Art of the 20th Century




Postwar Developments & Contemporary Art

 

Leonard Baskin


EXPLORATION: Balthus




Art Styles in 20th century Art Map


 

The New Avant-garde & Postmodernism

+ Georges Mathieu  Performance Art  Conceptual Art  Art Informel






 

Performance artist, sculptor and curator Oleg Kulik is most renowned for his performances as a dog, including Mad Dog, Reservoir Dog and I Bite America and


Kulik Oleg. His exhibitions and performative events are characterized by "strong" expression and social provocations, where he himself assumes the role of

Brutalism.

Term applied to the architectural style of exposed rough concrete and large modernist block forms, which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s and which derived from the architecture of Le Corbusier. The term originated from béton brut (Fr.: ‘raw concrete’) and was given overtones of cultural significance not only by Le Corbusier’s dictum ‘L’architecture, c’est avec des matières brutes établir des rapports émouvants’ (‘Architecture is the establishing of moving relationships with raw materials’), but also by the art brut of Jean Dubuffet and others, which emphasized the material and heavily impastoed surfaces. The epitome of Brutalism in this original sense is seen in the forms and surface treatment of its first major monument, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation de Grandeur Conforme (1948–54) in Marseille (for another LASDUN, DENYS). The ultimate disgrace of Brutalism in this same sense is to be seen in the innumerable blocks of flats built throughout the world that use the prestige of Le Corbusier’s béton brut as an excuse for low-cost surface treatments. In Le Corbusier’s own buildings exposed concrete is usually very carefully detailed, with particular attention to the surface patterns created by the timber shuttering, and this can be seen in the work of more conscientious followers of the mode such as Lasdun or Atelier 5.

 

Computer art.

Term formerly used to describe any work of art in which a computer was used to make either the work itself or the decisions that determined its form. Computers became so widely used, however, that in the late 20th century the term was applied mainly to work that emphasized the computer’s role. Such calculating tools as the abacus have existed for millennia, and artists have frequently invented mathematical systems to help them to make pictures. The GOLDEN SECTION and Alberti’s formulae for rendering perspective were devices that aspired to fuse realism with idealism in art, while Leonardo da Vinci devoted much time to applying mathematical principles to image-making. After centuries of speculations by writers, and following experiments in the 19th century, computers began their exponential development in the aftermath of World War II, when new weapon-guidance systems were adapted for peaceful applications, and the term ‘cybernetics’ was given currency by Norbert Wiener. Artists exploited computers’ ability to execute mathematical formulations or ‘algorithms’ from 1950, when Ben F. Laposky (b 1930) used an analogue computer to generate electronic images on an oscilloscope. Once it was possible to link computers to printers, programmers often made ‘doodles’ between their official tasks. From the early 1960s artists began to take this activity more seriously and quickly discovered that many formal decisions could be left to the computer, with results that were particularly valued for their unpredictability. From the mid-1970s the painter Harold Cohen (b 1928) developed a sophisticated programme, AARON, which generated drawings that the artist then completed as coloured paintings. Although the computer became capable of that task as well, Cohen continued to hand-colour computer-generated images

 

Fibre art.

Collective term, coined in the 1970s, for creative, experimental fibre objects. A wide range of techniques is used, often in combinations that encompass both traditional (e.g. felting, knotting) and modern (e.g. photographic transfer) practices. The eclectic range of materials includes many not previously associated with textiles, such as paper, wood, iridescent film, nylon mesh and wire.

 

Psychedelic art


OPTICAL ART

Kinetic Art

 

Alexander Calder	1898-1976	American
George Rickey	1907-2002	American
Jean Tinguely	1925-1991	Swiss
Julio Le Parc	Born 1928	Argentine

Pop Art - Jasper Johns, Yves Klein,

Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine.





Conceptual Art

HAPPENINGS - Lucas Samaras (sm.avantgarde)


Fluxus



PERFORMANCE ART

Gutai group

Body Art

Visual Poetry

LAND ART


Arte Povera - Lucio Fontana





Minimalism-  Frank Stella



Transavanguardia

Graffiti
 

Psychedelic art is art inspired by the psychedelic experience induced by drugs such as LSD, Mescaline, and Psilocybin. The word "psychedelic" (coined by British psychologist Humphrey Osmond) means "mind manifesting". By that definition all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered "psychedelic". However, in common parlance "Psychedelic Art" refers above all to the art movement of the 1960s counterculture. Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to psychedelic rock music. Concert posters, album covers, lightshows, murals, comic books, underground newspapers and more reflected not only the kaleidoscopically swirling patterns of LSD hallucinations, but also revolutionary political, social and spiritual sentiments inspired by insights derived from these psychedelic states of consciousness.

Psychedelic Art is informed by the notion that altered states of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs are a source of artistic inspiration. The psychedelic art movement is similar to the surrealist movement in that it prescribes a mechanism for obtaining inspiration. Whereas the mechanism for surrealism is the observance of dreams, the psychedelic artist turns to his drug induced hallucinations. Both movements have strong ties to important developments in science. Whereas the surrealist was fascinated by Freud's theory of the unconscious, the psychedelic artist has been literally "turned on" by Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD.

The early examples of "Psychedelic Art" are literary rather than visual. It should also be noted that these came from writers involved in the Surrealist movement. Antonin Artaud writes of his Peyote experience in "Journey to the Land of the Tarahumara" (1937). Henri Michaux wrote "Miserable Miracle" (1956), to describe his experiments with Mescaline and also hashish.

Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" (1954), and "Heaven and Hell" (1956), remain definitive statements on the psychedelic experience.

