The Introduction Of Mixed Media Art

By Clara Berta


Everything we know today as mixed media art started in the early twentieth century, when artists in search of an alternative to what they saw as hidebound academicism started including objects as well as images that were not regarded as art elements in their works. Samples of daily materials being a part of ceremonial or aesthetic objects can be found dating back to prehistory, but these were made with different motives, and provided a very different social purpose than the items known as "art."

In 1912, Picasso included a piece of chair caning into 1 of his works. While this act seems tame nowadays, it was quite radical at that time, when the idea of art needed a removal from the everyday world. By linking the partition between paint and reality, Picasso helped to bring on a time of revolutionary change in art, when rules were thrown out and materials of all kinds began to be seen as capable of becoming art. Five years later, in the year 1917, Marcel Duchamp displayed a urinal in an art show. Regardless of whether he was attempting to make the point that everything is art, or that nothing is art, has been the topic of debate ever since. Duchamp's uncovering of the "readymade," as he named the urinal as well as other things that he chose, removed the line between art and life even more completely than Picasso had accomplished.

In the 1920s, people of the Dada movement incorporated newspapers, detritus off the street, as well as pieces of wood, dressmakers' dummies and many other things in their artwork. Although Dada was a self-proclaimed anti-art movement, their continuation of Picasso's and Duchamp's usage of "non-art" objects within an artistic context served to encourage the development of mixed-media art, inducing the continuation, rather than the destruction, of art.

In the 1950s, Arman became really successful as an artist mainly by putting together large numbers of things in one particular place. His signature style was a collection of objects like wrenches, cutlery or shoes contained in a plexiglass box. Many have viewed his art as either a condemnation or a celebration of mass usage, the real beauty of it being that it could be either. In the 1960s, Jean Tinguely built sculptures out of bits of steel and other metals, found objects and gears. The unique characteristic of Tinguely's works of art was that they were animated and self-destroying. When Tinguely had completed a work, he would arrange a performance to which many individuals would come and watch his chaotic creations break themselves into oblivion.

Mixed media art is any form of art that combines two or more mediums in a single work. Assemblages and collages are varieties of mixed media which have been widely used in the twenty-first century. The combination of painting media such as oil, acrylic and watercolour in a single work has become a popular practice among artists. The combination of various drawing media, along with the mixture of drawing with media like painting, is yet another common form of mixed media art. The combination of printmaking techniques, like lithography and woodcuts, has a long history, and advancements in technology have motivated printmakers to experiment with mixing conventional techniques with digital printing as well as photography.




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