experimental definition art

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"[B]eauty is a defiance of authority."—William Carlos Williams

What Is Experimental Art?

One typically hears unusual art called three different things, often interchangeably:

• Avant-Garde
• Experimental

But what do these three words mean? Do they mean the same thing? I don’t think so, and in this post I’ll point out some basic differences between them. I’ll also define what I think experimental art essentially is, and how such art operates.

As I’ve argued here and here —and hopefully have been able to demonstrate in both those places and elsewhere—one encounters innovation simply everywhere : high art, low art, experimental art, mainstream commercial art. The Matrix (1999), for instance, was one of the most popular films of the late 1990s in large part because it exposed mainstream audiences to techniques and ideas that they hadn’t seen before. (I first heard about the film from friends who were bursting with excitement over it, talking on and on about how they couldn’t believe what they had just seen.)

Of course, the Wachowskis mostly borrowed/stole/derived those things from other sources:

Jean Baudrillard (who disliked how the Matrix films used his ideas )

Blade Runner (1982)

Heroic Trio (1993) (dubbed—blame the Weinsteins!—but a high-quality copy)

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

A lot of the art we call innovative works this way. As I wrote in this post :

To innovate literally means “to introduce something new.” But it also means to “make changes in anything established.” Which is the historical meaning of the word’s root: “to renew, alter.”

Innovation does not necessarily mean something new. It means doing something unfamiliar , often with old familiar things. The Matrix draws very heavily from Ghost in the Shell , often recreating images in that film:

Indeed, the Wachowskis originally pitched their film as a live-action version of Ghost in the Shell . But the Wachowskis still had to find ways to recreate those images in real space—a problem requiring often unique solutions. As the above video claims, their success was to synthesize the various things they liked—manga, Hong Kong martial arts films, Buddhism, Continental Theory—into something coherent.

Meanwhile, look what happened after The Matrix came out. As its novelty factor wore off, people grew increasingly tired of films that merely imitated it (including, it seems, The Matrix ’s own sequels). Consider Underworld (2003)—just one of dozens of Matrix clones I could have chosen:

This all said, The Matrix is not what we’d call an experimental film. The Harry Potter novels are in their own way rather innovative —and influential—but J.K. Rowling isn’t an experimental author.

So the experimental isn’t tied exclusively to innovation. (Or, rather: innovation is not tied exclusively to the experimental.)

The Avant-Garde

In 1863, Manet submitted the above painting to the Paris Salon for exhibition. It was rejected. Manet then took advantage of the Salon des Refusés, a venue better than no venue at all.

Which didn’t solve his problems. Manet’s work kept getting refused by the official Salon: it was too flat, too contemporary—and too erotic. (In 1867, he even paid for his own solo exhibition—the equivalent of today’s self-publishing.) But over time, he befriended other refusés (in particular, Edgar Degas, who—always the contrarian—was in self-imposed exile from the Salon). They, inspired by Manet’s solo efforts and by the Salon des Refusés, banded together in 1873 as the “Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers” in order to form their own exhibitions. (Members were supposed to denounce the Salon, but Manet kept submitting his work.)

In 1874, they had their first independent exhibition; other, more successful shows, followed. People started calling them “the Impressionists.” (Degas hated the term, insisting that he was actually a realist). By the mid-1880s, Manet and his colleagues were the leading celebrities of the Parisian art world: the avant-garde of painting.

The term “avant-garde” predates the Impressionists; it was first recorded in the 1825 Saint-Simonian essay “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel” (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”), where it has a very different meaning. That essay called upon artists to serve as the advance guard of the utopian socialist revolution :

It is we artists who will serve as your vanguard; the power of the arts is indeed most immediate and the quickest. We possess arms of all kinds: when we want to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them upon marble or upon a canvas; we popularize them through poetry and through song; we employ by turns the lyre and the flute, the ode and the song, the story and the novel; the dramatic stage is spread out before us, and it is there that we exert a galvanizing and triumphant influence. We address ourselves to man’s imagination and to his sentiments. We therefore ought always to exert the most lively and decisive action.

(Henri de Saint-Simon was a major influence on Karl Marx. Some attribute this tract to him; others to his follower Olinde Rodrigues .)

As Matei Călinescu notes in Five Faces of Modernity (1987):

By the mid-nineteenth century, the metaphor of the avant-garde had been used by social utopists, reformers of various sorts, and radical journalists, but, to my knowledge, had scarcely been used by literary or artistic figures. (108)

Călinescu sees the term starting to shift toward its more modern usage in 1856, in the literary criticism of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. But even then the term,

[f]requently used in the political language or radicalism, […] tended to point toward that type of commitment one would have expected from an artist who conceived of his role as consisting mainly in party politics. That was perhaps one of the reasons why Baudelaire, in the early 1860s, disliked and disapproved of both the term and the concept. (109)

By the time of (and partially due to) Manet and his fellow Impressionists, “avant-garde” had come to mean a group of artists whose work is initially rejected by authority, but that eventually comes to be accepted by society. (Visit any local art fair today, and you’ll see the Impressionists’ long-lasting influence.)

But it doesn’t always work that way. Consider serial music, one of the most powerful experimental forms of 20 th century composition. Derived from Arnold Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique (and atonal ideas well before that), serial composition dominated Western academies and conservatories from 1945 until some point in the 1970s (if not longer):

Serial music has numerous advocates (I rather like all of these works), but they tend to be academicians and others who love music theory—it never really caught on with the general populace, or had that much influence on popular music, or the culture at large. (Here’s the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s current season : Beethoven, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Schubert, Bach, …)

Does that mean that serialist music wasn’t experimental? Quite the contrary! But it wasn’t a successful avant-garde (if it was even avant-garde in the first place).

Minimalism was a more proper avant-garde movement. Its early practitioners—La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass—were acting in opposition to the authority of the academy, looking for an alternative to serialism (as well as to the aleatory techniques of John Cage et al). Excluded by music’s ruling class, they embraced different principles of composition (sustained tones, repetition with variation), and brought their work to alternative venues (loft parties, galleries, museums):

The Minimalists eventually achieved mainstream success—partly because, unlike the serialists, they courted mainstream audiences:

Their influence can be heard throughout modern popular music:

…to choose just a few possible examples.

How many self-professed avant-garde movements turned out to have little or even no effect on the rest of the culture? I’m not claiming that such movements were bad, mind you. But “avant-garde” is often a marketing term, inspired by the fantastic success that the Impressionists had a century ago. And sometimes marketing campaigns work…and sometimes they don’t… But the art can still be experimental even if the rest of the culture never “comes around” to adopting its techniques—or even liking it.

The Experimental

So what is experimental art? What defines it? What makes it experimental ?

To answer those question—to propose answers to those question—I’d first like to invoke Roman Jakobson’s notion of the dominant , which I discussed more at length in this post . Jakobson defined the dominant as

the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure. (41)

The dominant, in other words, is that artistic element that the artist values over all others: John Cage and his colleagues took chance techniques as their dominant. The Oulipians work under arbitrary and often severe constraints. The Language poets resist narrative pressures by emphasizing parataxis. And so on. All other aspects then bow to the dominant component.

Experimental artists often claim that they are breaking with the past:

The Impressionists favored color over line, worked en plein air , and chose contemporary rather than classical subjects. The Minimalists refused serialist and chance techniques, preferring to look for some other way of working (one that wasn’t simply a return to the tonal harmony of the 19th century).

But historical precedents can be found even in experimental art:

That Manet! What a little copycat he was! Furthermore, as the popular (and possibly apocryphal) story puts it , Manet met Degas while they were both copying the same painting:

(Regardless of whether that story is true, both Manet and Degas were both enthusiastic—and tremendously skilled—copyists.)

Philip Glass was influenced by Ravi Shankar. Steve Reich was influenced by Ghanan drumming and Balinese gamelan music. Terry Riley was influenced by Pandit Pran Nath and La Monte Young. La Monte Young (a truly great oddball) was influenced by the sounds of high tension power lines, and the wind whipping across the plains :

The very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of the wind blowing through the chinks and all around the log cabin in Idaho where I was born. I have always considered this among my most important early experiences. It was very awesome and beautiful and mysterious. Since I could not see it and did not know what it was, I questioned my mother about it for long hours. During my childhood there were certain sound experiences of constant frequency that have influenced my musical ideas and development: the sounds of insects; the sounds of telephone poles and motors; sounds produced by steam escaping, such as my mother’s tea-kettle and the sounds of whistles and signals from trains; and resonations set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic areas such as canyons, valleys, lakes, and plains. Actually, the first sustained single tone at a constant pitch, without a beginning or end, that I heard as a child was the sound of telephone poles, the hum of the wires. This was a very important auditory influence upon the sparse sustained style of work of the genre of the Trio for Strings (1958), Composition 1960 #7 (B and F# “To be held for a long time”) and The Four Dreams of China (1962).

Well, even anarchists like Alec Empire enjoy engaging with older materials:

Continuity is everywhere, even in situations of discontinuity. La Monte Young made music based on noise and drones, but he brought those noises and drones inside lofts, as parts of titled and performed musical compositions. And he synthesized those noises and drones with ideas he’d learned from Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage. (Young was more open to serialist and chance techniques than the other Minimalists, which is part of why his music sounds so different than theirs.)

The experimental artist can want to quit with all previous convention, but he or she still must communicate by means of some convention. As Frank Kermode put it in The Sense of an Ending (1967):

[N]ovelty in the arts is either communication or noise. If it is noise then there is no more to say about it. If it is communication it is inescapably related to something older than itself. (102)

Schism is simply meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. (116)

Furthermore, experimental art often draws on the same materials that non-experimental art does. Here’s an example of Donald Barthelme, Batman comic books, Tim Burton, William Castle, German Expressionism, J.D. Salinger, and Mark Twain all drawing inspiration, to some extent or another, from the same Victor Hugo story (sometimes directly, and sometimes through other works that had themselves been inspired).

So much, then, for the experimental dream of art ex nihilo . But what about the notion of art sui generis ? Synthesizing Jakobson and Kermode, here is my current conception of experimental art:

Experimental art is that which takes unfamiliarity as its dominant— even to the point of schism .

The experimental artist wants her artwork to be different from all the other artworks around her. She desires that her results be unusual, unfamiliar to the point of looking peculiar, perplexing. She may be drawing on conventions, she may be working inside one or more traditions. But her conventions and traditions are not dominant ones; they are, perhaps, older ones, or unpopular ones. Or she may be importing ideas and conventions from one medium into another, where they are not well known.

Or it may be that she has noticed an idea—a possibility—that has not been fully developed in other artworks, and therefore seeks to develop it. She exaggerates or expands that minor concept or idea (something that isn’t dominant in other works) until it overwhelms the more familiar aspects of her artwork, distorting and enstranging the entire thing. Hence Manet and Degas exaggerated the de-emphasis of line and more energetic brushstrokes that they observed in works by Velázquez, J. M. W. Turner, and Eugène Delacroix, developing that idea until they arrived at Impressionism.

Luckily for experimental artists, there exist audiences and critics who prize unfamiliarity. (Often they are other experimental artists.) In his wonderful essay “Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-garde Cinema Perverse?” , James Peterson identifies

a common feature of avant-garde film viewing—one that usually passes without comment: viewers initially have difficulty comprehending avant-garde films, but they learn to make sense of them. Students who take my course in the avant-garde cinema are at first completely confused by the films I show; by the end of the term, they can speak intelligently about the films they see. (110)

Audiences who enjoy such films would rather see the artist make something strange, even if the resulting work is “not as good” as a more familiar type of artwork. They enjoy being confronted with something that’s like a puzzle to figure out, a viewing experience that will initially confound and challenge them. (I of course disagree with Peterson’s use of the term avant-garde ; I would substitute for it experimental .) (But no doubt others will take issue with my use of the term experimental…)

One thing that I like about the view of the experimental that Peterson describes, and that I’m developing here, is that it’s close to the word experimental ‘s original meaning : “a test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc.” (Both experiment and experience share a root with peril .)

Furthermore, this view of experimental art does not require that the art or artist do anything new per se; it requires only that the art and artist be out of step with the dominant techniques and styles of the moment, preferring the unfamiliar to the familiar. (This helps explain why outsider art , née Art Brut , is often valued by experimentalists.) And this definition is comfortable with artworks like The Matrix or Harry Potter , which it admits employ innovative and unfamiliar concepts and styles, but doesn’t go on to claim as experimental . The innovations in those works are relatively minor features in regard to the whole, and ultimately dominated by other, familiar aspects of the work—more recognizable forms and concepts. Harry Potter is at heart a fairly familiar kind of novel. J.K. Rowling’s innovations lie in hybridizing genre, and not with, say, grammar (a la Stein) or novel structure (a la Cortázar).

Finally, this concept of experimental art helps explain why such art often stops being experimental. As time goes on, the artwork loses its unfamiliarity. This is why students scratching film emulsion today in imitation of Stan Brakhage are not making experimental cinema: they’re working within a known tradition, and not seeking to maximize their works’ unfamiliarity. (To be fair, many people remain sadly unfamiliar with Brakhage’s work, so a scratch film in 2010 might still blow a lot of minds. One must allow for context.) The experienced experimental film fan, meanwhile, always seeking new challenges, will sniff disdainfully when confronted with such work—”It’s so imitative!”—and go look for something he hasn’t seen before. Hence the pervasive emphasis in experimental art circles on novelty (real or imagined).

Of course, as time goes on, we may continue to enjoy previously experimental artworks. Stan Brakhage’s scratched films opened up my mind to a new aspect of cinema, and showed me a kind of beauty I hadn’t before then suspected existed. I appreciate that, and respect his films for their historical import. And I think that they continue to look rather pretty—although that’s an example of my liking them for the ways in which they’re familiar: canonical, rather than experimental .

Similarly, John Cage’s 4’33” initially confounded me—”Surely he can’t be serious! That isn’t art!” But after performing it dozens if not hundreds of times myself, I now consider it an old friend.

(Of course, 4’33” always shows you something new—especially when you perform it outside the concert hall. That’s part of what makes it such a great experimental artwork.) (That’s also why people have been looking at nature for millennia.)

Elsewhere, some experimental artworks don’t outlive their experimentation. In that case, one is free to do with them as the Zen monks advise that we do, when confronted by koans. Or as Wittgenstein put it so famously, at the end of his Tractatus :

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (189)

Works Cited

• Călinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.
• Jakobson, Roman. “The Dominant.” Language in Literature . Trans. Krystyna Pomorska. Eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Boston: Belknap Press, 1990.
• Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction . New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
• Peterson, James. “Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-garde Cinema Perverse?” Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . Trans. C.K Ogden. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1922.

A. D. Jameson is the author of five books, most recently I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING: STAR WARS AND THE TRIUMPH OF GEEK CULTURE and CINEMAPS: AN ATLAS OF 35 GREAT MOVIES (with artist Andrew DeGraff). Last May, he received his Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the Program for Writers at UIC.

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32 thoughts on “ what is experimental art ”.

I attended a performance of 4’33” recently, at a Cage event including the screening of Cage/Cunningham. It was lovely. What’s been your favorite recital?

