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Body Art
When
Duchamp dressed up as his feminine alter ego Rose Selavy,
covered himself with shaving foam to hide features of his body, or had
his head shaved in the shape of a star to be recorded for posterity by
the lens of
Man Ray, he was giving artistic meaning to his body and
transforming it into a work of art. The wit and irony found in
Duchamp's work re-emerged in the early 1960s in the creations of
Piero
Manzoni (1933-63), who in 1961 proposed turning people into living
sculptures by keeping their bodies still and adorning them with
certificates of authenticity. That same year, he also caused an uproar
with his Merda d'artista, which consisted of 90 cans of the
artist's excrement, for sale at the same price, weight for weight, as
gold. However, the Body art that established itself in the later 1960s
and 1970s was characterized by predominantly masochistic attitudes. It
involves the misuse or abuse of the body and condemning existential violence through a demonstration of self-inflicted
suffering. Gina Pane (b. 1939), for example, wounded herself with a
variety of instruments, assigning negative feelings to symbols usually
viewed in the opposite context. The roses in Azione sentimentale
(1974) were not embraced in an exaltation of romanticism but to
show the physical suffering inflicted by the thorns. Even when not
engaged in painful actions, the image of the human body was distorted
and its vitality transformed into a brute force. The Austrian artist
Arnulf Rainer (b. 1929) had himself photographed in unnatural poses
and then accentuated the crudeness by painting violent brushstrokes on
the results. Self-inflicted pain gave way to humorous narcissism in
the work of
Gilbert & George (b. 1943 and 1942 respectively), who
united to proclaim themselves "continuous sculptures" and to
propose their very existence as an artistic continuum.
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Piero Manzoni
(Italian Arte Povera Conceptual Artist, 1933-1963)
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Living Sculpture
1961
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Artist's Breath
1960
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Line 4.90m, December 1959
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Artist's Shit
1961
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The Artists' Breath
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Gina Pane
(1939-1990)
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Action Psyche
1974
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Autoportraits
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Autoportrait |

Terre protegee 2
Pinerolo (Italie)
1970
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Marina Abramovic, Navykani od Giny Pane (Gina Pane's The
Conditioning)
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Sentimental Action
1973
Photo: F.Masson
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Sentimental Action
1973
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Nourriture, feu, actualites T.V.
1973
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Untitled
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Untitled |
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Correspondence art
[Mail art].
Term applied to art sent through the post rather than
displayed or sold through conventional commercial channels,
encompassing a variety of media including postcards, books,
images made on photocopying machines or with rubber stamps,
postage stamps designed by artists, concrete poetry and other
art forms generally considered marginal. Although
Marcel Duchamp,
Kurt Schwitters and the Italian
Futurists have been
cited as its precursors, as a definable international movement
it can be traced to practices introduced in the early 1960s by
artists associated with Fluxus, Nouveau Realisme and the
Gutai group and most specifically to the work of
Ray Johnson. From
the mid-1950s
Johnson posted poetic mimeographed letters to a
select list of people from the art world and figures from
popular culture, which by 1962 he had developed into a network
that became known as the New York Correspondence School of
Art.
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Visual Poetry
Visual poetry was a descendant of the
Futurists free-word style, in
which words were displayed in ways that contravened any of the
traditional norms of order and arrangement on the page. However,
whereas the free words of
Futurists compositions were valued ultimately
as icons, in visual poetry the actual meaning of the words was
indispensable to our understanding of the work. The verbal content was
not in the form of captions or as a support to the images it
accompanied, but was present to introduce meaningful diversions with a
provocative content. These verbal visualizations also took images and
slogans from the mass media
and employed them in an ironic context. Emilio Isgro (b. 1937)
achieved notable results in this field, although he opted for more
personal interpretations than assemblages of words and images.
In his work Dio e un essere perfettissimo (God is a Perfect
Being, 1965) he parodies the link between religion, advertising, and
mass-produced consumer goods. In another Conceptual manifestation, he
deletes entire pages of books, leaving just a few words that gave
evidence of unnecessary verbosity. More attention was given to the
expressive potential of words by the protagonists of Concrete poetry,
who came from literary, philosophical, and musical backgrounds. They
conveyed their intent through patterns of words, letters, and symbols,
rather than through a conventional arrangement of sentences. This
was so with the Gruppo 70, formed in Florence in 1963 and involving
poets and writers such as
Eugenio Miccini and
Lamberto Pignotti (also
members of the literary Gruppo 63) and musicians like
Giuseppe Chiari
(in contact with the diverse artists of Fluxus). This experimentation
in Italy, with contributions also from Vincenzo Accame, Carlo Belloli,
Ugo Carrega, and Martino Oberto, had precedents in work that was
carried out in the late 1950s in Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland. The
style of the Concrete poets can clearly be seen in Schweigen
(Silence, 1968) by Eugen Gomringer (b. 1925). The sudden interruption
in the repetition of the word "schweigen", and the void or
visual gap that it creates, becomes a subtle visualization of the
semantic value of the whole composition.

