Tradition can be broken
...to challenge audience perceptions. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, five naked prostitutes stand in a brothel. The shattered composition is dull in colour and the figures have a heavy, flat, geometric quality. Picasso drew inspiration for the mask-like faces from the primitive sculpture of Africa, which had lately been discovered and admired by society. Marcel Duchamp redefined art as something that was not aesthetic, but thought provoking. In response to the pointless destruction and the mass slaughter of WWI, a group of artists formed the Dada movement in Zurich 1916. He was born in France and came from a cultured family, who acted as a springboard for Duchamp to develop ideas. He invented a new form of art “ready-mades” which consisted of found, everyday objects and called them art. Such works included Fountain, an upturned urinal, Bicycle Wheel, a wheel perched on top of a stool, still able to spin and a shovel propped against a wall entitled In advance of a broken arm. Through the ready-mades, Duchamp argued that “…much of the avant-garde art being produced…was in fact rubbish, of less significance…than many everyday objects.”Duchamp challenged his audience’s perceptions through his break in tradition through his own works, but also challenged their perceptions in regards to works already made, embedded in tradition. Xu Bing uses his works as a means of undermining traditional, pre-conceived ideas of language and culture. It is through the content of his artworks that he breaks tradition. Language is part of culture and is seen as a traditional communicative tool. Bing do...