Introduction
What is contemporary art? It is the art of the epoch we live. It is the art of nowadays. On a more somber note, while it may be difficult to categorize developing movements, contemporary art – generally – is much more communally awake than any previous era has been. The key part of art of the previous 30 years has been related to one issue or another: feminism, multiculturalism, globalization, bio-engineering and AIDS awareness all come eagerly to mind as subject issue.
Fascinatingly enough, some of the most unusual galleries were situated in Germany, the center of Europe’s modern art scene. “When the industrial epoch started, people earned a lot of money and they wished to invest in – and be diverted by – art,” Kunst im Peters explains. (Blackson, 2007).
All the artists who will be discussed in the paper are trying to show their own vision of the most substantial global matters. They are trying to make the humanity not to forget the drawbacks of the contemporary world, with its wars, crimes and violence.
The paper is claimed to review some of the most known contemporary artists, and define the particularities, that may be regarded as mnemonic traces of their arts. Thus, the notions on individuality will be observed.
Anselm Kiefer
Kiefer grades among the best-known and most victorious, but also most discussed German artists after World War II. In his works, Kiefer disputes with the past and refers to taboo and contentious matters from recent history. Themes from Nazi regime are chiefly pictured in his work; for example, the painting “Margarethe” was motivated by Paul Celan’s well-known verse “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue“). Polemical argumentations in the media over the estimation of his artistic work have taken place for many decades. (Gallucci, 2006).
Throughout the previous three decades, Anselm Kiefer has become globally known for imposing, operatic works relating the historical, legendary and literary subjects that enliven post-war German culture. He is trying to depict all the challenges that German people were facing during the restoring of Germany after the WWII, and the miseries of late 1940th Germany. The extraordinary graphic power of Kiefer’s work obtains from the application of the same dramatic views and imposing arrangements that featured Nazi parade-ground construction.
The symbolisms in Kiefer’s art, as well as the intricacy of his iconography and subject issue, are now assisted by volumes of opaque writing to decode his art. However his work has unusual “attendance” that instantly hypnotizes its audience and attracts the viewer to engage in the strong experiencing of Kiefer’s art.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Abakanowicz is regarded nowadays as the best known Polish artist in the world. Her large colossal works are established in open spaces, among others: in Italy – G. Gori collection – “Katharsis” – 33 bronze figures; in Jerusalem, Israel Museum – “Negev” – 7 huge stone discs; in Seoul Olympic Park – “Space of Dragon” – 10 matamorphic animal heads; at National Gallery of Art, Washington – “Puellae” – 20 children figures; in Nasher collection, Texas – “Bronze Crowd” – 36 standing figures; in Europas Parkas, Lithuania, a group of large oval forms out of concrete – “The Spece of Unknown Growth”. (Gallucci, 2002).
Abakanowicz reveasl the themes of solitude and the fear of crowds in her work reflect the severe limitations of space and materials that she experienced in her youth, under the Nazis during World War II and later under the Communists.
Her motives are close to the motives by Kiefer, as she also describes the post-war period in her creation, as Polish people also experienced the miserable restoration, communist regime after the termination of WWII.
Rather than connecting “War Games” to the calamity of war or to environmental tragedy, it is possible to observe that the description of anguish entails imposing ache on the materials provided. In order to make her sculptures, Abakanowicz unwraps the howl, cuts off the appendages, and interleaves metal devices into tree trunks, making them look like subjects of double torment, first by an unknown antagonistic power, then by the performer herself. Yet such “brutality” permits her to query the binary antagonisms of victim and tormenter, love and hate, life and death, while averting her from naively repeating the oratory that so often encloses themes of war, totalitarianism, or ecology.
The human face is one more matter of Abakanowicz researches and observations resulting in more than 150 metaphorical auto representations in bronze followed by faces and heads of fantasy creatures; then the cycle of beasts called “Mutants” chases. At the same time she makes the “War Games” – using massive tree stalks in horizontal location armed with steel elements. “Hand-like Trees” bronze shapes up to 500 cm high mounted permanently in various sculpture parks in the US and Europe are another Abakanowicz monument. She makes charcoal pictures and ink images. (Patin, 1997).
