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By their nature, fragments indicate the existence of some previously complete entity. Be they the broken remains of a classical Greek sculpture or stanzas from a lost poem, fragments inspire contemplation of the passage of time and thereby induce memory and nostalgia. During the 19th century, museums began collecting relics and ruins from other eras, their value increasing in direct proportion to their age. Decontextualized and displayed in this somewhat obsessive manner, vestiges of previous cultures became highly romantic emblems of the past. Charles Baudelaire located the spirit of modernity in such poeticized artifacts, recognizing that at every historical juncture there exists a fleeting consciousness of the present. By “modernity” he referred to “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” Toward the fin-de-siècle, artists embraced the fragmentary as a formal strategy with which to capture the transitory moment. Impressionist paintings often suggest a study or an unfinished sketch, as do Auguste Rodin’s abbreviated anatomical sculptures, which appear as if in eternal formation.
Such aesthetic fragmentation of perceived experience reflected the vast economic, social, and cultural disruptions of society initiated toward the end of the 19th century with the advent of industrialization. In Marxist terms, this phenomenon inaugurated a radical disjunction between labor and its products. In the psychological realm, the notion of subjective reality as a seamless construct was suspended when Sigmund Freud construed the human psyche as a tripartite, and not necessarily integrated, entity. The art created during the first part of the 20th century—the splintered planes of Cubist and Futurist art, the disjointed figures in German Expressionist painting, and the strange juxtapositions found in Surrealist imagery—may be read as visual analogues to the social and psychic fragmentation of reality. Those artists involved with Dada [more], Pop, Nouveau Réalisme, Neo-Dada [more], and Neo-Conceptual strategies have increasingly utilized the flotsam of everyday existence by drawing formal elements and subject matter from mass culture, often emulating cinematic montage and advertising techniques. As a critical mirror to our society and its representations—mediated imagery, movie trailers, MTV, and the World Wide Web—contemporary art has embraced the fragment as an end in itself.
NANCY SPECTOR
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See Robert Delaunay,
Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part)
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