MUHI Final Review
Ed Kienholz, The Birthday, 1962
"The Birthday" is an attempt to illustrate the precise moment when life begins. The woman lies in fear and pain, constricted by the old wives' tales that she has heard all of her life. What should be a joyful fulfillment gives way to agonized despair.The plastic bubble is a scream, the arrows spasmodic suffering. There is a card from her husband explaining his absence. She is absolutely alone. Yet from this ravaged torment comes rejuvenation for her and all mankind. With this piece, Kienholz had completed a transition in style from experimental assemblage to one of defining and working out a total preconceived idea in large sculptural terms. Things were no longer found and hoarded against some vague future use, but now, with "The Birthday" and all subsequent works, items were obtained and used to complete a total concept.
Alberto Burri, Sack H8,1953
"The sacks used in these canvases often displayed stenciled letters relating to their commercial origins. This suggests some link with the German prewar Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters who made collages from printed waste paper. However, Burri, unlike [Robert] Rauschenberg, dissociated himself from the Dada spirit. He also played down the evident biologistic associations of the works, emphasizing their abstract materiality." (Caption, p.48); "Italy, and Rome in particular, proved revelatory, and [Robert] Rauschenberg twice visited the studio of Rome-based painter Alberto Burri, whose Sacchi of the early 1950s, consisting of patched and stitched burlap bags mounted on stretchers, were part of an informel movement paralleling that in France."
Helen Frankenthaler, Las Mayas, 1958
"The saturated blotter effect of the thin paint on the unprimed canvas is very compelling. Yet I am somewhat uneasy about it. The accidental element seems to be carried too far" Frankenthaler embraced Abstract Expressionism as a part of the second generation in which she created a dialogue with and departure from Pollock's painting. She constantly reasserted her interest in making art that is good, not gendered. In her exposure to the New York school in the 1950's, she was initially highly influenced by Willem de Kooning. She eventually leaned toward Pollock because she felt that she could depart from his work into her own. This was unusual for the second generation because many painted similarly to de Kooning (Cross). Frankenthaler described that Pollock opened the way for her to make her own mark. She was not interested in Pollock's drips but instead in his mode of working on the floor and without a conventional brush. When commenting on her departure from drip to stain, Frankenthaler maintains her Abstract Expressionist authenticity, "I had no plan, I just worked. The point was to get down the urgent message I felt somehowready to express...I needed something more liquid, watery, thinner. The stain was significant to Frankenthaler's work because it became her mode of resistance and it allowed her to function within Abstract Expressionism as an outsider. Many women of the 1950's had returned to the role of homemaker after the war and men became 'organization men' who followed the rules of their corporations. People began to search for a sense of individuality and they found it within the arts. Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists represented and embodied the 'frontiersmen.' Their work gave viewers a sense of freedom and authentic expression of the masculine self, which was eagerly acquired within the cold war economy. As a woman, Frankenthaler had to find a way to exist within an art world that only valued this male expression. She existed as an outsider within Abstract Expressionism by creating her stain paintings.
Pure Abstraction
'Pure Abstraction' would be any work of art that has no subject; depicts nothing of the real world at all. A purely abstract work will consist of the classic painting elements like composition, balance, harmony, even depth of field and perspective, but these elements will be the only subject.
Happenings
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings occur anywhere and are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience. Key elements of happenings are planned but artists sometimes retain room for improvisation. This new media art aspect to happenings eliminates the boundary between the artwork and its viewer.
Morris Louis, Iris, 1954
All of the Color Field artists were concerned with the classic problems of pictorial space and the flatness of the picture plane. In 1953, Louis visited Helen Frankenthaler's New York studio, where he saw and was greatly impressed by her stain paintings especially Mountains and Sea (1952). Upon his return to Washington, Louis experimented with various techniques of paint application. Louis characteristically applied extremely diluted, thinned paint to an unprimed, unstretched canvas, allowing it to flow over the inclined surface in effects sometimes suggestive of translucent color veils. The importance of Frankenthaler's example in Louis's development of this technique has been noted. Louis reported that he thought of Frankenthaler as the bridge between Jackson Pollock and the possible. However, even more so than Frankenthaler, Louis eliminated the brush gesture, although his flat, thin pigment is at times modulated in billowing and subtle tones. In 1954, Louis produced his mature Veil Paintings, which were characterized by overlapping, superimposed layers of transparent color poured onto and stained into sized or unsized canvas. The Veil Paintings consist of waves of brilliant, curving color-shapes submerged in translucent washes through which separate colors emerge principally at the edges. Although subdued, the resulting color is immensely rich. In another series, the artist used long parallel bands and stripes of pure color arranged side by side in rainbow effects. The thinned acrylic paint was allowed to stain the canvas, making the pigment at one with the canvas as opposed to "on top". This conformed to Greenberg's conception of "Modernism" as it made the entire picture plane flat.
John Chamberlain, Essex, 1960
American sculptor, painter, printmaker and film maker. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1950 to 1952 and from 1955 to 1956 at Black Mountain College, NC, where he was exposed to the modernist aesthetics of the poets Charles Olson (1910-70) and Robert Creeley (b 1926), with whom he formed a lasting friendship. His early welded-iron sculpture was heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism and by the sculpture of David Smith. In 1957 he moved to New York where he made his first works out of crushed car parts, such as Shortstop (1957; New York, Dia A. Found.), a practice for which he became immediately recognized and recognizable. During the mid-1960s he continued in this mode, expanding its formal vocabulary to include larger free-standing complexes and wall reliefs, always emphasizing fit and spontaneity. This work earned him instant critical association with the Junk art movement. In 1966 Chamberlain received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. From 1967 he became interested in film and video, making his most ambitious cinematic project, Wide Point, in 1968. Around this time he returned to his crushed metal idiom after a brief fascination with a combination of stencil and Action painting, for which he used car spray paint. From that moment his materials began to include not only the familiar chassis, but also industrial rubber, plexiglass and polyurethane. Slightly later, near the height of the American fuel crisis, he made frequent use of oil barrels in such works as the Socket and Kiss series (1979; see Sylvester, nos 501-5 and 634-42). In addition to film and painting, Chamberlain produced and exhibited drawings and prints, for example Time Goes By, Purple Disappears (etching and aquatint, 1987; see A. America, lxxv/9, 1987, p. 90). Much discussion surrounding his work has centred upon his sympathy for the objet trouvé and his chance inventions, elements common to the art of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and others. The relationship between his use of cultural waste and the implied violence of his constructions is an issue which harmonizes equally well with his perceived allegiance to modern American painting.
