of formalist distance upon which modernists had relied for understanding the world. Critics increasingly pointed to a correspondence between the formal properties of 1960s art and the nature of the radically changing world that sur- rounded them. In fact formalism, the commitment to prior- itizing formal qualities of a work of art over its content, was being transformed in these years into a means of discovering content. Leo Steinberg described Rauschenberg’s work as “flat- bed painting,” one of the lasting critical metaphors invented 1 in response to the art of the immediate post-World War II Discovering the Contemporary period.5 The collisions across the surface of Rosenquist’s painting and the collection of materials on Rauschenberg’s surfaces were being viewed as models for a new form of realism, one that captured the relationships between people and things in the world outside the studio. The lesson that formal analysis could lead back into, rather than away from, content, often with very specific social significance, would be central to the creation and reception of late-twentieth- century art.

1.2 Roy Lichtenstein, Golf Ball, 1962. Oil on canvas, 32  32" (81.3  1.1 James Rosenquist, F-111, 1964–65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 10  86' (3.04  26.21 m). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 81.3 cm). Courtesy The Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. New Movements and New Metaphors Purchase Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). Acc. n.: 473.1996.a-w. Artists all over the world shared U.S. Pop artists’ interest in creating new metaphors from the appearances and experi- of advertising imagery and disruptive juxtapositions of scale ences of everyday life. The international artists’ group Fluxus n 1968, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Within a few years of Rosenquist’s Metropolitan Museum and color in F-111 can be read as a deliberate rejection of directed its attention to the artistic potential of the everyday. displayed F-111 (1964–65) by James Rosenquist (b. debut, all of the other institutions of high culture in New the compositional devices of traditional painting. This style From the Latin term for “flow,” Fluxus was a loose grouping I 1933) in the company of works by European masters York had begun to embrace contemporary art. Every promi- also rebutted the expectation that art should make order out of progressive international artists who worked in diverse of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centu- nent American Pop artist was given a major museum retro- of the world rather than repeat its chaos. Four years later, media. “Why does everything I see that’s beautiful like cups ries (fig. 1.1). The painting is a monumental expression spective, despite the fact that their careers were less than a in 1972, when Rosenquist was given a retrospective at the and kisses and sloshing feet have to be made into just a part of U.S. Pop art, a full-scale image of an F-111 military air- decade old. Paintings such as Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923–97) Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the discord of something fancier and bigger? Why can’t I just use it for craft overlaid with overlapping images drawn from U.S. Golf Ball (fig. 1.2), which in 1962 had inspired his dealer, and disjunction of his paintings was interpreted as a metaphor its own sake?” asked Fluxus artist Dick Higgens.6 In a similar culture, mixing the innocuous—a girl getting her hair Leo Castelli, to exclaim enthusiastically, “Look at that for contemporary experience.4 In effect, the contempo- spirit, Fluxus member Nam June Paik created Zen for Film done, cake, spaghetti—with the destructive and hor- picture! There is not an idea in it,” were being compared to rary was perceived as those experiences, in art and life that (1964–65) (fig. 1.3), which consists of twenty-three minutes rific—a mushroom cloud and the plane itself. The impos- the work of David and Mondrian.2 Not everyone was pleased. were being dislodged from narratives either of progress or of leader—the blank strip at the beginning of a reel, used to ing size of the piece and its ominous juxtapositions were “Pop Art at the Met? Sire, this is no longer the revolution, it intended by the artist to express the sense of fear he felt in is the Terror,” stated the critic Sidney Tillim, comparing the the face of nuclear proliferation. He also created it to serve situation to the worst excesses of the French Revolution.3 as a rebuttal to those who thought that the threat of war Even if overstated, Tillim’s critique raised issues that remain was a thing of the past and that contemporary Pop art “had contentious. If it was now museums, rather than churches nothing to say.”1 Here were the details of life as it was being or aristocrats, that determined the cultural value of art, he lived presented in the billboard advertising style in which it argued, works such as F-111 reflected not true resistance was being represented on the streets outside the museum. but instead the result of career-minded artists compromis- The event marked a change in the perception of contem- ing with publicity-seeking museums. After the efforts of porary art. The curators and directors of the Metropolitan modern artists from Courbet to Pollock to evade existing Museum pronounced the work a commentary on the omni- power structures, Pop now appeared to be collaborating presence of the military in American society and hung it with with them enthusiastically. Tillim and others felt that artists such well-known images of politics and power as Jacques- had sacrificed the outsider position that, following the logic Louis David’s Death of Socrates (1787), Emanuel Gottlieb of Clement Greenberg, had permitted the Modernist avant- Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), and Nicolas garde to challenge the status quo. Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1633–34). By juxtaposing In truth, Tillim’s objections to Rosenquist’s inclusion in Rosenquist’s work with classic history paintings, the museum the Met lay in large part in the Pop artist’s style. He disliked 1.3 Nam June Paik, Zen for Film, 1964–65, invested Pop art with the gravity of history, history with the Rosenquist’s use of montage, which involved layering inde- Photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore/ immediacy of Pop, and the Met itself with the cachet of pendent graphic elements and thus resisting the custom of Licensed by VAGA, NY. Courtesy the Nam June the contemporary. treating the painting as a unified whole. The broken rhythms Paik Estate.

18 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary New Movements and New Metaphors 19 help threading in a projector—so that the viewer watches an The art of the 1970s, to which most of this chapter is devoted, imageless movie made of just the physical film itself. Mean- was consistently critical of the status quo, and in a variety of while, the Japanese collective Hi Red Center marked off a forms and methods provided the foundations for the critical section of the Ginza financial district of Tokyo and, dressed perspectives discussed in the rest of this book. as surgeons, began the absurd task of sterilizing it. Cleaning Event (Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropol- The Minimalism of Donald Judd and Robert Morris itan Area) (1964) (fig. 1.4), announced with a sign reading While Pop artists looked to the image-bank of mass culture, “Be Clean!” in English and “Soji-chu” (“Cleaning Now”) generating art by recycling reality, Minimalist artists sought a in Japanese, used ordinary, even official-looking actions different means to write a new art history. In 1965, Donald in a real place to direct viewers’ attention toward larger Judd (1928–94), after arriving at what would be his mature political events: in particular, the Japanese government’s style—variations on rectangular boxes presented alone or attempt to brighten its image in advance of the forthcoming in groups with uniform parts repeated in serial progressions summer Olympics. (fig. 1.5)—published “Specific Objects,” a manifesto for While artists such as Rosenquist, Paik, and Hi Red Center this new art. Painting and sculpture had become, he wrote, utilized the products of contemporary society, isolating and “containers” for ideas about art and so were constrained in examining its component parts, other groups, specifically advance by unexamined preconceptions of the artist and Minimalist and Process artists, carried out investigations into his or her audience.7 Before a traditional sculpture is made the processes of art making and explored the properties of or viewed, it already had an identity that differentiated it in new non-traditional art materials. Such artists represented particular ways from other things. By contrast, Judd argued, an urgent desire to redefine the focus of art and the role artists of the 1960s wished to be free of such a priori assump- of the artist. As the 1970s wore on, many artists came to tions and so avoided resemblance to sculptural traditions. feel that Pop, Minimalist and Process art were only address- As these new works forged a new history of art they activated ing part of the issue; these movements interrogated the the space around them in a very particular and even aggres- nature of reality as it was, but left questions regarding how sive fashion. A “specific object,” he explained, did not sit existing forms acquired meaning and how reality might be passively waiting to be observed; it interrupted the serenity changed unanswered. Questions of meaning are philosophi- of the gallery or museum, eschewed the hieratical platform cal, social, and political and the 1970s ended with artists of the pedestal, and claimed real space as its own. Like the having begun to inflect their practice according to each of careening images in F-III or the flatbed of Rauschenberg’s these terms. Conceptual, feminist, and political artists of this combine, Judd was describing not only a contemporary second postwar generation set out toward a wider examina- approach to art making but also a new metaphor for under- tion of the relationships between history, society, and art. standing contemporary life.

7 1.5 Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968. Stainless steel, plexiglass, overall 33  67 ⁄8  48" (83.82  172.4  121.92 cm). From the exhibition “Art in Our Time: 1950 to the Present,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 5 September 1999 to 2 September 2001.