Albert Hofmann and his colleagues at Sandoz Laboratories were convinced immediately after it's discovery in 1943 of the power and promise of LSD. For two decades following it's discovery LSD was marketed by Sandoz as an important drug for psychological and neurological research. Hofmann saw the drug's potential for poets and artists as well, and took great interest in the German poet, Ernst Junger's psychedelic experiments.

Early artistic experimentation with LSD was conducted in a clinical context by Los Angeles based psychiatrist Oscar Janiger. Janiger asked a group of 50 different artists to each do a painting from life of a subject of the artist's choosing. They were subsequently asked to do the same painting while under the influence of LSD. The two paintings were compared by Janiger and also the artist. The artists almost unanimously reported LSD to be an enhancement to their creativity.

Ultimately it seems that psychedelics would be most warmly embraced by the American counterculture. Beatnik poets Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs became fascinated by psychedelic drugs as early as the 1950s as evidenced by "The Yage Letters" (1963). The Beatniks recognized the role of psychedelics as sacred inebriants in Native American religious ritual, and also had an understanding of the philosophy of the surrealist and symbolist poets who called for a "complete disorientation of the senses" (to paraphrase Arthur Rimbaud). They knew that altered states of consciousness played a role in Eastern Mysticism. They were hip to psychedelics as psychiatric medicine. LSD was the perfect catalyst to electrify the eclectic mix of ideas assembled by the Beats into a cathartic, mass-distributed panacea for the soul of the succeeding generation.

 

 

The term Outsider Art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for Art Brut (which literally translates as "Raw Art" or "Rough Art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane asylum inmates.

While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term "Outsider Art" is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or Naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as Outsider Artists have little or no contact with the institutions of the mainstream art world; in many cases, their work is "discovered" only after their deaths. Much Outsider Art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.

Outsider Art has emerged as a successful art marketing category (an annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1992); thus the term is sometimes misapplied as a catch-all marketing label for art created by people outside the "art world" mainstream, regardless of their circumstances or the content of their work.

Interest in the art of insane asylum inmates had begun to grow in the 1920s. In 1921 Dr. Walter Morgenthaler published his book Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist) on Adolf Wölfli, a psychotic mental patient in his care. Wölfli had spontaneously taken up drawing, and this activity seemed to calm him. His most outstanding work is an illustrated epic of 45 volumes in which he narrates his own imaginary life story. With 25,000 pages, 1,600 illustrations, and 1,500 collages, it is a monumental work. He also produced a large number of smaller works, some of which were sold or given as gifts. His work is on display at the Adolf Wölfli Foundation in the Museum of Fine Art, Berne. A defining moment was the publication of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the mentally ill) in 1922, by Dr Hans Prinzhorn.

French artist Jean Dubuffet was particularly struck by Bildnerei der Geisteskranken and began his own collection of such art, which he called Art Brut or Raw Art. In 1948 he formed the Compagnie de l'Art Brut along with other artists including André Breton. The collection he established became known as the Collection de l'Art Brut. It contains thousands of works and is now permanently housed in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dubuffet characterized Art Brut as:

"Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses - where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere - are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professions. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade." - Jean Dubuffet. Place à l'incivisme (Make way for Incivism). Art and Text no.27 (Dec. 1987 - Feb 1988). p.36

Dubuffet argued that 'culture', that is mainstream culture, managed to assimilate every new development in art, and by doing so took away whatever power it might have had. The result was to asphyxiate genuine expression. Art Brut was his solution to this problem - only Art Brut was immune to the influences of culture, immune to being absorbed and assimilated, because the artists themselves were not willing or able to be assimilated.

The interest in "outsider" practices among twentieth century artists and critics can be seen as part of a larger emphasis on the rejection of established values within the modernist art milieu. The early part of the 20th Century gave rise to cubism and the Dada, Constructivist and Futurist movements in art, all of which involved a dramatic movement away from cultural forms of the past. Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, for example, abandoned "painterly" technique to allow chance operations a role in determining the form of his works, or simply to re-contextualize existing "readymade" objects as art. Mid-century artists, including Pablo Picasso, looked "outside" the traditions of high culture for inspiration, drawing from the artifacts of "primitive" societies, the unschooled artwork of children, and vulgar advertising graphics. Dubuffet's championing of the art of the insane and others at the margins of society is yet another example of avant-garde art challenging established cultural values.

A number of terms are used to describe art that is loosely understood as "outside" of official culture. Definitions of these terms vary, and there are areas of overlap between them. The editors of Raw Vision, a leading journal in the field, suggest that "Whatever views we have about the value of controversy itself, it is important to sustain creative discussion by way of an agreed vocabulary". Consequently they lament the use of Outsider Artist to refer to almost any untrained artist. "It is not enough to be untrained, clumsy or naïve. Outsider Art is virtually synonymous with Art Brut in both spirit and meaning, to that rarity of art produced by those who do not know its name."

• Art Brut: Raw art, 'raw' in that it has not been through the 'cooking' process: the art world of art schools, galleries, museums. Originally art by psychotic individuals who existed almost completely outside culture and society. Strictly speaking it refers only to the Collection de l'Art Brut.
• Neuve Invention: Used to describe artists who, although marginal, have some interaction with mainstream culture. They may be doing art part-time for instance. The expression was coined by Dubuffet too; strictly speaking it refers only to a special part of the Collection de l'Art Brut.
• Folk art: Folk art originally suggested crafts and decorative skills associated with peasant communities in Europe - though presumably it could equally apply to any indigenous culture. It has broadened to include any product of practical craftsmanship and decorative skill - everything from chain-saw animals to hub-cap buildings. A key distinction between folk and outsider art is that folk art typically embodies traditional forms and social values, where outsider art stands in some marginal relationship to society's mainstream.
• Marginal Art/Art Singulier: Essentially the same as Neue Invention; refers to artists on the margins of the art world.
• Visionary art/Intuitive art: Raw Vision Magazine's preferred general terms for Outsider Art. It describes them as deliberate umbrella terms. However Visionary Art unlike other definitions here can often refer to the subject matter of the works, which includes images of a spiritual or religious nature. Intuitive art is probably the most general term available. The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is dedicated to the collection and display of such artwork.
• Naïve Art: Another grey area. Untrained artists who aspire to "normal" artistic status, i.e. they have a much more conscious interaction with the mainstream art world than do Outsider Artists.
• Visionary environments: Buildings and sculpture parks built by visionary artists - range from decorated houses, to large areas incorporating a large number of individual sculptures with a tightly associated theme. Examples include Watts Towers by Simon Rodia, and The Palais Ideal by Ferdinand Cheval.
• Irrealism: Nelson Goodman

