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November 21, 2007
Today we live in a period that exists chronologically after the breakdown of the notion of art, a breakdown for which the neo-avant-gardes were largely responsible. Moreover, the historical avant-gardes are understandable only through the restaging of their ideas by the neo-avant-gardes from the 1950s onwards.
The 'restaging' is a revision as the postwar American neo-avant garde abandoned o the revolutionary and utopian aspirations that had energized the European avant-gardes of the earlier twentieth century and distanced themselves from politically subversive or oppositional strategies.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, seaweed, Victor Harbor, 2007
We may need to use the notion of Nachträglichkeit--the Freudian idea describes the observation that a trauma can be understood only at a later, post-traumatic moment, and not when it is suddenly provoked. Dada would be the expression of trauma, would it not?
If the neo-avant-garde stilll places the same emphasis on the sublimation of art and life, then their aesthetic focus is undercutting the well-maintained borders separating the mediums of art. Thus Rauschenberg had been making Combines—found objects covered with slashing strokes of paint that blurred the boundaries between high and low—since the mid-1950s, and in the early '60s began transferring photographic images from newspapers directly onto his canvases (via the process of silkscreening) in rebus-like arrangements. Rauschenberg adapted the shock tactics of World War I-era Dada collagists such as Kurt Schwitters to the new postwar context of American hegemonic power.
In Germany, Gerhard Richter began compiling his own private archive of vernacular photographs---amateur and family photographs he found and collected; news images of political and historical events; advertisements and pornography; even shots of the Nazi death camps--- that then became a source of predigested, precomposed imagery from which the painter made his blurred photo-paintings.
For Warhol, photography—mechanical, reproducible, and indelibly tainted with mass culture and industrial production—served to question the cherished notions of authenticity and originality that underlay Abstract Expressionism. Hence his use of the automated "four-for-a-quarter" photo-booth of the kind found in the pleasure centers of urban spaces such as Times Square or Coney Island. While still working as a commercial artist, Warhol became obsessed with this popular, ubiquitous device, and asked friends and portrait sitters to sit for their pictures in order to use the results as the foundation for large silkscreen paintings, magazine illustrations, and album covers.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, squiggles, Adelaide CBD, 2007
The radical streak in Rauschenberg's early practice is neither a repeat of earlier avant-garde gesturings nor simply an accommodation to the values and commodifying mechanisms of postwar American consumer society.The disparate elements brought together in these paintings (combines) have no more guiding logic operating between them than that between the articles arrayed on the page of a newspaper or on a wall marked by graffiti.
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Gary,
the most influential must be Dada, which emerged in the middle of the First World War, They were subversive, irreverent and and Dada made the radical suggestion that anything could be art and anyone an artist.
Dada writers and artists attempted to dismantle traditional values, norms and codes of communication and thus to deconstruct contemporary culture. They pioneered experiments in interventionist collage, assemblage, performance and the inclusion of the industrially produced readymade.