Judd, himself, created objects where the dimensions, the beautiful, “Saturnian” even, lay references neither to earlier character of the materials, and the relationships between artists nor even to images from popular culture, but rather to the parts were all immediately self-evident. Anything sug- commercial suppliers: Bernstein Brothers, Tinsmiths; Allied gested by one part of the work, must be born out by the Plastics; Rohn Haas Plexiglas; and Galvanox and Lavax fin- whole. There were to be no mysteries to which the artist held ishes.9 Judd trawled contemporary culture as eagerly as did a secret key, or any unique point of view that would explain the Pop artists, suggested Smithson; he just looked for differ- the work. Likewise for works with multiple parts, any arrange- ent things. ment must be made so that the viewer could independently Smithson’s review hints at the emotional, even mystical, glean its logic; there were to be no complicated patterns, quality of Judd’s work. The boxes are often optically complex symbolic arrangements, or random or intuitive composi- sculptures that convey unpredictable effects through their tions. To borrow a quote from the Minimalist painter Frank knowable form. Robert Morris’s (b. 1931) work resists this 8 1.4 Hi Red Center, Hi Red Stella, “what you see is what you see.” Judd’s intention was visual pleasure and transcendental potential in favor of a Center’s Cleaning Event to disengage from the oppressive weight of history to present more physical brand of Minimalism. Morris’s work of the (Campaign to Promote something that could be known completely and experi- mid-1960s is characterized by boxes that are as simple as Cleanliness and Order in enced directly. Yet even his abstract boxes could be seen as Judd’s, but they are made of wood and painted gray. The the Metropolitan Area), connecting to life. In a 1965 exhibition review, fellow artist simplicity of the work and its lack of surface interest forces October 16, 1964. Robert Smithson (1938–73) identified Judd’s sources— the viewer to pay less attention to the object itself and more Performance piece. Photograph courtesy the a rather traditional art-historical endeavor. Behind Judd’s to the relationship between it, the viewer, and the context— artist and sepiaEYE. abstractions, however, which Smithson found exquisitely usually a gallery, sometimes a stage. Morris’s sculptures

20 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary New Movements and New Metaphors 21 1.6 Robert Morris, Green Gallery 1.8 Hélio Oiticica, Installation. Seven painted Tropicalia, 1967. plywood sculptures at the Green Showing Penetrables Gallery, New York, 1964. Varying PN2 and PN3 as dimensions. Courtesy Leo Castelli installed at Centro de Gallery, New York. Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro in 1996. Mixed media. Image courtesy Projecto Hélio Oiticica.

were closely related to his interest in dance, particu- larly the choreography of Anna Halprin and Merce Cunningham, who were both interested in generating dance from ordinary movements. Installations such as works, called Counter Reliefs and dating to the late 1950s, are geometry” and end with “an organic space” was realized by that at the Green Gallery in 1964 (fig. 1.6) produce quite modest: simple compositions built of panels of black, adopting details from the real spaces of Brazilian daily life situations in which the viewer is made aware of his or geometric shapes hung flat on the wall but layered so they and culture.11 her physical presence in the environment. Morris’s extend, like Judd’s “specific objects” a few years later, into the objects exert themselves in the room, forcing the visitor space of the viewer. From the Counter Reliefs, Clark and soon Process Art to navigate through, under, and around the objects and Oiticica pushed geometric forms into the rooms and even In his 1968 essay “Anti-Form,” Morris argued that the any other people in the space. Morris explained his the streets, assembling boxes and hinged assemblages (fig. problem with Minimalism was that, although it had pointed interests, noting that the “better new work takes rela- 1.7) that are intended to be handled by the viewer, who in so to the need to interrogate the assumptions that inform artis- tionships out of the work and makes them a function of doing activates the object and the space around it. tic production and reception, and compelled artists to focus space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision. The object In 1967, Oiticica created Tropicalia (fig. 1.8) in Rio directly on the specific properties of the object, much Mini- is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic.”10 This is de Janeiro (and in 1969 created similar installations in malist art ended up indifferent to its own material specificity. a Minimalism to be experienced, not merely observed. London), in which viewers were invited into the art rather Morris’s own blocks, for instance, could have been made of than asked to manipulate it with their hands as Clark had anything—there was nothing in the way he presented or even Neo-Concrete Art done. His inspiration was the spaces of the favelas, the shaped his Green Gallery exhibition that responded directly The Minimalists’ interest in geometric compositions slums of Brazil, which exemplified the integration of aes- to the materials with which he had chosen to work. The and the occupation of real space was shared by a variety thetic form and social content. In the gallery, Oiticica con- piece hanging from the ceiling even seemed to defy its own of artists. Brazilian Neo-Concrete artists, of whom Lygia structed a series of small rooms, boxes opening up into materiality. Much had been learned about the relationships Clark (1920–88) and Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) were each other and occasional interstitial spaces, some with with and beyond the work, but what about the object itself? chief representatives, offer a particularly dynamic floors of sand or straw, and one set up like a small pond. In response, Morris and others began to look closely at their expression of these concerns. Moving beyond the iso- The walls were adorned, and in places constructed, using materials to provide both the form and content of the work, lated interest in geometry that they felt had limited brightly colored and patterned fabrics. Tropical plants and letting the process of making rather than the finished object the Concrete Art movement that preceded them, Neo- birds populated the installation. The different spaces, all of take priority. Sculptor Lynda Benglis (b. 1941) described Concrete artists studied the relationships between which were open to the visitor, were inspired by different how these artists created what would be termed Process art: materials, form (often but not exclusively geomet- features of the favelas. Exhibition-goers were invited to take “When I learned what the material could do, then I could off their shoes and wade in the water, walk across the sand, ric), and the environment. For Clark, geometry was a 1.7 Hélio Oiticica, B3 Bólide Box 3 “Africana,” 1963. Oil on wood, control it, allowing it to do so much within the parameters 5 3 3 means toward the creation of spaces and incidents that 23 ⁄8  9 ⁄8  11 ⁄4" (59.9  23.8  30 cm). Image courtesy Projecto Hélio and lie in the straw. There were books to read and music to that were set up. So the material could and would dictate its inspired free movement and participation. Her early Oiticica. hear. In Tropicalia, the Neo-Concrete desire to “begin with own form, in essence.”12

22 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary New Movements and New Metaphors 23 1.9 Lynda Benglis, For Quartered Meteor (1969) (fig. 1.9), Benglis poured pig- (fig. 1.12), an enormous spiral constructed in Great Salt Quartered Meteor, 1969 mented polyurethane foam into the corner of a room. The Lake, Utah, from rock, earth, and salt crystals. As the artist 1 (cast 1975). Lead, 57 ⁄2  amorphous fluidity of the foam hardened into an object walked toward the still red water of the lake, he said that the 1 1 65 ⁄2  64 ⁄4" (146.1  with both organic shape and a hard edge as it dried in mid- stability of the deserted mining operations that flanked the 166.4  163.2 cm). Edition of 3. Courtesy Cheim & cascade. Benglis then cast the form in lead for the work we water and the hot desert that surrounded everything seemed Read, New York. see here. Morris cut, hung, and dropped pieces of felt to to give way to a spinning movement that inspired the winding create works such as Untitled (1967) (fig. 1.10), in which form of the spiral that he eventually realized there. “No ideas, gravity and the qualities of the fabric determined the compo- no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could sition. Richard Serra (b. 1939) created a text piece (1962–68) hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence … consisting of a handwritten list of verbs that might serve as It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, instructions for Process art: “To roll/ to crease/ to fold/ … and the lake remained rock still.”14 In Smithson’s film docu- to crumple/ to shave/ to tear/ to chip/ to split/ to cut/ to menting the project, geological and historical time intersect sever/…”13 The shock of Serra’s sculpture lay in his single- in the basements of natural-history museums, maps blowing minded application of such actions to materials and his across the desert, and toy dinosaurs marching through diora- commitment to letting the process define the product. Split- mas of the Paleolithic era. Footage of massive earth-moving ting, cutting, suspending, or forcing lead, steel, rubber, and vehicles is spliced with scenes showing crystal growth, sun- timber resulted in evocative, often poetic, even frightening spots, and Smithson’s editing table. The loss of dialectical results, such as his sculptures in which massive sheets of metal distance between past and present, history and actuality, are supported without fixings by gravity alone (fig. 1.11). enacted by Spiral Jetty would become an increasingly impor- By deeply experimenting with a wide variety of materials, tant theme throughout the 1970s. often foreign to the art museum, Process artists created work In 1972, two years after Spiral Jetty was completed, the that could not be readily integrated into existing modes of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and psycho- thinking about and displaying art. therapist Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930–92) published Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the most far-reaching Alternative Logics: Spiral Jetty and Conceptual Art statement of the anti-dialectical trend. Deleuze and Guattari One of the most radical Process art proposals was made by were interested in erotic desire and the unconscious as crea- Robert Smithson during the creation of Spiral Jetty (1970) tive forces. They saw the key to understanding the psyche not

1.10 Robert Morris, Untitled, 1967. Felt, 12  6' (3.65 m  1.11 Richard Serra, Prop, 1968. Lead antimony, four plates, each 182.88 cm). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 48  48  1" (122  122  2.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, 1.12 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Black basalt, limestone rocks, earth, and salt crystals, length 1,500' Collection of Ellen Johnson. Photo Rudy Burckhardt. New York. Gift of the Grinstein Family. Acc. num. 286.1986.a-d. (457.2 m). Great Salt Lake, Utah. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni, courtesy John Weber Gallery, New York.

