Given all the political and social unrest in the 60's, it seems logical that art would go through a transformation, too. What clear connections do you see between some of the demonstrations, riots and youth movements particularly from '68 and the trends in contemporary art of that time?
The artists of the 1960's seem bent on pushing every social boundary they can find. A lot of them focused on or performed in such a way that it became an invasion of privacy or made observers uncomfortable. Politically, Vietnam and civil rights movements were taking place and the art reflects this uneasy period of time.
ReplyDeleteVito Acconci comes to mind, as he kept trying to do increasingly break down social boundaries between himself and his audience. Artists like him seem to want to level with the audience, something that previous generations of artists neglected to do. I see this as something derived from the civil rights movement of the time and the new humanitarian movements that were taking place. The performative art did away with the canvas and allowed the art -whether it be performance or the situation that is presented- to exist in the space and in the audience's face.
Art during that time seems to be very extreme. I see a lot of large scale installation art that covers huge areas, and more specifically areas that people would not be likely to be walking by and see, I see a lot of performative art, and the need for the artists to connect, put across strong meanings, and interact the most they can with their viewers, and I also see these performative artists to be be choosing inappropriate ways in conveying their messages and also through harming their selfs. I can see how this has a connection to the civil unrest during the 60's and a bit after, as artists feel like they need to be very extreme and get their message around through very hard ways that people will possibly be shocked. Another reason the art might be like it is during this time period is because the artists themselves feel like they need to protest against their ideals and thus come up with all these ways to do so.
ReplyDeleteFor me, I think the best example of an artwork that reflects the feelings of the time period is Chris Burden's performance art piece Shoot (1971). In this piece, Burden stood on one side of the room and a friend of his stood a few feet across from him. The friend then shot Burden in the arm. When I first heard about this I didn't understand why it existed at all. I didn't get the purpose of such a seemingly random and ridiculous act of violence. However, during that time period the Vietnam War was going on, escalating and invading the public sphere. There was a heightened feeling of unrest and paranoia. Additionally, during this time many assassinations had taken place. In his piece, Burden was attempting to capture these feelings. He was calling into question the whole mentality of "us" and "them", he was calling into question choice and he was highlighting the ridiculous nature of war. I think that if you don't think about all the occurrences that were going on during the 1960's and 1970's, you won't be able to understand Chris Burden's work. It is directly related to the happenings during that time period and makes a very apt commentary on it.
ReplyDeleteThe most prominent connection I saw between the social unrest and the art being made was that of the sexual revolution. Everyone was trying to test boundaries and social constructions at the time. Vito Aconcci used sexual acts to test people's boundaries and their ideas of personal space. Performance art in general was a way to push people in ways they were not used to being pushed. The 1960s sexual revolution was all about making people uncomfortable and pushing them into new scenarios and the works discussed in the chapter definitely push those boundaries.
ReplyDeleteThe 60's was a time period full of extremes. The civil rights movement and vietnam war caused much animosity in citizens. People had strong contrasting opinions about the war and about civil rights which led to protests and demonstrations. This time was a very unstable one. Since this was a time different from any other, naturally art had to change in order to properly express what was going on. Artists felt that they had to resort to extreme measures to properly express what people were feeling. Ordinary art practices were not adequate anymore. Self mutilation and works containing things that were not socially acceptable were shocking and represented the mayhem in the 60s.
ReplyDeleteArt during the 1960’s was dependent upon the atmosphere that artists were living in. The movement against the Vietnam War in particular caused heated debate that was the catalyst to the broad change in almost every aspect of Western Culture. It seemed like everybody wanted to liberate or be liberated from something. The art we saw in class seems to be very extreme. Artists now wanted to make an even more powerful statement, which meant that they needed to push the viewer even more. In particular, Body Art, seems to me at least to be a very raw movement in which the artist uses their own body to make a statement. I looked into artists like Chris Burden who was best known for acts of self-mutilation art, Hermann Nitsch made expressionistic use of his own body in a series of bloody rituals, and Ana Mendieta, whose Tree Of Life, was a celebratory assertion of the female body as primal sources of life and sexuality. I feel like art transformed into these categories of body art and performance art because artists wanted more than metaphor. Daniel Buren in particular wrote” Art is the safety valve of our repressive system. As long as it exists, better yet, the more prevalent it becomes, art will be the system’s distracting mask. And a system has nothing to fear as long as its reality is masked, as long as its contradictions are hidden.” Artists wanted to create art that was more engaging in comparison to political action. Art challenged the political status quo.
ReplyDeleteAs society questioned transforming political events such as the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, artists began questioning too. Tremendous societal upheaval reflects in the work of the time. Art became monumental like in the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, with artistic comments on a level never seen before. The desire to be noticed and to find your own individualism became a strong goal. Consumerism was at an all time high and this gave artists something to react to. As society became more outspoken and more liberal, art followed. Boundaries were pushed to the extreme. For example, American society became more outspoken about their views towards the Vietnam war. At the same time artists became more outspoken about their work. Rather than leaving critics to talk about their work artists started to have a voice and discussed conception rather than aesthetics. In a changing world, different kinds of artists fought to be heard. The idea of anything has the ability to be art was fully formed.
ReplyDeleteI think of Vito Acconci when I think of changes in art during the 60's. His work broke down boundaries between himself and his audience. His work had sexual elements to it, which bring to mind clear associations with the sexual revolution of the 1960's. His work in which he masturbated under a ramp for 8 hours a day would challenge a lot of peoples comfort with both the definition of art and their ability to confront sex in a public forum. The works commentary (that sex and masturbation are a normal part of life) would have shocked some of its viewers and intrigued others. Body art as a genre of art became a trend because of the sexual revolution ( at least in my opinion it did).
ReplyDeleteMany changes occurred in the art world in the sixties. Due to the drastic increase in the number of television in individual household, people became more aware of what’s happening around the world. The Civil Rights movements and the reaction against the Vietnam War have greatly impacted that way Western culture developed. This is the time period of political unrest, with many assassinations of many public figures. The turmoil and social pressure of the era has a major impact on the art of the sixties. Artist move their attention from the formal quality of the work to its concepts. They start to break the boundary of what is perceive as the norm and the ideal and is the time when artist start to explore into new types of media espeicially performance art. Because of the tension in the society, art in at time period seems to be very extreme in terms of their subject matter and expression. They are often grotesque and disturbing, which are elements that artists used as a tool to invade into the viewer’s personal space; forcing the audience to think more critically about their work. Artist such as Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Hermann Nitsch are some of the figures who best represent work form the era.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think about the political upheaval of the 60’s in relation to the radical transformation of art as well, I cannot help but think of many of the early video artists. The medium itself became popularized in the 1960s due to the production of Sony’s Portapak, which gave easy access to video to everyday people. This was so cutting-edge and new that it pushed the boundaries of what we consider to be traditional mediums of art. Video allowed artists such as Chris Burden and Vito Acconci to use the camera as an extension of themselves in a whole new way. Both of these artists used video as a means of documenting extreme performances. In Burden’s Transfixed, for example, he crucified himself to a car. This violent act plays into the sort of anger that was felt by the people of that time and the sort of drastic measures they felt as if they needed to take. To put it simply, artists began to turn to performance & video because they began to feel the need to treat themselves as vessels for their personal message.
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