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In the early 20th century, many artists increasingly began incorporating everyday objects into their paintings and sculptures, blurring the lines between art and life. Ranging across styles, avant-garde artists created three-dimensional, mixed-media assemblages that questioned the very definition of art as it had come to be known. Using mass-produced objects and junk, artists like Marcel Duchamp often made satirical and biting critiques of modern, commercial culture. In the 1950s, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Assemblage for this hybrid art form, and while other artists used terms like Combines or Accumulations, the trend took off in the second half of the 20th century.
Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Arman, and Martha Rosler pushed the boundaries of Assemblage into the realm of Installation and Performance, creating immersive environments and experiential events. More contemporary artists such as David Hammons and Tracy Emin engage Assemblage techniques to create works that confront viewers in challenging ways.
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From the Parthenon frieze and the Easter Island maoi to the Chinese Terracotta Warriors and the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf, sculpture is a medium as diverse as it is ancient. Traditionally worked in natural materials like stone, clay, and metal, sculpture encompasses both free-standing works “in-the-round” and reliefs, often serving as architectural elements. Sharing the viewer’s space more literally than any other medium, sculpture has given rise to some of the most iconic works in art history, including the classical Greek Venus de Milo (c. 130-100 B.C.), Michelangelo’s High Renaissance David (1504), Rodin’s The Thinker (1902), and Constantin Brancusi’s The Kiss (1908). The 20th century saw the explosion of traditional sculpture, wherein virtually any material—like John Chamberlain’s car parts or Marcel Duchamp’s readymades—could be used, as well as the rise of such diverse movements as kinetic sculpture, sound sculpture, environmental art, and Minimalist sculpture.
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A genre of art-making in which the artwork is the artist performing—usually live but often in a film or video. Performances started occurring in art contexts—galleries, artists studios, museums—in the 1960s, with the rise of Happenings and Fluxus. In the '60s and '70s, artists such as Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, and Yoko Ono explored the possibilities of performance particularly in works which focused on the body (and often the abuse of it). The rise of performance was directly linked to the rise of Conceptual Art and Process Art in the late 1960s: Conceptual Art privileged an object-less art, while Process Art foregrounded the act of making a work over the final piece.
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