Pop, Conceptual and Minimalist art.

This lecture was based on pop, conceptual and minimalist art. I found this lecture quite hard to follow but I did take some useful information.

Roushenburg – “pop art is the work in the gap between art and life” Andy Warhol is obviously one of the most well-known pop artists. In the 1950s he started out by creating art and illustrations for vouge and harpers bazar. After this much of his work was based on events such as death and car accidents, his works having links to death, the media and consumerism. I found the meaning behind his repeated photograph images the most interesting. He ensured the images were exactly the same as “then the more the meaning goes away and the better you feel.” I feel that art like this acted to desensitise people from the more violent events happening in society and is an example of the wider uses of art.

Next was minimalism. The idea of minimalism is that it rejects self-expression. I feel that it is much more brutal looking and has a more rigidly considered look, an example of this being the idea of deductive structure. This mean that the shape of the canvas determined the composition of the painting. I feel that this type of minimalist art doesn’t follow the normal art process and that much on the work is decided before the piece is started.

And finally, conceptual art. This is the most controversial definition of art and challenges traditional art. The general idea is that artists dematerialised art so that it couldn’t be brought or sold or take up room in galleries. Conceptual art is less about the physicality of the art and more about the idea that it represents. We discussed conceptual art more in our seminar session. We talked about if it fitted with the definition of ‘art’ and how the simplest of items get sold for large amounts of money and if this is just. The way that I would describe conceptual art is – what I think people who don’t know about or study art; think art is. This is because this kind of controversial art gets publicised more and so I feel affects people’s perception of art in general.

We finally linked the ideas of conceptual arts from fashion. We looked at the work of Iris Van Herpen. She takes a concept such as water and explores this and translates it to fashion. This accumulates to really innovative and unique garments, made using technological processes such as 3d printing and laser cutting. Iris van Herpen is a designer that I would like to look into further as she takes a very different and interesting approach which create such stunning results.