EVE WHELAN

               Surrealism is a philosophical movement that began in 1920s Paris. It was seen as an escape from reality and the harshness of war; an opportunity to explore the subconscious of the human mind. It revolutionised human experience by removing all reason and control.                The word surrealism was first used by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe his opera “Les Mamelles de Tiresias”, written in 1903, performed in 1917. Surrealism is the idea of combining together two elements that don’t usually go together to create a strong and startling result for the viewer.                Salvador Dali is a surrealist artist, with one of his most famous paintings being “The Persistence of Memory” 1931. This painting, as pictured below, is an excellent example of surreal...

               Postmodernism began after Modernism didn’t quite live up to everyone’s expectations. Postmodernists wanted to challenge the audience and make them ask questions. Postmodernist style is about collage, mixing styles, mixing high and low art and critiquing basic assumptions about life. Postmodernist art is often political or satirical, playing on recent events of the time.                Self-referencing seems to be a big part of Postmodernism. A few examples of self-referential pieces include M. C. Escher’s ‘Drawing Hands’, 1948, where his drawing is of two hands both drawing the other as they are being drawn. ‘The Treachery of Images’ by Ren é Magritte, 1929, is also an excellent example of self-referencing, as it refers to itself in the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, explaining to the audience it is not a pipe, simply a dra...

               Wassily Kandinsky believed that each primary shape: triangle, circle and square. Had a corresponding primary colour: red, yellow or blue. In 1923 he created a questionnaire to ask people of the Bauhaus, where you had to colour in a triangle circle and a square with a primary colour and explain why you chose to pair the shape and colour. Kandinsky’s ideal for this was a blue circle, red square and a yellow triangle. This result was the majority during the 1923 Bauhaus test. I gave the test to a number of friends and family, there results are as follows. 1.       Red for the triangle as a triangle has sharp edges like blade that can draw blood and blood is red, also red has three letters and a triangle has three sides. Yellow for the circle as it reminds me of the sun when paired together. Blue for the square as blue has four letters and a square has four sides. 2. ...

               The Bauhaus was an experimental art and design school in Germany that lived only a short life, however its legacy lives on. Its short fourteen year life began in Weimar in 1919, where it remained for only six years before relocating to Dessau in 1925. Its final location was in Berlin where it closed in 1933, as things were changing in Germany in the lead up to World War II.                The Bauhaus wanted to combine art, design and crafts to produce practical, functional and clean looking pieces. They wanted to take a step away from traditional forms of expression and the late 19 th Century to early 20 th Century styles. Bauhaus were pioneers in Modernism and the roots of many things we see today began in the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus used simple shapes and colours, they believed the shapes triangle, circle, square to be primary...

               Marshall McLuhan first came up with the theory “the medium is the message”. The idea behind this is that the medium that something is portrayed in plays a vital role in how we receive it. In some cases, the chosen medium can have just as much importance as the message itself.                  McLuhan also had a very forward-thinking mind. In one of his essays he wrote of the potential of creating a ‘global village’, he also spoke of technology and communication; this was way before the internet as we know it.                McLuhan also wrote a book released in 1964, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’. This book contains many of his excellent and controversial theories. Three years later he released a book with graphic designer Quentin Fiore...

               Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols and the way we interpret them. The way one thing has the ability to stand for something else. The way we communicate visually and verbally. How we make sense of the visual world around us.                Ferdinand De Saussure is known as the founder of modern linguistics and the father of semiotics, or semiology as he called it. He broke up his idea of this into three key terms, the signifier, the signified and the sign. The signifier refers to the label of something, the spoken or written word. The signified is the thing to which the signifier refers to, the idea or image we think of in correspondence to the spoken or written signifier. Then finally the sign is both the signifier and the signified brought together.            ...

               Postproduction can be either a prequel or a sequel of an existing piece; it either follows on from a work or shows us what went before it. Postproduction can be the creation of a new piece of work inspired by previous works. Or it can be the edited version of an existing piece.                Nicholas Bourriaud, in his book, “Postproduction: Culture as a Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World” 2002, talks of the different forms of Postproduction and how vast the art form is. People such as DJs and web surfers, according to Nicholas Bourriaud, are Postproduction artists.                A literary example of Postproduction is the work of William Burroughs. Burroughs creates literary cut ups, combining some of his own work with that of Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, P...