MODULE 15: international avant-garde since 1945: Contemporary Art & Culture: THEN Chapt. 29

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Artists in the 1960’s were searching for a new voice At the same time many artists were caught up in the social/political turmoil of the late 60’s to early 70’s. Each subsequent generation of young artists sought to make their indelible mark on the social and art scene. Conceptual Art gave voice to the politically active, academically inclined, abstrusely emphasized, and Neo-Dadaist the ironic and whimsical. Performance Art invalidated traditional art venues, bringing their message to the streets and out of the museum. Within Neo-Realism, a wide range of painting styles reflected a concern for the process and conceptual origins of painting, sculpture and photography.

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SLIDE:
Shimamoto “Hurling Colors” (1956) Pl. 29-20

The character of Modern Japanese culture reflects the recent transition from a feudal to democratic society. This may explain the ready embrace of radical aesthetic ideas. The intellectual sensibilities that related to Dadaism and Abstract Expressionism, led artists such as Shimamoto to create performances in which the processes and physical production of art became an expression in itself.

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SLIDE:
Klein “Anthropometries of the Blue Period” (1960) Pl. 29-21

The photograph in your text does not truly describe the event pictured. Nude women slather themselves with Klein Blue paint, then press their painted bodies onto canvas while Klein ‘orchestrates’ the performance from afar. Yves Klien had coded his avant-garde territory by its provocative eccentricities. For example, his use of a particular saturated, pure blue that was identified with him, made the color itself proclaim his thesis. Like many early Dadaist artists, Klein’s actions were intended to provoke intellectual discourse. For some, his work was seen as intellectual ‘in jokes’ and attention-getting antics.

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SLIDE:
Tinguely “Homage to New York” (1960) Pl. 29-22

Taking sculpture to a new meaning and new possibilities, Tinguely animated the Dadaist influenced assemblage-sculpture to the point of self-destruction as spectacle as much as aesthetic statement.

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SLIDE:
Rauschenberg “Canyon” (1959) Pl. 29-23

Robert Rauschenberg was a transitionary figure, between the 1960’s radicalizing of the canons of painting to the 1970’s mixed disciplines of Performance Art and the early Post-Modernist visual/linguistic questioning of the meaning of symbols.

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SLIDE:
Kaprow “The Courtyard” (1962) Pl. 29-19

As a reation to what had been once so radical in Abstract Expressionism and was now absorbed, appropriated and accepted as the dominant thesis of art in the 1950’s and early 60’s, Alan Kaprow and others turned to a radically different form of expression. Happenings or Performance Art gave artists a vast new vocabulary of expressions. These artists rejected what they saw as elitist pretensions of the past and focused on the mundane, chance and ironic.

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SLIDE:
Kosuth “One and Three Chairs” (1965) Pl. 29-35

Conceptual artists examined the intellectual process of art, the thinking that was a precursor to the production of art, and the relative meanings associated with language. With Kosuth’s piece we are asked to decide which example best defines the experience of ‘chair;’ the actual chair, the photograph of a chair or the dictionary definition of a chair.

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SLIDE:
Nauman “Self-Portrait as a Fountain” (1967) Pl. 29-36

Bruce Nauman exhibits on of the fundamental characteristics of Dadaist ideals- that is, humor. In a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 urnial “Fountain,” Nauman has brought the dialogue to the 1970’s. His spitting ‘fountain’ in the nude also ridicules the pretensions of art history.

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SLIDE:
Beuys “Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me” (1974) Pl. 29-37

Joseph Bueys art was more an extended lecture with changing examples to illustrate his point. Social change was his stated goal. The particulars of his life and how it relates to his art are provocative in themselves, but by incorporating these particulars as elements and symbols of a larger issue, Beuys engaged an international dialogue.

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SLIDE:
Hanson “The Shoppers” (1976) Pl. 29-62

The Neo-Realist movement began in the early 1970’s as a result of Pop Art’s return of imagery to the considered resources of contemporary artists. There was also a desire on the part of some artists to return craft to artistic expression. The dilemma was that to be considered contemporary, one could not just redo the past, one had to find a unique view that identified it with other ideas in contemporary art. Photo-Realist artists developed a thesis based on the cool detachment of Minimalism, the intellectual justifications of Concept Art, and the limits of the mechanisms of photography. Duane Hanson’s fiberglass sculpture captures this ethos in three dimensions.

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