BODY Exhibition

Innovative

Innovating literally means 'introducing something new'. But it also means 'to make changes in all that is established'. That is the historical meaning of the root of the word: "to renew, to change." Innovation does not necessarily mean something new. It means doing something unfamiliar, often with old familiar things.

Avant-garde

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 on artists to be at the forefront of the utopian to serve socialist revolution: We artists will serve as your vanguard; indeed, the power of the arts is most direct and swiftest. We possess all kinds of weapons: if we want to spread new ideas among the people, we write them on marble or on a canvas; we popularize them by poetry and by song; we alternately use the lyre and the flute, the ode and the song, the story and the novel; the dramatic stage is spread before us, and there we exert a stimulating and triumphant influence. We address the imagination of man and his feelings. We must therefore always take the most lively and decisive action.

As Matei Calinescu points out in Five Faces of Modernity (1987), “In the mid-nineteenth century, the metaphor of the avant-garde was used by social utopians, reformers of all kinds, and radical journalists, but hardly used, as far as I know, by literary or artistic figures .”

By the time of (and in part thanks to) Manet and his fellow Impressionists, "avant-garde" had come to mean a group of artists whose work was initially rejected by authority but eventually accepted by society.

The experimental

Jakobson defined the dominant as “the focus component of an artwork: it governs, determines and transforms the other components. It is the dominant that guarantees the integrity of the structure”. In other words, the dominant is that artistic element that the artist values above all others: John Cage and his colleagues took accidental techniques as their dominant. The Oulipians work under arbitrary and often severe restrictions.

The language poets resist the narrative pressure by emphasizing parataxis. And so forth. All other aspects then bow to the dominant component. Experimental artists often claim that they are breaking with the past. The experimental artist wants her artwork to be different from all the other artworks around her. She wants her results to be unusual, unfamiliar to the point of looking idiosyncratic, mind-boggling. Maybe she draws from conventions, maybe she works within one or more traditions. But its conventions and traditions are not dominant; they may be older, or unpopular. Or maybe she imports ideas and conventions from one medium to another, where they are not well known.

My personal approach

Because I wanted to do experiments around the moon, I first also researched it, and suddenly I came across very interesting topics. The following story in particular appealed to me the most.

The moon keeps moving away, about 4 centimetres per year. This experiment revolves around the subject of the moon reaching the Roche limit. This means that the gravitational pull holding the moon together is weaker than the tidal forces working to pull it apart. When this limit is reached, the moon will be torn to pieces, forming a ring of debris above Earth's equator, which is expected to rain onto Earth's surface. The experiment was an attempt to visualize the process of tearing and destroying the moon, ending its existence as it began; like a ring of earth-encircling debris.

As the title of the experiment I have chosen ”Moon decay” / “Lunar decay”.

The visual representation is the attempt to bring together everything I learned during this period. This is a physical representation of what I thought about the moon as it parted, and what it might look like. I wanted this work not to be too heavy, so I used cardboard paper to give it a three dimensional look and feel.

The video Ava produced about this group exhibition.