Takis, Magnetic Fields (detail), 1969. Guggenheim Museum,
New York. This Kinetic sculpture is based on the activation and
deactivation of a magnet which causes a reaction of the other negative
and positive magnets, variously in states of repulsion or
attraction. The composition created by the magnets changes in
accordance with the variation of the magnetic field.
Sol Lewitt, Two Open Modular Cubes/Half Off, 1975. This
large sculpture, or "structure", by the American Conceptual artist Sol
Lewitt impresses both with its simplicity and its geometric forms. Its
very construction invites intellectual curiosity and engagement rather
than an emotional response.
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New Directions
Of the prominent movements, Kinetic art favoured mass-production,
with materials and techniques borrowed from industrial science;
meanwhile, Pop art took its inspiration from the iconographic
repertoire of the consumer world. However, neither of these new
artistic tendencies wanted the viewer to be passive or alienated.
Indeed, never before had the public been so encouraged to participate.
While Art Informel had assimilated the experiences of Expressionism
and Surrealism, the artists of the new avant-garde drew on the
infinite inventions of Dadaism, which had attempted to break down all
the barriers between art and life and to make them interchangeable.
The ■'ready-made" (the mass-produced article elevated to the status of
"art"), which had already surfaced in the art of Neo-Dada and Xouveau
Realisme, now appeared in a new guise under the banner of Pop art.
Other revolutionary initiatives that were taken by the Dadaists
emerged in the various forms of expression of Conceptual art. For the
first time, art was to be found away from its usual location in a
gallery and was presented in the open air in town squares or in
remote, inaccessible parts
of the world. It was seen on screen, for example, or in the street
in the form of an artist pretending to be a sculpture. Towns and
cities worldwide were becoming focal points for the new trends. In the
early 1960s, the development of Pop art took place predominantly in
the US, while
Europe, previously the centre of artistic change, lagged behind. A
decade later, the art scene, as represented by its important events
and leading groups, had become more international. However, by going
down this road to total freedom and accessibility, many of these
avant-garde movements paradoxically failed in their pursuit of the
Dada connection between art and life. Art became distanced from the
public, lost in introspection and experimentation.
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OPTICAL ART
Optical art, or Op art, made its first official appearance in 1965
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of "The Responsive
Eye" show organized by William Seitz.
Participants included Victor Vasarely (1908-97), Jesus Rafael Soto
(b. 1923), and Bridget Riley (b. 193D. The novelty of Op art works lay
in the optical effects and illusions they contained, such as the
illusion of movement or volume on a flat, static surface. For the
effect to be successful, however, Op art required the participation of
the spectator. This was not active participation as in some Kinetic
art, nor audience participation as in certain happenings, but rather a
psychological form of collaboration that would allow the illusions
created by the artist to be experienced by the viewer. By
concentrating on the picture or by moving to the best spot in order to
view it, the spectator actually established contact with the work,
often remaining transfixed by its hypnotic power. The images by
British artist Bridget Riley capture the eye and invite it into a web
of sinuous lines that look almost alive (Current 1964).
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Op art.
Term used as an abbreviation of ‘optical art’ to refer to
painting and sculpture that exploits the illusions or optical
effects of perceptual processes. It was used for the first
time by a writer in an unsigned article in Time
magazine (23 Oct 1964) and entered common usage to designate,
in particular, two-dimensional structures with strong
psychophysiological effects. The exhibition, The Responsive
Eye, held in 1965 at MOMA, New York, under the direction
of William C. Seitz, showed side by side two types of visual
solicitations already practised by artists for some time:
perceptual ambiguity created by coloured surfaces, then at the
fore in the USA, and the coercive suggestion of movement
created by lines and patterns in black and white, used
abundantly by European artists engaged in KINETIC ART. The
outstanding Op artists included Victor Vasarely, Bridget
Riley, Jesús Soto, Yaacov Agam, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Julio Le
Parc and François Morellet.
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Kinetic Art
The 1961 "Nouvelle Tendance" (New Tendency) show in Zagreb
exhibited the diverse Constructivist tendencies that were coming to
the fore in Western Europe. Participants included the GRAV (Groupe de
Recherche d'Art Visuel) in Paris, Gruppo N in Padua, and Gruppo T in
Milan, all of whom were motivated by the desire to make art more
accessible by demonstrating the ways in which it is perceived. Their
methods sought to bring art closer to a wider public by involving the
viewer directly. The sculptures, or assemblages, which were
devised with mathematical
precision, did not bear the artist's stylistic mark or speak of any
emotions but stood as basic demonstrations of themselves. Kinetic art
incorporated actual moving parts (as opposed to Op art, which
implied motion in its images).
The movement was derived either from the intrinsic nature of the
objects, such as mobiles, or from devices causing the motion.
Sometimes the public was invited to intervene in the workings of the
sculpture. This is the case with Oggetto a composizione
autocondotta (Object with Self-Regulating Composition, 1959) by
Enzo Mari (b. 1932), in which geometric shapes enclosed in a glass
container change their arrangement according to alterations made by
the spectator. Kinetic works were completely devoid of the sacred "do
not touch" aura usually surrounding art and demanded more involvement
than the passive acceptance usually associated with viewing art. The
artists themselves wanted to avoid the narcissistic self-involvement
of some Art Informel artists and
to lose their identity within the discipline of a more collective
activity. However, these hopes were soon to be clashed by the rapid
rise to fame of certain members of the group.
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Kinetic art.
Term applied to works of art concerned with real and
apparent movement. It may encompass machines, mobiles and
light objects in actual motion; more broadly, it also includes
works in virtual or apparent movement, which could be placed
under the denomination of OP ART. Kinetic art originated
between 1913 and 1920, when a few isolated figures such as
Marcel Duchamp, Vladimir Tatlin and NAUM GABO conceived their
first works and statements to lay stress on mechanical
movement. At about the same time Tatlin, Aleksandr Rodchenko
and Man Ray constructed their first mobiles, and Thomas
Wilfred and Adrian Bernard Klein, with Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack
and Kurt Schwerdtfeger at the Bauhaus, began to develop their
colour organs and projection techniques in the direction of an
art medium consisting of light and movement (1921–3). Although
László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Calder pursued more or less
continuous artistic research into actual motion in the 1920s
and 1930s, it was only after 1950 that the breakthrough into
kinetic art, and its subsequent expansion, finally took place.
Such artists as Pol Bury, Jean Tinguely, Nicolas Schöffer and
Harry Kramer played a leading part in this development as far
as mechanical movement was concerned; Calder, Bruno Munari,
Kenneth Martin (iv) and George Rickey in the domain of the
MOBILE; and Wilfred, Frank Joseph Malina (1912–81), Schöffer
and Gyorgy Kepes (b 1906) in that of lumino-kinetic
experiment.
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Mobile.
Form of kinetic sculpture, incorporating an element or
elements set in motion by natural external forces. The term,
which is also sometimes used more loosely to describe
sculptural works with the capacity for motorized or
hand-driven mechanical movement, was first used by Marcel
Duchamp in 1932 to describe works by Alexander Calder . The notable feature of
Calder’s sculptures, which were suspended by threads, was that
their movement was caused solely by atmospheric forces, such
as wind and warm air currents. Movement was not, therefore,
merely suggested by the treatment, as in traditional
sculpture, but took place directly and unpredictably in the
object. Because the kinetic sequences of the mobile could not
be fixed or programmed, predictability and repeatability were
eliminated.
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Pop Art
In the early 1960s, an artistic trend developed in the US that was to
represent a complete departure from Action painting, the dominant movement of
the previous decade. While Action painting had given pride of place to the inner
impulses of the artist and to autobiographical motivation and subjectivism, the
new tendency was to accentuate the sheer neutrality of everyday consumer goods.
But the images were not the actual objects, or "ready-mades", as found in
Dadaism, but a reworking of them, greatly elaborated in dimension or colour.
Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) blew up seemingly banal items into gigantic sizes,
transforming trowels, tubes of toothpaste, and clothes-pegs into huge
sculptures. He also created brighth' painted plaster sculptures of desserts,
cakes, and pieces of meat and made models of hard, unyielding objects, such as
light switches and typewriters, in soft, pliable materials. Andy Warhol
(1928-87), on the other hand, took well-known images from popular culture such
as cans of Campbell's Soup, Coca-Cola bottles, or photographs of stars who had
become legends (Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe) and turned them into prints or
paintings that shared the repetitive, mass-produced feel of commercial "art".
The mechanical insistence of repetition also succeeded in removing meaning from
images that were in themselves very dramatic. This is the case with the symbols
of death and social struggle that Warhol depicts in Orange Disaster
(1963) and Race Riot (1964); they are reduced to the status of decorative
elements. If Warhol annihilated the
significance of an image by-constant, unvarying repetition, then Roy
Lichtenstein (1923-97) emphasized its importance, taking the image out of its
context and reproducing it on a large scale. Thus a comic strip, usually a
disposable piece of light reading, was suddenly elevated to the status of a work
of art. Tom Wesselman (b. 1931) portrayed female nudes in commonplace
environments as if they, too, were consumer objects, lacking facial expression
and recognizable only by their
exaggerated erotic features. Striking a more existential note. American
sculptor George Segal (b. 1924) made plaster-cast models, taken from life, of
people frozen in varied poses or in the act of carrying out certain tasks. These
figures, in their isolated stillness, seem to convey modern man's alienation
from daily life.
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Pop art.
International movement in painting, sculpture and
printmaking. The term originated in the mid-1950s at the ICA,
London, in the discussions held by the INDEPENDENT GROUP
concerning the artefacts of popular culture. This small group
included the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi as
well as architects and critics. Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990),
the critic who first used the term in print in 1958, conceived
of Pop art as the lower end of a popular-art to fine-art
continuum, encompassing such forms as advertising,
science-fiction illustration and automobile styling. Hamilton
defined Pop in 1957 as: ‘Popular (designed for a mass
audience); Transient (short term solution); Expendable (easily
forgotten); Low Cost; Mass Produced; Young (aimed at Youth);
Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; and Big Business’. Hamilton
set out, in paintings such as £he (1958–61; London,
Tate), to explore the hidden connotations of imagery taken
directly from advertising and popular culture, making
reference in the same work to pin-ups and domestic appliances
as a means of commenting on the covert eroticism of much
advertising presentation (for illustration see
HAMILTON, RICHARD).
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POP ART IN BRITAIN
At the "This is Tomorrow'' exhibition of 1956 at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery in London, a photographic collage by Richard Hamilton
(b. 1922) marked the debut of British Pop art, later becoming a
virtual manifesto of the movement. The collage's very title —
Just what is it that makes todays homes so different, so appealing?
— hinted at the satire to be found in the work. It contained in
its interior setting various symbols of popular mass culture - from
the body-builder in the foreground and the cover girl on the divan
to the television and various electrical appliances, and the cinema
signs and posters glimpsed through the window. While these are all
recognizable elements of daily life, they look unnatural, resembling
items in a shop display.
A critical attitude towards the values of consumer society was an
underlying theme of British Pop art, as opposed to the neutral
stance that characterized American Pop art. Pop artists in Britain
regarded contemporary life from a distance and depicted it with a
critical eye, while those in the US seemed to
restrict their work to live, "unedited" recordings of consumer
society. Subtle irony permeates the work of Peter Blake (b. 1932).
David Hockney Cb. 1937), and Allen Jones (b. 1937). Jones reproduced
the iconographic repertory of
the female body as viewed in soft porn magazines, with the
pictorial synthesis of a billboard.
POP ART IN ITALY
When American Pop art was first seen in Italy at the Venice
Biennial exhibition of 1964, it provoked a strong reaction from the
authorities, and the President of the Republic refused to
participate in the opening ceremony. However, the works included
revealed clear links with the experiments being carried out by
certain Italian
artists, such as Enrico Baj, Tano Festa, Mimmo Rotella, and Mario
Schifano. The subject matter varied between the two currents, simply
because of the differing economic and cultural backgrounds of the
artists. The American artists favoured consumer objects, whereas
Italian Pop art was often based on a satirical observation of past
art movements and masterpieces. In Michelangelo according to
(1967) by Tano Festa (1938-88), the plasticity of Michelangelo's
style is flattened into a polka-dot decoration, while
in Futurism Revisited (1966) by Mario Schifano (b. 1934),
the historic photograph of the Futurist group led by Marinetti loses
its original documentary value with the deletion of the subjects'
faces.
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Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Kosuth's work operates on three levels: the chair is at
once real, virtual (photographed), and described in words.
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Conceptual Art
Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913) did more than transfer
attention from the imitation of an object to the object itself: it
opened up the way for the "ready-made",
which would prove so important in the second half of the century
for the Neo-Dadaists and Nouveau Realistes, and
exploited the potential of raising everyday objects to new levels
of aesthetic worth. The Conceptual artists looked back to Duchamp and
his principle of considering the concept more important than the
artistic process. They devoted themselves to viewing the art object as
only the inevitable visualization of the idea that generated it. In
One and Three Chairs (1965), for example, American experimental
artist Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) displays an actual chair, a photograph
of a chair, and a written definition of the word from a dictionary,
drawing attention to the notion of appearances and concepts. In this
rather cerebral artistic dimension, the power of the artist is
accentuated despite his apparent absence, for even though the active
presence of the artist is minimized, his role
as producer or director is in turn heightened. The work
Giovane che guarda Lorenzo
Lotto
(Young Man looking at Lorenzo Lotto,
1967) by Giulio Paolini (b. 1940) is a simple photographic
reproduction on canvas of a portrait by the Venetian painter Lorenzo
Lotto. The title, alluding to the original 16th-century work, is
slightly odd and thought-provoking itself. If the young man in the
portrait is looking at Lorenzo Lotto, then anyone in front of the
picture can identify themselves with Lotto, i.e. the painter of the
portrait. Paolini's work, therefore, comprises an imaginary situation
dictated by the title. Its impact rests on the possible momentary
union of spectator and painter, based on the idea that Lorenzo Lotto
could be transferred through time and space while painting his model.