• Nek Chand (1924- ) is an Indian artist, famous for building the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, a forty acre (160,000m²) sculpture garden in the city of Chandigarh, India.
• Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) was a country postman in Hauterives, south of Lyon, France. Motivated by a dream, he spent 33 years constructing the Palais Ideal. Half organic building, half massive sculpture, it was constructed from stones collected on his postal round, held together with chicken wire, cement, and lime.
• Henry Darger (1892-1973) was a solitary man who was orphaned and institutionalised as a child. In the privacy of his Chicago apartment, he produced 15,000 pages of text and hundreds of large scale illustrations, including maps, collaged photos and watercolors that depict his child heroes "the Vivian Girls" in the midst of battle scenes that combine imagery of the US Civil War with fanciful monsters.

• Madge Gill (1882-1961), was an English mediumistic artist who made thousands of drawings "guided" by a spirit she called "Myrninerest" (my inner rest).
• Alexander Lobanov (1924-2003) was a deaf and autistically withdrawn Russian known for detailed and self-aggrandizing self-portraits: paintings, photographs and quilts, which usually include images of large guns.
• Martin Ramirez (1895-1963), a Mexican outsider artist who spent most of his adult life institutionalized in a California mental hospital (he had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic). He developed an elaborate iconography featuring repeating shapes mixed with images of trains and Mexican folk figures.
• Achilles Rizzoli (1896-1981) was employed as an architectural draftsman. He lived with his mother near San Francisco, California. After his death, a huge collection of elaborate drawings were discovered, many in the form of maps and architectural renderings that described a highly personal fantasy exposition, including portraits of his mother as a neo-baroque building.
• Judith Scott (1943-2005) was born deaf and with Down Syndrome. After taking a fiber art class at an art institute for the disabled, she began to produce objects wrapped in many layers of string and fibers.
• Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), a Swiss artist, was confined to a psychiatric hospital for most of his adult life during which time he produced a vast amount of drawings, text and musical composition. Wölfli was the first well-known "outsider artist," and he remains closely associated with the label.

 

Contemporary Realism

America, Emerged in the Late 1960's/Early 1970's

Contemporary Realism is the straightforward realistic approach to representation which continues to be widely practiced in this post-abstract era. It is different from Photorealism, which is somewhat exaggerated and ironic and conceptual in its nature.

Contemporary Realists form a disparate group, but what they share is that they are literate in the concepts of Modern Art but choose to work in a more traditional form. Many Contemporary Realists actually began as abstract painters, having come through an educational system dominated by an professors and theorists dismissive of representational painting.

Among the best-known artists associated with this movement are William Bailey, Neil Welliver and Philip Pearlstein. There is an identifiable "group" of Contemporary Realists, but we have used a fairly loose definition to allow inclusion of a larger number of 20th-century realists.

 

Photorealism 1960's to 1970's

 Photorealism is a movement which began in the late 1960's, in which scenes are painted in a style closely resembling photographs. The subject matter is frequently banal and without particular interest; the true subject of a photorealist work is the way in which we interpret photographs and paintings in order to create an internal representation of the scene depicted.

The leading members of the Photorealist movement are Richard Estes and Chuck Close. Estes specializes in street scenes with elaborate reflections in window-glass; Close does enormous portraits of usually expressionless faces. Other photorealists also typically specialize in one particular subject: horses, trucks, diners, etc.
 

John Kacere	1920-1999	American Painter
Duane Hanson	1925-1996	American Sculptor
Ralph Goings	Born 1928	American Painter
Audrey Flack	Born 1931	American Painter/Sculptor
Malcolm Morley	Born 1931	British/American Painter/Sculptor
Robert Bechtle	Born 1932	American Painter
Richard Estes	Born 1932	American Painter
Idelle Weber	Born 1932	American Painter
Richard McLean	Born 1934	American Painter
Charles Bell	1935-1995	American Painter
Robert Cottingham	Born 1935	American Painter
Carolyn Brady	Born 1937	American Painter
Ron Kleemann	Born 1937	American Painter
John Salt	Born 1937	British Painter
John Baeder	Born 1938	American Painter
Tom Blackwell	Born 1938	American Painter
Chuck Close	Born 1940	American Painter
Brendan Neiland	Born 1941	British Painter
Ben Schonzeit	Born 1942	American Painter
Don Eddy	Born 1944	American Painter
Ian Hornak	1944-2002	American Painter
Davis Cone	Born 1950	American Painter
James Torlakson	Born 1951	American Painter
Richard Phillips 1962	Born 1962	American Painter

 

Neo-Humanist or Neo-Figurative Art

Neo-figurative art describes an expressionist revival in modern form of figurative art. The term neo- & figurative emerged in the 1960s in Mexico to represent a new form of figurative art.

