During the 1960s and 1970s the western world experienced a major cultural change. It is usually described as a move from Modernism to Post-modernism. So what do we mean by Modernism and Post-modernism and what do we mean by a discipline? Such words have been described in many ways, so we can check out the descriptions of these and other words in the 1993 edition of The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED).
Abstraction and abstract art
Abstraction: ‘the act of taking away’. Abstract art: ‘art free representational qualities’. Here we need to make a distinction. On the one hand there is art that abstracts from nature but retains features of nature or objects; on the other hand there is abstraction that makes no use of natural objects, i.e. non-figural abstraction.
Art
From Latin ‘ars, artis’, from a root meaning ‘put together, join, fit’, ‘skill as the result of knowledge and practice’.
Aristotle wrote in his Ethics:
‘Art is nothing more than a productive quality exercised in combination with true reason. The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself. This condition must be present, besause the arts are not concerned with things that come into existence from necessity or according to nature’.
We can observe art ‘in the special sense’ described by SOED as follows:
‘The application of skill according to aesthetic principles, especially in the production of visible works of imagination, imitation or design (paintings, sculpture, architecture, etc.); skilful execution of workmanship as an object in itself; the cultivation of the production of aesthetic objects in its principles, practices and results.’
Avant-garde
‘The pioneering of innovative writers, artists, etc. in a particular period’ (SOED). It originally meant the vanguard of an army and did not emerge in its present form until the early 20th century.
Contemporary
The word ‘contemporary’ is derived ultimately from medieval Latin: contemporarius, which, in its turn, derives from classical Latin contemporaneous; ‘belonging to the same time, existing together in time, belonging to the same period’. These meanings both emerged in English in the 17th century and remain in current use today.