Conceptual art frequently posed such enigmas, often using the most
simple of ideas to set off a chain of far wider questioning. More
dramatic projects, however, were not ruled out. At the Venice
Bienniale in
1972, Gino De Dominicis (b. 1947) exhibited a mentally ill young
boy, who was seated on a chair to be viewed by the visitors.
Meanwhile, Antonio Paradiso (b. 1936) organized a "Performance" that
consisted of a bull mating with a mechanical cow.
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HAPPENINGS AND PERFORMANCE ART
Happenings were a hybrid form of art, taking their inspiration
freely from theatrical, musical, literary, pictorial, and sculptural
methods of expression. It was already an established trend in the
1950s, but only in the following decade did it receive serious
widespread attention. More or less simultaneous experiments were
carried out
by the Japanese Gutai group, which was active in Osaka from
1954, and by the American artist Allan Kaprow (b. 1927). He was the
first to use the term "happening" to define apparently improvised
events that featured collaborators who had, in fact, been briefed
beforehand. While these events were not totally spontaneous and were
dictated by a plan, the final outcome was never intended to be
predictable. Artists from other fields who dedicated their energies to
happenings were the exponents of Pop art Jim Dine (TheSmiling
Workman, I960) and Claes Oldenburg (The Store, 1961), and
the Fluxus group. This included artists from various backgrounds,
among them Daniel Spoerri (Nouveau Realiste), George Brecht, Yoko Ono,
Ben Vautier, and Joseph Beuys (working in Conceptual fields), and Nam
June Paik and Wolf Vostell (founders of video art). Happenings exerted
a strong influence on theatre and contemporary dance, offering an
alternative to more traditional forms of stage direction and
choreography. The expressive freedom of Performance art inspired
the Off Broadway theatre group and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,
whose collaboration with John Cage (avant-garde musician and member of
Fluxus) led to a freer interpretation of the relationship between the
body, music, and the stage. The exponents of
the Wiener Aktionismus were authors of particularly extreme
happenings and performances, which were akin to behavioural research.
The sequences performed by Herman Nitsch (b. 1938), founder of the
Orgien Mysterien Theater in the late 1950s, were so gruesome that they
verged on outright acts of sacrilege: in what appeared as
purging rituals, the participants were covered in the blood of
sacrificial animals. Gunter Brus (b. 1938), wrapped himself in
bandages and simulated epileptic fits (Ana. 1964) or defecated
in public (Scheiss-Aktion. 1967), while Rudolph Schwarzkogler
(1949-69) would perform self-deprecating acts, such as smearing his
body with blood and excrement. His suicide was interpreted by some as
the final act of a performance of self-destruction.
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Following the late
1950s, a
happening was a performance, event or situation meant to be considered
as art.
Happenings could take place anywhere, were often multi-disciplinary, often
lacked a narrative and frequently sought to involve the audience in some
way. Key elements of happenings were planned, but artists would sometimes
retain room for
improvisation.
In the later sixties, probably due to film depiction of the
Hippy
sub-culture, the term was used much less specifically to mean any
gathering of interest, from a
pool
hall
meetup or a
jamming of just a few young people to a beer blast or fancy formal
party.
History
Origins
Allan Kaprow first coined the term happening in the Spring of
1957 at an art picnic at
George Segal's farm to describe the art pieces that were going on.
Happening first appeared in print in the Winter 1958 issue of the
Rutgers University undergraduate literary magazine, Anthologist.
The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the
U.S.,
Germany, and
Japan.
Jack Kerouac referred to Kaprow as "the Happenings man," and an ad
showing a woman floating in outer space declared, "I dreamt I was in a
happening in my
Maidenform brassiere."
Kaprow’s piece 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) is commonly cited
as the first happening, although that distinction is sometimes given to a
1952 performance of Theater Piece No. 1 at
Black Mountain College by
John
Cage, one of Kaprow's teachers in the mid-1950s. Accounts of exactly
what this performance involved differ, but most agree that Cage recited
poetry and read lectures,
M. C. Richards read some of her poetry,
Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played
phonograph records,
David Tudor performed on a
prepared piano and
Merce Cunningham danced. All these things took place at the same time,
among the audience rather than on a stage. Happenings flourished in
New York City in the late
1950s and
early 1960s.
Key contributors to the form included
Carolee Schneemann,
Red
Grooms,
Robert Whitman,
Jim Dine,
Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of their work is
documented in Michael Kirby's book Happenings (1966).
Around the world
In
Britain, the first happenings were organised in
Liverpool by the poet and painter
Adrian Henri. The most important event was the Albert Hall “Poetry
Incarnation” on
June 11,
1965, where
an audience of 7,000 people witnessed and participated in performances by
some of the leading avant-garde young British and American poets of
the day (see
British Poetry Revival and
Poetry of the United States). One of the participants,
Jeff Nuttall, went on to organise a number of further happenings,
often working with his friend
Bob
Cobbing,
sound poet and
performance poet.
In
Belgium, the first happenings were organized around 1965–1968 in
Antwerp,
Brussels
and Ostend
by artists
Hugo Heyrman and
Panamarenko.
In the
Netherlands
Provo organized happenings around the little statue "Het Lieverdje" on
the Spui, a square in the centre of Amstersam, from 1966 till 1968.
Police
often
raided these events.
In
Australia, the
Yellow House Artist Collective in
Sydney
housed 24-hour happenings throughout the early 1970s.
Behind the
Iron Curtain, in
Poland,
in the second half of 1980s, a student-based happening movement
Orange Alternative founded by Major
Waldemar Fydrych became known for its much attended happenings (over
10 thousand participants at one time) aimed against the military regime
led by
General Jaruzelski and the fear blocking the Polish society ever since
the
Martial Law had been imposed in December
1981.
Another form
By 1999,
another form of the happening appeared in
Brussels,
Belgium,
created by students of the Free University of Brussels (ULB).
The meaning of this form of the happening is that things happen, and
sometimes one can't do anything about it. It is presented in an everyday,
every time, everywhere "game" where people can constrain other people to
do something or to undergo a certain situation. This is done by simply
saying the word "happening" before one takes action on a person or forces
him to do something. When someone has said "happening" the "victim" has no
choice but to be a temporary puppet of the Happeninger (the one who's
doing the happening) and not answering back. Revenge has no place in this
game. The only way to avoid playing is to say "no way", showing the index
finger in a horizontal position when you suspect someone is about to
perform a happening on you. The safety time implied by the "no way" is not
precisely defined, it is contextual.
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Performance art.
Descriptive term applied to ‘live’ presentations by
artists. It was first used very loosely by artists in the
early 1960s in the USA to refer to the many live events taking
place at that time, such as Happenings, Fluxus concerts,
Events, body art or (in Germany) Aktionen and
Demonstrationen. In 1969 performance was more specifically
incorporated into titles of work in the USA and UK and was
interchangeable with ‘performance piece’ or simply ‘piece’, as
in Vito Acconci’s Performance Test or Following
Piece (both 1969), and by many other artists such as
Dennis Oppenheim, Yoko Ono (b 1933), Dan Graham,
Rebecca Horn, Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson and Bruce Nauman. It
was closely linked to the ideological tenets and philosophy of
CONCEPTUAL ART, which insisted on ‘an art of which the
material is concepts’ and on ‘an art that could not be bought
and sold’; those who made performance pieces did so as a
statement against the gallery system and the art
establishment.
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Performance art is
art in which
the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a
particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time,
or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that
involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body and a
relationship between performer and audience. It is opposed to
painting
or
sculpture, for example, where an object constitutes the work. Of
course the lines are often blurred. For instance, the work of
Survival Research Laboratories is considered by most to be
"performance art", yet the performers are actually machines.
Although performance art could be said to include relatively mainstream
activities such as
theater,
dance,
music, and
circus-related things like
fire breathing,
juggling,
and
gymnastics, these are normally instead known as the
performing arts. Performance art is a term usually reserved to
refer to a kind of usually
avant-garde or
conceptual art which grew out of the
visual arts.
Performance art, as the term is usually understood, began to be
identified in the
1960s with
the work of artists such as
Yves
Klein,
Vito Acconci,
Hermann Nitsch,
Carolee Schneemann,
Yoko Ono,
Joseph Beuys,
Wolf Vostell and
Allan Kaprow, who coined the term
happenings. Western cultural theorists often trace performance art
activity back to the beginning of the
20th century.
Dada for example, provided a significant progenitor with the
unconventional performances of poetry, often at the
Cabaret Voltaire, by the likes of
Richard Huelsenbeck and
Tristan Tzara. However, there are accounts of
Renaissance artists putting on public performances that could be said
to be early ancestors to modern performance art. Some performance artists
point to other traditions, ranging from tribal
ritual to
sporting events. Performance art activity is not confined to European art
traditions; many notable practitioners can be found in the
United States,
Asia, and
Latin America.
RoseLee Goldberg states in Performance Art: From Futurism to the
Present:
- “Performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public,
as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art
and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium,
especially in the 1980s, stems from an apparent desire of that public to
gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its
distinct community, and to be surprised by the unexpected, always
unorthodox presentations that the artists devise. The work may be
presented solo or with a group, with lighting, music or visuals made by
the performance artist him or herself, or in collaboration, and
performed in places ranging from an art gallery or museum to an
“alternative space”, a theatre, café, bar or street corner. Unlike
theatre, the performer is the artist, seldom a character like an actor,
and the content rarely follows a traditional plot or narrative. The
performance might be a series of intimate gestures or large-scale visual
theatre, lasting from a few minutes to many hours; it might be performed
only once or repeated several times, with or without a prepared script,
spontaneously improvised, or rehearsed over many months.”
Performance art genres include
body art,
fluxus,
happening,
action poetry, and
intermedia. Some artists, e.g. the
Viennese Actionists and
neo-Dadaists, prefer to use the terms
live art,
action art,
intervention or
manoeuvre to describe their activities.
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Gilbert & George, G & G at via del
Paradiso, 1972. Attico Gallery, Rome. Exhibiting themselves in
galleries as living sculptures is just one example of the art of British
artists Gilbert and George. They regard their very days as works of art
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Body Art
When Duchamp dressed up as his feminine alter ego Rose Selavy,
covered himself with shaving foam to hide features of his body, or had
his head shaved in the shape of a star to be recorded for posterity by
the lens of Man Ray, he was giving artistic meaning to his body and
transforming it into a work of art. The wit and irony found in
Duchamp's work re-emerged in the early 1960s in the creations of Piero
Manzoni (1933-63). who in 1961 proposed turning people into living
sculptures by keeping their bodies still and adorning them with
certificates of authenticity. That same year, he also caused an uproar
with his Merda d'artista. which consisted of 90 cans of the
artist's excrement, for sale at the same price, weight for weight, as
gold. However, the Body art that established itself in the later 1960s
and 1970s was characterized by predominantly masochistic attitudes. It
involves the misuse or abuse of the body and condemning
existential violence through a demonstration of self-inflicted
suffering. Gina Pane (b. 1939), for example, wounded herself with a
variety of instruments, assigning negative feelings to symbols usually
viewed in the opposite context. The roses in Azione sentimentale
(1974) were not embraced in an exaltation of romanticism but to
show the physical suffering inflicted by the thorns. Even when not
engaged in painful actions, the image of the human body was distorted
and its vitality transformed into a brute force. The Austrian artist
Arnulf Rainer (b. 1929) had himself photographed in unnatural poses
and then accentuated the crudeness by painting violent brushstrokes on
the results. Self-inflicted pain gave way to humorous narcissism in
the work of Gilbert & George (b. 1943 and 1942 respectively), who
united to proclaim themselves
"continuous sculptures" and to
propose their very existence as an artistic continuum.
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Body art is
art made on,
with, or consisting of, the
human body.
The most common forms of body art are
tattoos
and
body piercings, but other types include
scarification,
branding,
scalpelling, shaping (for example
tight-lacing of
corsets),
full body tattoo and
body painting.
More extreme body art can involve things such as mutilation or pushing
the body to its physical limits. For example, one of
Marina Abramovic's works involved dancing until she collapsed from
exhaustion, while one of
Dennis Oppenheim's better-known works saw him lying in the sunlight
with a book on his chest, until his skin, excluding that covered by the
book, was badly
sunburned.
It can even consist of the arrangement and
dissection of preserved bodies in an artistic fashion, as in the case
of the
plastinated bodies used in the travelling
Body Worlds exhibit.
In Western art, body art appears to be a sub-category of
performance art, in which artists use or abuse their own body to make
their particular statements.
In more recent times,
body became a
subject of much broader discussions and treatments that cannot be reduced
to the body art in its common understanding. Important strategies that
question the
human
body are:
implants,
body in
symbiosis with the
new technologies,
virtual
body etc. A special case of the body art strategies is the
absence
of body. The
most important artists that performed the "absence" of
body through
their
artworks were:
Keith Arnatt,
Andy Warhol,
Anthony Gormley and
Davor Džalto.
Examples of body art
Vito Acconci once documented, through photos and text, his daily
exercise routine of stepping on and off a chair for as long as possible
over several months. Acconci also performed a 'Following Piece', in which
he followed randomly chosen New Yorkers.
Chris Burden actually had an assistant shoot him in the arm in his
piece ‘Shoot’ (1971), which was observed by a live audience. This was
documented in an eight-second video and is a notorious example of
video
art as well as
performance art. In ‘Through the Night Softly' (1973), Burden crawled
naked through broken glass, which he saw as stars in the sky, and turned
the video footage into a ten-second commercial that was aired on
television. In ‘Locker’, he spent five days jammed into a 2' x 2' x 3'
locker at UCLA; in ‘Sculpture in Three Parts’ (1974), he sat on an upright
chair on a sculpture pedestal for 48 hours, until he fell off due to
exhaustion; in ‘White Light/White Heat’ (1975), he spent 22 days alone and
invisible to the public on a high platform in a gallery, neither eating,
speaking, seeing or being seen. Most of these performances are known only
through photographs or short video clips.