Arte Povera
Arte Povera (literally poor art) is a modern art movement. The Arte Povera movement was during 1967-1972 and took place in cities throughout Italy: Turin, Milan, Rome, Genoa, Venice, Naples and Bologna. The term was coined by Italian art critic Germano Celant and introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance.[1] Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture. The exhibition Im Spazio (The Space of Thoughts), curated by Germano Celant and held at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa, Italy, from September through October 1967, is often considered to be the official start of Arte Povera.[1] Celant, who became one of Arte Povera's major proponents, organized two exhibitions in 1967 and 1968, followed by an influential book published by Electa in 1985 called Arte Povera Storie e protagonisti/Arte Povera. Histories and Protagonists, promoting the notion of a revolutionary art, free of convention, the power of structure, and the market place. Although Celant attempted to encompass the radical elements of the entire international scene, the term properly centered on a group of Italian artists who attacked the corporate mentality with an art of unconventional materials and style.
Joseph Beuys, The Chief, 1964
As its title makes unmistakably clear, the performance Der Chef (Fluxus Gesang) (The Chief [Fluxus song], 1964), was another occasion on which Beuys openly addressed the question of authority, here adding a particular twist. The length of the performance was specified to equal the duration of an ordinary workday, and over the course of eight hours from 4 p.m. to midnight he performed the job of embodying authority. He appeared, rolled up in a felt blanket, in one of the exhibition spaces of the Galerie René Block in Berlin. The space could be looked into, but not entered, from the adjoining room. Hidden inside the blanket, Beuys could not be seen, only heard. He had a microphone with him, and at irregular intervals would make inarticulate sounds that were amplified via a PA system. This noise performance was interrupted periodically by a composition by Henning Christiansen and Eric Andersen played from tape. Two dead hares lay at either end of the rolled up felt blanket. Other props from Beuys' repertoire (copper rod, fat corner, fingernails, etc.) were placed all over the room to identify it as a space for ceremonial activities. In the announcement for the event, Beuys stated that Robert Morris would carry out the same performance simultaneously in New York. To my knowledge, it has never been confirmed that this actually happened. The announcement may well have been a joke made at Morris' expense, since Morris' own elegantly sober, analytically self-reflexive use of felt was certainly being undercut here by Beuys, who subjected the same material to a protracted, wearisome, and on the whole not very elegant process. In accordance with Beuys' own mythology, the performance could certainly be interpreted as an attempt to relive the experience of his healing on the Crimea. Yet this interpretation neither accounts for the title of the action, nor its time limit based on a workday, nor the central role that the PA system plays in the performance. If we take into consideration the historical resonance that the act of "barking into the microphone" had in the action ÖÖ-Programm, it is perhaps not too farfetched to see a parallel in Der Chef: the performance is centered around the experience of loudspeakers giving the guttural voice of an unseen speaker an uncanny physical presence in a room. This experience effectively resembles that of hearing propaganda speeches on the so-called Volksempfänger, the "people's radio," introduced into the German family home by the Nazis, the novelty of which very likely made for a formative media experience for an entire generation. If we assume that the distortion of the speeches by poor radio reception would have been a regular feature of that experience, then the indistinct muffled noises from the PA system (and its irregular interruption by music) would be, phenomenologically speaking, an echo of this experience. The "Chef" is in that sense also the "Führer."
Mark Rothko, Green, Red on Orange, 1950
By early 1949 Mark Rothko's "multiforms" developed into the signature style; Rothko exhibited these new works at the Betty Parsons Gallery. For critic Harold Rosenberg, the paintings were nothing short of a revelation. Rothko had, after painting his first "multiform," secluded himself to his home in East Hampton on Long Island. He invited only a select few, including Rosenberg, to view the new paintings. The discovery of his definitive form came at a period of great distress to the artist; his mother Kate died in October 1948. It was at some point during that winter that Rothko happened upon the use of symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary, colors, in which, for example, "the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground, concentrations of its substance. The green bar in Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, on the other hand, appears to vibrate against the orange around it, creating an optical flicker." Additionally, for the next seven years, Rothko painted in oil only on large canvases with vertical formats. Very large-scale designs were used in order to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko's words, to make the viewer feel "enveloped within" the painting. For some critics, the large size was an attempt to make up for a lack of substance. In retaliation, Rothko stated:
Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955
Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surmounted by four tinted-plaster faces in wood box with hinged front 2011 In the mid-1950s Johns incorporated symbols such as numbers, flags, maps, and targets into his paintings. Here, he transforms the familiar image of a target into a tangible object by building up the surface with wax encaustic. As a result, the concentric circles have become less precise and more tactile. Above the target Johns has added four cropped and eyeless faces, plaster casts taken from a single model over a period of several months. Their sculptural presence reinforces the objectness of the painting, particularly as the faces may be shut away in their niches behind a hinged wooden door. 2009 For Johns the common shooting target is one of the many "things the mind already knows." Using familiar objects "gives me room to work on other levels," he has explained. Though the target is closely linked with the acts of looking and aiming, the concentric circles of Johns's version are obscured and the surface made tactile with encaustic—pigment mixed with beeswax—on collage. Mounted above the target, four plaster casts taken from a single model over a period of several months are arranged in nonsequential order. A hinged wooden lid offers the option of shutting away the small niches that hold these cropped, eyeless faces.
Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept Waiting, 1962
Fontana began to use a razor blade to make precise, sweeping cuts in 1958. He wrote that: 'The picture "Spatial Concept" WAITING was based on my researches begun with the MANIFIESTO BLANCO published in Buenos Aires in 1946, and to be precise a new dimension beyond the canvas, time and space, the freedom to produce a work of art, liberating myself from the traditional canons of painting and sculpture' (letter of 9 July 1965).
Robert Rauschenberg, Erased DeKooning, 1953
From 1951 to 1953, Robert Rauschenberg made a number of artworks that explore the limits and very definition of art. These works recall and effectively extend the notion of the artist as creator of ideas, a concept first broached by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) with his iconic readymades of the early twentieth century. With Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Rauschenberg set out to discover whether an artwork could be produced entirely through erasure—an act focused on the removal of marks rather than their accumulation. Rauschenberg first tried erasing his own drawings but ultimately decided that in order for the experiment to succeed he had to begin with an artwork that was undeniably significant in its own right. He approached Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), an artist for whom he had tremendous respect, and asked him for a drawing to erase. Somewhat reluctantly, de Kooning agreed. After Rauschenberg completed the laborious erasure, he and fellow artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) devised a scheme for labeling, matting, and framing the work, with Johns inscribing the following words below the now-obliterated de Kooning drawing: ERASED de KOONING DRAWING ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG 1953 The simple, gilded frame and understated inscription are integral parts of the finished artwork, offering the sole indication of the psychologically loaded act central to its creation. Without the inscription, we would have no idea what is in the frame; the piece would be indecipherable. In 2010 SFMOMA used a range of digital capture and processing technologies to enhance the remaining traces of the original de Kooning drawing. This effort was intended not only to address our instinctive curiosity about what Rauschenberg erased but also to enable us to better understand what he grappled with, literally and figuratively, when he decided to erase the work of an artist he admittedly idolized. Because de Kooning used erasure heavily in his own drawings, it is possible that some traces made visible through this technology were actually erased by him as part of the original drawing, before it entered Rauschenberg's hands. However, the resulting image reveals a field of marks that is far from a finished drawing or even a focused study. Instead we see de Kooning at work, in process, thinking with his pencil and charcoal. Multiple figures fill the sheet, oriented in two directions. The female figure at lower left is likely related to the Woman series, with which de Kooning was deeply involved from 1950 to 1955. The sight of this approximation of de Kooning's drawing ultimately does not transform our understanding of Rauschenberg's finished artwork. The power of Erased de Kooning Drawing derives from the allure of the unseen and from the enigmatic nature of Rauschenberg's decision to erase a de Kooning. Was it an act of homage, provocation, humor, patricide, destruction, or, as Rauschenberg once suggested, celebration? Erased de Kooning Drawing eludes easy answers, its mysterious beginnings leaving it open to a range of present and future interpretations.
Piero Manzoni, Cans of Artist's shit, 1961 series of 90 cans
In May 1961, while he was living in Milan, Piero Manzoni produced ninety cans of Artist's Shit. Each was numbered on the lid 001 to 090. Tate's work is number 004. A label on each can, printed in Italian, English, French and German, identified the contents as '"Artist's Shit", contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961.' In December 1961 Manzoni wrote in a letter to the artist Ben Vautier: 'I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit, that is really his.' (Letter reprinted in Battino and Palazzoli p.144.) It is not known exactly how many cans of Artist's Shit were sold within Manzoni's lifetime, but a receipt dated 23 August 1962 certifies that Manzoni sold one to Alberto Lùcia for 30 grams of 18-carat gold (reproduced in Battino and Palazzoli p.154). Manzoni's decision to value his excrement on a par with the price of gold made clear reference to the tradition of the artist as alchemist already forged by Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein among others. As the artist and critic Jon Thompson has written: Manzoni's critical and metaphorical reification of the artist's body, its processes and products, pointed the way towards an understanding of the persona of the artist and the product of the artist's body as a consumable object. The Merda d'artista, the artist's shit, dried naturally and canned 'with no added preservatives', was the perfect metaphor for the bodied and disembodied nature of artistic labour: the work of art as fully incorporated raw material, and its violent expulsion as commodity. Manzoni understood the creative act as part of the cycle of consumption: as a constant reprocessing, packaging, marketing, consuming, reprocessing, packaging, ad infinitum. (Piero Manzoni, 1998, p.45) Artist's Shit was made at a time when Manzoni was producing a variety of works involving the fetishisation and commodification of his own body substances. These included marking eggs with his thumbprints before eating them, and selling balloons filled with his own breath (see Tate T07589). Of these works, the cans of Artist's Shit have become the most notorious, in part because of a lingering uncertainty about whether they do indeed contain Manzoni's faeces. At times when Manzoni's reputation has seen the market value of these works increase, such uncertainties have imbued them with an additional level of irony.
Claes Oldenburg, Store,1961
In the winter of 1961, Claes Oldenburg opened a store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (107E. 2nd St) selling his work, circumventing the usual practice of selling art through a gallery. He had created an eclectic array of objects- from lady's lingerie to rib eye steak- from roughly painted plaster in the back of the store, selling them in the front. Most of the items are strangely proportioned or of a large scale, playing around with the idea of commodity and art. They were 'objects after the spirit and in the form of popular objects of merchandise'. The idea was to create a store, or at least the functional equivalent of one. In the photograph one can see that the works were piled high, hanging off the walls and ceiling, layed out on counters, as though they were part of an 'Everything must go' sale. 'You could buy a relief of a rumpled girdle for $249.95, a Big Sandwich (1961) for $149.98; the 9.99 (1961) hanging in the front window went for $399.95. The slapdash painted sculptures mostly replicated coffee-shop food and bargain basement clothing, but mannequins, bits of signs, a wilting red-ribboned Success Plant (1961) and even the cash till were up for grabs.' Now the objects are in major art collections across the world, taking them from their original context, perhaps 'gentrifying' them into isolated art works that sit on a plinth.