Back in 2007, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, PA, had a “Pay-To-Play!” fundraiser to inaugurate “the Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ.” You could pay $25/minute or $75 for five minutes to play this “King of Instruments”—”a versatile 6,938-pipe beast with wide tonal palette and ‘heft'” (that assessment according to the organ aficionados at the Wall Street Journal ).

A friend of mine said at the time that he was going to pay $75 to play 4’33” on the thing. It actually never happened, but that’s still my favorite performance.

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I am writing a Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft article for dVerse Poets Pub, an online community of poets, to inspire our poets to explore experimentation. The pub supports weekly opportunities for poets around the world to connect with one another, learn about craft and the cannon, and from each other. Meeting the Bar is designed to provide them with a challenge and I am writing a series over the next several months on the language poets. I would like to link to your article for further investigation. Also, I would like to quote your definition/synthesis. The article will go up this Thursday and the site usually receives several hundred views each day (they have about 200,000/year). The site is here: http://dversepoets.com/ . If you would let me know by early Wednesday I would appreciate it. Thank you for your consideration and an excellent article.

Thanks for the kind words, Anna! By all means, please feel free to link and quote away (to anything that I write).

Thanks again, Adam

Thank you very much! Once the article at dVerse has posted I will send you the link. Warm regards, Anna

Thanks! Looking forward to it.

dang this is rich….i could spend the better part of a day checking out all the vids and processing the thoughts….pre-read anna’s piece for tomorrow and chased the link over to read….intriguing…will be back…

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Here’s the link to the article at dVerse http://dversepoets.com/2012/10/04/meeting-the-bar-postmodern-prose/ (you’ll figure into future posts too :)). Thanks so much!

Thank you , Anna!

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Reblogged this on Bíboros and commented: nothing

Interesting! Thanks for the article. I would have liked to know more about experimental or avant-garde art in contemporary pop culture (music, literature, any other art form)

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Adam, Great article!! Working on a senior thesis art film in NC. Wanted to give you a shoutout to thank you for your information and insight–keep writing! :)

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Quick reference.

An imprecise term which has sometimes been applied to art that is concerned with exploring new ideas and/or technology. It is sometimes used virtually synonymously with *‘avant‐garde’, but ‘experimental’ usually suggests a more explicit desire to extend the boundaries of the art in terms of materials or techniques, whereas ‘avant‐garde’ can include novel and provocative ideas expressed through traditional techniques. Most writers today would prefer more precise terms such as Kinetic or installation art for such activities.

The term implies a link with science. In 1923 Picasso said ‘I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find, is the thing’ (A. H. Barr Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art, 1946). These magisterial words are hardly an end to the matter. In practice the scientific notion of experiment or research has, legitimately or not, frequently been invoked by avant‐garde artists. Picasso himself spoke of a period in 1912 when ‘the studio became a laboratory’ (J. Richardson, Braque, 1959). In its early days the Surrealist movement conducted what it called a ‘Bureau of Surrealist Research’ and its first journal, La Révolution surréaliste, was modelled on a scientific journal.

Stephen Bann's 1970 book Experimental Painting uses the idea to cover a very wide range of art. It begins with Constable and Monet (because of their ‘scientific’ approach to nature) and goes through to Constructivists and abstract artists with a methodical or technological bent such as Vasarely. Then he takes in some figurative artists such as Giacometti and Auerbach, whom he sees as having an approach in common with the ‘auto‐destructive’ art of Gustav Metzger.

John A. Walker (Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design Since 1945, 1973, 3rd edn, 1992) writes of ‘experimental’: ‘It is a word with both positive and negative connotations: it is used to praise and condemn. Those writers for whom it is a term of praise often mean by it an empirical practice in which the artist plays with his materials and adopts chance procedures in the expectation that something of value will result…Those writers for whom “experimental” is a pejorative description mean by it “a trial run”, “not the finished work”, “something transitional”.’ Walker points out that in E. H. Gombrich's celebrated book The Story of Art, first published in 1950, the whole of 20th‐century art was originally embraced in a chapter called ‘Experimental Art’. Paradoxically it was Gombrich, in Art and Illusion (1960), who made one of the most thoroughly worked‐out attempts to relate the artistic process to that of scientific experiment. He was concerned here, not with strictly technical experimentation, but to argue for an analogy between the processes of representation as a series of experiments and that of the scientific ‘testing’ of a theory. Artists, in this model, test their theories (representations) against experience. As in science, therefore, there can be a kind of ‘progress’ as mistakes in the ‘theory’ are gradually corrected. There is no contradiction whatsoever between this notion of ‘experiment’ and Gombrich's generally conservative view of 20th‐century developments (see abstract art).

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Home Issues 6 What Do We Mean by Experimental Art?

What Do We Mean by Experimental Art?

This essay explores and evaluates a number of possible ways in which the phrase “experimental art” might be understood, considering several particular examples. “Experimental” may be understood purely on the basis of the scientific model, though this is not what we usually mean by the term. The experimental quality of art is more likely to be understood as a matter of degree of innovation, though this approach is rendered problematic when put in a historical context. We are more liable to call something an experiment when it does not lay the foundations for a new movement, but is something of a dead-end. It may be thought that the size of the audience is important, experimental art often being of minority interest, but some counter-examples are cited. The next question the essay considers is: “Is experimental art always a matter of technique — of a trying-out of new forms? Or is it possible to be experimental in terms of content alone?” Experimental art as commonly understood often means not fully achieved art. The essay then sets the term “experimental” next to another term, “inventive”, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida. Inventive art is very like experimental art, challenging the status quo, going beyond the “possible”, introducing that which is uncategorizable and unmarketable. The paradigmatic experimental work of art, perhaps, is one that is highly innovative in form, but doesn’t entirely succeed in what it attempts; it bears the marks of the artist’s trial-and-error procedures; it is appreciated by the few rather than the many; and it remains outside the mainstream of artistic production.

Cet article explore et évalue les différentes manières de comprendre l’expression “l’art expérimental”, en se basant sur des exemples précis. “Expérimental” peut être entendu comme étant entièrement basé sur un modèle scientifique, même si ce n’est pas ainsi qu’on l’entend habituellement. La qualité expérimentale de l’art est cependant beaucoup plus liée à un degré d’innovation qu’elle introduit, bien que cette approche puisse être problématique quand on la replace dans un contexte historique. Il est plus probable que nous désignions une œuvre comme “expérimentale” quand elle ne pose pas les fondations d’un nouveau mouvement, mais qu’elle représente plutôt une impasse. On peut penser que l’ampleur du public qui l’apprécie est importante, l’art expérimental n’étant souvent intéressant que pour une minorité de personnes, mais on peut trouver des contre-exemples. La question que se pose ensuite l’article est la suivante : « est-ce que l’art expérimental est toujours une question de technique, d’expérimentation autour de formes nouvelles ? Ou bien est-il possible d’être expérimental seulement au niveau du contenu ? » L’art expérimental tel qu’on le conçoit d’ordinaire est souvent un art qui n’est pas totalement achevé. L’article confronte le terme d’« expérimental » avec celui d’« inventif », en se basant sur l’œuvre de Jacques Derrida. L’art inventif est très semblable à l’art expérimental, il remet en question le status quo , va au-delà des possibles, introduit ce qui n’est pas catégorisable ni commercialisable. L’œuvre d’art expérimentale paradigmatique est peut-être celle qui est très innovante au niveau formel mais ne réussit pas tout à fait à atteindre le but recherché. Elle porte la marque de la procédure de tâtonnement de l’artiste, elle est appréciée par quelques-uns plutôt que par le plus grand nombre, et elle reste en dehors de la production artistique standard.

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1 What exactly do we mean when we call a work of art experimental? And how does experimental art relate to non-experimental — but still successful — art in the eyes of those who use these terms? To explore this question, I would like to approach it from six different directions; if we can gain a sense of how the term is generally used, we may be in a position to advance to a more theoretically based account.

2 (1) “Experimental” may be understood purely on the basis of the scientific model. That is to say, art may be used to test various hypotheses, or artists and scientists may work together to produce results that aim to illuminate the nature of reality or instruct the general public. One of many such examples is the “Synergy Project: Light and Life”, described on the project’s website as follows:

Tristan and artist Shawn Towne set out to develop a novel means of conveying human impacts on sea grass beds through art based on light and movement. Their inspiration is derived from underwater video taken off the coast of Cape Cod, focusing on fragile, ephemeral eelgrass beds. These are locations where man’s influence is driving rapid changes in the ecosystem, often for the worse.

Through their work together, they hope to communicate the degradation of these systems from coastal development, as well as provide a baseline view of particular ecological sites at a given point in time for potential scientific application. (Synergy Project)

3 However, this rather literal meaning is not what is usually meant by experimental art; the term may gain some authority from its overtones of hard science, but does not usually imply an actual engagement with science and scientists. The etymology of “experiment” takes us back to the Latin verb experiri , to test or try, and its associated noun experimentum , a trial, test, or proof; and the word in English of course predates the development of scientific method. (The earliest recorded examples of “experimental” mean “having experience of” or “based on experience” — and we may note that the French equivalent of “experiment” is expérience .) What does connect the modern scientific and artistic uses of the word is the sense of trial-and-error, of testing a hypothesis — but in the world of the arts, an experiment is not controlled in the same way as it is in scientific practice (a point I will come back to) nor is it a requirement that the experiment be repeatable by others.

4 (2) The experimental quality of art is more likely to be understood as a matter of degree of innovation . We do not use the label “experimental” for John Banville’s Book of Evidence (1989) or Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), though they are all outstanding examples of the novel form. We are more likely to apply the term to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) or Will Self’s Umbrella (2012) or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). McBride’s and Self’s novels announce in their first paragraphs that they are probing the limits of what is readable:

For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day. (McBride 2013:1)

I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man . . . Along comes Zachary , along from the porter’s lodge, where there’s a trannie by the kettle and the window is cracked open so that Muswell Hill calypso warms the cold Friern Barnet morning, staying with him, wreathing his head with rapidly condensing pop breath . (Self 2012: 1)

5 Danielewski’s experimentation begins even earlier: the title page states:

HOUSE OF LEAVES  

by Zampanò  

with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant (Danielewski 2000)

6 We may then notice that the page facing the title page has the words “MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI’S” across from the title. And if we flip through the book, we encounter a host of different type faces, pages largely blank, print running sideways up the page, and so on. House of Leaves shows itself to be worthy of the adjective “experimental” even before we start reading the text. One problem with this approach is that it presents us with a spectrum, and a spectrum that has many works falling somewhere in the uncertain middle area. For instance, staying with novels, would Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) be considered experimental? It appears at first to be relatively conventional, but when the reader discovers halfway through the novel that it is starting again in a different century (and especially if she learns that had she picked up a different copy of the same book she might have read the two halves in the other order) the term “experimental” might seem appropriate. Or take Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013). From one point of view it is a long, highly conventional narrative imitative of the three-decker Victorian novel; but when we take into account its form we may want to call it experimental: each of the many characters is associated with a zodiacal sign or heavenly body, each of the 12 parts opens with an astrological chart relevant to the date on which the events of that part occur, and the parts diminish in length in imitation of the waning moon.

7 This uncertainty about the middle ground perhaps does not matter; we can live with the idea of degrees of “experimentalness” and have no problem with the idea that one work is “highly experimental” while another is “somewhat experimental”. More problematic is the effect of history and hindsight on this approach. Let us take Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, for instance. In this work, first performed in 1805, Beethoven produced a highly radical piece of music which represented an immense challenge for its first listeners, who had heard nothing like it before. The composer, it must have seemed, was experimenting with the symphonic form. But we are unlikely to call it experimental today because of its place in the history of the symphony; Beethoven’s innovations soon became accepted resources for composers, and even longer, more discontinuous, more harmonically daring symphonies were to follow. Or take Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon : this work broke all the rules of representational art, and yet its influence has been such that it now has a solid place within the history of art that renders the term “experimental” unlikely in current discussions. We tend not to think of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as experimental today, though Eliot certainly was experimenting with what could be done in poetry, nor of Le Corbusier’s starkly simple villas of the nineteen-teens, though they were aesthetically revolutionary buildings, in both cases because their innovations gave rise to entire movements in their respective art forms.

8 It seems, then, when we take historical processes into account, the term “experimental” does not simply mean “degree of innovation.” We need to complicate our approach to the idea of experimentation in art.

• 1 For a full discussion, see Attridge (1974). The movement had analogues in a number of other Europea (...)

9 (3) The examples I have mentioned suggest that we are more likely to call something an experiment when it does not lay the foundations for a new movement, as the Eroica symphony, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , The Waste Land , and Le Corbusier’s villas did. We are more likely to use the term for a work of art whose innovations proved to be a dead-end, an artistic gamble that did not pay off. One body of poetry that still often gets called experimental is the series of attempts by a number of poets in England in the late sixteenth century to write vernacular verse in quantitative metres, imitative of Latin and Greek verse (as they understood it). Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Campion and many others tried to determine which syllables of English words were “long” and which “short” and to construct lines of verse on this basis; however, the nature of English speech, dominated by stress, not quantity, was unsuited to this method, and the craze soon died out. 1 Readers voted with their eyes and ears, so to speak, and preferred the accentually-based verse of The Faerie Queene and Astrophel and Stella (not to mention the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists, who were wise enough not to meddle with the vernacular verse-forms they had inherited.) These attempts at quantitative English metre are often referred to simply as the “quantitative experiments”. Other examples might be William Blake’s experiments with colour printing, which did not stand the test of time, and the language invented by Ted Hughes and Peter Brook for their play Orghast , presented at Persepolis in 1971 but not used again. And no doubt there were innumerable experiments by artists of all kinds throughout history whose failure led to their being quietly set aside, and of which we are consequently unaware.

10 This seems a rather negative approach to experimentation in the arts, however; it more or less equates “experiment” with “failed experiment”. It ought to be possible to speak of successful experiments, even in the past. We need to complicate our picture further.

11 (4) Perhaps we should put the emphasis on the size of the audience . Is experimental art always art of minority interest? How does it relate to the notion of the avant-garde , which usually implies art that appeals to only a small number?

• 2 This is not to suggest that later artists have not been influenced by these experiments, but they c (...)

12 It is certainly true that most examples of what we are likely to call experimental art do not have wide appeal, for reasons that are obvious. Arnold Schoenberg’s second string quartet, written in 1908, in which the composer experimented with complete atonality for the first time, still does not draw large audiences. However, if what appears to be an experiment does in the course of time become popular, we may well cease to think of it as experimental — as with the examples by Beethoven, Picasso, Eliot and Le Corbusier mentioned earlier. But there are possible counter-examples. Late in his life, Matisse started creating works of art out of boldly coloured cut-out shapes in a manner that we might want to call experimental; Turner, also late in his career, experimented with swirls of colour to produce paintings that were abstract in all but name; Malevich conducted what are called “suprematist experiments” with blocks of colour or squares of black or white. Yet these three bodies of work were among the most popular exhibitions in London in the year 2014 — in fact, the Matisse cut-out show was Tate Modern’s most popular show since the gallery’s opening. Because these works did not become assimilated as central to major movements in art — what could follow Matisse’s snail (Figure 1), Malevich’s black square (Figure 2) or Turner’s seascapes (Figure 3)? — they have not suffered the same fate as the other examples; they still stand out as exceptional and experimental. 2

Figure 1. Henri Matisse, T he Snail (1952-3)

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/​arts-entertainment/​art/​reviews/​henri-matisse-the-cut-outs-art-review-9259383.html#gallery

Figure 2. Kasimir Malevich, Black Square (1915)

Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/​art/​research-publications/​the-sublime/​philip-shaw-kasimir-malevichs-black-square-r1141459

Figure 3. J. M. W. Turner, Seascape with Distant Coast (ca. 1840).

Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/​art/​artworks/​turner-seascape-with-distant-coast-n05516

13 Music and literature do not furnish examples quite so easily, though it is worth noting that McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing , rejected by publishers over nine years of fruitless submissions, won the Goldsmiths’ Prize, the Bailey’s Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and is undoubtedly selling well as a result (if not always being read to the end). Some of the minimalist music of Arvo Pärt might be considered both experimental and popular, though to some ears it is too bland and unadventurous to merit the former label. Size of audience is not, it seems, a fool-proof guide to what we mean by “experimental”.

14 (5) The next question to be considered is: “Is experimental art always a matter of technique — of a trying-out of new forms? Or is it possible to be experimental in terms of content alone?” All the examples we have looked at so far involve formal innovation; they do not necessarily introduce material that has previously been kept out of the domain of art.

15 An artist who uses a relatively conventional form but depicts events or objects that have hitherto been excluded from art may well not be regarded as experimental. Zola represented aspects of reality that had not been the subject of fiction before him, but my sense is that we do not think of him as writing experimental novels, in spite of his own claim to be doing so (a claim based on approach (1) above, since he modelled his work on that of natural scientists). On the other hand, when there is a clear disjunction between new content and conventional form, we may reach for the idea of experimentalism to describe the work. When Mark Quinn creates a sculpture in Carrara marble representing the thalidomide victim Alison Lapper, naked and pregnant, and exhibits it on a plinth in Trafalgar Square, the contrast between the highly traditional polished marble and realistic carving and the unusual human body it represents is what makes the work powerful — and perhaps takes it into the realm of the experimental (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper Pregnant (2000)

Source: http://marcquinn.com/​artworks/​single/​alison-lapper-pregnant1

16 However, the self-assurance of Quinn’s statue makes it hard to think of it as an experiment; it reads as the work of someone who knew exactly where he was going when he made it, rather than somewhat trying out an idea without knowing where it will lead. This brings us to the final question.

17 (6) Does experimental art as commonly understood, then, mean not fully achieved art, where the reader, listener or viewer senses the riskiness of the project in its not quite complete success? In such cases, we might feel we are sharing with the artist the trial-and-error character of artistic creation, rather than receiving from his or her hand something that bears no traces of the chancy process whereby it come into being. If we return to the Matisse cut-out exhibition I mentioned earlier, we find Zoë Pilger writing in a review published in the Independent : “The early cut-outs were small, experimental ” (Pilger 2014, my emphasis).

Figure 5. Henri Matisse, The Fall of Icarus (1943)

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/​artanddesign/​2014/​mar/​29/​henri-matisse-cutouts-tate-modern-drawing-scissors

18 Presumably the later, larger, cut-outs, more suggestive of the artist’s confidence in what he is doing, do not register as experimental. Colin Wilson, reviewing the late Turner exhibition, makes the opposite point: “Nor are these dozens of paintings experiments but finished works by a master” (Wilson 2014, my emphasis). For Wilson, it is the impression the works give of being finished that prevents them from being called experiments. (Richard Dorment, though, notes that “Turner experimented with octagonal and round formats and explored ever wilder colour combinations” [Dorment 2014, my emphasis]; what motivates this comment, no doubt, is that octagonal and round formats never caught on, so they remain in the realm of the unsuccessful experiment, however finished they may seem.)

19 We can conclude from these various uses of the term “experiment” that we do not employ it in an entirely consistent manner. The paradigmatic experimental work of art, perhaps, is one that is highly innovative in form, but does not entirely succeed in what it attempts; it bears the marks of the artist’s trial-and-error procedures; it is appreciated by the few rather than the many; and it remains outside the mainstream of artistic production. But none of these criteria except the first is essential — and when we apply the term to contemporary artworks we can, as has often been noted, only do so in a provisional way: the future may turn current experiments into mainstream productions.

20 I want now to set the term “experimental” next to another term, “inventive”, and I will begin by quoting Jacques Derrida. Writing of the inventiveness of Francis Ponge’s little poem “Fable”, he says that writing such as this

3 Translation modified. The original French reads: “Cette écriture est passible de l’autre, ouverte à (...) is liable to the other, open to the other and worked by it; it is writing working at not letting itself be enclosed or dominated by that economy of the same in its totality, which guarantees both the irrefutable power and the closure of the classical concept of invention. […] Passing beyond the possible, it is without status, without law, without a horizon of reappropriation, programmation, institutional legitimation; it passes beyond the order of the demand, of the market for art or science; it asks for no patent and will never have one. (Derrida 2007: 46) 3

21 This account of invention makes it sound very much like experimentation in art, challenging the status quo, going beyond the “possible”, introducing that which is uncategorizable and unmarketable. But for Derrida, all art “worthy of the name” operates like this.

• 4 I have developed the notion of invention in The Singularity of Literature (Attridge 2004) and The W (...)

22 I find this a useful way to think about art’s relation to the norms and habits that exist at the time and place of both its production and its reception. 4 Invention, says Derrida, is always “invention of the other” (“ invention de l’autre ”), a phrase with a double genitive: the invention invents the other, but the other also invents. It is an act but also an event. In this act-event of invention, a way of doing art that is unthinkable within current norms is brought into being — an alterity that resists closure, troubles the institution, and demands new forms of attention and interpretation (and sets the critics searching for new ways of addressing — and inevitably circumscribing — the new work).

23 My question is this: Is it possible to distinguish between the inventiveness of all art (at least all art of any significance) and what is called experimental art? As we have seen, the term “experimental” suggests trial-and-error, the testing of new forms, the taking of risks; but isn’t this true of all inventive art? Wasn’t Sophocles being experimental in introducing a third actor onto the Greek stage? Wasn’t Chaucer being experimental in creating a verse-form we now call iambic pentameter? Wasn’t Defoe being experimental in writing a fictional narrative in the guise of an autobiography? These and many other innovations in the histories of all the arts were radical, untried, uncertain. I have already mentioned inventive works by Beethoven, Picasso, Eliot and Le Corbusier that, in the creative process, were experiments, and there are countless more examples. Only in hindsight do the new ventures by such artists appear obvious — a third actor hardly seems a surprising innovation, iambic pentameter feels like a natural verse-form in English, the novel in the guise of a fictional autobiography is hardly unusual — because they introduced new possibilities into the art form for others to take advantage of. Kant called this “exemplary originality” (Kant 1974: 150-1): not just that which has not been done before, which might be meretricious or trivial art, but that which, once done, creates fresh opportunities for new forms of originality. It is very easy to be original in the narrow sense: I could without difficulty produce a jumble of words, or sequence of sounds, or a pile of objects never before heard or seen. But these works of so-called “art” would not be inventive: they would not engage with the cultural, intellectual, political and ethical context within which they have been created, and they would not open up new possibilities for other artists. They would not, to use Derrida’s words, be “open to the other”.

24 The other, however, is not simply that which does not exist, or does not exist yet; it is other to “the economy of the same” — in other words, it is what is excluded by the current cultural configuration; it is what cannot be seen, or heard, or done, thanks to the power of the doxa . This is why the work of the true artist is difficult and risky: the task is to exploit the fissures and tensions within the economy of the same (which is never wholly coherent or totalised) to allow the other to be apprehended, and what that other is is not something that can be known in advance. And this is why it opens a path for future work.

25 It seems to me, therefore, that all art worthy of the name is experimental: all strong artists are working at the limits of what can be achieved, and all such artists are taking risks, engaging in a process of trial-and-error, going down a road without knowing where it leads. As J. M. Coetzee puts it with reference to verbal invention:

It is naïve to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say. Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place. […] What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. (Coetzee 1992: 18)

26 The writer of poetry, drama or fictional prose experiments with language, with what it can be made to say but also with what it can make the writer say. This is what Derrida suggests by the ambiguity of “ invention de l’autre ”, and what I mean by the coinage “act-event”. (Coetzee captures this doubleness in his apothegm, which occurs just after the passage I have quoted, “writing writes us”.) The painter experiments with the possibilities of light, colour, texture and representation; the composer experiments with the possibilities of sound. And so on. The greatest artists, perhaps, are those who are most sensitive to the cultural context in which they are working (which is, of course, inseparable from the social, political and economic environment), most open to the ideas, forms, sounds, shapes and feelings it occludes and the possibilities that exist for accessing them, most daring in letting those possibilities become real in their work, and most skilled at knowing when what they are making has reached its full realization.

27 I believe it is right to go on calling some instances of this artistic making “experimentation”, especially when it involves radically new techniques that do not become part of the central narrative of the art-form in question because they are taken up and developed by other artists. But what is also important is that we try to identify and encourage those contemporary experiments that are not merely offering something different but are engaging with the unapprehended potential that the culture has excluded — the kind of experiment that Derrida would call an invention. In the future, hindsight may strip the label “experimental” from these works precisely because they have identified so powerfully what is needed to bring to visibility, audibility or readability what the culture has excluded; they may come to seem an essential part of the story of art. We should not forget, however, that they started as experiments: ventures into the unknown, trials without guarantee of success, failures leading to new attempts, and a trust in the work that is finally delivered over to public judgement.

Bibliography

Primary sources.

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.

Banville, John. Book of Evidence. London: Secker and Warburg, 1989.

Catton, Eleanor. The Luminaries . London: Granta, 2013.

Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves . London: Random House, 2000.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment . London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1974.

McBride, Eimear. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing . Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2013.

Self, Will. Umbrella . London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

Smith, Ali. How to Be Both . London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014.

Tóibín, Colm. The Master . London/New York: Picador, 2004.

Secondary sources

Attridge, Derek. Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974.

Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature . Abingdon: Routledge, 2004.

Attridge, Derek. The Work of Literature . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.

Coetzee, J. M. Doubling the Point . David Attwell, ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Derrida, Jacques. “Psyché: Invention de l’autre.” In Psyché: Inventions de l’autre . Paris: Galilée, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques . “Psyche: Invention of the Other.” In Psyche: Inventions of the Other . Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, eds. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.

Dorment, Richard. “Late Turner: Painting Set Free, review: ‘Don’t let’s get too sentimental about Turner’.” The Telegraph. 8 September 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/11081456/Late-Turner-Painting-Set-Free-review-Dont-lets-get-too-sentimental-about-Turner.html

Pilger, Zoe. “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, Tate Modern, art review.” The Independent. 14 April 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/henri-matisse-the-cutouts-tate-modern-art-review-9259383.html

Synergy Project. http://science360.gov/obj/video/698ddccc-3558-40bd-a52e-bad1e90bf019/synergy-project-light-life

1 For a full discussion, see Attridge (1974). The movement had analogues in a number of other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

2 This is not to suggest that later artists have not been influenced by these experiments, but they cannot be said to have initiated artistic movements when displayed. Later artists — the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s in the case of late Turner and the minimalists of the 1960s in the case of Malevich — may be seen to have built on them, but this does not lessen their experimental status in their own time.

3 Translation modified. The original French reads: “Cette écriture est passible de l’autre, ouverte à l’autre et par lui, par elle travaillé, travaillant à ne pas se laisser enfermer ou dominer par cette économie du même en sa totalité, celle qui assure à la fois la puissance irréfutable et la fermeture du concept classique d’invention. […] Passant au-delà du possible, elle est sans statut, sans loi, sans horizon de réappropriation, de programmation, de légitimation institutionnelle, elle passe l’ordre de la commande, du marché de l’art ou de la science, elle ne demande aucun brevet et n’en aura jamais.” (Derrida 1987: 61)

4 I have developed the notion of invention in The Singularity of Literature (Attridge 2004) and The Work of Literature (Attridge 2015).

List of illustrations

Electronic reference

Derek Attridge , “What Do We Mean by Experimental Art?” ,  Angles [Online], 6 | 2018, Online since 01 April 2018 , connection on 11 September 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/angles/962; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.962

About the author

Derek attridge.

Derek Attridge is the author of, among other books, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Cornell, 1988), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1995), The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004; reissued as Routledge Classic, 2017), Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford, 2013), and The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015). He is the editor of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature (Routledge, 1992) and collections of essays on literary theory, James Joyce, and South African literature. Forthcoming is The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers . Having taught at Oxford, Southampton, Strathclyde and Rutgers Universities, he is now Emeritus Professor at the University of York, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Contact: derek.attridge[at]york.ac.uk

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0 . All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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The Seven Greatest Examples of Experimentation in Art

The word “innovation” is one of the most commonly used words today, and when it comes to experimentation in art, the artists around the world has become super creative too

We currently live in an era where technology, art, and environment share similar ideas and works together in producing innovative artworks by artists. This has, indeed, improved skill as a whole.

Tracing back through time, you will discover an unending list of history books and art streams where seven prominent paintings have a similar story to tell.

These paintings reflect the artists’ mind in compelling us to view a subject in a different approach and perspective, and we should try to question the normalcy of the things we see.

Through their psychedelic and hyper-imagination, which they termed “normal,” was the way they expressed themselves and their ideologies.

Let us take a look at seven great examples of experimentation in art.

Grauer Tag Painting by George Grosz

George Grosz was well-known for his caricature-like paintings that showed how life looked like in the German city of Berlin at the time.

But in 1920-1921, Grosz looked for new agitprop with this work, one with stylish visual language.

With the use of mediums that breathes Italian metaphysical art themes, George Grosz went beyond Dada and New Objectivity group of the Weimar Republic era. Moving to the USA in 1933, he abandoned his earlier style of the subject matter.

The paintings reminded the world of Giorgio de Chirico , which was something that looked like faceless people in empty areas in front of some standard industrial buildings.

These details mostly represented political issues and statements rather than existential.

The painting exposes controversial issues that were highlighted by a low brick wall.

There was a cross-eyed German nationalist council officer in the foreground.

According to the New Objectivity exhibition in Manheim in 1925, the other men behind the welfare officer was a disabled war veteran, a worker, and a black market dealer.

The illustration of this art divided society into two classes.

Grosz, however, started using the critical ‘Verism’ style and did not produce any more oil paintings as the years passed.  

The Great Metaphysician by Giorgio Chirico

De Chirico was a mysterious man, and his ideologies reflected in his works. In this painting, he created an empty building square in the middle of a strange monument.

The monument was made with furniture parts and construction tools with an eerie overall display.

The edifice was lit up with the summer sunlight beaming upon it like a stage while the darkness of the skies in the horizons highlights the nightfall.

To maintain the discontinuity, the chimney of the factory can be seen in the sky where the modern era bursts into the cosmos of quattrocento.

