Artists and the sciences in the birth of Modern life (original) (raw)
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The Political Basis of Abstraction in the 20th Century As Explored by a Painter
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The political nature of abstraction presented from an artist’s point of view – one who considers the most advanced task is the exploration of the language of pictures. Such exploration is understood as a separate discipline from the many others that employ pictures for practical functions. The author examines the development of 20th century abstraction as an effect of revolutionary social motion. Historic steps to abstraction, taking shape as rising and receding artistic movements, are correlated to revolutionary motion. The materialist underpinning of abstraction is distinguished from the idealism of Post-Modernism. The paper ends with an examination of contemporary discourse in the Western art world that attempts to erase the internationalism of abstraction and, thereby, marginalize non-Western practitioners.
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The author suggests that new concepts in twentieth-century science not only provide commonalities between the arts, sciences and humanities, they also point to the emergence of a new philosophy of nature with some promising political, sociological and technological implications. These developments demand a thorough-going ethical practise and a fundamental reformulation of accepted notions of creativity, consciousness and natural and social organization. Outlining key concepts and discoveries in twentieth-century science and philosophy, the author draws attention to the existence of a strong organismic or process tradition in Western culture that is re-emerging in various fields of the physical, biological and social sciences. The author asserts that such a change in science and technology will have global ramifications for humans and that it is the amplification of these insights to which artists should turn their attention.
Shapes, Numbers and Algorithms: The Conditions for Abstract Art Today
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2 From Impressionism , Cubism and Futurism to “ Geometric Abstractionism ”
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As is well known a strong interaction exists between Geometry & Art since the antiquity. This interaction has been revitalized by the developments of new artistic sensibilities in XX Century up to the turn of the third Millennium. Starting from the revolutions of Impressionism, Cubism and Futurism we discuss the role that Mathematics, Science and Technology had in inspiring some artistic movements: more specifically Geometric Abstractism, Constructivism, Kinetic Art and Optical Art. Particular attention will be given to the work of Vasily Kandinskii, Max Bill, Alexander Calder and Milan Dobes; we shall shortly mention also the role that Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Gestalttherie have played in early XX Century in forming these new sensibilities on perceiving and representing “reality”. In this way we shall emphasize that to understand most of the new forms of Art developed in the past Century one needs to understand (or at least grasp) their mathematical and technological roots...
Digital technology has undoubtedly influenced the way we create art today. The digital era gives us an unprecedented range of tools for making art and myriad art forms for expression, constituting a distinct aesthetic form. Furthermore, the new technology brought in new media that challenged the conventional notion of medium, artwork, artist, and audience and exerted a critical influence on the old, non-technological media, such as painting, drawing, sculpture, etc. The traditional media has been altered through hybridization and media convergence, most recently reaching the state of post-media condition. But we should remember that ours is not the first era in which technological advancements have led to a new state of art practice. The discovery of oil paints and the sfumato technique, and the linear perspective system in 15th century Europe formed the pictorial ideals for painting and drawing and, to a great extent, contributed to the Renaissance idea about human reason and power. Photography also generated a revolution in the art world. It was not only a new medium for artistic expression, but it changed the way image is perceived, challenging the detailed realism and conventional approach in the treatment of form and space in Western art. The work investigates similar ideas and sensibilities between the Renaissance, the discovery of photography, and the digital revolution, particularly relevant to the importance of technological advancements in artistic revolutions. Keywords: art and technology, technological innovations, Renaissance, the discovery of photography, digital art, new media art. This is an open access article under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
From Ruler to Tape: Stops and Starts in the History of Painted Abstraction
Getty Research Journal, 2018
This essay discusses the development of abstract painting in the twentieth century through the lens of artistic process. Before the invention of pressure-sensitive tape in the United States in the 1930s, abstract painters were limited to creating the straight edges of geometric forms by either applying paint freehand or by using tools such as straightedges and ruling pens. But whether abstract artists embraced the use of such aids, which resulted in a more industrial aesthetic, depended initially on whether they considered their artworks agents of spiritual cognition, as Wassily Kandinsky did, or agents of social transformation, as Aleksandr Rodchenko maintained. After tape became more widely available in the late 1940s, Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman incorporated it into their respective repertoires. While Mondrian never used tape for painting his bands, Newman developed such a mastery of applications that he effectively voided the dichotomy of earlier ideological debates. The essay also addresses technical issues in the work of Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Harry Holtzman, Burgoyne Diller, Mark Rothko, Bridget Riley, Jo Baer, Agnes Martin, and Richard Lin.
In the eighteenth century, Western civilization entered a historical epoch known as the Enlightenment, establishing a new cultural and artistic paradigm of modernity. A German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, remarked in this context: “The Enlightenment project formulated by the Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century consisted in their desire to create an objective science, a universal morality and law, and an autonomous art based on their internal logic of development.” The following two centuries brought incredible diversity and depth to the Western art scene. They witnessed an unprecedented array of movements and creative originality. In addition, and in pursuit of the proclaimed ideal of total autonomy, twentieth-century artists revised the three most essential principles of art. The masters of modernism reinterpreted a traditional relationship between the means of representation and the object of art. They developed a new understanding of the role of the author in creating an artwork. And finally, they changed their view of the relationship between art and life. In my opinion, those three features comprise the substantive evolution of twentieth-century modern art.
Leonardo, 2005
Recent investigations into both cognitive science and the functional derivation of the visual brain as well as evolutionary dynamics have led to new and exciting ways of interpreting art. Abstract art has often been regarded as beyond the purview of such interpretations because of the very fact that it is abstract. However, as a visually guided activity, abstraction is eminently suited to an analysis from this perspective. This essay will demonstrate how such an approach can reap rich rewards in the understanding of why and how art came to progress from an earlier representational phase to one of abstraction by examining some of the 20th century's most influential trends.