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The Dada Movement

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -1000

The Dada Movement

The Dada movement began in the 1916-7 period in Europe and America. Artists began to express their horror at the end of World War I. The newspaper of every country listed of the names of thousands of young men killed or wounded. This destruction of life in the west countries demanded expression and Dada became this form.

Dada was also assaulted on conventional norm ranging from humorous absurdity to savage satire. Dada was frankly anarchistic, ignoring accepted subject matter and techniques in all art forms and even sometimes aiming at the deliberate destruction of the achievement of Western Culture.

Artists involved in this movement were Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Max Ernst. They influenced the Surrealist movement in the 1920s and continue to exert influence on movements in the middle of the century.

Although Dada has no artistic significance, a literal translation from the French is to note that its irrelevancy the purposelessness of European life and culture in the young artists of the period.

Raoul Hausmann, ABCD, 1923-1924
Dada presents a challenge to art and the Visual. 'Anti-art' movement of the early 20th Century, rebelling against traditionalism of art and consumerist society. Art as non-art. Utilizing new techniques in myriad mediums, jarring juxtapositions, collages, nonsensical writings. Also, various abstract art styles develop during the 20th century, as the realm of the real in art has been taken over by photograph

Hannah Hoch - Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the First Epoch of the Weimar Beer-Belly Culture, 1919.

The Shock of the New

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -1000

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

ROBERT HUGHES 1991

How could you produce a parallel dynamicism to the machine age without falling into the elementary trap of just becoming a machine illustrator?

The first artists to sketch an answer to all this was Cubists

The key Cubist painting can be observed that they do not present an immediately coherent view of life in the way that Impressionism set forth its images of mid-bourgeois pleasure and boulevard manners. They have very little to do with nature. Cubism as practiced by its inventors and chief interpreters - Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris. Cubism was the first radicalled new proposition about the way we see that painting had made in about five hundred years.

Cezanne's late work was the governing element of reality. Braque followed Cezanne was The Village of la Roche Guyon - Ready made in nature the formality towards which his art was moving. Could Braque have invented Cubism on his own? Quite possibly but it would have lacked the power and tension that Picasso brought to it. He had unequalled (compared to Picasso) ability to realize form: to make your feel the shape, the weight, the edginess, the silence of things. In the meantime the paintings of Braque and Picasso were moving rapidly towards abstraction.

Léger was the son of a Normandy farmer, an instinctive socialist who became a practicing one in the trenches of World War I, he said "Once I had got my teeth into that sort of reality, I never let go of object again".

Léger confessed that his great visual epiphany in the trenches had been "the breach of a 75-millimetre gun in the sun light, the magic of light on white metal are applied to human body, and even the insignia and medals on these robots might as well be factory brands,

Lege works the card players, the three women.

With its geometrically simplified bodies and furniture, as deliberate as an Alexandrine of French classicism, embodying an idea of society- as machine, bringing harmony and an end to loneliness. This philosophical harem, though dealing with a subject not unlike that of Picasso Demoiselles is far from it in spirit.

We are offered a metaphor of human relationships working as smoothly as a clock, all passion sublimated with the binding energy of desired transformed into rhymes of shape.

Pop Art

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -1000

POP ART

EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH

The term itself was first used by the British critic Lawrence Alloway, in 1954, as a convenient label for the ‘popular art' being created by admass culture. Alloway extended the term in 1962 to include the activity of artists who were trying to use popular image in the context of ‘fine art'.

The development of POP Art in America is less easy to chart. It grew out of the prevailing Abstract Expressionist style; many of the American Pop Painters continue to name Willem de Kooning, one of the giants of Abstract Expressionism.

Pop also had European ancestry. Its roots are to be found in Dada. Dada it must be remembered was specifically anti-art. What the Pop artists did in their early and exploratory phase- was to find something positive in these gesture of the opposition, something which could be built on.

Pop Art is generally styleless, hostile to categories. Warhol, for instance, would like to eliminate the ideas of the photographic images transferred directly to the canvas by means of stencils. When one talks about Pop Art, one is therefore not discussing an art movement.

Before making up one's mind about Pop Art, it is essential to try and explore some of the conditions that brought it into being, and this means asking some radical questions. What, for example, is the ‘pop culture' which is supposed to supply Pop Art with its source material? In our society, pop culture is the product of the industrial Revolution and the series of technological revolutions which succeeded it. Bring together fashion, democracy and the machine, and pop culture is part of what results. Pop culture is therefore part of an economic process.

Pop Art of the 1960s, many people welcomed it as reversal of a trend, a sudden, unexpected, last minute victory scored by figuration over abstract painting. The beginning of Pop Art was in America.

Main Artists was Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Oldenburg and James Rosenquist.

Warhol, for instance, would like to eliminate the idea of the hand-made work of art together. Many of his pictures are based on photographic images transferred directly to the canvas by means of stencils.