For his transcended world view, De Chirico discovered Italy in a metaphysical stage. This view, however, was influenced by Nietzsche.

“The conception of a picture has to be something which does not make any sense in itself and no longer signifies at all from human logic,” He said.

The School of Athens by Raphael

Made by Raphael between 1509 and 1511, The School of Athens was identified as a sound reflection of the Renaissance theory .

The painting consists of many ideas of great and famous philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists formed into one image.

Here, men like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Da Vinci, and many more can be seen in the painting.

The painting shows them learning and interacting with each other.

These great men did not live during the same time frame, but Raphael majestically brings them all together. This was meant to signify the celebration of that age.

The Italian Renaissance artist created the art piece to decorate the rooms in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The rooms are now called the Stanze di Raffaello which was made to represent and pay homage to the Renaissance era.

The painting can still be found in some of the room sections, the Vatican, which was commissioned by his sponsor, Pope Julius II.

Der Radionist by Kurt Gunter

In early 1928, German art critic and historian Franz Roh discovered something about legendary paint created by Kurt Gunter.

He described the interiors as a petit-bourgeois living room.

However, this contradicts the intentions of Gunter’s idea.

“petit-bourgeois…has shut himself in on a Sunday with a crackling radio set, has clamped on headphones, opened a bottle of red wine and picked up an opera libretto and a cigar a vengeful bachelor’s idyll of our time and a musical fortification, with resistance glinting in his eyes.”

He described it as just a picture of Herr Schreck, a paraplegic and wheelchair-bound German listening to the radio as it broadcasts a program on October 29 th , 1923, which signified his improvement in expanding his social web.

In shaping the face of society, the theme of his painting highlighted the positivity and revolutionary effect of his invention.

It then later became a major subject of many more new objectives painting artworks to come.

Portrait of Madame Isabel Styler-Tas by Salvador Dali

This painting was created by the legendary Surrealists, Salvador Dali, in 1929.

The picture depicts the picture of successful Amsterdam jeweler Louis Tas’s daughter, Isabel, an arrogant and rich businesswoman.

The image had her wearing a sophisticated red clothe with a brooch of medusa pinned to her breast.

Behind her was a landscape embodied in deep fantasy. Opposite her was a fossilized version of herself, staring back at her.

With an excellent fascination for perspectives and illusion, Dali flirted with the modernism era, which was going through the cubist phase at the time.

He was able to translate old-fashioned artworks into modern issues, and that was one of the things that made him famous.

He also noted that “As far as a portrait painting goes, I intended to create a fateful connection between each of the different personalities and their backgrounds, in a manner far removed from direct symbolism.

This is in terms of medium and iconography to encapsulate the essence of each of my subject in mind”.

Roy Lichtenstein’s TAKKA TAKKA

In response to the revolution of popular culture in America in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an urgent need to maintain the status quo due to its power and growing fame.

After its emergence, there was no stopping in shaking up and then changing the perspective of art critics and conformist; in fact, the views of the whole world of art.

Takka Takka was created by Roy Lichtenstein , who was trained in the USA pilot and a World War II veteran but never saw combat.

He ironically used the style of a cartoon sound effect to name his work. “takka takka”; the sound of a firing machine gun. This artwork represents the entire elements of pop art and its importance.

About the cartoon shows and art of that time were always created to reach a common goal; a swashbuckling, funny, and ridiculously heroic commentary.

Using this style in effectively conveying his message, Lichtenstein aimed to leave a thought-provoking and effect on his audience using the juxtaposition to his advantage. This work is considered to be a great example of experimentation in art because of the artist’s courage to convey a strong perspective about a relevant subject

When Lichtenstein’s work was criticized for been militaristic, he smartly responded,” the heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but don’t take them seriously in these paintings. Maybe there is a point in not taking them seriously, a political position. I use them for purely formal reasons”.

The Suicide of Dorothy Hale by Frida Kahlo

This artwork is undoubtedly one of the most potent artworks to date. Despite the limited amount of details on the portrait, it was still powerful enough to shake the world when it was produced.

The artist displayed the image of Dorothy Hale’s suicide in a truly artistic manner – also one of the bold subjects when it comes to experimentation in art

However, it was not an initial plan of Frida Kahlo to paint the death of a fast-rising American actress of the time as she was commissioned to do. Read Frida Kahlo’s Lust for Life

The building she had fallen from can be seen behind almost entirely shrouded in clouds, representing the extent of the height in which she had reached and fell to her death. Frida passed her message in a strong sense of metaphor rather than literal.

Dorothy Hale’s body can be found at the bottom of the image, which symbolizes the impact of its realism.

20 famous paintings of Frida Kahlo

The painting possessed every sense of art, from the real to the surreal, which clearly shows every detail of Hale’s suicide.

Standing at 60.4 x 48.6 cm in the Pheonix Art Museum, the painting translates;

“In the city of New York on the twenty-first day of October 1938, at six o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Dorothy Hale committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampshire House building. In her memory…”

Conclusion – Experimentation in Art

A brief story on how some of the most formidable artists have dug deep into their bright imagination and conjured great art pieces.

Using the medium of diverse technicalities, themes, and subjects, they flawlessly passed their message in a truly artistic manner that was sure to change the face of art as a whole.

Passionate experimenter with a heart for art, design, and tech. A relentless explorer of the culture, creative and innovative realms.

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Unraveling the Mystery of Avant-Garde Art

Pablo Picasso, “Le Demoiselles d'Avignon,” 1907 (Photo: MoMA via Wikimedia Commons , Fair use)

Bold, innovative, progressive, experimental—all words that describe art that pushes boundaries and creates change. These characteristics are also all associated with a term that is often used but sometimes misconceived— avant-garde . The French term, which translates to “advance guard” or “vanguard,” refers to something visionary and ahead of its time.

Used frequently to discuss artistic contributions to society and culture, avant-garde is responsible for some of the most famous paintings and sculptures in history. But how does one characterize avant-garde art? And who are the forward-thinking artists that took the risks that now define art history?

In terms of art, avant-garde is usually tied to some sort of aesthetic innovation —one that is often misunderstood or unaccepted in its own time . It’s a concept that applies to those creatives who have pushed against mainstream ideals and, though it’s often used in relation to modernism, there are plenty of historic artists whose work can be seen as avant-garde during their time.

Before we dive into some of the most well-known avant-garde artists and art movements , let’s look at where the term comes from and how it took on its current meaning. Initially, it was used by the French military and referred to a small group of troops that carried out reconnaissance ahead of the main army. Over the course of the 19th century, it began being applied to left-wing socialist thinkers and their calls for political reform. In fact, it was the influential French socialist Henri de Saint-Simon who first applied the term to art.

In an 1825 text, he grouped artists together with scientists and industrialists as leaders of society that could guide people forward. From there, avant-garde was a term regularly applied to artists, with many citing the realism of Gustave Courbet as a starting point. Subsequently, many modern movements would see the term applied, though one could easily say that earlier artists like Leonardo da Vinci or Caravaggio were certainly avant-garde by breaking with traditional art practices. Even the Italian Renaissance itself was an avant-garde movement for its attention to perspective and realism in a way that was unheard of previously.

Avant-Garde Art Movements

While this is by no means an exhaustive list, here are some of the more memorable modern art movements in Western history that are considered avant-garde for breaking boundaries.

Impressionism

Claude Monet , “Impression Sunrise,” 1872 (Photo: Wikimedia Commons , Public domain)

While Impressionist art may not seem avant-garde by contemporary standards, the movement was revolutionary in its time. Rejected by the traditional Paris Salon , painters like Claude Monet , Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir favored landscapes and scenes of daily life over the accepted historical and mythological subjects. They also broke with tradition by moving out of the studio and painting en plein air .

Iconic Impressionist Paintings:

• Impression, Sunrise   by Claude Monet
• Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• Paris Street: Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte
• Check out this list to see 15 famous Impressionist paintings .

Henri Matisse, “Portrait of Madame Matisse. (The Green Line),” 1905 (Photo: Statens Museum for Kunst via Wikimedia Commons , Public domain)

Impressionism triggered a wave of innovative artists and styles. Among them was a brief but powerful movement called Fauvism . Co-founded by French artists Henri Matisse and André Derain, the style of les Fauves , or “the wild beasts,” is characterized by a saturated color palette, thick brushstrokes, and simplified—often nearly abstracted—forms. Fauvism acted as a transitional period for many of the artists associated with it, most notably Matisse and Georges Braque. Following its conclusion in 1910, these figures used their Fauve experience to embark on new projects and enter new periods.

Iconic Fauvist Paintings:

• Portrait of Madame Matisse by Henri Matisse
• Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse
• Charing Cross Bridge by André Derain

Giacomo Balla, “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash,” 1912 (Photo: Wikipedia , Public domain)

Founded in 1909, Futurism was an avant-garde movement that embraced innovation, technology, and transportation—all components of the future they saw after WWI. A hallmark of Futurist art is the depiction of speed and movement. In particular, they adhered to principles of “ universal dynamism ,” which meant that no single object is separate from its background or another object. Italian sculptor and leading futurist artist Umberto Boccioni explained the movement: “We synthesize every moment (time, place, form, color-tone) and thus paint the picture.”

Iconic Futurist Art:

• Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by Umberto Boccioni
• Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash by Giacomo Balla

Marcel Duchamp, “Fountain,” 1917 (Photo: Wikimedia Commons , Public domain)

Dada can be a difficult movement to pin down because the output of its artists is so diverse. It was formed in Switzerland during World War I and is revolutionary for its focus on making work that wasn't necessarily aesthetically pleasing. Its purpose, instead, was to question capitalist society and its values. Dada also made use of readymades—everyday objects appropriated as pieces of art—as a way to question bourgeois sensibilities and the role of the artist in creativity. Dada had a profound influence on other avant-garde movements that followed, like Cubism and Fluxus.

Iconic Dada Art:

• Fountain by Marcel Duchamp
• Glass Tears  by Man Ray
• The Art Critic by Raoul Hausmann

Surrealism is a highly experimental genre based on principles of the subconscious mind, borrowed from a literary technique called automatism . This break from reality gave Surrealist artists like René Magritte , Salvador Dalí , and Man Ray complete creative freedom, as they were no longer guided by academic principles. The dreamlike scenery of their art combines realistic renderings of fantastical subject matter. Surrealists were also well-known for dabbling in many forms of art, from painting and sculpture to photography and film.

Iconic Surrealist Art:

• The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí
• The Son of Man  by René Magritte
• The Great Masturbator  by Salvador Dalí

By completely abandoning traditional forms and moving toward abstraction, Cubism is one of the most well-known avant-garde movements. Founders Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso played with all the traditional, academic rules of Western art and transformed them into a new, unexpected method for creating art. Figures were broken into geometric shapes, colors were brightened and simplified, and collage was incorporated for an innovative result that continues to shape art today. In fact, looking at a timeline of art history, Western visual culture can be split clearly into two pieces—before and after Cubism.

Important Cubist Artworks:

• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso
• Three Musicians  by Pablo Picasso
• Guernica by Pablo Picasso
• Still Life with Metronome  by Georges Braque

Taking shape in the 1960s and 1970s, Fluxus is an interdisciplinary movement that involved artists, designers, composers, and poets. Heavily influenced by Dada, members of Fluxus staged performance art events that included noise music, poetry readings, time-based performances, and much more. Composer John Cage had a great deal of influence in Fluxus and his notion that interaction between an artist and the audience was the most important phase of work—rather than the finished product—was often followed. Avant-garde artists like Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Paik were all active in Fluxus.

Important Moments in Fluxus:

• Cut Piece  by Yoko Ono
• Zen for Film  by Nam June Paik
• Make a Salad  by Alison Knowles

This article has been edited and updated.

Related articles :.

13 Revolutionary Art Movements That Have Shaped Our Visual History

10 Great Hispanic Artists Who Shaped Western Culture

Why Post-Impressionist Painter Paul Cézanne Is Known as the “Father of Modern Art”

What is Modern Art? Exploring the Movements That Define the Groundbreaking Genre

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Experimental art

In asian contemporary art.

Experimental art refers to creative practices that push boundaries, challenge conventions, and explore new mediums, techniques, or ideas in the art-making process. This form of art often embraces innovation and unpredictability, encouraging artists to take risks and question traditional forms of expression.

congrats on reading the definition of experimental art . now let's actually learn it.

5 Must Know Facts For Your Next Test

• The '85 New Wave Movement in Asia embraced experimental art as a way to express cultural identity and address social issues in innovative ways.
• Artists involved in this movement often incorporated elements of pop culture, technology, and performance into their experimental works.
• Experimental art during this time was characterized by its use of mixed media, allowing artists to blend painting, sculpture, video, and installation.
• The movement encouraged collaboration among artists from different backgrounds, leading to a rich tapestry of diverse influences and ideas.
• Critics and audiences were sometimes challenged by experimental art due to its unconventional nature, sparking conversations about what constitutes art.

Review Questions

• Experimental art redefined artistic practices during the '85 New Wave Movement by pushing against established norms and encouraging artists to explore new techniques and media. This exploration allowed for a fresh dialogue about cultural identity, as artists utilized innovative methods to engage with social issues relevant to their communities. The movement's emphasis on experimentation fostered an environment where traditional boundaries between genres and forms were blurred, ultimately transforming how art was perceived and created.
• The integration of pop culture and technology into experimental art significantly impacted its reception during the '85 New Wave Movement by making it more relatable and accessible to a broader audience. Artists utilized familiar references from everyday life and emerging technologies to create works that resonated with contemporary experiences. This approach not only attracted attention but also prompted discussions about the role of media in society and how it shapes cultural identity, highlighting the intersection between art and popular culture.
• The legacy of experimental art from the '85 New Wave Movement has had a profound influence on contemporary artistic practices by inspiring ongoing innovation and exploration across various mediums. Today's artists continue to embrace interdisciplinary approaches, drawing from a diverse range of influences to create works that challenge traditional definitions of art. This legacy fosters an environment where experimentation is celebrated, encouraging new generations of artists to question established norms and engage with current social issues through creative expression.

Related terms

Avant-garde : A cultural movement that seeks to challenge the status quo and innovate beyond established norms in art, literature, and other fields.

Intermedia : Art that merges different artistic disciplines or media, creating new forms and experiences that blur the lines between them.

Conceptual art : A movement where the idea or concept behind the artwork is considered more important than the finished product, often focusing on the intellectual engagement of the viewer.

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Angles (Apr 2018)

What Do We Mean by Experimental Art?

• Derek Attridge

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This essay explores and evaluates a number of possible ways in which the phrase “experimental art” might be understood, considering several particular examples. “Experimental” may be understood purely on the basis of the scientific model, though this is not what we usually mean by the term. The experimental quality of art is more likely to be understood as a matter of degree of innovation, though this approach is rendered problematic when put in a historical context. We are more liable to call something an experiment when it does not lay the foundations for a new movement, but is something of a dead-end. It may be thought that the size of the audience is important, experimental art often being of minority interest, but some counter-examples are cited. The next question the essay considers is: “Is experimental art always a matter of technique — of a trying-out of new forms? Or is it possible to be experimental in terms of content alone?” Experimental art as commonly understood often means not fully achieved art. The essay then sets the term “experimental” next to another term, “inventive”, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida. Inventive art is very like experimental art, challenging the status quo, going beyond the “possible”, introducing that which is uncategorizable and unmarketable. The paradigmatic experimental work of art, perhaps, is one that is highly innovative in form, but doesn’t entirely succeed in what it attempts; it bears the marks of the artist’s trial-and-error procedures; it is appreciated by the few rather than the many; and it remains outside the mainstream of artistic production.

