Increasingly through the
twentieth century, and especially after the stranglehold exerted by
Abstract Expressionism, powerful and idiosyncratic art has often been
made against the prevailing ethos and in response not to theory but to a
desire for directness and immediacy of experience. Nevertheless the
proliferation of new movements at an ever accelerating pace has been one
of the most marked characteristics of art since the early 1960s. The
tendency for artists to react consciously against the tenets of their
immediate predecessors, combined with their need to combat the isolation
of the studio through friendship with other colleagues, has led
repeatedly to the formation of new groupings often further encouraged by
critics, dealers and museum administrators keen to be first at the scene
of every new artistic development. There has been a widespread anxiety
not to be left behind, like the conservatives who had resisted the rise
of Modernism at the turn of the century. This has engendered an
atmosphere conducive to experiments remote from the taste of the public
at large. The pressures of a constantly growing and more powerful market
for contemporary art during this period have likewise exercised a strong
influence, especially in the United States, which has come to dominate a
more genuinely international art world both in terms of its art
criticism and the commercial gallery system centered in New York City.
The effects of economic forces have been manifest not only in a
sometimes grotesque parody of the built-in obsolescence of the consumer
society, which requires new status-bearing products every season, but in
the reaction of artists who have sought to subvert the system altogether
by abandoning the manufacture of saleable commodities in favour of art
forms which do not lend themselves so easily to such manipulation: for
example
Conceptual Art, Video art,
Performance Art and
Land art.
Given the existential emphasis within
Abstract Expressionism, by which
every brushmark was judged an authentic sign of the artist's personality
and a gesture indicative of his or her free will, it was almost
inevitable that subsequent generations would seek a demystification of
both process and content as a release from this romantic inwardness.
Such impulses were central to the origins of
Pop Art in the 1950s and to
the evolution and influence of the movement in the following decade.
Indications of this shift in the late 1950s occurred also in the work of
American artists such as Helen Frankenthaler (born 1928) and Morris
Louis (1912-62), whose variations on the procedures of
Jackson Pollock's
drip paintings largely stripped them of their implications as a form of
handwriting conveying emotion; Louis in particular stressed simple
actions, such as staining the canvas with rivulets or pools of thinned
acrylic paint applied by pouring, to draw attention to the material
properties of the painting as a flat surface suffused with colour.
One of Louis's close associates, Kenneth Noland (born 1924), while also
favouring acrylic paint stained into rather than brushed on the canvas,
introduced into his work a strong formal design as a structuring device
for an art of colour and surface. In a number of paintings of the late
1950s and early 1960s he used a target-like motif of concentric rings of
colour not as a way of expressing an ironic equivalence between the
painting and a real object, as had been the case for
Jasper Johns a few
years earlier, but as a container for precisely judged relationships of
hue; among the diverse precedents for this art of colour and geometry
one could thus cite the Orphism of
Robert Delaunay and the almost
scientifically rigorous Homage to the Square paintings of
Josef Albers
(1888-1976).
Kenneth Noland
First
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Kenneth Noland
Red Blue
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Louis, Noland and Frankenthaler, along with other artists such as
Frank Stella (born 1936), Ellsworth Kelly (born 1923), Al Held (born 1928) and
Jules Olitski (born 1922), were grouped together by the critic Clement
Greenberg under the banner of Post-Painterly Abstraction in an
exhibition held in 1964. As the label suggests, Greenberg saw in these
artists a shared reaction against the importance accorded to painterly
gesture in certain types of Abstract Expressionism, arguing their case
as a search for the essence of painting as a medium of flat coloured
surfaces. Kelly, who was older than most of the artists in this group,
had been working independently since the late 1940s on the creation of a
concise language of geometric form, initially in painted wooden reliefs
inspired by modern architecture; by the early 1960s his preference for
clearly outlined brightly coloured shapes led him to being identified as
one of the originators of Hard-Edge Painting. Like many labels, this is
misleading in its emphasis on a minor technical aspect of the work, as
Kelly's concern was not simply with linear definition but with
relationships of shape and colour and of self-sufficient form to nature.
