Improvisation, often shortened to improv, is the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found.
The origin of the word itself is in the Latin "improvisus", which
literally means un-foreseen – but it is also related to both the old
French word "emprouer" and the English "improve", to improve.
Improvisation in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance
without specific or scripted preparation. The skills of improvisation
can apply to many different faculties, across all artistic, scientific,
physical, cognitive, academic, and non-academic disciplines; see Applied improvisation.
Skills and techniques
The skills of improvisation can apply to many different abilities or
forms of communication and expression across all artistic, scientific,
physical, cognitive, academic, and non-academic disciplines. For
example, improvisation can make a significant contribution in music,
dance, cooking, presenting a speech, sales, personal or romantic
relationships, sports, flower arranging, martial arts, psychotherapy,
and much more.
Techniques of improvisation are widely used in training for
performing arts or entertainment; for example, music, theatre and dance.
To "extemporize" or "ad lib" is basically the same as
improvising. Colloquial terms such as "playing by ear", "take it as it
comes", and "making it up as [one] goes along" are all used to describe
improvisation.
The simple act of speaking requires a good deal of improvisation
because the mind is addressing its own thought and creating its
unrehearsed delivery in words, sounds and gestures, forming
unpredictable statements that further feed the thought process (the
performer as the listener), creating an enriched process that is not
unlike instantaneous composition with a given set or repertoire of
elements.
Where the improvisation is intended to solve a problem on a
temporary basis, the "proper" solution being unavailable at the time, it
may be known as a "stop-gap". This applies to the field of engineering.
Another improvisational, group problem-solving technique being used in
organizations of all kinds is brainstorming, in which any and all
ideas that a group member may have are permitted and encouraged to be
expressed, regardless of actual practicality. As in all improvisation,
the process of brainstorming opens up the minds of the people involved
to new, unexpected and possibly useful ideas. The colloquial term for
this is "thinking outside the box."
Arts and entertaiment
Performing arts
ComedySportz
Austin performing a shortform game based on direction from the audience
with the help of Red Dirt Improv; in this case spoofing a hard rock
band performing a song made up on the stage
Improvisation can be thought of as an "on the spot" or "off the cuff"
spontaneous moment of sudden inventiveness that can just come to mind,
body and spirit as an inspiration. Viola Spolin created theater games as a method of training improvisational acting. Her son, Paul Sills popularized improvisational theater, or IMPROV, by using Spolin's techniques to train The Second City in Chicago, the first totally improvisational theater company in the US. However, for some particularly gifted performers, no preparation or training is needed.
Improvisation in any life or art form can occur more often if it is
practiced as a way of encouraging creative behavior. That practice
includes learning to use one's intuition,
as well as learning a technical understanding of the necessary skills
and concerns within the domain in which one is improvising. This can be
when an individual or group is acting, dancing, singing, playing musical instruments,
talking, creating artworks, problem-solving, or reacting in the moment
and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner
feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new
practices, new structures or symbols, and/or new ways to act.
Improvisation was originally rarely used on dramatic television. A major exception was the situation comedy Mork & Mindy where star Robin Williams was allotted specific sections in each episode where he was allowed to perform freely.
Musical improvisation is usually defined as the spontaneous performance of music without previous preparation or any written notes.
In other words, the art of improvisation can be understood as composing
music "on the fly". There have been experiments by Charles Limb, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, that show the brain activity during musical improvisation.
Limb showed increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which
is an area associated with an increase in self-expression. Further,
there was decreased activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex,
which is an area associated with self-monitoring. This change in
activity is thought to reduce the inhibitions that normally prevent
individuals from taking risks and improvising.
Improvisation can take place as a solo performance, or
interdependently in an ensemble with other players. When done well, it
often elicits gratifying emotional responses from the audience. One
notable improvisational pianist is Franz Liszt. The origins of Liszt's improvisation in an earlier tradition of playing variations on a theme were mastered and epitomized by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Notable improvisational musicians from the modern era include Keith Jarrett, an improvisational jazz pianist and multi-instrumentalist who has performed many improvised concerts all over the world; W. A. Mathieu a.k.a. William Allaudin Mathieu, the musical director for The Second City
in Chicago, the first ongoing improvisational theatre troupe in the
United States, and later musical director for another improv theatre, The Committee, an offshoot of The Second City in San Francisco; Derek Bailey, an improvisational guitarist and writer of Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice; Evan Parker; British saxophone player, the iconnical pianists Fred van Hove (Be) and Misha Mengelberg (NL) and more recently the Belgian Seppe Gebruers who improvise with two pianos tuned a quartertone apart.
Improvised freestyle rap is commonly practiced as a part of rappers'
creative processes, as a "finished product" for release on recordings
(when the improvisation is judged good enough), as a spiritual event, as
a means of verbal combat in battle rap,
and, simply, for fun. As mentioned above, studies have suggested that
improvisation allows a musician to relax the control filters in their
mind during this exercise. It often incorporates insults similar to those in the African-American game The Dozens, and complex rhythmic and sometimes melodic forms comparable to those heard in jazz improvisation.
