INTRODUCING THE SIXTIES
Developments percolating in the realm of high art by the late 1950s exploded in the 1960s, reflecting the political tumult of the period as well as its utopian spirit of experimentation and freedom. New York had become the center of the art world in the wake of World War II, but by the ’60s, Europe had recovered from the war’s devastation, creating a context for influential galleries in Paris, London, Cologne, and Antwerp, and important exhibitions of European and American art. Art in the ’60s, dominated at first by Pop art, quickly became wildly diverse, as artists experimented within established mediums, changing them from the inside, and also across disciplines, combining art with music, dance, and theater.
As evidenced by the work of certain artists of the time, the 1960s represent a particularly stormy period in world history. The Vietnam War, which had begun in 1955, escalated in 1961, with U.S. troops tripling in number. The war raged throughout the entire decade, alongside the so-called “Cold War” between the West and the Soviet Union, sparking the rise of an international student movement in the late ’60s, which was motivated by a desire for peace and policy reforms that would make global aggression less likely in the future; the movement was met with state violence in Europe and the U.S., intensifying tensions further.
As evidenced by the work of certain artists of the time, the 1960s represent a particularly stormy period in world history. The Vietnam War, which had begun in 1955, escalated in 1961, with U.S. troops tripling in number. The war raged throughout the entire decade, alongside the so-called “Cold War” between the West and the Soviet Union, sparking the rise of an international student movement in the late ’60s, which was motivated by a desire for peace and policy reforms that would make global aggression less likely in the future; the movement was met with state violence in Europe and the U.S., intensifying tensions further.
Race riots characterized the early 1960s, giving rise to the Civil Rights movement and the national prominence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, who was associated with the Nation of Islam. The Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, was passed in 1964, but it only stoked the flames of racial violence: Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, and King was murdered three years later. President John F. Kennedy, who vocally opposed the Jim Crow laws that segregated the American South, was assassinated in Texas in 1963, and his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated five years later as he was campaigning for president.
Political conservatism was also met with cultural revolution in the form of Hippies, free love, and the Beatles. The ubiquity of the television and the much faster circulation of images and ideas around the planet enabled the formation of an international youth culture that fueled the antiwar and student movements. The television also proved key to the final major event of the ’60s, which represented the pinnacle of scientific achievement: the Apollo 11 moon landing, which was watched live by an estimated 600 million people.
Political conservatism was also met with cultural revolution in the form of Hippies, free love, and the Beatles. The ubiquity of the television and the much faster circulation of images and ideas around the planet enabled the formation of an international youth culture that fueled the antiwar and student movements. The television also proved key to the final major event of the ’60s, which represented the pinnacle of scientific achievement: the Apollo 11 moon landing, which was watched live by an estimated 600 million people.
REWIND: AN OVERVIEW OF ART
IN EUROPE AND AMERICA AFTER
WORLD WAR II
As with any period of artistic production, the 1960s was characterized by reactions to the artistic developments of the 1950s, whether artists turned away from ’50s practices or tried to expand upon them and shift them in new directions. This section of the resource guide addresses two key artists and positions of the ’50s in order to set the stage for the art of the ’60s that will dominate the rest of the guide.
World War II had further repercussions for the Western art world. Prior to the war, Paris had been, without a doubt, the center of that world. Artists worked and lived in other places, of course, but many believed it utterly essential to travel to Paris to study with masters of painting and sculpture, to live among fellow artists in the city’s bohemian districts, and to spend as many hours as they could with the treasures of the Musée du Louvre. After World War II, in part because of the trauma that France had experienced under nearly five years of Nazi occupation, Paris was overtaken by New York. The American metropolis was the cultural capital of the U.S., now positioned as a global power, and by the end of the war was already home to a number of artists who had escaped the situation in Europe.
