History, Culture & Society

Friday 17th October 2014
Again in this lecture we breezed through the aspects of Abstract Expressionism, but delved more into the connotations of the influences.
Three main words for this lecture were History, Culture and Society, we gathered the following points for each of the 3 words and their connotations-
 
History

• What is history? A point we explored was that some people believe there is a define difference between past and history. Past being things that have just happened, and history historical events that have been written.
• Who writes history? Most war events and written historical events have been written by the victors or men, are the points of history that we know altered? 
• Distant memories, expediently written, our memories constantly playing tricks on us- some people remember a memory completely differently to how you remember it.
•  Conflicting views on how to record historical events- how factual are they really? 
• Piecing together the truth from written history.
• Making our own history, how do we remember our own historical events?
•  Victors portray themselves in the best possible light- contracts away from the truth and factual information.

Culture

•  Fashion- varying culture's ideas of fashion.
• Belief
• Languages
• Alternative cuisine
• Respect- the amount of care expected as part of the culture
• Upbringing- traditions being reinforced on children etc.
• Traditional values
• Culture of learning- overall consciousness
• Religion- overall faith, does it differ from those surrounding them?
• Social Class, are they working class or middle class perhaps?

Society

• Rules and regulations and laws
• Citizenship
• Government
• Moral values- what's wrong and right? Conforming to certain modes of behaviour
• Patterns of behavior that are passed down through society 
• Democratic behaviour- choosing a leader
•  Distinct desire of how we should live

 Modernism was an important factor to consider the aspect of involving a variety of mediums, not just Art, but English Literature & Language, Sciences and Music to name but a few. Looking into the contrast of two of the same song but before and after the Abstract Expressionism did open the horizons of the implications the movement had on music, with the first music clip being the song 'Embraceable You' by Sarah Vaughan whilst the second was by Ornette Coleman. I found the songs sounded completely different, yet still remained the same, much in similarity to the art movement of that time, such artists like Picasso produced abstract portraits but still with the same underlying traditional portrait structure.

The inclusion of Jackson Pollock in the lecture as previously visited was also helpful, my first thoughts on his speech was that there is in fact a structural idea behind what seems to be a random mess of marks. Jackson Pollock wanted to break free from the orthodox of traditional art expression and drift away from the original paintings he created.