------------

24
The Pluralistic Seventies

I
!

r;;1 resented with a world torn by mounting political and

ld social conflict, the younger artists who emerged during the late sixties and early seventies found little to satisfY
their expressive needs in the extreme purity and logic of
Minimal art. In the seventies, the New York critic John
Perreault voiced the growing dissatisfaction with the..
Minimalist aesthetic: "Presently we need more than silentf
cubes, blank canvases, and gleaming white walls. We are:
side to death of cold plazas, and monotonous 'curtain wall'
skyscrapers ... [as well as] interiors that are more like empty
meat lockers than rooms to live in." With this, art entered
what became lmown as its Post-Minimal phase-a time,
like 1nany others throughout histmy, when classical balance
yielded to its expressive oppo~ite. Minimalism's "classical"
purity lay in its combination of the most literal, concrete
kind ofform with highly rarefied intellectual or even spiritual content; .but- it was the Minimalists' emphasis on the
object, a commodity that could still be bought and sold,
that caused certain artists to reject it. To avoid the stigma
of commercialism and to recover something of the moral
distance traditionally maintained by avant-garde art in its
relations with society at large, some artists Ceased to make
objects altogether, except as containers of information,
metaphors, symbols, and meaningful images. This ushered
in Conceptualism, which considered a work finished as
soon as the artist had conceived the idea for it and had
expressed this, not in material, objective form, but rather in
language, documentation, and proposals.
Along with Conceptualism carne Process art, which
undermined Minimalist forms by subjecting them to such
eroding forces of nature as atmospheric conditions, as well
as to the physical force of gravity, Related to Process art
were "scatter works," consisting of raw materials dispersed
over the gallery floor, a manifestation that opposed formalism with formlessness; and Earthworks, for which ar'tists
abandoned the studio and gallery world altogether and
operated in open nature, to create art whose relationship to
a particular site was an inseparable part of its existence. But,
while some artists turned outward to nature, others turned

i.'

';'II
, I'
!'

'

I
I,

588

inward, to their own bodies. On a more intimate scale, the

human body served as the site for formal procedures comparable to those worked upon the environment. The artist
in his or her own person became central to Performance
art, which communicated ideas about the human situation,
often in an ideological or political context, through theatrical works, consisting of paintings, songs, recitations,
and dance, and often accompanied by instrumental or electronic music, light displays, and video. Perfmmance art of
this kind was usually more deliberately structured than the
original Happeillngs of the sixties (see cbapter 21) and
involved the audience less directly. Simultaneously, as some
artists abandoned studio and gallery, others revived easel
painting in a mimetic style so sharply focused that it was
dubbed Photorealism. This painstaking truth to appearances was not based on direct observation of the phenomenal world but rather on a purity of conception derived
from an embrace of both the art of painting and photography. Integral to the Photorealists was the primary
source of the photograph, the very kind of documentation
most favored by the iconoclastic Conceptualists.
In the seventies it appeared as if someone had opened
Pandora's box and released all the demons that modernism
had exorcized. illustration, pattern, decoration, expressionism, and even narrative were espoused by Postmodcrn
artists seeking new avenues beyond the prescriptive route
of modernism and its late, Minimalist phase. Without a
dominant mode to follow, younger artist~egan to work in
a more pluralistic way than that permitted Qy purist modernism. Rather than relying exclusively on the example
provided by the plastic arts, artists during the seventies
turned increasingly to linguistic and political theory as a
means to develop their art. Particularly influential were
theories of language and meaning, such as those of the analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgensteill, During this period,
the Marxist social and political critiques of such philosophers as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and VValter
Benjamin-the Frankfurt school-began to have increasing resonance with artists and c;ritics.- Their thinking could

be applied to the very system of commodification

art market traclitionally supported. So open, howdid this pluralistic era become that even the formalists
place.
pluralism of artistic forms and motivations during
sevenloes coincided with a growing revisionist trend in
This reflected a desire on the part of many
to devote attention to histories and arts of the
and t\Ventieth cenruries that had been marginor repressed in the accepted accounts of modern?
art. The artistic achieve1nents of other cultures
social groups outside the elite, male-dominated artof Europe and North America began to be chamby writers and taken forward by artist.<; themselves.

of Thought: Conceptual Art

gradual and progressive "dematerialization of the art
" as the critic Lucy Iippard called the antiformalist
veme:nt,
has its roots in the later sixties, but became
0
cre,tsingly dominant in the early seventies. In 1970 The
of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibicalled simply Information. As the title suggests, the
acknowledged that ideas had once again come to the
art and, for many younger as well as older artists,
precedence over concrete form. Already in 1967,
Minimalist sculptor Sol LeWitt had defined his own
and cube works (see fig. 22.52) as Conceptualist,
reinforcing his position with theoretical statements
had a vast influence on artists of kindred spirit. "In
oOfLCejJtu.al Art," LeWitt wrote in 1967, "the idea or
is the most important aspect of the work ... all
"""'"""-!> and decision[ s] are made beforehand and the
:xec:ution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the
~acmrtethat makes the art." Where Minimalism had taken

l joseph Kosulh, One and Three Chairs, 1965: Wooden

folding chair, photographic copy of a chair, and photographic
enlargement of a dictionary definition

of a

chair; chair,

32% X 14'A X 20'Ai" 182 X 37.8 X 53 em); pholo panel,

36 X 24~" 191 .5 X 61 . 1 em); text panel, 24~ X 24W
161.3 X 62.2 em). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

24.2 Joseph Kosuth, Art As idea As idea, 1966. Mounled

Photoslat, 48

48" 1121.9

121.9cm). Collection Roy and

Dorothy Lichtenstein.

;;..
'

a preconceived, intellectual approach, creating art from

such "readymades" as mathematical systems, .geometric
form, raw industrial materials, and factory production,
and pushed reductive formalism just .short of total selfelimination, Conceptual artists proposed that the next logical move lay in taking art beyond the object into the
realm of language, knowledge, science, and worldly data.
As if to offer a textbook demonstration of how this
., could be accomplished, the American artist Joseph Kosuth
(b. 1945 ), a co-curator of the Information exhibition,
made One and Three Chairs (fig. 24.1), which consists of
a real chair accompanied by a full-scale photograph of it
and a dictionary definition of"chair," together providing a
progression :frmn the real to the ideal and thereby encompassing all the essential properties of "chairness." The artist
was concerned with exposing the mechanics of meaning, as
regards objects, which involved linking a visual image with
a mental concept. Here it is appropriate to mention the
general language Of semiotics, the science of signs, and say
that the "signifier" (a specific representation of a concept
or thing) and the "signified" (the actual object, d!!air) combine to produce the sign "chair." By exhibiting, along with
the signifier (a common folcling chair), a surrogate for the
visual representation (the photograph) and a surrogate for
the mental concept (the clictionary definition), Kosuth
transformed his semiotic analysis into art and thus created
a new sign, or "metasign", which in turn invites further
analysis. He would soon omit the first two steps of his
analytical process and go straight for the metasign, in a
sequence of Photostat blowups of clictionary definitions of
art-related words (fig. 24,2). Once mounted and exhibited, the blowups not only achieve the character of visual
CHAPTER 24 : THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

589

art but also an objectlike aesthetic quality comparable to

that ofMinimalism's crisp, elegant beauty, as well as something of its serial Tepetitiveness.
The German-American artist Hans Haacke (b. 1936),
during the sixties, literally undermined the integrity of
Minimalist forms by subjecting them to the eroding forces
of nature, among them atmospheric conditions exhibited
in the condensation forming inside a clear acrylic plastic
cube. His interest in the degradation of apparently closed
systems extended beyond geometry to more extensive
social arrangements and brought to conceptual art a moral
conscience. On being invited to exhibit at the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Musemn in New York City, Haacke
created Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings,

2J.4E3St.
lll~ck 385
lot ll
5 sto;cy >'nlk-up old. h"
O><nod by

Horp~el

Contract~ slgno~

Ronlty

a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (fig. 24.

3
this Real Estate series, the artist captioned
),
of tenements, among other kinds of buildings, With
ness infonnation about ownership, acquisition, and
erty values. Presented with all the order and logic
minimalist grid, Shapolsky et al described a system in
a small group of property owners were malting
out of undermaintained buildings. Right away, the
Estate pieces were seen as being so inflammatory that the
Guggenheim canceled the show. While the
may have preserved the political "neutrality" essential to
tax-free educational institution, it also guaranteed tJ1,.. _ 1,crya
kind of public interest that could serve Haacke's over 1-1ct
.
.
.
lllg
pmpose-to JOlt complacent VIewers mto helping to cor.
rect social injustice. What it could have achieved had it
been viewed in the rotunda of the Guggenheim is, of
course, impossible to know.
Revisiting the early-twentieth-century idea later articu
lated by Donald Judd ("if someone says it's art, it's art"),
Conceptualism soon spawned a vast and unruly variety of
Post-Minimal works ranging from_ Performance art lo
Process and_ Land art, all united, however, by a com111on
.. and unprecedented emphasis upon ideas and their cxprcs
4
". sian through some medium other than a unique object-a
: permanent, portable, and therefore marketable comnmd
ity. Illustrating the principle that the "ideal Conceptual
work," as Mel Bochner characterized it, could be cxpcri
enceq. in its description and be infinitely repeatable-and
tl1us devoid of "aura" and uniqueness-tl1e French artist
Daniel Buren (b. 1938) reduced his painting to a unilorm
neutral and internal system of commercially printed vcrti
cal stripes, a formal practice that readily lent itself to intlnilc
replication and exhibition in any environment (fig. 24.4).
The initial concept would never have to cl1ange, and vari
ety came not in 'the form itself but rather in the context:
city streets,~ public squares, museums, and galleries arc al!

~no=ent
l:n~.,

600 Ell St., Jtrc

bJ" !larcy J. Shopohlcy, l'rosidont('63)

Hortin Shopobky, President('64)

~fi::~~~;; ~:r~!ntt~~:~ol-slcy(occord~ns to Real. :Eshte
A<:Qui..l:ed 8-21-196~ tl'<lOB John the Jloptiat Founo\ation,
c/o 'l:~e llnnk <>I Hoi< York, 46 Wall St., IITC,
tor S237 600.- {ot.lso 7d:hor blqa.)
n:;o 00!1.- !l<rd&oge at 6.o' into,o~t, 8-19-19&3, due
8-l<J-l96B, ho1d by 'l:ho IU.rrlsto,s orul. Hhslonorio~

~75"Z:!.:~ ~!~~ ~"t~~oll::t~s~t~~~,.b~~~~~

t~:~~d.,.!:t'~ 16aiu3 ~~:{'IT ?l} totol 575 coo.- (inelud9

'I'
'

ji"

:I
it

24.3 Hans Haacke, Shapo/5ky eta/., Manhattan Real Estate

Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971
(detail), 1971. 142 photographs, 2 mops, 6 charts. Edition of
two. Collection the artist.

