 politically motivated usage of ways of artmaking developed by post-war avant garde movements, is a form best positioned to answer the question of utility: that is, What good is art?
This is the classic question asked of visual art practice by activists in social movements. The answer which prevailed during the modernist period (mid-19th century to 1945), when art and social movements were closely allied, was that art served the purpose of propaganda – to agitate opinion, and mobilize the masses in support of revolutionary action.
How this was done, the forms used to achieve it, were realistic imagery, photographic collage and posters, and narrative film and theater. These were the forms employed most influentially by the artists of the Soviet Union and the socialist states. They were also the forms used by capitalist democracies and fascist states. They are the forms of advertising and popular art.
But artists continually develop new forms of art. The most experimental new forms developed during the modernist period – the late 19th and early 20th century – were not approved by political parties. Abstract art, non-narrative performance, “noise” music, and sound poetry from “trans-rational” language – none of these forms of artistic practice, pioneered by Futurists, Cubists, Dadas, Surrealists and others, were condoned by the modernist political movements. In fact, many artists who practiced in these modes were persecuted by the Nazis and Communists alike.
So what changed? How was political art reinvented?
Artists did not forget the radical new forms of expression invented by the classic avant garde, nor the exhilaration of bold experimentation. After World War II, the avant-garde of experimental artists slowly began to reconstitute itself. The artists of the day who looked beyond object-making developed their theories in full consciousness of the perceived failures of earlier movements. They laid the groundwork for the form (or method) Joseph Beuys was to label “social sculpture.”
The postwar avant-garde movements of the 1950s and ‘60s which have the most direct relevance for artists working in modes of social sculpture today are those that sprang out of the CoBrA, Situationist and Fluxus movements – all self-conscious descendants of Dada, the original modernist virus of anti-art.
From Action Painting to Acting Strange
Strangely enough, the story of contemporary social sculpture begins with avant-garde post-Cubist painting, more specifically, an interpretation of the work of Jackson Pollock.
Critics saw many things in Pollock’s revolutionary drip pantings: chaos, post-nuclear landscape, an allover formal breakthrough for modernist art, pure action as an image. Clement Greenberg’s idea that Pollock marked a degree zero of painting, a new starting point for post-Cubist medium specific abstract art was the most influential. Allan Kaprow’s interpretation of this work was different from most. Kaprow looked past the painting itself, past the object of art, at what Harold Rosenberg called the action in this action painting.
In a 1958 article on Pollock in Art News, Kaprow observed that Pollock painted his canvases on the floor, and that his marks extended past the boundaries of the canvas. Kaprow illustrated the article with one of Hans Namuth’s pictures of Pollock painting in 1950, taken from above. In another of Namuth’s photographs, the painter can be seen stepping into the canvas. In this action Kaprow, a painter himself, discerned an artistic impulse that was ready to break into the world beyond the canvas – out of the realm of illusion and abstract idealism into the world of the everyday.
Kaprow worked on this idea as he worked his art away from painting. By 1957 he was making “arrangements” of unusual materials, then “environments” for the viewer to experience, not just look at. In 1957 and ’58 he began to develop a series of actions he called Happenings. The big one was “18 Happenings in 6 Parts” (1959). It was a kind of theater piece, but it wasn’t. There was no script, and the “actors,” everyday artist folks Kaprow kn