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The Seven Greatest Examples of Experimentation in Art

The word “innovation” is one of the most commonly used words today, and when it comes to experimentation in art, the artists around the world has become super creative too

We currently live in an era where technology, art, and environment share similar ideas and works together in producing innovative artworks by artists. This has, indeed, improved skill as a whole.

Tracing back through time, you will discover an unending list of history books and art streams where seven prominent paintings have a similar story to tell.

These paintings reflect the artists’ mind in compelling us to view a subject in a different approach and perspective, and we should try to question the normalcy of the things we see.

Through their psychedelic and hyper-imagination, which they termed “normal,” was the way they expressed themselves and their ideologies.

Let us take a look at seven great examples of experimentation in art.

Grauer Tag Painting by George Grosz

George Grosz was well-known for his caricature-like paintings that showed how life looked like in the German city of Berlin at the time.

But in 1920-1921, Grosz looked for new agitprop with this work, one with stylish visual language.

With the use of mediums that breathes Italian metaphysical art themes, George Grosz went beyond Dada and New Objectivity group of the Weimar Republic era. Moving to the USA in 1933, he abandoned his earlier style of the subject matter.

The paintings reminded the world of Giorgio de Chirico , which was something that looked like faceless people in empty areas in front of some standard industrial buildings.

These details mostly represented political issues and statements rather than existential.

The painting exposes controversial issues that were highlighted by a low brick wall.

There was a cross-eyed German nationalist council officer in the foreground.

According to the New Objectivity exhibition in Manheim in 1925, the other men behind the welfare officer was a disabled war veteran, a worker, and a black market dealer.

The illustration of this art divided society into two classes.

Grosz, however, started using the critical ‘Verism’ style and did not produce any more oil paintings as the years passed.  

The Great Metaphysician by Giorgio Chirico

De Chirico was a mysterious man, and his ideologies reflected in his works. In this painting, he created an empty building square in the middle of a strange monument.

The monument was made with furniture parts and construction tools with an eerie overall display.

The edifice was lit up with the summer sunlight beaming upon it like a stage while the darkness of the skies in the horizons highlights the nightfall.

To maintain the discontinuity, the chimney of the factory can be seen in the sky where the modern era bursts into the cosmos of quattrocento.

For his transcended world view, De Chirico discovered Italy in a metaphysical stage. This view, however, was influenced by Nietzsche.

“The conception of a picture has to be something which does not make any sense in itself and no longer signifies at all from human logic,” He said.

The School of Athens by Raphael

Made by Raphael between 1509 and 1511, The School of Athens was identified as a sound reflection of the Renaissance theory .

The painting consists of many ideas of great and famous philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists formed into one image.

Here, men like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Da Vinci, and many more can be seen in the painting.

The painting shows them learning and interacting with each other.

These great men did not live during the same time frame, but Raphael majestically brings them all together. This was meant to signify the celebration of that age.

The Italian Renaissance artist created the art piece to decorate the rooms in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The rooms are now called the Stanze di Raffaello which was made to represent and pay homage to the Renaissance era.

The painting can still be found in some of the room sections, the Vatican, which was commissioned by his sponsor, Pope Julius II.

Der Radionist by Kurt Gunter

In early 1928, German art critic and historian Franz Roh discovered something about legendary paint created by Kurt Gunter.

He described the interiors as a petit-bourgeois living room.

However, this contradicts the intentions of Gunter’s idea.

“petit-bourgeois…has shut himself in on a Sunday with a crackling radio set, has clamped on headphones, opened a bottle of red wine and picked up an opera libretto and a cigar a vengeful bachelor’s idyll of our time and a musical fortification, with resistance glinting in his eyes.”

He described it as just a picture of Herr Schreck, a paraplegic and wheelchair-bound German listening to the radio as it broadcasts a program on October 29 th , 1923, which signified his improvement in expanding his social web.

In shaping the face of society, the theme of his painting highlighted the positivity and revolutionary effect of his invention.

It then later became a major subject of many more new objectives painting artworks to come.

Portrait of Madame Isabel Styler-Tas by Salvador Dali

This painting was created by the legendary Surrealists, Salvador Dali, in 1929.

The picture depicts the picture of successful Amsterdam jeweler Louis Tas’s daughter, Isabel, an arrogant and rich businesswoman.

The image had her wearing a sophisticated red clothe with a brooch of medusa pinned to her breast.

Behind her was a landscape embodied in deep fantasy. Opposite her was a fossilized version of herself, staring back at her.

With an excellent fascination for perspectives and illusion, Dali flirted with the modernism era, which was going through the cubist phase at the time.

He was able to translate old-fashioned artworks into modern issues, and that was one of the things that made him famous.

He also noted that “As far as a portrait painting goes, I intended to create a fateful connection between each of the different personalities and their backgrounds, in a manner far removed from direct symbolism.

This is in terms of medium and iconography to encapsulate the essence of each of my subject in mind”.

Roy Lichtenstein’s TAKKA TAKKA

In response to the revolution of popular culture in America in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an urgent need to maintain the status quo due to its power and growing fame.

After its emergence, there was no stopping in shaking up and then changing the perspective of art critics and conformist; in fact, the views of the whole world of art.

Takka Takka was created by Roy Lichtenstein , who was trained in the USA pilot and a World War II veteran but never saw combat.

He ironically used the style of a cartoon sound effect to name his work. “takka takka”; the sound of a firing machine gun. This artwork represents the entire elements of pop art and its importance.

About the cartoon shows and art of that time were always created to reach a common goal; a swashbuckling, funny, and ridiculously heroic commentary.

Using this style in effectively conveying his message, Lichtenstein aimed to leave a thought-provoking and effect on his audience using the juxtaposition to his advantage. This work is considered to be a great example of experimentation in art because of the artist’s courage to convey a strong perspective about a relevant subject

When Lichtenstein’s work was criticized for been militaristic, he smartly responded,” the heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but don’t take them seriously in these paintings. Maybe there is a point in not taking them seriously, a political position. I use them for purely formal reasons”.

The Suicide of Dorothy Hale by Frida Kahlo

This artwork is undoubtedly one of the most potent artworks to date. Despite the limited amount of details on the portrait, it was still powerful enough to shake the world when it was produced.

The artist displayed the image of Dorothy Hale’s suicide in a truly artistic manner – also one of the bold subjects when it comes to experimentation in art

However, it was not an initial plan of Frida Kahlo to paint the death of a fast-rising American actress of the time as she was commissioned to do. Read Frida Kahlo’s Lust for Life

The building she had fallen from can be seen behind almost entirely shrouded in clouds, representing the extent of the height in which she had reached and fell to her death. Frida passed her message in a strong sense of metaphor rather than literal.

Dorothy Hale’s body can be found at the bottom of the image, which symbolizes the impact of its realism.

20 famous paintings of Frida Kahlo

The painting possessed every sense of art, from the real to the surreal, which clearly shows every detail of Hale’s suicide.

Standing at 60.4 x 48.6 cm in the Pheonix Art Museum, the painting translates;

“In the city of New York on the twenty-first day of October 1938, at six o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Dorothy Hale committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampshire House building. In her memory…”

Conclusion – Experimentation in Art

A brief story on how some of the most formidable artists have dug deep into their bright imagination and conjured great art pieces.

Using the medium of diverse technicalities, themes, and subjects, they flawlessly passed their message in a truly artistic manner that was sure to change the face of art as a whole.

Passionate experimenter with a heart for art, design, and tech. A relentless explorer of the culture, creative and innovative realms.

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"[B]eauty is a defiance of authority."—William Carlos Williams

What Is Experimental Art?

One typically hears unusual art called three different things, often interchangeably:

• Avant-Garde
• Experimental

But what do these three words mean? Do they mean the same thing? I don’t think so, and in this post I’ll point out some basic differences between them. I’ll also define what I think experimental art essentially is, and how such art operates.

As I’ve argued here and here —and hopefully have been able to demonstrate in both those places and elsewhere—one encounters innovation simply everywhere : high art, low art, experimental art, mainstream commercial art. The Matrix (1999), for instance, was one of the most popular films of the late 1990s in large part because it exposed mainstream audiences to techniques and ideas that they hadn’t seen before. (I first heard about the film from friends who were bursting with excitement over it, talking on and on about how they couldn’t believe what they had just seen.)

Of course, the Wachowskis mostly borrowed/stole/derived those things from other sources:

Jean Baudrillard (who disliked how the Matrix films used his ideas )

Blade Runner (1982)

Heroic Trio (1993) (dubbed—blame the Weinsteins!—but a high-quality copy)

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

A lot of the art we call innovative works this way. As I wrote in this post :

To innovate literally means “to introduce something new.” But it also means to “make changes in anything established.” Which is the historical meaning of the word’s root: “to renew, alter.”

Innovation does not necessarily mean something new. It means doing something unfamiliar , often with old familiar things. The Matrix draws very heavily from Ghost in the Shell , often recreating images in that film:

Indeed, the Wachowskis originally pitched their film as a live-action version of Ghost in the Shell . But the Wachowskis still had to find ways to recreate those images in real space—a problem requiring often unique solutions. As the above video claims, their success was to synthesize the various things they liked—manga, Hong Kong martial arts films, Buddhism, Continental Theory—into something coherent.

Meanwhile, look what happened after The Matrix came out. As its novelty factor wore off, people grew increasingly tired of films that merely imitated it (including, it seems, The Matrix ’s own sequels). Consider Underworld (2003)—just one of dozens of Matrix clones I could have chosen:

This all said, The Matrix is not what we’d call an experimental film. The Harry Potter novels are in their own way rather innovative —and influential—but J.K. Rowling isn’t an experimental author.

So the experimental isn’t tied exclusively to innovation. (Or, rather: innovation is not tied exclusively to the experimental.)

The Avant-Garde

In 1863, Manet submitted the above painting to the Paris Salon for exhibition. It was rejected. Manet then took advantage of the Salon des Refusés, a venue better than no venue at all.

Which didn’t solve his problems. Manet’s work kept getting refused by the official Salon: it was too flat, too contemporary—and too erotic. (In 1867, he even paid for his own solo exhibition—the equivalent of today’s self-publishing.) But over time, he befriended other refusés (in particular, Edgar Degas, who—always the contrarian—was in self-imposed exile from the Salon). They, inspired by Manet’s solo efforts and by the Salon des Refusés, banded together in 1873 as the “Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers” in order to form their own exhibitions. (Members were supposed to denounce the Salon, but Manet kept submitting his work.)

In 1874, they had their first independent exhibition; other, more successful shows, followed. People started calling them “the Impressionists.” (Degas hated the term, insisting that he was actually a realist). By the mid-1880s, Manet and his colleagues were the leading celebrities of the Parisian art world: the avant-garde of painting.

The term “avant-garde” predates the Impressionists; it was first recorded in the 1825 Saint-Simonian essay “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel” (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”), where it has a very different meaning. That essay called upon artists to serve as the advance guard of the utopian socialist revolution :

It is we artists who will serve as your vanguard; the power of the arts is indeed most immediate and the quickest. We possess arms of all kinds: when we want to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them upon marble or upon a canvas; we popularize them through poetry and through song; we employ by turns the lyre and the flute, the ode and the song, the story and the novel; the dramatic stage is spread out before us, and it is there that we exert a galvanizing and triumphant influence. We address ourselves to man’s imagination and to his sentiments. We therefore ought always to exert the most lively and decisive action.

(Henri de Saint-Simon was a major influence on Karl Marx. Some attribute this tract to him; others to his follower Olinde Rodrigues .)

As Matei Călinescu notes in Five Faces of Modernity (1987):

By the mid-nineteenth century, the metaphor of the avant-garde had been used by social utopists, reformers of various sorts, and radical journalists, but, to my knowledge, had scarcely been used by literary or artistic figures. (108)

Călinescu sees the term starting to shift toward its more modern usage in 1856, in the literary criticism of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. But even then the term,

[f]requently used in the political language or radicalism, […] tended to point toward that type of commitment one would have expected from an artist who conceived of his role as consisting mainly in party politics. That was perhaps one of the reasons why Baudelaire, in the early 1860s, disliked and disapproved of both the term and the concept. (109)

By the time of (and partially due to) Manet and his fellow Impressionists, “avant-garde” had come to mean a group of artists whose work is initially rejected by authority, but that eventually comes to be accepted by society. (Visit any local art fair today, and you’ll see the Impressionists’ long-lasting influence.)

But it doesn’t always work that way. Consider serial music, one of the most powerful experimental forms of 20 th century composition. Derived from Arnold Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique (and atonal ideas well before that), serial composition dominated Western academies and conservatories from 1945 until some point in the 1970s (if not longer):

Serial music has numerous advocates (I rather like all of these works), but they tend to be academicians and others who love music theory—it never really caught on with the general populace, or had that much influence on popular music, or the culture at large. (Here’s the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s current season : Beethoven, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Schubert, Bach, …)

Does that mean that serialist music wasn’t experimental? Quite the contrary! But it wasn’t a successful avant-garde (if it was even avant-garde in the first place).

Minimalism was a more proper avant-garde movement. Its early practitioners—La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass—were acting in opposition to the authority of the academy, looking for an alternative to serialism (as well as to the aleatory techniques of John Cage et al). Excluded by music’s ruling class, they embraced different principles of composition (sustained tones, repetition with variation), and brought their work to alternative venues (loft parties, galleries, museums):

The Minimalists eventually achieved mainstream success—partly because, unlike the serialists, they courted mainstream audiences:

Their influence can be heard throughout modern popular music:

…to choose just a few possible examples.

How many self-professed avant-garde movements turned out to have little or even no effect on the rest of the culture? I’m not claiming that such movements were bad, mind you. But “avant-garde” is often a marketing term, inspired by the fantastic success that the Impressionists had a century ago. And sometimes marketing campaigns work…and sometimes they don’t… But the art can still be experimental even if the rest of the culture never “comes around” to adopting its techniques—or even liking it.

The Experimental

So what is experimental art? What defines it? What makes it experimental ?

To answer those question—to propose answers to those question—I’d first like to invoke Roman Jakobson’s notion of the dominant , which I discussed more at length in this post . Jakobson defined the dominant as

the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure. (41)

The dominant, in other words, is that artistic element that the artist values over all others: John Cage and his colleagues took chance techniques as their dominant. The Oulipians work under arbitrary and often severe constraints. The Language poets resist narrative pressures by emphasizing parataxis. And so on. All other aspects then bow to the dominant component.

Experimental artists often claim that they are breaking with the past:

The Impressionists favored color over line, worked en plein air , and chose contemporary rather than classical subjects. The Minimalists refused serialist and chance techniques, preferring to look for some other way of working (one that wasn’t simply a return to the tonal harmony of the 19th century).

But historical precedents can be found even in experimental art:

That Manet! What a little copycat he was! Furthermore, as the popular (and possibly apocryphal) story puts it , Manet met Degas while they were both copying the same painting:

(Regardless of whether that story is true, both Manet and Degas were both enthusiastic—and tremendously skilled—copyists.)