The
Vienna Action Group was formed in 1965 by Herman Nitsch, Otto Muhl,
Gunter Brus and Rudolf Schwartzkogler. They performed several body art
actions, usually involving social taboos (such as genital mutilation).
Marina Abramovic performed ‘Rhythm O’ in 1974. In the piece, the
audience was given instructions to use on Abramovic's body an array of 72
provided instruments of pain and pleasure, including knives, feathers, and
a loaded pistol. Audience members cut her, pressed thorns into her belly,
put lipstick on her, and removed her clothers. The performance ended after
six hours when someone held the loaded gun up to Abramovic's head and a
scuffle broke out.
The movement gradually evolved to the works more directed in the
personal mythologies, as at
Jana Sterbak,
Rebecca Horn,
Youri Messen-Jaschin or
Javier Perez.
Jake Lloyd Jones a Sydney based artist conceived a body art ride which
has become an annual event, participants are painted to form a living
rainbow that rides to the Pacific Ocean and immerses itself in the waves.Sydney
Body Art Ride
Guatemalan artist
Regina José Galindo have used body art to protest against political
oppression and
violence against women.
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Visual Poetry
Visual poetry was a descendant of the Futurist free-word style, in
which words were displayed in ways that contravened any of the
traditional norms of order and arrangement on the page. However,
whereas the free words of Futurist compositions were valued ultimately
as icons, in visual poetry the actual meaning of the words was
indispensable to our understanding of the work. The verbal content was
not in the form of captions or as a support to the images it
accompanied, but was present to introduce meaningful diversions with a
provocative content. These verbal visualizations also took images and
slogans from the mass media
and employed them in an ironic context. Emilio Isgro (b. 1937)
achieved notable results in this field, although he opted for more
personal interpretations than assemblages of words and images.
In his work Dio e un essere perfettissimo (God is a Perfect
Being, 1965) he parodies the link between religion, advertising, and
mass-produced consumer goods. In another Conceptual manifestation, he
deletes entire pages of books, leaving just a few words that gave
evidence of unnecessary verbosity. More attention was given to the
expressive potential of words by the protagonists of Concrete poetry,
who came from literary, philosophical, and musical backgrounds. They
conveyed their intent through patterns of words, letters, and symbols,
rather than through a conventional arrangement of sentences. This
was so with the Gruppo 70, formed in Florence in 1963 and involving
poets and writers such as Eugenio Miccini and Lamberto Pignotti (also
members of the literary Gruppo 63) and musicians like Giuseppe Chiari
(in contact with the diverse artists of Fluxus). This experimentation
in Italy, with contributions also from Vincenzo Accame, Carlo Belloli,
Ugo Carrega, and Martino Oberto, had precedents in work that was
carried out in the late 1950s in Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland. The
style of the Concrete poets can clearly be seen in Schweigen
(Silence, 1968) by Eugen Gomringer (b. 1925). The sudden interruption
in the repetition of the word "schweigen", and the void or
visual gap that it creates, becomes a subtle visualization of the
semantic value of the whole composition.
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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 verv
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 Dennis Oppenheim
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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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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Mario Merz, Object cache-toi, 1968. Merz has for some years
made his igloos out of a number of thought-provoking materials, both
natural and artificial
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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
struc-
ture 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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The term Arte Povera was introduced by the
Italian
art
critic and
curator,
Germano Celant, in
1967. His
pioneering texts and a series of key exhibitions provided a collective
identity for a number of young Italian artists based in
Turin,
Milan,
Genoa and
Rome. They
were working in radically new ways, breaking with the past and entering a
challenging dialogue with trends in
Europe
and
America.
The movement was particularly influential during the early 1970s in
countries with large Italian migrant populations, such as Australia where
major local practitioners included
John Davis and
Domenico De clario.
Giovanni Anselmo ,Alighiero
e Boetti ,Pier
Paolo Calzolari ,Rossella
Cosentino ,Gino
De Dominicis ,Luciano
Fabro ,Jannis
Kounellis ,Mario
Merz ,Piero
Manzoni ,Marisa
Merz ,Giulio
Paolini ,Pino
Pascali ,Giuseppe
Penone ,Michelangelo
Pistoletto ,Gilberto
Zorio
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SYSTEMIC PAINTING
A branch of Minimal art that relied on the use of simple,
standardized, non-representational forms, "Systemic painting" was the
title of a show organized by the British art critic Lawrence Alloway
in 1966 at New York's Guggenheim Museum. Contributors included the
American artists Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and
Robert Ryman, as well as Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, two leading
exponents of Abstract Expressionism. Frank Stella (b. 1936) had
already taken ideas from Reinhardt and Newman in the late 1950s as
inspiration for his attempts to reduce painting to its fundamental
essence; his work was to be read solely in terms of
form and colour, without any pretence that it revealed the artist's
state of mind. In this respect, Systemic painting displayed similar
intentions to the contemporary Minimal sculpture of artists such as
Carl Andre and Donald Judd.
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Minimalism
The term "Minimal art" was coined in 1965 by the critic-Richard
Wollheim and
encompassed a wide diversity of associated styles and concepts,
among them ABC art, Object sculpture, Cool art, Primary structures,
and Literalist art. The trend, which applied particularly to
sculpture, arose in the 1950s, chiefly in the US. Its distinguishing
characteristics were an extreme spareness of form and a minimal
expressive content; this was in violent contrast to the flamboyant
Abstract expressionist style that preceded it. The term is applied
in a precise way to the works of sculptors such as Donald Judd, Robert
Morris, Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, and Tony Smith, which display the same
essentially cold, geometric forms in vast sizes. The sheer scale on
which some were conceived meant that they had a strong relationship
with their surroundings and often assumed an architectural nature,
allowing the spectator to cross or walk along the structure. The
square copper plates that Carl Andre (b. 1935) laid on the floor, or
the smooth and anonymous parallelepipeds of Donald Judd (1928-94) did
not appear so different in concept from the repetitive objects in the
work of Warhol. However, Warhol took cultural icons and reproduced
them flatly and without emotion, while the Minimalists wanted to draw
people's attention to extreme formal simplicity, which they believed
was yet 10 be fully appreciated.
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Minimalism.
Term used in the 20th century, in particular from the
1960s, to describe a style characterized by an impersonal
austerity, plain geometric configurations and industrially
processed materials. It was first used by David Burlyuk in the
catalogue introduction for an exhibition of John Graham’s
paintings at the Dudensing Gallery in New York in 1929.
Burlyuk wrote: ‘Minimalism derives its name from the minimum
of operating means. Minimalist painting is purely
realistic—the subject being the painting itself.’ The term
gained currency in the 1960s. Accounts and explanations of
Minimalism varied considerably, as did the range of work to
which it was related. This included the monochrome paintings
of Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella
and Brice Marden, and even aspects of Pop art and
Post-painterly Abstraction. Typically the precedents cited
were Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, the Suprematist
compositions of Kazimir Malevich and Barnett Newman’s Abstract
Expressionist paintings. The rational grid paintings of Agnes
Martin were also mentioned in connection with such Minimalist
artists as Sol LeWitt.
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ANALYTICAL PAINTING
In Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of experimentation
took place comparable with that being carried out in the US in
Minimalist painting. Two groups working in this area in France in the
late 1970s were BMPT and Support-Surface, whose precedents could well
have been the series of blue "monochromes" by Yves Klein (1928-62). A
lack of pictorial content characterizes the work of Giorgio Griffa,
Rodolfo Arico, Claudio Olivieri, and Claudio Verna, while the work of
Piero Manzoni and Giulio Paolini is full of Conceptual nuances. From
1958 to I960 Manzoni was already producing his white monochrome
Achromes, reducing the picture to a mere rough support
soaked in kaolin. Meanwhile, Paolini demonstrated the basic
elements of painting in his Geometric Design, which was simply
a square, unprimed. unadorned piece of canvas. With similar intentions
in the 1970s, Morales (b. 1942) created diptychs composed of two
canvases, one painted all over, the other left untouched.
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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 Liiperz, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Jorg
Immendorf, and A.R. Penk. 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, commit-
ment. 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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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 iUusionism inside an old Bronx school next
to the Fashion Moda gallery ( Tlx> Thing, 1981); and John
Ahearn. whose painted reliefs on Bronx walls recall the Pop plaster
casts of sculptor George Segal.
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Installation
[Environment].
Term that gained currency in the 1960s to describe a
construction or assemblage conceived for a specific interior,
often for a temporary period, and distinguished from more
conventional sculpture as a discrete object by its physical
domination of the entire space. By inviting the viewer
literally to enter into the work of art, and by appealing not
only to the sense of sight but also, on occasion, to those of
hearing and smell, such works demand the spectator’s active
engagement. As an art form, installations are particularly
associated with movements of the 1960s and 1970s such as Pop
art, Nouveau Réalisme, Minimalism, conceptual art and process
art, but in theory they can be conceived within the terms of
virtually any style.
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Abstract illusionism is an artistic movement that came into
prominence in the
Unites States during the late 1960s. Works consisted of both
hard-edge and expressionistic abstract painting styles that employed the
use of perspective, artificial light sources and cast shadows to achieve
the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface.
Abstract Illusionism differed from traditional Trompe L’oeil (illusionistic)
art, in that the pictorial space seemed to project in front of, or away
from the canvas surface as opposed to receding into the picture plane as
in traditional painting.
Pre 1970 practioners of the style include,
Ronald Davis, James Havard,
Alan D'arcangelo, and
Al Held.
Documented artists associated with the 1970s Abstract Illusionism
movement include
Jack Lembeck, Tony King, George Green, Michael Gallagher,
Jack Reilly and Joe Doyle.
The first major museum exhibition to survey Abstract Illusionism was
"The Reality of Illusion" which originated in 1979 at the
Denver Art Museum and traveled to the
Oakland Museum,
Herbert Johnson Museum at
Cornell University,
University of Southern California, and Honolulu Academy of Art.
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Aktionismus.
Austrian group of performance artists, active in the 1960s. Its
principal members were Günter Brus, Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch, who
first collaborated informally in 1961, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who
was introduced to the group in 1963. Others associated with the group
included Anni Brus, the film maker Kurt Kren, the composer Anetis
Logosthetis and the actor Heinz Cibulka. The group were influenced by
the work of Adolf Frohner (b 1934), Arnulf Rainer and Alfons
Schilling (b 1934), who were all in turn influenced by American
action painting and by the gestural painting associated with Tachism.
The members of Aktionismus attached significance, however, not so much
to the paintings produced by the artist as to the artist as a
participant in the process of production, as a witness to creation
rather than as a creator. Muehl, Brus and Nitsch all felt drawn to
public performances celebrating and investigating artistic creativity
by a natural progression from their earlier sculptural or painterly
activities. In 1962 Muehl and Nitsch staged their first Aktion
or performance, Blood Organ, in the Perinetgasse in Vienna. In
1965 Brus produced the booklet Le Marais to accompany an
exhibition of his work at the Galerie Junge Generation, Vienna. Muehl,
Nitsch and Schwarzkogler all contributed, referring to themselves as
the Wiener Aktionsgruppe.
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The term Viennese Actionism describes a short and violent
movement in
20th century
art that can be regarded as part of the many independent efforts of
the 1960s
to develop "action
art" (Fluxus,
Happening,
Performance,
Body Art,
etc.). Its main participants were
Günter Brus,
Otto
Mühl,
Hermann Nitsch and
Rudolf Schwarzkogler. As "actionists," they were active between 1960
and 1971. Most have continued their artistic work independently from the
early 1970s
onwards.
Documentation of the work of these four artists suggests that there was
no consciously developed sense of a movement or any cultivation of
membership status in a "actionist" group. Rather, this name was one
applied to various collaborative configurations among these four artists.
Malcolm Green has quoted
Hermann Nitsch's comment, "Vienna Actionism never was a group. A
number of artists reacted to particular situations that they all
encountered, within a particular time period, and with similar means and
results."
Art and the Politics of Transgression
The work of the Actionists developed concurrently but largely
independently from other Avant Garde movements of the era who shared an
interest in rejecting object-based or otherwise commodifiable art
practices. The practice of staging precisely scored "Actions" in
controlled environments or before audiences bears similarities to the
Fluxus concept of enacting an "event score" and is a forerunner to the
emergence of
Performance Art as an institutionalized art practice.
The work of the Viennese Actionists is probably best remembered for the
wilful transgressiveness of its naked bodies, destructiveness and
violence. Often, brief jail terms were served by participants for
violations of decency laws, and their works were targets of moral outrage.
In June 1968 Günter Brus began serving a 6 month prison sentence for the
crime of "degrading symbols of the state," and later fled Austria to avoid
a second arrest.
Otto
Mühl served a one month prison term after his participation in a
public event, "Art and Revolution" in 1968. After his "Piss Action" before
a Munich
audience, Mühl became a fugitive from the West German police. Hermann
Nitsch served a two week prison term in 1965 after his participation with
Rudolph Schwarzkogler in the Festival of Psycho-Physical Naturalism. The
"Destruction in Art Symposium", held in London in 1966, marked the first
encounter between members of Fluxus and Actionists. It was a landmark of
international recognition for the work of Brus, Mühl and Nitsch.
