24th April 2013, ISSUE 1
Form Follows Function An exploration of Modernism and Post modernism
Surrealism
Modernism Noun 1.Modern character or quality of thought, expression, or technique. 2.A style or movement in the arts that aims to break with classical and traditional forms.
Modernism was not conceived as a style but a loose collection of ideas. It was a term which covered a range of movements and styles that largely rejected history and applied ornament, and which embraced abstraction. Born of great cosmopolitan centres, it flourished in Germany and Holland, as well as in Moscow, Paris, Prague and New York. Modernists had a utopian desire to create a better world. They believed in technology as the key means to achieve social improvement and in the machine as a symbol of that aspiration. All of these principles were frequently combined with social and political beliefs In the history of art, however, the term ‘modern’ is used to refer to a period dating from roughly the 1860s through the 1970s and describes the style and ideology of art produced during that era. It is this more specific use of modern that is intended when people speak of modern art. The term ‘modernism’ is also used to refer to the art of the modern period. More specifically, ‘modernism’ can be thought of as referring to the philosophy of modern art. The roots of modernism lie much deeper in history than the middle of the 19th century. For historians the modern period actually begins in the sixteenth century, initiating what is called the Early Modern Period, which extends up to the 18th century. The intellectual 2
underpinnings of modernism emerge during the Renaissance period when, through the study of the art, poetry, philosophy, and science of ancient Greece and Rome, humanists revived the notion that man, rather than God, is the measure of all things, and promoted through education ideas of citizenship and civic consciousness. The period also gave rise to ‘utopian’ visions of a more perfect society, beginning with Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, written in 1516, in which is described a fictional island community with seemingly perfect social, political, legal customs. The modernist thinking which emerged in the Renaissance began to take shape as a larger pattern of thought in the 18th century. Mention may be made first of the so-called ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns’, a literary and artistic dispute that dominated European intellectual life at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. The crux was the issue of whether Moderns (i.e. contemporary writers and artists) were now morally and artistically superior to the Ancients (i.e. writers and artists of ancient Greece and Rome). Introduced first in France in 1687 by Charles Perrault, who supported the Moderns, the discussion was taken up in England where it was satirized as The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift.
Surrealism had the longest tenure of any avant-garde movement, and its members were arguably the most “political.”1 It emerged on the heels of World War I, when André Breton founded his first journal, Literature, and brought together a number of figures who had mostly come to know each other during the war years. They included Louis Aragon, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Phillippe Soupault, Yves Tanguey, and Tristan Tzara. Some were “absolute” surrealists and others were merely associated with the movement, which lasted into the 1950s. The intervening years saw a shift from the original concern with the purely intuitive to a somewhat more rational—and perhaps more political—standpoint. But there were always journals intent on providing philosophical justification for surrealist artistic experiments, including La Revolution surrealiste and Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution. These were also edited by Breton. His novel Nadja (1928) is in this regard far less important than his countless essays, speeches, and manifestos. Surrealism was Dada’s heir. The new movement was more conscious of its aesthetic influences and more explicit in its political posture. The basic idea of surrealism is simple enough, and that defines its power. Everyday life or the habitual reality we experience is, according to Breton, a barrier to the expression of those manifold and unspoken desires encoded in dreams. Art should bridge the antithetical relation between reality and the dream—fuse them in the name of a new and superior reality, or the “surreal.” What Walter Benjamin termed the “poverty of the interior” becomes the target of surrealism and its attempt to transform everyday life. Evoking the consciousness of that poverty—or, to use another famous phrase from Benjamin, winning “the energies of intoxication for the revolution”—thus becomes the purpose of the surrealist enterprise. Surrealism called for total revolution. It highlighted the blending of the real and the surreal. Critical consciousness requires something more, however, than the evocation of the surrealist twilight or insight into “the crisis of the object.” The dialectical method is not intent on making reality more arbitrary in its associative possibilities, but of (thematically) rendering it more transparent and comprehensible.
