Presenter: Michelle Bynum
Mentor: Keith Eggener, Undergraduate Studies for Art History
Oral Presentation
Major: Art History
Art, before the 20th century, was subjected to the oppression of traditional concepts that prevailed in centuries of art movements prior to the revolutionizing Avante Garde movements. Through the Avante Garde movements occurring in the beginning of the 20th century, art was liberated. Art was now allowed to take form of individual realities in reaction to the current societal conditions of its time. Artist’s developed the profound desire to utilize new artistic methods, in order to create new and contemporary ways of intellectual thinking. World War I left Europe in a period of mass destruction, and had profound psychological effects on the European nation, specifically on the German, Swiss and Dutch people. Zurich Dada, an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century in Zurich spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter, refuted all logic in art, and believed that the route to salvation was through abandoning what is rational. Concurrently, Berlin Dada stemmed from more political criticism, using corrosive manifestos and propaganda through assemblage techniques. Artists countered political and social corruption through methods of abstraction, imposing universal utilitarian purposes in art, and reducing matter and subject in art. In turn, all of these methods produced extraordinary effects which subsequently painted the pathway for the individualism and originality that triumphs in our world today.