While the nature and content of each artist's work differed, there are
distinct aesthetic and thematic threads connecting the Actions of Brus,
Mühl, Nitsch and Schwarzkogler. Use of the body as both surface and site
of art-making seems to have been a common point of origin for the
Actionists in their earliest departures from conventional art practices in
the late 50s and early 60s. Brus' "Hand Painting Head Painting" action of
1964, Mühl and Nitsch's "Degradation of a Female Body, Degradation of A
Venus" of 1963 are characterized by their efforts to reconceive human
bodies as surfaces for the production of art. The trajectories of the
Actionists' work suggests more than just a precedent to later
performance art and
body art,
rather, a drive toward a totalizing art-practice is inherent in their
refusing to be confined within conventional ideas of painting, theatre and
sculpture. Mühl's 1964 "Material Action
Manifesto" offers some theoretical framework for understanding this:
...material action is painting that has spread beyond the picture
surface. The human body, a laid table or a room becomes the picture
surface. Time is added to the dimension of the body and space.
A 1967 revision of the same manifesto Mühl wrote:
... material action promises the direct pleasures of the table.
Material action satiates. Far more important than baking bread is the
urge to take dough-beating to the extreme.
Brus and Mühl participated in the "Kunst und Revolution" (Art and
Revolution) event in Vienna, June 1968, issuing the following
proclamation:
... our assimilatory democracy maintains art as a safety valve for
enemies of the state ... the consumer state drives a wave of "art"
before itself; it attempts to bribe the "artist" and thus to
rehabilitate his revolutionising "art" as an art that supports the
state. But "art" is not art. "Art" is politics that has created new
styles of communication.
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Junk art.
1961
Term first used by the critic Lawrence Alloway in 1961 to
describe an urban art in which found or ready-made objects and
mechanical debris were transformed into paintings, sculptures
and environments by welding, collaging, décollaging or
otherwise assembling them into new and unusual forms. The name
evolved from the phrase ‘junk culture’, which had been used in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly in Great Britain
and the USA, by writers such as Hilton Kramer (b 1928)
to describe the vulgar and kitsch qualities of objects with
built-in obsolescence produced in industrial nations after
World War II.
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Continuità.
1961
Italian group of painters and sculptors formed in 1961.
With the critic Carlo Argan (b 1909) as spokesman, it
included Carla Accardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio,
Gastone Novelli (1925–68), Achille Perilli (b 1927) and
Giulio Turcato among its founder-members. They were soon
joined by Lucio Fontana, Arnaldo Pomodoro and Giò Pomodoro.
Some of these artists had previously been members of FORMA,
founded in 1947 to promote abstract art. The notion of
continuity was inherent not only in the group’s general aim—to
regenerate the traditional greatness of Italian art—but
equally as an ideal for specific works of art, each painting
or sculpture reflecting the order and continuity of its
creation. This was in opposition not only to the social
realists, such as Renato Guttuso and Armando Pizzinato (b
1910), but also (to a lesser extent) to the Informalist trends
among artists of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and the Gruppo
degli Otto Pittori Italiani. However, some members, notably
Turcato, went through all phases from Expressionism in the
1930s to geometrical abstraction in the 1960s. Accardi,
Perilli and Novelli incorporated geometrical writing or
‘signs’ in their work. Fontana, the most influential and
avowedly abstract artist to be associated with the group,
added a further aspect to Continuità, the idea of continuity
of a work within its surroundings, for example his Spatial
Environment (1949; Milan, Gal. Naviglio), which was a
precursor of environmental art. From the late 1950s onwards he
also suggested continuity with the space behind the canvas in
his slit canvases known as Tagli (‘slashes’, e.g.
Spatial Concept—Expectations, 1959; Paris, Mus. A. Mod.
Ville Paris). Among the sculptors, Giò Pomodoro created cast
bronze reliefs with irregular surfaces, creating a sense of
integration with the surrounding wall or floor. Continuità,
like Forma before it, represented a convergence of artists
with similar aims rather than a definitive movement.
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Grupo Hondo.
1961
Spanish group of painters. It was formed in Madrid in 1961
by Juan Genovés, José Paredes Jardiel (b 1928),
Fernando Mignoni (b 1929) and Chilean Gastón Orellana (b
1933) and was active until 1964. They first exhibited together
in 1961 at the Galería Nebli, Madrid, reacting against the
total abstraction of Art informel but applying its
free, automatic, rapid and uninhibited techniques to a
socially committed and Expressionist ‘neo-figurative’ style.
They acquired two new members, José Vento (b 1925) and
Carlos Sansegundo (b 1930), for their second exhibition
in 1963, at the Sociedad de Amigos de Arte in Madrid, but they
went their separate ways a year later.
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Gruppe 5
[Nor.: ‘Group 5’].
1961
Norwegian group of artists active from 1961. It has had a
decisive influence on the recognition of abstract art in
Norway. The group was founded in 1961 by the Spanish-born
Ramon Isern (Solé) (b 1914; d 1989), together
with Håkon Bleken (b 1929), Halvdan Ljøsne (b
1929), Lars Tiller (1924–94) and Roar Wold (b 1926).
They were all teachers in the architectural department (Institutt
for form og farge) of the Norges Tekniske Høgskole in
Trondheim. They wished to define their shared opposition to
the traditional and conventional Trondheim art world and to
break Oslo’s dominance of Norwegian art. Without any agreed
ideological platform, they examined, in non-representational
paintings, the relationship between plane, form, colour,
space, the process of abstraction and the legacy of
Constructivism, as they had in their teaching. In their
abstract paintings the Constructivist stamp was rhythmically
enlivened by the materiality of colours and such evocative
spatially expansive subjects as that of Wold’s At the Edge
of the Beach (1963; Oslo, Mus. Samtidskst). Isern made
geometrically defined and totem-like sculptures in different
materials, as well as tapestries with similar forms. Most of
the group’s members also executed charcoal drawings, graphics
and collages, such as Ljøsne’s oil painting Accumulation
(1965; Oslo, Mus. Samtidskst) with glued-on newspaper
clippings and disturbing spatial effects, and wrote articles
about art theory (see Bleken).
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Annandale Imitation Realists.
1962
Australian group of mixed-media artists active in 1962. They formed
for the purpose of staging an exhibition of the same name. Ross
Crothall (b 1934), Mike Brown and Colin Lanceley worked
together in Crothall’s studio in Annandale, a suburb of Sydney, in
1961. They shared an interest in assemblage, collage, junk art,
objets trouvés and in non-Western art. Brown, who had worked in
New Guinea in 1959, was impressed by the use in tribal house
decoration and body ornament of modern urban rubbish such as broken
plates and bottletops. Crothall delighted in the altered objet
trouvé, for example egg cartons unfolded to become the Young
Aesthetic Cow, or pieces of furniture crudely gathered into
frontally posed female icons, sparkling with buttons and swirling
house-paint, with such titles as Gross Débutante. Lanceley was
deeply influenced by his teacher John Olsen and through him by Jean
Dubuffet. He covered impastoed surfaces with junk materials, often
decorating distorted female forms with strings of pearls, broken
plates and other items; in Glad Family Picnic (1961; Sydney,
A.G. NSW) elements combine into a garish visual cacophony.
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Archizoom (Associati).
Italian architectural and design partnership formed in 1966 by
Andrea Branzi (b 1939), Gilberto Corretti (b 1941),
Paolo Deganello (b 1940) and Massimo Morozzi. These were joined
by Dario Bartolini and Lucia Bartolini in 1968. They were based in
Florence and were influenced initially by the utopian visions of the
English architectural group Archigram. They achieved international
prominence following appearances at the Superarchitettura
exhibitions of radical architecture held at Pistoia (1966) and Modena
(1967) and organized with the SUPERSTUDIO group. Numerous projects and
essays reflected the group’s search for a new, highly flexible and
technology-based approach to urban design, and in the late 1960s
exhibition and product design began to form a significant part of
their work. The Superonda and Safari sofas, designed for the
Poltronova company, combine modular flexibility with kitsch-inspired
shiny plastic and leopard-skin finishes. Their central aim of
stimulating individual creativity and fantasy was the focus of
installations such as the Centre for Electric Conspiracy, with
its closed, perfumed meditation areas housing exotic objects from
different cultures, and the empty grey room presented at Italy: The
New Domestic Landscape, an exhibition held at MOMA, New York, in
1972. In the latter a girl’s voice describes the light and colour of a
beautiful house that is left to the listener to imagine. Dress is the
theme of the two films (Vestirsi è facile and Come è fatto
il capotto di Gogol ) that the group made shortly before
disbanding in 1974 to follow separate careers.
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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. 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.,
see 1989 exh. cat., p. 365), 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,
see 1989 exh. cat., p. 298). 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., see 1993 exh. cat., p. 63) by LUCIANO FABRO, a
gilded bronze relief of the map of Italy, hung upside down in
a gesture that was literally revolutionary.
Arte
povera
Italian term ('poor' or * 'impoverished art') coined by the critic
Germano Celant to indicate a tendency he discerned in 1967 and
presented in an exhibition in Turin in 1970. The artists he saw as
representatives of 'poor art' belonged to several countries and are
associated also with other movements and activities such as
*earthworks and "Conceptual art, under wide discussion in those years.
Using valueless raw materials, such as soil, Arte povera endeavoured
to elude the commercialism of art and its segregation as an exclusive
activity.
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Arte programmata
[It.: ‘programmed art’].
Term given to the work of various Italian artists active
during the early 1960s who were primarily interested in
KINETIC ART and OP ART. The phrase was used by Umberto Eco in
1962 for an exhibition that he presented at the Olivetti
Showroom in Milan. This show included works by BRUNO MUNARI,
Enzo Mari and members of GRUPPO N and GRUPPO T (both founded
1959). The artists produced objects by a procedure analogous
to the methods of technological research, creating a prototype
that was then developed through a series of closely related
artefacts. This practice was exemplified by Munari, whose
mass-produced ‘multiples’ took the form either of
hand-operated objects or simple machines (e.g. X Hour,
1963; see Tanchis, pp. 72–3). The ‘multiples’ required the
participation of members of the public in order to function
and were intended to explore optical and physical phenomena,
concerns that also dominated the work of other Arte
programmata artists. Giovanni Anceschi (b 1939)
created remarkable dynamic images with coloured liquids, while
Gianni Colombo (b 1937) made reliefs constructed out of
blocks that moved mechanically. Arte programmata gained
an international reputation and in 1964 was the subject of
exhibitions at the Royal College of Art, London, and at
various venues in the USA. In the late 1960s, however, the
artists became less closely associated, even though most
continued to pursue their interests in kinetic and optical
effects.
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Auto-destructive art.
Term applied to works of art in a variety of media, with
the capacity to destroy themselves after a finite existence,
ranging from a few moments to 20 years. This self-destruction
may result from natural processes such as collisions,
decomposition and dematerialization, or from mechanisms
requiring collaboration between artists, scientists and
engineers, and may be either random and unpredictable or
strictly controlled. The term, which is also sometimes used
more loosely to describe any works with the capacity to
transform themselves, was first used by Gustav Metzger in a
manifesto (November 1959). Metzger elaborated on what he saw
as an inherently political art theory and practice in five
manifestos, in public lectures and demonstrations and in his
own innovative techniques, including ‘painting’ in acid on
nylon (1960–62).
Autodestructive art
Works of art whose disintegration is their content and message have
heen produced in the West (and in countries under western influence,
such as Japan) since at least the 1960s. They should be distinguished
from works created to be temporary (ephemeral celebratory works, sand
paintings for an American Indian ritual, *Performance art etc.) whose
passing is incidental to their purpose. Gustav *Metzger's paintings
done in acid on nylon, *Latham's towers of burning books, *Tinguely's
self-demolishing machine Homage to New York all speak of
quietus. There have been many other such works, done to assert art's
freedom from commerce and also from its old association with grace and
with reassuring permanence.
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Brutalism.
Term applied to the architectural style of exposed rough
concrete and large modernist block forms, which flourished in
the 1960s and 1970s and which derived from the architecture of
Le Corbusier. The term originated from béton brut (Fr.:
‘raw concrete’) and was given overtones of cultural
significance not only by Le Corbusier’s dictum
‘L’architecture, c’est avec des matières brutes établir des
rapports émouvants’ (‘Architecture is the establishing of
moving relationships with raw materials’), but also by the
art brut of Jean Dubuffet and others, which emphasized the
material and heavily impastoed surfaces. The epitome of
Brutalism in this original sense is seen in the forms and
surface treatment of its first major monument, Le Corbusier’s
Unité d’Habitation de Grandeur Conforme (1948–54; see fig.) in
Marseille (for another illustrated example see LASDUN,
DENYS). The ultimate disgrace of Brutalism in this same sense
is to be seen in the innumerable blocks of flats built
throughout the world that use the prestige of Le Corbusier’s
béton brut as an excuse for low-cost surface
treatments. In Le Corbusier’s own buildings exposed concrete
is usually very carefully detailed, with particular attention
to the surface patterns created by the timber shuttering, and
this can be seen in the work of more conscientious followers
of the mode such as Lasdun or Atelier 5.
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Computer art.
Term formerly used to describe any work of art in which a
computer was used to make either the work itself or the
decisions that determined its form. Computers became so widely
used, however, that in the late 20th century the term was
applied mainly to work that emphasized the computer’s role.
Such calculating tools as the abacus have existed for
millennia, and artists have frequently invented mathematical
systems to help them to make pictures. The GOLDEN SECTION and
Alberti’s formulae for rendering perspective were devices that
aspired to fuse realism with idealism in art, while Leonardo
da Vinci devoted much time to applying mathematical principles
to image-making. After centuries of speculations by writers,
and following experiments in the 19th century, computers began
their exponential development in the aftermath of World War
II, when new weapon-guidance systems were adapted for peaceful
applications, and the term ‘cybernetics’ was given currency by
Norbert Wiener. Artists exploited computers’ ability to
execute mathematical formulations or ‘algorithms’ from 1950,
when Ben F. Laposky (b 1930) used an analogue computer
to generate electronic images on an oscilloscope. Once it was
possible to link computers to printers, programmers often made
‘doodles’ between their official tasks. From the early 1960s
artists began to take this activity more seriously and quickly
discovered that many formal decisions could be left to the
computer, with results that were particularly valued for their
unpredictability. From the mid-1970s the painter Harold Cohen
(b 1928) developed a sophisticated programme, AARON,
which generated drawings that the artist then completed as
coloured paintings. Although the computer became capable of
that task as well, Cohen continued to hand-colour
computer-generated images
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Conceptual art
[idea art; information art].