Hermann Nitsch
Nitsch’s art is preeminently understood within the phenomenon of presentation art following the Second World War. That Europe was culturally as well as architecturally obliterated by the war is not under consideration. It is significant, nevertheless, to deem how this obliteration patents itself in the work of performers from Germany and Austria more commonly and in exacting in the work of the Vienna school. It is just not probable to take into account art such as that of the Viennese Actionists enhancement and finding an audience in states such as the USA after the war, or in many other states even today. Their work creates clear all the violence and crimes that so many people tend to stifle. Possibly it can be noted that Nitsch dumped the pattern of beauty from the very start: he has always been prepared to forfeit aesthetic components so as to permit catharsis and sanitization in a participant fully shrouded within the presentation and physically in contact with animal elements, blood, smells and music. The dramatic emotions that Nitsch’s work calls forth in us can be realized in connection to ‘the primal scream’, a traumatic instance for the times of development which later provides as a provider of creativity and facilitates creative fantasy. (Artforum International, 2003).
All through his creation, Nitsch has returned to discover again and again one of the key subjects of his work: faith or, more purposely, an archaic, Dionysian pantheism. This art is a type of punk in the religious beliefs, as Nitsch totally protests the conventional views on the art and beauty, also relating the matters of pantheism.
Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovic is a recital artist who examines and pushes the restrictions of physical and mental capability. In her performances she has slashed herself, flagellated herself, frozen her body on blocks of ice, taken mind- and muscle-controlling drugs that have made her to fall insensible, and almost died from asphyxiation while lying within a drape of oxygen-devour flares.
Abramovic’s aim is not sensationalism, nevertheless. Her presentations are a sequence of tests aimed at classifying and stating the boundaries and restrictions: of her control over her own organism; of spectators’ relations with a performer; of art and, by addition, of the codes that rule community. Her deep and ambitious plan is to find out a technique, by the means of art, to make people more complimentary and open.
Her art represents the themes of cleansing and liberty by the means of ritual and pain are evident. Those familiar with Abramovic’s art are applied to regarding her engulfed in blazes, or nude, or gory, or covered in puncture injuries. Abramovic is a master of expectation and ‘shock ‘n awe’. She selected to remind of the cruelties and violence of the contemporary world, and doing so Abramovic tries not to allow the oblivion of the war crimes, victims and violence.
Lots of Abramovic’s presentations over the previous 30 years have been wicked and unnerving. Some of them got conclusion only when one of the watchers interceded. Once she stated: “I’m interested in art that disturbs and that pushes that moment of danger; then, the public watching has to be here and now. Let the danger focus you; this is the whole idea – to put you in the focus of now.” (Blackson, 2007).
Arnulf Rainer
One of the things that this critic least wishes to do, ever again and even for quite a great sum in money, is to read one more novel or sit through another movie about the modern art world. There is one exemption, however. Many worse matters come to mind than the life and career of Arnulf Rainer, the Austrian painter.
Rainer aimed to draw the attention to the matters of suppressed impulses in disobedience of bourgeois insincerity.
In 1951, when Paris led the rest of Europe in latter-day Surrealism and Andre Breton was the swaying dictator of taste in that domain, Mr. Rainer went to see him and demonstrated him his sketches. Breton was tired, and showed it. Rainer turned his back on late Surrealism and started painting blindfolded. A year or two after that, he resolved the matter of how to get started on a new painting by painting over an obtainable one in monochrome. Over the years that have chased, Mr. Rainer has worked with a whole range of allegedly progressive tools. (Gallucci, 2006).
