Back to the 90. Art & Beyond (original) (raw)
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How the '90s Have Become a Source of Inspiration for Pop Artists
Russia.Post, 2023
Maria Engström looks at the cultural recycling of the 1990s in contemporary Russian popular culture which works with mass things, trashy, insignificant and previously rejected, such as the shabby Khrushchevka housing, bad music, all kinds of kitsch, and dubious political ideas.
Bell-bottoms are in. Bell-bottoms are out. Bell-bottoms are back in again. Fads constantly cycle and recycle through popular culture, each time in a slightly new incarnation. The term “retro” has become the buzzword for describing such trends, but what does it mean? Elizabeth Guffey explores here the ambiguous cultural meanings of the term and reveals why some trends just never seem to stay dead. Drawing upon a wealth of original research and entertaining anecdotal material, Guffey unearths the roots of the term “retro” and chronicles its evolving manifestations in culture and art throughout the last century. Whether in art, design, fashion, or music, the idea of retro has often meant a reemergence of styles and sensibilities that evoke touchstones of memory from the not-so-distant past, ranging from the drug-induced surrealism of psychedelic art to the political expression of 1970s afros. Guffey examines how and why the past keeps coming back to haunt us in a variety of forms, from the campy comeback of art nouveau nearly fifty years after its original decline, to the infusion of art deco into the kitschy glamor of pop art, to the recent popularity of 1980s vogue. She also considers how advertisers and the media have employed the power of such cultural nostalgia, using recycled television jingles, familiar old advertising slogans, and famous art to sell a surprising range of products. An engrossing, unprecedented study, Retro reveals the surprising extent to which the past is embedded in the future.
Contemporary art: 1989 to the present
Choice Reviews Online, 2013
Inhabiting the technosphere. Art and technology beyond technical invention Prepublication Manuscript "Media convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as a framer of information: as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as selective processor in the creation of images." 1 The body as a framer of information: This notion, presented in the introduction to Mark Hansen's 2004 New Philosophy of New Media, could also stand as an introduction to the general condition under which art after 1989 thinks, produces and engages with technology. It marks not just a shift in thinking that concerns our general understanding of media technologies and practices-but an equally significant shift taking place within the type of artistic practice where new media and information technologies are not just deployed but are themselves also objects of thinking, investigation and imagination. The 1 Timothy Lenoir, Foreword, in Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, 2004, xxii task for art history is then to try to understand the newly prominent mediatic body that emerges with this shift-to discover its various manifestations in artistic practice, as well as its implications for aesthetic theory. In particular, we need to conceptualize its double relation to, on the one hand, technological media and the realm of media production and, on the other hand the notion of the artistic medium. With this shift, several influential conceptions of the relation between art, technology and media may be questioned. Firstly, the notion of the body as a framer of information challenges some of the most influential theorizations of the cultural shift that took place in the 1990's, as the Internet became a global phenomenon and digital processing emerged as a communal platform for all previously separate media and technologies of expression. One was the marginalization of art in the realm of new media. Digital media leave aesthetics behind, Friedrich Kittler claimed, with all the apocalyptic gusto of the early computer age: In distinction to the consciousness-flow of film or audio tape, the algorithmic operations that underpin information processing happen at a level that has no immediate correlate to the human perceptual system. Humans had created a non-human realm that made obsolete any idea of art based on the sense apparatus. And this turn of events was related to the way in which technologies of the information age severed any tangible connection with human existence beyond what pertains to the control practices of capitalist superpowers, notably warfare, surveillance and superficial entertainment or visual "eyewash". 2 Yet, against Kittler's bleak description of posthuman technologies it could be argued that information will still necessarily have to be processed by human bodies-even if the interaction between the human perceptual
Pop art: The art that emerged from popular culture
One of the biggest art movements of the 20th Century, Pop Art has been shaped by the demands of consumer society. In contrast to the elitist conception of art, postmodernism used popular images and became the art of consumer society. Employing images from the popular culture, it sought to elevate its objects to highbrow clientele. In this context, some saw Pop Art as a field whereby popular culture, which essentially belonged to common people, was utilised by the dominant classes to penetrate into the emotions and thoughts of people, eventually aiming to fortify their hegemony. Pop Art was defined as kitsch, decadent or banal for using the popular images from mass culture. Debates over popular culture versus high culture have started to set the tune in art theory.
