Is Bohemia a mobile state of mind?

January 6, 2007 10:53 AM

Where are our art movements? Where is the new Bohemia?

So, my SO and I were talking the other night about artistic movements in the past and how many of them were inextricably linked to a particular moment or place. Examples we came up with are the 'Lost Generation' of poets, writers and painters in 1920's Paris, the Beats across the US in the 1950's, the Hippies and the Pop Art movement in the 60', 70's and 80's, centered around New York. We also noticed a trend that most of these movements directly followed major wars or changes in society.

Try as we might, we had a hard time identifying modern equivalents. My SO suggested emerging democracies in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, So, our question to Ask MeFi is actually multi-faceted:

1) Where are the current centres of experimental or 'movement' based art in the world?
2) Is it possible to identify these movements while they are in progress, or is it always a retrospective labeling?
3) Is the tendency of these movements to cluster around areas of low-living cost still holding true?
4) Is the Web the next 'place' which arts movements will gather around? Is it already happening? Does the massive interconnectivity of the web disarm the entire notion of place/time based 'movements'?
5) What artistic movements exist outside Western society, and how are they affected by the factors listed above?

posted by Happy Dave to media & arts (11 comments total)

1. I think there are micro movements bubbling up everywhere and that power is now diffuse, and more easily linked across boundries. Winnipeg's Royal Art Lodge for example, could be seen as iconic and influential of a certain movement in art, but the artists of Winnipeg are unlikely to wait for the world to come to their city, and more likely to travel around as one of many movements that migrate around to multiple power centers.
2. You can identify movements in progress, but their ultimate significance must be retrospective.
3. Yes
4. yes Yes. The web is just one element of a new interconnectivity that weakens the influence of place, yet at the same time, is a long way away from dethroning the dominance of face to face real time interactions.
5. That is a good essay question. Perhaps I might see plenty of things as "artistic movements outside of Western society" but the people within these movements would be puzzled at my labeling. (e.g. Kinshasa's Sapeurs previously featured on mefi).
posted by extrabox at 12:02 PM on January 6, 2007

For me, it's we-make-money-not-art.com. These guys are all over the art world, from the very establishment, to the fringe, and, though I do see lots of art that's infused with new-media and especially tech-art and sculpture (and therefore a go-to place for me), I really think it captures something of the spirit of our age.

Another arty blog I read is grandtextauto.org. But an advisor of mine blogs there, so that's kinda cheating I guess.
posted by zpousman at 12:51 PM on January 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

Thoughts on (2), a fair chunk of the significance of these as art movements is in how influential they are/were. Influence necessarily comes after the fact (though not necessarily after the demise), however when you're talking massively influencial, as you are, the rammifications take a long time to filter into all the different places that become something massive in aggregate, it's not direct - A influences B which influences C which so on and so on. Ie it takes a lot of time for the size of the influence to establish - some things die out at B or C, other things are still going at F and G. How quickly it gathers momemtum doesn't indicate how long it will keep it. Or simply, big things take time to happen. You can call it while it's happening, but there is a fair chance your evaluation will miss the mark.

As for examples today, apple's imac-make-it-translucent and ipod-make-it-minimal-and-glossy-white (which to be fair, sony started first) are having big enough effects on the world that 40 years from now, all sorts of everyday objects from today will instantly date themselves to many/most observers by having that influence in their look.

Others, like grassroots media production, or tech geek DIY, also look like big movements to me, but less centred on a small geographically cohesive core. So yes to 4. - people no longer have to pack their bags and move to find others working in the same stuff, they go online and start an online community, and have conventions instead.
posted by -harlequin- at 3:23 PM on January 6, 2007

I can't think of any periods of time that didn't have major artistic movements. Or for that matter, any time that wasn't leading up to or following a war or major changes in society. Do you only mean those large enough to get significant press and influence pop culture?

What was the artistic movement of the hippies...do you mean the various student protest movements? (If so, they produced a brilliant and influencial blooming of graphic arts in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Paris, Spain, Mexico in particular.