24 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary New Movements and New Metaphors 25 Want It” (1969) created by John Lennon (1940–80) and Yoko gested that his show had wider implications. Audiences were Ono (b. 1933) (fig. 1.13), and the couple’s Bed-In (1969), to understand that art was engaged with the outside world; a repeated performance in which press and guests were the exhibition consequently included pieces that could be invited to discuss politics with them as they lay in bed in their found in the woods and rivers around the Cornell campus. hotel room. The artist and critic Allan Kaprow (1927–2006), who Relinquishing history and logic, however, did not always created performances that drew both on the ritualistic require that one lose oneself in the desert or the bedroom. process of Abstract Expressionism, as exemplified by Pollock, As Smithson was moving earth in Utah, Sol LeWitt (1938– and on the materials and spaces of the real world, shared 2007) was composing texts on Conceptual art that initiated a Sharp’s expansive vision. Happenings, the name Kaprow gave new form of secular mysticism. In his 1969 writing “Sentences to his performances, included any number of participants on Conceptual Art,” he pronounced: “Conceptual artists are engaged in activities ranging from rearranging furniture in mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions Push Pull (1963) and piling-up tires for Yard (1961), to more that logic cannot reach.”17 That leap depended on following complex scenarios including building towers and bonfires, a consistent “irrational” choice through to its completion.18 and spreading strawberry jam on a Volkswagen Beetle and LeWitt’s conceptual processes, like those of Judd, are gen- licking it off in Household (1964). As he explained in his land- erally quite simple: The point of the object is to communi- mark essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), artists cate the operations that produced it. Variations of Incomplete had learned that if they wanted to evoke sensations from the Open Cubes (1974) is an example (fig. 1.14). The title pro- real world, they need not imitate them in paint: If the artist vides a description of the idea that has generated the work. wants to suggest something hot or sweet, a bonfire and jam The minimum requirement for a visual description of an are more suitable materials. Kaprow went as far as assert- open cube is three lines, one each along the axes of height, ing that the only significant art was that which rejected the 1.13 John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “War is Over! If You Want It,” 1969. Billboard, New York. Photo by Yoko Ono © Yoko Ono. width, and depth. As the title does not specify how the vari- geometric, sanctioned spaces of the gallery. He claimed that ations are to be presented, LeWitt produced two- and three- purportedly anti-aesthetic work, such as Process art, by situat- dimensional renderings. On the floor are sculptures of every ing itself in galleries and museums, actually reinforced con- possible combination, from the three three-piece models to ventional Western views of art, including the “conventional in decoding hidden meanings based on past events, in the at the end of her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” that the single eleven-piece one. Images of the open cubes are dualism of the stable versus the unstable, the closed versus Freudian manner, but rather in asking questions about pro- “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”16 framed and hung on the wall. In the end, LeWitt depicted the open, the regular versus the organic, the ideal versus duction: “The question posed by desire is not ‘What does Efforts to translate, define, and explain art, Sontag argued, the concept in three ways, through words, objects, and the real and so on.”21 For example, we may find interest in it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’”15 By putting the obscure and overlook its productive power. One can see a images, thus diagramming both the geometrical concept and dropped felt, but it looks interestingly chaotic only in rela- emphasis on creation, Deleuze and Guattari saw opportuni- similar turning away from history and conventional logic to the threefold manner in which artists typically communicate tion to the square room in which it is installed. Worse than ties to merge the arts, psychoanalysis, and social revolution. embrace the generative potential of sensuality, desire, and their ideas. that, its value depends on the importance assigned to it by Their sentiment is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s injunction action in the billboards announcing “War is Over! If You LeWitt’s art would always include a physical component, the owners of that room. The concern with exploding con- but this was not the case for every Conceptualist. Many uti- ventional binaries such as order/chaos became more urgent lized text to suggest an idea that would become the work of as artists, especially feminist artists, moved away from formal art as the viewer contemplated the words. Robert Barry’s (b. issues to address social ones. 1936) All the Things I Know But Am Not Now Thinking (1969), In a 1970 article on an exhibition of Minimalist, Process, consisting of the title written across a white canvas, or Yoko Conceptual, and Earth art called “Spaces” at the Museum Ono’s Breath Piece (1966), for which the artist circulated a of Modern Art, New York, the artist and critic Gregory card among spectators with the word “Breathe” written on Battcock (1937–80) extended the line of critique presented it, were such works, initiated by text and completed by the by Kaprow, proposing that it was one’s moral responsibility viewer’s mind and body. to examine the context of contemporary art when interpret- ing its content. “One characteristic of modern man and of his On the Social Meaning of Form art is his new awareness of the repressive function of bounda- At Cornell University in 1970, the artist, writer, and curator ries,” he announced. “There are sexual boundaries, famil- Willoughby Sharp (1936–2008) presented an exhibition ial, administrative, governmental, geographical, and social titled “Earth Art” that celebrated the examination and boundaries and they all diminish man’s desire for freedom 1.14 Sol LeWitt, Variations of manipulation of over forty kinds of organic matter. Sharp and subsequently reduce the chances for authentic social Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. 22 Wood sculptures with white paint listed the materials used in alphabetical order, from “air, change.” Battcock identified certain forces that influenced (122 pieces), each piece 8" alcohol, ashes,” through “felt, fire, flares,” all the way to the way work was shown and viewed in “Spaces,” including (20.3 cm) square. Framed “twigs, twine, water and wax.”19 Sharp presented the actions the corporations that had funded the exhibition and indi- photographs and drawings (131 to which the materials had been subjected in a similarly vidual works within it: General Electric, Kimberly-Clark, RCA, pieces), each piece 26  14" ordered list, beginning with “bent, broken, curled” and and Sylvania to name a few. These “[i]ndustrial and research (66  35.6 cm). Base 12  120 ending with “spread and sprinkled.”20 While clearly drawing giants, electronic and data-oriented companies,” wrote  216" (30.5  304.8  548.6 cm). Courtesy the Saatchi on Morris’s notion of “Anti-Form” and the Abstract Expres- Battcock, “encouraged … artists to incorporate their discov- Gallery. sionist drip paintings of Jackson Pollock (1912–56), he sug- eries into art works. Instead of contributing to the church,

26 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary New Movements and New Metaphors 27 1.15 Terry Fox, Beuys’s theory of art depended, Defoliation Piece, he famously announced, “on the fact 1970. Four that every human being is an artist,”28 black-and-white a claim that celebrated the potential photographs, 8  10" (20.32  for creativity in all human beings. He 25.4 cm) each. explained that his audience must Performance be intellectually and politically alive, documentation of “The since art produced through thought- Eighties” exhibition, ful action required an equally engaged 17 March 1970, at the Powerhouse response from its recipients. Although Gallery, University Art Beuys is best known for his use of fat Museum, University of and felt, the materials for which he California, Berkeley. advocated most strongly were actu- © Estate of Terry Fox, ally “Thinking Forms” and “Spoken Köln. Courtesy of Forms,” which produce “Social Struc- Marita Loosen-Fox. ture.”29 By “sculpting” with thought, speech, and human relationships, artists could reshape society and history. This formulation suggested a radical extension of the artist’s role into a combination of activist, teacher, sculptor, painter, performer, and poli- tician. One manifestation of Beuys’s “expanded concept of art” was the they contributed to artists, and it all had the same effect. The (fig. 1.15), in which he set fire to a rectangular plot of Organization for Direct Democracy, 23 corporate conscience was appeased.” His charge was not jasmine flowers outside the University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1.16 Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit, 1970. Edition of 100. Two lifesize felt suits. which he founded in Düsseldorf in simply that MoMA provided industry with public-relations California. To get the garden to burn he used agent orange, Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. 1970. The group advocated a united opportunities, but that certain artists were also masking the a defoliant then in daily use in the Vietnam War (1959–75). Europe with a single electorate. In nature of their corporate production. In contrast to the con- In this case, Fox was able to invest what resembled a piece place of representational legisla- victions expressed by Process artists, “the properties of the of Minimalist and Earth art with poignant political content. By the 1970s, Beuys had created an identity for himself tive bodies and political parties, the organization promoted materials and inventions that are donated by the compa- Fox wrote of Defoliation Piece: “Everyone likes to watch fires. It that was equal parts shaman (mystical healer), politician, and direct democracy as a means of governance that treated eve- nies are not exploited for their unique and peculiar effects. made a beautiful roaring sound. But at a certain point people art professor. His mission was to develop forms of engage- ryone as fully active social beings. After the crises of fascism Rather these properties are sublimated.”24 To illustrate this realized what was going on—the landscape was being vio- ment with the world rather than to add more things to it. and the hubris of contemporary democracies, the Organi- point, Battcock cited Robert Morris’s use of trees provided by lated … Suddenly everyone was quiet. One woman cried for His work was intended to lead students from ideas to action; zation for Direct Democracy insisted that citizens be able to Kimberly-Clark which suggested that forest care, rather than twenty minutes.”25 any “art objects” as such were no more than by-products: “I represent themselves in the political arena. The Organiza- paper-making, was the company’s business. He further noted am not a teacher who tells his students only to think. I say: tion also offered free education, to provide an informed and that one (unnamed) artist had solicited one of the Defense Joseph Beuys Act; do something; I ask for a result. It may take different active electorate. Department’s largest suppliers for his materials, thus present- One of the loudest voices demanding that artists respond to forms.”27 In Beuys’s case, these included evocative non-art Beuys’s political activities were integral to his artistic ing the public with arms dealers in the guise of art suppliers. the entirety of human experience rather than to exclusively objects and alchemical combinations of fat and felt, sticks, production, providing a context in which the viewer was Such art concealed the social significance of its materials and aesthetic questions was Joseph Beuys (1921–85), who left stuffed animals, wires, toys, cars, bicycles, chalkboards, accorded agency and creative power, serving as a collabora- the corporations that produced them. Fluxus in 1965 because, as he put it, “they held a mirror up and himself, dressed almost invariably in a hunting vest tor with the artist to generate significance for his sculptures, In contrast to the sublimated violence and whitewashed to people without indicating how to change things.”26 Artists and felt hat. As in Process art and Arte Povera (the Italian to turn the fragmentary objects he created into tools for the history Battcock perceived at MoMA, the performances were obliged to participate, not simply to observe, he argued. movement based in Turin that made use of “poor” mate- creation and exchange of ideas. Beuys’s suits of felt, of which of Terry Fox (1943–2008) enacted real violence with his- His art was rooted in his experiences as a German air-force rials from nature and industry, as opposed to traditional he made many, achieve artistic depth as a conceptual artwork torical consciousness. In A Sketch for Impacted Lead (1970), pilot in World War II and the personal crisis that he had fine-art ones), these materials, which he selected on the that invites the viewer to re-imagine the relationship between Fox attempted to create a small bar of lead by firing several subsequently undergone. In 1944, according to his account, basis of their relative determinacy (including iron, tin, and contemporary urban society, as alluded to by the garment, bullets at the same spot. Impacted Lead is a variation on a his airplane was shot down over the Crimea and he was left wood) or indeterminacy (fat, honey, gelatin, watercolor, and and the compassion and knowledge of the natural world theme explored in lead Process pieces by Richard Serra, but stranded in the snow. Discovered barely alive by a group of blood), communicate first through their physical proper- revealed to the artist through the felt of the more ancient by using a gun to reveal the properties of his material, Fox local people called Tatars, he was kept warm with felt blan- ties. Beuys’s materials quite often degrade before the view- Crimean communities. Although few artists would pursue all bound the meaning of the piece to social issues relating to kets and animal fat, and tenderly nursed back to health. er’s eyes, and evoke complex associations with organic and the implications of Beuys’s practice, his influence remains firearms rather than formal ones concerning the inher- Although the truth of these experiences has never been con- geometric forms, ideas of creation and decomposition, and palpable today. The generation of German artists who dom- ent qualities of his materials. The performance was photo- firmed, when he finally started to make art again after the biographical and biological elements. Beuys’s work, from inated the international scene in the 1980s and 1990s were graphed: We can see Fox at the gun shop and the shop owner war, Beuys drew heavily on the story, creating art from felt his suits and stacks of felt (fig. 1.16) to his performances almost all products of Beuys’s teachings, and his conviction holding the gun, before Fox takes aim at a target behind the and fat and casting himself in the role of healer, providing with live and dead animals, pointed to a dimension beyond that every human being is an artist continues to resonate counter. In the same year, Fox created Defoliation Piece (1970) for Europe the assistance he had received from the Tatars. rational materialism. through artistic circles worldwide.

