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astroneatly's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
4.0
The neo-dada movement of the 1950s propelled art in 2 bisecting directions… between Pop and Minimalism, and while Art Since 1960 “The repetitions of daily life, the proliferation of consumer goods,” came to the fore as Warhol, with his paint-by-numbers and the rise of avant-garde and post-modernist. It became a question about the nature of art. Unfortunately, painting was never highly appraised as an art form during this time, until the post-modernist period, that is, when a return to painting ensued, and the concept of ‘the loss of originality’ was the maxim, a copy of a copy of a…
“The unease felt by some at this behaviour led to charges that postmodernism was, simply, devoid of any sense of history, that its products were cynically cobbled together from element seized because of their superficial visual appeal and that it was therefore itself only an art of surface, lacking substance.”
As I was reading this book I was thinking about how art has carried over from the emergence of social media… looking at all of these installations, and multimedia, how do they translate over to this brave new dimension? Through memes, video footage, anyway it can be done to get its point across. Prior to Warhol’s death in 1987, Andreas Serrano’s Piss Christ [1987] and that of Robert Mapplethorpe had outraged members of the Senate for being financed ‘with the assistance of public funds’, Ultimately the question pertinent to Art was how the artwork functions politically. The 70s saw the impact of feminism, when a male dominated art world finally emerged the breaking apart of it’s patriarchal conventions. Giving rise to great names as Rebecca Horn, Sidney Sherman, Susan Hiller, et al. All of whom would challenge the nature of identity, and the feminist appropriation of automatic writing, since ‘words don’t explain images - they exist in parallel universes.’
“Sculpture must always obstinately question the basic premises of the prevailing culture. This is the function of all art, which society is always trying to suppress… Art alone makes life possible- this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art 👨 is inconceivable in physiological terms.” -Joseph Beuys
“The unease felt by some at this behaviour led to charges that postmodernism was, simply, devoid of any sense of history, that its products were cynically cobbled together from element seized because of their superficial visual appeal and that it was therefore itself only an art of surface, lacking substance.”
As I was reading this book I was thinking about how art has carried over from the emergence of social media… looking at all of these installations, and multimedia, how do they translate over to this brave new dimension? Through memes, video footage, anyway it can be done to get its point across. Prior to Warhol’s death in 1987, Andreas Serrano’s Piss Christ [1987] and that of Robert Mapplethorpe had outraged members of the Senate for being financed ‘with the assistance of public funds’, Ultimately the question pertinent to Art was how the artwork functions politically. The 70s saw the impact of feminism, when a male dominated art world finally emerged the breaking apart of it’s patriarchal conventions. Giving rise to great names as Rebecca Horn, Sidney Sherman, Susan Hiller, et al. All of whom would challenge the nature of identity, and the feminist appropriation of automatic writing, since ‘words don’t explain images - they exist in parallel universes.’
“Sculpture must always obstinately question the basic premises of the prevailing culture. This is the function of all art, which society is always trying to suppress… Art alone makes life possible- this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art 👨 is inconceivable in physiological terms.” -Joseph Beuys
gaybf's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
3.0
reason behind rating is mostly long lists of artists related to certain topics and inadequate descriptions of artworks, even ones i was familiar with!
If what went on behind the Iron Curtain, that postwar political reality made concrete by the Berlin Wall in 1961, was Socialist Realism, there were strong grounds for describing Pop as Capitalist Realism. This label was used in association with the exhibitions organized by Rene Block in his Berlin gallery in the mid-1960s. (also by Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg/Fischer in their show "A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism," occupying a room tableau in a furniture store)
Situationism had a strong political figurehead in Guy Debord, but art practice featured largely in its original manifestos through the Neo-Dada input of the Danish painter Asger Jorn. Vostell's Fluxus 'actions,' and those of Joseph Beuys who met in 1963, very often had explicit political content. Later, (Wolf) Vostell would want to contribute to a Documenta by placing a US F-III, an abiding symbol of the political realities of his divided country, on the roof of the main exhibition building in Kassel, a project that remained unfulfilled. His actions remained simple in conception and forthright in intent: 'I want to find out whether rules for types of behaviour in daily life can be obtained from actions with a model character, whether impulses emanating from me can be applied in everyday life to counter intolerance, stupidity and oppression.'
