FREE ART SINCE 1989 PDF Kelly Grovier | 224 pages | 07 Dec 2015 | Thames & Hudson Ltd | 9780500204269 | English | London, United Kingdom Art Since by Kelly Grovier Imagine finding yourself in a maze of connected rooms. In front of you, a man is constructing a portrait of the Virgin Mary out of clumps of elephant dung and snippets of pornography. In the next room, you see a group of men straining to push a huge concrete block from one end of the space to the other and then back again, endlessly. As you make your way to a third doorway, you are confronted by a woman on her hands and knees who whips her long wet hair which she has dipped in cheap dye at your feet, driving you backwards. Suddenly, she turns away and begins to gnaw at the corners of a kg lb cube of chocolate, spitting each mouthful into a heart-shaped box. You manage to slip past her and begin running down a long corridor, catching glimpses of what occupies each of the Art Since 1989 that are open on either side of Art Since 1989 a man pouring blood into a clear mould that resembles his own head Art Since 1989 eventually find an exit and push the doors open, Art Since 1989 to escape the maze. But as soon as you step outside, you are paralysed by the sight of an enormous steel spider, nine metres 30ft in height, towering above you and, behind that, a West Highland Terrier, 12 metres tall, whose colourful fur is made out of living flowers Contemporary art is exhilarating, bewildering and, at times, terrifying. No era in the history of human creativity has ever been so diverse in its vision or so seemingly disconnected in its achievement than the one in which we currently live. Although individual paintings by Raphael, by Michelangelo and by Leonardo da Vinci may reveal Art Since 1989 temperament and unique brushwork of the artists who created them, when seen together the works of these three masters, however distinctive, are aesthetically consistent and all belong unmistakably to the same High Renaissance moment. They sing, as it were, from the same historical hymn sheet. But what score could hope to harmonise the discordant voices, say, of the Art Since 1989 flesh of British painter Lucian Freud's later portraits and the steep heap of cellophane-wrapped candies that comprises Cuban-born Art Since 1989 Gonzalez-Torres's conceptual installations? What can possibly unite into a coherent narrative the motivations behind American artist Robert Gober's sculpture of a Winchester rifle melted across a plastic basket filled with Granny Smith apples and Mexican artist Teresa Margolles's installation of floating soap bubbles, wafting from Art Since 1989 machine filled with water used to cleanse dead bodies? How are we to square the vision of controversial Belgium artist Wim Delvoye, who tattoos the backs of living pigs with sprawling designs, with that of American glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, who has transformed the field of blown glass with sprawling chandeliers of sinuous fronds? Our story begins at a moment of extraordinary upheavals around the world. It starts in the most astonishing stretch of months that bridged the political cataclysms of and the unprecedented scientific and technological awakenings of If saw one era of human history come to an end with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, student protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and the wave of democratic revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe — from Czechoslovakia to Poland, Hungary to Romania — the ensuing 12 months Art Since 1989 the dawn of a new cultural epoch without obvious parallel in the story of mankind. It was in the year that our knowledge of the universe would be changed forever with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, that our understanding of the very fabric of our bodies would be sharpened Art Since 1989 with the unveiling of the Human Genome Project, and that our ability to communicate with one another and to share information would be utterly transformed with the introduction Art Since 1989 the World Wide Web. Great art vibrates with the pulses of the age that provoked it and succeeds in chronicling its generation's consciousness more profoundly than any Art Since 1989 human document Art Since 1989. However valiantly historians of the Spanish Civil War may endeavour to piece together the events of 26 Aprilwhen a defenceless Basque village was ravaged from the sky by fascist forces, it will forever be Pablo Picasso's mute testimony, Guernicathat reverberates in our imagination with the meaning of those atrocities. But what of our own age? Which artists have managed Art Since 1989 record the rhythms, triumphs and traumas of our time? Guernica is notable not only for Art Since 1989 ability to capture the anguish of a given moment, but also for its genius in redefining the very nature of history painting. Picasso's devastating canvas, in other words, not only looks back to what happened, but endeavours to drive art history forward by forging a new language with which to convey intense feeling. It is this idea which has driven me to search out those artists who, in our own era, have likewise undertaken to shape Art Since 1989 fresh visual vocabulary and whose works reflect upon the turbulent years since the world began delving deeper into the unknown depths of outer and inner space than any generation before has ever attempted. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, which began in November — symbolising the tearing down of the Iron Curtain that stretched across the Art Since 1989 nations of Eastern Europe — and the subsequent hurtling, five months later, of a pioneering scientific lens out past the furthest horizon of conceivable vision when the Space Shuttle Discovery released the Hubble Space Telescope into the great beyondprovide powerful metaphors for the sudden boundlessness of imagination that characterises the art created in the ensuing months and years. For over a century, since the closing decades of the 19th century, the story of modern art had appeared to be a relentless succession of prevailing styles. Then, suddenly, the very notion of a dominant aesthetic style appeared to Art Since 1989 as outmoded an aspiration as any tyrannical political dogma. The days of overarching philosophies and theoretical manifestos to which artists either adamantly adhered or which they robustly repudiated were gone. Without an orthodoxy to resist, there can of course be no avant-garde — no overthrowing of an old order by a new one. Dramatic pronouncements that the history of art itself had reached its final act were being made Art Since 1989 prominent critics, such as Arthur Danto, who speculated in the mids that mankind was rapidly approaching "the end of art". Such writers conjectured that the future of creative expression would no longer take the form of Art Since 1989 unfolding narrative of distinct chapters devoted to individual movements — the medieval period followed by the Renaissance, romanticism followed by realism — but would instead be a shapeless and unending aeon of individual visions: an anything-goes free-for-all of hit-and-miss wonders. So far, such prognostications have been proved correct. In the current climate, there is no overriding style, technique or attitude governing artistic practice; nor is there any prevailing medium. For centuries, three predominant genres painting, drawing and sculpture accounted for nearly all of what society meant by the word "art". To restrict observation now to those three categories would be to blind ourselves to a majority of the exceptional work currently being made. What began as an audacious gesture when the French artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp introduced into artistic discourse the concept of the so- called "ready-made" — which most infamously took the form in of a urinal he entitled Fountain Art Since 1989 quickly caught fire in the mischievous imaginations of Pop Artists in the s and s. Today, conceptual art, which often employs found or retail objects appropriated from everyday life, has been broadly embraced as vibrant and viable a strand of creative expression as more conventional works fashioned by brush, pencil or chisel. Add to this the textures of new technologies introduced in the era of digitisation and the full palette of possibilities now available to artists would be virtually unrecognisable to any creator of visual work in the Art Since 1989 40, years, since mankind first began making art for the eyes. An exhibition of objects by an artist operating today is as likely to consist of videos, dioramic vitrines, displays of digital photographs, found objects and live performances as it is to feature a painted canvas, a work on paper demonstrating an agility of draughtsmanship or a three-dimensional object cast Art Since 1989 metal, marble or clay. It is extraordinary to reflect that the techniques and media that we regard today as traditional in the making of art were once cutting-edge and would have struck early observers of their use as bold and innovative. The appearance of stretched linen canvas, for example, as a support for oil paint would have seemed groundbreaking in the 14th and 15th centuries to observers conditioned to expect the warp and heft of a painted wood Art Since 1989. So rapid has been the recent assimilation of electronic gadgetry into our everyday Art Since 1989, it is Art Since 1989 to forget just how new and pioneering its use is in the making of art. The combined vantage and density of detail in works such as German photographer Andreas Gursky's nightscape Los Angeles would not have been possible before the democratisation of digitisation and seems to brood over an awakening world of artistic possibility.