Theological Art Criticism Paper – Mark Rothko

Order Description

1)It needs to primarily focus on a single artwork (or a single series) created in the last 150 years.
2)It needs to present a thesis, an argument for how the work should be interpreted.

3)It needs to be well-informed and directly reference at least three well-respected texts—books or
journal articles (internet sites are generally not acceptable).

4) quality of visual analysis (how well you “work” the visual characteristics of the art)

5) quality of ideas (your thesis, your angle of approach, the connections you make)

6) quality of research (how well you draw from the best literature on your artist/topic, how well
you cite your sources, the quality of your sources)

7) quality of writing (how well you structure your paper, your sentences, and how effectively
you choose your words).

BBST 465: Art and the Bible
Guidelines for Theological Art Criticism Paper
Your goal in writing this paper is to present a focused and careful theological “reading” of an artwork made sometime in the past century or so. You need to choose ONE artwork (or in some cases the work is really a series of artworks) by a well-established artist: critically analyze its form and submit it to careful theological interpretation (“artwork” can be broadly defined here to also include film, music, architecture, fashion, etc.). The primary aim of this paper is to offer your reader an interpretation of the work, and to do so specifically against the interpretive horizons of Christian theology. In other words, your task is to present an extended, focused argument about how this artwork should be interpreted if theology is included within our interpretive concerns. As you write this paper try to answer the following questions: What does this work assume about the way the world is or should be? What are the theological implications or challenges of this work? In what ways does this object embody, contribute to, challenge, and/or come under critique from Christian theology? What is a Christian understanding of this object?
While the paper is primarily focused on theologically interpreting a single work, you are free to make whatever connections you think are relevant to gaining a deeper understanding of the work. References to influential books, historical events, societal changes, and philosophical shifts in the culture at large may help to invigorate your interpretation of the work. You can trace specific influences or draw parallels to developments in other art forms, such as music, literature, theatre, film, television, or you could look for links to science, philosophy, technology, media, etc. If relevant, you are encouraged to quote the artist’s own words or cite passages from art critics, and you are welcome to include some biographical information on the artist and a discussion of other work by that artist, but only when it is directly relevant to the one work in question (try to avoid simply giving a generic summary of the artist’s life and his/her body of work). In other words, there are many ways to move outward from the art and many frames of reference that can lead you into the theological significance of the work. Be creative, but keep the argument focused, making only the connections you feel are most significant.
REQUIREMENTS:
? It needs be a minimum of 3000 words (maximum of 3500).
? It needs to primarily focus on a single artwork (or a single series) created in the last 150 years.
? It needs to present a thesis, an argument for how the work should be interpreted.
? It needs to be well-informed and directly reference at least three well-respected texts—books or journal articles (internet sites are generally not acceptable).
There are four criteria to good art criticism that you should keep in mind:
1) quality of visual analysis (how well you “work” the visual characteristics of the art)
2) quality of ideas (your thesis, your angle of approach, the connections you make)
3) quality of research (how well you draw from the best literature on your artist/topic, how well you cite your sources, the quality of your sources)
4) quality of writing (how well you structure your paper, your sentences, and how effectively you choose your words).
Guidelines for Formatting
1. TITLE PAGE: The title page should include the following:
? Create a title for your paper that cues the reader into your key idea/thesis (it should fit your paper)
? the artist’s name, the title of the artwork, and the date it was created in parentheses.
? your name, the course number, the university’s name, the name of the instructor, and the date that you are submitting the paper.
? Lastly, please include a reproduction of the artwork you have chosen. This reproduction can either be included on the title page or by itself on the second page.
? Feel free to design this title page any way that you like regarding placement, fonts, sizes, etc.
2. BODY OF THE PAPER:
? Use Times New Roman font in a standard 12 font size for your text (please do not italicize or boldface the entire text).
? The paper must be double-spaced or 1.5-spaced (not single-spaced).
? Margins should be exactly 1 inch all the way around: top, bottom, left, and right.
? Align text to the left; do not justify the right margin.
? Indent the beginning of all paragraphs except the first one.
? Do not leave an extra space between paragraph blocks; that is a practice used in business letters and formal documents (like this one), not research papers.
3. CITATIONS:
