Contemporary Art: a mirror or a hammer?

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it."
— Bertolt Brecht, playwright and poet

More than documenting human experience, Brecht suggests contemporary art can shape the social, political, and cultural issues of the day. Bringing together a range of global perspectives on these issues, the new Contemporary Art collection on Bloomsbury Visual Arts hub covers a broad array of themes such as disability and art, hip-hop graffiti as art, and the relationship between creativity, ecological crisis, and political change.

Dive into key areas of study within contemporary art with this selection of free-to-view content, including art and technology, the post-modern era, and contemporary art and disability.

Technology and contemporary Art

Mass-circulated imagery exploded in volume during the 20th Century through technology and new forms of communication. Melissa Gronlund’s chapter on reproducibility and appropriation explores how a set of political and social associations have been built up around the digital image – and how these assumptions form the terms of contemporary critical artwork responding to digital technologies in the post-internet age.

In Art Of The Postmodern Era: From The Late 1960s To The Early 1990s, Irving Sandler’s chapter Media Art explores the implications of this new kind of representation in the lead up to the digital revolution, through exhibition titled ‘Pictures’, curated by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in 1977. Today the accelerated development of Artificial Intelligence causes art and technology to intersect in new ways. These perspectives, informed by technological innovations of the past, become essential for the future.

Contemporary Art in the postmodern era

Contemporary art is no stranger to controversy. In The Incompatibility of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, Kieran Cashell asserts that transgressive practices have expanded the horizon of artistic expression, arguing that this approach endures as an important aesthetic force in post-twentieth-century culture.

Is it the role of an artist to confront or bear witness to contemporary issue? Anna Pigott, Owain Jones and Ben Parry, in Art and Creativity in an Era of Ecocide: Embodiment, Performance and Practice, explores this question among others in the context of ecocide. A rising numbers of artists, designers and creative practitioners have sought to adopt the climate crisis into their work. Others have joined social movements and participate in activist networks, putting creativity in service of climate justice through more urgent and radical means.

For more on how historical and contemporary artworks address environmental crises, read Artistic Visions of the Anthropocene North by Gry Hedin and Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud, which explores depictions of Nordic landscapes from 1780 to today in the planetary context.

Contemporary Art and disability

In Contemporary Art and Disability Studies, Amanda Cachia looks at how the work of select contemporary artists transcends damaging stereotypes, challenging ableist tropes through their art – for example, the prosthesis as a transformative and complex embodiment in the hands of both non-disabled and disabled artists.

For more on the evolution of disability studies over the past few decades and for nuanced, critical attention in this subject area, read Alice Wexler and John Derby’s chapter from Contemporary Art and Disability Studies, which introduces an in-depth understanding of disability through an interdisciplinary approach to disability, art, and visual culture.

Content linked to in this blog will be free for a month after the post date.

For full access to the new Contemporary Art collection on the Bloomsbury Visual Arts hub, visit our Librarians page for information on trials and purchasing.

Image credits: Charlie J Ercilla