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We have commissioned writers to comment on trends in contemporary art in hopes that they will encourage you to explore the work of more artists, including many in the NYFA Artists gallery. We invite you to explore the articles below. We will be adding additional articles and resources to this area of the Web site over time.
Visual Arts
“Interdisciplinary” seems to be the catchall name to describe the way many visual artists work today. Painters incorporate photography; sculptors incorporate film and sound. Dada, Fluxus, and experiments by artists in the last part of the twentieth century laid the groundwork for today’s innovations and experiments. Curator Johanna Burton starts with a look back at the work of Feliz Gonzalez-Torres to examine how this aesthetic continues to influence artists today.
Music
From Hayden’s and Mozart’s use of Turkish Crescents to Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado to the orientalism of Debussy and Rimsky-Korsikoff to Harry Parch’s experiments with his own type of Gamelan, western composers have shown an interest in the music and culture of the East. Contemporary composers today – many with family roots in Asia – evidence a more direct influence. Molly Sheridan discusses how Asian music is integral to the work of a number of contemporary New York composers.
Dance
Many postmodern choreographers, including such leading lights as Ronald K. Brown and John Jasperse, are creating a whole new kind of dramatic dance, which escapes the mawkishness of much dance-theater. What makes these choreographers successful is their fine-grained movement idioms and the fact that their dancers use them like a voice. These dances are intimate in scale but huge in spirit. Apollinaire Scherr takes a look.
Film
Perhaps never before in history has a culture been as concerned with personal identity as today: authors of all stripes write memoirs; composers probe the folk music of their ethnic backgrounds for raw material; and increasingly filmmakers look at themselves and their families to explore themselves as well as larger issues. Anna Farmer takes a look at several filmmakers whose films were sponsored by NYFA, several going on to be shown on the PBS series P.O.V.
Literature
Many 20th century artists have used various devices to distance us from the artwork so as to force us to recognize the artifice of the work. These devices vary from actors speaking directly to the audience to composers quoting from other composers’ works, to visual artists using found objects and elevating them to art. Writers have also sought ways to alienate the reader from the immediate experience of the story being told, but have some of them gone too far? John Palatella looks at some extreme cases.
Commissioning of articles for Perspectives was made possible with a grant from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.
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