Famous Neo-figurative artists include:
Fernando Botero
Antonio Berni
Oswaldo Viteri
Rebekah Boyer
Benjamin Canas

Post-modernism.

Term used to characterize developments in architecture and the arts in the 1960s and after, when there was a clear challenge to the dominance of modernism; the term was applied predominantly from the 1970s to architecture and somewhat later to the decorative and visual arts. It was first used as early as 1934 by Spanish writer Federico de Onis, although it was not then used again until Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History in 1938 (published after World War II); Toynbee and others saw the ‘post-modern’ phenomenon in largely negative terms, as an irrational reaction to modernist rationalism. The term was used sporadically thereafter in the fields of literary criticism and music. In the 1970s, however, it came into wide use in connection with architecture to denote buildings that integrate modernism with a selective eclecticism, often of classical or Neo-classical origin. In painting the term took hold later, peaking in the mid-1980s in the USA to describe work that offered a more biting critique of current cultural values than that offered in architecture. If the attachment of the label itself is ignored, however, the developments may be perceived as continuous with the anti-modernism of the 1960s, which readily related to the growing pluralism in art and architecture that came to be associated with Post-modernism from the early 1980s.

 

Contemporary Realism

America, Emerged in the Late 1960's/Early 1970's

Contemporary Realism is the straightforward realistic approach to representation which continues to be widely practiced in this post-abstract era. It is different from Photorealism, which is somewhat exaggerated and ironic and conceptual in its nature.

Contemporary Realists form a disparate group, but what they share is that they are literate in the concepts of Modern Art but choose to work in a more traditional form. Many Contemporary Realists actually began as abstract painters, having come through an educational system dominated by an professors and theorists dismissive of representational painting.

Among the best-known artists associated with this movement are William Bailey, Neil Welliver and Philip Pearlstein. There is an identifiable "group" of Contemporary Realists, but we have used a fairly loose definition to allow inclusion of a larger number of 20th-century realists.

 

Takis, Magnetic Fields (detail), 1969. Guggenheim Museum, New York. This Kinetic sculpture is based on the activation and deactivation of a magnet which causes a reaction of the other negative

and positive magnets, variously in states of repulsion or attraction. The composition created by the magnets changes in accordance with the variation of the magnetic field.

 

Sol Lewitt, Two Open Modular Cubes/Half Off, 1975. This large sculpture, or "structure", by the American Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt impresses both with its simplicity and its geometric forms. Its very construction invites intellectual curiosity and engagement rather than an emotional response.

New Directions

Of the prominent movements, Kinetic art favoured mass-production, with materials and techniques borrowed from industrial science; meanwhile, Pop art took its inspiration from the iconographic repertoire of the consumer world. However, neither of these new artistic tendencies wanted the viewer to be passive or alienated. Indeed, never before had the public been so encouraged to participate. While Art Informel had assimilated the experiences of Expressionism and Surrealism, the artists of the new avant-garde drew on the infinite inventions of Dadaism, which had attempted to break down all the barriers between art and life and to make them interchangeable. The ■'ready-made" (the mass-produced article elevated to the status of "art"), which had already surfaced in the art of Neo-Dada and Xouveau Realisme, now appeared in a new guise under the banner of Pop art.

Other revolutionary initiatives that were taken by the Dadaists emerged in the various forms of expression of Conceptual art. For the first time, art was to be found away from its usual location in a gallery and was presented in the open air in town squares or in remote, inaccessible parts

of the world. It was seen on screen, for example, or in the street in the form of an artist pretending to be a sculpture. Towns and cities worldwide were becoming focal points for the new trends. In the early 1960s, the development of Pop art took place predominantly in the US, while

Europe, previously the centre of artistic change, lagged behind. A decade later, the art scene, as represented by its important events and leading groups, had become more international. However, by going down this road to total freedom and accessibility, many of these avant-garde movements paradoxically failed in their pursuit of the Dada connection between art and life. Art became distanced from the public, lost in introspection and experimentation.

 

OPTICAL ART

Optical art, or Op art, made its first official appearance in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of "The Responsive Eye" show organized by William Seitz.

Participants included Victor Vasarely (1908-97), Jesus Rafael Soto (b. 1923), and Bridget Riley (b. 193D. The novelty of Op art works lay in the optical effects and illusions they contained, such as the illusion of movement or volume on a flat, static surface. For the effect to be successful, however, Op art required the participation of the spectator. This was not active participation as in some Kinetic art, nor audience participation as in certain happenings, but rather a psychological form of collaboration that would allow the illusions created by the artist to be experienced by the viewer. By concentrating on the picture or by moving to the best spot in order to view it, the spectator actually established contact with the work, often remaining transfixed by its hypnotic power. The images by British artist Bridget Riley capture the eye and invite it into a web of sinuous lines that look almost alive (Current 1964).

 

Op art.

Term used as an abbreviation of ‘optical art’ to refer to painting and sculpture that exploits the illusions or optical effects of perceptual processes. It was used for the first time by a writer in an unsigned article in Time magazine (23 Oct 1964) and entered common usage to designate, in particular, two-dimensional structures with strong psychophysiological effects. The exhibition, The Responsive Eye, held in 1965 at MOMA, New York, under the direction of William C. Seitz, showed side by side two types of visual solicitations already practised by artists for some time: perceptual ambiguity created by coloured surfaces, then at the fore in the USA, and the coercive suggestion of movement created by lines and patterns in black and white, used abundantly by European artists engaged in KINETIC ART. The outstanding Op artists included Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Jesús Soto, Yaacov Agam, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Julio Le Parc and François Morellet.