590

CHAPTER 24 ' THE PLURALISTIC SEVENTIES

24.4 Daniel Buren, Untitled, 1973. Installation incorporating

green and white stripes, Bleecker Street, NY (now destroyed).

~hJUgl1ted

by Buren's stripes, indicating that the circumsurrounding the display of art are as important as
work itself
Since its first articulation in LeWitt's statements,
:oncef>tu:uart has been a form of critical investigation into
premises of art-making and exhibitions. Michael Asher
1943) took the exposure of the museum and gallery
extremes by making his art out of the physical spaces of
and display. Asher's 1974 Situational Work consisted
removing the wall that divided the exhibition and
space of a gallery. The work made the economic conof aesthetic experiences visible, thus undermining the
of art praised by formalist critics. Moreover, there
no aesthetic or economic potential in the work itself.
Ph<>tog"tphty and text served to preserve the idea and the
but Asher's conceptual critique left nothing to buy
even observe.
Of the many forms of "documentation" that the Conce>>tu:alists found for their ideas, none served their purposes
perreedy than verbal language itself. "Without !anthere is no art," declared Lawrence Weiner, who
ffi2tint:airted that he cared litde whether his "statements,"
series of tersely phrased proposals, such as A 36 x 36"
Kemovat to the Lathing or Support of Plaster or Wallboard
a Wall, were ever executed, by himself or anyone else.
Fundamentally, he left the decision to implement the idea
to the "receiver" of the work. "Once you know about
a work of mine," he wrote, "you own it. There's no way
can climb into somebody's head and remove it."
Meanwhile, Douglas Huebler made the Conceptualists'
attitude toward form stunningly clear in a famous pronouncement published in 1968: "The world is full of
objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add

any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things

in terms of time or of space." In Location Piece #14
Huebler proposed that photographs be taken over a
twenty-four-hour period at twenty~four locations on the
45 parallel north of d1e Equator. The piece would then be
constituted of the photographs, a map of the world, and
the artist's statement, which concluded: "The owner of the
work will assume the responsibility for Jiufilling every
aspect of its physical execution." But even if the "owner"
assumed that responsibility, the photographs would have
been indistinguishable from one another, leaving the
viewer to make sense of them a,nd bringing to bear issues
of individual identity and personal response. Yet more
ephemeral, but touched with the charm of whimsy, were
such proposals as the following by Robert Barry, offered as
serious artistic commentary:
All the things I know
But of 1vhich I am not
At the moment thinking1:36PM, june 1969.

While the Conceptualists may have denied the sensory

delights offered by traditional painting and sculpture, they
distovered new possibilities within the relatiVely restricted
field of language .and linguistically analogous systems.
Books, newspapers, magazines, catalogs, advertising, postal
and telegraphic messages, charts, and maps were all seized
upon and exploited as resources for information and opinions about art and almost anything else of world interest
in the early s_eventies. Also susceptible to Conceptualist
exploitation was photography, inherent in any modern
print medium, and now also readily available in the kinetic
form of video, which became available to the public in the

ART HISTORY
A~g art:latbad jud fii8bcd art ><:hool. He aokcd bb
in~tru<:tur wb..t be ab<;~uM do next. "Go bo New Ym;k," the
cb.struCtor :repli<ld, "'""-d take olidu of your wtJd: 01.ruund to
- ..:U tJ:uo galla.rieB a)>d uli; them if !hay 'Will exhibit your work,"
'Which the arti.at did.

, -~ -w.;..~tu gallery altar gall.i.ry wilh hb olldeo

.E-a.cl> di:<a~~
pkked_ Up hio alt<hio one by moe, held ncl> np to the light
the b_.,ttar to
and oquhtbld hb eye a u hio_ .t.:.ok<od .
'~"!"'"- t911 provil>otalui utit" lh~y all,oaid. "You nu )>ot
in.l;ha ~tl'""'':"" ,_1~e're.lo<>king ro-., Art motory,"

~r

"""'It,

lr'!' trl:..a, _He _mo~d ~New _yo;k, IJe po,intad tlrelaooly,

'.oi!>ldo-iJ. tl.,_epklg! H.;, ~-t to_ ~aewn, aD<! ~ry opanlnga,
.~m.,:parita~. anj] artJot~'. tiara. He f;;Lil<ad ~ """'rY peroon
-~~,~~_,to ,~o !4th, a,rt; tr11,""ll"d ar.d.lhought =d rud
~~tly ;o.\oo~>ta~;-t. H~. "''!l!'"-pnd,
'
"

'

__.,

''.

io~khle- olfdaa.-..:roU11'd to 'g&u..rl"' a..o~~ond tim!>. ".Ah,"

'the galloiry direc!on ,;~ ihlo time, "linolly you ar~ hhtori~al."

&

'

~ralr -Hlot~rical ".n.t,FonoUJ><:<od

ooundo Uke

hyote:ri.~al.

24.5 John Baldessari, "Art History" from the book lngres and Otner Parables, 1972. Photograph and typed text, Slf X I 0"'"
[21 .6 X 27.6 em).
CHAPTER 24 :THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

591

mid-sixties. Non-unique visual linages quicldy became

almost as ubiquitous in Conceptual art as words.
John Baldessari (b. 1931) composed brief but trenchant tales. about art itself, usually accmnpanied by a reproduction of some key monument from the art-historical
canon (fig. 24.5). In later works such as the photomontage
Heel (fig. 24.6), however, the narrative element became
extremely ellipticaL The viewer may notice that almost all
of the inclividuals shown in the side photographs have
injured feet, suggesting that the title may perhaps refer to
the idea of an Achilles' heel, the mythical Greek hero's one
vulnerable point. And we may also note that the individuals on the periphery could easily gather in the crowd
depicted in the central image. But ~n order to grasp the
connection that the artist apparently had in mind, it helps
to know that he had been reacling Elias Canetti's book
Crowds and Power, on the relationship between crowds
and individuals. In superimposing a uniJYing red line on
the people who are drifting away from the main group,
Baldessari was iden~f:Ying what might be seen as the mob's
Achilles' heel: its vulnerable point is that its members may
wander off, one by one, dissipating its power to act.
Books, like verbal communication, offer a sequential_,.
cumulative experience, .as opposed to the plastic art of.'
traditional painting that, being static, has the potential fm:
providing a total, all-at-once experience at the ve1y instant
of perception. Freed from the tedium of material restraints,
the Conceptualists could now move even beyond the third
climension offered by sculptme to explore . the fourth

: .i

,'

24.7 On Kawara, The Today Series of Date Paintings, 1966.

Installation view.

climension of time, On Kawara (b. 1933), a Japanese

artist resident in New York, made the passage of time itsdf
the all-important subject by each day starting a small black
painting that simply set forth the current date in white
block lerters (fig. 24.7). With every panel an equal component in the series, the work can reveal its full meaning,
only as a total conception. The German artist Hanne
Darboven recorded the passage of time and her experience
of it by filling an enormous number of pages with a kind
of abstract calligraphy and mysterious permutating numeration, derived in part from the days, weeks, and months
of the calendar. As the artist's digits add up, multiply,
and interweave, they eventually cover whole walls of
gallery space, finally becoming a complete environment
given over to a trancelike involvement with time's steady,
inexorable advance.

Extended Arenas: Performance

Art and Video

II
1':1

~I
1:
I

24.6 John Baldessari, Heel, 1986. Black-and-white.

,,It

photographs with oil tint, oil stick, and acrylic, mounted on

board, 8' lOW' X 7'3" [2.7 X 2. 2 m). Los Angeles Counly
Museum of Art.

592

CHAPTER 24

THE PLURALISTIC SEVENTIES

Some artists found the material limitations of the

written word confining and preferred the temporality of
Performance art. In the seventies so many artists embraced
Performance that it has been called the art form most
chaiacteristic of ~e period. To a generation more eager
than ever to disavow the past, Performa.nce meant venturing into an arena, specifically theater, wlwre artists, owing
partly to their lade of expCrience in the field, felt encouraged to proceed as if unfettered by rules or traditions. Not
only did Perfunnance liberate artists from the art object,
it also fieed them to adopt whatever subject matter,
medium, or material seemed .promising_ for their purpo~cs.
Performance was not simply visual conimunication: it dten
incorporated words <l:lld called upon concepts of ritual and
mytl1 that had long been important tO twentieth-century
artists. Moreover, it enabled artists to offer their work at
any time, for any duration, at any ~cind of site, and in direct
contact with their audience. This gave artists instant access

the receivers of their work--without the intervention of

curators, and dealers-and thus permitted them a
.ewrcvc1 of control over its display and destination. For all
reasons,_ Performance appeared to offer the maxipossibility for converting art from an object of coO:umpnon to a vehicle for ideas and action, a new form of
communication.

artist active in the seventies realized the heroic patenof Performance more movingly than the charismatic
controversial German artist Joseph Beuys ( 1921-86).
down from his plane during World War II and given
for dead in the blizzard-swept Crimea, Beuys returned
peacetime existence determined to rehumanize both art
and life by drastically narrowing the gap between the two.
acbieve tbis, he employed personally relevant merl10ds
materials in order to render form an agent of meaning.
began by piling unsymmetrical clumps of animal grease
in empty rooms and tben wrapping bimself in fat and felt,
an act that ritualized the materials and techniques the
nomadic Crimean Tatars had used to heal the young airman's injured body. Viewing his works "as stimulants for
the transformation of the idea of sculpture or of art in general," Beuys intended them to provoke thoughts about
what art can be and how the concept of art-malting can be
"extended to the invisible materials used by everyone." He
wrote about "Thinking Forms," concerned with "how we
mold our thoughts," about "Spoken Forms," addressed to
the question of "how we shape our thoughts into words,"
and finally about "Social Sculpture," meaning "how we
mold and shape tbe world in wbich we live: Sculpture as an
evolutionary process; everyo"ne is an artist." He continued,

24.8 Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare,

1'965. Performance at the Galerie Schmela, DUsseldorf.

"That is why the nature of my sculpture is not fixed and

finished. Processes continue in _most of them: chemical
reactions, fermentations, color changes, decay, drying up.
Everything is in a state of change."
In a Diisseldorf gallery in 1965 tbe artist created How to
Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (fig. 24.8 ), for wbich he sat
in a bare room surrounded by bis funiliar media of felt, fut,

24.9 Joseph Beuys, The

Pack, 1969. Installation
with Volkswagen bus
and 20 sledges, each
carrying felt, fat, and a
flashlight. Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen Kassel,
Neue Galerie,
Germany.

