Postmodern art
Encyclopedia
Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism
, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as Intermedia
, Installation art
, Conceptual Art
and Multimedia
, particularly involving video are described as postmodern
.
There are several characteristics which define the term 'postmodern' in art; these include bricolage
, the use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage
, simplification, appropriation, performance art
, the recycling of past styles and themes in a modern-day context, as well as the break-up of the barrier between fine and high arts
and low art
and popular culture
.
". Not all art labeled as contemporary art is postmodern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modernist and late modernist
traditions, as well as artists who reject postmodernism for other reasons. Arthur Danto
argues that "contemporary" is the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a "subsector" of the contemporary movement. Some postmodern artists have made a more distinctive break from the ideas of modern art and there is no consensus as to what is "late-modern" and what is "post-modern." Ideas rejected by the modern aesthetic have been re-established. In painting, postmodernism reintroduced representation. Traditional techniques and subject matter have returned in art. It has even been argued that much of what is called postmodern today, the latest avant-gardism, should still be classified as modern art.
As well as describing certain tendencies of contemporary art, postmodern has also been used to denote a phase of modern art
. This position is adopted by both defenders of modernism such as Clement Greenberg
, as well as radical opponents of modernism such as Félix Guattari
, who calls it modernism's "last gasp". The neo-conservative Hilton Kramer
describes postmodernism as "a creation of modernism at the end of its tether." Jean-François Lyotard
, in Fredric Jameson
's analysis, does not hold that there is a postmodern stage radically different from the period of high modernism
; instead, postmodern discontent with this or that high modernist style is part of the experimentation of high modernism, giving birth to new modernisms. In the context of aesthetics
and art
, Jean-François Lyotard
is a major philosopher of postmodernism.
Many critics hold that postmodern art emerges out of modern art. Suggested dates for the shift from modern to postmodern include 1914 in Europe, and 1962 or 1968 in America. James Elkins, commenting on discussions about the exact date of the transition from modernism to postmodernism, compares it to the discussion in the 1960s about the exact span of Mannerism
and whether it should begin directly after the High Renaissance
or later in the century. He makes the point that these debates go on all the time with respect to art movements and periods, which is not to say that they are not important. The close of the period of postmodern art has been dated to the end of the 1980s, when the word postmodernism lost much of its critical resonance, and art practices began to address the impact of globalization
and new media
.
American Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson
argues that the condition of life and production will be reflected in all activity, including the making of art.
Jean Baudrillard
has had a significant influence on postmodern-inspired art and has emphasised the possibilities of new forms of creativity. The artist Peter Halley
describes his day-glo colours as "hyperrealization of real color", and acknowledges Baudrillard as an influence. Baudrillard himself, since 1984, was fairly consistent in his view that contemporary art, and postmodern art in particular, was inferior to the modernist art of the post World War II period, while Jean-François Lyotard praised Contemporary painting and remarked on its evolution from Modern art. Major Women artists
in the Twentieth Century are associated with postmodern art since much theoretical articulation of their work emerged from French psychoanalysis and Feminist Theory
that is strongly related to post modern philosophy.
As with all uses of the term postmodern there are critics of its application. Kirk Varnedoe
, for instance, stated that there is no such thing as postmodernism, and that the possibilities of modernism have not yet been exhausted. Though the usage of the term as a kind of shorthand to designate the work of certain Post-war "schools" employing relatively specific material and generic techniques has become conventional since the mid-1980s, the theoretical underpinnings of Postmodernism as an epochal or epistemic division are still very much in controversy.
. Specific trends of modernism that are generally cited are formal purity, medium specificity
, art for art's sake
, authenticity, universality
, originality
and revolutionary or reactionary tendency, i.e. the avant-garde
. However, paradox is probably the most important modernist idea against which postmodernism reacts. Paradox was central to the modernist enterprise, having been introduced by Manet
. Manet's various violations of representational art brought to prominence the supposed mutual exclusiveness of reality and representation, design and representation, abstraction and reality, and so on. The incorporation of paradox was highly stimulating from Manet to the conceptualists.
The status of the avant-garde is particularly controversial: many institutions argue that being visionary, forward-looking, cutting-edge, and progressive are crucial to the mission of art in the present, and therefore postmodern art contradicts the value of "art of our times". Postmodernism rejects the notion of advancement or progress in art per se, and thus aims to overturn the "myth of the avant-garde
". Rosalind Krauss was one of the important enunciators of the view that avant-gardism was over, and that the new artistic era is post-liberal and post-progress. Griselda Pollock
studied and confronted the avant-garde and modern art in a series of groundbreaking books, reviewing modern art at the same time as redefining postmodern art.
One characteristic of postmodern art is its conflation of high and low culture through the use of industrial materials and pop culture imagery. The use of low forms of art were a part of modernist experimentation as well, as documented in Kirk Varnedoe
and Adam Gopnik
's 1990-91 show High and Low: Popular Culture and Modern Art at New York's Museum of Modern Art
, an exhibition that was universally panned at the time as the only event that could bring Douglas Crimp
and Hilton Kramer
together in a chorus of scorn. Postmodern art is noted for the way in which it blurs the distinctions between what is perceived as fine or high art and what is generally seen as low or kitsch art. Whilst this concept of 'blurring' or 'fusing' high art with low art had been experimented during modernism, it only ever became fully endorsed after the advent of the postmodern era. Postmodernism introduced elements of commercialism, kitsh and a general camp
aesthetic within its artistic context; postmodernism takes styles from past periods, such as Gothicism
, the Renaissance
and the Baroque
, and mixes them in a fashion which ignores their original use in their corresponding artistic movement. Such elements are common characteristics of what is defined as postmodern art.
Fredric Jameson
suggests that postmodern works abjure any claim to spontaneity and directness of expression, making use instead of pastiche and discontinuity. Against this definition Charles Harrison and Paul Wood maintain that pastiche and discontinuity are endemic to modernist art, and are deployed effectively by modern artists such as Manet and Picasso.
One compact definition is that postmodernism rejects modernism's grand narratives
of artistic direction, eradicating the boundaries between high and low forms of art, and disrupting genre's conventions with collision, collage, and fragmentation. Postmodern art holds that all stances are unstable and insincere, and therefore irony
, parody
, and humor are the only positions that cannot be overturned by critique
or revision
. "Pluralism and diversity" are other defining features.
and particularly in its aftermath. With the introduction of the use of industrial artifacts in art and techniques such as collage
, avant-garde
movements such as Cubism
, Dada
and Surrealism
questioned the nature and value of art. These movements were influenced by new artforms such as cinema and the rise of reproduction as a means of creating artworks. The ignition point for the definition of modernism, Clement Greenberg
's essay, Avant-Garde and Kitsch
, first published in Partisan Review
in 1939, is a defence of the avant-garde in the face of popular culture. Later, Peter Bürger would make a distinction between the historical avant-garde and modernism, and critics such as Krauss, Huyssen, and Douglas Crimp, following Bürger, identified the historical avant-garde as a precursor to postmodernism. Krauss, for example, describes Pablo Picasso
's use of collage as an avant-garde practice that anticipates postmodern art with its emphasis on language at the expense of autobiography. Another point of view is that avant-garde and modernist artists used similar strategies and that postmodernism repudiates both.