Philip Glass was influenced by Ravi Shankar. Steve Reich was influenced by Ghanan drumming and Balinese gamelan music. Terry Riley was influenced by Pandit Pran Nath and La Monte Young. La Monte Young (a truly great oddball) was influenced by the sounds of high tension power lines, and the wind whipping across the plains :

The very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of the wind blowing through the chinks and all around the log cabin in Idaho where I was born. I have always considered this among my most important early experiences. It was very awesome and beautiful and mysterious. Since I could not see it and did not know what it was, I questioned my mother about it for long hours. During my childhood there were certain sound experiences of constant frequency that have influenced my musical ideas and development: the sounds of insects; the sounds of telephone poles and motors; sounds produced by steam escaping, such as my mother’s tea-kettle and the sounds of whistles and signals from trains; and resonations set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic areas such as canyons, valleys, lakes, and plains. Actually, the first sustained single tone at a constant pitch, without a beginning or end, that I heard as a child was the sound of telephone poles, the hum of the wires. This was a very important auditory influence upon the sparse sustained style of work of the genre of the Trio for Strings (1958), Composition 1960 #7 (B and F# “To be held for a long time”) and The Four Dreams of China (1962).

Well, even anarchists like Alec Empire enjoy engaging with older materials:

Continuity is everywhere, even in situations of discontinuity. La Monte Young made music based on noise and drones, but he brought those noises and drones inside lofts, as parts of titled and performed musical compositions. And he synthesized those noises and drones with ideas he’d learned from Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage. (Young was more open to serialist and chance techniques than the other Minimalists, which is part of why his music sounds so different than theirs.)

The experimental artist can want to quit with all previous convention, but he or she still must communicate by means of some convention. As Frank Kermode put it in The Sense of an Ending (1967):

[N]ovelty in the arts is either communication or noise. If it is noise then there is no more to say about it. If it is communication it is inescapably related to something older than itself. (102)

Schism is simply meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. (116)

Furthermore, experimental art often draws on the same materials that non-experimental art does. Here’s an example of Donald Barthelme, Batman comic books, Tim Burton, William Castle, German Expressionism, J.D. Salinger, and Mark Twain all drawing inspiration, to some extent or another, from the same Victor Hugo story (sometimes directly, and sometimes through other works that had themselves been inspired).

So much, then, for the experimental dream of art ex nihilo . But what about the notion of art sui generis ? Synthesizing Jakobson and Kermode, here is my current conception of experimental art:

Experimental art is that which takes unfamiliarity as its dominant— even to the point of schism .

The experimental artist wants her artwork to be different from all the other artworks around her. She desires that her results be unusual, unfamiliar to the point of looking peculiar, perplexing. She may be drawing on conventions, she may be working inside one or more traditions. But her conventions and traditions are not dominant ones; they are, perhaps, older ones, or unpopular ones. Or she may be importing ideas and conventions from one medium into another, where they are not well known.

Or it may be that she has noticed an idea—a possibility—that has not been fully developed in other artworks, and therefore seeks to develop it. She exaggerates or expands that minor concept or idea (something that isn’t dominant in other works) until it overwhelms the more familiar aspects of her artwork, distorting and enstranging the entire thing. Hence Manet and Degas exaggerated the de-emphasis of line and more energetic brushstrokes that they observed in works by Velázquez, J. M. W. Turner, and Eugène Delacroix, developing that idea until they arrived at Impressionism.

Luckily for experimental artists, there exist audiences and critics who prize unfamiliarity. (Often they are other experimental artists.) In his wonderful essay “Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-garde Cinema Perverse?” , James Peterson identifies

a common feature of avant-garde film viewing—one that usually passes without comment: viewers initially have difficulty comprehending avant-garde films, but they learn to make sense of them. Students who take my course in the avant-garde cinema are at first completely confused by the films I show; by the end of the term, they can speak intelligently about the films they see. (110)

Audiences who enjoy such films would rather see the artist make something strange, even if the resulting work is “not as good” as a more familiar type of artwork. They enjoy being confronted with something that’s like a puzzle to figure out, a viewing experience that will initially confound and challenge them. (I of course disagree with Peterson’s use of the term avant-garde ; I would substitute for it experimental .) (But no doubt others will take issue with my use of the term experimental…)

One thing that I like about the view of the experimental that Peterson describes, and that I’m developing here, is that it’s close to the word experimental ‘s original meaning : “a test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc.” (Both experiment and experience share a root with peril .)

Furthermore, this view of experimental art does not require that the art or artist do anything new per se; it requires only that the art and artist be out of step with the dominant techniques and styles of the moment, preferring the unfamiliar to the familiar. (This helps explain why outsider art , née Art Brut , is often valued by experimentalists.) And this definition is comfortable with artworks like The Matrix or Harry Potter , which it admits employ innovative and unfamiliar concepts and styles, but doesn’t go on to claim as experimental . The innovations in those works are relatively minor features in regard to the whole, and ultimately dominated by other, familiar aspects of the work—more recognizable forms and concepts. Harry Potter is at heart a fairly familiar kind of novel. J.K. Rowling’s innovations lie in hybridizing genre, and not with, say, grammar (a la Stein) or novel structure (a la Cortázar).

Finally, this concept of experimental art helps explain why such art often stops being experimental. As time goes on, the artwork loses its unfamiliarity. This is why students scratching film emulsion today in imitation of Stan Brakhage are not making experimental cinema: they’re working within a known tradition, and not seeking to maximize their works’ unfamiliarity. (To be fair, many people remain sadly unfamiliar with Brakhage’s work, so a scratch film in 2010 might still blow a lot of minds. One must allow for context.) The experienced experimental film fan, meanwhile, always seeking new challenges, will sniff disdainfully when confronted with such work—”It’s so imitative!”—and go look for something he hasn’t seen before. Hence the pervasive emphasis in experimental art circles on novelty (real or imagined).

Of course, as time goes on, we may continue to enjoy previously experimental artworks. Stan Brakhage’s scratched films opened up my mind to a new aspect of cinema, and showed me a kind of beauty I hadn’t before then suspected existed. I appreciate that, and respect his films for their historical import. And I think that they continue to look rather pretty—although that’s an example of my liking them for the ways in which they’re familiar: canonical, rather than experimental .

Similarly, John Cage’s 4’33” initially confounded me—”Surely he can’t be serious! That isn’t art!” But after performing it dozens if not hundreds of times myself, I now consider it an old friend.

(Of course, 4’33” always shows you something new—especially when you perform it outside the concert hall. That’s part of what makes it such a great experimental artwork.) (That’s also why people have been looking at nature for millennia.)

Elsewhere, some experimental artworks don’t outlive their experimentation. In that case, one is free to do with them as the Zen monks advise that we do, when confronted by koans. Or as Wittgenstein put it so famously, at the end of his Tractatus :

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (189)

Works Cited

• Călinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.
• Jakobson, Roman. “The Dominant.” Language in Literature . Trans. Krystyna Pomorska. Eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Boston: Belknap Press, 1990.
• Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction . New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
• Peterson, James. “Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-garde Cinema Perverse?” Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . Trans. C.K Ogden. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1922.

A. D. Jameson is the author of five books, most recently I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING: STAR WARS AND THE TRIUMPH OF GEEK CULTURE and CINEMAPS: AN ATLAS OF 35 GREAT MOVIES (with artist Andrew DeGraff). Last May, he received his Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the Program for Writers at UIC.

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32 thoughts on “ what is experimental art ”.

I attended a performance of 4’33” recently, at a Cage event including the screening of Cage/Cunningham. It was lovely. What’s been your favorite recital?

Back in 2007, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, PA, had a “Pay-To-Play!” fundraiser to inaugurate “the Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ.” You could pay $25/minute or $75 for five minutes to play this “King of Instruments”—”a versatile 6,938-pipe beast with wide tonal palette and ‘heft'” (that assessment according to the organ aficionados at the Wall Street Journal ).

A friend of mine said at the time that he was going to pay $75 to play 4’33” on the thing. It actually never happened, but that’s still my favorite performance.

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I am writing a Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft article for dVerse Poets Pub, an online community of poets, to inspire our poets to explore experimentation. The pub supports weekly opportunities for poets around the world to connect with one another, learn about craft and the cannon, and from each other. Meeting the Bar is designed to provide them with a challenge and I am writing a series over the next several months on the language poets. I would like to link to your article for further investigation. Also, I would like to quote your definition/synthesis. The article will go up this Thursday and the site usually receives several hundred views each day (they have about 200,000/year). The site is here: http://dversepoets.com/ . If you would let me know by early Wednesday I would appreciate it. Thank you for your consideration and an excellent article.

Thanks for the kind words, Anna! By all means, please feel free to link and quote away (to anything that I write).

Thanks again, Adam

Thank you very much! Once the article at dVerse has posted I will send you the link. Warm regards, Anna

Thanks! Looking forward to it.

dang this is rich….i could spend the better part of a day checking out all the vids and processing the thoughts….pre-read anna’s piece for tomorrow and chased the link over to read….intriguing…will be back…

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Here’s the link to the article at dVerse http://dversepoets.com/2012/10/04/meeting-the-bar-postmodern-prose/ (you’ll figure into future posts too :)). Thanks so much!

Thank you , Anna!

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Reblogged this on Bíboros and commented: nothing

Interesting! Thanks for the article. I would have liked to know more about experimental or avant-garde art in contemporary pop culture (music, literature, any other art form)

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Adam, Great article!! Working on a senior thesis art film in NC. Wanted to give you a shoutout to thank you for your information and insight–keep writing! :)

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Articles & Features

Art Media: What Happens When Artists Experiment with Unusual Materials

By Tori Campbell

Art observers often focus their attention on the subject portrayed in artistic works — but often the art media used to create the works is just as, if not more, important than the subject itself. Though we usually think of visual artists working in paints, inks, or clays; artists have also experimented with art media as strange and unconventional as bubblegum, elephant dung, and human blood. Take a look with us at some of the more surprising materials artists have created with throughout time.  

Burnt Plastic

Inspired by Jean Dubuffet’s use of dirt, sand, and organic materials; Italian artist Alberto Burri began to experiment with art while in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp in Texas. Thus, he worked with found materials like burlap, coal tar, and oil to hone his artistic style. Though born out of necessity, this practice became his signature style, and has culminated in his iconic series Combustioni Plastica of meticulously burnt sheets of plastic. By using a flaming torch as his paintbrush, and a sheet of plastic as his canvas, Burri creates postmodern pieces that hang from the ceiling and inextricably incorporate light and transparency into his media.

Meat as art media crept into popular culture in 2010 when Lady Gaga wore a dress of raw beef to the MTV Video Music Awards, but years prior performance artist Zhang Huan walked through the streets of New York City in a bulging meat suit. His piece, My New York, confronted his experience as an immigrant in the city, his relationship to Buddist tradition, and the animalism of man. Even further back, Carole Schneemann, performance artist and influential player in the Judson Church movement, choreographed and staged Meat Joy in 1964. The piece showed eight men and women chaotically writhing upon the floor whilst biting at raw chicken, fish, sausage, and scraps of meatpacking garbage. An instant shock to her audience, Meat Joy explored the relationship to the body and sexuality through raw flesh and allusions to erotic rites.

Smoke & Soot

Czechoslovakian artist Jiri Georg Dokoupil has worked with a multiplicity of art media throughout his career, experimenting with materials such as milk and soap. Never one to be pigeonholed into a singular style or media, Dokoupil has famously built upon the Surrealist practice of fumage, utilising smoke and soot in his art. Presented for the first time in 1936 at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London surrealist artist Wolfgang Paalen’s Dictated by a Candle was created using the fumes from a candle held near a canvas. Dokoupil’s smoke and soot works are extensions of this surrealist technique, studied and expanded upon in pieces like his 2004 Pusteblumen, where he has masterfully ‘painted’ a garden scene with soot.

Dead Animals

Somewhat of a celebrity in the art world; artist, collector, and entrepreneur Damien Hirst’s most iconic pieces incorporate dead animals as a primary art media. His 1991 piece The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, commissioned by British art collector Charles Saatchi, employed a dead 14-foot (4.3m) tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde to communicate the mission of his work. The series comprised of more, and other, dead animals in formaldehyde tanks, occasionally partially dissected; including sheep, cows, birds, and even a zebra. The works came under public scrutiny in 2016 when a study reported that high levels of formaldehyde fumes were leaking from his pieces throughout their 2012 exhibition at the Tate Modern. Though these claims are being contested, it is one small example of the logistical and legal troubles artists can experience when utilising strange or controversial art media. 

Elephant Dung

Another artist that is no stranger to the controversy surrounding their unorthodox choice of art media is Chris Ofili. Ofili is the artist behind the 1996 The Holy Virgin Mary, a massive 8-foot tall work created out of mixed art media including pornographic collage and elephant dung. To be crass the painting is quite literally ‘made of shit’ — or rather, elephant dung that Ofili brought back to London with him after a residency in Zimbabwe, allowing the work to become emblematic of everything that conservative thinkers thought offensive about modern art. The work travelled the world in the late 1990s as part of Charles Saatchi’s show Sensation , and it deeply upset Catholics everywhere it went — to the extent that it was defaced with white paint by a man who deemed the work ‘blasphemous’. Famously, then-mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, tried and failed to ban the work and strip the exhibiting Brooklyn Museum of its grant due to his aversion to the piece. 

“There’s nothing in the First Amendment that supports horrible and disgusting projects!” Rudy Guiliani

Inspired by the realism and true-to-life nature of life casting, Marc Quinn uses the technique in a brand-new way, employing blood as his chosen art media. In his sculptural Self series Quinn uses ten pints of his own blood to craft a self portrait that is both an image of him, and literally a part of him. Drawn to the medium as blood is the essence of life, a material that has deep symbolic and true function, Quinn has also used animal blood and placenta to create his pieces. His upcoming work Our Blood, set to open as public art on the steps of the New York Public Library in June 2021, comprises the blood of over 10,000 donations. Meant to illustrate the equalising power of blood, and that we are all one as humanity, Quinn aims to raise money and awareness for the rights of refugees with this ambitious work. Learn more about Our Blood by watching the video below.

Pornographic Magazines

One of the leading figurative artists in the world, Jonathan Yeo creates his portraiture out of art media not typically seen in galleries and museums: pornographic magazines. By meticulously collecting snippets of flesh and genitalia, Yeo crafts collaged portraiture that might seem perfectly normal from afar, but far from it up close. Coordinating his media with his subjects, his Bush piece is a perfect example of how his chosen art media can poke fun and provoke the people he depicts. Given former United States president George Bush’s puritanical views about sex and human sexuality, Yeo is able to shed light on the hypocrisy of the political right with his work.

Chewing Gum

Bubblegum: emblematic of the childhood fantasy-like wonder and enthusiastic playfulness of the artist that has been known to utilise the substance as art media. Dan Colen began to make ‘paintings’ out of chewing gum in 2006, ushering in an era of exploration around materials and medium as opposed to his previous tendency of representational subject matter. Primarily concerned with being guided by his art media instead of manipulating it himself Colen has mused upon this technique as a loss of control and an excitement with letting go, commenting that his paintings have taken on “inevitable forms — almost like destined forms” as if they have a life of their own.