CHAPTER 24 ' THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

593

wire, and wood, his face covered with gold leaf. A dead hare

Paik, Acconci, Nauman, and Burden

lay cradled in Beuys's arms, and he murmured urgently to

it. To help explain tllls piece, Beuys said that in his work
"the figures of the horse, the stag, the swan, and the hare
constantly come and go: figures which pass freely from one
level of existence to another, which represent the incarnation of the soul or the earthly form of spiritual beings with

A different kind of Performance artist whose chosen 01 .,.

ellla
are defined by change is Nam Jnne Paik (b. 1932 ), Who
switched from straight electronic music composition to the
visual arts when he discovered the expressive possibilities of
video. Paik proclaimed that "as collage technique replaced
oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas ,
Witty, charming, and therefore especially successful in
collaboration, Paik achieved a certain notoriety fur several
of the pieces he created for the classical cellist Charlotte

access to other regions." In this seemingly morbid perform-

ance, Beuys pointed up the complex and ambivalent feelings

aroused in us by works of art that try to deal directly with
such intractably unaesthetic subjects as death. The natural
human reaction to the harmless creature held by the artist
overturned any notion of('aesthetic distance." And the gold
maskBeuys wore made him seem not like an artist butr.ather
a shaman or healer who, through magical incantation, could
achieve a certain oneness with the spirits of animals.

Sculptural works such as The Pack (fig. 24.9) drew on

Beuys's experience in a different way, transforming inanimate objects by layering them with associations both positive and negative. The sleds in this work, for example, may
be part of a rescue operation, like the one that saved the
artist's life during World War II, since each one carries such
emergency gear as a flashlight, in addition to the felt an~
the animal fat that Beuys specifically associated with his
own rescue. But at the same time The Pack bears some
resemblance to the equipment of a milit~y assault force or
commando unit and in this way might assume a decidedly
more aggressive than pacifist character.
In 1962 Beuys joined Fluxus, which was a loosely
knit, nonconformist international group noted for its
Happenings, actions, publications, concerts, and mailing
activities (see below). By the end ofl965, however, he had
severed relations with Fluxus, not finding the work sufficiently effi:ctive: "They held a mirror up to people without
indicating how to change anything."

,,1
1:]
)

24.10 Nom June Paik, TV Bra for Living

Sculpture (worn by Charlotte Moorman).

1969. Television sets and cello .

.
24.11 Nom June Paik, TV Garden,
1974-78. Video monitors (number varies) and
plants, dimensions variable. Installation view,
WhHney Museum of American Art, New York,

1982.

II 1:'
594

CHAPTER 24 , THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

~-..___
..

'

'

24.12a, 24.12b Vito Acconci, Instant House, 1980. Flags, wood, springs, ropes, and pulleys, open 8' X 21' X 21'
(2.4 X 6.4 X 6.4 ml, closed 8' X 5' X 5' 12.4 X 1.52 X 1.52 mi. Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
~

Moorman. One of these had the instrumentalist play the

cello while wearing a bra made of two miniature TV sets,
which took on a humanity by their association with one of
the most intimate of personal garments (fig. 24.10). When
Paik and Moorman performed Opera Sextronique in New
York in 1967, the cellist removed all her clothing and was
promptly arrested for, as the guilty yerdict read, "an art
which openly .outrage[ d] public decency." In contrast to
his more provocative performance works, some of Paik's
video installation pieces can be quit~ lyrical, even contemplative. In TV Garden (fig. 24.11), the viewer is invited to
stroll through a pastoral setting of potted plants, a garden
decorated vvith television monitors. The glowing video
images appear amid the foliage like blossoming flowers.
One form of performance, Body art, often induced a
forced intllnacy between the performer and the audience,
with results that could be amusing, poetic, shocking, or
discomfiting. In Seedbed, 1972, Vito Acconci (b. 1940)
spent hours during each performance day masturbating
beneath a gallerywide ramp, while visitors overhead heard
via a loudspealcer the auditory results of his fantasizing.
Here was the artist reintroducing into his work the element
of personal risk that came from rendering himself vulnerable to the audience, as he engaged in an intensely personal
activity and grappled with the potential audience alienation
that such drastic strategies could produce.
Subsequently, Acconci made sculptural objects that can
"perform" when activated by 'the viewer. The concerns
reflected in these later works have become more political
than psycbological. His 1980 Instant House (fig. 24,12a
and b) lies flat on the floor in its collapsed position. When
the viewer sits on its swing, however, pulleys raise the
house's walls, malcing a toy building that looks like a child's

vefsion of a military guardhouse. With the walls up, the

vi<1wer seated inside is surrounded by U.S.,flags applied to
the inner surfaces, while viewers outside see tl1e red Soviet
flag, with its hammer and sidde. In Acconci's ironic reduction of Cold War confrontation to the less intimidating
proportions of a playground game, the nnderlying result
was to point to the terrifYingly real implications of Cold
War politics.
Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) wittily made himself into a
,living pun on Duchamp's Fountain (fig. 24.13), Over the
years, his production has been an astonishingly diverse

24.13 Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966-70.

Color photograph, 19% X 23%" (50.2 X 60.3 cml. Edition
of eight.

CHAPTER 24 ' THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

595

,
!

' i'

,.

24.14 Bruce Nauman, Violins Violence Silence, 1981-82.

Neon tubing with clear glass tubing suspension frame, 62~6 X

65% X 6' (158 X 166.1 X 15.2 em). Oliver-Hoffman family

Collection, Chicago.

24.15 Chris Burden, Doorway to Heaven, November 15,

1973. 'At 6 p.m. I stood in the doorway of my studio facing

-~

the Venice boardwalk. A few spectators watched as 1 pushed

two live electric wires into my chest. The wires crossed and
exploded, burning me, but saving me from electrocution."
'i)

i'

I II

I
I

;i
;I

'1''1.
,' Jl

,,,:1

24.16 Chris Burden, All the Submarines of the United States of America, 1987. lnslallation with 625 miniature
car,dboard submarines, vinyl thread, typeface, 13'2' X 18' X 12' (4 X 5.5 X 3.7 m), length of each
submarine 8" (20.3 em). Dallas Museum of Art.
.

II
596

CHAPTER 24 ; THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

eXpression of his declaration: "I'm not interested in adding

to the collection of things that are art, but [in] investigating the possibility of what art may be." Early in his career,
Nauman created a number of films that made use of all
that the young artist had available: himself and his empty
studio. The results, including Walking in Contrapposto,
Pacing Upside Down, and Slow Angle Walk, the latter two
filmed with the camera tipped and turned over, succinctly
combine humour and art history with the uncanny. His
sculptural work also fluctuates uneasily between levity and
seriousness. Nauman has made works in neon, some of
which blink on and off with disturbing imagery, such as
before-and-after images of a hanged man. Nothing could
.more pointedly contrast vvith the austere, Minimal fluorescent light-fixture works of Dan Flavin (see fig. 22.36).
Other of Naumap's neon signs, such as Violins Violence
Silence (fig. 24.14), depict only words and as such are
related to Conceptual art. Asking the viewer to read the
neon lettering from either side, these signs juxtapose different words aud flip them around, baclcward and forward,
until their usual meanings are rendered confused and
problematic; the letters become unfuniliar and operate
more like collections of abstract shapes and bright colors.
Unexpected relationships emerge, such as the odd similarity between "violence" and "violins."
Some Body artists risked going beyond the by-now
expected, and accepted, shock factor in contemporary
art into the realm of violent exhibitionism. Chris Burden
(b. 1946) achieved international fame in 1971 with a
performance in Los Angeles that consisted of having a
friend shoot him in the arm. As was crucial to much
of Conceptual art, the ephemeral performance was rendered permanent in photographic documentation. The
straightforward factuality of the photograph, capturing a
critical moment in another of Burden's performances
(fig. 24.15), malces the artist's ability to endure seem all
~e more harrowing.
Burden distanced himself, however, from any threat
of actual danger in installations that, instead of enacting
violence, sought to conceptualize it. He made All the
Su-bmarines of the United States of America (fig. 24.16)
during the centennial of the 1887 launching of the U.S.
Navy's first submersible, the SSJ. The work is made up
of some 625 miniature models, representing each of the
actual submarines launched by the navy during the ensuing
hundred years, including its nuclear-missile-carrying
Polaris submarines. The armada of tiny cardboard boats
floats harmlessly in the gallery space, like a school of fish,
but at the same time it enables the viewer to grasp a
formidable reality-a fleet of warships capable of mass
destruction.

London-based artists laiown simply as Gilbert (b. 1943)

and George (b. 1942) transformed themselves into "living
sculpture" and brought to art and the world of the late
sixties a much-needed grace note of stylish good humor.
Indeed, they would probably have been quite successful
performing in an old-fashioned English music hall, which,
lilce all the rest of their material, Gilbert and George simultaneously parodied. For their performance The Singing
Sculpture of 1971 (fig. 24.17), they covered their faces and
hands with metallic paint, adopted the most outrageously
proper English clothing and hairstyles, placed themselves
on a tabletop, and proceeded to move and mouth as if
they were wound-up marionettes rendering the recorded
words and music of the prewar song that gave the piece
its subtitle.
A Performance artist who actually does appear in music
halls, as well as recording for major record labels, while successfiilly preserving her place in the world of contemporary
art is the mnltitalented Laurie Anderson (b. 1947). & a
second-generation Conceptualist and a child of the media
age, Anderson can talce for granted the intellectual rigor of
her predecessors and, with greater command of far more
sp.ectacular means, transform the- older artists' erudite,

"

Gilbert and George, Anderson, and Horn

In a lighthearted, though serious, response to the abstract
. and modernist tendencies of English sculpture of the sixties
still influenced by Moore, Hepworth, and Caro, a pair of

24.17 Gilbert ond George, The Singing Sculpture

("Underneath the Arches"}, 1969. Performance at the
Sonnabend Gallery, New York, 1971 .

CHAPTER 24 : THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

597

24.18 Laurie Anderson, United States Part II. Segment "Let X~ X,"
October 1980. Performance at the Orpheum Theater, New York,
presented by the Kitchen.

but often rather amateurish, demonstrations into virtuoso

performances. For United States (fig. 24.18), a four-part .
epic composed and first presented over the years 1978-82,'"
Anderson marshaled the full array of her accomplishments- ,
drawing, sculpture, singing, composing, violin playing,
electronic effects-to deal in half-hour segments with the
themes of transportation, politics, sociopsychology, and
money. Juxtaposing images and text, sound and technological inventions, she swept her audience through a series
of ironical "talking songs." The journey turned into a joy
ride with such original devices as custon1-made instruments, a slide show that magically came and went with the

24.20 Rebecca Horn, Ostrich Egg Which Has Been Struck

by Lightening, 1995. Two brushes, ostrich egg, electric motor,

I 02 X 27~ X 12" [260 X 70 X 30 cml. Kunslmuseum,

Bonn, Germany.

i
'

24.19 Rebecca Horn, The

Feathered Prison Fan, as it
appears in the film Der
Eintdnzer, 1978. White ostrich
feathers, metal, motor, and

wood, 39% X 32% X 12%"

[I 00 X 82.9 X 32.1 cml.

r!j

Private collection.

I:

d.i
,I
r:::.~'
;

,1

;. !

