It is not enough for artists to simply “challenge” preexisting conventions in order to spark a provocative effect on the art-making world. In order to promote lasting and stimulating change through artistic practice, an artist’s work must contain fundamental ideas of political/social/environmental/material varieties. A statement alongside innovation, a meaning to support the destruction or adaption of long standing convention and covenant is a most crucial factor. Ai Wei Wei is an artist of culture and history, iconoclasm, political independence and authenticity who is heavily influenced by the Cultural Revolution, The 1989 Human Rights movement, and generally using his art making forms of ceramics/painting/photography and installation to speak out against human rights abuses and corruption in China. Marcel Duchamp was an artist interested in ideas as oppose to merely visual products. He sought alternatives to conventional art forms and through his later style of ready-mades he argued “An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist. He defied notions that art had to be aesthetically appealing, or even refined - so long as a work was provocative and could be interpreted, it was seen by Duchamp to be enough. He explored this clearly through his works “Fountain” (1917) and “Bicycle Wheel” (1913). And finally Robert Rauschenberg, an artist that used art to celebrate the beauty of the everyday, who exploited chance/unusual juxtapositions and an artist who possessed a strong enthusiasm for popular culture and rejected the angst of Abstract Expressionists. He chose to embrace materials traditionally outside of the artists reach, while still demonstrating a concern for aesthetics and formal painting. His works “Monogram” (1959) and “Erased De Kooning” (1953) explore this concept of innovation and challenge that all three artists possess. In reference to these particular artists, those who innovate and challenge preexisting artistic conventions can shape the art landscape, so long as their material practice is tied to strong conceptual and social meaning. Works can only have such a profound effect if they make a statement alongside innovation, a meaning to support the destruction or adaption of long standing convention and covenant.
Ai Wei Wei is a postmodern, dissident cultural critic who uses his artistic outlet to speak out for those who otherwise cannot. Due to his innovative and iconoclastic style of art making that seeks to expose political corruption and social unrest in China, the Chinese Government has elected to put Ai under surveillance/censoring and prevent him from leaving the country. His works have been exhibited internationally in places such as White Rabbit Gallery Sydney, Washington, Venice, Berlin, San Francisco and New York. Ai uses the social media platforms of blogs, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts. Although these accounts are constantly hacked into (due to strict internet blocking policies in China), he continues to revive them in a fearless attempt to expose underlying truths that have been muffled by a society that prevents freedom of speech and expressionism. Ai Wei Wei seeks to connect art and social change through his works “Sunflower Seeds” (Tate Modern) and “Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo” (1994).
Ai believes the modern Chinese landscape suffers a lack of basic human rights and feels angered by the fact that free election/association doesn’t yet exist. This “lack of conscious behaviors” is displayed through his work “Sunflower Seeds” (2010) that delves into the precious nature of material, effort of production and narrative in order to create a powerful commentary on the human condition and mass ‘uniformity’. Are we insignificant or powerless? Ai’s poignant work investigates “the individual pitted against the masses” in a rather interactive fashion. By allowing audiences to walk and lay in the seeds, Ai blends the realms of artwork and audience together. Sunflower seeds are one of China’s most prized exports, and the millions of ceramic beads individually crafted by hundreds of skilled hands symbolize the labour and toil that supports this seemingly slight and inconsequential article of consumption.
His 1994 work “Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo” is physically an adapted ancient Chinese urn, symbol of culture and capital, and metaphorically a representation of contemporary consumer society that dominates the western world (stemming from his younger artistic years spent in America). In many ways, Chinese society is rooted in the past. Broader discussions are needed surrounding China’s short sited policies and use of communication, in order to promote a lasting change. Ai Wei Wei uses his work as a continual quest towards greater social change, a shift in the way China's political and economical landscape functions - still creating work after work with views powerful enough to be considered "as profound as an earthquake".
On the other hand we have the work of Robert Rauchenberg. Considered by many to be one of the most influential American artists due to his radical blending of materials and methods, he was a crucial figure in transition from Abstract Expressionism. A key Neo-Dada artist, his experimental approach expanded the traditional boundaries of art, opening up avenues for future artists. Rauschenberg was deeply respected and admired by his predecessors but disagreed with many of their convictions and moved into new aesthetic territory that reiterated the earlier Dada inquiry into the definition of art.
