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Hamilton was chiefly concerned with the nature of style and glamour, and the processes of creating and processing consumerimagery. Acutely conscious of art-historical precedent, and assum
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302 Pop and Performance
ing the role of a Duchamp, he provided the Pop movement with an intellectual standpoint deliberately absent from the work of most of the others.
In general the imagery of Pop in Europe tended to be more oblique, as practised by Oyvind Fahlstrom (b. 1928) in Sweden, Martial Raysse (b. 1936) in France, and Peter Phillips (b. 1939) in England. Peter Blake’s (b. 1932) paintings had an inbuilt vein of nostalgia, both in the loving treatment of great boxers of the past and of the lettering that accompanied them. It was no surprise that he moved on to illustrate Eewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. David Hockney (b. 1937) was the most flamboyant English figure, and in his earliest and most irreverent phase he treated popular imagery in a quirky, graffiti-esque manner interlaced with visual puns on the foibles and mannerisms of painting. His style too lent itself to book illustration, notably of Grimm’s fairy tales, and subsequently to a bland form of portraiture. Richard Smith (b. 1931) was unusual among British painters of this generation in that he was one of the first to choose to work in New York in the early sixties. His paintings reflected this move, changing from shaped canvases in the Pop idiom to large-scale colour fields.
At one time or another most of the American Pop artists pushed beyond painting into performance as a strategy to make their art more immediate. Rauschenberg had incorporated into his paintings elements of real life, as represented by the inclusion of a stuffed goat or the presentation of a bed. Jim Dine (b. 1935) and Jasper Johns had attached the tools of their trade to their canvases. Now the bridging of the gap was taken one stage further. The influences came from outside, most significantly from Rauschenberg’s friendship with the composer John Cage and his belief in the effectiveness of ‘unfocusing’ the spectator’s mind, in order to make him more aware both of himself and of the world around. Happenings, events staged by artists, became so well established that a decade later one of the principal exponents, Allan Kaprow, was appointed to an academic chair in Happenings in California.
RICHARD HAMILTON
Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing? igy6
At the time, such performances seemed to be the way to add another dimension of reality and perhaps even direction to art. Painters like Jim Dine staged elaborate live tableaux: his Car Crash was a stylized slice of life featuring the remnants of mangled limousines and crash victims. Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), the master of soft sculpture, set up Store Days- an elaborate extension of his sculptural parodies of consumer goods. Here theatrical events and real sales transactions were mingled. After a period of intense activity in forms of theatre and spectator involvement, painters and sculptors gradually moved back into their separate fields.
Warhol's case was rather dill'erent in that hr .ml nullv extended his |>.ii11(1 11jl> into iilin milking, lie turned from isolating star examples ol evrrvdax lile in silksereen and instead pointed his movie camera at similar subject matter a man asleep, the fan pi re Stale building, casual encounters among his friends and let it run for hours 1 laving demonstrated time span, at length, literally, he proceeded to retrace the historv ol the cinema in his own ad hoc \va\ As these projects grew more elaborate, lie inereasiugb dele gated i esponsi bi I i I \ I lis role beraini' once more that of a detached impresario, watching ovei his lartnrv, as he called it
In Kurope, too, in the late fifties, painters began to feel that expanded forms ol aclivilv were needed Mere the emphasis was eonsislenllv more philosophical than in the United Stales, aimed
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306 Fontana mid Klein
more ;it awakening (lie spectator’s sensibilities to time, space and material than in involving him physically or violently. There was less pageant and more speculative thinking. Part of the reason lies in the reawakening of the humanism in the European tradition; some of it was more directly a reaction against the emphasis on instinct and physicality ol'the ‘informal’ style of painting- the European version ol Abstract Expressionism as practised by Dubnllet, VVols, and Tapirs. The main difference was that, whereas Abstract Expressionism had in many ways heralded the arrival ol a truly ‘American’ art, the informal marked the last gasps ol the School ol Paris. Commitment to painting as a selfcontained activity was over.
