ART AND POLITICS 1960

Art and Politics 1960

Art and Politics 1960

Introduction

The art of 1960 was considered as one of the popular art of its time. It contained art movements such as minimalism and pop art. The best and most revealing expression of its time under the heading "degenerate art". The power that had escaped from Europe was beamed back across the Atlantic, magnified by American sense of scale and supported by that especially American alliance between wealth and avant-gardism. In the symbolism of German regeneration and American independent wealth, modern art found a new importance and, from being a reduced survivor in 1945, grew to a powerful estate in the West in less than two decades.

Relation between Politics and Art

The interaction of political and social dissidence with art after 1965 was complex and pervasive. The ability of Conceptualism to present raw data in an acceptable "artistic" form made it the perfect vehicle for a political art. German artist Hans Haacke (1936) made the attack on art institutions from within, always implicit in modern art, quite explicit with his published statements about, for example, the detailed financial backing of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. For him, museums are political institutions irrespective of the stance they take. Other artists used the museum as a theater for manifesting contradictions and abuses in the society outside its walls, as in British artist Victor Burgin's (1941) commentary in eleven photographic panels, Britain 1976, where Social-Realist photographs overprinted with "up-market" advertising copy. Notably, Burgin moved to this simple and direct form of expression from an earlier involvement with linguistic and perception theories, which led him to question the necessity of any form of the art object.

Artists of Constructivist and Kineticist inclination did retain from their own tradition an aptitude for group activity. The German Gruppe Zero founded in 1957 by Otto Piene (1928) and Heinz Mack (1931-), with Gunther Uecker (1930), promptly turned away from any Constructivist discipline. The French Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, existing from 1960 to 1969, included in its members Vasarely's son Yvaral (1934) and was to some extent based on Vasarely's ideas. Although apparently more properly Constructivist in the Russian tradition, it too deviated in embracing instability and showing no interest in architectural scale (Burnham, 1971, pp. 345). Its aims, as defined in 1962, were to demystify art and make it more available, but also included a program for disrupting habitual visual responses and eliminating intrinsic stable values one paradox among many in the artistic programs of the 1960s. Its methods rested on dividing up a visual field on a rhythmical or pulsating system, in order to manifest patterns of energy. This can be done on a flat surface, but greatly enhanced if other planes added by relief, or by using transparent materials, to enable one to be played against the other. Movement, whether by motorizing the components or by using programmed light, emphasized the Kinetic effect in a dramatic way.

A German artist who came to embody the spirit of ...