In the realm of silent film
music, there are a small number of musicians whose work has been
recognized as exceptional by critics, scholars and audiences alike;
these include Neil Brand and John Sweeney, among others who are all performers at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival
in Italy. Their performances must match the style and pacing of those
films which they accompany and the knowledge of a wide range of musical
styles is required, as well as the stamina to play for films which
occasionally run more than three hours, without a pause.
Improvisation, in theatre, is the playing of dramatic scenes without
written dialogue and with minimal or no predetermined dramatic activity.
The method has been used for different purposes in theatrical history.
There are also many well known university improv teams, including Theatre Strike Force at the University of Florida, Gigglepants at the University of Texas at Austin, and Erasable Inc. at the University of Maryland. Improvisation found a home at universities. The origins of the Second City was the Compass Players, an offshoot of theatre programs at the University of Chicago
in the 1950s. Later, once improv had been established as an art form,
improv groups sprung up on college campuses, starting in the 1980s where
crowds were easy to find and teams could perform frequently. Now an
improv group is a common staple of college extra curricular activities.
Dance improvisation as a choreographic tool: Improvisation is used as a choreographic tool in dance composition.
Experimenting with the concepts of shape, space, time, and energy while
moving without inhibition or cognitive thinking can create unique and
innovative movement designs, spatial configuration, dynamics, and
unpredictable rhythms. Improvisation without inhibition allows the
choreographer to connect to their deepest creative self, which in turn
clears the way for pure invention. This cognitive inhibition is similar
to the inhibition described by Limb for musical improvisation, which can
be found in the music section above.
Contact improvisation:
a form developed in 1973, that is now practiced around the world.
Contact improvisation originated from the movement studies of Steve
Paxton in the 1970s and developed through the continued exploration of
the Judson Dance Theater.
It is a dance form based on weight sharing, partnering, playing with
weight, exploring negative space and unpredictable outcomes.
Sculpture
Sculpture often relies on the enlargement of a small model or maquette to create the final work in a chosen material. Where the material is plastic such as clay, a working structure or armature often needs to be built to allow the pre-determined design to be realized. Alan Thornhill's method for working with clay abandons the maquette, seeing it as ultimately deadening to creativity.
Without the restrictions of the armature, a clay matrix of elements
allows that when recognizable forms start to emerge, they can be
essentially disregarded by turning the work, allowing for infinite
possibility and the chance for the unforeseen to emerge more powerfully
at a later stage.
Moving from adding and taking away to purely reductive
working, the architectural considerations of turning the work are eased
considerably but continued removal of material through the rejection of
forms deemed too obvious can mean one ends up with nothing. Former pupil Jon Edgar uses Thornhill's method as a creative extension to direct carving in stone and wood.
Film
The director Mike Leigh uses lengthy improvisations developed over a period of weeks to build characters and story lines for his films.
He starts with some sketch ideas of how he thinks things might develop
but does not reveal all his intentions with the cast who discover their
fate and act out their responses as their destinies are gradually
revealed, including significant aspects of their lives which will not
subsequently be shown onscreen. The final filming draws on dialogue and
actions that have been recorded during the improvisation period.
Writing
Improvisational
writing is an exercise that imposes limitations on a writer such as a
time limit, word limit, a specific topic, or rules on what can be
written. This forces the writer to work within stream of consciousness and write without judgment of the work they produce. This technique is used for a variety of reasons, such as to bypass writer's block, improve creativity, strengthen one's writing instinct and enhance one's flexibility in writing.
Some improvisational writing is collaborative, focusing on an almost dadaist form of collaborative fiction.
This can take a variety of forms, from as basic as passing a notebook
around a circle of writers with each writing a sentence, to coded
environments that focus on collaborative novel-writing, like OtherSpace.
Improvisation in engineering is to solve a problem with the tools and materials immediately at hand. Examples of such improvisation was the re-engineering of carbon dioxide scrubbers with the materials on hand during the Apollo 13 space mission, or the use of a knife in place of a screwdriver to turn a screw.
Improvised bass drum in Trafalgar Square, London.An improvised cowbell, used for sheep or goats. The bell was found in 1988 in a field near Tuqu'
(Tekoa) in the West Bank. The bell's body is made of aluminum, probably
a broken kitchen utensil, while the clapper is a brass cartridge case
(SMI 25 NATO, probably 7.62×51mm).Improvised hat cover of an Orthodox Jew on a rainy day in Tel Aviv.
Engineering improvisations may be needed because of emergencies, embargo, obsolescence
of a product and the loss of manufacturer support, or just a lack of
funding appropriate for a better solution. Users of motor vehicles in
parts of Africa develop improvised solutions where it is not feasible to obtain manufacturer-approved spare parts.
The popular television program MacGyver used as its gimmick a hero who could solve almost any problem with jury rigged devices from everyday materials, a Swiss Army knife and some duct tape.