Citing other sources (the artist, respected scholars, etc.) can be a wonderful way of making your paper (1) powerful (because it will be well-informed) and (2) specific (because it will wrestle with specific facts and opinions, rather than vague generalizations). As you do this, it is very important to cite all the sources that you rely on and/or quote. Citing one’s sources is not simply a defensive move (to keep from plagiarizing); it is the way in which scholarship generates further research. Your reader must be able to retrace your steps in order to recover your sources and read them for him or herself.
Document your sources in the following format:
? Use footnotes at the bottom of the page (endnotes, which follow the last page of your text, are also acceptable, but footnotes are preferred). Please don’t use parenthetical notes.
? Format these footnotes using the Turabian format (see The Chicago Manual of Style by Kate Turabian).
? All sources referenced must appear in a bibliography at the end of the paper.
? See the pages below for examples of all of these. . .
(Example of a TITLE PAGE)
Singing Bodies
The Musical Theology of Tim Hawkinson’s Überorgan (2000)
by Jonathan A. Anderson
BBST 465: Art and the Bible
Professors Jonathan Anderson and Bob Covolo
Biola University
May 16, 2013
(Examples of Chicago/Turabian FOOTNOTES)
? Books:
1 Author(s) or editor(s), Title: Subtitle, translator(s), Series, edition, volume (City of publication: Publisher, year), page number(s).
2 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 45.
3 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 21–22.
4 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon, France: Les presses du réel, 2002), 14.
5 James Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment, The Art Seminar, vol. 7 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 171.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878), trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 150.
? Essays in Books:
8 Author(s), “Title of Essay,” in Title of Book: Subtitle, editor(s), translator(s) (City of publication: Publisher, year), page number(s).
6 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Reconsidering Joseph Beuys: Once Again,” in Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, ed. Gene Ray (New York: Distributed Art, 2001), 87.
7 Carol Harrison, “Augustine and the Art of Music,” in Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology, eds. Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 27–45.
? Journal Articles:
8 Author(s), “Title of Article,” Title of Journal volume number, issue number (year): page number(s).
9 Sally M. Promey, “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art,” The Art Bulletin 85, no. 3 (Sept 2003): 581–603.
10 Matthew Milliner, “A Tale of Two Art Worlds: October and its Others,” The City 3, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 5.
? The citation should always cite who is speaking. For instance, if you want to quote Warhol, but you found the quote in someone else’s text, the citation should read as follows:
11 Andy Warhol, quoted in Carter Ratcliff, Andy Warhol (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), 55.
? For repeated references to a single text, simply list the author’s last name, shortened title of the book, and the page number:
2 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 45.
12 Danto, After the End of Art, 21.
(Examples of Chicago/Turabian BIBLIOGRAPHY)
? List in alphabetical order according to last name of first author/editor:
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon, France: Les presses du réel, 2002.
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Reconsidering Joseph Beuys: Once Again.” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 75–89. New York: Distributed Art, 2001.
Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Elkins, James, and David Morgan, eds. Re-Enchantment. The Art Seminar, vol. 7. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Harrison, Carol. “Augustine and the Art of Music.” In Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology, edited by Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie, 27–45. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.
Promey, Sally M. “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art.” The Art Bulletin 85, no. 3 (Sept 2003): 581–603.
For further examples of proper Turabian formatting for footnotes/bibliography, start here:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/turabian/turabian_citationguide.html
http://www.library.georgetown.edu/tutorials/research-guides/turabian-footnote-guide
(Example of a page of text with citations, block quote, and footnotes)
distinct cultural configurations that have been remarkably disengaged from each other—in fact, often to the point of mutual unintelligibility. By 1979, renowned art theorist Rosalind Krauss had gone so far as to declare these spheres as having reached a condition of “absolute rift.”1
The reasons for this rift are numerous and complex, and they are tangled up in the broader, more sweeping narratives of Western secularization. In Krauss’s account, modern artists found themselves “participating in a drama that extended well beyond the domain of art” into science, philosophy, and politics, all of which found themselves increasingly doing “battle with God.”2 In this context, art was reconfigured and re-theorized as alternative to religion:
In the increasingly de-sacralized space of the nineteenth century, art had become the refuge for religious emotion; it became, as it has remained, a secular form of belief. Although this condition could be discussed openly in the late nineteenth century, it is something that is inadmissible in the twentieth, so that by now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence.3
In many ways, this formulation is a restatement of Nietzsche’s contention that “Art raises its head where religions decline. It takes over a number of feelings and moods produced by religion, clasps them to its heart, and then itself becomes deeper, more soulful. . . [F]eeling, forced out of the religious sphere by enlightenment, throws itself into art.”4 Krauss, however, identifies a further stage in this revearsal in which religious feeling becomes inadmissible, even embarrassing.
Intriguingly, Krauss’s passage (like O’Brien’s) highlights an incongruity between the way that art functions for artists and viewers—she admits it has “remained” a secular form of belief—and the
1 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Spring 1979): 54.
2 Krauss, “Grids,” 54.
3 Krauss, “Grids,” 54.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878), trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 150.
Tips for Writing a Good Paper
1. Provide a focused INTERPRETATION OF THE WORK:
Your main goal in writing this paper is to provide an argument for how the artwork you’ve chosen should be interpreted. To do this, you’ll need to provide some detailed description of the work, and you’ll probably need to know something about the artist’s life and his/her other artworks. But if a paper only provides description of the work and an overview of the artist’s life/work, without offering much in the way of an interpretation, then the paper hasn’t accomplished its purpose. The reason we write art criticism (and read other people’s writing) is to wrestle with the meaning of an artist’s work.
? TIP: One of the best ways to begin building your interpretation of the work is to read other critics’ interpretations of the artist’s work. This is one of the best ways to really charge up your own thinking: enter into the conversation that critics are already having about the work!
2. Clear TRAIN-OF-THOUGHT:
The most important aspect of a paper—the measure of its success or failure—is the degree to which it leads a reader through a clear and compelling line of thinking. Your reader should be able to identify what your main idea (“thesis”) is and should feel like every sentence and every paragraph is in some way leading towards and supporting that main idea.
On this point, it is extremely helpful to brainstorm and outline your ideas before writing your paper. Begin by building a list of all the points/ideas that might be addressed by your paper (devote a good amount of time to this process). Then, begin putting this list into the order that would make most sense, forming the most coherent train of thought (one point leads to the next point). As you do this, look for connections and look for ways that the outline might be edited down and simplified (maybe several of the points in your list can really be condensed under one or two main points). From here, begin writing a few sentences under each point, trying to concisely state what it is you’re going to argue. Proceed to write the paper by developing each of these points, expanding and clarifying your thinking, and adding any details, quotes, and references that directly support the points you’re trying to make (but don’t add these for their own sake—keep focused on the main points you’re trying to argue!).
3. ACADEMIC ‘TONE’:
(1) Do not mention your school assignment when writing the paper. Treat your papers as if they stand on their own, rather than simply as a classroom exercise. Be professional and not overly personal in your form of address. Write the paper so that people outside the class can read it, understand it, and benefit from it.
(2) Try to avoid using language that is in the first person (I, me, my, etc.) or second person (you, your, etc.). Your paper should not read like a diary entry, nor like you’re addressing a group of friends. This is not to say that it should be stiff and academic; it just needs to hold itself well.
(3) Cut the fluff. The best papers are those that maintain a focused train of thought all the way through, only including the information that is directly relevant to the paper’s central argument(s). If your paper comes up short, please don’t simply add useless sentences. Instead, ask yourself
“what is the next question that needs to be asked?” or “how can I provide better support what I’ve said already?”
(4) Use citations to build your argument; use them to argue with or against. Research will help you keep your reading of the artwork accurate and informed, and it will deepen your reading/analysis of the work. But outside research should never dominate your own voice, nor should it feel ‘tacked on’ as though you’re including it only for the sake of the assignment. Do more than synthesize and re-present the ideas of others; the idea is to write your perspective from an informed point of view, entering into conversation with those interested in the same work.
4. CITATIONS:
Citing other sources (the artist, respected critics & art historians, etc.) can be a wonderful way of making your paper (1) powerful (because it will be well-informed) and (2) specific (because it will wrestle with specific facts and opinions, rather than just operating on generalizations). As you do this, it is very important to cite all the sources that you rely on and/or quote.