Corporate Modernism
International Modern architecture adopted by large corporations, e.g. Lever House by Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill (1950-2), NYC. Many glass-and-metal-faced office-blocks were built in Manhattan in the mid-C20 by corporations hopeful of demonstrating progressiveness and modernity, although perhaps usually resulting in conformity.
Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Kelly arranged the sixty-four square panels of the grid in an arbitrary sequence, likening his method to the "the work of a bricklayer." Using squares of commercial colored paper left over from a previous series of collages, he first made a study for Colors for a Large Wall. Then he precisely matched the hues of the papers with oil paint, and arranged the final, full-size panels in strict adherence to the paper study.
Kenneth Noland, Mercer, 1962
Kenneth Noland's Target paintings, alternatively called Circles, were undoubtedly his breakthrough works. In 1958 he began applying a variety of color to a basic circle template positioned on a square canvas, often creating a burst of concentric circles rendered in complementary colors, which contrasted well against the square support. Another interesting feature of Noland's early Targets, painted between 1958 and 1960, was the presence of a smeared, almost jagged outer edge that framed the inner circles, suggesting a final burst of seemingly infinite color, stretching outward into the cosmos. As the 1960s commenced, Noland's use of color grew increasingly bold and ambitious. In his earlier, less refined Target paintings, heavier color forms were situated against a white or off-white backdrop. By 1962 Noland began to experiment with colored backdrops and cleaner dividing lines between each circle. He also began making the innermost point of his circles the visual focal point rather than the outer layers.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968, copper
Like the rectangular shape with which he began, Judd's rows and progressions are legible systems that reoccur in his oeuvre. In its repetition of serial forms and spaces, the vertical stack of Untitled (1969) literally incorporates space as one of its materials along with highly polished copper, creating a play between positive and negative that coheres as a totality.
Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961
New York, NY... By the late 1950s, American painter Allan Kaprow — formally trained in the era of Abstract Expressionism — began to view the action of Action Painting as far more important than painting itself. With the 1959 work 18 Happenings in 6 parts, a series of seemingly random but carefully choreographed activities executed with such friends as composer John Cage and artist Robert Rauschenberg, he embarked upon a career of intellectually rigorous site-specific, impermanent works that defied commoditization and ultimately gave birth to performance and installation art. The inventor of Happenings and Environments, Kaprow joyously incorporated improvisation and public participation within and beyond the traditional museum and gallery context. "Life is much more interesting than art," he wrote. "The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible."
Pop Art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States.[1] Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material.[1][2] The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.[2] Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them.[3] And due to its utilization of found objects and images it is similar to Dada. Pop art is aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony.[2] It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. Pop art and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede postmodern art, or are some of the earliest examples of Post-modern Art themselves.[4] Pop art often takes as its imagery that which is currently in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, like in the Campbell's Soup Cans labels, by Andy Warhol. Even the labeling on the shipping box containing retail items has been used as subject matter in pop art, for example in Warhol's Campbell's Tomato Juice Box 1964, (pictured below), or his Brillo Soap Box sculptures.
Post Painterly Abstraction
Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto. Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting that derived from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. The 31 artists in the exhibition included Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Friedel Dzubas, Paul Feeley, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Nicholas Krushenick, Alexander Liberman, Morris Louis, Arthur Fortescue McKay, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Ray Parker, David Simpson, Albert Stadler, Frank Stella, Mason Wells, Emerson Woelffer, and a number of other American and Canadian artists who were becoming well known in the 1960s.[1] Among the prior generation of contemporary artists, Barnett Newman has been singled out as one who anticipated "some of the characteristics of post-painterly abstraction."[2] As painting continued to move in different directions, initially away from abstract expressionism, powered by the spirit of innovation of the time, the term "post-painterly abstraction", which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by minimalism, hard-edge painting, lyrical abstraction, and color field painting
Ad Reinhardt, Painting, 1960-63
Reinhardt's earliest exhibited paintings avoided representation, but show a steady progression away from objects and external reference. His work progressed from compositions of geometrical shapes in the 1940s to works in different shades of the same color (all red, all blue, all white) in the 1950s. Reinhardt is best known for his so-called "black" paintings of the 1960s, which appear at first glance to be simply canvases painted black but are actually composed of black and nearly black shades. Among many other suggestions, these paintings ask if there can be such a thing as an absolute, even in black, which some viewers may not consider a color at all.
Robert Rauschenberg, Retroac8ve I, 1964
Robert Rauschenberg reintroduced recognizable imagery into contemporary art, and preferred employing popular mass media, such as newspapers, magazines and television, as his sources. Rauschenberg transferred these "found" media images to canvas, using commercially prepared photographic silk screens. Retroactive I is widely considered one of the finest of Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings. Central to the work is an iconic portrait of President John F. Kennedy, a symbol of progress and promise. Ironically, Rauschenberg ordered the silkscreen of this image during the summer preceding the president's assassination. He overcame his initial reluctance to use it following the trauma of November 1963, in part because he was committed theoretically to a non-hierarchical interest in all phenomena in the world around him. Nothing, however, can separate the power of this image from its emblematic reading as the embodiment of a national tragedy.