Another term which is sometimes applied to such work and to that of
older American artists such as
Barnett Newman and
Mark Rothko is Colour
Field Painting, which more helpfully emphasizes a shared concern with
the effects of saturated hues over a large surface. The proliferation
since the 1960s of terms, as of movements, needs to be treated with a
certain amount of scepticism: what begins as a useful shorthand for
identifying a common purpose may all too quickly degenerate into a
restrictive label. Although Post-Painterly Abstraction was destined to
remain more a convenient label than a coherent and lasting movement, it
did help to define the parameters of much of the art produced during the
1960s: in its elimination of the personal touch as a sign of the
artist's personality it heralded the anonymous surfaces of movements as
diverse as
Pop Art,
Optical Art and
Minimal
Art; in its insistence on logic it set
the tone for
Conceptual Art just as in its concentration on the most
basic and essential attributes of painting it prefigured Minimal art;
and in its concern with stripping bare the physical properties of each
object as the result of a sequence of actions it provided a background
for an emphasis on process in the work of other artists later in the
decade.
Greenberg's immense influence and single-mindcdness as a critic, while
doing much to establish the reputations of the American artists he
promoted, ultimately undermined the position of those who were judged to
be too much under his control, especially when his exclusivity and
formalist bias gradually lost favour. The artists whose work continued
to develop and to affect the course of art, at least in America, were
those who, like Stella and Kelly, had maintained a more independent
stance from the beginning. In the late 1950s and early 1960s
Stella
produced some of the most austere and demanding paintings of the period,
initially in single colours - black, aluminium and copper - and soon
after in combinations of bold primaries. Provocatively rejecting the
lofty philosophical intentions of the Abstract Expressionists, he
insisted that 'What you see is what you see', by generating simple
patterns of uniform stripes as a direct response to the structure of the
painting as an object: each stripe, painted in a flat, unmodulated and
unmixed colour, corresponded in width to the wooden stretcher bars
supporting the canvas. Large in scale and subject to severe rules of
logic, Stella's paintings appeared to be wiping the slate clean in
preparation for a re-examination of the properties of the medium.
Starting with the most extreme economy of means, during the 1960s he
gradually added to his repertoire increasingly complex elements: he
explored contrasts of colour, abandoned the conventional rectangle for a
variety of shapes still self-evidently generated by the underlying
structure and introduced interlaced semi-circles that replicated the
standard shapes of draughtsman's tools. By the late 1970s he had
abandoned all vestiges of restraint in large-scale metal reliefs in
which vigorously thrusting shapes are luxuriantly covered in exuberant
and seemingly arbitrary patterns and marks as if recklessly parodying
the frenetic gestures of his Abstract Expressionist forebears; while in
such works he may seem to have contradicted the logic and certainly the
austerity of the art by which he made his name, through all these
changes he has continued to insist on the appropriateness of one of the
original definitions of Modernist painting as the decoration of a (flat)
surface.
The matter-of-factness exemplified by Stella's paintings came to be a
dominating feature of much of the art produced in the 1960s. In
sculpture the American David Smith (1906—65) had begun as early as 1933
to ally his artistic process with steel welding techniques, culminating
in the Cubi series (1961—65) whose burnished surfaces and metallic sheen
have great painterly richness. Smith virtually redefined sculpture's
premises about materials and methods, and its relationship to the base
and the environment, while such formal concerns were matched by powerful
emotive content. His influence on sculptural developments was as great
as that of the Abstract Expressionists who were his contemporaries, and
his ideas were taken further mainly by the Englishman Anthony Caro (born
1924), one of the most eloquent and influential younger sculptors. After
meeting David Smith and Clement Greenberg on a visit to America in 1959
he began to produce brightly painted welded steel sculptures in which he
left intact the industrially produced components as a means of stressing
his concern with formal relationships; this was in stark contrast to the
traditional emphasis on imagery and on the transformation of materials
which continued to characterize the work of
Henry Moore (1898-1986), for
whom Caro had worked as an assistant in the early 1950s and who
continued to be regarded as a major international figure in the grand
tradition. Through his teaching at St Martin's School of Art in London
Caro helped redirect the course of sculpture in Britain; among his
former students who came to prominence at the Whitechapel Gallery's Mew
Generation exhibition in 1965 were Philip King (born 1934), whose often
fanciful variations of geometry were fabricated from industrial
materials including plastic and fibreglass, Tim Scott (born 1937) and
William Tucker (born 1935).
David Smith.
Cubi series (XXIV)
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Anthony Caro.
Midday
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Henry Moore.
