Formalism.

Formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is based completely by the way it is made, it's purely visual aspects and it's medium. It emphasizes compositional elements such as colour, line, shape and texture. This concept can be traced back as far as Plato, who argued that the shape of a thing included our perceptions of it, as well as those sensory aspects of a thing which the human mind can take in. He argued that shape included elements of representation and imitation, since the thing itself could not be replicated. Plato also believed that this was deceptive.

The concept of formalism in art evolved through the 20th century. Some art critics argue for a return to Plato's definition for Form. Another view argues that representational elements must be intelligible, but still aiming to capture the object's form.

Dadaism.

Dadaism is a cultural movement that began during World War I in Switzerland. The peak of the movement was from 1916 to 1922. This movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theatre and graphic design. It is concentrated on its anti-war politics. The purpose of Dadaism was to ridicule what was percieved the meaninglessness of the modern world. Dadaism was also anti-bourgeois and anarchistic.

Dada activities ranged from public gatherings and demonstrations to passionate coverage of art, politics and culture. The movement also influenced later styles such as the avant-garde and downtown music movements.

Dada was an informal international movement, spread through Europe and North America. The beginning of the movement correspont to the outbreak of World War I. This movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests. Dadaists believed that these were the root causes of the war.

The Dadaists from Berlin would use scissors and glue instead of paintbrushes and paints to express their views of modern life. This was photomontage, a variation on the collage technique. Photomontage utilized actual or reproductions of real photographs printed in the press.

Max Ernst used images from World War I to illustrate messages of the destruction caused by war.

Dadaism also brought about assemblages. These were 3D variations of the collage. They were an assembly of everyday object to produce meaningless pieces of work. These sometimes included war objects and trash. Objects were nailed, screwed or fastened together in different ways. Assemblages could be seen in 3D or hung on the wall.

Tracey Emin.

Tracey Karima Emin is a British artist, and is part of a group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists).

In 1997, Emin's piece Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent adorned with names, was shown at Charles Saatchi's sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. The same year, Emin gained considerable media exposure.

In 1999, Emin was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed, an installation, consisting of her own unmade, dirty bed. This is claimed to be the bed she stayed in for several days consecutively whilst experiencing relationship problems. The piece included used condoms, blood-stained underwear, cigarette packets and alcohol bottles.

In 2004, her tent artwork was destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire. In March 2007, Emin was chosen to join the Royal Academy of Arts in London as a Royal Academician. Emin has often made use of found objects in her work. This started from the early use of a cigarette box which she found in the car crash that killed her uncle.

Another instance is the removal of her beach hut from Whitstable to be displayed in a gallery. This was titled The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here (The Hut).

Emin revisited her bed theme in 2002 with her installation To Meet My Past, featuring a four poster bed with exbroidered text hanging down alongside the mattress.

Conceptualism for Dummies.

Conceptual art is any work that can question the meaning of art. Although it may not be recognisable as art, it can be just as popular as an oil painting. It may only exist for a moment, and only survive in notes and photographs. This documents the work without being the work itself. The movement emerged in the 1950s, although it drew inspiration from much further back in the 20th century. The Dada movement, and the work of Marcel Duchamp is often stated as the start of conceptualism.

His work 'Fountain' (1917), which is a urinal signed 'R Mutt' shocked critics and public alike. This raised the question 'could a mass-produced object become art simply because an artist signed it?' Duchamp produced many of these, and they were known as 'readymades'.

Conceptualism is, in part, a rebellion against the commercial art world. Conceptual artists create works that have little or no physical presence. A performance piece, for example, exists physically whilst being performed; once the performance is over, there is nothing to hang on the wall or put into a frame. Documentation, such as photgraphs of a piece being performed, or a written list of instructions, may survive, but are not the work of art itself, simply a representation.

Sol LeWitt designs large wall drawing, but these works are executed by others. So, who is the artist? LeWitt, or the person who executes them? Does having the idea make you the artist, or making the piece? This is just one of the questions that conceptualism raises.

As with all rebels, the Conceptualists who did not create solid works of art expected to be poor, through having nothing physical to sell. However, if the idea of the work is the core, that can be sold. Collectors started to buy these works that were previously thought of as 'unbuyables'.

Conceptual art is based on the idea, as is all art, at a basic level. Consider Abstract Expressionism, which has been described as the antithesis of Conceptualism in certain ways.

A Jackson Pollock, for example, is created in the moment, dripped onto the canvas with little planning before its execution. It is about emotion and creation; it is composed on the canvas. There are always arbitrary choices involved, but reliance on systems (often known as 'uncomposition') is a hallmark of much Conceptual Art.