Eugen Gomringer (b. 1925)
Konkrete
Poesie
Stuttgart 1978
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Minimalism
The term "Minimal art" was coined in 1965 by the critic Richard Wollheim and encompassed a wide diversity of associated styles and concepts,
among them ABC art, Object sculpture, Cool art, Primary structures,
and Literalist art. The trend, which applied particularly to
sculpture, arose in the 1950s, chiefly in the US. Its distinguishing
characteristics were an extreme spareness of form and a minimal
expressive content; this was in violent contrast to the flamboyant
Abstract expressionist style that preceded it. The term is applied
in a precise way to the works of sculptors such as Donald Judd,
Robert
Morris, Carl Andre,
Sol LeWitt, and Tony Smith, which display the same
essentially cold, geometric forms in vast sizes. The sheer scale on
which some were conceived meant that they had a strong relationship
with their surroundings and often assumed an architectural nature,
allowing the spectator to cross or walk along the structure. The
square copper plates that Carl Andre (b. 1935) laid on the floor, or
the smooth and anonymous parallelepipeds of Donald Judd (1928-94) did
not appear so different in concept from the repetitive objects in the
work of
Warhol. However,
Warhol took cultural icons and reproduced
them flatly and without emotion, while the Minimalists wanted to draw
people's attention to extreme formal simplicity, which they believed
was yet 10 be fully appreciated.
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Donald
Judd
(USA 1928 – 1994)
Blog Archive;
Blog Archive; Six
boxes
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Robert
Morris
Untitled, (Pink Felt)
1970;
Untitled, felt, dimensions variable, 1968;
Untitled Felt
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Carl Andre
(American Minimalist Sculptor, born in 1935)
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Equivalent VIII
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Aluminum Steel Plain |

144 Graphite Silence
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Lockblox
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Convex Pyramid
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Chain well
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Modular constructivism
(Modular
constructivism, minimalism)
Modular constructivism is a style of sculpture that emerged in
the
1950s and 1960s and
was associated especially with Erwin Hauer and Norman Carlberg. It is based on carefully structured modules which
allow for intricate and in some cases infinite patterns of repetition,
sometimes used to create limitless, basically planar, screen-like
formations, and sometimes employed to make more multidimensional
structures. Designing these structures involves intensive study of the
combinatorial possibilities of sometimes quite curvilinear and fluidly
shaped modules, creating a seemless, quasi-organic unity that can be
either rounded and self-enclosed, or open and potentially infinite. The
latter designs have proved useful and attractive for use in eye-catching
architectural walls and screens, often featuring complex patterns of
undulating, tissue-like webbing, with apertures which transmit and filter
light, while generating delicate patterns of shadow.
Writing in Architecture Week (August
4, 2004),
Hauer explains that "Continuity and potential infinity have been at the
very center of my sculpture from early on." Hauer made an extensive study of biomorphic form, especially what
he calls "saddle surfaces," which combine convex and concave curvature and
thus allow for smooth self-combination, sometimes in multiple dimensions.
Another inspiration is the sculpture of
Henry Moore, with its fluid curves and porousness.
Hauer's enthusiasm caught the imagination of his colleague at Yale, Norman Carlberg. Both were devoted students of the arch-formalist
Josef Albers. Indeed, from the beginning, there was in this modular
approach to sculpture an implicit formalism and even minimalism which held itself aloof from some of the other artistic
trends of the time, such as the pop art
and post-modernism that were just beginning to emerge. As Carlberg
recalls, within his artistic circle "you analysed, you looked at
something, but you looked at it formally just for what it was and the
message was almost always out of it."
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Erwin Hauer
(b.1926)
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ANALYTICAL PAINTING
In Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of experimentation
took place comparable with that being carried out in the US in
Minimalist painting. Two groups working in this area in France in the
late 1970s were BMPT and Support-Surface, whose precedents could well
have been the series of blue "monochromes" by
Yves Klein (1928-62). A
lack of pictorial content characterizes the work of Giorgio Griffa,
Rodolfo Arico, Claudio Olivieri, and Claudio Verna, while the work of
Piero Manzoni and
Giulio Paolini is full of Conceptual nuances. From
1958 to I960 Manzoni was already producing his white monochrome
Achromes, reducing the picture to a mere rough support soaked in kaolin. Meanwhile,
Paolini demonstrated the basic
elements of painting in his Geometric Design, which was simply
a square, unprimed. unadorned piece of canvas. With similar intentions
in the 1970s, Morales (b. 1942) created diptychs composed of two
canvases, one painted all over, the other left untouched.
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Mec art.