(Critic Barbara Rose) wrote that 'both Duchamp's and Malevich's decisions were renunciation--on Duchamp's part, of the notion of the uniqueness of the art object and its differentiation from common objects, and on Malevich's part, a renunciation of the notion that art must be complete.' Judd wrote in 'Specific Objects,' that much art then being made could no longer be described as either painting or sculpture. He termed it instead 'three-dimensional work.'
Asked by the critic Bruce Glaser why he wanted to avoid compositional effects, Judd replied: 'Well, those effects tend to carry with them all the structure, values, feelings of the whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that's all down the drain. ....The qualities of European art so far [are] innumerable and complex, but the main way of saying it is that they're linked up with a philosophy--rationalism.'
(Dan Flavin) Several of the works of the mid-1960s have the generic title 'Monument for V. Tatlin,' and in 1966 he made the first of his installations set at an angle across the corner of a room. The effect of this to remodel the space by making the corner 'disappear.' The artist Mel Bochner wrote of Flavin exhibiting an 'acute awareness of the phenomenology of rooms. ...[His] demolished corners convert the simple fact of roomness into operative factors.'
When Warhol was asked, 'Why did you start painting soup cans?', he replied, 'Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again. (the "pulse of repetition" pop artists like he , judd, and carl andre were anxious to deal with)
(Carl Andre's) '37 Pieces of Work' (1969) which brought 36 separate works together to make a 37th in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum. In order that they be experienced in full, the spectator was invited to talk on these 'plains.' The literal feel of the work, the particular density of the metal, its sound and its resistance to the tread, are all part of what it can give to the 'spectator.' Yet again Duchamp is called to mind for his strictures against a visual art that was purely 'retinal.'
In a way which seems akin to Judd's stress on the work of art as 'one thing,' 'a whole thing,' Morris, in 'Notes on Sculpture,' proposes a work of sculpture as a gestalt object. That is, a simple form whose total shape can be immediately apprehended by the viewer. A consequence of such simplicity of form is that, once recognized, 'all the information about it, qua gestalt, is exhausted.' This then frees one to consider other aspects, of scale, proportion, material, surface, for instance, in cohesive relation to this fundamental unity. Given the undifferentiated character of this type of work, the onlooker becomes aware of the viewing process as having duration. Whereas looking into a painting had allowed one to lose oneself in the world it offered, an exploration that was often described as timeless, or as occurring outside time, this was quite clearly not the case when one was confronted with Morris's 'Untitled' (1965): four waist-high mirrored cubes. Walking around and between the separate parts of this sculpture allows one to experience the gallery space and one's own and others' bodies as fractured and disjunctive reality.
The consequence of the loosening of categories and the dismantling of interdisciplinary boundaries was a decade, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, in which art took a great many different forms and names: Conceptual, Arte Povera, Process, Anti-Form, Land, Environmental, Body, Performance, and Political. These and others had their roots in Minimalism and the various offshoots of Pop and new realism. During this period there was also an increasing ease of access to and use of communication technologies: not only photography and film, but also sound, with the introduction of the audio cassette and wider availability of recording equipment, and video, following the appearance on the market of the first standard non-broadcast machines.
After Minimalism came post-Minimalism (coined by critic Robert Pincus-Witten); an alternative term was Process art, because in its final form the materials and stages of manipulation that had been required in achieving it were made explicit. At other times it was dubbed Anti-Form. ....an art that chronologically succeeded Minimalism which seized the freedoms it had brought and yet reacted against its formal rigidity. (ex. Richard Serra's One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1968-9 or Eva Hesse's Hang Up, 1966)
...there remains the thought that Conceptual art was somehow unexpressive. LeWitt spoke positively of making a thing 'emotionally dry' in order for it to be 'mentally interesting' for the spectator, and the French artist Daniel Buren referred to an art that was 'impersonal.' Buren, who adopted the candy stripe as a sign of the art's presence, quoted and emphasized the French writer Maurice Blanchot's phrase, 'a work of art of which nothing can be said, except that it is.'