Reclining Figure
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One of the most striking characteristics of
Caro's work was his
elimination of the conventional pedestal which had traditionally
elevated sculptures from the environment in which they were sited. The
supports for Caro's constructions were part and parcel of their
construction, a straightforward device through which he was able not
only to articulate the way in which form followed function, as had long
been the case in Modernist architecture, but to seek a more democratic
confrontation between his work and the spectator by acknowledging their
interaction on the same literally down-to-earth level. A similar urge to
involve the viewer directly motivated other tendencies during this
period, in particular
Optical Art and
Kinetic Art. For Op artists such as the
English Bridget Riley (born 1931), the French
Victor Vasarely (born
1908) and Francois Morellet (born 1926), the most pressing concern was
with the act of perception itself, with the dazzling and often
disorientating effect on the eyes of particular patterns of line, shape
and colour. By definition such images require the active response of the
spectator in order to take effect. While much Op art depended for its
effect cm phenomena that had been more ably investigated by scientists,
in the hands of its most sophisticated practitioners it proved to be far
more than a passing fashion or gimmick in spite of the speed with which
it was consumed and imitated within popular culture in the wake of
exhibitions such as The Responsive Eye (held at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York) in 1965.
Riley, for instance, followed her purely black
and white paintings of 1963 with canvases of coloured stripes, deployed
either as parallel lines or as wave patterns of alternating thickness,
which functioned in many different ways. In some cases no more than
three colours might be juxtaposed in a variety of configurations in
order to create an illusion of an immense variety of colour by purely
optical means involving after-images. Within the strict limits of her
formal vocabulary she was able to continue such investigations
throughout her later work in endless permutations.
Op Art is sometimes treated as a branch of Kinetic art, given that both
are concerned with movement: either actual motion, as in Kinetic art, or
implied or imagined action, as in Op art. The dividing line between the
two types can be ambiguous, as in the work of the Venezuelan artist
Jesus-Rafael Soto (born 1923), who is best known for kinetic relief
constructions in which constantly changing patterns are created by the
optical interaction of forms suspended in front of a surface pattern of
parallel lines. The quasi-scientific tone of much of this art can be
gleaned from the very name of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, the
French group which during its existence from 1960 to 1968 numbered among
its members Vasarely's son Yvaral (born 1934) and the Argentinian Julio
Le Pare (born 1928). By contrast, however, other Kinetic artists
introduced mystical and absurdist approaches to art in movement: the
Greek artist Takis (born 1925) created eerie musical environments of
suspended metallic objects activated by electromagnetism, while the
Swiss Jean Tinguely (born 1925), a latter-day Dadaist, delighted in
creating unwieldly clattering machines that endlessly repeated patently
useless actions.
A desire for directness of confrontation with the spectator was also one
of the motivating forces in the mid-1960s for the rise of
Minimal
Art, a
movement which stressed simplicity of form and clarity of idea in the
creation of paintings and sculptures as objects that could be
apprehended in their totality virtually at a glance. Paradoxically the
very sparseness of their means, particularly when removed from the
defining context of a group of works conceived as a complete
installation, guaranteed the almost complete incomprehension of the
public at large when faced with works such as Carl Andre's Equivalent
VIII, a rectangular solid formed by 120 standard bricks stacked in a
simple formation in defiance of all traditional notions of technical
skill and composition. Minimal art was taken to its most extreme logical
conclusion by certain American sculptors, notably
Carl Andre (born 1935),
Donald
Judd
(born 1928) and Dan Flavin (born 1933), who made use of
industrial materials, often in readily available prefabricated forms,
for a sophisticated art of precise arrangement and interval. Flavin's
structural elements, for instance, were fluorescent lights in standard
lengths and colours, arranged in basic configurations or simply propped
up as a single luminous line as a means of articulating or transforming
the space of the room in which they were installed. A heightened
awareness of place was essential, too, to the 'floor pieces' made by
Carl Andre from metal plates laid edge-to-edge in a kind of chequerboard
pattern, not only because the spectator was encouraged to stand on these
works to experience their materiality and a sense of the space they
occupied, but also because they were often conceived for particular
gallery spaces or installed in such a way as to deflect attention onto
the characteristics of the room itself.