Rauschenberg's 1985 exhibition at the Beijing National Gallery was the first officially sanctioned American art show to visit China in 50 years - his 'combines' acting as a huge progression and inspiration for numerous contemporary Chinese artists such as Ai Wei Wei and Song Dong. Ai Wei Wei and Rauschenberg are inextricably linked in this cultural sense - that one of the first western exhibitions to be shown in Communist China post the death of Mao Zedong was that of Rauschenberg. Art that wasn't conventional, art that dealt unapologetically with political and social change and questioned the role and conventions of modern and postmodern art. Entering the 1960's, Rauschenberg left behind five years of conventional painting and sculpture to focus on combines. The combines display his closeness to Modernism and its past, but also his singular role in creating the anti-art and installation that followed. They are a tribute to native optimism and hard-won realism - creatures petering in a perpetual state of confusion and unrest. His work “Monogram” features a stuffed Angora goat encircled by a tyre - standing on a painting as if grazing in a pasture, scavenger guarding over and also destroying art, a shamanic manifestation of Rauschenberg himself. In his attempts to push art into regions the Abstract Expressionists never imagined, Rauschenberg created a profound effect a big as an earthquake on the artmaking landscape. This is partially devoted to material practice in the way his combines fuse painting, sculpture and everyday objects in a way that had never been properly done before, and in its raw qualities of “torture, struggle, pain and passion”.
In regards to Rauschenberg and the ‘Erased de Kooning’, he went through an experimental period using materials such as gold leaf, toilet paper and dirt and asked himself whether a drawing might be made from erasing. He tried to use his own drawing at first but couldn’t achieve the desired impact as he needed an “inarguable work of art”. Upon his request, Kooning was initially reluctant but soon agreed and imparted a mixed media drawing of chalk, pastel, lead and oil paint that he thought would be difficult to erase. He chose the most prominent painter among the Abstract Expressionists, as he wanted his act to be widely interpreted as a symbolically patricidal gesture. The work has been hailed as a landmark of postmodernism because of its subversive appropriation of another artist’s work, and it has also been understood as a rejection of the traditional practice of drawing as the foundation of a painting. Kooning’s cooperation was key; he consented to what might be constructed as an act of aggression, and he took great care in his selection of the piece. Rauschenberg admired his work tremendously and already owned two sketches by him. He was in a sense paying tribute to de Kooning, whose habitual revision; erasure and assembling of painted and drawn elements were integral to a manner of painting that many others had begun to imitate. Another of his influential works that changed the landscape of artmaking exponentially was the ‘all white’ series (1951). Created at a time when Abstract Expressionism was ascendant in New York, the uninflected all-white surfaces eliminated gesture and denied all possibility of narrative or external reference. In his radical reduction of content as well as in his conception of the works as a series of modular shaped geometric canvases, Rauschenberg can be seen as presaging Minimalism by a decade. Misunderstood at the time, but the works were highly influential for Rauschenberg's frequent collaborator, the composer John Cage. Under the sway of the Buddhist aesthetics of Zen, Cage interpreted the blank surfaces as "landing strips" or receptors for light and shadow, and was inspired to pursue the corresponding notion of silence and ambient sound in music. His response, 4'33" (1952), consisted of the pianist sitting quietly at the piano without touching the keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds so that incidental sounds in the surrounding environment—such as the wind in the trees outside or the whispering of audience members—determined the content of the piece. This clearly displays the profound effects of Rauschenberg’s work on his audience, artistic predecessors and art making world in years subsequent.
And finally, Marcel Duchamp's "Bicycle Wheel" challenges conventions of what art 'can and can't be'. At the ready-mades time of inventions, they were received with complete controversy. Critics called Duchamp's ready-mades immoral and vulgar, even plagiaristic, but they were as Duchamp described – “a new autonomous artistic genre… industrially produced utilitarian objects which achieve the status of art merely through the process of selection”. Duchamp was an innovator and iconoclast influenced heavily by Conceptual and Pop Art and has come to influence artists like AI Wei Wei and Damien Hurst. He also proverbially changed the art world by signing a urinal and calling it art. Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917) holds iconic status as a work that removed art to the cerebral realm from the physical or retinal. Ready-mades disrupted centuries of thinking about the artist’s role as a skilled creator of original handmade objects. Duchamp paved the way for Conceptual art with his works that evokes a reaction of visual indifference, total absence of good or bad taste. As a Dadaist Duchamp both embraced and critiqued modernity by using unorthodox materials and chanced based procedures. In this way, Duchamp’s artistic career of exploring conceptual art, iconoclasm and about expanding what "art" could be displays the inner working of a mind who sought to innovate and challenge existing conventions to create a profound wave of change within the art world, and the greater social sphere of conventional behaviours.