Maybe I don't get what you mean by an artistic movement.
posted by desuetude at 3:55 PM on January 6, 2007

I suppose I mean a confluence of social and artistic interaction, i.e . a group of people at a common time and (in the past) place who are united by similar artistic goals, music, shared culture and/or politics. I guess at the moment as I look around, everything seems relatively fractured and there don't seem to be any period-defining 'movements' of the sort that can be identified in the past, and particularly no specific places. Perhaps this is a function of the web, and of increased travel and interconnectivity generally, or perhaps movements will be visible in retrospect.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:27 PM on January 6, 2007

It does seem to me like a good bit of retrospective labelling is involved in the sorting of artists into movements. The names of many familiar movements of the past, (e.g. impressionism and fauvism) were imposed by critics, and weren't necessarily meant as compliments.

IMO, there are three major reasons to classify artists into movements. The first is connoiseurship-- collectors need to identify the limits of the thing that they're collecting. The second is critical-- artists and scholars need to understand how particular aesthetic impulses came into being, and this is often done through creating a kind of intellecutal pedigree for it. Grouping artsists into movements facilitates that process greatly. The third reason is marketing. Artists, galleries, magazines, and the like often benefit from creating a brand that people will recognize and embrace.

It's always possible to identify groups of artists who know each other and seem to be working toward some common purpose. Contemporary examples inlcude (but are by no means limited to) the early Pilchuck people; the Pop Surrealists; Endicott Studio; the artists associated with The Dia Center; Dorkbot; and the McSweeney's usual suspects. If you were willing to stretch, you could extend the definition to include things like Cacophony, and the world of fan fiction. Some of these groups have even marketed themselves well enough to have collective name recognition. But the problem with identifying movements as they happen is that it's impossible to be sure of what history will favor and what history will discard. Whether, in future years, scholars and collectors will continue to find it useful to group these people together (or, indeed, whether they'll be remembered at all) is simply impossible to know.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 5:31 PM on January 6, 2007

Read ArtForum. Lots of stuff about very cutting edge work from China these days. Also, try Juxtapoz for a specific movement, certainly very big in NY and esp LA.
posted by johngumbo at 5:35 PM on January 6, 2007

A lot of good questions here. I'll briefly predict that when we look back on this era we'll find that a lot of potentially invigorating Art Movements were ripped off by corporations before they had a chance to gain real traction as a cultural influence. Ask yourself what the last youth movement was that wasn't somehow co-opted or tied into a corporate agenda. Maybe the Club Kids from the 80's? That was over twenty years ago. Progressive art springs from an inspired culture. Not much inspiration these days, save for the idea that you are the artist.
posted by quadog at 12:00 AM on January 7, 2007 [1 favorite]

1) Where are the current centres of experimental or 'movement' based art in the world?

All over, connected by the internet, and in isolated hotspots (US: Providence, Portland, Oakland, Hollywood/K-town, etc.)

2) Is it possible to identify these movements while they are in progress, or is it always a retrospective labeling?

Sometimes it is, but very few are able to do so.

3) Is the tendency of these movements to cluster around areas of low-living cost still holding true?

Yes, without a doubt. Driven creative people need to minimize hours spent working (in order to maximize time spent creating or shedding or whatever).

4) Is the Web the next 'place' which arts movements will gather around? Is it already happening? Does the massive interconnectivity of the web disarm the entire notion of place/time based 'movements'?

I think it does *to a degree* - internet communities bring people together in a useful way for "experimental" (unpopular) activities in a way that is difficult in the real world. That said, the real world communities can be so much closer and more meaningful, when they occur, and you can't hug someone on the internet.

5) What artistic movements exist outside Western society, and how are they affected by the factors listed above?

This I don't know. Butoh dance maybe? Lots of "fusion" stuff, but I don't think that often represents interesting directions.

