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Arte Povera
[It.: ‘impoverished art’].
Term coined by the Genoese critic Germano Celant in 1967
for a group of Italian artists who, from the late 1960s,
attempted to break down the ‘dichotomy between art and life’ (Celant:
Flash Art, 1967), mainly through the creation of
happenings and sculptures made from everyday materials. Such
an attitude was opposed to the conventional role of art merely
to reflect reality. The first Arte Povera exhibition was held
at the Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa, in 1967. Subsequent shows
included those at the Galleria De’Foscherari in Bologna and
the Arsenale in Amalfi (both 1968), the latter containing
examples of performance art by such figures as
Michelangelo Pistoletto
and
Argentine-born Italian Arte Povera Sculptor and Painter
Lucio Fontana . In general the work is characterized by startling
juxtapositions of apparently unconnected objects: for example,
in Venus of the Rags (1967; Naples, Di Bennardo col.),
Pistoletto created a vivid
contrast between the cast of an antique sculpture (used as if
it were a ready-made) and a brightly coloured pile of rags.
Such combination of Classical and contemporary imagery had
been characteristic of Giorgio de Chirico’s work from c.
1912 onwards. Furthermore, Arte Povera’s choice of unglamorous
materials had been anticipated by more recent work, such as
that of Emilio Vedova and
Alberto Burri in the 1950s and
1960s, while
Piero Manzoni had subverted traditional notions
of the artist’s functions (e.g. Artist’s Shit, 1961). Like
Manzoni’s innovations, Arte
Povera was also linked to contemporary political radicalism,
which culminated in the student protests of 1968. This is
evident in such works as the ironic Golden Italy (1971;
artist’s col.) by Luciano Fabro, a
gilded bronze relief of the map of Italy, hung upside down in
a gesture that was literally revolutionary.
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Arte Povera
In 1967, Germano Celant, inspired by the "poor theatre" of Jerzy
Grotowski, spoke of "poor art", referring to the work of certain
Italian artists, including Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro,
Mario Merz,
Pino Pascali,
Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Jannis Kounellis (Greek,
but resident in Italy since 1956). They wanted to make art out of
rough, worthless materials found in everyday life and displayed in
their natural state. A similar approach had already been advocated in
Nouveau Realisme. This included scraps of discarded newspaper
preserved in a frame, and, as in sculptor Daniel Spoerri's
Tableauxpieges (snare pictures) - existing artefacts used in a
novel way to make crude and dramatic compositions. Arte Povera, on the
other hand, gave reality a more intellectual and emotive treatment,
bearing witness to its affinities with Conceptual art. In addition to
materials that exhibited the banality of their nature, such as the
coloured wood of Alighiero Boetti (1940-94) or the cotton wool used by
Jannis Kounellis (b. 1936), there were the bright mirrorlike surfaces
in the steel of
Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933). on which he printed
photographs of objects, animals, and full-size figures. The effect of
the latter's work is completed by the reflection in the "mirror" of
the surroundings and the spectators themselves. The "conceptual"
element of these works is to be found in their openness to all the
changes that might occur in their environment, i.e. in the idea of a
piece of art that alters constantly and is the product of that
perpetual state of flux. Mario Merz (b. 1925) combines the symbolic
structure of an igloo - shaped like a globe, but at the same time a
shelter that protects people -with neon tubes (i.e. products of
technology) often in the shape of Fibonacci numbers. This sequence
forms the basis of the theory of dynamic symmetry as applied to art
and living forms.
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Land art.
International art form that developed particularly from the
late 1960s and early 1970s. It was part of a revolt against
painting and sculpture and the anti-formalist current of the
late 1960s that included CONCEPTUAL ART and Arte Povera. A
number of mainly British and North American artists turned
their attention to working directly with nature, notably
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Walter De Maria,
Michael Heizer,
Dennis Oppenheim,
Robert Smithson and Richard Long. They
created immense sculptures on the same scale as landscape
itself, or exhibited written and photographic accounts of
their excursions. With few exceptions, their works (also known
as earthworks) are almost inaccessible, situated far from
human settlements in deserts or abandoned areas. Their
lifespan was brief: little by little they were destroyed by
the elements and often by erosion, so that for posterity they
exist only in the form of preparatory drawings, photographs or
films. The works themselves were seen by only a small number
of people and sometimes by only the artist.