Both
Frank Stella and
Ad Reinhardt, with his dictum that 'Less is more',
prefigured and influenced the emphasis on literalness that characterized
Minimal
Art; Reinhardt's 'black paintings' of 1960-66, each of which
consisted of an almost invisible cruciform shape imposed on the dark
background of a square canvas, were meant to look as much alike as
possible so as to prepare the viewer to scrutinize the surface for
almost imperceptible variations of hue and tone. With such works an
initial imprcsson of immediacy, obviousness and emptiness, further
encouraged by their display in series of nearly identical units, often
gave way to an appreciation of the extremely subtle variations which
occur both within a single painting or sculpture or from one work to the
next. In the case of Robert Ryman (born 1930), for instance, every work
he has created since the late 1950s could be described blandly as a
white painting in a square format, but within these severe restrictions
he has explored an immense variety of the properties of the medium: he
has used different types of paint, ink and drawing materials (oil,
acrylic, gouache, casein, enamel, gesso, emulsion, pastel) on supports
ranging from stretched canvas, wood and paper to copper, steel and
plexiglass; he has explored changes wrought by scale, different types of
brushwork and variations in the relationship of the painted area to the
edge; and he has drawn attention to the many ways by which the surface
can be fixed to the wall. While remarkable for the clarity and
single-mindedness with which he has systematically laid bare his medium,
Ryman is not alone among Minimal artists in achieving a state of
heightened sensibility. During an equally long development another
American painter, Agnes Martin (born 1912), has specialized in paintings
covered with washes of colour or pencilled grids of such delicacy as to
be almost imperceptible in reproduction, each conveying highly specific
experiences of light or landscape. Similarly the English painter Peter
Joseph (born 1929) has focused his attention since the early 1970s on
variations of a single format — a rectangle of a flatly painted colour
surrounded by a border of a different hue - to convey introspective
moods through the precise meeting of light and dark, that is to say,
through the juncture of two colours in a particular proportional
relationship.
Robert Ryman.
Courier
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Agnes Martin.
Untitled XXI
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Peter
Joseph.
Dark Ochre Colour with Red Border
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While
Minimal
Art proved flexible enough to accommodate such refinements
of sensibility and emotion, it is for the often mathematical rigour of
its logic that the movement remains best known. The sculptures of both
Andre and
Sol LeWitt (born 1929) have explored numerical permutations;
Andre's much misunderstood brick piece, for instance, was one of four
sculptures created for an exhibition entitled Equivalents in 1966 in
which he stacked the same number of bricks in four configurations so as
to stress the transformation of solid matter from a specific quantity of
identical units.
LeWitt, for his part, in the 1960s created room-size
installations based on a grid formation in which he explored the changes
that could be wrought to a form as basic as the cube; subsequently he
made wall drawings generated by such strict principles that it could be
left to others to execute them according to his instructions. Such
reliance on assistants and even on industrial manufacture, which also
characterized the work of
Donald
Judd, shifted attention from execution,
which was assumed to be as impersonally perfect as that of a
mass-produced industrial object, to the form as the material evidence of
an idea.
Judd was consistently concerned with the properties of
different materials - among them plywood, galvanized iron, stainless
steel, anodized aluminium and plexiglass - and with questions of spacing
and proportion as structuring devices no less rigorous than those
employed in classical art and architecture.
Minimal
Art proved to be much longer-lived than might have been expected
of a movement predicated on such notions of simplicity, both in the
hands of its original practitioners and in the variations created in its
wake. As early as 1964, a year before the movement had even been named,
another American artist, Richard Artschwager (born 1924), was creating
sculptures made of formica on wood in which the standard Minimalist cube
was transformed into an image of an ordinary object such as a piece of
furniture; at once an illusion and a literal account of its identity as
an object manufactured from modern synthetic materials, it proposed
unsettling questions about such essential matters as representation and
the function of art. Among other artists who maintained an idiosyncratic
relationship with Minimal art was the Austrian-born British painter
Peter Kinley (1926-88), who from the mid-1960s employed a
representational language of emblematic simplicity to convey highly
personal responses to nature, animals and domestic life. In a later work
such as Battleship (1985), for instance, an image generally considered
sinister materializes in brushwork of great tenderness; the artist
acknowledged that far from being an image of militaristic aggression, he
conceived it as a metaphor or vehicle for his own sense of resilience
and fortitude at a time of his life when he felt isolated and under
siege. While never considered to be Minimalists, Kinley and others who
have similarly used a representational language of extreme economy, such
as Susan Rothenberg (born 1945), have continued to demonstrate the
possibilities of such forms for the expression not only of rigorous
logic but also of intimate emotion.
Richard
Artschwager. Table with Pink
Tablecloth
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Peter Kinley.