The term electronic art is almost synonymous to computer art and digital art. The latter two terms, and especially the term computer-generated art
are mostly used for visual artworks generated by computers. However,
electronic art has a much broader connotation, referring to artworks
that include any type of electronic component, such as works in music, dance, architecture and performance. It is an interdisciplinary field in which artists, scientists and engineers often collaborate when creating their works. The art historian of electronic art Edward A. Shanken
works to document current and past experimental art with a focus on the
intersection of art, science, and technology. Other writers on the
topic of electronic art include Frank Popper, Dominique Moulon, Sarah Cook, and Christiane Paul.
Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that 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 lend art to being postmodern; these include bricolage, the use of text 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.
Use of the term
The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is "contemporary art".
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 "contemporary" is the broader term, and postmodern objects represent a "subsector" of the contemporary movement.
Some postmodern artists have made more distinctive breaks 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. Some critics argue much of the current "postmodern" art, the latest avant-gardism, should still classify as modern art.
As well as describing certain tendencies of contemporary art, postmodern has also been used to denote a phase of modern art. 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," have adopted this position. 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 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 postmodern art emerges from 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 these debates go on all the
time with respect to art movements and periods, which is not to say
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.
Jean Baudrillard has had a significant influence on postmodern-inspired art and 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.
American Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson argues the condition of life and production will be reflected in all activity, including the making of art.
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.
Defining postmodern art
The
juxtaposition of old and new, especially with regards to taking styles
from past periods and re-fitting them into modern art outside of their
original context, is a common characteristic of postmodern art.
Postmodernism describes movements which both arise from, and react against or reject, trends in modernism. General citations for specific trends of modernism 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, which Manet
introduced. 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 controversial: many institutions
argue 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 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.[24]
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.
While 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, kitsch 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 so as to ignore their original use in their
corresponding artistic movement. Such elements are common
characteristics of what defines postmodern art.
Fredric Jameson
suggests postmodern works abjure any claim to spontaneity and
directness of expression, making use instead of pastiche and
discontinuity. Against this definition, Art and Language's Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood maintained pastiche and discontinuity are endemic
to modernist art, and are deployed effectively by modern artists such
as Manet and Picasso.
One compact definition is 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 all stances are
unstable and insincere, and therefore irony, parody, and humor are the only positions critique or revision cannot overturn. "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 I 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. New artforms, such as cinema and the rise of reproduction, influenced these movements 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, defends 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 anticipating postmodern art
with its emphasis on language at the expense of autobiography. Another point of view is avant-garde and modernist artists used similar strategies and 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 just 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, which 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. Some critics question calling Duchamp—whose obsession with paradox
is well known—postmodernist on the grounds 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 hold 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 realizing
one no longer believes in the myth of progress, and Duchamp sensed this
in 1914 when he changed from a 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
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.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all Contemporary art following him. Pollock realized 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 artmaking during the
mid-century. Pollock's move from easel painting and conventionality
liberated his contemporaneous artists and following artists. They
realized 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 - blasted artmaking beyond prior
boundaries. Abstract expressionism
expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities 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 following artworks.
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, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, 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. 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, exemplified this art trend.
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. 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.
Thomas McEvilly, agreeing with Dave Hickey,
says 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 Pop art is postmodern is it breaks down what Andreas Huyssen calls the "Great Divide" between high art and popular culture. Postmodernism emerges from a "generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism."
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-Dadaist
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 extreme simplicity could capture the sublime representation art requires. 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 minimalism is not a "dead end" of modernism, but a "paradigm
shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."
Robert Pincus-Witten coined the term Post-minimalism
in 1977 to describe minimalist derived art which had content and
contextual overtones minimalism rejected. His use of the term covered
the period 1966 – 1976 and 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 describing this work, which the space
it occupies and the process by which it is made determines.
Rosalind Krauss
argues 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."
Lawrence Weiner, Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2005.
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",
in which the music is said to be "the sounds of the environment that
the listeners hear while it is performed," 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.
Figurative painting
Some currents of post-war figurative painting have been analyzed as postmodern. The Italian painter Carlo Maria Mariani was described as a postmodernist by American critics. According to Charles Jencks, Mariani's group portrait The Constellation of Leo
(1980–1981), which depicts people from Italy's art world with
references to mythology and art history, came to define a trope of
postmodern art: "an ironic comment on a comment on a comment which
signals the distance; a new myth thrice removed from its originating
ritual".
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 collages 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.
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.
Joseph Nechvatalbirth Of the viractual 2001 computer-robotic assisted acrylic on canvas
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. The impact of digital technology
has transformed activities such as painting, drawing, sculpture and music/sound art, while new forms, such as net art, digital installation art, and virtual reality, have become recognized artistic practices.
Another trend in art which has been associated with the term postmodern is the use of a number of different media together. Intermedia, 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.
Telematic art is a descriptive of art projects using computer
mediated telecommunications networks as their medium. Telematic art
challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects
and passive art objects by creating interactive, behavioural contexts
for remote aesthetic encounters. Roy Ascott
sees the telematic art form as the transformation of the viewer into an
active participator of creating the artwork which remains in process
throughout its duration. Ascott has been at the forefront of the theory
and practice of telematic art since 1978 when he went online for the
first time, organizing different collaborative online projects.
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."
The return to the traditional art forms of sculpture and painting 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.
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