Strategies of Modern and Contemporary Art

Alexandr Skriabin

• Sound and colour – colour piano, „Synaesthesia“

Hungarian avantgarde: László Moholy-Nagy• Constructivism -

Bauhaus

• Project of a beauty

machine „Light-Space

Modulator“

– experience of perfect

harmony

– produces esthetical „truth“

– Formal beauty can make

man happy

1930´s: Progress and Optimism

Zdeněk Pešánek

• kinetic art, neon lights, sound

• „Spectrophone“• Light= modernity

1930´s: Progress and

Optimism

Duchamp

• Machine seen with an irony: The Large Glass, 1923

• http://youtu.be/lmag4vL7hnQ?t=2m6s

1960: Self Destroying Machine

• Jean Tinguely, Hommage to New York: http://swf.tubechop.com/tubechop.swf?vurl=3JEx6CDW6-o&start=3180&end=3362&cid=4886634– Rotozaza, 1967: Smashing-bottles machine• On occasion of the congress „Vision 67: Survival and

Growth. Second World Congress on Communication in a Changing World“, University of New York

1960: Experimental Art

• John Cage, Waterwalk, 1960: http://youtu.be/SSulycqZH-U– The overcoming of subjectivity by introducing the principle of

disinteressedness• Merce Cunningham, Walk Around Time, 1968 (Large Glass

by Duchamp)• RHYTMIC STRUCTURE – coexistence and independence of

music and dance (India), chance operations (Yìjīng/ I Ching)

• Further watching: http://youtu.be/ZNGpjXZovgk

1960´s: Experimental Art

• Marcel Duchamp: “when you have the independence between the music and the dance that we have, then the observer becomes the third point in a triangle; he completes the work and each triangle is a different triangle.”

Experimental Art

"We want to go beyond painting, sculpture, poetry, music, we need an art that would be in greater harmony with the needs of the new spirit... The motionless pictures of yesterday no longer satisfy the longings of the new man, formed by the necessity of action and co-habitation with machinery, demanding a constant dynamic. The aesthetics of organic motion replace the aesthetic lassitude of rigid forms. In the name of this change, which has occurred in the character of man, and in the name of the spiritual and internal changes in all human relations and activities, we abandon the use of the familiar art forms and begin the development of the new art, consisting in the unity of time and space."

Lucio Fontana, White Manifesto, 1946:

Experimental ArtVladimír Boudník: Explosionalism

• http://www.artlist.cz/en/vladimir-boudnik-101681/

Experimental Art

• Hugo Demartini, 1968• Milan Grygar,

http://youtu.be/PRHHLNiCJBg