World War II had further repercussions for the Western art world. Prior to the war, Paris had been, without a doubt, the center of that world. Artists worked and lived in other places, of course, but many believed it utterly essential to travel to Paris to study with masters of painting and sculpture, to live among fellow artists in the city’s bohemian districts, and to spend as many hours as they could with the treasures of the Musée du Louvre. After World War II, in part because of the trauma that France had experienced under nearly five years of Nazi occupation, Paris was overtaken by New York. The American metropolis was the cultural capital of the U.S., now positioned as a global power, and by the end of the war was already home to a number of artists who had escaped the situation in Europe.
New York’s rise in the international art scene was helped significantly by the development of a new movement in painting presented as distinctly American. Abstract Expressionism, which is also tellingly called the “New York School,” emerged out of the stylistically diverse painting practices of a number of artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Joan Mitchell, Adolph Gottlieb, and Clyfford Still. Though Abstract Expressionism (abbreviated as AbEx hereafter) was lauded as an American movement, it is important to note that one of the most influential painting teachers associated with the movement, Hans Hofmann, was a German émigré, while Gorky, de Kooning, and Rothko were all born outside of the U.S. AbEx also had equivalents in Western Europe, movements called Tachisme and Art Informel, though they differed in some important respects, and the New York School maintained a distinct character.
Although each AbEx artist had his or her own formal approach to painting, they were all in search of deeper meaning, whether spiritual, mystical, or philosophical. All of these artists rejected representation, opting instead to paint exclusively abstract forms that did not mimic forms found in daily life or in nature. Influenced in part by the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and ’30s, the AbEx painters also understood their work to be an expression of their inner selves or psyches, and thus highly individual, while at the same time they believed that such expressions were conduits for universal human themes.
Although each AbEx artist had his or her own formal approach to painting, they were all in search of deeper meaning, whether spiritual, mystical, or philosophical. All of these artists rejected representation, opting instead to paint exclusively abstract forms that did not mimic forms found in daily life or in nature. Influenced in part by the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and ’30s, the AbEx painters also understood their work to be an expression of their inner selves or psyches, and thus highly individual, while at the same time they believed that such expressions were conduits for universal human themes.
Above all else, the AbEx painters valued what they saw as the freedom to experiment. Scholars who have assessed AbEx retrospectively, however, have argued that, contrary to the rhetoric of freedom adopted by AbEx artists, political conservatism in the U.S. forced them to express themselves by abstract means alone, as many cultural producers at the time were at risk of being persecuted by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which aimed to root out and blacklist Communist sympathizers in all corners of American society.
AbEx remained the dominant paradigm of art-making throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. Already in the ’50s, however, a number of young artists wanted to learn from, challenge, and supersede AbEx. Jasper Johns and Allan Kaprow each took different aspects of AbEx painting and made them their own, pushing art toward new horizons that would break open even further in the decade that followed.
AbEx remained the dominant paradigm of art-making throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. Already in the ’50s, however, a number of young artists wanted to learn from, challenge, and supersede AbEx. Jasper Johns and Allan Kaprow each took different aspects of AbEx painting and made them their own, pushing art toward new horizons that would break open even further in the decade that followed.
SELECTED ARTWORK:
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That same year, Johns hit upon the idea of using a technique called encaustic. Encaustic is a method of painting in which pigment is suspended in hot wax. The wax is applied to a canvas or other substrate (like wood or cloth) and reheated to fuse it with the canvas. The encaustic then cools and hardens very quickly. The speed at which encaustic dries was one major reason Johns preferred it, for it allowed him to keep working areas of a painting that otherwise would have required several hours to dry.
At the same time that Johns discovered encaustic, he recalled that, “there was a change in my spirit, in my thought and my work, as well as some doubt and terror,” and he finally felt he had figured out a path forward as a painter. He destroyed almost all of his work, and, after a dream in which he saw himself painting a large American flag, he began to paint in the late fall of 1954 what would be his breakthrough picture.
