Discovering the Contemporary

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.

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