10.1 Materials, Processes, and Techniques in Global Contemporary Art

Global contemporary art (about 1980 to today) has no single style. Artists cross old boundaries between painting and craft, high art and popular culture, trained and self-taught, permanent and temporary. Video, performance, digital media, graffiti, found objects and installation (a whole space arranged as the work) sit alongside oil paint and bronze.

These choices raise questions: Who decides what counts as art? What happens when traditional skills and natural materials disappear, or when only some people have access to digital technology? Technology also changed how art is seen: the internet gives instant access to images and information about artists worldwide. When you analyze a work from this unit, ask why the artist chose this material and process, and what it adds to the meaning.

Horn Players (Jean-Michel Basquiat; 1983 CE; acrylic and oil paintstick on three canvas panels). Basquiat, a Brooklyn-born artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, began as a graffiti writer in New York. This triptych honors the bebop jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, shown as sketchy, skeletal figures on a black ground. Words like "ORNITHOLOGY" (a Parker tune) and "DIZZY" are written, repeated and crossed out. Oil paintstick, oil paint in solid crayon form, let him draw and write fast, like graffiti or a jazz solo. The work celebrates Black artists often left out of art history.

Androgyne III (Magdalena Abakanowicz; 1985 CE; burlap, resin, wood, nails, and string). Abakanowicz grew up in Poland during the Nazi occupation and then lived under Communist rule. She pressed burlap soaked in resin into molds of a human body, making a hollow, headless body shell, which rests on a rough wooden stand. The androgyne, neither male nor female, stands for any human being. The rough, cheap sacking and empty interior suggest how fragile and anonymous individuals become under oppressive systems.

Dancing at the Louvre, from the series The French Collection, Part I; #1 (Faith Ringgold; 1991 CE; acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed, pieced fabric border). Ringgold, an African American artist from Harlem, made "story quilts": paintings framed by quilted fabric with handwritten stories. The French Collection follows a fictional Black American artist, Willia Marie Simone, in 1920s Paris. Here a woman and three girls dance joyfully in front of the Mona Lisa and other paintings by Leonardo. Quilting, a craft passed down by Black women including Ringgold's own family, is joined to painting, a medium long treated as higher, so the work challenges both racial and material hierarchies.

Electronic Superhighway (Nam June Paik; 1995 CE; mixed-media installation: 49-channel closed-circuit video installation, neon, steel, and electronic components). Paik, a Korean-born pioneer of video art, coined the phrase "electronic superhighway" in the 1970s, before the internet was widespread. The museum's full title adds "Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii." Here, over 300 televisions fill a map of the United States outlined in colored neon. Each state plays clips tied to it, such as The Wizard of Oz for Kansas, and a camera puts viewers on screen in the Washington, D.C. section. The work captures a nation built on mass media and asks how screens shape identity.

Stadia II (Julie Mehretu; 2004 CE; ink and acrylic on canvas). Mehretu was born in Ethiopia and raised in the United States. On a very large canvas, she layered architectural drawings of stadiums, sweeping arcs and lines, sealed them under translucent acrylic, then added dense ink marks and bright shapes like flags, pennants and logos. The layers create depth and motion like a roaring crowd. Stadiums are places of shared spectacle and national pride, but crowds can also turn to conflict. Through abstraction, Mehretu maps the energy and tension of a globalized world.