A key figure in Italy was Lucio Fontana (1899 1968). He was one ol the lirst artists to see art as a way ol expressing the currents and energies ol modern science by finding a philosophical equivalent in art, rather than just translating the technology. His slashed canvases or Spatial Concepts of the early fifties were intended to isolate the energy ol the gesture at the moment of penetration.
I hey are not about destruction, except in terms of breaking through the two dimensions ol painting into a greater space beyond, and this is what he meant by the term ‘Spatialism’. The object itself was not so important: ‘it is the idea that counts’, he said. W ritten manifestoes and the formation of the ‘Nuclear Croup were essential parts ol his activity. The idea of group research and publications was to be a hallmark of European art in 1 he sixties.
Yves Klein and Piero Man^oni were among the younger generation ol artists who came to be loosely known as the New Realists. Needless to say, their art had nothing to do with realism in the figurative sense. If anything, it meant a reality beyond appearances and beyond material. The progress of Klein in France and Man/oni in Italy can be seen as parallel, though Klein was a more flamboyant showman, and in some ways a more I radii ional artist.
Klein sought a revolution of the sensibility of man through art. His best-known strategy was his invention of a standard colour
all his own: International Klein Blue ( 1 KB), through which this revolution was to be spread. That was the motivation for his brand of monochrome paintings: blue was revolutionary, gold was mystical and alchemical. The idea that art can be made ol any material is recurrent in twentieth-century art; Klein extended it by putting the emphasis on the activity of making an art-work, so that the work itself remains as the trace of the energy put into it. Paintings by Klein were given a different commercial value according to the intensity of feeling that he maintained had gone into their making. Or a painting could be made by the action of rain or fire on a canvas. Most publicized of these extensions of the artist’s brush were the Anthropometries canvases bearing the
308 / lit 11 'arid ns I //
minks nl paint soaked lemalc bodies, produced midri Klein's direelions, l'’nr Klein die artist's activity e\lended min anything (lull ennld express his eonvii I inn dial man could siirmniml his pin si cid li mi I a I inns, lie 1 1 I It rough expel I ise in judo 01 a 11 cm pis In lly.
Man/oni’s nl I it ude was essenliallv <h lie mil : i a I her dial i seeking In dei In die artist, lie believed ilia l evervnne, a nil even (lie woi l< I ilsell’, ennld he seen as a work nl ail Then* were I wo sides in his aelivitv : lastly die ennslanl emphasis nil ‘work’: die side nl his ail dial tan lie seen In link up In die reductive line nl painting 1 lie prod need while si ill aces ni it In nines, carried mil in materials that became progressively more lowly plasln so;iked canvas, stitched sheets, rollon wool slabs and halls, bread rolls, eggshells, and polystyrene grannies. Man/nni wauled in lice the snrlaee Irnni all eminnl a I inns and symbolism a while dial is not a point I a nil sea pe, not a material in cvnl n I inn nr a be a n I i 1 11 1 material, not a sensation or .1 symbol or anything else jnsl a while snrlaee dial is si m pi y a while sin lace and nothing else',
I he oilier side nl Mnnzoni's activity was In inllnence a snbse ( 1 1 lent genera I inn nl a r! is Is concerned with the si la legies of arl in die Duchamp tradition Man/nni attacked die hierarchies and pretensions nl arl by elevating humans In die stains ol'arl works,
.Inst as everyone was an artist, so everything the artist produced was arl. Mis breath, blond, and excrement could I here lore be packaged and sold Maps, measured lines, and calendars were shown In impose entirely artificial limitations which could be altered al w ill. Man/nni s main weapon was his wit llis serious point was that man is essentialb lice Iml has In be made' aware nl n both Klein and Man/nni died young. Then ironic standpoint and llieii strategies were maintained and extended by others, and pariienlarlx through the anarchic activities in Knrope and in Vmerica nl die I’lnxns movement which got going cail\ in die sixties In many wavs this was an extension Inn nl die American Happening, and represented a melting pot of nationalities and directions, \merican, \sian, and I'anopean Iduxus ,11 lists in eluded die Immdcr, (ienrge Macinnas, Nam June I’aik, l amncl
