This is a weekly assignment that will require you to pick one artist from the assigned readings and describe how their work corresponds to that week’s movement (ie. How does Andy Warhol’s work contribute to the Pop Art movement?) Minimum 250 words.
18
Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus
T
he European avant-garde mobilized diverse approaches
to artmaking in the postwar years (see Chapter 17). By
1960, though, this diffusion of aesthetic responses coalesced
for some of Europe’s most daring and ambitious artists in
the Nouveau Réalisme or New Realism movement. With
more than a decade’s distance between them and the war,
these artists were now able to confront directly what they
believed to be its sources: materialism, consumerism, militarism, and nationalism. As the chief postwar symbol of all
of these qualities, the United States provided a source of
alternating fascination and distress (see The Marshall Plan
and the “Marilyn Monroe Doctrine,” opposite). Hollywood
films, American automobiles, and New York City all provided literal or metaphorical subjects for the New Realists.
Yet the U.S.A. was also seen as Europe’s liberator and provider, making the avant-garde’s reception of American culture all the more vexed. Nouveau Réalisme encompassed a
variety of styles and techniques, ranging from large, visually
seductive monochrome canvases to disconcertingly violent
sculptures made out of crushed automobiles. The heterogeneity of Nouveau Réalisme testifies to the diversity of aesthetic positions available to European artists. Humor, particularly irony, was the only unifying characteristic.
Irony offered the possibility of aesthetic distance from
a resurgent nationalism and breakneck consumerism. In
France, for instance, the revered General Charles de Gaulle,
who had led the Free French Forces in opposition to the
occupying German Army during World War II, was elected
president in 1958 with promises of restoring the country’s
still-foundering economy and its sinking international prestige. France’s prewar economic dependence on its colonies
in Africa and Asia had, along with a hardening suspicion
of communism, contributed to long and bloody wars in
Algeria and Vietnam. Above all, De Gaulle pursued a doctrine of complete self-sufficiency for France, which included
establishing an ambitious nuclear program. Italy was undergoing its own postwar cultural risorgimento of sorts. The
country’s first television network began broadcasting in
1954, leading to an unprecedented adoption of a common
dialect and a new concept of “Italian” identity. Movies, too,
served as touchstones of Italian cultural life, as filmmakers
and audiences alike relished the relaxation of censorship following the end of the war and of fascism. West Germany,
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established with the country’s forced division in the wake
of the Nazis’ 1945 defeat, achieved its Wirtschaftswunder
(“economic miracle”) thanks not only to its successful manufacturing of consumer goods like the popular Volkswagen
Beetle, but also to its emulation of American consumerism.
West Germany’s economics minister equated consumption
to civic duty: “Every citizen must be conscious of consumer
C ONTEXT
The Marshall Plan and the
“Marilyn Monroe Doctrine”
As devastating as World War II was for Europe and parts of
Asia, the cessation of hostilities brought only limited relief.
Infrastructures were badly damaged, millions of people were
displaced, and economies had collapsed. General George C.
Marshall had served as the U.S. Army chief of staff in Europe during the war, assuming the post of Secretary of State
in 1947. Marshall believed that the precarious condition of
America’s wartime allies and enemies would wreak further
disaster. Along with humanitarian concerns, he also worried that these vulnerable countries might be prey to Soviet
Communist expansionism. He proposed providing American
financial and technical support, with the stipulation that participating countries would need to generate matching funds
and eventually repay some of the aid. Also mandated were
trade agreements favorable to the U.S.A. The Marshall Plan,
as it was dubbed, went into effect in 1947. The Plan included
an aggressive cultural program, with touring exhibitions of
American art and a film-production arm charged with making
pro-democracy movies. Most cinemas were, in fact, limited
to screening Marshall Plan propaganda reels or Hollywood
films, which countries enrolled in the program were required
to import. This flood of American consumer goods and culture was both welcomed and scorned. But it could not be ignored. Some European artists looked to Americanization for
metaphorical as well as literal sources for their art. In addition
to American motifs like cowboys and movie stars, some New
Realist artists made works out of imported American goods
and abandoned U.S. Army surplus.
freedom and the freedom of economic enterprise as basic
and inalienable rights, whose violation should be punished
as an assault on our social order.”
