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The Sixties in America Art Movements Visual art movements marked by their diversity. The 1960's movements spawned a pluralism in art that lasted for at least the next thirty years. The visual art movements of the 1960's, reflecting a decade of frenetic activity and contradictions, appeared and clashed or coexisted with what may have been the last full decade of mainstream modernism. The movements included pop art, minimalism, and varieties of conceptual art from happenings and performance art to process art, earth art, and site installation art. Pop Art Pop art was the first art movement to consistently take inspiration, in a backhanded way, from commercial art and mass-market advertising. It ushered in the 1960's in the United States with an uproarious commotion and remains the best remembered among the noteworthy art movements of that decade. By about 1960, a few American painters and sculptors, working independently of and basically unaware of each other's interests, had begun incorporating in their artwork photographic images from films, television news and other programming, weekly magazines, daily newspapers, and especially advertising. The key artists and their signature imagery or themes were Roy Lichtenstein (comic strips, and past art from mass-produced art history textbooks), James Rosenquist (billboard advertising), Andy Warhol (grocery item packaging, celebrities from films, popular music and front-page news stories), Tom Wesselmann (the convention of the classical nude updated via voyeuristic girlie magazines), and Claes Oldenburg (American fast food and ordinary items from office or home, all greatly enlarged). In a parallel track thematically were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, although their works used mass urban culture sources more as a springboard to address existing mainstream modernist concerns of form and surfaces. In 1961, perceptive New York City gallery owners Richard Bellamy (Green Gallery) and Leo Castelli (Castelli Gallery) began to promote some of these artists. The next year, a major art journal responded to the highly recognizable "nonart" imagery as did the mass-media magazines Life, Time, and Newsweek. The term "pop art," which may sound like American slang, was actually coined by the English art critic Lawrence Alloway a few years earlier while assessing the paintings and ideas of fellow English artists Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, and Edouard Paolozzi. Pop art set off a firestorm of criticism because it seemed to embrace commercial art, something mainstream modernists found despicable. It also incurred the modernists' wrath because the images were immediate and realistic, again anathema to modernists. Many viewers, including the nonconnoisseurs of avant-garde contemporary art, welcomed the appearance of subjects from their familiar middle-class environment. They also enjoyed the art's humor despite the banality. All this led to a major misunderstanding of the artists' intentions. Pop artists neither emotionally embraced nor hated the bland commercial imagery they appropriated. They regarded it as interesting, new, and outside the modern art dialogue with earlier modern art. Minimalism In the 1960's, minimal art embarked upon a reductive approach to modern painting and sculpture whereby artists consciously sought to simplify or eliminate materials, forms, external references, color, emotions, spontaneity, and related elements. That purging attitude was part of the goal of repudiating the assumptions of the dominant art movement of the previous decade, abstract expressionism, and to create art in a purer, more rigorous, more literal state. Abstract expressionism in the late 1940's and through much of the 1950's had stressed spontaneity, ambiguity, complexity, biographical introspection, visceral reactions to subjects and art materials, violent color, and often giant canvases. By contrast, minimal art, so termed by 1965, seemed one hundred and eighty degrees from abstract expressionism in its insistence upon simplicity of painted forms (sometimes just a single color or hue) and an almost total absence of brush strokes, especially bravura. Minimal art emerged from the color field abstraction, also called post-painterly abstraction, of the late 1950's with a goal of less complicated abstract imagery and was represented by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Ad Reinhardt, and Morris Louis. Minimal art is best remembered for its distinctive paintings and sculpture. The painter whose work bore the most emblematic features was Frank Stella. He surfaced in 1959 with immense, dark monochrome paintings of subtle, schematic rectilinear outlines--repetitive, angular, intersections or rectangles within rectangles. Those characteristics are found in Stella's so-called Pinstripe series, which essentially launched the movement. A major motivation for Stella and other minimalists was the