Cassette Tapes

Enchanted by an event in which he cut out and carried the tape of a cassette around with him throughout the day, bringing a song physically in his pocket artist Gregor Hildebrandt has brought this inspiration into his artistic oeuvre. Defined by art media surrounding musical artefacts like cassette tapes and vinyls; Hildebrandt’s work literally incorporates songs, films, or poems within the visual art. Repurposing materials often found in garage sales and rubbage heaps, Hildebrandt purchases his art media from eBay in massive batches, displaying visually that which is recorded in audio — just like the grooves of a vinyl record.

Lottery Tickets

While walking their dog Banana, artists Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom noticed discarded colourful bits of paper; lottery tickets. The poetic implications of dreams unfulfilled or hopes dashed that accompanied these thrown away tickets was not lost on the artists, and their inspiration to create the series Ghost of a Dream was born. While collecting tons upon tons of the tickets, they also conducted research to find out what people buy when they win the lottery. They found that often, the first thing winners do is buy a car. Thus, Was and Eckstrom set out to create a full scale Hummer H3, the first piece of the dream trilogy that also included Dream Vacation and Dream Home, the top three things purchased with lottery winnings . Dream Car made of $39,000 worth of lottery tickets to represent the retail cost of the new car in 2008, is a large-scale installation that ruminates on money spent on dreams and the risky behaviours that accompany these goals.

Relevant sources to learn more

Learn from the Tate about what an art medium is Read for yourself about the controversy surrounding Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde Have you learned about the medium of textile art? Take a look at the work of our top ten favourite textile artists

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experimental art

Quick reference.

An imprecise term which has sometimes been applied to art that is concerned with exploring new ideas and/or technology. It is sometimes used virtually synonymously with *‘avant‐garde’, but ‘experimental’ usually suggests a more explicit desire to extend the boundaries of the art in terms of materials or techniques, whereas ‘avant‐garde’ can include novel and provocative ideas expressed through traditional techniques. Most writers today would prefer more precise terms such as Kinetic or installation art for such activities.

The term implies a link with science. In 1923 Picasso said ‘I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find, is the thing’ (A. H. Barr Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art, 1946). These magisterial words are hardly an end to the matter. In practice the scientific notion of experiment or research has, legitimately or not, frequently been invoked by avant‐garde artists. Picasso himself spoke of a period in 1912 when ‘the studio became a laboratory’ (J. Richardson, Braque, 1959). In its early days the Surrealist movement conducted what it called a ‘Bureau of Surrealist Research’ and its first journal, La Révolution surréaliste, was modelled on a scientific journal.

Stephen Bann's 1970 book Experimental Painting uses the idea to cover a very wide range of art. It begins with Constable and Monet (because of their ‘scientific’ approach to nature) and goes through to Constructivists and abstract artists with a methodical or technological bent such as Vasarely. Then he takes in some figurative artists such as Giacometti and Auerbach, whom he sees as having an approach in common with the ‘auto‐destructive’ art of Gustav Metzger.

John A. Walker (Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design Since 1945, 1973, 3rd edn, 1992) writes of ‘experimental’: ‘It is a word with both positive and negative connotations: it is used to praise and condemn. Those writers for whom it is a term of praise often mean by it an empirical practice in which the artist plays with his materials and adopts chance procedures in the expectation that something of value will result…Those writers for whom “experimental” is a pejorative description mean by it “a trial run”, “not the finished work”, “something transitional”.’ Walker points out that in E. H. Gombrich's celebrated book The Story of Art, first published in 1950, the whole of 20th‐century art was originally embraced in a chapter called ‘Experimental Art’. Paradoxically it was Gombrich, in Art and Illusion (1960), who made one of the most thoroughly worked‐out attempts to relate the artistic process to that of scientific experiment. He was concerned here, not with strictly technical experimentation, but to argue for an analogy between the processes of representation as a series of experiments and that of the scientific ‘testing’ of a theory. Artists, in this model, test their theories (representations) against experience. As in science, therefore, there can be a kind of ‘progress’ as mistakes in the ‘theory’ are gradually corrected. There is no contradiction whatsoever between this notion of ‘experiment’ and Gombrich's generally conservative view of 20th‐century developments (see abstract art).

From:   experimental art   in  A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art »

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For families

Experiment with materials, movement, and action

From manipulating materials to moving your body, making art involves action. try out these six activities that take inspiration from artists’ experimentation..

Cari Frisch, Larissa Raphael, Elizabeth Margulies

Aug 28, 2020

For everyone ages four and up

Richard Serra. Verblist . 1967–68

1. Take action

DISCOVER Richard Serra likes to explore all the things different materials can do. In Verblist , he made a list of action words that became instructions for experimenting with materials.

GATHER An assortment of materials such as aluminum foil, cardboard, fabric, and paper

EXPLORE Experiment with shaping your materials into different forms using these action words:

to roll, to curve, to lift, to wrap, to prop, to heap, to open, to bend, to twist

DISCUSS Take a look at the sculpture Serra made with vulcanized rubber, following the instruction “to lift.” Not all of Serra’s material experiments ended as art. Talk about whether you think what you made is a work of art—why or why not?

Judith Scott. Untitled . 2002

2. Wrap it up

DISCOVER Judith Scott created sculptures by taking everyday objects and wrapping them in yarn, fabric, rope, and other fibers. Sometimes, she hid the objects completely, but sometimes she left hints of what was underneath. People have made X-rays of her works and found zippers, pins, and even jewelry.

GATHER An everyday object from your house that has an interesting shape or texture, as well as yarn, string, ribbons, or anything you can use to wrap your object, like cut up strips of newspaper and tape

EXPLORE Begin wrapping your object with yarn, string, ribbons, paper, or a combination of materials. Decide if you want to cover the object completely or if you want to leave parts exposed. Look at the new shape you created. How has the object been transformed?

DISCUSS Show your wrapped artwork to a friend or family member. See if they can guess what is underneath.

Janine Antoni. Butterfly Kisses . 1996–99

3. Make your mark

DISCOVER Janine Antoni uses her body as a tool to make art. To make Butterfly Kisses , she applied mascara to her eyelashes and quickly blinked, so that her lashes brushed the paper and left fluttery marks. The marks show the movements of the artist’s body—her eye blinking. Antoni made around 60 marks per day and completed the drawing after about 2,124 blinks, made over many months.

GATHER Paper; washable ink pads

EXPLORE Make a drawing using your body as a tool. Pick a part of your body—your fingertips, a foot, or an elbow. Press that body part into the ink pad and stamp it onto a sheet of paper. Play around with the amount of pressure you apply, and with moving your body slightly as you stamp. After you play around for a bit, take a new sheet and make another body print drawing. Will you make a design or will you improvise?

DISCUSS How will you decide when your piece is finished?

4. Capture textures

DISCOVER To make Soho Sidewalk , Sari Dienes rubbed an inked paint roller over a cotton sheet on top of the sidewalk. Dienes made an artwork from something people hardly ever look at closely, bringing our attention to the different shapes, lines, and textures that make up this sidewalk section.

GATHER Paper and crayons, or a pencil

EXPLORE Go on a walk around your neighborhood or living space. Search for interesting textures you might want to capture. Place a sheet of paper over the surface and then rub the paper with the side of an unwrapped crayon or pencil. What textures and lines appear? Add more rubbings to your paper—they can be of different floor surfaces, or objects around your house (keys, leaves, placemats).

DISCUSS How are the textures different? Do they remind you of anything?

Sari Dienes. Soho Sidewalk . c. 1953–55

5. Push paint

DISCOVER To make the series of paintings he called Energy Fields, Jack Whitten poured paint onto canvases and dragged through a variety of tools, from Afro combs to squeegees, rakes, and brooms. The result gives a sense of movement, like the blurred vision from a moving vehicle, in paintings like Siberian Salt Grinder .

GATHER Paint; a paintbrush; a variety of items such as Q-tips, a comb, a paper clip, a spatula, or twist-ties; and aluminum foil or paper. Be sure to cover your table surface and have a water container nearby.

EXPLORE Pour a bit of paint onto a piece of aluminum foil. Spread it around, coating the surface. Choose some tools to drag through the paint and try making different kinds of marks. Think about moving your tool fast and slowly, make skinnier bands and thicker ones, and make shorter marks and try ones that go from edge to edge.

DISCUSS What do you notice about the marks you made? Did certain tools work better than others? Is there a sense of movement in your painting? If so, how would you describe the action?

Jack Whitten. Siberian Salt Grinder . 1974

Bruce Nauman. Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 . 1968

6. Perform a movement

DISCOVER Bruce Nauman made artworks in which he filmed himself moving his body in unusual ways. In Bouncing in a Corner, No. 1 , the artist jumped in a corner for 60 minutes. In Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) , he invented his own unusual style of walking and repeated it for an hour.

GATHER A stopwatch or timer, and some energy

EXPLORE Try out these challenges inspired by Nauman. Once you’ve experimented a bit, ask a family member to make a video capturing the action.

Choose a movement from the list below and repeat it for 60 seconds.

Jumping in place Twirling in a circle Tapping your foot Patting your stomach Bouncing in a corner Marching in place Flapping like a bird Nodding your head

Then invent your own style of walking. Where or when might you walk this way?

DISCUSS How did your movements change with time? Watch the video of your movements. What do you notice?

Volkswagen of America is proud to be MoMA’s lead partner of education. Family Programs are made possible by The Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Family Endowment Fund. Generous funding is provided by The William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund and Brett and Daniel Sundheim. Additional support is provided by the Annual Education Fund.

Cari Frisch

Larissa Raphael

Elizabeth margulies, related articles, letting go: making art with the element of chance.

As many of us learn to live with uncertainty, we can take inspiration from artists who play with the element of chance.

Jul 31, 2020

Create with Line, Shape, and Color

Spend time making art with your family with these videos, featuring activities inspired by works in MoMA’s collection. Recommended for ages four and up.

Jul 7, 2020

Magazine Podcast

Jazz in the Garden

Listen to MoMA’s newest podcast, about the rich, surprising 60-plus-year history of jazz performance at the Museum.

May 22, 2024

Joseph Wright 'of Derby', 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump', 1768

An audience has gathered around a lecturer to watch an experiment. It is night, and the room is lit by a single candle that burns behind a large rounded glass containing a diseased human skull. A white cockatoo has been placed in a glass container from which the air is being pumped to create a vacuum. Will the lecturer expel the air completely and kill the bird, or allow the air back in and revive it? Wright focuses on the viewers‘ differing reactions – from the girl unable to watch to the lovers with eyes only for each other.

This is the largest, most ambitious and dramatic of the series of ’candlelight' pictures Wright painted during the 1760s. It captures the drama of a staged scientific experiment but it also functions as a vanitas – a painting concerning the passing of time, the limits of human knowledge and the frailty of life itself.

It is night in a grand private house: through the window the moon gleams behind a cloud. A travelling lecturer, with all the drama of a magician, fixes his gaze upon us. An audience of men, women and children are gathered around him to watch the experiment he is conducting. The room is lit by a single candle that burns out of sight on the polished table behind a large rounded glass containing a diseased human skull. The candlelight is diffused through the murky liquid and illuminates the faces of the observers, casting deep, dramatic shadows – every furrow of the lecturer’s brow and curl of his silver hair is heightened.

A rare white cockatoo has been taken from its cage and placed in a glass container from which the air is being pumped to create a vacuum. The cockatoo convulses in distress as it struggles to breathe. With one hand raised, the lecturer has the god-like power over life or death – he can either expel the air completely and kill the bird or allow the air back in and revive it. A gentleman times the experiment on his pocket watch, while the youth seated beside him leans in for a closer view. The lecturer points to the ticking watch and, with his other hand on the air valve, looks to us as though the decision is ours.

The little girl observes the bird with fascination, but her elder sister cannot bear to watch and covers her eyes. Her father places his arm around her shoulder, perhaps to reassure her, or to explain that all living creatures must one day die. The boy beside the window waits, rope in hand, to see whether he will need to lower the cage for the reprieved bird. The young couple beside the lecturer only have eyes for each other. They are Thomas Coltman and Mary Barlow, friends of the artist who were to marry in 1769 and sit for their double portrait, Mr and Mrs Thomas Coltman . The elderly man on the right contemplates the skull, lost in thought. The skull and candle are emblems of mortality, but Joseph Wright’s painting leaves us uncertain of the outcome for the bird.

Paintings such as this fitted into none of the generally accepted categories of British art. Its subject was not from literature, it was too modern to be a history painting and too serious to be a conversation piece. The Air Pump captures the drama of a staged scientific experiment but it is also a modern-day vanitas – a reminder of the passing of time, the limits of human knowledge and the frailty of life itself.

During the 1760s Wright painted a series of ‘candlelight’ pictures of increasing complexity. A Girl reading a Letter by Candlelight, with a Young Man peering over her Shoulder (private collection) of about 1760–2 was probably the first. In it, Wright has observed the dramatic effects of light thrown upwards by candlelight onto the girl’s face and the more shadowy face of the man behind her. Wright’s use of strong directional light and deep shadow to create drama was new in British art. Three Persons viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight , exhibited in 1765 (private collection), shows three men studying a copy of one of the most famous sculptures of antiquity, the Borghese Gladiator , conveying the excitement of the acquisition of knowledge. The following year, in 1766, Wright exhibited A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in place of the Sun (Derby Art Gallery). The ellipses of the candlelit orrery demonstrate the movement of the earth around the sun. Wright had realised that a scene communicating ‘the Pleasures of Science’ to men, women and children with different levels of knowledge could be made into a dramatic painting on a large scale.

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump , exhibited two years later, is even larger than The Orrery and the most ambitious and theatrical of all Wright’s candlelight pictures. The experiment was not new in 1768 as it had been invented over a century before, but what was new was showing its impact on ordinary people. The public probably only encountered ’science‘ in the form of demonstrations by travelling lecturers, usually in town halls or, as here, privately by invitation. In The Air Pump , Wright celebrates the new appetite for learning.

His first idea for the picture is painted in oils on the back of his Self portrait of about 1767–8 (private collection). In the oil sketch there are fewer figures: the father and girls are present, as is the older man and the gentleman with the pocket watch. However, the lecturer is less dramatic, positioned to the side of the air pump and demonstrating the experiment on a small bird, primarily to the girls. Wright’s final version, with the air pump in the centre of the canvas, gives much greater prominence and power to the lecturer and heightens the drama of the scene.

In The Air Pump , Wright carries out his own experiment into what happens to colours as they recede from the light. The lecturer’s showy red robe is of light red damask woven with arabesques; salmon pink in the candlelight, but darkening to magenta as the eye travels further from the light. The girls’ dresses transform from pale lilac to purple and then to black. The little girls are the most brightly lit figures, and their reactions to the bird’s fate the most extreme. The polished surface of the table reflects the light and the objects on it and surrounding it. The younger girl’s arm can be seen through the glass bottle of translucent amber liquid lit by the candle, and shadows loom across the walls. Where the light does not reach – beneath the table – colour and form disappear altogether into blackness. Light and dark – as much as life and death – are the subjects of Wright’s dramatic, monumental canvas.

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[Video title]

An enlightened experiment

Joseph Wright hailed from Derby, a city at the centre of the Industrial Revolution. What can we learn from 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump' about this advancing time and how does this painting represent the Enlightenment that was taking plac...

What Do We Mean by Experimental Art?