At the same time that Johns discovered encaustic, he recalled that, “there was a change in my spirit, in my thought and my work, as well as some doubt and terror,” and he finally felt he had figured out a path forward as a painter. He destroyed almost all of his work, and, after a dream in which he saw himself painting a large American flag, he began to paint in the late fall of 1954 what would be his breakthrough picture.
Flag: Analysis
Flag, which Johns finished in the winter or early spring of 1955, looks fairly straightforward, especially in reproduction, but it is in fact a multi-layered, multi-part painting. Johns painted Flag in three pieces on bedsheets mounted to wood panels, embedding bits of newspaper under pigmented encaustic that he painted on in thick, textured layers. The newspaper is legible up close, revealing bits of local and international news stories from 1954 and 1955 alongside recipes, advertisements, and cartoons. From afar, the three panels of the painting cohere into one image—the image of a flag—but up close, one can discern where the panels meet, making the construction of the work obvious.
Why an American flag? One theory (besides Johns’s admission that it came to him in a dream) suggests that the flag is an autobiographical reference to the military hero after whom Johns was named, who bravely raised the flag during the Revolutionary War. Johns claimed that he was interested, however, in simply using “pre-formed, conventional, depersonalized, factual, exterior elements”—that is, images that exist in the world around us and that are easily and instantly recognizable. Such images in Johns’s work have been likened to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades of the 1910s, which consisted of barely altered store-bought items (including a urinal, bottle rack, and shovel) presented as sculpture. (Johns saw Duchamp’s work in Philadelphia in 1957 and went on to purchase a number of his works.) |
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The choice of a familiar motif allowed Johns to play with the formal elements of painting itself without worrying about deeply meaningful subject matter. It was, in essence, a strong reaction to the claims of Abstract Expressionism, which avoided representational forms in order to use abstraction to access the inner psyche and express universal truths. Johns radically turned back to representation, but paradoxically in order to make it so literal that it could be abstract: Flag mimicked the appearance of a flag, but it was not an actual flag, and the painting highlighted that disjuncture between the image of a thing, its name, and the thing itself.
Johns’s philosophical approach was indebted to that of Surrealist painter René Magritte. In 1954, Johns saw a version of Magritte’s 1929 painting The Treachery of Images at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. The painting depicts a smoking pipe with a caption directly below that says, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” this is not a pipe. Magritte was illuminating with the pipe precisely what Johns would with his flag: the representation of a pipe or a flag is not the same as what it represents. As Johns became well known for his paintings of flags, later works that depicted the flag came to be seen not as references to the flag as a real-world object, but rather as references to Johns’s prior paintings of flags. In that way, Johns revealed the arbitrariness and flexibility of what are called, in the field of linguistics and semiology, “signs,” or carriers of meaning. That Johns was able to affect such a shift in meaning using a symbol that usually bears the heavy weight of historical and political meaning makes his achievement all the more important.
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Johns’ Continued Development and Influence
![Picture](/uploads/6/1/8/8/61886323/published/cri-000000080148.jpg?1533450001)
The American flag is typical of Johns’s use of quotidian imagery in the mid to late 1950s. As he explained, the imagery derives from “things the mind already knows,” which expanded beyond the flag to include targets, stenciled numbers, ale cans, and, later, maps of the U.S. Just after finishing Flag, Johns created Target with Four Faces, which consists of a painting of a shooting target topped with four cast heads looking out from a wooden cabinet of sorts, perhaps referencing the wooden boxes in Joseph Cornell’s work, which Johns had admired.
Target appeared on the cover of Artnews magazine in January 1958, when Johns was still entirely unknown in the New York art world. By that time, however, the influential gallerist Leo Castelli, tipped off to Johns’s work by Robert Rauschenberg, had agreed to mount Johns’s first solo show, which opened just two weeks after the release of the Artnews cover. The show sold out, with curator Alfred J. Barr, Jr. purchasing three paintings on the spot for the Museum of Modern Art. He had also wanted to buy Flag but was worried that the museum’s acquisitions committee would find it unpatriotic (a risk many would not have wanted to take at the height of McCarthyism in the U.S.). He instead convinced the architect Philip Johnson to buy it, and Johnson donated it to the museum in Barr’s honor in 1973.
Target appeared on the cover of Artnews magazine in January 1958, when Johns was still entirely unknown in the New York art world. By that time, however, the influential gallerist Leo Castelli, tipped off to Johns’s work by Robert Rauschenberg, had agreed to mount Johns’s first solo show, which opened just two weeks after the release of the Artnews cover. The show sold out, with curator Alfred J. Barr, Jr. purchasing three paintings on the spot for the Museum of Modern Art. He had also wanted to buy Flag but was worried that the museum’s acquisitions committee would find it unpatriotic (a risk many would not have wanted to take at the height of McCarthyism in the U.S.). He instead convinced the architect Philip Johnson to buy it, and Johnson donated it to the museum in Barr’s honor in 1973.
The show at Castelli touched off a career that has continued to this day, with Johns producing ever more surprising paintings and sculptures. Unlike most artists of his generation, Johns also became a committed and highly accomplished printmaker, transforming motifs from his paintings and sculptures into reproducible media, including etchings, lithographs, and monotypes. Across his body of work, Johns has continued to give viewers pause, to make them consider the nature of what they are seeing and how the representation of a given motif—whether a flag or a letter of the alphabet—corresponds, or diverges, from the thing it supposedly represents. As we shall see, many artists in the 1960s would take that idea and run with it, whether through Pop art’s invocations of everyday images and objects or through Conceptual artists’ play with semiotics and meaning.
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SELECTED ARTWORK:
ALLAN KAPROW, 18 HAPPENINGS IN 6 PARTS, 1959
ALLAN KAPROW, 18 HAPPENINGS IN 6 PARTS, 1959
Kaprow’s Early Career
Allan Kaprow was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1927. He attended boarding school in Tucson, Arizona, and later the High School of Music and Art in New York. He received a bachelor’s degree from New York University with majors in philosophy and art history in 1949; in his final year at NYU, he had also studied at Hans Hofmann’s privately run painting school, learning Abstract Expressionist methods. He went on to earn a master’s degree in art history at Columbia University in 1952, studying under Meyer Schapiro, and that year helped found an artists’ cooperative called Hansa Gallery. He took up a teaching position at Rutgers University in 1953, and became a lifelong teacher. (He later taught at the State University of New York, Stony Brook; California Institute of the Arts; and University of California, San Diego, where he retired in 1992).
By the mid-1950s, Kaprow had begun making collages and assemblages, gathering elements from everyday life and combining them into what were called “action- collages.” He worked quickly, applying paint to canvas with gestural brushstrokes (reminiscent of AbEx painting) and incorporating all kinds of quotidian detritus, from crumpled paper and aluminum foil to apples, oranges, and cardboard boxes. The assemblages gave way in the late 1950s to what Kaprow called Environments, entire spaces filled with objects that viewers would have to navigate physically, often in a way that altered the arrangement of the space.
From 1957 to 1958, Kaprow attended the weekly course in music composition that John Cage taught at the New School for Social Research, a haven for progressive pedagogy since its founding in New York in 1919. Kaprow’s fellow students included George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, and La Monte Young, all of whom would become associated with the Fluxus movement. Cage opened Kaprow’s eyes to new possibilities for art, as he used the musical score as a proxy for temporality, repeatability, and elements of chance through audience participation, as in Cage’s famous score 4’33”, in which the pianist is silent (aside from opening and closing the keylid), thus allowing the audience’s nervous fidgets, coughs, laughs, and murmurs to fill the void and fulfill the openness of the score.