Frank Stella, Ouray, 1960-61
Stella completed a total of sixteen copper paintings; like most titles in the series, Ouray [9] (painted soon after Stella's inclusion in the now legendary "Sixteen Americans" exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959-1960) exists as two large versions and the present smaller version. This more intimate scale was executed at the suggestion of Castelli and Ivan Karp, who encouraged Stella to replicate the original copper paintings in a more 'portable' format. [10] "The copper pictures ... represent the extreme—the limit—to which I could take the shaping. Even though so much is cut away—and in some cases so arbitrarily—what saves them, I think, is the fact that they keep echoing a kind of rectilinearity." [11] Ouray's Greek cross, like the other works in the series, is an extraction from patterns in the Black paintings. Yet they operate as much more open pictures than the latter, and are defined less by their monumentality than by the thrust, even dynamism visible on the surface of their contoured canvases. It is composed on cardinal points, reinforcing the expansiveness of the picture field. Yet Stella's rectilinear brushstrokes belie the sensibility of their irregularities. They're impossible to reproduce. Separating the stripes are the pauses, the void-like spaces of painterly avoidance, wherein the supposedly flat picture plane is both challenged with hint of potential depth and exquisitely disintegrated into many separate picture planes (were one to read a stripe as its own entity, as Newman did in Oneness). Did it, as it would seem, have a systematic facture? Despite the work's explicit regularity, the configuration of these paintings was rather more liberally conceived, through a process whereby the outermost border dictated the internal separation of the stripes. The working method on the copper series is supported by sketches.
Bridget Riley, Current, 1964, emulsion on cardboard
Technically an op artist (short for optical illusion) Is minimalist in the way that the paintings deny expressive qualities; use hard edges and smooth surfaces, but remain abstract Looks three dimensional, but is completely flat Still technically an abstract arrangement lines; doesn't use traditional painting techniques (like perspective); instead, the lines give the illusion of volume
Beat Culture
The Beat Generation was a group of American post-World War II writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired. Central elements of "Beat" culture: rejection of received standards, innovations in style, use of illegal drugs, alternative sexualities, an interest in religion, a rejection of materialism, and explicit portrayals of the human condition.[1] Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.[2] Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.[3][4] The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. The original "Beat Generation" writers met in New York. Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco where they met and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and larger counterculture movements.
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimus, 1950-51
The Latin title of this painting can be translated as "Man, heroic and sublime." It refers to Newman's essay "The Sublime is Now," in which he asks, "If we are living in a time without a legend that can be called sublime, how can we be creating sublime art?" His response is embodied in part by this painting—his largest ever at that time. Newman hoped that the viewer would stand close to this expansive work, and he likened the experience to a human encounter: "It's no different, really, from meeting another person. One has a reaction to the person physically. Also, there's a metaphysical thing, and if a meeting of people is meaningful, it affects both their lives." Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Newman's largest painting at the time of its completion, is meant to overwhelm the senses. Viewers may be inclined to step back from it to see it all at once, but Newman instructed precisely the opposite. When the painting was first exhibited, in 1951 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, Newman tacked to the wall a notice that read, "There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance." Newman believed deeply in the spiritual potential of abstract art. The Latin title of this painting means "Man, heroic and sublime."
Minimalism
The term "Minimalism" has evolved over the last half-century to include a vast number of artistic media, and its precedents in the visual arts can be found in Mondrian, van Doesburg, Reinhardt, and in Malevich's monochromes. But it was born as a self-conscious movement in New York in the early 1960s. Its leading figures - Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Robert Morris, and Carl Andre - created objects which often blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and were characterized by unitary, geometric forms and industrial materials. Emphasizing cool anonymity over the hot expressivism of the previous generation of painters, the Minimalists attempted to avoid metaphorical associations, symbolism, and suggestions of spiritual transcendence. The revival of interest in Russian Constructivism and Marcel Duchamp's readymades provided important inspiration for the Minimalists. The Russian's example suggested an approach to sculpture that emphasised modular fabrication and industrial materials over the craft techniques of most modern sculpture. And Duchamp's readymades pointed to ways in which sculpture might make use of a variety of pre-fabricated materials, or aspire to the appearance of factory-built commodities. Much of Minimalist aesthetics was shaped by a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Minimalists wanted to remove suggestions of self-expressionism from the art work, as well as evocations of illusion or transcendence - or, indeed, metaphors of any kind, though as some critics have pointed out, that proved difficult. Unhappy with the modernist emphasis on medium-specificity, the Minimalists also sought to erase distinctions between paintings and sculptures, and to make instead, as Donald Judd said: "specific objects." In seeking to make objects which avoided the appearance of fine art objects, the Minimalists attempted to remove the appearance of composition from their work. To that end, they tried to expunge all signs of the artists guiding hand or thought processes - all aesthetic decisions - from the fabrication of the object. For Donald Judd, this was part of Minimalism's attack on the tradition of "relational composition" in European art, one which he saw as part of an out-moded rationalism. Rather than the parts of an artwork being carefully, hierarchically ordered and balanced, he said they should be "just one thing after another."
Art Brut
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut. a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by those on the outside of the established art scene, such as psychiatric hospital patients and children. While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term "outsider art" is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.
Op/Light Art
The use of color, light, and pattern to create images that can be deceptive or misleading to the brain.
French Realism
This movement in French art flourished from about 1840 until the late nineteenth century, and sought to convey a truthful and objective vision of contemporary life
Dan Flavin, Untitled (To the Master of the Wheeling Peach-blow), 1968
This work marries color and light, bringing them into three dimensions. In dialogue with the surrounding space, the vertical and horizontal tubes both illuminate and obscure the corner—a location not typically used for displaying art. Though the emitted light transcends its physical encasement and transforms the surrounding space, Flavin rejected any characterization of his work as sublime. "One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do," he stated. "And it is . . . as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find." Flavin began to use commercially available fluorescent light tubes in 1963.
