Environment
The Environment (English environment = the environment, the environment) is a in the late 1950s borrowed years from the American English term for artistic works that deal with the relationship between the object and the surrounding area. The environment can become part of the work of art.
development
The conceptual foundations for overcoming the separation between art and life, which artists in the 20th century repeatedly strived for, were laid in Dadaism and Surrealism . In his Dadaist Manifesto , Richard Huelsenbeck formulated in 1918: "Life appears as a simultaneous tangle of noises, colors and spiritual rhythms, which [...] is adopted in its entire brutal reality." At the same time, Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal in New York in 1917 as a work of art off, the fountain . An industrially manufactured object, the ready-made , has been declared a work of art, see also object art .
The term environment appears in the USA at the end of the 1950s in the context of the artists of pop art and happenings . George Segal calls his white plaster figures in a suggested environment “environmental sculptures”. Claes Oldenburg is known for its oversized replicas of food from "the store". Edward Kienholz and Duane Hanson provoke with a hyperrealism of their figures, whereby Kienholz creates isolated walk-in scenarios as an environment, while Hanson creates human figures (e.g. woman with shopping cart, 1970) isolated from the original environment suddenly in the spatial situation of a museum or gallery represents.
A second way of creating environments is created by the happening artists working in parallel. Allan Kaprow , who coined the term happening in 1959, was probably the first artist to focus on a process rather than an object. The remnants of the happening actions were then grouped into an environment and traditionally exhibited. In 1962 the Fluxus movement emerged in Europe , which wanted to create its environments a little more systematically, as there was no audience participation, and to enrich it with music and performances (see also George Maciunas , Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik ).
In the 1970s and 1980s, the term `` installation '' for large-scale works finally emerged, especially in Europe . The artists, such as Joseph Beuys , whose works are referred to by this term, worked from an artistic approach that was different from the environment artists. While the examination of the everyday world and the world of goods played a central role in the environments, for the installation artists intellectual and spiritual references behind the tangible elements of their installations formed the starting point of the work.
Examples
Environments as the result of a happening (all 1969)
- Jannis Kounellis brought twelve horses to a Roman gallery in Via del Paradiso. One possible interpretation would be that it suggests a provocative association (art gallery = stable). In this case, the space is an integral part of the work of art.
- Ulrich Herzog and Günter Sarée unloaded five tons of waste paper in Munich's Schackstrasse on a Sunday morning. The location (at the Siegestor ) is not arbitrary, but is intended to convey part of the message.
- Wolf Vostell boarded his Opel Kapitän in front of a gallery in Cologne on Domstrasse and poured the boarding with concrete so that the vehicle remained in the concrete without being visible from the outside. He called the action "Situation idle traffic" ( idle traffic ). Without the location in the busy traffic area of the city center, the concrete sculpture alone would not convey the same message.
literature
- Heinz Ohff: Gallery of New Arts, revolution without a program . Bertelsmann-Kunstverlag, 1971.
- Peter Sager : New Forms of Realism . Publishing house DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1973.
- Otto Kammerlohr: Epochs of Art Vol. 4 . R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1989.
- Thomas Dreher: Performance Art after 1945. Action theater and intermedia . Munich 2001, chap. 2.4.1 Happening: Environment and “compartmented structure”, pp. 85–117, chap. 2.4.1.1 Media expansion of the environment, pp. 85–91.