radical painting stance voiced by Reinhardt in a 1957 issue of Art News. Reinhardt's call for change, known as the Twelve Rules for a New Academy (of artistic thought), included no drawing, no color or light, no texture or brushwork, no design of forms, no sense of movement or time, and no subject except the painting as object itself. As the 1960's progressed, Stella also appropriated selective practices from Johns's maverick experiments with the U.S. flag and targets of the later 1950's, including the preconception of paintings, the adherence to a preset motif, and the regularized repetition of motifs, brush strokes, or colors as rhythm and interval. Initially, the right-angled intersecting image and black paintings satisfied Stella, but their extreme formal reductiveness was eventually deemed more severe than interesting despite the introduction of shaped canvases. To relieve his stark, black enamel abstractions, Stella began to use copper and aluminum colors. By 1967, his stunning protractor-shaped series appeared with multiple, bright Day-Glo colors applied in a restricted manner to clearly demarcate areas of many intersecting protractor shapes. Despite the complexity of the new compositions, the colorful arching bands were self-referential to the composition's closed system. Additional important minimalist painters noted for chromatic scale and shaped canvases include Brice Marsden, Robert Mangold, and possibly Ellsworth Kelly. The reductive geometry of minimalist painting spread to sculpture and found an articulate spokesperson in Donald Judd. The artist had abandoned painting for sculpture in 1961, totally disenchanted with pictorial illusionism. By 1963, Judd had produced enclosed boxlike volumes in metal and other constructions in pipe and wood. His delight in tangible objects of mass in actual space may also be indebted to his interest in the eighteenth century empiricist philosopher David Hume of Scotland. By 1965-1966, Judd's metal boxes were being fabricated by a foundry in galvanized iron and in anodized aluminum. The choice of foundry fabrication instead of personal handicraft was a matter of Judd's conceptual aesthetic. Commercial fabrication (entirely to Judd's specifications) plus automobile lacquer finishes and identical unit arrangement in series meshed easily with his newly adopted artistic theory of detachment, providing something both industrial and commercial. Joining Judd with related sculpture interests were Tony Smith (steel cubic box forms scaled to specific sites in nature and conceived as holistic images--to be seen all at once as a single form); Carl Andre (arrangements of sawed wood pieces twelve by twelve by thirty-six inches stacked like bales of hay and later similar explorations of industrial materials such as fire bricks followed by flat sheets of steel and magnesium emphasizing their mass and form); and Dan Flavin (white or green fluorescent tubes and fixtures, singly or in groups, investigating light as choreography and sculpture as space instead of form). Minimal art was initially shocking to many art critics and to untold numbers of viewers. It seemed empty, too reductive, neutral, impersonal, mechanical, chilling in its apparent lack of symbolic quality, monotonous, repetitious but not in a rhythmic sense--in a word, boring. Those reactions were understandable considering minimal art came after the romantic hyperbole and grand manner of abstract expressionism. Furthermore, minimal art was almost exactly contemporary with pop art with its easily recognizable and occasionally witty imagery. For other viewers, minimal art bordered on the sinister, with its overtones of aggression and authoritarianism and because it symbolized the presumed power of white male artists, their dealers, and the rest of the art business world. Perhaps viewer frustration was also rooted in the level of concentration needed when looking at the stripped-down singleness of minimalist paintings and sculpture. Ironically, this art movement, which stood for the reduction, negation, and simplification of so much of the fullness of previous modern art, generated a disproportionate amount of polemic. Minimalist artists may have written the bulk of the commentary about their sometimes complicated motivations for the seemingly simple works. Conceptual Art Conceptual art sprouted in the United States and Europe during the 1960's as an attempt to re-radicalize avant-garde art by emphasizing the thinking processes involved in creating art instead of the visual and emotional responses to it. At first, the art was often something not to be bought and sold and exhibited in galleries or art museums but placed in remote stretches of the landscape and often not seen except by documenting photographers and not written about by critics and art reviewers but by the artists themselves. On October 23, 1960, artist Yves Klein leapt out of a second-story window of a Paris building in a soaring position as a demonstration of flying and