For avant-garde artists, especially those working in France
under the influence of Existentialism, such pronouncements
only confirmed the absurdity of seeking moral guidance
from sources other than oneself.
It was from this milieu, then, that Nouveau Réalisme
emerged in the 1950s. The movement was officially founded
in 1960 by the French critic Pierre Restany in the Paris
apartment of artist Yves Klein. A manifesto was issued (see
Manifesto of Nouveau Réalisme, opposite) and exhibitions
were held in Milan in 1960 and at Restany’s Gallery J in
Paris the following year. The latter was labeled 40 Degrees
Above Dada, indicating a kinship, at least according to
Restany, with the earlier movement. The original members
of the group included Klein, Martial Raysse, Arman, Jean
Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la
Villeglé, and François Dufrêne. All of these, with the exception of Klein, were included in The Art of Assemblage exhibition in New York, and in the New Realists show at Sidney
Janis. In the catalog for the latter, Pierre Restany is quoted
as saying:
S OURCE
Manifesto of Nouveau Réalisme
signed October 27, 1960
In Europe, as well as in the United States, we are
finding new directions in nature, for contemporary
nature is mechanical, industrial and flooded with
The New Realists have seized awareness of their collective
singularity. New Realism = new ways of perceiving the real.
advertisements.… The reality of everyday life has now
become the factory and the city. Born under the twin
signs of standardization and efficiency, extroversion is
the rule of the new world.…
“Sensibility in Material Form”: Klein
A central figure of Nouveau Réalisme was Yves Klein
(1928–62), who was concerned with the dramatization of
ideas beyond the creation of individual works of art; the
mystical basis of his art set his work apart from his American
Pop contemporaries. He was a member of an obscure spiritual sect, the Rosicrucian Society, and held an advanced
black belt in judo. He even opened his own judo school in
Paris in 1955, the year of his first public exhibition there.
In his blue monochrome abstractions (fig. 18.1), paintings
that caused an uproar when first shown in Milan in 1957, he
18.1 Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, 1961. Dry pigment in synthetic polymer
medium on cotton over plywood, 6’ 47⁄8” 4’ 71⁄8” (2 1.4 m). The Museum
of Modern Art, New York.
Explore more about Klein on mysearchlab.com
CHAP T E R 1 8 NOUVE AU RÉ ALISME A N D F L U X U S
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Today the painter of space ought actually to go into
space to paint, but he ought to go there without tricks
or fraud, not any longer by plane, parachute or rocket:
he must go there by himself, by means of individual,
autonomous force, in a word, he should be capable
of levitating.
The artist’s blue Anthropometries (a term invented by
Restany) of 1960 were realized with nude models, his “living
brushes,” who were covered with blue paint and instructed
to roll on canvases to create imprints of their bodies (fig.
18.3). In the Cosmogonies, he experimented with the effects
of rain on canvas covered with wet blue paint. To make his
fire paintings, he used actual flames to burn patterns into
a flame-retardant surface and, in later works, added red,
blue, and yellow paint (fig. 18.4). With his passion for a
spiritual content comparable to that preached by Kandinsky,
Mondrian, and Malevich, Klein was moving against the
trend of his time with its insistence on impersonality, on the
painting or sculpture as an object, and on the object as an
end in itself.
18.2 Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 23, 1960.