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF POP ART MOVEMENT AND ITS ARTISTIC LEGACY
IJCIRAS, 2019
'The artistic movements of pop art were defined as popular, young, witty, sexy, and glamorous. (a quote from the website of original style , an online tile shop)' The appearance of pop art in Britain and the United States in the mid 1950 and early 1960 respectively. Taking up the ideas of dada an early 20 th century art movement, that used irony and found objects in the service of cultural critique-the pop artists expanded the definition of the art object by exploring the image world of popular culture and the concomitant growth of mass reproduction. A number of the artists who emerged , or more appropriately burst upon the art world. Particularly in new York and los angels in the 1 st years of the 1960's were responding to society's new commercialism. indeed those who came to be identified as pop artists embraced consumerism as a fitting subject of their art. expression and gesture hallmarks of abstract expressionism which preceded pop in the late 1940's and early 1950's were replaced with cool, detached, mechanical illustrations of common objects. Often based on appropriated advertising images. Pop art was preparing a new kind of subjectivity and art language. pop artists turned outward for aesthetic stimuli. Pop art was a significant sociological phenomenon. In turn, the consumer industry itself adopted it as an antidote to the rigidity of high art. Pop came to encompass the field of music, consumer design, and fashion , correspondent to an entire way of life among young people in the 1960's.
WALKING TOWARDS THE LIGHT. ART IN THE MID-EIGHTIES TO THE MID-NINETIES
Da compreensão da arte ao estudo da história da arte, hoje.
We have noted the importance of the exhibition Les Immatériaux-Modernes, et après? (at the Georges Pompidou Center) which would ultimately prove a watershed, stating clear intentions as to the change of values-the key ingredient in the genesis of Postmodernity. In the words of its main curator, Jean-François Lyotard, the exhibition did not intend to be more than "(…) une expo pédagogique-expliquer par exemple les nouvelles technologies (...), mais une expo qui soit une oeuvre d'art. De viser donc non pas la capacité d'acquisition d'un public mais plutôt sa sensibilité, c'est-à-dire un sentiment esthétique." Les Immatériaux took on the role of artistic form based on science, presenting itself for enjoyment. Not just the creator's enjoyment, at least not first and foremost; instead, it offered itself to a wide audience. Thus began a praxis that would send ripples across the history of art over the following decade: the curator as artist, as creator. At the core, Les Immatériaux had global claims on the avowal of complexity, and even though mass computerization was not yet a reality, it was intended that the mass audience should get to grips with a host of "…dispositifs technologiques en passe de constituer notre environnement et une nouvelle écologie de l'esprit". The exhibition is underpinned by philosophy , concept, science and aesthetic, committed to the "recherche de la recherche", accepting the uncertainty of concepts. It is the acme of all exhibitions of super-modernity, to some, or a second stage in postmodernity to others: a place of passage, a wandering through realities and eras, where borders, not tightly upheld, come to fade naturally-bereft of the support of ideology, theory and even matter. The airtight compartments that seal off fields of research make no sense on the virtual plane. In Les Immatériaux, different sites embody different contexts. The same now happens when we browse the internet, looking at site after site. Favoring what can be sensed rather than what can merely be seen (this is a fundamental operation), the goal is to achieve total involvement, engagement with the multiple senses of the human. Les Immatériaux is above all a course in reflection in perception. As Martine Moinot would have it: "(...) la mise en espace, repose sur l'idée de 'parcours' réflexifs / perceptifs, qui se déplacent de questions en questions, et non pas d'objets en objets proposés comme des références. La perception dans le parcours de l'expo ne doit pas fonctionner uniquement sur le visible, mais plus largement sur le sensible."
Evoking a level of animosity from a bygone cultural moment, the hipster belongs to a time when the economic advantages of cultural innovation in the arts were seriously believed. What that time was, and where we are now, is this book’s subject, examined through the lens of art history and the creativity hype of neoliberalism. Having been associated with post- World War Two bebop and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the early 2000s as a form of generic individualism that was easily identifiable even if endlessly mutable. However, in recent years “hipster” has become increasingly impotent as an accusation, shifting in its meaning to refer less to an external identity than to a mode of deflection in which authenticity and discernment are challenged only to be surreptitiously reinforced. Marking a transition from a period in Western art when irony and high-minded nonchalance reigned, the hipster appears in the context of contemporary art not as a critical standpoint in itself but as the continually deferred subject position of creative practice. Today, ethical considerations of identity overshadow discerning proclamations of cultural taste, making palpable an uncertainty about our capacity to untangle capitalism’s thirst for reinvention from the artist’s thirst for subverting norms.