Neo-Dada
In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. He professed his intent that people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "readymades". Fountain was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, the exhibition of which shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art, other famous examples being John Cage's 4'33", which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning. Many conceptual works take the position that art is the result of the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not of the intrinsic qualities of the work itself. Thus, because Fountain was exhibited, it was a sculpture.
Marcel Duchamp famously gave up "art" in favor of chess. Avant-garde composer David Tudor created a piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross, that features a chess game in which each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. Duchamp and Cage played the game at the work's premier.
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner identify Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as part of the transitional phase, influenced by Marcel Duchamp, between modernism and postmodernism. Both used images of ordinary objects, or the objects themselves, in their work, while retaining the abstraction and painterly gestures of high modernism.
Another trend in art associated with neo-Dada is the use of a number of different media together. Intermedia, a term coined by Dick Higgins and meant to convey new art forms along the lines of Fluxus, concrete poetry, found objects, performance art, and computer art. Higgins was publisher of the Something Else Press, a concrete poet, husband of artist Alison Knowles and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp.
Read more about this topic: Modernism, After World War II (mainly The Visual and Performing Arts), Minimalism