,,,I
I

598

CHAPTER 24

THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

24.21 Peter Campus, Three Transitions, 1973. Two-inch videotape in color with sound, five minutes.

stroke of a neon violin bow, and red lips that suddenly

floated in the dark. With humor, language, careful timing,
style, and tmdeniable stage presence, Anderson has
brought Conceptual art to a wide audience.
The German performance artist Rebecca Horn (b. 1944)
has been active in creating sculpture, installations, and
films. In much of her work, Horn explores the physical
limits of the human body, which she often extends by using
fantastic theatrical props, such as a mask of feathers, or
gloves vvith yard-long fingers, or bizarre winglike devices
operated by the performer. The most ambitious of these
props are conceived as machines, such as the mechanical
sculpture The Feathered Prison Fan (fig. 24.19), which
appeared in Horn's first feature-length film, Der Binttinzer
("The Gigolo," 1978).
The film is set in a ballet studio. In one scene, the fan's
two huge, rotating sets of ostrich plumes, one on either
side, envelop a ballerina. Yet when the legs of the standing
figure are exposed, the framework of feathers looks like
i s~t of wings mounted on her seemingly headless torso,
perhaps recalling the renowned Hellenistic sculpture the
Nike or Winged Victory of Samothrace, or suggesting
the feathered wings attached by the mythological master
inventor Daedalus to his son Icarus-that is to say, evoking
figures capable of flight. And indeed elsewhere, as in
Ostrich Egg Which Has Been Struck by Lightning (fig.
24.20), the form of the egg calls to mind the most positive
associations, symbolizing the artistic perfection sought
by ballerinas as well as the formal absolutes, of sculptors
like Brancusi. The egg is placed between two soft brushes
that move up and down but never come into contact
with it; the spearlike forms threaten to pierce the egg
and just barely miss. It is sensual and erotic and, at the
same time, tantalizes viewers, whose expectations are titillated and then denied. Another influence is Max Ernst,
whose Surrealist, masculinist fantasies are ironically evoked
by Horn.

Campus's Videa Art

During the seventies, Performance art extended itself into
the new realm of video art, as video cameras and recorders
be.(:arne widely available and were used by artists such as
Paik. Peter Campus's (b. 1937) early video work included
closed-circuit installations. Viewers approaching them, not
realizing that they were on camera, would unexpectedly
encounter projections of their own image. Observers found
thems~lves suddenly turned into performers. In such works,
Campus explored how we come to see ourselves in unanticipated ways, not only physically but psychologically,
and took as one of his main themes the ever-shifting nature
of the self-image. In the early seventies -he made a series of
,short videotapes, such as Three Transitions (fig. 24.21),
that pursue related ideas of transformation, usually focusing on himself as performer. Among other strange metamorphoses acted out on the tape, Campus applj_es mal,Cup
to his face, and the cosmetics appear to dissolve his features
away. In another sequence he sets fire to a mirror reflecting
his face; the mirror burns up, leaving only a dark badeground. In such vignettes, the human face, the basis of our
sense of ~dentity, becomes little more than a changing m~sk
that we can never see behind.

Radical Alternatives: Feminist Art

Performance, like Conceptual art, challenged the existing
means of evaluating quality that had guided the rise of
modernism. Throughout the sixties) artistic and critical
voices had been calling for new means of-art-malting to
present contemporary content. First Minimalism, with its
disavowal of any relationship to the context of traditional
painting or sculpture, then other, less object-centered art
forms gave artists the means to distinguish themselves from
the oppressive nature of the canon. It was Performance art
in the hands of ~erninist artists, however, that most clearly
defined the political art of the seventies.
CHAPTER 24 ' THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

599

--,

Schapiro and Chicago's teaching redefined the creat

< IVe
process. Making art was not to be conceived as a private
introspective, mythic adventure. Instead, through publi~
and private discourse, consciousness-raising sessions, personal confessions, and technical training, -the program
strove "to help women restructure their personalities to be
more consistent with their desires to be artists and to help
them build their artmaking out of their experiences as
women." The major artistic statement of the program
Womanhouse, exposed the barriers to those desires. I~
describing their world, the artists of the Feminist Arts
Program began restructuring the art historical landscape.
Womanhouse was one of the largest installations of the
seventies. Guests were invited into the traditional spaces of
domestic femininity to discover that political analysis had
replaced homemalcing. A bride descended a staircase, her
train getting dirty as she moved straight to the kitchen,
itself decorated with brightly colored breasts that slid down
into the frying pan to form two fried eggs. A linen closet

24.22 Yoko Ono perf~~ming Cut Piece at Carnegie Recital

Hall, NYC, March 21, 1965.

Fluxus
The intuition that the personal was artistic, just a short step
from declaring it political, was at the heart of the Fluxus
group, an international collective of sculptors, painters,
poets, and performance artists. In the words of the group's
de facto leader, George Maciunus, Fluxus asked, "Why
does everything I see that's beautiful like cups and ldsses
and sloshing feet have to be made into just a part of something fancier and bigger? Why can't I just use it for its
own sake(" Fluxus resisted transformations of life into art,
believing that the two were already inseparable. Japaneseborn American member Yoko Ono (b. 1933) created performances Breathe Piece and Laugh Piece (both 1966) by
giving one-word instructions to her audience. Her 1964
Cut Piece (fig. 24.22), in which the artist sat on stage
beside a large Pair of scissors and wordlessly waited as
the audience cut her clothes off, marks an unsettling and
effective transition from the joyful whimsy of much Fluxus
work to the politically astute presentations of everyday life
created by feminists in the seventies.

The Feminist Arts Program

Feminist art of the seventies began at the Feminist Arts
Program at the University of California, Valencia. Directed
by Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923) and Judy Chicago
(b. Judy Cohen, 1939), the. program sought to address
inequities in the arts from an institutional position.

'.1

li
600

CHAPTER 24 , THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

24.23 Feminist Art Program, Womanhouse (detail of linen

closet) by Sondra Org, 1971. Mixed media.

another woman in a life defined, as one performdemonstrated, by an endless sheet endlessly ironed
24.23). Perhaps the most disturbing room to audiwas the Menstruation Bathroom. The bathroom
e<pose:a the aspect of women's lives that is probably the
effectively hidden. In a white bathroom immaculately
clean<oct, a wastebasket sat under the sink overflowing with
the evidence of an impossibly heavy period. The excess
that small sculpture served as a metaphor for the exploof the house itsel Performances, classes,
conS<:ioustle,;s-tcau;ing sessions, talks, readings, plays, and a
do<:UnlerttaJy film about the project presented the often
p'"rchol<Jgically crippling pressures of being a middle-class
y.r<Jrnan in America. In doing so, Womanhouse provided
evidence of the artistic potential of populations and
sutJjects that had scarcely featured in art history textbooks
Womanhouse encouraged a generation of women artists
to explore content and media that had been marginalized

in the artworld but that are central to many women's experiences. The most visible work to come out of this tradition

was Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, 1979 (fig. 24.24). This

elaborate celebration of women's history was executed,
with intentional exaggeration, in such stereotypically feminine and decorative artistic mediums as neCdlework and
china painting. The entire ensemble is organized as a triangle, a primordial symbol ofwomauloood as well as equality. Within its enclosed .floor area are inscribed the names of
999 women in history and legend, from the ancient world
up- to such modern figures as Isadora Duncan, Georgia
O'Keeffe, and Frida Kahlo. Each side of the triangular table
has thirteen place settings; in part this makes a Wry com-
ment on the Last Supper-an exclusively male dinner party
of thirteen-and in part it acknowledges the number of
witches in a cov~n. The thirty-nine settings pay tribute to
thirty-nine notable women, and each nime is placed on a
runner embroidered in a style appropriate to its figure's
historical era. In The Dinner Partjs most provocative gesture, the plates on the table display painted and sculpted
motifs based on female genitalia. The dynamic designs of
the plates tr"ansform the vagina into an energetic com1terpart to the ubiquitous phallic symbol. Such a reversal

I I

;.;t.

24.24 judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79. White tile floor inscribed in gold with 999 women's names; triangular
table with painted porcelain, sculpted porcelain plates, and needlework, each side 48' ( 14.6 m).

CHAPTER 24

THE PLURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

601

attracted criticism, first for essentializing and defining each

woman by her anatomy, and second for visualizing female
power as phallic energy in drag. The essentializing and
binary nature of the work has made it as controversial as
its politics and craft have made it central to the history of
gender and the arts.

Performance Artists
N, Judy Chicago was making work that took the female

body as its source of aesthetic unity and political identity,

artists such as Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) and
Harmah Wilke (1940-93) presented their bodies as their
art. In the sixties, Schneemann's Meat Joy, a ritualistic,
erotic romp between four men, four women, a serving
maid, raw fish, chickens, paint, plastic, and sausages,
drew on contemporary dance and Happenings to arise
like the repressed unconscious of American Pop and
European abstraction. First performed in Paris in 1964,
Schneemann's narrative and physical clutter challenged
the directorial control exerted by Yves Klein in his
Anthropometries (see chapter 22) and the classicism of her
American peers. Meat Joy was about liberation, sensuality,
and spirit rather than aesthetics.
..
By the seventies, Schneemann's performances were
focusing on the relationship between culture, meaning, and

"'

the female body. Interior Scroll (fig. 24.25) is one of

t 11C
most visceral performances of the decade. The per-"101111_
ance included readings, the painting of a large figure and
concluded with Schneemann slowly unrolling a scroll the
end of which she had been carrying in her vao-ina
A- I
b"
n..s S lC
removes the text she reads it and tells the audience about a
confrontation with a male filmmaker. The man told her
that good art must avoid the graphic and personally revealing subject matter that interested her: "You are unable to
appreciate the systen1 of the grid," he exclaims. It is this
ability to confound the aesthetic rules that guide the reception of contemporary art that continues to make work such
as Schneemann's so challenging. With a sensitivity that
avoids the binary reversals that generated Dinner Pmt;
Schneemann gave serious thought to finding meaning in
the experience of being a woman that was independent
from male symbols. She explained, "I thought of ct1c
vagina in many ways-physically, conceptnally: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the source of sacred
knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation." From
within her body, Scbneemann described her life and challenged the codes of the artworld.
Lilce Schneemann's, Hannah Wilke's performances
reiterate her position as someone whose life is defined by
playing the role of female artist. She takes the portrait as
1

11

--,
"";;'!,F_.,~;

7F.11 J<;U l ..,; BlCE. 7<l

MT .. r.:-E.