Allan Kaprow was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1927. He attended boarding school in Tucson, Arizona, and later the High School of Music and Art in New York. He received a bachelor’s degree from New York University with majors in philosophy and art history in 1949; in his final year at NYU, he had also studied at Hans Hofmann’s privately run painting school, learning Abstract Expressionist methods. He went on to earn a master’s degree in art history at Columbia University in 1952, studying under Meyer Schapiro, and that year helped found an artists’ cooperative called Hansa Gallery. He took up a teaching position at Rutgers University in 1953, and became a lifelong teacher. (He later taught at the State University of New York, Stony Brook; California Institute of the Arts; and University of California, San Diego, where he retired in 1992).
By the mid-1950s, Kaprow had begun making collages and assemblages, gathering elements from everyday life and combining them into what were called “action- collages.” He worked quickly, applying paint to canvas with gestural brushstrokes (reminiscent of AbEx painting) and incorporating all kinds of quotidian detritus, from crumpled paper and aluminum foil to apples, oranges, and cardboard boxes. The assemblages gave way in the late 1950s to what Kaprow called Environments, entire spaces filled with objects that viewers would have to navigate physically, often in a way that altered the arrangement of the space.
From 1957 to 1958, Kaprow attended the weekly course in music composition that John Cage taught at the New School for Social Research, a haven for progressive pedagogy since its founding in New York in 1919. Kaprow’s fellow students included George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, and La Monte Young, all of whom would become associated with the Fluxus movement. Cage opened Kaprow’s eyes to new possibilities for art, as he used the musical score as a proxy for temporality, repeatability, and elements of chance through audience participation, as in Cage’s famous score 4’33”, in which the pianist is silent (aside from opening and closing the keylid), thus allowing the audience’s nervous fidgets, coughs, laughs, and murmurs to fill the void and fulfill the openness of the score.
Kaprow’s Writing on Jackson Pollock
Cage’s teaching helped Kaprow figure out how to respond to and extend the legacy of Jackson Pollock, who had died in a car crash in 1956 at the height of his fame. In 1947, Pollock had developed a radical new technique, pouring and dripping paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground, rejecting traditional methods of painting in which pigment is applied with a brush to a canvas positioned on an easel. Pollock’s entirely abstract paintings were shocking to the general public (a famous cartoon showing a monkey dripping paint on canvas played up the skepticism with which Pollock’s art was received), but Pollock’s drips became one of the crowning achievements of Abstract Expressionism, attaining an all-over, immersive picture that emphasized painting’s basic elements: line, color, and the canvas and paint themselves as materials.
Pollock moved around the canvas like a dancer. A performance of his process was captured in still photographs and film by Hans Namuth in 1950 and broadcast to the public in 1951. One year later, critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” to describe Pollock’s work and that of a number of his AbEx contemporaries. In the essay “The American Action Painters,” Rosenberg writes: At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. Kaprow was captivated by Pollock’s emphasis on a highly active process of art-making and saw Pollock’s work as “blurring the edges between his art and the world beyond.” In an essay published in 1958, titled “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Kaprow wrote passionately that: Pollock... left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street.” He added, “Young artists of today need no longer say ‘I am a painter’ or ‘a poet’ or ‘a dancer.’ They are simply ‘artists.’ All of life will be open to them. They will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. They will not try to make them extraordinary but will only state their real meaning. But out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well. People will be delighted or horrified, critics will be confused or amused, but these, I am certain, will be the alchemies of the 1960s. Kaprow’s text turned out to be quite prescient, accurately predicting the major turn in the ’60s to practices that aimed to blend art and life—a turn that would be effected in part through the art form Kaprow was developing, called Happenings. |
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18 Happenings in 6 Parts: Analysis
In October 1959, the ideas Kaprow had been exploring for several years coalesced in an event at the newly founded Reuben Gallery, an empty loft on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan’s East Village. Titled 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, the event was staged in three separate spaces that Kaprow had created with temporary partitions made of wood and sheets of plastic and canvas. Over the course of an hour, six participants (three men and three women) moved through the various spaces, executing a range of simultaneous actions dictated in advance by Kaprow’s detailed score, sometimes with the aid of props arranged throughout the space. Attendees of the event, meanwhile, were instructed upon entering that they would be required to move from room to room during selected intermissions, thereby engaging the whole space of the event.
