AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Fragment definition art8/27/2023 ![]() ![]() It is the interaction of these as an active system: the process of living and dying, that creates the subject of the work. In other recent pieces (an example would be A Thousand Years (1990) by Damien Hirst), there is little or no artistic sense to each separate fragment – a piece of rotting meat, some flies, an insect lamp, an incubator case. In these examples, each small element has an aesthetic contribution in its own right as well as aggregating to the whole. To take another example: In Jake and Dinos Chapman’s construction Hell (1998), it is the sheer repeated volume of the minutely sculpted imagery that creates a sense of inescapable brutality – leaving the viewer unsure how to deal with it all. Her more colourful line paintings have an intended dazzling optical effect that relies on each individual line not only having its own effects but on a perceived colour-sense (itself drawing on colour theory) whereby each coloured stripe influences the perception of the stripes on either side of it, across the whole surface. In a similar way, in Briget Riley’s painting Hesitate (1964), it is the regular arrangement of around 400 not-quite-monotone circles/ellipses that create the illusion of an undulating surface. Other works of his are similarly made up of repeated units creating a geometric whole. There are many more works that use fragments of a whole to depict a wider image eg the atomising effect of the machine age in Christopher Nevinson’s war painting Column on the March (1915) with its mechanised men moving as a splintered unit or repeated items eg Warhol’s soup cans or Brillo boxes, to reflect 1950s growth in consumerism, commercialisation and popular culture or the repeated use of his own bodyform in the ongoing work of Anthony Gormley.Ĭarl Andre’s (at the time, controversial) Equivalent VIII (1966) owes its rectangular whole to a particular arrangement of 120 low-stacked firebricks. ![]() The fragmented flow of the girl, each part itself fragmented, adds to an overall sense of running. Taking this further, Giacomo Balla’s Girl Running on a Balcony (1912) not only has the repeated figure moving across the surface, but each figure is created – mosaic-like – from a few hundred small, coloured squares. An example might be Natalia Goncharova The Cyclist (1913). ![]() The artist’s intent, however, was less about depicting motion for its own sake as about decomposing the figure.įragmentation recurs as a device in the Futurists’ images, this time used to indicate speed. In Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No 2 (1912), each figure exists in its own right but it is the flowing overlap of multiple images, against the staircase background, that gives the overall dynamism to the work. Depicting natural forms began to give way to a degree of abstraction and fragmentation of form. It was around the end of the C19th, however, that so many scientific and industrial inventions were infusing society that artists sought new ways of responding through aesthetic processes of flux, of fracture and of fragmentation instead of the traditional focus on unity and wholeness. Hogarth’s Gin Lane (1715),contains a number of pictorial sections that could stand as cameos in their own right, but it is the compression of several of these into one image that creates a wider trenchant critique of society at the time. In some works, the build-up of fragments is more overt. In Nighthawks (1942), by Edward Hopper, each figure is significant within the overall composition the focus is enhanced by the portrayal of fluorescent light indoors against the dull shadowy outside all of which, together with the relative emptiness of much of the canvas, combine to give the piece its signature bleak sense of urban isolation. A number of art works will be considered, via this perspective of fragments and wholes. These are artist decisions and skills brought variously into play as the work progresses. The finished whole is determined by issues of composition, colour, emphasis, flow, light and shadow, perspective, and so on. Making any artwork involves issues of relationships of various parts to the final object.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |