6EN001 Modernisms

Blog Text 1

Dadaism was an artistic movement which started in Zurich, Switzerland, as a result of the First World War. The movement became active towards the first half of the 20^th Century. The primary cause for the birth of this movement was to poke fun at the meaninglessness of the modern materialistic world. The whole movement had a powerful influence on several artists, shaping their art forms in different ways. The art form focused not on aesthetic outcomes, but rather realistic artworks that prepared people to question the society and the nationalistic norms, and the role of art in general (Sinfield 2014). The artists of the Dada movement were known for their use of real everyday objects that could be store-bought. The artist would distort the orientation of the object or manipulate the presentation of the object and create that into art. The use of these readymade objects would direct the minds of the masses to question the about artistic creativity and the liberty to practice that. Not only did the war impact the people, the social media and emerging industrial age and the change it brought about also had a large impact. The sole purpose of the Dadaists was to mock dehumanization with plenty of elements like pulleys, dials, wheels, pistols, clocks, and alike. Beyond non living entities that they portrayed, the human figures by these artists were distorted depictions, to bring out our internal crippled judgements. Macabre, grotesque, absurdity are close-knit concepts along with Dadaism. The absurdity of existence found expression in these art forms. Some of the artists of the Dadaist community are Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Benjamin Peret, Hugo Ball, Max Ernst, Alice Bailley, Tristan Tzara, whose genre of work ranged from sculptures, to paintings, to literature (The Art Story 2017).

Blog Text 2

Modernism is associated with the movement in art and outlook during the first part of the 20th Century. Modernism rejected all that was traditional in terms of values and techniques, putting emphasis on individual experiences and perception of the world. The following essay has entries, putting light into two concepts of modernism among several others. Another major concept of Modernism would be Montage. In 1916, John Heartfield and George Grosz started the concept by experimenting with pasting different pieces of pictures (Stern 2015). This concept was later given name. As an aesthetic principle, montage will be an amalgamation of separate items into one composite frame, by way of juxtaposition. The word montage has been derived from the French verb ‘monter’ which translates to ‘to assemble’ in English. Although related to the practice of collages, montage deals mostly with juxtaposition, which generally has a rhetorical point. This concept is most commonly associated with Soviet cinema of the 1920’s. Montage favoured irony, ambiguity and paradox over totality. Montage derived from concepts of Futurism and Dadaism. Montage as a genre of expression is multilingual in nature. The concept of photomontage relates to practices based on assembling photographic materials. Photomontage is made from photographs and fragments from different photos and making that work out into a new piece of art. During the inter-war years, photomontage was used as a huge medium to reach out to people and persuade them. This was used for publicity and agendas, by artists who would practice Surrealism, Dadaism, Constructivism and alike. Photomontage provided a visual stimulation to the onlookers. The concept was to reach out to the mass, and this kind could be remade and interpreted the way one wanted. Photomontage survived the Dadaism movement and its impact, and it was a technique used by European surrealists. The influences spread to Japan, where this technique was used widely, in different modes of media to cater to te maximum amount of people (Courses.washington.edu, 2017).

References

Courses.washington.edu. (2017). Kinds of Photomontage. [online] Available at: https://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/cgi-bin/book/pmontage/kindsofpm.html [Accessed 7 Jul.2017].

Stern, G., 2015. Notes on Photomontage. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 24(2), pp.269-274.