...The understanding of art as a set of products can be seen here to give way to the idea of it as a process that is coextensive temporally with the life of the artist and spatially with the world in which that life is lived.
The contribution of Robert Barry to the Dusseldorf exhibition 'Prospect 69,' a question and answer text, made similar assumptions:
Q: Which is your piece for Prospect 69?
A: The piece consists of ideas which people will have from reading this interview.
Q: Can this piece be shown?
A: The piece in its entirety is unknowable because it exists in the minds of so many people. Each person can really know only that part which is in his own mind.
Joseph Kosuth (in the '60s): Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes along with it. That's because the word 'art' is general and the word 'painting' is specific. Painting is a *kind* of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. One is then accepting the nature of art to be the European tradition of a painting-sculpture dichotomy. (his influence was AbEx Ad Reinhardt's square, black paintings painted up to his death)
Comments by the Brazilians Cildo Meireles and Helio Oiticica (at the Information show at Moma, 1970) reiterated this view an interpreted the terms of their participation as being of a similar nature to their art. The art was what it was, and not a representation of anything else; they, too, were who they were, and were not there as representatives of their country.
Richard Long's walks could be seen in plain sculptural terms as description of form in space, but there was another important strand to his work. Materials--slates, sticks, driftwoods, mud--from a particular place might be removed and exhibited in a gallery. Here, the question is not so much 'Is the real work in the landscape or the gallery?' as 'What contribution does the landscape make to the particular effectiveness of the work in the gallery, given that the origin of the materials makes a difference?'
For Smithson there was a close relationship between the formation and life of these sculptures--all of which, like Long's, were left to their fate--and mental activity. The laying of memory upon memory, the struggle to form a clear image from a jumble of impressions, and the connections made between disparate ideas and loss through forgetfulness and minor sedimentation, folding, plate tectonics, seismic fracturing and other geological phenomena. Smithson would also document the environment as he found it, presenting, for example, photographs of the factory outflows, bridges and pontoons on the Passaic river in industrial New Jersey as a series of 'monuments.' In recognizing industrial structures as the true monuments to culture and civilization in the twentieth century, Smithson's attitude was close to the Germans Bernhard and Hilla Becher, who had been photographing their 'anonymous sculptures'--water towers and pit-heads--since the late 1950s.
Ad Reinhardt stated in an interview the year he died: 'I never go anywhere except as an artist.' Gilbert and George designated their whole life as an art in rather more overt manner: 'On leaving college and being without a penny, we were just there. ...We put on metallic make-up and became sculptures. Two bronze sculptures. Now we are speaking sculptures. Our whole life is one big sculpture.' Their first performances, in 1969, involved their appearance in public in such a guise. ...Later performances strengthened not just the social, but the socializing aspect of the work: for example, they served dinner to David Hockney in front of an audience. From the early 1970s, they would indulge in evenings spent doing nothing more productive than getting drunk to be documented in multiple photo pieces: "Smashed" 1972-3.
In more general terms, the distinction between American and German art of the period could also be demonstrated by a comparison between the character of Happenings and of Fluxus events. Both drew on Dada, but while Happenings were extensive, a multiplicity, full of things, Fluxus events were simple and unitary in conception. In addition, the anti-art of the Fluxus artists, and this of course included Beuys, was aimed at reconnecting art with life in a fully political sense.
There was, in fact, much Body Art and Performance that was excessive in one way or another. Largely though they came about as the result of working through an idea. Some were sensational: The paint-drenched performers in "Meat Joy" (1964) by Carolee Schneeman rivalled Nitsch's spectacle, and the Californian Chris Burden variously crawled cross a floor strewn with broken glass, had himself shot and was crucified on a car. Barry Le Va hurled himself against a wall until he collapsed exhausted. Dennis Oppenheim had stones thrown at himself, and allowed himself to be badly sunburned. (etc)
Hans Haake, born in Germany, had been living in New York for some years. His early work examined self-contained systems of an ecological or environmental nature, but by this time his focus had shifted to economic and social systems. Like many others, Haacke viewed Political art as a rejection of the formalist approach to practice and criticism espoused by Greenberg. He stated, "For decades now [Greenberg's formalist doctine] has managed to have us believe that art floats ten feet above the ground and has nothing to do with the historical situation out of which it grew. It is presumed to be an entity all to itself. The only acknowledged link with history is a stylistic one. The development of those 'mainstream' styles, however, is again viewed as an isolated phenomenon, self-generative and unresponsive to the pressures of historical society.' (goes on to describe his work "Shapolskey et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971" (1971).