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LAND ART
Land artists distanced themselves from urban constraints in their
search for open areas that inspired interaction. The nature of their
work could best be described as a combination of the aspirations of a
romantic traveller and the Dada rejection of traditional modes of
artistic expression. In order to discover Spiral Jetty by
Robert Smithson (1938-73), constructed in 1970 on Utah's Great Salt
Lake, spectators had to follow in the footsteps of the artist,
communing with nature in a dimension outside all normal experience.
Alternatively, they would have had to accept its almost sacred
inaccessibility and be content to examine plans and photographs.
However, a work of art that exists but cannot be seen must be at the
limits of abstraction. Although Spiral Jetty was supported by
pictures that attested to its existence, the very fact that the spectator could not easily come into contact with it
almost required an act of faith to believe it was there. In a stand
against the commercialization of art, the American artists Michael Heizer, Douglas Huebler, and
Oppenheim Dennis
worked in remote and desolate places. Sometimes, however, a piece of
Land art can successfully be re-created within the confines of a gallery. The arrangement of natural materials in
Richard Long's Circle (1972) seems to acquire added resonance when
displayed within an artificial environment.
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Michael Heizer
(born in 1944)
North, East, South, West,
1967
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Richard Long
(1927 - 1974)
Paddy-Field Chaff Circle, Warli Tribal Land Maharashtra India
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Environmental
art
Art form
based on the premise that a work of art should invade the
totality of the architecture around it and be conceived as a
complete space rather than being reducible to a mere object
hanging on a wall or placed within a space. This idea, which
became widespread during the 1960s and 1970s in a number of
different aesthetic formulations, can be traced back to
earlier types of art not usually referred to as environments:
the wall paintings of ancient tombs, the frescoes of Roman or
of Renaissance art and the paintings of Baroque chapels, which
surround the spectator and entirely cover the architectural
structure that shelters them. Indeed, the whole of art history
prior to the transportable easel picture is linked to
architecture and hence to the environment. A number of artists
in the 1960s conceived environmental art precisely in order to
question the easel painting.
Environmental art
is an emerging art form that presses an ecological message, by either:
raising awareness of the fragility of nature (includes landscape-based
photography, painting, drawing), investigating natural phenomena
(includes scientific illustration), using natural materials gathered
outdoors (such as twigs, leaves, stones, soil, feathers), not
contributing to environmental degradation (includes ‘green’ work made
from bio-degradable or recycled materials; and ‘Eco sculpture’ which
is sensitively integrated into a natural habitat)
While many artists have
produced art with an environmental theme, this international movement has
chiefly emerged in its own right since 1970. In its early phases it was
most associated with sculpture — especially Site-specific art, Land art
and Arte povera — having arisen out of mounting criticism of traditional
sculptural forms and practices which were increasingly seen as outmoded
and potentially out of harmony with the natural environment. The category
now encompasses many media.
Environmentalism into Art
In identifying
Environmental art a crucial cut needs to be made between artists who
damage the environment, and those who intend to cause no harm to nature,
indeed, their work might involve restoring the immediate landscape to a
natural state. For example, despite its aesthetic merits, the American
artist Robert Smithson’s celebrated sculpture
Spiral Jetty (1969) involved inflicting considerable permanent damage
upon the landscape he worked with. The landscape became a form of
wasteground, Smithson using a bulldozer to scrape and cut the land,
impinging upon the lake. Art was effectively a form of pollution inflicted
on the environment.
Indeed, such
criticism was raised against the European sculptor
Christo when he
temporarily wrapped the coastline at Little Bay, south of Sydney,
Australia, in 1969. Local conservationists staged a protest, arguing that
the work was ecologically irresponsible and adversely affecting the local
environment, especially the birds that nested in the wrapped cliffs.