Unlike other movements, Conceptualism was not a conscious movement. Like Impressionism grew from a number of artists exploring similar ideas, Conceptualism grew similarly. Both movements contained a dislike for the modern state of the art world. However, Conceptualism signifies a way or ways of approaching the creation of an artwork.

Other groups of artists emerged around the same time. Minimalism, which is as much about the use of materials as the concept of the work, overlaps Conceptualism quite a lot. Performance art, though also getting inspiration from Dada, blossomed during the same time. Video art began to emerge also, but that has more to do with the development of video equipment.

Bruce Nauman is an artist who has produced many video works, and could be considered a Conceptualist. Many artists use Conceptualist approaches today who might not be termed as strictly Conceptualist artists. Thus, though Conceptualism reached it's peak back in the 1970s, the idea continues.

Art History: Conceptualism: (1960 - 1975)

Conceptual art is based on the concept that art may exist soley as an idea and not in the physical realm. Conceptualists believe that the idea of a work matters more than it's physical identity. This movement began in the 20th century, and was based on the European Dada movement and the writings of the Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Conceptual art also had roots with Marcel Duchamp, also known as the father of Dadaism.

Conceptual art quickly became a movement, spreading through North America, Western Europe, Suth America, Eastern Europe, Russia, China and Japan.

Conceptualism emerged in the 1960s, the term first being used in 1961 by Henry Flynt in a Fluxus publication. It was later given a different meaning when the Art & Language group, headed by Joseph Kosuth, adopted it - the analysis of the object succeeded the object itself. This gained public recognition in 1967 when journalist Sol LeWitt used it to define a specific art movement. The first conceptual art exhibition, titled "Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects" took place in 1970 at the New York Cultural Centre.

Conceptual art intends to convey a concept to the viewer, rejecting the importance of the creator or a talent in the traditional forms such as painting and sculpture. Works were strongly based on text, used more often than imagery. Conceptual art usually contains photographs, instructions, maps or videos. This movement challenged the importance of artistic traditions, and discredited the significance of the materials and finished product. Conceptual works were meant to be proactive and questioning to the nature of art.

This was a controversial movement. Supporters believed that it expanded the boundaries of art and stopped the influence of commercialisation. Some critics see the movement as pretentious and dull. Although some works create political and social statements, more often than not they are preoccupied with analysing the nature of art. Conceptual art was the forefunner for installation, digital and performance art.

The History of Photography.

The word ‘photography’ comes from the Greek words ‘phos’ and ‘graphein’ – light, and to write respectively. Sir John Herschel first used the word in 1839.

Photography came about by combining different technical discoveries. Before the first photographs, Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid talked about a pinhole camera in the 4^th and 5^th centuries BC. In the 6^th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a kind of ‘camera obscura’ for his experiments. Ibn al-Haytham studied this also, along with the pinhole camera. Albertus Magnus discovered silver nitrate and Georges Fabricius discovered silver chloride. Daniel Barbaro talked about a diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg talked about light darkening some chemicals ie. the photochemical effect in 1694. Tiphaigne de la Roche wrote a novel named Giphantie describing what could be thought of today as photography.

Joseph Nicephore Niepce created the first permanent photograph in 1826. These were produced on a pewter plate covered in a petroleum-like substance called bitumen of Judea, which hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened part can then be washed away and the metal plate polished, leaving a negative image. This is then coated in ink and impressed on paper, making a print. Niepce also experimented with iron compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 – that an iron and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. Together, Niepce and Louis Daguerre refined the existing silver process. When Niepce died, this was left to Daguerre, who had no scientific background. However, he made two crucial contributions to the process. He discovered that by exposing silver to iodine vapour before light, and then to mercury fumes afterwards, he could form a latent image. He also discovered that bathing the plate in a salt bath would fix the image. In January 1839, Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the daguerreotype – a patent which was bought by the French government before being made public domain. However, in 1832, French-Brazilian painter and inventor Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process, naming it ‘Photographie’.

After reading about Daguerre’s invention, Fox Talbot worked on his own process; in 1839 he made a key improvement – from John Herschel, the astronomer, who had already showed that hyposulfite of soda would dissolve silver salts, creating an effective fixer. This was the year that Herschel created the first glass negative.

By 1940, Talbot had created the calotype process. He coated paper sheets with silver chloride, creating an immediate negative image. This differed from a daguerreotype because a calotype negative could be used to reproduce positive prints, as most chemicals films do today. Talbot patented this process, limiting its adaption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending this process, until he later gave up on photography. Later, George Eastman improved Talbot’s process, creating the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today.