Battleship
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One of the American artists associated with the origins of Minimal art,
Robert
Morris
(born 1931), was also instrumental in the development from
Minimalism
of types of art which stressed the process by which they had
come into being. In an influential article titled 'Antiform', published
in Artjorum in April 1968, Morris rejected form as an end in itself in
favour of chance and indeterminate methods and materials which gave rise
to objects of an ephemeral or changeable nature. Among the methods cited
by him were 'random piling, loose stacking [and] hanging'. His materials
could be as evanescent as steam and as malleable as felt, from which he
made a number of large hanging works in the late 1960s and early 1970s;
some of these bore more than a passing resemblance to paintings by
Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis which had prefigured such an insistence
on chance methods and shapes induced by process.
Process art, while never clearly identified or promoted as a coherent
movement, was nevertheless an important force in American and European
art by the end of the 1960s. Early in the decade the Pop artist
Claes
Oldenburg had begun to make sculptures representing ordinary objects on
a heroic scale in both 'hard' and 'soft' versions, drawing attention to
the characteristics of contrasting processes and materials in generating
forms; from such experiments in malleable shapes a new type of sculpture
emerged which became known as Soft art. In Europe much of this work, favouring materials previously deemed inartistic, was presented under
the banner of Arte Povera; among the artists associated with these
developments were the German
Joseph Beuys (1921-86), along with the
Italians Mario Merz (born 1925), Giulio Paolini (born 1940) and the
Greek-born
Jannis Kounellis (born 1936). The diversity of methods and
associations could encompass industrial procedures and techniques,
especially in American art, as in the sculptures of crushed fragments of
car bodies by John Chamberlain (born 1927) or in the lines formed from
molten lead hurled against the junction of wall and floor by Richard Serra (born 1939). They could, however, also take a much more domestic
or prosaic form, as in the Heap of coloured cloth presented as a
sculpture by the English artist Barry Flanagan in 1968, or in the
emphasis on ordinary methods of construction such as folding, tieing,
stapling, stitching and bolting together in paintings by the English
artists Richard Smith and Stephen Buckley (born 1944). For the
German-born American sculptor Eva Hesse (1936-70), the relationship
established with the spectator through this open avowal of the act of
making could entail the use of transparent materials such as fibreglass,
which openly revealed their structure, and a metaphorical equivalence
between organic-looking pendulous forms and the human body.
Jannis Kounellis.
La puerta cerrada con libros
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John Chamberlain. Essex
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Barry Flanagan.
Heap II
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Stephen Buckley. Nice
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Eva Hesse. Contingent
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Joseph Beuys. Terremoto
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For
Joseph Beuys particular materials such as felt and fat conveyed an essentially
private mythology-rooted in his wartime experiences of protection and
survival when near death; his tendencies towards the esoteric were
checked, however, by his innate sense for the qualities of different
materials and for the emotive effects and physical sensations stimulated
by sculptures on an environmental scale. One of his last major works, an
installation titled Plight (1985) at the Anthony d'Offay gallery in
London, involved the virtual sealing off of the interior in bundles of
felt to create a still, silent, warm and almost claustrophobically
sealed shelter or womb-like space. Through such works and occasional
performances and lectures
Beuys made a strong case for the transcendence
of the spirit and of elemental forces over matter, presenting himself as
a shaman. Without perhaps ever being fully understood, he remained an
immensely influential figure, especially in Germany, for his insistence
on art as an instrument capable of healing the wounds of society.
For Beuys and other artists in the
1960s the gallery space was not
merely a neutral or passive receptacle for art but an essential part of
the art-work itself. The role accorded to presentation by the Minimal
artists, for instance, was not simply one of professionalism or
commercial astuteness but a means of articulating the meaning of
individual works and of their inter-relationships in a specific context;
as Barnett Newman had earlier avowed with his term 'hereness', Minimal
artists and composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass alike sought
a concentration of perception and physical being on the immediate moment
and thus on the particularity of the place. In the wake of this stress
on the exhibition itself as the work of art, artists of diverse
stylistic allegiances have placed emphasis on the installation as a
whole rather than on its individual components. Environmental art in
this specific sense had historical precedents, particularly in pre-Pop
works by Claes
Oldenburg such as The Street (i960) and The Store (1961),
but what had begun as temporary displays in an almost theatrical context
has since become the standard form for artists who otherwise have little
in common stylistically or in terms of subject matter. The often
mysterious installations by
Jannis Kounellis, for example, tend to
include traces of the actions by which they came into being, such as the
singeing of the gallery walls by smoke. There is little basis on which
to relate such works to the highly specific theatrical tableaux created
by the American Edward Kienholz (born 1927) or the manifestations of
dream imagery produced by a younger American, Jonathan Borofsky (born
1942). For each of them, however, the relationships established within
the whole remain of greater importance than the constituent parts.