• experimental art
• inventiveness
• Derrida Jacques

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Experimental Art: How Taking Risks Impacts the Arts and Creators

Ready to explore the wild side of art? Embrace experimentation and see how taking risks impacts your art! Get inspired and become an innovator!

Are you looking to break out of the doldrums and try something new, even if it’s a little risky?

Take heart!

Experiments in creativity can be extremely rewarding - not just for yourself as an artist but also for the art world at large.

Experimental art--the process of pushing boundaries in the arts and taking risks with your own projects--is a fantastic way to express yourself and grow as an artist.

As artists, we often get comfortable with our styles and techniques, but taking creative risks and experimenting with different methods can result in game-changing discoveries, leading to incredible breakthroughs in our artistic pursuits.

Just like any creative endeavor, art requires constant experimentation, risk-taking and adventurousness.

If you want to breathe new life into your creative pursuits , it's time to embrace experimentation.

By understanding how experimental art works, what it has achieved thus far, and why it's so important to take chances with your creativity , creators of all sorts can unlock their full potential.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the impacts of stepping away from your comfort zone and pushing the limits of what we think is possible in our artwork.

Whether you are an amateur hobbyist or a professional artist, exploring new and unique ways of creating can spark creativity and inspiration that will invigorate your work in unique and unexpected ways.

Let's take a look at how taking risks helps artists explore different art mediums and techniques, why experimentation is important even (and often especially) when it doesn't lead to success right away, plus plenty of tips on getting started with experimenting in arts and crafts .

Get ready to take off on an experimental journey, where you will find new ideas and fresh ways to create unique works that are sure to spark inspiration among all kinds of artists!

Read on to see how embracing risk-taking can help open up a world of exciting opportunities for creators everywhere!

Artistic Experimentation

Art is a realm of boundless possibilities, where creativity knows no limits.

It is in this realm that experimentation takes center stage, pushing the boundaries and challenging the established norms.

In the context of art, experimentation refers to the act of exploring new approaches, techniques, and ideas that deviate from traditional or established methods.

It is an essential tool for artists seeking to break free from the confines of conformity and unlock their true creative potential .

Experimental art, my friends, is like a breath of fresh air in the stuffy room of traditional art forms.

It's an artistic movement that thrives on unfamiliarity, cherishing the element of surprise and pushing the limits of artistic expression.

It's about stepping outside the comfort zone and diving headfirst into the unknown, armed with nothing but curiosity and a thirst for innovation.

It's the rebellious cousin at the family gathering, the eccentric artist who dances to their own tune.

It's about pushing boundaries, embracing the unfamiliar, and daring to break free from the shackles of conventionalism.

Experimental art is essentially a style of art that aims to break free from tradition that explores new ideas, approaches, and techniques to create something unique, unconventional, and innovative.

The key to successful experimental art lies in taking risks and pushing boundaries to create something new and original.

But why is experimentation so crucial in the creative realm?

Well, my dear readers, it's because experimentation opens doors to uncharted territories; it allows artists to tap into their deepest wells of imagination, unearthing hidden treasures that would otherwise remain buried.

It challenges the status quo, forcing us to question our preconceived notions of what art should be.

Picture this: an artist standing before a blank canvas, armed with brushes, paints, and an unwavering desire to create something that has never been seen before.

They throw caution to the wind, surrendering themselves to the process of experimentation.

Colors blend in unexpected ways, brushstrokes dance across the canvas in a frenzy, and forms emerge from the chaos.

This is the magic of experimental art unfolding before your eyes.

Let's delve into the world of experimentation and discover its impact on the arts, creativity , and creators.

The Evolution of Experimentation

Experimentation in art has evolved over time, taking on various forms and embracing new technologies and mediums.

From the Renaissance period's scientific approach to artists like Leonardo da Vinci, who explored anatomy and perspective, to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, that challenged societal norms, experimentation has always been a driving force in pushing artistic boundaries.

Throughout history, experimentation has played a pivotal role in shaping artistic movements and propelling artists to greatness.

Take, for instance, Jackson Pollock, the maestro of abstract expressionism.

With his iconic drip paintings, he revolutionized the art world, defying conventional techniques and embracing spontaneous gestures.

His experimentation paved the way for future generations of artists to let loose their creativity and follow their artistic instincts.

In modern society, experimentation has expanded beyond traditional mediums like painting and sculpture.

With the advent of digital art , installation art, performance art, and conceptual art, artists now have a vast playground to experiment with.

The rise of technology has opened up new avenues for exploration, allowing artists to blend traditional techniques with digital tools, creating immersive experiences that transcend the boundaries of the physical world.

Modern and contemporary art is a testament to the power of experimentation and risk-taking in art.

From interactive installations, to virtual reality works, and multimedia performances - these are all examples of how artists have transcended the limitations of traditional forms by embracing risk-taking.

In the contemporary art scene, experimental art has become a guiding force, igniting the flames of creativity and inspiring artists to think outside the box.

It encourages us to see the world through a different lens, to question the norms, and to embrace the freedom of self-expression .

It challenges us to confront our own biases and preconceptions, opening our minds to new possibilities.

Experimental art is about pushing boundaries in every artistic medium imaginable.

Think immersive installations that transport you to alternate realities, sculptures crafted from unconventional materials, and performances that challenge our very perception of time and space.

Experimental art takes us on a journey beyond the realm of the familiar and into uncharted territories of imagination .

It's an adventure that's full of surprises and delights, allowing us to explore new realms and rediscover our inherent creative powers.

Experimental art is a powerful tool for sparking creativity, inspiring innovators , and propelling the arts forward.

The Importance and Power of Experimentation

Experimentation is the lifeblood of artistic evolution.

It fuels innovation , challenges conventions, and propels the arts forward.

Without experimentation, art would remain stagnant, confined to predefined rules and limitations.

It is through experimentation that artists discover their true potential, find their voice, and leave an enduring impact on the world.

Experimentation holds immense significance in the arts, offering numerous perks for creators and the wider artistic community.

Firstly, experimentation allows artists to break through creative roadblocks by encouraging them to step outside their comfort zones.

By venturing into uncharted territory, artists can discover new techniques, materials, and forms of expression that they may never have encountered otherwise.

Moreover, experimentation challenges established norms and pushes the boundaries of what art is and can be; it disrupts the status quo, inviting viewers to question their preconceived notions and experience art in unconventional ways.

By embracing experimentation, artists can pave the way for new artistic movements, redefine artistic practices, and ignite critical conversations.

Experimental art is also an excellent platform for cultivating collaboration.

It encourages artists to embrace different perspectives, work together to find innovative solutions, and explore new ideas that may not have been possible alone.

At its core, experimentation in art fosters a culture of discovery, creativity, and innovation—one that is essential for the development of the arts and the growth of individual creators.

Benefits of Creative Experimentation

Experimentation is a powerful tool for unlocking creativity and uncovering hidden potential.

By taking risks and exploring unfamiliar methods, artists can discover new techniques, refine their skills, and create unique works of art that stand out from the crowd.

Whether practicing the visual arts, performing arts, or any other artistic endeavor, experimentation can help artists hone their craft and unlock the full range of their talents .

So, why should you take risks with your creative pursuits?

Here are some key benefits of embracing creative experimentation:

• Inspiration and Motivation:

Experimenting encourages artist to explore their creative limits and think outside the box.

It can be an excellent source of motivation when tackling large projects, allowing them to stay inspired and focused on the task at hand.

• Refinement of Skills:

By exploring different approaches and methods of creating, artists can hone their skills and refine their techniques.

With practice, they can become more comfortable working with unfamiliar materials and styles, gaining valuable knowledge in the process.

Experimentation also allows artists to explore different techniques, encouraging them to think critically and push their creative boundaries.

• Unlocking Potential:

Experimentation can help artists unlock hidden potential, prompting them to discover new forms of expression that may not have been possible before.

By taking risks, they can explore uncharted territories, uncover latent talents, and potentially create works of art that can truly stand out.

• Overcoming Creative Roadblocks:

Experimentation can be an effective tool for overcoming creative roadblocks, allowing artists to view their current situation from a new perspective and discover fresh ideas and solutions that they may not have thought of before.

While the outcomes of experimentation are never guaranteed, it can lead to incredible breakthroughs in creativity , providing a much-needed spark of inspiration for tackling tough projects.

• Professional Growth:

Experimenting can help artists stand out from their peers, broadening their network of contacts and paving the way for professional success.

It also serves as an excellent platform for learning new skills, building confidence , and showcasing their talents to the world.

In short, experimentation can open up a world of exciting opportunities for artists of all skill levels.

Real-Life Examples

Throughout history, countless artists have embraced experimentation, leaving an indelible mark on the art world.

Experimental artists come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, each with their own unique creative style .

To get a better sense of the power of experimentation in art, let's take a look at some real-life examples.

One notable example is Pablo Picasso, whose cubist paintings shattered traditional notions of representation.

His bold exploration of multiple viewpoints and fragmented forms revolutionized the art scene and inspired generations of artists to challenge conventions.

Another artist who exemplifies the power of experimentation is Yayoi Kusama.

Through her immersive installations and polka dot motifs, she transports viewers to otherworldly realms, blurring the boundaries between art and reality.

Her fearless experimentation with space and repetition has captivated audiences worldwide and propelled her to iconic status.

Hiroshi Fuji's recycled art sculptures offer yet another example of the potential impacts of experimentation.

His sculptures, crafted from discarded materials embody his environmentalist ethos while redefining what art can be.

By embracing unconventional materials and techniques, Fuji has transformed everyday objects into fascinating works of art, inspiring a wave of eco-friendly creatives in the process.

These examples illustrate the many ways in which experimentation can lead to groundbreaking works and transform the art scene as we know it.

They also demonstrate how taking risks can inspire others to embrace their creative potential, explore uncharted territories, and leave an unforgettable mark on the world.

The art world is filled with artists who have embraced experimentation, offering us a glimpse into the potential of taking risks in art.

Some showcase their artworks in an exhibition, others whisper it from the rooftops, while some simply let their work speak for itself.

Regardless of how they choose to showcase their artworks, these artists are a testament to the power of experimentation and risk-taking in art.

By understanding their stories and exploring their works, we can gain valuable insights that will help us expand our own creative horizons.

Artistic production is, after all, a process of experimentation and exploration - one that should be embraced and celebrated.

Only by taking risks can we hope to create something truly unique and memorable.

Incorporate Experimentation into Your Practice

For creators looking to incorporate experimentation into their own art making practice, there are several practical steps to consider.

Formal innovation isn't the only way to make art; it's also important to explore informal techniques and methods that challenge traditional practices.

Creating a conducive environment that fosters experimentation is crucial.

This includes setting aside dedicated time for exploration, creating a supportive network of fellow artists, and embracing a growth mindset that welcomes failure as an opportunity for growth.

Another way to experiment with your art is to change your approach to materials; taking risks is an essential aspect of experimentation.

Instead of sticking to the same canvas and paint, why not experiment with new materials and mediums?

Artists should be willing to step outside their comfort zones, try new techniques, and explore unfamiliar subject matters.

By stepping out of your comfort zone and using new materials, you can unlock new artistic possibilities and discover new avenues of creative expression.

Another way to experiment with your art is to change your perception and outlook.

Try looking at your subjects from a different angle, or trying out a different color scheme.

This can help you to explore new perspectives and unlock new artistic possibilities.

An idea that is often overlooked when it comes to experimenting with art is collaboration .

When like-minded artists come together, they can trade ideas and techniques, collaborate to create unique artwork together, and bring fresh perspectives to the table.

Collaboration plays a significant role in experimentation, as it allows artists to combine their unique perspectives and skills, pushing the boundaries even further.

Working with fellow artists can unlock powerful insights, spark innovative ideas, and provide valuable feedback on your works.

By collaborating with other creatives, you can break down creative roadblocks, explore new possibilities, and discover hidden potential in your work.

At the end of the day, experimentation is an essential tool for unlocking creativity , inspiring innovation, and propelling the arts forward.

Whether drawing, crafting a story with written word, or playing around with sound, experimentation is a powerful tool that can help you explore new artistic territories and uncover your true creative potential.

By embracing experimentation, artists can unlock a world of possibilities and create something truly remarkable.

A single risk could lead to an incredible breakthrough in your creative practice, so take a chance and see what happens.

Tips for Experimentation in Art

So, you're ready to take a leap of faith and dive into the world of artistic experimentation?

Awesome! Here are some useful tips to get your creative juices flowing.

• Start Small:

It's perfectly fine to start experimenting with smaller projects and gradually expand your creative endeavors.

Small experiments can help you to gain confidence in the process and build up your artistic skills before tackling more ambitious projects.

• Experiment with Different Techniques:

From traditional mediums to digital tools, there are many techniques that artists can experiment with.

Try mixing different mediums together, combine painting and photography, or experiment with materials and textures.

• Embrace Technology:

In the digital age, technology is an invaluable tool for experimentation.

Try exploring virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing , or any other tools that can expand your artistic capabilities.

• Take Risks:

Experimentation requires taking risks and pushing boundaries.

Don't be afraid to take risks and explore uncharted territories; you never know what new creations you may come up with!

• Find Inspiration Everywhere:

For inspiration , look beyond the art world for ideas.

Draw inspiration from everyday life, nature, music , literature—anything that can help to spark your imagination.

• Get Feedback:

Asking for feedback is essential to experimentation.

It can help you identify areas for improvement and uncover new creative possibilities.

Above all, remember to have fun!

Enjoy the process and don't take yourself too seriously; experimentation should be liberating and enjoyable.

So, dear creators, dare to dream, embrace the unknown, and let experimentation guide you on a journey of self-discovery and artistic growth.

As the great artist Henri Matisse once said, "Creativity takes courage."

Embrace that courage, ignite your imagination, and let experimentation be your guide to unlocking the true essence of your artistic brilliance.

Embracing Experimental Art

Experimentation is the key to unlocking your true creative potential as an artist.

From inspiring innovation to cultivating collaboration, experimentation can open up endless possibilities in the arts.

Don't be afraid to try new techniques, materials or collaborate with others to create something unique.

It might seem daunting at first, but risk-taking and adventurousness can result in game-changing discoveries.

By embracing experimentation, artists can discover new techniques, challenge themselves to think outside the box, and leave an unforgettable mark on the art world.

If you're looking to take the next step in your artistic pursuits, embrace experimentation and unleash the incredible creativity that resides within you.

Let's celebrate the bold, the audacious, and the wonderfully weird.

Let us immerse ourselves in the world of experimental art and allow our imaginations to run wild.

After all, it is through experimentation that we discover the true essence of creativity and unlock the boundless potential within ourselves!

