New Genres
New Genres is the name art schools and critics give to art that begins with an idea and then chooses - or invents - the form to carry it: installation, video, film, sound, performance, digital media, internet art and hybrid forms still unnamed. Instead of mastering a classical genre like painting or sculpture, the practitioner questions what art can be made of and where it can happen. The ground was laid early in the twentieth century by Dada and Futurist performance and by Duchamp's readymades - his Fountain (1917) showed that an artist's designation could make a non-art object art. As a named field it crystallized in the 1970s, when programs such as Howard Fried's Performance/Video curriculum at the San Francisco Art Institute began teaching it.
Defining characteristics
- Idea first, medium second: the work's concept dictates its form
- Time-based and live formats: video, sound, performance, and durational action
- Installation and site-specific environments that treat space itself as material
- Body, voice, and process used directly instead of represented
- Institutional questioning: what counts as art, and where art can happen
- Hybrid and emerging formats absorbed as they appear (digital media, networked work)
Key figures
- Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) — Whose readymades (Fountain, 1917) opened the conceptual space New Genres works in
- Nam June Paik (1932-2006) — Pioneer of video art, one of the field's founding media
- Vito Acconci (1940-2017) — Performance and body artist who turned the self and its behaviour into the work
- Marina Abramović (b. 1946) — Durational performance artist whose endurance pieces defined the form
Example works
- Fountain — Marcel Duchamp (1917)
- Following Piece — Vito Acconci (1969)
- Rhythm 0 — Marina Abramović (1974)
Sources
- New Genres - Wikipedia encyclopedia