Term applied to work produced from the mid-1960s that
either markedly de-emphasized or entirely eliminated a
perceptual encounter with unique objects in favour of an
engagement with ideas. Although Henry Flynt of the Fluxus
group had designated his performance pieces ‘concept art’ as
early as 1961, and Edward Kienholz had begun to devise
‘concept tableaux’ in 1963, the term first achieved public
prominence in defining a distinct art form in an article
published by Sol LeWitt in 1967. Only loosely definable as a
movement, it emerged more or less simultaneously in North
America, Europe and Latin America and had repercussions on
more conventional spheres of artistic production spawning
artists’ books as a separate category and contributing
substantially to the acceptance of photographs, musical
scores, architectural drawings and performance art on an equal
footing with painting and sculpture.
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Correspondence art
[Mail art].
Term applied to art sent through the post rather than
displayed or sold through conventional commercial channels,
encompassing a variety of media including postcards, books,
images made on photocopying machines or with rubber stamps,
postage stamps designed by artists, concrete poetry and other
art forms generally considered marginal. Although Marcel
Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and the Italian Futurists have been
cited as its precursors, as a definable international movement
it can be traced to practices introduced in the early 1960s by
artists associated with Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme and the Gutai
group and most specifically to the work of RAY JOHNSON. From
the mid-1950s Johnson posted poetic mimeographed letters to a
select list of people from the art world and figures from
popular culture, which by 1962 he had developed into a network
that became known as the New York Correspondence School of
Art.
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Drop Art
In 1961, filmmaker
Gene Bernofsky and artist
Clark Richert, art students from the
University of Kansas, developed an art concept they called Drop Art
or "droppings". Informed by the "happenings"
of
Allan Kaprow and the impromptu performances a few years earlier of
John
Cage,
Robert Rauschenberg and
Buckminster Fuller at
Black Mountain College, Drop Art began when Richert and Bernofsky
started painted rocks and dropping them from a loft roof onto the sidewalk
of Lawrence Kansas's main drag - watching the reactions of passersby.
Early Drop Art included such pieces as "Egg Drop" and "Pendulum"
(pictured) . Drop Art eventually led to the creation of
Drop
City, an experimental artist's community founded in 1965 near
Trinidad, Colorado. The intention was to create a live-in work of "Drop
Art".
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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.
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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; & ‘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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Equipo Crónica
[Sp.: ‘the chronicle team’].
Spanish group of painters formed in 1964 and disbanded in
1981. Its original members were Rafael Solbes (1940–81),
Manuel Valdés (b 1942) and Juan Antonio Toledo (b
1940), but Toledo left the group in 1965. They worked
collaboratively and formed part of a larger movement known as
Crónica de la Realidad, using strongly narrative figurative
images that were formally indebted to Pop art and that had a
pronounced social and political content directed primarily
against Franco’s regime.
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Fibre art.
Collective term, coined in the 1970s, for creative,
experimental fibre objects. A wide range of techniques is
used, often in combinations that encompass both traditional
(e.g. felting, knotting) and modern (e.g. photographic
transfer) practices. The eclectic range of materials includes
many not previously associated with textiles, such as paper,
wood, iridescent film, nylon mesh and wire.
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Fluxus.
Informal international group of avant-garde artists working
in a wide range of media and active from the early 1960s to
the late 1970s. Their activities included public concerts or
festivals and the dissemination of innovatively designed
anthologies and publications, including scores for electronic
music, theatrical performances, ephemeral events, gestures and
actions constituted from the individual’s everyday experience.
Other types of work included the distribution of object
editions, correspondence art and concrete poetry. According to
the directions of the artist, Fluxus works often required the
participation of a spectator in order to be completed (see
PERFORMANCE ART).
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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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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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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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Hi-Red Center
[Haireddo Senta].
Japanese group of installation artists founded in 1963 and
active until 1964. The group’s name comprised a translation of
the first part of each founder’s surname: ‘Taka’ from JIRO
TAKAMATSU, ‘Aka’ from Genpei Akasegawa (b 1937) and
‘Naka’ from Natsuyuki Nakanishi (b 1935). The group
attempted to draw attention to their neo-Dadaist ideas through
the staging of public installations and performances. In the
Dairoku ji mikisa keikaku (‘The sixth blender plan’)
exhibition at the Miyata Clinic, Shinbashi, Tokyo (1963), for
example, Nakanishi covered himself in metal clothes-pegs. The
Shieruta puran (‘Shelter plan’) event in the Teikoku
Hotel, Tokyo (1964), involved the creation of personalized
nuclear fall-out shelters by the group’s members. Hi-Red
Center also produced a number of pamphlets in addition to
their other activities.
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Lyrical Abstraction is an important American
abstract art movement that emerged in
New York City,
Los
Angeles,
Washington DC and then
Toronto
and London
during the
1960s -
1970s. Characterized by intuitive and loose paint handling,
spontaneous expression, illusionist space, acrylic staining, process,
occasional imagery, and other painterly and newer technological
techniques.[1]
Lyrical Abstraction led the way away from
minimalism in painting and toward a new freer
expressionism.[2]
Painters who directly reacted against the predominating
Formalist,
Minimalist, and
Pop Art
and
Geometric abstraction styles of the 1960s, turned to new,
experimental, loose, painterly, expressive, pictorial and abstract
painting styles. Many of them had been Minimalists, working with various
monochromatic, geometric styles, and whose paintings publicly evolved into
new abstract painterly motifs. American Lyrical Abstraction is related in
spirit to
Abstract Expressionism,
Color Field painting and
European
Tachisme
of the 1940s and 1950s as well.
Tachisme
refers to the French style of abstract painting current in the 1945 -1960
period. Very close to Art Informel, it presents the European equivalent to
Abstract Expressionism.
Context
Lyrical Abstraction is a term that
was originally coined by Larry Aldrich (the founder of the
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield Connecticut) in
1969 to
describe what Aldrich said he saw in the studios of many artists at that
time.[3]
It is also the name of an exhibition that originated in the Aldrich Museum
and traveled to the
Whitney Museum of American Art and other museums throughout the United
States between 1969 and
1971.[4]
For many years the term Lyrical Abstraction was a pejorative, which
unfortunately adversely affected those artists whose works were associated
with that name. In 1989
Union College art history professor, the late Daniel Robbins correctly
observed that Lyrical Abstraction was the term used in the late sixties to
describe the return to painterly expressivity by painters all over the
country and "consequently", Robbins said, "the term should be used today
because it has historical credibility"[5]
Between 1960
and 1970
Abstract Expressionism had waned, emerging directions such as
Formalism,
Color Field painting,
Fluxus,
Happenings,
Minimalism,
Pop Art,
and Op art
had decidedly swerved the focus of the
avant-garde away from subjective expressionism toward a more objective
geometric precision and socio-political theatricality, commentary and
observation. During the mid-1960s American painting was declared dead by
various critics including
Minimalist sculptor/critic
Donald Judd citing three-dimensional, volumetric objects as the
embodiment of visual truth. Pictorial illusionism as it appears in
painting - which is flat and merely depicts space, was described as
deceptive and outdated, in a European old-fashioned way. Formalist
arguments generally put forth in the name of
Clement Greenberg seemed dated and outmoded and missed the point of
new painting being made after the mid-1960s altogether.
History
Lyrical Abstraction along with the
Fluxus
movement and
Postminimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the
pages of
Artforum in 1969) sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting
and Minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of
expression.
Postminimalism often incorporating industrial materials, raw
materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition,
and often with references to
Dada and
Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of
Eva
Hesse. Lyrical Abstraction,
Conceptual Art,
Postminimalism,
Earth
Art, Video,
Performance art,
Installation art, along with the continuation of
Fluxus,
Abstract Expressionism,
Color Field
Painting,
Hard-edge painting,
Minimal Art,
Op art,
Pop Art,
Photorealism and
New
Realism extended the boundaries of
Contemporary Art in the mid-1960s through the 1970s.[6]
Lyrical Abstraction is a type of freewheeling abstract painting that
emerged in the mid-1960s when abstract painters returned to various forms
of painterly, pictorial, expressionism with a predominate focus on
process, gestalt and repetitive compositional strategies in general.
Characterized by an overall gestalt, consistent surface tension, sometimes
even the hiding of brushstrokes, and an overt avoidance of relational
composition. It developed as did
Postminimalism as an alternative to strict
Formalist and
Minimalist doctrine.
Lyrical Abstraction shares
similarities with
Color Field
Painting
and
Abstract Expressionism especially in the freewheeling usage of paint -
texture and surface. Direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects
of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint
superficially resemble the effects seen in
Abstract Expressionism and
Color Field
Painting.
However the styles are markedly different. Setting it apart from
Abstract Expressionism and
Action Painting of the 1940s and 1950s is the approach to composition
and drama. As seen in
Action Painting there is an emphasis on brushstrokes, high
compositional drama, dynamic compositional tension. While in Lyrical
Abstraction there is a sense of compositional randomness, all over
composition, low key and relaxed compositional drama and an emphasis on
process, repetition, and an all over sensibility. The differences with
Color Field
Painting
are more subtle today because many of the Color Field painters with the
exceptions of
Morris Louis,
Ellsworth Kelly, Paul Feeley, Thomas Downing, and
Gene
Davis evolved into Lyrical Abstractionists. Lyrical Abstraction shares
with both
Abstract Expressionism and
Color Field Painting a sense of spontaneous and immediate sensual
expression, consequently distinctions between specific artists and their
styles become blurred, and seemingly interchangeable as they evolve.
Abstract Expressionism preceded
Color Field painting, Lyrical Abstraction,
Fluxus,
Pop Art,
Minimalism,
Postminimalism, and the other movements of the 1960s and 1970s and it
influenced the later movements that evolved. The interrelationship of/and
between distinct but related styles resulted in influence that worked both
ways between artists young and old, and vice-versa. During the mid-1960s
in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere artists often crossed the lines
between definitions and art styles. During that period - the mid 1960s
through the 1970s advanced American art and contemporary art in general
was at a crossroad, shattering in several directions. During the 1970s
political movements and revolutionary changes in communication made these
American styles international; as the art world itself became more and
more international. American Lyrical Abstraction's
European
counterpart
Neo-expressionism came to dominate the 1980s, and also developed as a
response to American
Pop Art
and
Minimalism and borrows heavily from American
Abstract Expressionism.
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Mec art.
Term coined in 1965 as an abbreviation of ‘mechanical art’
by Alain Jacquet and Mimmo Rotella and promoted by the French
critic Pierre Restany (b 1930) to describe paintings
using photographically transferred images that could be
produced in theoretically unlimited numbers. The term was
first publicly used of works by Serge Béguier (b 1934),
Pol Bury, Gianni Bertini (b 1922), Nikos (b
1930), Jacquet and Rotella at an exhibition at the Galerie J
in Paris entitled Hommage à Nicéphore Niépce. In
contrast to the use of screenprinting by Americans such as
Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol to incorporate
photographic images, the Mec artists projected images directly
on to canvases coated with photosensitive emulsion, and they
generally used the method to alter rather than merely
reproduce the original photographic image. In his
Cinétizations, for example, Bury cut and turned concentric
rings in the original photograph before rephotographing the
image and transferring it on to canvas, as in La Joconde
(1964; see 1989 exh. cat., p. 61). Having earlier used the
method of décollage, Rotella continued to rely on torn
surfaces when he began in 1964 to produce works that he termed
reportages, rephotographing his altered material before
projecting it on to the sensitized canvas. Jacquet, for his
part, broke down the photographic image in paintings such as
his Déjeuner sur l’herbe series (1964; e.g. Paris,
Fonds N. A. Contemp.) into a pattern of coloured spots to
imitate the process of printing by four-colour separations
used in the mass media.
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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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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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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 (for illustration see GWATHMEY,
CHARLES) and Meier, while Hejduk was also strongly affiliated
with Synthetic Cubism and Constructivism, and Eisenman (for
illustration see 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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Plop art is a pejorative
slang term
for
public art (usually large, abstract, modernist or contemporary
sculpture) made for government or corporate plazas, spaces in front of
office buildings, skyscraper atriums, parks, and other public venues. The
term connotes that the work is unattractive or inappropriate to its
surroundings - that is, it has been thoughtlessly "plopped" where it lies.
Plop art is a play on the term
pop art.
According to artnet.com, plop art was coined by architect
James Wines in
1969. The
derisive term was eagerly taken up both by progressives (like Wines) and
by conservatives. Progressives were critical of the failure of much public
art to take an environmentally-oriented approach to the relationship
between public art and architecture. Conservatives liked the term because
it suggested something ugly, formless, and meaningless, produced without
any real skill or care (frequently the conservative view of abstract art
in general). The very word "plop" suggested something falling wetly and
heavily - extruded, as it were, from the fundament of the art world, and
often at public expense.
More recently, defenders of public art funding have tried to reclaim
the term. The book Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund,
celebrates the success of the
Public Art Fund in financing many publicly placed works of art over
the last few decades, many of which are now beloved, though they may at
first have been derided as "ploppings". Several currents or movements in
contemporary art, such as
environmental sculpture,
site-specific art, and
land art,
counterpose themselves philosophically to "plop art," as well as to
traditional public monumental sculpture.
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Photorealism
[Hyper Realism; Super Realism].