Now, go forth and explore the unexplored, embrace the unconventional, and let your creativity soar to new heights.

The world is your canvas, so why not paint it with the vibrant colors of experimentation?

Interested in learning more about experimenting in art and the creative process ? Check out Helen Wells Artist: Sketchbooks + Art Ideas' video!

Want even more content about creativity and art?

Be sure to check out all of our creative chronicles !

Ready to experiment and tap into your creative side ?

Check out some of our other articles:

- Art for social change

- Art of mindfulness

- Reflection in art

- Break generational trauma

- Benefits of microlearning

- Digital nomadism

- Creative burnout

- Art of resilience

What Are the 7 Fundamentals of Art? Unlocking Secrets to Master!

What Are the Basics of Painting? Unlock Creativity and Painting Mastery

Is It Too Late to Learn to Paint? Unleash Your Creativity!

What Should I Start Painting as a Beginner? The Brushstrokes of Beginnings

Can I Learn to Paint by Myself? Acquire Painting Mastery All by Yourself!

What is the Most Common Painting Technique? Unlocking Painting Mastery

Liron Yanconsky

Artist, Creator and Author

Importance of Experimentation in Art – Break Your Own Patterns | Liron’s Podcast Episode 84

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In this episode I want to talk about just how important experimentation is in art. This connects to everything – improving, developing a unique style, enjoying the process and more!

What I mean by Experimentation

As this is aimed at visual artists, mainly painters – here are some relevant examples of experimentation:

• Utilizing different techniques
• Using new tools
• Trying out different approaches & work processes
• Painting subjects you are unfamiliar with
• Using colors you’re not used to

Why Experimentation is Important

Unique and individual Style – Yes! Experimentation will help you incorporate and implement new elements into your style, that will in turn make it more YOU.

Novelty & Burnout Prevention – Experimentation will help you to continue enjoying your medium in the long run. It will keep things interesting and even less expected!

Preventing Complacency – Constant experimentation and challenging yourself to try out different things will help to prevent settling in your patterns and becoming stale in your growth and development.

Caveat – Focus & Improvement

I think experimentation can become a crutch / escapism , if used to the extreme. If you are only trying new things all the time, you don’t really have to become proficient in anything…

That’s why you want to balance it out with a routine, and with working on the basics of art and your medium.

The answer is always – Both!

Artist Corner – Marc Folly

In this one I feature Marc Folly, an incredible French painter who’s style I find very intriguing.

He has a way of connecting areas and leading the viewer in a very clear way towards points of interest.

He’s a master of wet in wet and negative painting techniques.

You can check out his work on his website: Marc Folly

And here’s where you can find me…

Check out my  YouTube Channel – Liron Yanconsky

Or ask me questions on  Instagram – @LironYanIL  or Snapchat – @LironYan3

I hope you enjoyed this one. Take care, and we’ll talk again really soon,

— Liron

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Learning resources

Experimental drawing

KS2 (ENG) , KS2 (NI) , CfE L2 (SCO) , PS3 (WAL) , KS3 (ENG) , KS3 (NI) , CfE L3 (SCO) , KS3 (WAL)

Introduction

This activity offers suggestions for a series of experimental drawing exercises that can be explored in the classroom or at home. 

The exercises will help students to loosen up in their approach to drawing, be less precious about neatness and detail and explore lines and mark-making as well as the possibilities of drawing materials.

Artists often use quick drawing exercises to warm up as they begin their work. As well as freeing themselves up from labouring over detail, the quick exercises help them to pick out essential shapes, lines and emotions. The aim is not for 'perfect' finished drawings, but alternative representations of an object or person.

Below are just a few examples of artists' drawings. Many more drawings can be found on Art UK .

At the end of a drawing session, think about (or encourage students to think about) the drawings they have made.

• What does your drawing look like? (What words would you use to describe it?)
• Is there anything unexpected about it?
• Are there any bits of the drawing that you like?
• What did you discover?
• Is there anything that you have discovered that you can take to future drawings?

You will need:

• a good supply of paper e.g. a sketchbook, printer paper or sugar paper, or a combination of these (try and have some big sheets of paper available too)
• a range of drawing materials: biros or felt pens; pencils (softer 2B and 4B are best, but HB is OK); coloured pencils or crayons; charcoal
• a sharpener
• a stopwatch (mobile phones usually have one)

Drawing exercises

Choose a subject

Choose a person or object to draw (or if you are teaching, you could assign students a subject if easier).

Alternatively, you could  choose a sculpture from the Art UK website to draw. (By clicking through to the sculpture you can see multiple photos of the sculpture, viewed from different angles.)

Continuous line drawing

• Set a timer for four minutes. Draw your chosen subject without taking your pencil off the page – this might mean creating extra lines to get from one bit of the drawing to another. You'll find your drawing has some interesting qualities.
• Then try making a continuous line drawing without looking at the page. Keep your eyes fixed on the person or object that you are drawing and try not to look at what is happening on your page (don't cheat!) What is the result?

Drawings without taking the pencil off the page

Development idea: continuous line abstract doodle!

Now that you are used to making a continuous line drawing, let’s try something different.

Put your pen or pencil on your paper and take it for a walk – as if you are doodling. You could draw something from your imagination or just make an abstract pattern. But don't take your pen off the paper. You will see that your continuous line has created lots of shapes. Fill these in with different colours to make a colourful abstract artwork.

Two Figures

Kenneth Hall (1913–1946)

Loose control!

• Draw with a pencil or biro in your less dominant hand (your left hand if you are right-handed, for example). This can be a challenge at first but be brave and give it a go. Time yourself for four minutes. Your drawing may look quite strange, but you might discover some interesting lines – and might learn to love it!

Drawn using the hand they don't usually write with

• Tape a piece of charcoal or a felt-tip pen to a long stick (such as a metre ruler, a garden cane or even a wonky stick from a garden or park). Set a timer for 3 minutes and draw your subject standing at a distance from the paper. The length of the stick will make it hard for you to control what you are doing and you'll see some lively marks! Increase the time to 5 minutes, 10 minutes and 15 minutes. How do the drawings change?

 Double trouble

• Choose two coloured pencils and draw your subject with both hands at the same time. This can be quite a strange experience to start with but stick with it.

Drawing with both hands

• Now attach two coloured pencils together with tape and draw your subject. Then try drawing with 3 or more pencils strapped in a bundle!

In the Aftermath of World War Two (I) 1974

Arnold Daghani (1909–1985)

Abstracting your subject

• Simplify your subject into the different shapes you can see. Rearrange these shapes in different ways to make an abstract version of your subject. Which arrangement works best?

Breaking the subject down into simple shapes

• Look out of the window or choose a landscape painting from Art UK . Try simplifying the landscape into basic shapes without details or shading.

Twelve Pins, Cumbria 1955

Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887–1976)

You might be familiar with artist L.S. Lowry's paintings of industrial streets (with tiny matchstick-like figures), but did you know he also produced simple drawings of empty landscapes? Many of these are devoid of details and have an abstract quality.  Explore his drawings on Art UK for inspiration .

Different views...

• Have a go at drawing your subject from different angles or viewpoints, making the drawings on top of each other. This will create an interesting abstract drawing that provides different views of the same subject.

Transitional Object

Ray Smith (1949–2018)

...and moving models

• Ask a friend, classmate or family member to strike a different pose every 10 seconds for a minute. Draw the poses. Focus on the main lines made by their body and limbs to create a sense of movement. You could place the drawings on top of each other for extra movement effect! Then have a go at longer poses (for 30 seconds, then a minute and five minutes). How do the drawings change? What did the super-quick poses and drawings teach you?
• Now have a go at drawing a moving model. Ask a friend or family member to walk up and down the room in front of you (or to dance!) Use quick lines and marks to capture their movement. Don't worry if your drawing is messy and it doesn't look much like a figure – capturing the movement is the key point of this exercise!

Collaborative drawing  for two people

• Work in pairs. One of the pair should choose an object (or a simple sculpture from Art UK's website if you prefer ) without revealing what this is. They should then describe the object to their partner. They can describe its shape, texture and any either qualities, but try not to give away what it is! 

Two Heads (Mother and Child) c.1932

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975)

• Now try the same exercise again using a different subject. This time the drawer should wear a blindfold so not only can they not see the object they are drawing, but they also cannot see what the drawing they are creating on the paper looks like!
• Compare the drawings to the original objects. Are there any similarities? How are they different?

Collaborative group drawing

• This fun drawing activity works best with four or more people. Tape a piece of paper to the back of each drawer and give each of the drawers a wax crayon or soft pencil.
• Stand in a circle with each person facing the back of the person in front. 
• One person in the circle is the designated drawer and chooses a subject to draw (or they may decide to create an abstract drawing of shapes, marks and lines). 
• The drawer should draw their drawing onto the paper on the back of the person in front. This person then draws what they feel on their back onto the back of the person in front of them and so on.
• Compare the drawings at the end of the exercise. How have the drawings changed down the line?

Sensory drawing: sound

• Make an abstract drawing in response to music. Have a selection of drawing tools available such as pencils, charcoal, crayons and ink and brushes and some large sheets of paper. Select some music (this could be for example classical music, hip hop or jazz). 
• Start by listening to the music for two or three minutes with your eyes closed. Try thinking about it in relation to marks, lines and physical movements.
• Now have a go at translating the sounds you hear and how the music makes you feel into marks on your paper.
• Try playing a very different piece of music to draw to. How does your drawing change?

Drawing No. 21 c.1962

Sandra Blow (1925–2006)

If you are interested in how music can be used in art, have a look at the paintings of artist Denzil Forrester . He was inspired by the music he heard as a youth in nightclubs in the East End of London. He drew and sketched in the clubs and used his sketches to create paintings full of music and the movement of dancers.

Witchdoctor 1983

Denzil Forrester (b.1956)

Sensory drawing: touch

• Make a drawing inspired by your sense of touch.
• The teacher (or someone not taking part in the activity) should place some objects in tote bags and secure the bags so that the objects cannot be seen. Try and include a range of objects with different shapes and textures.
• Drawers should then feel the objects through the fabric of the bags. What forms and surfaces can you feel? Try translating these into lines, shapes and marks. (Even if you recognise the objects, try not to draw what you think they look like, focus on the forms and surfaces as this will make for a more interesting drawing!)

Untitled 2*

Will Alsop (1947–2018)

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More art resources.

• KS1 (ENG) KS1 (NI) CfE L1 (SCO) PS2 (WAL)

• KS2 (ENG) KS2 (NI) CfE L2 (SCO) PS3 (WAL) KS3 (ENG) KS3 (NI) CfE L3 (SCO) KS3 (WAL)

• KS1 (ENG) KS2 (ENG) KS1 (NI) KS2 (NI) CfE L1 (SCO) CfE L2 (SCO) PS2 (WAL) PS3 (WAL)

• KS2 (ENG) KS2 (NI) CfE L2 (SCO) PS3 (WAL) KS3 (ENG) KS4 (ENG) KS3 (NI) KS4 (NI) CfE L4 (SCO) CfE L3 (SCO) KS3 (WAL) KS4 (WAL)

• KS4 (ENG) KS4 (NI) CfE L4 (SCO) KS4 (WAL) KS5 (ENG) KS5 (NI) CfE Sen. (SCO) KS5 (WAL)

• EYFS (ENG) KS1 (ENG) KS2 (ENG) FD (NI) KS1 (NI) KS2 (NI) CfE EY (SCO) CfE L1 (SCO) CfE L2 (SCO) PS1 (WAL) PS2 (WAL) PS3 (WAL) KS3 (ENG) KS3 (NI) CfE L4 (SCO) CfE L3 (SCO) KS3 (WAL)

• KS3 (ENG) KS4 (ENG) KS3 (NI) KS4 (NI) CfE L4 (SCO) CfE L3 (SCO) KS3 (WAL) KS4 (WAL)

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Terry Berlier

Paul DeMarinis

Shane Denson

Jamie Meltzer

Camille Utterback

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performance art

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• The Art Story - Performance Art
• Art in Context - Performance Art – A Look at the Types of Performance Art
• Khan Academy - Performance Art: An Introduction

performance art , a time-based art form that typically features a live presentation to an audience or to onlookers (as on a street) and draws on such arts as acting , poetry , music , dance , and painting . It is generally an event rather than an artifact , by nature ephemeral , though it is often recorded on video and by means of still photography.

Performance art arose in the early 1970s as a general term for a multitude of activities—including Happenings , body art, actions, events, and guerrilla theatre . It can embrace a wide diversity of styles. In the 1970s and ’80s, performance art ranged from Laurie Anderson ’s elaborate media spectacles to Carolee Schneeman’s body ritual and from the camp glamour of the collective known as General Idea to Joseph Beuys ’s illustrated lectures. In the 1990s it ranged from Ron Athey’s AIDS activism to Orlan’s use of cosmetic surgery on her own body. And in the early 21st century, Marina Abramović rekindled a great interest in the medium through her re-creation of historical pieces.

Performance art has its origins in the early 20th century, and it is closely identified with the progress of the avant-garde, beginning with Futurism . The Futurists’ attempt to revolutionize culture included performative evenings of poetry, music played on newly invented instruments, and a form of drastically distilled dramatic presentation. Such elements of Futurist events as simultaneity and noise-music were subsequently refined by artists of the Dada movement, which made great use of live art. Both Futurists and Dadaists worked to confound the barrier between actor and performer, and both capitalized on the publicity value of shock and outrage. An early theorist and practitioner in avant-garde theatre was the German artist Oskar Schlemmer , who taught at the Bauhaus from 1920 to 1929 and is perhaps best known for Das triadische Ballet (1916–22; “The Triadic Ballet”), which called for complex movements and elaborate costumes. Schlemmer presented his ideas in essays in a collective publication, Die Bühne im Bauhaus (1924; The Theater of the Bauhaus ), edited by Walter Gropius .

Subsequent important developments in performance art occurred in the United States after World War II . In 1952, at Black Mountain College (1933–57) in North Carolina , the experimental composer John Cage organized an event that included performances by the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham , the poet Charles Olson , and the artist Robert Rauschenberg , among others. In its denial of traditional disciplinary boundaries, this influential event set a pattern for Happenings and Fluxus activities and provided an impetus for much of the live art of the following decade. In the 1960s and ’70s, performance art was characterized by improvisation , spontaneity, audience interaction, and political agitation. It also became a favourite strategy of feminist artists—such as the gorilla-masked Guerrilla Girls , whose mission was to expose sexism, racism, and corruption mainly in the art world—as well as of artists elsewhere in the world, such as the Chinese artist Zhang Huan . Popular manifestations of the genre can be seen in Blue Man Group and such events as the Burning Man festival, held annually in the Black Rock Desert , Nevada.

• Film Theory

What is Experimental Film — History, Examples & Movements

W hat is an experimental film? This elusive and niche genre can be difficult to define, and there are many common misconceptions about experimental filmmaking, but we’ll be sorting through the fact and the fiction to provide a comprehensive overview of what it means for a film to be “experimental”. We’ll get started with a definition, then dig deeper into experimental filmmaking as a genre, and finally close things out by taking a look at some notable examples.

