The 1979 American Punk Art dispute: Visions of punk art between sensationalism, street art and social practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-466
Author(s):  
Marie Arleth Skov
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Social Art ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Art School

In May 1979, a conflict arose in Amsterdam: the makers of the exhibition American Punk Art clashed with local artists, who disagreed with how the curators portrayed the punk movement in their promotion of the show. The conflict lays open many of the inherent (self-) contradictory aspects of punk art. It was not merely the ubiquitous ‘hard school vs. art school’ punk dispute, but that the Amsterdam punk group responsible for the letter and the Americans preparing the exhibition had different visions of what punk art was or should be in respect to content and agency. Drawing on interviews with the protagonists themselves and research in their private archives, this article compares those visions, considering topics like institutionalism vs. street art, avantgarde history vs. tabloid contemporality and political vs. apolitical stances. The article shows how the involved protagonists from New York and Amsterdam drew on different art historical backgrounds, each rooted in the 1960s: Pop Art, especially Andy Warhol, played a significant role in New York, whereas the signature poetic-social art of CoBrA and the anarchistic activity of the Provos were influential in Amsterdam. The analysis reflects how punk manifested differently in different cultural spheres, but it also points to a common ground, which might be easier to see from today’s distance of more than forty years.

Hopps, Walter (1932–2005)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken D. Allan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Joseph Cornell

Walter Hopps was an American art dealer and curator of modern and contemporary art. Best known for organizing the first museum retrospective of Marcel Duchamp in 1963 at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon), Hopps was a pioneering example of the independent, creative curator, a model that emerged in the 1960s in the United States From his start as an organizer of unconventional shows of California painters on the cultural fringe of conservative Cold War-era Los Angeles, Hopps became one of the most respected, if unorthodox, curators of his generation, holding a dual appointment at the end of his life as 20th-century curator at Houston’s Menil Collection and adjunct senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Some of his noted exhibitions include: in Pasadena, a 1962 group show that helped to define pop art, The New Paintings of Common Objects; the first U retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters (1962) and Joseph Cornell (1967); Robert Rauschenberg retrospectives in 1976 and 1997 at the National Museum of American Art and Menil Collection, respectively; a 1996 survey of Edward Kienholz for The Whitney Museum of American Art; and a James Rosenquist retrospective in 2002 at the Guggenheim.

scholarly journals Art as document: on conceptual art and documentation

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (6) ◽  
pp. 1149-1161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Berryman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Art History ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Material Base ◽  
History And Criticism ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
The 1960S

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to bring the work of Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013) to the attention of document studies. Siegelaub was a pioneer of the conceptual art movement in New York in the 1960s, active as an Art Dealer, Curator and Publisher. He is remembered by art history for his exhibition catalogues, which provided a material base for intangible works of art. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a comparative approach to examine the documents of conceptual art, especially the exhibition catalogues produced by Siegelaub between 1968 and 1972. Drawing on literature from document theory and art history and criticism, it examines several of Siegelaub’s key exhibition catalogues and books. Findings Siegelaub’s theories of information have much in common with the documentalist tradition. Siegelaub’s work is important, not just for its potential to contribute to the literature of document theory. It also provides a point of dialogue between art history and information studies. Originality/value To date, the common ground between art and documentation has been explored almost exclusively from the perspective of art history. This paper is among the first to examine conceptual art from the perspective of document theory. It demonstrates potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Loft Life, Speaking Out, and European Vistas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Family Member ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Death Row ◽  
Speaking Out ◽  
Car Accidents ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Large Groups

During the 1960s, Elaine lived in a succession of New York lofts, where she painted, wrote, and entertained large groups of friends—including artists, writers, and athletes. She became caught up in the Death Row case of Caryl Chessman, one of several causes she vigorously pursued. Feminism was not among them. She was equally hostile to Pop Art, scorning it as simply “a way of making money.” The mid-sixties were a troubled time for Elaine: her mother died; Bill tried to divorce her. Her drinking escalated, leading to several car accidents and embarrassing scenes. (She stopped drinking in the mid-seventies.) Elaine spent summers in Paris as a teacher at the New York Studio School, bringing a family member or student along for city excursions. A Jules Dalou sculpture in the Jardin du Luxembourg prompted her Bacchus painting series, which captured the play of dappled light and foliage on the bronze figures.

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

2018 ◽  
pp. 146-178
Author(s):  
Kimberly Lamm
Keyword(s):  
Pop Art ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
Attempted Murder ◽  
Marilyn Monroe ◽  
The 1960S

Focused on the infamous SCUM Manifesto (1967), chapter 4 examines how Valerie Solanas deployed language as a weapon capable of ‘cutting up’ patriarchal authority and demonstrates how her history as a feminist lesbian of the 1960s helps evoke a historical milieu that brings the stakes of Codex Artaud into relief. Solanas wrote at western feminism’s most violent edge – and was perceived to be a monster for doing so. Reading Solanas as both an icon of the feminist lesbian but also the ambitious writer of a tightly crafted manifesto, this chapter traces how Solanas wrote to reject the expectation that women renounce their aggression. An Artaud-like figure who also embodies madness, Solanas’s attempted murder of Andy Warhol demonstrates that this rejection can take a dangerously literal turn. More subtly, her murderous rage reveals the insanity that came from sustaining a protest alone, bereft of feminist collectivities or images that mirror the value of women’s transgressions. Drawing upon Mary Harron’s well-researched film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), this chapter highlights Solanas’s history as an unruly feminist lesbian who, with connections to Warhol, Pop Art, Marilyn Monroe, and the typewriter, exemplifies the risks and possibilities of refusing to become an image of feminine submission and sexual availability..