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Williams, Dick Higgins, A 1 Hansen, Charlotte Moorman, Takenhisa Kosugi, Wolf Vostell, La Monte oung, and, for a time, John Cage, Yoko Ono, and Joseph Beuys. At its peak in *9^3 5 a Fluxus festival brought together musicians, dancers, painters, poets, and sculptors. Fluxus, like Dada before it, aimed to release the individual from every inhibition, physical, mental, and political. The art strategies of Klein and Manzoni were extended and given a political dimension, particularly in (Jermain
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ll wits even more i11 1 <*i ii.iimn.il ili.m l)ad;i, and much more mobile lake Dada, n was disruptive and anti-authoritarian, denied dial a 1 1 i Ik la I I >a 11 iei s e< mid be ( i ca In I between I lie various lields nl die ai ls, and extended this to slate t hat there should equally be no distinction between ail and lile. I bis lime, this recurring strain in I went iel h eenl nry ail was formulated in John ( luge's desire lo < onsidei everyday lile as theatre. The emphasis, in olliei words, was on man’s latent creativity. Under allai k was die nolion nl spec nilisl and reduced areas ol creativity. 11 represented a not hr i III rea I lo I he idea ol I he artist as a separate kind ol briny; and lo the upialion of creativity willi (he narrow lields ol | >ainl my; and seillpt lire.
I wo things happened allei the peak years ol I'lnxns. I lie line ol si ml ey;\ m ail continued, and with il I lie belied’in art as a politieal, mnl\iny;, 01 relcasiny; loree. ( lonsislenlly, since Duchamp, this line has placed more emphasis on die activity ol arl Ilian on the ai Inal end product, the arl object, ll is this (actor dial makes il impossible lo give a balanced account ol contemporary art in terms ol painting or sculpture alone, since generally speaking the artists who opl lot painting alone as a specialist activity represent diegronp who have deliberately rejcried hoih si i a legy and polilies.
I 'hey eonlinue a hermetic language which has been attacked by many ol their Irllow ailists. And increasingly the result is a defensive kind ol loi malisin that lends oil ipieslioning ol ils role and him lion by del i bei a I ely s pea king a la n gunge that can rel'er only to i Inc*11 ,
Naturally enough, there was a reaction against the wilful disruption and illogicality that characterized the Iduxus years. Ilrra use die work produced by this read ion was easier lo handle, il was vveh omed yy iih rrlirl and encouraged by many institutions • mil i lilies In painting, particularly, the late sixties saw a return to order In some eases this mean! an attempt to transform painting ilsell into an allegedly ideological analysis of its own languageslrurturc. This happened particularly in fiance, and showed the influence ol the Mai xisl linguistic theory that changes in languagesi rucl lire bring about changes in thought patterns and therefore
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in society. Protagonists included (lie Supports/Surl'aces group But more generally, and particularly in America, the reaction heralded a new kind of formalism and a divorce from the prolt lems of the world outside art. In the case of Minimal art, lin instance, this meant that the art object could be discussed onl\ in terms of itself. This was at its most obvious when presented in three dimensions, as in the blank cubes of a sculploi like Don Judd; but in painting, too, it had its own history and equivalents Ad Reinhardt had reduced painting to the Pllirnalf Plink Painting , a perfect square five feet by live: ‘a painting that is simply a black painting and nothing more’. So in a way the painting stood as a definition of painting, or of its ultimate reduc tion. But the next generation found a way of taking this even furthei and this marks the beginning of Conceptual art. Joseph kn.suth (b 1945) took the cue from Reinhardt and prn\ided bis fom b\ lorn dictionary definition of painting in place ol the black surfac e Numerous directions have arisen around this process ol definition, and for a time they were all classified together as Con
312 Conceptual Art
yves klein Large Anthropophagy Homage to Tennessee Williams. ig6o
ceptual art, a term that quickly became equated with impenetrably complicated written material or cryptic messages from the artist to his bemused public. The term ‘conceptual’ would indicate that the traditional relationship in the work of art between idea and expression has been altered in some way in order to place the (mpbasis on the idea rather than the end result. In these terms it represents one stage on from, say, Yves Klein, where the activity, the stage between idea and end-product, was the important part of the process of making art.
