JD Holden: Art Practice Blog: What school of art am I from?

Ripped from Wikipedia as a way of getting a very quick overview of schools of art.

Classicism is a specific genre of philosophy, expressing itself in literature, architecture, art, and music, which has Ancient Greek and Roman sources and an emphasis on society. It was particularly expressed in the Enlightenment, and the Age of Reason.
Classicism first made an appearance as such during the Italian renaissance when the fall of Byzantium and rising trade with the Islamic cultures brought a flood of knowledge about, and from, the antiquity of Europe. Until that time the identification with antiquity had been seen as a continuous history of Christendom from the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine I. Renaissance classicism introduced a host of elements into European culture, including the application of mathematics and empiricism into art, humanism, literary and depictive realism, and formalism. Importantly it also introduced Polytheism, or "paganism", and the juxtaposition of ancient and modern.
The classicism of the Renaissance led to, and gave way to, a different sense of what was "classical" in the 16th and 17th centuries. In this period classicism took on more overtly structural overtones of orderliness, predictability, the use of geometry and grids, the importance of rigorous discipline and pedagogy, as well as the formation of schools of art and music. The court of Louis XIV was seen as the center of this form of classicism, with its references to the gods of Olympus as a symbolic prop for absolutism, its adherence to axiomatic and deductive reasoning, and its love of order and predictability.

I do like a certain orderliness in my work, but there's a good deal of serendipity that works against Classicism. Pedagogy is important to me in general, and some of my work involves juxtaposition. It's interesting that it was foreign influences, trade, movement that enabled this ism to appear, and there may be links to Altermodernism (see below)

Cubist In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.

I guess I do this. But instead of re-assembling on one surface, I put them into three separate surfaces, making the viewer move from form to form.

Constructivist was an artistic and architectural movement that originated in Russia from 1919 onward which rejected the idea of autonomous art in favour of art as a practice directed towards social purposes.

My art has no social purpose, just personal purpose. I don't make art to teach, to inform, to change society. I make art for individuals to put in their spaces. Even monumental or public art is like this.

Futurist expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition.

I love futuristic art. I don't loathe anything.

Formalist is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content. In visual art, formalism is a concept that posits that everything necessary to comprehending a work of art is contained within the work of art. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance. Formalism is an approach to understanding art.

I hope that my work can be seen as of and by itself. But I like telling the story of my art. And I certainly don't plan every line or plane.

Modern includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art.

I embrace the traditions of the past, especially the modern past. I guess there is a tendency towards abstraction in my work.

Modernist Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism. Arguably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism, is the rejection of tradition, and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms. Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and also that of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God.
In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the movement's approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, which in the 1940s, invited to challenge conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony, typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking. A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form, and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).

Fifty years ago, I would have been proudly Modernist. And I am happy enough that the process and materials used in my abstraction can be seen. But I want to make it new by looking at the old.

Remodernist The Remodernism manifesto was published on March 1, 2000 to promote vision, authenticity and self-expression, with an emphasis on painting, and subtitled "towards a new spirituality in art." Its premise is that the potential of the modernist vision has not been fulfilled, that its development has been in the wrong direction and that this vision needs to be reclaimed, redefined and redeveloped. It advocates the search for truth, knowledge and meaning, and challenges formalism.
It has a short introduction, summing up: "Modernism has progressively lost its way, until finally toppling into the bottomless pit of Postmodern balderdash." This is followed by 14 numbered points, stressing bravery, individuality, inclusiveness, communication, humanity and the perennial against nihilism, scientific materialism and the "brainless destruction of convention." Point 7 states:
Spirituality is the journey of the soul on earth. Its first principle is a declaration of intent to face the truth. Truth is what it is, regardless of what we want it to be. Being a spiritual artist means addressing unflinchingly our projections, good and bad, the attractive and the grotesque, our strengths as well as our delusions, in order to know ourselves and thereby our true relationship with others and our connection to the divine.
Point 9 states: "Spiritual art is not religion. Spirituality is humanity's quest to understand itself and finds its symbology through the clarity and integrity of its artists." Point 12 links its use of the word "God" to enthusiasm — from the Greek root "en theos" (to be possessed by God).
The summary at the end starts, "It is quite clear to anyone of an uncluttered mental disposition that what is now put forward, quite seriously, as art by the ruling elite, is proof that a seemingly rational development of a body of ideas has gone seriously awry," and finds the solution is a spiritual renaissance because "there is nowhere else for art to go. Stuckism's mandate is to initiate that spiritual renaissance now."

I started looking at Remondernism with interest. And then we got to the spirituality bit. I love the word enthusiasm, but I prefer the notion of "God within" rather than being "possessed". It is a choice we make, not an overtaking by God. But art does not need a spiritual renaissance. And it certainly doesn't need the God-awful art as shown as part of this movement at http://www.redbubble.com/groups/remodernist-painters

Post-modern is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. It involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Rather, it holds realities to be plural and relative, and dependent on who the interested parties are and what their interests consist in. It attempts to problematise modernist overconfidence, by drawing into sharp contrast the difference between how confident speakers are of their positions versus how confident they need to be to serve their supposed purposes.

I don't really have a problem with this manifesto, just how it is manifest. I love some post-modern art, and hate other. So I guess that works in it's favour. I want people to love or hate my work, but not to be ambivalent toward it.

Relational art
Artists included by Bourriaud under the rubric of Relational Aesthetics include: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Carsten Höller, Henry Bond, Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe.[13]
Bourriaud explores this notion of relational aesthetics through examples of what he calls relational art. According to Bourriaud, relational art encompasses "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."[14]
The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Bourriaud claims "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist."
In Relational art, the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption.

I love my studio. I don't think I want other people actually messing in there. But when I have an "open studio" day I love talking to people about my work, and they gather meaning and encounter the work in an interesting way. But I do think I create works for individual consumption. Though I am interested in looking at how I might take my art out into the world.

Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to LeWitt's definition of Conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:
“ In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Nah.... I want to make pretty things, and serendipity in the process is too important for the outcome for everything to be planned.

Altermodernism ALTERMODERN
MANIFESTO
POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD
A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture

Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live

Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe

Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture

This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing

Today's art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves

Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

Watch the cartoon here:
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/cartoon.shtm

"Heterochronia is the co-presence of different times in our everyday life. I think what's very specific to our period of time is the intertwining of different periods of historisations at the same time. We are surrounded by many different layers of time, all the time and it leads to a different way to apprehend what's contemporary, what is really contempoorary, and what are we contemporary of?" [NICOLAS BOURRIAUD, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/explore.shtm]

Heterochronia

Viatorisation

Travel

Borders

Simon Starling