Absurd: Fission And Performance Of Modern Western Painting

"Absurdity" is to explain the illogical and unreasonable aspects of things. In the sense of aesthetics, absurdity, as a non-natural narrative means, transcends elegance and grandeur, beauty and ugliness. It's a presentation of inharmony and irrationality; it's a revelation of the individualized psyche.Absurdity used to be found in the paintings with religion as the theme, esp. in Christian art after Middle Ages. In those works, absurdity, as a symbolic means of artistic expression, manifests the legends and fancy vision in the Bible. As the purpose of Christianity is to rule people's mind and spirit, so there is little expression of personal and subjective ideas in those works. After the Renaissance, with the rise of humanist thoughts, religion works are no longer bond by religious ideas. Instead, the artists turned to depict traditional morals and value judgment.Strictly speaking, absurdity, as an ideology and means of expression, comes forth in the modern times. It's a product of special history situation in the 20th century. It's also an inevitable consequence of painting self-development. The social turbulence and two world wars made people realize the absurdity of existence itself. Artists depict loss of humanity and the cruelty of war by means of absurdity. The absurdity of life leads to absurdity of mind, and modern philosophy and psychology, as the new modern idea, stress irrationality and sub-consciousness. With this as the base of creation, the artists began to experiment with language and means. Their works embodied an antinomy of rationality and irrationality, consciousness and sub-consciousness, which is a mixing of the artists' inner illusions and outer world experiences.Artists unpuzzle the world by visionary absurdity, -symbols and fancy imagination. I. Abnormal shape design helps artists create some indication of absurdity both in vision and subject matter by distortion technique. II. Absurd reconstruction of everyday subjects is to form an illusionary combination of everyday subjects in seemingly random way. III. Absurd expression of spatial illusion is the embodiment of absurd combination of subjects in visual space and that of oppositionand mixing of real space and illusionary space. IV. Illogical absurd construction reflects the deconstruction of the artist's reasonable structure, and the absurdity lies in the fact that illogical painting expresses the artist's ideas by seemingly logical and unscramble indications. V. Random borrowing of the classic paintings brings about a conflict between the works and the appreciator's traditional value expectation to produce absurdity feeling.As an ideology and means of expression, absurdity is not only a vision liberation but rather a liberation of ideology, which leads the ideology and expression to extreme. More important, absurdity itself is an ideology. It brings art out of painting and into ideology, and hence broadens the range of art. First, artists have developed the chance factors of absurdity reconstruction, changed traditional medium of art works into general earthly subjects, and the space is widened to form construction by putting together real things. Secondly, study of sub-consciousness of absurdity painting makes the artists look down on the realization of creation and turns to focus on spiritual experience and the value of body movement, which leads art to purely chance behavior.Those artists haven't outgrown their ancestors in probing the artistic consciousness, but they transferred the problems that absurdity painting studies to modern program and are advancing on the road of developing rules of art and making art connect with life.