Robert Morris, Untitled, 1965
Unfortunately, any photograph of Robert Morris's L Beams is going to miss the point if we want to understand the object both in an artistic and material sense. Morris wanted to expose the conditions of perception and display and the fact that these conditions always affect the way we comprehend the art object—sculpture always exists somewhere in relationship to someone at sometime. This specificity, Morris felt, had not been investigated enough, even by the many avant-garde experiments that define Modernism. By placing two eight-foot fiberglass "L-Beams" in a gallery space (often, he showed three), Morris demonstrated that a division existed between our perception of the object and the actual object. While viewers perceived the beams as being different shapes and sizes, in actuality, they were the same shape and of equal size. In direct opposition to Modernism's focus on the internal syntax of the object, that is, how the object can be understood as something "self-contained," Morris choose instead to examine the external syntax; the theatricality of the object—the way an object extends out from itself into its environment. In his series of essays on sculpture written in the late 1960s, Morris observed how he wanted to make sculpture, A function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision [...] for it is the viewer who changes the shape constantly by his change in position relative to the work. [...] There are two distinct terms: the known constant and the experienced variable. This last line is revealing as it demonstrates the crux of L-Beams. No matter how hard we try, we can't reconcile what we see and what we know. Morris' objects appear one way, "the expierenced variable," but in our minds we identify them to be another, "the known constant." Informed by theories of the body and perception, including his reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Morris explored the circumstances of the art object as we actually encounter it. He asked, why do we ignore the space and conditions of display in the presentation of art? Why do we only focus on the object? What about everything that circumscribes it; from its frame, to the wall that it is hung on, to the shape of the space that we put it in.
Existentialism
a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.
Yves Klein, L'accord blue, c1959
accord Bleu is one of the earliest of Yves Klein's revolutionary Reliefs éponges, his celebrated sponge reliefs. This work, with its incredibly variegated surface articulated by the application of numerous sponges, all coated in an even, deep blue, has been given the number RE 52 by the archives dedicated to the artist's work. This is one of the few examples of the Reliefs éponges to have been given a specific title: Accord bleu, which Klein would use again two years later as a title for a sponge relief now in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, speaks of agreement within the realm of the hallowed blue that was Klein's greatest weapon in his arsenal of the metaphysical and the Immaterial. On the reverse of Accord Bleu, as well as the artist's name, title and date, is a clue to the importance of the picture. For the word 'Gelsenkirchen' is also written there. Klein's career came to be intimately entwined with the German city, and it was in relation to his epic mural project there that the Reliefs éponges such as Accord Bleu were originally conceived. It was in part the favorable reception that Klein received again and again in Germany that cemented his reputation as one of the greatest artistic pioneers of the post-war period; Accord Bleu is an important witness to this historic juncture. The development of the Reliefs éponges such as Accord Bleu owed itself to a series of acquaintances and friendships that Klein had made. It was in May 1957 that he had met the sculptor Norbert Kricke, who had been given a show at the gallery of Iris Clert, Klein's great supporter. Kricke had visited Paris alongside the architect Werner Ruhnau. During this time, a competition was announced for suggestions of how to decorate the proposed opera house and theater being built at Gelsenkirchen. This was to be a pioneering collaboration between artists and architects. Klein was invited to join Kricke's team, submitting proposals for the interior alongside the other artists. Around that time, Klein was also offered a one-man show to mark the inauguration of the gallery of Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf. There, Klein showed a number of his monochromes, as he had done earlier in Milan. In Germany, these pictures sparked a heated debate and garnered much attention. Ruhnau himself acquired one of the pictures from Schmela's show, as did Paul Wember, who would later orchestrate one of Klein's most important retrospectives and assemble the catalogue raisonné that is still the authority on his work (D. Riout, Yves Klein: L'aventure monochrome, Paris, 2006, p. 43). The exhibition increased Klein's standing internationally and--crucially during the period of the joint application to work on the Gelsenkirchen project--in Germany. Some months later, Klein's team had won the Gelsenkirchen commission and began working more extensively with Ruhnau. Klein's initial proposal was for a pair of murals, but in fact he was commissioned to create six. During 1957, he created maquettes of his first sponge reliefs. Several of these were white, as Klein had still not managed to convince the board overseeing the Gelsenkirchen development of the need to use his blue. However, those early experiments were deemed unsuccessful. It was in October 1958 that Klein returned to Gelsenkirchen to take up the mantle of the commission and truly began to develop the Reliefs éponges, bringing with him Rotraut, the sister of the artist Günther Uecker, whom he had met when she was working as a babysitter at Arman's earlier that year; she worked initially as a translator and assistant, and would later become Klein's wife. Returning to the sponge relief format in 1958 involved a number of new developments from the first attempts. While originally he had hoped to leave the sponges soft, now he was impregnating them with plastics in order to solidify them, making them more manageable, a technique that is clear in Accord Bleu. He was using techniques developed in Gelsenkirchen and in Paris alongside Jean Tinguely--who through his introduction to Ruhnau was also commissioned to create a mobile for the opera house--and Paolo Vallorz, who had been using plastics to remodel the light-weight chassis of artist Jean-Paul Riopelle's racing car (P. Restany, Yves Klein, New York, 1982, p. 62). It was with the consolidation of these techniques that works such as Accord Bleu were made in the closing months of 1958, paving the way for Klein's creation in Gelsenkirchen of a "blue tapestry woven with sponges" (Y. Klein, quoted in S. Stich, Yves Klein, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1994, p. 114). Klein's blue realm was designed to invoke "the invisible becoming visible," he explained. It was the color of the deep sky, which Klein himself had claimed as his first readymade artwork. "Blue has no dimensions. It exists outside the dimensions that are part of other colors" (Y. Klein, quoted in O. Berggruen, M. Hollein, I. Pfeiffer, (eds.), Yves Klein, exh. cat., Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004, p. 48). His IKB, International Klein Blue, the intense aquamarine, which he would actually patent in 1960 and which he used in many of his monochromes, has an intense, shimmering depth and presence that is made all the more absorbing because of the novel techniques he employed in order to suspend the pigment in resin. For the