28 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary New Movements and New Metaphors 29 Leon Golub also argued, like Battcock, that disengaging one’s art from Beuys’s Organization for Direct Democracy shared its dis- society through claims to artistic freedom allowed the human trust of representation with much art of the 1960s, from and ecological costs of capitalism to remain hidden. Giving Minimalism to Process. The clearly political and social nature expression to his anger with the regimes that controlled both of Beuys’s Organization is useful for calling attention to current political events and art history, Golub showed how the political connotations of this suspicion. Not everyone, art could resist by representing the human cost of political however, had given up on representation. U.S. painter Leon choices and highlighting its own role in the mechanisms of Golub (1922–2004) embraced representational painting as political control. a means, he said, to “get at the real.”30 In Vietnam II (1972) (fig. 1.17), he cut away parts of the painting, inviting real space into the carefully rendered images of contemporary Institutional Critique warfare. Nailed to the wall like a tarpaulin, the image of “Institutional critique” is the name given to art designed bodies in violent confrontation appears damaged by gashes to examine the conditions of its own existence, from the that the eye falls into, moving through the skin of the canvas museums that show it to the groups of people that value it. as though each cut were a wound or a fissure between the One of the most suggestive examples of such art appeared realms of art and life. Golub’s work made reference to exist- in Sharp’s “Earth Art” exhibition at Cornell University. This ing figurative traditions and mass-media imagery, including was a pile of dirt deposited by the German artist Hans Haacke photographs from newspapers and popular military maga- (b. 1936) in the center of one of the galleries. The mound, zines such as Soldier of Fortune. Bodies, often awkwardly posed titled Grass Grows (1969), was seeded and watered, and by and imperfectly formed, act out scenes of military aggression the end of the exhibition had become a small grassy hill—an and almost inhuman malaise. Soldiers pause between killing indoor landscape. To see the work through to its completion, and smoking to look out at the viewer. Their expressions, sug- Haacke relied on what he called the “systems” that connected gesting a range of emotions from self-satisfaction to sadistic his materials to their environment. The museum, with its staff pleasure, seem to seek out the camera’s attention. As such, of curators, educators, administrators, and custodians, consti- Golub insists that viewers consider their own act of observa- tuted the system that supported art. However, the particular tion as well as the acts they observe. requirements of Grass Grows—water, light, consistent temper- Some of the most striking works of the 1970s were texts ature, and fresh air—collided with those of display and secu- and images presented in art magazines, particularly Art­forum rity that museums are generally designed to meet. As curators and Arts Magazine. In the U.S., Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on became gardeners, the contrast between cultural and natural Contemporary Art” discussed above was published in the systems became apparent. Soon after Grass Grows, Haacke British journal The Fox as well as the U.S. 0-9, and the German shifted his attention away from issues of nature and culture to periodical Interfunktionen will be discussed in Chapter 3 for investigate increasingly complex social systems. providing a similar platform for German conceptualism. Haacke’s most notorious investigation, Shapolsky et al., Golub took advantage of this medium, writing essays address- Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, ing the relationship between art and society, and criticizing as of May 1, 1971 (fig. 1.18), caused his scheduled 1971 the dissociation from real-world concerns that had generally Guggenheim Museum exhibition to be canceled. The piece defined avant-garde art throughout the twentieth century. included publicly available information about poorly main- Golub argued that claims for the freedom of art were in tained apartment buildings owned by Harry J. Shapolsky fact a means to neutralize its revolutionary potential. He and his associates. When housed in their original archives,

1.18 Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971. Showing three of 33 panels; 146 black and white photographs, 146 typewritten pages, 2 plans, 6 tables of transactions, 1 explanatory panel. La Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

the photographs and records Haacke assembled were seen that its status as a treasure box for valuable art objects had only by the few lawyers who might look through them in the changed into being a flashpoint for the real-world social course of their work. Presented on the wall of the museum, politics of real-estate speculation and tenants’ rights in New however, they became public displays of economic injustice. York City. As Haacke said of the role of an artist whose prac- As one writer explained, “At a gut level Haacke is asking this tice is informed by politics: “One’s responsibilities increase; question: is there really any difference between the power however, this also gives the satisfaction of being taken as of money to control the direction of art and the power a bit more than a court-jester, with the danger of not being of money to keep rotten slums in existence?”31 By reach- forgiven.”32

3 5 1.17 Leon Golub, Vietnam II, 1972. Acrylic paint on linen, 115 ⁄4"  37' 9 ⁄32" (2.94  11.51 m). Presented by ing out through the doors of the museum into the streets, Haacke was not alone in his concern with creating politi- the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of Ulrich and Harriet Meyer (Building the Tate Collection), 2012. Haacke upset the Guggenheim, which suddenly found cally engaged art. For a 1974 show at the Claire Copley

