Modern Art

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1

Performance Art

Driven by similar impulses to exclude market forces from art, and inspired by dadaist performances of some 40 years earlier, the performance art movement emerged in the early 1960s. Allan Kaprow, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Carolee Schneeman were among the artists who created happenings. These unrehearsed performances or events, in which the audience was often expected to participate, were intended to blur the boundaries between art and everyday life. In Germany, an international group of artists who called themselves had similar goals. Fluxus was founded in 1961 by American artist George Maciunas, Korean American artist Nam June Paik, and German artist Wolf Vostell.

One of the most prominent members of Fluxus was Joseph Beuys, a German sculptor and performance artist. In the spirit of dadaism, Beuys's gestures were often intentionally absurd, such as his suggestion that the Berlin Wall be raised a few centimeters for better proportion or his attempt to found political parties for animals. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Beuys tied a piece of felt to the sole of one foot and a piece of metal to the other. He then covered his head with gold leaf and proceeded to explain works of art to a dead hare that he cradled in his arms. Hidden within this apparent absurdity were more serious questions about the boundaries between life and death, human being and animal, the rational and the irrational, and finally between art and audience.

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2

Conceptual Art

Performance artists began the process of separating art from the creation of a physical object; the conceptual art movement carried this impulse to its logical conclusion. In the mid-1960s conceptual artists began to make works of art indistinguishable from the ideas that brought them into being. One and Three Chairs (1970, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), by American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, is an example of what the artist called 'Art as Idea as Idea.' Kosuth juxtaposed a real chair with a photograph of a chair and a written dictionary definition of a chair. In doing so he called attention to the distinction between reality and representation and between representation and language.

Other conceptual artists wanted their art to have political content rather than philosophical content alone. In Right to Life (1979, private collection) German artist Hans Haacke reproduced a well-known shampoo advertisement depicting a young woman with luxuriant hair. Underneath the reproduction Haacke posted the shampoo manufacturer's written policy for its female employees of child-bearing age who might be exposed to toxic chemicals. The policy exempted the corporation from responsibility if these women bore children with birth defects. The policy also stated that these women had the right either to leave the company, accept transfer to lower-paying jobs in the same company, or be sterilized. Haacke’s caption then repeated the company's name and added the sarcastic comment: 'Where women have a choice.'

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H

Photorealism

While happenings, earthworks, and conceptual art seemed to indicate an end to art as permanent physical object, the photorealism movement advocated a return to more traditional techniques and subject matter. Photorealist painters, including Americans Chuck Close, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, and Ralph Goings, and English artist Malcolm Morley, painted works based closely on photographs. Close's Phil (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City) is a giant portrait of American composer Philip Glass. But photography never replicates the world exactly as it is: the curvature of the camera lens has slightly deformed the shape of the face, the tip of the nose and certain strands of hair appear out of focus, and other distortions have crept into the work. Instead of correcting these imperfections, Close recorded them as exactly as possible in his painting. Photorealism was realism of a new kind: not representation so much as the representation of representation, a clear acknowledgment of the role of the camera as an intermediary between reality and the artist.

Sculptors such as Duane Hanson and John De Andrea created three-dimensional human figures with strong ties to photorealism. Rather than using a camera, they cast molds directly from the human body. For Artist and His Model (1980, private collection) De Andrea had molds made of his own body and that of a model, which he then painted to replicate their bodies in precise detail. But despite the uncanny illusion of reality, De Andrea left the model's foot unpainted; flesh color appears only gradually to the viewer as the eye moves from foot to leg to body. De Andrea’s omission negates the work's initial truthfulness, and recalls the myth of Pygmalion, the artist who fell so in love with his sculpture that the gods granted his wish and brought her to life.

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Neoexpressionism

In the 1970s and 1980s the return to figurative art took a more personal form in neoexpressionism. In Italy, Germany, and the United States neoexpressionists borrowed the vigorous brushstrokes of earlier expressionist artists but used them to paint the human form in new ways. Italian artists, including Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cucchi, explored classical mythology and other topics long ignored by modernism. In Germany neoexpressionism offered a means for artists to draw on their cultural past: The earliest manifestations of expressionism in Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter had been primarily German. At the same time, German painters such as Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz could use the visual language of the earlier expressionists to address difficult issues of Germany’s Nazi past ignored by abstract painters of previous decades.

American neoexpressionists Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, David Salle, and others used figuration in a wide variety of ways. Fischl depicted vaguely sinister scenes of suburban life, Schnabel painted on unconventional materials such as black velvet or broken crockery, and Salle quoted imagery ranging from 17th-century Dutch paintings to Walt Disney cartoons to abstract expressionist works. Salle’s work seemed to reject the idea of originality that had been so important to earlier modernists.

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Pluralism

Salle’s indiscriminate borrowing of earlier artistic styles is one aspect of a larger phenomenon known as postmodernism, meaning “after modernism.” The problem with trying to define this broad term is that doing so depends on the existence of a persuasive definition of modernism, and few scholars have come to any agreement as to what modernism actually is. In addition to stylistic borrowing, strategies associated with postmodernism include inconsistency, irony, allegory, impurity, references to language, and ambiguous meanings. But there has been much scholarly debate on whether these strategies were completely new or whether they were themselves key components of modernism.

Competing styles existed side by side during the 1980s and 1990s, making this a period often described as pluralist. The only thing that seemed to unite most artists was the continuing belief that art can never be fully defined. This diversity can be seen in the works of American artist Jenny Holzer, who designed electronic signs; Korean American Nam June Paik, who built towers out of television sets; and Americans Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who raised graffiti to the level of fine art.

Some artists have begun to use computer software to create art that brings its own existence into question. In a 1997 installation by American artist Peter Halley at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, spectators used computers to change the images and colors the artist had chosen. The work raised a number of key questions: What is the work of art? Is it the image on the screen? Is it the printout? Is it the software program? And if the program is interactive, who, then, is the artist? Or is the word artist itself no longer appropriate? These were among the important questions left unanswered by the art of the 20th century.

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