Cultural Foundations III
Appropriation
(taking material from one source and using it, unaltered, in another)
Identity Art
can include any self- consciously politicized examination of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
synthetic cubism
cubism of collages, later stage, ie Pablo Picasso GLASS AND BOTTLE OF SUZE
analytic cubism
first stage of cubism. Paintings such as Georges Braque VIOLIN AND PALETTE, Pablo Picasso PORTRAIT OF DANIEL-HENRY KAHNWEILER
Postmodernism
is a term sometimes applied to later Modern art and more specifically to artworks made after the 1970s. While Modernists pioneered the use of conglomerate materials (collage, assemblage, the use of "found" objects, etc.), Postmodernists often go one step further and treat ideas in the same way—mixing historical and cultural references, quotations, or symbols in the same piece of art. They may move beyond recognized art mediums and blur the boundaries between visual and performing art (multimedia installations, performance art) and may include random or arbitrary factors, improvisation, or impermanence. Later Modern and Postmodern art may be provisional, un-repeatable, or subject to change through environmental causes or audience participation. Postmodernism is fundamentally art about art.
Photomontage
A photographic work created from many smaller photographs arranged (and often overlapping) in a composition, which is then rephotographed.
Mobile
A sculpture made with parts suspended in such a way that they move in a current of air.
Biomorphic
A term used in the early twentieth century to denote the biologically or organically inspired shapes and forms that were routinely included in abstracted Modern art.
Negritude
Artistic and intellectual movement that began in the former French colonies of the Caribbean and Africa during the 1930s: Celebration of Black culture (African and African diaspora); attempt to define and reclaim African roots and identity.
Postcolonial Theory:
Examines the effects of European colonization on the colonized, both during the original occupation and in the aftermath. Seeks to "demystify" the discourse Europeans used to justify colonization. The descendants of colonized peoples talk back to the empires (European, U.S., Western) that oppressed them, critiquing and exposing colonial rhetoric and practices and offering a counter-history
Surrealism
At the same time in France in the early 1930s, a group of artists and writers took a very different approach to Modernism in a revolt against logic and reason. The Surrealists embraced the irrational, disorderly, aberrant, and even violent social interventions. Surrealism emerged initially as an offshoot of Dada from the mind of the poet André Breton (1896-1966). Breton trained in medicine and psychiatry and served in a neurological hospital during World War I where he used Freudian analysis on shell-shocked soldiers. By 1924, Breton, still drawn to the vagaries of the human mind, published the "Manifesto of Surrealism" in which he interpreted Freud's theory that the human mind is a battleground where the irrational forces of the unconscious mind wage a constant war against the rational, orderly, and oppressive forces of the conscious mind. Breton wanted to explore humanity's most base, irrational, and forbidden sexual desires, fantasies, and violent instincts by freeing the conscious mind from reason. As Breton wrote in 1934, "we still live under the rule of logic." Thus, he and other Surrealists developed strategies to liberate the unconscious using dream analysis, free association, automatic writing, word games, and hypnotic trances. Surrealists studied acts of "criminal madness" and the "female mind" in particular, believing the latter to be weaker and more irrational than the male mind. Breton believed that the only way to improve the war-sick society of the 1920s was to discover the more intense "surreality" that lay beyond rational constraint.
Avant-garde
Avant-garde (from French, "advance guard" or "vanguard", literally "fore-guard") refers to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics. The term avant-garde refers to a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to postmodern artists such as the Language poets around 1981. The term also refers to the promotion of radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" ("The artist, the scientist and the industrialist", 1825), which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde" in its now customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as [the people's] avant-garde", insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social, political and economic reform.
Collage
Collage (From the French: coller, to glue, French pronunciation: [kɔ.laːʒ]) is a technique of an art production, primarily used in the visual arts, where the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. A collage may sometimes include newspaper clippings, ribbons, bits of colored or handmade papers, portions of other artwork or texts, photographs and other found objects, glued to a piece of paper or canvas. The origins of collage can be traced back hundreds of years, but this technique made a dramatic reappearance in the early 20th century as an art form of novelty. The term collage derives from the French "coller" meaning "glue". This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.
Installation
Contemporary art created for a specific site, especially a gallery or outdoor area, that creates a complete and controlled environment.
Cubism
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, joined by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris[1] that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne, which were displayed in a retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne.[2] In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to the work of certain late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience. Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher, though he did not use the term existentialism. He proposed that each individual—not society or religion—is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely ("authentically"). Existentialism became popular in the years following World War II, and strongly influenced many disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology.