reliefs that he was designing for Gelsenkirchen, Klein developed a new idea for the monochrome surface that allowed him to add a depth, a variation and a sense of composition to the work: the application of sponges to the surface (other murals in the project had variegated, landscape-like surfaces that prefigured the terrain of his 'planetary reliefs'). This allowed him to create works such as Accord Bleu which, in their poise and balance, with the individual placement of each sponge, recalled the gravel and stones of the Zen gardens of Japan which he had visited some years earlier while studying his beloved Judo there. Klein had already used the sponges in sculptures that he had created in 1957, as he had initially used them to apply his monochrome colors to the canvases such as the IKB works, before choosing a roller as his implement of choice. "It was also on this occasion that I discovered the sponge," he recounted: "While working on my paintings in the studio, I sometimes used sponges. Very quickly they obviously became blue! One day I noticed the beauty of the blue in the sponge; in an instant this working instrument became raw material for me. It is the sponge's extraordinary capacity to impregnate itself with anything fluid that attracted me" (Y. Klein, quoted in ibid., p. 90). For Klein, the use of the sponge encompassed a versatile range of statements, meanings and implications. Taking this natural readymade, this 'living, savage material,' he was embracing the natural world in his work. This was particularly suited to the concept of the blue itself, which Klein believed hovered between realms, creating a portal to the infinite while emerging in our own dimension: "material, physical Blue, offal and dried blood, issue of the raw material of sensibility" (Y. Klein, quoted in N. Root, "Precious Bodily Fluids," pp. 141-145, ibid., p. 142). In Accord Bleu, the individual sponges that comprise the surface and that make such an intriguing, textured otherworldly landscape harness life; at the same time, they serve as microcosms, as Klein had explained, for the saturation of sensibility within the viewer. Indeed, the role of the sponge, and its ability to be 'impregnated' by the Immaterial, had specific resonances for Klein due to his fascination with Rosicrucianism. In the first chapter of Max Heindel's important 1909 work, The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, or Mystic Christianity: An Elementary Treatise Upon Man's Past Evolution, Present Constitution and Future Development, the author explained how the various dimensions of existence, ranging from the basest material order to the heights of the divine Immaterial, could exist simultaneously and in the same place by using the sponge as an illustration: the sponge can be saturated by sand and water, the latter itself containing air. This idea of the different interlacing levels of existence in the different planes of existence, with the Immaterial co-existing with our more material dimension, intrigued Klein and fueled much of his work, and it is this that he has captured in the saturated blue in the sponges of Accord Bleu.
social realism
an international art movement, refers to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions. While the movement's artistic styles vary from nation to nation, it almost always utilizes a form of descriptive or critical realism.
Figurative
describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—that is clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational. often defined in contrast to abstract art:
Ready-Made
found objects used in art
Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch (Black series), 1959
is a Minimalist painting. The use of basic geometric systems in the work is regarded by many as the precursor of Minimalism. The painting was made by marking equal subdivisions along the sides, bottom and top edges of the canvas and using these intervals to generate simple, symmetrical patterns consisting of bands of black enamel paint separated by thin lines of unpainted canvas. Frank Stella gave the work a provocative title. named after the anthem of the Nazi Party, the Horst-Wessel-Lied, and is one of several paintings in the series that make direct reference to Nazism. By applying a hotly emotive title to the image, Stella's ironic purpose was that of destabilizing the idea of meaning itself.
Material Realism/Kitchen Sink Realism
is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose protagonists usually could be described as angry young men. It used a style of social realism, which often depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.
Kinetics
is art from any medium that contains movement perceivable by the viewer or depends on motion for its effect
Hard Edge Painting
is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.
constructivism
laborers in the factories, and peasants in the country, didn't want to live the way they were. Oppressed and abused by the government which was unwilling to change the ways of their top heavy rule. Russian revolution happened in 1917. Workers seized the power from the gov control, they wanted to create a paradise for all. Where wealth attained by the people was spread evenly amongst the people. Industrialization brought along the change in society. Russian avant-garde reconstructed art. We call the revolution in art modernism, and this is the Russian version of that. No longer was the art meant for art sake. It was meant to serve all people, to serve the social purpose, and be practical. Practicality married with beauty. It was replaced with socialist realism. Architectural avant-garde.
Yves Klein, Le Vide, 1958
n 1958, Yves Klein burst onto the art scene with Le Vide, a work in which he simply emptied a gallery interior and painted it entirely white. Three years earlier, Klein introduced his famous monochrome paintings that were technically nothing more than an ordinary canvas covered in flat, blue paint. How was Klein able to gain international notoriety as a cutting edge artist for work that seemingly required no more skill than that of a competent house painter? In order to answer this, one could analyse the historical precedence or the gallery system at the time, but the central question remains: how was Yves Klein able to persuade the art community to accept his artwork as legitimate and collectable? Though he was unlikely aware of it in a formal sense, Klein had developed the ability to represent his artwork in a way that adhered to a number of marketing principles (later established by psychologists) that determine effective persuasive techniques. Using these techniques, Klein was able to attract people's attention as well as convince them that he knew what he was talking about, that what he was saying was important, and that his artwork was a gateway to understanding his frame of mind. This essay will focus on how Klein implemented four psychological tactics that solidified his standing as one of Modernism's most sought after and valuable artists. These tactics include source credibility and legitimacy, the halo effect, latitude of acceptance, and the elaboration likelihood model. The popularity and financial success of Yves Klein was a direct result of his ability to persuade people using these four techniques.
Carl Andre, Equivalents I-VIII, 1966, wood
occasionally referred to as "The Bricks", is the last and most famous of a series of minimalist sculpture by Carl Andre. Constructed in 1966, it was bought by The Tate Gallery in 1972. The exhibit comprises one-hundred-and-twenty fire bricks, arranged in two layers, in a six-by-ten rectangle. All eight structures in the series have the same height, mass and volume, but different shapes. Thus they are all "equivalent".
