LECTURE 14
2014-01-23
1960s, Fluxus, Conceptualism
FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS IN THE 1960:
FLUXUS, CONCEPTUAL ART, BEUYS
We saw last week the development in the 1950s and 1960s of Pop Art, both in Great
Britain and the USA. Both Pop tendencies were fascinated with the growing consumer society
and the imagery and artefacts associated with it, eg advertising, magazines and comics, signs,
glamour, fame; ‘low’ culture as opposed to the ‘high’ culture normally associated with art.
As western society gradually became richer and old notions were challenged, the decade
of the sixties threw up many new ideas in art. The decade was also beset with upheaval, and the
background of the Vietnam war, and challenges to the structure of society, to sexism and racism
for instance, must be remembered. The period was also the height of the Cold War, with the
Communist bloc in opposition to America and the capitalist West (Berlin Wall built 1963),
pointing large amounts of nuclear missiles at each other.
In this talk we will consider the development of conceptual art, performance art, art
outside the gallery system, politics.
Pop art was saleable through the gallery system. Some artists however made a political
stance not to engage with galleries, commerce etc; to make art which would be temporary, free,
out in the wider world, or would, in the phrase of critic Lucy Lippard ‘de -materialise’ the art
object. In the 1950s the Situationist group in Paris focussed on engaging with the world through
direct experience, through walking for instance (they called this the ‘derive’, a way of
unconsciously making your way through an urban setting to experience in a new way the
environment; much based on old surrealist tactics). The main theoretical base for this tendency
was ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ by Guy Debord.
In the early 60s the Fluxus group formed (named and organised by George Maciunas),
which was a loose association of artists, musicians and writers who sought to cross over the
boundaries of these different disciplines. Fluxus was very interested in the experiments of
composer John Cage, and engaged in a range of experimental works in sound, performance,
publishing, art. Influenced by Dada and the ideas of Duchamp, Fluxus engaged in the use of
chance, the use of non-art materials and idea that particular skills were not necessary for
creativity. Driving all this was an ‘alternate’ view to the politics and bourgeois customs of
western society. See artists Nam Jun Paik, Yoko Ono, Ben Vautier, George Brecht.
GRAHAM CHORLTON
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LECTURE 14
2014-01-23
JOSEPH BEUYS
Became a prominent artist in the early sixties in Germany, with an early interest in the
Fluxus group. His ideas questioned the role of the artist in society; he was interested in the artist
as ‘shaman’, a tribal role which would somehow heal problems. He was interested in nature
and its relationship to man in a world becoming more distanced from it. His work encompassed
performance, sculpture, found objects, political engagement (he was an early champion of the
Green movement), drawing, installation. He was interested in certain creatures, for instance the
hare as a free sprite of nature, or materials, eg copper for its ability to conduct energy. He used
symbols and historic references (eg references to Germany’s recent Nazi past). His ideas
became very popular and created a huge following worldwide as artists tried to work in a way
which was not to do with making saleable artefacts but with generating and communicating
ideas.
This concentration on the idea rather than the object became known as Conceptual Art.
There are various examples of this from earlier in the century, notably the work of Marcel
Duchamp, but now it became much more developed. In Italy the artist Piero Manzoni produced
objects such as his ‘Artists Breath’ which were basically the record of an idea or action, the
object acting as a trigger to a set of thoughts/ideas/associations. In France Yves Klein similarly
worked with ideas, producing performances, such as his painting performances, the staging of
stunts like his Leap into the Void, the conception of a new colour (‘International Klein Blue’),
the use of found objects; all to challenge the orthodoxies of the art world and to engage in pure
ideas.
We can see in the work of the American Joseph Kosuth the investigation of meaning in
art, of how we know things through language as well as vision; see for instance his image of a
chair through displaying the actual object, a photo of it, and a dictionary definition of ‘chair’.
This was influential on the British Art and Language group, which came together at Coventry
School of Art, sometimes in the same room you are sitting in for this talk. The group challenged
the idea of what constituted an artwork, an artist, an audience, and how we talk about and
understand art.
One way of dematerialising the art object was not to have an object at all. We can see
this in the development of performance art. Performance can be traced back to Dada and
Futurism in the first and second decades of the 20th century, but really developed as an attitude
in the 60s. Know at first as ‘Happenings’, artists like Alan Kaprow in America produced live
action events, which might well involve the audience, in communal, non-commercial ways.
(see also Yoko Ono, or Jim Dines performance ‘Car Crash’). In Britain at the end of the 60s the
artists Gilbert and George created performances such as their ‘Singing Sculpture’. The British
artist Stuart Brisley would subject himself to enormous feats of endurance, hardship and pain
in performances designed to shock the audience our of complacency, to take them away from
polite western society, to question their lives.
GRAHAM CHORLTON
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LECTURE 14
2014-01-23
The Feminist movement started to gain ground in the late sixties and into the seventies.
Certain women artists challenged notions of art, as exemplified by the male dominated art of
the past. Mary Kelly produced an elaborate work called Post-Partum Document, in which she
documented the early life of her child, the development of his thinking and her reactions to the
situation. Martha Rosler produced collages called Bringing the War Back Home, which
contrasted images from the Vietnam war with images of domestic American scenes,
highlighting the fact that wars are male, political decisions male and half the population
(women) are side-lined.
In painting and sculpture, in contrast to Pop Art, we can see a tendency to refine the
abstract art pioneered by the Abstract Expressionists into a very refined visual language,
operating to formalist rules championed by the critic Clement Greenberg. In America this was
called Post Painterly Abstraction (see the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth
Noland). In Britain the sculptor Anthony Caro produced radically new abstract sculpture which
explored the very properties of sculpture as an end in its own right.
GRAHAM CHORLTON
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