Photograph by Harry Shunk.
covered the canvas with a powdery, eye-dazzling, ultramarine pigment that he patented as IKB (International Klein
Blue). For Klein, this blue embodied unity, serenity, and, as
he said, the supreme “representation of the immaterial, the
sovereign liberation of the spirit.” These flat, uninflected
paintings carried no indication of the artist’s hand on their
surface and were a radical alternative to gestural abstraction,
though Klein cheekily differentiated the works by pricing
each one differently. Klein’s assertion of the futility of quantifying aesthetic experience in monetary terms appeared
again in a 1959 project for which he printed certificates of
authenticity for “immaterial pictorial sensibility” that he
sold at a price tied to the current value of gold. He even
insisted on payment in gold dust. Meeting the buyer along
the Seine, Klein would exchange his certificate for the gold,
throwing half of the metal into the river. The buyer was then
required to burn the certificate of authenticity.
In 1958 Klein attracted audiences to an exhibition of
nothingness—Le Vide (The Void)—nothing but bare walls
in a Parisian gallery. In 1960 he had himself photographed
leaping off a ledge in a Paris suburb as a “practical demonstration of levitation” (fig. 18.2). The photograph was doctored to remove the judo experts holding a tarpaulin below,
but Klein, a serious athlete, was obsessed with the notion of
flight or self-levitation. In this altered image he presents less
a prankish demonstration of levitation than an artistic leap
of the imagination. He wrote:
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CH A P TER 1 8 N O U V EA U R ÉA L IS M E A ND FL UXUS
18.3 Yves Klein, Shroud Anthropometry 20, “Vampire,” c. 1960.
Pigment on canvas, 43 30” (109.2 76.2 cm). Private collection.
18.4 Yves Klein, Fire Painting, 1961–62. Flame burned into asbestos with
pigment, 43 30” (109.2 76.2 cm). Private collection.
Tinguely and Saint-Phalle
For Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925–94), a friend and collaborator of Klein’s, mechanized motion was the primary
medium. “The machine allows me,” he said, “above anything, to reach poetry.” After the formulation of metamechanic reliefs and what he called “metamatics,” which permitted the use of chance and sound in motion machines,
he introduced painting machines in 1955, another attempt
at debunking the assumptions surrounding so-called Action
Painting or French Tachisme. By 1959 he had perfected the
metamatic painting machines, the most impressive of which
was the metamatic-automobile-odorante-et-sonore for the
first biennial of Paris. It produced some 40,000 paintings
in an Abstract Expressionist style on a roll of paper that was
then cut by the machine into individual sheets.
In 1960 Tinguely came to New York, where he and
his companion, the artist Niki de Saint-Phalle, sought
like-minded American artists with whom to collaborate.
Tinguely’s 1960 Homage to New York (fig. 18.5), created in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern
Art out of refuse and motors gathered from around the
city, was a machine designed to destroy itself. An invited
audience watched for about half an hour as the machine
smoked and sputtered, finally self-destructing with the
aid of the New York Fire Department. A remnant is in the
museum’s collection.
Parisian-born Niki de Saint-Phalle (1930–2002) lived
in New York from 1933 to 1951 and exhibited with the
New Realists from 1961 to 1963. In the early 1960s she
began to make “Shot-reliefs,” firing a pistol at bags of
paint placed on top of assemblage reliefs. As the punctured
18.5 Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York, 1960. Mixed media.
Self-destructing installation in the garden of The Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
Listen to a podcast about Tinguely on mysearchlab.com
CHAP T E R 1 8 NOUVE AU RÉ ALISME A N D F L U X U S
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18.7 Niki de Saint-Phalle, Black Venus, 1965–67. Painted
polyester, 9’ 21⁄4” 2’ 11” 2’ (2.8 0.89 0.61 m).
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
18.6 Niki de Saint-Phalle, Shooting Picture, 1961. Plaster, paint, string,
polythene, and wire on wood, 561⁄4 303⁄4 31⁄8” (143 78 8 cm).