Term coined in 1965 as an abbreviation of ‘mechanical art’
by
Alain Jacquet and
Mimmo Rotella and promoted by the French
critic Pierre Restany (b 1930) to describe paintings
using photographically transferred images that could be
produced in theoretically unlimited numbers. The term was
first publicly used of works by Serge Beguier (b 1934),
Pol Bury, Gianni Bertini (b 1922), Nikos (b
1930),
Jacquet and
Rotella at an exhibition at the Galerie J
in Paris entitled Hommage à Nicéphore Niépce. In
contrast to the use of screenprinting by Americans such as
Robert Rauschenberg and
Andy Warhol to incorporate
photographic images, the Mec artists projected images directly
on to canvases coated with photosensitive emulsion, and they
generally used the method to alter rather than merely
reproduce the original photographic image. In his
Cinétizations, for example,
Bury cut and turned concentric
rings in the original photograph before rephotographing the
image and transferring it on to canvas, as in La Joconde
(1964). Having earlier used the
method of décollage,
Rotella continued to rely on torn
surfaces when he began in 1964 to produce works that he termed
reportages, rephotographing his altered material before
projecting it on to the sensitized canvas.
Jacquet, for his
part, broke down the photographic image in paintings such as
his Déjeuner sur l’herbe series (1964; e.g. Paris,
Fonds N. A. Contemp.) into a pattern of coloured spots to
imitate the process of printing by four-colour separations
used in the mass media.
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Syn.
German artists’ group formed in 1965 in Stuttgart by
Bernd Berner (b 1930), Klaus Jurgen-Fischer (b 1930)
and Eduard Micus (b 1925). They were joined in 1966 by
the painter Erwin Bechtold (b 1925). The driving force
behind the group was Jürgen-Fischer, who had worked on the
editorial staff of Das Kunstwerk and had written an
existentialist philosophical work Der Unfug des Seines
(1955). In 1963 he published a manifesto ‘Was ist komplexe
Malerei?’, establishing the theoretical
basis of Syn. Its members, three of whom (Berner, Jürgen-Fischer
and Micus) had studied under Willi Baumeister at the
Kunstakademie in Stuttgart, shared a common background in
abstraction. Their work ranged from Berner’s highly individual
colour field paintings (e.g. Index of Work 793, 1961) to Bechtold’s hard-edge
abstraction, which combined geometric shapes and amorphous
forms (e.g. Orgina Organa 66–31, 1966). The group’s purpose was to redefine the elements
and means of painting to enable the controlled use of often
extreme techniques within the context of an art that was to be
seen as self-referential. These principles were given voice in
the journal Syn, edited by Jurgen-Fischer, and
eventually set down in programmatic form in 12 points in the
catalogue of their exhibition at the Nassauischer Kunstverein,
Wiesbaden, in 1967. The group’s membership was not fixed and
the core members were joined from time to time by other
non-figurative artists, such as Kumi Sugai and Wilhelm Loth.
The group stopped exhibiting together in 1970.
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Bernd Berner
(b 1930)
Flachenraum
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Eduard Micus
(b 1925)
Komposition Sommer I
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Zebra.
German artists’ group formed in Hamburg in 1965 by the
painters Dieter Asmus (b 1939), Peter Nagel (b
1942), Nikolaus Stortenbecker (b 1940) and Dietmar
Ullrich (b 1940). They were all graduates of the
Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in Hamburg and shared a common
interest in Photorealism. Their work was characterized by the
setting of objects and figures against an indistinct
background. Despite the precise delineation of objects,
sometimes approaching trompe l’oeil in the work of
Nagel, their paintings were not naturalistic. Colour and form
were used in an anti-realistic way, and the artists sometimes
adopted the convention of using monochrome for figures and
bright, arbitrary colours for inanimate objects, as in Asmus’s
Vitamin-Bomb (1976; Bochum, priv. col.). From photography they took the device of cutting
off figures and objects, thus robbing their images of
traditional compositional structure. Stortenbecker, in
particular, employed a precise, minutely detailed realism that
gave his work the impression of being a photograph, rather
than a painted image. In the work of all four artists there
was a tendency to suppress dramatic and expressive content by
means of an apparently objective manner and by their attempts
to dissociate their subjects from any ‘meaning’ that might
have attached to them. This is as true of Ullrich’s paintings
featuring sport (e.g. Swimmer, 1970–71; Neuss, Clemens-Sels-Mus.),
which give the impression of a freeze-frame camera, as it is
of Nagel’s isolated, oversized technological fragments (e.g.
Red Tent, 1972–4). The
members of Zebra exhibited widely in Germany and elsewhere
both independently and as a group.
