- Branche: Art history
- Number of terms: 11718
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Also described as environments, the term is used to describe mixed-media constructions or assemblages usually designed for a specific place and for a temporary period of time. Works often occupy an entire room or gallery space that the spectator invariably has to walk through in order to engage fully with the work of art. Some installations, however, are designed simply to be walked around and contemplated, or are so fragile that they can only be viewed from a doorway, or one end of a room. Installation art emerged from the earlier form of the environment. One of the originators of environments was the American artist Allan Kaprow in works made from about 1957 onwards. In an undated interview published in 1965 Kaprow said of his first environment: 'I just simply filled the whole gallery up—When you opened the door you found yourself in the midst of an entire Environment—The materials were varied: sheets of plastic, crumpled up cellophane, tangles of Scotch tape, sections of slashed and daubed enamel and pieces of coloured cloth. ' There were also lights hung within all this and 'five tape machines spread around the space played electronic sounds which I had composed. ' Miscellaneous materials (mixed media), light and sound have remained fundamental to Installation art. From that time on the creation of installations became a major strand in modern art, increasingly from about 1990, and many artists have made them. In 1961 in New York, Claes Oldenburg created an early environment, The Store, from which his Counter and Plates with Potato and Ham comes. One of the outstanding creators of installations using light is James Turrell.
Industry:Art history
The act of critiquing an institution as artistic practice, the institution usually being a museum or an art gallery. Institutional criticism began in the late 1960s when artists began to create art in response to the institutions that bought and exhibited their work. In the 1960s the art institution was often perceived as a place of 'cultural confinement' and thus something to attack aesthetically, politically and theoretically. Hans Haacke is a leading exponent of Institutional critique, particularly targeting funding and donations given to museums and galleries. In 1971, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne rejected his work Manet-Projekt 74 from one of their shows. The work was related to the museums' recent acquisition of Edouard Manet's Bunch of Asparagus and detailed the provenance of the painting and Nazi background of the donor. During the 1990s it became a fashion for critical discussions to be held by curators and directors within art galleries and museums that centred on this very subject, thereby making the institution not only the problem but also the solution. This has changed the nature of Institutional critique, something that is reflected in the art of Carey Young, who considers this dilemma.
Industry:Art history
Any form of printmaking in which the image is produced by incising into the printing plate and where it is the incised line or area that holds the ink. Intaglio methods include etching, drypoint, engraving, and wood engraving.
Industry:Art history
In 1932 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held the first architectural exhibition featuring architects associated with the Modern Movement. International Style was the term coined by historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson for the catalogue. Most of the architects defined by International Style were European with a considerable German brigade emerging from the Bauhaus, namely Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ernst May, Erich Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe and Hans Scharoun; other Europeans included France's Le Corbusier, Italy's Luigi Figini and Finland's Alvar Aalto. The majority of the buildings defined by International Style were similar in that they were rectilinear, undecorated, asymmetrical and white, although after the Second World War this was modified as a matter of economy in dealing with post-war reconstruction and later, with the introduction of industrial steel and glass. International Style is seen as single-handedly transforming the skylines of every major city in the world with its simple cubic forms.
Industry:Art history
Originally, a French term applied to the quiet domestic scenes of Bonnard and Vuillard. Since applied widely to any painting of such subject matter. An outstanding example is Gwen John.
Industry:Art history
Term used to describe the culture of the reign of James I (reigned 1603-25) particularly theatre (and even furniture) as well as painting. Great Elizabethan miniaturist Hilliard continues but succeeded in royal favour by Oliver. Similarly Gheeraerts flourished but overtaken by more sophisticated naturalism of Dutch-born Van Somer and then Mytens (pronounced mittens) from about 1616.
Industry:Art history
Kinaesthesia is the sense that detects bodily position, weight or movement of the muscles, tendons and joints of the body. The term has come to be used in relation to art that deals with the body in movement. It was first associated with Futurism, which sought to champion the dynamism of the modern age by depicting people and things in motion. The performances of the American choreographer Merce Cunningham can also be described as kinaesthetic, because his dancers are concerned with the exploration of space through the body's movement. In 1973 Trisha Brown used the Manhattan skyline as a stage for her performance Roof Piece in which dancers transmitted movements to other dancers standing on rooftops across New York.
Industry:Art history
The word kinetic means relating to motion. Kinetic art is art that depends on motion for its effects. Since the early twentieth century artists have been incorporating movement into art. This has been partly to explore the possibilities of movement, partly to introduce the element of time, partly to reflect the importance of the machine and technology in the modern world, partly to explore the nature of vision. Movement has either been produced mechanically by motors or by exploiting the natural movement of air in a space. Works of this latter kind are called mobiles. A pioneer of Kinetic art was Naum Gabo with his motorised Standing Wave of 1919-20. Mobiles were pioneered by Alexander Calder from about 1930. Kinetic art became a major phenomenon of the late 1950s and the 1960s.
Industry:Art history
Term originally used as the title of an article by the critic David Sylvester in the December 1954 issue of the journal Encounter. The article discussed the work of the realist artists known as the Beaux Arts Quartet, John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith. Sylvester wrote that their work 'takes us back from the studio to the kitchen' and described their subjects as 'an inventory which includes every kind of food and drink, every utensil and implement, the usual plain furniture and even the babies' nappies on the line. Everything but the kitchen sink? The kitchen sink too. ' Sylvester also emphasised that these kitchens were ones 'in which ordinary people cooked ordinary food and doubtless lived their ordinary lives. ' The Kitchen Sink painters' celebration of the everyday life of ordinary people carries implications of a social if not political comment and Kitchen Sink art can be seen to belong in the category of Social Realism. Kitchen Sink reached its apogee in 1956 when the Beaux Arts Quartet were selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Industry:Art history
Kitsch is the German word for trash. Sometime in the 1920s it came into use in English to describe particularly cheap, vulgar and sentimental forms of popular and commercial culture. In 1939, the American art critic Clement Greenberg published a famous essay titled 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch'. In it he defined kitsch and examined its relationship to the high art tradition as continued in the twentieth century by the avant-garde: 'Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard. True enough—simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West: that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc, etc. ' Some more up-to-date examples of kitsch might include plastic or porcelain models of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, Japanese manga comics and the Hello Kitty range of merchandise, many computer games, the whole of Las Vegas and Disneyland, and the high-gloss soft porn of Playboy magazine. Greenberg saw kitsch as the opposite of high art but from about 1950 artists started to take a serious interest in popular culture, resulting in the explosion of Pop art in the 1960s. This engagement with kitsch has continued to surface in movements such as Neo-Geo and in the work of artists such as John Currin or Paul McCarthy.
Industry:Art history