In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp
exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. His point was to have people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art, because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "Readymades
". The Fountain
, was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, that shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada
. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art
. It is questionable, to some, whether Duchamp—whose obsession with paradox
is well known—can be called postmodernist on only the grounds that he eschews any specific medium, since paradox is not medium-specific, although it arose first in Manet's paintings.
Dadaism can be viewed as part of the modernist propensity to challenge established styles and forms, along with Surrealism
, Futurism
and Abstract Expressionism. From a chronological point of view Dada is located solidly within modernism, however a number of critics have held that it anticipates postmodernism, while others, such as Ihab Hassan
and Steven Connor
, consider it a possible changeover point between modernism and postmodernism. For example, according to McEvilly, postmodernism begins with the realization that one no longer believes in the myth of progress, and that Duchamp sensed this in 1914 when he changed his modernist practice to a postmodernist one, "abjuring aesthetic delectation, transcendent ambition, and tour de force demonstrations of formal agility in favor of aesthetic indifference, acknowledgement of the ordinary world, and the found object or readymade."
In general, Pop Art
and Minimalism
began as modernist movements: a paradigm shift
and philosophical split between formalism
and anti-formalism in the early 1970s caused those movements to be viewed by some as precursors or transitional postmodern art. Other modern movements cited as influential to postmodern art are conceptual art
and the use of techniques such as assemblage
, montage
, bricolage
, and appropriation
.
's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all Contemporary art
that followed him. To some extent Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Pablo Picasso
's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via Cubism
and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art gets made at the mid-century point. Pollock's move — away from easel painting and conventionality — was a liberating signal to his contemporaneous artists and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process — working on the floor, unstretched raw canvas, from all four sides, using artist materials, industrial materials, imagery, non-imagery, throwing linear skeins of paint, dripping, drawing, staining, brushing, essentially blasted artmaking beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism
in general expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning
, Franz Kline
, Mark Rothko
, Philip Guston
, Hans Hofmann
, Clyfford Still
, Barnett Newman
, Ad Reinhardt
and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them.
In abstract painting
during the 1950s and 1960s several new directions like Hard-edge painting
and other forms of Geometric abstraction like the work of Frank Stella
popped up, as a reaction against the subjectivism of Abstract expressionism began to appear in artist studios and in radical avant-garde
circles. Clement Greenberg
became the voice of Post-painterly abstraction; by curating an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States
in 1964. Color field painting, Hard-edge painting
and Lyrical Abstraction
emerged as radical new directions.
By the late 1960s however, Postminimalism
, Process Art
and Arte Povera
also emerged as revolutionary concepts and movements that encompassed both painting and sculpture, via Lyrical Abstraction
and the Postminimalist movement, and in early Conceptual Art
. Process art as inspired by Pollock enabled artists to experiment with and make use of a diverse encyclopedia of style, content, material, placement, sense of time, and plastic and real space. Nancy Graves
, Ronald Davis
, Howard Hodgkin
, Larry Poons
, Jannis Kounellis
, Brice Marden
, Bruce Nauman
, Richard Tuttle
, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard
, Lynda Benglis
, Dan Christensen
, Larry Zox
, Ronnie Landfield
, Eva Hesse
, Keith Sonnier
, Richard Serra
, Sam Gilliam
, Mario Merz
, Peter Reginato
were some of the younger artists who emerged during the era of late modernism
that spawned the heyday of the art of the late 1960s.
During the late 1950s and 1960s artists with a wide range of interests began to push the boundaries of Contemporary art
. Yves Klein
in France
, and Carolee Schneemann
, Yayoi Kusama
, Charlotte Moorman
, and Yoko Ono
in New York City
were pioneers of performance based works of art. Groups like The Living Theater with Julian Beck
and Judith Malina
collaborated with sculptors and painters creating environments; radically changing the relationship between audience and performer especially in their piece Paradise Now. The Judson Dance Theater
located at the Judson Memorial Church
, New York
, and the Judson dancers, notably Yvonne Rainer
, Trisha Brown
, Elaine Summers
, Sally Gross, Simonne Forti, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton
and others collaborated with artists Robert Morris
, Robert Whitman
, John Cage
, Robert Rauschenberg
, and engineers like Billy Klüver
. These performances were often designed to be the creation of a new art form, combining sculpture, dance, and music or sound, often with audience participation. The works were characterized by the reductive philosophies of minimalism
, and the spontaneous improvisation, and expressivity of Abstract expressionism
.
During the same period — the late 1950s through the mid 1960s various avant-garde
artists created Happenings. Happenings were mysterious and often spontaneous and unscripted gatherings of artists and their friends and relatives in varied specified locations. Often incorporating exercises in absurdity, physical exercise, costumes, spontaneous nudity
, and various random and seemingly disconnected acts. Allan Kaprow
, Claes Oldenburg
, Jim Dine
, Red Grooms
, and Robert Whitman
among others were notable creators of Happenings.
Related to Abstract expressionism
was the emergence of combined manufactured items — with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting and sculpture. This trend in art is exemplified by the work of Robert Rauschenberg
, whose "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art
, and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography.
Leo Steinberg
uses the term postmodernism in 1969 to describe Rauschenberg's "flatbed" picture plane, containing a range of cultural images and artifacts that had not been compatible with the pictorial field of premodernist and modernist painting. Craig Owens goes further, identifying the significance of Rauschenberg's work not as a representation of, in Steinberg's view, "the shift from nature to culture", but as a demonstration of the impossibility of accepting their opposition.
Steven Best
and Douglas Kellner
identify Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
as part of the transitional phase, influenced by Marcel Duchamp
, between modernism and postmodernism. Both these artists used images of ordinary objects, or the objects themselves, in their work, while retaining the abstraction and painterly gestures of high modernism.
Anselm Kiefer
also uses elements of assemblage in his works, and on one occasion featured the bow of a fishing boat in a painting.
The term "Pop Art" was used by Lawrence Alloway
to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism
of the post World War II
era. This movement rejected Abstract expressionism
and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior, in favor of art which depicted, and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age. The early works of David Hockney
and the works of Richard Hamilton
, John McHale
, and Eduardo Paolozzi
were considered seminal examples in the movement. While later American examples include the bulk of the careers of Andy Warhol
and Roy Lichtenstein
and his use of Benday dots
, a technique used in commercial reproduction. There is a clear connection between the radical works of Duchamp, the rebellious Dada
ist — with a sense of humor; and Pop Art
ists like Claes Oldenburg
, Andy Warhol
, Roy Lichtenstein
and the others.
Thomas McEvilly, agreeing with Dave Hickey
, says that U.S postmodernism in the visual arts began with the first exhibitions of pop art in 1962, "though it took about twenty years before postmodernism became a dominant attitude in the visual arts." Fredric Jameson
, too, considers pop art to be postmodern.
One way that Pop art is postmodern is that it breaks down what Andreas Huyssen
calls the "Great Divide" between high art and popular culture. Postmodernism emerges out of a "generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism."
Fluxus was named and loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas
(1931-78), a Lithuanian-born American artist. Fluxus traces its beginnings to John Cage
's 1957 to 1959 Experimental Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Many of his students were artists working in other media with little or no background in music. Cage's students included Fluxus founding members Jackson Mac Low
, Al Hansen
, George Brecht
and Dick Higgins
.
Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada
before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art
sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues.
Fluxus can be viewed as part of the first phase of postmodernism, along with Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol and the Situationist International. Andreas Huyssen
criticises attempts to claim Fluxus for postmodernism as, "either the master-code of postmodernism or the ultimately unrepresentable art movement – as it were, postmodernism's sublime." Instead he sees Fluxus as a major Neo-Dada
ist phenomena within the avant-garde tradition. It did not represent a major advance in the development of artistic strategies, though it did express a rebellion against, "the administered culture of the 1950s, in which a moderate, domesticated modernism served as ideological prop to the Cold War
."
By the early 1960s Minimalism
emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in geometric abstraction via Malevich, the Bauhaus
and Mondrian
) which rejected the idea of relational, and subjective painting, the complexity of Abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of Action painting
. Minimalism
argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Associated with painters such as Frank Stella
, minimalism in painting, as opposed to other areas, is a modernist movement and depending on the context can be construed as a precursor to the postmodern movement.
Hal Foster, in his essay The Crux of Minimalism, examines the extent to which Donald Judd
and Robert Morris
both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian modernism in their published definitions of minimalism. He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of modernism, but a "paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."
The term Post-minimalism was coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1977 to describe minimalist derived art which had content and contextual overtones that minimalism rejected. His use of the term covered the period 1966 - 1976 and was applied to the work of Eva Hesse
, Keith Sonnier
, Richard Serra
and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson
, Robert Morris
, Sol LeWitt
, and Barry Le Va, and others. Process art
and anti-form art are other terms used to describe this work determined by the space it occupies and the process by which it is made.
Rosalind Krauss argues that by 1968 artists such as Morris, LeWitt, Smithson and Serra had "entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist." The expansion of the category of sculpture to include land art
and architecture
, "brought about the shift into postmodernism."
Minimalists like Donald Judd
, Dan Flavin
, Carl Andre
, Agnes Martin
, John McCracken
and others continued to produce their late modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainder of their careers.
with its staunch rejection of all art it perceives to be modern. This movement is often referred to as classical realism
.
Conceptual art is sometimes labelled as postmodern because it is expressly involved in deconstruction
of what makes a work of art, "art". Conceptual art, because it is often designed to confront, offend or attack notions held by many of the people who view it, is regarded with particular controversy.
Precursors to conceptual art include the work of Duchamp, John Cage
's 4' 33" which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence and Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning
Drawing. Many conceptual works take the position that art is created by the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not from the intrinsic qualities of the work itself. Thus, because Fountain
was exhibited, it was a sculpture.
An important series of movements in art which have consistently been described as postmodern involved installation art
and creation of artifacts that are conceptual in nature. One example being the signs of Jenny Holzer
which use the devices of art to convey specific messages, such as "Protect Me From What I Want". Installation Art has been important in determining the spaces selected for museums of contemporary art in order to be able to hold the large works which are composed of vast collages of manufactured and found objects. These installations and collage
s are often electrified, with moving parts and lights.
They are often designed to create environmental effects, as Christo and Jeanne-Claude
's Iron Curtain, Wall of 240 Oil Barrels, Blocking Rue Visconti, Paris, June 1962 which was a poetic response to the Berlin Wall built in 1961.
, a term coined by Dick Higgins
and meant to convey new artforms along the lines of Fluxus
, Concrete Poetry
, Found objects, Performance art
, and Computer art
. Higgins was the publisher of the Something Else Press
, a Concrete poet, married to artist Alison Knowles
and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp
. Ihab Hassan
includes, "Intermedia, the fusion of forms, the confusion of realms," in his list of the characteristics of postmodern art. One of the most common forms of "multi-media art" is the use of video-tape and CRT monitors, termed Video art
. While the theory of combining multiple arts into one art is quite old, and has been revived periodically, the postmodern manifestation is often in combination with performance art
, where the dramatic subtext is removed, and what is left is the specific statements of the artist in question or the conceptual statement of their action.
Higgin's conception of Intermedia is connected to the growth of multimedia
digital practice such as immersive virtual reality, digital art
and computer art
.
In his 1980 essay The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Craig Owens identifies the re-emergence of an allegorical impulse as characteristic of postmodern art. This impulse can be seen in the appropriation art of artists such as Sherrie Levine
and Robert Longo
because, "Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery." Appropriation art debunks modernist notions of artistic genius and originality and is more ambivalent and contradictory than modern art, simultaneously installing and subverting ideologies, "being both critical and complicit."
in the late 1970s and early 1980s seen in the work of Neo-expressionist
artists such as Georg Baselitz
and Julian Schnabel
has been described as a postmodern tendency, and one of the first coherent movements to emerge in the postmodern era. Its strong links with the commercial art market has raised questions, however, both about its status as a postmodern movement and the definition of postmodernism itself. Hal Foster states that neo-expressionism was complicit with the conservative cultural politics of the Reagan-Bush era in the U.S. Félix Guattari
disregards the "large promotional operations dubbed 'neo-expressionism' in Germany," (an example of a "fad that maintains itself by means of publicity") as a too easy way for him "to demonstrate that postmodernism is nothing but the last gasp of modernism." These critiques of neo-expressionism reveal that money and public relations really sustained contemporary art world credibility in America during the same period that conceptual artists, and practices of women artists
including painters and feminist theorists like Griselda Pollock
, were systematically reevaluating modern art. Brian Massumi
claims that Deleuze and Guattari open the horizon of new definitions of Beauty
in postmodern art. For Jean-François Lyotard, it was painting of the artists Valerio Adami
, Daniel Buren
, Marcel Duchamp
, Bracha Ettinger, and Barnett Newman
that, after the avant-garde's time and the painting of Paul Cézanne
and Wassily Kandinsky
, was the vehicle for new ideas of the sublime in contemporary art.
, Daniel Buren
and Hans Haacke
.
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as Intermedia
Intermedia
Intermedia was a concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres that became prevalent in the 1960s. Thus, the areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting...
, Installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, Conceptual Art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
and Multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
, particularly involving video are described as postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
.
There are several characteristics which define the term 'postmodern' in art; these include bricolage
Bricolage
Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process...
, the use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
, simplification, appropriation, performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, the recycling of past styles and themes in a modern-day context, as well as the break-up of the barrier between fine and high arts
High culture
High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture...
and low art
Low culture
Low culture is a term for some forms of popular culture. Its opposite is high culture. It has been said by culture theorists that both high culture and low culture are subcultures....
and popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
.
Use of the term
The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is "contemporary artContemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
". Not all art labeled as contemporary art is postmodern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modernist and late modernist
Late modernity
Late modernity is a term that has been used to describe the condition or state of some highly developed present day societies...
traditions, as well as artists who reject postmodernism for other reasons. Arthur Danto
Arthur Danto
Arthur Coleman Danto Arthur Coleman Danto Arthur Coleman Danto (born January 1, 1924 is an American art critic, and professor of philosophy. He is best known as the influential, long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he...
argues that "contemporary" is the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a "subsector" of the contemporary movement. Some postmodern artists have made a more distinctive break from the ideas of modern art and there is no consensus as to what is "late-modern" and what is "post-modern." Ideas rejected by the modern aesthetic have been re-established. In painting, postmodernism reintroduced representation. Traditional techniques and subject matter have returned in art. It has even been argued that much of what is called postmodern today, the latest avant-gardism, should still be classified as modern art.