In 1975 the U.S. artist Mary Kelly then living in England began her long-term project, Post-Partum Document. The work's aim was to examine the process of socialization through which her newly born son was to pass during the first five years of his life. In order to do this Kelly collected and analyzed the communications between her son and herself. In the first stages of the child's life, before the acquisition of any language, she was reliant on other signs to gauge his well-being, notably the state of his bowels as revealed by the contents of his nappies. These later gave way to words, drawings, sentences, and more extensive, self-aware signals. Through this material, Kelly built up a picture of the process of entering a society and at the same time revealed how her participation in this process, as the child's mother, reinforced her own subordinate social position. Crucial to Kelly's thinking in carrying out this work was not only neo-Marxist theory, but also the structuralist interpretation of Freud carried out by the French psychoanlysit Jacques Lacan.
Community-based work was no more free of economic constraints than the art from which it tried to distance itself. The difficulty of 'consuming' Performance, Installation and public art in the normal manner--buying them and taking them home--meant that they required subsidy funding in order to be able to exist at all. The 1970s witnessed a growth in public patronage. This was not a defeat of the art market, but a transfer of its operational imperatives into the field of national and local government. It is easy to be cynical and smile patronizingly at the misplaced idealism of those who thought that by making a direct appeal to the population as a whole they would convince many of art's value. But out-and-out cynicism would be misplaced, since the expansion of governmental and quasi-governmental involvement in funding of the arts was symptomatic of a growing belief in the necessity of art in a modern democratic society. Art was certainly not a luxury, but something that any self-respecting advanced society should expect as a mark of its civilized status.
(Anarchitecture with Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, and Laurie Anderson)'s aim was to focus on the gaps and undeveloped places within the urban environment: not the buildings so much as 'the places where you stop to tie tour shoelaces, places that are just interruptions in your daily movement.' This attitude was taken much further and to striking effect in the sequence of alterations Matta-Clark made to buildings between 1974 and his death in 1978. Cutting deep into their fabric--first in Splitting (1974) involved slicing a house entirely in half--he practiced what Dan Graham referred to as 'urban ecology.' He explained, 'His approach is not to build with expensive materials, but to make architectural statements by removing in order to reveal existing, historical aspects of vernacular, ordinary buildings. Thus the capitalist exhaustion of marketable material in the name of progress is reversed.'
Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, one of the most important collectors of Minimal and post-Minimal art, regarded it as amove backwards rather than forwards, a regression to an art that was easily appreciated after the apparent difficulty of much of 1960s and 1970s art. To promote the latest art as essentially a return to painting, particularly the kind of large format, macho gestural painting that had been challenged by feminism, was a marketing exercise, a conservative rejection of Conceptalism's critical inquiry and a capitulation to the insistent demands of the market.
In the spirit of Asher and Broodthaers, Louise Lawler conducted a renewed examination of the ways in which art attains value as it finds its place in the system of exchange and display. "How Many Pictures" (1989) for example shows through the reflection of a Frank Stella painting in a gallery's highly polished floor how indissolubly linked are work and context.
The only European figure of equivalent stature to Warhol throughout this period was Joseph Beuys, and he had died the year before Warhol. These two deaths coincided with a change of circumstance and perception that accompanied the absorption of the lessons of the previous quarter century's experimentation.