Avant garde film definition

First, let’s define experimental film.

There are many film terms and phrases that could use simple definitions, and we’ve compiled them all in our ultimate guide to filmmaking terminology . You can also look up definitions for every genre of film in our ultimate guide to movie genres .

EXPERIMENTAL FILM DEFINITION

What is an experimental film.

An experimental film is a project bucks the trends of conventional cinema and pushes the medium of film in unexplored ways. The spectrum of experimental films is extremely broad; this genre encompasses a great many types of projects of varying lengths, styles, and goals.

There are experimental feature films, though more experimental projects have shorter runtimes. This is due in part to many experimental films being made for low budgets and/or the fact that the majority of experimental films are never intended for mainstream appeal or traditional distribution.

AVANT GARDE FILM CHARACTERISTICS

• Can be any length
• Niche and often artsy
• Pushes boundaries and tries new things

Experimental filmmakers

Digging deeper into experimental film.

Let’s dig a little deeper into what it means for a project to be classified as an experimental film. There is a modicum of debate over what exactly constitutes an experimental film, and some projects blur the line between traditional cinema and experimental filmmaking by including elements of each. Experimentation can be found in the editing, in the filming, in the subject matter, or in the manipulation of the camera and celluloid’s chemical and mechanical processes.

A beginner’s guide to experimental cinema

There are many misconceptions about what experimental filmmaking is, so let’s dispel a couple. One common belief is that experimental films have no story. While some experimental films certainly lack anything that could be considered a traditional narrative, that does not hold true for all experimental films.

Another commonly held notion is that experimental films are weird for the sake of being weird or that they are simply filmed nonsense. This is quite a reductive stance to take on the entire genre, but it is an opinion shared by many. The audience for experimental films can be extremely niche, and experimental filmmakers are aware of this. They are not made for everyone.

Surreal = experimental is another common misconception. Containing an element of surrealism does not automatically make a project experimental in nature. However, there is an intrinsic linkage between surrealism and experimental cinema, so the misconception is understandable. Let’s clarify this point with an example.

Sexy Beast  •  dream sequence

This dream sequence from the gangster flick Sexy Beast is undoubtedly surreal yet there is nothing experimental at play. The surrealism is conjured through traditional filmmaking means only. So, while surrealism and experimental cinema often go hand-in-hand, surrealism alone is not enough to constitute a film being labeled as experimental; the filmmaking methods and the pushing or warping of boundaries play important roles as well.

Related Posts

• Read More: What is Surrealism →
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The history of experimental cinema

Experimental filmmaking over the years.

Since the first camera was invented , artists have been experimenting with the tool. At the dawn of cinema, everything was an experiment. It was only through the intervention of time that certain techniques and methods became standard.

While many of the techniques used in Voyage dans la Lune seem antiquated by modern filmmaking standards, they were absolutely boundary shattering way back in 1902. Radical experimentation was necessary to pull off so many things that had never before been seen or created in the medium of film.

A Trip to the Moon

As cinematic techniques improved and became seen as standards, there were still filmmakers willing to experiment and push the envelope. 1929’s Un Chien Andalou was an early masterpiece of both surrealism and experimental filmmaking. Many of the techniques used in Un Chien Andalou were experimental at the time but have since been integrated into more standard filmmaking techniques as the decades have passed. Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel were two master surrealists and played an important role in the common linkage between surrealism and experimentation through their boundary pushing methods.

Un Chien Andalou

By the 1940s, surrealism and experimental filmmaking were further linked through the work of Maya Deren. Over time, she has proven to be one of the most influential experimental filmmakers of all time. She created a number of experimental short films, the first of which, Meshes of the Afternoon , is often credited as a turning point for experimental and avant garde cinema. The short remains a highlight of the genre more than 70 years after it was first released.

If you are interested in making your own short films, check out our how to make a short film guide first.

Meshes of the Afternoon  •  Maya Deren

Andy Warhol is a name well known in the pop art world, but he made numerous contributions to the experimental film world as well. Warhol made nearly 150 experimental short films throughout his lifetime, and a number of them made throughout the 1960s were considered important contributions to the form. Below is a compilation of six of Warhol’s shorts made between 1964 and 1966.

Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

David Lynch is perhaps the most well-known filmmaker to consistently experiment in his films. He earned a spot on our list of the best directors of all time . Some Lynch projects explore a blend between experimental cinema and traditional filmmaking, while other Lynch projects comfortably fall into the “wholly experimental” category. Since his debut feature in 1977 with Eraserhead , Lynch has continued to employ experimental techniques in his feature films to this day. A significant degree of Eraserhead’s experimentation can be found in the atmospheric sound design . Listen closely to the trailer below.

Eraserhead  •  trailer

Now that we’ve explored a brief history of experimental filmmaking, let’s see if we can sort experimental films into a few distinct categories.

Experimental film examples

Types of experimental films.

Though experimental films in general can be a bit difficult to categorize as they defy convention by their very nature, there are a few common types we can examine from a bird’s eye view . The first type is: experimental films that challenge the form of filmmaking . This includes projects that defy the expectation of what a film is and manipulate the creation process, like Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man .

Dog Star Man  •  complete

This piece of experimental filmmaking was originally produced as four shorts before being compiled as a singular project. Dog Star Man is often hailed as an experimental masterpiece and was made through various manipulations to the film stock, experimenting with different exposure types, and radical editing techniques.

Another film that lands in the “challenges the form” category is Derek Jarman’s Blue . This one-hour-19-minute experimental film features just a single, unchanging visual for the entire duration: a solid blue screen. An intricately orchestrated audio track underscores the static visual, and the two combine to form a highly emotional experience.

Blue  •  Derek Jarman

Our next type of experimental film is the experimental documentary . Check out our list of the best documentaries to set a baseline for traditional documentary filmmaking before we jump into the experimental side of the genre. This experimental category encompasses projects like the nearly century old Soviet-produced Man With a Movie Camera . The full documentary is available to watch below.

Man With a Movie Camera

Another experimental documentary found in this category comes from none other than Orson Welles with For for Fake . This documentary, essay-film hybrid blurs the lines between fact and fiction in a fascinating way.

F for Fake Video Essay

Experimental Animation is a tried and true category of experimental filmmaking with many worthwhile and envelope pushing entries. Again, you can set a baseline for the non-experimental side of this genre by checking out our list of the best animated films ever made . As for the experimental side of the medium, first, we can return to David Lynch for his contribution to the category.

Six Men Getting Sick

The above short film, Six Men Getting Sick , was David Lynch’s very first foray into filmmaking. He began his journey into the arts as a painter, and you can see him bridging the gap with this painted filmmaking experiment.

For further examples of experimental animation, we can look to the Quay Brothers. Their shorts utilize a dreamy blend of stop-motion animation and puppetry. A number of their shorts are in the criterion collection; here is a highlight reel for four of their shorts.

Criterion teaser for the Quay Brothers

And for one last example of experimental animation found in a recent film, we can look to 2018’s German-Chilean production La Casa Lobo . Sculpture, stop-motion, traditional animation, and other artistic techniques were blended together in jaw dropping fashion that utilized life-size sets and dizzying camerawork. This experimental production pushes the boundaries of animation and accomplishes things never before seen in the medium. It gives the absolute best stop-motion films a run for their money.

The Wolf House  •  trailer

Experimental filmmaking remains alive and well in the modern filmmaking age. As long as there are boundaries left to push, filmmakers will continue to experiment.

What Was Dogme 95?

If you’re interested in experimental filmmaking, the Dogme 95 cinematic vow of chastity makes a fascinating case study into a radical filmmaking experiment. Learn about the movement, why and how it was created, the films that comprise it, and more, up next.

Up Next: What was Dogme 95? →

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Experimental Photography: A Primer for the Curious

• Jonathan Jacoby

Last updated:

• April 8, 2024
• See comments

Want to explore and develop your creative path beyond established photographic norms? In that case, experimental photography might be right up your alley.

Many factors go into the experimental photographic process, including composition and creative flow matter. But just as much, the non-traditional way of using your camera and development techniques defines such images.

What is Experimental Photography?

So what exactly makes certain pictures experimental in technique or look? To answer that question, we will need to examine the principles behind experimental photographs closely. From theory all the way to execution, let’s take a look at the science behind the art!

In doing so, I hope I will be able to instill in you some inspiration for future experimental projects of your own!

The History of Experimental Photography

As long as photographers have been creating pictures, innovators and abstract artists have dared to experiment. Let’s take a minute to look at the diverse history of different experimental approaches to photography.

Dadaist Experimentation and the Birth of Modern Abstract Photography

Today’s notion of experimental photography mostly emerged in the wake of the first World War. At that time, the Dadaists, Cubists, and Futurists were the talk of the painting world. Their ideology revolved around a libertine, pacifist, and satirical view of the world that challenged all sorts of established norms.

These aesthetic influences soon bled over into photography as well.

Important Dadaist photographers like Man Ray developed their own unique process for producing abstract , experimental images. Then, the most common techniques in use were multiple exposures, non-standard lighting, and soft focus.

Many Dadaists and Futurists also experimented with collage work, layering multiple images and arranging them in a particularly creative way. This would become a staple of experimental photography in later years.

Experimental Photography Since 1945

As time passed, more wild opportunities for creating experimental photography became available or were discovered. For example, X-ray and infrared photography took off massively after World War II, leading to a slew of notable experimental art in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Advanced forms of image manipulation and alternative processes spread, too. Some artists like Ray K. Metzker would make use of this to take existing expressions further, experimenting with what he would dub “composites”.

These were wildly arranged frames consisting of numerous photographic images, sometimes as many as hundreds. Metzker based this on older types of collage but amplified by the more modern, radical darkroom processes available at the time.

Others would dip their toes into the world of cameraless photography, using chemicals, papers, and brushes as their main image-making tools and working entirely within the studio.

Experimental Photography in the Digital World

The immense power of digital editing means that experimental photographers today can produce pictures that previous generations could have only dreamed of! Thanks to post-processing software, real limitations to radically altering your experimental images no longer exist.

With that said, it’s not really possible to recreate the aesthetic possibilities offered by chemical-based photographic techniques using digital effects.

Because of this, many experimental photographers continue to work across both mediums, film and digital, utilizing the strengths of each.

In-Camera Experimental Photography Techniques

Let us now take a look at some concrete examples of experimental photography techniques used by artists past and present to create stunning images!

The following are examples of in-camera techniques. That is, they represent an easy and foolproof way to add some experimental elements to an otherwise conventional photograph by manipulating one particular aspect of how you use your camera.

Deliberate Use of Light Leaks

This technique mostly relates to film photography. Though it’s possible to create light leaks on a digital camera, it might not be as easy as described below.

A light leak occurs when light from the environment reaches the film or sensor – but not through the lens.

In many analog camera designs, especially SLRs, there are a series of foam-based seals that keep the body perfectly shut when the film is loaded. By messing with these seals, you can create localized leaks that produce interesting flashes or streaks of color and light on your exposure.

How exactly a light leak will show up on your capture is almost impossible to predict. But, for the experimental photographer, that’s the fun bit!

Even the earliest abstract photographers realized that you could render an otherwise mundane scene visually more interesting by toying with focus.

Instead of narrowing down the focus to a precise, pin-sharp point, as most of us were taught to do, you can achieve soft focus by focusing slightly in front of or behind your main subject. Playing with unusual aperture settings is also a way to bring the depth of field into a “softer” range for your shot.

Some go even further by using specialized lens filters to blur their subjects further.

The controversial British photographer-cinematographer David Hamilton became famous for his photo series and movies shot in the 1970s that all feature a very distinctive “impressionist” soft focus look. Allegedly, he achieved this by smearing vaseline all over his camera lenses!

Soft focus is an amazing fit for portraits. Still, the technique can also render still lives and other types of experimental photography in a fascinating fashion!

Intentional Motion Blur

The idea of using motion blur and intentional camera movement is similar to the notion behind soft focus. It is a way of achieving a blurred, more abstract view of your subject that can be aesthetically more interesting (if less precise) than sharp focus.

The only prerequisite for deliberate motion blur is some moving subject. In the case of static subjects, you may try to move your camera instead.

You can even try shooting from a moving vehicle (as long as it’s safe, of course)! Creating blur is also relatively easy by itself. Simply aim for a long exposure by modifying your shutter speed to blur your surroundings selectively.

Light Painting

Some photographers have further expanded on the idea of creating a picture with light in motion as the main subject. They became interested in developing a technique where long exposures could be used to create shapes and figures out of nothing more than light trails.

This is called painting with light , and it is particularly popular nowadays in the new era of abstract digital photography.

Light painting is highly inventive and can really help you unlock your potential. I highly suggest trying it out as one of your first experimental photography techniques!

Double (Triple, Quadruple…) Exposures

Taking a number of exposures on the same frame is another time-tested method to lend any picture elements of daring uniqueness.

A double exposure is considered the most beginner-friendly option. This is because the difficulty of preventing an overblown image increases drastically the more exposures you use.

Multiple exposures work best when there are large contrasts you want to exploit in your image.

For example, a first (base) frame with lots of dark areas lends itself well to this technique. A brighter second exposure will show brilliantly against the darker backdrop.

If exposing more than two times in total, make sure to graduate your individual exposures to prevent areas that are too bright from washing out large parts of your image.

Shooting Expired Film

If you’ve been dabbling in photography for a while, you have no doubt noticed the expiration dates on packs of film. Owning a roll or two that have “gone bad” is no reason to toss them into the trash, though! A film that’s expired can indeed still be used.

More than that, you can create some stunning experimental photography with it!

How exactly expired film turns out on your final print is pretty much impossible to predict. It depends on the film stock’s chemical makeup, its age, conditions of storage, and countless other factors.

Sometimes, an expired roll can turn out just like a brand-new film!

Other times, crazy chemical reactions can radically alter the look of your image. Using a film like this is definitely a gamble, but one that can produce stunning results.

It also doesn’t require any special prerequisites, making it very beginner-friendly.

Shooting Photographic Paper

Did you know that film isn’t the only thing you can put into your analog camera? Indeed, some photographers like to experiment by using paper in its place.

This is most easily accomplished on cameras that take sheet film in the same size as common paper sizes, such as 4×5″ or 8×10″.

However, by cutting and forming paper in the darkroom, you can custom-fit it to nearly any camera, given the right tools and lots of patience!

Because photographic paper is intended for printing, its chemical properties and the way it captures light differ strongly from the film.

Everything from sharpness and depth of field to development techniques work differently when using paper negatives. The upside is that highly surrealist, experimental pictures can result, making for a rewarding journey!

The Diverse Possibilities of Experimental Photography Gear

Of course, what makes experimental photography so exciting is that it’s not just about how you use your gear but also about what you use to capture images in the first place!

Owing to their anti-traditionalist roots, experimental photographers from all over the world have photographed with a huge variety of non-conventional tools.

Here, we’ll take a look at a few of those to give you some inspiration!

Toy Cameras

Especially recently, in the wake of the Lomography movement, toy cameras have surged in popularity. Humble in origins, they can often be had for pocket change at yard sales and flea markets.

These kinds of machines usually offer a minimum of controls, bodies made of bakelite, and meniscus (single-element) lenses.