Expressionism
Expressionism refers to styles in which the artist exaggerates aspects of form to draw out the beholder's subjective response or to project the artist's own subjective feelings. Expressionism, in which the artist's emotional intensity overrides fidelity to the actual appearance of things
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality. Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music. The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though in practice the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism.
Fascism
Fascism /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. Influenced by national syndicalism, the first fascist movements emerged in Italy around World War I, combining more typically right-wing positions with elements of left-wing politics, in opposition to communism, socialism, liberal democracy, and in some cases, traditional right-wing conservatism. Although fascism is usually placed on the far right on the traditional left-right spectrum, fascists themselves and some commentators have argued that the description is inadequate.
Globalism
Finally, the Internet has allowed visual access to art globally. We can find information on practically any exhibited art, and much that is not exhibited, on our laptops. This new globalism has forced artists to question not just how their own identities but also how those of others are formed, and to realize that neither identity nor art is as simple or as univalent as it might have seemed as recently as in the 1990s.
Globalization
Globalization (or globalisation) is the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture. Advances in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure, including the rise of the telegraph and its posterity the Internet, are major factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities.
Performance Art
In Europe, Performance art occurred as part of the activities of the New Realism movement, a term coined by art critic Pierre Restany. Restany argued that the age of painting ended with the New York School and Art Informel and that thereafter art would take its form from the real world. He wrote: "The passionate adventure of the real, perceived in itself .... The New Realists consider the world a painting: a large, fundamental work of which they appropriate fragments." The French artist Yves Klein (1928-1962) first staged his Anthropometries of the Blue Period in 1960. He invited members of the Paris art world to watch him direct three female models covered in blue paint as they pressed their naked bodies against large sheets of paper to the musical accompaniment of a 20-piece orchestra playing a single note. The performance was a commentary on the perceived pretentiousness of Pollock's action painting, of which Klein wrote: "I dislike artists who empty themselves into their paintings. They spit out every rotten complexity as if relieving themselves." Like Cage, Johns, and Rauschenberg, Klein orchestrated his performance but often removed himself from the act of crafting the final object. He used the nude female body as the subject of his painting by pressing the model's bodily imprint in paint directly onto the paper. Klein presents art making as a physical, gestural act and the final work of art as the imprint of either the artist or his model.
Futurism
In Italy, technology and speed were combined with Cubism to create Futurism. Futurism (Italian: Futurismo) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane and the industrial city. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Key figures of the movement include the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Antonio Sant'Elia, Bruno Munari and Luigi Russolo, and the Russians Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Igor Severyanin, David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as the Portuguese Almada Negreiros. Its members aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past, to glorify modernity. Important works include its seminal piece of the literature, Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism, as well as Boccioni's sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and Balla's painting, Abstract Speed + Sound (pictured). Futurism influenced art movements such as Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree, Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism.
the Harlem Renaissance
In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrated from the rural, mostly agricultural American South to the urban, industrialized North to escape racial oppression and find greater social and economic opportunities. This Great Migration prompted the formation of the nationwide New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance in New York, which called for greater social and political activism among African Americans. Harlem's wealthy middle-class African-American community produced some of the nation's most talented artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the jazz musician Duke Ellington, the novelist Jean Toomer, and the poet Langston Hughes. The movement's intellectual leader was Alain Locke (1886-1954), a critic and philosophy professor who argued that black artists should seek their artistic roots in the traditional arts of Africa rather than in mainstream American or European art.
Action Painting
In the late 1940s, Pollock pushed beyond the Surrealist strategy of automatic painting by taking his canvas off the stretcher, placing it on the floor, and throwing, dripping, and dribbling paint onto it to create a sublime abstract calligraphy as it fell. In 1950, Time magazine described Pollock as "Jack the Dripper." In 1952, Rosenberg coined the term "Action painting," in an essay, "The American Action Painters." Rosenberg described the development and purpose of Action painting as follows: "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined."
Pop Art
In the late 1950s, several artists began to focus their attention on the explosion in visual culture, fueled by the growing presence of mass media and the rising disposable income of the postwar young. Pop art originated in Britain, but reached its zenith in the United States in the early 1960s. During this period individual and mass identity was increasingly determined by how people looked and dressed, and by what they consumed. Home ownership, cars, and the visible display of objects in the home were modeled on what appeared on television, in film, and in print advertising. Pop artists critiqued the fiction and superficiality of the perfect home and perfect person projected in this new popular culture.