This essay explores and evaluates a number of possible ways in which the phrase “experimental art” might be understood, considering several particular examples. “Experimental” may be understood purely on the basis of the scientific model, though this is not what we usually mean by the term. The experimental quality of art is more likely to be understood as a matter of degree of innovation, though this approach is rendered problematic when put in a historical context. We are more liable to call something an experiment when it does not lay the foundations for a new movement, but is something of a dead-end. It may be thought that the size of the audience is important, experimental art often being of minority interest, but some counter-examples are cited. The next question the essay considers is: “Is experimental art always a matter of technique — of a trying-out of new forms? Or is it possible to be experimental in terms of content alone?” Experimental art as commonly understood often means not fully achieved art. The essay then sets the term “experimental” next to another term, “inventive”, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida. Inventive art is very like experimental art, challenging the status quo, going beyond the “possible”, introducing that which is uncategorizable and unmarketable. The paradigmatic experimental work of art, perhaps, is one that is highly innovative in form, but doesn’t entirely succeed in what it attempts; it bears the marks of the artist’s trial-and-error procedures; it is appreciated by the few rather than the many; and it remains outside the mainstream of artistic production.

Cet article explore et évalue les différentes manières de comprendre l’expression “l’art expérimental”, en se basant sur des exemples précis. “Expérimental” peut être entendu comme étant entièrement basé sur un modèle scientifique, même si ce n’est pas ainsi qu’on l’entend habituellement. La qualité expérimentale de l’art est cependant beaucoup plus liée à un degré d’innovation qu’elle introduit, bien que cette approche puisse être problématique quand on la replace dans un contexte historique. Il est plus probable que nous désignions une œuvre comme “expérimentale” quand elle ne pose pas les fondations d’un nouveau mouvement, mais qu’elle représente plutôt une impasse. On peut penser que l’ampleur du public qui l’apprécie est importante, l’art expérimental n’étant souvent intéressant que pour une minorité de personnes, mais on peut trouver des contre-exemples. La question que se pose ensuite l’article est la suivante : « est-ce que l’art expérimental est toujours une question de technique, d’expérimentation autour de formes nouvelles ? Ou bien est-il possible d’être expérimental seulement au niveau du contenu ? » L’art expérimental tel qu’on le conçoit d’ordinaire est souvent un art qui n’est pas totalement achevé. L’article confronte le terme d’« expérimental » avec celui d’« inventif », en se basant sur l’œuvre de Jacques Derrida. L’art inventif est très semblable à l’art expérimental, il remet en question le status quo , va au-delà des possibles, introduit ce qui n’est pas catégorisable ni commercialisable. L’œuvre d’art expérimentale paradigmatique est peut-être celle qui est très innovante au niveau formel mais ne réussit pas tout à fait à atteindre le but recherché. Elle porte la marque de la procédure de tâtonnement de l’artiste, elle est appréciée par quelques-uns plutôt que par le plus grand nombre, et elle reste en dehors de la production artistique standard.

Index terms

Mots-clés : , keywords: .

1 What exactly do we mean when we call a work of art experimental? And how does experimental art relate to non-experimental — but still successful — art in the eyes of those who use these terms? To explore this question, I would like to approach it from six different directions; if we can gain a sense of how the term is generally used, we may be in a position to advance to a more theoretically based account.

2 (1) “Experimental” may be understood purely on the basis of the scientific model. That is to say, art may be used to test various hypotheses, or artists and scientists may work together to produce results that aim to illuminate the nature of reality or instruct the general public. One of many such examples is the “Synergy Project: Light and Life”, described on the project’s website as follows:

Tristan and artist Shawn Towne set out to develop a novel means of conveying human impacts on sea grass beds through art based on light and movement. Their inspiration is derived from underwater video taken off the coast of Cape Cod, focusing on fragile, ephemeral eelgrass beds. These are locations where man’s influence is driving rapid changes in the ecosystem, often for the worse.

Through their work together, they hope to communicate the degradation of these systems from coastal development, as well as provide a baseline view of particular ecological sites at a given point in time for potential scientific application. (Synergy Project)

3 However, this rather literal meaning is not what is usually meant by experimental art; the term may gain some authority from its overtones of hard science, but does not usually imply an actual engagement with science and scientists. The etymology of “experiment” takes us back to the Latin verb experiri , to test or try, and its associated noun experimentum , a trial, test, or proof; and the word in English of course predates the development of scientific method. (The earliest recorded examples of “experimental” mean “having experience of” or “based on experience” — and we may note that the French equivalent of “experiment” is expérience .) What does connect the modern scientific and artistic uses of the word is the sense of trial-and-error, of testing a hypothesis — but in the world of the arts, an experiment is not controlled in the same way as it is in scientific practice (a point I will come back to) nor is it a requirement that the experiment be repeatable by others.

4 (2) The experimental quality of art is more likely to be understood as a matter of degree of innovation . We do not use the label “experimental” for John Banville’s Book of Evidence (1989) or Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), though they are all outstanding examples of the novel form. We are more likely to apply the term to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) or Will Self’s Umbrella (2012) or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). McBride’s and Self’s novels announce in their first paragraphs that they are probing the limits of what is readable:

For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day. (McBride 2013:1)

I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man . . . Along comes Zachary , along from the porter’s lodge, where there’s a trannie by the kettle and the window is cracked open so that Muswell Hill calypso warms the cold Friern Barnet morning, staying with him, wreathing his head with rapidly condensing pop breath . (Self 2012: 1)

5 Danielewski’s experimentation begins even earlier: the title page states:

HOUSE OF LEAVES  

by Zampanò  

with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant (Danielewski 2000)

6 We may then notice that the page facing the title page has the words “MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI’S” across from the title. And if we flip through the book, we encounter a host of different type faces, pages largely blank, print running sideways up the page, and so on. House of Leaves shows itself to be worthy of the adjective “experimental” even before we start reading the text. One problem with this approach is that it presents us with a spectrum, and a spectrum that has many works falling somewhere in the uncertain middle area. For instance, staying with novels, would Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) be considered experimental? It appears at first to be relatively conventional, but when the reader discovers halfway through the novel that it is starting again in a different century (and especially if she learns that had she picked up a different copy of the same book she might have read the two halves in the other order) the term “experimental” might seem appropriate. Or take Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013). From one point of view it is a long, highly conventional narrative imitative of the three-decker Victorian novel; but when we take into account its form we may want to call it experimental: each of the many characters is associated with a zodiacal sign or heavenly body, each of the 12 parts opens with an astrological chart relevant to the date on which the events of that part occur, and the parts diminish in length in imitation of the waning moon.

7 This uncertainty about the middle ground perhaps does not matter; we can live with the idea of degrees of “experimentalness” and have no problem with the idea that one work is “highly experimental” while another is “somewhat experimental”. More problematic is the effect of history and hindsight on this approach. Let us take Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, for instance. In this work, first performed in 1805, Beethoven produced a highly radical piece of music which represented an immense challenge for its first listeners, who had heard nothing like it before. The composer, it must have seemed, was experimenting with the symphonic form. But we are unlikely to call it experimental today because of its place in the history of the symphony; Beethoven’s innovations soon became accepted resources for composers, and even longer, more discontinuous, more harmonically daring symphonies were to follow. Or take Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon : this work broke all the rules of representational art, and yet its influence has been such that it now has a solid place within the history of art that renders the term “experimental” unlikely in current discussions. We tend not to think of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as experimental today, though Eliot certainly was experimenting with what could be done in poetry, nor of Le Corbusier’s starkly simple villas of the nineteen-teens, though they were aesthetically revolutionary buildings, in both cases because their innovations gave rise to entire movements in their respective art forms.

8 It seems, then, when we take historical processes into account, the term “experimental” does not simply mean “degree of innovation.” We need to complicate our approach to the idea of experimentation in art.

• 1 For a full discussion, see Attridge (1974). The movement had analogues in a number of other Europea (...)

9 (3) The examples I have mentioned suggest that we are more likely to call something an experiment when it does not lay the foundations for a new movement, as the Eroica symphony, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , The Waste Land , and Le Corbusier’s villas did. We are more likely to use the term for a work of art whose innovations proved to be a dead-end, an artistic gamble that did not pay off. One body of poetry that still often gets called experimental is the series of attempts by a number of poets in England in the late sixteenth century to write vernacular verse in quantitative metres, imitative of Latin and Greek verse (as they understood it). Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Campion and many others tried to determine which syllables of English words were “long” and which “short” and to construct lines of verse on this basis; however, the nature of English speech, dominated by stress, not quantity, was unsuited to this method, and the craze soon died out. 1 Readers voted with their eyes and ears, so to speak, and preferred the accentually-based verse of The Faerie Queene and Astrophel and Stella (not to mention the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists, who were wise enough not to meddle with the vernacular verse-forms they had inherited.) These attempts at quantitative English metre are often referred to simply as the “quantitative experiments”. Other examples might be William Blake’s experiments with colour printing, which did not stand the test of time, and the language invented by Ted Hughes and Peter Brook for their play Orghast , presented at Persepolis in 1971 but not used again. And no doubt there were innumerable experiments by artists of all kinds throughout history whose failure led to their being quietly set aside, and of which we are consequently unaware.

10 This seems a rather negative approach to experimentation in the arts, however; it more or less equates “experiment” with “failed experiment”. It ought to be possible to speak of successful experiments, even in the past. We need to complicate our picture further.

11 (4) Perhaps we should put the emphasis on the size of the audience . Is experimental art always art of minority interest? How does it relate to the notion of the avant-garde , which usually implies art that appeals to only a small number?

• 2 This is not to suggest that later artists have not been influenced by these experiments, but they c (...)

12 It is certainly true that most examples of what we are likely to call experimental art do not have wide appeal, for reasons that are obvious. Arnold Schoenberg’s second string quartet, written in 1908, in which the composer experimented with complete atonality for the first time, still does not draw large audiences. However, if what appears to be an experiment does in the course of time become popular, we may well cease to think of it as experimental — as with the examples by Beethoven, Picasso, Eliot and Le Corbusier mentioned earlier. But there are possible counter-examples. Late in his life, Matisse started creating works of art out of boldly coloured cut-out shapes in a manner that we might want to call experimental; Turner, also late in his career, experimented with swirls of colour to produce paintings that were abstract in all but name; Malevich conducted what are called “suprematist experiments” with blocks of colour or squares of black or white. Yet these three bodies of work were among the most popular exhibitions in London in the year 2014 — in fact, the Matisse cut-out show was Tate Modern’s most popular show since the gallery’s opening. Because these works did not become assimilated as central to major movements in art — what could follow Matisse’s snail (Figure 1), Malevich’s black square (Figure 2) or Turner’s seascapes (Figure 3)? — they have not suffered the same fate as the other examples; they still stand out as exceptional and experimental. 2

Figure 1. Henri Matisse, T he Snail (1952-3)

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/​arts-entertainment/​art/​reviews/​henri-matisse-the-cut-outs-art-review-9259383.html#gallery

Figure 2. Kasimir Malevich, Black Square (1915)

Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/​art/​research-publications/​the-sublime/​philip-shaw-kasimir-malevichs-black-square-r1141459

Figure 3. J. M. W. Turner, Seascape with Distant Coast (ca. 1840).

Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/​art/​artworks/​turner-seascape-with-distant-coast-n05516

13 Music and literature do not furnish examples quite so easily, though it is worth noting that McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing , rejected by publishers over nine years of fruitless submissions, won the Goldsmiths’ Prize, the Bailey’s Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and is undoubtedly selling well as a result (if not always being read to the end). Some of the minimalist music of Arvo Pärt might be considered both experimental and popular, though to some ears it is too bland and unadventurous to merit the former label. Size of audience is not, it seems, a fool-proof guide to what we mean by “experimental”.

14 (5) The next question to be considered is: “Is experimental art always a matter of technique — of a trying-out of new forms? Or is it possible to be experimental in terms of content alone?” All the examples we have looked at so far involve formal innovation; they do not necessarily introduce material that has previously been kept out of the domain of art.

15 An artist who uses a relatively conventional form but depicts events or objects that have hitherto been excluded from art may well not be regarded as experimental. Zola represented aspects of reality that had not been the subject of fiction before him, but my sense is that we do not think of him as writing experimental novels, in spite of his own claim to be doing so (a claim based on approach (1) above, since he modelled his work on that of natural scientists). On the other hand, when there is a clear disjunction between new content and conventional form, we may reach for the idea of experimentalism to describe the work. When Mark Quinn creates a sculpture in Carrara marble representing the thalidomide victim Alison Lapper, naked and pregnant, and exhibits it on a plinth in Trafalgar Square, the contrast between the highly traditional polished marble and realistic carving and the unusual human body it represents is what makes the work powerful — and perhaps takes it into the realm of the experimental (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper Pregnant (2000)

Source: http://marcquinn.com/​artworks/​single/​alison-lapper-pregnant1

16 However, the self-assurance of Quinn’s statue makes it hard to think of it as an experiment; it reads as the work of someone who knew exactly where he was going when he made it, rather than somewhat trying out an idea without knowing where it will lead. This brings us to the final question.

17 (6) Does experimental art as commonly understood, then, mean not fully achieved art, where the reader, listener or viewer senses the riskiness of the project in its not quite complete success? In such cases, we might feel we are sharing with the artist the trial-and-error character of artistic creation, rather than receiving from his or her hand something that bears no traces of the chancy process whereby it come into being. If we return to the Matisse cut-out exhibition I mentioned earlier, we find Zoë Pilger writing in a review published in the Independent : “The early cut-outs were small, experimental ” (Pilger 2014, my emphasis).

Figure 5. Henri Matisse, The Fall of Icarus (1943)

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/​artanddesign/​2014/​mar/​29/​henri-matisse-cutouts-tate-modern-drawing-scissors

18 Presumably the later, larger, cut-outs, more suggestive of the artist’s confidence in what he is doing, do not register as experimental. Colin Wilson, reviewing the late Turner exhibition, makes the opposite point: “Nor are these dozens of paintings experiments but finished works by a master” (Wilson 2014, my emphasis). For Wilson, it is the impression the works give of being finished that prevents them from being called experiments. (Richard Dorment, though, notes that “Turner experimented with octagonal and round formats and explored ever wilder colour combinations” [Dorment 2014, my emphasis]; what motivates this comment, no doubt, is that octagonal and round formats never caught on, so they remain in the realm of the unsuccessful experiment, however finished they may seem.)

19 We can conclude from these various uses of the term “experiment” that we do not employ it in an entirely consistent manner. The paradigmatic experimental work of art, perhaps, is one that is highly innovative in form, but does not entirely succeed in what it attempts; it bears the marks of the artist’s trial-and-error procedures; it is appreciated by the few rather than the many; and it remains outside the mainstream of artistic production. But none of these criteria except the first is essential — and when we apply the term to contemporary artworks we can, as has often been noted, only do so in a provisional way: the future may turn current experiments into mainstream productions.

