Modernism in the streets

2018 ◽  
pp. 66-95
Author(s):  
Anna Dahlgren

Chapter 2 considers the introduction of modernist aesthetics in Sweden in the early 1930s in the image communities of marketing and visual art. The main focus is the Stockholm Exhibition held in 1930 in which marketing and advertising played an integral part in the presentation of modern architecture, design and visual art. The exhibition area hosted the first large presentation of modernist visual art in Sweden and was simultanoeusly a decisive event for the introduction of modernist window displays. From the late 1920s and onwards window displays were clearly being influenced by avant-garde modernist art such as cubism, futurism and constructivism. This is evident in the designs themselves but it was also spelled out in professional journals and handbooks. In the commercial context pure marketing rationales and arguments were linked to the modernist aesthetic.The modernist design in window displays was not unique to Sweden around 1930. However, this is an instructive case as the reception of modernist images differed widely between the two image communities. Within marketing aesthetics the Stockholm exhibition marks the breakthrough for modernism. But simultaneously, the art field was very resistant to modernist aesthetics and the Art Concret exhibition proved to be a complete fiasco.

2011 ◽  
Vol 368-373 ◽  
pp. 3833-3836
Author(s):  
Wei Qiang An ◽  
Chong Wang

Parametric design,the mainly style for Neo-avant-garde in 21 century, has satisfied all the appeals on design methods when the computer technology has been imported in architecture design by avant-gardes. As another paradigm that has been looked as the successor of modern architecture, parametric design has effected and remolded our cognitive styles through its special way. This article is going to analyze the rationalities of the parametric architecture in the context of ethic and to discuss the relationship among people, city and nature in the context of technology and social culture.


2014 ◽  
Vol 638-640 ◽  
pp. 2265-2268
Author(s):  
Shuang Qiu

Modern architecture design lays more emphasis on the authenticity and regionality of the building.The basic tectonic principles are the real material performance and real construction expression. Architecture artistic is based on the internal expressive force of the structural system. And the logicality of building structure is given the inner beauty of architectural image. Modern timber-structure building is breaking the fetter of formalism in the aspect of structure performance. Its tectonic methods are making the positive exploration in terms of the architectural context inheritance.


Author(s):  
Tanja Poppelreuter

Mart (Martinus Adrianus) Stam (b. in 1899 in Purmerend, Netherlands—d. in 1986 in Goldach, Switzerland) was a Dutch architect, designer, and architectural theorist, and was involved in a number of principal events and organizations during the 1920s and 1930s. Stam moved to Berlin in 1922 to work as a draftsman with Max Taut and Hans Poelzig among others. While in Berlin, Stam met El Lissitzky who introduced him to Constructivism. Inspired by the progressive and social outlook of this Russian movement Stam founded the avant-garde magazine ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen [ABC: Contributions on Building] together with Hans Schmidt, Hennes Mayer, and Emil Roth (1924–1928). The magazine focused on convincing readers about the social necessity for low-cost, well-designed, and functional houses, as well as the use of modern technologies. ABC also established connections with Asnova, the association of new architects in Moscow, and published the student work of Vkhutemas [School of Modern Architecture] in Moscow.


Author(s):  
Thuy N. D. Tran

The Young Vietnamese Artists Association (YVAA; 1966–75) was an avant-garde artist collective founded in Saigon in November 1966 in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam; 1954–75). Also referred to as the Society of Saigonese Young Artists, the majority of its members were under the age of thirty and were recent graduates of the National College of Fine Arts, Saigon (est. 1954) and the Fine Arts College of Hue (est. 1957). The YVAA’s mission was to foster a new direction for visual art in Vietnam that would better reflect the cultural internationalism and modernization of the era. While YVAA artists experimented with a variety of artistic styles, abstract works influenced by the modernist styles found in the School of Paris—including Lyrical Abstraction, Cubism, Fauvism, and Naive Art—were prevalent. Initiated by art collector Dr Nguyễn Tấn Hồng and artist Ngy Cao Uyên (YVAA’s founding president), the Association’s founding members were mainly painters and sculptors: Vị Ý, Cù Nguyễn, Âu Như Thụy, Nguyễn Trung, Trịnh Cung, Nguyên Khai, Hiếu Đệ, Nguyễn Phước, Mai Chửng, Đinh Cường, Nghiêu Đề, Nguyễn Lâm, Hồ Hữu Thủ, and Hồ Thành Đức. With frequent sponsorships from the Goethe Institut and the Alliance Française, the YVAA became a driving force behind Saigon’s arts scene.


