Juxtaposition

jux·ta·po·si·tion

noun

noun: juxtaposition; plural noun: juxtapositions

the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.

THINK:

How do you define Freedom? 

Is Freedom a given or do you need to earn Freedom?

How do you define happiness?

Is happiness the "possibility" of your dream or actually living your "dream"?

Do you wanna, do you wanna be
Do you wanna, do you wanna be
Do you wanna, do you wanna be, free
Do you wanna, do you wanna be, happy
Do you wanna, do you wanna be, happy
Do you wanna be, happy
Do you wanna, do you wanna be, happy
I said do you wanna, do you wanna be, happy
I said do you wanna, do you wanna be, free
I said do you wanna, do you wanna be happy
I said do you wanna, do you wanna be, free
Free from pain, free from scars
Free to sing, free from bars
Free my dawgs, you're free to go
Block is hot, the streets is cold
Free to love, to each his own
Free from bills, free from pills
You roll it loud, the speakers blow
Life get hard, you ease your soul
And cleanse your mind, learn to fly
Then reach the stars, you take your time
And look behind and say, "Look where I came
Look how far I done came"
They say that dreams come true
And when they do that there's a beautiful thing
Do you wanna, do you wanna be, happy
I said do you wanna, do you wanna be, free
I said do you wanna, do you wanna be

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 Journal Questions?

Is freedom being able to have the buying power for anything you want or to be unencumbered?

Point out the symbolism the artist uses to portray the idea of happiness and freedom, success and money, and journey and destination.

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America Is Hard to See

By: Robert Frost

Columbus may have worked the wind

A new and better way to Ind

And also proved the world a ball,

But how about the wherewithall?

Not just for scientific news

Had the Queen backed him to a cruise.

Remember he had made the test

Finding the East by sailing West.

But had he found it? Here he was 

Without one trinket from Ormuz

To save the Queen from family censure

For her investment in his venture.

There had been something strangely wrong

With every coast he tried along.

He could imagine nothing barrener.

The trouble was with him the mariner.

He wasn't off a mere degree;

His reckoning was off a sea.

And to intensify the drama

Another mariner Da Gama,

Came just then sailing into port

From the same general resort,

And with the gold in hand to show for

His claim it was another Ophir.

Had but Columbus known enough

He might have boldly made the bluff

That better than Da Gama's gold

He had been given to behold

The race's future trial place,

A fresh start for the human race.

He might have fooled Valladolid.

I was deceived by what he did.

If I had had my chance when young

I should have had Columbus sung

As a god who had given us

A more than Moses' exodus.

But all he did was spread the room

Of our enacting out the doom

Of being in each other's way,

And so put off the weary day

When we would have to put our mind

On how to crowd and still be kind.

For these none-too-apparent gains

He got no more than dungeon chains

And such posthumous renown

(A country named for him, a town,

A holiday) as, where he is,

He may not recognize for his.

They say his flagship's unlaid ghost

Still probes and dents our rocky coast

With animus approaching hate,

And for not turning out a strait,

He has cursed every river mouth

From fifty North to fifty South.

Someday our navy, I predict,

Will take in tow this derelict

And lock him through Culebra Cut,

His eyes as good (or bad) as shut

To all the modern works of man

And all we call American.

America is hard to see.

Less partial witnesses than he

In book on book have testified

They could not see it from outside—

Or inside either for that matter.

We know the literary chatter.

Columbus, as I say, will miss

All he owes to the artifice

Of tractor-plow and motor-drill.

To naught but his own force of will,

Or at most some Andean quake,

Will he ascribe this lucky break.

High purpose makes the hero rude;

He will not stop for gratitude.

But let him show his haughty stern

To what was never his concern

Except as it denied him way

To fortune hunting in Cathay.

He will be starting pretty late.

He'll find that Asiatic state

Is about tired of being looted

While having its beliefs disputed.

His can be no such easy raid 

As Cortez on the Aztecs made.

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America Is Hard to See  

Whitney Museum of American Art

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Allan D’Arcangelo (1930-1998), Madonna and Child, 1963. Acrylic and gesso on canvas, 68 1/2 × 60 1/8 in. (174 × 152.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2013.2 Art© Estate of Allan D’Arcangelo, Licensed by VAGA, New York

Although Allan D’Arcangelo would become known primarily for his images of US highways, complete with road signs and billboards, he made a number of significant paintings of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, the latter pictured in Madonna and Child with her toddler daughter. D’Arcangelo worked from a contemporary portrait photograph of the First Lady and Caroline Kennedy to make this graphic take on an age-old religious art-historical subject. Mother and daughter are rendered in bold blocks of unmodulated color, their featureless faces ringed in bright yellow halos that elevate them to the status of contemporary icons and saviors of America.
D’Arcangelo highlights the Kennedys’ brand status in his use of the bold style and limited color palette of commercial design and advertising, epitomized in the subjects’ two-tone hair. The image trades on visual legibility: its sitters are recognizable merely by virtue of their signature hair and clothing, and Jackie’s string of pearls. With its graphic style and celebrity subjects, Madonna and Child relates to works by other Pop artists such as Andy Warhol. Like Warhol’s works, this painting points to the more sinister side of celebrity and consumer culture: despite their apparently heavenly status, Jackie and Caroline have been reduced to images to be consumed, devoid of depth, individuality, and voice. The tragic aura of the painting seems particularly poignant given the assassination of President Kennedy just a few months after D’Arcangelo completed this work.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 107. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press