Tate, London.
bags leaked their contents, “drip” paintings were created
by chance methods (fig. 18.6). These works were both a
parodic comment on Action Painting and a ritualistic kind
of Performance art. Occasionally titled with references to
corporate businessmen or her father, her shooting paintings also delivered strong political and personal messages
(she recounted her father’s sexual abuse of her in an autobiography, Mon secret). Saint-Phalle is best known for
her Nana or woman figures, which came to represent the archetype of an all-powerful woman. These
are rotund, highly animated figures made of papiermâché or plaster and painted with bright colors
(fig. 18.7). SHE (“hon” in Swedish) (fig. 18.8), an
eighty-two-foot, six-ton (25 m, 6.09 tonne) reclining Nana, was made in collaboration with Tinguely
and a Swedish sculptor named Per-Olof Ultvedt for
the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where it was
exhibited. Visitors entered the sculpture on a ramp
between the figure’s legs. Inside this giant womb
they encountered a vast network of interconnected
18.8 Niki de Saint-Phalle, SHE—A Cathedral, 1966. Mixedmedia sculptural environment, 20 82 30’ (6.1 25 9.1 m).
Moderna Museet, Stockholm (fragmentary remains).
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CH A P TER 1 8 N O U V EA U R ÉA L IS M E A ND FL UXUS
compartments with several installations, including a bottlecrunching machine, a planetarium, and a cinema showing
Greta Garbo movies. The work was destroyed after three
months, although the head remains in the permanent collection of the Moderna Museet.
Arman
Arman (Armand Fernández) (1928–2005) was a friend and
in some degree a competitor of Klein’s. In 1960 he filled
a Parisian gallery with refuse, calling it Le Plein (Fullness),
thus countering Klein’s exhibition of nothingness in Le Vide.
Arman either fractured objects such as violins into many slivers or made assemblages, which he called “accumulations,”
consisting of reiterated objects—such as old sabers, pencils,
teapots, or eyeglasses. He placed these objects under vitrines
or imbedded them in transparent, quick-setting polyester.
Later he created clear figures as containers. Bluebeard’s
Wife, a transparent female nude torso filled with men’s shaving brushes, conjures the tensions in the fairytale between
masculine and feminine, secrecy and openness (fig. 18.9).
18.10 Arman, Long-Term Parking, 1982. Sixty automobiles imbedded in
cement, 60 20 20’ (18.3 6.1 6.1 m). Centre d’Art de Montcel,
Jouy-en-Josas, France.
Arman called one group of his assemblages Poubelles
(“trash cans”), a term that comments on the prodigal waste
inherent in contemporary consumerism while also alluding
to the potential for visual poetry in life’s recycled detritus,
as we have seen in the art of Schwitters (see Ch. 10, pp.
230–31). In 1982 Arman realized a work on a grand scale
with Long-Term Parking (fig. 18.10), a sixty-foot (18.3m) concrete tower with some sixty complete automobiles
imbedded in it. The park-like setting outside Paris affirms
the artist’s contention that, far from expressing the antiart
bias present in Duchamp’s original use of found objects,
Long-Term Parking reflects a desire to restructure used or
damaged materials into new, aesthetic forms as a metaphor
for the hope that modern life may yet prove salvageable.
18.9 Arman, Bluebeard’s Wife, 1969. Mixed media in polyester resin,
33 111⁄2 121⁄2” (83.5 29 32 cm). Tate, London.
César
César Baldaccini, known as César (1921–98), created comparable effects from the assemblage of old iron scraps and
machine fragments. His work developed independently of
trends in the United States but paralleled that of certain
American sculptors, notably John Chamberlain (see fig.