As well as describing certain tendencies of contemporary art, postmodern has also been used to denote a phase of modern art
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
. This position is adopted by both defenders of modernism such as Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
, as well as radical opponents of modernism such as Félix Guattari
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
, who calls it modernism's "last gasp". The neo-conservative Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer is a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator.Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982,...
describes postmodernism as "a creation of modernism at the end of its tether." Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
, in Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
's analysis, does not hold that there is a postmodern stage radically different from the period of high modernism
High modernism
High modernism is a particular instance of modernism, coined towards the end of modernism. "High modernism", like similar names designating intellectual and artistic eras such as "the high Middle Ages" or "the high Baroque", presumably is meant to specify the most characteristic, developed,...
; instead, postmodern discontent with this or that high modernist style is part of the experimentation of high modernism, giving birth to new modernisms. In the context of aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
and art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
, Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
is a major philosopher of postmodernism.
Many critics hold that postmodern art emerges out of modern art. Suggested dates for the shift from modern to postmodern include 1914 in Europe, and 1962 or 1968 in America. James Elkins, commenting on discussions about the exact date of the transition from modernism to postmodernism, compares it to the discussion in the 1960s about the exact span of Mannerism
Mannerism
Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...
and whether it should begin directly after the High Renaissance
High Renaissance
The expression High Renaissance, in art history, is a periodizing convention used to denote the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance...
or later in the century. He makes the point that these debates go on all the time with respect to art movements and periods, which is not to say that they are not important. The close of the period of postmodern art has been dated to the end of the 1980s, when the word postmodernism lost much of its critical resonance, and art practices began to address the impact of globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
and new media
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
.
American Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
argues that the condition of life and production will be reflected in all activity, including the making of art.
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
has had a significant influence on postmodern-inspired art and has emphasised the possibilities of new forms of creativity. The artist Peter Halley
Peter Halley
-Early Life and Career:Halley first came to prominence as a result of the geometric paintings rendered in intense day-glo colours that he produced in the early 1980s. His practice as an artist is usually associated with minimalism, neo-geo, and neo-conceptualism...
describes his day-glo colours as "hyperrealization of real color", and acknowledges Baudrillard as an influence. Baudrillard himself, since 1984, was fairly consistent in his view that contemporary art, and postmodern art in particular, was inferior to the modernist art of the post World War II period, while Jean-François Lyotard praised Contemporary painting and remarked on its evolution from Modern art. Major Women artists
Women artists
Women artists have been involved in making art in most times and places. Often certain certain media are associated with women, particularly textile arts; however, these gender roles in art change in different cultures and communities...
in the Twentieth Century are associated with postmodern art since much theoretical articulation of their work emerged from French psychoanalysis and Feminist Theory
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
that is strongly related to post modern philosophy.
As with all uses of the term postmodern there are critics of its application. Kirk Varnedoe
Kirk Varnedoe
John Kirk Train Varnedoe was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and was an American art historian and writer, a Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a noted curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.-Life:He studied...
, for instance, stated that there is no such thing as postmodernism, and that the possibilities of modernism have not yet been exhausted. Though the usage of the term as a kind of shorthand to designate the work of certain Post-war "schools" employing relatively specific material and generic techniques has become conventional since the mid-1980s, the theoretical underpinnings of Postmodernism as an epochal or epistemic division are still very much in controversy.
Defining postmodern art
Postmodernism describes movements which both arise from, and react against or reject, trends in modernismModernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
. Specific trends of modernism that are generally cited are formal purity, medium specificity
Medium specificity
Medium specificity is a consideration in aesthetics and art criticism. It is most closely associated with modernism, but it predates it. According to Clement Greenberg, who helped popularize the term, medium specificity holds that "the unique and proper area of competence" for a form of art...
, art for art's sake
Art for art's sake
"Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...
, authenticity, universality
Universality (philosophy)
In philosophy, universalism is a doctrine or school claiming universal facts can be discovered and is therefore understood as being in opposition to relativism. In certain religions, universality is the quality ascribed to an entity whose existence is consistent throughout the universe...
, originality
Originality
Originality is the aspect of created or invented works by as being new or novel, and thus can be distinguished from reproductions, clones, forgeries, or derivative works....
and revolutionary or reactionary tendency, i.e. the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
. However, paradox is probably the most important modernist idea against which postmodernism reacts. Paradox was central to the modernist enterprise, having been introduced by Manet
Manet
-MANET as an abbreviation:*MANET is a mobile ad hoc network, a self-configuring mobile wireless network.*MANET database or Molecular Ancestry Network, bioinformatics database-People with the surname Manet:*Édouard Manet, a 19th-century French painter....
. Manet's various violations of representational art brought to prominence the supposed mutual exclusiveness of reality and representation, design and representation, abstraction and reality, and so on. The incorporation of paradox was highly stimulating from Manet to the conceptualists.
The status of the avant-garde is particularly controversial: many institutions argue that being visionary, forward-looking, cutting-edge, and progressive are crucial to the mission of art in the present, and therefore postmodern art contradicts the value of "art of our times". Postmodernism rejects the notion of advancement or progress in art per se, and thus aims to overturn the "myth of the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
". Rosalind Krauss was one of the important enunciators of the view that avant-gardism was over, and that the new artistic era is post-liberal and post-progress. Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock is a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and...
studied and confronted the avant-garde and modern art in a series of groundbreaking books, reviewing modern art at the same time as redefining postmodern art.
One characteristic of postmodern art is its conflation of high and low culture through the use of industrial materials and pop culture imagery. The use of low forms of art were a part of modernist experimentation as well, as documented in Kirk Varnedoe
Kirk Varnedoe
John Kirk Train Varnedoe was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and was an American art historian and writer, a Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a noted curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.-Life:He studied...
and Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnik, is an American writer, essayist and commentator. He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker—to which he has contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir and criticism—and as the author of the essay collection Paris to the Moon, an account of five years that Gopnik, his wife...
's 1990-91 show High and Low: Popular Culture and Modern Art at New York's Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, an exhibition that was universally panned at the time as the only event that could bring Douglas Crimp
Douglas Crimp
Douglas Crimp is an American professor in art history based at the University of Rochester.- Biography :Born in Idaho, Crimp went to Tulane University in New Orleans on a scholarship to study art history. His career started after moving to New York in 1967, where he worked as an art critic,...
and Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer is a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator.Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982,...
together in a chorus of scorn. Postmodern art is noted for the way in which it blurs the distinctions between what is perceived as fine or high art and what is generally seen as low or kitsch art. Whilst this concept of 'blurring' or 'fusing' high art with low art had been experimented during modernism, it only ever became fully endorsed after the advent of the postmodern era. Postmodernism introduced elements of commercialism, kitsh and a general camp
Camp (style)
Camp is an aesthetic sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its taste and ironic value. The concept is closely related to kitsch, and things with camp appeal may also be described as being "cheesy"...
aesthetic within its artistic context; postmodernism takes styles from past periods, such as Gothicism
Gothic art
Gothic art was a Medieval art movement that developed in France out of Romanesque art in the mid-12th century, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, but took over art more completely north of the Alps, never quite effacing more classical...