In his catalogue essay, Diedrich Diederichsen looked at the fears that the changes in global power relations had unleashed. 'The misery of being exploited,' he said, quoting Mayo Thompson, 'is nothing when compared to the misery of not even being exploited anymore.' he suggested a new criteria of judgement of this art: 'Pornographic is the adjective that ought to replace the pejorative 'decorative' in art criticism. It is a term for work that takes no responsibility for its origin. Trash, in contrast, takes responsibility.' p 192
+ Gary Hill's Tall Ships, 1992
Situationism had a strong political figurehead in Guy Debord, but art practice featured largely in its original manifestos through the Neo-Dada input of the Danish painter Asger Jorn. Vostell's Fluxus 'actions,' and those of Joseph Beuys who met in 1963, very often had explicit political content. Later, (Wolf) Vostell would want to contribute to a Documenta by placing a US F-III, an abiding symbol of the political realities of his divided country, on the roof of the main exhibition building in Kassel, a project that remained unfulfilled. His actions remained simple in conception and forthright in intent: 'I want to find out whether rules for types of behaviour in daily life can be obtained from actions with a model character, whether impulses emanating from me can be applied in everyday life to counter intolerance, stupidity and oppression.'
(Critic Barbara Rose) wrote that 'both Duchamp's and Malevich's decisions were renunciation--on Duchamp's part, of the notion of the uniqueness of the art object and its differentiation from common objects, and on Malevich's part, a renunciation of the notion that art must be complete.' Judd wrote in 'Specific Objects,' that much art then being made could no longer be described as either painting or sculpture. He termed it instead 'three-dimensional work.'
Asked by the critic Bruce Glaser why he wanted to avoid compositional effects, Judd replied: 'Well, those effects tend to carry with them all the structure, values, feelings of the whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that's all down the drain. ....The qualities of European art so far [are] innumerable and complex, but the main way of saying it is that they're linked up with a philosophy--rationalism.'
(Dan Flavin) Several of the works of the mid-1960s have the generic title 'Monument for V. Tatlin,' and in 1966 he made the first of his installations set at an angle across the corner of a room. The effect of this to remodel the space by making the corner 'disappear.' The artist Mel Bochner wrote of Flavin exhibiting an 'acute awareness of the phenomenology of rooms. ...[His] demolished corners convert the simple fact of roomness into operative factors.'
When Warhol was asked, 'Why did you start painting soup cans?', he replied, 'Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again. (the "pulse of repetition" pop artists like he , judd, and carl andre were anxious to deal with)
(Carl Andre's) '37 Pieces of Work' (1969) which brought 36 separate works together to make a 37th in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum. In order that they be experienced in full, the spectator was invited to talk on these 'plains.' The literal feel of the work, the particular density of the metal, its sound and its resistance to the tread, are all part of what it can give to the 'spectator.' Yet again Duchamp is called to mind for his strictures against a visual art that was purely 'retinal.'
In a way which seems akin to Judd's stress on the work of art as 'one thing,' 'a whole thing,' Morris, in 'Notes on Sculpture,' proposes a work of sculpture as a gestalt object. That is, a simple form whose total shape can be immediately apprehended by the viewer. A consequence of such simplicity of form is that, once recognized, 'all the information about it, qua gestalt, is exhausted.' This then frees one to consider other aspects, of scale, proportion, material, surface, for instance, in cohesive relation to this fundamental unity. Given the undifferentiated character of this type of work, the onlooker becomes aware of the viewing process as having duration. Whereas looking into a painting had allowed one to lose oneself in the world it offered, an exploration that was often described as timeless, or as occurring outside time, this was quite clearly not the case when one was confronted with Morris's 'Untitled' (1965): four waist-high mirrored cubes. Walking around and between the separate parts of this sculpture allows one to experience the gallery space and one's own and others' bodies as fractured and disjunctive reality.
The consequence of the loosening of categories and the dismantling of interdisciplinary boundaries was a decade, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, in which art took a great many different forms and names: Conceptual, Arte Povera, Process, Anti-Form, Land, Environmental, Body, Performance, and Political. These and others had their roots in Minimalism and the various offshoots of Pop and new realism. During this period there was also an increasing ease of access to and use of communication technologies: not only photography and film, but also sound, with the introduction of the audio cassette and wider availability of recording equipment, and video, following the appearance on the market of the first standard non-broadcast machines.