Alice Neel (1900-1984), Pat Whalen, 1935. Oil, ink, and newspaper on canvas: 27 1/8 × 23 1/8 in. (68.9 × 58.7 cm); image, 26 3/4 × 22 7/8 in. (67.9 × 58.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Dr. Hartley Neel 81.12 © The Estate of Alice Neel; Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Joan Mitchell (1926-1992), Hemlock, 1956. Oil on canvas, 91 × 80 in. (231.1 × 203.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art 58.20 © The Estate of Joan Mitchell

Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Four Darks in Red, 1958. Oil on canvas, 101 13/16 × 116 3/8 in. (258.6 × 295.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz, Mrs. Samuel A. Seaver and Charles Simon 68.9 © 2015 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York

Four Darks in Red exemplifies Mark Rothko’s darker palette of the late 1950s, when he increasingly used red, maroon, and saturated black hues. When seen close up (as the artist intended), this nearly 10-footwide canvas engulfs the viewer in an atmosphere of color and intense visual sensations. The weightiest dark color is at the top of the canvas while a softer, roseate glow emanates from below, creating a reversal of visual gravity. Rothko believed that such abstract perceptual forces had the ability to summon what he called “the basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, and doom.”

Lari Pittman (b. 1952), Untitled #16 (A Decorated Chronology of Insistence and Resignation), 1993. Acrylic, enamel, vinyl paint, glitter, and crayon on wood, 84 × 60 1/16 in. (213.4 × 152.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Peter Norton 93.130 © Lari Pittman

Neil Jenney (b.1945), Threat and Sanctuary, 1969. Oil on canvas, with wood frame, 61 × 123 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. (154.9 × 313.1 × 8.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection 2012.175a-b © Neil Jenney

For Threat and Sanctuary, Neil Jenney used broad brushstrokes executed in thinly applied paint to depict a lone figure swimming through shark-filled waters toward an empty lifeboat. The title underscores the deadpan literalism of the scene. Threat and Sanctuary is part of a series in which each painting names two subjects that don’t logically belong together. Collectively, the works—all set in deep black frames constructed by Jenney and whose titles the artist hand-lettered—offer a backhanded testament to the power of painting, a medium whose persuasive power is so great that it can, at least momentarily, make a believable reality out of absurd juxtapositions.

Jenney wryly referred to his paintings as “good ideas done badly,” a description that anticipated the late 1970s categorization “Bad Painting.” As an artist who willingly defied conventional expectations, Jenney readily embraced the term.

Mark Bradford (b. 1961), Bread and Circuses, 2007. Found paper, metal foil, acrylic, and string on canvas, 134 1/4 × 253 1/2 in. (341 × 643.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Patrick and Mary Scanlan 2008.42 © Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford often builds the surface of his collaged paintings, including Bread and Circuses, using materials salvaged from the street. A self- proclaimed “paper chaser,” the artist gathers printed matter from his South Central Los Angeles community—advertisements, posters, newsprint, and notices that implicitly reference the livelihood of the neighborhood—and recombines the fragments into multilayered abstractions.
The dense, gridded passages and more open areas—demarcated by silver paper—resemble an indecipherable map of a tangled, urban landscape. Noting that he was influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s Deluge drawings of cataclysmic storms inundating a city, Bradford has linked the work to the contemporary devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which had devastated the Gulf Coast just two years before he made the painting.
The work’s title invites a political reading. Translated from a Latin idiom, it refers to the provision of food and entertainment intended to divert the common people’s attention from problems such as poverty, disenfranchisement, and lack of social mobility.

Dana Schutz (b. 1976), Building the Boat While Sailing, 2012. Ink on paper: sheet, 72 1/8 × 96 in. (183.2 × 243.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Drawing Committee 2013.33 © Dana Schutz

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Process/Method: 

Using your journal entries as a road map...

• Create a 2 dimensional black and white drawing illustrating your definition of Happiness.
• Create a 2 dimensional collage using commercial images to illustrate your definition of Freedom.
• Cut up the two artworks you have just created and arrange the pieces in a square format of 16in by 16in.  Remember to keep in mind the idea of juxtaposition and two ideas/emotions either blending together or living side by side. 

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Related Links:

Bet the Farm -- The New Yorker  
J.Cole Bio -- NPR