16.36). In his constructions, César tended toward abstraction but often returned to the figure. (Paradoxically the figure is also implicit in many of the abstract works.) His 1958
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18.11 César, The Yellow Buick, 1961. Compressed automobile,
591⁄2 303⁄4 247⁄8” (151.1 78.1 63.2 cm). The Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
Raysse
The work of Martial Raysse (b. 1936) perhaps has the
most in common with British and American Pop artists,
though his beach scenes are more reminiscent of his native
Côte d’Azur than Coney Island (fig. 18.12). In 1962, for
an exhibition at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, the artist
created an installation called Raysse Beach. Using life-size,
photographic cut-outs of bathing beauties set in an actual
environment of sand and beach balls, he achieved a synthetic
recreation of an expensive watering place, a kind of artificial
paradise for the Pop generation. Central to Raysse Beach are
the stereotypical images of women drawn from advertising.
After participating in Janis’s New Realists exhibition in 1962,
Raysse spent time in both New York and Los Angeles and
associated with American artists such as Claes Oldenburg
and Robert Rauschenberg, whom he had already met in
Paris. Their work is discussed later in this chapter.
Nude is a pair of legs with lower torso, eroded and made
more horrible by the sense of life that remains. During
the late 1950s and early 60s (and with variants in new
materials into the 90s) he made what he called “compressions”—assemblages of automobile bodies crushed under
great pressure and then pressed into massive blocks of varicolored materials, as they are in auto junkyards when the
metal is processed for reuse (fig. 18.11).
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Although never formally associated with Nouveau Réalisme,
the art of Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff) (b. 1935)
and Jeanne-Claude (Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon)
(1935–2009) shares the group’s fascination with everyday objects and their capacity for cultural transformation
and aesthetic transcendence. Christo was born in Bulgaria,
which had become a Soviet satellite state after World War II.
Travel outside the “Eastern bloc,” as the Soviet Union and
the countries under its domination were known, was rarely
permitted. Christo escaped
from the Eastern bloc by way
of Prague in 1957, studying for
a semester at the Vienna Fine
Arts Academy before relocating the following year to Paris.
There he met his future wife
Jeanne-Claude, who became
his artistic collaborator in 1961.
By then, Christo had already
begun to wrap quotidian
objects—initially studio refuse
or household items as well as
objects purchased at flea markets—in cloth. These wrapped
forms ranged from more recognizable shapes like a chair, a
woman, or a Volkswagen automobile to unidentified objects,
18.12 Martial Raysse, Tableau dans
le style français, 1965. Assemblage
on canvas, 7’ 17⁄8” 4’ 63⁄8”
(2.2 1.4 m). Collection Runquist.
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CH A P TER 1 8 N O U V EA U R ÉA L IS M E A ND FL UXUS
and collages. But in 1968, they actually wrapped their first
building, the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland (fig. 18.14).
Here, the urban environment is transformed by the simultaneous absence and presence of the building: the exterior is
hidden, but the volume and materiality of the museum assert
themselves even more emphatically thanks to the wrapping.
Read as a veil, the fabric summons associations with disguise and mystery. As a shroud, the wrap instead suggests
the ritual and memorial functions of the museum as a tomb
for culture. Banded with rope, the building also resembles a
consumer object, packaged for delivery. With this, the artistic practice of Christo and Jeanne-Claude not only alerts the
viewer to the particularities of the urban and rural landscape
but also raises questions about the commodification of culture in the postwar era.
18.13 Christo, Package 1961, 1961. Fabric and rope,
365⁄8 263⁄4 121⁄4” (93 68 31 cm). Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
which present themselves as abstract, highly enigmatic sculptures (fig. 18.13). The artistic collaboration of Christo and
Jeanne-Claude focuses on large-scale, outdoor works such
as the 1961 project Dockside Packages, in which a stack of
55-gallon oil drums resting on the busy quay at Cologne
Harbor was shrouded in fabric. Most of their early site-specific projects, however, were carried out only in drawings
Rotella and Manzoni
The Italian artist Mimmo Rotella (1918–2006) was an
early practitioner of the New Realist technique known as
“décollage,” which he began to use in 1953 (fig. 18.15).
