Simulation and seduction : towards a new grammar on stage and in life

Abstract

What will characterise the artist of the 21st century? For some, the characteristic quality of an artist lies in his ability to produce an exact representation of life. For others, the real artist is the social rebel who creates a reality apart from the norm. From Ancient Greek times debates have arisen over who or what makes an artist but in many cases they have fallen to the level of 'recipes': a step by step guide to the right artistic form or style. The 'original' artist is the one who, with his own original style, frees himself from the pre established and set conventions of art. Ironically, the more successful this artist, the more unsuccessful is his cause as his work becomes a role model for later imitation therefore reinforcing the existence of a ready-made artistic code. In the visual arts of the 20th century, Cubism rejected the exact representation of life by revolutionizing the use of colour, light and space. The subject is fragmented, various angles shown simultaneously, and the spectator is invited to perceive the subject in unusual ways. An example of this is Alexander Archipenko's Walking (1912), a bronze sculpture of a woman walking where the image is found not in the bronze itself but in the empty spaces. The Dadaist movement reflected the rising awareness that aesthetic beauty in art was being created by the same dominant classes that had produced chemical warfare thereby destroying all beauty in life. The Dadaists highlighted this paradox by creating 'meaningless' or 'ugly' art such as Duchamp's urinal (1917), a closer reflection, they thought, to reality.