Abstract

This article presents the international movement New Tendencies as one of the first large scale international art movements that made artist-led research a core concern. New Tendencies adopted ideas and methods from Gestalt psychology, a holistic, experimental form of psychological research, and combined it with the idea of liberating the viewer from alienation. This paper will primarily focus on the first phase of New Tendencies, from 1961 to 1963, when the movement developed its new aesthetics and poetics. The viewer was made a participant in the work by creating a relational field between work and viewer, whereby visual research was meant to replace the notion of art. This happened in the social context of the time, characterised by rapid modernisation processes in industry summarised by the term “automation”, and by a cultural Cold War in which art was exploited by both East and West.