In conclusion, it is not enough for artists to simply “challenge” preexisting conventions if they wish to stimulate a provocative effect on the art-making world. In order to spark change through artistic practice, an artist’s work must contain fundamental ideas of political/social/environmental/material varieties. A statement to provide for the destruction or adaption of long standing conventions. As shown, the power of Rauschenberg’s works such as ‘Erased de Kooning Drawing’ derive from the allure of the unseen and the artists enigmatic nature. Was it an act of homage, provocation, humour, patricide, destruction or celebration? The work is open to past and present interpretation –some take this interpretation to the extent of ‘vandalism’. On the other hand, Duchamp’s practice assimilates the lessons of Cubism and Futurism, whose joint influence may be felt in his early paintings where he acted as a spearheaded for the American Dada movement. And finally Ai Wei Wei, a contemporary Chinese artist who is making waves in the social and artistic spheres via his installation works that take stimulus from the kinetic art and ready-made art of both Duchamp and Rauschenberg alike. In the words of Duchamp, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” esentailly making it possible that artists, with the right ideas and social awareness, can contest convention in order to create lasting effects on the art world and endlessly change the face of art.
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Ai Wei Wei is a postmodern, dissident cultural critic who uses his artistic outlet to speak out for those who otherwise cannot. Due to his innovative and iconoclastic style of art making that seeks to expose political corruption and social unrest in China, the Chinese Government has elected to put Ai under surveillance/censoring and prevent him from leaving the country. His works have been exhibited internationally in places such as White Rabbit Gallery Sydney, Washington, Venice, Berlin, San Francisco and New York. Ai uses the social media platforms of blogs, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts. Although these accounts are constantly hacked into (due to strict internet blocking policies in China), he continues to revive them in a fearless attempt to expose underlying truths that have been muffled by a society that prevents freedom of speech and expressionism. Ai Wei Wei seeks to connect art and social change through his works “Sunflower Seeds” (Tate Modern) and “Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo” (1994).
Ai believes the modern Chinese landscape suffers a lack of basic human rights and feels angered by the fact that free election/association doesn’t yet exist. This “lack of conscious behaviors” is displayed through his work “Sunflower Seeds” (2010) that delves into the precious nature of material, effort of production and narrative in order to create a powerful commentary on the human condition and mass ‘uniformity’. Are we insignificant or powerless? Ai’s poignant work investigates “the individual pitted against the masses” in a rather interactive fashion. By allowing audiences to walk and lay in the seeds, Ai blends the realms of artwork and audience together. Sunflower seeds are one of China’s most prized exports, and the millions of ceramic beads individually crafted by hundreds of skilled hands symbolize the labour and toil that supports this seemingly slight and inconsequential article of consumption.
His 1994 work “Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo” is physically an adapted ancient Chinese urn, symbol of culture and capital, and metaphorically a representation of contemporary consumer society that dominates the western world (stemming from his younger artistic years spent in America). In many ways, Chinese society is rooted in the past. Broader discussions are needed surrounding China’s short sited policies and use of communication, in order to promote a lasting change. Ai Wei Wei uses his work as a continual quest towards greater social change, a shift in the way China's political and economical landscape functions - still creating work after work with views powerful enough to be considered "as profound as an earthquake".
On the other hand we have the work of Robert Rauchenberg. Considered by many to be one of the most influential American artists due to his radical blending of materials and methods, he was a crucial figure in transition from Abstract Expressionism. A key Neo-Dada artist, his experimental approach expanded the traditional boundaries of art, opening up avenues for future artists. Rauschenberg was deeply respected and admired by his predecessors but disagreed with many of their convictions and moved into new aesthetic territory that reiterated the earlier Dada inquiry into the definition of art.
Rauschenberg's 1985 exhibition at the Beijing National Gallery was the first officially sanctioned American art show to visit China in 50 years - his 'combines' acting as a huge progression and inspiration for numerous contemporary Chinese artists such as Ai Wei Wei and Song Dong. Ai Wei Wei and Rauschenberg are inextricably linked in this cultural sense - that one of the first western exhibitions to be shown in Communist China post the death of Mao Zedong was that of Rauschenberg. Art that wasn't conventional, art that dealt unapologetically with political and social change and questioned the role and conventions of modern and postmodern art. Entering the 1960's, Rauschenberg left behind five years of conventional painting and sculpture to focus on combines. The combines display his closeness to Modernism and its past, but also his singular role in creating the anti-art and installation that followed. They are a tribute to native optimism and hard-won realism - creatures petering in a perpetual state of confusion and unrest. His work “Monogram” features a stuffed Angora goat encircled by a tyre - standing on a painting as if grazing in a pasture, scavenger guarding over and also destroying art, a shamanic manifestation of Rauschenberg himself. In his attempts to push art into regions the Abstract Expressionists never imagined, Rauschenberg created a profound effect a big as an earthquake on the artmaking landscape. This is partially devoted to material practice in the way his combines fuse painting, sculpture and everyday objects in a way that had never been properly done before, and in its raw qualities of “torture, struggle, pain and passion”.