levitation. Assistants for his art action broke his fall with a tarpaulin, but the tarp and his helpers were cut out of the altered photograph, resulting in a frightening image. Klein's bizarre gesture, rooted in a desire for a brave new future of levitation and the immaterial presence, hinted at the astounding actions, events, and site works that would appear throughout the decade. Conceptual art also grew out of events in the late 1950's called happenings. In 1958, artist and critic Allan Kaprow combined the need to go beyond Jackson Pollock's use of spontaneity and the arbitrary sculpture of Johns and Rauschenberg in attempts at randomly fusing urban cultural artifacts with sounds emanating from radios and his own unstructured performances. Kaprow's 1959 work Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, held at the Reuben Gallery in New York City, combined untrained actors with the artist's relatively unplanned performance. Other happenings were organized by various art-world notables, including Henry Geldzaher of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and artists Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, and Red Grooms. Collectively, happenings tended to consist of viewer participation, interruptions, layers of stimuli somewhat assaulting participants and viewers alike (though little of it verbal), chaos, and no clear ending. Happenings intrigued audiences as a potentially revolutionary art form. Concurrently, other artists similarly inclined to de-emphasize art as objects created nonpaintings on large wall panels. These works featured, for example, photo-enlarged typeset dictionary definitions of words such as "art" or "idea," reflecting an interest in communication, linguistics, semiotics, and the construction and deconstruction of information. Involved artists were Joseph Kosuth, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Donald Burgy, Lawrence Weiner, Hans Haacke, and Dan Graham. Simultaneously, the artists Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Lynda Benglis, Richard Serra, and Nauman explored the physical nature of various materials, some used in contemporary sculpture and some not, and a number of concepts of process in art. Benglis poured amorphous shapes of bright-colored latex and also created blubberlike mounds of colored polyurethane foam shaped by chance. Serra's flung molten metalworks of 1968-1969, documented by menacing photographs of that process, seemed to parallel the reckless violence of the United States during the 1960's. In those years, Serra melted lead, ladled it out, and assuming a stance similar to that of a hammer-throwing athlete, slung the hot material toward the walls of a New York City warehouse. The Splashings and Castings that resulted, a kind of antiform sculpture, depended on the amount of lead thrown, the number of times it was thrown, force or velocity, and gravity. Still another outlet for conceptual art was performance art, which was the province of artists such as Nauman, Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, Chris Burden, and Joseph Beuys. Artists of this mind-set may have been the most rebellious of all the categories in conceptual art. These artists revolted against perceived restrictions of inherited forms of modern art and even the other subcategories of conceptual art. Performance artists assumed roles as actors, seers, and shamans. Best known among them was Beuys, a German sculptor who lectured and performed internationally and also wore the hat of an activist and shaman from the 1960's until his death in 1986. He ambitiously explored ways to heal artists' grievances with educational and commercial art-world institutions in addition to elemental ways for humans to live and work without destroying the earth. Beuys gave the name of "social sculpture" to his multifaceted performance activities, which were laden with myth, legend, and history. A final area of conceptual art is earth and site works, also known as artists working in the landscape. By whatever name, the movement within a movement produced some of the largest, most breathtaking, most photogenic, and sometimes, the most exasperating works in all of conceptual art. Artists included Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Charles Simmonds, Richard Long, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, and Christo Javacheff (known as Christo) and his collaborator wife, Jeanne-Claude. A representative survey must list Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1969-1970), wherein rocks and earth were bulldozed from an oil-prospecting despoiled site along the shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah, out into the lake to form a narrow, shallow road bed in the shape of a spiral fifteen hundred feet in length. Spiral Jetty was motivated by Smithson's interest in entropism, that is, the decay and rate of decay of all matter, including Spiral Jetty. However, the stage for earth and site art in the 1960's was