The most strictly Conceptual art was therefore the written kind: the presentation of theory following the line of Kosuth's definition. Here the art-work or painting was apparently phased out in favour of the discussion of art in theoretical terms. Surpris ingly enough, many of its most dogged exponents emerged in England, which in terms of art has usually been best known for its rejection of theory in favour of instinct. The intellectual pursuit of art is carried out by the Art and Language group, centred around Coventry, by Victor Burgin (b. 1941 and by John
Stezaker (b. 1945), in America by Lawrence Weiner (b. 1940) and Robert Barry (b. 1936). Presentation can be like Art and Language’s published magazines, styled in the manner of an academic bulletin, or their microfilm system and filing-cabinets. Others like Stezaker use objects as learning models, while Burgin juxtaposes photographs and written texts to demonstrate the ways in which differing forms convey their meanings, and Weiner publishes cryptic sentences of shifting meanings. With Conceptual art has come an enormous amount of small books, tape recordings, and other documentation, all basically dealing with ways of discussing art.
But a sad paradox has arisen. Many of this generation of artists were sincerely concerned to transcend both the limited function of art in modern society and the inward-looking formalism of the Minimalists who preceded them. For an artist like Victor Burgin it seemed ridiculous in the context of modern life that, for instance, an allegedly major art figure like Robert Morris could fill a whole lecture discussing the difference between rolled steel and flat steel. Many of them resorted to other fields in order to widen the area of art, to make it more than the discussion of the relationships between colour and shapes. Some have sought, with copious quotes and footnotes, to incorporate the researches of linguistics, philosophy, and sociology into their written texts. The result is a kind of teething stage: the artist, worried about his marginal role in modern society, seeks to amplify it, but in order to do so he resorts to another specialist language, often based on its own brand of code and abstraction to such an extent that it too has little to do with reality and is inaccessible to any but a small initiated elite. If this tendency has a future, it must be in the finding of a communicable form, just as the artist has always had to resolve the problem of the relationship between the idea and its expression.
The term Conceptual has also been applied to other related or overlapping tendencies. Documentation plays a large part in this. The activity of the artist is recorded in photographic form and this is presented as the art-work. It was widely supposed that Conceptual art marked the phasing out of the art object as such,
Documentation as Art 31s
Inn this was a false alarm: artists and galleries still exist on the proceeds of the documentation, preparatory notes, and video tapes that abound in Conceptualism. Related activities extend to Land art, the logical expansion ol the large scale of Minimalism in America into the sculpting ol the landscape itself, as practised lor a number of years by Robert Morris (b. 193 1), Robert Smithson (1938 73), and Dennis Oppcnheim (b. 1938). In England it has a poetic parallel in the romantic work of Richard Long (b. 1945) and Hamish Fulton (b. 1946). Here the art activity is centred on nature. In a way it can be seen as a contemporary form ol landscape painting, and its motivation and mood are certainly in the romantic tradition. The activity of Long and Fulton consists ol walking in, observing, and photographing nature, in tracing parallels between one kind of natural form and another, or between the manifestations of different eras or primitive cultural traditions. The end-product is presented as the photographic equivalent of a painting, titled, framed and priced as such, and collected in the same way.
Photographic documentation has in fact replaced painting as a form of presentation for many artists. Performances that seek to bridge the gap between art and dance, or between art and music, activities that can be seen as sons of Fluxus, are processed in the same way. Then there is a different kind of photographic documentation which does not serve as a record of some activity, but is simply there itself as the art-work. In this vein there have been projects to document every living being on the earth (Douglas Huebler, b. 19^4), to indicate the physiognomical differences among the races of the world (Claudio Costa), to demonstrate the similarities and contrasts of innumerable pit-heads (Bcrnd and 11 ilia Bee her, both b. 1931), to record all 883 municipalities of the Netherlands (Wim (Jij/en, b. 1941), and to name the owners of tenement buildings in New York (Hans Ilaaeke, b. 1936). Some ol these projects are obviously humorous, others are in deadly earnest, and some seek, again, to broaden the scope of art, to extend its range ol possible subject matter and to present it in a modest, cheap, and transportable form. 1 lerc another red herring
jan dibbets Dutch Mountain, igyi.