Because achieving sharp focus is difficult and body sealing often very poor on these kinds of cameras, they are fairly frustrating to use for high-definition, professional photography.

However, those same properties make such toy cameras extremely attractive for creatively using techniques like light leaks, motion blur, and soft focus.

The Power of Large-Format Photography

In many ways, large-format photography is king when it comes to experimental photography techniques. Because large-format film only comes in single sheets, developing and processing using advanced techniques becomes a lot easier than with rolls and spools of smaller formats.

The physical size of the negative also makes it much more convenient to contact print instead of enlarging. That further opens up possibilities for certain post processing techniques which may not work well otherwise.

Selective Focus with Camera and Lens Movements

Using a large-format camera in itself is a totally different experience from what you’re probably used to. It’s many times slower, more antiquated, in a lot of ways, far less convenient.

However, it also offers you unprecedented levels of creative freedom, not just in the darkroom!

Most large-format designs are view cameras, where the lens board and the image plane are linked by bellows and rails. This allows them to move at any angle and distance relative to each other (or at least as far as the bellows allow), unlike regular solid-bodied cameras where the two are always parallel.

By making use of the power of bellows and lens movements, you can create effects of depth, fine selective focus, and much more that is hardly possible with smaller, less flexible gear.

For many, that’s a fair price to pay in exchange for the cumbersome, heavy, and slow nature of large-format photography!

You Don’t Need a Camera to Take Experimental Photos

Some hunt for the most elusive specialist gear to take experimental photographs with. Others choose to go with nothing at all !

That’s right – there is a school of experimental photography that deals with cameraless art, created entirely without the traditional construct of lens, shutter, and such.

For example, by utilizing cyanotypes, you can expose objects directly on paper using sunlight or an artificial UV light source. Essentially, you are “contact exposing” your image, much like contact printing a negative!

This type of art is called a photogram to distinguish it from a photo graph taken with a camera. While cyanotypes make a cyan blueprint, you can explore countless other processes that will produce photograms with a different look.

Altering Experimental Photographic Images with Processing Techniques

As I already mentioned, much of the magic behind any experimental image occurs after exposure in post processing. Here are some basic techniques you can use to bring out the most desirable features of your art!

Avant-Garde Printing Processes

In a similar vein to processes like cyanotype photograms, other avant-garde printing techniques can allow artists to experiment wildly with their own vision.

Take, for instance, gum printing. An old photographic process first developed in the 1800s, it doesn’t use silver emulsions like the kinds of mediums we are familiar with today. Instead, it is based on a few different salts and proteins.

Experimenting with gum prints is like learning photography all over again. The results are also quite unlike anything else you’ll ever see!

There are countless other processes out there that you can explore, from printing with platinum to developing in red wine (no kidding!). Take your time to explore this strange world and see what sticks with you!

An Experimental Photographer’s Favorite Recipe: The Film Soup

One process that I have grown particularly fond of is the so-called film soup. In souping, you immerse your roll in a homemade “soup” of liquid ingredients after having exposed, but before moving on to developing.

The ingredients you can soup with can be almost anything. Proven examples include green tea, vinegar, all kinds of spices and herbs, fruit extracts, and more. Your imagination is the limit here!

Souping can create all kinds of different effects, and it’s easy to experiment with, so I would especially recommend this one to beginners.

Painting in the Darkroom

For more advanced and daring photographers, there are techniques like chemograms, or as I like to call them, “darkroom paintings”.

In a chemogram (and other related processes), you paint on your photographic paper in much the same way as you would paint on a canvas. But instead of watercolors, you use developer and other photo chemicals!

This can result in extremely unconventional images, especially when exposing objects in double exposures or in non-traditional settings and angles.

Blending Art Forms and Expanding Your Horizons as an Experimental Photographer

Ultimately, the bases covered in this short guide represent nothing more than simple, abstract techniques to get you started in the world of experimental photographs.

Start with what you’ve learned today and choose to go beyond. Many of history’s most successful experimental photographers grew their portfolios largely by deciding on a unique artistic vision, a framework for their aesthetic output.

I recommend trying to use the techniques we looked at today to construct such a framework. This can give direction to your craft and help you set clear goals.

Most important of all, don’t forget to practice as much as you can! There’s a lot to learn in experimental photography, and none of it will sink in over the long term if you don’t expose yourself to it regularly.

With that, I wish you good luck and a lot of fun experimenting! Till next time!

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Beyond Ink: Contemporary Experimental Ink Art

2020, Xu Bing, Beyond the Book from the Sky

What defines avant-garde ink art? This issue was raised in the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 2013 to 2014 titled Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China. A debate centers around whether contemporary works of art without the actual presence of ink material bear traces of the practitioner’s praxis. Can ink works stand on their own, devoid of cultural context (as long as they reflect ink traces)? Put another way, how can ink transcend the burden of “Chinese” culture? Or, vice versa, does the absence of ink indicate lack of pedigree? This issue has broad implications, raising the problem of national identity. This essay considers the ways in which experimental artists deploy this material on a conceptual level and direct it toward a dialogue to expand audiences, using ink to broaden the relevance of contemporary Chinese art beyond China. Where is cultural performance situated: in the material used or the context in which it was created?

Related Papers

Ink remix: contemporary art from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong

Eugene Y Wang

James Elkins

The idea here is to provide a clear, arguable definition, in order to clarify some of the ongoing discussions about what counts as ink painting. These debates are especially important given the claim that Chinese ink painting should be considered as the central Chinese contemporary art. It has a 3,000 year history, and it is not centrally or necessarily influenced by the West like so much Chinese art of the last few generations. One of the things standing in the way of a general acceptance of ink painting is that there is no general agreement about what counts as ink painting: is it the use of ink? Rice paper? Traditional techniques? Can photographs influenced by ink painting count? Can Gu Wenda's paintings count? Xu Bing's calligraphy? Ai Weiwei's architecture, furniture, or painted vases? The definition proposed here is non-visual: I suggest that it is helpful to think of ink painting as not dependent on any particular materials, but rather on the quality and nature of its references to the past. In that sense, much of Chinese contemporary art is neither ink painting nor especially Chinese; and much contemporary Chinese ink painting does not use ink, paper, or traditional brush marks. The essay is unpublished. It was commissioned, fully edited, paid, and then rejected, for an exhibition of contemporary ink painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012-13. (It was rejected because it is more art criticism than art history. Exhibition catalog essays for larger museums need to appear as art history and scholarship, and not as criticism or theory, even if the exhibition they accompany is itself a critical or theoretical contribution.)

The British Journal of Aesthetics

Ivan Gaskell

Pedith Chan

beth mckillop

Before the 20th century, ink was always central to the visual and written culture of educated Chinese people. It was made and mixed, stored and treasured, decorated and collected throughout the country’s long history. Successive generations of writers and artists have written and painted with ink, seeing it as the most natural medium for self-expression. In our times, there are still many traditional artists who produce work in the classical style, in addition to those who play on the material and spiritual qualities of ink to explore new possibilities, sometimes in new media.

MA Asian Art Histories Thesis

Vincent Lin

[This online version of the thesis is presented without the interview transcripts. Images have been converted to monochrome and have their resolutions reduced.] This study adopts cultural identity as a framework to analyse and discuss contemporary Chinese ink art in Singapore. While much literature has been written about the classical Chinese ink heritage from China and its influence and development in Singapore, contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink art have begun to emerge as responses towards the classical Chinese ink heritage. The study examines how contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink artists negotiate classical Chinese ink heritage as a cultural basis for their art making. This study attempts to describe their efforts as a distinction from the classical Chinese ink heritage and yet retains a sense of cultural familiarity. The study reviews literature on classical Chinese ink heritage and its development in Singapore to set the context for the contemporisation of Chinese ink art in Singapore. The study then establishes three key parameters for the examination of the four case studies: the sense of familiarity, extension of material, and fusion of Chinese and Western thought. The study describes the sense of familiarity as a cultural association with the iconography of classical Chinese ink heritage. The extension of material would encompass the application of the traditional Chinese ink medium and material, as well as unconventional materials, in artworks. The fusion of Chinese and Western thought would reference the synthesis of medium, philosophies, ideas, narratives and cultural dilemmas as perceived by Western educated Singaporean Chinese ink artists. The study has visually and contextually analysed Ling Yang Chang’s Taking a Break, Hong Sek Chern’s Rolled/Unrolled, Lim Choon Jin’s Rolling Mist in Highlands and June Lee Yu Juan’s Lost in Translation as contemporary Chinese ink artworks fitting these parameters. This study concludes that cultural familiarity is the key component for understanding contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink art, while the extension of material and fusion of Chinese and Western thought are to be considered as supporting influences towards cultural familiarity. With these parameters, the cultural negotiation of these contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink artists are thus made clear as distinct but familiar from the cultural basis of the classical Chinese ink heritage. The study hopes to expand the discourse of Singaporean Chinese ink through the examination of contemporary artworks, and to propose the usage of the three parameters of familiarity, extension and fusion for the study of contemporary Chinese ink in Singapore. The study proposes that future research into contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink can be expanded through the coverage of more artists and how the medium can be used in artistic production.

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

Luise Guest

The 'yaji' (雅集) in Imperial China was an 'elegant gathering' of scholars who met to play chess, listen to music, and appreciate ink painting and calligraphy. They were generally all-male affairs, often taking place in a walled garden. Recently it has been argued that such forms of semi-private contemplation are appropriate models for exhibiting Chinese contemporary art. This article has two connected parts: the first examines how two women artists, Tao Aimin (陶艾民) and Bingyi (冰逸), 'outsiders' to the yaji garden gathering as it was traditionally constructed, subvert (yet also honour) important Chinese traditions. They challenge a gendered historical narrative by means of a reinvigorated and performative ink language, negotiating literal and figurative 'inside' and 'outside' spaces. Positioned as reconfiguring space in a way that challenges binaries of inside/outside, they interrogate the literati tradition that functioned as an expression of class and gender. Two works in particular exemplify their practice: Bingyi's Époché, a 2014 performance in which she dropped 500 kilograms of ink/oil 'missiles' from a helicopter over the airfield at Shenzhen Bao'an Airport, and Tao Aimin's 2008 The Secret Language of Women, an installation of bound books printed from rural women's washboards employing the ancient Nüshu script invented by rural women. The second part of the article critically examines contemporary iterations of the yaji as a model for the exhibition of contemporary art. The term yaji is thus used in two ways in this article: as a metaphor to reflect on the absence of women artists in the reinvented literati ink tradition, and in a critical examination of its real-world manifestations in several recent exhibitions. In this context, the works of Tao Aimin and Bingyi occupy a complicated liminal space: they position themselves at times inside feminist discourse and at other times disavow a connection; they occupy a marginal space within dominant contemporary art world discourses and historically masculine discourses around calligraphy and the yaji, yet 'inside' the ink tradition.

Daniela C . Zhang

The purpose of this study is to present the work of the contemporary Chinese avant-garde painter Zhang Yu in relation to Experimental Ink and Wash Painting in mainland China and his contribution to this movement. This artist is the founder and ideological leader of the movement, whose views strongly influenced the avant-garde contemporary ink painting in all its forms. His work has gradually moved from monochrome ink paintings, through paintings on glass and on other materials, to installation, but his work is still characterised by certain constant philosophical and aesthetic concepts. Sources From a relatively large amount of literature written about contemporary Chinese art, only a small part deals with ink painting, that stands and stood aside from the avant-garde movements that journeyed Chinese art and it is a rewarding and grateful source for art critics and theorists. Overall there is much less material that deals with contemporary Chinese ink painting, it is a topic that interests more Chinese critics than the world public. However, there are books dealing with these issues. Despite the above mentioned facts, I had no significant problems with the lack of material. In addition, for * This study is published within the VEGA No. 2/0102/16 grant project.

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Are Art and Science Forever Divided? Or Are They One and the Same?

The sprawling California festival “PST Art” promises a dialogue between “two cultures.” But painting and physics may have more in common than their practitioners know.

By Jason Farago

One spring morning, one wet English morning, John Keats looked up at a rainbow and felt nothing.

The colors that streaked across the sky in Hampstead should have awed him, as they awed people of centuries past — when Noah saw the rainbow as proof of the Lord’s covenant, or when Norsemen believed the rainbow linked this realm to the world of the gods. But by the early 19th century, all Keats could see in the rainbow were optical, verifiable facts. His countryman Isaac Newton had proved that the colors were just sunlight refracted on water droplets, each wavelength bent at a different angle. This was the scientific disenchantment that the young Romantic described in his 1819 poem “ Lamia ”:

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine — Unweave a rainbow …

Culture and religion, dreams and angels: for Keats, by 1819, they had all been unwoven. Their poetry had been zeroed out by the cold calculations of physics (or natural “philosophy,” to use his word). And as the modern gospel of progress and rationalization continued to “conquer all mysteries,” artists and scientists began to look at each other with a mutual incomprehension — even disdain — that the British author and chemist C.P. Snow notoriously diagnosed in 1959 as “two cultures.” Art imagines, science answers: and the answer is final.

But go ask Aristotle: Art and science were not always opposites. The Renaissance was an art/science crossover. Without Darwin and Einstein there is no modernism. “ PST ART: Art & Science Collide ,” the biggest artistic event of the fall season, is all about these two complementary curiosities — and in Los Angeles this September, where Keats would have most likely encountered disappointing rainbows at a West Hollywood happy hour, the denizens of California’s studios and laboratories are going to get to know each other a little better. Nearly 70 exhibitions, of antiquities and contemporary production, in museums and at universities and research centers, will put science in a new frame, and art under the microscope.

Originally called Pacific Standard Time, “PST Art” is an initiative of the Getty — the richest art institution on earth, and among the most intellectually ambitious — to produce a synchronized showcase of Southern Californian cultural clout. This is its third full-scale edition since 2011, and this fall the Getty will be presenting no fewer than nine PST exhibitions, including “Lumen: The Art & Science of Light,” a survey of optics and religion in medieval Jewish, Christian and Islamic art, as well as an overview of Experiments in Art and Technology , a 1960s organization that brought leading American artists to Bell Labs. (Both shows open on Sept. 10.)

But this interdisciplinary festival stretches far beyond the Getty’s Brentwood acropolis. The Getty has committed $20.4 million to institutions large and small in Southern California, and, from the desert to the ocean, PST places a particular emphasis on research-driven exhibitions. There are shows of 1,500-year-old manuscripts and 20th-century aerospace technology, of botanical intricacy and digital minimalism.

At the Palm Springs Art Museum, “Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990” (from Sept. 14) examines how the astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory and the aeronautics engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena inspired painters and sculptors in Cold War L.A. Similar correspondences animate “Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920-2020” (at six locations at the California Institute of Technology, from Sept. 27), which will present rare books of astronomy by Kepler and Copernicus and a new installation by Helen Pashgian, a California sculptor who worked at the science institute in the late 1960s. “Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World , ” at the San Diego Museum of Art, assembles miniatures, maps, carvings and navigational instruments to illuminate an intellectual tradition in which art and science were not at odds (from Sept. 7).

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