The antithesis of collage, which involves layering materials,
décollage is a reductive process in which layers are removed
by tearing to reveal what lies beneath. A familiar feature of
any urban landscape is the layers of half-torn posters—modern urban palimpsests—that decorate billboards, kiosks,
and walls. Rotella stripped these posters, often promoting
Italian films, from city walls and mounted them on canvas
only to tear them off layer by layer. With traces of several
posters visible, the finished work evokes a variety of meanings. No longer a clear advertisement for a particular product or event, the image becomes a lyrical record of an everchanging urban culture. “What a thrill, what fantasy, what
strange things happen,” he said,
“clashing and accumulating
between the first and last layer.”
Sometimes, Rotella used grattage (“scraping”) along with
peeling and tearing to arrive
at a work of complete abstraction that resembles Abstract
Expressionist paintings in its
seeming spontaneity and record
of gesture.
The idiosyncratic art of the
Italian Piero Manzoni (1933–
63) ushered in much of the
conceptually based work of the
18.14 Christo and Jeanne-Claude,
Wrapped Kunsthalle, 1968. Bern,
Switzerland. Photo in collection of Christo
and Jeanne-Claude.
Explore more about
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
on mysearchlab.com
CHAP T E R 1 8 NOUVE AU RÉ ALISME A N D F L U X U S
451
18.15 Mimmo Rotella, Untitled, 1963. Décollage, 47¼ 393⁄8”
(120 100 cm). Location unknown.
1960s and 70s that would follow his death. A significant
event in Manzoni’s career, which was even more short-lived
than Klein’s, was the 1957 exhibition in Milan of the French
artist’s monochrome paintings. The young Manzoni was an
agent provocateur in the Dada tradition, as when he offered
for sale balloons that would become sculptures once inflated.
He charged significantly more for balloons filled with his
own breath, thereby playfully addressing the Romantic concept of artistic genius. Inspiration—derived from the Greek
word for “breath”—can be collected along with paintings
and sculptures. Manzoni pushed this commentary on the
artist’s capacity to embody genius even further when, in
1961, he signed cans purportedly containing his own excrement. He also made “living sculpture” by signing the bodies of friends or nude models and providing certificates of
authenticity, resulting in a kind of “living readymade.”
Manzoni was involved with the Italian group Arte nucleare (Nuclear Art), which denounced the idea of personal
style and, like latter-day Futurists, called for an art of explosive force in the postnuclear age. Klein also exhibited with
this group in Milan in 1957. That year, after seeing Klein’s
show, Manzoni ceased to make tar-based paintings and
began his series of Achromes, monochrome works with neutral surfaces that were emphatically devoid of any imagery.
The Achromes consisted of a whole range of media, including plaster or cotton balls, or pebbles mounted on canvas.
Achrome of 1959 (fig. 18.16) is reminiscent of the work of
an older Italian artist, Fontana (see fig. 17.30), for Manzoni
simply manipulated the canvas by folding it into pleats.
Fluxus
18.16 Piero Manzoni, Achrome, 1959. Kaolin on pleated
canvas, 551⁄8 471⁄4” (140 120 cm). Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Explore more about Manzoni on mysearchlab.com
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CH A P TER 1 8 N O U V EA U R ÉA L IS M E A ND FL UXUS
The intuition that the personal was artistic, just a short step
from being declared political, was at the heart of the Fluxus
group, a loose international collective of sculptors, painters,
poets, and Performance artists that began to form in 1962.
That year, the group’s de facto leader, the American artist
George Maciunas (1932–78), asserted in one of his many
manifestos, Neo-Dada in Music, Theatre, Poetry, Art, that
“If man could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him (from mathematical ideas to physical matter)
in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need
for art, artists and similar ‘nonproductive’ elements.” That
such a call for a new consciousness should be delivered at the
height of the Cold War as the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union
engaged in proxy wars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is
telling. Artists affiliated with Fluxus often understood their
work in political terms while generally avoiding dogmatic
pronouncements (see The Situationists, opposite).