In music, the new "bohemia" is probably noise music and free (and electro-acoustic) improvisation, which is a very robust DIY subculture in the US and abroad (and in which I'm an active participant).
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:23 AM on January 7, 2007

i saw something very special whilst covered in mud in mid-Tennessee cow field a few summers ago, a beautiful and decidedly modern echo of things past, but each subsequent revisit shook my faith that it hadn't been co-opted in the name of economic sustainability.
posted by trinarian at 9:07 AM on January 7, 2007

time to get really long-winded:

1) the idea of the artistic "movement," is, perhaps, getting a bit stale. and, indeed, my feeling is that many of the self-professed "movements" currently at work tend to be a bit... backward in their approach. the stuckists come to mind. i mean, manifestos? really? the internet and acceptance of a broad septum of practices (within the art community, at least*) has largely rendered the art movement obsolete**. artists can, of course, still be grouped by the themes they explore, by location, etc., but you're not likely to find a true modern equivalent to, say, the fauves or the cubists. you have things like the YBA phenomenon, AIDS-related practice, postcolonial practice, the current preponderance of faux-naïf painting, leo koenig's roving pack of enfants terribles, relational artists, tech artists, the weird 1960's-counter-culture revivalism in full effect at last year's whitney biennial, and so on and so forth. history may choose to define these as distinct "movements," but i think it's more useful to think of them as trends (which is not meant to sleight their potential for longetivity or future relevance, except in the case of the hippie revivalists, but that may just be wishful thinking).

2) it's hard to say. it seems sometimes that, these days, as soon as someone defines a "movement," it tends to evaporate. but that may owe more to the fact that there's a pretty rapid turnover of ideas and trends, at present. and my only recent point of reference for this is the YBA "movement." all of those artists are, i, think, still active, but nobody calls them YBA's, anymore. maybe just because they're getting old.

3) is and always will be. however, i've visited MASSIVE, super-high-tech brooklyn studios and million-dollar midtown manhattan loft studios, and a lot of artists come from money. that said, these are always going to be the exception that proves the rule: matthew barney may have a massive trust fund, but the rest of us tend to live in squalor.

4) i think the web actually encourages people to declare new "movements," regardless of whether these pan out in a meaningful way. it's the same phenomenon as usenet fetish communities. i mean, you may find a thousand people who profess to be incredibly turned on by, like, waterpiks or the jingle-bell cats: clearly they wouldn't be talking about these things without the internet, clearly the internet is only encouraging them, and, at the end of the day, i question their commitment to jingle-bell-cat fetishism. the internet brings far-flung lunatics together, and it's from those scenarios that "art movements" blossom. there are of course, web-based artists (who would have known that wouldn't blow over after 1999? oh well). and the illustrators and comics people certainly flock to the internet in droves, doggedly insisting that the critical framework of fine art can apply to their work.

5) really, the only time we hear much about nonwestern artists is when they come to the west. things like postcolonialism and the african/palestinian/jewish/indian/asian diasporas certainly inform a lot of practices, but i feel like it's kind of trivializing to sum up either as a "movement." that said, the exhibition form of art making/reception is a western construct.

---
* people outside of the arts community seem content with their monet coffee mugs and starry night refrigerator magnets. you know, the people who write letters to the editor complaining about public arts funding. they usually begin, "as a taxpayer..." ... because artists do not pay taxes.
** there is no real salon to, uh, refuse, few people really want to burn down the école des beaux-arts, anymore, and none of them think they can do it with their choice of paint color. there just isn't the same imperative for artists to align with one another and raise a ruckus that there was in the first half of the 20th century

and as a little PSA in response to extrabox's comment: i feel the need to point out that there is SO MUCH more to winnipeg's (perhaps surprisingly) vibrant artistic community than just the g.d. royal art lodge. go to a winnipeg opening and mention marcel dzama (or better yet, his wife) and watch the eyes start rolling.
posted by wreckingball at 9:53 AM on January 12, 2007