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Dada
Emerging in 1916 from the melting pot of abstract painting and avant-garde poetry, Dada was a crisis in art, a leap outside the ranks of the “isms”, a complete insurrection. Reinventing the mechanics of creation and thought, a group of young artists fundamentally changed the world’s conception of art. The incandescence and integrity of this individualist revolt were to become the yardstick for all avant-garde art in the future. Dada was a word, a rallying symbol, an intentionally derisory anti-label. As a provocative slogan it wrong-footed the critics, who habitually pinned pejorative labels on new tendancies, such as Cubism. The tone was set: the Dadaists were not aiming to win over the critics, but to mock them. Duchamp called them “critiques dard”, Schwitters ironically referred to them as “messieurs les criquicques”, and Raoul Hausmann caricatured them in a collage. By adopting this polemical relationship with the critics (the only one that could adopt), Dada won a head start that it never lost. The Dada experiment in Zurich, or the Dada Movement, as it became officially known, transformed art, reinventing every discipline from within. An inherited culture that had now become unacceptable was replaced by a new inventiveness and a direct relationship between the artist and his art - as opposed to the art that until then had been imposed by social constraints. Dada demonstrated that a society that had lost respect was no longer in a position to demand that the artist adhere to its aesthetics and ideological values. Rather than focusing on representation, painters now worked with their material for its own sake in terms of its colour, form, and structure, and felt liberated from the triviality of figurative art to organize these according to laws that applied to art and art alone. 4
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Postmodern art, architecture, or literature responds against earlier modernism by reintroducing traditional or the usual features of style. By carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes. Postmodernism, as a continuation of modernism, it destroys the past; it rearranges it and makes use of it for its own innovative purposes. Giving us the freedom and ability to create something new from a mixture of the design world we already know. "Postmodernism" describes a culture that has rejected or gone beyond "modernism."
Pop art Movement in modern art that took its imagery from the glossy world of advertising and from popular culture such as comic strips, films, and television; it developed in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s, notably in Britain and the USA. Pop art reflected the new wealth, consumerism, and light-hearted attitudes that followed the austerity of the post-war period. It was also a reaction against abstract expressionism, the dominant art movement of the 1950s, which was serious and inwardlooking – pop art was playful and ironic, and ignored the rules of the traditional art world. The movement helped to prepare the way for postmodernism, a feature of Western culture since the 1970s. Leading US pop artists include Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein; UK exponents include Richard Hamilton and Allen Jones. Andy Warhol’s famous Twenty Marilyns (1962; Paris, private collection), depicting Marilyn Monroe, is a typical example of pop art. Although sometimes regarded as mainly a US phenomenon, the term ‘pop art’ was first used by the British critic Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) in about 1955, to refer to works of art that drew upon popular culture. Richard Hamilton, one of the leading British pioneers and exponents of pop art, defined it in 1957 as ‘popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business’. In Britain, pop art emerged in the mid 1950s at about the same time as it did in the USA, and likewise became a distinctive force around 1960. Leading British figures included Peter Blake, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and Eduardo Paolozzi. For some of these artists, such as Hockney, pop art represented a brief stage in their career, but others have solidly committed themselves to the style. Allen Jones was still producing work in the 1990s that was very similar to his work of the 1960s. He is best known for sculptures in which erotically dressed women double as pieces of furniture; for example, a table is made out of a woman on all fours with a sheet of glass resting on her back.
‘…we only experience reality through the pictures we make of it… To an ever greater extent our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema. Next to these pictures, first-hand experience begins to retreat, to seem more and more trivial.’ Douglas Crimp Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal. So we can all look at the same subject, draw the same subject, but they will be totally different. Due to the different persp¬¬¬¬ectives everyone sees. Postmodernism thought was largely imported into the visual arts from the worlds of linguistics, literacy theory and social anthropology. “…Line can have a purely artistic function… the line is a thing which is as much of a practical entity as a chair, a well, a knife, a book etc… Thus, in a picture when a line no longer describes a thing but functions as a thing itself, its inner sound is not muffled by other considerations. Its inner power is fully realised.” Wassily Kandinsky
Postmodernism The terms postmodernity and postmodernism also suggest a break, respectively, with modernity, determined economically by capitalism and culturally by humanism and the Enlightenment, and with Modernism, the literary and aesthetic movements of modernity in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. While the distinction between modernity and postmodernity can be made without much difficulty, the distinction between modernism and postmodernism is more complicated. Some early critics argued that postmodernism was not really “post” at all, but simply “late” modernism. It quickly became apparent, however, that, despite its continuities with modernism, postmodernism does represent a definitive break from its predecessor, as well as a broader overall phenomenon, which includes in particular postmodernist theory. Postmodernist art has been, since its beginnings in the movements of the 1960s— Pop art, Fluxus, and feminist art—art that was inherently political and simultaneously
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engaged with and critical of commercial mass culture. All these movements are linked to the development of multimedia performance art and conceptual art, a term that designates art that is neither painting nor sculpture, art of the mind rather than art of the eye. An avant-garde form of contemporary art, postmodernism has been described as “A late 20th Century style and conceptual theory in the arts and architcture, characterized by a general distruct of ideologies as well as a rather ‘difficult’ relationship with what constitutes art.” To paraphrase Andy Warhol, “anyone can be famous for 15 minutes”. This idea, more than any other, sums up the postmodernist age. Faced with a new non-sensical world, the postmodernist response has been: okay, lets play around with the nonsense. We accept that life and art no longer have any obvious intrinsic meaning, but so what? Lets experiment, make art more interesting, and see where it leads.
