The New Tendency In Art

An art critic examines the products of artists and the movements in art from World War II to the present.

Excerpt from The New Tendency, in Art: Post Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism Art's complaisancy has been shocked. The immunity which has been continued to her through thirty odd centuries is at length recalled. She finds herself now brought face to face with a challenge which she must either ignore or accept. The world has lived through the like experience in its other great activities. In medicine Hahnemann inaugurated no less of a revolution, when, instead of opposing the principle in disease, he treated it in kind, nor was Luther's revolt any less appalling when he substituted faith in place of works. Music has arrived with less of a shock at Debussy because of Wagner, but the step from Mendelssohn to him is no greater than from Raphael to Gauguin. In jurisprudence the wig and gown has received its fillip in the Recall of Judicial Decisions. In time each of these, comfortably established by Tradition, has been asked to rouse itself, get up, and turn around. It has never hurt any of these to be viewed from the other side. In the New Movement in art we can detect the same protesting spirit in which Luther nailed his theses upon the Church door of Wittenberg when he tried to raise formalism to the higher power of faith. Here likewise is a protest that demands the eye of faith, with its ability to see the spirit. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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An account of a major international art movement originating in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s, which anticipated key aspects of information aesthetics. New Tendencies, a nonaligned modernist art movement, emerged in the early 1960s in the former Yugoslavia, a nonaligned country. It represented a new sensibility, rejecting both Abstract Expressionism and socialist realism in an attempt to formulate an art adequate to the age of advanced mass production. In this book, Armin Medosch examines the development of New Tendencies as a major international art movement in the context of social, political, and technological history. Doing so, he traces concurrent paradigm shifts: the change from Fordism (the political economy of mass production and consumption) to the information society, and the change from postwar modernism to dematerialized postmodern art practices. Medosch explains that New Tendencies, rather than opposing the forces of technology as most artists and intellectuals of the time did, imagined the rapid advance of technology to be a springboard into a future beyond alienation and oppression. Works by New Tendencies cast the viewer as coproducer, abolishing the idea of artist as creative genius and replacing it with the notion of the visual researcher. In 1968 and 1969, the group actively turned to the computer as a medium of visual research, anticipating new media and digital art. Medosch discusses modernization in then-Yugoslavia and other nations on the periphery; looks in detail at New Tendencies' five major exhibitions in Zagreb (the capital of Croatia); and considers such topics as the group's relation to science, the changing relationship of manual and intellectual labor, New Tendencies in the international art market, their engagement with computer art, and the group's eventual eclipse by other “new art practices” including conceptualism, land art, and arte povera. Numerous illustrations document New Tendencies' works and exhibitions.

An account of a major international art movement originating in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s, which anticipated key aspects of information aesthetics.

This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption – called "contemporary art" – emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the "global contemporary" without also paying careful attention to the particular, local, and/or national symptoms of the contemporary condition. Part I is methodological and theoretical in scope, while Part II is historical and documentary. For the latter, a number of case studies address the emergence of the category "contemporary art" in the context of Lebanon, Egypt, India, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, and Moldova. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, globalism, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.