dominated by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Christo fled communist Bulgaria, his native country, by hiding in the trunk of a vehicle. Never forgetting the experience of being packaged on his way to freedom, he began to wrap items to make the general public more aware of parts of the urban or rural environment that were abused or taken for granted. As his wrapping projects grew larger, he sold drawings, collages, and photomontages of his current and future works to finance his projects. The raising of money was mostly supervised by his indispensable partner Jeanne-Claude. In 1969, Christo wrapped the exterior of the Contemporary Art Museum in Chicago. All Christo's projects were intended to be temporary, so the shroud was removed after two weeks. Conceptual art, in most of its varieties or subcategories, was generally greeted by both the critical and general press with bafflement. The artworks and art actions, especially those judged as extreme, prompted many critics to wonder if conceptual art might mean the end of painting. Others feared that it might be the end of art, given its antiart provocational overtones. The general public found most of it ridiculous, disappointing, ugly, incomprehensible, and unfulfilling. However, conceptual art was gradually accepted by galleries and museums, many of which seemed to prostrate themselves before it rather than be seen as bourgeois or rear guard. Impact The heyday of pop art was 1961 to 1964. After 1965, the most original of the circle of pop artists seemed more interested in pursuing individual exploration than group continuity. However, exhibitions of pop art increased and became more inclusive, with artists from Chicago and Los Angeles adding diversity and variety. Publications of pop art increased as did gallery sales, all to meet increased demand. By then, the audacity and novelty of this new art passed into acceptance, a maturing of styles, analyses, and the solidification of careers for its leading artists. By the later 1960's, the blatant urban imagery, especially from photographs, was intriguing a scattering of younger artists. Such artists, primarily painters, were quick to value the flattened surrogate reality of the photograph as information already in usable format for their flat canvases. They collectively launched photo-realism, the dominant painting movement of the 1970's in American art. Minimalist art, which lacked the easily identifiable and accessible images of pop art, was far less popular. The progression of minimalist painting and sculpture toward a possibly irreducible image or structure (otherwise known generally in modern art as the emptying out of content), may have contained the seeds of both its own loss of impetus and a generation of newer phenomena. Conceptual art, like pop art, found greater acceptance as it matured. Most of the conceptual artists continued their explorations and investigations in subsequent decades, and their activities increasingly gained sponsors, patrons, gallery affiliation, and museum recognition. Conceptual art, more than any of the other avant-garde episodes or movements of the 1960's, stimulated an artistic pluralism fraught with even more tendencies, directions, and crosscurrents. Additional Information Among the first books to document pop art were Pop Art (1966), by Lucy Lippard; Pop Art Redefined (1969), by John Russell and Suzi Gablik; and American Pop Art (1974), by Lawrence Alloway. Pop Art: A Continuing History (1990), by Marco Livingstone, follows the primary vein of the pop art phenomena in the United States, England, and parts of Western Europe up to the 1980's. Early works that examined minimalism in 1960's painting and sculpture were Gregory Battcock's Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (1968); Judd's Donald Judd Complete Writings, 1959-1975 (1975); and Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (1976), by Brenda Richardson. In 1995, Sidney Guberman's Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography presented a richly illustrated and informative study of Stella's long career in painting, sculpture, and collaborative experimental prints with Ken Tyler of Tyler Graphics. A book that fit the stances of conceptual art when they seemed radical and raw was The New Avant-Garde (1970), by Gregiore Muller. Another important early study was sculptor and writer Ursula Meyer's Conceptual Art (1972), a key work that presents thirty-nine statements from and interviews with artists, with numerous illustrations. A noteworthy survey of artists working in the landscape is Earthworks and Beyond (1984), by John Beardsly. A later book that focused on site-specific works for museum settings is Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art, 1969-1996 (1996), with essays by Hugh M. Davies and Ronald J. Onorato. Tom Dewey II See AlsoHappenings; Hesse, Eva; Lichtenstein, Roy; Media; Minimalism; Pop Art; Warhol, Andy. |
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