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Do IT this week: Layering
Akron museum showcases 10 experimental works from 1960s and 1970s with contemporary impact
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art & architecture critic
Published on Sunday, Jul 05, 2009
Just as July Fourth fireworks light up our skies, certain events and encounters can light up our notions of what makes a great work of art.
Many of us have always thought that the visual arts reveal a master's complete understanding of a combination of things that, taken together, make up a great drawing, painting or a sculpture, a print or a photograph, a pot or a textile.
In art school we learn how to put the various elements together — line, volume, space, color, light, dark, scale, balance, rhythm, texture — to create a compelling presence or composition.
To these classic elements have been added in recent years movement, pace, duration, approach and attitude. And bling. Let's not forget bling.
For no longer is art drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, photography or fiber, but increasingly a combination of all these things and then some.
We see installations — the current ''in'' art form — that are about all of the above, plus sound, scent, taste, texture, a variety of craft techniques, precious objects, the narrative placement of objects and their polemical associations.
When did work like this begin to be regarded as art?
Through Oct. 4, the Akron Art Museum presents Rethinking Art: Objects and Ideas from the 1960s and '70s, an exhibit that touches briefly upon the time when American artists began to challenge the limits of art.
In this exhibit the museum exhibits 10 experimental artworks from its own collection and that of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.
The show includes works by artists such as Dan Flavin, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Joseph Kosuth and Robert Smithson.
The ideas of these artists are said to have sparked the evolution of contemporary art, catalyzed by the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States.
In response to this upheaval, many American artists began to examine the broader role of art in society, reconsidering not only art's part, but the actual process of making art. They looked anew at materials, reconsidered techniques and approaches and upended traditional ideas on how art should be presented and experienced.
Flavin created sculpture from factory-made fluorescent light tubes. Kosuth enlarged photocopies of word definitions. Robert Morris attached large swaths of felt to walls with grommets, among other things. Christo made proposals to wrap buildings and other large structures, such as walkways in Kansas City and islands in Miami.
Smithson tilted large mirrors against walls and poured rock salt over their bases. John Chamberlain was known for creating sculpture out of squashed cars, or in this case, a block of foam rubber bent, cut and twisted to mock twisted metal.
These works are meant to make the viewer stop and not just look, but also think. They also led to one of our more beloved art forms, Pop Art.
Where did their ideas come from? We might like to think these are intrinsically American art forms, but they had help. Their origins were in Europe.
In the art history books of my era we were shown Pablo Picasso's Bull's Head (1943) as an example of the first found art object. Picasso saw the bicycle seat and the handlebars and simply realigned them to create the image, then had it cast in bronze.
Yet 30 years earlier Marcel Duchamp had declared his first ready-made, which he called Bicycle Wheel. He took an ordinary bicycle wheel and mounted it vertically on a pedestal.
That was it. The irony of the act and the mocking idiosyncrasy of the form were seen as sufficient. Plus, in this work Duchamp had an agenda: movement.
Bicycle Wheel was declared in 1913, the same year that Duchamp's painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, was kicked out of an exhibit because of just this feature.
Nude Descending a Staircase is now seen as a remedy for Cubism's greatest weakness — the paintings were static and somewhat formulaic. So, rather than show his subject from multiple views at one moment, as Cubist theory dictated, Duchamp portrayed her from one view at multiple moments, as the photographer Eadweard Muybridge had done.
By turning Cubist theory on its ear, Duchamp was able to give his painting life and vigor, something the hidebound second-generation Cubists could not seem to accomplish.
But by adopting the precepts of Cubism — the somber palette, the methodical deconstruction of form — while undermining its principles, Duchamp ridiculed its rules.
Soon after it was finished, Nude was rejected by the Salon des Independents. They objected to the title, the form of which they saw as low humor. Duchamp painted it along the bottom edge of his painting, cartoonlike, bolstering the idea. Also, their art ''didn't move'' with nudes that were ''Descending.''
Members of the society's jury felt that Duchamp was poking fun at Cubism. They were right.
And he didn't stop there. Duchamp's retort to their rejection came in the form of his first ready-made, whose salient feature is the possibility of continuous movement.
Duchamp created 21 ready-mades between 1913 and 1923, and although they are all made of different materials, they are united by one idea — provocation, a deliberate effort to break every rule of the artistic canon to create a new kind of art.
Scholars have made much of the irony with which Duchamp's objects are imbued, whereas Picasso's found objects are merely rearranged, with evidence of the artist's manipulation not only in the bicycle parts but clearly visible in the bronze material.
The difference between the two approaches is the key to the new art Duchamp wished to create — he declared that the artist is more than an eye; the artist is also a mind.
In a similar way, some say that Andy Warhol's Brillo Soap Pads Boxes (1964), of which the Akron Art Museum has two on display, have more wit than Jasper Johns' Beer Cans (1960).
Warhol hired carpenters to make plywood boxes identical in size and shape to supermarket cartons. Then, with the help of Gerard Malanga and Billy Linich, he painted and silkscreened the boxes with logos of the different consumer products: Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Brillo Soap Pads, Mott's Apple Juice, Del Monte Peaches, and Heinz Ketchup. The finished sculptures were virtually indistinguishable from their cardboard counterparts.
On the other hand, Johns' cans are lovingly formed in bronze, with evidence of the artist's hand throughout. But if we think that Warhol outwits Johns, we're forgetting reversal and transformation, two key features in much of Johns' work. Machine-made becomes manmade; common materials become precious, low becomes high and high low. Johns revived the idea of the ready-made, and added a new facet: linking the art object to American popular culture.
Not coincidentally, Johns and his studio mate, Robert Rauschenberg, also an early proponent of the use of ready-mades, were part of a new artistic circle back then. Called Neo Dadaism, it formed around Duchamp himself. The critical point they were all trying to make was then revolutionary: this is art because I, an artist, say it is.
From these beginnings we now have come to the place where a single work of art can take up an entire gallery or an entire fortune.
From provocation to bombast, from Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel to Damien Hirst's For the Love of God, an actual human skull, cast in platinum and encrusted with more than 8,000 diamonds.
And the wheel goes round and round. Remember bling? At this year's 40th Art Basel, an international show for contemporary works, gone are the gold and the glitter of previous years, according to recent reports.
Also gone, art that looks like it's been farmed out to fabricators. Basel collectors are said now to want art that's handmade and seems to demonstrate intense effort.
Art follows money, and these days money wants a real return on its value.
Details:
Show: Rethinking Art: Objects and Ideas from the 1960s and '70s.
When: Through Oct. 4
Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday, until 9 p.m. Thursday. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
Admission: $7; $5 students with ID, seniors; free members and children 12 and under. First Sundays are free days.
Where: Akron Art Museum, 1 S. High St., Akron
Information: 330-376-9185 or www.akronartmuseum.org
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
Just as July Fourth fireworks light up our skies, certain events and encounters can light up our notions of what makes a great work of art.
Get the full article here.
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