New Elements/Principles of Art          From the Walker Art Center

1. Appropriation

We live in a culture that overflows with images and objects. From television to the Internet, from the mall to the junkyard, we are surrounded by words, images, and objects that are cheap, or free and throwaway. It is not surprising that artists today incorporate this stuff into their creative expression.

To appropriate is to borrow. Appropriation is the practice of creating new work by taking a preexisting image from another source—art history books, advertisements, the media—and transforming or combining it with new ones. The three-dimensional version of appropriation is the use of found objects in art. A found object is an existing object—often a mundane manufactured product—given a new identity as an artwork or part of an artwork.

What is the source of the image or object that has been appropriated? Why has the artist chosen this source for images?

Some common sources of appropriated images are works of art from the distant or recent past, historical documents, media (film and television), or consumer culture (advertisements or products). Sometimes the source is unknown, but it may have personal associations for the artist. The source of an appropriated image or object can be politically charged, symbolic, ambiguous, or can push the limits of imagery deemed acceptable for art.

What does the artist do with the appropriated image?

Appropriated imagery can be photographically or digitally reproduced, copied by mechanical means such as an overhead projector, attached directly onto an artwork, or re-created in a number of ways. The result can be a deadpan representation or a startling transformation. Artists sometimes re-create an object or repaint it, altering its scale or style to create new meaning. Artists can also juxtapose different images or objects, layer them with other images, break them into fragments, or recontextualize them, which means to redefine images or objects by a placing them in a new context.

* What elements of this work are appropriated?

* Can you identify the source of the appropriated image or object?

* What did the artist do to it to create this artwork?

* What do you think the artist was trying to express in this artwork?

* How does the source and/or the transformation of the appropriated image or object help create the meaning of this artwork?

 “In all of [my sources], there was originally a model sitting in a chair in a studio who gets characterized by that artist. He finished it and it gets photographed. Then the photograph gets turned into a print, which gets put in a book. I get that book and do my paintings from it. Through these stages, the original person gets further and further back. Further and further lost, further removed. The whole notion that there was a character underneath the images kept me wanting to do them. It was that sense of loss as if they were ghosts.”

—Glenn Brown

2. Time

How do you know when time has passed? Do you wear a watch? Keep a calendar? Read the daily news? How much of your daily activities are determined by time? When does time go fast for you? When does time seem to pass slowly?

Time occupies an important, but invisible, place in human culture. It controls our daily activity and inspires imaginative scenarios in science fiction. New global technologies such as satellite TV, cell phones, and the Internet have transformed our conception of time and made the instantaneous experience of time across distances commonplace. It is not surprising that it has become a key element in the work of many artists today.

It is not new for artists to choose a specific moment in time for the content of their work. History paintings documenting important events were considered among the most significant subjects for artists to explore. Contemporary artists bring the element of time into their work in many different ways. A specific moment in time can be the subject of an artwork, but artists today can also manipulate how that moment is experienced. They can choose historically charged moments or focus on mundane, even boring ones. Some contemporary artists make time their subject matter by systematically noting its passage . Others employ media such as film and video, which require us to invest time in order to fully experience it. These media also allow artists to manipulate time—slow motion, fast forward, rewind, repeat—as an expressive element.

3. Performance 

Artists today work with the idea of performance in two ways:

Performance art refers to art activities that are presented before a live audience and can combine music, dance, poetry, theater, visual art, and video. Whether public, private, or videotaped, performance art often involves the artist performing an action that may be planned and scripted, or may emphasize spontaneous, unpredictable elements of chance. Different types of performance art have evolved from simple, often private investigations of ordinary routines of everyday life, rituals, and tests of endurance to larger-scale site-specific environments and public projects, multimedia productions, and autobiographical cabaret-style solo work.

Performative art describes artists’ explorations of the processes, motions, and actions they use to create art. These acts are often more important to the artists’ practice than the finished art objects. Some artists transform their bodies into paintbrushes or musical instruments or raw materials for a finished product. Others create public or private performances, rituals, or multimedia events in which an artwork is the documentation or by-product.

4. Space

What are different meanings of the term “space”?  How is space used in sculpture?   How is space depicted in painting?   How is space in art different from space in life?

In traditional drawing or painting, artists have often been concerned with creating the illusion of space or depth upon a flat surface. They use the effects of one point perspective and/or light and shadow to create this illusion—or they may purposely distort these elements to make abstractions, as in the Cubist style. In traditional sculpture, space is discussed in terms of positive and negative space.

Many contemporary artists work with space by focusing on real space—the dimensions of a room, the spaces we move through in the city or in the natural world, even the limitless spaces of the sky or the virtual space of the Internet. They work with fine-art or industrial materials—from wood and stone to steel and plastics—to frame space or install a work to fill a space. Materials such as electric light, film, video, or digital media can also transform, document, or create spaces. Viewers can be surrounded by art, or are led to a focused experience or perception of a real space. When an artist creates a work for a room or specific space, it is called installation art. Most installations are temporary and sometimes engage multiple senses such as sight, smell and hearing.

5. Hybridity

In science, a hybrid is created by mixing the characteristic of two different species in order to create one that is better or stronger. In an automobile, a hybrid combines an electric motor with a gasoline engine.

What are some plants or animals that are hybrids?

How could this idea transfer when we use the term hybridity to describe contemporary art?

The concept of hybridity can be applied to two aspects of art today.

Material Hybridity/Blurring the Boundaries

What do artists use to make art? For artists today, the choice of materials and media for creating art is wide open. Some artists continue to use traditional media such as paint, clay, or bronze, but others have selected new or unusual materials for their art, such as industrial or recycled materials, and newer technologies such as photography, video, or digital media offer artists even more ways to express themselves. Many artists working today incorporate more than material or technique in ways that create hybrid art forms. Combinations of still image, moving image, sound, digital media, and found objects can create new hybrid art forms that are beyond what traditional artists have ever imagined.

Artists today are comfortable using whatever seems best to fully investigate and express their ideas or concepts and often move among different media and techniques to express new things in their work. One approach to understanding art today involves identifying what media and materials the artists chose and considering why they chose to work with them.

Look at the three artworks below.

What materials, media, and techniques did each artist choose for their work?

Which of these are nontraditional materials for making art?

Would you describe these works as paintings, sculptures, or something else?

How does an artist’s choice of media, materials and techniques contribute to the meaning of the artwork?

            “It's important to exhibit your mistakes. Man is not perfect. Neither are his creations. I’ve given up using sour milk. Instead I use music. I sometimes fasten a tape recorder onto paintings or objects and have the music pour over the spectator/listener. This creates a certain effect: those who look at the art don’t realize how bad it is when they hear the music. For the music is even worse. Two bad things make one good thing.”

—Dieter Roth, 1978

Cultural Hybridity

We live in a world that is constantly on the move. People move between places and cultures either as an immigrant, refugee, worker, or tourist. Further, with technologies such as television, radio, and the Internet, we can be virtual travelers to almost anywhere at any time. Many contemporary artists have experienced movement between and among cultures in their lives, and their work often explores issues of personal and cultural identity.