Fluxus resisted transformations of life into art, believing that the two were already inseparable (fig. 18.17).
Performance pieces served best to demonstrate the commingling of life and art, and Fluxus members staged various events ranging from Fluxus festivals, where many participants would convene for concerts and Performances
executed over several days, to intimate happenings such
as Fluxus divorces (in one case involving a group of
The Situationists
C ONTEXT
A number of groups dedicated to a radical reformulation of
culture and society emerged after World War II and, as was
the case with earlier movements like Dada, avant-garde artists played a central role in their formation. Fluxus, founded
in 1962, attracted hundreds of artists, critics, curators, and
historians to its Neo-Dada enterprise. Even more radical in
its antiart position and political commitments was the Situationist International, from which many Fluxus artists drew
inspiration. Lasting from 1957 to 1972, the Situationist International was composed of European artists and thinkers who
subscribed to broadly leftist, even anarchist, ideas. So opposed
were they to conventional cultural values and consumerism
that they eschewed the fabrication of any objects whatsoever
and turned instead to destabilizing society through actions or
even pranks that aimed to reveal the contradictions, base inequalities, and hypocrisy underlying modern Western society.
It was the situation—a moment of awareness in which ideology is made apparent—that members sought to manipulate.
The group’s intellectual leader Guy Debord provided much
of the theoretical rationale underlying the widespread student
demonstrations and labor strikes in Western Europe, particularly France, during the summer of 1968. Their program for
revolution called for students and workers to assume control
of their institutions and to overthrow the authority of centralized government. An influential early member of the Situationist International was Danish painter Asger Jorn, whose
1961 departure from the group was motivated by his continuing desire to create artworks. Contemporary interventionists
like the U.K. organization Reclaim the Streets or the Canadabased group Adbusters (www.adbusters.org, see fig. 27.29)
cite the Situationists as a decisive influence.
participants who literally cut all of the couple’s possessions
in half), to Maciunas’s 1978 “Fluxus Wedding” to artist
Billie Hutching, in which the couple arrived in traditional
wedding attire before ritually exchanging costumes (fig.
18.18). Wedding guests then presented various impromptu
actions and pre-orchestrated Performances.
There was no discernible Fluxus style, though artists
involved with the group shared a suspicion of art’s role as
a commodity. With the art market exerting ever greater
pressure on the artistic process, some progressive artists
felt that artworks had been drained of any but their commercial value. Ephemeral works like Performance pieces
and Happenings (see Ch. 19, pp. 466–67) were one way
to subvert the market’s duty to transform art objects into
commodities. Another way to undermine the market was
by producing unlimited editions of works that could be
made available directly to those who wished to own them.
Without an “original” object to which a dealer might attach
18.17 George Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963. Offset, 83⁄16 511⁄16”
(20.8 14.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
18.18 View of George Maciunas and Billie Hutching’s
Fluxus Wedding. Photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter
Moore/Licensed by VAGA, NYC
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453
the value-added condition of “authenticity,” mass-produced
works executed in series bypassed the gallery system (at
least for a while—galleries soon adjusted to these strategies
and now accommodate even works made expressly to defy
their authority). Fluxus magazines and other publications
appeared occasionally during the 1960s and 70s. Catalogs
of Fluxus wares were also produced, in a direct-to-the-consumer gesture reminiscent of the Bauhaus.
Ono and Beuys
George Maciunas admired the work of Japanese-born
American artist Yoko Ono (b. 1933) and invited her to
join Fluxus. Though Ono declined, she created a number of films and Performances closely associated with the
movement. For instance, the Performances Breathe Piece
and Laugh Piece (both 1966) involve providing one-word
instructions to her audience, as indicated by their titles.