 

Kinetic Art

The 1961 "Nouvelle Tendance" (New Tendency) show in Zagreb exhibited the diverse Constructivist tendencies that were coming to the fore in Western Europe. Participants included the GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel) in Paris, Gruppo N in Padua, and Gruppo T in Milan, all of whom were motivated by the desire to make art more accessible by demonstrating the ways in which it is perceived. Their methods sought to bring art closer to a wider public by involving the viewer directly. The sculptures, or assemblages, which were devised with mathematical

precision, did not bear the artist's stylistic mark or speak of any emotions but stood as basic demonstrations of themselves. Kinetic art incorporated actual moving parts (as opposed to Op art, which implied motion in its images).

The movement was derived either from the intrinsic nature of the objects, such as mobiles, or from devices causing the motion. Sometimes the public was invited to intervene in the workings of the sculpture. This is the case with Oggetto a composizione autocondotta (Object with Self-Regulating Composition, 1959) by Enzo Mari (b. 1932), in which geometric shapes enclosed in a glass container change their arrangement according to alterations made by the spectator. Kinetic works were completely devoid of the sacred "do not touch" aura usually surrounding art and demanded more involvement than the passive acceptance usually associated with viewing art. The artists themselves wanted to avoid the narcissistic self-involvement of some Art Informel artists and

to lose their identity within the discipline of a more collective activity. However, these hopes were soon to be clashed by the rapid rise to fame of certain members of the group.

 

Kinetic art.

Term applied to works of art concerned with real and apparent movement. It may encompass machines, mobiles and light objects in actual motion; more broadly, it also includes works in virtual or apparent movement, which could be placed under the denomination of OP ART. Kinetic art originated between 1913 and 1920, when a few isolated figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Vladimir Tatlin and NAUM GABO conceived their first works and statements to lay stress on mechanical movement. At about the same time Tatlin, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Man Ray constructed their first mobiles, and Thomas Wilfred and Adrian Bernard Klein, with Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and Kurt Schwerdtfeger at the Bauhaus, began to develop their colour organs and projection techniques in the direction of an art medium consisting of light and movement (1921–3). Although László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Calder pursued more or less continuous artistic research into actual motion in the 1920s and 1930s, it was only after 1950 that the breakthrough into kinetic art, and its subsequent expansion, finally took place. Such artists as Pol Bury, Jean Tinguely, Nicolas Schöffer and Harry Kramer played a leading part in this development as far as mechanical movement was concerned; Calder, Bruno Munari, Kenneth Martin (iv) and George Rickey in the domain of the MOBILE; and Wilfred, Frank Joseph Malina (1912–81), Schöffer and Gyorgy Kepes (b 1906) in that of lumino-kinetic experiment.

 

Mobile.

Form of kinetic sculpture, incorporating an element or elements set in motion by natural external forces. The term, which is also sometimes used more loosely to describe sculptural works with the capacity for motorized or hand-driven mechanical movement, was first used by Marcel Duchamp in 1932 to describe works by Alexander Calder . The notable feature of Calder’s sculptures, which were suspended by threads, was that their movement was caused solely by atmospheric forces, such as wind and warm air currents. Movement was not, therefore, merely suggested by the treatment, as in traditional sculpture, but took place directly and unpredictably in the object. Because the kinetic sequences of the mobile could not be fixed or programmed, predictability and repeatability were eliminated.

 

Pop Art

In the early 1960s, an artistic trend developed in the US that was to represent a complete departure from Action painting, the dominant movement of the previous decade. While Action painting had given pride of place to the inner impulses of the artist and to autobiographical motivation and subjectivism, the new tendency was to accentuate the sheer neutrality of everyday consumer goods. But the images were not the actual objects, or "ready-mades", as found in Dadaism, but a reworking of them, greatly elaborated in dimension or colour. Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) blew up seemingly banal items into gigantic sizes, transforming trowels, tubes of toothpaste, and clothes-pegs into huge sculptures. He also created brighth' painted plaster sculptures of desserts, cakes, and pieces of meat and made models of hard, unyielding objects, such as light switches and typewriters, in soft, pliable materials. Andy Warhol (1928-87), on the other hand, took well-known images from popular culture such as cans of Campbell's Soup, Coca-Cola bottles, or photographs of stars who had become legends (Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe) and turned them into prints or paintings that shared the repetitive, mass-produced feel of commercial "art". The mechanical insistence of repetition also succeeded in removing meaning from images that were in themselves very dramatic. This is the case with the symbols of death and social struggle that Warhol depicts in Orange Disaster (1963) and Race Riot (1964); they are reduced to the status of decorative elements. If Warhol annihilated the

significance of an image by-constant, unvarying repetition, then Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97) emphasized its importance, taking the image out of its context and reproducing it on a large scale. Thus a comic strip, usually a disposable piece of light reading, was suddenly elevated to the status of a work of art. Tom Wesselman (b. 1931) portrayed female nudes in commonplace environments as if they, too, were consumer objects, lacking facial expression and recognizable only by their

exaggerated erotic features. Striking a more existential note. American sculptor George Segal (b. 1924) made plaster-cast models, taken from life, of people frozen in varied poses or in the act of carrying out certain tasks. These figures, in their isolated stillness, seem to convey modern man's alienation from daily life.

 

Pop art.

International movement in painting, sculpture and printmaking. The term originated in the mid-1950s at the ICA, London, in the discussions held by the INDEPENDENT GROUP concerning the artefacts of popular culture. This small group included the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi as well as architects and critics. Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990), the critic who first used the term in print in 1958, conceived of Pop art as the lower end of a popular-art to fine-art continuum, encompassing such forms as advertising, science-fiction illustration and automobile styling. Hamilton defined Pop in 1957 as: ‘Popular (designed for a mass audience); Transient (short term solution); Expendable (easily forgotten); Low Cost; Mass Produced; Young (aimed at Youth); Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; and Big Business’. Hamilton set out, in paintings such as £he (1958–61; London, Tate), to explore the hidden connotations of imagery taken directly from advertising and popular culture, making reference in the same work to pin-ups and domestic appliances as a means of commenting on the covert eroticism of much advertising presentation (for illustration see HAMILTON, RICHARD).