20 I want now to set the term “experimental” next to another term, “inventive”, and I will begin by quoting Jacques Derrida. Writing of the inventiveness of Francis Ponge’s little poem “Fable”, he says that writing such as this

3 Translation modified. The original French reads: “Cette écriture est passible de l’autre, ouverte à (...) is liable to the other, open to the other and worked by it; it is writing working at not letting itself be enclosed or dominated by that economy of the same in its totality, which guarantees both the irrefutable power and the closure of the classical concept of invention. […] Passing beyond the possible, it is without status, without law, without a horizon of reappropriation, programmation, institutional legitimation; it passes beyond the order of the demand, of the market for art or science; it asks for no patent and will never have one. (Derrida 2007: 46) 3

21 This account of invention makes it sound very much like experimentation in art, challenging the status quo, going beyond the “possible”, introducing that which is uncategorizable and unmarketable. But for Derrida, all art “worthy of the name” operates like this.

• 4 I have developed the notion of invention in The Singularity of Literature (Attridge 2004) and The W (...)

22 I find this a useful way to think about art’s relation to the norms and habits that exist at the time and place of both its production and its reception. 4 Invention, says Derrida, is always “invention of the other” (“ invention de l’autre ”), a phrase with a double genitive: the invention invents the other, but the other also invents. It is an act but also an event. In this act-event of invention, a way of doing art that is unthinkable within current norms is brought into being — an alterity that resists closure, troubles the institution, and demands new forms of attention and interpretation (and sets the critics searching for new ways of addressing — and inevitably circumscribing — the new work).

23 My question is this: Is it possible to distinguish between the inventiveness of all art (at least all art of any significance) and what is called experimental art? As we have seen, the term “experimental” suggests trial-and-error, the testing of new forms, the taking of risks; but isn’t this true of all inventive art? Wasn’t Sophocles being experimental in introducing a third actor onto the Greek stage? Wasn’t Chaucer being experimental in creating a verse-form we now call iambic pentameter? Wasn’t Defoe being experimental in writing a fictional narrative in the guise of an autobiography? These and many other innovations in the histories of all the arts were radical, untried, uncertain. I have already mentioned inventive works by Beethoven, Picasso, Eliot and Le Corbusier that, in the creative process, were experiments, and there are countless more examples. Only in hindsight do the new ventures by such artists appear obvious — a third actor hardly seems a surprising innovation, iambic pentameter feels like a natural verse-form in English, the novel in the guise of a fictional autobiography is hardly unusual — because they introduced new possibilities into the art form for others to take advantage of. Kant called this “exemplary originality” (Kant 1974: 150-1): not just that which has not been done before, which might be meretricious or trivial art, but that which, once done, creates fresh opportunities for new forms of originality. It is very easy to be original in the narrow sense: I could without difficulty produce a jumble of words, or sequence of sounds, or a pile of objects never before heard or seen. But these works of so-called “art” would not be inventive: they would not engage with the cultural, intellectual, political and ethical context within which they have been created, and they would not open up new possibilities for other artists. They would not, to use Derrida’s words, be “open to the other”.

24 The other, however, is not simply that which does not exist, or does not exist yet; it is other to “the economy of the same” — in other words, it is what is excluded by the current cultural configuration; it is what cannot be seen, or heard, or done, thanks to the power of the doxa . This is why the work of the true artist is difficult and risky: the task is to exploit the fissures and tensions within the economy of the same (which is never wholly coherent or totalised) to allow the other to be apprehended, and what that other is is not something that can be known in advance. And this is why it opens a path for future work.

25 It seems to me, therefore, that all art worthy of the name is experimental: all strong artists are working at the limits of what can be achieved, and all such artists are taking risks, engaging in a process of trial-and-error, going down a road without knowing where it leads. As J. M. Coetzee puts it with reference to verbal invention:

It is naïve to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say. Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place. […] What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. (Coetzee 1992: 18)

26 The writer of poetry, drama or fictional prose experiments with language, with what it can be made to say but also with what it can make the writer say. This is what Derrida suggests by the ambiguity of “ invention de l’autre ”, and what I mean by the coinage “act-event”. (Coetzee captures this doubleness in his apothegm, which occurs just after the passage I have quoted, “writing writes us”.) The painter experiments with the possibilities of light, colour, texture and representation; the composer experiments with the possibilities of sound. And so on. The greatest artists, perhaps, are those who are most sensitive to the cultural context in which they are working (which is, of course, inseparable from the social, political and economic environment), most open to the ideas, forms, sounds, shapes and feelings it occludes and the possibilities that exist for accessing them, most daring in letting those possibilities become real in their work, and most skilled at knowing when what they are making has reached its full realization.

27 I believe it is right to go on calling some instances of this artistic making “experimentation”, especially when it involves radically new techniques that do not become part of the central narrative of the art-form in question because they are taken up and developed by other artists. But what is also important is that we try to identify and encourage those contemporary experiments that are not merely offering something different but are engaging with the unapprehended potential that the culture has excluded — the kind of experiment that Derrida would call an invention. In the future, hindsight may strip the label “experimental” from these works precisely because they have identified so powerfully what is needed to bring to visibility, audibility or readability what the culture has excluded; they may come to seem an essential part of the story of art. We should not forget, however, that they started as experiments: ventures into the unknown, trials without guarantee of success, failures leading to new attempts, and a trust in the work that is finally delivered over to public judgement.

Bibliography

Primary sources.

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.

Banville, John. Book of Evidence. London: Secker and Warburg, 1989.

Catton, Eleanor. The Luminaries . London: Granta, 2013.

Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves . London: Random House, 2000.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment . London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1974.

McBride, Eimear. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing . Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2013.

Self, Will. Umbrella . London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

Smith, Ali. How to Be Both . London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014.

Tóibín, Colm. The Master . London/New York: Picador, 2004.

Secondary sources

Attridge, Derek. Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974.

Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature . Abingdon: Routledge, 2004.

Attridge, Derek. The Work of Literature . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.

Coetzee, J. M. Doubling the Point . David Attwell, ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Derrida, Jacques. “Psyché: Invention de l’autre.” In Psyché: Inventions de l’autre . Paris: Galilée, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques . “Psyche: Invention of the Other.” In Psyche: Inventions of the Other . Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, eds. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.

Dorment, Richard. “Late Turner: Painting Set Free, review: ‘Don’t let’s get too sentimental about Turner’.” The Telegraph. 8 September 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/11081456/Late-Turner-Painting-Set-Free-review-Dont-lets-get-too-sentimental-about-Turner.html

Pilger, Zoe. “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, Tate Modern, art review.” The Independent. 14 April 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/henri-matisse-the-cutouts-tate-modern-art-review-9259383.html

Synergy Project. http://science360.gov/obj/video/698ddccc-3558-40bd-a52e-bad1e90bf019/synergy-project-light-life

1 For a full discussion, see Attridge (1974). The movement had analogues in a number of other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

2 This is not to suggest that later artists have not been influenced by these experiments, but they cannot be said to have initiated artistic movements when displayed. Later artists — the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s in the case of late Turner and the minimalists of the 1960s in the case of Malevich — may be seen to have built on them, but this does not lessen their experimental status in their own time.

3 Translation modified. The original French reads: “Cette écriture est passible de l’autre, ouverte à l’autre et par lui, par elle travaillé, travaillant à ne pas se laisser enfermer ou dominer par cette économie du même en sa totalité, celle qui assure à la fois la puissance irréfutable et la fermeture du concept classique d’invention. […] Passant au-delà du possible, elle est sans statut, sans loi, sans horizon de réappropriation, de programmation, de légitimation institutionnelle, elle passe l’ordre de la commande, du marché de l’art ou de la science, elle ne demande aucun brevet et n’en aura jamais.” (Derrida 1987: 61)

4 I have developed the notion of invention in The Singularity of Literature (Attridge 2004) and The Work of Literature (Attridge 2015).

List of illustrations

Electronic reference

Derek Attridge , “What Do We Mean by Experimental Art?” ,  Angles [Online], 6 | 2018, Online since 01 April 2018 , connection on 25 September 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/angles/962; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.962

About the author

Derek attridge.

Derek Attridge is the author of, among other books, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Cornell, 1988), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1995), The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004; reissued as Routledge Classic, 2017), Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford, 2013), and The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015). He is the editor of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature (Routledge, 1992) and collections of essays on literary theory, James Joyce, and South African literature. Forthcoming is The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers . Having taught at Oxford, Southampton, Strathclyde and Rutgers Universities, he is now Emeritus Professor at the University of York, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Contact: derek.attridge[at]york.ac.uk

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0 . All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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Experimental Art: How Taking Risks Impacts the Arts and Creators

Ready to explore the wild side of art? Embrace experimentation and see how taking risks impacts your art! Get inspired and become an innovator!

Are you looking to break out of the doldrums and try something new, even if it’s a little risky?

Take heart!

Experiments in creativity can be extremely rewarding - not just for yourself as an artist but also for the art world at large.

Experimental art--the process of pushing boundaries in the arts and taking risks with your own projects--is a fantastic way to express yourself and grow as an artist.

As artists, we often get comfortable with our styles and techniques, but taking creative risks and experimenting with different methods can result in game-changing discoveries, leading to incredible breakthroughs in our artistic pursuits.

Just like any creative endeavor, art requires constant experimentation, risk-taking and adventurousness.

If you want to breathe new life into your creative pursuits , it's time to embrace experimentation.

By understanding how experimental art works, what it has achieved thus far, and why it's so important to take chances with your creativity , creators of all sorts can unlock their full potential.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the impacts of stepping away from your comfort zone and pushing the limits of what we think is possible in our artwork.

Whether you are an amateur hobbyist or a professional artist, exploring new and unique ways of creating can spark creativity and inspiration that will invigorate your work in unique and unexpected ways.

Let's take a look at how taking risks helps artists explore different art mediums and techniques, why experimentation is important even (and often especially) when it doesn't lead to success right away, plus plenty of tips on getting started with experimenting in arts and crafts .

Get ready to take off on an experimental journey, where you will find new ideas and fresh ways to create unique works that are sure to spark inspiration among all kinds of artists!

Read on to see how embracing risk-taking can help open up a world of exciting opportunities for creators everywhere!

Artistic Experimentation

Art is a realm of boundless possibilities, where creativity knows no limits.

It is in this realm that experimentation takes center stage, pushing the boundaries and challenging the established norms.

In the context of art, experimentation refers to the act of exploring new approaches, techniques, and ideas that deviate from traditional or established methods.

It is an essential tool for artists seeking to break free from the confines of conformity and unlock their true creative potential .

Experimental art, my friends, is like a breath of fresh air in the stuffy room of traditional art forms.

It's an artistic movement that thrives on unfamiliarity, cherishing the element of surprise and pushing the limits of artistic expression.

It's about stepping outside the comfort zone and diving headfirst into the unknown, armed with nothing but curiosity and a thirst for innovation.

It's the rebellious cousin at the family gathering, the eccentric artist who dances to their own tune.

It's about pushing boundaries, embracing the unfamiliar, and daring to break free from the shackles of conventionalism.

Experimental art is essentially a style of art that aims to break free from tradition that explores new ideas, approaches, and techniques to create something unique, unconventional, and innovative.

The key to successful experimental art lies in taking risks and pushing boundaries to create something new and original.

But why is experimentation so crucial in the creative realm?

Well, my dear readers, it's because experimentation opens doors to uncharted territories; it allows artists to tap into their deepest wells of imagination, unearthing hidden treasures that would otherwise remain buried.

It challenges the status quo, forcing us to question our preconceived notions of what art should be.

Picture this: an artist standing before a blank canvas, armed with brushes, paints, and an unwavering desire to create something that has never been seen before.

They throw caution to the wind, surrendering themselves to the process of experimentation.

Colors blend in unexpected ways, brushstrokes dance across the canvas in a frenzy, and forms emerge from the chaos.

This is the magic of experimental art unfolding before your eyes.

Let's delve into the world of experimentation and discover its impact on the arts, creativity , and creators.

The Evolution of Experimentation

Experimentation in art has evolved over time, taking on various forms and embracing new technologies and mediums.

From the Renaissance period's scientific approach to artists like Leonardo da Vinci, who explored anatomy and perspective, to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, that challenged societal norms, experimentation has always been a driving force in pushing artistic boundaries.

Throughout history, experimentation has played a pivotal role in shaping artistic movements and propelling artists to greatness.

Take, for instance, Jackson Pollock, the maestro of abstract expressionism.

With his iconic drip paintings, he revolutionized the art world, defying conventional techniques and embracing spontaneous gestures.

His experimentation paved the way for future generations of artists to let loose their creativity and follow their artistic instincts.

In modern society, experimentation has expanded beyond traditional mediums like painting and sculpture.

With the advent of digital art , installation art, performance art, and conceptual art, artists now have a vast playground to experiment with.

The rise of technology has opened up new avenues for exploration, allowing artists to blend traditional techniques with digital tools, creating immersive experiences that transcend the boundaries of the physical world.

Modern and contemporary art is a testament to the power of experimentation and risk-taking in art.

From interactive installations, to virtual reality works, and multimedia performances - these are all examples of how artists have transcended the limitations of traditional forms by embracing risk-taking.

In the contemporary art scene, experimental art has become a guiding force, igniting the flames of creativity and inspiring artists to think outside the box.

It encourages us to see the world through a different lens, to question the norms, and to embrace the freedom of self-expression .

It challenges us to confront our own biases and preconceptions, opening our minds to new possibilities.

Experimental art is about pushing boundaries in every artistic medium imaginable.

Think immersive installations that transport you to alternate realities, sculptures crafted from unconventional materials, and performances that challenge our very perception of time and space.

Experimental art takes us on a journey beyond the realm of the familiar and into uncharted territories of imagination .

It's an adventure that's full of surprises and delights, allowing us to explore new realms and rediscover our inherent creative powers.

Experimental art is a powerful tool for sparking creativity, inspiring innovators , and propelling the arts forward.

The Importance and Power of Experimentation

Experimentation is the lifeblood of artistic evolution.

It fuels innovation , challenges conventions, and propels the arts forward.

Without experimentation, art would remain stagnant, confined to predefined rules and limitations.

It is through experimentation that artists discover their true potential, find their voice, and leave an enduring impact on the world.

Experimentation holds immense significance in the arts, offering numerous perks for creators and the wider artistic community.

Firstly, experimentation allows artists to break through creative roadblocks by encouraging them to step outside their comfort zones.

By venturing into uncharted territory, artists can discover new techniques, materials, and forms of expression that they may never have encountered otherwise.

Moreover, experimentation challenges established norms and pushes the boundaries of what art is and can be; it disrupts the status quo, inviting viewers to question their preconceived notions and experience art in unconventional ways.

By embracing experimentation, artists can pave the way for new artistic movements, redefine artistic practices, and ignite critical conversations.

Experimental art is also an excellent platform for cultivating collaboration.

It encourages artists to embrace different perspectives, work together to find innovative solutions, and explore new ideas that may not have been possible alone.

At its core, experimentation in art fosters a culture of discovery, creativity, and innovation—one that is essential for the development of the arts and the growth of individual creators.

Benefits of Creative Experimentation

Experimentation is a powerful tool for unlocking creativity and uncovering hidden potential.

By taking risks and exploring unfamiliar methods, artists can discover new techniques, refine their skills, and create unique works of art that stand out from the crowd.

Whether practicing the visual arts, performing arts, or any other artistic endeavor, experimentation can help artists hone their craft and unlock the full range of their talents .