Style of painting, printmaking and sculpture that
originated in the USA in the mid-1960s, involving the precise
reproduction of a photograph in paint or the mimicking of real
objects in sculpture. Its pioneers included the painters
Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack (b
1931), Robert Bechtle (b 1932), Robert Cottingham (b
1935), Richard McLean (b 1934), Don Eddy and the
English painter John Salt (b 1937), and sculptors such
as Duane Hanson and John De Andrea. Though essentially an
American movement, it has also had exponents in Europe, such
as Franz Gertsch.
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Photorealism is the genre of painting resembling a
photograph, most recently seen in the splinter
hyperrealism art movement. However, the term is primarily applied to
paintings from the American photorealism
art movement of the late
1960s and
early 1970s.
Style and History
As a full-fledged art movement, photorealism sprang up in the late
1960s and
early 1970s
mostly in America (where it was also commonly labeled
superrealism, new realism or sharp focus realism) and was dominated by
painters.
The term "photorealism" was first coined in the late
1960s by
the very successful New York City art dealer and self-acclaimed "father"
of photorealism,
Louis K. Meisel.[1]
Photorealism rejected the ideas and artistic processes of
Abstract Expressionists from the
1940s to
the late 1960s
whose artwork reflected that of spontaneous, anti-figurative scenes.[2]
Photorealists very consciously take their cues from
photographic images, often working very systematically from
photographic slide projections onto
canvases
or using grid techniques to preserve accuracy. The resulting images are
often direct copies of the original photograph but are usually at least
ten times the size of the original photograph or slide. This results in
the photorealist style being tight and precise, often with an emphasis on
imagery and color that requires a high level of technical prowess and
virtuosity to simulate, such as
reflections in specular surfaces and the
geometric
rigor of man-made environs. In his 1972 manifesto of photorealism Meisel
states that all potential photorealists are required to "have the
technical ability to make the finished work appear photographic."[3]
20th century photorealism can be contrasted with the similarly literal
style found in
trompe l'oeil paintings of the 19th century. However, trompe
l'oeil paintings tended to be carefully designed, very shallow-space
still-lifes with illusionistic gimmicks such as objects seeming to lift
slightly from the painting. The photorealism movement moved beyond this
double-take illusionism to tackle deeper spatial representations (e.g.
urban landscapes) and took on much more varied and dynamic subject matter.
Artists
The first generation of American photorealists includes such painters
as
Richard Estes,
Ralph Goings,
Chuck Close,
Charles Bell,
John Baeder,
Audrey Flack,
Don Eddy,
Robert Bechtle, Tom Blackwell and
Richard McLean.
Duane Hanson and
John DeAndrea were the
sculptors
associated with photorealism famous for amazingly lifelike painted
sculptures of average people that were complete with simulated
hair and real
clothes. They were called
Verists. Often working independently of each other and with widely
different starting points, photorealists routinely tackled mundane or
familiar subjects in traditional art genres--landscapes
(mostly urban rather than naturalistic),
portraits,
and
still lifes. They essentially evolved from Pop art and carried Pop
Art's return to imagery to its ultimate possibilities.
Photorealism at the Millennium
The height of the original photorealism movement was in the mid-1970s
but the early
1990s saw a re-birth of interest in the genre thanks to Louis K.
Meisel's two books on photorealism: "Photorealism" and "Photorealism Since
1980." This renewed interest included original artists from the "first
generation" as well as many younger photorealists. The evolution of
photorealism brought a emergence of an advanced form of photorealistic
painting. With the new technology in cameras and digital equipment the
younger artists were able to be far more precision oriented than their
elders. Many of the new brilliant Photorealists are European. They include
Raphaella Spence who is British but living in Italy, Bertrand Meniel in
France, Roberto Bernardi in Italy, Bernardo Torrens in Madrid, Spain, Tony
Brunelli in New York and Clive Head in Britain. Although the original
American tradition of Photorealism is a frame of reference for the
artists, they incorporate more detailed references in their work by use of
better technology.
Richard Estes,
Ralph Goings,
Charles Bell, Robert Bechtle and Audrey Flack Historically though are
the originators. Louis K. Meisel's latest book on photorealism,
"Photorealism at the Millennium" acknowledges the new generation and
photorealism's advancement into the 21st Century. There was a word used in
Europe in the early 70's,
Hyperrrealists or Hyperealisti in Italy, it has since been wrongly
used to describe photorealistic paintings. Many of the new and European
Photorealists are building upon the foundation set by the original
photorealists and the likenesses of their predecessors can be seen in such
works by photorealists
Clive Head,
Glennray Tutor,
Kim Mendenhall,
Raphaella Spence, and
Bertrand Meniel.
List of Photorealists
Original Photorealists
Photorealists
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Post-painterly Abstraction is a term created by
art
critic,
Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled
to the
Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto.
Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting which
derived from the
Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or
clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting
style. The approximately 100 artists in the exhibit included
Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Friedl Dzubas, Sam Francis,
Helen Frankenthaler,
Ellsworth Kelly,
Morris Louis,
Kenneth Noland,
Jules Olitski,
Frank Stella and a number of other American and Canadian artists who
were becoming well-known in the 1960s.
As painting continued to move in different directions, powered by the
spirit of innovation of the time, the term "Post-painterly Abstraction",
which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by
"Minimalism",
"Hard-edge
painting", "Lyrical
Abstraction" and "Color
Field Painting".
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Hyperrealism is an emerging school of
painting
that grew out of the American school of
photorealism. Through counterfeit photographic imagery, hyperrealist
painters routinely create a simulated two-dimensional image of a
three-dimensional reality. Hyperreal paintings are optically convincing
visual illusions of reality based upon reductive photographic images that
initially attempt to represent reality. Hyperreal paintings create an
almost tangible solidity and physical presence through subtle lighting and
shading effects where shapes, forms and areas closest to the forefront of
the image can appear beyond the frontal plane of the canvas. Hyperrealist
painters include
Alicia St. Rose,
Pedro Campos,
Jacques Bodin,
Denis Peterson,
Gottfried Helnwein,
Gilles Esnault,
Istvan Sandorfi,
Luciano Ventrone,
Latif Maulan,
Luding Meng,
Glennray Tutor,
Suzana Stojanovic,
Bert Monroy (hyperrealist digital painter), and
Ron
Mueck (hyperrealist sculptor).
Certain of these hyperrealists have further incorporated social,
cultural and political thematic elements as an extension of a visual
illusion; a distinct departure from the school of
Photorealism.
Denis Peterson,
Gottfried Helnwein, and
Latif Maulan are three provocative hyperrealist painters who have
depicted the political and cultural deviations of societal decadence, its
enigmatic imagery, and the aftermath of its tragic, ideological and insane
consequences. Thematically, these controversial artists aggressively
confront the corrupted human condition through narrative paintings as a
phenomenological medium. The paintings are historical commentary on the
grotesque mistreatment of human beings.
Peterson’s latest provocative work on human oppressions has focused on
diasporas,
genocides and
refugees
around the globe as a political statement through visually disturbing and
highly charged images that have recorded an abhorrent period in history
that has marked the decadence of the human condition.
Helnwein developed unconventionally narrative work centered around
past, present and future deviations of the
Holocaust and its grotesque darkness.
Maulan’s work is primarily a critique of society’s disregard for the
helpless, the needy and the disenfranchised. These three hyperrealists
have exposed totalitarian regimes and evocatively raised political and
moral conflicts with third world military governments through narrative
and hyperrealistic depictions of the legacy of hatred and intolerance.
Subjects of these
iconoclastic artists are often statuesque figures and stoic faces that
eerily seem to share an internalized calm in the face of the surrounding
horrors of deadly disease, impending torture, terrorizing fear and
irrational hatred.
Early 21st century hyperrealism is contrasted with the similarly
literal, photorealistic style found in traditional photorealist paintings
of the late 20th century. Painters in both schools of art make allowances
for some mechanical means of transferring images to the canvas, including
preliminary drawings or grisaille underpaintings. Photographic slide
projections onto canvases and rudimentary techniques such as gridding may
also be used to ensure accuracy. Both styles require a high level of
technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate reality; however, despite any
apparent similarities, the two styles are distinctly apart from one
another.
Photorealist painters tended to systemically imitate photographic
images, often consciously omitting pictorial details, human emotion,
political value and narrative elements. The photorealistic style of
painting is uniquely tight, precise, and mechanical with an emphasis on
mundane everyday imagery.
The more recent hyperrealist style tends to be much more literal as to
pictorial detail with an emphasis on social, cultural or political themes.
This is in stark contrast to the concurrent
Photorealism with its avoidance of photographic anomalies including
digital fractalization, image degradation, and subtractive versus additive
color creation, i.e. CMYK versus RGB color wheels.
As such, hyperrealism incorporates and often capitalizes upon
photographic limitations such as depth of field, perspective and range of
focus to create a new
hyperreality.
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Post-painterly Abstraction.
Term devised as an exhibition title in 1964 by the critic
Clement Greenberg to describe a new trend in American abstract
painting that emerged in reaction to Abstract Expressionism.
Extending to contemporary art the distinction made by Heinrich
Wölfflin between painterly and linear art, Greenberg
postulated that the most recent painting, although still owing
something to its immediate forebears, was in contrast moving
towards a greater linear clarity and/or a physical openness of
design.
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Process art.
Form of art prevalent in the mid-1960s and 1970s in which
the process of a work’s creation is presented as its subject.
The term is of broad reference, encompassing in particular
aspects of Minimalism, Post-Minimalism and performance art,
but in its narrowest sense it refers primarily to the work of
American sculptors such as Richard Serra, Robert Morris (ii),
Barry Le Va (b 1941), Keith Sonnier (b 1941) and
Eva Hesse. The seeds of process art were in action painting:
the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, for example, clearly
conveyed to the viewer the creative process that lay behind
them, further emphasized by the publication of numerous
photographs and films showing Pollock at work. These earlier
paintings, however, were intended to be seen as expressive of
the artist’s psyche, with the stripping bare of the creative
process merely as a by-product of the artist’s ingrained
individualism and reliance on his or her emotions.
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Psychedelic art.
Term used to describe art, usually painting, made under the
influence of hallucinogenic drugs. It was particularly
identified with the early 1960s, when the use of such drugs
was at its height. Various artists, mostly in isolation, took
‘mind-expanding’ drugs such as peyote and more especially LSD
(lysergide) to heighten their awareness and enlarge their
mental vision with images. The mental state of the person who
took the ‘trip’ (a mental state not necessarily known to that
person) determined whether the experience was favourable and
enjoyable or frightening and liable to lead to psychosis; thus
the creators of psychedelic art did not know what type of work
or what specific images would be produced under the influence
of the drugs, until the ‘trip’ had ended and the effects of
the drug had worn off. With no particular philosophy other
than an interest in seeing what might be produced, and with no
attempt by its creators to band together for the purpose of
exhibiting, psychedelic art died out by the end of the 1960s,
particularly as the negative properties of hallucinogenic
drugs became known. An example of psychedelic art is the
poster style of painting associated with hippie culture,
especially in San Francisco, CA, in the late 1960s. This
painting is characterized by sinuous patterns, the use of
erotic imagery and by ‘day-glo’ fluorescent colours, whose
anti-naturalistic shades could be seen as a reference to the
changing states of consciousness induced by drugs.
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Psychedelic art is art inspired by the psychedelic experience
induced by drugs such as
LSD,
Mescaline, and
Psilocybin. The word "psychedelic" (coined by British psychologist
Humphrey Osmond) means "mind manifesting". By that definition all
artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered
"psychedelic". However, in common parlance "Psychedelic Art" refers above
all to the art movement of the
1960s counterculture. Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to
psychedelic rock music. Concert posters, album covers, lightshows,
murals, comic books, underground newspapers and more reflected not only
the kaleidoscopically swirling patterns of LSD hallucinations, but also
revolutionary political, social and spiritual sentiments inspired by
insights derived from these psychedelic states of consciousness.
Psychedelic art and society
Leading proponents of the Psychedelic Art movement were
San Francisco poster artists such as:
Rick Griffin,
Victor Moscoso,
Stanley Mouse &
Alton Kelley, and
Wes
Wilson. Their Psychedelic Rock concert posters were inspired by
Art
Nouveau, Victoriana,
Dada, and
Pop Art.
Richly saturated colors in glaring contrast, elaborately ornate lettering,
strongly symmetrical composition, collage elements, and bizarre
iconography are all hallmarks of the San Francisco psychedelic poster art
style. The style flourished from about 1966 - 1972. Their work was
immediately influential to album cover art, and indeed all of the
aforementioned artists also created album covers.
Yet psychedelic album cover art was more international: Majorca based
painter
Mati Klarwein created psychedelic masterpieces for
Miles Davis' Jazz-Rock fusion albums, and also for
Carlos Santana Latin Rock.
Pink
Floyd worked extensively with London based designers,
Hipgnosis to create graphics to support the concepts in their albums.
Psychedelic light-shows were a new art-form developed for rock
concerts. Using oil and dye in an emulsion that was set between large
convex lenses upon overhead projectors the lightshow artists created
bubbling liquid visuals that pulsed in rhythm to the music. This was mixed
with slideshows and film loops to create an improvisational motion picture
art form to give visual representation to the improvisational jams of the
rock bands and create a completely "trippy" atmosphere for the audience.
The
Brotherhood of Light were responsible for many of the light-shows in
San Francisco psychedelic rock concerts.
Out of the psychedelic counterculture also arose a new genre of comic
books:
underground comix. "Zap Comix" was among the original underground
comics, and featured the work of
Robert Crumb,
S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and
Robert Williams among others. Underground Comix were ribald, intensely
satirical, and seemed to pursue weirdness for the sake of weirdness.
Gilbert Shelton created perhaps the most enduring of underground
cartoon characters, "The
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers", whose drugged out exploits held a
hilarious mirror up to the hippy lifestyle of the 1960s.