Complaints were only heightened when several penguins and a seal became
trapped under the fabric and had to be cut out. Conservationists' comments
attracted international attention in environmental circles, and lead
contemporary artists in the region to re-think the inclinations of Land
art and Site-specific art.
In comparison, a
committed Environmental artist such as the British sculptor Richard
Long has for several decades made temporary outdoor sculptural work by
rearranging natural materials found on the site, such as rocks, mud and
branches, and which will therefore have no lingering detrimental affect.
While leading Environmental artists such as the Dutch sculptor
Herman de Vries, the Australian sculptor John Davis and the British
sculptor Andy Goldsworthy similarly leave the landscape they have worked
with unharmed, and in some cases have in the process of making their work
revegetated with appropriate indigenous flora land that had been damaged
by human use. In this way the work of art arises out of a sensitivity
towards habitat.
Alan Sonfist, with his first
historical Time Landscape sculpture, proposed to New York City in 1965,
visible to this day at the corner of Houston and LaGuardia in New York
City’s Greenwich Village, introduced the key environmentalist idea of
bringing nature back into the urban environment. Today Sonfist is joining
forces with the broad enthusiasm for environmental and green issues among
public authorities and private citizens to propose a network of such sites
across the metropolitan area, which will raise consciousness of the key
role that nature will play in the challenges of the 21st century.
Probably the most
celebrated instance of Environmental art in the late 20th century
was 7000 Oaks, an ecological protest staged at Documenta during
1982 by Joseph Beuys, in which the artist and his assistants highlighted
the condition of the local environment by attempting to reafforest
polluted and damaged land with 7000 oak trees. In the last two decades
significant environmentally-concerned work has also been made by Rosalie
Gascoigne, who fashioned her serene sculptures from rubbish and junk she
found discarded in rural areas, and John Wolseley, who hikes through
remote regions, gathering visual and scientific data, then incorporates
visual and and other information into complex wall-scale works on paper.
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Postmodernism
In the 1980s, in contrast to the stark, cerebral experience of
Conceptual art, there was a call for art to be more accessible and
more immediately rewarding. There was nostalgia for traditional styles
and techniques, and images that would express ideas in an intelligible
way, at a time when very often the ideas had taken priority over the
results. Artists seemed to want to turn back the clock to the artistic
practices that prevailed prior to Conceptual art. In a way, that is
what happened, except that the Conceptual experience had made too much
of an impact not to have any influence on new developments. While
painting again dominated the art scene, it bore the traits of
Conceptualism and could never make a full return to former styles. In
Postmodernism, there lingered a Conceptual taste for irony, as well as
a freedom of choice that allowed artists to draw on any subject
matter.
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Transavanguardia
The leading artists of the Italian Transavanguardia movement,
defined by the critic Achille Bonito Oliva in 1979, were Sandro Chia,
Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, Nicola De Maria, and Mimmo Paladino.
However, the group soon became international, involving primarily the
German artists
Markus Lupertz,
Anselm Kiefer,
Georg Baselitz,
Jorg
Immendorf, and
A.R. Penck. After many decades of Abstractionism in all
its forms, followed by the Conceptualism of the 1970s,
Transavanguardia took up figurative art again and re-examined the
colours and tools of painting. Abandoning the search for intellectual
reasons to modify or annul conventional artistic practices, these artists rediscovered the
traditional skills of painting in works that were
instantly-recognizable in their form and content. This was not a
return to certain figurative trends of the postwar period, however,
and Transavanguardia differed from these both in style and ideology.