Tony Smith, Die, 1962
one of Tony Smith's first steel sculptures and the inspiration for much of his later work. He had made a six-inch cardboard model in black in 1962, but he did not have Die fabricated until 1968. To have it made, Smith telephoned the Industrial Welding Company in Newark, New Jersey, whose sign, "You specify it; we fabricate it," had caught his eye on trips to and from New York. The artist's specifications for the sculpture were as follows: "a six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel with diagonal internal bracing." The dimensions were determined, according to Smith, by the proportions of the human body. He explained that a larger scale would have endowed Die with the stature of a "monument," while a smaller one would have reduced it to a mere "object." It is this simple yet profound observation about scale that placed Die at the center of key artistic debates. Weighing approximately 500 pounds and resting on the museum floor, the sculpture invites us to walk around it and experience it sequentially, one or two sides at a time. The sculpture's deceptively simple title invites multiple associations: it alludes to die casting, to one of a pair of dice, and ultimately, to death. As Smith remarked, "Six feet has a suggestion of being cooked. Six foot box. Six foot under." Rationality, evoked by Die's purely geometric configuration, is countered by the sculpture's brooding presence. Meaning becomes relative rather than absolute, something generated through the interplay of word and object. Weaving together strains of architecture, industrial manufacture, and the found object, Smith radically transformed the way sculpture could look, how it could be made, and how it could be understood. The form, materials, and impersonal surfaces of the sculpture relate to Smith's architectural background and to minimalist art of the mid-1960s. However, the artist also embraced the heroic and humanistic attitudes associated with abstract expressionist art of the 1950s. Smith was a pivotal figure who bridged two generations, and Die is now recognized as an icon of post-war American art. There are four examples of Die, but only two were produced during the artist's lifetime: no. 1/3 was manufactured in 1962 and belongs to the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. The present example, no. 2/3, was fabricated in 1968 and kept in the artist's backyard in South Orange, New Jersey, until his death in 1980. The two posthumous examples belong, respectively, to a private collector in Philadelphia and to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Otto Piene, Black Volume in Red Rectangle, 1962
one of the founders of the zero group
Action Painting
sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied.
suprematism
under the broader umbrella of modernist abstraction. No representation of reality or the physical world at which we live. Color, line, shape, how are they complementary. How does the canvas establish harmony. What kind of contrasts are created? It's about only art, for the most part. Malevich is the founder of this movement. Art movement centered around the supremacy of pure feeling or perceptions in the pictorial arts. Non-objective forms not related to objects in the physical world. The underlying reality of feeling. This continued further in the direction of non-representation. The point isn't to understand the painting, the point is to think about the painting. Conceptuality, what feeling looks like, what paint does best. It was an art movement, focused on basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colors. It was founded by Kazimir Malevich in Russia, around 1913, and announced in Malevich's 1915 exhibition in St. Petersburg where he exhibited 36 works in a similar style. The term refers to an abstract art based upon "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on visual depiction of objects.
Zero Group
was the name of a magazine founded in 1957 by Heinz Mack officially disappeared in 1967. The word "zero" expressed, in Otto Piene's words, "a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning."[1] The movement is commonly interpreted as reaction to Abstract Expressionism by arguing that art should be void of color, emotion and individual expression.[2] Many of the Zero artists are better known for their affiliations with other movements, including Nouveau réalisme, Arte Povera, Minimalism, Op Art and Kinetic art.[3] Mack and Piene invited artists like Günther Uecker to exhibit in their studio, and the three friends became the founding fathers of the Zero movement, which would soon reach out to embrace artists throughout Europe. Working in an environment without galleries and contemporary art spaces, these artists came together to exhibit their work in a series of one-day-only evening exhibitions, often staged in their studios.[4] Manifestos were often published in association with the shows, such as Zero 1 (1958), Zero 2 (1958), and Zero 3 (1961). These included texts in multiple languages written by artists and curators active in the Zero circle who sought to define what they termed The New Artistic Conception. The involved artists soon established a vigorous network of collaboration and exchange. Like-minded practitioners came above all from France (Arman, Jean Tinguely, and Yves Klein), Italy (Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni), Spain (Antoni Tàpies), and Austria (Arnulf Rainer).[5] In the Netherlands, the "informal group" of Nul artists began around 1958 and can be narrowed to four: Jan Schoonhoven, Armando, Jan Henderikse and Henk Peeters, who were linked to the Italian and German painters but penned their own manifesto.[6] Latin American artists, like the Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto, the Argentine Luis Tomasello, and Brazilian Almir Mavignier became affiliated with Zero while working in Paris in the 1950s.
Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,1959
«In his groundbreaking happening, presented at the Reuben Gallery in New York in the fall of 1959, Kaprow synthesized his training in action painting with his study of Cage's scored and performed events. Working from a carefully conceived and tighlty scripted score, he created an interactive environment that manipulated the audience to a degree virtually unprecedented in 20th century art. The audience were given programs and three stapled cards, which provided instructions for their participation: ‹The performance is divided into six parts...Each part contains three happenings which occur at once. The beginning and end of each will be signaled by a bell. At the end of the performance two strokes of the bell will be heard...There will be no applause after each set, but you may applaud after the sixth set if you wish.› These instructions also stipulated when audience members were required to change seats and move to the next of the three rooms into which the gallery was divided. These rooms were formed by semitransparent plastic sheets painted and collaged with references to Kaprow's earlier work; by panels on which words were roughly painted, and by rows of plastic fruit. (...) In contrast to Cage, whose encouragement of the participation of audience members war motivated by his desire to relinquish authorial control, audience members in many of Kaprow's Happenings became props through which the artist's vision was executed.»
