- Industry: Art history
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A form of criticism, which involves discovering, recognising and understanding the underlying—and unspoken and implicit—assumptions, ideas and frameworks of cultural forms such as works of art. First used by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s, deconstruction asserts that there is not one single intrinsic meaning to be found in a work, but rather many, and often they can be conflicting. In Derrida's book La Vérité en peinture (1978) he uses the example of Vincent van Gogh's painting Old Shoes with Laces, arguing that we can never be sure whose shoes are depicted in the work, making a concrete analysis of the painting difficult. Since Derrida's assertions in the 1970s, the notion of deconstruction has been a dominating influence on many writers and conceptual artists.
Industry:Art history
French word meaning literally to unstick. The term is generally associated with the Nouveau Réalisme (new realism) movement, although the first time it appeared in print was in the Dictionnaire Abrégé du Surréalisme in 1938. In the context of Nouveau Réalisme it meant making art works from posters ripped from walls, exhibiting them as aesthetic objects and social documents. The artists involved, such as Raymond Hains, often sought out sites with many layers of posters so that the process of décollage took on an archeological character and was seen as a means of uncovering historical information. From 1949 Hains made work from posters that he tore from the walls of Paris. In 1963 the German artist Wolf Vostell appropriated the term, staging a series of Happenings under the title Nein-9 Decollagen which involved television images which he had decollé —unstuck from the screen—and re-presented. In 1962 Vostell had founded Décollage: Bulletin Aktueller Ideen, a magazine devoted to the theoretical writings of artists involved in Happenings, Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme and Pop art.
Industry:Art history
Phase or branch of Symbolism in 1880s and 1890s and many artists and writers seen as both. Term came into use 1880s e. G. French journal Le Décadent 1886. Generally refers to extreme manifestations of Symbolism emphasising the spiritual, the morbid and the erotic. Decadents inspired partly by disgust at corruption and rampant materialism of modern world, partly by concomitant desire to escape it into realms of aesthetic, fantastic, erotic, religious. In art key influence from Rossetti and then Burne-Jones. Key artists abroad Khnopff, Moreau, Rops; in Britain Beardsley, Simeon Solomon. Key books Huysmans A Rebours (Against Nature) and Wilde Dorian Gray.
Industry:Art history
A term used to describe the visual representation of information, often statistical. In the past this was usually in map or graph form, but computers make it possible to represent data in animated and interactive form. Artists use data visualisation as a way of revealing and exploring hidden aspects of society as manifested in new forms of social representation such as web logs. An example of this is The Dumpster, an online artwork devised by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, which uses data from web logs to plot the romantic lives of teenagers.
Industry:Art history
Museums and galleries typically employ numbers of curators who are concerned with staging temporary loan exhibitions, arranging displays of the museum's own collection and making acquisitions for that collection. In the past twenty years the role of the curator has evolved: now there are freelance or independent curators who are not attached to an institution and who have their own idiosyncratic ways of making exhibitions. Such curators are invited to curate, or themselves propose, exhibitions in a wide range of spaces, both within and outside the established gallery system, and online. The Swiss curator Harald Szeemann who was the director of the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2001 is a good example of an independent curator, as is the artist and curator Matthew Higgs who is known for his low budget, DIY exhibitions that have included the publication Imprint, an art exhibition that was posted to people rather than exhibited in a gallery space.
Industry:Art history
Until modern times royal courts were a major focus of artistic patronage. Monarchs employed their own artists giving them titles such as King's Painter, but they are generally referred to as court painters. They could be among the most famous artists of the day: in Britain Henry VIII imported Holbein, and Charles I appointed Van Dyck 'Principalle Paynter in ordinary to their majesties'. Elizabeth I nurtured the first native-born genius of British art, Hilliard. Charles I built one of the greatest royal art collections and lavishly patronised the arts in general.
Industry:Art history
Content generally refers to the subject matter, meaning or significance of a work of art, as opposed to its form. In modern art the dramatic succession of innovations in form from Impressionism onwards have meant that discussion of this has often taken precedence over that of content. In the 1960s and early 1970s the particularly radical flight from traditional forms of art that resulted in what became known as Conceptual art, gave rise to work in which form and content were fused in a new way.
Industry:Art history
Particularly austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915. The constructivists believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. Tatlin was crucially influenced by Picasso's Cubist constructions (Construction 1914) which he saw in Picasso's studio in Paris in 1913. These were three-dimensional still lifes made of scrap materials. Tatlin began to make his own but they were completely abstract and made of industrial materials. By 1921 Russian artists who followed Tatlin's ideas were calling themselves Constructivists and in 1923 a manifesto was published in their magazine Lef: 'The material formation of the object is to be substituted for its aesthetic combination. The object is to be treated as a whole and thus will be of no discernible 'style' but simply a product of an industrial order like a car, an aeroplane and such like. Constructivism is a purely technical mastery and organisation of materials. ' Constructivism was suppressed in Russia in the 1920s but was brought to the West by Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner and has been a major influence on modern sculpture.
Industry:Art history
An extension of Constructivism in Britain from about 1950 in the work of Victor Pasmore, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin and Anthony Hill. Naturally occuring proportional systems and rhythms underpinned their geometrical art. They were inspired by the theories of the American artist Charles Biederman and explored the legacy of the 'Constructive art' made in the 1930s by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, whose contribution to the Russian Constructivism was exemplary. Hill insisted on using the term Constructionism for the British phenomenon, but Constructivism is more commonly found.
Industry:Art history
The rise of conceptual photography in the 1960s coincided with the early explorations into video art. Using cameras, artists like Richard Long and Dennis Oppenheim began recording their performances and temporary art works in a manner that is now often described as deadpan. The aim was to make simple, realistic images of the artwork that looked as documentary as possible. It was the pedestrian nature of photography, its unshakable capacity to photograph everything the same, that the artists liked, believing it was the art depicted in the photograph that was important. Precedents for conceptual photography can be found as far back as the early twentieth century when Alfred Stieglitz photographed Marcel Duchamp's readymade made from a urinal, Fountain, for an exhibition in New York. The original Fountain was lost, but the photographs by Stieglitz remain and have become works of art in themselves.
Industry:Art history