has emerged with. Conceptual art. It would have been an ideal way of extending the idea of the multiple, idealistically a cheap way of reproducing the art object in editions or ad infinitum , and of shifting the emphasis from its value as a single unique object to a cheap and reproducible conveyor of an idea. But although editions abound, many photographs are sold as traditional unique art-works for three figure sums. Art as investment continues unabated regardless of changes in style.
And at the beginning of the seventies yet another change of style emerged. It was a return to painting, partly in reaction to a surfeit of documentation and partly as a continuation of both the Minimalist approach and the process of definition laid out by Ad Reinhardt. This tendency has been loosely labelled PostConceptual, and .once again represents a return to order, and a
BARKY i i.anai; an //tinging Canvas. it/yj
318 Post-Conceptual Painting
deliberately narrow field of activity. It has exponents in every country of the Western art world, and is characterized by the largely monochrome approach of the previous generation. Each exponent has developed a readily recognizable format or idiosyncrasy: a triangular, often blue canvas in the case of Palermo (b. 1943) in Germany; exploration of white on white brushstrokes on a square format in the case of Robert Ryman in America; slightly shifting, asymmetric variants of the square and the circle on a monochrome surface for Robert Mangold (b. 1923), also American; delicately toned stripes on unstretched material for the Italian Giorgio Griffa (b. 1936). Often the painting itself is little more than an idea; the carrying out of it is divorced from the notion of inspiration. It can be a chore, or something that can be endlessly repeated.
For the uninitiated spectator there is little to distinguish one monochrome painting from another, and no help at all in distinguishing what could represent art strategy from what is nothing more than wall decoration. The repetition of the same striped format, varying only in colour, has been elevated to strategy, for instance, by the French artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938). The presentation over at least eight years of what is essentially the same work of art forms part of his activity; the other part is the analysis of the institutions that show such work, the point being that it is the context that conditions the status of art, as of most things in present society, and not the quality of the art-work itself.
A very different attempt to solve the problem of what was to be done with painting found followers in the late sixties. HyperRealism or Photorealism, as practised by Chuck Close (b. 1940), Richard Estes (b. 1936), and Malcolm Morley (b. 1931), appeared initially to be simply a reactionary move against abstraction and intellectualization in painting. Images were chosen by the most arbitrary means; cars, motorbikes, store-fronts, and nudes were the stock-in-trade. The source images had to be modified to some extent, but essentially the aim was to present a smart, Kodachrome appearance, for the Hyper-Realists depended exclusively on photographs whereas their Pop predecessors had
p&int'ing, ». 1 . the act or occupation of covering surfaces with paint.
2. the act, art, or occupation of picturing scenes, objects, persons, etc. in paint.
3. a picture in paint, as an oil, water color, etc.
4 . colors laid on. [Obs.]
5. delineation that raises a vivid image in the mind; as, word -painting. [Obs.]
Joseph kosuth Art as Idea. ig66
drawn their imagery in the main from commercial graphics. Once the picture had got under way the aim of a Hyper-Realist was basically the same as that of any other painter: that of filling the picture surface with a convincing ‘real’ presence. Like Pop, once it was packaged and labelled it became a phenomenal commercial success.
Looking back over the last fifteen years a polarity emerges; art at both its extremes weaves its way between mandatory changes ofstyle and instant innovation. On one extreme there is the art which accepts an essentially passive role, and depicts the world as it is. On the other is the idea of art as strategy, continuing in a fairly inevitable way the process set up by Duchamp, but continually running the risk of growing inward. From this a strange paradox emerges. The second tendency, that of strategy, would seem on the face of it to change the nature of art, but from a distance it can be seen in spite of itself as an inevitable stage in the development of art history.
From the more passive side, there emerges the traditional function of painting as a reflection of the times in which it was
