The Effect of WWII on the Visual Arts Essay Example for Free

The Effect of WWII on the Visual artistic productions essayThe global scathe of World War II, particularly the purgets that took place at Auschwitz and Hiroshima, caused dramatic changes in the optic humanities. New ideas and criticisms of culture and society had come about, and artists were respondingconsciously and unconsciouslyto the engagement.New ideas about the arts had emerged shortly after the war. The long-standing ideal that the arts make society more civilized and raise people above their instincts of fear and military force was proven untrue. Consequently, arts very right to exist came into question. In 1949, Theodor Adorno stated in his essay, Cultural disapproval and Society, that to go on writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. He argued that new rules and conventions for art must be found and the old unrivaleds must be aband 1d.One major attempt in creating these new rules and conventions is when arts main concern shifted from object-making to per formativity. Jackson Pollock was among the first to make this transition. With his all-over drip paintings of the late 1940s, he had successfully liberated painting into becoming a sweet of performance. His process has been described as a kind of dance with the canvas and paint. When examined closely, the viewer can trace the first marks made to the very suffer ones. In response to the controversy surrounding his method of painting, Pollock stated that New strikes need new techniquesthe modern painter can non express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of every other past culture. His mention of the atom bomb proves that Pollocks method was a kind of response to the trauma of WWII.An artist as equally performative as Pollock was Lucio Fontana. In works such as Concetto Spaziale, Fontana attacks the step to the fore of the canvas, thereby focusing the viewers attention on art-making as an action. This could also be seen as a li teral attack on the medium of painting. In the Manifesto Blanco, Fontana stated that We live in the mechanic age. Painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist. This was a proclamation of his goal to create spatial art, art that is more engaged with technology.Similar to Fontanas attacks on the canvas, Shozo Shimamoto would repeatedly puncture the painting surfaces of his works. He also experimented with smashing bottles filled with paint onto the canvas. Shimamoto was a member of the Gutai Art Association, a group founded in Osaka, Japan which explored new areas of perfomativity and innovated the proto-happening.These early performative artists were not consciously addressing the trauma of the war in their art, further this shift to performativity suggests an unconscious response to it.In contrast, other artists were responding very consciously to what had happened during the war. The Nouveaux Ralistes in France were the first to do this. Artists that belong ed to this group included Arman,Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Joseph Beuys, and Jean Tinguely. These artists stayed within the Bourgeois paradigm of art, but their art was clearly a conscious response to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, since galore(postnominal) of the titles of their artwork make direct references to these events.Yves Klein, for example, named one of his monochrome IKBs Hiroshima, a negative anthropometric painting showing dead bodies after the nuclear attack. Arman did umpteen pieces that dealt with Auschwitz by showing negative presentations of Nazi victims through accumulations of their belongings. In the early sixties, Arman became more performative with his combustion pieces, believably an influence from the Happening which started taking place in New York around 1959.The happening brought about one of the most important changes when the audience was made to play a major role in the offspring of the piece. A much more significant movement than the Happening, however , was Fluxus, an international movement consisting of many different kinds of artists from many different ethnicities. It is practically impossible to combine all Fluxus artists into a single group, since their art ranges from anti-expressionist to hyper-expressionist, political to not political at all. Whereas Happenings were unconscious of their politics, some Fluxus artist created highly political art. Those in favor of anti-expressionism were sideline the example of John Cage, while another tendency, inspired by the Living Theater, created highly expressive art. The struggle with WorldWar II was fully conscious with the Living Theater, which, like the Happening, would involve audience participation.Fluxus was the preference to club soda art, which was taking place at the same time. Though both consciously addressed the war, Pop art sometimes seemed to glorifyor bring attention tothe American way of life after the war, as in James Rosenquists F-111. His most famous antiwar pai nting, F-111 combines images of a fighter plane, a nuclear bomb, and a little miss sitting under a hair dryer. Such art can be seen as a reflection of the Wests collective response to Auschwitz and Hiroshima they denied that it had to do with capitalism, did not agree with the idea of Instrumental Reason, and were, on the whole, optimistic, stock-still enjoying life after the war.In conclusion, following the tragedy of World War II, art has never been the same. Artists agnize that they could no longer continue making art in the same way that they did before the war, playacting as if nothing had happened. Performativity and politicized art were perhaps the most significant of these changes. Whether unconscious or conscious, performative or not, responses to the horrendous events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima can be seen in many postwar art, and the trauma of these two events can be seen even in the art of today.