Ready-made or "found" objects
In works such as this, Picasso introduced the sculptural technique of assemblage, giving sculptors the option not only of carving or modeling but also of constructing their works out of found objects and unconventional materials.
Assemblage
Johns, Cage, and Rauschenberg collaborated on several theatrical events that extended the idea of the assemblage into temporal space in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Cage composed music while Johns and Rauschenberg designed sets and sometimes actually performed. They worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which specialized in creating dance based on everyday actions such as waiting for a bus or reading a newspaper. Prior to these events, none of the participants informed the others what they were planning to do, so the performances became legendary in their unpredictability.Assemblage is an artistic process. In the visual arts, it consists of making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects. In literature, assemblage refers to a text "built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context". The origin of the artform dates to the cubist constructions of Pablo Picasso c. 1912-1914. The origin of the word (in its artistic sense) can be traced back to the early 1950s, when Jean Dubuffet created a series of collages of butterfly wings, which he titled assemblages d'empreintes. However, both Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso had been working with found objects for many years prior to Dubuffet. They were not alone. Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin creates his "counter-reliefs" in the middle of 1910s. Alongside Tatlin, the earliest woman artist to try her hand at assemblage was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Dada Baroness. In addition, one of the earliest and most prolific was Louise Nevelson, who began creating her sculptures from found pieces of wood in the late 1930s.
Mystification
Marxist term for the structure of beliefs and discourses that conceal injustice (includes assumptions embedded in literature and art that covertly justify the status quo). Mythologizes the conditions of inequity and oppression in a way that makes them seem natural, inevitable, and right.
Minimalism
Minimalism, which dominated the New York art discourse in the late 1960s, argued for the dematerialization of the art object. In the mid-1960s, a group of articulate young sculptors, including Donald Judd (1928-1994), Robert Morris (b. 1931), and Carl Andre (b. 1935), proposed what was variously called ABC Art, Primary Structures, or Minimalism. They produced slab- or box-like sculptures, frequently fabricated for them out of industrial materials such as Plexiglas, fluorescent lighting, steel, and mirrors, and so rejected the gesture and emotion invested in the hand-crafted object, as well as the traditional materials of sculpture. Judd and Morris described their theories eloquently in the journal Artforum. They asked viewers to try to comprehend their art objects as united wholes without a focal point, allowing the energy of the work and the viewers' interest to be dissipated throughout the object in a kind of entropy.
Modernism
Modernism is a term that may be applied to the work of artists who reject the conventions and limitations of traditional, representational art. Typically, this art is engaged in self-consciously examining what it means to be "modern." More specifically, the term is refers to wide variety of artists and writers working during the first half of the 20th century (1900-1945). These Modernists shared a desire to re-invent art by moving away from a strictly representational approach. Modernism may include experiments with form, critiques of Western art traditions, incorporation of direct or indirect political messages, and/or focus on the expressionistic or abstract/symbolic potential of art. More broadly, the term "Modernism" may be applied to any later art (including contemporary art) that shares these features. You can also speak of late 19th century artists (Impressionist and Post-Impressionist) as having "modernist" features or tendencies— but note they are not technically Modernists.
Dadaism
One of the first artistic movements to address the slaughter and the moral questions it posed was Dada. If Modern art until that time questioned the traditions of art, Dada went further to question the concept of art itself. Witnessing how thoughtlessly life was discarded in the trenches, Dada mocked the senselessness of rational thought and even the foundations of modern society. It embraced a "mocking iconoclasm," even in its name, which has no real or fixed meaning. Dada is baby talk in German; in French it means "hobbyhorse"; in Romanian and Russian, "yes, yes"; in the Kru African dialect, "the tail of a sacred cow." Dada artists annihilated the conventional understanding of art as something precious, replacing it with a strange and irrational art about ideas and actions rather than about objects. Dada was a transnational movement with several quite distinct local manifestations that arose almost simultaneously in the cities of Zürich, New York, Paris, and Berlin, as Paris temporarily relinquished its place at the center of the art world in 1914.
Perspectivism
Perspectivism is the term coined by Friedrich Nietzsche in developing the philosophical view (touched upon as far back as Plato's rendition of Protagoras) that all ideations take place from particular perspectives. This means that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives in which judgment of truth or value can be made. This is often taken to imply that no way of seeing the world can be taken as definitively "true", but does not necessarily entail that all perspectives are equally valid.
