Experimental art

• An imprecise term applied to art that is concerned with exploring new ideas and/or technology. It is sometimes used virtually synonymously with ‘avant-garde', but ‘experimental’ usually suggests a more explicit desire to extend the boundaries of the art in terms of materials or techniques, whereas ‘avant-garde’ can include novel ideas expressed through traditional means. John A. Walker (Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design Since 1945, 1973, 3rd edn., 1992) writes that ‘it is a word with both positive and negative connotations: it is used to praise and condemn. Those writers for whom it is a term of praise often mean by it an empirical practice in which the artist plays with his materials and adopts chance procedures in the expectation that something of value will result … Those writers for whom “experimental” is a pejorative description mean by it “a trial run”, “not the finished work”, “something transitional”.’ Walker points out that in E. H. Gombrich's celebrated book The Story of Art, first published in 1950, the whole of 20th-century art was originally embraced in a chapter called ‘Experimental Art'