After Minimalism came post-Minimalism (coined by critic Robert Pincus-Witten); an alternative term was Process art, because in its final form the materials and stages of manipulation that had been required in achieving it were made explicit. At other times it was dubbed Anti-Form. ....an art that chronologically succeeded Minimalism which seized the freedoms it had brought and yet reacted against its formal rigidity. (ex. Richard Serra's One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1968-9 or Eva Hesse's Hang Up, 1966)
...there remains the thought that Conceptual art was somehow unexpressive. LeWitt spoke positively of making a thing 'emotionally dry' in order for it to be 'mentally interesting' for the spectator, and the French artist Daniel Buren referred to an art that was 'impersonal.' Buren, who adopted the candy stripe as a sign of the art's presence, quoted and emphasized the French writer Maurice Blanchot's phrase, 'a work of art of which nothing can be said, except that it is.'
...The understanding of art as a set of products can be seen here to give way to the idea of it as a process that is coextensive temporally with the life of the artist and spatially with the world in which that life is lived.
The contribution of Robert Barry to the Dusseldorf exhibition 'Prospect 69,' a question and answer text, made similar assumptions:
Q: Which is your piece for Prospect 69?
A: The piece consists of ideas which people will have from reading this interview.
Q: Can this piece be shown?
A: The piece in its entirety is unknowable because it exists in the minds of so many people. Each person can really know only that part which is in his own mind.
Joseph Kosuth (in the '60s): Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes along with it. That's because the word 'art' is general and the word 'painting' is specific. Painting is a *kind* of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. One is then accepting the nature of art to be the European tradition of a painting-sculpture dichotomy. (his influence was AbEx Ad Reinhardt's square, black paintings painted up to his death)
Comments by the Brazilians Cildo Meireles and Helio Oiticica (at the Information show at Moma, 1970) reiterated this view an interpreted the terms of their participation as being of a similar nature to their art. The art was what it was, and not a representation of anything else; they, too, were who they were, and were not there as representatives of their country.
Richard Long's walks could be seen in plain sculptural terms as description of form in space, but there was another important strand to his work. Materials--slates, sticks, driftwoods, mud--from a particular place might be removed and exhibited in a gallery. Here, the question is not so much 'Is the real work in the landscape or the gallery?' as 'What contribution does the landscape make to the particular effectiveness of the work in the gallery, given that the origin of the materials makes a difference?'
For Smithson there was a close relationship between the formation and life of these sculptures--all of which, like Long's, were left to their fate--and mental activity. The laying of memory upon memory, the struggle to form a clear image from a jumble of impressions, and the connections made between disparate ideas and loss through forgetfulness and minor sedimentation, folding, plate tectonics, seismic fracturing and other geological phenomena. Smithson would also document the environment as he found it, presenting, for example, photographs of the factory outflows, bridges and pontoons on the Passaic river in industrial New Jersey as a series of 'monuments.' In recognizing industrial structures as the true monuments to culture and civilization in the twentieth century, Smithson's attitude was close to the Germans Bernhard and Hilla Becher, who had been photographing their 'anonymous sculptures'--water towers and pit-heads--since the late 1950s.
Ad Reinhardt stated in an interview the year he died: 'I never go anywhere except as an artist.' Gilbert and George designated their whole life as an art in rather more overt manner: 'On leaving college and being without a penny, we were just there. ...We put on metallic make-up and became sculptures. Two bronze sculptures. Now we are speaking sculptures. Our whole life is one big sculpture.' Their first performances, in 1969, involved their appearance in public in such a guise. ...Later performances strengthened not just the social, but the socializing aspect of the work: for example, they served dinner to David Hockney in front of an audience. From the early 1970s, they would indulge in evenings spent doing nothing more productive than getting drunk to be documented in multiple photo pieces: "Smashed" 1972-3.
In more general terms, the distinction between American and German art of the period could also be demonstrated by a comparison between the character of Happenings and of Fluxus events. Both drew on Dada, but while Happenings were extensive, a multiplicity, full of things, Fluxus events were simple and unitary in conception. In addition, the anti-art of the Fluxus artists, and this of course included Beuys, was aimed at reconnecting art with life in a fully political sense.