The intention was to operate with the maximum of expressive freedom
without relying on any particular cultural models, taking them all
into consideration despite any eventual lack of consistency in content
or form. The so-called "nomadism" of the Italian Transavanguardists
led them to take inspiration from various artistic styles -
Expressionism,
Surrealism,
Cubism
- and excluded them from any cultural, or political, commitment. The German artists had a different attitude, remaining more
openly linked to their own avant-garde traditions and to
Expressionism. Sensitive to their recent past, they also wanted to
free German art from the process of subordination to American art that
had occurred after World War II. An art form that made more precise
stylistic references was Anachronistic painting, which looked to the
examples of
Mannerism and
Neoclassicism. All the same, in the
figurative purity that characterized the work of
Carlo Maria Mariani
(b. 1931), there are still echoes of Conceptual tautology. In La
Mano ubbidisce all'intelletto (The Hand Obeying the Intellect,
1983), the painting is reflected in itself and is left to reflect on
its own existence.
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Sandro Chia
(born in 1946)
Untitled
1991
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Francesco Clemente
(born in 1952)
Al mare o in
montagna
1981
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Graffiti.
Term applied to an arrangement of institutionally illicit
marks in which there has been an attempt to establish some
sort of coherent composition; such marks are made by an
individual or individuals (not generally professional artists)
on a wall or other surface that is usually visually accessible
to the public. The term ‘graffiti’ derives from the Greek
graphein (‘to write’). Graffiti (sing. graffito) or
SGRAFFITO, meaning a drawing or scribbling on a flat surface,
originally referred to those marks found on ancient Roman
architecture. Although examples of graffiti have been found at
such sites as Pompeii, the Domus Aurea of Emperor Nero (reg
AD 54–68) in Rome, Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli and the Maya site
of Tikal in Mesoamerica, they are usually associated with
20th-century urban environments. They may range from a few
simple marks to compositions that are complex and colourful.
Motives for the production of such marks may include a desire
for recognition that is public in nature, and/or the need to
appropriate a public space or someone else’s private space for
group or individual purposes. Graffiti are recognized as a way
of dealing with problems of identification in overcrowded or
self-denying environments, and are an outlet through which
people may choose to publish their thoughts, philosophies or
poems. Illegitimate counterparts to the paid, legitimate
advertisements on billboards or signs, graffiti utilize the
walls of garages, public toilets and gaol cells for their
clandestine messages.
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URBAN GRAFFITI
In many aspects the Graffiti art movement in America resembled the
Transavanguardia experience in Italy, especially in that it saw a
return to figurative art without highbrow artistic pretences, yet with
great communicative force. Graffiti art in America was the expression
of a rebellious subculture and was to be found sprawled over the walls
of the derelict districts and subway trains of New York. Consisting
almost entirely of self-taught artists, the movement grew
spontaneously amid the rhythms of rap and break-dance. The vibrancy of
the art. which was not confined by the boundaries of a frame or
limited by the size of a canvas, was enhanced by its sheer scale. The
style adopted had clear associations with Pop art, but this time the artists were not looking cynically at mass
popular culture and its habits but were the representatives of a
culture that had emerged on the margins of urban society. The Graffiti
movement first received recognition when Stefan Eins, an artist
originating from Austria, opened an alternative art gallery in the
notoriously rough South Bronx district of New York. He entrusted its
decoration to the Graffiti artist Crash and provided an outlet for the
young Graffitists of the area. Before long, Graffiti art was being
allocated space in the most prestigious New York galleries and was
losing the aggressive image that had been its stamp on the walls of
the dilapidated suburbs. Notable Graffitists include
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88), whose untimely death only served to accentuate the aura of misadventure
that surrounded him:
Keith Haring (1958-90). known for his Radiant
Child, whose vibrancy became the stylistic mark of the artist
Justen Ladda, creator of a mural of extraordinary illusionism inside an old Bronx school next
to the Fashion Moda gallery ( The Thing, 1981); and John
Ahearn, whose painted reliefs on Bronx walls recall the Pop plaster
casts of sculptor
George
Segal.
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General Idea.
