Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- 1 Arrival in the USA and ‘Clemsville’
- 2 Junk art
- 3 American Pop
- 4 Curator at the Guggenheim
- 5 Six Painters and the Object and Six More, 1963
- 6 Other writings on Pop
- 7 Art as human evidence
- 8 Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley
- 9 Systemic Painting, 1966
- 10 Abstraction and iconogra
- 11 The communications network
- 12 Departure from the Guggenheim
- 13 Exile in Carbondale
- 14 Arts Magazine
- 15 Arts Magazine
- 16 Return to New York: SVA, SUNY, and The Nation
- 17 Options
- 18 Expanding and disappearing works of art
- 19 Alloway's Nation criticism
- 20 Newness and the avant-garde
- 21 Post-Minimal radicalism
- 22 Historical revisions: Abstract Expressionism and Picasso
- 23 Mass communications
- 24 Film criticism
- 25 Violent America
- 26 Pluralism as a ‘unifying theory’
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
21 - Post-Minimal radicalism
from Section C - Abundance, 1961–1971
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- 1 Arrival in the USA and ‘Clemsville’
- 2 Junk art
- 3 American Pop
- 4 Curator at the Guggenheim
- 5 Six Painters and the Object and Six More, 1963
- 6 Other writings on Pop
- 7 Art as human evidence
- 8 Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley
- 9 Systemic Painting, 1966
- 10 Abstraction and iconogra
- 11 The communications network
- 12 Departure from the Guggenheim
- 13 Exile in Carbondale
- 14 Arts Magazine
- 15 Arts Magazine
- 16 Return to New York: SVA, SUNY, and The Nation
- 17 Options
- 18 Expanding and disappearing works of art
- 19 Alloway's Nation criticism
- 20 Newness and the avant-garde
- 21 Post-Minimal radicalism
- 22 Historical revisions: Abstract Expressionism and Picasso
- 23 Mass communications
- 24 Film criticism
- 25 Violent America
- 26 Pluralism as a ‘unifying theory’
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
Summary
The 1960s are often remembered as a time of optimism, and an optimistic tone certainly underlies most of Alloway's criticism. He explained that partly by stating that “When I came to America, it seemed to me I was surrounded by enough negative criticism, so I tended not to write about people I didn't like.” More important, though, was the art world itself: “The 1960s was a period of exceptional high pressure, affluence, creativity, confidence, and you had a terrific succession of movements.” However, his espousal of “stylistic abundance” in art in the 1960s could be seen as the equivalent to the “material abundance” of the consumer society. Certainly the link between art and society was explicit: “An aesthetic of plenty with its multiplicity of styles and consumer-mobility is appropriate to a non-Depression-based culture.” Perhaps Dore Ashton's accusation that Alloway was little more than a marketing man helping to sell the latest fashion in art by carefully branding it was, ironically, systemically true. Abundance chararacterized the 1960s’ art world. In the words of the artist Paul Brach in 1967: “There are more artists, more collectors, more dealers, more critics, more money, more action!” Pluralism could just be the intellectual rationalization of consumer society's excess.
A reaction against the materialism of the consumer society, especially amongst the young, aligned with political disillusionment, and opposition to the Vietnam war and police over-reaction to protest, led to the growth of movements such as civil rights, anti-war, Black Power, and the beginnings of the women's movement, and this was to have an impact on Alloway's criticism and his thoughts about pluralism in the 1970s. There was a very different mood in the last years of the decade. According to Kim Levin:
Modern art had promised a rosy future… But around 1968—in the midst of napalm and dropouts and widespread disruptions—the optimistic approach of modern art, asserting faith in technology and scientific belief in purity, logic, and formal procedure, became untenable. Instead of unlimited progress and expansion, there were shortages and outrages, inflation and devaluation. Instead of evolution ever onward to a utopian future, we began realizing our own shortcomings.
In 1967 Donald Judd responded to a question about the sensibility of the 1960s by commenting that “The same fat surplus which burns in Vietnam feeds us. Let the art armies be disbanded.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Art and PluralismLawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism, pp. 258 - 262Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012