Art as a mirror of a society
‘All artists bear the imprint of their time but the great artists are those in which this stamp is most deeply impressed’ - Henry Matisse, 1908.
Art has been always a mirror of the society and a reflection on each era: now more then ever, while we are all facing this surreal situation where majority of people worldwide are forced to stay at home with no social interactions, art can still bring us together (virtually, at least) and invites us to reflect on the times we’re living in.
If you look back at the history, the most progressive movements were born in the most challenging times. Dadaism, for example was born in Zürich in 1916, developed during and after the First World War as young artists banded together to express their anger with the war. They thought that the only hope for society was to destroy systems based on reason and logic and replace them with ones based on anarchy, the primitive and the irrational. By doing so, they challenged the status quo and we can fairly say that this movement definitely changed the course of art.
The expression anti-art was originated by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 to mark works which challenge accepted definitions of art. Passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including Surrealism, nouveau réalisme, pop art and Fluxus.
Marcel Duchamp Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) formerly titled as, Revolving Glass Machine, 1920
Rotary Glass Plates is a motorized device that demonstrates the continuity of visual impressions. Its five glass blades and (portions of the support) are painted so that when set in motion and viewed head-on, the machine forms concentric circles on a single plane. For about eight years before constructing this apparatus, Duchamp had been reading various treatises on mathematics and perceptions, and a number of his art works dealt with rotating machines. Rotary Glass Plates was the first actual machine that Duchamp made in his quest for a new world that would no longer separate art from idea.
At the same time, De Stijil artists had a different mission: they wanted to create a new art in the spirit of peace as they believed that the reduction of art to its basics would in turn lead to a renewal of the society.
George Maciunas Fluxus Manifesto,1963
In 1961 George Maciunas invented the word ‘Fluxus’: the basic idea was that life itself can be experienced as art and this artistic movement spread across three continents and included many artists such as: Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and Naim June Paik (an early pioneer of video art). Fluxus continues to develop today, taking advantage of new technologies, such as the internet.
Nam June Paik, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
With the technological progress nowadays we talk a lot about digital art, but we can see that digital art did not develop in an art-historical vacuum either, but it has strong connections to previous art movements - especially the above mentioned Dada, Fluxus and Conceptual Art. The importance of these movements for digital art resides in their emphasis on formal instructions and in their focus on concept , event, and audience participation, as opposed to unified material objects.
During the upcoming days we’ll start sharing some interesting insights on the history of digital art, stay tuned!