, the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
and the Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
, and mixes them in a fashion which ignores their original use in their corresponding artistic movement. Such elements are common characteristics of what is defined as postmodern art.
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
suggests that postmodern works abjure any claim to spontaneity and directness of expression, making use instead of pastiche and discontinuity. Against this definition Charles Harrison and Paul Wood maintain that pastiche and discontinuity are endemic to modernist art, and are deployed effectively by modern artists such as Manet and Picasso.
One compact definition is that postmodernism rejects modernism's grand narratives
Metanarrative
A metanarrative , in critical theory and particularly postmodernism, is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. According to John Stephens, it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge...
of artistic direction, eradicating the boundaries between high and low forms of art, and disrupting genre's conventions with collision, collage, and fragmentation. Postmodern art holds that all stances are unstable and insincere, and therefore irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
, parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
, and humor are the only positions that cannot be overturned by critique
Art criticism
Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art.Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty...
or revision
Historical revisionism
In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations, and decision-making processes surrounding a historical event...
. "Pluralism and diversity" are other defining features.
Avant-garde precursors
Radical movements and trends regarded as influential and potentially as precursors to postmodernism emerged around World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and particularly in its aftermath. With the introduction of the use of industrial artifacts in art and techniques such as collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
, avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
movements such as Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
, Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
and Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
questioned the nature and value of art. These movements were influenced by new artforms such as cinema and the rise of reproduction as a means of creating artworks. The ignition point for the definition of modernism, Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
's essay, Avant-Garde and Kitsch
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
Avant-Garde and Kitsch is the title of a 1939 essay by Clement Greenberg, first published in the Partisan Review, in which he claimed that avant-garde and modernist art was a means to resist the 'dumbing down' of culture caused by consumerism...
, first published in Partisan Review
Partisan Review
Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...
in 1939, is a defence of the avant-garde in the face of popular culture. Later, Peter Bürger would make a distinction between the historical avant-garde and modernism, and critics such as Krauss, Huyssen, and Douglas Crimp, following Bürger, identified the historical avant-garde as a precursor to postmodernism. Krauss, for example, describes Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
's use of collage as an avant-garde practice that anticipates postmodern art with its emphasis on language at the expense of autobiography. Another point of view is that avant-garde and modernist artists used similar strategies and that postmodernism repudiates both.
Dada
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. His point was to have people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art, because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "Readymades
Readymades of Marcel Duchamp
The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art". By simply choosing the object and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the object became art...
". The Fountain
Fountain (Duchamp)
Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades. In such pieces he made use of an already existing object. In this case Duchamp used a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". Readymades also go by the term Found object...
, was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, that shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
. It is questionable, to some, whether Duchamp—whose obsession with paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
is well known—can be called postmodernist on only the grounds that he eschews any specific medium, since paradox is not medium-specific, although it arose first in Manet's paintings.
Dadaism can be viewed as part of the modernist propensity to challenge established styles and forms, along with Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, Futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
and Abstract Expressionism. From a chronological point of view Dada is located solidly within modernism, however a number of critics have held that it anticipates postmodernism, while others, such as Ihab Hassan
Ihab Hassan
Ihab H. Hassan is an American literary theorist and writer born in Egypt.-Biography:He was born in Cairo Egypt, and emigrated to the United States in 1946. Currently he is Emeritus Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee...
and Steven Connor
Steven Connor
Steven Connor is the Academic Director of the London Consortium and Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London.- Biography :* Born: Bognor Regis, Sussex, in 1955....
, consider it a possible changeover point between modernism and postmodernism. For example, according to McEvilly, postmodernism begins with the realization that one no longer believes in the myth of progress, and that Duchamp sensed this in 1914 when he changed his modernist practice to a postmodernist one, "abjuring aesthetic delectation, transcendent ambition, and tour de force demonstrations of formal agility in favor of aesthetic indifference, acknowledgement of the ordinary world, and the found object or readymade."
Radical movements in modern art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
and Minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
began as modernist movements: a paradigm shift
Paradigm shift
A Paradigm shift is, according to Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , a change in the basic assumptions, or paradigms, within the ruling theory of science...
and philosophical split between formalism
Formalism (art)
In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content...
and anti-formalism in the early 1970s caused those movements to be viewed by some as precursors or transitional postmodern art. Other modern movements cited as influential to postmodern art are conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
and the use of techniques such as assemblage
Assemblage (art)
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...
, montage
Photomontage
Photomontage is the process and result of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. A similar method, although one that does not...
, bricolage
Bricolage
Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process...
, and appropriation
Appropriation (art)
Appropriation is a fundamental aspect in the history of the arts . Appropriation can be understood as "the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work."...
.
Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism
During the late 1940s and early 1950s PollockJackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all Contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
that followed him. To some extent Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art gets made at the mid-century point. Pollock's move — away from easel painting and conventionality — was a liberating signal to his contemporaneous artists and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process — working on the floor, unstretched raw canvas, from all four sides, using artist materials, industrial materials, imagery, non-imagery, throwing linear skeins of paint, dripping, drawing, staining, brushing, essentially blasted artmaking beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
in general expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
, Franz Kline
Franz Kline
Franz Jozef Kline was an American painter mainly associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys...
, Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...
, Philip Guston
Philip Guston
Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning...
, Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
, Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism.-Biography:...
, Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...
, Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...
and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them.
After abstract expressionism
In abstract painting
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
during the 1950s and 1960s several new directions like Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
and other forms of Geometric abstraction like the work of Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
popped up, as a reaction against the subjectivism of Abstract expressionism began to appear in artist studios and in radical avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
circles. Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
became the voice of Post-painterly abstraction; by curating an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 1964. Color field painting, Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
and Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
emerged as radical new directions.
By the late 1960s however, Postminimalism
Postminimalism
Postminimalism is an art term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism...
, Process Art
Process art
Process art is an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment and world view where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The 'process' in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and...
and Arte Povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...
also emerged as revolutionary concepts and movements that encompassed both painting and sculpture, via Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
and the Postminimalist movement, and in early Conceptual Art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
. Process art as inspired by Pollock enabled artists to experiment with and make use of a diverse encyclopedia of style, content, material, placement, sense of time, and plastic and real space. Nancy Graves
Nancy Graves
Nancy Graves was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and sometime-filmmaker known for her focus on natural phenomena like camels or maps of the moon...
, Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis , born 1937, is an American painter whose work is associated with Geometric abstraction, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Hard-edge painting, Shaped canvas painting, Color field painting, and 3D Computer Graphics...
, Howard Hodgkin
Howard Hodgkin
Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin CH, CBE is a British painter and printmaker. His work is most often associated with abstraction.-Early life:...
, Larry Poons
Larry Poons
Lawrence Poons , better known as Larry Poons, is an abstract painter who was born in Tokyo, Japan. He studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician...
, Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. He studied in art college in Athens until 1956 and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome....
, Brice Marden
Brice Marden
Brice Marden , is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although his work defies specific categorization. He lives in New York and Eagles Mere.Marden is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.-Life:...
, Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico....
, Richard Tuttle
Richard Tuttle
Richard Dean Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line.- Biography :...
, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard
Walter Darby Bannard
Walter Darby Bannard , also known as Darby Bannard, is an American abstract painter.Bannard attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton University, where he struck up a friendship and working relationship with Frank Stella, which continued after graduation and eventuated in the extreme...
, Lynda Benglis
Lynda Benglis
Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor known for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. After earning a BFA from Newcomb College in 1964, Benglis moved to New York, where she lives and works today...
, Dan Christensen
Dan Christensen
Dan Christensen, the American abstract painter, was born in Cozad, Nebraska on October 6, 1942, he died in Easthampton, New York on January 20, 2007....
, Larry Zox
Larry Zox
Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....
, Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, , and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.Landfield is...
, Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse , was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. -Early life:Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany...
, Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier is a Postminimalist, performance, video and light artist. Sonnier was one of the first artists to use light in sculpture in the 1960s, and has been one of the most successful with this technique...
, Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
, Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam is internationally recognized as one of America's foremost Color Field Painter and Lyrical Abstractionist artists....
, Mario Merz
Mario Merz
Mario Merz was an Italian artist, and husband of Marisa Merz.-Life:Born in Milan, Merz started drawing during World War II, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from...
, Peter Reginato
Peter Reginato
Peter Reginato , is an American abstract sculptor.Reginato was born in Dallas, Texas, but grew up in the hills outside Oakland, California and he attended the San Francisco Art Institute. He began making abstract sculpture in 1965 and moved to New York City in 1966 to pursue his career as a sculptor...
were some of the younger artists who emerged during the era of late modernism
Late Modernism
Late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and post-modernism although there are differences. The predominant term for...
that spawned the heyday of the art of the late 1960s.
Performance art and happenings
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
. Yves Klein
Yves Klein
Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, and Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann is an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. Her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the...
, Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama
is a Japanese artist whose paintings, collages, soft sculptures, performance art and environmental installations all share an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation...
, Charlotte Moorman
Charlotte Moorman
Madeline Charlotte Moorman Garside was an American cellist and performance artist.She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied cello from age ten and won a scholarship to Centenary College where she took her B.A. in music in 1955. She received her M.A...
, and Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
were pioneers of performance based works of art. Groups like The Living Theater with Julian Beck
Julian Beck
Julian Beck was an American actor, director, poet, and painter.-Early life:Beck was born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City, the son of Mabel Lucille , a teacher, and Irving Beck, a businessman. He briefly attended Yale University, but dropped out to pursue writing and...
and Judith Malina
Judith Malina
Judith Malina is an American theater and film actress, writer, and director, who was one of the founders of The Living Theatre.-Early life:...
collaborated with sculptors and painters creating environments; radically changing the relationship between audience and performer especially in their piece Paradise Now. The Judson Dance Theater
Judson Dance Theater
Judson Dance Theater was an informal group of dancers who performed at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, Manhattan New York City between 1962 and 1964. It grew out of a dance composition class taught by Robert Dunn, a musician who had studied with John Cage...
located at the Judson Memorial Church
Judson Memorial Church
The Judson Memorial Church is located on Washington Square South between Thompson and Sullivan Streets, opposite Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of the Manhattan borough of New York City...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, and the Judson dancers, notably Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her work is classified as minimalist art.- Early life :...
, Trisha Brown
Trisha Brown
Trisha Brown is a postmodernist American choreographer and dancer.Brown was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and received a B.A. degree in dance from Mills College in 1958. Brown later received a D.F.A. from Bates College in 2000. For several summers she studied with Louis Horst at the American Dance...
, Elaine Summers
Elaine Summers
Elaine Summers American choreographer, experimental filmmaker, and intermedia pioneer.Summers was a founding member of the workshop-group that would form the Judson Dance Theater and significantly contributed to the interaction of film and dance, as well as the expansion of dance into other related...
, Sally Gross, Simonne Forti, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton
Steve Paxton
Steve Paxton is an experimental dancer and choreographer. His early background was in gymnastics while his later training included three years with Merce Cunningham and a year with José Limón. As a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, he performed works by Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown...
and others collaborated with artists Robert Morris
Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...
, Robert Whitman
Robert Whitman
Robert Whitman is an American artist best known for his seminal theater pieces of the early 1960s combining visual and sound images, actors, film, slides, and evocative props in environments of his own making...
, John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, and engineers like Billy Klüver
Billy Klüver
Billy Klüver Johan Wilhelm Klüver was an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories who founded Experiments in Art and Technology. Klüver lectured extensively on art and technology and social issues to be addressed by the technical community. He published numerous articles on these subjects...
. These performances were often designed to be the creation of a new art form, combining sculpture, dance, and music or sound, often with audience participation. The works were characterized by the reductive philosophies of minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
, and the spontaneous improvisation, and expressivity of Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
.
During the same period — the late 1950s through the mid 1960s various avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
artists created Happenings. Happenings were mysterious and often spontaneous and unscripted gatherings of artists and their friends and relatives in varied specified locations. Often incorporating exercises in absurdity, physical exercise, costumes, spontaneous nudity
Nudity
Nudity is the state of wearing no clothing. The wearing of clothing is exclusively a human characteristic. The amount of clothing worn depends on functional considerations and social considerations...
, and various random and seemingly disconnected acts. Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
, Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...
, Jim Dine
Jim Dine
Jim Dine is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with...
, Red Grooms
Red Grooms
Red Grooms is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life...
, and Robert Whitman
Robert Whitman
Robert Whitman is an American artist best known for his seminal theater pieces of the early 1960s combining visual and sound images, actors, film, slides, and evocative props in environments of his own making...
among others were notable creators of Happenings.
Assemblage art
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
was the emergence of combined manufactured items — with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting and sculpture. This trend in art is exemplified by the work of Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, whose "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography.
Leo Steinberg
Leo Steinberg
Leo Steinberg was an American art critic and art historian and a naturalized citizen of the U.S.-Life:Steinberg was born in Moscow, Russia and grew up in Berlin, Germany. He was the son of Isaac Nachman Steinberg. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art...
uses the term postmodernism in 1969 to describe Rauschenberg's "flatbed" picture plane, containing a range of cultural images and artifacts that had not been compatible with the pictorial field of premodernist and modernist painting. Craig Owens goes further, identifying the significance of Rauschenberg's work not as a representation of, in Steinberg's view, "the shift from nature to culture", but as a demonstration of the impossibility of accepting their opposition.
Steven Best
Steven Best
Steven Best is an American animal rights activist, author, talk-show host, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso...
and Douglas Kellner
Douglas Kellner
Douglas Kellner is a “third generation” critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kellner was an early theorist of the field of critical media literacy and has been a leading theorist of media culture generally...
identify Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
as part of the transitional phase, influenced by Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
, between modernism and postmodernism. Both these artists used images of ordinary objects, or the objects themselves, in their work, while retaining the abstraction and painterly gestures of high modernism.
Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac...
also uses elements of assemblage in his works, and on one occasion featured the bow of a fishing boat in a painting.