.\!ill !<ElSII<O'S

"'-' :<,

)!O.I;JI~G "'""" !"~ I.UHO ~;

""""l<'

r:=

U?Pl

l= ~...,,., "'""' = ""'"--:~

APlm r;.m< o""W>"l' 1'"'-"N-' -

--El-r
"'"""'""'J.I"'
!lr.."'<>!.w;;;~
oo~ C>~~ m: ~O-\t
rrs :o:wnov:c ""'"

In:

;.m;

~m ~-,;

lOU A""

T~M~ nf,C1..EA~ ~i:<Df,Cl>:5'''"'~'

I ""--

AR:"; I!fr1.1"l>O U'<O~ VI""";>:,.,

or rou

n'

~~ '10 !.<:OK

;.oe

;;;; ~~.~~~)'"""
~"~""

;;,<::D

c:.;l><r::>

'"" OO'.l':O

1.11:: c;o:~.u:< yau.:;

0-'J<"-':lO~G~

Ul7~R

~~U~

"""""-nm;;

.,..,.""'"' ;;""''-'

'

~C<:G!iiT

U"''

P.i~01.1D "'""""~ rw:; "" ""-''~

'"~ Pif<O

""''"lBII.-I:?i

ro. '"" "'"" cnuu

I~ P=""-'' ~<>'1
~-"<IH!.!.:<!O

-- If

I:ln"".O:::>:c;;

"""
p""''"'-' """'
'"" n"''"" ce>M-"
on~

~.1 ~r.n

;,"""'"~ I!! ;r..: "'""" ro.< -'

<n>:cero.oo:'Ar.o""'""
"'""''"~"!'"~ o;- '"':L:n:os
T"~ DL\"l~"(>C

t!;!l~"""'

rn.".s

nnn:ta ~~ EAI..r sou~ <>Y

PUL.'iDIG tms 1C D.'""-~ 0)' Ut

,-, Cl..'l'<>'l we~ "''

.-nr.
TH~

"'''

1u
-~~n
.I-'<
wna
<>:cno;;r. ~~"''"'"" ""'""
A'1'Iffi! 5t.7.il>J<~In -- lll''""'"-

~....,,

10 !1:

PD<rn;o >..GH!:Iqu""

(I

oo::~

C!'

~;11

T>!::S T;rr.

>.:l'llC~

'O:o ::rol,i uu; TO

'"'"'""'Lns)
p;.y ;.n;,;<nm ro CQlUC.U.

wo '""cnc>L Fi!><

'-'liQ"~~~

;.~ ~

~~!5'~~7D" ;.::~ ~~
SI.ID YOU 0:.:0 ])()

o:n.T

DO

t""";,-:;s

'I;.l;i;GN~CC>:.<

fOLIL\; lYn s.a!CT>"!

!>!PLJc;.Uo:!S =>=cr 1.t.1-r
L.l';,li!.!Z1i A O!::T'-.'1 GY

""'""'''"'ws ;;""
.-.::o~LL<l

vneL~ H~U/.L

I OUD ~~ FIIJl 15 C<:OiC.';!O";II

",

no on."l

~o~;~

'/R117 nLL ""

n;ao..,!o:;

~>10

<0""

~H

=~""'m
:i:U" Tlt..:O: IS

~"-''" <5 '""'"-"

IO Pli' ll< <15'>

~-~ ~l

l"

!>IO...ION

,..1
.1

'

'I
24.25

602

Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975. Pholographs of performance and scroll

CHAPTER 24

THE PLURALISTIC SEVENTIES

text,

48"

72" [1.22

1.83m).

I!

I
'

1.~ I~ 1~~I~! ~I 144] I'.II;~ I I~ I~ 1~1 ~I [ill~& I

24.26 Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Storilicotion Object Series, 1974-82. Mixed media, 40.5" X 58" (1.03 X 1.47m) framed.

the central document of her work, staging events for the

camera as well as the audie~ce. As she has said, even asleep
she is posing. U n!ike Sclmeemann, Wilke works from within
the expectations of society, casting herself as the beautiful
woman posed to display her body and play the role ofseductress. As she presents herself, she crafts the images so as to
indicate the physical pleasure and the personal cost of such
objectification. Concerned with "how to malceyourselfinto
a work of art instead of other people making you into something you might not approve of," Wilke encourages viewers
to enjoy the sensuality of the body-hers and theirs-but
also to recognize that desire is not without cost.
A 1977 work Intercourse with ... express~ the particular nature of Wilke's exposed body. The piece consisted of
the artist striking poses as an answering machine played
messages from her friends and fumily. The words shaped
her body and defined her actions. She then undressed and
covering her body were the names of the speakers. The
names were slowly removed leaving her body without the
protection of clothes or community. In SOS Starification
Object Series (fig. 24.26) she marked her body with signs
of distress rather thai1 care. The work consisted of an

extended series of photographs that initially resemble fushion plates. Mfixed to Wilke's body, however, were pieces of
chewed gum folded to represent small vulvas. The gum
sculptures disrupt the seductive quality of the pose and the
photograph with external signs of what artists referred to
as "internal wounds." She intended the gum to suggest
society's chewing up and spitting out, not only of women
but also of minority ethnic groups.
The work of the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta
(1948-85) centered on the drama of the body, treating
female physiology as an emblem of nature's cycl'l!'ofbirth,
decay, and rebirth. Her sculptural Process pieces evoke the
aura of ancient fertility rituals. These works were often
developed from the direct imprint of the body, as when
Mendieta outlined her own silhouette on the ground in
gunpowder and then sparked it off, burning her form into
the soil. The resulting image was a way, the artist said, of
"joining myself with nature." That impulse is also evident
in the pictograph-like figure outlines tl>at Mendieta
drew on amate (bark) paper, such as The Vivification of the
Flesh (fig. 24.27). Here she inscribed a symbol of the body
onto bark taken from a tree rooted in the earth. And in a
CHAPTER 24 ' THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

603

-;,<.

'

24.27 Ana Mendieta, The Vivification of the Flesh from series

Amategram, 1981-82. Gouache and acrylic on ornate (bark)

paper, 24% X 17" (62.9 X 43.2 em). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.

work for the Fetish series (fig. 24.28), Mendieta created a

mummyshaped mound of mud resembling a barely buried
cmpse and surrounded it with a shallow ditch, as if carrying out an archaic burial ceremony and returning the
deceased to the earth. At the same time, the irrigation ditch
and the small branches stuck into the figure's chest suggest
that the body has been in a sense "planted" in the ground,
to germinate and be resurrected in the spring.

Language and Identity

One of the lessons Miriam Schapiro took from her experience in the Feminist Arts Program was that, "Merely to
speak out, to describe the daily ways of your life, turns out
to be political." Life was a performance, and its presentation was art and politics. By the late seventies, feminists
were shifting from descriptive projects to those examining
how lifestyles are learned and knowledge is created. One
of the 1nost remarkable documents of the period is
Mary Kelly's (b. 1941) PostPartum Document (fig.
24.29). American born but at that rime based in London,
Kelly charted the early childhood development of her son
in comparison to the psychological changes of herself as a
new mother. Basing her work on the linguistic interpretation of Freud by the French psychoanalyst and writer

.,d

604

CHAPTER 24

THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

24.28 Ana Mendieta, Untitled, from series Fetish, 1977.

Color photograph mounted on paperboard, 20 X 13~"
(50.8 X 33.7 em). Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York.

Jacques Lacan, Kelly emphasized the role of language in

identity formation, and the changes to the mother-child
relationship as her son came to an understanding of his
own selfhood and a command of language.
Post-Partum Document is a series of records: imprints
of diaper stains, handprints, art work, lists, medical and
educational records, diagrams, and confessional notes.
Some of the most striking pages record the boy's writing
and the mother's interpretation on slates recalling both a
schoolhouse chalkboard and the ancient "gyptian Rosetta
Stone, and notes about her highly ambivalent attempts to
provide day care, all displayed. The pages poignantly detail
the incomplete translation of the son's acquisition of language and education into a sensible event for the mother.
This is a moment when the relationship between mother
and child begins to change. Significance for the child starts
to be located out in the world, to be translated by him
through language rather than given to him by the mother.
Lilcewise, the role of the child as the primary bearer of
meaning for the mother begins to fade in a
confusing, often distressing manner. Kelly's striking foray

24.29 Mary Kelly,

Post-Partum Document:
Documentation I Analysed
fecal stains and feeding
charts, 1974. Perspex units,
white card, diaper lining,
plastic sheeting, paper, ink.

Collection Art Gallery of

Ontario.

FESRUARV
06. JO I-IRS.

ze, 19'tli
4f ozs, s'MA, 2-TSPS.cE:r:ieAi.{/3 TS,;tic'1<if ',
VOLt{

10,20 HAS,
12. JO HRS.
14, JO HRS.
11.JOHRS,
20. 00 HRS,
21.00 HRS.
TOT AU

'

2 ozs.
OBANGE
ozs, SJ>:1A,
4 TSPS,CAAF.ro!,

ozs.

Ol=pl.NGE

I}

<!

TSP,i......

;.g~f~O~~ l TSPS.CEREAI.- 1 I:! TSP5~

zf

OZS, RU:JENA
SMA

s ozs.

34 OZ5. LJOUIOf>

.;!0 TSPS. SOUPS

a FEB19'7.t

into motherhood and psychology proposed content and

form that combined Conceptual art, feminist politics, and
psychoanalytic theory to examine aspects offemale experience that Were still taboo in the artworld of the seventies.

Metaphors for Life: Process Art

Like Performance, Process art countered the timelessness
and structural stability of Minimal art with impermanence
and variability. But while Performance artists operated in
real time by malcing their bodies their material and personal action their means, artists interested in Process took
entropy as an all-important criterion in their choice of
materials and allowed the transformative effects of time to
become their principal means. The Process artist's action
concludes once he or she has selected the substance of the
piece----ice, grass, soil, felt, snow, sawdust, even cornflalcesand has "sited" it, usually in a random way, by such means

02

as scattering, piling, draping, or smearing. The rest is left

to natural forces-time in tandem vvith gravity, temperature, atmosphere, and so forth-which suggests that now,
in an art where creation and placement are an integral
part of the same process, means have, in the truest sense of
the word, become ends. Thus, as literal as Process art may
be, it also constitutes a powerful metaphor ~ the life
process itse1In addition to Joseph Beuys, another artist fascinated
with felt was the prolific and protean Robert Morris
(b. 1931), who in the late sixties subverted his own
Minimalist sculptures (see fig. 22.51) by reinterpreting
their Minimalist aesthetic in a heavy, charcoal-gray fabric
that immediately collapses into shapelessness, however
precisely or geometrically it may be cut (fig. 24.30). Soon
Morris would be working with such insubstantial and
transient materials as steam. He also countered the
absolute, concrete clarity and order of his Minimal works
CHAPTER 24 THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

605

24.30 Robert Morris, Untitled, 1967-68. Felt, size variable.

Installation view, 1968, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Privat~~
collection, New York.

with "scatter pieces," actually installations of what appear

to be scraps left over from the industrial manufacture of
metal as well as felt squares, cubes, cylinders, spheres, and
grids. The order within tills apparent disorder resulted
fr01n a "continuity of details," like that discernible in
Pollock's allover gestural painting-an art unified by the
generalized, holistic continuum of its endlessly repeated
drips and dribbles.
German-born Eva Hesse (1936-70), who died at the
young age of thirty-four, saw Process, especially as evidenced in such unconventional, malleable materials as
latex, rubber tubing, and fiberglass, as a way of subjecting Minimalist codes----serial order, modular repetition
anonymity-to a broader, less exclusive range of huma~
values than those inherent in cerebral, male-prescribed
grandeur and monumentality. Taking memory, sexuality,
self-awareness, intuition, and humor as her inspiration, she
allowed forms to emerge from the interaction of the
processes inherent in her materials and sucl1 natural forces
as gravity (fig. 24.31). Thus, her pieces stretch fiom ceiling
to floor, are suspended from pole to pole, sag and nod
toward the floor, or hang against the wall. The works seem
like dream objects, materializations of things remembered
from the remote past, some even evoking the cobwebs

.~ '\~~. ~.