So, why should you take risks with your creative pursuits?

Here are some key benefits of embracing creative experimentation:

• Inspiration and Motivation:

Experimenting encourages artist to explore their creative limits and think outside the box.

It can be an excellent source of motivation when tackling large projects, allowing them to stay inspired and focused on the task at hand.

• Refinement of Skills:

By exploring different approaches and methods of creating, artists can hone their skills and refine their techniques.

With practice, they can become more comfortable working with unfamiliar materials and styles, gaining valuable knowledge in the process.

Experimentation also allows artists to explore different techniques, encouraging them to think critically and push their creative boundaries.

• Unlocking Potential:

Experimentation can help artists unlock hidden potential, prompting them to discover new forms of expression that may not have been possible before.

By taking risks, they can explore uncharted territories, uncover latent talents, and potentially create works of art that can truly stand out.

• Overcoming Creative Roadblocks:

Experimentation can be an effective tool for overcoming creative roadblocks, allowing artists to view their current situation from a new perspective and discover fresh ideas and solutions that they may not have thought of before.

While the outcomes of experimentation are never guaranteed, it can lead to incredible breakthroughs in creativity , providing a much-needed spark of inspiration for tackling tough projects.

• Professional Growth:

Experimenting can help artists stand out from their peers, broadening their network of contacts and paving the way for professional success.

It also serves as an excellent platform for learning new skills, building confidence , and showcasing their talents to the world.

In short, experimentation can open up a world of exciting opportunities for artists of all skill levels.

Real-Life Examples

Throughout history, countless artists have embraced experimentation, leaving an indelible mark on the art world.

Experimental artists come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, each with their own unique creative style .

To get a better sense of the power of experimentation in art, let's take a look at some real-life examples.

One notable example is Pablo Picasso, whose cubist paintings shattered traditional notions of representation.

His bold exploration of multiple viewpoints and fragmented forms revolutionized the art scene and inspired generations of artists to challenge conventions.

Another artist who exemplifies the power of experimentation is Yayoi Kusama.

Through her immersive installations and polka dot motifs, she transports viewers to otherworldly realms, blurring the boundaries between art and reality.

Her fearless experimentation with space and repetition has captivated audiences worldwide and propelled her to iconic status.

Hiroshi Fuji's recycled art sculptures offer yet another example of the potential impacts of experimentation.

His sculptures, crafted from discarded materials embody his environmentalist ethos while redefining what art can be.

By embracing unconventional materials and techniques, Fuji has transformed everyday objects into fascinating works of art, inspiring a wave of eco-friendly creatives in the process.

These examples illustrate the many ways in which experimentation can lead to groundbreaking works and transform the art scene as we know it.

They also demonstrate how taking risks can inspire others to embrace their creative potential, explore uncharted territories, and leave an unforgettable mark on the world.

The art world is filled with artists who have embraced experimentation, offering us a glimpse into the potential of taking risks in art.

Some showcase their artworks in an exhibition, others whisper it from the rooftops, while some simply let their work speak for itself.

Regardless of how they choose to showcase their artworks, these artists are a testament to the power of experimentation and risk-taking in art.

By understanding their stories and exploring their works, we can gain valuable insights that will help us expand our own creative horizons.

Artistic production is, after all, a process of experimentation and exploration - one that should be embraced and celebrated.

Only by taking risks can we hope to create something truly unique and memorable.

Incorporate Experimentation into Your Practice

For creators looking to incorporate experimentation into their own art making practice, there are several practical steps to consider.

Formal innovation isn't the only way to make art; it's also important to explore informal techniques and methods that challenge traditional practices.

Creating a conducive environment that fosters experimentation is crucial.

This includes setting aside dedicated time for exploration, creating a supportive network of fellow artists, and embracing a growth mindset that welcomes failure as an opportunity for growth.

Another way to experiment with your art is to change your approach to materials; taking risks is an essential aspect of experimentation.

Instead of sticking to the same canvas and paint, why not experiment with new materials and mediums?

Artists should be willing to step outside their comfort zones, try new techniques, and explore unfamiliar subject matters.

By stepping out of your comfort zone and using new materials, you can unlock new artistic possibilities and discover new avenues of creative expression.

Another way to experiment with your art is to change your perception and outlook.

Try looking at your subjects from a different angle, or trying out a different color scheme.

This can help you to explore new perspectives and unlock new artistic possibilities.

An idea that is often overlooked when it comes to experimenting with art is collaboration .

When like-minded artists come together, they can trade ideas and techniques, collaborate to create unique artwork together, and bring fresh perspectives to the table.

Collaboration plays a significant role in experimentation, as it allows artists to combine their unique perspectives and skills, pushing the boundaries even further.

Working with fellow artists can unlock powerful insights, spark innovative ideas, and provide valuable feedback on your works.

By collaborating with other creatives, you can break down creative roadblocks, explore new possibilities, and discover hidden potential in your work.

At the end of the day, experimentation is an essential tool for unlocking creativity , inspiring innovation, and propelling the arts forward.

Whether drawing, crafting a story with written word, or playing around with sound, experimentation is a powerful tool that can help you explore new artistic territories and uncover your true creative potential.

By embracing experimentation, artists can unlock a world of possibilities and create something truly remarkable.

A single risk could lead to an incredible breakthrough in your creative practice, so take a chance and see what happens.

Tips for Experimentation in Art

So, you're ready to take a leap of faith and dive into the world of artistic experimentation?

Awesome! Here are some useful tips to get your creative juices flowing.

• Start Small:

It's perfectly fine to start experimenting with smaller projects and gradually expand your creative endeavors.

Small experiments can help you to gain confidence in the process and build up your artistic skills before tackling more ambitious projects.

• Experiment with Different Techniques:

From traditional mediums to digital tools, there are many techniques that artists can experiment with.

Try mixing different mediums together, combine painting and photography, or experiment with materials and textures.

• Embrace Technology:

In the digital age, technology is an invaluable tool for experimentation.

Try exploring virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing , or any other tools that can expand your artistic capabilities.

• Take Risks:

Experimentation requires taking risks and pushing boundaries.

Don't be afraid to take risks and explore uncharted territories; you never know what new creations you may come up with!

• Find Inspiration Everywhere:

For inspiration , look beyond the art world for ideas.

Draw inspiration from everyday life, nature, music , literature—anything that can help to spark your imagination.

• Get Feedback:

Asking for feedback is essential to experimentation.

It can help you identify areas for improvement and uncover new creative possibilities.

Above all, remember to have fun!

Enjoy the process and don't take yourself too seriously; experimentation should be liberating and enjoyable.

So, dear creators, dare to dream, embrace the unknown, and let experimentation guide you on a journey of self-discovery and artistic growth.

As the great artist Henri Matisse once said, "Creativity takes courage."

Embrace that courage, ignite your imagination, and let experimentation be your guide to unlocking the true essence of your artistic brilliance.

Embracing Experimental Art

Experimentation is the key to unlocking your true creative potential as an artist.

From inspiring innovation to cultivating collaboration, experimentation can open up endless possibilities in the arts.

Don't be afraid to try new techniques, materials or collaborate with others to create something unique.

It might seem daunting at first, but risk-taking and adventurousness can result in game-changing discoveries.

By embracing experimentation, artists can discover new techniques, challenge themselves to think outside the box, and leave an unforgettable mark on the art world.

If you're looking to take the next step in your artistic pursuits, embrace experimentation and unleash the incredible creativity that resides within you.

Let's celebrate the bold, the audacious, and the wonderfully weird.

Let us immerse ourselves in the world of experimental art and allow our imaginations to run wild.

After all, it is through experimentation that we discover the true essence of creativity and unlock the boundless potential within ourselves!

Now, go forth and explore the unexplored, embrace the unconventional, and let your creativity soar to new heights.

The world is your canvas, so why not paint it with the vibrant colors of experimentation?

Interested in learning more about experimenting in art and the creative process ? Check out Helen Wells Artist: Sketchbooks + Art Ideas' video!

Want even more content about creativity and art?

Be sure to check out all of our creative chronicles !

Ready to experiment and tap into your creative side ?

Check out some of our other articles:

- Art for social change

- Art of mindfulness

- Reflection in art

- Break generational trauma

- Benefits of microlearning

- Digital nomadism

- Creative burnout

- Art of resilience

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Probing the power and importance of art

The Arts and Mind Lab at Boston College explores cognition in the arts—and the value of arts education

By Kirsten Weir

May 2019, Vol 50, No. 5

Print version: page 66

12 min read

• Color and Design Elements
• Creativity and Innovation

"My kid could have done that." It’s a common criticism of abstract art, including the paint splatters of Jackson Pollock or the playful shapes and childlike figures of Joan Mir ó . But psychologist Ellen Winner, PhD, wasn’t so sure.

She wondered if it was true that an abstract painting by a great artist was indistinguishable from art made by children or even animals. In other words, can we somehow judge skill in seemingly random splatters and lines?

That question is one of the many Winner has explored at her Arts and Mind Lab at Boston College, which studies the cognitive factors at play in creating and experiencing art.

To better understand people’s reactions to abstract painting, Winner led a series of experiments in which she and her colleagues presented adult participants who had little familiarity with abstract art with pairs of paintings that were superficially similar—but one had been painted by a great abstract expressionist, while a child, monkey, ape or elephant had created the other. Without revealing the artists, she asked participants which they preferred, and which they thought was a better work of art. For both questions, participants chose the fine art more often than chance. Winner then repeated the study but asked participants to choose which they thought was by a real artist, and which was by a child or animal. Again, the untrained observers correctly identified work by great artists more often than not. In another variation, she mislabeled the paintings. Asked which they preferred and which was a better work of art, participants were still more likely to choose artwork by fine artists, even though they believed it had been created by a child ( Cognition , Vol. 137, No. 1, 2015).

When Winner asked participants why they picked the paintings they did, they described the images they chose as less random and more planned. And when asked to rate the unlabeled images on a variety of dimensions, the ones by professional artists received higher ratings of intentionality. "We believe people are able to tell the difference based on the level of perceived intentionality," Winner explains. "When you look at the art, you can somehow tell if it’s somewhat ordered or somewhat random." Precisely how we see the mind behind the art, she adds, is still a mystery. "There’s something in the structure, but we don’t know what it is."

Winner is naturally drawn to such philosophical questions about the arts since "psychology grew out of philosophy," she says. She has, for instance, explored why we disparage forgery and whether we believe our aesthetic preferences have any objective basis. Yet many of her projects are much more applied. In one line of work, she and her students identified the cognitive skills taught in arts classes, with the goal of more systematically judging whether arts education influences academic outcomes. She has also studied giftedness in the arts, a topic that can have implications for better supporting artistically gifted children in schools. She and her students have also explored emotion ­regulation through art, and the link between creativity and executive functioning.

All of her projects stem from a deep appreciation for the arts. "The arts began before the sciences," she says. "Art is a fundamental part of being human."

A rage to master

After graduating from Radcliffe College with an undergraduate degree in English, Winner enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to study painting. But she developed doubts about whether she was cut out for a career as an artist. She began researching programs in clinical psychology and saw an announcement for a research assistant job at Project Zero, a program to study learning in and through the arts, founded by the philosopher Nelson Goodman at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1967.

That ad changed everything. "I discovered I could actually do research about the subject I knew and loved best," she says. Winner got the job and went on to earn a PhD at Harvard, studying how children develop the ability to use metaphor—a kind of linguistic art, and one well suited to a former English major. After graduating in 1978, she joined the faculty at Boston College and continued to work with Project Zero, where she remains a research associate.

After her foray into metaphor and then irony, Winner turned her attention to studying visual arts. Her lab has always been small, with two or three doctoral students and a team of undergraduate volunteers. As an under-the-radar subfield, the psychology of the arts has never attracted strong support from large funding sources, but Winner has secured grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science Foundation, as well as private foundations. "With under­graduate volunteers we get a lot of research done," she says. "You don’t need an enormous lab and huge funding to do good work."

Among that work is research to better understand giftedness. With her former student Jennifer Drake, PhD, now an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Winner studied "precocious realists"—children able to create extremely realistic drawings from a very young age. Gifted children often share certain traits, whether they excel in drawing, music, athletics or some other domain: They tend to learn rapidly and make discoveries in that domain without much guidance from grown-ups. They also have an intrinsic drive to practice—what Winner calls a "rage to master." You’ll find a precocious artist drawing at the breakfast table, doodling on her schoolbooks all day and escaping to draw even when she has friends over to play. "They are passionately motivated and unable to pull themselves away from what they love to do," Winner says.

Does that talent for drawing translate to other areas of their lives? To find out, Winner and Drake compared 12 precocious realists with matched controls and found that giftedness in drawing wasn’t related to either verbal or nonverbal IQ. Precocious realists did score better than their peers on visual-spatial tasks that required the ability to focus on parts of a visual display. But the drawing prodigies scored no higher than their peers on tests of visual memory, visual imagery or mental rotation ( Roeper Review , Vol. 40, No. 4, 2018). Drake and Winner conclude that these talented young artists could benefit from advanced arts education. Yet while gifted education programs are relatively common for academic giftedness, targeted art education programs for precocious artists are hard to come by.

The benefits of arts education

Winner has also explored how typical children might benefit from arts education. It’s a loaded question. Funding for arts education is often precarious, and arts advocates are eager to show that studying art or music will lead to better grades or higher SAT scores.

Winner was cautious about making that claim. "I didn’t see what the mechanism might be for a transfer effect," she says. So, she and her colleagues undertook a series of meta-analyses to explore the link between arts education and academic outcomes ( Journal of Aesthetic Education , Vol. 34, No. 3/4, 2000). They surveyed hundreds of articles and published a series of papers, each focused on different art forms and type of outcomes.

The results didn’t bode well for transfer effects, as Winner and her collaborator Lois Hetland, EdD, summarized in a report on the project ( Arts Education Policy Review , Vol. 102, No. 5, 2001). "In general, correlational studies showed a strong connection: Kids who take arts classes do well in school," Winner explains. But that connection unraveled when they looked at experimental studies, she adds. "In the experimental studies, there was no causal effect—and of course, there are many explanations for a correlation besides a causal one."

Although arts advocates were not happy with those results, Winner says it’s the researcher’s job to accurately show what studying the arts can—and cannot—do. "If the only justification for art is raising academic performance, then as soon as superintendents find out that doesn’t hold up, they’ll have reason to cut the arts," she says. Winner asserts that the arts should be judged on their own merit, not because painting might make you better at geometry. "Nobody expects math skills to transfer to biology. The arts are held to a different standard," she says. "I fundamentally believe there is value to learning the arts, independent of transfer."

Artistic habits of mind

To change the conversation around arts education, Winner and her colleagues set out to characterize how visual arts classes teach student about ways of thinking. They filmed and interviewed visual arts teachers on the job and coded their films for the kinds of "habits of mind" they saw being taught, both implicitly and explicitly. These habits include observing closely, envisioning and manipulating mental images, exploring new ways of solving problems and learning from mistakes, reflecting on one’s process and learning to evaluate what’s working, what’s not and why.