30 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary Institutional Critique 31 placed alternating 3½-inch-wide bands of white and another keynote speaker, and curator, demonstrates the critical detail color in, out of, and between spaces where art was dis- and historical nuance being presented by institutional cri- played, including gallery walls and windows, art magazines, tique inside the museum. For Museum Highlights: A Gallery and out in the streets. Art objects, Buren argued, take their Talk (1989), performed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, place in the museum as signs of value based on economic, Fraser took on the identity of Jane Castleton, a professionally political, and social factors as well as aesthetic and mystical attired college-educated young museum professional who considerations. By eliminating the individuality of the image, provided docent tours of the museum. Her talk took in the giving the viewer no form or content within the work to con- membership desk, where she recited passages from museum template, attention is shifted to the context around it instead, statements about the importance of membership, and the those external features that define certain objects as art. great hall, where she discussed the history of the Philadel- In works such as Photo-souvenir: Within and Beyond the Frame phia Museum and its relation to other municipal services and (fig. 1.19), Buren’s stripes drew attention to non-artistic civic institutions including local hospitals, prisons, libraries, sources of value, much as Piper’s “meta-art” required. This and zoos. Her walk through the period rooms took visitors installation inside, on, and outside the Weber Gallery in New from the display of eighteenth-century French work, where York was set up in 1973 and then re-created for the gallery she quickly recited art-historical descriptions, to the men’s in a new location in 1978 as Change of Scenery, thus pulling room, where she rehearsed early twentieth-century tracts on the viewer’s eye and mind not only through the art gallery health. In the galleries she indicated highlights from the col- and out into the street but also through time. Like Haacke, lections but, as she did in the bathroom, focused more on Buren had trouble with the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, early-century descriptions of social types and urban issues when he suspended a banner of stripes down the center of than art-historical texts. the museum. Waving gently in Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda, In the 1970s institutional critique was one expression of Buren’s work implicated the space of the building in pro- the growing impulse among artists and critics in the labor, cesses of cultural politics, connecting the museum to the anti-war, and minority rights and women’s rights movements other contexts to which Buren’s stripes had previously drawn to make the connection between art and politics evident and attention, to galleries that sell art and the neighborhoods instrumental. In the subsequent decades the lesson that the that invest in it. Buren’s work was removed by the museum museum is connected to every other political and social insti- authorities after just a day on the premise that it blocked tution had become standard fare, giving Fraser’s generation views of other works—a somewhat perplexing argument con- the opportunity to move beyond needing to point to the fact sidering that the sightlines are already obstructed by the spi- of complicity. Such a critical and comprehensive approach to raling architecture of the museum. making art has been a continued means of maintaining the In the 1970s, voices drawing attention to the connections connection between the often-sanctified rooms of the art between art and politics were becoming increasingly forceful. museum and the spaces and issues that surround them. In 1971, protesters marched in front of MoMA in New York to urge Picasso to remove his painting Guernica from the city. The artist had entrusted his 1937 memorial to the victims of African-American Critiques fascism in Spain to the United States for safekeeping until a In the U.S., many African-American artists felt with par- republican government was re-established in Spain and the ticular urgency the need for engagement with daily life painting could be returned, which it was in 1981. However, on the streets as well as artistic experimentation in the the protesters argued that the American bombing of civil- studio. By the late 1960s, artists such as Romare Bearden ians during the war in Vietnam had rendered prominent U.S. (1911–88) and Benny Andrews (1930–2006) in New York institutions such as MoMA inappropriate caretakers for a had already created a substantial body of work exploring 1.19 Daniel Buren, Photo-souvenir: Within and Beyond the Frame, 1973. Detail, work in situ. painting expressing the artist’s anger at similar actions by the intersections of abstraction and figuration in the context John Weber Gallery, New York. Image courtesy the Buren Studio. Spanish fascists. of racially focused subject matter (fig. 1.20). Few venues Institutional critique as practiced by Haacke, Buren, and existed for them to show their work, however, and there others would be developed into a distinct genre in the sub- was a clear divide between black and white art worlds. Gallery in Los Angeles, artist Michael Asher (b. 1943) demand that an artist’s practice be limited to such politically sequent decades. Artists discussed in later chapters including Mobilized by the disparity not only between black and removed the dividing wall between the exhibition space and conscious reflexivity, only that it be informed by it. Group Material, Fred Wilson, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Santiago white artists, but between the level of racially conscious dis- the offices behind it, revealing the commercial side of the French Conceptual artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938), with Sierra, and Alexander Brener have created object-, image-, course occurring every day in the streets and newspapers business. Meanwhile U.S. artist and philosopher Adrian Piper colleagues Olivier Mosset (b. 1944), Michel Parmentier (b. and performance-based practices that point to the complex and the virtual silence on the same subject in museums, (b. 1943) called on artists and audiences to consider political 1938), and Niele Toroni (b. 1937), used uniform painted ways in which cultural institutions participate in politics and artists of color, with Andrews in a leading position, fol- awareness as integral to all artistic practice. She called such marks and complex critical analysis to argue that even a how art can assume both complicit and resistant positions. lowed the model of grassroots activists and formed the political awareness “meta-art” and defined it as “the activity Minimalist box communicated its meaning within a socially By the 1980s, museums were opening their doors to artists to Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) in 1969 in of making explicit the thought processes, procedures, and defined discourse, which ultimately had more influence on perform what approximated to a form of public self-critique. direct response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibi- presuppositions of making whatever kind of art we make.”33 the nature of the art experience than properties such as color The work of Andrea Fraser, in which the artist or a surro- tion “Harlem on My Mind.” Presented as a commemora- Piper (see Chapter 7), like Haacke and others, did not or form. Buren’s work consisted exclusively of selectively gate steps into various institutional roles including docent, tion of the New York borough and its celebrated arts scene,

32 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary African-American Critiques 33 the first of many expressions of local and racial politics to be painted in U.S. cities across the following decade. It responded to sentiments such as those expressed by Black Arts Movement writer Larry Neal that the “political liberation of the Black Man is directly tied to his cultural liberation.”35

AfriCOBRA In 1968, Jeff Donaldson (1932–2004), Jae Jarrell (b. 1935) and her husband, Wadsworth Jarrell (b. 1929), and Gerald Williams (b. 1926) brought together other OBAC participants and like-minded African-American artists to “transcend the ‘I’ of the ‘me’ for the ‘us’ and ‘we’ in order to create a basic philosophy which would be the foundation of a visual Black Arts movement.”36 This gathering resulted in the formation of COBRA (Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists), which took as its mission the need to address the challenges facing the black commu- nity at home in Chicago and nationally. The group selected subject matter that it would address collectively (the first such theme was the black family) and outlined aesthetic parameters for its output, such as the use of figurative composition, the inclusion of text, and the production of low-price prints that could be made avail- able to a wide audience. In the process of inventing appropriate 1.20 Romare Bearden, Tomorrow I Might Be Far Away, 1967. Collage of various papers with charcoal and graphite means to match its message, the group’s on canvas, overall 46  56" (116.8  142.2 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Paul Mellon Fund. message changed. It remained commit- ted to a “shared collective concept” and it consisted exclusively of photographs of the neighborhood shows were being held at the Brooklyn Museum (1969) and a “black aesthetic,” but soon these con- and showed no interest in Harlem artists themselves. Many the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1970); the time was thus cerns led members to look beyond their painters and sculptors who had been working in Harlem obviously ripe for the Whitney Museum to make a national 1.21 OBAC Visual Arts Workshop, Wall of Respect, 1967. original local, distinctly U.S., setting.37 In since the 1920s and 1930s lived just a short walk from the statement. When the “Survey of Black Art” opened in 1971, Oil on brick, 30  60' (9.1  18.2 m). Chicago. 1969, COBRA thus became AfriCOBRA, museum, but were not included in the show. The BECC however, there was no guest curator and limited participa- the African Commune of Bad Relevant argued that, since the museum had no experts on black art tion by the African-American arts community. Major figures, and 1970s across the U.S. By the end of the 1960s, the Organ- Artists. With this new name came a new audience, defined on its staff and had failed to enlist any such specialists to help including painter Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) and sculptor Melvin ization for Black American Culture (OBAC) had sparked sig- not by where it lived but by its African heritage. Success- curate the exhibition, the only thing “Harlem on My Mind” Edwards (b. 1939), publicly boycotted the show on the nificant activity in Chicago. OBAC (pronounced “oba cee,” to ful work was still judged on its ability to convey “to its viewer revealed was institutionalized racism and a deep desire to grounds that it “negate[d] a coherent viewing and analysis suggest the Yoruba word oba, or “ruler”), the primary organ a statement of truth, of action, of education, of conditions keep the existing Met power structure intact. Bearden’s of the creative content, context, influence, and general value of the Black Arts Movement, a national cultural organization and a state of being to our people.”38 Those conditions group Spiral took a less confrontational stance, but also criti- of the works of African American artists.”34 Although the that promoted intellectual production by and about African- were clearly expressed in the assertion that “all Black people, cized the show’s exclusions. groundwork for representing non-majority art was beginning Americans, formed a visual-arts workshop to complement regardless of their land base, have the same problems, The BECC made public its objections to the racism of to be laid, decades would pass before satisfactory exhibitions its literary activities. The result was the 1967 Wall of Respect the control of their land and economics by Europeans or current museum practices and entered into negotiations with would result. (fig. 1.21), a mural depicting African-American luminar- Euro-Americans.”39 The combined themes of race, class, the Met and other museums. Conversations with the Whitney New York might play the dominant role in the exhibi- ies selected by the artists in a dialogue with residents of the and power produced imagery replete with the signs of the Museum of American Art in New York resulted in plans for tion, sale, and production of American art, and indeed in art city’s South Side neighborhood, where it was painted. Among Black Power movement, such as raised, clenched fists, para- an African-American art exhibition to be produced with the activism, but it was not the only important center. Black arts those represented were Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, military garb, afros, portraits of Malcolm X, and revolution- help of an African-American guest curator. Similar, if smaller, received steadily growing attention throughout the late 1960s Muhammad Ali, and Aretha Franklin. The wall was among ary texts.