 

• David Hockney
• Sir Peter Blake
• Derek Boshier
• Patrick Caulfield
• Alan D'arcangelo
• Jim Dine
• Marisol Escobar
• Alfred Gockel
• Red Grooms
• Philip Guston
• Keith Haring
• Richard Hamilton
• Robert Indiana
• Jasper Johns
• Allen Jones
• Nicholas Krushenick
• Yayoi Kusama
• Roy Lichtenstein
• Peter Max
• John McHale
• Takashi Murakami
• Julian Opie
• Claes Oldenburg
• Eduardo Paolozzi
• Sigmar Polke
• Hariton Pushwagner
• Mel Ramos
• Robert Rauschenberg
• James Rosenquist
• Ed Ruscha
• George Segal
• Aya Takano
• Wayne Thiebaud
• Andy Warhol
• Tom Wesselmann
• William Eggleston
• Richard Lindner

 

POP ART IN BRITAIN

At the "This is Tomorrow'' exhibition of 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, a photographic collage by Richard Hamilton (b. 1922) marked the debut of British Pop art, later becoming a virtual manifesto of the movement. The collage's very title — Just what is it that makes todays homes so different, so appealing? — hinted at the satire to be found in the work. It contained in its interior setting various symbols of popular mass culture - from the body-builder in the foreground and the cover girl on the divan to the television and various electrical appliances, and the cinema signs and posters glimpsed through the window. While these are all recognizable elements of daily life, they look unnatural, resembling items in a shop display.

A critical attitude towards the values of consumer society was an underlying theme of British Pop art, as opposed to the neutral stance that characterized American Pop art. Pop artists in Britain regarded contemporary life from a distance and depicted it with a critical eye, while those in the US seemed to

restrict their work to live, "unedited" recordings of consumer society. Subtle irony permeates the work of Peter Blake (b. 1932). David Hockney Cb. 1937), and Allen Jones (b. 1937). Jones reproduced the iconographic repertory of

the female body as viewed in soft porn magazines, with the pictorial synthesis of a billboard.

POP ART IN ITALY

When American Pop art was first seen in Italy at the Venice Biennial exhibition of 1964, it provoked a strong reaction from the authorities, and the President of the Republic refused to participate in the opening ceremony. However, the works included revealed clear links with the experiments being carried out by certain Italian

artists, such as Enrico Baj, Tano Festa, Mimmo Rotella, and Mario Schifano. The subject matter varied between the two currents, simply because of the differing economic and cultural backgrounds of the artists. The American artists favoured consumer objects, whereas Italian Pop art was often based on a satirical observation of past art movements and masterpieces. In Michelangelo according to (1967) by Tano Festa (1938-88), the plasticity of Michelangelo's style is flattened into a polka-dot decoration, while

in Futurism Revisited (1966) by Mario Schifano (b. 1934), the historic photograph of the Futurist group led by Marinetti loses its original documentary value with the deletion of the subjects' faces.

 

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kosuth's work operates on three levels: the chair is at once real, virtual (photographed), and described in words.

 

Conceptual Art

Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913) did more than transfer attention from the imitation of an object to the object itself: it opened up the way for the "ready-made",

which would prove so important in the second half of the century for the Neo-Dadaists and Nouveau Realistes, and

exploited the potential of raising everyday objects to new levels of aesthetic worth. The Conceptual artists looked back to Duchamp and his principle of considering the concept more important than the artistic process. They devoted themselves to viewing the art object as only the inevitable visualization of the idea that generated it. In One and Three Chairs (1965), for example, American experimental artist Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) displays an actual chair, a photograph of a chair, and a written definition of the word from a dictionary, drawing attention to the notion of appearances and concepts. In this rather cerebral artistic dimension, the power of the artist is accentuated despite his apparent absence, for even though the active presence of the artist is minimized, his role

as producer or director is in turn heightened. The work Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto (Young Man looking at Lorenzo Lotto, 1967) by Giulio Paolini (b. 1940) is a simple photographic reproduction on canvas of a portrait by the Venetian painter Lorenzo

Lotto. The title, alluding to the original 16th-century work, is slightly odd and thought-provoking itself. If the young man in the portrait is looking at Lorenzo Lotto, then anyone in front of the picture can identify themselves with Lotto, i.e. the painter of the portrait. Paolini's work, therefore, comprises an imaginary situation dictated by the title. Its impact rests on the possible momentary union of spectator and painter, based on the idea that Lorenzo Lotto could be transferred through time and space while painting his model. Conceptual art frequently posed such enigmas, often using the most simple of ideas to set off a chain of far wider questioning. More dramatic projects, however, were not ruled out. At the Venice Bienniale in

1972, Gino De Dominicis (b. 1947) exhibited a mentally ill young boy, who was seated on a chair to be viewed by the visitors. Meanwhile, Antonio Paradiso (b. 1936) organized a "Performance" that consisted of a bull mating with a mechanical cow.