Andy Warhol	Roy Lichtenstein	Robert Rauchenberg

Conceptual Art

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -1000

Author: Roberta Smith

‘And then there is that one-man art movement, Marcel Duchamp - for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to - a movement for each person and open for everybody'

Willem de Kooning, 1951

The art of the late 1950s and earlier sixties, both in America and Europe, was prepared with context-conscious, non-object, post - Duchampian, proto-conceptual efforts but these remain for most part peripheral to ‘mainstream' modernism and usually on the outskirts of careers devoted primarily to painting and sculpture.

In the mid - sixties, and the young generation sparked the imagination of so many artists that his ‘one man movement' grew into a throng. Achieving its purest and most widespread expression, his ‘art as ideas' was broken down and expanded into art as philosophy, as information, as linguistics, as mathematics, as autography, as social criticism, as life -risking, as joke, as story - telling.

After 1966, the interest in ‘context' and in the dispensability of the unique art object became epidemic and moved towards the centre. Conceptual art, as it came to be known, was one of several interrelated, overlapping alternatives to traditional forms and exhibition practices. Conceptual art populated the art scene of the late sixties and early seventies. It remains most vivid, in memory and influence, today.

Despite its extreme diversity, most Conceptual activity was united by an almost unanimous emphasis on language or on linguistically analogous systems - that language and ideas were true essence of art, that visual experience and sensory delectation was secondary and inessential, if not downright mindless and immoral.

‘Art's "art condition" is a conceptual state', wrote Joseph Kosuth.

‘Without language there is no art', echoed Lawrence Weiner.

Another factor which made Conceptual Art perhaps the most radical of all ‘post-Minimal' efforts.

According to LeWitt, a conceptualist was an important influence on both European and American Artist stated:

In Conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work...all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.

Conceptual Art probably was the largest, quickest-growing and most genuinely international of all twentieth-century art movements. Unlike Cubism, Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism, Conceptualism really cannot be narrowed down to a handful of ‘seminal artists' in one country or another. It is very difficult to pinpoint its originator or inventor, the way one can point to Baraque and Picasso for Cubism or Stelle and Judd for Minimalism. However the artists most often referred to are Kosuth, Barry, Weiner and Huebler. They all exhibited in 1968 and 1969 in a series of innovative exhibitions organized by curator Seth Siegalaub.

Conceptual art, not surprisingly, resulted in few museum masterpieces than any twentieth-century art movement... Nonetheless, its influence has been pervasive.

Conceptualism was like Surrealism lacked a coherent visual style and which had an overriding concern with meaning and subject matter. Conceptual art ranged from pure thought, such as Robert Barry's 1969 Telepathic Piece to the perversely hidden physicality of Walter de Maria's 1977 Vertical Earth Kilometer in Germany.

For almost all other Conceptual artists, language functioned more or less as a tool, a means by which they brought some aspect of life rather than art. The Conceptual ‘moment' seems to have ended somewhere around 1974 or 1975.

In many ways, de Kooning was right. What Duchamp had set in motion culminated, at least for a while, in a moment ‘open for everyone', a time of a tremendous liberation, experiment and even license, which seems to have left little in the way of conventionally ‘great' art, despite its extreme positions, its manifestos, its idealism and the challenging thinking its generated about art and its possibility. Conceptualism was variously indulgent, polemical, hilarious, narcissistic, and brilliant but only occasionally moving or wise.

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Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -1000

Author: Robert Hughes 1991

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

ROBERT HUGHES 1991

How could you produce a parallel dynamicism to the machine age without falling into the elementary trap of just becoming a machine illustrator?

The first artists to sketch an answer to all this was Cubists

The key Cubist painting can be observed that they do not present an immediately coherent view of life in the way that Impressionism set forth its images of mid-bourgeois pleasure and boulevard manners. They have very little to do with nature. Cubism as practiced by its inventors and chief interpreters - Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris. Cubism was the first radicalled new proposition about the way we see that painting had made in about five hundred years.

Cezanne's late work was the governing element of reality. Braque followed Cezanne was The Village of la Roche Guyon - Ready made in nature the formality towards which his art was moving. Could Braque have invented Cubism on his own? Quite possibly but it would have lacked the power and tension that Picasso brought to it. He had unequalled (compared to Picasso) ability to realize form: to make your feel the shape, the weight, the edginess, the silence of things. In the meantime the paintings of Braque and Picasso were moving rapidly towards abstraction.

Léger was the son of a Normandy farmer, an instinctive socialist who became a practicing one in the trenches of World War I, he said "Once I had got my teeth into that sort of reality, I never let go of object again".

Léger confessed that his great visual epiphany in the trenches had been "the breach of a 75-millimetre gun in the sun light, the magic of light on white metal are applied to human body, and even the insignia and medals on these robots might as well be factory brands,

Lege works the card players, the three women.

With its geometrically simplified bodies and furniture, as deliberate as an Alexandrine of French classicism, embodying an idea of society- as machine, bringing harmony and an end to loneliness. This philosophical harem, though dealing with a subject not unlike that of Picasso Demoiselles is far from it in spirit.

We are offered a metaphor of human relationships working as smoothly as a clock, all passion sublimated with the binding energy of desired transformed into rhymes of shape.

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Sat, 29 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -1000

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