34 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary African-American Critiques 35 1.22 Wadsworth Jarrell, Revolutionary, and philosophy, AfriCOBRA artist Barbara Jones-Hogu (b. community that Newton described as highly visual, Douglas 1 1 1971. Acrylic on canvas, 50 ⁄2  63 ⁄2" 1938) explained that the group’s art and theoretical stand- integrated graphic design, portraiture, caricature, text, and (128  161 cm). Collection of the point were the outcome of “rap[ping] about the hip aesthetic photography to demonstrate “the Correct Handling of the Brooklyn Museum, New York. things that a ‘negro’ group could do.”41 Like much feminist Revolution.”44 Images in the newspaper revealed how the © Wadsworth Jarrell. work of the period, AfriCOBRA made clear that aesthetics conditions of daily life demanded social upheaval and how were culturally specific. Even if they strove to praise AfriCO- black men, women, and children possessed the moral and BRA art, white critics often felt shut out by it. As Donaldson physical strength to carry it out. By the early 1970s, the news- noted, though he and his peers were of the same generation paper had a circulation of over 100,000 copies. and trained by the same people as the Pop artists, their goals Douglas designed the format of the newspaper to maxi- were very different. mize its visual impact, including detachable posters that Celebration of the specific associative qualities of form showed black Americans suffering garbage-filled streets and and color in a black context, however, did not exclude more police brutality, and that could be used to spread the Black formalist discussions of art. The AfriCOBRA theory of repre- Panther message. In an image from April 1971 (fig. 1.23), sentation is particularly striking. Rather than understanding this bullet-riddled photograph of a seventeen-year-old boy representation as the reflection of an appearance or experi- who was shot by Oakland police gives evidence of the need ence, AfriCOBRA style was presented as a resolution of com- for community control of the police. By the mid-1970s, peting interests, “mimesis at mid-point” as it was dubbed for Douglas had introduced a more sensitive visual style which the group’s third exhibition. The appearance of the world in used line drawings that were nuanced in detail and soft in an AfriCOBRA work “marks the spot where the real and the effect. Like his earlier collage aesthetic, the drawings demon- un-real, the objective and the non-objective, the plus and the strate another face of revolutionary representation and the minus meet. A point exactly between absolute abstractions heterogeneity of both political art and black identity. and absolute naturalism.”42 As in Photorealist work of the period, abstraction was enlisted as a means to produce natu- ralism. Chuck Close (b. 1940), the best-known Photorealist, began painting by taking a photograph, plotting a grid across it and a corresponding one across his canvas, then tran- scribing the image by copying it square by square. In 1969, his paintings closely resembled photographs; in the 1970s, the process itself became his subject matter as much as the actual appearance of his sitters. Though AfriCOBRA artists were less methodical, they also conceived of the canvas as a field of abstractions that coalesced to form clear images. As mentioned above, several members of AfriCOBRA marked a further contest between abstraction and representation by including text, often imitating the cadence of spoken words. In a painting such as Revolutionary, for instance, forms combine to produce images at the very point where letters In Wadsworth Jarrell’s Revolutionary (1971) (fig. 1.22), case inspired a nationwide campaign for her exoneration; and words join to deliver a message about the world. a portrait of African-American activist Angela Davis, the in 1972, she was tried and acquitted. Wadsworth Jarrell’s use subject’s body, clothing, and the space around her vibrate of the hero’s words to represent her body in Revolutionary Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party with words: “BLACK,” “BEAUTIFUL,” “REVOLUTION,” reflected a political reality as well as a formal artistic solution. Across the country, in Oakland, California, institutional “RESIST,” and long lines of “B”s and “R”s. Her loose-fitting The impact of such politically volatile content was further critique of a very different sort could be found in the work blouse with facsimile ammunition belt projecting off the amplified inRevolutionary by Jarrell’s explosive use of of Emory Douglas, creator of the media-savvy style and ico- canvas was based on Jae Jarrell’s “Revolutionary Suit,” which “Coolade Color” and “Shine,” terms employed in AfriCOBRA nography of the Black Panther Party. Douglas’s training was integrated pan-African and paramilitary references in a skirt- texts to discuss the aesthetic qualities of their art. Jeff Don- in commercial art at City College, San Francisco, in the late suit design with real bullets affixed to the top. In the painting aldson defined “Shine” as “a major quality, a major quality. 1960s. While using his talents to promote the City College the fabric is covered with the words: “I have given my life to We want the things to shine, to have the rich luster of a just- Black Students’ Association, he met Huey Newton and the struggle. If I have to lose my life in the struggle that is the washed fro, of spit shined shoes, of de-ashened elbows and Bobby Seale, who were then developing the Black Panther way it will have to be.” In 1971, after being accused of provid- knees and noses. The Shine who escaped the Titanic, the platform and strategy. Named minister of culture for the party, ing weapons used in an ambush on a California courtroom ‘li’l light of mine,’ patent leather, Dixie Peach, Bar-BQ, fried Douglas created a public image for the Panthers that would intended to free Black Panther organizer George Jackson, fish, cars,ad shineum!”40 “Shine” was not a word found in be imitated by liberation movements all over the world. The Davis was placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s art establishment-sanctioned texts about formalism or the pages of the Black Panther newspaper provided a gallery of

list of most-wanted criminals and went into hiding. Four history of the avant-garde. And that, of course, was the point: what Douglas called “revolutionary art,” that “enlightens the 1.23 Emory Douglas, The Black Panther, April 3, 1971. people were killed in the ambush, including a judge. There It was a term coined by black-art theorists for exclusive use party to continue its vigorous attack against the enemy, as Pen, ink, and collage on board, 17  11" (43.2  27.9 cm). was little evidence that Davis had been a participant and her in relation to black art. In her declaration about its history well as educate the masses of black people.”43 Addressing a Courtesy the artist.

36 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary African-American Critiques 37 at various times and in different places after World War 1.25 Yoko Ono, Feminist Statements II. Women artists inflected postwar movements including Fly, 1970. Film In her 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Fluxus, Actionism, and Gutai with gender consciousness. In still. Courtesy of Yoko Ono. Artists?” the art historian Linda Nochlin (b. 1931) concluded some cases the feminist politics were explicit. For example, that the idea of “greatness” depended on a set of social prac- in 1969, VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940), an artist associated tices that by definition excluded women. The institutions with Austrian Actionism, whose participants experimented that conferred value on a work of art or enabled a young with ritualistic performances, created Genital Panic. For this artist to gain skills were all structured in such a way as to aggressively confrontational piece, the artist forced viewers make it difficult for women to succeed. Educational opportu- to consider the discrepancy between the real and repre- nities, the customs of workshops and studios, not to mention sented worlds of sexuality by entering a cinema wearing the venues for patronage, exhibition, and sales, were all crotchless pants and standing directly in front of the seated shaped to suit men. The few women who did “make it” were audience. Photographs taken later and titled Aktionshose: exceptions whose success often relied on help from a male Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic) showed the artist guide. The route to change, Nochlin suggested, was not to wielding a machine gun. The gun makes explicit the con- be more attentive to women within the existing system, but nection, asserted by EXPORT’s performance, between issues to alter the art system and the structures of society altogether. of representation and issues of power. However, contrary to Concern about gender difference in the production, rumors that have grown up since, EXPORT denies having reception, and definition of art can be seen in work made this weapon with her on the occasion of the original per- formance. Other works, such as Yoko Ono’s perfor- mance Cut Piece (1964) (fig. 1.24) or filmFly (1970) (fig. 1.25), demonstrate a more implicit feminist politics through their embrace of the Fluxus interest in simple acts: in this case, cutting clothes and watch- ing a fly. As the viewer realizes that the object on which these acts are being performed is a woman’s body, revealed slowly as her clothes are cut away or as the fly and the camera traverse the contours of her Structuralist thinker was the anthropologist Claude Lévi- submission, while the “agents of exploitation and repression” body, the content becomes more pointed and politi- Strauss, whose analysis of kinship relations led to his articu- learned mastery.46 In Althusser’s view, individuals do not cal. Throughout the 1970s, feminists would focus on lation of structures of familial and social relations that were choose their own path, as society is structured to preclude the interplay between the social and the individual, seemingly repeated in communities across the spectrum options that might upset its balance. Culture plays a role and the represented and the real, to great effect. of contemporary and historical humanity. By the 1960s, here. For instance, contained in the notion that art is either however, faith in the existence of such universal structures a form of pure, personal expression or equally pure, formal The Role of Theory and in our ability to correctly discern and define them had experimentation, two typical Modernist convictions, there is By the 1970s, political and social criticism had faltered—hence the turn to Poststructuralist analyses. the assumption that art and society are separate. Such ideas become as much a part of an artist’s practice as Drawing on their experience of the radicalism of the are part of an ISA that keeps the work of artists isolated from painting or sculpting. This expansion of the art- 1960s as well as on political theory, European historians that of politicians. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth- ist’s purview took place initially in the context of the and philosophers such as Foucault and Althusser examined century capitalist industrialism, such beliefs about the sepa- debates over Minimalism and Process art in texts such the role of power in history. Foucault believed that categories ration of art and politics coincided with the disenfranchise- as Morris’s “Anti-Form,” but was increasingly adopted organizing knowledge, from criminal codes to the methods ment of the working class. Activist artists in the 1960s used by artists concerned with clarifying the political and objects of historical study, functioned to maintain exist- the theories of Foucault, Althusser, and others to demon- terrain that they considered relevant to an under- ing power relations; artistic greatness was one such category. strate the common cause of artists and the working class. standing of their work. Turning to French Poststruc- By identifying certain practices—technical virtuosity, for turalist theorists such as historians Michel Foucault instance—as the measure of artistic success, artists could Nancy Spero and Louis Althusser, linguists Roland Barthes and be corraled to work in line with, rather than against, pre- As is evident in EXPORT’s and Ono’s work, feminist politics Jacques Derrida, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, vailing power structures. Althusser interpreted power in often encouraged new formal solutions. In the U.S., Nancy as well as different elements of feminist and socialist Western society through his theory of the Ideological State Spero’s (1926–2009) creation of an explicitly feminist prac- theory, artists and critics began a process of redefin- Apparatus (ISA), showing how the assumptions one made tice drew on her earlier oil-on-canvas works, which had ing artistic production as a significant strand of intel- about society were largely ideological products reflecting explored the intersections between figuration and abstrac- lectual and political history. As a theory of culture the way society was organized. Social norms are thus not col- tion. By the late 1960s, Spero had turned to hand-printing and meaning, the earlier Structuralism had posited lective wisdom but ideological devices that enforce “subjuga- fragments of personal testimonies, news and police reports, that there were patterns within human societies and tion to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its practice.”45 poetry and roughly drawn female forms, which she applied psyches that could be isolated and shown to repeat Whether one learned to be docile, as did most girls, or active, to single pages, scrolls, and eventually walls and ceilings. across history. The search for and creation of such as did most boys, depended on one’s position in society. In In this new working practice, Spero—like Leon Golub, to 1.24 Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964. Performance at Yamaichi Hall, Tokyo, 1964. unifying structures typified twentieth-century intel- addition, corresponding to feminist insights, Althusser’s whom she was married—addressed overtly political content. Courtesy of Yoko Ono. lectual pursuits across the disciplines. The foremost analysis was explicitly Marxist: The labor force was taught She explained: “I decided to address the issues I was actively