Psychedelic art was also applied to the LSD itself. LSD began to be put
on blotter paper in the early 1970s and this gave rise to a specialized
art form of decorating the blotter paper. Often the blotter paper was
decorated with tiny insignia on each perforated square tab, but by the
1990s this had progressed to complete four color designs often involving
an entire page of 900 or more tabs.
Mark McCloud is a recognized authority on the history of LSD blotter
art.
The fact that LSD blotter art kept evolving over decades shows that the
Psychedelic Art movement did not end with the '60's, and if considered
more deeply it did not begin in that decade either. The use of drugs by
artists is nothing new - the Roman poet
Ovid said,
"There is no poetry among water drinkers." However, since drugs have
always been taboo, the drug use of artists has not always entered the
historical record. It was part of the youth rebellion of the 1960s to
openly use drugs, but the psychedelic drugs were also seen in a different
light from more traditional inebriants such as opiates, cocaine and
alcohol. LSD was a new invention that had shown wondrous promise as a
psychiatric medicine. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe
LSD research and its various results, but importantly to the
counterculture movement of the 1960s it had been strongly demonstrated to
be an enhancer of creativity and a gateway to mystical experience. These
aspects drew artists and intellectuals to experiment with LSD and other
psychedelic drugs.
Early artistic experimentation with LSD was conducted in a clinical
context by Los Angeles based psychiatrist
Oscar Janiger. Janiger had a group of 50 different artists each do a
painting from life of a subject of the artist's choosing. Then they were
asked to do the same painting while under the influence of LSD. The two
paintings were compared by Janiger and also the artist. The artist's
almost unanimously reported LSD to be an enhancement to their creativity.
Beatnik poets such as
Allen Ginsberg and
William S. Burroughs were certainly aware of LSD and other
psychedelics during the 1950s. The beatniks understood the role of
psychedelics as sacred inebriants in native american cultures, and also
had an understanding of the philosophy of the surrealist and symbolist
poets who called for a "complete disorientation of the senses" (to
paraphrase
Arthur Rimbaud). They knew of the altered states of consciousness that
were essential to Eastern Mysticism. LSD was the perfect catalyst to
electrify the eclectic mix of ideas assembled by the beatniks into a
cathartic panacea for the succeeding generation.
While LSD and the other psychedelics were criminalized in 1966, and
psychedelics research was brought to a halt, psychedelia entered the
popular culture and for decades to come influenced Hollywood, Madison Ave,
and perhaps even more consequentially Silicon Valley.
Computer Arts have allowed for an even greater and more profuse
expression of psychedelic vision. Fractal generating software gives an
accurate depiction of psychedelic hallucinatory patterns, but even more
importantly 2D and 3D graphics software allow for unparalleled freedom of
image manipulation. Much of the graphics software seems to enable a direct
translation of the psychedelic vision. The "digital revolution" was indeed
heralded early on as the "New LSD" by none other than
Timothy Leary.
The Rave movement of the 1990s was a psychedelic renaissance fueled by
the advent of newly available digital technologies. The rave movement
developed a new graphic art style partially influenced by 1960s
psychedelic poster art, but also strongly influenced by graffiti art, and
by 1970s advertising art, yet clearly defined by what computer graphics
software and home computers had to offer at the time of creation.
Concurrent to the rave movement, and in key respects integral to it,
are the development of new mind altering drugs, most notably,
MDMA
(Ecstasy). Ecstasy, like LSD, has had a tangible influence on culture and
aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of Rave Culture. But MDMA is
(arguably) not a real psychedelic, but is described by psychologists as an
"empathogen". Development of new psychedelics such as "2CB"
and related compounds (developed primarily by chemist
Alexander Shulgin) are truly psychedelic, and these novel psychedelics
are fertile ground for artistic exploration since many of the new
psychedelics possess their own unique properties that will affect the
artist's vision accordingly.
Perhaps the future of psychedelic art will be defined by those artists
who have practiced it most purely. That is to say by those artists who
have sought to record the visions derived from the psychedelic drug
experience into works of art. Even as fashions have changed, and art and
culture movements have come and gone certain artists have steadfastly
devoted themselves to psychedelia. Well known examples are
Alex
Grey and
Robert Venosa. These artists have developed unique and distinct styles
that while containing elements that are obviously "psychedelic", are
clearly artistic expression that transcend simple categorization. While it
is not necessary to use psychedelics to arrive at such a stage of artistic
development, serious psychedelic artists are demonstrating that there is
tangible technique to obtaining visions, and that technique is the
creative use of psychedelic drugs.
Psychedelic art in prehistory
Using altered states of consciousness as a source for artistic
expression is not a new concept and has been practised throughout human
history. Where this art occurs in the past it is often called 'psychedelic
art' to conceptually link it to the well-known modern movement. This
linkage is contentious and the difficulty in proving the psychedelic
origins of
prehistoric artwork has led many people to refer to it as entoptic
art or subjective visual art. 'Entoptic art' emphasises the
fact that evidence for its hallucinatory origins comes mainly from
identification of motifs related to
entoptic phenomena.
Prehistoric entoptic art lacks the range of colours of modern
psychedelic art and is often characterised by repeating concentric circles
and spirals.
Psychedelic artists
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Re-figuración.
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 (see PARAGUAY,
§IV, 2), 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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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’ (see 1986 exh. cat.). 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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Solentiname primitivist
painting.
Style of painting practised from 1968 by a Nicaraguan group
of rural labourers on the island of Mancarrón 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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Soft art.
Term that gained currency in the late 1960s to describe any
form of sculpture made from pliable materials and consequently
not absolutely fixed in its shape. As an art form its origins
can be traced particularly to the ‘soft sculptures’ devised by
Claes Oldenburg as early as 1962. Precedents can be found,
however, in earlier 20th-century art, beginning with Dada, for
example in Marcel Duchamp’s presentation of a typewriter cover
as a ready-made entitled Traveller’s Folding Item
(1917; untraced; replica, 1964; see Marcel Duchamp, exh.
cat., New York, MOMA, 1973, p. 280) and in object collages by
Man Ray (e.g. the Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 1920; see
Man Ray photographie, exh. cat., Paris, Pompidou, 1981,
p. 134). Sculptures made by Surrealists, such as those shown
in Paris at the Galerie Charles Ratton (1936) and at the
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Paris, Gal. B.-A.,
1938), made particular use of malleable materials, often with
a strong erotic aspect; Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936;
New York, MOMA), a fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, is
perhaps the most notorious example. The Surrealists displayed
such a predilection even in their paintings, as in Salvador
Dalí’s the Persistence of Memory (1931; New York, MOMA),
with its soft watches as an image of the fleeting nature of
time.
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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 AND
MELAMID, ERIK BULATOV (e.g. Horizon, 1971–2; Paris,
priv. col.), and, since the mid-1970s, IL’YA 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 Grigory 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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Straight Ahead
[Pol. Wprost].
Polish group of artists established in 1966 by five
graduates from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków: Maciej
Bieniasz (b 1938); Zbylut Grzywacz (b 1939);
Barbara Skapska (b 1938), who participated only in the
first exhibition; Leszek Sobocki (b 1934), a member of
the group until 1986, and Jacek Waltos (Jacek Buszynski) (b
1938). They were inspired by the metaphorical paintings of
Adam Hoffmann (b 1918), their teacher at the Academy,
and considered Andrzej Wróblewski as an influential precursor.
Two published manifestos (1966, 1969) clearly defined their
programme: the representation of all subjects, no matter how
brutal or unpleasant, in a manner unrestricted and unveiled by
any conventions. They aimed to speak openly and
straightforwardly about existence and emotions, using a simple
artistic language and rejecting both abstraction and the
Colourism of the followers of the Kapists. Early works that
showed a concern for figuration, such as Grzywacz’s The
Forsaken (oil, 1973–4; Warsaw, N. Mus.), gave way to a
form of realism in which the creative technical process was
deliberately revealed, giving an unfinished appearance to
their work, as in Waltos’s sculptures in the form of hollow
moulds. A form of allegory often co-existed with this harsh
realism in the group’s work, for example in Bieniasz’s dull
Silesian cityscapes and Sobocki’s self-portraits (e.g.
Tattoo, oil, 1978) and prints (e.g. Blood, linocut,
1971; both Warsaw, N. Mus.).
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Supports-Surfaces.
French group of painters, active from 1967 to 1972. The
group began to evolve through the discussions of Claude
Viallat, Daniel Dezeuze (b 1942) and Patrick Saytour (b
1935). Reacting against the notion of the artist as an image
maker and illusionist, they concentrated upon the very
materials that underpinned painting. Dezeuze, for example,
produced works whose main component was a canvas stretcher,
either painted or, as in Frame (1967; Paris, Pompidou),
covered with transparent plastic. In 1969 the three artists
exhibited at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris,
together with Marcel Alocco (b 1937), Noël Dolla (b
1945), Bernard Pagès (b 1940) and Jean-Pierre Pincemin
(b 1944). The group acquired its name in 1970 with the
first Supports-Surfaces exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris. The name was whimsically suggested by
one of its participants, Vincent Bioulès.
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Syn.
German artists’ group formed in 1965 in Stuttgart by Bernd
Berner (b 1930), Klaus Jürgen-Fischer (b 1930)
and Eduard Micus (b 1925). They were joined in 1966 by
the painter Erwin Bechtold (b 1925). The driving force
behind the group was Jürgen-Fischer, who had worked on the
editorial staff of Das Kunstwerk and had written an
existentialist philosophical work Der Unfug des Seines
(1955). In 1963 he published a manifesto ‘Was ist komplexe
Malerei?’ (see 1963 exh. cat.), establishing the theoretical
basis of Syn. Its members, three of whom (Berner, Jürgen-Fischer
and Micus) had studied under Willi Baumeister at the
Kunstakademie in Stuttgart, shared a common background in
abstraction. Their work ranged from Berner’s highly individual
colour field paintings (e.g. Index of Work 793, 1961;
see 1991 exh. cat., p. 38) to Bechtold’s hard-edge
abstraction, which combined geometric shapes and amorphous
forms (e.g. Orgina Organa 66–31, 1966; Mannheim, Städt.
Ksthalle). The group’s purpose was to redefine the elements
and means of painting to enable the controlled use of often
extreme techniques within the context of an art that was to be
seen as self-referential. These principles were given voice in
the journal Syn, edited by Jürgen-Fischer, and
eventually set down in programmatic form in 12 points in the
catalogue of their exhibition at the Nassauischer Kunstverein,
Wiesbaden, in 1967. The group’s membership was not fixed and
the core members were joined from time to time by other
non-figurative artists, such as Kumi Sugai and Wilhelm Loth.
The group stopped exhibiting together in 1970.
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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’ (see 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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Ugly Realism.
Term coined to describe the work of a number of artists
working in Berlin in the 1970s. These artists combined the
fine draughtsmanship of Otto Dix and George Grosz with an
iconographical treatment of the ‘ugly’: this could be a
pimple, a deformed limb or a terrorist with a machine-gun, all
rendered with a chilling photographic clarity that pointed to
the brutality, shallowness, alienation and perversion of
modern urban humanity. The objects and figures presented to
the observer in such detail were designed to provoke in him a
mixture of disgust, revulsion and distaste as well as a
reluctance to recognize what was being portrayed. Many of the
artists associated with Ugly Realism were originally members
of the artists’ co-operative gallery in Berlin, Grossgörschen
35, founded in 1964. In 1966 a rift developed between the
expressionist faction represented by K. H. Hödicke, Markus
Lüpertz and Koberling and the so-called critical realists,
Ulrich Baehr (b 1938), Charles Diehl, Wolfgang Petrick
and Peter Sorge (b 1937), who later made the Galerie
Eva Poll home to this new brand of realism.
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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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Zebra.
German artists’ group formed in Hamburg in 1965 by the
painters Dieter Asmus (b 1939), Peter Nagel (b
1942), Nikolaus Störtenbecker (b 1940) and Dietmar
Ullrich (b 1940). They were all graduates of the
Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and shared a common
interest in Photorealism. Their work was characterized by the
setting of objects and figures against an indistinct
background. Despite the precise delineation of objects,
sometimes approaching trompe l’oeil in the work of
Nagel, their paintings were not naturalistic. Colour and form
were used in an anti-realistic way, and the artists sometimes
adopted the convention of using monochrome for figures and
bright, arbitrary colours for inanimate objects, as in Asmus’s
Vitamin-Bomb (1976; Bochum, priv. col., see 1978-80 exh.
cat., pl. 8). From photography they took the device of cutting
off figures and objects, thus robbing their images of
traditional compositional structure. Störtenbecker, in
particular, employed a precise, minutely detailed realism that
gave his work the impression of being a photograph, rather
than a painted image. In the work of all four artists there
was a tendency to suppress dramatic and expressive content by
means of an apparently objective manner and by their attempts
to dissociate their subjects from any ‘meaning’ that might
have attached to them. This is as true of Ullrich’s paintings
featuring sport (e.g. Swimmer, 1970–71; Neuss, Clemens-Sels-Mus.),
which give the impression of a freeze-frame camera, as it is
of Nagel’s isolated, oversized technological fragments (e.g.
Red Tent, 1972–4; see 1978–80 exh. cat., pl. 33). The
members of Zebra exhibited widely in Germany and elsewhere
both independently and as a group.
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The term Soviet Nonconformist Art refers to
art produced in
the former
Soviet Union from
1953-1986
(after the death of
Stalin
until the advent of
Perestroika and
Glasnost)
outside of the rubric of
Socialist Realism. Other terms used to refer to this phenomenon are
"unofficial art" or "underground art."
History
During the
Soviet period (1922-1991), official artistic policy required that
artists subscribe to the doctrine of
Socialist Realism. Artists who chose their own form of expression,
whether it was
abstraction,
expressionism,
conceptual art or
performance art were unable to show their work publicly. Soviet
Nonconformist Art therefore includes a variety of artists and different
styles that were produced unofficially during the
Soviet
period.