 

HAPPENINGS AND PERFORMANCE ART

Happenings were a hybrid form of art, taking their inspiration freely from theatrical, musical, literary, pictorial, and sculptural methods of expression. It was already an established trend in the 1950s, but only in the following decade did it receive serious widespread attention. More or less simultaneous experiments were carried out

by the Japanese Gutai group, which was active in Osaka from 1954, and by the American artist Allan Kaprow (b. 1927). He was the first to use the term "happening" to define apparently improvised events that featured collaborators who had, in fact, been briefed beforehand. While these events were not totally spontaneous and were dictated by a plan, the final outcome was never intended to be predictable. Artists from other fields who dedicated their energies to happenings were the exponents of Pop art Jim Dine (TheSmiling Workman, I960) and Claes Oldenburg (The Store, 1961), and the Fluxus group. This included artists from various backgrounds, among them Daniel Spoerri (Nouveau Realiste), George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Ben Vautier, and Joseph Beuys (working in Conceptual fields), and Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell (founders of video art). Happenings exerted a strong influence on theatre and contemporary dance, offering an alternative to more traditional forms of stage direction and

choreography. The expressive freedom of Performance art inspired the Off Broadway theatre group and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, whose collaboration with John Cage (avant-garde musician and member of Fluxus) led to a freer interpretation of the relationship between the body, music, and the stage. The exponents of

the Wiener Aktionismus were authors of particularly extreme happenings and performances, which were akin to behavioural research. The sequences performed by Herman Nitsch (b. 1938), founder of the Orgien Mysterien Theater in the late 1950s, were so gruesome that they verged on outright acts of sacrilege: in what appeared as

purging rituals, the participants were covered in the blood of sacrificial animals. Gunter Brus (b. 1938), wrapped himself in bandages and simulated epileptic fits (Ana. 1964) or defecated in public (Scheiss-Aktion. 1967), while Rudolph Schwarzkogler (1949-69) would perform self-deprecating acts, such as smearing his body with blood and excrement. His suicide was interpreted by some as the final act of a performance of self-destruction.

 

Following the late 1950s, a happening was a performance, event or situation meant to be considered as art. Happenings could take place anywhere, were often multi-disciplinary, often lacked a narrative and frequently sought to involve the audience in some way. Key elements of happenings were planned, but artists would sometimes retain room for improvisation.

In the later sixties, probably due to film depiction of the Hippy sub-culture, the term was used much less specifically to mean any gathering of interest, from a pool hall meetup or a jamming of just a few young people to a beer blast or fancy formal party.

History

 

Origins

Allan Kaprow first coined the term happening in the Spring of 1957 at an art picnic at George Segal's farm to describe the art pieces that were going on. Happening first appeared in print in the Winter 1958 issue of the Rutgers University undergraduate literary magazine, Anthologist. The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the U.S., Germany, and Japan. Jack Kerouac referred to Kaprow as "the Happenings man," and an ad showing a woman floating in outer space declared, "I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere."

Kaprow’s piece 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) is commonly cited as the first happening, although that distinction is sometimes given to a 1952 performance of Theater Piece No. 1 at Black Mountain College by John Cage, one of Kaprow's teachers in the mid-1950s. Accounts of exactly what this performance involved differ, but most agree that Cage recited poetry and read lectures, M. C. Richards read some of her poetry, Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played phonograph records, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano and Merce Cunningham danced. All these things took place at the same time, among the audience rather than on a stage. Happenings flourished in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Key contributors to the form included Carolee Schneemann, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of their work is documented in Michael Kirby's book Happenings (1966).

 

Around the world

In Britain, the first happenings were organised in Liverpool by the poet and painter Adrian Henri. The most important event was the Albert Hall “Poetry Incarnation” on June 11, 1965, where an audience of 7,000 people witnessed and participated in performances by some of the leading avant-garde young British and American poets of the day (see British Poetry Revival and Poetry of the United States). One of the participants, Jeff Nuttall, went on to organise a number of further happenings, often working with his friend Bob Cobbing, sound poet and performance poet.

In Belgium, the first happenings were organized around 1965–1968 in Antwerp, Brussels and Ostend by artists Hugo Heyrman and Panamarenko.

In the Netherlands Provo organized happenings around the little statue "Het Lieverdje" on the Spui, a square in the centre of Amstersam, from 1966 till 1968. Police often raided these events.

In Australia, the Yellow House Artist Collective in Sydney housed 24-hour happenings throughout the early 1970s.

Behind the Iron Curtain, in Poland, in the second half of 1980s, a student-based happening movement Orange Alternative founded by Major Waldemar Fydrych became known for its much attended happenings (over 10 thousand participants at one time) aimed against the military regime led by General Jaruzelski and the fear blocking the Polish society ever since the Martial Law had been imposed in December 1981.

 

Another form

By 1999, another form of the happening appeared in Brussels, Belgium, created by students of the Free University of Brussels (ULB). The meaning of this form of the happening is that things happen, and sometimes one can't do anything about it. It is presented in an everyday, every time, everywhere "game" where people can constrain other people to do something or to undergo a certain situation. This is done by simply saying the word "happening" before one takes action on a person or forces him to do something. When someone has said "happening" the "victim" has no choice but to be a temporary puppet of the Happeninger (the one who's doing the happening) and not answering back. Revenge has no place in this game. The only way to avoid playing is to say "no way", showing the index finger in a horizontal position when you suspect someone is about to perform a happening on you. The safety time implied by the "no way" is not precisely defined, it is contextual.

 

Performance art.

Descriptive term applied to ‘live’ presentations by artists. It was first used very loosely by artists in the early 1960s in the USA to refer to the many live events taking place at that time, such as Happenings, Fluxus concerts, Events, body art or (in Germany) Aktionen and Demonstrationen. In 1969 performance was more specifically incorporated into titles of work in the USA and UK and was interchangeable with ‘performance piece’ or simply ‘piece’, as in Vito Acconci’s Performance Test or Following Piece (both 1969), and by many other artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, Yoko Ono (b 1933), Dan Graham, Rebecca Horn, Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson and Bruce Nauman. It was closely linked to the ideological tenets and philosophy of CONCEPTUAL ART, which insisted on ‘an art of which the material is concepts’ and on ‘an art that could not be bought and sold’; those who made performance pieces did so as a statement against the gallery system and the art establishment.