Canadian partnership of conceptual artists working as
performance artists, video artists, photographers and
sculptors. It was formed in 1968 by A. A. Bronson [pseud. of
Michael Tims] (b Vancouver, 1946), Felix Partz [pseud.
of Ron Gabe] (b Winnipeg, 1945) and Jorge Zontal [pseud.
of Jorge Saia] (b Parma, Italy, 1944; d Feb
1994). Influenced by semiotics and working in various media,
they sought to examine and subvert social structures, taking
particular interest in the products of mass culture. Their
existence as a group, each with an assumed name, itself
undermined the traditional notion of the solitary artist of
genius. In 1972 they began publishing a quarterly journal,
File, to publicize their current interests and work. In
the 1970s they concentrated on beauty parades, starting in
1970 with the 1970 Miss General Idea Pageant, a
performance at the Festival of Underground Theatre in Toronto
that mocked the clichés surrounding the beauty parade,
resulting in the nomination of Miss General Idea 1970. This
was followed by the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant,
which involved the submission by 13 artists of photographic
entries that were exhibited and judged at The Space in
Toronto.
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Monoha
[Jap.: ‘object school’].
Term applied to tendencies in the
works of the Japanese artists Nobuo Sekine (b 1942),
Katsuro Yoshida (b 1943), Susumu Koshimizu (b
1944), Katsuhiko Narita (1944–92), Shingo Honda (b
1944), Kishio Suga (b 1944) and the Korean Lee U-fan (b
1936) after 1968 and particularly from 1972 to 1974. The term
began to be used informally to denote the fact that they took
as their material natural objects, including trees, stones and
earth, and manmade objects such as beams, girders, concrete,
paper and glass. However, the emphasis in the works of the
Monoha artists was not on the objects themselves, as with
some Minimalist works and the Arte Povera, but on the
relationship between object and object or between objects and
the spaces they occupy (e.g. Suga’s Situation of Eternity,
1970; Kyoto, N. Mus. Mod. A.). This demonstrated a new
artistic approach, unlike that of conventional sculpture or
environmental art, that took as its aim the shaping of space
itself. In this it had affinities with Concrete art. The
central concern in Monoha works, however, was not a
purely formal interest in creating some new kind of shape but
an attempt to reconsider fundamental questions concerning
humanity’s involvement with the world of matter. It was thus a
characteristically Japanese tendency, whatever its
similarities with some European and American movements.
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Nobuo Sekine
(born in 1942)
Phase -
Mother Earth
1968
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Susumu Koshimizu
(born in 1944)
Paper
1969
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Solentiname primitivist
painting.
Style of painting practised from 1968 by a Nicaraguan group
of rural labourers on the island of Mancarron in the
Solentiname archipelago of Lagos de Nicaragua. The style took
its name from the parish in which it arose with the
encouragement of Padre Ernesto Cardenal (b 1925), a
priest, poet and man of letters who in 1979 became the
Minister of Culture in Nicaragua. This community of 1000
impoverished labourers was established in 1965 around the
basic precepts of liberation theology, with its emphasis on
social justice and communal sharing being predicated on a type
of Christian Socialism. Motivated by these egalitarian ideals
and a deep involvement with the arts, Cardenal invited the
painter Roger Pérez de la Rocha (b 1949) to Solentiname
to introduce the populace to the fine arts.
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New
York Five.
Term applied in the late 1960s and early 1970s to five
architects practising in New York—Peter D. Eisenman, Michael
Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier—whose
work was the subject of an exhibition at MOMA, New York, in
1969 and subsequent publication Five Architects (1972).
These architects were related at that time in their allegiance
to the forms and theories developed by Le Corbusier in the
1920s and 1930s. This is most clearly seen in the work of
Graves, Gwathmey and Meier, while Hejduk was also strongly affiliated
with Synthetic Cubism and Constructivism, and Eisenman (EISENMAN, PETER D.) was deeply
influenced by the work of the Italian Rationalist architect
Giuseppe Terragni. Anticipating criticisms of this ‘Twenties
Revivalism’, Colin Rowe challenged the idea of Modernism as
the constant pursuit of originality by stating that the great
revolutions in thought and form in the early 20th century were
so ‘enormous as to impose a directive that cannot be resolved
in any individual life span’ (Frampton and Rowe, 1972, p. 7).