'li
~I

/i

.I

. .

'

I!

I!

! '

II,
I

._

"

--

1
1i

24,31 Photograph of Evo Hesse's Bowery studio in New York, 1966. Lett to right: Untitled, 1965; Ennead, 1966;
/ngeminate, 1965; Several, 1965; Verffginous Detour, 1966; Total Zero, 1966; Untitled, 1966; Long life, 1965;
Untitled, 1966; Untitled, 1965; Untitled or Not Yet, 1966.

!I

I!
I

606

CHAPTER 24

THE PLURALISTIC SEVENTIES

24.32 Eva Hesse,

Conlingent, 1969.
Cheesecloth, latex, and
fiberglass in eight panels.
Installation, 12'\,;'' X 9'4'%''
X 3'2W' (3.7 X 2.9 X

0.98 m). National Gallery

of Australia, Canberra.

24.33 Lynda Benglis,

Bounce, 1969. Poured
colcir8d latex, size variable.
Priv(]te collection .

CHAPTER 24 ' THE PLURALISTIC SEVENTIES

607

---,
that cling to old possessions long shut away in attics and
basements. The. pendulous, organic shapes of her sculptures provoke associations Mth gestation, growth, and
sexuality, the lcind of emotionally loaded themes that
orthodox Minimalists cast aside.
The late piece called Contingent(fig. 24.32), consisting
of eight free-floating sections of cheesecloth that have been
covered with latex and fiberglass, takes the characteristic
Minimalist concern with repeatable, serial objects and
"humanizes" it. The luminous, translucent sheets function
both as paintings and sculpture. Each of the hangings is
allowed to become a distinct entity Mth its own texture
and color, and eacl1 is suspended at a slightly different
height; by these means, each one is given its own way of
addressing the viewer who stands before it.
In the late sixties, Lynda Benglis (b. 1941) became fas
cinated by the interrelationships of painting and sculpture
and used Process as a route not only to new form but also
to new content. She began to explore these issues by pouring liquid substances onto the floor, just as a sculptor
might pour molten bronze (fig. 24.33). But instead of
shaping it Mth a mold, she allowed the material to seek its
own form. The artist sinlply mixed and puddled into th~

flow a startling array of fluorescent oranges, chartreLtses

Day-Glo pinks, greens, and blues.
'
A process of a different, more organic ldnd, gave rise to
the relief Excess (fig. 24.34). Here the use ofbeeswa;x suggests an association between the malcing of the work and
bees' natural process of building up a honeycomb. The
relief, too, was built up over time, growing bit by bit as the
artist applied the pigmented wax medium. The resultin
form also displays unmistalcable links with organic life: i~
encrustations recall the furrowed underside of some
immense caterpillar. In subsequent works, the artist has
pursued pictorial effects in wall reliefs with strong plastic,
sculptural qualities. Often they have fun or bow-knotted
shapes and are finished Mth some sumptuously decorative
materials, such as gold leaf or a patina of rich verdigris.
Although he i:rune to prominence among ambitious
Minimalist sculptors, many of whom have created powerful
works in steel and stone, Richard Tuttle (b. 1941) dared
to give viewers what Bruce Nauman, an admirer of his
work, has called "a less important thing to look at."
Working throughout his career with delicate and ephemeral
materials, such as paper, string, and thin pieces of wire,
Tuttle has been singled out for his work's unassertiveness,

24.34 Lynda Benglis, Excess, 1971 . Purified beeswax,

36 X 5 X 4' (91.4 X 12.7 X 10.2 em). Walker Art Center,

24.35 Richard TuHie, Monkeys Recovery for a Darkened Room

(Bluebird), 1983. Wood, wire, acrylic, paint, mat board,
string, and cloth, 36 X 22 X 6J.i'' (91.4 X 55.9 X 16.5 em).

Minneapolis.

Private collection.

dammar resin, pigments on Masonite and pinewood,

608

CHAPTER

24 , THE

PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

24.36 Sam
Gilliam, Carousel
Farm II, 1969.
Acrylic on canvas,

10' X 6'3" (3 X
1.9 mi. Installation
view, Corcoran
Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
Collection the
Artist.

as when, for example, dyed pieces of cloth in geometric

shapes are simply attached to the wall of a gallery.
When introduced into a specific venue, such works do
not aggressively transfonn their surroundings, as do the
more imposing sculptural works of some of Tuttle's peers.
Instead, with their subtle nuances of texture and color, his
modest constructions awaken a feeling for the sheer vulnerability of the domestic items around us, a sense of needing protection that can extend to ourselves as well._ One
critic has called Tuttle's work a "meditation on the extreme
fragility of existence." Tutde gains our sy1npathy for these
frail, decorative pieces (fig. 24.35) by endowing them with
so mud1 visual life: a fiuely gauged interplay of primary
colors, the skillful intermixing of geometric with organic
forms, and an elegantly balanced yet lively composition.
The Washington-based artist Sam Gilliam (b. 1933)
fi.tsed painting and sculpture by flinging highly liquefied
color onto stretched canvas, somewhat in the fashion
of Jad<:son Pollock, though less in the spirit of controlled
accident. He then suspended the support, minus its
stretchers, fiom the ceiling (fig. 24.36 ). Thus draped and
swagged, the material ceased to do what would traditionally be expected of painted canvas and became a fiee-form,
plastic evocation.
Associated for a time -with the Fluxus group, Germanborn Dieter Roth (b. 1930) lived in Switzerland, Iceland,
Spain, and England. Roth became known for using food

and other organic materials in unusual ways. In 1970 he

had an exhibition of forty pieces of luggage, each fiJled
with a different variety of cheese; during the show, the
.cheeses rotted and the suitcases leaked, att1:-acting hordes
of flies. As Roth has said of another work of his made
with foodstuffs, "Sour mille is like landscape, ever changing. Works of art should be like that-they should change
like man himself, grow old and die."
While living in London, Roth became a friend of the
British Pop artist Richard Hamilton (see fig. 21.1). This
association informs Six Piccadillies (figs. 24.37 a and b), a
portfolio of six prints based on a postcard view of Piccadilly
Circus. In tl:is instance, Roth explored a different kind of
process-the technical act of mal<ing a reproductive print,
which involves separating the colors of the original image
into the four basic colors used for commercial prU!ling, creating plates to hold the inks, and reworking the image
through a series of press proofs._ By these 1neans, Roth produced a series of variations on the postcard image, letting
it "decompose" itself through the printed medium.
Following a long tradition in Western civilization that
can be traced from Plato through Cezanne to the
Minimalists, Canadian-born Jackie Winsor (b. 1941)
visualizes perfect:ion in what the sixties had learned to call
Primary forms-simple. squares, cubes, cylinders, spheres,
and grids. Although her works do not, once finished,
evince the process of their own malcing, that process is
CHAPTER 24 ' THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

609

24.37a, 24.37b Dieter Roth, Two screen prints from Six Piccadilties, 1969-70. Portfolio of six screen prints on board,

each 19% X 27;:'' (50.2 X 69.9 em).

quite significant. It involves prolonged, ritualistically
repetitive activity and materials chosen for their power to
endow ideal geometry with a mysteriously contradictory
sense of latent, primitive energy. In a 1971-72 work
entitled Bound Grid (fig. 24.38) that kind of energy w~
evident in the tension between a boldly simple grid
form, made of crossed logs, and the slow, complex teclinique employed to lasb the beams together. This entailed
unraveling massive old ropes, returning them to their
primary state as twine, and wrapping the crinlded, hairy
strands round and round, for several days a week over
months on end.
In 1980-82, Winsor set about activating energy in
another, more startlingly dramatic maimer. First she built a
multilayered interior of plaster, gold leaf, and fluorescent
pigment contained within a cube made of hand-buffed,

black concrete reinforced with welded steel. After bringing

the piece to the requisite degree of perfection, Winsor
added a further element-dynamite-and exploded it (fig.
24.39a). Later she gatl1ered up the fragments, reinforced
the interior, and restructured the outer layer (fig. 24.39b ).
In its final state, Exploded Piece seems quiescent and contained, even though it bears the scars of the various
stages-both the carefully measured a11d the immeasurably
volatile-through which it passed in the course of its creation, destruction, and reconstruction. What physically
happened to the form and its material constitutes the
content of Exploded Piece.
Associated with Arte povera in Italy-a group that
attempted to illustrate the intersection of everyday life
with the practice of art-the Italian sculptor and painter
Mario Merz (b. 1925) has always been fascinated by the

24.38 Jackie Winsor,

Bound Grid, 1971-72.

Wood and hemp,
7' X 7' X 8" (2. 1 X 2.1
X 0.2 m). Fonds Notional
d'Art Contemporain, Paris.

610

CHAPTER

24 '

THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

way that the world of nature and the world of modern civilization interact. Exploring this theme, he began maldng
his "igloos" in 1968. Lil<:e much of his other work, the
igloos fhse natural materials, such as mud and twigs, with
industrial products, such as metal tubing and glass, to
create rudimentary structures that look as if they were
the shelters of some unlmown nomadic people. The igloos'
effect when shown in a 1nuseum is that their inhabitants
have tempormily camped indoors. In the case of Giap
Igloo (fig. 24.40), Merz added modern neon signs to the
outside, which spell out (in Italian) a saying by the North

24.40 Mario Merz, Giap Igloo--If the Enemy Masses His

Forces, He Loses Ground; If He Scatters, He Loses Strength,

1968. Metal tubes, wire mesh, wax, plaster, and neon tubes,
height 3'11 X:" (1.2 m), diameter 6'6%" (2m). Musee National.
d'Art Moderne, Centre d'Art et de Culture Georges Pomprdou,

'Paris.

24.39a (above, top), 24.39b (above) Jackie Winsor,

Exploded Piece, 1980-82. Wood, reinforced concrete, plaster,
gold leaf, pigment, steel, and explosive resrdue, 34l> X 34l>
X 34W (87.6 X 87.6 X 87.6 em(. Private collection.

