Another facet of the new art styles was the exploration of materials not previously employed by artists. These experiments with materials occurred in many art movements, and have continued throughout this century as new materials and technologies have become available.
Assemblage
is a broad term which refers to two and three dimensional art works which combine
diverse materials traditionally not considered as art materials. Such works
are also called collages, (usually when the work is two dimensional)
and may include scraps of paper, cloth, wood, string, or any other materials
selected by the artist. This form was first given credibility when Picasso,
experimented with printed paper, rope, and newsprint combined with painting,
and was also taken up by early twentieth century artists such as
Man
Ray, and Kurt Schwitters.
Marcel Duchamp , a founder of the DaDa movement, combined supposedly unrelated
objects and materials and then gave them deliberately outrageous though evocative
titles such as "Bride
Stripped Bare by her Bachelors." Use of collage and assemblage continued
into the Surrealist movement in the work of Max Ernst, Hanna Hoch, and
Joseph
Cornell. These artists believed that in the newly dawning industrial age,
the use of manufactured materials was an appropriate means of expressing the
realities of the twentieth century.
Found
objects or "objet trouve" were also employed by Duchamp and
Picasso. Manufactured objects were rearranged or placed in a new context in
a way that altered their meaning. Others who have used found objects include
Alexander Calder, and John
Chamberlain. Duane Hanson
and
George Segal combined fiber glass or plaster casts of real people with actual
clothing and furnishings to create "real" environments for their eerily convincing
figures. This use of plaster and fiberglass to replicate real human bodies was a significant
innovation, and a departure from conventional ideas about how sculpture should be done.
Movement in art Since the earliest times artists have
sought to create the illusion of movement in their works, with varying degrees
of success. The invention of time lapse photography and motion pictures introduced
new ideas about the way in which motion could be recorded. Such artists as the
Futurists
(Boccioni,
Severini ,
Balla)
and Marcel Duchamp in his
"Nude Descending a Staircase" attempted to capture movement as an event
in time, showing simultaneous fragments of the process of movement. Literal
movement becomes part of the repertoire of art with the introduction of the
mobile by
Alexander Calder.
By the 1960's Kinetic Art presents us with sculptures driven by motors, wind,
and in due course, by computers. This video
shows the work of digital artist Nathaniel Stern,
an alumni of this department,
and now teaching art at the University of Wisconsin.
Film
and video are of course extremely important media in which movement and
the fourth dimension - time - are key elements. Video and film are also ways to capture the ephemeral performance of kinetic
art, as is the case in this example.
|
|
 |
