IMPORTANT ART MOVEMENTS IN CONTEMPORARY ART

By Tony Godfrey

Being asked to talk for an hour on important movements in contemporary art I was reminded of a play performed in England in recent years “all the plays of William Shakespeare” – 37 plays performed in an hour and a half with a mere three actors. There may not have been 37 movements in contemporary art but it has certainly been (to mix metaphors) an action packed roller coaster. When does it begin? Some people would say 1960 and the man who lit the touch paper was Andy Warhol: compared to the tragic, heart-felt paintings of Mark Rothko (“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”) his work was totally superficial. Also his Brillo box like Jasper Johns’ Ale cans raised a question: “what is so special about an art work anyway?” Fellow pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein gloried in the mindless optimism of American commercial art.

Andy Warhol. Brillo Boxes. 1964/69

Minimalism, which developed a little later, was never going to be popular - as Pop Art has proved to be. The works of Donald Judd and Carl Andre were austere and simple in construction and choice of materials. They came not from any dumbness but from a desire to escape pretentiousness in art and present things as they were. Indicatively a Korean artist whose work looks similar, U Fan Lee, saw his works as having more metaphysical, or even spiritual, associations.

U Fan Lee. Relatum: Lovers. 1986

Donald Judd. Untitled (100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminium, 1982-86 AT MARFA TEXAS)

If both Pop and Minimalism were reactions against the self-indulgence and bleeding-heart- on-the-sleeve of abstract expressionism, around 1968 Conceptual Art took their critique of the art object much further. Could art be a painting made by someone else or just of a date? A scratchy video of someone bouncing a ball, a walk or a corner filled with fat? Works like that by John Baldessari, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, Richard Long and Joseph Beuys were just that. Art could be anything but it was only good art if it raised interesting questions – in these cases about authenticity, time, frustration, being and trauma. Art had become a way of thinking and discussing the world and how we lived in it.

Joseph Beuys. 7,000 Oaks. Dokumenta VII, 1982

In the 1980s there was a reaction to such anarchic thinking when many artists (and collectors) returned to painting big time. And to everybody’s surprise it was not USA but Germany that led this with a number of outstanding artists: Georg Baselitz who made his paintings upside down to show they were empty (though they weren’t), Anselm Kiefer who performed an autopsy on images of German history and Gerhard Richter whose immaculately made works played on difference between the photo and the painting.

Of course it’s not a “movement” but it is a big change in the world of art: the advent of several major and successful women artists such as, for example, Cindy Sherman who has made a career of being photographed adopting different roles and persona, Ana Mendiata who made performances about her Latino roots before falling out of a window (or some say pushed) or Marlene Dumas a painter whose work is rumbustious, confessional and critical.

Ana Mendieta. Arbol de la Vida (Tree of Life). 1976

And by the late Eighties, we got Neo-Conceptualism as reaction to the return of painting but this time round it was not so austere! Jeff Koons made immaculate replicas of sexy scenarios, Richard Prince made gorgeously tacky versions of smutty pictures, Takashi Murakami made equally immaculate cartoon-like paintings and Damien Hirst became a brand with his spot paintings and preserved dead animals. Unlike the first generation of Conceptual Artists they made desirable consumer objects and became very rich.

Richard Prince, Untitled (Original), 2007. Newer Older. Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2007.

Installation isn’t a movement so much as a new type of medium that took off in the Eighties, artists such as Ann Hamilton and Xu Bing using the whole space of the gallery to make complex and often interactive environments. And some artists are still painting: Neo Rauch whose canvases have a chunky, burlesque quality and Liu Xiaodong who makes realist paintings, but done with a wry eye on how media sees things.

Liu Xiaodong. Getting Out of Beichun. 2010

And now are we beyond “isms”? Are we in a post movement period? Maybe. In our own area we look at artists such as Agus Suwage, Geraldine Javier or Zhao Renhui and we find them hard to categorise: they all make installations, Suwage and Javier paintings, Zhao photographs. They have all absorbed ideas and strategies from the preceding movements, using them to develop strong personal positions. Art is so diverse now and so widespread that it is hard to see any movement making a universal paradigm shift. But, art can surprise: who knows?

Geraldine Javier. Installation at Arndt, Berlin. 2013