The Vorticists: a short-lived 20th century avant garde art movement
"The vorticists did not have many members; nor did the movement last long, because of unfortunate timing - it formed in 1914 as Europe hurtled towards war. By 1918 there was not much appetite for dogmatic groups such as theirs.
Nevertheless, the group holds an important place in 20th-century British art history.
'They were the first abstract modernist group in Britain,' said Stephens. 'It inevitably comes out of the revolution of cubism, but then, so does everything in the 20th century.'
They were part of a maelstrom of new, aggressive art 'ism' movements, not least the one practised by the Italian futurists, who were, in Lewis's eyes, the bad guys.
Stephens said: 'Unlike the futurists, who celebrate the energy of the machine and actual war as a purging force, the vorticists were engaged in more universal ideas of identity, time and movement in a philosophical sense.'"
(Mark Brown, 13 June 2011, The Guardian)
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The Feral Diagram: Graffiti and Street Art 2011
"This diagram was meant as a challenge to the prevailing art world hegemony. It was created to prove the argument that graffiti and street art were already at the center of the art world whether they were officially recognized or not.
Utilizing the same graphic vocabulary as Alfred H. Barr, Jr (the first director of MoMA for the cover of the catalog for Cubist and Abstract Art exhibition in 1937) to create an impression of authority equivalent to his diagram. The Feral Diagram picks up chronologically where Barr left off, thereby subverting and redirecting the officially recognized historical trajectory.
Six years after the first draft of this diagram, the acknowledgement of graffiti and street art as important movements within the fine art community, if not the most important movements at the beginning of the new millenium, has come to light with major museum retrospectives, a never ending stream of books on the subject, websites, products, etc."
(Daniel Feral, 2011, Flickr)
Fig.1 revised "Feral Diagram 2.0" version.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Fluxus Reader offers the first comprehensive overview on this challenging and controversial group
"Fluxus began in the 1950s as a loose, international community of artists, architects, composers and designers. By the 1960s, Fluxus has become a laboratory of ideas and an arena for artistic exprmentation in Europe, Asia and the United States. Described as 'the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s', Fluxus challenged conventional thinking on art and culture for over four decades. It had a central role in the birth of such key contemporary art forms as concept art, installation, performance art, intermedia and video. Despite this influence, the scope and scale of this unique phenomenon have made it difficult to explain Fluxus in normative historical and critical terms. The Fluxus Reader offers the first comprehensive overview on this challenging and controversial group. The Fluxus Reader is written by leading scholars and experts from Europe and the United States."
(Ken Friedman, Swinburne Research Bank)
Fig.1 Robert Watts (1965). 'TV Dinner' from the exhibition Art in Our Time: 1950 to the Present, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, September 5, 1999 to September 2, 2001.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