Hippolyte Bayard had also developed a similar method, but delayed announcing it, and was not recognized as its inventor.

After John Herschel made the first glass negative in 1839, he found his process difficult to reproduce. Slovene Janez Puhar invented a process for making photographs on glass in 1841; however it was not recognized until June 1852 in Paris by the Academie Nationale Agricole, Manufacturiere et Commerciale. In 1847, Niepce St. Victor published his invention of a process for making glass plates with an albumen emulsion; the Langenheim brothers of Philadelphia and John Whipple of Boston also invented workable negative-on-glass processes in the mid 1840s.

In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer invented a process called collodion. Photographer and children’s author Lewis Carroll used this process. Herbert Bowyer Berkeley experiment with his own version of this after Samman introduced the idea of adding dithionite to the pyrogallol developer. Berkeley discovered that with his own addition of sulfite, which he used to absorb the sulfur dioxide given off by the dithionite in the developer, dithionite was not required to develop. In 1881 he published this discovery. His formula contained pyrogallol, sulfite and citric acid. Ammonia was added just before used to make the formula alkaline. The new formula was sold by the Platinotype Company in London as Sulpho-Pyrogallol Developer.

19^th century experiments with photography happened more and more often. The German-born, New Orleans photographer Theodore Lilienthal got legal redress in an 1881 infringement case involving his ‘Lambert Process’ in the Eastern District of Louisiana.

The daugerreotype was popular for portraiture amongst the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution. As this demand could not be met by oil painting portraiture, the push for the development of photography grew.

In 1847, Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky designed a bellows camera. This significantly improved the process of focusing. This adaptation influenced the design of cameras for decades and is still found in professional cameras today. Whilst in Paris, Levitsky would be the first to introduce interchangeable backgrounds in his images, as well as the retouching/manipulation of images to reduce or get rid of technical deficiencies. Levitsky was also the first photographer to show a photograph of a person in different poses and even in different clothes. Roger Fenton and Philip Henry Delamotte helped popularize this new way of recording events. The first was his Crimean War pictures, the second, his record of the disassembly and reconstruction of The Crystal Palace in London.

By 1849, Levitsky’s images from a mission to the Caucasus were exhibited by a famous French optician as an advertisement of their lenses. These images received the Exposition’s gold medal. This was the first time a prize of its kind had been awarded to a photograph. The same year, Levitsky first proposed the idea to artificially light subjects in a studio setting using electric lights in conjunction with daylight. He later said “as far as I know, this application of electric lighting has never been tried; it is something new, which will be accepted by photographers because of its simplicity and practicality”.

In 1851, Levitsky would win the first ever gold medal awarded for a portrait photograph. This was at a Parisian exhibition.  By this time in America, a broadside by daguerreotypist Augustus Washington were advertising prices ranging from 50 cents to $10. However, daguerreotypes were fragile and difficult to reproduce, meaning many photographers encouraged chemists to refine the process of cheap mass production, eventually leading them back to Talbot’s process.

Most of the modern photographic processes come from improving and refining the techniques in the first 20 years. In 1884, George Eastman from New York, developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate that had been earlier used. This was so a photographer no longer had to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman’s Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest”. This meant that anybody could take a photograph, leaving the complex parts of the process to others. Photography then became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.

In the 20^th century, photography developed quickly as a commercial service. For the modern enthusiast photographer processing black and white film, not a lot has changed since the introduction of the 35mm film Leica camera in 1925. The first digitally scanned image was produced in 1957. The digital scanning process was invented by Russell A. Kirsch, a computer pioneer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He developed the system capable of feeding a cameras images into a computer. His first fed image was one of his son, Walden Kirsch. The photo was set at 176x176 pixels.

Although colour photography had been explored throughout the 19^th century, initial experiments in colour resulted in projected temporary images, rather than permanent images. Moreover, until the 1870s the emulsions available were not sensitive to red or green light. The first colour photo, an additive projected image of a tartan ribbon, was taken in 1861 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Several patentable methods for producing images were created from 1862 onwards by two French inventors, both working independently. These were Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros. Practical methods to sensitize silver halide film to green and then orange light were discovered in 1873 and 1884 by Hermann W. Vogel, but full sensitivity to red light was only achieved until the early 20^th century.