The most vehement critique of the work of the New York Five
(referred to as the ‘Whites’) came in a group of essays, ‘Five
on Five’ (1973), written by the architects Ronaldo Giurgola,
Allan Greenberg (b 1938), Charles W. Moore, Jaquelin
Robertson (b 1933) and Robert A. M. Stern (the
‘Grays’), whose theoretical affiliation was with Robert
Venturi and Vincent Scully. Denying the existence of a
‘school’ and very anxious to nullify the possibility of
Corbusian Modernism as a major tendency in the 1970s, they
attacked the Five’s ‘lack of concern with siting’, the
‘unusability’ of their spaces and, particularly, their
‘élitism and hermeticism’—their treatment of architecture as ‘
"high art", divorcing it from day to day life’ (Robertson).
The phenomenon of the New York Five is not to be seen as a
school or movement but as a tendency signalling a deliberate
reworking of early 20th-century Modernism in the face of a
counter-tendency later defined as POST-MODERNISM. The work of
the members of the New York Five subsequently developed in
different directions.
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Sky art.
Term coined by Otto Piene
in 1969 and described by him as: ‘The arbitrator between
man-made feelings and emotions and yearnings evoked by earth
and sky and their overwhelming size and power .... Technology
helps to distribute and connect while we keep it from dulling
the senses and numbing our imagination’. By the 1980s sky art had
become a movement centred around Piene and other artists at
the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA.
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Re-figuracion.
Paraguayan
art movement active in the 1970s. It produced a form of
figurative art based on the exploration of the nature of
pictorial signs, yet also with a strong expressive quality.
The movement investigated the mechanism of representation and
the relationship between reality and image, without abandoning
the vital dramatic sense that marks the best figurative work
in Paraguay. It was related to the wider development of the
visual arts in Paraguay in the 1970s , which was characterized by a
reflective mood connected with the prevalence of conceptual
art. The most representative artists of Re-figuración were
Osvaldo Salerno (b 1952), Bernardo Krasniansky (b
1951) and Luis Alberto Boh (b 1952), but the movement
also had a considerable effect on the work of such other
artists as Carlos Colombino, Olga Blinder, Susana Romero and a
whole generation of young artists working at that time.
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Grupo
CAYC.
Argentine group of artists. It was founded in Buenos Aires
in 1971 as the Grupo de los Trece by the critic Jorge Glusberg
(b 1938) and renamed Grupo CAYC because of its close
association with the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. The group
held its first public show in 1972 in the exhibition Hacia
un perfil del arte latino americano at the third Bienal
Coltejer, Medellín, Colombia. The group’s chief members were
Jacques Bedel, Luis Benedit, Jorge Glusberg, Víctor Grippo,
the sculptor Leopoldo Maler (b 1937), the sculptor
Alfredo Portillos (b 1928) and Clorindo Testa. Treating
the visual aspect of works of art as just one element in order
to demonstrate the complexity and richness of the creative
process, they took a wide view of Latin American culture that
spanned the cosmogony of Pre-Columbian societies to the
technological and scientific concepts of the late 20th
century. In 1977 they won the Gran Premio Itamaraty at the
14th São Paulo Biennale with their collective work Signs of
Artificial Eco-systems.
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Sots art
[Sotz art].
Term used from 1972 to describe a style of unofficial art
that flourished in the USSR from c. 1970 to c.
1985–8. The term itself is formed from the first syllable of
Sotsialisticheskiy realizm (Rus.: ‘Socialist Realism’)
and the second word of Pop art and is attributed to the art
historian Vladimir Paperny. Sots art takes the style of
SOCIALIST REALISM, with its mass ideological implications, as
a legitimate object of investigation, intending to deconstruct
the ideological system through its own visual language. It
forms a criticism of Socialist Realism by unofficial Russian
artists as reflecting the ideological myths underpinning
Soviet society. The means of ideological propaganda are thus
investigated in terms of their relation to the national
mentality and their consumption as objects of mass culture.