There was, in fact, much Body Art and Performance that was excessive in one way or another. Largely though they came about as the result of working through an idea. Some were sensational: The paint-drenched performers in "Meat Joy" (1964) by Carolee Schneeman rivalled Nitsch's spectacle, and the Californian Chris Burden variously crawled cross a floor strewn with broken glass, had himself shot and was crucified on a car. Barry Le Va hurled himself against a wall until he collapsed exhausted. Dennis Oppenheim had stones thrown at himself, and allowed himself to be badly sunburned. (etc)
Hans Haake, born in Germany, had been living in New York for some years. His early work examined self-contained systems of an ecological or environmental nature, but by this time his focus had shifted to economic and social systems. Like many others, Haacke viewed Political art as a rejection of the formalist approach to practice and criticism espoused by Greenberg. He stated, "For decades now [Greenberg's formalist doctine] has managed to have us believe that art floats ten feet above the ground and has nothing to do with the historical situation out of which it grew. It is presumed to be an entity all to itself. The only acknowledged link with history is a stylistic one. The development of those 'mainstream' styles, however, is again viewed as an isolated phenomenon, self-generative and unresponsive to the pressures of historical society.' (goes on to describe his work "Shapolskey et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971" (1971).
In 1975 the U.S. artist Mary Kelly then living in England began her long-term project, Post-Partum Document. The work's aim was to examine the process of socialization through which her newly born son was to pass during the first five years of his life. In order to do this Kelly collected and analyzed the communications between her son and herself. In the first stages of the child's life, before the acquisition of any language, she was reliant on other signs to gauge his well-being, notably the state of his bowels as revealed by the contents of his nappies. These later gave way to words, drawings, sentences, and more extensive, self-aware signals. Through this material, Kelly built up a picture of the process of entering a society and at the same time revealed how her participation in this process, as the child's mother, reinforced her own subordinate social position. Crucial to Kelly's thinking in carrying out this work was not only neo-Marxist theory, but also the structuralist interpretation of Freud carried out by the French psychoanlysit Jacques Lacan.
Community-based work was no more free of economic constraints than the art from which it tried to distance itself. The difficulty of 'consuming' Performance, Installation and public art in the normal manner--buying them and taking them home--meant that they required subsidy funding in order to be able to exist at all. The 1970s witnessed a growth in public patronage. This was not a defeat of the art market, but a transfer of its operational imperatives into the field of national and local government. It is easy to be cynical and smile patronizingly at the misplaced idealism of those who thought that by making a direct appeal to the population as a whole they would convince many of art's value. But out-and-out cynicism would be misplaced, since the expansion of governmental and quasi-governmental involvement in funding of the arts was symptomatic of a growing belief in the necessity of art in a modern democratic society. Art was certainly not a luxury, but something that any self-respecting advanced society should expect as a mark of its civilized status.
(Anarchitecture with Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, and Laurie Anderson)'s aim was to focus on the gaps and undeveloped places within the urban environment: not the buildings so much as 'the places where you stop to tie tour shoelaces, places that are just interruptions in your daily movement.' This attitude was taken much further and to striking effect in the sequence of alterations Matta-Clark made to buildings between 1974 and his death in 1978. Cutting deep into their fabric--first in Splitting (1974) involved slicing a house entirely in half--he practiced what Dan Graham referred to as 'urban ecology.' He explained, 'His approach is not to build with expensive materials, but to make architectural statements by removing in order to reveal existing, historical aspects of vernacular, ordinary buildings. Thus the capitalist exhaustion of marketable material in the name of progress is reversed.'
Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, one of the most important collectors of Minimal and post-Minimal art, regarded it as amove backwards rather than forwards, a regression to an art that was easily appreciated after the apparent difficulty of much of 1960s and 1970s art. To promote the latest art as essentially a return to painting, particularly the kind of large format, macho gestural painting that had been challenged by feminism, was a marketing exercise, a conservative rejection of Conceptalism's critical inquiry and a capitulation to the insistent demands of the market.
In the spirit of Asher and Broodthaers, Louise Lawler conducted a renewed examination of the ways in which art attains value as it finds its place in the system of exchange and display. "How Many Pictures" (1989) for example shows through the reflection of a Frank Stella painting in a gallery's highly polished floor how indissolubly linked are work and context.
