Exploration of Expressionist Expression in Avant-Garde Multimedia Art in Contemporary Art Creation

Abstract

Expressionism, as an aesthetic logic privileging the externalisation of inner emotional states over the mimetic representation of external reality, has undergone a significant transformation in contemporary art, migrating from its historical origins in early twentieth-century German painting to become a transhistorical principle animating avant-garde multimedia practices in installation art, video art, performance and digital immersion. The argument of this paper is that the fusion of expressionist logic and multimedia intermediality is one of the defining aesthetic formations of contemporary avant-garde art production, allowing artists to simultaneously engage many sensory registers in the interests of emotive intensity. The paper draws on Worringer’s theory of the abstraction impulse, Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde, Foster’s return-of-the-real model, Higgins’s intermedia concept, and Massumi’s affect theory to examine three case studies—Bill Viola’s transcendental video art, Anselm Kiefer’s neo-expressionist multimedia installations, and teamLab’s immersive digital environments—as paradigmatic examples of this aesthetic formation, elucidating the particular modalities by which multimedia intermediality amplifies and enriches expressionist expression in contemporary artistic practice.