The first fully practical colour plate, named Autochrome, only reached the marked in 1907. It was based on a screen-plate method, the screen of filters being made using dyed dots of potato starch. The screen lets filtered red, green or blue light though each grain to a photographic emulsion in contact with it. The plate is then developed to a negative, and reversed to a positive, which when looked at through the screen restores colours approximating the original.

Other systems of colour photography include the system used by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, which involved three separate monochrome exposures of a still scene through red, green and blue filters. These required a special machine to display, but the results are impressive even by modern standards. His collection of glass plates was purchased from his heirs by the Library of Congress in 1948, and is now available in digital images.

The charge-coupled device (CCD) is the most important invention for digital photography. Willard Boyle and George E. Smith developed it in 1969 at AT&T Bell Labs. The lab was working on the Picturephone and on the development of semiconductor bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed ‘Charged “Bubble” Devices’. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor.

In 1973 Fairchild Semiconductor releases first large image forming CCD chip; 100 rows and 100 columns. In 1975 Bryce Bayer of Kodak develops the Bayer filter mosaic pattern for CCD colour image sensors, and in 1986 Kodak scientists develop the words first megapixel sensor.

The web has been a popular medium for storing and sharing photos ever since the first photograph was published on the web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. This was in image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes. Today, popular sites such as Flickr, Picasa and PhotoBucket are used by millions of people to share their pictures.

Joseph Kosuth.

Joseph Kosuth's art strives to explore the nature of art. It focuses on ideas at the fringe of art rather than on producing art. This means that his art is self-referential.

"The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art."

This is one of Kosuth's most famous works - One and Three Chairs. It is a visual expression of Plato's concept of The Forms. The piece consists of a physical chair, a photograph of that chair and the dictionary definition of a chair. The photograph is a representation of the physical chair situated on the floor. The definition, on the wall to the right of the physical chair, explains in words the concept of the chair in it's various incarnations. In this work, Kosuth forwards tautological statements, where the works literally are what they say they are.

Kosuth argues that art is the continuation of Philosophy, which he saw at an end. Kosuth linked Formalism to Conceptualism, saying that it 'limits the possibilities for art with minimal creative effort put forth by the Formalist'. Kosuth further argues that the "change from 'appearance' to 'conception' was the beginning of 'modern art' and the beginning of 'conceptual art'."

Conceptual Art movement.

Conceptual art is art in which the concepts or ideas are considered more important than aesthetic or material concerns. The term was first used in 1961, in a publication by Fluxus. Many of the works are called ‘installations’. Sol LeWitt, who first defined conceptual art at length, says that his installations can be constructed by anyone willing to follow simple instructions.

LeWitt’s definition of conceptual art: “in conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Conceptual art came about in reaction to what many artists considered over-commercialisation of art. Conceptual art stresses the concepts of the artist rather than the art object itself.

Tony Godfrey, who wrote a book on the subject, states that conceptual art, questions the nature of art. This is a notion that Joseph Kosuth extended to be a definition of art itself in his manifesto of conceptual art “Art after Philosophy”.

“By adopting language as their exclusive medium, Weiner, Barry, Wilson, Kosuth and Art & Language were able to sweet aside the vestiges of authorial presence manifested by formal invention and the handling of materials.”

A key difference between conceptual art and more traditional forms of art-making lies in artistic skill. It is difficult to argue that no skill is required to create conceptual art, or that skill is always lacking in them. For instance, John Baldessari has presented realist pictures that he commissioned professional sign-writers to paint. Many conceptual performance artists (e.g. Stelarc, Marina Abramovic) are actually accomplished performers and skilled with the use and manipulation of their own bodies.

The first “wave” of the conceptual art movement happened between 1967 and 1978. Early “concept” artists such as Henry Flynt, Robert Morris and Ray Johnson influenced the later movement. Contemporary artists such are Mike Kelley or Tracey Emin are sometimes called “post-conceptual” artists.

In 1999, a group of artists called the Stuckist’s were founded. This group proclaimed themselves “pro-contemporary figurative painting with ideas and anti-conceptual art, mainly because of its lack of concepts”. They called the movement unremarkable and boring. In July 2002 the Stuckist artists left a coffin outside of the White Cube Gallery, with a label saying “The Death of Conceptual Art”. The group also staged yearly protests outside the Turner Prize.

Conceptual art has seen come across more criticism. In 2002, Ivan Massow, the Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts branded  conceptual art “pretentious, self-indulgent craftless tat” that was “in danger of disappearing up its own arse” – Massow was forced to resign soon after. At the end of 2002, Kim Howells (an art school graduate) denounced the Turner Prize as “cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit”.