Pop art
Lawrence Alloway
Lawrence Alloway was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from the 1960s. In the 1950s he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an influential writer and curator in the US...
to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
of the post World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
era. This movement rejected Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior, in favor of art which depicted, and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age. The early works of David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....
and the works of Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard William Hamilton, CH was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...
, John McHale
John McHale (artist)
John McHale was an artist and sociologist. He was a founder member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and a founder of the Independent Group, which was a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies...
, and Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi
Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, KBE, RA , was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He was a major figure in the international art sphere, while, working on his own interpretation and vision of the world. Paolozzi investigated how we can fit into the modern world to resemble our fragmented civilization...
were considered seminal examples in the movement. While later American examples include the bulk of the careers of Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
and Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
and his use of Benday dots
Benday Dots
The Ben-Day Dots printing process, named after illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr., is similar to Pointillism. Depending on the effect, color and optical illusion needed, small colored dots are closely spaced, widely spaced or overlapping. Magenta dots, for example, are widely spaced to...
, a technique used in commercial reproduction. There is a clear connection between the radical works of Duchamp, the rebellious Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
ist — with a sense of humor; and Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
ists like Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...
, Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
, Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
and the others.
Thomas McEvilly, agreeing with Dave Hickey
Dave Hickey
David Hickey is an American art and cultural critic. He has written for many American publications including Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Harper's Magazine, and Vanity Fair...
, says that U.S postmodernism in the visual arts began with the first exhibitions of pop art in 1962, "though it took about twenty years before postmodernism became a dominant attitude in the visual arts." Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
, too, considers pop art to be postmodern.
One way that Pop art is postmodern is that it breaks down what Andreas Huyssen
Andreas Huyssen
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1986...
calls the "Great Divide" between high art and popular culture. Postmodernism emerges out of a "generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism."
Fluxus
George Maciunas
George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers...
(1931-78), a Lithuanian-born American artist. Fluxus traces its beginnings to John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
's 1957 to 1959 Experimental Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Many of his students were artists working in other media with little or no background in music. Cage's students included Fluxus founding members Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle...
, Al Hansen
Al Hansen
Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen was an American artist considered as one of the most important Fluxus figures. He was a Norwegian American....
, George Brecht
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
and Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
.
Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art
Anti-art
Anti-art is a loosely-used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage point of art...
sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues.
Fluxus can be viewed as part of the first phase of postmodernism, along with Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol and the Situationist International. Andreas Huyssen
Andreas Huyssen
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1986...
criticises attempts to claim Fluxus for postmodernism as, "either the master-code of postmodernism or the ultimately unrepresentable art movement – as it were, postmodernism's sublime." Instead he sees Fluxus as a major Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
ist phenomena within the avant-garde tradition. It did not represent a major advance in the development of artistic strategies, though it did express a rebellion against, "the administered culture of the 1950s, in which a moderate, domesticated modernism served as ideological prop to the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
."
Minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in geometric abstraction via Malevich, the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
and Mondrian
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...
) which rejected the idea of relational, and subjective painting, the complexity of Abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of Action painting
Action painting
Action painting sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied...
. Minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Associated with painters such as Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, minimalism in painting, as opposed to other areas, is a modernist movement and depending on the context can be construed as a precursor to the postmodern movement.
Hal Foster, in his essay The Crux of Minimalism, examines the extent to which Donald Judd
Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...
and Robert Morris
Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...
both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian modernism in their published definitions of minimalism. He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of modernism, but a "paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."
Postminimalism
Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse , was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. -Early life:Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany...
, Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier is a Postminimalist, performance, video and light artist. Sonnier was one of the first artists to use light in sculpture in the 1960s, and has been one of the most successful with this technique...
, Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
, Robert Morris
Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...
, Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
, and Barry Le Va, and others. Process art
Process art
Process art is an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment and world view where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The 'process' in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and...
and anti-form art are other terms used to describe this work determined by the space it occupies and the process by which it is made.
Rosalind Krauss argues that by 1968 artists such as Morris, LeWitt, Smithson and Serra had "entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist." The expansion of the category of sculpture to include land art
Land art
Land art, Earthworks , or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked...
and architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
, "brought about the shift into postmodernism."
Minimalists like Donald Judd
Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...
, Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.-Early life and career:...
, Carl Andre
Carl Andre
Carl Andre is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His sculptures range from large public artworks to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American...
, Agnes Martin
Agnes Martin
Agnes Bernice Martin was an American abstract painter, often referred to as a minimalist; Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist.She won a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998....
, John McCracken
John McCracken
John Harvey McCracken was a contemporary artist who lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico and New York.- Education/teaching :...
and others continued to produce their late modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainder of their careers.
New Classicism
The clear distinction between what defines modern art, with its constant reinvention, and the return to classical painting and sculpture is a central concern in postmodernism. Chief among the proponents of this aspect of postmodernism is the Art Renewal CenterArt Renewal Center
The Art Renewal Center is an organization led by New Jersey millionaire, businessman, and art collector Fred Ross dedicated to the promotion of what it terms classical realism in art, as opposed to the Modernist developments of the twentieth century...
with its staunch rejection of all art it perceives to be modern. This movement is often referred to as classical realism
Classical Realism
For Classical Realism in International Relations, see Realism Classical Realism refers to an artistic movement in late 20th century painting that places a high value upon skill and beauty, combining elements of 19th century neoclassicism and realism.-Origins:The term "Classical Realism" first...
.
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is sometimes labelled as postmodern because it is expressly involved in deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
of what makes a work of art, "art". Conceptual art, because it is often designed to confront, offend or attack notions held by many of the people who view it, is regarded with particular controversy.
Precursors to conceptual art include the work of Duchamp, John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
's 4' 33" which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence and Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
Drawing. Many conceptual works take the position that art is created by the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not from the intrinsic qualities of the work itself. Thus, because Fountain
Fountain (Duchamp)
Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades. In such pieces he made use of an already existing object. In this case Duchamp used a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". Readymades also go by the term Found object...
was exhibited, it was a sculpture.
Installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
and creation of artifacts that are conceptual in nature. One example being the signs of Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist. Holzer lives and works in Hoosick Falls, New York.-Education:...
which use the devices of art to convey specific messages, such as "Protect Me From What I Want". Installation Art has been important in determining the spaces selected for museums of contemporary art in order to be able to hold the large works which are composed of vast collages of manufactured and found objects. These installations and collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
s are often electrified, with moving parts and lights.
They are often designed to create environmental effects, as Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a married couple who created environmental works of art...
's Iron Curtain, Wall of 240 Oil Barrels, Blocking Rue Visconti, Paris, June 1962 which was a poetic response to the Berlin Wall built in 1961.
Lowbrow art
Lowbrow is a widespread populist art movement with origins in the underground comix world, punk music, hot-rod street culture, and other California subcultures. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art highlights a central theme in postmodernism in that the distinction between "high" and "low" art are no longer recognized.Intermedia and multi-media
Another trend in art which has been associated with the term postmodern is the use of a number of different media together. IntermediaIntermedia
Intermedia was a concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres that became prevalent in the 1960s. Thus, the areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting...
, a term coined by Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
and meant to convey new artforms along the lines of Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, Concrete Poetry
Concrete poetry
Concrete poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on....
, Found objects, Performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, and Computer art
Computer art
Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, videogame, web site, algorithm, performance or gallery installation...
