peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)
2010
art trends update… `
The broad spectrum
of forms that were found in the late 20th century continue to dominate (as the expansion
of form, content and material that culminated in the early twentieth century
was expanded in mid-century to include all manner of form, content, and means
of expression), not least in combination where the resulting art may serve a
broad range of purposes… (often referred to as a ‘Globalised
Post-Conceptualism’, but equally describable as a situation of ‘anything goes’,
often taking the form of an installation, united by its existence in
institutional space and a guiding idea, or ‘concept’).
Found Objects (or
‘ready-mades’) just get bigger, featuring, for example, planes, trains and
automobiles on site… a form of installation
often implying conceptual force (implying some manner of comment). Or
collections of found objects are made to occupy ever more space, so obeying the
trope of hyperbole; size matters (as also found in the word of the image,
painting and photography, in recent decades, and echoing, often with a hint of irony, the more
traditional uses of this trope in religious or traditional State art).
‘Minimalism’, traces remain in the use of basic forms, but with a twist,
evincing humour or comment (including anti-or broken form). And of course often
combined with other material (so no longer representing pure forms).
Conceptualism/post-conceptualism (or
more generally the continuing influence of the ‘neo-avant-gardes’ of the
‘sixties and ‘seventies): all uses, from relatively ‘deep’ forms of topical
comment (political, ecological, sociological, anthropological) to brief bursts
of contrast-based humour (post conceptualism as a form of pun). Usually to be
found in the form of combines, or installations
(so incorporating images, still or in motion, and found objects, or
ready-mades, as well as specially made or site-specific objects…). Indeed the
relationship to the message may be read as referring to a continuum all the way
from the ‘representation’ of a life-world or a given community, so showing a
piece of ‘their world’, to, at the other end of the spectrum, the art work as
the manifestation of a simple disjunction of levels or a fore-grounded
de-familiarised relation (often one thing made from an unlikely kind of
material). The later experience is usually exhausted in the apprehension and so
thin in meaning. (See also ‘Image’ below).
Conceptual
concerns (as well post–conceptual humoresques) have also moved into photography
and image-making generally (in an over-lap with anthropological or documentary
recording and comment).
The Image. In
the realm of painting as in other forms of pictorial representation,
abstraction, realism, expressionism, surrealism etc., all continue to flourish.
The biggest changes in influence of new technologies; however these have been
generally disappointing in terms of content change (rather a source of parallel
inclusion and distribution networks, often short-lived). Technology, so far,
has lead to an increase of virtual material, but if (as with the Net) content
has not been dramatically affected, then it has been the speed and amount of
distribution that has changed (developments have been, in general, quantitative
rather than qualitative). There has also been a move towards
conceptual-influenced and post-conceptual styles (this development follows the
post-conceptual dominance in art fashions in the last quarter century, which in
turn followed on the arrival of Conceptualism (also Pop Art, ‘Combines’, etc.)
in
A ‘Little
Anthropology’ may be said to represent the ‘deep end’ of recent art, heir
to political conceptualism (whence the use of textual and cartographical
evidence) and so the serious side of globalised post-conceptual art works (as
well as research into ‘the Other’, ‘the Other within’ and documentary
traditions). Such artworks combine a variety of means of expression to
illustrate aspects of (often conflicted) lives which have not previously been
through worthy of artistic reference (the inclusion of popular cultural
material is to be seen in this light). Such material may amount at time to an installation, and include on occasion,
although usually as a recording, forms of performance
(or the rituals apposite to, or inspired by, those forms of life represented).
If the last category, Performance Art, is still a comparatively rare form due to its live
nature, it is nevertheless often found existing as a recording of an event, as
part of an installation, where it may carry conceptual or post-conceptual (as
form of shock or joke) as well as anthropological overtones.
Historical
overview. It may be useful to paint in broad strokes the
most general movement in art (literary and musical) history over the last two
hundred years (coincidental with the birth of the photograph, the beginning of
the freeing to the image from compulsorily representation). Thus movement, in
all the arts, may be represented as a double arch.
First Arch: (Ia) First there is the century long
climb to abstraction; initially passing through Impressionism and
Post-Impressionism (echoing beginnings made by Titan and Velasquez in their use
of a less sharply defined brushstroke). This movement climaxes in the period
around the First World War (Expressionism and Cubism, the fragmenting of space
and time/narrative in literature, atonality and chromaticism in music). (Ib) A period of consolidation then
sets in (the return to a variety of realisms in literature and painting, and
neo-tonality or Serialism in music) which lasts from the interwar period until
the ‘sixties.
Second Arch: (IIa) The arrival of a new generation
in the post-war period gives rise to a second period of intense
experimentation, the ‘neo-avante garde’ (Pop Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism,
Conceptualism; in literature, the ‘big’ experimental novel; in music, total
serialism, aleatory, process music). (IIb)
This period is in turn followed by another period of consolidation or
retrenchment (born in part by the arrival of a genuinely ‘mass culture’in the
‘sixties and ‘seventies) which finds the focus of experiment on the frame (possibility
of enunciation, citation) rather than the content, and re-finds ‘history’ as
style and ornament –a feature of all
art before the late-nineteenth century. More generally there is a return to
listenability, readability and comprehension as a prerequisite for cultural
activity, so signaling a retreat from a narrow code-based avant-garde elitism
to more easily assimilable culture (Neo-expressionism, the return to painting
and representation in visual culture, Magic Realism and self-referentiality in
literature, minimalism and neo-romanticism in music). Signaled by the terms,
‘Postmodernism’ as a movement across the arts and ‘Post-modernity’ as theorized
in the social sciences and philosophy (giving rise the now familiar phenomenon
of ‘post-ism’; Post-foundationalism, Post-structuralism, etc).
These two broad
waves of experimentation and consolidation offer a ‘twin peaks’ structure which
leaves the last thirty years (say the last quarter of the 20thc and the first
part of the 21st) sitting on a plateau of experimental consolidation and
international cross-fertilization. A situation where the ‘new’ no longer comes
from a (white, male) European-American avant-garde, but from cultural
influences world-wide including the problematisation of all forms of identity
(regional, national, tribal, language group, religion, class, gender, sexual,
generational) see especially international trends in drama and anthropology as
well in art.
In general then,
the prognosis of a plateau or Long Baroque in the (lack of) development in art,
if not quite ‘The End of Art’ (History) predicted by some, nevertheless appears
still to be in force, attenuated and inflected by the continuing inclusion of
previously excluded voices and regional, identity-based, geo-cultural, and geo-political
concerns (local languages and customs). With minor variations (perhaps the
products of individual talent, of those capable of rising above the genre they
inhabit) art around the world continues to look the same.
Copyright, Peter Nesteruk, 2010