Everyday Life in Art After WWII: 1950s to 1970s

Question 1

Independent Group

Answer 1

(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

Question 2

Pop Art

Answer 2

(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

Question 3

Nicholas Schöffer

Answer 3

father of cybernetic art, Hungarian-born French artist

Question 4

Cybernetic Art

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Le Mouvement

Answer 5

(1955) Paris, France; exhbition organized by Denise René, helped to popularize kinetic art; artists included Agam, Bury, Calder, Duchamp, Jacobsen, Soto, Tinguely, Vasarely

Question 6

Kinetic Art

Answer 6

art from any medium that contains movement perceivable by the viewer or depends on motion for its effect

Question 7

ZERO

Answer 7

(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

Question 8

GRAV

Answer 8

(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

Question 9

GUTAI

Answer 9

(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

Question 10

Happenings

Answer 10

(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

Question 11

Fluxus

Answer 11

(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

Question 12

Situationist International

Answer 12

(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

Question 13

Constructed Situation

Answer 13

a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events

Question 14

Affiches Lacerées

Answer 14

(1949-1965) France; “torn posters” by Jacques de la Villeglé

Question 15

Nouveau Réalisme

Answer 15

(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

Question 16

Robert Rauschenberg

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Jasper Johns

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Arte Povera

Answer 18

(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

Question 19

Minimalism

Answer 19

(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

Question 20

Land Art

Answer 20

(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

Question 21

Conceptual Art

Answer 21

(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

Question 22

Process Art

Answer 22

(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