. Higgins was the publisher of the Something Else Press
Something Else Press
Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by Higgins, Ray Johnson, Gertrude Stein, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Bern Porter, John Cage, Emmett Williams and others. The Something Else Press was an early publisher of...
, a Concrete poet, married to artist Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles in New York City is an American visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, and publications. Knowles was very active in the Fluxus movement, and continues to create work inspired by her Fluxus experience....
and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
. Ihab Hassan
Ihab Hassan
Ihab H. Hassan is an American literary theorist and writer born in Egypt.-Biography:He was born in Cairo Egypt, and emigrated to the United States in 1946. Currently he is Emeritus Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee...
includes, "Intermedia, the fusion of forms, the confusion of realms," in his list of the characteristics of postmodern art. One of the most common forms of "multi-media art" is the use of video-tape and CRT monitors, termed Video art
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
. While the theory of combining multiple arts into one art is quite old, and has been revived periodically, the postmodern manifestation is often in combination with performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, where the dramatic subtext is removed, and what is left is the specific statements of the artist in question or the conceptual statement of their action.
Higgin's conception of Intermedia is connected to the growth of multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
digital practice such as immersive virtual reality, digital art
Digital art
Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
and computer art
Computer art
Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, videogame, web site, algorithm, performance or gallery installation...
.
Appropriation art and neo-conceptual art
In his 1980 essay The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Craig Owens identifies the re-emergence of an allegorical impulse as characteristic of postmodern art. This impulse can be seen in the appropriation art of artists such as Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer and appropriation artist.-Education:Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned an M.F.A. from the same institution....
and Robert Longo
Robert Longo
Robert Longo is an American painter and sculptor. Longo became famous in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities" series, which depicted sharply dressed businessmen writhing in contorted emotion.-Early life and education:...
because, "Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery." Appropriation art debunks modernist notions of artistic genius and originality and is more ambivalent and contradictory than modern art, simultaneously installing and subverting ideologies, "being both critical and complicit."
Neo-expressionism and painting
The return to the traditional art forms of sculpture and paintingPainting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
in the late 1970s and early 1980s seen in the work of Neo-expressionist
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
artists such as Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz is a German painter who studied in the former East Germany, before moving to what was then the country of West Germany...
and Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates....
has been described as a postmodern tendency, and one of the first coherent movements to emerge in the postmodern era. Its strong links with the commercial art market has raised questions, however, both about its status as a postmodern movement and the definition of postmodernism itself. Hal Foster states that neo-expressionism was complicit with the conservative cultural politics of the Reagan-Bush era in the U.S. Félix Guattari
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
disregards the "large promotional operations dubbed 'neo-expressionism' in Germany," (an example of a "fad that maintains itself by means of publicity") as a too easy way for him "to demonstrate that postmodernism is nothing but the last gasp of modernism." These critiques of neo-expressionism reveal that money and public relations really sustained contemporary art world credibility in America during the same period that conceptual artists, and practices of women artists
Women artists
Women artists have been involved in making art in most times and places. Often certain certain media are associated with women, particularly textile arts; however, these gender roles in art change in different cultures and communities...
including painters and feminist theorists like Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock is a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and...
, were systematically reevaluating modern art. Brian Massumi
Brian Massumi
Brian Massumi is a Canadian political philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987...
claims that Deleuze and Guattari open the horizon of new definitions of Beauty
Beauty
Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...
in postmodern art. For Jean-François Lyotard, it was painting of the artists Valerio Adami
Valerio Adami
Valerio Adami is an Italian painter. Educated at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, he has since worked in both London and Paris. His art is influenced by Pop Art....
, Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist.- Work :Sometimes classified as an abstract minimalist Buren is known best for using regular, contrasting maxi stripes to integrate the visual surface and architectural space, notably historical, landmark architecture.Among his chief concerns is the...
, Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
, Bracha Ettinger, and Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...
that, after the avant-garde's time and the painting of Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
and Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
, was the vehicle for new ideas of the sublime in contemporary art.
Institutional critique
Critiques on the institutions of art (principally museums and galleries) are made in the work of Michael Asher, Marcel BroodthaersMarcel Broodthaers
Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist with a highly literate and often witty approach to creating art works....
, Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist.- Work :Sometimes classified as an abstract minimalist Buren is known best for using regular, contrasting maxi stripes to integrate the visual surface and architectural space, notably historical, landmark architecture.Among his chief concerns is the...
and Hans Haacke
Hans Haacke
Hans Haacke is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.- Early life :Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker,...
.
See also
- Anti-anti-artAnti-anti-artAnti-anti-art is a stance proposed by the Stuckists in their manifestos outlining their art. In it, they take a particularly strong position in opposition to what is known as "anti-art"....
- Classificatory disputes about artClassificatory disputes about artArt historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today....
- Electronic artElectronic artElectronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media or, more broadly, refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music...
- Experiments in Art and Technology
- GazeGazeGaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object...
- Modernist project
- Neo-minimalismNeo-minimalismNeo-minimalism is an amorphous art movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It has alternatively been called "neo-geometric" or "neo-geo" art...
- Net.artNet.art"net.art" refers to a group of artists who worked in the medium of Internet art from 1994. The main members of this movement are Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting...
- New European PaintingNew European PaintingNew European Painting emerged in the 1980s and has clearly reached a critical point of major distinction and influence in the 1990s with painters like Gerhard Richter and Bracha Ettinger whose paintings have established and continue to create a new dialogue between the historical archive, American...
- New Media artNew media artNew media art is a genre that encompasses artworks created with new media technologies, including digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, computer robotics, and art as biotechnology...
- SuperflatSuperflatSuperflat is a postmodern art movement, founded by the artist Takashi Murakami, which is influenced by manga and anime. It is also the name of a 2001 art exhibition, curated by Murakami, that toured West Hollywood, Minneapolis and Seattle....
- SuperstrokeSuperstrokeSuperstroke is a term used for a contemporary art movement with its origins in South Africa. Superstroke is one of the influential art movements regarding African modernism and abstraction. The word "Superstroke" implies the super expressive brush stroke...
- RemodernismRemodernismRemodernism revives aspects of modernism, particularly in its early form, and follows postmodernism, to which it contrasts. Adherents of remodernism advocate it as a forward and radical, not reactionary, impetus....
- Virtual artVirtual artVirtual art is art practice using virtual reality, augmented reality or mixed reality as a medium in a digital environment..-Form:It can be considered a post-convergent art form, containing all previous media as subsets...
Sources
- The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005, Hilton KramerHilton KramerHilton Kramer is a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator.Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982,...
, 2006, ISBN 978-0-15-666370-0 - Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts), Kirk VarnedoeKirk VarnedoeJohn Kirk Train Varnedoe was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and was an American art historian and writer, a Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a noted curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.-Life:He studied...
, 2003 - Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, Irving SandlerIrving SandlerIrving Sandler is an American art critic and educator. He has provided numerous first hand accounts of American art, particularly around the abstract expressionist circles of the 1950s, where he managed the Downtown Tanager Gallery and co-ordinated the New York artists' 'Club' from 1955 to its...
- Postmodernism (Movements in Modern Art) Eleanor Heartney
- Sculpture in the Age of Doubt Thomas McEvilley 1999