"Those habits of mind have little or nothing to do with the skills measured by standardized tests," Winner says—but it’s not hard to imagine how they might be beneficial outside the art studio. She and her colleagues published a book on their findings, "Studio Thinking," in 2007 to give teachers and arts advocates a research-based framework for talking about the benefits of arts education. To her surprise, it was featured in The New York Times and went viral among art teachers. "Teachers have said it gives them a language to organize their teaching and also to advocate to their school about why what they do is important," Winner says.

She and her colleagues published a second edition in 2013, and in 2018, they released a related title, "Studio Thinking From the Start," a practical handbook for K–8 art teachers. Winner’s graduate student Jillian Hogan took the lead on writing the book.

That project was like coming full circle for Hogan, who was drawn to the lab because of Winner’s research on the studio habits of mind. She had worked as a K–8 music teacher and learned about those habits of mind from the visual arts teacher in the classroom next door. Hogan loved the concept but found visual arts habits didn’t exactly map onto the skills she was teaching in music. Eventually, she joined Winner’s lab as a PhD student to explore the habits of mind more deeply.

Among other projects, Hogan worked with Winner to create the music-specific framework she’d been missing, publishing a study on "ensemble habits of mind" in "The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education" (in press). Winner’s former doctoral student, Thalia Goldstein, PhD, now an assistant professor at George Mason University, is taking a similar approach to uncover the habits of mind taught in theater classes.

Through these efforts, Hogan says, she and her colleagues can begin to answer the questions that she and other teachers have about how students learn best in the arts. "I feel lucky that I can spend my days asking these questions that matter to teachers, and it’s important to me to see research findings translated for them," she says.

Detailing habits of mind isn’t only for the benefit of educators, however. Hogan has begun to take the next step: developing valid measures of the habits of mind. That would enable researchers to accurately measure how each of those skills is learned—and whether they transfer to benefits in domains outside the arts.

Creativity and mood

Another line of research at the lab is being conducted by student Mahsa Ershadi, who previously taught in a Toronto program for adults who hadn’t finished high school. Most of Ershadi’s students came from marginalized populations and lower-socioeconomic-status backgrounds—and that experience has informed her research. Her dissertation research is exploring the connection between socio­economic status, executive function and creative problem- solving in young children. Previous work has shown that kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to have reduced cognitive control. That’s typically viewed as a deficit, but Ershadi wonders if it might predispose the kids to greater insight problem-solving. "I think we should get away from the idea that these kids need to be fixed," she says. "Instead of focusing on their supposed deficits, maybe we should find what their talents are and try to foster them."

Winner’s students often pursue research that takes them in somewhat different directions from their adviser. Drake, for instance, studied how drawing can help people regulate their emotions. She put adults and children in a sad mood by asking them to recall a sad experience or imagine a disappointing event. Then she asked half of the participants to draw something to distract themselves from thoughts of the negative event. She instructed the other half to express their thoughts and feelings about that negative event through their drawing. The question she sought to answer was whether it is better to express negative feelings through art, or to turn away from those feelings. "We found that in children and adults, drawing to distract improves mood more than drawing to express," she says ( Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts , Vol. 6, No. 3, 2012; Cognition and Emotion , Vol. 27, No. 3, 2013).

Winner’s graduate students say the variety of research topics in the lab illustrates her willingness to dive into almost any subject. "You can come to her with an idea and an hour later you’re writing your institutional review board application," Hogan says. "She’s always eager to find answers to these questions."

And to Winner, the art world offers an abundance of fascinating questions. Exploring the psychology of the arts can tell us a lot about the human experience, she says. "My goal is to bring the psychology of the arts into the mainstream by probing how people think about and respond to art, by studying the effects of arts education on children’s development—and by showing the importance of the arts in people’s lives." 

"Lab Work" illuminates the work of psychologists in research labs.

Further reading

How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration Winner, E., Oxford University Press, 2018

Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education Winner, E., et al.,  Educational Research and Innovation , OECD Publishing, 2013

Essentialist Beliefs in Aesthetic Judgments of Duplicate Artworks Rabb, N., et al., Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts , 2018

Giftedness and Expertise: The Case for Genetic Potential Winner, E., & Drake, J.E.,  Journal of Expertise , 2018

Recommended Reading

Research foci.

The Arts and Mind Lab at Boston College is:

• Investigating philosophical questions about the arts using experimental methods.
• Describing and measuring the habits of mind associated with arts education.
• Exploring the relationship between executive function and insight problem-solving in young children.
• Studying giftedness in the arts.

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Hands-on and Minds-curious Art Learning

July 17, 2015 14 Comments

12 Ways to Integrate Science and Art

My 13 Art and Math Projects for Kids post has been doing pretty well on my site lately, so I decided to keep the art integration going with Science! Check out these awesome ways to teach science using art below.

There are tons of projects out there online that integrate art and science, but the science is mixing a sensory goop. Those are so fun, but I left them out for this collection. I only choose science and art activities that teach specific science concepts as this post is about teaching science using art rather than teaching art using science.

Rainbow Paper | Color Science for Kids by The Science Kiddo

The Art & Science of Leaf Rubbings by Edventures with Kids

Texture rubbing is a staple in the art classroom, and I like how Jacquie incorporated the science of trees with her kids. I know I will definitely be using this activity in my homeschool!

Leaf Relief by Cassie Stephens

While we are talking about leaves, check out this project. It is pretty freaking amazing. It does require a little heavier involvement with the teacher, but the results are so beautiful! This definitely takes leaf printing to the next level.

Exploring Absorption with Watercolors on a Texture Board by Fun at Home with Kids

Art & Science for Kids: Watercolors & Oil by Babble Dabble Do

Sweet Science – The Study Of Seed Crystals Growth (Rock Candy) by Fancy Shanty

Explore Nebulae Through Art by Mosswood Connections

Exploring Sunography: Making Sun Prints by In the Playroom

Flower Petal Fingerpaint by The Chaos and the Clutter

Exploring Sound: Making a Kazoo by Buggy and Buddy

Connecting Art and Science with Hokusai’s The Great Wave by Pragmatic Mom

This is one of my favorite artworks. I’ve always loved it! In this post, Mia at Pragmatic Mom shares some great books and resources about the artwork and also describes how to use this artwork to teach about the science of Tsunamis. I’ve written about this artwork and others like it on my post of Japanese ukiyo-e prints as well as my Japanese prints Montessori-inspired lesson for kids .

Jupiter Art and Science Lesson by Adventures in Mommydom

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Reader Interactions

14 comments.

July 17, 2015 at 6:25 pm

Thanks so much for including my post on The Great Wave by Hokusai!!

July 17, 2015 at 10:19 pm

Of course! And, thank you for linking to mine and for all the tweets! 🙂

January 30, 2023 at 12:59 pm

Hi, I tried getting your freebie worksheets for sometime now and it won’t send me the email for them. [email protected] . I want to introduce this concept to my college class.

February 10, 2023 at 6:12 am

Thank you for letting me know. I just attempted to email you and it bounced back, so the reason you have not received your requested downloads is that your schools firewall is blocking our emails. Do you have a different email you can send the downloads to?

January 4, 2017 at 7:16 pm

If I suscribe, will >I have access to the recorded webinars ??

Many thanks for your help

January 4, 2017 at 7:36 pm

Yes! If you join The Resource Library , you will have access to both the live and recorded webinars.

January 15, 2018 at 6:22 pm

I suggest taking down the nail polish project:

Only one other person back in 2015 brought up the concern about the toxicity of nail polish. As an artist and executive director of an arts education organization, I have given lectures on toxins in art materials. Nail polish is NOT JUST problematic if children eat it – it’s the fumes that are so extremely toxic . The chemicals used in nail polish are neurotoxins – dibutyl phthalate, toluene, and formaldehyde and are called the ”toxic trio.”

Children have something like 32x the metabolism rate as adults. Nail polish is toxic to us, therefore, children absorb it 32 times faster than we do. Never do this project with children at home or in the classroom! Use other methods to teach ROYGBIV projects such as bubbles, prisms or DVDs.

August 7, 2019 at 1:50 pm

There is organic nail polish without such chemicals now….but it is pricier. Agree that nail polish in general is not a classroom-friendly material.

July 10, 2020 at 5:14 am

nice We can also learn

July 12, 2020 at 1:55 am

Thanks for all the lovely ideas you are generating . Loving it all.

December 2, 2020 at 6:12 am

this is so interesting I ve a lot how science meet art , we cannot separate the two

December 8, 2020 at 11:08 am

November 23, 2021 at 3:52 pm

Thank you for providing art lessons connected to science ideas!

November 26, 2021 at 9:38 am

You’re welcome!

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10 Experimental Drawing Processes

For me, this year is going to be all about ‘process’ and this blog post explores 10 experimental drawing processes. What do I mean by that? Rather than concentrating on single media I’m going to think more carefully about creating processes that my students can go through so that they create exciting, experimental work. We can all get into a bit of a rut with our teaching and my rut has been telling students to make sure they worked with pencil, pen, coloured pencil etc, ie single media. It has been more at the development stage of work that they have mixed things up more, but why not introduce this experimentation earlier in the project?

In the UK students aged 15 and above who pursue art at school have to fulfil an assessment objective that includes ‘recording’. This encompasses photography, drawing with all sorts of different media and writing such as annotation. Personally, I get students to do lots of recording before they look at an artist so that they have the freedom to work any way they want (as long as it’s appropriate for the theme they are investigating). Other art teachers may do this in different ways. My students would go on to look at an artist, develop their work further inspired by this artist, then create compositions and a final piece(s).

10 Experimental Drawing Processes for the Art Room

It’s during this recording phase that I want to introduce more exciting, experimental drawing processes.  Here are some ideas:

1. Stick down areas of collage before drawing.  The artwork below shows collage which has then had white and grey paint added to it and then a charcoal drawing with white and yellow highlights added in paint.

[Collage + paint + charcoal drawing + paint highlights]

2. Place down appropriate pieces of collage for what you are going to draw. This is different from above as the collage is more part of the drawing rather than a background. Paint loosely with coffee, draw with coloured pencil.

[Draw with collage + loose coffee painting + detailed pencil]

3. Stretch paper, glue on tissue paper with PVA , let it dry, peel off loose bits, sandpaper off rough bits with fine sandpaper, draw with a pen. [Stretch paper + Distressed tissue background + Draw with pen]  There is a video by artist Ian Murphy which shows this process here .

4. Stick together two pieces of packaging. Use gumstrip and masking tape to stick on the front like collage and then draw.

[Packageing + gumstrip + masking tape + drawing]

5. Ink splat or drip ink on paper, or work wet on wet with ink or watercolour, allow to dry, then draw.

[Ink or watercolour surface + ballpoint pen drawing].

6. Wet watercolour paper or really thick cartridge paper, blot with tissue so damp, draw with Payne’s grey watercolour.  I like to give students a tiny blob from tubed watercolour for this task.  You can see below how the watercolour bleeds into the damp paper.  If the paper is too wet the drawing becomes completely obscured.

[Wet paper + draw with Payne’s grey watercolour and small brush + allow to dry + detail with Payne’s grey watercolour on dry drawing].

You can choose to leave the drawings as above or to paint on more detail like the example below.

The example of a bee below follows the process described above, only white pen has also been added.

7. Stretch paper, wet paper, dab on strong ink or dilute acrylic, lay down cling film (known as seran wrap in the States) which is deliberately creased, allowed to dry and peel off the clingfilm to reveal a beautiful surface. Draw in coloured pencil, pen or charcoal.  The example below used dilute acrylic and charcoal.

[Clingfilm/ink surface + Draw]

8. Print with hessian or old net curtain or doilies, (probably in pale colours) allow to dry, draw on top. (Example coming soon).

9. Create a PowerPoint of images appropriate for the class theme. Give each student pieces of cartridge paper, coloured paper, brown paper, old envelopes et cetera. Give students a variety of media e.g. soft pencil, sharpie, charcoal. Use a timer and put the images on screen and give students three minutes, then two minutes, then one minute to draw the images you display on screen. I had to move the desks in my room to do this. I have done this with students aged 15 and each student drew about 15 drawings in a 50 minute lesson and chose their best 3 to go in their sketchbook. You could ask students to do contour drawings and blind contour drawings.

10. Create a digital line drawing. Create different surfaces (printed, splashed, coffee, collage) print line drawing onto surfaces. Work with different media into prints. E.g. watercolour, Quink ink, stippling.

The example below shows three digital line drawings that have been arranged in a composition.  They have then been printed onto a collage of book paper and coffee-stained paper.

I have tried all these processes above before but I just want to make sure I build in more exciting work like this to my planning. It’s part of my desire to be a ‘reflective practitioner’ and continually improve the way I teach.

Of course, there is still a place for using single media. Nothing beats a well-executed pencil drawing on a clean white page. My planning this year includes a pencil drawing and stippled drawing in pen for homework. As long as I show my students good examples that highlight my high expectations it should be alright for students to complete these tasks at home.

If you have any experimental drawing processes that you guide students through please comment below as I would love to hear about them.

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The Arty Teacher

Sarah Crowther is The Arty Teacher. She is a high school art teacher in the North West of England. She strives to share her enthusiasm for art by providing art teachers around the globe with high-quality resources and by sharing her expertise through this blog.

2 responses to “10 Experimental Drawing Processes”

I love to create and use hand made, unique drawing tools with my students. They collect a variety of materials such as q-tips, plastic netting, natural sticks, cardboard cut and frayed, and other materials that can be attached on the end of a wood tongue depressor to create a homemade tool for mark making. Using these tools and ink they can create stunning animal, landscape, and/or still life drawings. The experimental process is challenging and exciting! Love your blog!

This sounds like a great mark making lesson. It’s so engaging if they have to find their own tools. Thanks for your comment.

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Feeling Artsy? Here's How Making Art Helps Your Brain

Malaka Gharib

Credit: Meredith Rizzo/NPR

A lot of my free time is spent doodling. I'm a journalist on NPR's science desk by day. But all the time in between, I am an artist — specifically, a cartoonist.

I draw in between tasks. I sketch at the coffee shop before work. And I like challenging myself to complete a zine — a little magazine — on my 20-minute bus commute.

I do these things partly because it's fun and entertaining. But I suspect there's something deeper going on. Because when I create, I feel like it clears my head. It helps me make sense of my emotions. And it somehow, it makes me feel calmer and more relaxed.

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This story comes from an episode of Life Kit , NPR's podcast with tools to help you get it together. For more, sign up for the newsletter and follow @NPRLifeKit on Twitter .

Making Art Is Good For Your Health. Here's How To Start A Habit

That made me wonder: What is going on in my brain when I draw? Why does it feel so nice? And how can I get other people — even if they don't consider themselves artists — on the creativity train?

It turns out there's a lot happening in our minds and bodies when we make art.

"Creativity in and of itself is important for remaining healthy, remaining connected to yourself and connected to the world," says Christianne Strang , a professor of neuroscience at the University of Alabama Birmingham and the former president of the American Art Therapy Association .

This idea extends to any type of visual creative expression: drawing, painting, collaging, sculpting clay, writing poetry, cake decorating, knitting, scrapbooking — the sky's the limit.

