Everyday Life in Art After WWII: 1950s to 1970s Flashcards
Independent Group
(1952-63) England; consisted of painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who wanted to challenge prevailing modernist approaches to culture; introduced mass culture into debates about high culture, re-evaluated modernism and created the “as found” or “found object” aesthetic; precursor to the Pop Art movement
Pop Art
(1961-69) aims to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or tacky elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony; popular (designed for mass audience), transient, expendable (easily forgotten), low cost, mass produced, aimed at youth, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business; reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism
Nicholas Schöffer
father of cybernetic art, Hungarian-born French artist
Cybernetic Art
Schöffer’s CYSP (“CYbernetic” and “SPatiodynamic”) was first; builds upon the legacy of cybernetics, where feedback involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns
Le Mouvement
(1955) Paris, France; exhbition organized by Denise René, helped to popularize kinetic art; artists included Agam, Bury, Calder, Duchamp, Jacobsen, Soto, Tinguely, Vasarely
Kinetic Art
art from any medium that contains movement perceivable by the viewer or depends on motion for its effect
ZERO
(1958-66) Germany; group of artists founded by Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker; reaction to Abstract Expressionism by arguing that art should be void of color, emotion and individual expression; one-day-only evening exhibitions, often staged in their studios
GRAV
(1960-68) France; Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (Research Art Group) consisted of eleven opto-kinetic artists; goal to merge the individual identities of the members into a collective and individually anonymous activity linked to the scientific and technological disciplines based around collective events called Labyrinths
GUTAI
(1954-72) first radical, post-war artistic group in Japan founded by Jiro Yoshihara; involved in large-scale multimedia environments, performances, and theatrical events and emphasizes the relationship between body and matter in pursuit of originality; rejected traditional art styles in favor of performative immediacy
Happenings
(1958-70s) art movement that grew from social changes of the time, required the viewer to actively participate in each piece; temporary and changing, the outcome of the performance depended on the actions of the viewer who was made to participate; absence of boundaries between the viewer and the artwork meant the artwork became defined by the action as opposed to the physical, or resulting, object; a combination of performance and installation art, inspired by the performances of Futurists and their tendency to break the “fourth wall” and elicit audience participation, Dadaist use of the element of chance
Fluxus
(1962-present) international movement of artists, poets, composers, and designers of the 1960s and 1970s, “intermedia,” new syntheses of two or more unrelated media or disciplines; performance “events,” which included enactments of scores, “Neo-Dada” noise music, and time-based works, as well as concrete poetry, visual art, urban planning, architecture, design, literature, and publishing; anti-commercial and anti-art sensibility; John Cages principle of artwork without an end and interaction between artist and audience; leadership of George Maciunas
Situationist International
(1957-72) France; organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists; foundations derived from anti-authoritarian Marxism, Dada and Surrealism; critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism; took a close, archaeological view of what everyday life looked and felt like, and how one could react to that as an artist; advanced capitalism caused social dysfunction and degradation of everyday life, spectacles (commodities) over real experiences; constructed situations
Constructed Situation
a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events
Affiches Lacerées
(1949-1965) France; “torn posters” by Jacques de la Villeglé
Nouveau Réalisme
(ca. 1955-66) France; New Realism, new ways of perceiving the real; coined by group of artists that had come together in spite of, or because of, their differences; “poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality” parts of the everyday world incorporated into work; inventor of the décollage technique (the opposite of collages); compared to the Pop Art movement in New York
Robert Rauschenberg
American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement; “Combines,” non-traditional materials and objects employed in innovative combinations; “Neo Dadaist,” questioned the distinction between art objects and everyday objects
Jasper Johns
American painter and printmaker; often described as Neo-Dadaist, played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies; seeking to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols, imply symbols existing outside of any referential context
Arte Povera
(1960s-70s) Italy; “poor art,” avant-garde movement using materials that might evoke a pre-industrial age, such as earth, rocks, clothing, paper and rope; mostly sculptural, a reaction against the modernist abstract painting; rejected American Minimalism and technology; modernity threatened to erase our past, sought to complicate our sense of the effects of passing time; created an irrational world, presented absurd, jarring and comical juxtapositions
Minimalism
(1960s-70s) favored the cool over the “dramatic”; sculptures frequently fabricated from industrial materials and emphasized anonymity over the expressive excess of Abstract Expressionism; avoided overt symbolism and emotional content, but instead focused on the materials; avoided biography and metaphor in art; inspired by the use of industrial materials in post-Sputnik era Russian Constructivism, sought to breakdown traditional notions of sculpture and to erase distinctions between painting and sculpture
Land Art
(1960s-70s) “earthworks”; landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked; created in nature, using natural materials such as soil, rock (bed rock, boulders, stones), organic media (logs, branches, leaves), and water with introduced materials such as concrete, metal, asphalt, or mineral pigments; landscape as a means to creation
Conceptual Art
(1960s) concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns; installations, may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions; all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair (idea becomes machine that makes art); all contemporary art that does not practice the traditional skills of painting and sculpture
Process Art
(1960s) end product of art and craft (the objet d’art) is not the principal focus; concerned with the actual doing and how actions can be defined as an actual work of art; themes of change and transience; refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, patterning, and moreover the initiation of actions and proceedings