 

Performance art is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body and a relationship between performer and audience. It is opposed to painting or sculpture, for example, where an object constitutes the work. Of course the lines are often blurred. For instance, the work of Survival Research Laboratories is considered by most to be "performance art", yet the performers are actually machines.

Although performance art could be said to include relatively mainstream activities such as theater, dance, music, and circus-related things like fire breathing, juggling, and gymnastics, these are normally instead known as the performing arts. Performance art is a term usually reserved to refer to a kind of usually avant-garde or conceptual art which grew out of the visual arts.

Performance art, as the term is usually understood, began to be identified in the 1960s with the work of artists such as Yves Klein, Vito Acconci, Hermann Nitsch, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell and Allan Kaprow, who coined the term happenings. Western cultural theorists often trace performance art activity back to the beginning of the 20th century. Dada for example, provided a significant progenitor with the unconventional performances of poetry, often at the Cabaret Voltaire, by the likes of Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara. However, there are accounts of Renaissance artists putting on public performances that could be said to be early ancestors to modern performance art. Some performance artists point to other traditions, ranging from tribal ritual to sporting events. Performance art activity is not confined to European art traditions; many notable practitioners can be found in the United States, Asia, and Latin America.

RoseLee Goldberg states in Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present:

“Performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium, especially in the 1980s, stems from an apparent desire of that public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its distinct community, and to be surprised by the unexpected, always unorthodox presentations that the artists devise. The work may be presented solo or with a group, with lighting, music or visuals made by the performance artist him or herself, or in collaboration, and performed in places ranging from an art gallery or museum to an “alternative space”, a theatre, café, bar or street corner. Unlike theatre, the performer is the artist, seldom a character like an actor, and the content rarely follows a traditional plot or narrative. The performance might be a series of intimate gestures or large-scale visual theatre, lasting from a few minutes to many hours; it might be performed only once or repeated several times, with or without a prepared script, spontaneously improvised, or rehearsed over many months.”

Performance art genres include body art, fluxus, happening, action poetry, and intermedia. Some artists, e.g. the Viennese Actionists and neo-Dadaists, prefer to use the terms live art, action art, intervention or manoeuvre to describe their activities.

 

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.

Body art is art made on, with, or consisting of, the human body. The most common forms of body art are tattoos and body piercings, but other types include scarification, branding, scalpelling, shaping (for example tight-lacing of corsets), full body tattoo and body painting.

More extreme body art can involve things such as mutilation or pushing the body to its physical limits. For example, one of Marina Abramovic's works involved dancing until she collapsed from exhaustion, while one of Dennis Oppenheim's better-known works saw him lying in the sunlight with a book on his chest, until his skin, excluding that covered by the book, was badly sunburned. It can even consist of the arrangement and dissection of preserved bodies in an artistic fashion, as in the case of the plastinated bodies used in the travelling Body Worlds exhibit.

In Western art, body art appears to be a sub-category of performance art, in which artists use or abuse their own body to make their particular statements.

In more recent times, body became a subject of much broader discussions and treatments that cannot be reduced to the body art in its common understanding. Important strategies that question the human body are: implants, body in symbiosis with the new technologies, virtual body etc. A special case of the body art strategies is the absence of body. The most important artists that performed the "absence" of body through their artworks were: Keith Arnatt, Andy Warhol, Anthony Gormley and Davor Džalto.

 

Examples of body art

Vito Acconci once documented, through photos and text, his daily exercise routine of stepping on and off a chair for as long as possible over several months. Acconci also performed a 'Following Piece', in which he followed randomly chosen New Yorkers.

Chris Burden actually had an assistant shoot him in the arm in his piece ‘Shoot’ (1971), which was observed by a live audience. This was documented in an eight-second video and is a notorious example of video art as well as performance art. In ‘Through the Night Softly' (1973), Burden crawled naked through broken glass, which he saw as stars in the sky, and turned the video footage into a ten-second commercial that was aired on television. In ‘Locker’, he spent five days jammed into a 2' x 2' x 3' locker at UCLA; in ‘Sculpture in Three Parts’ (1974), he sat on an upright chair on a sculpture pedestal for 48 hours, until he fell off due to exhaustion; in ‘White Light/White Heat’ (1975), he spent 22 days alone and invisible to the public on a high platform in a gallery, neither eating, speaking, seeing or being seen. Most of these performances are known only through photographs or short video clips.

The Vienna Action Group was formed in 1965 by Herman Nitsch, Otto Muhl, Gunter Brus and Rudolf Schwartzkogler. They performed several body art actions, usually involving social taboos (such as genital mutilation).

Marina Abramovic performed ‘Rhythm O’ in 1974. In the piece, the audience was given instructions to use on Abramovic's body an array of 72 provided instruments of pain and pleasure, including knives, feathers, and a loaded pistol. Audience members cut her, pressed thorns into her belly, put lipstick on her, and removed her clothers. The performance ended after six hours when someone held the loaded gun up to Abramovic's head and a scuffle broke out.

The movement gradually evolved to the works more directed in the personal mythologies, as at Jana Sterbak, Rebecca Horn, Youri Messen-Jaschin or Javier Perez.

Jake Lloyd Jones a Sydney based artist conceived a body art ride which has become an annual event, participants are painted to form a living rainbow that rides to the Pacific Ocean and immerses itself in the waves.Sydney Body Art Ride

Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo have used body art to protest against political oppression and violence against women.

 

Visual Poetry

Visual poetry was a descendant of the Futurist 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 Futurist 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