Post-Structuralism
Philosophical and literary theory that gained prominence in the 1970s; the theoretical counterpart to Postmodernism. Post-structuralists see themselves as debunkers of received wisdom. They are concerned with identifying flaws in the Western rationalist philosophical tradition. To do this, they point to two things: (1) A myth of lost perfection and wholeness (the garden of Eden, childhood, primitive culture) (2) A series of (false) hierarchical dichotomies on which Western thought is based. Post-structuralists see the traditional Western myths that explain human nature as being falsely constructed justifications for inequality and unhappiness.
Primitivism
Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian motifs in paintings and ceramics. Borrowings from primitive art has been important to the development of modern art. The term "primitivism" is often applied to other professional painters working in the style of naïve or folk art like Henri Rousseau, Mikhail Larionov, Paul Klee and others.
Recontextualize
Recontextualisation is a process that extracts text, signs or meaning from its original context (decontextualisation) in order to introduce it into another context.
Orientalism:
Said redefines what earlier (European and American) scholars believed to be a neutral term for western representations of the Middle East and Asia. Eurocentric stereotyping that justifies European dominance over these peoples; the west defines itself through representing the Arab or Asian as "Other" (a form of mystification). He sees this as happening even when the depiction of "Orientals" seems positive—idealized or romanticized but in a way that limits and objectifies.
Abstract Expressionism
The influential formalist (concerning form over content) critic Clement Greenberg urged the Abstract Expressionists to consider their paintings "autonomous" and completely self-referential objects. The best paintings, he argued, made no reference to the outside world, but had their own internal narrative and order. Abstract Expressionism was also deeply informed by the theories of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961), who described a collective unconscious shared by all humans. The Abstract Expressionists aspired to create heroic and sublime worlds in paint inhabited by universal symbolic forms. As the 1940s progressed, the symbolic content of their paintings became increasingly personal and abstract. Some Abstract Expressionists were interested in "primitive," mythic imagery and archaic, archetypal, and primal symbolism that connected all people through the collective unconscious; several used biomorphic forms or an individual symbolic language in their paintings; all made passionate and expressive statements on large canvases. The Abstract Expressionists also felt destined to make a major mark on art history; they were convinced that they had the power to transform the world with their art. Thus, Abstract Expressionists were brought together by four major endeavors: first, an interest in the tradition of painting, but a desire to rebel against it and to recalibrate the ideas of European Modernism; second, a desire to treat the act of painting on canvas as a self-contained expressive exercise; third, a mining of visual archetypes that Jung argued were embedded in the collective unconscious to communicate universal ideas in paint; and, fourth, the ambition to paint sublime art on a heroic scale. The critic Harold Rosenberg described two major categories of Abstract Expressionism: "Action painting" and "Color Field painting." The Abstract Expressionists disliked these terms arguing, with good reason, that they were too simplistic, but as general typologies go, the terms are useful.
Conceptual Art
The logical extension of the Minimalist move away from the handcrafted art object was Conceptual art. Unlike Duchamp and Dada artists earlier in the century, who argued that the idea is the work of art, Conceptual artists argue that the "idea" and "form" of art are separable. Thus, for Conceptual artists there are times when a physical object is an appropriate vehicle for a work of art, other times when a performance is more appropriate, and still other times when a conceptual manifestation, sometimes in the form of written or spoken instructions, is most appropriate. Conceptual art literally "dematerialized" the art object by suggesting that the catalyst for a work of art is a concept and the means by which the concept is communicated can vary. The conceptual work of art usually leaves behind some visual trace, in the form of a set of instructions, writing on a chalkboard, a performance, photographs, or a piece of film, and in some cases even objects. Conceptual art is theoretically driven and is noncommodifiable because it leaves no precious object behind for purchase, although collectors and many museums now collect the "trace" objects left behind. Some of the most radical Conceptual art came out of Europe. Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was perhaps the most significant early Conceptual artist.
Self-Reflexive, Metatextual
These terms are used to point to a distinctive feature of postmodern art and literature: the way the artists and writers consciously incorporate references to their process of making art, hence calling attention to the act of creation itself. This has an effect of reminding the audience that what they are viewing/reading is artificial, interfering the with immersive experience of traditional art and breaking the illusion that the art is somehow "natural" or "real." In theatre, this is called "breaking the fourth wall" or violating the audience's "willing suspension of disbelief" and is sometimes referred to as "meta-theatrical."