Happenings, which became larger and more complex after their initial debut, collapsed the boundaries between art and theater, creating a time-bound spectacle in which spectators were made active participants. (In later Happenings, attendees did much more than simply shift rooms during the event.) After attending a number of Happenings, critic Susan Sontag wrote in an incisive essay in 1962 that they have no plot, no “climax or consummation,” and audiences usually have to be signaled, as a result, when a Happening has ended. Sontag compared Happenings to modernist works of art, arguing that such events have an autonomous totality that mirrors that of modernist painting. Sontag also argued that the primary concern of Happenings is an engagement with materials, which aligns with Kaprow’s earlier investments in accumulation, collage, and the items of everyday life. She writes, “This preoccupation with materials, which might seem to make the Happenings more like painting than theatre, is also expressed in the use or treatment of persons as material objects rather than ‘characters’.”
One of the important precursors for Kaprow’s Happenings was an event titled Theater Piece No. 1, which took place at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1952. Black Mountain was an important art school, attracting avant- garde artists from Europe and America to teach courses and engage in experimental activities. John Cage made a number of visits beginning in 1948 and was inspired by a series of all-white paintings that Robert Rauschenberg was making there. In Theater Piece No. 1, organized by Cage, the composer stood on a ladder at the center of the space and delivered a lecture while artists, musicians, and dancers moved around the space, where one of Rauschenberg’s white paintings was included as part of a minimal set design. Considered by many to be the first happening, Theater Piece No. 1—and Cage’s interests in time, scored events, and the merging of art and life—strongly influenced Kaprow’s development of Happenings.
Kaprow’s Influence
Happenings began in 1958 and were solidified as an art form by 1962. Many of Kaprow’s fellow artists, including Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, who were central players in the Happenings scene, eventually shifted to Pop art, but Kaprow stayed the course, continuing to explore and refine the form he had created. In the late 1960s, he gradually moved away from heavily scripted Happenings to pieces based on short instructions, and he often documented the carrying out of those instructions with deadpan black and white photographs, a strategy also used contemporaneously by Conceptual artists.
It is important to note, as Sontag did in her early essay on Happenings, that as events which produced nothing for sale, they deliberately resisted the art market, which was becoming an ever more dominant feature of the art world in New York at the time. Happenings bucked the market’s desire for objects to sell. These works have been, perhaps as an unintended result, difficult to assimilate into the canon of art history because they were rarely well-documented. 18 Happenings in 6 Parts “exists” today in the form of several written accounts, a handful of photographs, the printed program, and Kaprow’s written score, making it hard for us to fully comprehend everything that occurred and how it might have felt to be a participant or spectator at the event. Even though our information about them is limited by these circumstances, Happenings, as we shall see in the following sections, were incredibly important for several movements that aimed to bring art and daily life closer together, from Pop art to Land art. Happenings also laid the groundwork for performance art, which continues to be a prominent form of contemporary artistic practice to the present day.
Simply put, Happenings were held in physical environments – loft spaces, abandoned factories, buses, parks, etc. – and brought people, objects, and events in surprising juxtaposition to one another. Kaprow views art as a vehicle for expanding our awareness of life by prompting unexpected, provocative interactions. For Kaprow, art is a continual work-in-progress, with an unfolding narrative that is realized through the active participation of the audience.
Redoing Allan Kaprow's "18 Happenings in 6 parts"
in Fundacio Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain, by students of the HEAD, Geneva, Switerzland. |
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Allan Kaprow's How to Make a Happening was released as a LP album in 1966 by Mass Art Inc.
(- The album has a silkscreened cover with a photo from Allan Kaprow's happening "Household", Cornell University, 1964). |