Critical modernism: where is post-modernism going? by Jencks, Charles., Jencks, Charles.
There have been no great international art movement during the postmodernist period. Instead, the era has been characterized by a number of national movements along with several brand new art forms. In addition, there have been dozens of artistic splinter groups, as well as one or two anti-postmodernist schools whose members have endeavoured to produce the sort of art that Michelangelo or Picasso would have been proud of. The main postmodern movements are; Pop art (1960s onwards), conceptual art (1960s onwards), performance art (early 1960s onwards), installation art (1960s onwards), photorealism (1960s-1970s), Graffiti art (1960/70s onwards). In its present “conceptualist” form, postmodern art will no doubt continue to produce arresting works to satisfy the public. After all, we live in an age dominated by TV programs like big brother, endless TV soaps, and a host of foods that are injurious to our health.
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Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. After attending Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, and studying art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York, Kruger obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. Working for Mademoiselle Magazine, she was quickly promoted to head designer. Later, she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. This
background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground.” Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and
individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. As well as appearing in museums and galleries worldwide, Kruger’s work has appeared on billboards, buscards, posters, a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and in other public commissions.
Ray Gun Ray Gun was an American alternative rock n roll magazine, first published in 1992 . Led by founding art director David Carson who was influential graphic designer at that time. His widely-imitated aesthetic defined the socalled “grunge typography” era. David Carson, the rockstar-beloved graphic designer and founding art director of Ray Gun is back in the magazine business, as creative director of the new C A R S O N magazine. C A R S O N will publish bi-monthly in 2011, with themed issues covering art, culture, design, fashion, and current events. It will be based in Venice, CA, natch. Ray Gun, which ran from 1992-2000, was known primarily for having legitimately cool musicians on the cover, and for Carson’s insane typography play. He had a lot to do with the 90s’ reconsideration of legibility as a design ideal. Nylon editor-in-chief Marvin Scott Jarrett was another owner-founder. While the contents of its pages were not related to graphic design, Ray Gun magazine proved to be an exploration of typography, layout and visual storytelling that would shift the approach of many graphic designers. The magazine was founded in 1992 and led by the work of David Carson, who served as its art director for the first three years of its career, which lasted 7 years and over 70 issues. Carson’s style of typographic experimentation influenced the development of the deconstruction style of design and a whole new generation of designers. The experiments by Carson and other Ray Gun designers were chaotic, abstract and distinctive, but sometimes illegible. The magazine’s radical subject matter often related to music and pop culture icons and the magazine became a reliable source for the prediction of up-andcoming stars. 8
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Iamdesi I am for design that screams out my name I am for design that expresses all emotion, the good the bad and the ugly I am for design that has purpose I am for design that inspires to do more, forward think and explore I am for design that makes you think outside the box I am for design that is not afraid to tell the truth, to have no boundaries I am for design that interacts with everyday I am for design that leaves you wanting more I am for design that time spent doing is time taken to be appreciated by everyone I am for design that doesn’t hate I am for design that is simply that I am for design I am design
‘The Holstee Manifesto’, is based on life but is not specifically targeting one aspect of it. Instead of writing a paragraph full of detail, the three writers (Fabian Pfortmüller, Dave and Mike Radparvar) got together in the summer of 2009 and wrote whatever sprung to mind which when put together formed an inspirational piece of work that is passionate about life itself. Each sentence is short, sweet and to the point. However each has its own powerful meaning that gets the reader to reflect these quotes on their own lives. ‘This is your life’ first quote, used as both a statement and a basic summary of the rest of the manifesto, already the reader is intrigued to read more.
‘If you don’t like something, change it’ is one of the best quotes created on this piece in my opinion as it’s a basic rule everyone should follow to get the best out of everything. Why be stuck on one path when there is a world of opportunities? It’s the choices we each make in life that makes up a person’s thoughts and attitudes. ‘Some opportunities only come once, seize them’, following more from my last choice in quotes about which path we choose. It’s important that some risks have to be made, whether they end up badly or not, we learn from our mistakes. Life should be about living with no regrets. ‘Stop over analysing, Life is simple’. Don’t stress over money, relationships, etc. In the end everyone ends up in the same place. Simple as.
A manifesto can be formed from any type of media. Its purpose is to explain what your intentions are or what you think you’re all about.
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‘Life is short’, the shortest of quotes but can be pursued as the most affective as it leads you to a train of thought that makes you, as the reader question every choice you have ever made and makes you wonder if they were the ones that were right at time and shaped out your future the way you had planned. It would also ask the question ‘are you happy?’ as your life could end at any moment so it should be lived to the fullest and take it as it comes as there is way of knowing if there is really a second chance at it. Be happy with what you do have and take in all the precious moments, as they really are the ones that come for free. 11