Author(s):  
Jane Hu

The term ‘stream of consciousness’ was first coined by psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology in 1893, when he describes it thusly: "consciousness as an uninterrupted ‘flow’: ‘a ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life" (243). The term quickly came to mean a narrative mode that seeks to give the written equivalent of a character’s thought processes, and is sometimes described in terms of an ‘interior monologue’. As such, it differs from the ‘dramatic monologue’ or ‘soliloquy’ where the speaker addresses the audience or an implied receiver. Stream of consciousness style is often identified by fictional techniques such as lack of punctuation, long and sometimes agrammatical sentences, and a series of unrelated impressions. Stream of consciousness technique tries to represent a character’s general mental state before it is condensed, organized, or edited down into narrative coherence or sense. While stream of consciousness is often read as an avant-garde technique, its aims were to get closer to the ‘reality’ of human thought processes. As a narrative technique, stream of consciousness maintains affiliations with other modernist art forms, such as the visual art of German expressionism, Cubism, and modernist film.


Author(s):  
Fernando N. Winfield

Commenting on an exhibition of contemporary Mexican architecture in Rome in 1957, the polemic and highly influential Italian architectural critic and historian, Bruno Zevi, ridiculed Mexican modernism for combining Pre-Columbian motifs with modern architecture. He referred to it as ‘Mexican Grotesque’. Inherent in Zevi’s comments were an attitude towards modern architecture that defined it in primarily material terms; its principle role being one of “spatial and programmatic function”. Despite the weight of this Modernist tendency in the architectural circles of Post-Revolutionary Mexico, we suggest in this paper that Mexican modernism cannot be reduced to such “material” definitions. In the highly charged political context of Mexico in the first half of the 20th Century, modern architecture was perhaps above all else, a tool for propaganda. In this political atmosphere it was undesirable, indeed it was seen as impossible, to separate art, architecture and politics in a way that would be a direct reflection of Modern architecture’s European manifestations. Form was to follow function, but that function was to be communicative as well as spatial and programmatic. One consequence of this “political communicative function” in Mexico was the combination of the “mural tradition” with contemporary architectural design; what Zevi defined as “Mexican Grotesque”. In this paper, we will examine the political context of Post-Revolutionary Mexico and discuss what may be defined as its most iconic building; the Central Library at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico . In direct counterpoint to Zevi, we will suggest that it was far from grotesque, but rather was one of the most committed political statements made by the Modern Movement throughout the Twentieth Century. It was propaganda, it was political. It was utopian.


Author(s):  
Carrie Rohman

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.


Author(s):  
Hakan Saglam

The concept of ‘Art’ in the modern meaning, evaluates within the Enlightenment’s seminal World of philosophy. Before the Enlightenment architecture and craft were instinctively united fields of creating, almost impossible to detach one from the other. From the beginning of twentieth century the avant-garde of modern architecture were aware of the growing schism between art and architecture and vice versa. The pioneers were writing manifestos, stating that art and architecture should form a new unity, a holistic entity, which would include all types of creativity and put an end to the severance between “arts and crafts”, “art and architecture”.  Approaching the end, of the first decade of the twenty first century, as communicative interests in all fields are becoming very important, we should once more discuss the relation/ interaction / cross over of art and architecture; where the boundaries of the two fields become blurred since both sides, art and architecture, are intervening the gap between. The aim of this paper is to discuss the examples of both contemporary art and architecture, which challenge this “in between gap.” Key words: Architecture, art, interaction, in between.


Author(s):  
Judith Zilczer

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw painters renounce mimetic representation for the formal rigors and spiritual transcendence of visual art divorced from reproduction of the visible world. That they chose to do so in no small measure resulted from a profound shift in aesthetic values: music became the paradigm for visual art. While the concept of visual music gained international currency, this seductive aesthetic model had particular resonance in the United States. Between 1910 and 1930, leaders of the American avant-garde, such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Max Weber, experimented with musical ideas to forge a new abstract art. A comparative case study of the music pictures of these painters and the inter-media installations of contemporary artist Jennifer Steinkamp will illuminate the transformation of the modernist ideal of visual music in the postmodern era.


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