The main artists producing works of this type were
Komar & Melamid, ERIK BULATOV (e.g. Horizon, 1971–2; Paris,
priv. col.), and, since the mid-1970s,
Ilya Kabakov, Dmitry
Prigov (b 1940), the sculptors Aleksey Kosolapov (b
1948) and Leonid Sokov (b 1941) and the group Gnezdo (Rus.:
‘Nest’), founded in 1975. The first prominent exhibition of
Sots art was held at Ronald Feldman Fine Art, New York, in
1976. There was a second wave of Sots art in Moscow,
comprising work by the group Mukhomory (Rus.: ‘Toadstool’),
founded in 1978, which included the sculptor Boris Orlov (b
1941) and the painters
Grisha Bruskin
(b 1945) and
Rostislav Lebedev (b 1946). Artists who had emigrated
and continued to work in this style in New York (Komar,
Melamid, Sokov, Kosolapov) used it to criticize not only
Soviet but also American ideological myths and institutions.
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Tendenza.
Term applied to an architectural stylistic tendency that
emerged in the late 1960s in several Italian and Swiss
universities under the influence of ALDO ROSSI, Giorgio Grassi
(b 1935) and Massimo Scolari (b 1943) among
others. Although Tendenza never became an official
movement, its theoretical principles were set out in three
main texts by Rossi (1966), Grassi (1967) and Ezio Bonfanti
(1937–73) and others (1973), all of which articulate a
position in continuity with pre-World War II Italian and
European Rationalism and in contradiction to populist or High
Tech architecture. The earliest use of Tendenza as a
proper stylistic term was in 1973 in Scolari’s essay,
‘Avanguardia e nuova architettura’ (Bonfanti and others).
The Tendenza was brought to international attention by
Rossi’s work for the XV Triennale in Milan (1973), whereupon
the term became increasingly used as a generic label and was
ultimately repudiated by its original users.
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New
Topographics.
Term first
used by the American William Jenkins (1975 exh. cat.) to
characterize the style of a number of young photographers he
had chosen for the exhibition at the International Museum of
Photography, Rochester, NY, in 1975. These photographers
avoided the ‘subjective’ themes of beauty and emotion and
shared an apparent disregard for traditional subject-matter.
Instead they emphasized the ‘objective’ description of a
location, showing a preference for landscape that included
everyday features of industrial culture. This style,
suggesting a tradition of documentary rather than formalist
photography, is related to the idea of ‘social landscape’,
which explores how man affects his natural environment.
Jenkins traced the style back to several photographic series
by Edward Ruscha in the early 1960s of urban subjects such as
petrol stations and Los Angeles apartments.
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Workshop for the
Restoration of Unfelt Sensations
[Latv. Nebijusu Sajutu Restauresanas Darbnica; NSRD].
Latvian association of artists, architects and designers,
active from September 1982 until 1989. It introduced video and
computer art, new music and hybridized art genres to a
conservative public in Latvia towards the end of the Soviet
period. Its very name implied preconditions of stricture and
privation, and its multidisciplinary methods served to expand
critical discourse when Latvian cultural identity and
collective political consciousness were undergoing a symbiotic
revival, with the restoration of independence as a goal. NSRD
founders Juris Boiko (b 1954) and Hardijs Ledins (b
1955), both self-taught artists, organized Actions that some
critics considered to be subtle acts of political dissent.
Their Walk to Bolderaja, an annual pilgrimage begun in
1982 to an off-limits Soviet submarine base (representing
thwarted access to the West), took place along railroad tracks
that recalled the mass deportations of Balts to Siberia during
the 1940s, to which Boiko’s parents fell victim. Workshop
members included Aigars Sparans (b 1955), Dace Senberga
(b 1967) and Imants Zodziks (b 1955). Together
they produced numerous video projects, music recordings and
performances, and three exhibitions. Much of this work was
created under the rubric Approximate Art, an admixture of Zen
Buddhism and Californian high-tech philosophy originated by
Ledins that is also associated with the artist Miervaldis
Polis (b 1948). In keeping with its global focus NSRD
pursued international contacts and collaborations, which
members continued in their subsequent individual careers.
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