"Anything that engages your creative mind — the ability to make connections between unrelated things and imagine new ways to communicate — is good for you," says Girija Kaimal . She is a professor at Drexel University and a researcher in art therapy, leading art sessions with members of the military suffering from traumatic brain injury and caregivers of cancer patients.

Shots - Health News

Can poetry keep you young science is still out, but the heart says yes.

But she's a big believer that art is for everybody — and no matter what your skill level, it's something you should try to do on a regular basis. Here's why:

It helps you imagine a more hopeful future

Art's ability to flex our imaginations may be one of the reasons why we've been making art since we were cave-dwellers, says Kaimal. It might serve an evolutionary purpose. She has a theory that art-making helps us navigate problems that might arise in the future. She wrote about this in October in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association .

Her theory builds off of an idea developed in the last few years — that our brain is a predictive machine. The brain uses "information to make predictions about we might do next — and more importantly what we need to do next to survive and thrive," says Kaimal.

When you make art, you're making a series of decisions — what kind of drawing utensil to use, what color, how to translate what you're seeing onto the paper. And ultimately, interpreting the images — figuring out what it means.

Make This: "How To Start An Art Habit" Zine

This zine covers the basics of starting an art habit. Print it out here , and carry its inspiration wherever you go. ( Folding directions courtesy of The Oregonian ).

"So what our brain is doing every day, every moment, consciously and unconsciously, is trying to imagine what is going to come and preparing yourself to face that," she says.

Kaimal has seen this play out at her clinical practice as an art therapist with a student who was severely depressed. "She was despairing. Her grades were really poor and she had a sense of hopelessness," she recalls.

The student took out a piece of paper and colored the whole sheet with thick black marker. Kaimal didn't say anything.

"She looked at that black sheet of paper and stared at it for some time," says Kaimal. "And then she said, 'Wow. That looks really dark and bleak.' "

And then something amazing happened, says Kaimal. The student looked around and grabbed some pink sculpting clay. And she started making ... flowers: "She said, you know what? I think maybe this reminds me of spring."

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Through that session and through creating art, says Kaimal, the student was able to imagine possibilities and see a future beyond the present moment in which she was despairing and depressed.

"This act of imagination is actually an act of survival," she says. "It is preparing us to imagine possibilities and hopefully survive those possibilities."

It activates the reward center of our brain

For a lot of people, making art can be nerve-wracking. What are you going to make? What kind of materials should you use? What if you can't execute it? What if it ... sucks?

Studies show that despite those fears, "engaging in any sort of visual expression results in the reward pathway in the brain being activated," says Kaimal. "Which means that you feel good and it's perceived as a pleasurable experience."

She and a team of researchers discovered this in a 2017 paper published in the journal The Arts in Psychotherapy . They measured blood flow to the brain's reward center, the medial prefrontal cortex, in 26 participants as they completed three art activities: coloring in a mandala, doodling and drawing freely on a blank sheet of paper. And indeed — the researchers found an increase in blood flow to this part of the brain when the participants were making art.

This research suggests making art may have benefit for people dealing with health conditions that activate the reward pathways in the brain, like addictive behaviors, eating disorders or mood disorders, the researchers wrote.

It lowers stress

Although the research in the field of art therapy is emerging, there's evidence that making art can lower stress and anxiety. In a 2016 paper in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association , Kaimal and a group of researchers measured cortisol levels of 39 healthy adults. Cortisol is a hormone that helps the body respond to stress.

Start Fresh: 6 Tips For Emotional Well-Being In 2020

They found that 45 minutes of creating art in a studio setting with an art therapist significant lowered cortisol levels.

The paper also showed that there were no differences in health outcomes between people who identify as experienced artists and people who don't. So that means that no matter your skill level, you'll be able to feel all the good things that come with making art.

It lets you focus deeply

Ultimately, says Kaimal, making art should induce what the scientific community calls "flow" — the wonderful thing that happens when you're in the zone. "It's that sense of losing yourself, losing all awareness. You're so in the moment and fully present that you forget all sense of time and space," she says.

And what's happening in your brain when you're in flow state? "It activates several networks including relaxed reflective state, focused attention to task and sense of pleasure," she says. Kaimal points to a 2018 study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology , which found that flow was characterized by increased theta wave activity in the frontal areas of the brain — and moderate alpha wave activities in the frontal and central areas.

So what kind of art should you try?

Some types of art appear to yield greater health benefits than others.

Kaimal says modeling clay, for example, is wonderful to play around with. "It engages both your hands and many parts of your brain in sensory experiences," she says. "Your sense of touch, your sense of three-dimensional space, sight, maybe a little bit of sound — all of these are engaged in using several parts of yourself for self-expression, and likely to be more beneficial."

A number of studies have shown that coloring inside a shape — specifically a pre-drawn geometric mandala design — is more effective in boosting mood than coloring on a blank paper or even coloring inside a square shape. And one 2012 study published in Journal of the American Art Therapy Association showed that coloring inside a mandala reduces anxiety to a greater degree compared to coloring in a plaid design or a plain sheet of paper.

Strang says there's no one medium or art activity that's "better" than another. "Some days you want to may go home and paint. Other days you might want to sketch," she says. "Do what's most beneficial to you at any given time."

Process your emotions

It's important to note: if you're going through serious mental health distress, you should seek the guidance of a professional art therapist, says Strang.

However, if you're making art to connect with your own creativity, decrease anxiety and hone your coping skills, "by all means, figure out how to allow yourself to do that," she says.

Just let those "lines, shapes and colors translate your emotional experience into something visual," she says. "Use the feelings that you feel in your body, your memories. Because words don't often get it."

Her words made me reflect on all those moments when I reached into my purse for my pen and sketchbook. A lot of the time, I was using my drawings and little musings to communicate how I was feeling. What I was doing was helping myself deal. It was cathartic. And that catharsis gave me a sense of relief.

A few months ago, I got into an argument with someone. On my bus ride to work the next day, I was still stewing over it. In frustration, I pulled out my notebook and wrote out the old adage, "Do not let the world make you hard."

View this post on Instagram left this(very common saying)on the back of the x1 bus going downtown,for anyone A post shared by malaka🥀gharib (@malakagharib)on Jul 10,2019 at 5:54am PDT

I carefully ripped the message off the page and affixed it to the seat in front of me on the bus. I thought, let this be a reminder to anyone who reads it!

I took a photo of the note and posted it to my Instagram. Looking back at the image later that night, I realized who the message was really for. Myself.

Malaka Gharib is a writer and editor on NPR's science desk and the author of I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir .

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For as long as language has existed, people have got creative with it. Almost any expressive language with a rhythm can be thought of as poetry. From early chants, songs, and epic narratives, to contemporary visual and performance poetry, here's a five-beat history.

The hunting songs of African communities and the court-poems of civilizations in the Nile, Volta, and Niger river valleys are considered some of the earliest origins of poetry, according to historians like Ruth Finnegan.

Ancient Sumerian priests probably used early forms of poetry in their hymns. The erotic verse of Sappho, the Greek poet from the island of Lesvos, survives from around 600 BCE.

This carving, known as the Deluge Stone, is from around 2000 BCE, and relates the epic poem of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian hero.

From Gilgamesh to the Epic of Sundiata to Beowulf to Homer and beyond, long stories of wars, journeys, and other heroic endeavours have formed the stuff of poetry for millennia.

Italian poet Dante Alighieri even imagined a fiery descent into the Inferno of hell, a climb up the mountain of Purgatory, then bliss in Paradise. He settled some old scores along the way, placing some of his political enemies in the deep circles of the underworld.

I wandered lonely as a cloud... Many people were taught about Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelley (the Romantic Poets) at school, but the tradition of 'lyric' poetry - short poems with expressive and often romantic subjects - goes back way further.

The word 'lyric' comes from the stringed instrument which accompanied early Greek verse, the 'lyre'. This one's 3000 years old! Lyric poems are what most people think of when they hear the word 'poetry', and include everything from Shakespeare's sonnets to Sanskrit hymns.

From 1900 onwards, poets in many languages began experimenting with abstract forms and innovative language, responding to a more mechanized modern world and the new wonders (and horrors) that came along with it.

From T.S. Eliot's 1922 The Waste Land up to the Beat Poets of 1950s and 60s America, poetry responded to modernity by seeing how far language could be pushed and distorted to communicate new experiences.

Poetry began as a spoken medium, and, today, Slam Poetry is an international phenomenon, bringing the oral, rhythmic traditions back to the fore with a punch.

But poetry on the page thrives, too, with small independent presses to suit any taste, as well as a rich global practice of 'visual poetry' which draws on traditions dating back to ancient China. Today you can read, see, hear, and make poetry anywhere, with anyone.

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Performance Artist Stood Still For 6 Hours to Let People Do What They Wanted to Her Body

Many of us know Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic through the video of her painfully silent reunion with her former lover Frank Uwe “Ulay” Laysiepen.

Many people have hailed Abramovic as the “grandmother of performance art.” After all, she has been staging thought-provoking interactive installations for more than 40 years.

Indeed, it can’t be denied that her performances have a lasting impact. In fact, one of her earliest performances is still being talked about today. Abramovic staged a performance piece called “Rhythm 0” at Studio Morra in Naples, Italy.

At first, only photographers were going near her.

The premise of “Rhythm 0” was deceptively simple: Abramovic would stand still for six hours straight while the people who came to see her were urged to do whatever they wanted to her using one of 72 objects that she had placed on a table.

After a while, people began picking stuff from the table.

Abramovic stood in the middle of the room with a notice board containing these words:

Instructions. There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. Performance. I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility. Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am)

Some people made her sit down so they could humiliate her.

Among the things on the table were “objects of pleasure” and “objects of destruction.” Among the harmless objects were feathers and flowers. The dangerous stuff included a knife, razor blades, and a loaded gun.

There were those who changed her position.

What happened in the next six hours was horrifying, to say the least.

There were people who liked to attach things to her.

Art critic Thomas McEvilley who observed the performance related:

“It began tamely. Someone turned her around. Someone thrust her arms into the air. Someone touched her somewhat intimately.”

One man used a razor to make a cut on her neck.

Then, as McEvilley went on to disclose,

“In the third hour, all her clothes were cut from her with razor blades. In the fourth hour, the same blades began to explore her skin. Various minor sexual assaults were carried out on her body. She was so committed to the piece that she would not have resisted rape or murder.”

It just got worse in the last two hours.

Someone made her point a gun at herself.

Abramovic’s own account of what the people did to her was even more heartbreaking.

She recalled,

“I felt raped, they cut off the clothes, they stuck me with thorns of rose in the stomach, aimed the gun to my head, another came apart.”

What happened next we can only describe as sexual assault.  Sorry, but we’re not going to show pictures of the molestation that happened next.  Suffice to say, this was a bad idea of hers.

When the six hours were over, Abramovic started to walk among the people. They couldn’t even look her in the face.

The violence and sexual harassment escalated.

Abramovic observed that people didn’t want any sort of confrontation with her. They didn’t want to be held accountable or judged for what they did. It seemed as if they wanted to forget how they relished hurting her.

Listen to Marina Abramovic talk about her frightening experience.

Abramovic noted:

“This work reveals something terrible about humanity. It shows how fast a person can hurt you under favorable circumstances. It shows how easy it is to dehumanize a person who does not fight, who does not defend himself. It shows that if he provides the stage, the majority of ‘normal’ people, apparently can become truly violent.”

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High Museum of Art Exhibition Examines Impact of Avant-Garde Photography Movement a Century After Its Inception

September 24, 2024

Exhibition will bring together century-old photographs with contemporary works drawn from the High’s collection “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” Feb. 21-July 13, 2025

ATLANTA, Sept. 24, 2024 — In early 2025, the High Museum of Art will present “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” (Feb. 21-July 13, 2025), an exhibition uniting more than 100 works from the High’s robust photography collection to trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Works will include century-old photographs exemplifying themes from the movement and modern and contemporary images that emphasize the relevance of current artistic and social practices as a response to the technological and cultural changes that occurred in the early 20th century.

“This exhibition provides an opportunity to illuminate photographers’ creativity and innovative practices, all inspired by the progression of the medium in the 1920s and 30s,” said High Museum of Art Director Rand Suffolk. “Many of the works are rarely on view, so it will be an exciting experience for visitors to see them and learn about photographers’ abilities as they reflect reality while experimenting with technique and perspective.”Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterized by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages and compositions that favored extreme angles and unusual viewpoints, and these extended to movements such as surrealism and constructivism.

“Experiments in Seeing” will feature nearly 100 photographers. It will also demonstrate how the New Vision movement revolutionized the medium of photography in the early 20th century in response to the great societal, economic and technological shifts spurred by the upheaval of the two World Wars. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham and Moholy-Nagy will be complemented by a multitude of photographs by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.

The first section of the exhibition will delve into experimental techniques that foreground the light-sensitive aspects of photography, followed by works created through in-camera manipulations or additions to the surfaces of the prints. Subsequent sections will explore inventive methods of capturing unexpected views of the world articulated with radical angles or detailed close-ups. Other works will showcase surreal approaches to subjects such as humanlike forms and bodies, the use of mirrors and doubling, and everyday scenes heightened by uncanny moments or distorted through the interplay of light, shadow and water.

“Not only does the early 20th century and its art movements continue to be influential, but that time also echoes our current moment—one that feels similarly consequential and innovative with the development of new emerging technologies and methods of communicating,” said Maria L. Kelly, the High’s assistant curator of photography. “The movements and happenings of a century ago are akin to those of today and those shown in the exhibition. There remains a desire for alternative ways to see and approach the world through art, and particularly through photography.”

“Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” will be on view in the Lucinda W. Bunnen Galleries for Photography located on the Lower Level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion.

Exhibition Organization and Support “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. This exhibition is made possible by Premier Exhibition Series Sponsor Delta Air Lines, Inc.; Premier Exhibition Series Supporters Mr. Joseph H. Boland, Jr., Harry Norman Realtors, and wish Foundation; Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporters Robin and Hilton Howell; Ambassador Exhibition Series Supporters Loomis Charitable Foundation and Mrs. Harriet H. Warren; and Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters Farideh and Al Azadi, Mary and Neil Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones, Megan and Garrett Langley, Margot and Danny McCaul, Wade A. Rakes II and Nicholas Miller, and Belinda Stanley-Majors and Dwayne Majors; Generous support is also provided by Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund, Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund, Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund, and USI Insurance Services.

About the High Museum of Art Located in the heart of Atlanta, the High Museum of Art connects with audiences from across the Southeast and around the world through its distinguished collection, dynamic schedule of special exhibitions and engaging community-focused programs. Housed within facilities designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Richard Meier and Renzo Piano, the High features a collection of more than 19,000 works of art, including an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American fine and decorative arts; major holdings of photography and folk and self-taught work, especially that of artists from the American South; burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, including paintings, sculpture, new media and design; a growing collection of African art, with work dating from prehistory through the present; and significant holdings of European paintings and works on paper. The High is dedicated to reflecting the diversity of its communities and offering a variety of exhibitions and educational programs that engage visitors with the world of art, the lives of artists and the creative process. For more information about the High, visit www.high.org .

DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Media contacts: Marci Tate Davis Manager of Public Relations 404-733-4585 [email protected]

Brittany Mizell Senior Coordinator, Public Relations 404-733-4423 [email protected]

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