The only European figure of equivalent stature to Warhol throughout this period was Joseph Beuys, and he had died the year before Warhol. These two deaths coincided with a change of circumstance and perception that accompanied the absorption of the lessons of the previous quarter century's experimentation.
In his catalogue essay, Diedrich Diederichsen looked at the fears that the changes in global power relations had unleashed. 'The misery of being exploited,' he said, quoting Mayo Thompson, 'is nothing when compared to the misery of not even being exploited anymore.' he suggested a new criteria of judgement of this art: 'Pornographic is the adjective that ought to replace the pejorative 'decorative' in art criticism. It is a term for work that takes no responsibility for its origin. Trash, in contrast, takes responsibility.' p 192
+ Gary Hill's Tall Ships, 1992
cmd10634's review
4.0
Quite readable overview of post-WWII art. Hardly any depth on individual artists, but that's the flip side to the book's strength of guiding readers through such a breadth of art-world figures.
Typical paragraphs start with about 5 names & dates of artists. Then the paragraph gives a few sentences to each name, specifying individual works and their significance. Next paragraph repeats that formula with new names... again and again.
At times, it felt too fast: when that individual artwork wasn't printed in the book, how much can 2 sentences express about it? Yet Archer writes precisely so, more often, I got a clear sense of or at least an intriguing evocation about the work. And with 200+ illustrations (many in color) in my 2002 new/2nd edition, there often is an accompanying visual.
I don't recall any thesis given in a chapter or the book as a whole. That too is a strength & weakness. As a philosophy professor, I want a theory, a claim, a 'truth' about some set of particulars (crazy of me, I know!). But artists, art historians, and critics like Archer are much more focused on particular artists, works. They 'show' some discrete thing and leave generalities to readers who are so inclined. That is, they know what philosophers often forget: that the particular has reality and value even when not yoked to some world-historical theory about "Sensation," "Representation," "History," "The West," etc.
And yet! No sense that chapters or the whole book had much of a point or organizing idea other than "artists in this approximate timeframe." Again, giving something other than generalities about 'The Artwork' (generalities which others can form if they care to do so based on Archer's supplied particulars) is valuable, and is a skill (a duty, even?) of the critic.
Yet a mass of details held to gather by little more than "here are this decade's trends, which sort of differ and sort of resemble some prior trends' feels unrewarding, unfinished.
The upshot: a crisp read covering a wide variety of artists. Read it once through and then retain it as a list of artists, some of whom you will look into in greater depth, going beyond what this book could or attempted to give you.
Typical paragraphs start with about 5 names & dates of artists. Then the paragraph gives a few sentences to each name, specifying individual works and their significance. Next paragraph repeats that formula with new names... again and again.
At times, it felt too fast: when that individual artwork wasn't printed in the book, how much can 2 sentences express about it? Yet Archer writes precisely so, more often, I got a clear sense of or at least an intriguing evocation about the work. And with 200+ illustrations (many in color) in my 2002 new/2nd edition, there often is an accompanying visual.
I don't recall any thesis given in a chapter or the book as a whole. That too is a strength & weakness. As a philosophy professor, I want a theory, a claim, a 'truth' about some set of particulars (crazy of me, I know!). But artists, art historians, and critics like Archer are much more focused on particular artists, works. They 'show' some discrete thing and leave generalities to readers who are so inclined. That is, they know what philosophers often forget: that the particular has reality and value even when not yoked to some world-historical theory about "Sensation," "Representation," "History," "The West," etc.
And yet! No sense that chapters or the whole book had much of a point or organizing idea other than "artists in this approximate timeframe." Again, giving something other than generalities about 'The Artwork' (generalities which others can form if they care to do so based on Archer's supplied particulars) is valuable, and is a skill (a duty, even?) of the critic.
Yet a mass of details held to gather by little more than "here are this decade's trends, which sort of differ and sort of resemble some prior trends' feels unrewarding, unfinished.
The upshot: a crisp read covering a wide variety of artists. Read it once through and then retain it as a list of artists, some of whom you will look into in greater depth, going beyond what this book could or attempted to give you.
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