38 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary Feminist Statements 39 involved in—women’s issues. I wanted to investigate the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history.” The Feminist Art Program more palpable realities of torture and pain.”47 After several Women’s textual insurgency required, Cixous argued, a new By the mid-1970s, U.S. feminist artists could be divided into years of research and production, Spero completed two relationship to the body one that resisted translating sensa- two groups loosely based on their attitudes toward three series of works, Torture of Women (1974) and Notes in Time tion into the limiting structures of existing language. She issues: belief in a shared female artistic practice; relations on Women (1979). For Torture of Women, she used blocks of implored women: “Write your self. Your body must be heard. with the existing art world; and the balance between social texts recording horrific abductions, tortures, and murders Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious critique and personal expression. Opinion tended to divide of women that she had culled from a variety of public and spring forth.”48 Cixous’s writing, like Spero’s art, was based along regional lines, with feminists on the West Coast advanc- personal sources. Spero then hand-printed the narratives in a political and sensual experience of the body. It aimed to ing a distinctive female style, a separatist approach to the art using a variety of typefaces, generating a formally inventive expose and destroy existing social orders and to envision a world, and a personally expressive art, while their East Coast combination of highly legible and emotionally and morally previously unimagined future. counterparts by and large argued the reverse. excruciating content. In Notes in Time on Women (fig. 1.26), Spero enlisted women’s experiences to generate the One major source of this dichotomy was the early and Spero used imagery from a range of historical periods and symbols with which to share sensations, emotions, and ideas lasting success of the Feminist Art Program (FAP), begun in cultures to expose past and present violence against women. that up to that point had lacked access to language. Simulta- 1970 by Judy Chicago (b. 1939) at California State University She juxtaposed documentation of assaults on women with neously destructive and constructive, women’s art of this type Fresno, and then developed by Chicago and Miriam Schap- images of Greek and Aztec goddesses, fashion models, and crossed the formal boundaries between writing, painting, iro (b. 1923) at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, athletic nudes. Words and bodies, letters, lines, and colors criticism, and theory. “Women’s writing,” Cixous asserted, beginning in 1972. The FAP was a response to its founders’ collide and caress each other in a rhythm that fluctuates from was a product of women who had been liberated from the (and many other women’s) experience of sexism in the art earthly to airborne, from graceful to damaged. example of history and as such could not truly be “theorized, world. Women were making art in basements and bedrooms Spero’s desire to create a visual language for women’s enclosed, or encoded.”49 Throughout the 1970s Spero pro- after coming home from work, cooking meals, and caring for experience of and resistance to societal oppression was duced just such a language of unprecedented form and sub- husbands and children. Art schools, then as now, were full of shared by and explored in the work of a number of intellec- versive content. In 1981, she completed The First Language, female students, but galleries and museums showed almost tuals and activists. The French literary critic and philosopher the first of her large-scale print works without text. The piece no women’s art. The FAP’s mission was “to help women Hélène Cixous’s account of “women’s writing” in her 1975 consisted of images of women dancing, running, threaten- restructure their personalities to be more consistent with manifesto “The Laugh of the Medusa” is a key text for inter- ing, contemplating, even roller-skating. After a decade of their desires to be artists and to help them build their art- preting Spero’s work. Here, Cixous explained that a woman explicitly feminist work, she had created a lexicon that, vari- making out of their experiences as women.”50 The concept “must write her self, because this is the invention of a new ously using text and imagery separately or together, commu- of training women artists to value their experience and insurgent writing which … will allow her to carry out the nicated in the realm of activist politics and feminist theory. to base communities and artistic identities upon it con- trasted with the highly individualistic and competitive

approach of contemporary art schools. The FAP encom- 1.27 Womanhouse installation in Los Angeles featuring Robin Weltsch's passed consciousness-raising sessions, performances, discus- Kitchen and Vicki Hodgetts's Eggs to Breasts (sponsored by the Feminist Art 15 15 sions, and opportunities to practice painting, sculpture, film, Program at CalArts), 1972. Gelatin silver print, 9 ⁄16  7 ⁄16" (25.3  weaving, crafts, collage, assemblage, and installation. It devel- 20.2 cm). The Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43.1. oped a resource center containing a catalogue of images and projects initiated by women artists across the U.S. (Don- aldson had set up a similar archive of African-American arts danger. Though the piece, subtitled Eggs to Breasts, was attrib- in Chicago.) To some—Judy Chicago in particular—the uted to Hodgetts, it was designed collaboratively, matching images in the FAP database revealed a female aesthetic to personal inspiration to group vision. match the circumstances of female artists. Integrating anatomy with architecture was a common motif The most influential FAP production wasWomanhouse: of the Womanhouse installations, as was the works’ ambivalent Nurturant Kitchen (1971–72), a Hollywood mansion converted combination of sensual pleasure and social anxiety. Faith into a stage, installation, workshop, and community space. Wilding’s (b. 1943) Crocheted Environment (1972) enveloped Womanhouse was a showcase for the alternative processes and audiences in “womb-shelters,” while Sandy Orgel’s Linen products created by self-identified “women artists,” and the Closet (1972) featured a nude female mannequin walking rooms were turned into materialized fantasies and fantastic through shelves of sheets and towels and out into the room.51 metamorphoses of their realities. In Womanhouse: Nurturant Womanhouse exemplified the type of alternative institution Kitchen of 1972 (fig. 1.27), an installation designed for the that feminist practice could generate. Audience members house by FAP participants Vicki Hodgetts, Robin Weltsch, walked out of the building exhilarated and often quite upset and Susan Frazier, the walls, ceilings, windows, and appli- as a result of experiencing the sensations of confinement, ances glowed with warm, enveloping shades of pink, while restriction, and liberation so dramatically visualized within. 1.26 Nancy Spero, Notes in Time on eggs appeared to have migrated from the stovetop directly As such, Womanhouse politicized many of its visitors. Women, 1979. Detail. Hand-printing, to the ceiling, where Hodgetts had sculpted dozens of them gouache, and collage on paper; hovering over the visitors. As the eggs reached the edge of Judy Chicago 24 panels, overall 20"  210' the ceiling and headed down the walls, they turned into Critic Anne-Marie Sauzeau (b. 1938) argued that the key to (50.8 cm  64 m). Collection Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy breasts, capturing the sensuality many in the group asso- representing femininity did not lie in using images drawn Galerie Lelong, New York. ciated with the kitchen, but also the sense of exposure and from reality to challenge stereotypes, since such a strategy