By the late 1960s such concern with the work of art as a total
environment, combined with a desire to remove art from the commercial
manipulation and rarefied context of galleries and museums, had helped
create the basis of a new art form known as
Land art or Earth art. Works
by its most notable practitioners, especially in the United States,
often occupied a vast space in remote locations and involved the direct
interaction of man and nature with the earth itself as a raw sculptural
material. Given the vastness of North America and the availability of
large stretches of desert and other uninhabited areas of land, it was
perhaps inevitable that many of the major artists associated with the
movement were American and that their works were often characterized by
a grandeur of scale; such was the case with Michael Heizer (born 1944),
Dennis Oppenheim (born 1938) and Walter De Maria (born 1935). Other
artists, such as the Englishmen
Richard Long (born 1945), Hamish Fulton
(born 1946) and David Tremlett (born 1945), travelled to places as
distant and inhospitable as Greenland and Tibet in search of a suitable
location for a communion with nature. The implicit actions performed on
the land were often direct and immediate, involving the digging or
removal of soil or rock or the restructuring of a site into an elemental
and symbolic form such as a spiral, as in works by
Robert Smithson
(1938-73) such as Spiral Jetty (a 1500-foot [457.2-metre] long coil of
mud, salt crystals, rock and water at Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake,
Utah, 1970) and Spiral Hill (a hill at Emmen, Holland, made of earth,
black topsoil and white sand, measuring approximately 75 feet [22.8
metres] at its base, executed in 1971). The forms taken by
Land art
could involve nothing more than the subtle relocation of natural
elements indicating the passage of a human being through a hitherto
untouched environment, as in works by Richard Long such as England
(1968), which consisted of a large X shape made on a grassy field by the
removal of the heads of daisies; these works, documented in photographs,
were temporary by definition, since the cycles of mortality at work in
nature were built into their very structure. In this type of art it was
often the case that the direct experience was afforded only to the
artist himself, and it was left to the spectator's imagination to
reconstruct its physical character by means of photographs, maps and
written documentation of a sometimes overtly poetic nature, as in the
work of Hamish Fulton.
Long also produced works for installation in
galleries, particularly floor pieces which bore some formal resemblance
to the Minimal art of Andre but which made a specific connection through
their materials — quantities of stone or driftwood - to specific natural
locations as a way of connecting the two environments and the
experiences which they represent. The preoccupations of other Land
artists, particularly in the United States, were more overtly sculptural
in a traditional sense, as in works by the Bulgarian-born artist
Christo
(born 1935) such as Wrapped Coast (Sydney, Australia, 1969) and Valley
Curtain (Colorado, 1971), in which the shape and mass of large areas of
land were articulated by massive quantities of cloth.
If much Land art indicated a nostalgic desire for an escape from
civilization as well as from the corruption of art by its commercial
exploitation, similar motivations encouraged the development of another
art form during the 1960s: Performance art. Although its origins can be
traced to theatrical provocations early in the century by Futurists,
Russian Constructivists, Dadaists, Surrealists and other Modernist
artists, it was in the late 1950s that it began to take shape more
explicitly as a means of making art in its own right, for example in the
Happenings by New York artists associated with the origins of Pop art
such as
Allan Kaprow (born 1927),
Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine (born 1935),
Red Grooms (born 1937), Robert Whitman (born 1935) and
Robert
Rauschenberg. Performances could be gruelling experiences for the artist
and audience alike, both physically and intellectually, as in works by
Joseph Beuys such as How lo Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare and
Twenty-jour Hours (both 1965), which demanded high levels of
concentration and physical stamina as part of their confrontational
nature and examination of consciousness. Feats of endurance and physical
pain, to which especially Europeans such as
Herman Nitsch
(born 1938),
Gunter Brus (born 1938),
Arnulf Rainer (born 1929),
Gina Pane (born
1939) and Stuart Brisley (born 1933) subjected their bodies, often had
ritualistic and expressionist overtones as part of a purging of social
or religious patterns of behaviour. Artists associated with
Body Art,
such as the Americans Scott Burton and Lucinda Childs, used the human
figure as a sculptural element as part of a contemplation of time and
space, while for others such as the Canadian group General Idea (formed
in 1968 by A. A. Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal), the British
team of
Gilbert & George (born 1943 and 1942) and the Scottish artist
Bruce McLean (born 1944) doses of humour and vaudeville provided a means
of unmasking human behaviour and the pretensions of the art world.
