Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- 1 Disorientation and dissent in the art world
- 2 Alloway and the politicization of art, 1968–1970
- 3 Changing values, 1971–1972
- 4 Artforum and the art world as a system
- 5 1973 and a new pluralism
- 6 The uses and limits of art criticism
- 7 Criticism and women's art, 1972–1974
- 8 Women's art and criticism, 1975
- 9 The realist ‘renewal’
- 10 Photo-Realism
- 11 The realist ‘revival’
- 12 Realist revisionism
- 13 The decline of the avant-garde
- 14 ‘Legitimate variables’
- 15 Earth art
- 16 Public art
- 17 In praise of plenty
- 18 Crises in the art world: criticism
- 19 Crises in the art world: feminism
- 20 Crises in the art world: curatorship
- 21 The co-ops and ‘alternative’ spaces
- 22 Turn of the decade decline
- 23 Mainstream…
- 24 … and ‘alternative’
- 25 The last years
- 26 The complex present
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
1 - Disorientation and dissent in the art world
from Section D - Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- 1 Disorientation and dissent in the art world
- 2 Alloway and the politicization of art, 1968–1970
- 3 Changing values, 1971–1972
- 4 Artforum and the art world as a system
- 5 1973 and a new pluralism
- 6 The uses and limits of art criticism
- 7 Criticism and women's art, 1972–1974
- 8 Women's art and criticism, 1975
- 9 The realist ‘renewal’
- 10 Photo-Realism
- 11 The realist ‘revival’
- 12 Realist revisionism
- 13 The decline of the avant-garde
- 14 ‘Legitimate variables’
- 15 Earth art
- 16 Public art
- 17 In praise of plenty
- 18 Crises in the art world: criticism
- 19 Crises in the art world: feminism
- 20 Crises in the art world: curatorship
- 21 The co-ops and ‘alternative’ spaces
- 22 Turn of the decade decline
- 23 Mainstream…
- 24 … and ‘alternative’
- 25 The last years
- 26 The complex present
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
Summary
At the beginning of the decade, what to some like Alloway appeared as aesthetic changes, were interpreted by others as political statements. For example, Kynaston McShine's Information exhibition at MoMA had been intended to show the impact on art of a “culture that has been considerably altered by communications systems.” By the time it opened in July, the context had been changed by political events and the catalogue included a reproduction of the Art Workers’ Coalition's And Babies poster, endpapers with photographs of an anti-war march, and a collection of uncaptioned illustrations that mixed together art and politics. In his introduction, McShine referred to the artists’ “spirited if not rebellious” contributions which had been partly shaped by
the general social, political, and economic crises that are almost universal phenomena of 1970. If you are an artist in Brazil, you know of at least one friend who is being tortured; if you are one in Argentina, you probably have a neighbour who has been in jail for having long hair…; and if you are living in the United States, you may fear you will be shot at, either in the universities, in your bed, or more formally, in Indochina.
Lippard had believed that the type of work in Information would subvert the normal assumptions of the art market: “since dealers cannot sell art-as-idea, economic materialism is denied along with physical materialism.” Reflecting on the radicalism of conceptual art, she stated that “It seemed… that no one, not even a public greedy for novelty, would actually pay money, or much of it, for a xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of photographs documenting an ephemeral situation or condition, a project for work never to be completed, words spoken but not recorded; it seemed that these artists would therefore be forcibly freed from the tyranny of a commodity status and market-orientation.” Instead, the artist could create “visionary and utopian art” or some form of interventionist and oppositional work that confronted aspects of, if not capitalism, then at least the complacent and compliant society that had transmogrified the American dream in terms of international aggression and personal affluence. Disorienting art was appropriate for the dissenting society that had been growing in the later years of the 1960s.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Art and PluralismLawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism, pp. 291 - 295Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012