Lou Reed: “In the Beginning Was the Word”

2017 ◽  
pp. 40-69
Author(s):  
Daniel Kane
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Free Association ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
New York School ◽  
Syracuse University ◽  
Velvet Underground ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Drag Queens

This chapter analyzes the ways in which Lou Reed’s vision of himself as a writer informed his music and lyrics for the Velvet Underground and his solo career. I track how Reed’s engagement with Andy Warhol and the New York School of poets complicated and troubled his otherwise relatively traditional views of the Poet as oracular figure. The chapter pays special attention to Reed’s stories and poems published in his collegiate-era mimeographed journal Lonely Woman Quarterly, analyzing how these works ultimately fed into Reed’s music and lyrics in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Mixing a world-weary, vernacular tone with bursts of inspired disjunction, or interrupting a straightforward narrative with Joycean free-association, Reed used the journal to sketch the personae that were to prove obstinate presences throughout his career. Reed’s porn-freaks, alcoholics, suburbanite wannabees, drag queens, hustlers, and junkies all got their start at Syracuse University, accompanying Reed on his journey from Lewis to Louis to Luis and, ultimately, Lou.

The Screen Scene: Andy Warhol, the Factory and Home Movies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Monteiro
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
Strict Adherence ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personality Differences ◽  
The People ◽  
Family Home ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
The 1960S

In his prodigious output of hundreds of films throughout the 1960s, Pop artist Andy Warhol cultivated an approach to making and viewing movies that borrowed heavily on the conventions of family home-movie culture. Warhol’s Factory studio in New York and his entourage of so-called “Superstars” functioned much like a family of misfits. This chapter explores film’s role in this context, analysing how Warhol combined improvised scenarios with personality differences to forge or reinforce intimate relations through filmmaking. It argues that his tendency to screen these films in the Factory—often before the people who appear on screen—functioned as a means of identifying, describing, and securing a nucleus of close social relations. Through comparison with the rhetoric of home-movie advertising and guidebooks, it teases out ways Warhol’s films paradoxically became avant-garde distortions of home-movie practices through strict adherence to suggestions and tips given to home-movie practitioners.

Introduction

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Independent Group ◽  
Women's Art ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
Art And Society ◽  
The 1960S

Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) can be considered one of the founders of contemporary cultural ideals. One of the most esteemed art critics of the post-war years, Alloway was significantly involved with both the Independent Group and the Place and Situation painters in London during the 1950s. At the beginning of the 1960s, he moved to New York, where he became a leading interpreter of Pop art, ‘systemic’ abstraction, and the realist revival as well as women's art. He wrote more than 800 texts ranging from books to reviews and catalogues essays and displayed wholehearted commitment to pluralism and diversity in both art and society. In post-war London, Alloway witnessed an art scene that was impoverished but received a boost from the newly elected Socialist government's emphasis on culture. Art News and Review, a magazine launched by Richard Gainsborough in 1949, proved invaluable to Alloway as an aspiring art critic in the post-war years in London.

Jazz Bubble

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Chapman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Social Trends ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
A Site

Hailed by corporate, philanthropic, and governmental organizations as a metaphor for democratic interaction and business dynamics, contemporary jazz culture has a story to tell about the relationship between political economy and social practice in the era of neoliberal capitalism. The Jazz Bubble approaches the emergence of the neoclassical jazz aesthetic since the 1980s as a powerful, if unexpected, point of departure for a wide-ranging investigation of important social trends during this period. The emergence of financialization as a key dimension of the global economy shapes a variety of aspects of contemporary jazz culture, and jazz culture comments upon this dimension in turn. During the stateside return of Dexter Gordon in the mid-1970s, the cultural turmoil of the New York fiscal crisis served as a crucial backdrop to understanding the resonance of Gordon’s appearances in the city. The financial markets directly inform the structural upheaval that major label jazz subsidiaries must navigate in the music industry of the early twenty-first century, and they inform the disruptive impact of urban redevelopment in communities that have relied upon jazz as a site of economic vibrancy. In examining these issues, The Jazz Bubble seeks to intensify conversations surrounding music, culture, and political economy.

Reviews

Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-130
Author(s):  
Tru Leverette ◽  
Barbara Mennel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Body Culture ◽  
Art School

Zélie Asava. Mixed Race Cinemas: Multiracial Dynamics in America and France (New York Bloomsbury, 2017). 216 pp., ISBN: 1501312456 (paperback: $35.96)Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler, eds. Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019). xl + 345 pp., ISBN: 9781501344787 (hardback, $110), (paperback, $29.95)

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