Performances could be improvised and spontaneous or as intricately
scripted and visually exacting as the ambitious theatrical events staged
by the American Robert Wilson (born 1941), such as his collaboration
with the composer Philip Glass on the opera Einstein on the Beach
(1976). Performance art, in other words, while never achieving a very
wide public, proved to be as flexible and various as any art form in the
styles, moods and themes which it was able to convey. The ephemerality
and lack of marketability which had initially attracted many artists to
such work, however, in the end contributed to the marginalization of the
form, and many of those associated with it turned again to the
production of more conventional art'objects as sculptors or painters.
Performance Art, while particularly lucid in its emphasis on action in
time rather than on the creation of a finite object, was only one of
several media which challenged traditional artistic priorities during
this period. The Video art initiated early in the 1960s by the Korean
Nam Jun Paik (born 1932) and others, while dependent on the physical
sensations afforded by the latest technology, used television sets not
as ends in themselves but as a means of transmitting a specifically
contemporary experience of the modern world or of recording for
posterity an otherwise transient performance. For Paik in particular the
medium offered a suitable means of expressing and questioning the
bombardment of the senses effected by the mass media. All such moves
away from standard media, including Process art, Land art and
Performance art, presaged a general emphasis in the later 1960s away
from the object in favour of the generating idea. In its most extreme
form, Conceptual art, the idea alone could be presented as the work of
art. In an essay titled 'Art After Philosophy', published in Studio
International in October 1969, the leading American exponent of
Conceptual art,
Joseph Kosuth (born 1945), cited
Marcel Duchamp's
invention of the 'unassisted Ready-made' as the single event which
changed the focus of art from 'appearance' to 'conception', 'from the
form of the language to what was being said'.
Kosuth's own work often
relied on photographic enlargements of dictionary definitions presented
as equivalents to real objects or to their representations in
photographs. Much of Conceptual art was text-based, with the written
word functioning as a replacement for visual signs, as in the
handpainted phrases presented on gallery walls by the American Lawrence
Weiner (born 1940); while much of this type of art was pedantically and
ponderously intellectual, Weiner continued in his later works to use
words for their visual suggestiveness, as in BILLOU'LXG CLOUDS OF
FERROUS OXIDE SETTING APART A CORNER 0N THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1986), in
the process making a strong case for the power of language and memory in
conveying experience. Another artist who relished paradoxical
interchanges between words, objects and images was the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76), whose Conceptualism was at least partly rooted in
the paradoxes of the Surrealist Rene Magritte; for example in an
installation titled La Salle Blanche (1975) he reconstructed in wood the
surfaces of two rooms in his house on which he had inscribed references
both to standard images in painting (shadow, sunlight, clouds) and to
things used in the making and promotion of art (canvas, easel, gallery,
percentage, museum).
Conceptual Art, in spite of its apparent affront to the marketing of art
objects, was severely dependent on its context in order to express its
meaning; outside a gallery or museum it ran the risk of failing to be
recognized as art. The leading French Conceptual artist, Daniel Buren
(born 1938), turned this situation into a virtue by basing his work on
the changes wrought by different environments to a single visual sign -
a simple pattern of alternating stripes - which through constant use was
paradoxically transformed from an anonymous image into his personal
trademark. It was through words, however, that most Conceptual artists
conveyed their ideas; one of the most active groups, Art and Language,
even published its own magazine as a forum for its British and American
members. In England a variant of Conceptual art dependent on the
relationships established between written texts and photographic images
provided the structure for philosophical, social and political enquiry;
among the practitioners of this type of art were
Victor Burgin (born
1941), John Stezaker (born 1949) and Stephen Willats (born 1943). In the
1980s two Americans,
Barbara
Kruger (born 1945) and Jenny Holzer (born
1950), were among those who even more explicitly sought to decode the
methods of advertising and the mass media in order to reverse the
depersonalization and manipulation to which they generally subjected
viewers assumed to be passive consumers.
