I encourage you to create your own as a way of breaking though cliché:

 

Superfictions: A creative work that exists in the gap between installation/performance art and literary/pulp fiction. In its extreme form it could be said to link creativity with any two or more forms of (mostly) human activity. See CLUE 1

 

Adventurism: An artwork that involves travel across oceans and continents, or perhaps across the internet, social media, or the imagination. See CLUE 2. Danger and chance may be elements in this. This differs from classic performance art which often relies on a strict list of rules for performer or subject (see Marina Abramovic). By contrast, Martin Kippenberger would, for example, deliberately get himself into a fight in a bar on a Pacific island – not knowing what the result would be – death, imprisonment, flight…Or your adventure may happen in your own room or studio see: A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre,

(1794/1871).

 

Synthetic Modernism: In the early 1980s I became dissatisfied by the way the terms Modernism and Post-Modernism were set up as a traditional binary opposition (like two football teams competing against each other). I wondered if there was a middle, more inclusive, route where the grey areas of both tendencies overlapped positively, through synthesis. I looked at the way Synthetic Cubism was a synthesis of Analytical Cubism with the whole history of Western and Non-Western Art. I took inspiration from the triad of  Johann Fichte’s “thesis”, “antithesis”, and “synthesis” (1795) that grew out of Hegel’s “concrete, abstract, absolute.”

 

Heroic Amateurism: Reflect on the art world – perhaps on a long walk or when swimming laps. What are you curious about? Do you notice some kind of tendency but realise there is no name for it? Try giving it a name. Or more than one name – perhaps one academic name and the other popular (in my own case “fictive realism” (academic) versus “superfictions” (popular). In the early 1980s, I noticed there were many neo-expressionist painters emerging on the international scene who had switched from being conceptual artists, performance artists, or abstract painters and were now firm followers of what Achille Bonito Oliva called the Trans-avantgardia. These artists included Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Sandro Chia, Jorg Immendorff, Steven Campbell, and Komar and Melamid. Sadly it was a very male (but not exclusively so) period style. I described Heroic Amateurs as “entering a new discipline with huge ambition and energy, and risking falling flat on their face.”

What is your own, personal, viewpoint on art and art writing in 2020 and beyond?

 

Additive artworks: Others have used this term. I use it to describe the way my projects grow out of the preceding ones. I guess this is the antithesis of “the reductive” in art. The Canadian group General Idea also spoke of their works as being “additive”.

 

Logical Extremism: This, for me, is the tendency of artists to take elements of their work to “the logical extreme.” One can see aspects of nudity, sexuality, and fetish expanding over years, decades, and centuries towards outer limits, or no limits. Politics, gender, screen violence, and time-fragmentation issues can be seen to advance and retreat in similar fashion.

 

Advancing through failure: I am a big believer (and practitioner) of this. But Samuel Beckett put it much better than I ever could when he advised, “Try again, fail again, fail better.”

Aesthetic Vandalism: This is a term I coined to cover the long-term aesthetic of artists fully or partially destroying or damaging their own artworks as an integral part of the creative process (destructive process?). Michael Landy’s work Breakdown where he destroyed all of his possessions including passport, albums, and clothing; Yves Tinguely’s auto-destructive sculptures (which Michael Landy based a series of monumental prints on); Joan Miro’s burnt canvases (exhibited at Tate Modern a decade ago and suspended from the ceiling so you could see through the burnt holes). This was an anti-Franco, anti-Fascist statement. Ai Weiwei dropping and smashing a Han Dynasty Urn (1995); Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases. Some of my inspiration for this came from studying Asgor Jorn’s invention of The Institute of Comparative Vandalism (Jorn was a member of the COBRA movement whose name came from the capital cities of all its members (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). Later, he was a Situationist. Two of my own fictional artists – Hal Jones and Herb Sherman – are proponents of Aesthetic Vandalism.