24.41 Jannis Kounellis, Cotonif'!ra, 1967. Steel and cotton.

CHAPTER 24 ' THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

611

Vietnamese general named in the work's title: "If the

enemy masses his forces, he lC?ses ground; if he scatters, he
loses strength." With its military proverb and conspicuous
association with Vietnam, this particular igloo, made in
1968 at the height of the war, suggests an improvised
guerrilla fortification of sandbags.
In one of his best-known works, Jannis Ko1mellis
(b. 1936)-a Greek artist active in Italy and deeply influenced by the Process-related works of the Italians Alberto
Burri and Lucio Fontana (see figs 20.38, 20.40)-stabled
horses in a Roman art gallery as a way of dramatizing the
contrast, and necessary relationship, between the organic
world of nature and the human-created, artificial world of
art. The same ideas inform Cotoniera (fig. 24.41), a piece
in which the soft, white, perishable fluffiness of cotton was
combined with the dark, indestructible rigidity of steel to
create a dialectic of nature and industry. In a later, untitled
work of 1986, the world of human creation is all that is
made manifest, represented by no more than forty-two toy
trains endlessly orbiting the pillars of a vacant building.

Big Outdoors: Earthworks

and Land Art
At the same time that certain Process artists were integrating aspects of nature into their work, other Conceptualists
acted .on the idea of taking art out of both gallery and
society and fixing it within far-off, uninhabited nature as
huge, immobile, often permanent Land- or Earthworks.
Insofar as pieces of this environmental character and scale
were often not available to the general public, it was largely
through documentation that they became known-which
made such informational artifacts as photographs, maps,
and drawings all th~ more important. Ironically, the doc:uments often assumed a somewhat surprising fine-art pictorial- quility,_ .especially when presented in a conventional
gallery setting. Then again, while Land artists may have
escaped the ubiquitous marketing system of traditional art
objects, they became heavily dependent on engineers, construction crews, earth-moving equipment, and even aerialsurvey planes, the field equivalent of the factory-bmmd
industrial procedures used by Minimalists, with all the high
finance that that entailed.
The possibility of talcing art into the wilderness nevertheless held great meaning at the time. Just as performance
appeared to reintroduce an clement of sacred ritual and
mystery into a highly secularized modern society, Earth
art seemed to formalize the revived interest in salvaging
not only the environment but also what remaine~ of
such archaeological wonders as Stonehenge, Anglcor Wat,
and pre-Colnmbian burial mounds. The back-to-the-soil
impulse may have first appeared in the post-studio works of
Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra, who began
to democratize sCulpture by adopting the most commonplace mate~ials-firebricks, logs, metal squares, styrofoam,
rusted nails-and by merely scattering them over the floor

!i

,,

612

CHAPTER 24 THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

or assembling them on it. In Earth and Site works, the variables of selection and process inherent in the site took
precedence over materials; they also shifted the perspective
from that imposed by standing, vertical postures, with
their anthropomorphic echoes of the human figure, to the
bird's-eye overview allowed by arrangements that stayed
flat to the ground. In its dialogue with natural forms and
phenomena, Land art chimed with the burgeoning ecology
movement of the late twentieth century, which called
fur more sustained and serious attention to be directed
toward the dislocating effects of human intervention 011
the natural environment.

Monumental Works
One of the first to make the momentous move from gallery
to wilderness was the California-born artist Michael Heizer
(b. 1944), who, with the backing of art dealer Virginia
Dwan and the aid of bulldozers, excavated a Nevada site
to create the Earthwork Double Negative (fig. 24.42).
Heizer is a Westerner and is sensitive to the immensity of
the American landscape. In the Nevada desert he found
what he called "that kind of unraped, peaceful religious
space artists have always tried to put in their work." For
Double Negative) Heizer and his construction team sliced
into the surface of Mormon Mesa and made two cuts to a
depth of fifty feet (15.25 m), the cuts facing one another

24.42 Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969-70.

240,000-ton displacement in rhyolite and sandstone, 1,500 X
50 X 30' [457.2 X 15.2 X 9.1 m). Mormon Mesa, Overton,
Nevada. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

24.43 Dennis Oppenheim, Canceled Crop, 1969. Groin

field, 709 X 422' (216 X 129 m). Finsterwolde, the
Netherlands.

across a deep indentation to create a site fifteen hundred

feet (457 rn) long and about fifty feet (15.2 m) wide. But
at the heart of this work resides a void, with the result that,
while providing an experience of great vastness, Double
Nigative does not so much displace space as enclose it.
Here the viewer is inside and surrounded by the work, instead of outside and in confrontation with it.
For Canceled Crop (fig. 24.43), a work created in 1969
at Finsterwolde, the Netherlands, Dennis Oppenheim (b.
1938) plowed an "X" with 825-foot (251.5 rn) arms into
a 709 by422-foot (216 x 129 rn) wheat field. As if to comment on the binding artist-gallery-art cycle, Oppenheim
said of his Dutch piece: "Planting and cultivating my own
material is like mining one's own pigment .... I can direct
the later stages of development at will. In this case the
material is planted and cultivated for the sole purpose of
withholding it fiom a product-oriented system." In a work
like this, Oppenheim emphasized the overridingly significant elements of tilne and experience in Conceptual art.
When d1e American artist Walter de Maria (b. 1935)
initially felt the telluric pull, he responded by transporting
earth directly into a Munich gallery. Once installed,
Munich Earth Room, 1968, consisted of 1,766 cubic feet

(50 cubic meters) of rich, aromatic topsoil spread some

two feet (0.6 m) deep throughout the gallery space. At the
same time that this moist, brown-black rug kept patrons at
a definite physical remove, it also provided a light-dark,
textural contrast with the gleaming white walls of the
gallery and filled the air with a fiesh, country fragrance,
both purely sensuous or aesthetic experiences. Eventually
De Maria would eJrpand the boundaries of his site to
embrace vast tracts of fallow land and the entire sky above.
In Lightning Field (fig. 24.44) De Matia combined the
pictorialness and ephemeral character of European Land
art with the sublimity of scale and conception typical of
American Earthworks. Here the natural force incited by
the work is lightning, drawn by four hundred stainless-steel
rods standing over twenty feet (6 m) tall and arranged as a
one-mile-by-one-kilometer grid set in a flat, New Mexican
basin ringed by distant motmtains. Chosen not only for
its magnificent, almost limitless vistas and exceptionally
sparse human population, but also for its frequent incidence of atmospheric electricity, the site offered the artist a
prime opportunity to create a work that would involve
both earth and sky, yet intrude upon neither, by articulatinlf. their tracldess expanse with deliberately induced discharges of lightning. Few have ever been eyewitnesses to
Lightning Field in full performance, but the photographic
documentation leaves little doubt about the sublime, albeit
unpredictable, unrepeatable, and fugitive effects that can
be produced by a work designed to celebrate the power
and visual splendor of an awesome natural phenomenon.
In 1968, the same year that De Maria created
his Munich Earth Room, Robert Smithson (1938-73)

24.44 Walter de Maria, Lightning Field, 1970-77. A

permanent Earth sculpture: 400 stainless steel poles, with solid
stainless-steel pointed tips, arranged in a rectangular grid array

( 16 poles wide by 25 poles long) spaced 220' (67.1 m) apart;

pole tips farm an even plane, average pole height 20'7" (6.3
m); work must be seen over a 24-hour period. Near Quemado,
New Mexico.

CHAPTER 24 'THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

613

---,
relocated shards of sandstone fi-om his native New Jersey to
a New York City gallery and there piled them in a mirrorlined corner. In such gallery installations, including ChalkMirror Displacement of the following year, Smithson
utilized strategically positioned mirrors to endow the
amorphous mass of organic shards with a new form.
Smithson's nonsite works (that is, works made in a formal,
gallery setting rather than out in the landscape) were a synthesis of unformed organic material from the landscape and
such rigid, manufactured forms as mirrors. The juxtaposition of these materials represented the dialectic bernreen
entropy and order. And just as the transferral from nature
to gallery would seem to have arrested the natural process
of continuous erosion and excerpted a tiny portion from an
immense universal whole, the mirrored gallery setting
'
expanded the portion illusionistically, while also affirming
its actual, and therefore infinite, potential for change in
character and context. Fully aware of the multiple and contrary effects of his mirror pieces-of the dialectic it set up
between site and nonsite--Smithson commented on these
works' power as a metaphor for fLux: "One's mind and the
earth are .in a constant state of erosion ... ideas decompose
into stones of unknowing."
-~4
Smithson moved from gallery installations back to site '
works and discovered a major inspiration in Utah's Great ~
Salt Lake, which the artist saw as "an impassive faint violet
sheet held captive in a storiy matrix, upon which the sun
poured down its crushing light." As this lyric phrase would

:i'

suggest, the artist was a gifted and even prolific Writer

whose essays about his Great Salt Lake creation have l11ad~
Spiral Jetty the most famous and romantic of all the
Earthworks (fig. 24.45). He deposited 6,000 tons (6,09 6
tonnes) of earth into the lake, forming an enormous raised
spiral. With its gracefiU curl and extraordinary coloration--------.
pink, blue, and brown-black-the piece rewards the viewer
with endless aesthetic delight, ,but the form, for all its
purity, arose from Smithson's deep pondering of the site
combined "rith his fascination with enb:opy-the gradu~
degradation of matter and energy in the universe-and the
possibilities of reclamation.
At this particular point on the shore of the Great Salt
Lake, Smithson found not only industrial ruin, in the form
ofwreclcage left behind by oil prospectors, but also a landscape wasted and corroded by its own inner dynamism. As
Smithson wrote, the gyre does not expand into a widening
circle but winds inward; it is "matter collapsing into the
lalce mirrored in the shape of a spiral." Prophetic words
for in the ensuing years Spiral Jetty has disappeared----and
reappeared-periodically aruidst the changing water levels
of the Great Salt Lake. The films and photographs that
document the piece now provide the only reliable access
to it. Tragically, Smithson died in a plane crash during an
aerial inspection of a site in Texas.
On a less monumental scale than her husband Robert
Smithson's late projects, Nancy Holt's (b. 1938) Lmd
art involves site-specific architectural sculptures that arc

'li

I'
I

24.45 Robert Smithson, Spiral jetty, 1969-70. Black rock, salt crystal, and earth, diameter 160' (48.8 m], coil length I ,500'
(457.2 m], width 15' (4.6 m). Great Salt Lake, Utah.

