Sixties - 2012 - West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

Elissa Auther & Adam Lerner (eds.)

Lucy Lippard (foreword)

University of Minnesota Press

2012

388 pages

Considering that Sixties America is supposed to have been a special time of swift and turbulent change, the canon of American art history of that period reflects very little of that milieu.  Where it does, for example, make a critical statement of the times: in Andy Warhol’s disaster series, for example, it says something that had already been stated more artfully by some media guru or another.  Editors Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner have compiled this volume of twenty chapters, each on a separate art movement or artist of the 1960s/70s counterculture, as a companion to an exhibition of the same title, shown from November 2011 - February 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and from September 29, 2012 to January 6, 2013 at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Johnny, by Roger Anderson - 1972

The book is varied in its approach to its subject matter, with chapters on topics such as Drop City (and later, Libre) two dome-based communes that update some of the 19th century utopian society ethos, a-la Brook Farm, with modern technology and the creative ethos of the 1960s at its centre, and Crossroads Community, a farm set up on the land under a highway interchange in San Francisco (recalling a greened and livable version of JG Ballard’s Concrete Island). The book has a number of different sections but the art movements and practices discussed in West of Centre can be broken down into discussions of creative communities that, in a sense, lived their art, including discussions of the above communities, and also Drag Collectives and various art-making workshops and retreats.  

The second overarching type of art discussed in the chapters of West of Center are the more traditional graphic arts movements of the 1960s counterculture. These mostly focused on those artists who illustrated the radical publications of various liberation movements, most notably Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party and the premiere illustrator of that organization’s weekly newspaper. Another, lesser known, graphic artist for a radical cultural newspaper was Yolanda Lopez, who contributed drawings and collages to La Basta newspaper, a radical Spanish newspaper for California’s various Chicano communities. Additionally, this book includes chapters on feminist and Gay liberation artists as well as subversive ‘detourned’ advertisements that address political issues of the time.  In brief, psychedelia and the accompanying 60s tradition of rock posters are also investigated with some awesome reproductions of posters by the great psychedelic artist, Rick Griffith, featured in full colour.

It should be noted, even though it may be obvious from the title, that West of Centre only focuses on countercultural art and communities from the Western United States. Nothing from the eastern hippie Mecca of New York City that provided the setting, for example, for the great Hippie musical and film, Hair, is included. Nothing focusing on the imagery produced on the periphery of the many hardcore radical movements like The White Panthers or The Motherfuckers that operated out of eastern or midwestern northern cities like Detroit or Chicago. Then again, the San Francisco Diggers weren’t mentioned either.... Anyways, the book offers plenty of information and full colour images of countercultural creative groups that have held little presence in the numerous texts of 60s nostalgia, and helps to broaden the retrospective image of 1960s art beyond the set boundaries of tie-dye clothing, Abbie Hoffman’s TV antics, and the San Francisco Oracle.

by Emory Douglas

avant garde, stewart home - book - 1991 - Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers

Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers
Stewart Home
AK Press
1991

    Stewart Home is a transgressive writer from the United Kingdom whose work advances the literary models developed by the Dadaists and Situationists.  Home is best known for authoring a number of experimental novels and parodies of pulp fiction.  He has also written a number of caustic non-fiction books on punk, avant garde art, and counterculture, in which he often harshly criticizes figures such as rock historian Greil Marcus (author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century), or Situationist thinker Guy Debord.  Home appears to follow in the artistic, rather than theoretical, footsteps of the Situationist International, focusing on the low brow and deploying strategies of plagiarism to construct his works.

Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers is a book split into halves representing two of Home's projects.  Each halve starts at the end and progress towards the book’s centre.  The Neoist Manifestos contains sixteen texts, many of them less than a page in length, outlining the mission of Neoism as an avant-garde art movement.  These writings recall the numerous manifestos of the Italian Futurists, but in their varying formats and degrees of attack on existing artistic milieus, they also recall the many Dada manifestos written by Tristan Tzara and his ilk.  In many of these manifestos Home reiterates the Neoist commitment to plagiarism in addition to a number other oppositional positions regarding western culture.  The Neoist Manifesto half of the book also contains an appendix featuring a number of unpublished poems by the author.

The second half of the book, The Art Strike Papers, is much more interesting in my opinion.  This section documents the call and response to a strike enacted by artists to cease artistic production for three years.  Home borrowed the idea for an artists’ strike from Gustav Metzger, the German-British artist of auto-destructive art, who called such an action in the 1960s.  Home, himself, is possibly the only member of the art strike, but it is not important to figure out who actually participated in the strike - maybe no one did.  What makes The Art Strike Papers interesting are the responses, issued by serious people, to the strike.    No one honestly believed that artists were ever going to strike en masse, but many individuals took the 1990 art strike seriously enough to respond.  

The caustic responses by artists to the strike, preceded by Stewart Home’s explanations of the event, make up the Art Strike Papers.  The art strike appeared to provoke responses that exposed the problematic attitudes towards art held by many individuals at the time.  Many of the artists whose writing appears in the Papers were insightful enough to state that the strike was, itself, a work of art, implying the impossibility of an art strike because of a view, frequently expressed in the papers, that everything is art.  Home initially proposed a strike in the hopes of subverting art as a market commodity.  He resulted in agitating artists into conveying their most ludicrous views on art.  If everything is art, then nothing is art.  Under such a regime art is a diffuse conceptual overlay of reality and everyday life and a means of keeping the world at a distance.  

The American visual artist Fred Rinne, whose work looks like a cross between Philip Guston and Raymond Pettibone, demanded to know why the strike participants would not support real strikes instead.  While such a demand is really the circumvention of the central issue, presented as an imposition of a political agenda, Rinne’s demand also raises questions about the efficacy of socially conscious art.  What does it do?    This kind of demand is repeated by many others who appear in the Papers, and it seems to suggest that artists struggled with the challenge that the strike presented to their situation as creative labourers whose work enters a marketplace as commodity. 

Ultimately, many of the respondents conveyed two major themes in their critique of the art strike.  The first is a repulsion over the use of the ‘strike’ tactic typically reserved for exploited labour.  The pretense that art directs attitudes and attentions towards or against a cause, and that its driving creative energies are beyond the concerns of market capitalism, are well represented in the Papers.  (note: see John Roberts: The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade for an interesting analysis of such concerns with regards to art). The second theme (which is related to the first) is an apprehensive repulsion to the suggestion, implicit in the basic concept of an art strike, that the fine arts in their current situation may not be a pathway towards a transcendent utopia.  In effect, his strike may have been simulated, no one could possibly verify that he was not doing creative work at the time.  If it was a simulated strike then Home may have been playing with the reality principle, as Jean Baudrillard (whom Home cites as a source of inspiration) put it, in order to reorient some attitudes towards art, its accompanying markets, and its place in society.