A collection and response to Graduate Art Seminar - Spring 2010
Modern Art
Modern Art started around 1855 and was superseded by post-modern art around 1970. In architecture, The Crystal Palace designed by Sir Joseph Paxton in England in 1855 first represented modern art. The date perhaps most commonly identified as marking the birth of modern art in painting is 1863, the year that Edouard Monet exhibited his painting Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe in the Salon des Refusés in Paris. Earlier dates have also been proposed, among them 1855, the year Gustav Courbet exhibited The Artist’s Studio. (Wikipedia)
All that can be really said is that modern art doesn’t really have a definite ‘start’ date. So many influences and movements around the world influenced the flux into modern art making it difficult to find a defining moment. I would say that modern art started in terms of painting when there was a distinct movement away from realism, around 1860. It became a phenomenon during the first impressionist show in 1874.
The pioneers of modern art were Romantics, Realists and Impressionists, all movements within Modern Art.
The main critic of the movement, at least between 1939 and 1960, was Clement Greenberg whose guiding principal, Formalism, argued that modern art is a complete break from representational art and is a pure expression of its own intrinsic values. In other words, the art is stripped of all associations with non-visual arts and external representational references. Therefore, according to Clement Greenberg, the mission of modern art is pure opticality.
The main principals of Modern Art is the point at which artists
1. felt free to trust their inner visions
2. expressed those visions in their work breaking with the ‘law’ of realism
3. used social issues and images from modern life as a source of subject matter
4. started to experiment and innovate as part of the artistic process
Some of the main artists of Modern Art are:
Christo, Picasso, Warhol, Brancusi, Rauschenberg, Oppenheim, Manet, Van Gogh, Calder, Conner, Motherwell, Rothko, Newman, Pollack, Gorky, Frankenthaler, Martin, Stella
Post-Modern Art
Post-Modern Art began in the 1970’s in contradiction to some aspects of modern art. It describes a series of movements that at the same time, arise from and react against or reject, trends in modernism such as purity, medium specificity, art for art’s sake, authenticity, universality, originality, and most important, paradox or avant-garde.
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.
In my opinion it ended around the turn of the century in 2000.
Critics:
Rosalind Krauss – avant-gardism is over and the new artistic era is post-liberal and post-progress
Griselda Pollock
Characteristics:
1. Use of industrial materials and pop culture imagery
2. Rejects modernism’s grand narratives of artistic direction, eradicating the boundaries between high and low forms of art
3. All stances unstable and insincere and therefore, irony, parody and humor are the only positions that cannot be overturned by critique or revision.
4. Pluralism and diversity are defining features as well.
Artists:
Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marcus Harvey, Gary Hume, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Liam Gillick
Art of This Time – The Year 2010
The art of today is psychologically based and takes into account our level of consciousness and how it affects us and the global world.
The name I give it ISISM
It began when art critics, galleries, art historians and the artists themselves could no longer define a movement within the art world.
The main principals associated with Isism …
1. can no longer be judged as ‘good’ on any basis because it no longer adheres to a movement or a set of rules
2. uses all the past movement concepts and structures – everything can be used and will be used without reservation or retaliation
3. value of a piece of art is solely based on marketing and the art market and this has no relevance to the art world per se – completely separate and irrelevant to each other
4. art is global and personal at the same time and the meaning cannot be inferred without social, political and cultural context as well as individual psychology – the meaning becomes a matrix
Definition of post- from Merriam dictionary:
Function: prefix
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin, from post; akin to Lithuanian pas at, Greek apo away
1 a : after : subsequent :postdate> b : behind : posterior :postpostconsonantal>
2 a : subsequent to :postoperative> b :postorbital>
A prefix that means "after," as in postoperative, after an operation, or "behind," as in postnasal, behind the nose or nasal passages.
post-modernism
post-forism
Post-colonialism
post-abortion
post-accident
post-adolescent
post-amputation
post-apartheid
post-apocalyptic
post-arrest
post-atomic
post-attack
post-baccalaureate
post-biblical
post-bourgeois
post-burn
post-capitalist
post–Christian
post-coital
post-college
post-collegiate
post-colonial
post-communist
post-conception
post-concert
post-conquest
post-consonantal
post-convention
post-copulatory
post-coronary
post-coup
post-crash
post-crisis
post–Darwinian
post-deadline
post-debate
post-delivery
post-depositional
post-depression
post-devaluation
post-dive
post-divestiture
post-divorce
post-drug
post-editing
post–Einsteinian
post-election
post-encephalitic
post-epileptic
post-eruptive
post-exercise
post-experience
post-exposure
post-fire
post-flight
post-fracture
post-freeze
post–Freudian
post-game
post-glacial
post-graduation
post-harvest
post-hemorrhagic
post-holiday
post-holocaust
post-hospital
post-impact
post-imperial
post-implantation
post-inaugural
post-independence
post-industrial
post-infection
post-injection
post-inoculation
post-irradiation
post-landing
post-launch
post-liberation
post-marital
post-mastectomy
post-mating
post-medieval
post-midnight
post-neonatal
post-orgasmic
post-presidential
post-primary
post-prison
post-psychoanalytic
post-puberty
post-pubescent
post-race
post-recession
post–Reformation
post-resurrection
post-retirement
post-revolutionary
post-riot
post-romantic
post-season
post-secondary
post-show
post-stimulation
post-stimulus
post-strike
post-tax
post-teen
post-traumatic
post-treatment
post-trial
post-vaccinal
post-vaccination
post-vasectomy
post–Victorian
post-weanin
post-workshop
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Post-it notes
Post-impressionism
Post-secondary education
post-mortem
post-impressionist
post-diluvian
post-colonial
post-meridiem
post-grad
post test
Post-nasal drip
Post-structuralism
Post-mortem
