- Industry: Art history
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Refers to art that challenges the existing accepted definitions of art. It is generally agreed to have been coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he made his first readymades, which are still regarded in some quarters as Anti-art (for example by the Stuckist group). In 1917 Duchamp submitted a urinal, titled Fountain, for an exhibition in New York, which subsequently became notorious and eventually highly influential. Anti-art is associated with Dada, the artistic and literary movement founded in Zurich in 1916 and simultaneously in New York, in which Duchamp was a central figure. Since Dada there have been many art movements that have taken a position on Anti-art, from the lo-fi Mail art movement to the YBAs, some of whom have embraced the absurdities of Dada and Duchamp's love of irony, paradox and punning.
Industry:Art history
Meaning cannibalism, as an art term it is associated with the 1960s Brazilian art movement Tropicália. Artists Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Rogério Duarte and Antonio Dias used anthropophagia in the sense of a cultural and musical cannibalism of other societies. Embracing the writings of the poet Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), who wrote the Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) in 1928, they argued that Brazil's history of cannibalising other cultures was its greatest strength and had been the nation's way of asserting independence over European colonial culture. The term also alluded to cannibalism as a tribal rite that was once practised in Brazil. The artworks made as a result of this concept stole their influences from Europe and America but, ultimately, were rooted in the cultural and political world of 1960s and 1970s Brazil.
Industry:Art history
Animation is the rapid display of sequences of static imagery in such a way as to create the illusion of movement. The history of animation dates back to early Chinese shadow lanterns and the optical toys of the eighteenth century, but it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that illustrators like Émile Cohl began drawing cartoon strips on to celluloid. The most famous animator was Walt Disney, best known for his cartoon feature films like Fantasia and The Jungle Book and whom Salvador Dalí believed to be the heir to Surrealism. Computer animation began in the 1960s and is animation's digital successor. Using software programs like Adobe Flash, animators build up sequences on a computer to be used as special effects in film, called Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), or as animated sequences in their own right. Computer animation has distinct advantages for artists: it is cheap to make, fast, and the artist is able to control every aspect of the process unlike the vagaries of shooting film which cannot be viewed until developed. Sites like YouTube and MySpace have become forums for computer animation, bypassing the traditional galleries and museums as the spaces for artistic enterprise.
Industry:Art history
Title of Australian modernist literary journal founded 1940 at University of Adelaide by four poets: DB Kerr, MH Harris, PG Pfeiffer, G Dutton. At this time the University of Adelaide was a focus of modernist writing and debate under the influence of the poet playwright and teacher CR Jury, who acted as patron to the magazine. The name became that of the modernist literary and artistic movement, centred around Harris, that sought to shake up the entrenched cultural establishment of Australia in the 1940s. They were seen as 'angry' young men—the rebels of their day. The Angry Penguins, said Harris, expressed 'a noisy and aggressive revolutionary modernism' and represented the new language and the new painting of Australia. They were forthright and unapologetic, demanding to be heard and seen. The artists included Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. In 1944 Angry Penguins was the victim of a famous literary hoax when two opponents concocted a set of modernist poems by a writer they invented called Ern Malley. Harris published them and a storm ensued when the hoax was revealed. Harris was tried and convicted for publishing obscenities and the cause of modernism in Australia was substantially set back.
Industry:Art history
In an attempt to classify the revolutionary experiments made by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris when they were exponents of Cubism, historians have tended to divide Cubism into two stages. The early phase, generally considered to run from 1908-12 is called Analytical Cubism and the second is called Synthetic Cubism. Termed Analytical Cubism because of its structured dissection of the subject, viewpoint-by-viewpoint, resulting in a fragmentary image of multiple viewpoints and overlapping planes. Other distinguishing features of Analytical Cubism were a simplified palette of colours, so the viewer was not distracted from the structure of the form, and the density of the image at the centre of the canvas.
Industry:Art history
During America's Great Depression of the 1930s and 1940s, photographers were employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the rural poverty and exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant labourers in an attempt to garner support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. The photographs were distributed free of charge to newspapers across the country and brought the plight of displaced farming communities to the public's attention. The most famous images were made by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, whose black-and-white stills of starving fruit-pickers in California became iconic symbols of the Great Depression.
Industry:Art history
An organisation founded in 1936 to promote the appreciation of abstract art in the United States. It held its first annual exhibition in April 1937. Early members included Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock and David Smith.
Industry:Art history
Coined by curator Nicolas Bourriaud on the occasion of the Tate Triennial 2009, Altermodern is an in-progress redefinition of modernity in the era of globalisation, which focuses on cultural translations and time-space crossings. Against cultural standardisation and massification but also opposed to nationalisms and cultural relativism, Altermodern artists position themselves within the world's cultural gaps. Cultural translation, mental nomadism and format crossing are the main principles of Altermodern art. Viewing time as a multiplicity rather than as a linear progress, the Altermodern artist navigates history as well as all the planetary time zones producing links between signs faraway from each other. Altermodern is 'docufictional' in that it explores the past and the present to create original paths where boundaries between fiction and documentary are blurred. Formally speaking, it favours processes and dynamic forms to one-dimensional single objects and trajectories to static masses.
Industry:Art history
Painting placed on or behind the altar of a Christian church as a focus for worship. Usually depicts scenes from the life of Christ, especially the Crucifixion, or from the life of the Virgin Mary. Altarpieces are often in two or three panels (diptychs and triptychs) with the panels showing separate but related scenes. Modern artists have sometimes adopted these formats for non-religious works, either for the increased narrative scope they offer or to add a sense of spiritual weight to subjects dealing with the major issues of human life, or both.
Industry:Art history
In art, a composition in which all the elements are designed to symbolise or illustrate some general idea such as life, death, love, virtue, faith, justice, prudence and so on.
Industry:Art history