The death of
Stalin
and
Khrushchev's denunciation of his crimes and
cult of personality in
1956 created
a liberal atmosphere wherein artists felt more freedom to create
expressive or personal work without the fear of negative repercussions.
Still, none of the official policies regarding the production of art had
changed, which is why the majority of the art that falls under this
category remained underground.
Once
Glasnost and
Perestroika were initiated in the mid-1980s there was no longer a need
for the art to remain underground, and thus for all intents and purposes
it ceased to exist.
Contributors to the movement
Notable Soviet Nonconformist artists from
Russia
include
Ilya Kabakov,
Oleg Vassiliev,
Komar and Melamid,
Leonid Sokov,
Boris Sveshnikov,
Vladimir Yakovlev,
Anatoly Zverev,
Ylo Sooster,
Vladimir Nemukhin,
Ernst Neizvestny and
Oscar Rabine,
Alexander Yulikov,
Andrey Grositsky,
Igor Shelkovsky, from
Moscow,
and
Timur Novikov and
Afrika (Sergei Bugaev), from
St. Petersburg.
The Petersburg group
The artistic group are formed in
Leningrad into 1960.
The Group begins in
1964, from
the exhibition in
Hermitage Museum of five artists: V. Kravchenko, V. Uflyand, V.
Ovchinnikov, M. Chemiakin and O. Liagatchev.
The official name of the exhibit was "Exhibition of the
artist-workers of the economic part of the Hermitage. Towards the 200
anniversary of Hermitage".
Exhibition was opened 30-31 March of 1964 and on 1 April it was
arrested by authorities.
The Hermitage director,
Mikhail Artamonov, was removed from his post.
In 1967 it
was written "Manifest Peterburg Group", signed by M. Chemiakin,
O.Liagatchev, E. Yesaulenko and V. Ivanov. Somewhat previously by V.
Ivanov and M. Chemiakin are written theoretical essay " Métaphysique
Synthétisme".
Group gave preference to still life, stylistic searches and
illustration.
M. Chemiakin in its painting realizes the ideas of the "Métaphysique
Synthétisme". In the graph they created illustrations to the works E.T.A.
Hoffman, to "Crime
and Punishment" Fyodor M. Dostoevsky; it so works in the technology of
the engraving painted by water color.
Since 1968 O.
Liagatchev is fascinated by semiotic searches and manufactures his
visual-ornamental style; characteristic for this style picturesque works
as "Kafka" and "Intimeniy XX" in
1973,
"Composition - Canon" in
1975.
Joined this group A. Vasiliev, as the master of picturesque invoices
and technical improvisations and V. Makarenko as miniature-painter and
metaphysical painter.
In 1971
Chemiakin emigrated to France, and later the United States.
Liagatchev and Vasiliev participated in the exhibitions non-conformist
artists at the
Cultural Center Gaza in 1974 and at the
Cultural Center Nevsky 1975.
In 1975 Liagatchev emigrated to France. Group did not have joint
exhibitions and became defunct in
1979.
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Soviet Nonconformist Art
-
The death of
Stalin
in 1953, and
Nikita Khrushchev's
Thaw, paved the way for a wave of liberalization in the arts
throughout the
Soviet Union. Although no official change in policy took place,
artists began to feel free to experiment in their work, with
considerably less fear of repercussions than during the
Stalinist
period.
In the 1950s
Moscow
artist
Eli Beliutin encouraged his students to experiment with
abstractionism, a practice thoroughly discouraged by the
Artists' Union, which strictly enforced the official policy of
Socialist Realism. Artists who chose to paint in alternative styles
had to do so completely in private and were never able to exhibit or
sell their work. As a result,
Nonconformist Art developed along a separate path than the
Official Art that was recorded in the history books.
LIFE
Magazine published two portraits by two painters, who to their mind,
were most representative of Russian Arts of the period: it was Serov, an
official Soviet icon and
Anatoly Zverev, an underground
Russian avant-garde expressionist. Serov's portrait of
Lenin's and Zverev's selfportrait were associated by many with an
eternal Biblical struggle of Satan and Saviour. When Khrushev learned
about the publication he was outraged and forbade all contacts with
Western visitors, closed down all semi legal exhibitions. And of course
Zverev was the main target of his outrage.
The
Lianozovo Group was formed around the artist
Oskar Rabin in the 1960s and included artists such as
Valentina Kropivnitskaya,
Vladimir Nemukhin, and
Lydia Masterkova. While not adhering to any common style, these
artists sought to faithfully express themselves in the mode they deemed
appropriate, rather than adhere to the propagandistic style of
Socialist Realism.
Tolerance of Nonconformist Art by the authorities underwent an ebb
and flow until the ultimate collapse of the
Soviet Union in
1991.
Artists took advantage of the first few years after the death of
Stalin
to experiment in their work without the fear of persecution. In
1962,
artists experienced a slight setback when
Khrushchev appeared at the exhibition of the 30th anniversary of the
Moscow Artist's Union at the
Manege
exhibition hall. Among the customary works of
Socialist Realism were a few abstract works by artists such as
Ernst Neizvestny and
Eli Beliutin, which
Khrushchev criticized as being "shit," and the artists for being
"homosexuals." The message was clear: artistic policy was not as liberal
as everyone had hoped.
Unfortunately, the history of late Soviet art has been dominated by
politics and simplistic formulae. Both within the artworld and the
general public, very little consideration has been given to the
aesthetic character of the work produced in the USSR in the 1970s and
1980s. Instead, the official and unofficial art of the period usually
stood in for either "bad" or "good" political developments. A more
nuanced picture would emphasize that there were numerous competing
groups making art in Moscow and Leningrad throughout this period. The
most important figures for the international art scene have been the
Moscow artists Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrsky, Vitaly
Komar and Aleksandr Melamid.
The most infamous incident regarding nonconformist artists in the
former
Soviet Union was the
1974
Bulldozer Exhibition, which took place in a park just outside of
Moscow, and included work by such artists as
Oskar Rabin,
Komar and Melamid,
Alexandr Zhdanov, and
Leonid Sokov. The artists involved had written to the authorities
for permission to hold the exhibition but received no answer to their
request. They decided to go ahead with the exhibition anyway, which
consisted solely of unofficial works of art that did not fit into the
rubric of
Socialist Realism. The
KGB put an
end to the exhibition just hours after it opened by bringing in
bulldozers to completely destroy all of the artworks present.
Fortunately for the artists, the foreign press had been there to witness
the event. The world-wide coverage of it forced the authorities to
permit an exhibition of Nonconformist Art two weeks later in
Izmailovsky Park in Moscow.
By the 1980s,
Gorbachev's policies of
Perestroika and
Glasnost made it virtually impossible for the authorities to place
restrictions on artists or their freedom of expression. With the
collapse of the
Soviet Union, the new market economy enabled the development of a
gallery system, which meant that artists no longer had to be employed by
the state, and could create work according to their own tastes, as well
as the tastes of their private patrons. Consequently, after around
1986 the
phenomenon of Nonconformist Art in the
Soviet Union ceased to exist.
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Naïve art
is created by untrained artists. It is
characterized by simplicity and a lack of the elements or qualities found
in the art of formally trained artists. (See also,
outsider art, with which it bears many similarities.)
The term naïve art presumes the existence (by contrast) of an
academy and of a generally accepted educated manner of art
creation, most often
painting.
In practice, however, there are schools of naïve artists. Over time it has
become an acceptable style.
The characteristics of naïve art are an awkward relationship to the
formal qualities of painting; for example, difficulties with drawing and
perspective that result in a charmingly awkward and often refreshing
vision; strong use of pattern, unrefined colour, and simplicity rather
than subtlety are all supposed markers of naïve art. It has become such a
popular and recognisable style that many examples could be called
pseudo-naïve.
Primitive art is another term often applied to the art of those
without formal training. This is distinguished from the self-conscious
movement
primitivism. Another term related to, but not completely synonymous
with, naïve art, is
folk art.
19th century
20th century
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Modular constructivism is a style of sculpture that emerged in
the 1950s and
1960s and
was associated especially with
Erwin Hauer and
Norman Carlberg. It is based on carefully structured modules which
allow for intricate and in some cases infinite patterns of repetition,
sometimes used to create limitless, basically planar, screen-like
formations, and sometimes employed to make more multidimensional
structures. Designing these structures involves intensive study of the
combinatorial possibilities of sometimes quite curvilinear and fluidly
shaped modules, creating a seemless, quasi-organic unity that can be
either rounded and self-enclosed, or open and potentially infinite. The
latter designs have proved useful and attractive for use in eye-catching
architectural walls and screens, often featuring complex patterns of
undulating, tissue-like webbing, with apertures which transmit and filter
light, while generating delicate patterns of shadow.
Writing in Architecture Week (August
4, 2004),
Hauer explains that "Continuity and potential infinity have been at the
very center of my sculpture from early on."
[1] Hauer made an extensive study of biomorphic form, especially what
he calls "saddle surfaces," which combine convex and concave curvature and
thus allow for smooth self-combination, sometimes in multiple dimensions.
Another inspiration is the sculpture of
Henry Moore, with its fluid curves and porousness.
Hauer's enthusiasm caught the imagination of his colleague at
Yale,
Norman Carlberg. Both were devoted students of the arch-formalist
Josef Albers. Indeed, from the beginning, there was in this modular
approach to sculpture an implicit
formalism and even
minimalism which held itself aloof from some of the other artistic
trends of the time, such as the
pop art
and
post-modernism that were just beginning to emerge. As Carlberg
recalls, within his artistic circle "you analysed, you looked at
something, but you looked at it formally just for what it was and the
message was almost always out of it."
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Kitchen sink realism was a recognisable
English
cultural movement in the late
1950s and
early 1960s.
It was seen in the
theatre,
in art, in
novels, in
film and in
television plays, focusing on social realism relevant to the audience
of the day.
The term "kitchen sink" derived from an expressionist painting by
John Bratby, which contained an image of a kitchen sink. The critic
David Sylvester wrote an article in 1954 about trends in recent
English art, calling his article "The Kitchen Sink" in reference to
Bratby's picture. Sylvester argued that there was a new interest among
young painters in domestic scenes, with stress on the banality of life.
Bratby painted several kitchen subjects, often turning practical utensils
such as sieves and spoons into semi-abstract shapes. He also painted
bathrooms, and made three paintings of toilets. Other artists associated
with the "kitchen sink" style include Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch
and Jack Smith.
The term was quickly applied to a new style of drama, the hallmark of
which was a more realistic representation of social life;
country houses and
tennis courts were out;
ironing boards and minor domestic squalor were in, as in
John Osborne's play
Look Back in Anger with ironing as a piece of stage business. This
was a reaction against the
Noel Coward/Terence
Rattigan style of dramatic setting.
Another factor particularly notable in the films and novels of the time
is the use of
North of England situations, accents and themes (such as featuring
rugby league, the iconic sport of
Lancashire and
Yorkshire). An example here is the 1961 film
Whistle Down the Wind, which segues the innocence of earlier
British cinema with more modern harsh realities. Also, a combination of a
frankness about sex, and a more political content (sometimes descending to
rants), led to a rather clean break with the assumptions of 1950 in the
arts generally.
Kitchen sink realism is sometimes conflated with the rise of the
Angry Young Men. It was in fact more substantive, less driven by
journalistic excess, and is more properly its successor.
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While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term "Outsider
Art" is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or
Naïve
art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled
as Outsider Artists have little or no contact with the institutions of the
mainstream art world, their work considerably being an example of
intrinsic motivation, often employing unique materials or fabrication
techniques. Much Outsider Art illustrates extreme mental states,
unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds. Since 2000 the
EUWARD, the European Award for painting and graphic arts by mentally
handicapped artists, is providing this art with an international forum.
Outsider Art has emerged as a successful art marketing category (an
annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1992); thus the
term is sometimes misapplied as a catch-all marketing label for art
created by people outside the "art world" mainstream, regardless of their
circumstances or the content of their work.
Dubuffet argued that 'culture', that is mainstream culture, managed to
assimilate every new development in art, and by doing so took away
whatever power it might have had. The result was to asphyxiate genuine
expression. Art Brut was his solution to this problem - only Art Brut was
immune to the influences of culture, immune to being absorbed and
assimilated, because the artists themselves were not willing or able to be
assimilated.
The interest in "outsider" practices among twentieth century artists
and critics can be seen as part of a larger emphasis on the rejection of
established values within the
modernist art milieu. The early part of the 20th Century gave rise to
cubism
and the Dada,
Constructivist and
Futurist movements in art, all of which involved a dramatic movement
away from cultural forms of the past. Dadaist
Marcel Duchamp, for example, abandoned "painterly" technique to allow
chance operations a role in determining the form of his works, or simply
to re-contextualize existing "readymade" objects as art. Mid-century
artists, including
Pablo Picasso, looked "outside" the traditions of high culture for
inspiration, drawing from the artifacts of "primitive" societies, the
unschooled artwork of children, and vulgar advertising graphics.
Dubuffet's championing of the art of the insane and others at the margins
of society is yet another example of avant-garde art challenging
established cultural values.
A number of terms are used to describe art that is loosely understood
as "outside" of official culture. Definitions of these terms vary, and
there are areas of overlap between them. The editors of
Raw
Vision, a leading journal in the field, suggest that "Whatever views
we have about the value of controversy itself, it is important to sustain
creative discussion by way of an agreed vocabulary". Consequently they
lament the use of Outsider Artist to refer to almost any untrained
artist. "It is not enough to be untrained, clumsy or naïve. Outsider Art
is virtually synonymous with Art Brut in both spirit and meaning, to that
rarity of art produced by those who do not know its name."
