American men. How has our view of that trope changed in the years since the book was written?

Suggested Readings:

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltest Falcon

Artist: Kwong Chi Tseng
Date: 1979
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 36.875 x 37 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1999.67

Professor Dan Bacalzo writes that Tseng "makes use of [the] discourse of Orientalism, self-consciously taking on the image of the Other and creating an ironic challenge to predominant representations of Asian Americans." 

Source: Theater Journal 53.1 (2001)

Discussion:

Does the way Tseng chooses to represent himself, as an Asian American, work as an "ironic challenge" to stereotypical or negative attitudes?

How does art and literature affect our attitudes toward people from other cultures? It has the potential to exoticize, which could be seen as negative, but also the potential to create sympathy and empathy.

Suggested Readings:

Gish Jen, Typical American

Gene Luen Yan, American Born Chinese

Artist: Natalie Bookchin
Medium: Media Arts, Internet Art, Other, text, game
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #:
URL: http://calarts.edu/~bookchin/intruder/

In their book Videogames and Art, Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell write: "Bookchin presents an awareness of being an intruder, herself, in the (previously?) male-dominated world of videogame creation and enjoyment. The videogame paradigms are subverted, mocked, and implicitly criticized for their shallow competitive and violent nature not unrelated to the nature of the violence of the males."

Source for Clarke and Mitchell: Videogames and Art (2007)

A video of The Intruder can be seen here.

Discussion:

How are our daily choices affected by videogames? Do they make people more violent? Do they affect or reflect our dominant culture?

Should artists and writers use videogames in their work? Will it affect its artistic value? Gain new readers?

Suggested Readings:

Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl

Artist: Shirin Neshat
Date: 1999
Medium: Media Arts, Videotapes/Videodiscs, Audio-Video
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2000.100.1-.6

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist currently living in the U.S. ArtsConnectEd explains this work: "Soliloquy explores self-identity and the splitting of the self." 

A video of Soliloquy can be seen here.

Discussion:

How do the choices artists and writers make shape how we view or feel about our identites? Think about dual or multiple identites specifically.

Soliloquy shows Neshat in traditional Muslim clothing in a modern Westen city and a traditional Islamic one. Think of an example from literature that illustrates the importance of context to individuals.

Suggested Readings:

Simin Daneshvar, Savushun

Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men

Artist: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes
Medium: Media Arts, Internet Art, Other, online forum
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #:
URL: http://www.echonyc.com/~confess/

The Temple of Confessions is an internet site where visitors can leave their confessions, which are incorporated into live performances by Gomez-Pena and other contemporary artists.

In their description of the work, NYU's Hemispheric Library writes, "The basic premise of these collaborations is founded on an ideal: if we learn to cross borders on stage, we may learn how to do so in larger social spheres."

Source: Hempispheric Institute for Performance and Policits (hidvl.nyuedo)

A video from a performance of Temple of Confessions can be seen here.

Discussion:

What choices do we make about when and how to confess whatever acts we feel guilty about? How has this changed over the years?

Do artists and writers ever incorporate an element of personal confession into their work? How and why?

Suggested Readings:

Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl

Artist: Lisa Hutton
Date: June 1996
Medium: Media Arts, Internet Art, Other, text
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #:
URL: http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~Variety_Is/TCA1.html

An interactive work from Lisa Hutton, Cyber*Babes looks critically at the way information is transmitted and processed. From her own website: "The piece repeatedly asks the user to state whether they are over 18 years of age or under 18 years of age," linking underage users to content filtered by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Users who choose over 18 are shown various "offensive" online material.

Source: www.lisahutton.net/artwork

Discussion:

How are our choices limited by the way information is presented and how accessible it is?

When artists and writers comment about censorship and technology, can it affect readers or society in general?

Suggested Readings:

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Don De Lillo, White Noise

Artist: Julia Scher
Date: 1995
Medium: Media Arts, Internet Art, DASC
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #:
URL: http://adaweb.walkerart.org/project/secure/corridor/sec1.html

Securityland is an interactive visual work where users can explore "issues of control and personal privacy," according to ArtsConnectEd. "All manners of psychologically and physically invasive services and products are seductively pitched at the visitors, promising to alleviate problems caused internally and externally."

Source: ArtsConnectEd website

Discussion:

When art or literature involves political messages about security and privacy, how does this affect a reader's choices about those issues?

Think about a book from at least 50 years ago and compare its representaion of privacy to the way we view privacy today.

Suggested Readings:

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

Artist: Alec Soth
Date: 2008
Medium: Photographs
Size: sheet 30 x 24 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 2011.20.1-.3

While many of Minneapolis photographer Soth's works, like the picture of a bride earlier in this Set, are taken of strangers, this image confronts the viewer by placing her in the perspective of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. 

Discussion:

How do the choices authors and artists make regarding perspective affect their work? Compare visual perspective in art with point of view in literature.

What does Soth's protograph say about the importance of context and background knowledge? If the work were untitled, would be be less meaningful? Meaningless?

Suggested Readings:

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Artist: Paul Shambroom
Date: 1992
Medium: Photographs
Size: framed 49.0625 x 61.9375 x 2.6875 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1995.99

Minneapolis photographer Paul Shambroom's images document power, from simulated terrorist attack drills to photographs like this one, showing a nuclear weapons facility.

Discussion:

Art (and literature) can make us think about society and democracy. Does this influence our everyday choices?

Think about the ideas regarding fear, paranoia, and social control shown in the books below, or other literature. Compare them with Shambroom's photograph.

Suggested Readings:

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr,. Slaughterhouse-Five

Artist: Ashley Bickerton
Date: 1989
Medium: Sculpture, Sculptures
Size: 96 x 156 x 12.5 inches
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #: 1990.19.1-.26

ArtsConnectEd explains the work: "The six cast-concrete boxes contain soil and crop samples from Africa, Asia, and South America, areas where monocuture--the widespread cultivation of a single cash crop--has become a common practice." 

Source: ArtsConnectEd website

Discussion:

Although one of the purposes of this artwork is to criticize monoculture, that message is probably ambiguous to most viewers. Does that make it less successful?

As consumers of food, we are presented with choices frequently that impact the prevalence of monoculture. Should we be more critical and careful of those choices than we are?

Suggested Readings:

John Christopher, The Death of Grass

Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Artist: Eugene Thacker
Date: 1999
Medium: Media Arts, Internet Art
Institution: Walker Art Center
Accession #:
URL: http://gsa.rutgers.edu/maldoror/formless/index/splash_image.html

Formless Anatomy is an ftp counter-genetic database that examines how scientists have moved from a physical to virtual system of cataloguing and monitoring the human body.

Discussion:

How can choices artists and writers make affect what is known, understood, and thought about the body?

Thacker's work i s about the intersection between technology and the human body. Think about science or speculative fiction that includes the same theme and how it relates to Thacker's project.

Suggested Readings:

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake 

William Gibson, Neuromancer