Summary IEB: Visual arts (Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism)
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Course
Visual Arts
Institution
12th Grade
These notes offer a clear overview of Dada, Abstract Expressionism, and Surrealism. They cover the origins, key themes, and defining characteristics of each movement, along with analyses of major works and artists. Key figures include Marcel Duchamp and Hannah Höch for Dada, Jackson Pollock and Ma...
DADA
Marchel Duchamp
-Most influential artist of this movement
- According to Duchamp, life and art were matters of chance and choice freed from
the conventions of society and tradition.
-Within his approach to art and life, each art act was individual and unique.
-The way the viewer interprets the work will also be individual and unique and
therefore, the work will have continuous ‘shifting’ meaning.
DADA sculpture relied on what?
-of commonplace materials never before used in high art.
-they removed objects like a chair, wheel, bottle rack and urinal from their ordinary
setting and context and reused them in a new combination
Bicycle Wheel, 1951
-In 1913 he abandoned oil painting and assembled out
of a stool and a bicycle wheel his first ‘ready-made’
sculpture
-Bicycle wheel, he combined two ordinary
mass-produced objects and displayed them from their
expected everyday locations by mounting a single
bicycle wheel atop the seat of an ordinary wooden
kitchen stool
-This work epitomises Dadaist irony: The wheel as
well as the stool is no longer functional but elevated
to an art object.
-Such works, he insisted, were created free from any
consideration of either good or bad taste, qualities
shaped by society that he and other Dada artists
found especially bankrupt.
What aesthetic appeal does bicycle have:
• Idle visual pleasure: Duchamp said he simply enjoyed
gazing at the wheel while it spun, likening it to gazing
into a fireplace.
• Comic effect: an ordinary unicycle is a comical thing; upside-down and immobile it
might be hilarious
,• The juxtaposition of motion and a static position (recalling the theme of a previous
work, King and Queen
Surrounded by Swift Nudes)
• Evocation of domestic pleasures: it suggests a spinning wheel, with attendant
evocations of the fireplace
• Resemblance to human form: it suggests a neck and head – or an eye – on a
pedestal.
Viewer participation:
- Spinning the wheel of the sculpture
- Mental participation
- Linguistic participation – verbalising the
titles phonetically
Fountain, 1917
-This is a detached urinal, set on its side
and signed visibly with a witty pseudonym
derived from the Mott plumbing
manufactory’s name and that of the short
half of the Mutt and Jeff comic- strip team
-urinal signed with the letters R.Mutt
-was rejected for exhibition in New
York. After this rejection, Duchamp resigned
from the association to which he and the
gallery belonged.
After his work was rejected, Duchamp said, "Whether Mr. Mutt made the
fountain or not is immaterial. What matters is that I have chosen it as an
artwork.”
-He was saying that established art meant nothing anymore.
-He believed that chance and spontaneous acts had more meaning and made
more sense than the art of a rotten society.
-He saw the art world as one of the mechanisms by which the elite in society
maintain their position of dominance: Oil paint and marble and brushes and linseed
oil are expensive items and thus immediately exclude those artistic people who can’t
afford them.
, What are ready-mades?
● His “readymades” consisted simply of everyday objects, such as a urinal and a
bottle rack, selected and presented in a gallery space.
●Duchamp believed that the “discovery” or the “conception” of the object was what
made the work of art, not the uniqueness of the object.
This work attacks the tradition of western art in various ways and is
nonetheless rich in symbolic meaning:
▪ The fact that it is a found object literally produced in a factory by numerous
workers challenges the notion of individual authorship of an artwork.
▪ The fact that the object is not unique challenges the notion of originality, a
concept so dear to the Western art world
▪ In this work as in many others, Duchamp expresses disillusionment through
satirical humour.
▪ Placing a found object, discarded by society, opens the possibility of new forms
of creativity available to rich and poor alike.
▪ The signature “R.Mutt” when pronounced in German sounds phonetically like the
word “Armoed” which like the Afrikaans word ‘armoedigheid’ refers to poverty –
Duchamp in effect signed the work on behalf of
the poor.
▪ Duchamp said the short sentence inscribed on the readymade was important, and
was not intended as a title but rather “to carry the mind of the spectator toward
other regions, more verbal.”
▪ “Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade
products, we must conclude that all paintings in the world are readymades-aided” -
Duchamp
▪ Duchamp even imagined a reciprocal readymade: “use a Rembrandt as an ironing
board,” he said.
HOWEVER: Despite his anti-art, anti-aesthetic attitude, his readymades as he
himself warned, did finally become works of art and now they take on a perverse
kind of beauty of their own.
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