In regards to Rauschenberg and the ‘Erased de Kooning’, he went through an experimental period using materials such as gold leaf, toilet paper and dirt and asked himself whether a drawing might be made from erasing. He tried to use his own drawing at first but couldn’t achieve the desired impact as he needed an “inarguable work of art”. Upon his request, Kooning was initially reluctant but soon agreed and imparted a mixed media drawing of chalk, pastel, lead and oil paint that he thought would be difficult to erase. He chose the most prominent painter among the Abstract Expressionists, as he wanted his act to be widely interpreted as a symbolically patricidal gesture. The work has been hailed as a landmark of postmodernism because of its subversive appropriation of another artist’s work, and it has also been understood as a rejection of the traditional practice of drawing as the foundation of a painting. Kooning’s cooperation was key; he consented to what might be constructed as an act of aggression, and he took great care in his selection of the piece. Rauschenberg admired his work tremendously and already owned two sketches by him. He was in a sense paying tribute to de Kooning, whose habitual revision; erasure and assembling of painted and drawn elements were integral to a manner of painting that many others had begun to imitate. Another of his influential works that changed the landscape of artmaking exponentially was the ‘all white’ series (1951). Created at a time when Abstract Expressionism was ascendant in New York, the uninflected all-white surfaces eliminated gesture and denied all possibility of narrative or external reference. In his radical reduction of content as well as in his conception of the works as a series of modular shaped geometric canvases, Rauschenberg can be seen as presaging Minimalism by a decade. Misunderstood at the time, but the works were highly influential for Rauschenberg's frequent collaborator, the composer John Cage. Under the sway of the Buddhist aesthetics of Zen, Cage interpreted the blank surfaces as "landing strips" or receptors for light and shadow, and was inspired to pursue the corresponding notion of silence and ambient sound in music. His response, 4'33" (1952), consisted of the pianist sitting quietly at the piano without touching the keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds so that incidental sounds in the surrounding environment—such as the wind in the trees outside or the whispering of audience members—determined the content of the piece. This clearly displays the profound effects of Rauschenberg’s work on his audience, artistic predecessors and art making world in years subsequent.
And finally, Marcel Duchamp's "Bicycle Wheel" challenges conventions of what art 'can and can't be'. At the ready-mades time of inventions, they were received with complete controversy. Critics called Duchamp's ready-mades immoral and vulgar, even plagiaristic, but they were as Duchamp described – “a new autonomous artistic genre… industrially produced utilitarian objects which achieve the status of art merely through the process of selection”. Duchamp was an innovator and iconoclast influenced heavily by Conceptual and Pop Art and has come to influence artists like AI Wei Wei and Damien Hurst. He also proverbially changed the art world by signing a urinal and calling it art. Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917) holds iconic status as a work that removed art to the cerebral realm from the physical or retinal. Ready-mades disrupted centuries of thinking about the artist’s role as a skilled creator of original handmade objects. Duchamp paved the way for Conceptual art with his works that evokes a reaction of visual indifference, total absence of good or bad taste. As a Dadaist Duchamp both embraced and critiqued modernity by using unorthodox materials and chanced based procedures. In this way, Duchamp’s artistic career of exploring conceptual art, iconoclasm and about expanding what "art" could be displays the inner working of a mind who sought to innovate and challenge existing conventions to create a profound wave of change within the art world, and the greater social sphere of conventional behaviours.
In conclusion, it is not enough for artists to simply “challenge” preexisting conventions if they wish to stimulate a provocative effect on the art-making world. In order to spark change through artistic practice, an artist’s work must contain fundamental ideas of political/social/environmental/material varieties. A statement to provide for the destruction or adaption of long standing conventions. As shown, the power of Rauschenberg’s works such as ‘Erased de Kooning Drawing’ derive from the allure of the unseen and the artists enigmatic nature. Was it an act of homage, provocation, humour, patricide, destruction or celebration? The work is open to past and present interpretation –some take this interpretation to the extent of ‘vandalism’. On the other hand, Duchamp’s practice assimilates the lessons of Cubism and Futurism, whose joint influence may be felt in his early paintings where he acted as a spearheaded for the American Dada movement. And finally Ai Wei Wei, a contemporary Chinese artist who is making waves in the social and artistic spheres via his installation works that take stimulus from the kinetic art and ready-made art of both Duchamp and Rauschenberg alike. In the words of Duchamp, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” esentailly making it possible that artists, with the right ideas and social awareness, can contest convention in order to create lasting effects on the art world and endlessly change the face of art.
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