Christian Boltanski
Boltanski’s work regularly relates the matters of Holocaust, nevertheless not openly. In Altar to Lycee Chases (1986-88), for instance, unclear photographs of the 1931 modifying class of a Jewish high school in Vienna are lit by low-priced gooseneck lamps that unclear as much as light up the image and also request associations with cross-examination. The work serves as a cenotaph for the millions assassinated without naming anyone. In 1991 Boltanski enlarged that project with a collection of photogravures named Gymnsium Chases, issued by Crown Point Press. Other works, such as The Reserve of Dead Swiss, 1990, made of pictures of Swiss citizens gathered from newspaper necrologies, memorialize people who have died in normal ways.
He initiated writing letters and compiling compendia, and offering them to famous figures in the arts sight. His uncooked materials were photocopies blended among unique documents and photographs from his family photo albums. Using these new materials was tantamount to investing his personal universe in his work. His individual history grew into one of the key themes of his photos. Boltanski generally works with constant subjects of childhood and death, and of recollection that forms our sense of actuality. His works retort to the application of power of light and shadow to highlight memory’s place in the twilight among past and present.
Christian Boltanski has had solo displays at major organizations all over the world entailing the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. In 2005, the Mathildenhohe in Darmstadt, Germany increased a Boltanski demonstration exhibition named “Time.” Boltanski’s work is in many community compilations in Europe and the United States comprising the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, the Tate Collection, London, and the Pompidou Center, Paris.
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter classified early on with the Art Informel association in Germany. His later on works can be split into roughly two key spheres: photography and painting.
The discoloration of Gerhard Richter’s work is informative, and suffering. It comes, surely, from black and white photography. In any of these types, accurately as they assert to be records of actuality, photographs are essentially furthest from actuality.
He seems to be non-painting his earlier Socialist Realist paintings, and, more sharply, the very landscapes he is using. Pushing the paint around is like manipulating the pictorial emulsion to change the picture, to see into the prospect, to alleviate it of dullness. He is anxious with the socialist fate of that part of the world, which selected socialistic way of development. It seems like he realizes that this way would lead to the dead end, and he is attempting to show it by the mean of his photos and paintings.
This blurring is a general and very apparent component in the work of Gerhard Richter. In his photographic works Richter applies pragmatic but hazed pictures of shapes and scenes. In his paintings he increases paint in lines and smears onto the outside of the support and then spreads the paint somewhat evenly to influence a blur of the different paints. (Monger, 2006).
Miquel Barceló
Well known painter Miquel Barceló is one of the most admired Spanish artists in the current global art sphere. His work reproduces, from the very first instance, a distinguished interest in natural metaphors, as much earthly as nautical, rendered in a dark and often serious palette. Barceló’s work has had a great impact on his younger colleagues. (Monger, 2006).
His works focus on biblical themes, and also with the interiors of cinemas or museums. Barceló shows himself painting, alluding to the position of the demiurge exemplified by the artist, or draws on daily inspiration (still life, portrayals, landscapes). It seems like he reveals the matters of contemporary life, and compares it with biblical themes, in order to show the demerits of the contemporary world, in comparison with the biblical epoch.
Conclusion
The world of Contemporary art may be regarded as the mirror of either the past, or the present times. All the artists are making an attempt to show, that the world is not perfect, and it is required to be changed until it is late. The main themes are generally crimes, wars, violence, cruelty, hypocrisy… The only emphasis that should be made is that contemporary art is mainly focused not on the beauties of the world, but on its miseries, and imperfections.
References
Blackson, Robert. “Once More. with Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture.” Art Journal 66.1 (2007): 28 “Contemporary Art in U.S. Museums.” Artforum International 2003: 288.
Gallucci, Margaret A. “The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe.” Renaissance Quarterly 59.1 (2006): 237.
Kaplan, Janet A. “The Quiet of the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art, and the Shakers A Conversation with Janet A. Kaplan.” Art Journal 57.2 (1998): 4.
Monger, George. “Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK.” Folklore 117.2 (2006): 225.
Painter, Colin, ed. Contemporary Art and the Home. New York: Berg, 2002.
Patin, Thomas, and Jennifer McLerran. Artwords: A Glossary of Contemporary Art Theory. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997.