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Dieter Asmus
Zebra vor Rot, 1968
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Dieter Asmus
(b 1939)
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Dieter Asmus
Frau mit Kreisel, 1967
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Dieter Asmus
Ski-Urlauberin
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SYSTEMIC PAINTING
A branch of Minimal art that relied on the use of simple,
standardized, non-representational forms, "Systemic painting" was the
title of a show organized by the British art critic Lawrence Alloway
in 1966 at New York's Guggenheim Museum. Contributors included the
American artists
Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and
Robert Ryman, as well as
Barnett Newman and
Ad Reinhardt, two leading
exponents of Abstract Expressionism.
Frank Stella (b. 1936) had
already taken ideas from Reinhardt and Newman in the late 1950s as
inspiration for his attempts to reduce painting to its fundamental
essence; his work was to be read solely in terms of form and colour, without any pretence that it revealed the artist's
state of mind. In this respect, Systemic painting displayed similar
intentions to the contemporary Minimal sculpture of artists such as
Carl Andre and Donald Judd.
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Straight Ahead
[Pol. Wprost].
Polish group of artists established in 1966 by five
graduates from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków: Maciej
Bieniasz (b 1938); Zbylut Grzywacz (b 1939);
Barbara Skapska (b 1938), who participated only in the
first exhibition; Leszek Sobocki (b 1934), a member of
the group until 1986, and Jacek Waltos (Jacek Buszynski) (b
1938). They were inspired by the metaphorical paintings of
Adam Hoffmann (b 1918), their teacher at the Academy,
and considered Andrzej Wróblewski as an influential precursor.
Two published manifestos (1966, 1969) clearly defined their
programme: the representation of all subjects, no matter how
brutal or unpleasant, in a manner unrestricted and unveiled by
any conventions. They aimed to speak openly and
straightforwardly about existence and emotions, using a simple
artistic language and rejecting both abstraction and the
Colourism of the followers of the Kapists. Early works that
showed a concern for figuration, such as Grzywacz’s The
Forsaken (oil, 1973–4; Warsaw, N. Mus.), gave way to a
form of realism in which the creative technical process was
deliberately revealed, giving an unfinished appearance to
their work, as in Waltos’s sculptures in the form of hollow
moulds. A form of allegory often co-existed with this harsh
realism in the group’s work, for example in Bieniasz’s dull
Silesian cityscapes and Sobocki’s self-portraits (e.g.
Tattoo, oil, 1978) and prints (e.g. Blood, linocut,
1971; both Warsaw, N. Mus.).
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Archizoom (Associati).
Italian architectural and design partnership formed in 1966 by
Andrea Branzi (b 1939), Gilberto Corretti (b 1941),
Paolo Deganello (b 1940) and Massimo Morozzi. These were joined
by Dario Bartolini and Lucia Bartolini in 1968. They were based in
Florence and were influenced initially by the utopian visions of the
English architectural group Archigram. They achieved international
prominence following appearances at the Superarchitettura
exhibitions of radical architecture held at Pistoia (1966) and Modena
(1967) and organized with the SUPERSTUDIO group. Numerous projects and
essays reflected the group’s search for a new, highly flexible and
technology-based approach to urban design, and in the late 1960s
exhibition and product design began to form a significant part of
their work. The Superonda and Safari sofas, designed for the
Poltronova company, combine modular flexibility with kitsch-inspired
shiny plastic and leopard-skin finishes. Their central aim of
stimulating individual creativity and fantasy was the focus of
installations such as the Centre for Electric Conspiracy, with
its closed, perfumed meditation areas housing exotic objects from
different cultures, and the empty grey room presented at Italy: The
New Domestic Landscape, an exhibition held at MOMA, New York, in
1972. In the latter a girl’s voice describes the light and colour of a
beautiful house that is left to the listener to imagine. Dress is the
theme of the two films (Vestirsi è facile and Come è fatto
il capotto di Gogol ) that the group made shortly before
disbanding in 1974 to follow separate careers.
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Supports-Surfaces.
French group of painters, active from 1967 to 1972. The
group began to evolve through the discussions of Claude Viallat
(b 1936), Daniel Dezeuze (b 1942) and Patrick Saytour (b
1935). Reacting against the notion of the artist as an image
maker and illusionist, they concentrated upon the very
materials that underpinned painting. Dezeuze, for example,
produced works whose main component was a canvas stretcher,
either painted or, as in Frame (1967; Paris, Pompidou),
covered with transparent plastic. In 1969 the three artists
exhibited at the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris,
together with Marcel Alocco (b 1937), Noel Dolla (b
1945), Bernard Pages (b 1940) and Jean-Pierre Pincemin
(b 1944). The group acquired its name in 1970 with the
first Supports-Surfaces exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris. The name was whimsically suggested by
one of its participants, Vincent Bioulès.
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Claude Viallat
(b 1936)
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Sans titre n° 012
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Sans titre n° 226
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Untitled n°224
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Untitled n° 020
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