614

CHAPTER 24 , THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

'

as a permanent outdoor installation on the campus of

Western Washington University at Bellingham, Washington. It consists of two concentric rings formed of stone
walls two feet (0.6 m) thick and ten feet (3 m) high.
The inner wall defines a tubular space at the center and
the outer one an mmular space in the corridor running
between the two rings; the smaller ring measures twenty
feet (6 m) in diameter and the larger one forty feet (12m).
Piercing the walls are eight-foot (2.4 m) arches and twelve
circular holes three feet, four inches (l m) iu diameter.
Together these apertures give the spectator both physical
and visual access into and even through a structure whose
circular presence and carefully calculated perspectives
evoke Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument in Wiltshire,
England, apparently constructed, at least in part, as a
device for marking the solar year.
24.46 Nancy Holt, Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings, 1977-78.
Brown Mountain stone, diameter of outer ring 40' (12.2 m),
diameter of inner ring 20' (6. 1 m). height of ring walls 10'
(3 m). Western Washington University, Bellingham.

absolutely integral with their surroundings. Holt's involvement with photography and camera optics led her to malce
monumental forms that are literally seeing devices, fixed
points for tracking the positions of the emth, the sun,
and the stars. One of her most important works is Stone
Enclosure: Rock Rings (fig. 24.46), designed for and built

Landscape as Experience
In England, with its long history of the interrelationship of
art and the natural environment in painting, poetry, and
landscape gardening, a number of artists contemporary
with Heizer and Smithson also looked to landscape as a
.means of creating art outside the market system. But these
attists were confi:onted Mth very different issues~Iimited
funds and a more intimate landscape that was densely
populated, heavily industrialized, rigorously organized, and
carefully protected. In response to these challenges, they
chose to treat nature with a featherlight touch and, in

,.

24.47 Richard long, A Line in Scotland, 1981. Framed work consisting of photography and text, 34~ X 49" (87.6 X 124.5 em).
Private collection, London.

CHAPTER 24 , THE PLURALISTIC SEVENTIES

615

1
,/

:11

, iI

I'

24.48 Richard long

0 cean Stone c I
rrc e
I 990. Stones d
13' (3 .96 mi.' rorneler

II
'i

II'

contrast to the more interventionist Americans, to work on

a decidedly antiheroic scale.
Richard Long (b. 1945) "intervenes" in the countryside mainly by walking through it, and indeed he has made
walking his own highly economical means of transforming
land into art. Along the way he expresses his ideas about
time, movement, and place by making marks on the earth,
by plucking blossoms from a field of daisies, or by rearranging stones, sticks, seaweed, or other natural phenomena (fig. 24.47). With these he effects sin1ple, basic shapes:
straight lines, circles, spirals, zigzags, crosses, and squares
that he documents with photographs. A token of human
intelligence is thus left on the site-lilce the stone markers
put in place by prehistoric peoples-and is then abandoned
to the weather. "A walk is just one more layer," Long
asserts, "a mark-laid upon the thousands of other layers of
human and geographic history on the surface of the land."
Then, in a reversal of this practice, these landmarks can also
be gathered up and displayed in a museum setting (fig.
24.48), as were Smithson's gallery installations. When the
stones are arranged indoors, a token of the natural world is
introduced into the human-made environment of buildings
and communities. The walk through na~re, which Long
has now extended to a global enterprise, is completed as
the walker returns home fi_om the gallery.
In contrast to Nancy .Holt, who constructs permanent
sites for viewing transient phenomena, Mary Miss (b.
1944) builds deliberately fragile architectural sculptures as
a means of stressing the ephemerality of experience.
Common to both artists, however, is a preoccupation with
time as it affects the perception of space, as well as a deter616

CHAPTER 24' THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

mination to create a viable public art by making the vicw~:r

more than a neutral receptor. In the publicly funded Fidd
Rotation (fig. 24.49), sited at Governors State Univer!lity
in Park Forest South, Illinois, Miss took her primary inspiration from the terrain, an immense, flat field with a gently
curved mound at the center. To explore this space and
unleash its potential for yielding both a personal and shared
expression of cultural experience, Miss used lines of pmts
to pattern the field as a kind of giant pinwheel. Its spokes
or arms radiate outward from, while also converging,
toward, a "garden" sunk within the central hub or mound.
In it, there is a pit shaped like a fortress and built up inside

24.49 Mary Miss, Field Rotation, 1981. Steel, woad, and

gravel, central structure 56' square (17. I m'l. depth 7' (2.1 mi.
sited on 4\4 acres ( 1.8 hectares). Governors State University,

Park Forest South, Illinois.

as a reticulated, cross-timbered lookout rising above a

"secret" well filled with water. At the same time that
the posts and their fanlilce movement articulate the vast
openness of the American landscape, the sunken garden
which these paths lead both toward and away from provides
sanctuary and retreat fr01n the surrounding barrenness.
Alice Aycock (b. 1946) too is less interested in building
durable 1nonuments than in siting and structuring her
sculptures to induce us to move and thus intensifY our
experience of the environment, the work, and ourselves.
But in a manner all her own, Aycock is concerned -with the
psychological implications of the architectural sites she creates for the salce of reembracing nature. On a site she chose
jn Far Hills, New Jersey, Aycock built A Simple Network of
Unde>;ground Wells and Tunnels(fig. 24.50), a structure, as
the title would suggest, hardly visible at eye level, but filled
with implications for the spectator courageous enough to
enter it. To realize the work, Aycock began by marking
off a twenty-eight-by-fifty-foot (8.5 x 15.2 m) site witl1
sn-aight rows of ce1nent blocks. Within this precinct she
then excavated a twenty-by-forty-foot (6.1 x 12.2 m) area
and installed two sets of three seven-foot-deep (2.1 m)
wells connected by tunnels. After capping three of the
shafts, the artist lowered ladders into two of the uncapped
ones, thereby inviting the observer to descend and explore
an underground labyrinth of dark, dank passages. Aycock
uses Minimalism's cool, sn-ucturalist vocabulary but in
distinctively novel, even surreal ways, the better to evoke
such sn-uctural precedents as caves, catacon1bs, dungeons,

24.50 Alice Aycock, A Simple Network of Underground Wells

and Tunnels, 1975. Concrete-block wells and tunnels
underground, demarcated by a wall, 28 X 50' (8.5 X 15.2 mi,
area 20 X 40' (6. I X 12.2 m). Marriewold West, Far Hills,
New Jersey.

or beehive tombs and to malce them the expressive agents.

of her own work.
In celebrating the natural environment, Alan Sonfist
(b. 1946) has sought to recreate a sense of an earlier,
unspoiled time. Sonfist was born in the South Brmu, in
N.ew York City, but happened to live near one of the area's
ew remaining wooded stretches. The compelling e."'<perience of seeing the vestiges of nature amid the gdtty streets
is reflected in his 1978 outdoor mural, An American
Forest, at Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. The painting's

"'

24.51 Alan Sonfist, Circles of Time, 1986-89. Bronze, rock, plants, and trees on three acres (1.2 hectares).
Created in Florence, Italy.

CHAPTER 24 'THE PlURAliSTIC SEVENTIES

617

marked contrast with the dete1iorating buildings around it

with the materials and shifting conditions they offered
created a sharp sense of how different the American Eden
(fig. 24.52). This took him from sites such as the beaver
had been before the land was settled and the cities built. In
bogs near Marlboro, Vermont, to the saltwater marshes of
another, more Conceptual work, Son fist put up memorial
Long Island, New York Instead of imposing a preset idea
on these sites in the 1nanner of the Earth artists, however
cardboard plaques at sites around the city where particular
indigenous flora and fauna had long ago been displaced
he allowed nature and its laws to act on him and his work~
by sidewalks and office buildings. Some of his other work
In the mid-seventies, Singer returned to the studio and
has a more international scope but still generally refers
began maldng indoor pieces, confident that he could now
maintain an aesthetic distance from such dominant trends
to an earlier, unspoiled state of nature. Circles of Time
(fig. 24.51), created for the city of Florence, is a circular
as Minimalism and Conceptualism. By the eighties, the
garden that allows the viewer to trace what Sonfist calls
resulting art had grown in complexity and poetic content
yet it preserved the essential qualities that Singer achieved
"the history of vegetation~~ in that part of Italy. Like the
rings of a tree trunk, each successive concentric circle of
almost from the start. Formally, they contained rough
stones and beams of diverse shapes assembled on the
this work, frmn the center to the outer rim, represents a
ground or on doors in self-contained, though visibly acceslater era. In the center is the virgin forest, a time before
sible, structures held in serene balance-a balance so delihuman intervention. Farther out lies a band representing
cate and precarious that it seems redolent of the mystery
the herb gardens of the ancient Etruscans. Next are bronze
emanating
from altars and ritual gates.
casts of endangered or extinct trees, then a ring of laurels,
referring to the influence of Greece on Italy. A band of
The photographer John rfahl (b. 1939) has also been
much involved with interventions at specific sites. Among
stones then demonstrates a historical Tuscan style of street
his works along these lines is an extended series from 1974
pavement, and the present-day agriculture of modern
Tuscany is memorialized at the edges.
to 1978 called Altered Landscapes. Ffahl photographed nat
Like many sculptors during the early seventies, Michacl.h4 ural landscapes that had been subtly changed by the addi.
Singer (b. 1945) first worked in natural environments ' tion of foreign objects, such as pieces of string, foil, or blue

II

'i:.I
'!

,'

:,j

24.52 Michael Singer, First Gate Ritual series, 1979.

Bamboo and phrogmites. DeWeese Park, Dayton, Ohio.

,,

618

CHAPTER 24 'THE PLURALISTIC SEVENTIES

24.53 john Pfahl, Fat Man Atomic Bomb/Great Gallery

Pictographs from series Missile/Glyphs, 1984-85. Twa
Cibachrame prints mounted on aluminum, 44 X 32" (111.8
X 81.3 cml.
' ...

:r

tape. In adding such modest items, he took care to ensure

that the scene was never physically compromised. Concern
for the natural environment prompted him to call attention
to the threats posed to the earth by human actions. In Fat
Man Atomic Bomb/Great Gallery Pictographs (fig. 24.53)
from the series Missile/Glyphs, Pfahl documented a marking
of the land aB harmless as his own-the petroglyphs, or pictorial inscriptions, carved or scored on rock by indigenous
peoples. But he contrasts this with the horrific nuclear
threat posed by modern missiles: a bulbous shape recalling
"Fat Man," the military's familiar wartime name for the
Nagasaki atomic bomb, has been added to the depiction of
the site and looms ominously over a group of glyph figures.
The small area of rock actually shown in the photograph
seems to become a populated landscape, 'With a threatening
mushroomlike form above. It is a restrained image that
nonetheless carries tragic overtones.
James Turrell (b. 1943) was associated at the beginning of his career with the Californian Robert Irwin (see
fig. 22.37), founder ofwhatis usually called light and space
art. But Turrell's installations, to a greater degree than
Irwin's, explore the mysteries of how we actually perceive
light, the basis of all visual experience. Specifically, Turrell
manipulates our perception of light in order to reveal that

24.54 james Turrell, Afrum-Proto, 1967. Quartz-halogen

proiection.

our understanding of the space before us, and the way we

see things within it, is fundamentally a kind of optical illusion. For example, in tbe early light sculpture Afrum-Proto
(1_\g. 24.54 ), Turrell projected an intense beam of halogen
light to form what appeared to be a three~dimensional,

24.55 james Turrell, Aerial view of Roden Crater Proiect, Sedona, Arizona, 1982. Cinder cone volcano, approx. height 540'
[164.6 mi. diameter 800' (243.8 m).

CHAPTER 24 : THE PlURALISTIC SEVENTIES

619