While these pieces resonate with the antiart or Neo-Dada
spirit of the Fluxus movement, another Performance reveals
the political stakes that often rests hidden behind the Fluxus
sensibility. In Ono’s 1964 Cut Piece (fig. 18.19), the artist sat impassively on the floor of a stage wearing a black
dress and black nylon stockings. Next to her on the floor
was a pair of silver shears. Audience members were invited
18.19 Yoko Ono performing Cut Piece at Carnegie Recital Hall,
New York City, March 21, 1965.
Listen to a podcast about Ono on mysearchlab.com
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to cut her dress. Taking turns, individuals came up to the
stage and, reluctantly at first, took turns making slits into
the dress or cutting pieces out of the fabric while Ono neither moved nor spoke. Eventually, once the upper portion
of the garment had been cut away, a male member of the
audience—egged on by now-emboldened viewers—clipped
away the straps of her bra, leaving Ono to hold the undergarment up. This work, with its subtle but chilling evocation of society’s casual exploitation of women, confirms that
the apparent whimsy of much Fluxus work masks politically
astute commentaries on everyday life.
Just as Ono’s exploration of the banality of violence and
sexism derives, at least in part, from her experiences of
World War II and its aftermath (she was living in Tokyo
when the city was firebombed by American forces in 1945),
the work of the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86)
can be seen as a response to the war and the subsequent
cultural and economic consequences of the Marshall Plan.
Beuys was a radio operator serving on bombers. Shot down
in 1943 over the blizzard-swept Crimea, Beuys credited his
survival to nomadic Tatars who, Beuys later claimed, found
him nearly lifeless and immediately took him in, nursing
him for a week by wrapping him in warm felt and dressing his wounds with lard. While this story has never been
confirmed—indeed, inconsistencies in versions of the tale
as well as Beuys’s own emphasis on the importance of myth
suggest that the account of his rescue may have been at least
partially fabricated—it provides a guiding rationale for his
remarkable sculptures, installation pieces, and Performances.
Through his artworks, Beuys sought to rehumanize both
art and life by drastically narrowing the gap between the
two. In this way, his project bore a kinship with that of
the Fluxus artists, and in 1962, he was briefly an official
member, but by the end of 1965 he had severed relations
with the group, not finding the work sufficiently effective:
“They held a mirror up to people without indicating how
to change anything.”
Beuys employed personally relevant methods or materials
in order to render form an agent of meaningful transformation. He began by piling asymmetrical clumps of animal
grease in empty rooms and then wrapping himself in fat
and felt, an act that ritualized the healing techniques of the
Tatars. 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 artmaking 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 the world in which we live: Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone is an artist.” He continued, “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.”
Sculptural works such as The Pack (fig. 18.21) drew on
Beuys’s personal 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, since each one carries such emergency gear
as a flashlight, in addition to the felt and 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 military assault force or commando unit
and in this way might assume a decidedly more aggressive
than pacifist character. The Volkswagen—that symbol of
Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder—appears to disgorge the
sleds. According to Beuys, “In a state of emergency the
Volkswagen bus is of limited usefulness, and more direct
and primitive means must be taken to ensure survival.” In
other words, the marvels of modern consumer culture will
not save us.
18.20 Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead
Hare, 1965. Performance at the Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf.
Listen to a podcast about Beuys on mysearchlab.com
In a Düsseldorf gallery in 1965 the artist created How
to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (fig. 18.20), for which
he sat in a bare room surrounded by his familiar media
of felt, fat, copper, and wood, his face coated with honey
onto which gold leaf had been applied. A dead hare lay
cradled in his arms, and he murmured urgently to it,
sometimes raising its limp paw to gently stroke a picture. To elucidate this 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 access to other regions.” In this seemingly
morbid Performance, 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 mask Beuys wore made
him seem not like an artist but rather a shaman or healer
who, through magical incantation, could achieve a certain oneness with the spirits of animals.
18.21 Joseph Beuys, The Pack, 1969. Installation with Volkswagen bus
and twenty sledges, each carrying felt, fat, and a flashlight. Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen Kassel, Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany.
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