? TIP: when you include a quote, (1) make sure the quote is integrated into the train of thought, and (2) give some commentary on the implications of the quote. Sometimes quotes can feel like interruptions to the flow of the paper, as though they’ve been “dropped in” for the sake of including quotes, but they don’t really support or fit what is being talked about. Use quotes to help you make your points and connect them to what you’ve already said.
*Many students are unsure of what information needs a reference note and what can be stated without any citation. Any direct quotation must be put in quotation marks and accompanied by a footnote citing the specific source and page number. Any specific biographical data about the artist (other than standard facts, such as birth and death dates) should also be accompanied by a footnote stating the specific source and pertinent page numbers from which you got the information. Do not quote a source for these facts; instead, paraphrase, but still cite your source! You want to use quotes strategically: Only quote when there is something special about the passage—something about its content or particular phrasing—that is needed verbatim for you to make your point effectively. In other words, do not lift a paragraph from a text and simply tack quotation marks around it and a citation at the end; that is appropriating, not writing.
5. COMMON GRAMMATICAL AND TECHNICAL ERRORS TO AVOID:
a. Titles of artworks, books, magazines, and newspapers should always be Capitalized and Italicized (underlining is acceptable, but italics are the norm). Titles of articles (which are found in books, magazines, etc.) should be placed in “Quotation Marks.” For artworks, the date can be included in parentheses: “Robert Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit (1955) is one of the first paintings to…”
b. Always refer to artists or writers by their full names the first time, and then only by their last names in subsequent references (e.g. please don’t refer to Ann Hamilton simply as “Ann”).
c. Apostrophes should not be used to denote plural nouns (including dates)!
WRONG: “In the 1990’s, Christo did a massive installation of umbrella’s in Central California.”
RIGHT: “In the 1990s, Christo did a massive installation of umbrellas in Central California.”
d. “Its” is possessive (“The sculpture could no longer bear its own weight”).
“It’s” is the conjunction of “it” and “is” (“It’s a very dark painting”).
e. “There” indicates position (“There are tremendous obstacles to installing artwork there”).
“Their” is possessive (“Artists need to consider their responsibilities to their culture”).
“They’re” is the conjunction of “they” and “are” (“They’re beginning a new collaboration”).
f. Watch for subject/verb agreement:
“Every person has a lens through which they see the world.”
WRONG. (“person” is singular, but “they” is plural)
“Every person has a lens through which he or she sees the world.”
RIGHT. (“person” is singular, and either “he” or “she” is also singular)
g. Semi-colons are used to join two complete sentences that are part of the same thought. That means that anything that comes before and after a semi-colon must be a complete sentence in its own right. (Ex: “The brushstrokes are fast and violent; they seem to have been laid down in a fit of rage.”)
h. Use a colon to stand for “as follows.” (“This painting explores uncomfortable regions of human relationships: vulnerability, nakedness, and self-disclosure.”)
i. Any quoted passage over four lines long should be written as a single-spaced block quotation. This means that the entire quote is indented an additional ‘tab’ from the left. Do not use quotation marks on block quotes (see example in following pages).
j. “Affect” is usually a verb (“The quality of your research will affect the quality of your writing.”)
“Effect” is a noun (“The massive scale of the work has a profound effect on the viewer.”)
*You can usually sort out which is which by adding a “the” in front of the word: if you can stick a “the” in front of it, then it’s a noun (“the effect”); if you can’t, then it’s a verb (“affect”).
k. “Than” is used for comparisons (“This painting seems more mournful than any of the others.”)
“Then” is used to speak about sequences in time or thoughts (“Leon Golub paints large mercenary figures on unstretched canvas and then scrapes the paint off with a meat clever. If he wants us to think about violence, then he drives his point home by performing violence on the painting itself.)
l. “Alter” is a verb that means to make a change (“The expansion of media technology has forever altered the ways we see our world.”)
“Altar” is a noun that generally refers to a sacred object/image (“Mark Rothko’s paintings for the Houston chapel seem to function as blacked out altarpieces.”)
m. As a general rule, avoid contractions—didn’t, couldn’t, don’t, haven’t, can’t, won’t, etc.—in a formal paper. Make each word count (did not, could not, do not, have not, can not, etc.).
n. Use descriptive language, but do not load up your sentences with impertinently recursive language and esoteric dialectics (like I just did here). Keep your writing focused and articulate, and avoid packing multiple ideas together into run-on sentences.
o. Avoid sentence fragments. Each sentence must contain both a subject and a verb. On the other hand, avoid run-on sentences that carry on and on without “taking a breath.”