40 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary Feminist Statements 41 allowed the existing order to define the terms of refer- Mary Kelly and opening a gallery; AIR responded more directly ence, “which means betraying the basic … OTHERNESS of In England, the work of the American-born artist Mary to practical problems facing working artists. As the women’s experience.”52 Proposing a radical language of Kelly (b. 1941) represented a very different approach to critic Lucy Lippard (b. 1937), who had helped give a otherness, Sauzeau posited: “The actual creative project of making art about experience, arriving at emotion and poli- voice to Minimalist and Process art in the 1960s and [women] … involves BETRAYING the expressive mechanisms tics through a highly conceptual and analytic practice. In her to feminist art from the 1970s on, observed, women of culture.”53 From 1974 to 1979, Judy Chicago worked with striking contemporary portrait of a mother and child, Post- artists who began to show their work in the 1970s a team of women to create the monumental collaborative Partum Document (1973–79), Kelly combined psychoanalytic had often been artists for a long time. Because they work Dinner Party (fig. 1.28) as both a real and a metaphori- explanations of identity formation with records of the growth had had few professional opportunities after art cal attempt to bring women to the table and to wrest the of her own newborn son and her personal experience as a school, however, their careers had been shaped in expressive mechanisms of culture from the grip of men. The new mother. Kelly’s investigation drew on the work of Jacques the absence of the artistic, personal, and professional work consists of a triangular table with place settings for Lacan, who developed Freud’s ideas in wide-ranging intellec- benefits that usually came with being part of the art thirty-nine named female “guests of honor,” each with an tual contexts including linguistics and philosophy. She also community. The agenda of groups such as AIR, WAR individually designed plate in the form of a symbolic vagina. observed the stages of child-rearing with methodical rigor, (Women Artists in Revolt), and increasingly vocal The names of a further 999 women are painted on the tiled including such things as notes on her child’s linguistic devel- groups of curators and historians was to provide a floor around the table. LikeWomanhouse before it, The Dinner opment, food intake, topics of conversation, drawing and context for this work and to generate a dialogue Party laid claim to the empowering capacity of artistic expres- writing, and even his soiled diapers. In the image shown here about it in feminist terms. sion on behalf of women. It replaced the exclusively male cast (fig. 1.29), we see how Kelly combined different elements In a 1977 essay on feminist art in California, of traditional “Last Supper” paintings—Jesus flanked by his from her analysis, insisting, for instance, that scientific obser- Rosler argued that the most pressing issue for femi- twelve disciples—with a celebration of vaginal power. Perhaps vation is literally sullied by the physicality of child-rearing. nist and other contemporary artists was to set their this amounted to a “betrayal” of male-dominated (or phallo­ As we read this and other sections of Post-Partum Document work in a political context. She observed that art by centric) cultural forms—the controversy that the piece spurred we come to know Kelly as the artist/mother who is both women was shown and discussed only in contexts upon its initial exhibition and the reticence, until 2002, for any emotionally sensitive to the subtle changes in her son’s life where the political challenge of the women’s move- museum to take The Dinner Party into its collection suggests and intellectually brilliant in her careful analysis and selec- ment could be neutralized. In such circumstances, that it was perceived as such. However, Chicago’s inadvertent tive accumulation of data. Although Chicago’s hijacking of said Rosler, feminist art could be presented as “val­ mirroring of the phallocentric hierarchical order, as repre- the expressive mechanisms of male-dominated culture also orizing, in the name of ‘women’s culture,’ [prac- sented by the provision of “places of honor” at the table, has continued to be reflected in feminist practice, Kelly’s more tices] developed under conditions oppressive to been seen to undercut the work’s liberating quality.54 distanced, analytical approach, with its concern for issues of women” and might “wind up serving repressive ends.”57 As critics of Process and Earth art noted in the late 1960s, and as the Black Emergency Cul- 1.29 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts, 1974. Detail. Perspex unit, white card, diaper linings, plastic sheeting, tural Coalition found in the early 1970s, radical 7 paper, and ink; 1 of 31 units, each 13 ⁄8  11" (35.5  28 cm). Collection, art often needed partisan writers to help prevent Art Gallery of Ontario. © Mary Kelly. it from being presented in ways that merely served dealers, museums, and the status quo. Making art psychoanalysis, identity, and representation, would prove to was up to the artists; making it dangerous required critics be more in tune with the critical art of the 1980s. and historians. Rosler’s conclusion cut two ways. Not only was “wider atten- Martha Rosler tion to feminist theorizing” required, but also “new theory Almost immediately upon its creation, Womanhouse became a needs new practice.”58 Her Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) reference point by which feminists identified their own par- (fig. 1.30) illustrates one form of this new practice. The six- ticular brands of feminism. To artist and critic Martha Rosler minute film features Rosler wearing an apron and standing at (b. 1943), the FAP appeared to practice Abstract Expression- a kitchen counter as though she were on the set of an adver- ism “by other means,” thus committing more to expressing tisement or cooking show. From this stage, Rosler presents the self than transforming society.55 When asked in 1973 and demonstrates a series of kitchen utensils, beginning with about their relationship to Womanhouse, members of AIR her apron and proceeding alphabetically through the rest (Artists in Residence), the New York women artists’ coopera- of the items around her. She raises the objects, pronounces tive gallery co-founded by Nancy Spero, either rejected the their names, and demonstrates their use, giving physical comparison entirely or used it to draw distinctions between expression to the dominance that tools of the kitchen exert 1.28 Judy Chicago, Dinner Party, 1974–79. White tile the East and West Coast projects. Agnes Denes (b. 1931) over the woman who use them. As Rosler continues, the floor inscribed in gold with noted that work produced in California reminded women of letters of the alphabet themselves make an appearance 999 women's names; their accomplishments and encouraged them to create art among these conventional kitchen instruments: When she triangular table with painted from their experiences. AIR, on the other hand, was “trying reaches “U,” “V,” and “W,” Rosler holds her arms up, knife porcelain, sculpted porcelain to get out, to go forward to do innovative art and art of any and fork in hand, to form the letters. She thus turns lan- plates, and needlework, each 56 side 48" (14.6 m). The kind, not looking backwards to what we left.” While the guage into just one more object shaping and controlling Brooklyn Museum of Art, FAP was raising feminist consciousness and creating new lan- women’s daily activities and even their bodies. As the dem- New York. guages to express it, members of AIR were doing studio visits onstration progresses, however, the viewer becomes aware

42 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary Feminist Statements 43 however, reveal an artist’s point of view and thus tend held press conferences, vigils, panels, and performances. display cases, and, most memorably, made out of gum and to run counter to the expectations that most viewers The comparison with the epidemic of violence in the late applied like three-dimensional tattoos on the artist’s face, have for art. The work of West Coast artist Suzanne 1970s was significant: 2,387 sexual assaults were reported in neck, and torso. The vagina in these works is both star and Lacy (b. 1945) and East Coast-based Hannah Wilke 1977; in 2011, there were fewer than half that number, with a scar, a label for the socialized sexuality that empowers women (1940–93) demonstrate different options for a critical higher percentage of the crimes being reported. Lacy’s strat- as sexual beings and the brand that defines them as sex feminist representation. egy of making art about political issues by utilizing means objects. Wilke’s sculptures explore the process of objectifica- Lacy’s integration of performance, installation, often associated with organizing and protest has been termed tion in an awkward yet alluring way. On the one hand, the and community outreach is on vivid display in works “public practice” and constitutes the focus of the graduate forms epitomize rejection: They are chewed up and spat out. such as Three Weeks in May (1977), which typifies program that she now runs at Otis College of Art and Design On the other, they are produced by the action of lips, tongue, the practice she has continued to develop since the in Los Angeles. Lacy’s program and projects such as Three fingers, and saliva, and so allude to physical intimacy. In pho- 1970s. Each day of the three-week project, Lacy went Weeks in January demonstrate the continued urgency with tographs of the work, Wilke strikes fashion-model poses with to the central office of the Los Angeles Police Depart- which contemporary artists are creating socially engaged art. the vaginal objects thus combining pop-culture and con- ment to gather information about the number and ventional norms of beauty, which Wilke satisfies, with more locations of rapes reported the previous day. In a Hannah Wilke complex issues of objectification, repulsion, and desire, as gallery space, she then assembled the police reports On the East Coast, Hannah Wilke used a mix of performance well as those of politics, feminism, and representation. in a systematic manner, repeating a format used in and sculpture to reflect social, personal, and aesthetic con- By the end of the 1970s, hotly contested questions of the 1.30 Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975. Video, 6:09 minutes. Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash. work such as Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. A second public cerns. As described in 1975 by critic Cindy Nemser, Wilke’s social dimensions of artistic production and the politics of venue was created at City Hall, where Lacy presented work sounds as though it would be at home in Womanhouse: representation remained unresolved. The following chapters of an uneasy relationship between the tools and the woman. a large map of Los Angeles County with markers to indi- “Hannah Wilke … currently produces vaginal forms out of address the response to the appeal made by Rosler, Sauzeau Some objects—the hamburger press and juicer, for instance cate where each rape had taken place. Around each loca- pastel-tinted latex, pink pigmented terra cotta, multi-colored and others for new art and new theory. Chapter 2 examines —reveal their expected kitchen functions. Others, however— tion was a ring of smaller notations signifying the number of lint, and grey-toned kneaded erasers.”59 Despite at first appropriation art, while Chapter 3 looks at the more visceral such as the knife, fork, and icepick—are presented like rapes that go unreported for every call made to the police. appearing personal and emotive, however, these small sculp- productions of Neo-Expressionism. Although the debates weapons. These momentary glimpses of possible violent dis- These visual components were accompanied by demonstra- tures became more ambivalent when viewers were invited that had shaped art in the 1960s and 1970s continued into ruption in the otherwise peaceful routine of a woman’s life tions, educational and political activities, and performances to survey the large series, choose their favorite vagina, pay the following decade, their tenor changed. The activist poli- are quite different from the cathartic expressions of Wom- including dramatic productions as well as rituals of cathar- for it, and take it home. The impact of the work rested on tics of the Vietnam years and the social movements that anhouse. There is no drama and no personal expression— sis and healing. The events added the emotive and personal its identity as a carefully sculpted form and an individually developed in their wake lost ground to the political and potential action is simply pointed to, before the rhythm of features of West Coast feminism to the analytical, intellectual priced commodity, a comment on the commercialization of social conservatism of the Reagan/Thatcher era. In addi- the alphabet resumes, and the presentation and the presenter quality typical of East Coast work. In 2012, Lacy reinvented art as much as the objectification of women. The feminism tion, a boom in the art market introduced the topic of price. are both kept in order. Semiotics of the Kitchen points to the col- the piece as Three Weeks in January (fig. 1.31), again creating of Wilke’s work become more apparent in S.O.S. Starification Radicalism in contemporary art remained but, as will be dis- lusion between language and sexism, but it also demonstrates a map of violence against women and facilitating a series of Object Series (1974–82) (fig. 1.32), for which Wilke presented cussed, politics looked different in the 1980s than it had in resistance and humor. Often, Rosler turns very utilitarian public events. Lacy collaborated with Los Angeles organiza- the vaginal forms in a variety of ways: presented in frames, the 1970s. gestures, such as serving or stirring, into slapstick comedy, as tions including Code Pink and Peace over Violence, and when she pretends to throw the con- tents of a ladle or spoon off-camera. Such humor lightens but also empha- sizes the seriousness of the project. In a spirit akin to the social protest move- ments of the 1950s and 1960s, Rosler’s film suggests that the first step toward changing power relations is to make them visible, while her threatening ges- tures with sharp objects indicate the urgency of the matter. 1.32 Hannah Wilke, Suzanne Lacy S.O.S. Starification The challenge facing artists seeking Object Series, 1974–82. Gelatin to reveal the political nature of daily silver prints with experience was that, as Beuys said in chewing gum 1 relation to Fluxus, presenting reality sculptures, 40  58 ⁄2 1 was not enough. Injustice is not always  2 ⁄4" (101.6  self-evident; it must be labeled as well 148.6  5.7 cm). as shown. Without visible and political The Museum of 1.31 Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in January, 2012. Lacy and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Modern Art, New self-consciousness, art risks leaving the at the opening press conference of this performance piece. Produced by Los Angeles Contemporary York. Courtesy Ronald viewer unsure how to interpret what Exhibitions for the Getty Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, January 2012. Feldman Fine Arts, he or she sees. Instructions and labels, Courtesy of the artist. New York.

44 Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary Feminist Statements 45