originally published January 6, 2012
For every great piece of art, there is a piece of anti-art. For every bold statement, scraped from the most tender and painful wound on an artist’s soul and splattered desperately upon a canvas or shaped into clay, there’s someone else who says, “You know what? Fuck art.” And so we get this:
Anti-art is all about rejecting established notions of art. One could call it ‘hipster art’, as the entire purpose of it appears to be to call attention to oneself as intellectually superior to the 9-to-5, punch-the-clock artists who are slaves to the populist interpretations of their medium.
I know, I’m going to get thousands of angry replies (from the tens of people who read this site – and I love all of you), telling me I just don’t get it, and I should take my philistine approach to art over to some Motel-6 and steal one of their paint-by-numbers depictions of a caribou smoking a cigarette in the rain.
Like most artistic movements in recent history, we can blame this one on the French. A group of artists known as the Incoherents were founded in 1882, producing charitable art exhibitions with a satirical slant: basically, art by people who have no talent or ability at producing art. The movement was revolutionary, as those are the same tenets one can find at the core of much of today’s teen-pop music.
Then come the Dadaists. Coming out of Switzerland during WW1, the Dada movement ignored aesthetics, aimed to offend, and laid the groundwork for abstract art, also known as “art you will never understand.” The Dadaists were anti-war, which is understandable when you consider they were Swiss and only had those little pocket knives to fight with. They had lost faith in their culture, and sought to destroy it by designating a drinking fountain as art. No, really, Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” is one of the big pieces of this movement.
In the ‘spirit of Dada’, performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli urinated on The Fountain in 1993, then smashed it with a hammer in 2006. Now THAT’S (anti) art!
Anti-Artist Tristan Tzara stated, “As long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society.” Fortunately, Tzara was not employed in the field of medicine.
Constructivism came out of Russia, where anti-artist Alexander Rodchenko declared the ‘end of painting’ by submitting a series of monochrome, single-color paintings in 1921. This is a painter, stating he has delivered the last necessary paintings to the world. The guy sounds like an immense, Kanye-level dickhead.
The 1920s brought about the Surrealist movement. As far as political expression, where the Dadaists were anarchists, the Surrealists were communists. This is where you find the work of Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, and Rene Magritte’s famous “This Is Not A Pipe.”
Surrealism is not so much about rejecting art, but rather about rejecting established reality and offering up to the world what some critics would call “some messed-up, drug-induced, hippie stuff.” Today, Surrealism is respected as an important, thought-provoking evolution of art, but at the time it was seen as radical and revolutionary, tied invariably to politics and people hell-bent on bitching about stuff.
If anti-art had finished off with Surrealism, I’d have no complaints. But then it wouldn’t be art unless there was someone in the shadows, trying to be more ‘reject-y’. So again we turn to France, and the Letterist movement of the mid-40s. These folks moved in the world of film, splicing together films or finding ways for the audience to participate in what was called Situationist Art.
I’m starting to think you can add ‘ist’ to the end of any word and call it an artistic movement. I’d like to start my own. Maybe Staplist Art, in which artworks are stapled in on each other so you have to pick the staples out to see them. How about Condimentist Art, produced solely through the medium of mustard and relish? I’m leaning toward Imaginist Art, in which I sit in the middle of a gallery and imagine some crazy, insane artwork, but reject the formal traditions of actually creating it and instead just tell people they’re really missing some great stuff.
Isidore Isou came up with Supertemporal Art, in which the audience helped to create the finished product. This would mean leaving blank pages in a book for the audience to fill, or leaving paint and brushes out for them to splatter the canvas. Come to think of it, that’s really not much more work than my concept of Imaginist Art – I might truly belong in this world.
The Japanese art scene in the mid-50s included Group Kyushu, a bunch of “experimental and rambunctious” artists who covered their work in metal shavings, tar, sometimes even excrement. I’m sorry, I’m going to sound like an uneducated boob again, but as soon as poop enters a piece of art, it is no longer a piece of art. It’s just something that someone pooped on.
Lastly we come to the anti-art of the last half-century, including Neo-Dada, avant-garde and the Fluxus movement of the 1960s. This is the genesis of noise music, stuff shoved into boxes as an artistic statement, and Yoko Ono inviting audience members onto the stage to snip off pieces of her clothing.
Hopefully Wikipedia will guide me back to the Fluxus folks before this thousand days is up, at which time I can get into more detail about Robin Page, who dyed his beard blue, Robert Watts, who exhibited a bunch of plaster-cast bread loaves as art, or Franz Kamin, who had his gallery audience walk through an elaborate series of doors. Some of this is eye-roll-worthy, some of it is actually downright fascinating.
A lot of art critics, art historians and art lovers have embraced anti-art as a legitimate form of art. I’m not entirely certain how much further the movement can go: we have single-color paintings, white noise as music, and performance art that involves walking through doors. How much more un-art can art get?
I have my own ideas on this, of course. And below this paragraph you’ll find the beginnings of it. Trust me, it looks really intense in my mind.
1000 Albums, 1000 Dates 